The Girl In Between series: Books 1-4

by Laekan Zea Kemp

  “How’s it coming?” he asked.

  I tossed the broken spotlight in the trash. “It’s not.”

  “Maybe you need to take a break.”

  “Maybe,” I said, even though I was already searching the table for another piece.

  “You thinking about tomorrow?” he asked.

  “Trying not to.”

  “Nervous?”

  “Kind of.”

  He was quiet. He knew I didn’t mean the needles or that warm chemical smell of the dying. I’d spent enough time in hospitals to know what to expect and I’d been poked and pricked so often I didn’t even feel it anymore. He knew I was talking about the trial, about whether or not it would work.

  “You’ve got time,” he said, as if that was some kind of reassurance. “If this one doesn’t work you can keep trying.”

  “And keep being disappointed?”

  I expected a repeat of his last lecture. You’re not weak. This isn’t you. But he didn’t say any of it. He didn’t say anything for a long time and I thought maybe he was finally giving me permission not just to be weak but to be honest about it.

  But then he said, “I’m sorry.”

  And it was more than I’m sorry that you have to do this, that you’re sick, that you’re scared. I could see it in those dark shadows on his face, in those lines that hadn’t been there before I was born. It was an, I’m sorry you’re going to be disappointed again. I’m sorry he left you.

  “I know,” I said.

  He gripped my shoulder, squeezed, and gave me a kiss on the head. “It’ll be okay.”

  Those three little words were so generically beautiful that I felt raw. I tucked them away—the sound of his voice, his grip on me—like all of the other things he’d said to me growing up. Truths and secrets, lessons and white lies, bedtime stories and cautionary tales. Things my father should have said to me. But all he’d ever said was goodbye.

  My uncle climbed the steps into the house and I stood there waiting for his words to sink in. But all I could think about was that aluminum trailer on FM 685; about the sound of footsteps on the gravel drive; me running to the window to see if it was my dad. If he’d come back. If he’d come back for me. But it was always my grandfather or my aunt, my uncle or the postman or some guy looking for work, out-of-towners needing directions. But never him. I never saw him.

  My mom and I finally left the trailer. We waited there for six months and then one day my grandfather came with his work truck, he and my uncle loading the bed with mattresses, bags of clothes, my obnoxious collection of stuffed animals, and my mom’s china. Only the necessities. We moved in with my grandparents while my mom went back to school. I only really saw her on the weekends and it made her seem like this romantic rarity. Like someone who probably had more important things to do than spend time with her eight-year-old daughter—more mysterious things, more exciting. But she did it anyway and every Saturday felt like my birthday.

  My dad showed up three years later. I was eleven. We had our own apartment by then but somehow he’d found us. I was watching TV when someone knocked on the door. I shouldn’t have answered it. When I stood on my toes, finding his bulbous face inside the peephole, I shouldn’t have opened the door.

  But I did, pausing to run a hand over my hair, to rub the crust out of my eyes, to waste ten seconds on the idea that maybe it was me. That maybe I was the reason he’d left and that maybe this was my second chance, not his. So I reached for the knob, trying to look like my mom, like the pieces of her he’d fallen in love with, and then I cracked the door open.

  He stayed in town for two months. Two months of trying to get my mom to let him take me out to lunch, to let him buy me a new bike, to let him pretend like the last three years hadn’t happened. He was persistent. He seemed changed and my mom caved. Four weeks later he was gone again.

  Every once in a while I’d get a birthday card in the mail, a spontaneous phone call from an out of state payphone, his voice crackling before it finally cut out. When we moved again I thought I saw him idling in his truck across the street one night. He never came to the door.

  It had been eight months since I’d seen my dad, though I knew how he’d aged, every nuance of his face. I tried not to look at my uncle and see my dad’s shadow but I did and it hurt.

  That’s why I spent every waking hour fighting the temporary. That’s why I liked sculptures. My mom took me to see one of the outdoor exhibits at the museum when I was ten and the first piece I ever saw was called Infinity.

  It was fifteen feet long, a rushing river curled out of thin sheets of gold and copper and iron. The description written by the author said: The plight of mankind—stalling infinity—and in that one piece, she’d done it. She’d stopped time, folding it into the metal, trapping it there in something equally as infinite. Something strong. Something that would last.

  I wanted to make something that would last. I liked knowing that there were pieces of me—strong, unyielding, permanent pieces that weren’t sick or weak or afraid. They were perfectly intact even when I wasn’t and when I disappeared for good, slipping into one last long sleep, those pieces of me would still be there. Somewhere.

  I held one of the license plates over the flame, blowing out the embers and then molding it with a gloved hand. Some of the fingertips were fraying, my skin absorbing the heat. But I didn’t flinch.

  I clipped the metal, twisting each individual strip, and then I slipped off my gloves. I smoothed out the edges with a flint stone and knocked it against my thigh to shake off the ashes. Then I held the flame under each strip until they drooped like the petals on a lily.

  A shadow caught in the sheen of the piece I was working on. I looked down at the metal flower and saw a drop of my blood. I checked my hands, palms up, and I saw it trickling down from the tip of my index finger.

  I set the piece down on my worktable and stuck the wound in my mouth. But it didn’t taste like blood and when I stared down at my finger again there was suddenly no hole. I turned my hands over, searching for a wound but there was nothing.

  Something scraped across the garage floor and I jumped at the sound, a sharp edge cutting into my skin. I looked down and I was still holding the flower, the tip of one of the petals biting into my index finger. I held it up, watched the blood trickle down from the very same spot it had bubbled from just seconds before, and then my grandmother’s shadow was pouring over me.

  “You’re just like your grandfather,” she said. “Gloves on the table instead of on your hands.”

  I watched my blood trickle onto the metal.

  “You deaf, girl?”

  “Sorry.”

  I stood but my legs felt weak.

  “Since when are you afraid of a little blood?” She reached for my hand, twisting my finger in a dishtowel until I could feel my pulse.

  It swelled in my ears. What just…?

  “Bryn.”

  “What?”

  My grandmother pulled me over to one of the shelves. “Hand me those pruning sheers.”

  She was still gripping my finger but I managed to reach them. I handed them to her and then she was dragging me into the yard. She bent over her herbs, checking their leaves, plucking a few free before sticking them in her mouth.

  “Mint.” She pressed the leaf between my lips. “Chew.”

  I did.

  She dragged me all around the backyard, each of us sidestepping over metal cages full of green tomatoes and ducking under potted plants hanging from the trees. She clipped some more rosemary and stuffed it into the pocket of her overalls.

  “Oh no.” She stomped over to the side of the house. “This damned drought.”

  She ripped a rose bulb from the stem, petals crumbling in her hand. I’d given her the seeds for her birthday last year. Pink. Her favorite. Now they were black.

  “What happened to them?” I asked.

  “Dead.” She let out a long breath.

  But they looked more than dead. They looked ro
tten. They looked…like the flowers in my childhood nightmares, black vines scaling me until I couldn’t breathe.

  My grandmother pulled a piece of rosemary from her pocket, chewed on it.

  “Grandma, what’s the rosemary for?”

  She looked at me, eyes strange as if I should already know the answer. Then she said, “Bad dreams.”

  “But I don’t have bad dreams anymore, remember?” I tried to make my voice light. “I sleep fine.”

  “Oh, Bryn.” She looked at me for a long time, expectantly, almost anxious, and then she said, “Bad dreams don’t just come when you’re sleeping.”

  She was still holding my hand, still looking at me as if there was more she wanted to say or more she was hoping to hear. But I just tried to smile, shaking off whatever in her voice had felt like some kind of accusation.

  She let out a faint sigh and then she stuffed a piece of rosemary in my pocket before finally letting go of my hand and walking inside.

  I stared at the roses, at the dark veins carving across each dry petal. The breeze shook a few free and suddenly I heard my mom’s voice, then my uncle’s, and I leaned against the side of the house, matching his lips with the stilted voice coming through the screen.

  “Give her something to look forward to,” he said.

  My mom’s words were thin, trapped in a sigh, and I couldn’t make them out.

  “I’ll pay for her school,” he said. “You know you don’t have to worry about the money.”

  “She can’t.”

  He shook his head. “That kid can do anything she wants. She always does.”

  “But—”

  “Give her this. Don’t give her your fear. Give her something to look forward to.”

  I thought my mom had started to cry but I was still clinging to my uncle’s words. Anything. Always. Maybe he was right. And maybe my mom would give me her blessing, maybe she wouldn’t. But maybe I could give myself something too—permission to keep trying. Even when it felt like it was all for nothing. Even if trying was all I ever did, I shouldn’t stop.

  I made my way back to the garage and looked at my sculpture—raw and twisted—and I realized that it would only be another disappointment if I abandoned it for good. I saw my sketch sputtering, wind kicking it out into the grass, and I chased after it, unfolding it in my hand, pressing it down until I could see the lines again and then I got back to work.

  12

  .

  I hid in that empty trailer house for what seemed like hours, waiting for the sun to peek out over the trees again but when I finally stepped outside it was still stalled red in the exact same place it had been earlier. The forest was gone and I followed a chalk road, waiting for the farmhouse to rise on my left, to hear the waves, to feel the breeze cutting across the snow. But suddenly I was walking through a desert, a sunburn already creeping up the back of my neck despite the setting sun. And I was still fighting it. Still waiting for that road to carry me home, somewhere that actually made sense.

  Something shifted to my left and I paused. I examined the flat dusty terrain, still waiting for my eyes to adjust. Shapes were strewn along the path, darkness winding and clawing across the desert floor, the shadows of giant constellations in orbit. I shuddered and the heat suddenly felt alive. Everything felt alive.

  The night seemed to flex and groan, sun finally sinking. I picked up my pace, glancing over my shoulder until I tripped over a loose stone. I hadn’t realized I’d been running. I hadn’t realized I’d been afraid. But as I rose to my knees, still staring into the darkness, feeling paralyzed, I realized that maybe I was. When I saw those shadows moving in the distance I realized that maybe I should be.

  I was steeled to the ground, watching it inch towards me. It was thick and rolling and endless. It was reaching. For me. I tried to tell myself that it was some kind of wall cloud, a part of the landscape. I tried to tell myself to move.

  Shit. Shit.

  I shivered, ready to break into a run, trying to.

  Move. Run.

  The darkness closed in on me. I closed my eyes and when I opened them again I was sitting on the front porch of the farmhouse.

  And I just kept sitting there. Afraid to move. Afraid to be moved. Because something had just shifted. Not just the trees or the desert or the ocean. But inside me. I could feel it. I thought of the shadows and I just tried to hold onto Bryn’s words. You don’t have to be afraid.

  I waited for her to step outside but when she didn’t I let myself in again, that one step over the threshold drying the sweat from my clothes. I hoped maybe she’d be inside but it was empty.

  She’d said time was strange here—like everything else—and I wondered how long she’d really been gone. How long it had been since I’d been gone too. Though, from where, I still wasn’t sure.

  I hovered by the window for a while, staring into the dark. When it felt like it was staring back I closed the curtains and double-checked the locks, my sweaty palms gripping my pant legs as I searched for some kind of distraction.

  I scanned the bookshelf, spotting that same gold scroll lining one of the spines. I expected it to be just another copy of Through The Looking-Glass but when I flipped it open I saw the same inscription. The pages even splayed the same in my palm, edges thin and tearing, brown glue unstuck from the binding. My hand trembled as I laid it back on the shelf, wondering if maybe it had been moved here by something else too. Something I had the slightest feeling wasn’t necessarily good. I tried to ignore it, thumbing through a few more books and then through the old western movies lining the middle row, dust clinging to the tips of my fingers. Nothing I’d ever read or remembered watching.

  I reached for one of the strange metal sculptures, a robot holding a pitchfork, prongs dulled. I spotted another face, eyes fashioned out of the heads of screws, smile made out of the small spring you find in pens. Its chest was exposed, a coil welded within the frame like intestines.

  The shelves were bowed under the weight of trinkets and old leather journals, VHS tapes and wooden boxes with velvet linings. The bottom shelf was stuffed with the cracked sleeves of old records and that’s when I noticed the old record player next to the shelf under the window.

  The lid lifted with a crack, a vinyl copy of Tusk by Fleetwood Mac just waiting for the needle. I stared at the cover, waiting for something to click. When it didn’t, I lowered it, turning the player on. It coughed out that signature scratch and then the sound of a piano sifted out.

  I let the record play, the melody just as foreign as everything else, while I examined the rest of the bookshelf. I spotted a small journal, paisley spine, a broken lock clanking against my hand as I pulled it free. Her full name, Bryn Reyes, was scrolled across the first page in juvenile cursive but as I flipped through I noticed the letters tightening, the slant more defined.

  I watched the door waiting for her to walk inside. I peered through the windows, checking the beach but it was still empty. I sat on the couch, Bryn’s diary opened against my knees and then I started flipping through the pages.

  Young, scribbling Bryn made Christmas lists and wrote about slumber parties at her cousin Dani’s house while swirling, cursive-writing Bryn wrote about waking up a week after Christmas Eve having slept through the entire thing and lying to her aunt about Dani staying the night at her house so her cousin could go out with a guy.

  I tried to remember Christmas—making my own lists, waiting for sleep and Santa at the same time. But for some reason all I could drudge up were the smells. New things and old things. Plastic and crackling cedar. Did we even have a fireplace?

  I kept flipping through paragraphs about Bryn’s first day of high school and her first date with some guy named Drew. He’d idled in his truck, her mom glaring at him from the doorway and then he’d taken Bryn to see a movie. She didn’t remember any of it. She was too busy trying to act normal, resting her hand within holding distance, waiting for him to reach for it. He didn’t.

  I wondered if I’d
ever felt that nervous, that uncomfortable in my own body, and then I thought about washing up on the beach, scrambling for air on my hands and knees. I thought about the first time I saw my face, floating there in Bryn’s eyes.

  I’d felt so disgustingly foreign like I’d been transplanted into this strange flesh that didn’t even belong to me. But could another person make you feel that way? Like jumping out of your skin, wanting to, just to escape the anticipation of their rejection. I tried to find a face, a pair of lips, eyes I could stare at for hours. Some girl I’d wanted to kiss, maybe had. Some girl who might have been waiting for me wherever it was that I’d come from.

  I didn’t know if I’d ever been in love. I couldn’t remember. But in that second I wished I hadn’t. Because if I had and I couldn’t remember her, what would that mean? About people. About soul mates. It would mean that they’re not real. It might mean that nothing is. And I have to be real. I couldn’t just be some side effect of Bryn’s illness, some product of her imagination. I couldn’t. Could I?

  Pages slipped past my fingers in a fury as I read about Bryn’s uncle and her deadbeat dad and her widowed grandmother. Bryn’s grandfather had died of a stroke when she was fifteen. She’d slept in one of his old work shirts for three weeks and she’d cried every night for two. Two years earlier they’d lost Bryn’s uncle, Dani’s dad, and in the years since, still mourning those losses on half-hearted holidays and stolen birthdays, the rest of them had clung to each other.

  And I couldn’t help but wonder what they were like—my family. Maybe my dad was tall like me. Maybe I had his nose or his chin. He could have been a doctor or a teacher or maybe he worked in the oil fields too. We’d watch football together on Sundays while my mom lay on the couch reading a book. She’d have hair the same color as mine, always thrown into a ponytail. Or maybe it was always loose, curled around her shoulders. Maybe I used to pull on it when I was a baby, tiny fingers gripping those soft strands until she winced and smiled.