by Dani Collins
“You are going to tell me,” Sky said, coming across to stand way too close. “And don’t give me that look.” Sky pointed at her chin. She was tall enough these days they were almost eye to eye, so full of aggression is was another jostle to Wren’s composure. A trigger. Stand still, say you’re sorry and try harder. Be good. Don’t cry.
But she literally felt like her blood was boiling. There was a primal scream inside her that wanted to come out.
She contained it. Pushed it down, down, down. She ignored the pressure in her chest, the sting behind her eyes. Put on her mask of indifference and told herself to feel nothing. This was just how life was. Shitty and hard and who cared? No one.
“I hate when you look like that. I know you’re lying when you do.”
Liar. You know who it is.
“You always tell me I have to be honest with you,” Skylar went on, right in Wren’s face. “That you expect me to be responsible and trust you and that you want what’s best for me. Then you completely lie to me, and hide things from me, and make me live here with people I hate. You should have left me with Nana and Granddad if you were just going to bring me here instead of raise me yourself.”
“Do you have any idea what my father would do to you if you talked to him like this?” Wren spat.
“Lock me in the closet? Oh, wah.”
“The closet was where you went when you were crying. The crying happened after you got a wooden spoon across the knuckles. That’s what you got when you talked back. Or didn’t get the dishes done fast enough. Do you know what you got when you didn’t tell your dad who got you pregnant? His belt. Except I grabbed his arm and said, ‘Don’t. You might hurt the baby.’ So he gave it to me.”
Skylar’s expression changed, but Wren barely saw it. She was back in the farmhouse in Utah, convinced she was going to die.
“I thought my own father was going to kill me, Sky. That’s my big secret. And it’s mine. Does your immature brain have the ability to understand that it hurts to talk about it and that’s why I don’t? That if I do, it should be my decision and not yours.” Pain reverberated in her chest and she realized she had knocked her fist into it. Hard. “I should only have to share my pain with someone I trust. Not someone who is looking for more ammunition to hurt me. How dare you go through my things and demand explanations. Not everything is about you. Do you realize that? Should I have let him beat you out of her that day? Would that have made you happy? At least I wouldn’t be putting up with all of your shit right now, would I?”
She was going too far. She knew she was, but she had completely lost control of her tongue. Poison that had festered her entire life was spewing out of her in vicious clusters of noxious words.
“I have never, ever done anything to you except try to be patient and kind and loving. To protect you from all the ugliness I grew up in. I’ve tried to give you everything I got from your mother and what do I get back from you? Him. You think you hate me? You have no concept of what hatred really is. I hate him in ways you don’t have the experience to grasp. Go ahead and hitchhike back to Utah. Go live with him. I dare you. Go do whatever the hell it is that will make you happy because I am done trying to figure out what it is.”
Skylar looked like a ghost. Her face had gone gray and her parted lips were colorless. She was exactly what Wren had been aiming for after trying to prevent it all her life. Sky was traumatized.
And Wren realized that the person behaving like her father was herself.
Such a wave of shame engulfed her, she tasted it as bile in the back of her throat.
She walked out. Would she have hit Sky? She was appalled to realize she didn’t know. She didn’t know what kind of person she had turned into in those moments. She was someone she didn’t recognize or want to acknowledge.
She kept moving, trying to put space between herself and Sky, but even more importantly, between herself and the past.
She was outside. Trotting. Not paying attention to where she was going, just moving. Picking up her feet and running. Running and running and running.
*
Sky heard a knock and it made her jolt in surprise.
She realized she had been standing in the same place for a long time. She felt awful. Sick. Bad. Like she had run over a dog or something.
“Sky?” It was Trigg. “It’s time to walk Murphy.”
She couldn’t see and swiped her sleeve across her eyes. Mascara streaked her cuff.
“Go without me.” Her voice sounded garbled and she had to cough to clear it.
“Want to wait until after dinner?”
“No. Just go.” If he opened the door, she didn’t know what she would say or do.
Had Granddad really done that? Auntie Wren had been a little bit younger than her when her mom got pregnant. Eleven. But if he had, and the police had been called, why had Auntie Wren still lived with them? Why had she brought Sky to live there?
“Are you sure?” Trigg asked through the door.
Oh my Gawd. “Go!”
She pushed the cuff of her hoodie under her nose and looked around at the huge mess. She remembered doing it, but it kind of felt as though Auntie Wren had created this disaster with her voice. She hadn’t even yelled. But she had been so angry. Sky had never heard Auntie Wren’s voice sound like that, all tight and cold and mean. She pushed the heel of her hand into the middle of her chest where it felt achy and broken.
Maybe she was lying. Maybe Granddad hadn’t done that. He had never hit her. Not with his hand or a wooden spoon or even yelled. In fact, he had barely come in the house, always out in his shop.
But she remembered Auntie Wren always being extra polite to him and making sure Sky said please and thank you and taking her to their bedroom if Sky got stubborn.
Sky had accused Auntie Wren of lying a lot lately, but she didn’t actually think Auntie Wren lied very often at all. She didn’t think she’d been lying about this. She had been kind of crazy-eyed intense in a way that made Sky feel sick and scared. Like something had happened that she wished could unhappen.
Story of her life lately.
She picked up the diary, flipping to the page of sorrys. Looking at them made her feel really gross. Like when she looked down from a place that was really high and her head felt as though it was already tumbling down while her stomach felt heavy and full of sour oatmeal.
Should I have let him beat you out of her that day?
She sat on the edge of the bed. Her eyes were hot as she ran her fingers over the sorrys. She kind of felt like writing a bunch of them herself.
*
Wren stopped to catch her breath, hands on her knees, ready to puke from exertion and shame. She was still crying, but now it was with remorse. With self-hatred for dumping her baggage on a kid who had been a zygote when Wren’s father had lost control. She hadn’t meant to make it sound like she blamed Sky for that.
She didn’t even hate her father that much. It was more a hatred of circumstance. Fury that her parents had been messed up by the loss of their son. It had made them incapable of being decent parents. Her upbringing had been lean and hard and sad. So what? No one was promised a rose garden.
Had she tried too hard to give a rose garden to Sky? Sure, but Sky’s life had been rough enough, losing her mom before she remembered her and changing schools and all the other challenges. Wren had never seen how complaining about her own childhood would have helped Sky cope with her own. She had just removed Sky from her own trashy upbringing as soon as she could, not wanting her to grow up under the same cloud. And, yeah, maybe shame of where she came from had made her keep the gory details from Sky. Why coat her in that stigma?
But she’d been telling the truth when she said it ought to be her choice when and with whom she shared her childhood pain. It was one of the few choices she’d ever had.
She heard a car coming from the lodge and turned as if she was looking across the washout, which was a stretch of stumps and burned slash greening up with spring. I
t wasn’t a complete eyesore, but not exactly a vista one made a point of running down here to admire. She was already embarrassed on so many levels and now mortified to be caught halfway to the highway, bawling her eyes out.
Of course the truck stopped and the passenger window rolled down. Glory gave her a concerned frown. “Wren? Are you okay?”
“Totally fine.” She ran her fingertips across her wet cheeks, searched for something resembling a smile.
“How did you get here? Did your car break down or something?”
“No, I walked.” Ran pell-mell down the hill like a lunatic. It was going to be a thigh-burning climb back up. “I had an argument with Sky. Needed to get some air. Clear my head.”
I’m doing the best I can. At least she had been, until today.
“Is she okay? Where is she?”
“Back at the lodge. We’re fine.” So not fine. She folded her arms, looked back the way she had come. She hoped the warnings about bears and other predators were real. Getting ripped apart by a pack of wolves sounded like a dream come true right now.
She heard a male voice ask something and Glory said something back. Wren glanced through and saw it wasn’t Rolf behind the wheel. It was Nate.
“We can turn around and take you back,” Glory said.
“I can mange. It’s okay.”
Glory frowned at her. “Or you could come with me,” she coaxed. “Nate’s dropping me in Haven. I’m having drinks with a friend. Rolf will come later to bring me back. It sounds like you could use a night out.”
Dear God, that sounded good right now.
“I should get back,” Wren made herself say. “Pretty sure I’m too old for running away from home.”
Nate put the truck in park and came around to open the back door of his truck.
“No, honestly—”
He retrieved a box of tissues from the floor and held it out to her. “I’m no expert on parenting a girl Sky’s age, but we all lose our cool sometimes. Don’t beat yourself up.”
His empathy was too sincere not to melt her into a puddle of gratitude. She took a tissue and blew her nose.
“I was out really of line,” she confessed with fresh compunction. “We both were.” She blew again. “But I was worse.”
“Kids were put on this earth to test us. I live in dread of the day I can’t pick up Aiden and put him in time-out. Sky’s twelve. She’ll be fine. Hop in and take a break for the night.”
Wren hadn’t talked with Nate much outside of the day they had all walked around the pond. She really liked him, though. He was a Steady Eddy and clearly loved his son. She desperately wanted to believe him.
“I’m getting Ilke from the airport,” he added. “I don’t want to be late.”
“Oh.” She found herself moving quickly to accommodate, climbing past the car seat and fishing for the seat belt in the empty spot.
“What was the fight about?” Glory asked over her shoulder as Nate got behind the wheel.
“I’d rather not talk about it. It wasn’t about Trigg, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“Twelve is a rough age,” Glory said, sitting forward again. “Dad and I started our rough patch at that age. At least I had my mom.”
“My ex is a child and youth worker. I’ll give you her number,” Nate said. “She runs a preschool these days, but she worked with all ages when we were in Sacramento.”
“Wanda’s really nice,” Glory swung around again. “You’ll love her.”
“Maybe I should walk back,” Wren said, realizing, “I didn’t bring my phone.”
“No, I’m kidnapping you,” Glory said. “If Sky was Aiden’s age, it would be different, but you guys don’t even have separate bedrooms. No wonder you’re fighting. Plus, you and I are overdue for getting to know one another. And it’s time for Trigg to level up as a parent.”
Wren had a vision of Trigg seeing the disaster Sky had made and Sky telling him all that Wren had revealed. She cringed. “Please don’t get him involved.”
“No?” Glory seemed surprised and glanced at Nate, then said, “Okay. But I’ll text Rolf where you are, in case Sky is looking for you.”
Ha. As if.
*
Trigg hated when Rolf acted like he was at his beck and call. Depending on his mood, Trigg often responded with a single finger or ignored him altogether.
It wasn’t that he didn’t like his brother. These days, he didn’t like hardly anyone, but there were hundreds of reasons for animosity rather than accord between them: their age difference of eight years, the fact their dad had had an affair with Trigg’s mom, Rolf’s arrogant personality and Trigg’s insistence on pushing the envelope, sometimes just for the sake of seeing how far he could.
That’s why his mom hadn’t taken their rebuilding this resort seriously at first. She knew the two of them couldn’t work together without clashing. They did. Daily. Because the real reason for their antagonism was that they were both competitive, control-seeking pricks.
All that taken into account, Trigg had had a lot of practice reading the fine print in Rolf’s very subtle body language. He watched for it when he was trying to get a rise out of him. He always knew when flipping the bird would take things from zero to sixty in a blink.
That’s how he tuned in to Rolf’s exact level of alert tension when he showed up in the lounge, didn’t come across to speak to him, just made eye contact and jerked his head for Trigg to follow him out.
It was exactly the kind of order that would normally make Trigg tell Rolf to go fuck himself. In fact, he often thought he should get T-shirts made and save his vocal cords. He definitely started to say that tonight. He was talking to a woman who had checked in with the cycling club for a single night. She had legs that could crack him in half and he hadn’t been laid since this whole thing with Sky had started. He was hoping a shift of his attention to a stranger would erase the vision of Wren’s lithe body as she had asked him why he wasn’t shadowing Sky all day, pulling her into line.
He was starting to feel really inadequate where Sky was concerned, which wasn’t a comfortable place for him. At all. His kid was rejecting him and even though he was the adult and knew he couldn’t let it bother him, it did.
Meanwhile, as Wren had been pointing out that this was supposed to be a team effort, he’d been unable to ignore the way her breasts had been pretty little mounds under her T-shirt. Her loose pants had draped off the curve of her butt in a way that was so sexy, it was still imprinted on his brain.
He needed sex. If Rolf cost him this opportunity, he would kill him.
But his sixth sense told him Rolf wasn’t yanking his chain for kicks.
Trigg signaled to Marvin to put another drink for the cyclist on his tab and excused himself to see what bug had crawled up his brother’s constipated ass.
“What?” he said flatly as he came even with Rolf at the check-in desk.
Rolf only walked down the hall to knock on the door to Wren and Sky’s suite.
“Who is it?” Sky said.
“Me,” Trigg said after a beat, when Rolf looked to him.
“I’m getting ready for bed.”
At seven thirty on a Friday?
“I need to talk to you,” Trigg said, holding Rolf’s gaze.
“What do you want?” Sky sounded like she was right behind the door.
“Do you know where your aunt is?” Rolf asked.
A pause, then: “Out.”
And she left Sky here alone? Trigg frowned. They had just talked about this yesterday.
“Let us in,” Rolf said, trying the door.
“Um…” Sky pushed herself into the crack and showed one eye racooned by smeared makeup.
Trigg reacted on instinct and stuck his foot in the door, pushing in. Rolf followed and they both choked out a laugh of disbelief.
“Wow.” Trigg pressed the door until it clicked. “Is this why you didn’t want to walk tonight? You were being raided by the FBI?”
Sky scow
led and moved to pick up a couple of notebooks. She stood by the foot of her bed, the only thing in this room that wasn’t torn apart. She wore the same hoodie she always wore over a pair of jeans. Getting ready for bed, huh? She was also wearing her running shoes. She hugged the notebooks, looking guilty as hell.
“Signs of a struggle,” Trigg said to Rolf. “Maybe Murphy can sniff out the shallow grave.”
“Wren is in Haven,” Rolf said. “With Glory.”
Sky scowled, chin pushed out. “She left her phone. I didn’t know where she was.”
“Glory said you had a fight. She thought you might be worried about her.”
“Like a real fight?” Trigg scanned for injuries on Sky, but only saw shadows of shame and regret.
“Were you worried?” Rolf pressed.
Sky jerked her shoulder. “It’s going to be dark soon. You guys keep talking about bears.”
“What did you fight about?” Trigg took in the way she was hugging the notebooks. He had a dim recollection of Marvin saying something about Wren having Mandy’s diaries. “Are those your mom’s journals?”
“No.” Sky took a step back, though, and tightened her arms.
“Is that what you fought about? You read them? What do they say?”
“They’re letters to Auntie Wren and none of your business.” She looked pretty adamant as she said that, but scared, too.
“Not your business, either, huh?” Trigg surmised.
She flushed even darker, but she didn’t hang her head. No, she stared with belligerence right at him, daring him to make one more remark about it. There was a real fight-me look on her face, almost like she would relish a scrum.
Trigg looked to his brother, at a loss as to what he was supposed to do here.
Something in Rolf’s profile jangled in Trigg’s brain. It wasn’t the structure of his brother’s face so much as the aura of frustration that was radiating off him. It was the way Rolf had looked at Trigg most of his life. When Trigg looked back at Sky, he saw the same thing in her expression.