Indigo: The Saving Bailey Trilogy #2

by Nikki Roman

  “Not this time, Sydney,” Dad says forcefully, shoving her hand back at her. “Never again will you touch our daughter. It ends now.”

  Mom looks at me, crumbling like a pastry. “Your stuff is in my room…sweetheart,” she says, all the anger and bitterness devoid from her voice.

  “Go get your things, Bailey.” Dad nods.

  I pass the kitchen without giving so much as a glance; I keep my eyes straight ahead, on Mom’s room. There are cardboard boxes, each one containing different things of mine. I get on my knees and sort through the one that has my socks. I find my tapes and push them into a pair of socks, so Mom and Dad won’t see. I can hear them talking quietly in the kitchen.

  When I return, I can’t bring myself to look my mother in the eyes. Her hands touch my arm but I keep on walking. “I’ll wait outside,” I say.

  I climb back through the window with Angel. I sit on the rotted boards outside my bedroom, while Dad has a heart to heart with Mom. Petting Angel, my fingers brush over his coat in a quick, repetitive motion.

  “Did you miss me?”

  Angel barks.

  “Was she good to you?”

  He barks again.

  “Miemah is dead,” I say.

  He lowers his head to my lap and looks up at me, a forlorn expression on his furry little face. “I know, boy, there’s going to be darkness tonight.”

  Dad comes through the window with a big, stupid grin on his face. “Come on,” he says. I follow him to his truck, Angel bounding at my feet. “I’m going back to work. Go home and relax.”

  “Why are you smiling so big?” I ask. “What did she say?”

  “We’ll talk about it later. Drive home now…watch some T.V. or take a nap, do normal teenager stuff.”

  “Okay,” I say.

  I tuck Angel into my hoodie and only his faces peers out. I mount Harley and wait for Dad to pull his truck out in front of me.

  “You drive that thing pretty well, for a little girl,” he says, driving away.

  I do a lot of things pretty well for a little girl.

  I drive back home with a blank mind and stare. Angel hangs out his tongue and pushes his paws out of my hoodie so he can better enjoy the ride. If he jumped out right now I wouldn’t even bat an eye. I would keep on driving, like nothing happened. If a kid jumped out in front of me, I would run him down without a thought. That’s how things are when you’re dead inside—you get this feeling that others are as dead as you and can’t feel any pain either.

  •••

  As I’m pulling the keys out of Harley and letting Angel run free, the landlord opens the front door of his apartment and steps out. The Complex is two stories; his apartment is on the second floor. It has a screened in porch where he stands now with a giant rabbit hopping around his feet. “Hello,” he says, “are you Angel’s daughter?”

  I decide his voice sounds friendly, maybe a little too friendly.

  “Yes.” I feel the tapes, heavy in the front pocket of my hoodie, and realize that I won’t be able to watch them without a video camera. Well, I hadn’t thought about that. “Do you own a video camera?”

  “Huh? I can’t hear you from down there. Come up here,” he says.

  When you’re dead inside, nothing is off limits. I climb up the spiral staircase and meet him at the screen door; he unlocks it for me and lets me in.

  “Hello, sweetie,” he says, cordially.

  “You look familiar,” I blurt out. He does- his shiny brass eyes and ruddy cheeks like he has just come in from the cold. And the crinkly, dull, acorn hair—all a dead giveaway, I have seen this man before.

  “White truck.”

  White truck?

  “Goodwill,” he says, when I fail to catch on.

  I instinctively take a step back, tripping over my own feet. He is the man who followed me on my way to Goodwill, the one who Spencer called…what did Spencer call him? Oh yeah, a bastard.

  “I was going to Goodwill to buy some shirts and I saw you walking along the edge of the road, and I just had to stop and tell you what a pretty little girl I thought you were.” He says all this as if the ordeal was nothing but a big misunderstanding.

  “Yes,” I say, treating the encounter the same way. I need that video camera as much as an astronaut needs oxygen in outer space. “Do you possibly have a video camera I could borrow?”

  The rabbit is pooping on every inch of carpet; the landlord smiling down at it like it’s a baby taking his first steps. He pretends to not have heard me.

  “Please, do you have a video camera?” I repeat myself.

  “Oh sure, I just like the sound of your voice. Its angelic.”

  “Video camera,” I say nodding to his door.

  “I’ll go get it, stay out here.”

  As if I was planning on following a creepy, middle- aged man into his apartment? No, thanks.

  He whistles, patting his leg, and the rabbit follows him into the apartment. He returns shortly with a Sony video camera no bigger than the size of his palm. He hands it to me, I thank him and turn for the screen door, but as I come to it, he says, “Don’t I get a kiss?”

  Bile rises in my throat.

  “On the cheek, of course,” he says as if I should be relieved he doesn’t mean lips.

  “That doesn’t seem right,” I say, grabbing the door handle with my now sweaty palm.

  “I’m old enough to be your grandfather, it’s just an innocent kiss. You’re a kid aren’t you? I wouldn’t think of it as being anything else.”

  “My dad will be home soon.”

  “My granddaughters are your age and they kiss me.”

  “I have to go now, bye. I’ll return your camera tomorrow.” I try to push the handle down but my sweaty palm slips. I push it a second time and the door creaks open, I clamber down the stairs, the screen door slamming behind me.

  “Don’t run, you’ll fall!” the landlord hollers.

  I head straight into Dad’s apartment without waiting to see if Angel wants to come in, and I deadbolt the door. My hands shake so badly that I drop the camera. I slide down the door and catch my breath.

  Still attempting to relocate my lungs, I push one of the tapes into the camera, not sure if it is the one of Miemah destroying me, or the one of Papa destroying her.

  The camera makes a clicking noise as the video starts up and Miemah is brought to life on the three inch screen, standing in her bedroom with a cigarette in her mouth. Hide it, I think. Her dad walks in and spots her in the act.

  “What are you doing now, you little whore? Smoking in my house! MY HOUSE. Where are they? Give them to me, before I smash your teeth in!”

  Thank you for the threat; it will make for great evidence in court.

  “Dad, No! I need them, just a couple, please. They aren’t even mine, they belong to Cecil, she will be so pissed with me if she finds out you threw them away!”

  Maybe because she said please the court will pity her.

  “I said no smoking in dis’ house, hand them over, or I’m going to beat you senseless. You’re a little bitch, just like your mother.”

  Ooh, Papa, thank you, thank you, a thousand times thank you. Causation and motivation are all over that sentence—bitch, just like your mother.

  Miemah says something in Spanish and Papa doesn’t seem all too happy about it. He smacks her down.

  “Go, go, we have to go,” I say, in accordance with my voice on the tape.

  “No, I’m getting something,” says Alana.

  Miemah gets off her bed, I pause the video. There are tears coming down her left cheek, and tears held back in her right eye. The blood that drips from her mouth is dark red, and bright as a ruby, on her tear stained chin. Anyone who sees this won’t be able to deny that there was foul play.

  “Why?” I say aloud. “Why couldn’t you have just let me kill her!”

  I close the camera. That is all I can bear to watch, for now. From where I sit, against the door, I snatch the remote off of the couch
and turn the TV to the local news station. As I was counting on, Miemah’s name is being flashed across the screen in a strip of red. I gather key words from what the news cast is saying and store them in my head. Father. Suspect. Strangled. Beaten. Little evidence. Mother missing. Heartbroken community.

  What about the heartbroken girl, who’s sitting alone in her apartment with all the evidence in her hands to prove Miemah’s dad guilty? She isn’t going to say a peep. Not yet, because I want some alone time with the tape, bonding time I never got with Miemah.

  I want to learn how each side of her hair curls around her face, the way her voice raises in pitch when she is terrified of Papa, and each object in her room that means nothing to me and everything to her. I want to understand Miemah in a way no one else could.

  I jump right out of myself when Dad knocks on the door to be let in. I scream, thinking it is the landlord come back for his kiss.

  “Bailey, its Daddy, open the door.”

  I quickly turn off the TV and undo the deadbolt. Dad walks in and looks around the living room, then down at me. “Is everything okay, sweetie?”

  I smell rabbit pellets, sweating palms, and metallic blood all of the sudden. My stomach tightens, like it does after Stewart has made us do the plank. I give Dad a look that says, no, everything is wrong.

  “You want to talk about it?”

  “I don’t think I can, just yet,” I say.

  “Well, I’m here for you when you’re ready,” he says. “I picked up a pizza for dinner, peperoni and olive.”

  “My favorite,” I say with a tiny smile. I sit at the table and take a slice from the box. Dad removes his muddy boots at the door before joining me. “Will you tell me about Mom now?”

  “Yes,” he says. “I held her like this.”

  He picks me out of my chair. “Like I hold you.” He squeezes me.

  “What did she say?”

  “That she was sorry she never took care of you like she should have. That she missed me and every morning she woke up and looked for me in bed, but I wasn’t there.”

  “And?”

  “I told her I’m sorry I was gone. I left you both alone in the world when I had promised to always be there,” he says. “I promise I’m never leaving again.”

  Being in Dad’s arms makes me think of Miemah’s dad. Of how easily he threw away his daughter, as easily as my own Mom might have, if Dad hadn’t come back for me. My name would be the one scrolling across the bottom of the TV screen.

  I think of Clad’s painting, the red streaks like the red rectangle at the bottom of the news, blaring out Miemah Valdez’s name. The funeral that could have been mine.

  Clad didn’t have a vision or an epiphany, he only saw what was inevitably to come if my dad didn’t get back in time to save me. Clad always had a way of seeing things to come, like how he knew I’d go through with my Bullet List. I wish he were here right now, to paint me a picture of what is next to come.

  Chapter 26

  “You’re the first person I’ve told,” I say to Thomas. “You didn’t know her but I had to tell someone.”

  He is flipping through his Polaroid collection of photos, pictures of people on streets and in parks.

  “Why did you take a picture of this?” I ask, grabbing a blurry photo of a woman walking her dog and looking out at the ocean.

  “She was sprinkling her mother’s ashes there,” Thomas says.

  “Did you know her?”

  “Mm, no,” he says.

  “Why do you think she poured her mother’s ashes into the sea?”

  He takes a while to think about this and I do the same.

  “I think,” he says, “because the ocean makes a spirit free.”

  “In what way?”

  “It’s like this,” he says, “the ocean is free flowing. It’s vast and the current can carry you all around the world. Aside from outer space exploration, traveling through infinite universes, it’s the closest thing a spirit can get to living infinitely. Always moving, always a part of that endless blue, a piece of that endless mirror reflecting the ever changing sky.”

  “That,” I say, “is definitely worthy of owl status.”

  “Ha, what do ya mean? I’m wise like an owl?”

  “It’s just something my boyfriend and I say…I’m a turkey and he’s an owl. His mom is Momma Owl. Anyway, it’s stupid. And what you just said was amazing. Not at all stupid. Forget I even said it. See, this is why I’m the turkey.”

  “I don’t think it’s stupid,” he says, laying out more pictures for me to browse through. I look over one he’s taken of a little boy, crying at the end of a driveway, his knees scraped.

  “You can’t do this,” I say, stacking the pictures up. “You don’t even know these people.”

  “That’s exactly why I do it,” Thomas says. He’s chewing on a bone from a chicken leg he got at Circle K.

  “I like to know who people are, too,” I say.

  “Do you take pictures of them?”

  “No, it’s an invasion of privacy.”

  “And I suppose watching them closely, as if under a microscope, isn’t invasion?” he says. “I don’t invade; I take a snapshot and leave.”

  “You’re a stalker,” I say.

  “A stalker catching stalkers in action. I’m a protector.” He hands me a picture from a separate heap stashed in a Ziploc baggie.

  I am spinning, my hair a black cloud sweeping through the picture. My hands and arms blurring into each other, my lines long—I look like a dancer. A ballerina. I feel it in my toes, on the balls of my feet, sinuous leather boots turned to ballet shoes, bending with my arches. It’s the wind in my hair and the dizziness in my head as I twirl and twirl. The photograph is alive.

  “Bailey, you see it, don’t you?” Thomas says. “See the girl in the car? She has binoculars.”

  “Her,” I say.

  “Yes,” he says taking the picture from my hand and pointing her out. “She’s in her car, watching you at the same time I was. If that isn’t fate, I don’t know what is.”

  “That’s her!” I scream. “Thomas, that’s the dead girl, the one who tried to kill me. She was the one watching from my window while I slept, not you!”

  “Well, I know that. I told you I wasn’t stalking you.”

  “I wonder how long she was watching me and why. What was she planning?”

  “Maybe she wasn’t planning anything,” Thomas says. He takes his picture back. “Anyway, you’ll never know, on account of she’s dead.”

  “Can I keep it?”

  “If you want to.” He gives it back to me.

  I spend a good chunk of time staring at Miemah, most of her face blocked by her massive binoculars. It’s hard to tell what a person is thinking when you can’t see their eyes. Her mouth is open, as if she were in the middle of saying something.

  “Are you okay?” he asks when my eyes stay on the picture too long.

  “I’m not sure,” I say, unable to break free of the binoculars that stare back at me, as threatening and dark as Miemah’s eyes.

  “You’re sad she’s dead, even though you think that’s all you ever wanted.”

  “How do you know that?” I ask picking my eyes off the picture finally.

  “I watch people for a living.” He winks.

  “I didn’t think she would ever die, it felt like she were immortal.”

  “Vengeance is mine—”

  “Saidth the lord,” I finish.

  “God protects all his little children.”

  I smile at him and Starkey, and my voice echoes the way it does when I’m holding back tears, “God will take care of her and you, too. I know it. And someday you’ll have a real house, and more food than you can even eat.”

  “Someday she’ll have a mommy, I hope,” Thomas says, looking down at his silent daughter. She is playing with his chicken bone but her eyes are trained on us, as if she understands our words.

  “I don’t see why not,” I say. “Thom
as, you’re a wonderful man.”

  “And you are a wonderful girl, but you should spend more time with your boyfriend. You kids need each other. I got Starkey to keep me company.”

  “Sometimes, you’re easier to be around than my boyfriend is,” I say. “But you’re right, he’s probably wondering where I am. So I should get going, now.”

  I kiss Starkey’s fuzzy head, as I often do before leaving her and Thomas, and wipe the dirt from my shorts.

  When I leave the shed, I am brought back by the sight of a black wall of clouds heading toward Goodwill. Another thunderstorm is festering in the summer heat. I hike up the small hill to the parking lot. My new boots slip, lacking traction. Their design is meant only for show, they are beautiful but, in a way, as useless as a Faberge egg.

  Despite the consistent heat of the day, I’m dressed in a plain white T-shirt and a sweater, like what Mr. Rogers wore on Mr. Rogers’sNneighborhood.

  We have customers. A car is in the parking lot beside Spencer’s truck, which is rarely seen with a companion on weekdays. I open the door so fast that the bell fails to give out a warning ding to Spencer as I come up behind the customers and wave my picture for him to see.

  “Spencer, you have got to see this!” I say. “You won’t believe it.”

  “I’m with customers, Bailey,” he says, his eyes bulging toward the family of Cubans who are intent on finding a microwave.

  “One that can pop popcorn and cook frozen TV dinners,” the head of the family is saying.

  “Any one of them can,” I say. “In the back, to the right, is where we keep the appliances, have a look.”

  “Bailey,” Spencer says, trying to get me to leave.

  “Can we talk?” I ask him, ignoring the customers who are watching us with impatience.

  “No, I’m with customers. Get!”

  I slap my hands down to my thighs and let my eyes roll to the ceiling to show my deep displeasure. “But we need to,” I whisper and head into the back room.

  I crouch under a free hanging shelf holding buckets of nails and jars of bolts, while listening to Spencer coax the family into buying a toaster oven, rather than a microwave.