The Innocent

by Michelle K. Pickett

  I hovered at the entrance to the kitchen. “Mom? Can I talk with you for a second?”

  “Sure, what’s up?”

  “I’m going to eat in my room. I don’t feel like being around anyone right now.”

  Her brows knitted. She turned and tossed the towel she held on the makeshift counter. “What happened? You and Chay?”

  “And Xavier.” I nodded and glanced quickly at him.

  “What do you mean? What about Xavier?”

  “He kissed me and Chay saw.” The tears I’d been fighting all afternoon were winning the battle and pushing their way out.

  She pulled me further away from the kitchen where my dad and Xavier talked. “I’m taking it that this kiss was a one-sided thing?”

  “Yes,” I said, wiping my eyes with the back of my hand.

  “But Chay—”

  “Doesn’t want to hear about it. He knows Xavier and I dated while he was gone. And it was easy for him to assume, well, you know.” I shrugged a shoulder

  “I’ll have Xavier leave.”

  “No, that’s okay. I’d rather not make a big deal out of it. I’d just like to eat in my room tonight, please.”

  She smiled and smoothed my hair out of my face. “Sure, honey, go ahead. How about tomorrow we go look at some comforters for your room and pick out your paint so we’ll be ready to start redecorating next weekend?”

  “Sounds good, Mom.” I tried to smile, but any movement of my face had the tears staging a mutiny. So I tried hard not to move too much because I. Did. Not. Want. To. Cry. In. Front. Of. Xavier.

  That night, of all nights, the hobgoblins showed. I didn’t particularly want to see them any night, but I wasn’t in the mood then for sure.

  “Mi-lay-na,” the grumpy one called. “We need to talk to you.”

  I ignored it. Maybe if I didn’t say anything, it’d go away and leave me alone to sulk in peace. But, like I said, I hadn’t been very lucky that day.

  “Come play,” they hollered from the ground below my bedroom window.

  After an hour of them calling my name, giggling and running through the yard, popping up on the eaves of the house so they could look through the window into my bedroom, I gave up and went outside to see what they wanted.

  “What?” I snapped.

  “Oh, she’s not in a good mood,” Scarface said to the other one.

  “What’s wrong?” the friendly one asked me.

  “For starters, you’re here.”

  “That wasn’t nice,” it growled. Its face turned hard and a scowl distorted its lips.

  “Look, guys, it’s been a shitty day. Just tell me why you’re here so we can all get on with our miserable lives. ‘Kay?”

  “Works for me,” Scarface said. “Azazel wants the Four Brothers to finish you off—”

  “Yeah, I already know that. But shouldn’t you say three brothers now? I killed one…Vann, wasn’t it?”

  “Yeah… and you are in so much trouble. The other brothers are pissed.”

  “Tough. What else do you have to tell me? So far you haven’t said anything I didn’t already know.”

  “If you come to Azazel willingly, he’ll spare your friends and family. If not, he’ll start picking them off one by one, making you watch, just like he did with sweet, little ol’ Mae,” Scarface said with a sneer. “Then, after you’ve watched everyone you care about die, he’ll kill you.”

  “He didn’t do anything to Mae. We killed Vann before he could finish the job.”

  “Check the paper, Milayna.” Scarface waved his hand at me and twiddled his fingers, motioning me to go.

  “Yeah, start with the obituaries,” Friendly said with a huge smile like it was all a game.

  With their message given, they left, leaving little plumes of smoke and the smell of sulfur and rotting flesh behind.

  The obituaries?

  I ran inside and to my dad’s favorite chair where he always read the daily newspaper. It wasn’t there. I jogged into the kitchen and looked in the recycle bin. It was lying on top. My hands shook as I thumbed through the sections, looking for the obituaries. I pulled the page out of the stack and stood in the middle of the room, just holding it. My hands shook so badly, the paper made a crinkling noise. I held the page in both hands and rolled it down between my fingers, looking for something that might resemble Mae’s name. I didn’t know her last name. I didn’t even know if Mae was her first name or a nickname. I was just about to give up when I saw it. Maeve Yeoman.

  Maeve Yeoman, 78, died early Saturday morning October 2nd at St Mary’s Methodist Hospital from an apparent heart attack. She is survived by her five children…

  I fell to my knees, still clutching the piece of newspaper in my hand. “Oh, Mae.” The tears I’d been fighting all day broke through. It was almost cathartic to cry. I let the tears come until the newsprint smeared on the paper and my nose ran.

  “Milayna?”

  “Mom, Mae’s dead.”

  She held her arms out to me, and I scooted across the rough wood floor into them. She wrapped me against her, and I breathed in her comforting smell of lavender soap. I cried on her shoulder for Mae. For Chay. For the fear of my family. For the stress of everything. I just wanted to stay there forever, like a little girl hiding behind her mother’s apron. I didn’t want to leave. I wanted to hide forever.

  But that wasn’t me.

  I sniffed. Lifting my head slightly, I wiped my tears and pulled away from my mom. “Thanks.”

  “Always. Better?”

  “Yes. He won’t break me, Mom.”

  “I know, Milayna.” She smiled and planted a kiss on the top of my head. “You’re too stubborn to let a little thing like a demon break you.”

  I laughed. “I don’t know if it’s stubbornness or stupidity, but it’s one or the other. Probably a little of both.”

  “Probably,” she agreed with a smile. “You get that from your dad.”

  ***

  I drove to his house first thing Sunday morning. He answered the door, and I almost lost it. Hair mussed from sleeping, wearing a pair of sweatpants that rode way too low on his hips to be legal, and no shirt covering his broad shoulders and perfectly rippled abs. My fingers itched to touch him. I thought I felt a little drop of drool run down my chin.

  Oh, my…

  “What?” he asked in a voice one would use when speaking to a very unwelcomed visitor.

  Oh, that’d be me. The unwelcomed visitor. Right.

  “I just thought you’d like to know the hobgoblins were over last night.”

  “I saw. What about it?”

  I stared at him. I was hoping to see some change in mood, but he was barely civil. Sighing, I looked away. All of a sudden, I was exhausted, like I hadn’t slept in a week and had just finished running a marathon. I didn’t want, nor have, the energy to fight with him, to worry about the ups and downs of our ever-changing relationship—if we even had one.

  “Here, thought you’d want to see this. I circled it for you. See ya around, Chay.”

  “What do I care about the obits, Milayna?” He started to wad the paper up.

  A tear fell from my eye, and I silently cursed it. “Nothing. It’s nothing. I shouldn’t have… just forget I came.”

  “Where’s your necklace?”

  My hand flew to my neck. I forgot the chain with his ring on it had broken. I didn’t really think he’d notice anyway. “It broke. Like a lot of things.”

  He looked down at the paper and smoothed it out, looking it over until he saw the section I circled. “Who’s Maeve?”

  I looked at him one last time. Let my eyes get their fill. Then I walked away. Another tear fell from my eyes. I swiped it away with an angry brush of my hand.

  I was half inside my car when he called to me. “Mae? Milayna, is it Mae?” Nodding, I pulled the car door shut. I pulled away from the curb and drove away, trying not to look at him in the rearview mirror.

  It wasn’t thirty seconds later that my cell phon
e rang. Chay’s picture smiled at me from the screen, his blue-green eyes twinkling in the sunlight. I tossed the phone in the passenger seat and let the call go to voicemail.

  It rang again a few seconds later. I didn’t bother looking at it. When it rang a third time, I snatched it from the seat and pushed the answer button. “What?” I snapped.

  “I’m sorry,” he said quietly.

  “For which particular thing are you sorry, Chay?”

  “Mae. I’m sorry neither of us saw it coming.”

  “Me, too. I need to go. I’m driving.” I started to click off when I heard him.

  “Milayna…”

  I waited silently for him to finish.

  “I… about last night—”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “No? Why not?”

  “Why should I explain what happened? You didn’t want to hear it last night. And don’t say it caught you by surprise or some equally stupid bullshit like that. If you trusted me, you would have listened. You don’t trust me—”

  “I don’t trust him,” he bit out.

  “You don’t trust me either. I need to go. But for future reference, I’m not with Xavier, haven’t been for five months, Chay, because I was waiting for you. But now that you’re back, I don’t think I want to be with you either.” I clicked off the line.

  ***

  Tuesday morning, the sun was shining. The birds were singing. The squirrels were using the last few days of the Indian summer to gather nuts and bury them for winter, even though they wouldn’t remember where the hell they put them a week from now. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky. Everyone seemed happy.

  But it wasn’t a day to be happy. Not for the friends and family of Maeve Yeoman. I wasn’t sure I counted as a friend. I’d like to think I did. But the truth was that I knew very little about her. I’d only met her twice, very briefly. But I grieved for her nonetheless.

  Maybe I felt guilty. If Chay and I had stayed a little later that night or if I’d brought her home with me until her apartment had dried out, maybe things would be different. Something. Then she wouldn’t have been alone. But that was the emotional side of my brain talking. The logical side told me it wouldn’t have mattered. Azazel would’ve taken her life then or a week later. Time didn’t matter to him. He had all of it he needed.

  Or so he thought. I was going to shorten his time significantly. If it was the last thing I did, and it very well might be.

  I finished getting dressed for the funeral, pulled on my shoes, walked out the door, and stopped short.

  There he was, leaning his back against the railing of the porch, looking at me. Waiting for me. He grinned crookedly and ducked his head, looking up at me through his thick eyelashes.

  “You’re beautiful.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Well, for starters, I was hoping I could catch a break and maybe take you to lunch after Mae’s funeral. And I was hoping to catch a ride to the funeral with you.”

  “You’re going?”

  “Yeah.”

  I nodded, looking over the side yard so I didn’t have to look at him. Was it wrong to have butterflies the size of trucks flying in my stomach when we were on our way to a funeral? I hoped not, because I had a fleet of them.

  “You can ride with me to the funeral. Let’s go. I don’t want to be late.”

  “And lunch?” Chay asked.

  “I’ll think about it.”

  “At least that’s not a no,” he said with a smile.

  “Yet.” His smile faltered just a fraction.

  Most funerals sucked. Watching people cry over the loss of their loved one, seeing their sadness, feeling their grief—I’d braced myself for that. I told myself that it would be bad. After all, the newspaper said she had five living children and a bunch of grandkids, so many they didn’t list them all by name. She even had two great-grandchildren. I fully expected to be torn apart by the family’s grief. What I wasn’t prepared for was no family. Not one. Not only was I grieving the loss of a sweet woman, but also a woman whose family couldn’t be inconvenienced by her, even in death.

  The front row of the chapel that was usually reserved for family was vacant. It was like a wart on someone’s nose. You tried not to look, but your eyes kept roaming there.

  A few friends showed up, most barely able to walk. It scared me to realize they actually drove there. Some younger ladies from her church’s quilting group were there, as well as Chay and me. That was it—oh, and the minister.

  In front of the minister lay Mae in her coffin. She looked peaceful in a powder-blue dress and matching box hat with a fishnet veil.

  “Oh, look, Gertie. She’s wearing her favorite dress,” a woman—that had to be two hundred years old if she was a day—said to a woman behind her pushing a walker.

  “She looks very peaceful,” Gertie, the woman with the walker, said softly.

  “That she does.” The first woman nodded and dabbed her eye with a lace hankie.

  After we were all seated, the minister started the ceremony. A woman from Mae’s church sang. Someone read a scripture and the minister said a few words.

  I looked around. The chapel was nearly empty. Everyone there fit into two pews. And when I looked in front of me, at Mae, my breath hitched in my throat. There were no sprays of flowers. No blankets of blooms to lie over her coffin. No wreaths that said ‘Mom’ or the like on it. Just a few haphazard bouquets brought by the handful of mourners.

  It was almost as though Mae’s life, and death, was a nonevent for her family—the people who should have loved her most.

  After the church ceremony, Chay and I went to the graveside portion. As soon as the last prayer was said, I couldn’t get out of there fast enough.

  “Let’s go.” I grabbed Chay’s arm.

  I turned too quickly. The heel of my shoe caught in the moist soil. My shoe went one way, I went another, and my ankle bent somewhere in between. Chay’s hand snaked out to steady me before I face-planted in the rotting layer of autumn leaves carpeting the grass.

  “Whoa, Speed Racer. You okay?” he asked.

  “Ah, yeah… no… I don’t know.” I covered my eyes with my hand. I knew what was coming, and it had nothing to do with the searing pain in my ankle. It really didn’t have to do with Mae’s death, although that certainly was a part of it. It was him—standing next to him, smelling him, my shoulder brushing against his arm, seeing the sun glint off his glossy hair showing just a hint of golden-red highlights.

  “Oh, Milayna,” Chay murmured when he saw the first tear roll down my cheek. Reaching down, he picked up my shoe and swept his arm under my knees, pulling me into his arms. He carried me toward the car.

  “Is she okay?” an old woman called.

  “Yes, she just twisted her ankle on the wet ground. I don’t know why she wore such high heels,” Chay said with a smile.

  “Harold, how come you don’t carry me like that anymore?” The old lady looked at the man next to her. He was around ninety and walked with a cane.

  “I don’t wanna break a hip,” he said.

  I choked back my laughter. Chay’s lips twitched. The woman didn’t find humor in his answer.

  “I have a suspicion that poor Harold is gonna get an ear full on the way home.” Chay’s breath skimmed my neck when he spoke.

  “Mm-hmm.” I nodded.

  Chay sat me in the passenger’s seat of the car, my legs hanging outside the car. “Does it hurt?”

  “It’s fine,” I said.

  “At least let me drive you home.”

  I tried hard not to look at him, staring over his shoulder at a cardinal perched on a branch of a pine tree, instead. The sight of him made my insides feel strangely out of place, and I couldn’t trust myself to make even the simplest of decisions. “Okay,” I finally said, dropping the keys in his open hand.

  He knelt down by my legs, looking up into my eyes for what seemed an eternity before he reached up and gently twirled a
loose curl of my hair around his finger. He rubbed the strands between his finger and thumb before pushing them softly behind my ear.

  His finger trailed down the side of my neck, lifting the gold chain lying against my skin. “I see you got it fixed.”

  I could feel a blush heat my cheeks. “It’s a different chain,” I whispered.

  “Hmm.”

  “Chay, it really wasn’t what it looked like,” I said in a rush. “He kissed me. I swear it. Think about it… were my arms around him? No, because I wasn’t returning the kiss. I told you about Xavier. And I was telling you the truth when I said we were through. But what I didn’t tell you is that Xavier—”

  “Doesn’t want it to be over,” Chay said, looking at the toe of his shoe.

  “Right.” I sighed.

  “And you hid that little fact from me because?”

  “No, it’s not like that. I wasn’t hiding it. It just didn’t seem important. I honestly didn’t think it mattered.”

  “Give me the ring.” He held out his hand.

  “What?” My heart sped up and blood rushed behind my ears.

  “The ring I gave you. Give it to me.”

  “Oh.” A painful lump formed in my chest. It grew like a tumor, making it hard to breathe. Tears pushed behind my eyes. My fingers fumbled with the clasp. They were shaking so badly that I had a hard time getting the tiny lever on the clasp to open.

  I looked at it one last time before holding it out to him. I couldn’t believe he was taking it back. He had to know how important it was to me. I told him I never took it off while he was away. “Um…” I swallowed hard. My voice was thick, and I cleared my throat. “Here.” He slipped the ring from my grasp, and I bit my lip to hold back a cry. Instead, I nodded and looked away.

  “If you want to be with me. I mean, with only me—no Xavier, no hot blond construction guys…

  Oh, crap. He heard that!

  …then put it on.”

  “What?”

  “Prove to me I’m the only one you want, Milayna. Wear the ring on your finger where everyone can see you’re mine. Not on a chain under your clothes. Out in the open. Unless you’re not sure. If you’re not sure, that’s okay, but I need you to tell me—”

  I held out my hand. “Put it on me, Chay. I was just waiting for you to ask me to wear it again. Put it on.”