The door creaks wider. “Ted, what the fuck’s taking so long—”
Sadie freezes when she sees me. We both freeze. Her dreads are pulled back, and she looks the same, only worse, in this puffy-eyed, bare-lashes way, not one but two sticky kids barnacled to her legs. Their braids are identical. Their faces.
One waves. I hate kids. But I’m so shocked, I wave back.
“Language,” Teddy sighs.
“Language,” the boys mimic, pinching her. She yelps.
A white cat wanders out and writhes around my ankles. Ted and Sadie remain silent, trading fire with their eyes. Meanwhile, she’s barely looked at me. Sadie. I try to beam her some kind of message. A reminder that she told me not to go, and I haven’t. I never will. Then she spots the guitar, and something seems to loosen inside her.
“Listen up, troops.” She squats to address the twins, not that she technically needs to. “Remember that pack of cards from last night? I want you to go downstairs and throw them all over the rec room. Fifty-two-card pickup. I know your daddy yelled at us before, only now”—she fishes for his eye, but he’s turned away from her, pinching the bridge of his nose—“I’ve got a hunch he won’t care.” The boys run off shrieking. Sadie stands. Her jeans are too long, cuffs rolled but still piling over her bare feet. I don’t recognize those jeans. Or the saggy Yeti sweater.
“Hello, Koda.” This wrinkle in her voice.
“Sadie,” Teddy says.
I want to touch her.
“Sadie, I swear to Christ—”
“What?” she barks. “You think I called her? How would…” The word catches. Our eyes connect, and I get this feeling—this fizzy, reckless feeling. Teddy steps back. Too close not to have felt it too.
“A minute,” Sadie says.
I go molten. Full-body flush.
“Give us a minute, Teddy, won’t you?”
“A minute,” Ted says, holding up a finger. Just one.
* * *
The room Sadie pulls me into off the entryway is dark and musty-smelling, but I don’t care, because I’m here. Sadie’s here. And now she’s shutting the door and rushing toward me, whispering my name. I don’t know how I catch her, but I do.
“Sadie, oh God, I missed you. I missed you so much!” I was hoping to say something better than this. Something cool, and clever. But with her skinny legs hooked around my waist, I don’t need to be either. The force of our impact smashed me into the furniture. Some kind of humungous desk that I can barely make out in the darkness.
“I know,” she says quietly. “Kiddo, I know, I thought about you every goddamn minute. What are you doing here? Are you crazy?” She takes my face in her hands. “Does your mother know—”
No. Mom has no idea. Presumably. My phone’s deep in my backpack, on silent—but mentioning Mom has made Sadie paler. “I thought you were dead,” I say, wheezing with excitement. Relief. “I thought I’d never see you again. My mom told me you went to rehab. She’s doing everything she can to keep us apart!” Sadie slides from my arms.
“Did go, but I couldn’t…” She falters. “Rehab’s a little been there, done that for me, you know? That kumbaya twelve-step garbage, it’s not exactly my style.”
“Oh.” I guess it wouldn’t be. But if she’s still using drugs… if rehab could help…
“Of course, Ted’ll tell you I should’ve stayed. So why, I ask, would he help bust me out?” A thread of hair clings to my lips. I feel it tickling, and then the brush of Sadie’s fingers as she pushes it impatiently away. “You’re wild,” she murmurs. A compliment. It must be.
I grab her hand. “Will Teddy let me stay?”
“Minute’s up,” he booms through the door.
While Sadie goes to open it, I smooth my hair, right my sweatshirt. No way she would’ve told him that we kissed. He’s just doing his overbearing concern thing. At least, that’s what Sadie accuses him of as he steps into the room. Light from the hall spills in, and I realize we’re in some kind of office. Paperwork stacked in piles, a slumbering MacBook. The whole far wall is lined with trophies. Alpaca trophies. BEST FIBER ART, STUD OF THE YEAR, BEST FLEECE. I almost don’t realize that Ted’s staring at me.
“He would have done this,” he says after a long moment. His voice is so ordinary. Not deep. Not high. Even if he could sing, I can’t imagine my father letting him.
Sadie leans against the door, arms folded. “Told you.” In the sallow light she looks worse than ever, her mouth swollen and bruised. I swallow, ignoring memories of her lurching from my arms that day in the bathroom, heaving up the blood that had drained into her stomach. The memory is so visceral, that I struggle to work out what they’re implying.
Of course my father would’ve done this. That’s the point. But their acknowledgment still makes me breathless. “Thanks.”
Teddy tugs thoughtfully at his curls and says we might as well move into the kitchen. An impossibly green kitchen at the back of the house, with avocado-colored appliances and some other vegetable—cabbages?—dotting the wallpaper. That’s also how the place smells. Old cabbage. And manure, courtesy of mucky boots stacked by the door. The table is covered in what appears to be more paperwork. Teddy jerks out a chair but then sits in another, across from it. Sadie begins puttering around the cabinets.
“I feel,” Teddy says, not ungently, “that you owe us an explanation, Koda Rose. I assume that your mother doesn’t know where you are, and is probably going out of her mind with worry. I also assume Sadie’s told you my rule about the guitar. Not that that’s more important than your mom’s peace of mind, but…” He pulls one of Sadie’s dreads as she passes by, making her cringe and smack his arm. “Let’s say it is.”
The guitar case is propped in a corner. Teddy must have carried it in while I was reuniting with Sadie. He must’ve hunted around the kitchen for a clean, uncluttered place to put it, far from the shit boots.
“You’ve got to do something about these locs, Sades,” Ted’s saying.
She flicks him off.
“This is your last warning, and I mean it. As your sole Black friend, I do not, nor will I ever, condone this.” He turns back to me, eyebrows raised. “So?”
I linger by the chair he pulled out, wondering if it’s for me. If it’d be too presumptuous or totally beside the point if I asked him to call me Koda. There are cabbages on the back of the chairs, too, but painted. I trace one with a fingertip. Where to begin?
“Ted’s been real hot for the I feel statements lately,” Sadie says, spooning grounds into a coffee maker. She faces the counter—I can’t read the slope of her shoulders, if she’s trying to cover for me, or what. Once again, Teddy grimaces, which must be a thing with him. Every line in his face seems to be waiting for it. “Sadie,” she mocks, in Ted’s nothing voice, “when you do X, I feel Y. Which, you know, makes me feel like total shit, but there you have it.”
Deciding the chair is for me, I sit down. A cat jumps immediately into my lap. Not the white one from before, but a ginger tabby determined to show me her butthole. I dodge her stringy tail while Teddy cradles his head in his hands.
“Okay.” He straightens, rubbing his big dry paws together. “Okay, Koda Rose—”
“Koda,” I rasp.
He doesn’t seem to hear. “I’ll explain, since Sadie refuses. This is the third—no, fourth time?—that Sadie’s attempted rehab. First couple, she almost makes it through the program. Then some big anniversary rolls around, Mack’s death, their first date, whatever, to make her relapse, and here I come driving all over the state to pick her up and bring her home. Third, she gets clean. Stays clean until”—he points at me, then wiggles his fingers, boom, confetti flying—“she meets you. And now her nose is bleeding again. She’s got to have surgery. Okay? I’m sorry. I know you’re just a kid, and this must all be very exciting for you, this grown-up person with her grown-up problems, but you’ve got to accept responsibility for your actions. That guitar represents…” He stabs a finger at it. “How the
hell did you get ahold of it anyway?”
I’m too busy processing this new information—Sadie only mentioned rehab didn’t work for her; I didn’t realize she’d tried and struggled and been bailed out so many times—that I don’t see her mouth pressed into a thin, white scar. Not until I’m saying, “What do you mean, how did I get ahold of the guitar? I didn’t. Sadie showed me. In her apartment,” and her whole face collapses. What’s wrong? I try to ask with my eyes. What was my mistake?
“Seriously?” Ted says.
She turns away, wiping her cheeks with the back of her hand.
“The guitar was in storage. I got—you’re supposed to be using the goddamn storage unit, Sadie!”
Storage unit? What is he talking about? “Sadie’s been teaching me to play,” I say with all the snottiness I can muster. “She’s an amazing teacher, even though I’m pretty much hopeless. Bad just like my father.”
At that, Ted tilts his head. He glances back at Sadie. “Bad?”
“Started bad, stayed bad,” I quote proudly. Sadie swirls a finger on the countertop.
“I mean…” Ted’s looking at me now. “Don’t get me wrong, he wasn’t a natural, not like Our Lady of Chaos over here, but he was never bad.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“So don’t. But that’s the truth. We met at jazz band practice—he played bass too. Whooped my ass at bass, in fact.”
A crash downstairs. Yelling. There might be more than cards being thrown in the basement. I want to scream at Ted that I’m not a kid, that my very presence in his kitchen, my refusal to buy into his stupid lies, proves as much. But he pushes up from the table, glancing at the clock. “I’ve got to take the boys to their grandparents’,” he announces, then moves off into the hallway, bellowing, “Boys!”
Say something, Sadie. Come on. Say something. Tell Teddy he’s wrong.
Sadie nibbles her sweater cuff.
The cat purrs into my face.
She moves away from the counter when the boys stampede into the kitchen, clutching jackets. Sadie screws herself together to help them, maneuvering arms and zipping zippers more expertly than expected. Either the boys aren’t old enough not to stare at strangers, or Teddy hasn’t gotten around to imparting this valuable lesson yet. I glare back at them, rooted to my chair.
“That’s Koda,” Sadie says, not quite looking at me. She points to a twin—the stickier-looking of the two. “Archie.” She points to the other. “Jet.”
“I’m Jet!” the stickier one screeches, and Sadie makes a show of acting astonished, clutching her head, which makes them howl. The fury I’ve been holding back crashes over me.
“Don’t you realize she’s humoring you?” I demand.
Sadie flinches, but I might as well be talking to the cabbages. The boys hop around her. Too stupid, and little and naive, to understand what I meant anyway. I stand. My chair shrieks against the linoleum. “Are you going to be here when we get back, Aunty Sadie?” one asks as I push into the hall. I glance back at her. One last, helpless grab of a glance—does she not care where I’m going? Sadie chuckles, pretending to bonk the boys’ heads together.
“Depends on how well you behave.…”
Teddy’s in the foyer, sorting through a heap of sneakers.
“Sadie wouldn’t lie to me,” I inform him.
He pauses, a different shoe in each hand. “Did I say she lied?”
“You contradicted what she told me. Same thing.”
Teddy digs two more shoes from the pile, then takes something from the closet. Stiff, brown canvas, more tarp than coat. I look back toward the kitchen, and when I refocus on Teddy, he’s adjusting the tarp-coat’s collar, watching me closely. “You’re incredibly tall,” he says.
“Five ten,” I reply automatically. Then, “Taller than him.”
I meant this defiantly, but he laughs, the sound big and unexpected. A door slamming. “Not hard.”
The boys appear. Teddy grabs his keys off an alpaca-shaped hook on the wall. “Archie, wait,” he warns, but they’re gone already, tumbling out into the night. The white cat slinks inside. Teddy sighs. And it’s not until he steps closer to me that I understand how blue his eyes are. Not the deep, broody blue of my father’s, but flickering, practically holographic in their intensity. “Your dad… he’s been gone a long time. Eighteen years, just about. You’ve got to excuse us if our memories of him aren’t perfect.”
No. No. Memory fading is no excuse at all. Sadie and Ted lived with my father. They did drugs together, and laughed and had sex and fought about songs. They knew him. If I’d had the same privilege, every second I spent with him, every word he spoke, would be in my head forever. Wrapped in velvet paper.
Damp air trickles through the door, smelling like grass, and rain, and more shit. I shiver, stuffing my hands in my armpits.
“I’m heading one county over. Two hours, round-trip,” Teddy tells me. He starts for the porch, then stops. “Please don’t be here when I get back.”
When I return to the kitchen, Sadie has the window cracked over the sink, a cigarette tucked in the corner of her mouth. As I approach, she removes it with a guilty swipe.
“Just me.” The words seem weighted somehow. Like just by saying them, I’m disappointing her. She lights up, takes the hard, hungry drag she’s probably been dying for since Teddy bailed her out of rehab. Now his words—You’ve got to excuse us if our memories of him aren’t perfect—tumble through my brain. “Sades?” I wait for her to look at me. “How come you told me my father was… you never said he played bass.”
Sadie studies the cigarette’s red-hot tip. “You try it, ever?”
My last remaining defense—a casual shrug.
I have acid reflux and a pet frog. Every instrument is a mystery to me.
“Easiest goddamn thing to play in the world, let me tell you. Stand there and pluck it.” She ashes the cigarette over the sill.
Her crumpled pack of Newports sits on the counter. I sense her watching with approval as I draw one out. A charge leaps through my fingertips, and I almost drop it. The insides of my cheeks start to sweat.
She smirks. “Make you puke.”
One puff and I’m coughing. Sadie rubs my back in that funny way of hers. Up and down instead of in circles, like Mom would.
For a few minutes we just stand here. My head spins from the nicotine, this caving sensation opening inside me that I don’t know how to acknowledge without everything else caving too. Mostly, I try to copy Sadie. The cool, easy way she balances the cigarette between her fingers. Hers is a stub, mine ashy, when we crush them out in the sink.
Sadie mutters, “Ted’ll kick my ass out too if he smells smoke on me.”
So she heard us talking in the hall. She heard him say I had to leave, and didn’t do anything to defend me. I don’t know how to process this. I can’t go home yet.
Sadie’s lighting up again when I touch her shoulder.
“Shower,” I say.
CHAPTER 29
UPSTAIRS, TEDDY’S HOUSE IS THICKLY carpeted, the mat in the little guest bathroom noodly between my toes. Water drums into the tub, Sadie silhouetted by the plastic curtain. I hear her gurgle and spit. “Tastes like shit,” she complains.
My legs quiver. I try to draw them up, but the toilet is unacceptably narrow, especially with the seat down. Steam billows, blurring the medicine cabinet and tiny window. Bottles line the tub ledge. I study the labels. Pantene, and some kind of off-brand body wash that’s supposed to smell like cupcakes.
Sadie says, “Big risk, coming all this way.”
“I had to.”
She sets something down. “Teddy—”
“I don’t care what Teddy thinks. He’s an idiot. Okay? Best friends, they say they want what’s best for you, maybe even put up a really convincing front, but they don’t know anything. They’re all idiots!” If she agrees, she doesn’t show it. The body wash bottle disappears. Sadie sticks a hand out, and I reach to pull a washcloth from t
he shelf above the toilet, doing my best to ignore that she’s naked.
She laughs. “Well, excuse me, princess.”
I close my eyes. Squeeze them tight, tighter, until sparks shower across my lids. When I open them, Sadie’s silhouette is squirting shower gel into the washcloth. It actually does smell like cupcakes. Sprinkles, and vanilla, and yellow dough. I push my breath out my mouth. This grown-up person with her grown-up problems… like mine don’t qualify. Like no matter how old I get, how much I learn about my father, I’ll never be grown-up enough to fully comprehend him.
In Sadie’s version of my father, the version that I have clung to these past two months, he’s this wild renegade. Reckless, only functionally talented, a quiet loner. In the other version, Teddy’s version, a crucial new detail: he played bass. I don’t know why that matters to me. It shouldn’t. Not this much. He could have played bass, and been all of the other things Sadie claimed he was. This image I’ve cherished of him helping me with Lindsay and teaching me guitar, laughing at our mutual suckiness—that could still be true. Couldn’t it?
My phone jolts against my thigh.
Hey. The bracelet is beautiful. thx <333
just wanted to let u know that.
It must be my disbelief, the shock at finally hearing from her, that makes me type, Ur welcome.
Also I…
Ugh idk how to say this but
When ur ready to talk about my visit
Just know that I am 2. Ok???
Talk? About…? If the visit had gone better, I could tell her what happened with Sadie. Omg, Linds, guess where I am right now??? Obviously, she hasn’t been following the blogs.
Then again, if we hadn’t fought, if I’d chilled out and maybe just listened to her concerns about Sadie, I wouldn’t be here at all.
I don’t say anything more, and neither does Lindsay. While Sadie finishes up, I doodle a hole in the foggy window and look out of it, at the blank space where the moon should be.
The Mythic Koda Rose Page 22