Fuck with Lydia and Lilly, asshole, and you’ll get the monster.
I turn up the machine as loud as it will go. Very faintly, I hear footsteps in the background. Like a nice pair of shoes stepping across a freshly waxed, cleaned floor. A soft echo that follows each step.
Wears nice shoes, I write down.
Of course, it could be someone else around him. But there’s something about his steps, the sharpness of his tone that matches his words. He’s walking.
“Hey.” I hear, and my front door shuts.
I jump, causing my beer to spill all over the counter.
“Shit.” I grab the roll of paper towels by the sink.
Ethan stands in the doorway. “Did I interrupt?”
Wiping up the beer, saving my house phone and the answering machine from the alcohol, I shake my head. “Scared the shit out of me.”
I debate on telling Ethan about this. Really, it’s nothing yet. Besides, I can handle this fucker, whoever he thinks he is.
The answering machine message plays again.
Shit.
Ethan listens and rests his hands on the counter.
The message stops.
“Who’s that?” Ethan asks.
“Beer?”
“Sure.”
I grab one from the fridge and hand it to him. He pops it open. Takes a swig and waits for my answer.
Instead, I grab another beer, open it, take a long drink, and then say, “Not sure.”
He smirks, taking another drink. “You need backup?”
It’s good to have the newer Ethan back. The one who cracks jokes, smiles. Although we’ll never have the old Ethan back, we have an Ethan back who’s been through hell. Fought hard to be who he is today and found a woman who loves him as fiercely as I do. Though I’d never tell him this.
This guy on the answering machine doesn’t scare me in the least. What scares me is that he knows Lilly and Lydia.
So, in that respect, I answer, “Maybe.”
“How’d he get your number?”
“No idea.” I lean over to the machine and hit Save.
“You gonna tell Lydia?”
“Nah.” I debate on telling him that it’s been hard for us to make it this far and that I don’t want to push her away. Besides, threats are just that. Threats.
Will I keep a closer eye out? Fuck yes. Will I be extra cautious, extra protective when I’m with the both of them? Absolutely.
Ethan shrugs. Tucks his beer in the crook of his arm. “Good thing you still have the prehistoric time box.”
I take another sip of my beer. “What’d you come here for? To give me a rash of shit?”
He shakes his head. “Just felt like you needed me—and to give you shit.”
I let a big breath out. “Have … have you seen the stitches on Lydia’s arm, near her wrist?”
Ethan’s eyes narrow in on mine. He shakes his head. “But I don’t spend any time with her.”
There isn’t a thought that she might have done this to herself or something awful like that. Not a thought that I’ve had though.
He says, “Do you think there’s a connection with this douche bag?” He nods his head toward the prehistoric time box.
Shit.
Fuck.
Why didn’t I think of that?
My blood becomes fire. My heart rate increases. Hands grow sweaty. “I-I don’t know.”
Now, this thought drives me crazy. Not only do I need to figure out who this guy is, but I also need to find out why Lydia has the mark on her wrist. Are there others on her body?
“Play the message again,” Ethan says.
I hit play.
The clicking of footsteps. The slight echo of his words. A hallway. Ethan isn’t listening to his words either. He’s listening to what I’m listening to—everything the man isn’t saying. We’re trained for this. We went to school for this.
“Echo,” he says. “Footsteps. Where’d the call come from?”
“Unknown number.”
He nods. “Play it again.”
I do.
“Is he wearing the shoes that are doing the clicking?”
“It seems like it. Almost like his words fall in line with his step.”
The message stops.
“Could call Hodges at the troopers’ office. Just see what he knows. Anything suspicious going on here. Or anywhere around us for that matter.” Ethan rests his back on the counter.
I’ll be vigilant. Observant. Watchful.
“Wouldn’t take it too serious. Could be some sort of keyboard warrior who’s off his rocker a bit.”
“Where I get caught up is, he knows Lydia and Lilly by name and knows I’ve been spending time with them.”
“And yet, he hasn’t faced you. Approached you like a man, face-to-face. He’d rather call and leave a message on that little box that our current world has a hard time comprehending.”
“And an email. If it’s the same guy.” There’s a pause. “Could get rid of the machine.”
Ethan laughs. “You won’t. You’ll hang on to that fucker until it sells as an antique. Just like our old baseball bats that you have in your garage. And our mitts.”
He’s right. But, one day, we’ll use the bats and mitts, maybe to remind us what it was like for four boys to hit the ball field and be free. Free to roam the town. Not a care in the world. Play baseball like it was life and not just a memory in the making.
“You good?” Ethan asks.
“Yeah. You off tomorrow?”
“Nope. Duty calls.” He walks to the sink and dumps whatever’s left of his beer. Sets the bottle on the counter. Comes back toward me. “You?”
“Yeah. Two in a row.”
“Keep me posted on this. If anything changes.”
I nod, holding my beer, turning the cap in my hand.
Ethan leaves, shutting the door behind him.
Thirteen
Lydia
My eyes adjust to the morning light as it peeks through my window. I stare at the ceiling, following the grooves from the paint on the ceiling. The sheer curtains that cover the window are for decor purposes only. I stretch out my arms, and they fall to a lump next to me.
I pull my head up from my pillow, and out from the comforter on the pillow are wisps of blonde hair. I pull the cover gently enough to see my sweet nugget sacked out next to me. Mouth open, on her back. Turning to my side, I watch her as she sleeps. Wonder what she’s dreaming about. Trying to pinpoint the exact time I fell in love with this little girl. It wasn’t when she was born. It was before that, I guess. The first time she kicked a roundhouse to my ribs. I was almost, but not quite, twenty weeks pregnant with her. I knew from that moment on that my little girl was going to be tenacious, stubborn, and steadfast.
Her long eyelashes rest on her perfectly round cheeks below. The curve of her lips, perfect and pink. She sleeps softly, and I hear her tiny breaths, just like I did when she was a baby. When a woman has a child, becomes a mother, three things happen.
1. Her heart changes forever where she becomes second and her child becomes first.
2. She knows a love that only a mother knows.
3. She gains superpowers.
When I first told Brett I was pregnant, he was overjoyed. Ecstatic to be a father, but even more so, I think, happier for me. We’d tried for a while to get pregnant but to no avail. Then, one morning, in the sadness of another negative pregnancy test, I stopped trying. I stopped worrying. I let go. And wouldn’t you know, the next month, I came up pregnant.
I thought, somehow, the violence would stop. I see it now. That I was in denial. That I lived in some fairy tale because I loved Brett with all my heart.
He works long days, I used to tell myself. Helps people. Saves lives.
I defended him. He had no way to de-stress. Every single time he did it, I saw the remorse in his eyes that came soon after. Sometimes, just minutes later. Every time, I took him back. Forgave him. Blamed it on the world. Its p
roblems. His demanding career.
If he could just get a good night’s sleep, he wouldn’t do this, I’d tell myself.
But none of this is why I took Lilly and left. The worst was yet to come.
I try to blink out the memory, not allow the tears to fall that somehow feel like boulders.
Lilly stirs with a squeal and pushes her arms above her head. Her eyes blink awake. A huge smile spreads across her face when she sees me. She turns inwardly, and I pull her to me. My heart swells.
“Good morning, Mommy.”
“Good morning, baby girl. Did you sleep well?”
“Not so good. I had a nightmare,” she says.
My heart constricts. Thoughts of Brett brimming my mind. Lilly and I left Brett in Massachusetts when she was just barely a year old. Sometimes, she has nightmares but says she never remembers what they’re about, only that the feeling she gets when her eyes shoot open is that she’s scared and she can’t explain why, except that it’s a fear inside her bones.
Most children don’t know what real fear is like, and I wonder if Lilly does. Although she was just an infant when we left Brett, there were times when he’d strike me right in front of her while she was lying on the floor on her blanket or in her swing.
“How about we make blueberry pancakes and then go down to the harbor and feed the seagulls?” I ask.
Lilly’s quiet, more reserved than usual. She plays with a string from my pajama top.
“Mommy?”
“Hmm?” I take my fingers and push her silky blonde hair behind her ears.
“Aaron is really nice. It was nice of him to sit with me all day and help sell lemonade.”
The feeling starts in my stomach. It twists and turns and makes me feel uncomfortable and whole, all at the same time. I push it away, trying to tuck it down beneath my heart. “It was nice of him.”
“He has the kind of eyes that tell the truth. And that don’t hurt my mommy.”
The punch to my gut lands right where it should, and all my air is exhausted, leaving me with questions.
Does Lilly remember her father?
Does she remember him hurting me?
Grief and guilt consume me like ill-fitted feelings that I’m not suited for, not ready for, and yet I take them, let them fall over me like waves in an ocean. Waves I can’t control.
Can’t breathe.
Say something, Lydia. Say some goddamn words right now. Help your daughter.
“Do you remember your father, Lil?”
She shakes her head.
I wait on her words like an ice cube waiting its demise in the summer heat. The lump in my throat and the twisted feelings in my gut play on each other like a sick game of two truths and a lie.
“No.”
I exhale.
“But I remember someone hitting you in the face. I can’t see who hit you, but you fell to the ground and lay there and wouldn’t wake up.”
Pulling my daughter to me, I rest her against my heart. My body, not feeling as it should, I hold tight to my world as I kiss the top of her head and put my cheek on her strands of blonde hair. My heart pounds against what is not right, the poor decisions I made that put us in that spot. No child should see what Lilly has seen.
I’m scared to ask what else she’s seen, but I do it anyway. My daughter needs this.
“Did you see anything else?” I try to hold my voice steady.
“No.”
I clear my throat. Push away the tears, find strength somewhere between her and me.
This will not break us. I can live with my decisions that have affected my life, and I must live with the decisions that have affected my daughter’s life.
I should have left sooner.
“Is this what your nightmare was about?”
Does she really remember these nightmares but is too scared to share them with me?
Slow nod.
I want to ask, Why didn’t you tell me sooner? Why did you hold this in?
But I don’t get to ask these questions because nothing will change the situation at hand. We can’t unsee anything. Life isn’t well paced. It’s planned but not in the order we’d like it to be. Life is in session, and we’re merely pawns. So, all I do is hold my little girl in my arms and pray that I have the ability to clear her troubled heart.
“You are wise beyond your years, Lilly White. Do you know that?”
“Can we have pancakes now, Mommy?”
“As many as you want.” I give her a big squeeze. “You know that we’re okay now, right, baby girl?”
She nods, leaving the slumber in her eyes to the birds. “Your hugs and kisses tell me we are.”
Lilly gives Nana one last hug. I do, too.
“Your father is going nuts without his buttermilk bread. You’d think he could drive his ass to the store and pick some up, but no.”
I let my arms linger around her neck for just a moment longer. “Thank you for everything, Mom.”
Thank you for getting sober.
Thank you for raising me the way you did.
Thank you for teaching me to be strong, even when I didn’t think I had it in me.
But I don’t say all this. Besides, I think she knows.
Mom gets in her car, rolls down the passenger window with a push of a button, and waves. “I’ll text you when I get home.”
Lilly and I wave from the curb until Nana’s car disappears down Main Street.
Our hands fall to our sides. Lilly holds on to my leg. My eyes fall to her.
“The harbor?”
She grins. “Yeah, the harbor.”
It’s eleven thirty in the morning, and the bookstore is always closed on Sundays. The whole town of Granite Harbor, aside from Granite Harbor Grocery and Oceanside Deli, are closed. We pack two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and a loaf of stale bread that we save for occasions like these.
“Ready?” I ask, looking down at my grinning daughter with her hot-pink sunglasses on, holding our blanket.
“Yep.”
We walk downstairs from our apartment and down the alleyway to Main Street. We cross the street and wave to the Petes, who are leaving Oceanside Deli.
Lilly is talking about how Maddy Sunday doesn’t like Sundays because Ruby’s mom said Sundays were the day God told all the churchgoers to take a break. “Maddy Sunday has a hard time slowing down, Mommy.”
“I know.”
“We don’t go to church. Do we need to take a break, too?”
“I suppose everyone needs a day to slow down, no matter what day it is.”
“Ruby’s mom said that if people don’t accept God into our hearts, they’ll go to hell. Is that true?”
I make a mental note to call Penny Sunday and tell her to stop screwing with my kid’s head. I’m quiet for a moment. “I believe that God, whatever he looks like to you, trusts that if we do good, we’ll all get to heaven eventually.” And don’t listen to Penny Sunday. She’s got a screw loose. But I don’t say this.
We’re almost to the harbor as we cross the park.
“Hey, how would you feel about going to dinner with Aaron tonight?” I bring up the topic as if he’s just a friend.
A grin starts to spread across her face. “I’d like that a lot.”
“It’s settled then.”
We throw our blanket down in the grass just above the harbor, which leads to the sand that leads to the water. I’m wearing jean capris and a flowy, long-sleeved black blouse. A black bathing suit underneath. Not that we’ll go swimming, but because I want to stay cool.
We feed the birds our old, stale bread.
We run in the surf.
We pretend to be tourists who have British accents.
We call in fishing boats.
We build palaces made of sand and rock.
We try to forget about our past, what we went through to get here.
We give freely of our minds, forget that the world around us is watching, and live in the moment.
The
sun hasn’t budged much. Our sandwiches taste good. We breathe heavily as we take our seats on the blanket. We sit, eat, and watch the sea lions bark, push, and play on the dock just to the east of us.
“This is the best life, Mommy.” Lilly looks up at me and drops her head to my side. “The best life.”
There was a small time when we lived apart so that I could get treatment. And maybe it had a bigger impact on my Lilly than I thought.
“You are my best life, Lilly.”
“I know,” she says as she takes another bite of her sandwich.
A boat is called in from the Atlantic and steered to the dock.
Another sea lion barks.
Everything seems to move like clockwork, a forward motion, and yet here we are, reminiscent and stuck at the same time, collecting up memories as we make them, like an old box of photographs that reminds us of feelings, yesterdays, and lives lived.
“When are we going to dinner with Aaron, Mama?”
“At six o’clock.”
Lilly takes another bite of her sandwich, and with her mouth full, she says, “I’ll wear a dress.”
Lilly hates dresses. Loathes them. For her school Christmas performances and dressy occasions, I buy leggings for her.
“A dress?”
“Yeah. I think this is important to Aaron.”
“Yeah? Why?”
“Mommy, he likes you a lot.”
I reach for her hand.
Am I confusing her more? Taking up dinner with a man who’s, yes, attractive and, yes, good to my daughter and all right, yes, very handsome, but if I say my daughter is first in my life, will this change things? This might confuse her.
Panic builds in my throat. But I can’t back out now. That would most certainly confuse her. Human emotions can be so complex. When I’m with Aaron, alone, I feel as though everything is just as it should be. The bees pollinate, plants grow, and the world spins. Everything in the world has its time and place. As if all the previous moments have led us to this point in our life, and all the pieces are beginning to fall into place.
But it’s these times, the times with just Lilly and me, when the confusion starts with Aaron. Thoughts begin to build on other thoughts, and my past, our past, seems to creep up into the cracks of my mind and feed on my vulnerabilities, allowing self-doubt and guilt to break free.
Lilies on Main Page 9