Indigo: The Saving Bailey Trilogy #2 (21 page)

“She can’t do anything about it. I told her over the phone that if I came I was going to take you away, that or call the police. She didn’t argue,” he says.

“I’d kiss you right now, but it’d taste like vomit. I love you when you act all macho like this. Like I’m Lois Lane and you’re Spiderman, or something.”

I lean past the front seats, and rest my head on the center console. Spencer ruffles my hair. “Are you okay, baby?”

“I am now,” I say.

A circus,
Bailey called it. Her mom, the ring leader, controlling the natural order of everything. The rest of us elephants walking on two legs, or lions growling on command.

“Why do we keep playing part in her circus?” Bailey asked.

It seems she had already asked herself that same question. She wanted to get off the ride, but she knew it wasn’t going to stop for her. Sitting on my mom’s bathroom rug, in one of our beach towels, she stared back at my family like we could stop natural order, her eyes so large they might have turned to vortexes and sucked everything up in them.

Mom had helped her into a hot bath and washed her hair. She put burn cream on her back and let her sleep in her bed. It was really all she could do. In truth, it felt like that was really all
any
of us could do.
Sydney had cracked her whip and who were we to fight against it?

In the kitchen, I find Sarah at the table in soccer garb, downing a grapefruit bigger than her head. “The charity case is back,” she says between slurping bites of grapefruit.

“You know what the thing about charity cases is?”

“No, what?” she says, pouring half a cup of sugar onto the abnormally large fruit.

“They’re grateful. Some of the most grateful people you’ll ever come across. They don’t ask for anything, except a little help.”

“They suck you dry, like leeches. You’re going to get tired of taking care of her. Someday you’re going to want someone who isn’t in pieces.”

“Sarah, get your head out of your ass and open your eyes!
I love her
. When she’s whole and when she’s not. I don’t love her any more or any less because she’s in shambles. That’s what love is. You never even had a boy look your way, you wouldn’t know.”

She points her spoon at me, her eyes squinting as if she’s about to tell me off, then her shoulders and the corners of her mouth droop. “I’m done eating,” she says pushing the grapefruit away from her and getting off the chair.

Sauntering around the corner, she moves in the direction of Mom’s room. My muscles tense, I don’t want her bothering Bailey so I follow.

She stands in the doorway, watching Bailey sleep.

“You can go in,” I say.

She sits down with her back to the wall, facing the bed. “Mom didn’t do my laundry today,” she says. “She didn’t make me breakfast, or ask me to take a shower, or remind me to brush my teeth.”

“She’s been busy. You’re a big girl, you can do those things on your own,” I say, sliding down the wall beside her.

“It’s not the point, Spence,” she says. “I think she likes Bailey better than me.”

“Sarah—” I begin.

“And who wouldn’t? She’s sweeter and prettier, and braver, and everything I’m not,” she scowls. “Mom loves her.”

“Mom loves
you
, Sarah. You’ll always be her little girl. She just feels sorry for Bailey is all… she feels
obligated
.”

“Mom didn’t tell me that,” she says.

“Well, I’m telling you. Bailey’s very sick. Mom’s only trying to make her feel better, and then she’ll be back to taking care of you like normal, I promise.”

“Are you going to marry her?” she asks out of the blue.

“I would like to,” I say.

“She’s going to replace me. That’s what’s going to happen. Mom will love her more.”

“Yeah and how do you know that?”

“Because… even I love her more than myself.” Sarah rises and kisses Bailey’s forehead.

A few days pass. Bailey becomes well enough to walk to the park and observe our little tree, thriving in the summer heat and showers. Mom braids Bailey’s hair and sometimes she styles it in a half down ponytail- a powder blue ribbon in her hair, like a piece of the summer sky is always with her.

I teach Bailey how to grow roses. We buy a bush at Home Depot and plant it in a large clay pot. I show her how you trim the stalks that are only thorns and no roses—deadwood.

“What about this?” Bailey asks, her hand under a damaged stem.

“Damaged wood.” I take Mom’s gardening shears and cut it back an inch to healthy wood.

“What about the dead roses?”

“You remove them,” I snip one off and put it in her hair. “It’s still pretty, isn’t it, though?”

Bailey smiles at me and turns in her sundress. These past few days mark the happiest I have ever seen her. Like the roses, she blossoms under my touch. I cut back the damage and the deadness. New buds form, they open and flourish in their own perfumed splendor.

One day at the park, over lunch break, grazing underneath the shade created by our little tree, Bailey tells me that she punched her pregnant mother in the stomach. She says that she was sure she’d killed the baby, but last time she spoke with her mom she had gone for an ultrasound and the baby was fine.

“It’s a boy!” Bailey says with relief.

“You wanted a brother?”

She nods her head furiously, smiling with her sandwich between her teeth. “I’ve always wanted a little brother…I knew it was a boy.”

“So, who’s the father?”

“Saint,”
she says sticking out her tongue. “She told me when we were in a moving truck on the way to our new apartment…it was the day I thought I had come home just in time to stop her from having sex with him.”

“Who is he?”

She takes one of my chips and shrugs. “Some sleazebag Mom brought home from Indigo. They just did it and bam—
baby!
”

I want to tell her that’s not how it works, you don’t just do it and then you’re pregnant. That first there is love, deep love that warrants an offspring. I want to tell her that I wish there were little Baileys running all around us now. But then I think she would argue that her mother and father conceived her, and there never was any love involved. She’d never known such love, until she came into my family. I just kiss her head and steal one of her chips to get even.

“I keep thinking that maybe I’ll leave her. Let her raise the baby alone. Like starting new. Maybe then she wouldn’t abuse him,” she says, squinting at the sun.

“Your eyes are watering,” I say.

“It’s the sun.”

“You couldn’t leave your mom and she couldn’t let you go. It would never happen,” I say.

“You’re right, I love her too much.”

I tell Bailey that she should just run away from her mom. Maybe move to the mountains…a secluded meadow atop a hill and build a house on it. I say that we’ll live together and I’ll sing a new song every day so she’ll never be bored.

Bailey says, “Sometimes the sun shines too strongly on our tree; it wilts its leaves and shrivels them up like prunes. But it doesn’t hate the sun; it doesn’t hide from it or run from it.” She shields her eyes and shifts her gaze to me. “Because it still needs that sun to grow.”

“Come on in,” Thomas says cheerfully. It’s sweltering in the 8x8 aluminum shed. I wonder how anyone could be happy in such suffocating heat.

“So, you finally got a home,” I say, finding a place to sit in the dirt.

“Yep,” he says. “Home is a place with a roof and four walls.”

I tuck my knees under my chin.

“Are you hungry?” He holds out a red apple with dull, bruised skin to me.

“Oh, I couldn’t—” I start to say.

“I have six of them and they’ll be rotten by the end of the day in this heat.”

He places it on my knee and I stare. “How were you able to afford this shed?” I ask, my eyes remaining on the apple as it wobbles on my bony kneecap.

“The owners of the Circle K got tired of me sitting in front of their store every day.” He takes a bite out of his apple too big for his mouth, putting a finger up as he chews. “I told them I was being a statue, free of charge. And they said they appreciated the gesture but that I didn’t fit in with the outside décor.”

The baby girl squirms and fusses in his arms.

“Then they bought me this shed,” he points to a sign hanging in the window, a piece of plywood that says,
Welcome home
, in robin-egg blue cursive.

I laugh inside myself, thinking that a random shed at the side of their gas station looks much more obtrusive than a loitering man and his infant child.

“What’s her name?” I ask, nodding to the baby.

“Starkey,” he says.

“Who named her
that
?” I ask, my eyebrows shooting up.

“Her mom did. I like it, don’t you? It’s different.”

I shrug.

“Do you mind it here?” Thomas says.

I look around and shrug once more. “What’s not to like?” I ask. “It’s quaint and you can smell the flowers.” There’s a black plastic flower bed at the back end of the shed and the flowers look even thirstier than Thomas, but just the same they seem happy to be out of the sun.

“You’re a grub worm, just like me, aye?” he says shaking my boot.

“What’s that ‘upposed to mean?” I finally bite into my apple.

“You don’t mind that your clothes don’t match and your shoes haven’t had laces in years. You could skip a shower or two and you wouldn’t feel any the worse off for it.”

I look down at my boots. One has a white shoelace knotted in six different places and the other has no laces. They are of some type of black suede; Mom purchased them for me a couple of years ago from a thrift store. She brought them home as a birthday present and I was thrilled to bits.
They are so much comfier than the wedges she got me last year.

Cinched at my waist are a pair of Sarah’s soccer shorts. A grey T-shirt I found hidden in the back of Spencer’s closet hangs loosely on my shoulders. “I wear what I can find,” I admit.

“And you don’t feel any worse off than someone who wears fancy designer clothing, do you?”

“I figure I’d still be the same Bailey. Maybe just shined up a bit more.”

“I like you just the way you are,” Thomas smirks, juice from his apple dribbling into his beard. “An apple tastes just as good with dull skin as it does with shiny skin, don’t it?”

“No.”

Thomas raises an eyebrow.

“It tastes
sweeter
,” I say, winking.

Sweat drips into my eyes and I blink it away. “So, what’s your story, Thomas, how did you end up living in the back of a Circle K inside a shed doubling as a sauna?”

“I thought you wanted me to leave you alone? You were angry I came to your house and asked for more money. What do you care what my story is?”

“People say stupid things when they’re angry. I like you. I like being around you and Starkey. You are my friends. Tell me your story, please?”

“All right, that’s all the convincing I need,” he says, with that charming toothless grin.

His steely eyes, the same color as the smooth, grey trunk of a birch tree, lock on mine. “This is how it starts,” he says, taking out a stack of Polaroid pictures from a black weatherproof box. At my feet, he puts down a picture of a young, blonde green-eyed girl. “My girlfriend, Emmy.”

He puts another picture down of a young man with the same grey eyes as his but a face so full of life and youth, that I can’t find anymore resemblance between the two. Then he digs something else out of the box, a little plastic baggie. He pushes the two pictures side by side and places the baggie over them. “
Cocaine
,” he says. “Emmy started doing drugs.”

“And then you dumped her?”

“Not exactly. I couldn’t, because I needed her desperately at that time.” He picks up the picture of the young man and bends it. Starkey, who had been quietly sucking on her hand, giggles at the sight of the bent photograph propped up like a tiny bridge in the dirt. “I broke my back at work.”

I turn the picture upside down and make it rock for Starkey, she giggles harder. “You lost your job?”

“When my back healed I tried to go back, but they wouldn’t take me… said my spot had already been filled. I stayed with Emmy for a while, but she eventually kicked me out. She was cheating on me with her drug dealer.

“I was already homeless when I found out about Starkey, but I was so lost and lonely, I didn’t tell the hospital that I didn’t have a home for her.”

“And what happened to Emmy?”

“She passed away after giving birth to Starkey. It’s a miracle she was able to carry her. Her body was all screwed up from the drugs and childbirth did her in.” He sits Starkey on the pictures and she giggles again. Her little face shines, her smile hiding her gaunt cheeks and hungry eyes.

“I would be nothing without her,” Thomas says, his chin bent down to his chest and eyes shining with tears.

“You are something to me,” I say putting a hand over his and another on top of Starkey’s head. “You’re remarkable and so alive. Thomas, we
live
while others just exist.”

“Thank you, sweetie,” he says, squeezing my hand.

“We’re closer aren’t we, to death? And we appreciate life more than someone who’s in no fear of losing it.”

Thomas closes his eyes. “I hear a voice,” he says, “calling you.”

“Yeah, who is it?” I ask, thinking he’s hearing voices in his head.

“God.”

“What? What is he saying?”

His eyes fling open. “I’m only kidding, child. I think it’s your boyfriend.” A knock follows the end of his sentence.

“Bailey? Are you in there?” Spencer says.

“You’re a jerk,” I scowl at Thomas, whose resolute eyes have lit up from his antic.

“You believed me,” he says, grinning.

Spencer opens the door and takes a step back from the heat wave that escapes the shed. “It’s like an incinerator in here,” he says wiping sweat from his forehead. “You ready to go, Bailey? I have a surprise for you at home.”

I uncross my legs and swipe dirt off them. “I hope you aren’t tricking me, too,” I say with a sideward glance at Thomas.