Indigo: The Saving Bailey Trilogy #2 (41 page)

Angel lets out a throaty growl and paws out of the room, his back end swinging in defiance.

I push pieces of crust at the bird’s bent down beak. He gobbles it up greedily and chirps for more. I sprinkle the rest on the sill; he pecks about, chirping and snapping up the bread like worms from the ground.

“I’m not going to turn
you
loose,” I say, stroking the birds’ feathers. “You are always welcome at this window.”

When I say he’s always welcome, I mean it. I didn’t know that someone could say so and not mean it. Not until I fell in love with Spencer.

He’d welcomed me into his home—repeatedly—his whole family had. Fed me their bread, and then, like Indian-givers, turned me away, shut their windows and kept their bread to themselves. So when B.B. called me, a couple of days ago, leaving a tearful voicemail on our home phone, asking me to come back into her and Spencer’s life,
I promptly deleted it.

I had done no wrong; wasn’t Spencer supposed to be the one person who could see that? Was he not supposed to understand that I would never betray him? That I only kept the Allie secret to protect us both?

Yet, he was the only person who couldn’t see why I joined the Allie. Even Alana understood; surely Clad would’ve. I guess it’s hard to understand when you’ve yet to leave your front porch and have only gone as far as the neighborhood park.
What does he know about being forced into a gang and having to hold your best friend in your arms as she dies?

The bird flies away, having had his fill. Angel returns and sniffs at the window. “He’s gone, boy. Sorry, looks like it’s dog food for dinner again,” I say, ruffling his fur.

Dad’s truck pulls up the drive; I hear it stall and the engine cut off. I pat the side of my thigh for Angel to follow me out the door. Dad is just getting out of his truck when I run up and jump into his arms. He swings me in a circle and puts me down.

“How was work today, Daddy?” I ask, laughing, breathless from the spin.

“Really good. Actually
sweltering
, but good. You mind getting the cooler out of the back for me? I’m beat. Oh, and it’s nice to see you so happy, sweetie, how was your day?”

I climb on one of the back tires and heave the cooler over the side of the truck. It crashes on the pebbled drive and drinks bang against each other in the melted ice. “It was okay,” I say, dragging the cooler inside.

“Your mom wants to go to the beach tomorrow… I’ve got to put more ice in the cooler. You’d like going to the beach, wouldn’t you? Ya know, normal family stuff,” Dad says.

“Yeah, sure, Dad.”

I don’t say that normal and our family don’t belong together in the same sentence.

I’m setting the table for dinner when Mom asks me to grab her juice box out of the fridge. I gape at her, dropping the plate I’m holding and retreat to the bedroom.

“Sydney, what the hell were you thinking?” Dad berates her.

“She’s sixteen. She shouldn’t be afraid of the refrigerator.
Christ!
There’s something wrong with her, maybe brain damage. I hit her too hard, it’s my fault.”

She rips open a new box of Marlboros and her words become stifled as she talks with a cigarette in her mouth. “You shouldn’t have made me have her so young… there was always something off about her… now that she’s older, it’s starting to show more. I can’t just pretend she’s a little kid with an imagination that runs too wild.”

“Listen to yourself speak!” Dad says. “You beat her since she was five. I was gone from her life and after seeing Jack die…just…
No
. If anyone’s off, it’s
you
.”

“Need I remind you of Indigo? She was stripping!” Mom says. She knows I am listening, because the bedroom door is wide open.

She takes out another cigarette and flicks her lighter. I imagine it is the little flame that was able to consume Alana in minutes and turn her to ash. “
Nooo
!” I scream out, throwing my hands in front of me- I reach for the lighter before it can touch Alana’s clothes and ignite her.

My parents stop talking.

I breathe heavily.

“Bailey?”

“Damnit, Sydney, see what you’ve done? She was just fine until you came home!”

I open the top drawer of my dad’s dresser and find the tenant’s video camera and my two tapes. I close the drawer and bring the camera with me.

“Bailey, your mom is sorry. She didn’t mean the things she said,” Dad says when I emerge from the bedroom.

“Then, she should say what she means,” I say. “It sounded pretty clear to me. She thinks I’m clinically insane. Well, I am, and I don’t give a damn!”

I point a finger at her. “It takes a village to raise a child, but only a single person to fuck one up. Remember that, Mom, you made me this way. Fuck, if I’m crazy, then what the hell are you? Smoking your cigarettes and sitting there with a bastard in your stomach. You make sure your hands are clean next time you want to accuse me of being unstable. You don’t know what I’ve been through…
hell
, sometimes I don’t even know what I’ve been through!”

“Bailey! Don’t talk like that!” Dad says.

“I. Just. Did,” I say. “I learned from the best, didn’t I,
Mommy dearest
?”

Mom lurches at me and Dad restrains her. “It’s like—” she starts to say, her claws frozen in air, the veins in my father’s arms popping out as he struggles with her.

“Like you don’t even know me?” I provide. “It’s called standing up. A hard thing to do, when someone keeps kicking your feet out from underneath you. But Mommy, I’ve learned how to pick myself back up.”

I turn for the door, catching the hint of a smile on my dad’s lips as I do so. Sometimes pieces of Indigo shine through my exterior, the pieces that make me feel whole. Pieces that push me forward and force me to fight, when what I really want to do is crawl into a corner and cower in fear.

Brown pine needles, cooked by the summer sun, crunch beneath my feet. I go into the woods, fighting off sharp branches with the video camera. The sun plows through the trees that should provide shade, as if they are nothing more than sheets peppered with bullet holes.

I sit on one of the boulders along the river and turn the camera on. I put Miemah’s tape inside it and watch it one more time.

For the very last time, I will observe how her face changes in pain, and I will listen to her father’s harsh words that make me shake all over.
Second degree murder
. The court pulled enough evidence to damn him. Even without my tape, he was sentenced to life in prison, or as I like to see it, death in prison because there really is no living in a place like that.

Miemah lights a cigarette. The smoke enters her lungs, exits. I think how funny it is that she’ll never have to worry about getting lung cancer.

In enters Papa. Some obscenities are thrown around. His thick hand meets Miemah’s face. Miemah falls onto her bed, a soft landing.

And then, she is inspecting her busted lip and worse, inspecting the two faces outside her window looking in.

The video ends. I dig a shallow hole with the toe of my boot and drop the tape inside. I cover it up with dirt and stomp on it.
One less person to worry about
.

Next, I put my tape in and watch it the same way one watches a scary movie: fingers spread over my eyes and head slightly turned away from the horror unfolding.

“You think it’s funny to record people getting beat up? Now
you
can be the star,” Miemah says.

I watch myself pass out as she rams my head into tile. I hold the camera away from me and choke on air like my throat has tripped over its own feet. Suddenly, I am dizzy and ill. I force myself to finish watching so that I can bury this tape, too.
Bury all my problems in the ground.

Miemah laughs and says something to Cecil, in a voice that is menacing but quiet as death. I am unconscious.

Then Cecil turns the camera on somebody else. It lands on a shoulder, following it up to a neck and face. Green eyes stare back at me.
“Turn that off,”
Alana says.

I pause the video, the same way my heart paused when I saw Alana’s face come into focus. Here she is in my hand—
alive
. Her voice as strong and full of breath as it was before she died. I touch the screen with the tips of my fingers, brushing at her hair and face. My mouth goes dry, my stomach clenches.

I am safe… here in… the… trees.
Alana’s last words seem to be all around me. When I play the video again, I hear the sentence come from her mouth even though her lips don’t match up with the words.

Alana’s cameo should boil my blood. Naturally, it should make me think our friendship meant nothing to her, that it was all a setup. But eleven years is a long, long time to fake a friendship.
And what good is it being angry at a dead girl?

The video has awakened all my senses, so much so that I think if I wanted to I could speak with Alana’s angel. I hear everything now, the birds’ songs, the crickets’ chirps and the splashes of fish as they swim in the creek…and someone walking this way. My sense of danger is awakened too.

I rise to my feet and bolt from the oncoming person.

Finding a tree with branches close together like the rungs of a ladder, I climb, something I never would have done before Alana’s death. Only now does it feel safe to do so.

With one hand on the camera and the other gripping branches, I pull myself up. The footfalls are coming closer, they splash in the creek. I reach the top of the tree, as soon as the person starts to break through foliage skirting the creek.

I’m twenty feet up. Maybe higher. And, I can see the top of the person’s head as he scratches it. “Is anyone here?” the man asks the trees and fish.

I recognize the voice as belonging to the tenant. I’ve had his camera for a month now, even though I promised to give it back the very next day. If he finds me I will have some explaining to do…
or kissing.

“No one?” He shakes his head to himself for hearing voices and walks back the way he came.

When I am sure he is clear from the woods, I rewind the video and watch Alana come back to life again for the three seconds she is on camera.

I have finally climbed a tree for Alana and now I understand why she had ceaselessly begged me to join her all those years; up here the world is smaller and bigger, all at once. Up here, I have the upper hand.

I am safe here in the trees.

She sits on an algae dipped boulder, in her tiny striped bikini, waving and smiling at us. On tiptoes she jumps from boulder to boulder, I watch her lithe figure bend with each pounce. She has her father’s body.

“She’s going to fall,” Angel says. He’s sucking seeds out of a gigantic slice of watermelon and spitting them into the sand. “Honey, don’t do that!”

“Let her fall,” I say. “She’ll learn to be more careful.”

I suddenly remember a time when Bailey was hardly a year old; we had a pool at our first home and a baby gate surrounding it. I left her alone on the lanai because when I tried to bring her in the house to do the dishes, she threw a fit. I left the sliding glass door open like she was a dog that would come in on her own time. Moments later, I heard a soft
Ker plunk
and a cry.

Bailey had managed to open the gate and had fallen into the pool. I could see her black hair swaying in the water and her little arms flailing from the kitchen window. I watched her struggle to stay afloat and then sink to the bottom.

Finally, I left the kitchen and jumped into the pool to save her. When I pulled her out of the water she was silent but alive, her big blue eyes accusing me of letting her drown.
I wanted to throw her back in
.

Bailey slips, her knee catching on one of the boulders. Angel leaves his towel and runs to her. Blood drips from her knee but she laughs at the pain. Angel gives her kisses and wipes sand off her legs. I burn with envy. I want her thin body to fall between the rocks and become stuck there.

Angel trudges through the sand, back to our setup of umbrellas and towels. He’s smiling with that twinkle in his eyes, that twinkle that used to be for me.

“She’s okay,” he says. “Cut her knee.”

Of course she’s fine, I’ve done much worse to her.
She holds up very well for a small girl. There’s an instinct to survive threaded in her brain, I have seen it when I know very well she wants to be gone—her brain overriding her heart’s desire.

She could have died in the pool, or when I hit her in the head with a toaster, or when I pushed her down the stairs, or when…so many times I pushed her past the brink… the brink of pain that a little girl should be able to suffer and still survive. It had become a sort of game for me, as she grew older, how hard could I hit her before she’d be knocked out or …
die
?

“What are you thinking about, babe?” Angel says, punching a straw into his Capri Sun.

“’Bout our daughter. How happy she looks,” I say.

“She doesn’t look THAT happy.”

I shrug my shoulders. The baby inside of me flips, a little foot kicks at my ribs. I put a hand over my stomach, bringing attention to myself. Angel, who had been watching Bailey intently, turns to me. “How’s the baby?”

“Kicking, thriving,” I say.

“Have you thought about what you’re going to name him?”

“Indy, like Indiana Jones,” I say.

“
What a name
,” Angel snorts.

“Yeah, and Bailey wasn’t a plain Jane name either.”

“No, it’s was a beautiful name for a beautiful girl.”

“What about Sydney?”

He feeds me a bite of his watermelon and gives me a sip of his juice. “Sydney? It’s not my first choice. Are you jealous of your own daughter?”

Yes. I hate her and love her, and wish I was her, just so I could have your love.

“I was just asking,” I say.

The love was there, right before Bailey was conceived and even a little after her birth. When she was born I couldn’t stop crying… the nurses took her away and I didn’t ask for her back. Angel fed her and changed her diapers for the first week. I couldn’t even look at her. She’d be in her crib and I’d be on the other side of the nursery, in a rocking chair; Angel would say things like, “She has your nose. Her eyes, Sydney, they’re stunning. She’s a beautiful baby. Don’t you want to hold her?”