An hour after lights-out Charlie could hear the long, slow breaths of deep sleep. Doc snored laboriously on her bed; Kit was coiled on top of the sleeping bag next to hers, the shotgun inches from an outstretched hand. Charlie thought of her parents like Manny had described, young and tearing around Texas in his Mustang. It hurt her to think of Kit like that, like she had missed out on the fun, on all the best parts of her mother. It seemed like Manny could slice the world down its middle and open it up to her, whereas Kit had only made it smaller.
The embers in her chest had cooled, but Charlie had made up her mind. She had to know what it was like to be with her dad, and she didn’t see how she could do it with Kit around. Kit would come after her, and she’d be mad. She remembered what Dirk had said, how Kit had busted into the trailer looking for Charlie with murder in her eyes. She picked up the gun. Lifted it slowly by its slim, oily barrel, careful not to brush Kit with the strap. It was heavy in her hand, unwieldy, but when she hung it on one shoulder she felt strong.
Charlie crossed the room to leave, wincing with every creak of the floorboards, but no one stirred. She lowered herself down the steep stairs from the loft to the ground floor. About halfway, she lost her footing and slid down three steps before she caught herself. Kit called out her name and Charlie’s stomach flopped.
“Are you okay?” Kit asked.
Charlie wrestled with her breath as her heart pounded. “I’m going to take a dump, geez.” She went downstairs, stayed in the bathroom a long time, and washed her hands in case her mom was still up. Then she stood at the base of the stairs and listened. When she was convinced her mom and Doc were both asleep, she found her shoes by the front door and slipped quietly away.
As she approached the front gate, an inconvenient memory surfaced. Not a memory exactly, but the sensation of crawling into bed with Kit in the middle of the night. Though fully asleep, Kit would shift to make room for Charlie. How perfectly warm she felt tucked into the little harbor of her mother’s side-lying lap. Tears slid down her cheeks and hung suspended from her jaw. It wasn’t enough, merely to remember. She had to see what it would be like not to be disappointed all the time. She wiped her face dry and turned left away from town. The first day Manny had come to visit, he had told Kit he was staying at the Big Sky Motel, and she was pretty sure she knew the one. It would take over an hour, she guessed, to make it there on foot.
Chapter Thirty-Five
He had only gone by to watch. He loved to track the shadows stretching over pulled shades, to see which lights stayed on and which went out. To know what time Kit went to bed and what Charlie did after her mother was down. Sandy had invited herself, armed, this time, with the bribe that she could give him a copy of Kit’s key if he let her come. He hadn’t known they would be gone, lights out, driveway empty. Sandy found the spare key taped slyly under the top step and let him in the back door. As he went in, a bramble snagged the skin of his tricep and broke off, embedded like a tick.
Just being in this house, with her smells all around him, turned him on. He hustled Sandy toward the kitchen sink, lifted her up, and plunged her mouth with his tongue. Strawberry gum. Sweet junk sex, this one, plentiful and cheap, a bottomless soda. She gripped his hips tightly with her knees, locked her ankles behind him.
“When do you think she’s coming back?” she whispered, fingering his hair.
“Could be anytime.”
“What if she catches us?” she said, not cautious, but thrilled. “What’ll we do?”
“That’s why I need you on the lookout,” he said and kissed each eye, steered her out the door, and patted her on her broad, flat behind. She stalked back to the car in pouty obedience. He was tiring of her soft petulance, her scent—the chemical tell of her imitation perfume, and how it followed him around—the way she rouged her cheeks to carve out cheekbones where there were none. She only made him crave Kit more. Manny wanted to slip Kit on like skin, feel what she felt, pad around in her footsteps. He had been so dutiful, so restrained with her, not letting his hunger show. He had veered off track with the horse, and the virulence of his jealousy had surprised him. But it was a necessary detour. A purge. Now that he was here, in her private place, his obsession was baited, and he was salivating. He had never been able to penetrate her, see her guts, the way he wanted. They were the same stuff, but she always kept part of herself out of reach. Here, perhaps, he could stick his hand in and take it. He needed a talisman. More than that he craved a sign, something to let him know Kit still needed him.
With Sandy perched at the car window like a spaniel, he ventured upstairs and found, at the end of the hall, Kit’s room. He walked toward it deliberately, as if approaching a holy place. When he felt clods of dirt crunch underfoot, he knew he was treading on the same soil Kit had. A fussy lampshade on the bedside table, old lady wallpaper, and an antique brass bed. The smell of dust, old paper, cedar sap—none of it was hers. And yet, to have let it be, after all this time, to have lived tracelessly, was classic Kit.
“I know you,” he said with such fondness.
He opened the closet door, rummaged through a few things stowed in a box on the floor. Nothing of use to him. Some crude drawings and a framed photo, her dead aunt’s will, a recipe for garlic bread.
He knelt and nestled his head in the rivulets she’d left in the unmade bed, overwhelmed by feelings both vicious and tender. “Together or apart, you could never hide from me.” He slid his hands under the mattress as if he could find her there, fingers groping, face pressed into the seam. Why could he have anyone he wanted but her? How could she reject him when he had given her all of him, everything she could need? He had been contrite, he had humbled himself. Didn’t she know what that meant to him? He lurched forward screaming and pushed the mattress halfway off the bed.
Something clattered to the floor. He crouched and tucked his head under the bed. Dust balls and tissues and a shadowy clump. He reached out and held it like a small animal in his hand, brushed off the dust and held it to the light. It was a trinket, a tiny chandelier made of pink shells. Galveston.
She had held on to it all these years.
As he gazed at the bauble, which was no more than six strands of pink shells, the shape of conchs and the size of pearls, attached to a rack of spokes, which were encrusted in the same shells, he remembered the dare, how she had balked, only briefly, and accepted the challenge. He knew then that he could trust her. That she had saved the souvenir was all the sign he needed.
Then he sensed a leering presence in the doorway.