I left a message for Guidry; if the mysterious call from the blocked number originated from Key West, I’ll know someone is following me, even if he and his team still prefer to think I’m trying to pull some sort of trick.
Sitting upright in Bella’s bed, with her asleep, snuggling at my side, I almost feel peaceful. My eyelids grow heavy.
I feel the rise and fall of Bella’s chest, and I try to sync my breaths with hers. She’s part of me, and I’m part of her. I won’t let anything happen to her. I’ll stand up for her in a way Mama never stood up for me.
Mama . . . an ethereal feeling settles into my skin, my bones, as if I’m hovering in a place between dark and light. A feather on air, I drift through the coils of memories I keep locked away.
She’s on the floor, blood pooling beneath her head and spurting out of her neck, her lips twisted into a grin, and her eyes cold and open. I hold her limp body in my arms, staring down at her as if I can will life back into those eyes.
Eyes like amber stones.
A blink later, her body becomes my babies’.
The sheets are sticky with miscarriage and death.
Bella!
I startle and gasp, a sob lodged at the back of my throat.
Caught in a hammock of sleep paralysis, I can’t move, can’t open my eyes to prove to myself that it’s just a bad dream.
I feather a finger over her cheek.
Warm.
Alive.
And then I smell it—the fading scent of cigarette smoke—and I see, in my mind, the glow of an orange light on the fairway back at the Shadowlands.
I struggle to draw in a breath, but I can’t breathe over the asphyxiating sensation, as if fingers of smoke are curling around my throat.
No, Micah. Don’t do it. Don’t take her away from me!
Micah, Micah, Micah.
If I concentrate, can I bring him back?
Slowly, I expel the smoke from my mind.
Gradually, it fades, giving way to Dolce & Gabbana The One Sport.
Drifting through the air on a surreal breeze, accompanied by the crickets and humming from the lampposts outside.
I smell him, practically feel him sitting next to me.
“Nicki-girl.”
I flinch.
And suddenly, he’s there—Micah—sitting on the edge of the bed and cupping a hand over my feet.
He’s whispering, something about blue.
I taste rum on his breath.
Suddenly, I’m back there, on the wet sand, kissing a man I hardly know. The things I did last night are irreversible.
“Blue what?” I draw in a stuttering breath. I can’t stop shaking. “What?”
Chapter 46
I open my eyes when Elizabella’s shriek of laughter rings in the air.
“That’s so funny, Nini. Do it again.”
Micah.
I gasp and sit up. I’m in Bella’s room, in her bed.
She’s seated on the floor, a scattering of plastic teacups and dollhouse furniture surrounding her. A teddy bear sits on the swing in the corner of the room.
Of course, Micah isn’t here.
It was a dream. It must’ve been.
I fell asleep—obviously—and dreamed Micah had come back to me.
My head whirls.
“Bella.”
“Nini, Mommy’s awake!” She catapults from the floor into my arms and plants a kiss on my lips. “Hungry.”
“Okay, baby. Give Mommy a minute.”
She squirms off my lap.
I inhale deeply, testing the air for any trace of Micah. I still feel the warmth of him, the comfort of his arms around me, but there is no physical evidence that he’s been here.
My head is aching, and my bladder feels as if it’s about to burst. I think to ask Bella if she remembers seeing her father last night, just to confirm that no matter how vivid, how real it felt, it didn’t really happen.
“Brendan, don’t!”
But maybe there’s enough going on in that head of hers. I can’t confuse her; I can’t put ideas into her head.
I close my eyes for just another few seconds to savor the feeling of Micah in my arms; however illusory it was, it warms me, fills voids he left behind.
I swing my legs off the bed and stand on numb legs. A wave of nausea washes over me. I stumble my way to the toilet and kneel at the commode.
It’s a side effect of my hormones balancing out after I’d taken such extreme doses in an attempt to conceive. And now that the first menstrual cycle after retrieval has passed, the elevated hormones are wreaking havoc on my system.
Or maybe this time, it’s the price I pay for a good mojito.
Vomit splashes into the toilet, but Bella’s still there behind me, chattering about Brendan and Connor and Nini. Her lack of reaction to my throwing up is also a side effect of IVF: my daughter is so used to seeing me toss my cookies it doesn’t bother her to see it.
Now, in the light of day, all the demons of yesterday seem impossible. It was just a bad day. Too many things hitting me all at once. I don’t know who called me on the beach. But I have to stay strong, have to move on. Have to trust that Guidry and his team will do what they’re supposed to do.
I flush the toilet.
I’m feeling a little better.
“You know what we’re going to do today, Bella?”
“Go to the park with Connor and Brendan?”
“We’re going to probably see a park, and maybe we can play at one. But first, we’re going to look at some schools.”
“No school.” She crosses her arms over her chest and sticks out her bottom lip so far I fear she’ll trip on it.
“We won’t even go inside. It’s Saturday. We’re just going to look.”
“Just look?”
“School can be fun, Ellie-Belle. Your other school . . . not so much, right? But that’s why we’re going to look and spend some time playing there first. Before you enroll.”
“No school.”
“You can help Mommy choose the school this time, and maybe you won’t go every day, but you have to go.”
She’s emphatically shaking her head.
“One step at a time. Brush your teeth.”
“Nini says no.”
“Mommy says yes. Remember what we talked about yesterday? About listening?” I hand over her toothbrush, and she reluctantly climbs the steps in front of her sink. She brushes as I count aloud the number of times her brush passes over her teeth.
We then walk the length of the hallway to the master suite, where I splash water onto my face and brush my teeth and pull another sundress over my head. A lovely breeze passes through the open window over the claw-foot soaker tub. I turn into the breeze, which carries the scent of jasmine vines and summer. “Let’s have breakfast on the porch,” I suggest.
“Nini, too?”
“Nini, too.”
Before I get breakfast together, I enter the studio and cautiously test the exterior of the kiln. While it’s been off for at least twelve hours, it’s finally reasonably cool. I learned yesterday that the metal sides of this appliance could pass for a radiator, even hours after the timer goes off. I don’t know if it’s hot to the touch at that point, but I didn’t want to learn the hard way. I unlock the lever and lift the lid.
My weird, amateurish creations are a whiter gray now. But they’re sturdy and solid. No longer brittle.
I did it!
I created oddly shaped ceramic coffee mugs. Or flowerpots. Or topless canisters.
My victory is short-lived, as a sinking feeling returns to me.
I smell something burning. And while I suppose it’s to be expected—this kiln at cone four had to have gotten pretty hot to have morphed clay into something unbreakable—should the scent of fire linger?
There’s an ashy residue at the bottom of the kiln, a fine dust. And some larger flakes, like paper incinerated.
Is something still burning? I can’t risk a fire hazard.
And wouldn’t that be just my luck? I try my hand at the arts, and it results in devastation? If I burn the residence I own to the ground, Bella and I will truly be on the streets.
I follow my nose to the floor, where the odor grows stronger.
Soon, I’m on my stomach, with my cheek to the travertine floor, peering beneath the kiln, which stands on four legs, like a piece of furniture.
There’s something beneath it, something rectangular, which I fish out.
I gasp when I realize what it is: two bundles of cash, now singed and blackened.
I peel away the layers; bill after bill crumbles in my hands.
I feel sick.