Suspicion stretched between us in mints and ferns and lime sherbets. I worried that I’d sounded bitter about him not letting me in. How rich, given that I’d made it my life’s mission to let nobody—especially him—in. “Why were you there?” he asked. “Why were we together?”
“Oh God,” I breathed. “You really don’t remember anything.”
He shook his head, slowly at first, and then with more conviction. His forehead creased. “I’m trying. I remember being at your graduation. And then . . . pieces. You were in jail, right?”
“That’s what you remember, out of all this time? That I was in jail? Yeah. I was in jail. For a night. You got me out. We were looking for Rigo Basile, and we found him. You sh—” I stopped myself short. You shot Bill Hollis, I was about to say. But was that something you sprang on someone—that they’d killed somebody? Would he understand why without me retelling everything that had happened? It didn’t seem like it. And where did I start, anyway? With my arrest at the graduation party? With the day we busted into the Hollis warehouse? With my mom dying right next to me when I was eight? It all seemed to go together, to get scrambled into one long event. And I wasn’t sure how he would take it, or even if he could take it. “You should go home and get that beer,” I said instead. “You’ll remember more tomorrow, probably.”
He grunted, frustrated, as if he wanted to say something else, but then he thought better of it and started limping away from me again.
“And for your information, I’m not afraid,” I said to his back. He stopped, turned. I kicked at the manila envelope. “It’s the written test. I can’t pass that. You know how my grades were.” What he didn’t know was that it was the distraction of my synesthesia that made my grades suck. And what neither of us knew was whether or not I could use it to my advantage now that I’d learned how to rely on it in the right ways. But what I didn’t want to know was if I sucked just as bad in the real world as I did in school. You suck at school, you get an F; you suck at the real world, you get a shitty life; you suck as a cop, you get dead.
“Sounds like you’re afraid,” he said. “Afraid of taking a test. I don’t know what to tell you. I, personally, think you could pass it without a problem. But I’m not the one who has to go in and take it. Already did that. And, yes, I do remember taking it. You want, maybe I can help you study for it. Or not. Entirely your call.”
I felt irritation well up inside me—piping-hot ink with steam—and I clenched my fists. The rah-rah-you-can-do-it Chris was annoying, but this Chris was . . . well, he was just an ass.
“No, I don’t need your help with anything,” I said. “I’m not taking it.” I bent and picked up the envelope. “And I can study on my own.”
He smirked. I realized what I’d just said, how it made no sense that I could study alone for a test I wasn’t taking, and the fact that he’d reduced me to idiocy only served to enrage me further.
Still, it was kind of good to see the old Chris come through a little, even if just with that maddening smirk.
“Got it,” he said. “It’s good to see you, Nikki. I missed you. You shouldn’t have stayed away so long. I could have used a friendly face in that therapy room.”
I frowned, cocked my hip to one side. “Does this look like a friendly face to you?”
“No, not exactly,” he said. “But when you’re around, something inside me remembers that it can be.” He opened his car door and tossed his cane across to the passenger seat. “Don’t be such a stranger,” he said, then got in, started up, and pulled away.
I stood in the shade of the cottonwood tree, listening to the warning cries of a mother bird above me, and held the manila envelope, which felt heavy and impossible in my hand. I watched him go.
At least he remembered something.
2
TELLING DAD THAT I was thinking of becoming a cop may have been the least of the problems we had between us, but it was a problem nonetheless. He wasn’t happy about it. He didn’t like the police any more than I did. Maybe even less. They’d never solved my mother’s murder, and in his eyes, that was just as bad as being the murderer. It wasn’t logical, but I could understand where he was coming from. The crimson memories of my mother were the worst memories I had, and every time I thought about her murderer, walking around in the world, totally free, while she rotted beneath the ground, the crimson fused with indigo betrayal that blanketed me with such hopelessness, it was like I was the dead one. At least on the inside.
But how much of Dad’s outrage over Mom’s death was genuine, and how much was a front? This was a question that had been nagging me for months now, ever since I’d discovered Mom’s ties to Vanessa Hollis’s escort service, and Dad’s complete and total lie about not knowing anything about the Hollises at all. Something fishy was going on, and I hated that the one man in this world that I thought I could trust was the source of my unease.
I hated it, but I accepted it. Because I didn’t have a choice.
Every time Dad left the house for any amount of time—and with his job as a photographer, he was constantly on location—I busied myself with trying to figure out what exactly he was hiding from me, and how. The problem was, when you’ve been hiding something from someone you live with for over ten years, you get pretty good at hiding. I had searched the entire house, top to bottom, twice, and had found nothing. Only a dusty, locked metal box beneath his desk, and even that I had run across by accident. And I couldn’t crack the combination to save my life. Or to avenge Mom’s. Or whatever it was I was trying to do.
I came home from the physical therapy parking lot and plopped the manila envelope on the kitchen counter, grabbed a glass from the cabinet and turned to the refrigerator to fill it. I was so irritated by my run-in with Chris, I almost didn’t see Dad sitting at the kitchen table, poring over some paperwork of his own. He looked up when I dropped the envelope.
“Bad day at the station, Officer?” He said it like he was teasing, but he still had a bitter edge to his voice whenever he brought up my future plans. And to think, just a few months ago at my graduation, he was desperate for me to have future plans.
I took a long drink of water. “For your information, I’m not even applying. I decided today.”
He blinked, pulled off his glasses, and laid them on the paperwork. “Oh, really? You okay with that decision?”
“Would I make it if I wasn’t okay with it?”
“Maybe.”
“Well, how about, yes, I’m totally okay with my decision.”
“Doesn’t really seem like it.”
I took another drink. “Don’t pretend like you’re not thrilled about it.”
He rubbed his eyes with forefinger and thumb. “Well, no, if you’re not happy, I’m not happy. You know how this goes. I’m your dad. I love you.”
I ground my teeth together to keep myself from asking why a dad who loved me so much was keeping things about my own mother from me. How a dad with such love for his daughter could lie to her for her entire life.
“I’m happy,” I said instead.
“Nikki,” he said, in that voice I’d grown so sick of ever since that night at Tesori Antico. I’d been a mess when I came home from the hospital that night. Filthy, bloody, emotionally wrecked. There was no hiding anything from Dad at that point. Luna had gotten away again, and Chris was at death’s door, and every time I closed my eyes, I saw Vanessa hitting the ground, blood blooming around her, the same crimson that bloomed around my mom. How was it possible that they bled the same?