Chapter Three
Gray
My boots crunched gravel when I left my pickup and I shut my door behind me to approach a house with deep-blue shutters, the property lights on and the house bright inside. The entire property was surrounded with a white picket fence, the temperate air of a summer evening breezing about the leaves of the two large oak trees planted in the front yard. White-walled with the brown porch wrapped around created a vision of security, a stable home and a steady life that no doubt went with it.
My feet moving, I cracked the harmony of that home when I creaked the white gate open, closing it softly behind me. I looked up to find my presence already known despite how quiet I tried to be. I didn’t want to disrupt the flow of the environment more than I already had been doing as of late.
Ms. Jolene Berry came with her smile, always with her smile no matter how early in the evening I tended to be. I really tried today, took my time by going to the bar and everything.
“Gray,” she said, waving, her pants cuffed at the ankles. She had her powder-blue blouse tied at the waist over her cotton t-shirt, the young school teacher casual in the final days of summer. Stepping from her doorframe, she met me midway onto her lit porch.
“We actually just got done,” she said, not acknowledging the fact that I’d come early once again today. I could thank her for that.
In the past I had.
My smile small but always genuine, I nodded at her, then panned to her left a little. She was shy one person today, my little person.
Laura could be quiet, but I never lost her. I always found her. Always.
A head with a crooked ponytail bobbed and tilted not far behind Jolene, strands of deep, dark silk hiked high atop her head. I’d been getting better at doing her hair, but we’d been running late today. I had a repair job in the town over at an office building and could be mismanaged in regards to time sometimes. I always made sure we got where we needed to be in the end, though. That was my job.
That was my honor.
On her belly, Laura colored in Jolene’s living room with a colored pencil, her location within clear view of the school teacher’s foyer. She and Jolene must have gotten done early like the teacher said. She’d never let Laura color unless she was done with her schooling.
My smile widening, I made moves forward, toward her, but stopped when Jolene flagged me down.
“I wanted to speak with you about something quickly if we could,” she said, cutting my view off from Laura a little when she shut the door a bit. She didn’t do it much and I assumed so sound couldn’t travel.
I guess that explained why they finished up early. She wanted to talk to me.
“About?” I asked finding her eyes when I removed my gaze from Laura. “Everything all right? Did she—”
“She was an angel as she always is,” she told me and I believed her. She’d only spoken highly of my daughter, honest about my daughter.
Sometimes to the point of overstepping her boundaries.
I felt she was on the cusp of that now, a change in the summer air I spoke about before.
Her vision panned to Laura through the glass window on her door.
“I’d like to see Laura join regular classes in the fall,” Jolene said, confirming my earlier thoughts. She faced me. “She’d do well in a traditional school environment. She’s smart. You’ve seen her work.”
My daughter was smart. She was.
But that wasn’t the problem.
Moving my jaw, I faced that same girl through the window Jolene stared upon. She’d continue to color, keeping to herself as she always did. My daughter never bothered anyone. She’d never been trouble for me.
Squeezing my fist, I stared at Jolene. “We’ve had this talk before.”
In fact, too many times to count. The discussions had only gotten more frequent as the summer months dwindled down. I took Jolene on to teach my daughter all she could before the regular school year required more of her time. The tutoring would allow my daughter the best education possible as I took on repair and maintenance jobs.
This had been a big step for me.
I didn’t trust easy, but I gave this woman before me a chance. She came with questions and answers I never had, but she took on the job. She seemed happy to, especially after meeting Laura. Like I said, my girl didn’t get in trouble.
I breathed. “My daughter won’t be starting school and I can go back to homeschooling her in the fall if you don’t have time—”
“That’s not what this is about, Gray,” she said, her expression serious. “You know I enjoy teaching Laura. I just want her to have the best learning experience possible.”
“Which is?” I asked, my face doing nothing to cool in the soft heat of the night.
She shook her head. “Interaction. She needs friends, Gray. She needs something I can’t give her and people her own age.”
“And you’d know exactly what she needs wouldn’t you, Jolene?” I told her, raising my head. “Because you’re a parent? You know how to parent my child?”
Because she didn’t and last time I checked, she didn’t have children. She was a teacher, an educator and a damn good one judging by the work my daughter brought home.
But that didn’t give her any right to parent.
Having enough of this, I went to move around her. She did move out of my way. I gave her that, but that didn’t stop her words.
“She’s getting… worse, Gray.”
I closed my eyes, my hand sliding from her door.
Worse…
“Her withdrawal…”
The woman’s eyes were cringing when I turned around, her face sad as strands of her red hair swept her face in the wind on her porch.
She pulled it away, shrugging a little. “It’s like some days I don’t even know if she’s there. If she hears me at all when I’m teaching her.”
My eyes cringing now, I faced my daughter, barely an expression on her face while she colored in her coloring book. I got so used to that, so much so that some days…
My fists tightened at my sides, my head shaking when I faced Laura’s teacher again.
Jolene came forward and the genuine concern on her face was evident. She’d had it that first day she met my daughter, but it got better. It got better.
“She needs interaction with others, Gray.”
“She has me,” I said, lifting my head.
Jolene nodded. “She does and she’s blessed to have that.”
Was she, though? Sometimes I did wonder.
I wondered if I brought more hell than happiness into Laura’s life, but worse, I worried if I was the cause for her lack of happiness. She didn’t have fun like most children her age, didn’t laugh and barely played. Jolene was right. My child was withdrawn.
And only one had been able to get through to her.
I squeezed my eyes, hearing Jolene’s steps creak closer. Those slats on her wraparound porch were giving way under subtle movement.
“Consider school,” she said, then made it worse when she said, “I think Jo would want that for her.”
I watched my daughter in the dim evening of our drive home, her head leaning against the half-open window of my old truck. She had her fingers curled tight over the top of the glass, wisps of her chocolate-toned hair touching her cheek in the open wind. Flush and round, her cheek peeked beneath the strands, her dark-brown lashes framing eyes I knew to be just as brown. She looked like me in so many ways, but more so resembled her mom. Her skin toasted and tan, Laura held strongly to the Puerto Rican roots of her mother and I was proud of that. I was glad she had that, something if anything positive from her mom.
She’d never have much, a reality I knew more than she might ever even as she grew into adulthood. I worried for those times, the days and years that passed for her.
I worried who she’d end up becoming.
Swallowing, I forced my eyes on the road, my thoughts taking me away as they always did. I was always thinking, my mind a web of anxiety and unease.
“Ms. Berry said you did well today,” I told her, referring to what little good did come out of my conversation with her teacher.
There hadn’t been much.
I breathed, facing Laura. She reacted in no way to my words, her hand playing at the window. Some guys couldn’t get their kid to stop talking.
I unfortunately never had that problem.
Trying to get her out of herself, trying anything I moved her leg, forcing a smile at my little human.
“How about we make your favorite tonight?” I asked her returning my hand to the wheel. “We got a bunch of mac and cheese last grocery trip.”
I knew she liked it because she ate a lot of it, always going back for more and being assertive about it.
I didn’t know what I hoped for by telling her I’d make her favorite dish, but in the end, I didn’t get much. I just got Laura, Laura ignoring me and maybe listening. She only did when I was forceful about it, obedient when she needed to be and nothing more.
We listened to the road a long time before I spoke again, and by then, I found myself grasping at straws. I told her about my day and all the work I’d done. I took on about three repair jobs today before settling in at that bar this evening and I told her details about every one of them.
Which may have been the problem.
I noticed her head lift when I mentioned Jo’s place, her fingers stopping entirely when I moved on to details about my time at the house.
“It’s looking good,” I said to her, smiling when her hand returned to her lap. She rose up. She was listening.
My smile widened. “It’s been cleaned up real nice and I got a job fixing the place up. I’ll get some of those things done that fell by the wayside a little.”
The older woman had been maddeningly stubborn in her days. I couldn’t work on anything without her getting on me about it. She literally wouldn’t ask for help until things broke down.
That’s how wonderful she’d been.
She’d been so kind to Laura and me, and in the back of my mind, I knew that’s why my daughter was paying attention. She was listening about the woman and home she cared about and because she was, I kept on. I kept talking, kept pushing, and mentioning everything, which occurred today at the house outside of Josephine’s niece. I would have gotten to that. That came next.
Until Laura.
My daughter rarely looked at me when I spoke. Like I said, only when she knew she needed to. She did so in instances of urgency and because those occasions were so rare it was hard to know if she was paying attention like Jolene said.
I damn sure knew when something was wrong, though.
My daughter didn’t scream. She didn’t shout. She didn’t yell and sometimes… well, sometimes I wished she would. It’d let me know she was in there.
It’d let me know my daughter existed.
The smack of her hand on my truck’s dashboard rang in my ears, then reverberated in both the cabin and my head when she hit against the truck’s window. Laura wasn’t much for strength. Eight-year-olds really weren’t, but I heard those hits, those pounds against the glass and the door. Her other hand joined in, fists slamming and hands slapping and the violent sounds surged bile to chase up my throat.
“Laura,” I urged, trying to make her stop while I kept my eyes on the road. I grabbed her arm. “Laura, stop.”
But my kid wouldn’t stop. Her hits, her thrashes only hit harder, and when her little hands tugged at the door handle, I had to pull over. We’d made it close to the house but still had a couple of miles.
That didn’t seem to stop my daughter.
Going for the lock, she tugged it open, and before I knew it, I caught nothing but her back. She was out of my truck then and on her feet, running out into the world.
What the hell…
“Laura!”
I called through the open door first before unbuckling my belt and getting on my feet. Free, I sprinted into the prairie grass after her.
Until I realized I didn’t need to.
My steps slowing, I knew exactly where she was headed and I found her there. I found her past the seemingly miles of land.
And gravestones covering them.
A tiny girl out of breath lay against one of them, holding herself while she stared off into the distance. Despite where she was, what she was doing, she looked at peace. In fact, I knew she was.
A short time ago, she always looked that way when she watched Jo’s hands, her head against the back of the piano while the older woman played it. She’d sit for literally hours if Josephine’s hands held up and some days they did.
My breath all but lost, I stepped up to the gravestone that was engraved with the woman known as Josephine Bradley, a woman who’d done more for me, hell more for my daughter, than I’d been able to do in the last three years of her life. Since I’d gotten Laura I hadn’t known what to do with her, for her, but this woman had. She’d gotten my daughter to open up and if she’d lived longer…
I might have been able to hear my daughter’s voice again.