Chapter 33: Skylar

 “No, I don’t understand. I will never understand.” I paced the length of my dad’s studio, which was really a garage full of oil paintings and sculptures. Dad could never commit to a single medium, and his drive to be an artist with his “own space” had caused him and my mom to spend countless mornings scraping the ice and snow off their cars after parking by the curb.

Dad sat at his easel, smudging grey and black paint over a large, white canvas. “What don’t you get, Sky? He’s the baby’s father and we’re lucky he’s bringing her here at all. I think the least we can do is welcome Mitch into the family.”

I’d been looking at one of my dad’s framed pieces: an abstract snowstorm with flicks of blue and pink, camouflaging what must be our house, but I suppose nobody would recognize the blurry brown blob as home except for me, Mom, Dad, and Jo Beth. Yet Jo Beth would never recognize anything, not ever again.

I turned my angry eyes toward my father. “The least we can do is report Mitch and Magda to the police.”

Dad took a measured, pained sigh. “Don’t be like that, okay? It doesn’t help.”

“Dad, they’re responsible!”

“Your mother was there and she says that they’re not.” Dad cast his gaze toward the ceiling, as if that would stop more of his tears from coming. Drip, drip, drip. He’d been crying constantly, like a stubbornly leaking pipe that can’t be fixed. I envied him. My anger was too aggressive to let my tears see the light of day.

“Mom’s not always right.”

“But she’s right about this.” Dad lowered his voice into his most serious of tones. “It was a severe allergic reaction brought about by an amniotic fluid embolism. Clear and simple.”

Did Dad even know what that meant? Maybe it helped him to say the supposed cause of Jo Beth’s death out loud, but it didn’t help me to hear it. “But what about the marks on her face and the cuts on her hands and feet? And what about Jo Beth’s voicemail?”

That voicemail. That terrible voicemail was a tattoo on my conscious. Why didn’t you come, Skylar? Every time I closed my eyes I heard those words as if for the first time, and they screamed at me from the cell phone in my mind. After I got the horrendous news that Jo Beth had died three hours after her labor, I immediately left the training camp and flew home, where Gavin and Dad were waiting for me, their tearful hugs encircling me like a straitjacket. I didn’t deserve their kindness, but I also didn’t comprehend the full extent of my guilt and negligence until I thought back to all the warning signs, to all the moments when Jo Beth might have accepted my help yet I did nothing.

“You know she wasn’t in her right mind,” Dad said. “We have to trust your mother on that. Mom’s gone through the same…challenges as Jo Beth, so she could recognize the signs in her own daughter. Jo Beth was suffering.”

“No, Dad. I did some research. Turns out there are poisons that can cause the same reaction as amniotic embolisms. Mom told me that Jo Beth ate breakfast after her labor. It would have been so easy for Mitch or Magda to just slip a little bit of hydrofluoric acid into her orange juice. Because soon after her heart just stopped and everyone assumed it was because of a complication during labor—my God, it’s the perfect murder!”

Dad closed his eyes and took steady breaths, like it took all his focus not to just spontaneously combust. “What’s their motive, Sky?”

“Jo Beth’s money.”

Dad laughed sardonically, opened his eyes, and gave me a tearful glare. “Mitch would have already married Jo Beth if he was after her money. And where are they going to get hydrofluoric acid? You can’t just walk into Walgreens and buy it.”

“I don’t know, but Dad, I wish you’d take me seriously on this. Mitch is dangerous. We’ve got to protect little Bijou. As soon as they get here, we need to order him to leave.”

“Skylar!” Dad threw his paintbrush to the floor, startling me with his raised voice. Dad rarely yelled. “We will do no such thing! Mitch and Bijou are all we have left of Jo Beth, so your mother and I will let him stay with us if he wants. And I won’t have you spouting off any more of this paranoid nonsense. Mitch is Bijou’s father and you can’t legally take her from him.”

My guilt and my sense of obligation clawed at me with sharp, dirty talons. I knew I should concede before the scratches grew too deep.

“Then they’ll stay with me,” I said with a sigh. “That makes the most sense. Technically, the condo still belongs to Jo Beth, so technically it belongs to Bijou. We can set up a nursery and make it her home.”

Dad pressed his lips together and I knew he was trying to settle on an emotion before his mouth went slack. He looked like he’d aged ten years in the last ten minutes. “Your mother wants the baby with us.”

“I know, but Jo Beth said she wanted Bijou to be with me. It was her last wish before she died.” I didn’t say that if Mitch was staying at the condo, I’d be able to watch him. Dad had probably already jumped aboard my train of thought.

“Well, we’ll leave it up to Mitch to decide where he’d rather stay,” said Dad. He narrowed his eyes at me. “But if you try anything, if you say anything to him about your conspiracy theories, I swear to God, Skylar—”

My car keys were resting atop an art supplies cabinet and I grabbed them. “I’m going shopping for baby stuff right now. I’ll have everything ready by this evening, when they get here.”

He sighed. “Do you know anything about taking care of a newborn?”

“No, but I’ll figure it out.” Now I struggled with the stupid crutches that were still necessary for me to get around. Shopping would be a challenge.

Maybe I should call Gavin.