Criminal (3 page)

Grandma would cook me dinner. She'd take me clothes shopping sometimes. But then Grandma got sick for real, and I didn't see her for long stretches of time. I'd ask Cherry to take me to see her and she'd say Grandma was too unwell for any company. I thought maybe Grandma needed someone to care for her the way she'd taken care of us, but anytime I said anything, Cherry would get mad and say she wasn't the bad daughter I was accusing her of being. And then Cherry went away too, this time for five months. I was on my own in the house, but I did okay. I'd met Bird by then, and though she was five years older than me and could already afford to rent her
own house, somehow we took a shine to each other and made fast friends.

By ninth grade, I had it pretty much figured out. I went over to see Bird more times than not, cleaning up and helping around in exchange for dinner or a place to sleep where there'd be some company. Grandma died sometime that year. Most of what I remember about then is that Cherry wore a yellow dress to the funeral. I was the one who talked on the phone to the ladies from church, coordinated all the casseroles that came to our house. Momma didn't actually
say
she didn't want to handle things, but she didn't take on anything herself, either. Grandma's lawyer called all the time, and I got so tired of telling him that Momma was still sick that one day I pretended to be her. I don't know if she remembers signing the papers. I don't know, still, if I did a right job in everything. But now Momma has her house and her own car, and though there's the insurance we have to pay and the phone, there isn't much else.

Finding all the mail was still a challenge. Sometimes it'd be in a tidy stack under a pile of CDs and dirty hand towels, other times it would be scattered from the back door to the bedroom, like some kind of treasure trail for me to follow. Today it was all in a mound next to the kitchen sink—a lot of it damp. Most of it was things neither of us needed to see, but I was the only one who was checking.

I walked through the bare, beige house to Cherry's room. After that time she was passed out in there, it was a habit in me to always check, before moving down the hall into my own room. Usually Cherry's door was open and the room was empty: her bed made or unmade, with her pale rosebud sheets. Sometimes just the mattress, bare. Maybe a blanket, bunched up. Grandpa's old desk cluttered with her various things. Wads of money sometimes, which I never touched. Clothes on the floor often, but other times everything picked up. Always the sense she'd been here, and hadn't. That other people had been here too, but weren't anymore. Today, there was an empty pill bottle just under the bed and two half-full glasses of water on the bedside table. I wondered the things I always wondered, and that never did any good. Had she been arrested? Was she in jail? Was she at someone's house—say Bo Jenkins's or Halfway Carl's? Had I just missed her? Had she walked out the door, ready for work, or cloaked in perfume and someone's arms?

Cherry. Her bleach-blond hair like mine. Her thin-lipped laugh. The way she sounded young even if she didn't look it. Teaching me to paint my nails. Yelling at me to mop the floor. Showing me how to pour beer for grown-ups—making sure the amber liquid went down the side of the glass so it wouldn't foam too much on top. Pressing a freshly hot iron against my forearm, her bony hand gripping down on my wrist, because I was sixteen
by then, had dropped out of school, and wouldn't fork over my whole paycheck.

I went down the hall, past the dark, shadowed mouth of the bathroom, to my own room. We were like roommates, really, even when I was in middle school and Gary was here. Two girls sharing a bathroom, no real art on the walls, nothing that made this house seem like anyone's. Her toothbrush, and mine, in the same fluted glass from an old set of Grandma's. Both of us hostessing her friends in our nightgowns. Neither of us giving up all our secrets to each other.

Standing in the doorway of my bedroom, I looked around and tried to guess what she might've stolen this time. I had a fireproof lockbox in my closet—she knew it was there, knew she couldn't get into it, and sometimes this made her mad—but it didn't really matter because the things Cherry stole were strange. Months used to go by before I realized a pair of earrings was missing. Or a lip gloss from the back of my dressing table drawer. Gloves from the pockets of an old thrift store coat I'd hated. Once, a two-dollar bill that was pressed in a scrapbook, shoved under my bed since we moved here. I'd only noticed it was gone when I pulled out the album, wanting to show Bird how skinny I used to be, back before Grandma started feeding me regular. Before Gary got arrested and Cherry started getting really bad.

I didn't know why I was caring about it all now. It didn't matter what Cherry took from me. Now anything I truly cared about, I made sure to keep out of her reach. Including myself. And yet, looking down at the bed where she'd tucked me in, where some nights—even after I was too old—she bent close with her low-cut T-shirt and her lipstick and her glassy eyes, I felt some kind of . . . missing, maybe. Needing. Wanting her to somehow be different. To fold me in, hold me close, and tell me how she would make it all okay. But missing a momma you never had felt strange, too.

I went to the closet, the dresser drawers, to see if there were any different clothes I'd want to take. Most of my things had been moved over to Bird's, but there was always some leftover dress, some sweatshirt. I moved around the room quickly, ignoring the safe because it only had a couple crisp hundred-dollar bills in it anyway, and I wanted to save those, in case. I knew, at that point, Cherry wouldn't be home at all, but I acted as though she might be, at any moment.

TWO DAYS LATER AT THE SALON WHERE I WORKED, I HAD
my gloved hands deep in relaxer when the glass door swung open. Coming in the door were two guys who were definitely not there to get their hair done. And I knew they knew. I knew they were coming to arrest me, and maybe Dee had been taken already. Panic washed over me and made it hard to stand up, let alone stand still. I thought of my phone, in my purse in the back room. Dee. I had to get to Dee. I tried to keep my eyes on what I was doing with this girl's hair, but all I could hear was their low voices, talking to my boss, Alessia, at the front counter. They said my full name. Nicola.

After a minute, Alessia came over and started putting gloves on next to me.

“Girl, let me take over that for you a minute,” she whispered. “These men want to talk to you.”

I couldn't tell if she was mad or scared or trying to help me. I took off my gloves, one by one. Trying not to go too slow. But trying not to hurry.

THEY DIDN'T ARREST ME. ONLY HAD QUESTIONS. QUESTIONS
about my relationship with Dee, about this “Bird” person—what was his real name and could they talk to him. It made me mad, for a second, knowing Dee had said anything about her at all. But of course he'd had to. We'd talked about that on the drive to the station. And we had been at her house. I gave them her real name and address, thinking I'd have to call her right away when I finished talking to them. They asked me other things, like what was the name of his gym and what kind of car did he have. Those things were all easy to find out, so I knew I couldn't lie about them. I could tell from what they were asking me—
Did you know he had a gun?
—that they already knew enough anyway.

But they weren't arresting me. Instead they brought out this
plastic bag with a crumply piece of notebook paper in it.

“Miss Dougherty, do you know who Nicole Palmer is?”

I looked at the paper. A letter. In Dee's handwriting. Words on it like
forever
and
baby
and
I will protect you always
.

Her name hit me. Nicole. Practically the same as mine. “Who?”

“We found this letter at her home. While we were investigating a crime scene.”

Who? What?
“I don't know who you're talking about.”

“You don't know Nicole Palmer, who lives at 247 Abbey's Ferry?”

She
lived
there? “No, sir, I do not.”

More words swim off the page.
Darling. My love. Never give you up.

“And, Miss Dougherty, would you be willing to give a sworn statement here, telling us that Denarius Pavon was with you on August twenty-third and the twenty-fourth? The entire day?”

“Not on Friday, when I was at work. But he picked me up. We were together all weekend. And the morning of the twenty-fifth, too. That's when he got called and went in.”

“All right, Miss Dougherty,” the one who'd been writing everything down said. He handed me a card. “If you think you have any more information you'd like to tell us, you call this number.”

I took it, but all I could see, as the detective put it in his jacket pocket, was Dee's handwriting on that letter:
You'll be my wife.

ALL THE REST OF THE AFTERNOON, MY HEAD WAS FULL OF
my love
and
forever
and
Nicole
. That, and what would happen when the police got to Bird. Today she was at her KFC job that she did two shifts a week—Jamelee was at her auntie's—but I hadn't told them about that. All they wanted was her address, so that's all I'd given them. But they would be by. And all I could do was text her to call me, even though I didn't know what to tell her when she did.

I texted Dee too. He hadn't been able to call me yet, only texted a couple times since he left my driveway Sunday afternoon. It was hard, but I understood. The silence. There was a reason. This, though, he needed to know.
They were here
, was all I said. After an hour of not hearing from him, though, even that seemed like too much. Would I give him away somehow? Mess things up?
And when he did finally call, how on earth was I going to ask him about that letter?

I nearly burned off a client's left eyebrow I was so distracted, and at one point the fumes from the bleaching chemicals almost made me pass out. When everyone ordered lunch from Zaxby's across the way, I didn't eat. My mouth was full of ashes.

• •

Bird still wasn't home when I got back to the house, and she hadn't called me. Neither had Dee. I let myself in, but then I didn't know what to do with myself. I stared at the living room, at Jamelee's toys on the floor and a big basket of laundry that I should fold on the card table. Mostly I had a crazy thought to pack my things, leave here, and run away with Dee, but it was like I couldn't move. I was just dumb, standing there, not even thinking anything really. Just hearing those shots coming from behind and to the side. Seeing Dee running between those houses, his knees high and his face blank. Picturing his handwriting, so tiny and careful, scratching out love messages to a girl who wasn't me. I'd known about someone else—one from when he and I were broken up before. But he'd never told me her name. That it started with an
N
too. Almost the same as mine.

The sound of Bird's key in the lock pulled me out of it. I heard Jamelee babbling and the rustle of bags and went to help Bird at the door.

“What's got you?” she asked right away, almost mad-sounding in her concern.

Which is when I started to cry.

“Lord, girl,” I heard her mutter. I tried to reach for some of the bags to help her but she moved too smoothly past me.

I didn't follow her into the kitchen. Instead I plopped down, put my head on what clear space of table there was, and wept. I'd kept everything pretty well together since Saturday, but now the stress and the plain fear of it was leaking out. Bird moved around in the kitchen behind me while I sobbed, not even asking for an explanation. I remembered her face when she'd gotten home from her shopping trip Saturday afternoon and how hard it had been to not tell her right then. Dee beside me on the couch, his hand clamping down on my knee, the main thing keeping me quiet.

I knew it would make me feel better to say something to Bird now. For a lot of reasons. And yet I also knew I couldn't. Bird'd just go straight to the police. Or tell them when they questioned her, anyway. I didn't really know what might happen to Bird if they found out about us using her car, but I definitely knew what would happen to Dee if she told. The more Bird didn't know, the better it would be for everyone.

What I wanted—so bad—was to talk to Dee. He would be able to calm me down like he always did. He was always so
reasonable when I wasn't. But I didn't know where he was or when he'd come back for me, and I had no idea what he was really thinking. After the news report, the questioning, and that awful letter, I needed Dee's strong arms holding me, his face filling up my vision, his body filling up everything else. He was the one who'd brought all this, and he was the only—only—one who could take it away.

BIRD FINALLY FINISHED WHATEVER SHE WAS DOING IN THE
kitchen and brought two beers into the living room. Thinking about Dee, and knowing he needed me to be strong, had helped me stop crying. I'd smoothed my hair and I was sitting up, folding the laundry, trying to take deep, slow breaths. My hands were still shaking a little, and I was afraid if Bird saw, she'd come and say it out, straight:
Dee killed that cop, didn't he?
but she had her attention mainly on Jamelee, who was guiding herself along the edge of the couch. She looked over her shoulder every step or two to make sure Bird was watching.

“You gonna come out with it?” Bird asked me, still looking at the baby.

I stared at the side of her face a minute, not certain she'd
actually said it out loud. And then she turned to me, eyes wary, but also worried.

Worried for who I didn't know.

“The police came to work today,” I said slowly, hearing each word the way it might sound to her.

Her jawline tightened. That was all.