Those Girls (21 page)

“I mean it. Not Emily or Taylor or anyone else.”

“I won’t.”

Finally she drifted off, but I stayed awake for a while, thinking about what might have happened down at that river. I knew Mom hadn’t told me everything, had probably held back a lot, and my mind spun with questions. I couldn’t stop thinking about Crystal saying, “They’re going to kill us this time.”

She’d sounded so sure.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

I drove over to Crystal’s the next afternoon. She opened the door still wearing the shorts and tank top she’d pulled on the night before, her hair a mess. Her face didn’t look too bad, but one side of her bottom lip was a little swollen and she had a faint blue shadow around one eye.

“Good. It’s you,” she said. “I thought it was Dallas checking up on me again.”

“Did I wake you?” I said.

“I was just dozing on the couch. Come in.” She walked into the living room, collapsed back down onto the couch. The blinds were closed on all the windows, the room dark.

I sat at her feet. Her ashtray was full of cigarettes, and there were already two empty beer bottles on the coffee table and one on the go.

“Have you been out today?” I said.

“The liquor store,” she said with a smile. “Had to get my medicine.” Normally I’d have laughed, but it didn’t seem funny today.

“Are you okay?” I said.

“Yeah,” she said, but she didn’t meet my eyes as she sat up and reached for another cigarette.

“You want me to make some soup?” I said. “Have you eaten anything?”

“You sound like your mom.” She leaned back on the couch, lit her smoke.

“Sorry. I’m just worried about you.”

She gave me a sad smile. “Sorry for scaring you last night, kiddo.”

“You freaked out.” I picked up the tinfoil from an empty cigarette pack on the coffee table, started making an origami crane. The smooth foil felt comforting under my fingers.

“I shouldn’t have been doing coke.”

“I didn’t know you did that.”

“Haven’t touched it for years, but Larry had some.” She shrugged. “Seemed like a good idea at the time.” She looked at me. “Boy, he turned out to be a fucker, hey?” She shook her head. “You never know.…”

“Mom told me what happened to you guys in Cash Creek.” I paused from my work on the bird, waiting to see how my words would land.

She took a hard drag of her cigarette, her gaze sliding away like she didn’t know where to look. “What did she tell you?” She blew the smoke up toward the ceiling, showing her neck and the scar on her jaw.

“How your truck broke down and those guys picked you up, and then you worked at their ranch, but they … they hurt you.” I didn’t want to tell her exactly what Mom had said. She met my eyes, and it was like all the life had gone out of hers. They were just dark pools of pain so deep I wanted to pull away, wanted to run outside and suck in the clean air and feel sunshine against my skin.

“She told you what they did?” Her voice sounded hollow.

“Yeah, but she didn’t say much. She got upset.”

She reached out and grabbed the beer off the coffee table, took a few mouthfuls, one after the other.

“What happened?” I said in a soft voice.

My question hovered between us as we sat there for an endless minute. I stared down at the foil bird, counted the beats of my heart, wondered if Crystal’s was beating this fast. I wished I could reach out and snatch my question back, but I’d thought about it a lot during the night, feeling this weird mix of fear and curiosity. I needed to know what had happened at that river. I felt bad asking her when she still seemed so depressed, but that was when Crystal talked the most.

“They tied us up in the back of their truck and took us to a warehouse,” Crystal finally said. She took a drag of her cigarette. “They kept us for five days.”

“Five
days
?” I almost crushed the bird in my hands.

She exhaled slowly, the cigarette smoke pushing into my nose.

“They were sick assholes, like,
really
sick.”

I didn’t know what to say, the enormity of what she had told me sinking through me like a stone. Mom had lied. Those men hadn’t just gotten “rough” with them. They’d hurt them badly, held them captive, did terrible things.

“Do you really think they’re still looking for you?” I thought about how Mom would get up in the night and check the locks. I glanced at the door now—had Crystal locked it after I came in?

“No,” she said. “I was just messed up.”

I studied her face to see if she was telling the truth. “How did you escape?”

“We stole their truck and got back to town. We were trying to get our truck out of their garage, but it was locked up in the back.” She was picking at the label on her beer, ripping off little pieces. “This biker dude helped us out—he owned the pub next door. His son drove us to the bus in the morning.”

My feelings were all tumbling around inside, angry someone had hurt them, confused and upset I’d never known anything about it, but mostly I felt scared. “It must be horrible knowing that they’re still out there somewhere.”

“It’s pretty fucked up.” Her eyes were shiny as she took another long drag of her cigarette. She’d almost smoked it down to the filter already.

“They shouldn’t be allowed to get away with it,” I said. “I mean, I know you couldn’t go to the cops. But I’d want to kill them.”

Crystal was looking at me but her eyes were vacant, like her mind was somewhere else, the cigarette still burning down in her hands.

“Crystal?” I said. “You okay?”

“Yeah, I was just thinking about how easy you think things are going to be sometimes, how you’re on this path and then all of a sudden…” She made a motion with her hand. “Shit is going sideways. And you can’t go back in time, you can’t do it over again. No matter how much you wish you could.”

“You mean like you wish you hadn’t gone to Cash Creek?”

“I wish I hadn’t done a lot of stuff,” she said, staring at the far wall. A tear dripped down the side of her face. She brushed it off, took a ragged breath.

“Like what?”

“It’s my fault we had to run away. I screwed up. I’m the one who
always
screws up.”

“What do you mean?”

She put out her cigarette in the ashtray, smashing the filter down with one finger, grinding it in. She lit another.

“Did you know I was going to be a singer?”

“You never said anything.” I felt thrown off again, like I’d been walking a balance beam and kept getting pushed off. We talked about music all the time.

“I could play the guitar and everything.” She pantomimed plucking strings. “And your mom, she was going to be a photographer—she was so fucking smart. Smarter than Dallas and me in school. She could’ve been anything.”

I never thought about my mom having any hobbies or dreams, but she did like taking pictures—our walls were covered with her photos. I’d found an old camera one day hidden on the top shelf of her closet. I’d put it back, feeling guilty, and never asked her about it, but it was weird. Was that from when she was a kid? Crystal was right about Mom being smart, but she only had her GED. She read my homework and borrowed my books all the time.

Crystal looked at me again, tears making her eyelashes spike. “You’re a good kid, Skylar. A really good kid.”

“Thanks.”

“I mean that,” she said. “Don’t try to be like me.”

“You’re not so bad.”

“I haven’t done one good thing with my life.” She picked up her beer and swallowed it all, wiping her mouth when she was done.

“You’ve done lots of great stuff.”

“Nope.” She shook her head. “Dallas, she’s always helping people. And your mom … she’s braver than you’ll ever know. I haven’t done fuck-all.”

“What would you do if you could?”

She met my eyes, hers kind of vacant again.

“I wish we’d killed them,” she said. “I wish it all the time.” She was staring through me, smoke drifting up from her cigarette.

“Crystal?”

She focused in on me, noticed the bird in my hands. “What is that?”

“It’s a crane. The Japanese call it the bird of happiness. They believe cranes live a thousand years, so it’s supposed to represent good fortune and longevity or something like that. They make strings of them at funerals.”

“That must look really pretty,” she said, then smiled sadly. “Hey, Sky. I’m really glad you came to see me, but do you mind if I just go back to bed? I’ve got a brutal headache.”

“Yeah, sure. I’m sorry if I upset you.”

“No, you’re the best. We’ll go to the beach tomorrow, okay? Give me a call in the morning.”

*   *   *

That night when Mom came home from work she looked exhausted, her hair coming loose from its braid, the tendrils damp, her face flushed.

“God, the bus was just gross tonight. Like being trapped in a hot tin can.” She hung up her purse. “I can’t wait to get out of these clothes.”

I made her a fruit smoothie while she was changing and brought it out to her on the balcony, where we had a little plastic table, two chairs, and a hibachi grill that we used in the summer. Mom had found a flowered tablecloth for our table and some citronella candles in pretty pots to keep away the mosquitoes.

She’d changed into shorts and a tank top and had her legs braced up on the railing, her head resting against the back of the chair, her shoes kicked off. I could see red marks in her feet from where her shoes had rubbed.

She took a sip of the smoothie. “Yum.” She reached for my hand and gave it a squeeze. “How are you feeling?”

“I went over and saw Crystal.”

“How was she? I tried to call from work but she didn’t pick up.”

“She was probably sleeping. She seems kind of depressed. Do you think we should get her some help? Like, what about therapy or something?”

“She wouldn’t go.” I could hear tension in her voice and knew she didn’t really want to talk. Her eyes were closed, her head still resting on the back of the chair like it was the first time she’d had a chance to relax all day. But after my conversation with Crystal I had even more questions about what had happened.

“Crystal told me what the guys really did.”

She opened her eyes and frowned at me. “What do you mean?”

“She told me how they kept you for days, and hurt you.… I’m really sorry that happened to you, Mom. You must have been so scared.”

Mom looked pissed off. “She had no right to tell you that.”

“She thought I knew. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I didn’t want you to have to think about those things.”

“Did you ever tell anyone?” I said.

“No.”

“Not even Patrick or Karen?”

“We didn’t want to talk about it.” Neither of my aunts or my mom had ever liked talking about their past, which made more sense now. But they barely talked about when they were kids, either. Mom had told me some things about her mother over the years, like that her name was Lillian and she’d been a good cook and liked to fish. She didn’t really talk about her dad.

“Crystal said you stole their truck.…”

“Yeah.”

“How did you get out of the warehouse?”

“Can we talk about this another time? I’ve had a long day.”

“You always say that when you don’t want to talk about something.”

“It’s always true.” She looked away, took a sip of her drink.

“Crystal said it was her fault that you guys had to run away.”

I could see a pulse beating in Mom’s throat. “She probably just meant because Dad and she used to fight a lot.”

“What about?”

“What’s
this
all about?” She looked at me again.

“I just wanted to understand. Why is that so weird?” What they went through was really horrible, and I got why they didn’t want to talk about it, but something still felt strange about it all, like they were hiding something else.

“Crystal doesn’t think,” Mom said, her voice angry. “She says all kinds of crap when she’s in one of these moods. It doesn’t mean anything.”

“It sure sounded like it meant something.”

“Who knows with Crystal?” She stood up. “I’m going to take a shower.”

I went into my bedroom, put on my headphones, and messed around with some beats, but when I played them back they all sounded angry, chaotic, confused. Like they didn’t know what they wanted to be yet.

Later that night I texted Crystal, said I was looking forward to going to the beach and asked if she wanted me to pick up anything on the way to her place.

She didn’t answer.

*   *   *

Around ten in the morning I threw my bathing suit in my bag, grabbed a towel and some lotion, and headed over to Crystal’s. She hadn’t answered any of my texts that morning or my phone call, but I figured she might still be sleeping.

When I got to her place, all the windows were closed and she didn’t answer the door. I knocked a few times and called out. Then I went around to every window, trying to see inside, but the blinds were closed. I checked around the back of the house—her car wasn’t in the carport. I thought about asking the upstairs tenants if they’d seen her but it didn’t look like anyone was home.

I went back to our apartment, disappointed Crystal had forgotten our plan. Maybe she had to go in to work or something. I texted her a few times that day and night, but she wasn’t answering any of my messages. I checked her Facebook, mostly photos of her with different guys and shots of her at the bar or partying with friends. She hadn’t updated her status since the night we were at the bar:
Can’t wait to see the Headkickers! The bar will be rocking!

“I can’t find Crystal,” I said the minute Mom got home. “We were going to the beach.”

“I’m sorry, baby. But are you really surprised?”

I knew Crystal blew off lots of people, but I was hurt she did it to me. “She’s not answering my texts.”

“I’ve been trying her too. She probably just forgot her cell somewhere. She’ll check in soon.”

*   *   *

I came home from the gym the next day to find Mom watching TV and painting her toenails. She was working late that night at the hotel for a wedding.

“Mom, I need to talk.”

“What’s wrong?” She looked up, her face concerned.