Page 58 of Paper Ghosts

Those words gave Tasha pause. What Tug had shared about Bailey’s life over the years had a common thread running through it. She was refusing to create a life she could enjoy, as if it were some sort of penance. “Being mean to you isn’t going to help.”

“I should go.” Bailey stood and Tasha walked her to the door. As soon as she stepped into the cold, she said, “Our friendship when we were children was probably the last time I really liked myself. Thank you for letting me be me. Tell Olivia Grace I’m sorry again.”

Because of her mother, Tasha’s nervous system was constantly scanning for tiny changes in the moods of those around her. And she resented having to worry about Bailey right now. “Should I be concerned about you?”

“Oh, no,” she said quickly. “I didn’t mean for that to sound gloomy. I just meant I’m going to keep trying to find that version of me. Like I said, please don’t worry.” Tasha watched her walk down the steps. She paused on the sidewalk, considering something. She took out her phone and started texting.

Tasha closed the door and put her hand on her stomach again before going to the kitchen. She opened one of the upper cabinets for a tea bag, but then stared into space, distracted. Damn it. Now she had to know. She left the cabinet door open, and went to the kitchen office nook, where there was a Janet Hill original hanging on the wall and a laptop on the desk.

After the bonfire, she had spent months terrified that the Westers had a security system that had caught what her mother had done to Clutch. It was only after marrying Gary and moving into this house that she found out neither the Tillburys nor the Westers had any sort of monitoring system back then, beyond Willamena herself. It had been such a relief. But they had plenty of cameras now, and one of the upper ones pointed toward the Wester House. She clicked on their home security link and rewound to last night when she’d seen Bailey step outside. She watched the camera pan to Bailey in the doorway to the Wester back patio, her posture stiff. She called out something. Then the camera panned over the backyard.

Nothing was there.

Tasha was about to click out, but decided to scroll further back to before Bailey stepped outside. She stopped the video and waited while the camera panned over the Wester’s empty patio, then slowly over their backyard again.

Wait.

She rewound the video and watched again. A blip appeared on the screen for just a second, and then was gone. It was near where the lawn sloped down to the creek. She watched it over and over, trying to make out what it was. She finally paused the video right when the blip appeared, and zoomed in.

The image was grainy, but with enough imagination it could be the form of a man. The backyards in this neighborhood were virtually inaccessible from the creek side, because you would have to cross the fast-moving water and then walk up the steep hill. So if someone had been in the Westers’ backyard, they weren’t there by accident.

She wasn’t sure what this feeling was, but the scent was a combination of the dread of black licorice, and something curious like tobacco smoke.

“Tasha?”

She turned to see Gary in the kitchen. He was in his golf clothes. His curly salt-and-pepper hair, usually a little wild and endearing, was tamped down, still wet from his shower. There was a front moving in later, bringing much-needed rain, so she knew he was in a hurry to get in a round.

“You scared me,” she said, clicking the video closed. Secrets were a slippery slope.

“Everything okay?”

“Yes, of course,” she assured him. “Bailey Wester just stopped by.”

“You’ve been distracted lately, Tash,” he said, closing the cabinet door she’d left open. But it wasn’t the door he cared about. He was such an easygoing man that she could leave every cabinet in the house open and he wouldn’t mind. He’d told her once that his mother used to call him Airy Gary. “If something’s wrong, you can tell me. I’ll do everything I can to fix it. And if you don’t want me to fix it, I won’t. I just want you to be happy.”

There were times when she was sure that Gary believed she was going to leave him one day. She recognized it, because it was the same fear she had that he would leave her. “I’m fine, really.” She knew she needed to tell him about the baby. But she wanted to live a little while longer as this incarnation of herself, before everything changed. Before she changed, back into her old self, back to Smeller.

Or worse, her mother.

It was only minutes after Gary left and Tasha brewed her tea that she heard, “Look who I found outside.”

She was resting her forehead on the breakfast table, but at Gary’s voice her head jerked up like a puppet on a string. She pushed her dark hair out of her face to see him leading Olivia Grace into the kitchen.

“Thanks, Gary,” Olivia Grace said as he left again.

It was Sunday, and Olivia Grace had weekends off work from the country club, but she had on her official burgundy sweater with the club’s crest on it anyway. She usually came by at some point on Sunday just to hang out, which Tasha enjoyed, just not this early. She seemed to take a great deal of comfort in being inside Tasha’s house. Tasha once asked Gary if he minded her frequent visits, and if so, they could go to a coffee shop. Gary told her not to worry, that it was something everyone did at one time or another in their lives, without even realizing it. Fundamentally, we orbit the lives we most want. But there were times it still caught Tasha off guard, that people liked her life so much that they wanted to be in it.

“I knew Gary would be headed to the course this morning,” Olivia Grace said.

“Would you like some tea?”

“No, thanks,” she said. “I’m not staying. I just wanted to say I’m sorry about yesterday. I don’t know what came over me. Bailey is the only Feather I’ve seen in years, and she wasn’t even the worst of them. Remember Vanna? She was the real evil queen. I want to believe Bailey’s different now, I really do. But I think I want even more for her to see that I’m different. Then I wonder, am I, really?”

“Yes, you are. And as much as it pains me to say this, Bailey is, too. That’s where you need to leave it. You’re digging up trauma, so step out of the hole before you uncover something that needs to stay buried.”

Olivia Grace leaned over and gave Tasha a hug. “Thanks for putting up with me.”

“I don’t put up with you. I love you,” Tasha said, waving as Olivia Grace walked out of the kitchen. She waited until she heard the front door close, then she ran to the bathroom and threw up.