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What are you doing in my shed?
What has you out there in the rain? In the middle of the night?
Only it’s not my shed. It’s his girlfriend’s. Celeste may have asked him to take a look and check my story.
I’ve hidden the gun well. I’m always careful about that.
I run through the list of what Liam is likely to find there. The answer is “nothing important.” I’ve traveled light, carrying only the essentials that will suggest I am exactly what I pretend to be.
Liam spends at least fifteen minutes searching, and I grit my teeth, imagining him pawing through my belongings, through my clothing.
Memories flash, and they don’t stop flashing. I blame this place. Being back in the state my mother fled, determined to start over, only to tumble down a rabbit hole too dark for her to see that she wasn’t the only one suffering.
She’d suffered with my father, too. As much as I loved him, I don’t deny that. Battling one’s demons is a cliché, but when I first read those words, I pictured my father locked in mortal combat with the drugs and the poverty that ruled his life. Yet in my mind, he didn’t fight to save himself. He fought to save my mother and me, to give us a better life. He tried. God, how he tried. He loved me and protected me, and I never really realized just how much until we left him and I was alone with Mom and with Keith.
Cracks in the shed walls glow blue with the light of Liam’s cell phone, and in my memory, I’m fourteen, in my bedroom watching a flashlight bob around my backyard playhouse.
I slipped out armed with a kitchen knife only to find Keith pawing through my box of treasures—the glossy shells and cheap jewelry and pretty rocks strewn over my playhouse floor.
I stormed in, seething with righteous fury. “What are you doing? That’s mine.”
“If it’s on my property, missy, it’s mine. You’re too old for playhouses, and I intend to find out what you’re doing in here. Your mother is worried. After your dope-fiend father—”
“I have never even smoked weed. Test me if you’re worried. I’m clean. Always.”
He shrugged. “What’s bred in the bone...”
I didn’t understand what he meant, but I stiffened and said coldly, “I come here for privacy. That’s all.”
He fished out a romance novel with a clinching couple on the front. My cheeks burned as he flipped through, pausing to chuckle at the dog-eared pages.
“Well, well,” he said, “our little girl really is growing up.”
“That’s Blaire’s. She borrowed it from her mom.”
He lifted his flashlight to one of the dog-eared pages and began reading aloud. With every word, my cheeks flamed hotter.
“Curious little thing, aren’t you?” he said.
“It’s Blaire’s. Those are her marked pages.” True. “I skip them.” Not true.
“It’s natural to be curious,” he said.
I didn’t answer. My favorite teacher—Ms. Nanak—had caught me reading one of those books, and she’d said the same thing. When she’d said it, though, it’d been reassuring, making me feel like just a normal girl, normally curious. We’d had a long talk about how both boys and girls are curious, but it’s only considered “natural” for boys. Here was Keith saying the exact same words, and yet it made my fingers tighten on the knife.
“Are you curious, peanut?” he asked. “You don’t need to be ashamed of it.”
I said nothing. If there is such a thing as a female instinct, it screamed that no good would come of any answer I made.
He set down the book and laid a hand on it, almost reverently. “If you have questions, I’m here for you.”
My whole body twanged, a bowstring ready to snap. I wanted to run, and I also didn’t want to run—I wanted to brandish the knife and show him all the ways I wasn’t my mother. If he laid a finger on me, he’d lose it.
But that voice kept whispering in my ear, telling me again that I was doing the right thing by standing firm and saying nothing. Wait it out.
That’s what I did, all those years ago. Waited it out and then walked back into the house, shoved a chair under my door knob and went to sleep with the knife beneath my pillow.
Now I’m watching that blue glow bob around the dilapidated shed, and I tell myself this is not Keith. I am not fourteen. I am not helpless.
That reassurance, though, doesn’t keep me from imagining Liam pawing through my underwear, as Keith used to under the guise of doing the laundry for Mom. He’d gather a basket with my bras and panties displayed on top and bring it to my room and sometimes hold up a piece and tell me that I needed to replace it, that I’d obviously outgrown it. Just being helpful.
By the time the blue light bounces from the shed, I’m white-knuckling the spade handle. I watch the light as it circles the house. Then the old house shudders as the front door snaps shut, leaving zero doubt who was out there.
