AllFreeNovel
Share Us
One more day, maybe three, and the kitchen would be done.
Detective Kay Sharp had been telling herself that for the past few days, when she pushed herself to leave the warmth of her bed before first light, to work on spackling the kitchen walls before the start of her day.
Rubbing her eyes and fighting pointlessly against a yawn, she stretched and walked into the small bathroom. Cold water dissolved whatever remnants of sleep still clung to her eyelids. When she looked at herself in the mirror, she smiled tentatively, shyly, as if she were planning to flirt shamelessly with a heartthrob at some fancy ball, not run sandpaper over dried spackling to smooth it over.
It was the age of renewal, of healing.
It was time.
Back in her bedroom, Kay slid on a pair of paint-stained denim shorts and an old Metallica T-shirt. A couple of years ago, she’d reluctantly condemned that T-shirt to be worn for chores after an incident with a spilled glass of red wine. Several faint purple blotches still stained the fabric, underlining the name of her once-favorite rock band.
Like the T-shirt, the kitchen walls had stories to tell, one for every scuff, scratch, dent, or hole. Unlike the fading wine stain, those stories were mostly painful, forever etched into her memory with the sound of her mother’s cries and sobs. The smell of drunken sweat coming from her father. The taste of tears on her lips. The fear in her brother’s round eyes as he crouched behind the couch.
Scars memorialized in weathered drywall; a testimony of the years Kay desperately wanted to forget.
Maybe a layer of light-yellow wall paint and smoothness that would make a professional contractor choke with envy could erase some of those flickers of nightmare still embedded into her memory.
Tiptoeing into the kitchen, she filled the coffee maker quietly, careful not to wake Jacob. Moments after she’d pressed the button, the aroma of French Vanilla filled the kitchen with the promise of an excellent day. Those two hours she took in the mornings to fix the walls were hers. Hers alone. She was still looking for healing, processing her trauma, reliving every moment, hopefully for the last time. There was no reason to drag her brother into this; he seemed to have put the past behind him in typical male uncomplicated style. His role had been limited to signing off on the paint color, his protests drowned by Kay’s voice, seconded by his girlfriend’s, in an instant alliance of female dominance in all matters pertaining to the way a home should look.
She took the lid off the can of spackling and started covering up some holes with the pink paste that turned white as it dried. It smelled fresh, of new walls and cleanliness. Sanding yesterday’s patchwork was second on the agenda for when Jacob would wake up. Sanding walls, even by hand, was noisy.
She’d worked counterclockwise through the kitchen, starting from the window above the sink. Yesterday, she’d noticed the back door structure needed a little more work, its frame loosened by years of being slammed angrily by her father’s hand. Jacob had reserved a pleasant surprise for her. The frame was stabilized, and the walls that held it were ready to be worked on.
Finishing up a long scratch where the leg of a chair had landed after being thrown across the room during one of her father’s drunken outbursts, Kay realized she’d been holding her breath for a while. She forced air into her lungs slowly, then held it in for a couple of seconds before releasing it. If she closed her eyes for a brief moment, she could hear the shouting, the chair flying over the table, then slamming against the wall with a thud before falling to the ground.
Her hand froze in midair after she loaded the spackling knife with more pink paste. Then it started shaking and turned heavy. Kay dropped the knife into the can, her eyes burning with tears as she stared intently at a small hole in the wall. Since the renovation project started a few days earlier, she’d been avoiding that spot. She’d been veering her eyes away from it for sixteen years.
Her shaky index finger touched the edges of the small hole, where the drywall had cracked and crumbled when she’d removed the bullet from it with the tip of a steak knife. The bullet that nearly killed her brother. The bullet she’d fired with her father’s gun.
A sob shattered her breath and stopped on her lips as she covered her mouth with her hand. “Oh, God,” she whispered as tears flooded her eyes.
“Hush now, sis,” Jacob whispered, wrapping his strong arms around her. Lost in her past, she didn’t hear him come into the kitchen. “Soon, you won’t even know where this hole was,” he added, a tinge of humor in his voice. He rocked her back and forth slightly as she sobbed, her face buried at his chest. “Everything will be, um, lemon meringue yellow. That the color we’re painting these walls?”
“Uh-huh,” she mumbled, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. She pulled herself away a little but couldn’t look her brother in the eye. Not yet.
“Who gives shades of paint these stupid names? Can you imagine having that job? Making up stupid, crazy shit all day and calling it work?”
She glanced at Jacob quickly, then looked away. Her eyes found the window, where the rising sun was chasing away the lingering gloom of night. A few yards away, two massive willows were casting long shadows tinged in dawn shades of orange and gold.
Jacob turned her head away from the willows with two fingers gently pushing her chin. “Don’t do this to yourself, sis.”
“I could’ve killed you that day. It’s a miracle I didn’t.” Kay finally looked up at him and held his gaze for a brief, loaded moment, then stared at the stained floor.
“You didn’t, and it’s over. It has been over for years.” He lifted her chin up until Kay’s eyes met his. “I do hope they taught you how to shoot at Quantico.”
She couldn’t help the smile that scared away the last of her tears. “You’d think, yes.”
“Or was your crappy marksmanship the reason why you quit the FBI and resigned yourself to be a small-town cop instead? Profilers are more like paper pushers, aren’t they?”
She gasped. Was he serious? She was about to remind him why she’d returned to their hometown, but the well-guarded secret was written in his eyes. Unspoken truths weighed heavily between them, some unbearable. Kay’s guilt had been a painful burden all those years, but Jacob had always been there to help her carry it. That guilt still persisted, although she knew what she’d done sixteen years ago was right. Justified. Necessary. And still, she’d never managed to rid herself of that guilt, of the nightmares that came with it, fueled by the relentless anguish of her mind. By the secret they were both protecting.
A wave of unspeakable sadness washed over her. No matter how many coats of lemon meringue yellow she applied to those walls, it wouldn’t change what she’d done. Nothing ever would. And if the truth ever came out, her life would be finished. Jacob’s too.
A shudder ran through her body. Jacob looked at her intently, his brow furrowed.
Without a word, he rolled up his blue-striped pajama sleeves and grabbed the can of spackling paste from the counter, loading the knife with a fresh pink dollop. Then he applied it to the wall, covering the bullet hole with one swift, expertly choreographed move. Once done, he looked at her with a silent question in his eyes.
Kay nodded and smiled weakly, admiring his work, then lifted her gaze to meet his. There was strength in those eyes, vulnerability too, and love. One by one, the scars of the past were fading away, even if some were still agonizing.
