Finally, and with great care, I opened. I let myself feel the emotions coursing through her. Most of the time, I kept myself closed off. There was simply too much out there. I’d learned to control what and how much I absorbed when I was in high school. Before that, life had been … challenging. Especially around the step-beast.
Emotion rushed through her in spades, the worst of it like a lightning strike, knocking the breath from my lungs. Fear. Doubt. Grief.
Someone had died. Or someone was going to die. Those feelings were way too strong to be associated with anything other than death.
“First, I want you to know that I believe in you. In what you can do.”
So the woman who made my childhood—my abilities—a living hell now believed in them. Oh, yeah. Someone was going to die. Maybe it would be her, but I didn’t want to get my hopes up.
“Awesome!” I said, faking enthusiasm. “Now we can be besties.”
She ignored me. “I’ve known for a long time, Charlotte.”
She’d always refused to use my nickname. The gesture would make us seem close, and we couldn’t let that happen. Her friends might look down their noses at her.
“You have to understand that it was hard raising you.”
I couldn’t help it. I snorted. Loud. Then laughed. “Raising me? Is that what you call it? What you did to me?”
She ignored me my entire childhood. Unless I’d embarrassed her in front of her friends or was bleeding profusely, I was of no consequence to her whatsoever. I was nobody. Invisible. I was dust beneath her feet.
Not that I was bitter or anything.
“You don’t have children, so I don’t expect you to understand.”
I decided to share an anecdote with her to help her better grasp the situation. “Anyone with children should know, sometimes when you ask little Charley who broke the lamp and she says she doesn’t know, what she’s actually saying is, ‘It was a guy with pale, see-through skin and bad hair who may have died from the blunt force trauma to the head but more likely bit the dirt from the multiple gunshot wounds to his chest.’ But that could just be me projecting.”
“Your circumstances were unusual,” she acquiesced, examining her sunglasses.
“Ya think?”
She bit back a retort and I almost smiled. I wasn’t sure when I’d become so cruel. She was clearly in pain. But payback was a cold, hard bitch. I’d have to be one more often.
Ever the stalwart soldier, she marched onward and asked, “Will you give me the message? The one my father left for me?”
I couldn’t help it. My mouth fell open and I almost scoffed aloud. Now? After all these years she decides she wants to join the club and I’m supposed to remember a message given to me by a departed when I was in the low single digits? What the bloody hell?
“Okay, well, I was like—” I lifted my eyes to the big calculator in the sky. “—I don’t know, four or five, so that was how many years ago? Math isn’t really my thing.”
“Twenty-three,” she offered.
“So, I was four.”
“I know,” she said. Her fingers tightened around her bag. “But I also know how amazing that mind of yours is.” She looked at me pointedly. “Clearly you never forget anything.”
“You do have a point. I still remember quite profoundly the slap you gave me in front of the crowd at the park. And the time you dragged me off that bike at the beach. By my hair. And the time I tried to tell you what your father said and how you went ballistic on my ass, screaming at me as we drove to Dad’s bar.” I leaned in. “You spit in my face.”
Her lips thinned in regret. Damn, she was good. If I didn’t know her better, I’d say she was actually sorry for what she did.
“I was in shock at the park. What you did was—” She inhaled, then let that accusation drop and moved on to the next. “And your hair caught in my ring. I told you not to get on that bike and you disobeyed me.”
If the heat of anger could manifest outside my body, she’d have been nuked right then and there. A charcoal briquette in the shape of Hitler, because she really did resemble him in an odd, disturbing kind of way. What I did? How dare she.
“And if you will remember, I wasn’t even aware that my father had died when you told me you had a message from him from the grave. How was I supposed to respond to that, Charlotte?”
“By spitting in my face, apparently.”
She lowered her head. “If I apologize, will it help?”
“Not especially.”
“Will you tell me anyway?”
The sadness in her eyes, the remorse, ate at my resolve. Not much. Kind of like a mouse nibbling a tiny speck off a hunk of cheese the size of Mount Rushmore. But enough to have me saying, “I honestly don’t remember the exact message, since you’re asking. It was something about blue towels. Or maybe towels that weren’t really blue. Fuck, I don’t know.”
Okay, I only used the F-word because I knew how much she hated it, but it did little good. She was lost in thought, trying to remember what I could possibly be talking about. Then something sparked in her memory. Recognition flitted across her face. “Wait,” she said.
“How long, because I really do have things to do.”
She stood and turned her back to me. “What did he say about the towels?”
After taking a deep breath, I said, “I told you, something about the fact that they weren’t really blue. I think he said it wasn’t your fault.”