The Reckless Oath We Made(41)

I dreamt I was in a long hallway, with gray-tiled floors and walls. In real life, the hall wasn’t nearly as dark or as creepy, but in my dreams it was like something out of a horror movie. I’d only been there once, when I went to claim Dad’s body, after he died. I was twenty, and while LaReigne was off playing Air Force wife with Loudon, and Mom was having a nervous breakdown, I was the one who arranged for the undertaker, picked out the coffin, and planned the funeral.

In the dream, sometimes the hallway turned into my old high school, and I was going to take a test I hadn’t studied for. Other times, I was waiting to see Dad’s body, while the prison chaplain tried to comfort me. When one of the doors opened, I knew I was supposed to go in, but I guess my brain decided I’d had enough of that particular dream and woke me up.

For a few minutes I didn’t remember where I was. I sat up and looked around, because it wasn’t completely dark. The walls glowed white, almost like there was a streetlight outside, but it had to be the moon.

I got up, stepped around the tent’s center pole, and opened the flap to look outside. Gentry was lying there, sleeping right on the ground.

“My lady, art thou well?” he said. While I stood there like a dope, looking at him, he’d been awake, looking back at me.

“I’m fine. You surprised me. I thought you were asleep.”

“Nay. Needest aught?”

“No. I’m just restless.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I tied the screen flap to keep the bugs out, and went back to bed. Having the outside flap open let in a lot more moonlight, and I could hear Gentry breathing. I felt better knowing he was there. Like being alone, but not alone.





CHAPTER 20





Zee



In the morning, the way the light came through the tent canvas was so beautiful, I felt a little buzzed, even though I was sober. The roof of the tent was held up by something that looked like a wagon wheel, balanced on top of the central pole. It reminded me of the parachute we used to play with in PE class in grade school.

I wondered if this was what it felt like to jump out of a plane, because I felt like I was free-falling. I was helpless, and there was nothing holding me. Marcus was with the Gills. Mom had disowned me. I didn’t know where LaReigne was. I’d lost my job, my apartment, and my car.

I’d felt that way after my wreck, when I was in the hospital with nothing to do except lie there. For a while it was peaceful, but eventually I crashed into the ground. I lost the baby. Nicholas abandoned me. I had no place to go. LaReigne rescued me, but living with her and Loudon was like Thunderdome with the fighting. Then the bills started coming, and the giant shit show that was my life returned to regular programming.

Thinking about all that crap ruined my little moment of calm, so I sat up and found my phone. I called Mom first, but it went to voicemail. Probably she was still mad at me. Or she couldn’t find the phone. Or she’d tried to carry things back inside and had an actual heart attack.

After I hung up, I looked at my call log, at that seventeen-second phone call to Uncle Alva. I didn’t even know why I’d called him, but the more I thought about it, the more tempted I was to call him again. He’d said, Don’t call me again, and I kept turning that over in my head. I hadn’t done anything for him to be mad at me. The last time I saw him, I was eight years old, right before he and Dad robbed that second bank. The one that got them caught. The one where my father killed a bank guard.

Uncle Alva had spent six years in the penitentiary at El Dorado. The same place my father had served. The same place LaReigne volunteered. I wondered how much had changed at El Dorado in the twelve years since Uncle Alva got paroled. It wasn’t that long ago, and there were lifers there. Men who’d been there before Uncle Alva and who were still there. Men who might know something.

He’d told me not to call, but maybe he was worried about his phone line being tapped. Maybe his phone line was tapped. Ours had been for years after Dad went to prison. One more reason not to have a landline.

I closed the phone app and opened my browser to check a few news sites, but they were rehashing what I already knew. They’d dug up some new photos, including one of those portrait studio shots. They’d blurred out Loudon and Marcus, but there was LaReigne with a big smile on her face. I don’t know why I kept looking, burning up my data, knowing that eventually I’d stumble across the video of Mom being loaded into the ambulance. At the end of the news clip, Gentry stepped in from the left of the screen and put his hand over the reporter’s camera lens.

All I was doing was sitting around feeling helpless, so I got up and got dressed. The braids Elana had put in my hair had come halfway out, so I took them the rest of the way out, but didn’t bother trying to comb the mess. I stepped outside and looked around at what I hadn’t been able to make out in the dark. The tent was surrounded by trees with a fire ring about twenty feet away, and the ice chest was strung up between two trees, to keep it away from animals, I guessed. In the night, I’d thought we were hiking over rough terrain to get there, but in daylight, I could see there was a trail that led back down to the main camp.

I followed the path, and found Rosalinda beside the fire, stirring something in a pot. Last night, I’d thought she was wearing a nightgown, but now I could see it was some kind of Ren Faire outfit. A long dress under a bustier, and a head scarf. She stood up and waved at me.