Neighborly(59)

“I thought it would be good for me to get out of the AV, try to gain some perspective, but I just don’t know.” I keep the singsong lilt in my voice, and I’m sure she’s kicking her legs inside the sleep bag responsively. “I can’t stop thinking about Yolanda and the notes and the openness, wondering how we can make the best of things.” It might help to talk out my feelings, and I can’t do it with Doug, who’s up in the main house. Besides, running monologues are our thing—Sadie’s and mine.

“I’m glad you like it here, though. Your dad likes it, too. I’m the one who’s out of step.” I push the shower curtain back as it crowds me once more.

“You probably don’t know what I mean. I hope you never do. I hope you belong wherever you go. Not that you’ll be a follower. That’s no good, either. But it’s easier if you happen to feel the way the majority does. Like your daddy. He’s the kind of person who’s in step wherever he goes. Somehow, what he feels and what he does fit.” If he had it his way, we’d be doing what everyone else is doing in the AV. We might even be on that spreadsheet.

“No, we don’t see everything the same way. Take your grandmother, for example. He thinks she’s this incredibly sweet, giving person. But really, being seen that way gives her power. It lets her control the people around her, and no one suspects.” Sadie makes a delighted noise. “Exactly! Good girl! You just hold it together out there while Mommy finishes her shower, OK?” That happy noise can be the precursor to terrible things, a sign that she’s close to an emotional edge. My heart speeds up a little, and I start conditioning madly. “Daddy thinks that I’m resisting his mother because I’ve got mommy baggage from my childhood. But the thing is, Sadie, your grandmother pretends she wants to be my mom because then she has license to run my life. Meanwhile, she’s judging me all the time. She wants me to do things her way.”

Since Sadie hasn’t made another peep, I decide to risk it. I apply shaving cream to my legs, striping them with the razor. “Like last night. Every time I held you, her eyes were on me. Appraising me, wanting me to hand you over to her again. She thinks I’m not good enough. But when she caught my eye, she’d give me this simpering smile, as if you and I were just the cutest things ever together. And when you started crying and I walked you around and sang to you, she was at the ready, like I needed backup.”

As I rinse my legs, I continue. “I know it’s better for you to believe the best about your grandmother. I just can’t. Sometimes life is harder when you see things clearly.”

I turn the knobs to off and squeeze the excess water from my hair. A towel intrudes, attached to a hairy forearm. “Doug,” I say. I drop the towel in the tub, and my heart drops along with it. He storms from the room.

Naked, exposed in more ways than one, I race after him, pleading for him to understand. “Sadie won’t remember anything. I was just thinking out loud, that’s all. I don’t even believe what I was saying.”

Sadie is wailing at being left behind. Doug stops and stands dead-still in the center of the room, his eyes cold. He’s waiting for me. He wants me to see that look in his eyes, a look that says he could hate me. First the women of the AV. Now Doug.

Then he walks out, and I crumple to the floor.

Vows aside, any couple’s love is conditional. In a marriage, what’s tied can be untied. My pretty life can be lost, just as I’ve always half feared.

No, one look can’t say all that. He was angry. There’s no way he could mean that. He’s my family, the only one I’ve got. Him and Sadie. He knows that.

Maybe it’s why he chose me. Maybe Melody isn’t the only one whose seeming sweetness is actually power in disguise. Doug picked me because I was isolated, because I was malleable. Just like Layton.

That’s only my past and the AV paranoia talking. Doug and I love each other. We both love Sadie. We’re a family. Recent events aside, I know these things to be true.

I steady myself enough to return to the bathroom. Sadie’s eyes are wet, red, and accusing. She’s asking how I could have left her. “I’m sorry, baby.”

I wrap the discarded towel around myself, tucking it in, and lift her into my arms. “I’m sorry,” I tell her again. She bleats an extra few times and then drops her head against me, spent. I carry her into the other room and climb into bed. Her body is so limp, so trusting. I wonder if I ever trusted my own mother this much, if she ever held me like this or she just let me cry alone. “I’m not going anywhere,” I say into the top of her sweet-smelling head. “I’ll hold you as long as you need me. Longer.” Within a few minutes, she’s fast asleep, overdue for her morning nap.

Doug will come back soon, and I’ll apologize. I’ll tell him I didn’t mean a word of it, that it was temporary insanity brought on by stress, and we’ll be fine.

He’s always been convinced that my resistance to Melody is because of what I never got. Where Melody was supposedly buoyant and thrilled to parent Doug, my mother was perpetually sad and beaten down, paralyzed by depression. My grandmother probably should have raised me herself, but she didn’t want to admit how bad off my mother was. So Grandma just covered for her. We scraped by on public assistance and my grandmother’s handouts. My mother was unfit to be alive, let alone to parent. Doug thinks I don’t know how to be a daughter because I didn’t really have a mother.