The Watcher Girl(13)
“Like breathing air?” My answer comes out like a question because I don’t know how else to answer something like that without using dramatic words akin to “survival.”
Rose wouldn’t know the first thing about surviving. After Mom was sentenced, Rose got to stay in the family home with Dad and Sebastian and Nana Greta, who thought her Sweet Rose hung the moon and could do no wrong.
Rose was the daughter Greta never had. Sebastian was the second coming of her beloved Graham. I was chopped liver. An afterthought living in a two-bedroom condo in a retirement community with our poker-loving, chain-smoking, gin-and-tonic-swigging Grandma Janet.
While Rose and Sebastian attended private schools, I attended a high school with a 68 percent graduation rate.
When Nana Greta took Rose and Sebastian on European summer vacations (my invite was clearly lost in the mail), I was sweating my ass off selling snow cones from a shack on Orange Avenue for minimum wage.
Rose was a cheerleader with a tight-knit circle of bubbly, popular, perfect-top-knot-wearing girlfriends who never had to scrounge around for a last-minute prom date.
I scuff my shoe against the concrete step again, leaving a bigger scrape than the last.
“Mom misses you. She asks me about you all the time.” Rose avoids eye contact.
“I’m sorry I haven’t been around for you.” I’m not allergic to apologizing. I’m not afraid to acknowledge my weaknesses. I live with them every day, like a pack of obnoxious roommates. “But I stand by my decision regarding . . . her.”
It’s difficult to call her Mom, at least out loud. It’s an unfamiliar word on my lips these days. I don’t know that I could eke the word out if I tried.
Another car idles down our quiet street, and I’m jealous of its freedom, the fact that it never has to think or feel or wonder or worry or run away or numb itself into oblivion.
“She’s going to die alone in that prison someday. Do you have any idea what it’s like for her?”
A minute ago, I almost thought about confiding in my sister about the real reason I came home. I thought we were having a moment. And it would’ve been nice to open up to someone about all of this, to have someone else confirm that I’m not crazy or imagining these coincidences.
But our conversation has taken a sharp left turn, and we’re gunning for a cliff.
I won’t stand here and be guilt-tripped by my mother’s avatar.
I lift my watch, press the “Run” setting, and take a deep breath. “Going to take my jog now.”
And then I trot toward Sutton’s house on Lakemont, leaving Rose—and all that noise—in the distance.
CHAPTER 5
I’m a block from 72 Lakemont, clipping along square after square of white sidewalk, sidestepping automatic sprinklers, and returning carefree waves from unsuspecting strangers on their Sunday drives.
Every stride puts me this much closer to becoming a regular neighborhood fixture.
An old-school hip-hop song plays in my ear, and a powder-faced elderly beagle on the other side of a picket fence tries to keep up with me for half a block.
We had a dog, once: a chocolate labradoodle the size of a small horse. Nana Greta ended up “rehoming” her shortly after she moved in because she was “too much to handle.” But I knew the real reason—scooping the massive piles of crap that polluted the backyard was beneath her.
I think about that dog still, twenty years later. What became of her. If she had a good life. If she was loved. I’d have taken her with me to Florida, but Grandma Janet’s apartment was strictly pet-free. When I was twelve, I captured an anole from the parking lot and fixed up a home for it in an old Nike shoebox from my closet. Grandma found it a week later and set it free while I was at school. At least that’s what she told me. For all I know, she flushed it down the toilet. She could be heartless like that.
These days I much prefer animals over people, but I’ve never been able to bring myself to get one of my own. If something were to happen to me, who would take care of it?
More important than that . . . who could I trust to take care of it?
I spot the emerald-green-and-white street sign for Lakemont ahead, nestled above the untrimmed, sky-high hedges I noticed yesterday, and I pick up my pace.
My watch reads 7:16 AM, and I imagine Sutton and his little family are up for the day. Maybe Campbell is making buckwheat pancakes in the kitchen while he’s discussing the yard work on the docket. Sesame Street plays on the TV in the living room, and a load of bleached towels is tumbling in the dryer. Campbell asks if they should open the windows today, and Sutton checks the weather. “Too humid,” he tells her. “Tomorrow maybe.” And if he squints hard enough when he looks at her, he sees me.
I round the corner by the overgrown shrubs, and my heart lurches in my chest with each bounce of my foot against pavement. But before my gaze so much as lands on 72 Lakemont, I find myself on a collision path with a woman pushing a stroller.
In an attempt to avoid pummeling into the innocent bystanders, I dodge to the right, only to stumble over my own feet and land against the concrete with a rigid smack that knocks the air from my lungs.
It all happens so fast.
My palms throb, like a hundred tiny fires.
I don’t have to examine them to know they’re pitted with pebbles of sidewalk and dirt. Pushing myself up, I spot a horizontal tear in my leggings, one that showcases a bleeding scrape.