When No One Is Watching(73)

I purposefully unclench my jaw and take a deep breath. No time for memories, or for questions.

I’m in Mommy’s room for a reason.

I head for her closet, pull down one of the familiar blue cookie tins as the persistent vibration of my phone purrs in the duffel on the window seat. No, this tin is too light. Must be her sewing things. I place it back on the shelf—Mommy did not tolerate me digging through her belongings and I learned as a child to put things back exactly as they were.

I find what I’m looking for in the fourth cookie tin I pick up, the heaviest one, the one with things rolling around like marbles inside.

I place it on the bed, sweat rolling down my temples and pooling beneath my titties from the top-floor heat of this room, and fight with the slightly rusted lid, eventually winning the battle. The lid pulls free and there it is. Mommy’s little silver revolver. It’s not shiny anymore, how I remember it, and it’s old enough that people would clown me if I posted a pic of it on social media, but I’m not pulling it out for social media clout.

My grandfather had given the gun to her when she’d come up north, but she’d known how to use it since she could walk. That’s what she told me, at least. Her parents taught her how to hunt for food, and how to protect herself when the white boys from town got bored and came cruising through their neighborhood looking to do evil, or if the Brown boys she’d grown up with suddenly didn’t understand the word no.

I pick it up, the heft of it a familiar comfort that grounds me in the swirling tornado of my thoughts and fears. Mommy taught me how to use it early, and then taught me never to touch it unless there was an emergency.

I think she’d agree this counts, given what I know of her definition of emergency.

Fitzroy told us the story of Mommy making a man dance at the end of this gun during the blackout. He probably didn’t know she’d run my daddy off the same way. I only found out the truth toward the end of things. We’d been watching Goodfellas in her bed, and during the scene where Karen shoves a gun into Henry’s mouth as he’s sleeping after she finds out he’s cheating, Mommy laughed so hard she’d lost her breath. I forced her to take a few sips of water and asked what was so funny.

“Just . . . memories. That’s how your daddy woke up after the first and last time he hit me,” she said, her gaze soft and unfocused and the slightest smile on her face.

“I wish I’d told you that earlier. How to treat men who want to make you small, crush you under their heel.” She looked into my eyes, her gaze loving but hard. “I put my gun in your daddy’s mouth and I made him apologize. And then I told him, ‘If you ever hit me again, you better kill me, because next time I won’t hesitate to pull this trigger.’ He left not long after that. Before he knew about you.”

I grasp the bullets from the box in the tin with clumsy fingers and load them into the chamber, thinking of all the people who think they can hurt everybody else with no consequence. Most times they’re right. They live long, successful lives while using other people’s necks as ladder rungs.

I don’t have a plan just yet, but this is not going to be one of those times, if I can help it. I’m not going to let VerenTech, Josie and Terry, Ponytail Lululemon, or anyone else continue to take what’s mine.

Something flashes into my eyes through the window as I push the chamber back into place with the heel of my hand. Theo is in his window across the street, eyes wide and waving around a mirror with a flashlight pointed at it, some kind of Boy Scout trick to get my attention. I give him the finger, jamming it up into the air hard and then pressing it to the glass as my rage at his betrayal flares up in me.

I expected him to have dropped the act already, but his hair is on end and his face is flushed as he tosses the mirror and picks up his phone, waving his other arm and pointing at me, waving and then pointing at the phone. I can see that confused brow knit of his from all the way over here.

I shake my head, pissed off that he has the nerve to look legitimately distressed, but I don’t take my eyes off him even as I stick the Ziploc baggie of bullets into my pocket.

He bangs his windowpane and because his window is open, I hear him when he yells something in frustration.

“Please!”

And because I’m not my mother’s daughter, just her diluted progeny, I second-guess myself. One doubt is all it takes. I pick up the phone when it vibrates again.

“Sydney, what the—” He reins himself in, and through the window I see him drop his hand onto his hip in an almost comical way. “You need to get out of your house now. He’s downstairs. Can you go down a fire escape? He’s in the house.”

His panic hits me like a wave through the phone, so real, or maybe, like the phone call that trapped my mother, just some fast talking designed to lure me into a trap. Theo knows how to do that—talk and talk and make you feel safe.

“Who is he? Why should I believe you after your little conversation with Kim? I saw you texting her while you were in the kitchen! I read the messages.”

I watch him, expecting him to show some sign that the jig is up, but his exasperated expression doesn’t change. “I remembered where I’d first heard the name VerenTech and was looking up something. What messages?”

“The ones that popped up on the iPad in the living room, honeycheeks. Next to Drea’s air conditioner. The one missing from her room.”