He went to get me more cake.
Yes, I will be someone’s perfect wife and someone’s perfect mother, but not your wife and not your child’s mother.
In my mind’s eye, I saw Haylee listening. As the determination returned to my face, she began retreating.
She even looked a little sorry and now a little frightened.
Oh, don’t worry, I thought. You will be sorry. You have good reason to be frightened.
Anthony returned with my second piece of cake. I ate it faster than the first.
“Well, I’ll be a dog in heat. You want to be better faster, too, don’tcha? You want that baby even more than I do.”
I looked up at him.
And smiled.
This had to lead to another way out of my prison. I was already thinking of ways to use it.
17
Haylee
“I’m moving back into your mother’s bedroom tonight,” Daddy declared as we drove home from the restaurant.
“Really?”
“Mrs. Lofter has given us all her time without taking any time off for herself because it was important in the beginning, but we can’t expect her to be at our house day and night seven days a week.”
“Oh.”
So he wasn’t falling back in love with her or anything like that, I thought. It was something temporary.
“Does Mother know you’re doing that?”
He looked at me as if I had just arrived on the planet and then shook his head. “I’m sorry, Haylee. I know it’s difficult for you to wrap yourself around it, but your mother doesn’t know what’s happening right now. She’s in a sort of limbo state of mind. I doubt she’ll think anything of my moving back in . . . or maybe it will nudge her back into reality. Like shock treatment or something.”
“Then what? I mean, when she realizes again that Kaylee is really gone?”
“We’ll see, but if she should regain her bearing and her strength to the point where she can handle things again, I’ll move out, not just out of her room but out of the house.”
“Out of the house? I’ll be alone with her?”
“You were before this happened.”
I turned away and stared out the side window. I would never say it, of course, but Mother’s psychological breakdown was a bonus. She’d had such a firm control of our lives before all this. She practically knew how many breaths we took daily. From the time Kaylee and I could move around the house by ourselves until Kaylee’s disappearance and the aftermath, I felt we had lived in a Big Brother world, only it was a Big Mother world instead. She had homeschooled us until the third grade and then reluctantly gave in and let us attend a real school. But when we were at that school, she was still watching us closely. She had taken a teacher’s assistant job just to spy on us.
To do what I considered normal things, I’d had to devise ways to sneak around, and I’d had to do it for the two of us. Kaylee was never very good at coming up with clever deceptions. I was the one who had to invent the excuses and the good lies. She was the timid and reluctant one. No other girl my age had such an added burden. There were many times when Kaylee had stupidly revealed the truth and ruined things for us, or maybe she’d done it deliberately because of her fat conscience. I probably had fewe
r hairs on my head than the number of times she’d gotten me angry at her since we were born together. I wouldn’t doubt that she’d angered me in Mother’s womb, too. Mother used to complain about all the kicking we did. I’m sure it was all my kicking. Kaylee was too considerate to kick while she was inside Mother.
“Hey,” Daddy said now. I turned back to him. “I wouldn’t be too optimistic just yet.”
Optimistic? It was just the opposite. He should have said, “I wouldn’t be too depressed yet.” After all, what did “the point where she can handle things again” mean? It wasn’t simply going to be a return to the past. It couldn’t be with Kaylee gone.
Oh, no. I imagined new restrictions, especially on my social life. For one thing, Mother might come up with the insane idea that whoever took Kaylee would come after me, too. Wouldn’t he want both halves of a perfect young girl?
Besides that irrational fear, she’d conclude that since Kaylee wasn’t here to do something, then I couldn’t do it, either. Night after night, I’d be sitting at home having to console Mother. She wouldn’t simply accept that Kaylee was gone and there was nothing more to do, no reason to punish me by restricting my life. Perhaps she would stop pretending Kaylee was here, yes, but she wouldn’t give up on her returning. If I happened to die before her, Mother would tell the undertaker to wait before burying me: “Her sister is on the way home, I’m sure.”