I blink and swallow. Has Adam been talking to more people than my sisters? I can’t hide my immediate feelings. She notes this and her eyes flare as though she’s won the battle. Anger rises in me but I take a page from her book and stay very calm on the outside. “Yes. He told me he would. Because of the piece he’s writing about me.”
“Right.” She cuts her pasta into tiny pieces and continues to take bite sizes suited for a mouse. “Thepiece.” She puts down her fork and her knife with a clatter. “Based on what these individuals said he’d asked, Sky, I regret to inform you that this piece does not paint you in the best of light.”
My stomach sinks. Adam asked people about me? People who are not my sisters? People who he had said I deserved better treatment from?
I refuse to allow my face to show my doubt. “And what is your evidence for this claim?”
“The questions he asked them.” She throws up a hand. “Had Ms.Flores disappeared before going missing? Did Ms.Flores have a boyfriend outside of town? Did Ms.Flores show signs of…” She shakes her head. “Psy…Psy…I cannot say this word.”
I furrow my brow. “Psycho? Psychopath? Psychic powers?”
She points. “Psychosis.” It comes out as a hiss. “The man thinks you’re not sane. And he’s trying to use your affections to get access to our family secrets.”
I laugh. “That is not…No.” I almost sayHe loves me, butthen I realize that I will sound like a child, trying to convince her parental figure that her good-for-nothing boyfriend isn’t good-for-nothing. Which will play right into the narrative she’s trying to create right now. “Adam isn’t asking people if I’ve experienced psychosis.”…Is he?
“It’s not a matter of is or isn’t. It’s already done, Sky. He’s asked the questions. They’ve been answered.” She raises her eyebrow and looks me up and down. “Do not tell me he got you to tell him about our…” She looks around, as though anyone else could possibly have snuck into the kitchen. “Gifts.”
I say nothing.
She sighs and puts her hand on her head. “I think I’m getting a migraine, Sky; do not tell me that you told this man about these things!”
“He doesn’t know everything,” I tell her. Which is accurate.
“The last thing this family needs is another scandal!” She raises her voice. “First, your mother, and now you? No wonder my hair went gray in my thirties!”
“I wasn’t even alive when you were in your thirties,” I shout back, because yes, I guess we’re shouting now. “And why the hell would you care if I was involved in a scandal, besides the way it would makeyoulook?” I take a breath and look down. “You don’t even want to be seen with me now. Some new scandal wouldn’t change anything between us.”
She crosses her arms. “What are you talking about, I don’t want to be seen with you?”
I shake my head. “You think I haven’t noticed that you never take me to the same brunch place you take Teal? That whenever you want to catch up, it’s always somewhere on the edge of town, or outside of town?”
Amá Sonya sighs. “People talk, mija.”
“People talk. They call me names. They play cruel pranks on me. And you know what would’ve been great? To have my powerful, rich grandmother do something about it, instead of cowering in fear in her four-point-eight-million-dollar beachside mansion, only coming here because you think your reputation is at stake. Not because you actually care about me.” I toss my own napkin on the table. “I’m going to the woods.”
I don’t stop to hear what she has to say to that. I just run out the door.
30
It’s incredibly stupid, but afterwandering around the trees for a bit, with a blue jay on my shoulder (I call him Blueberry. Predictable, I know, but I think he loves the name), I make my way to Nadia’s backyard, toeing to the cliff until I’m one footfall away from falling, and I sit and dangle my legs on the edge.
It’s not a sharp drop-off. If I slipped, I would roll, but the risk wouldn’t be like before, where the force of hitting the ground is what would get me. More likely, it would be hitting my head on a rock, or maybe getting impaled by a tree branch along the way.
Blueberry flaps his wings and walks all around on my legs. I sigh and lean against the tree trunk to my right—a young pine tree with long, sap green needles. “Blueberry,” I murmur. “This fucking sucks.”
I actually don’t care right now that I yelled things at Amá that she probably won’t forgive me for. What would change in our relationship? The grandmother who’s ashamed of me won’t speak to me anymore? Oh no, not that!
It’s what she said about Adam that’s messing up my head.
I think about everything that transpired between us for a long while. I try to remember every conversation. Every expression. Was there something I missed?
I want to say the way he’s been treating me…the way he acts around me. Bashful and haunted and…well, if not love, he acts like he likes me a lot. I want to believe that.
But I also know men trick women all the time. So I can’t use that as evidence that he doesn’t have some horrible plan to discredit me for all eternity in Cranberry.
I shake my head. It’s not what Amá says. It can’t be. Because everything I told him about me, about our family, was freely given. He never pressured me. He barely even had to ask. I told him because I wanted people to know the truth.
The whole thing was my idea from the start. Not his.
