That was the way Vance was looking at me.
Right then, in the dim room, his eyes half-sleepy and half-full… of me.
Oh… my… God.
“I got him,” Vance repeated not realizing I’d frozen. He leaned toward me, touched his lips to mine and got out of bed. He pulled on his jeans, did up all the buttons but two, rifled through my bag until he found Boo’s food and he walked out of the bedroom, Boo prancing in his wake, tail straight up.
I collapsed on the pillows and then turned my back to the door.
“Oh crap, oh crap, oh crap,” I whispered to myself again and again, holding the pillow to me. Then I stopped when I thought maybe Vance could hear.
Something was stealing over me, over my skin, through my insides, both places it felt like velvet. Then it was all around me like a cocoon, warm and sweet and safe.
Then Auntie Reba’s voice came to me, the first time in years.
After she died I’d hear it a lot, sometimes memories, sometimes like she was talking to me. I used to think I was a little insane so I kept it to myself. I didn’t even tell Nick. It was my secret and I didn’t want anyone to talk me out of having her voice with me. The months passed and it went away but now it was back. I heard her voice, soft and wise, just like it had been the day she said the words.
Nick was in danger of getting transferred to Springfield, Illinois. I didn’t want to go to Springfield. Nick didn’t want to go to Springfield. Auntie Reba didn’t want to go to Springfield. We were in the kitchen and I was pitching a teenaged fit. Denver was all I knew, it was home.
Auntie Reba, on the other hand, seemed totally at peace.
“How can you be so calm?” I’d shouted.
She turned to me, a small smile on her lips. “Jules, sweetheart, home isn’t a place. Home is anywhere, just as long as the people you love are there.”
Nick never got transferred and a few months later Auntie Reba died.
And home was torn away from us. We’d been homeless ever since.
Or we thought we were.
The tears hit my chest with a weight so hard it shoved itself up my throat and I could do nothing about it. It hurt too much to hold them back, they sprang from my eyes.
I was finally, finally back home.
But having Nick all these years I realized I’d never left.
“I’m so stupid,” I told the pillow.
“Jules?”
I turned in the bed, flat on my back and looked at Vance standing in the doorway, tears streaming from my eyes.
“I… I’m so f… fucking stupid,” I sobbed.
“Jesus,” he whispered, took two long strides and then I was in his arms.
“She left and sh… she was… ho… ho… home,” I said against his neck, somehow I was in his lap and holding on tight. “And N… N… Nick and now this. I’m so stupid.”
I was making no sense. I knew it but I couldn’t help it.
Vance had an arm tight around my waist, the other hand stroking my back.
“She died twelve years ago. When is it going to stop hurting!” I screamed over his shoulder.
“I don’t know, Princess,” Vance murmured into my neck.
I sat in his lap holding on to him and then all of a sudden I shouted, “I’m a freak!”