Stone Cross (Arliss Cutter #2) - Marc Cameron Page 0,88
and a loose T-shirt, sitting on her bed with her knees drawn up to her chest. A Paris Saint-Germain poster was tacked to the wall behind her, along with several ribbons from soccer camps she’d attended in Anchorage. She looked up, actually said hello, and then went back to whoever she was texting.
Birdie paused at the door—hovering, Jolene called it. How could something so beautiful come from such an ugly encounter?
Jolene glanced up. “Good potluck, Mom.”
Flustered at the civil tone from her normally icy offspring, Birdie struggled to think of something worthwhile to say.
“It was.” She wracked her brain and came up empty. “I’m going to have a shower.”
“’Kay.”
Jolene returned to her text.
Unwilling to squander the moment, Birdie banged her head nonchalantly against the door frame. “You and that lady marshal seemed to be having a nice conversation.”
“You mean Lola?” Jolene said, looking down to pick a piece of lint off her toe. “She’s badass.”
Birdie felt the agutaq churn in her belly.
“Is that so?”
“Yep.”
“Anything interesting?”
“Some.”
“She seems like a tough one.”
“She is.” Jolene looked up again, but only with her eyes. “Have a good shower, Mom.”
The moment was over before it started, but Birdie was around fifteen-year-olds every day, enough to know her daughter wasn’t an anomaly. Teenagers were snarky. That was the way of things. Birdie had been a handful when she was that age—until that day with Sascha Green. After that, she’d become a real problem.
She said good night to Jolene and got a nod back. Status quo.
Birdie shut the door to her own bedroom—no rules there—and stepped on the toe of each of her socks to pull them off, kicking them into the hamper in the corner. Her khaki slacks were clean enough to get another day’s wear—a miracle considering the mud outside—so she hung them over the back of a wooden chair beside her bed. It was all relative anyway. If everyone was muddy, then the acceptable level of mud went up. It was like being drunk. Birdie had spent her freshman year of college slightly less intoxicated than her friends, so no one had noticed.
Her shoulder ached more than usual today and she winced when she pulled the polo shirt over her head. It always hurt when she lifted her arm that way, especially when a big storm was blowing in off the Bering. Her hand hurt too, worse than her shoulder. She had scars there, deep ones, and another behind her ear in her hairline. The worst one—the worst physical scar anyway—ran from her left buttock to the side of her knee. That one had nearly killed her. It had earned her a flight to the Alaska Native Medical Center in Anchorage, eleven days in the hospital, forty-two stitches, and gallons of antibiotics.
Sascha had done a number on her. He’d hurt her, bad, and in countless ways, but he hadn’t been the one to take her virginity. Sadly, that job had been done the month before she turned thirteen. She’d always looked older than she was and told herself that the boy was just a high school jock taking things too far. He had not hurt her, or at least he wasn’t cruel about it when he did. She still saw him almost every day around the village. He’d grown up to be the local agent for one of the bush airlines. Later, she’d come to realize that he had some level of fetal alcohol syndrome. It didn’t excuse what he’d done. She was twelve and he was sixteen, but his mental state made it easier for her not to fixate. Now, if he came near Jolene, Birdie would lure him out to the tundra and gut him on the ice. That went without saying. But he hadn’t. And she didn’t hate him. Much.
Though her virginity was no longer up for grabs, Sascha had still managed to rob her of health and youth. She reserved the bulk of her hate for him. He’d separated her collarbone during the attack and almost sixteen years later it still crunched and popped if she moved her arm just so. One of her shoulders was all wonky, sloping downward a hair lower than normal and making it impossible to keep bra straps and swimsuits in place. The unevenness was an unforeseen consequence that, while not horrible in and of itself, reminded her daily of the violence of the event.
She thought about it each day, some days more than others. Some days, it was all she could think about.