She’s looking for something, her eyes darting around the small room. She wanders over to the coffee table, then the side tables, then the kitchen bar.
“What are you looking for?” I ask.
“My brush. Have you seen my brush?”
“No.”
She goes back into her room and I can hear her opening and closing drawers. Her search is all very random. All very distracted. Like she’s looking, but not looking.
I get up, go into the bathroom and find the brush in a basket sitting on the windowsill. I come back out, holding it in the air.
She’s looking at me from across the room. Somehow, in the five seconds it took me to locate the brush, she has made it all the way back out to the couch. A good reminder of who she is.
“Sit down,” I say, using the brush to point at the couch.
I expect a huge argument over this command because that’s the kind of girl Wendy Gale is. Aggressive. Belligerent. Combative. Fighting is her one true God-given gift.
But she gives in immediately and that’s kinda sad.
I walk over, sit down to her right, then angle myself into the couch arm. She does the same, angling herself into me.
And then I begin to brush her hair.
This is something I’ve seen Chek do hundreds of times. When Wendy was little, she hated brushing her hair. I think all little girls are like that. Lauren was like that when she and I were still together. I started brushing her hair after watching Chek do Wendy’s.
It calms them. The Zero girls. They hate it and I’m not convinced that it even feels good to them the way it might to a normal girl. But it calms them anyway. Don’t ask me why, it just does.
So it calms Wendy now. She lets out a deep breath and her shoulders slump a little as she bows her head in defeat. Like she’s giving up on this day.
I am careful as I brush. Lauren was always very sensitive about me touching her head. I don’t know if this is something all little girls get weird about, or just the Zero girls, but it’s a real thing. She would cry sometimes if I wasn’t paying close attention when I was touching her scalp. Not just with a brush, but with anything. I tried to get to the bottom of this several times and she never could explain it. She told me brushing her hair hurt her in the teeth. Which was her way of explaining some weird neurological connection between the two things, I guess. The way you can touch a spot on your leg and feel it in your shoulder. Pressure points. Like Chinese medicine. But she also said it felt like bugs crawling, it gave her the shivers, it made her feel sick, and—my favorite—it made her crave ice cream.
This memory of Lauren makes me smile. I don’t think about her much. There’s no point. I’m never going to see her again and thinking about her makes me sad.
No one likes to be sad.
But anyway. Back to Wendy. She is the same about the hair. “You can’t let it get tangled,” Chek used to caution me about Lauren’s hair when she was small. “Or you’ll have to shave it off. They can’t tolerate the untangling. Put it up in braids. Keep it neat.”
Of course, Wendy is older now. Practically grown up. So she does tolerate the untangling. And her hair is kind of a mess. But her skin prickles up and she shudders more than once as I work the knots out.
We are silent as I do this. She’s sitting cross-legged on the couch in front of me, her forearms resting on her knees. And I don’t know why, but I’ve always hated the silence with Wendy. It means she’s thinking and most of the time I hate it because for as long as I’ve known her, I have been waiting for the day she decides she really doesn’t like me any more.
I mean, she’s tried to kill me at least five times but it was heat-of-the-moment kind of stuff and happened at the end of stressful situations. She was angry about something, but it was never about me. It was something else, or someone else. It just wasn’t me.
But right now, seventeen days after Chek’s death, on her seventeenth birthday, I’m pretty sure this silence is about me.
Chek. He was all she had.
She’s got a lot, that’s not what I mean about this statement. Wendy Gale has a cabin, a hundred acres of land or whatever, a truck, bank accounts, a hidden cache of gold coins, and plenty of weapons. Not only that, she has been trained to survive just about any situation imaginable.
Chek was the only person she had. And that’s worth more than the house, the land, the truck, the money, the gold, and all the weapons put together.
But I could change that for her. I could become the next only person she has.
So I decide to do that.
I say, “Dear Wendy.” She turns her head, just a little. Just enough to almost side-eye me. “Do you remember the first time I took you to the library?”
I catch a very small smile creeping into the corners of her barely visible mouth. Then she actually chuckles. “That’s not how it went.”
“Sure it is. I was all, ‘Dear Wendy. Have you ever heard of these things called books?’”
Her chuckle becomes a laugh. “Oh, fuck you.”
“What? That’s how it went.”
“That’s not how it went. I was…” She stops, realizing what I’m doing, which is distracting her. And I expect that to be that. I expect her to sigh and give up. Sigh and go silent. Sigh and growl at me.
But she doesn’t.
She keeps going.
“I was the one who loved books first.”
“I know that,” I say softly, still brushing her hair.
“I was the one who took you to the library.”
“Yep. That was all you, Wen.”
“I was the one who taught Lauren how to read.”
I kinda wanna argue with this one, because the way I remember it, Lauren taught herself to read using that app on my phone, but this is not the time to argue. And anyway, Wendy was there with us in the beginning. She’s part of that time and that means she’s part of us. So I say, “You sure were.”
“Did you ever miss me, Nick?”
“What?”
“When you dropped me off?” She turns all the way around to look at me and I’m suddenly… I dunno. Nervous, maybe. “Did you miss me when you dropped me off?”
When I showed up at the airstrip begging Chek for assistance with baby Lauren, Wendy didn’t want to come help me raise an infant. She was nine years old. But aside from her age, she was working by then. Chek had her so well trained, she was already doing important jobs. So this request not only took her out of the game, it left Chek vulnerable.
But he gave her to me anyway. And she came along. It took her a few days to warm up to me, but she took to Lauren immediately.
Our lives changed that day on the airstrip. And we spent the next eight months together. Just me, and Wendy, and Lauren. We lived on the road, stopping in random places to stay a night, or sometimes we’d find a really nice place and stay a week. We even went on a real vacation once, but that was later.
The first time I dropped Wendy back off with Chek she was turning ten and Lauren was about ten months old.
“You want the truth?” I ask her. “Or you want me to be nice?”
She takes a deep breath. Lets it out. “Truth, please.”
“OK.” I swallow hard and set the brush down on the coffee table. “The moment you got out of my truck that first time my heart hurt so bad, I wanted to grab you. Tie you up, chain you to the door and just keep you forever.”