Page 39 of Paper Ghosts

She pulled over in front of the Wester House and cut the engine. Tasha crawled into the front seat, leaning over to turn off the headlights so they wouldn’t attract attention.

Pam sighed as she looked up the lawn. “Wouldn’t it be great to live there? I wonder what it looks like inside. It was nice of Bailey to come tonight. I wish I had been able to say hello. I’ll call Tug later and tell him to thank her. I haven’t talked to him in ages. It’s a shame you and Bailey won’t be going to college together. But you can catch up when you’re home on breaks. Maybe the four of us could get together in the park, like old times.”

She could feel her mother shaking with nervy energy. All day she’d been in a crescendo toward manic. She would be up for the rest of the night, maybe longer. There would be no calming her unless Tasha made her take her meds and sat with her to make absolutely sure she didn’t spit them out, because she liked her highs. Getting things done, making lists, calling people she hadn’t spoken to in a while—it all felt like hope to her. But she always paid for it later. They both did.

Minutes ticked by. Tasha pulled her knees to her chest and hugged them, suddenly cold. The adrenaline was wearing off.

“Who is that?” Pam suddenly said, and Tasha looked up to see someone limping down the sidewalk toward them. He would appear under one streetlamp, disappear into the darkness, then reappear under the next streetlamp.

Her mother leaned forward. “It’s him! That boy. What is he doing here? We dropped him off two blocks over.”

They both watched as Clutch finally stopped in front of the Wester House. In one hand he was carrying whatever he’d taken off the floorboard. It was a broken, globe-like piece of plastic. He set it down to take a cigarette out of his pocket and light it, and then he stared at the house while he smoked. Tasha held her breath. They were only feet away from him. He might notice them at any moment. He finally dropped the cigarette and picked up the object again and slowly ascended the concrete steps toward the Westers’ door.

That’s when it clicked.

He knew it was Bailey who’d hit him.

Her mother sucked in her breath. “Is he going to rob them?” Pam said. “No, no, no. That’s not going to happen. Not on my watch.” She opened her door.

“Mom, stop!”

But Pam had taken off in a sprint toward Clutch, her yells piercing the silence of the neighborhood. Someone was probably, at this moment, sitting up in bed and grabbing their phone to report a crazy woman screaming, “Citizen’s arrest! Citizen’s arrest!”

Pam’s battle cry obviously caught Clutch off guard, because he didn’t even check to see who it was. He instantly ran around the side of the Wester House, toward the backyard.

And her mother went after him.

Tasha fumbled around in the glove compartment, wasting precious time. Everything fell out and she scrambled through the contents until she finally found the can of pepper spray she’d given her mother, then ran up the steps. She rounded the corner of the house, not knowing what she was going to find, and nearly collided with her mother.

She was now completely wet and smelled of earthy, murky creek water.

“Oh my God, what happened?” she whispered. “Why are you wet?”

Pam looked down at herself as if this was news to her.

“Come on,” Tasha said, and started to guide her back to the Jeep. That’s when she noticed her mother had a broken side mirror from a car, carrying it by the hanging cords like some sad purse. “What is that?”

“He dropped it.”

So that’s how he knew. He’d found Bailey’s side-view mirror.

“I picked it up and hit him with it. He went into the creek and I lost my balance and went in with him.”

“You hit him? Are you sure?”

“I think.”

Her mother was barely five feet tall and as thin as Christmas tinsel, so she couldn’t have done much harm. Could she? “Is he okay?”

“He got carried downstream.”

If the police got involved now, what kind of havoc was this going to create? Clutch Vallow and Pam Keller had gotten into a fight in the Westers’ yard. Would anyone believe them if they told them why they were there? And if it came down to it, would Bailey come clean and protect Tasha’s mom the way Tasha had protected Bailey?

She knew the answer to that.

And in that moment, Tasha understood the real meaning behind Bailey asking, What if we don’t say anything?

You would do anything when it came to protecting the person who had shaped you most, the person who had given you everything, except the one thing you needed. Because the child in you never stopped dreaming of still getting it, one day.