Page 72 of Caution to the Wind
“My Mei,” she murmured into my hair, clutching me tight enough to hurt, her nails curling into my leather jacket. “My Mei.”
I pressed a kiss on to her temple and then peppered more all over the side of her head when it was obvious one wasn’t going to be enough. The bruising that had mottled her face in the hospital was gone now, at least, and only a faint scar at her right temple was still visible. I kissed it three times as if my lips could erase the history of the mark.
“Hi, Glory,” I whispered, forcing the words through my too-tight throat. “I’m so fucking sorry it took me so long to get here. That…that I wasn’t here in the first place.”
She made an animal kind of whine in her throat, pressing impossibly closer. “You’re here, now. Just…just promise you won’t leave again like you did before. I need you.”
My heart ached like a fresh wound. I pulled back to cup Cleo’s beautiful, gaunt face in my hands and promised in the same voice I’d once promised her mother, “I’m not going anywhere, okay?”
She placed her hands over mine on her face, one arm bent at a sharp angle by the cast that stretched from below her armpit all the way to her wrist. “Thank you.”
Someone cleared their throat from behind Cleo in the doorway. Without thinking, I turned us so I was in front of Cleo before swirling to face the stranger.
My protective instincts were a little laughable, considering the woman had been inside Cleo’s home with her, and it was even more ridiculous when I saw the fine-boned, almost waifish blonde who stood there. She was unbelievably pretty, almost doll-like, with wide blue eyes and thick pale hair that curled over the breast of her pink sweater dress. The wickedly sharp knife she had clutched easily in one hand seemed completely out of place on her person as did the swell of an unmistakable pregnant belly beneath her dress. Not only did she seem too young to be a mother, she seemed too…ridiculously pure to be a teen mum. I wondered snidely if it had been an immaculate conception.
“Oh,” Cleo exhaled on a little laugh, stepping up beside me to take my hand. “Mei, this is my best friend, Beatrice Lafayette. Bea, this is my Mei Zhen Marchand.”
Bea and I stared at each other for a long moment, both of us warring, I thought, with our respective importance to Cleo. She was herbest friendnow, but she still called me hers like I’d been born to her. A feeling I reciprocated.
I wondered how much Cleo had changed that her new best friend wore pink unironically and looked like some kind of Barbie doll when her old best friend was in shit kickers and the same vintage leather jacket I’d worn when we were teens.
“It’s nice to finally meet you, Mei,” Bea said, her voice sweet as sugar pie, perfectly in keeping with her image. She lifted the hem of her loose sweater dress to slide the knife back into its sheaf strapped around her thigh and bent to pick up Cleo’s discarded crutches. After handing them off to her, she offered me a slim hand, one I shook after a moment’s hesitation. “I wish it was under better circumstances.”
I nodded, because I didn’t have anything else to say.
Luckily, we were distracted from awkwardness by the need to get Cleo inside. I realized immediately that she shouldn’t have been out of bed, let alone out in the cold. She was rail thin, her bones harsh shards like glass threatening to poke through her skin. It was difficult for her to even manoeuvre the weight of the two huge casts. The main room of the cabin was fairly huge, the kitchen along the back wall with a big island and hanging copper pots above it, the living room to the right, and the dining room with a massive raw edge wood table set to the left. Above the kitchen was the exposed hallway of a second story, a wooden railing separating the floor from the drop below. Big rough-hewn wooden beams arched overhead, and massive windows along both sides of the house exposed a view of the lake to one side and the forest to the other. The furniture was oversized to fit the scale of the space, dark wood, deep chocolate leather, and homey touches like a handknit blanket thrown over the couch and books here and there over different surfaces.
It was completely unlike Henning and Cleo’s small bungalow in Calgary yet it suited them––Henning––perfectly.
I lost my breath to its perfection, literally sucking in short, sharp breaths as I took everything in while Cleo led me to the L-shaped leather couch. My fingers traced the ink over the cushions, swirling patterns I knew had been made by Henning’s expert hand in coloured ink pens.
It was only when we were sitting beside each other, knees pressed together, our tangled hands between us, that I finally took in the changes in Cleo herself.
And I lost my breath even more to that.
She clearly wasn’t well.
I knew from her texts that she was recovering from the assault by the serial killer the media coined “The Prophet,” but it looked as if she was held together with barely a hope and a prayer. Her once gorgeous, thick golden-brown hair was cut in a ragged, awful style, short as a boy’s, and her bones pressed too-hard against her skin, deep hollows beneath her cheekbones and around her wide, dulled sage-green eyes.
I pressed a fist to my mouth to keep in the sob, taking Cleo’s thin hand with me when I did.
Her expression collapsed in on itself, lips trembling, brows bowed under the strain of her frown. “I know…I don’t look so pretty anymore.”
“You’ll always be beautiful,” I told her honestly. The other girl, Bea, was totally forgotten even though she sat three feet away in a chair. “But this…God, my heart breaks just looking at you. What did he do to you…?” I let the question trail away because it was rhetorical, but Cleo seemed to take it seriously.
“Everything,” she whispered. “Everyone says I should talk to someone about it. I-I had some meetings with a trauma psychologist at the hospital, but…how can I find the words?”
She swayed toward me, planting her face in my neck so she could whisper her heartbreaking words against my ear. “He took my womb from me, Mei. I’ll never have kids.”
My eyes squeezed shut so tightly I saw exploding stars. Idly, I wondered if I was watching my heart fragment into pieces.
Cleo had always wanted children. She was the kind of girl who grew up thinking about her wedding to a good, kind man with a stable job and living in a house with a white picket fence and two-point-five children. She was wholesome, not because she’d been raised in a wholesome environment by wholesome people, but because shehad not.
All my sweet Cleo had ever dreamt of waspeace.
And peace to her meant a big family she could shower her love and goodness on.
I’d never even thought about having children. How could I when the man I loved in a way I knew I’d never stop had been taken from me when I was just seventeen?