Tempest Rising - Diane Mckinney-whetstone [96]
“Me?” Ramona’s voice screeched, and she turned back to face Mae, to glare at her, to tell her once and for all that she was a sad excuse for a foster mother and an even more pathetic natural one. But Mae’s expression was so steady, like the face she put on at the card table when it was time to raise or fold, her drooping eye blinking out of sync with her good one, that Ramona swallowed the rest of her words, and only air was left in her mouth, which she huffed at Mae, and then stomped out of Mae’s bedroom. She ran back to the girls’ bedroom to survey it again, maybe get some clues. Wasn’t kidnapping a possibility? Weren’t their parents rich? Maybe she should hunt for a ransom note. She let the thought go as quickly as it had come. Kidnapping wasn’t a possibility. She was sure. Nor did she need to go in that room to find out why they’d left. The whys were running all through that house. Starting with Addison, she thought, and his dick that was where his brain should be, and Mae with her sweet-sounding words that were like cotton candy, no insides to her words at all, just puffs of sugar-coated air. Even herself. She didn’t want to begin to see her own behavior, hear her own words, which had been filled with venom for the girls. Even after she had allowed Victoria to get close to that part of her she’d kept buried and covered with granite, she would still use her words to slap around Bliss and Shern every chance she got. Especially Shern.
The closed bedroom door stopped her thoughts about Shern. Now she was flooded with the image of the girls curled up in that twin bed. Now she hoped that maybe she just thought the beds were empty, that she’d woke in a fog and gone in there before her eyes were working right. “Please let them be here,” she whispered against logic, praying now that she wouldn’t have to pick up the phone to call the police to report them missing. She opened the door lightly. She would have to call the police. The bed was empty. They were gone.
She went back into the girls’ room to wait for the police to come. The massive gray cloud had gotten comfortable with this day and was all leaned back in the sky and only allowing a thread of the early-morning pink to push through the window. The pink settled in the bedroom and illuminated what the girls had left behind. The beds appeared freshly made, and Ramona almost choked on the thought that those girls were the type who took the time to make up the bed they’d slept in even as they were preparing to run away. Their trunk was still there; their book bags were piled neatly in the corner; they’d even left shoes behind, lined up in size order and peeking from under the spread. She got down on her knees and searched under the beds for their fur-lined boots. Good, there was a hole under the bed where the boots usually stood; at least their feet may have stayed dry and warm through the night.
Shern’s lime green velvet bathrobe was folded at the foot of the bed, and Ramona picked it up and felt around in the pockets, for what she didn’t know. The pockets were empty, and she held the robe up to straighten it out and fold it down again. She was struck then by the feel of the robe, the way the soft lush threads were warm under her fingers as they yielded to her press and then surrounded her fingers and held them there. She’d never owned anything where the richness permeated every fiber. Even the way the robe smelled, a light sweetness to it, like lavender with a touch of mint, not like the heavy perfume she wore that she bought on special that sometimes reminded her of how a funeral parlor smelled.
She imagined Shern and her mother shopping for the robe together. Maybe they’d just had lunch in the Crystal Room at John Wanamaker’s and then taken the escalator down to the fourth floor, where the sales manager of