The Fourteen Day Soul Detox, Volume Two (17 page)

“I want to go home,” she
said.

“Okay, climb on into your seat,”
I told her.

The moment I sat in my car, my phone
dinged with a text.

Chris:
I
think it was just a twenty-four-hour bug. I’ll definitely be at
work tomorrow.

Me:
I
am so sorry Chris, I meant to check up on you. I’m glad you’re
feeling better. Unfortunately, the offer was a bust. I have a lot to
tell you.

Chris:
Too
bad. See you bright and early.

After buckling Sarah in, I slowly drove
through the lot and back onto the road.

“Mom, can we listen to the kids’
CD?” Sarah asked.

When I pressed the button for the CD,
the song we had last been listening to blared out,
“He rode
right to Miss Mousie's den, mm mm, mm mm…”
I skipped
past the song. A new song played with a group of kids singing,
“
Itiskit, Itasket, green and yellow basket, I wrote a
letter to my love, And on the way I dropped it…”

I sang along under my breath all the
way back to our apartment.

When I circled the lot, Clarke’s
spot was once again vacant.

Parking in my own spot, I reached back
and unbuckled Sarah’s seatbelt.

Sarah screamed at me and tried to
fasten the latch back into the seatbelt receptacle.

“I’m sorry! I forgot!
Sarah—wait, I’ll help you,” I said.

She furiously pushed my hands away.

“Sarah, let me buckle you back in
and then you can unbuckle yourself—there,” I said,
putting my hands up in surrender.

Sarah took another minute to calm down
but finally unbuckled her own seatbelt.

“Okay, let’s just go home,”
I said.

We climbed out of my car. The leaves on
the bushes around my duplex rustled softly, swaying back and forth.
The building cast a severe shadow across the entire walkway.
Goosebumps ran up my arms.

I pulled out my keys to unlock my
house, sticking the key in my lock but the door simply pushed open.

“Huh?” I whispered, hand
still hovering with my keys in the lock.

Sarah barged forward through the door.

I grabbed her around her torso and held
her to me. “Wait baby.”

I turned on the hallway light, glancing
around what I could see of the living room and kitchen. I examined
every inch of the kitchen, then moved into the living room, keeping
Sarah’s hand in mine. I continued looking through the bathroom,
checking behind the shower curtain, and then into the bedrooms.

When the entire house was searched, I
locked the front door.

“I want to watch the artistic
women’s beam final from the North Greenwich arena at the London
Olympics.”

“Right now the choices are to
read books or do art, baby. You didn’t have the best day at
school today and we have to earn videos,” I said.

I pulled some art material down from
the shelf, and went to Sarah’s room to grab a couple books from
her shelf.

“I’ll do art in books,”
Sarah said, grinning with a crayon in her hand.

“Ha. Not in those books.” I
grabbed them back off the table. “I’ll go get your
coloring books.”

I walked back to the room, grabbing
Sarah’s coloring books and leafing through their pages on my
way back to her. “This one has a lot of free pages,” I
said, handing it to her. “Alright, I’m going to be right
back.”

Turning, a low buzzing started ringing
in my ears. Concentrating on my breathing, I walked slowly back into
my bedroom. From the doorway I could see where my underwear drawer
had been left just the slightest bit open. I glanced around the room
again, but just as when I’d checked five minutes ago, I didn’t
see anything else out of place.

Closing the distance, I slid the drawer
open. At first glance, I only saw the same lacey thongs that had been
lying haphazardly in my drawer since this morning, but then I saw it.
I dug my hand through my other underwear and pulled out a gray
boy-short pair.

“Oh my god,” I whispered.

The underwear slipped from my fingers
and back into the drawer.

I pulled my phone from my pocket,
thumbing through my contacts and calling Gina.

“This is Gina,” she
answered.

“Gina, this is Jamie, I think he
came into my house when I wasn’t here,” I said.

“Whoa, slow down there Jamie. You
neighbor came into your house?” she asked.

“I, um, yeah, I think so.”

“What happened? Did you leave
your house unlocked or did he break in?”

“He must have broken in. I
locked…wait I—I was going to lock it but then the
property manager called and… I didn’t lock it,” I
said.

“How do you know there was an
intruder?” she asked.

“He left a pair of my underwear,
one of the ones that went missing from the laundry,” I said.

“Now Jamie, I’m only going
to ask you this because this is the first question many people will
ask you, but I want you to know that I believe you that this man is
harassing you; is there any way that you just accidentally didn’t
include this underwear in your laundry and they’re lying around
the house?”

“They were in the laundry, I know
for a fact they were there,” I said.

“I believe you. Are you still in
the house?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“You need to leave,” she
said.

“I can’t Gina, it’s
too hard on Sarah. She gets so thrown off when her routine is messed
up, especially on the weekdays. It’s not fair to her to be
moving her around like this,” I said.

“We are talking about the safety
of you and your child,” she said.

“I just—I just can’t
do it to her right now,” I said.

“Is there anyone who can stay
with you?” she asked. “I have designated driver duties,
but I can cancel if you need me.”

“I’ll call someone,”
I said.

“Promise me you’ll call
someone, and I’m hoping that someone is your dad,” she
said.

“It won’t be my dad, but I
will call someone and ask them to come here. I’ll probably call
Cameron,” I said.

“As long as I have that guarantee
from you, and that you’ll call me if he can’t come,”
she said.

After I hung up with Gina, I scrolled
down my contacts, until I found Cameron’s number. Taking a deep
inhale through my nose, I pressed the call button next to his name.

After three rings, a woman’s
voice answered with, “Cameron’s phone.” Her voice
was accompanied with the loud sound of people chattering along with a
periodic tinkling.

I didn’t say anything for a few
seconds, and then I said, “Oh, I’m so sorry, is he busy?”

“Darn it. I can’t hear you…
I am so sorry, I’m in a really loud restaurant. Cameron has one
of these blasted old fashioned flip phones and I have no idea how to
turn up the volume. Is this the client he’s waiting for a call
from?”

Her deep melodic voice, the way she
said his name… I realized who it was. Blinking around my room
in surprise, I walked over to my bed and took a seat. “Vanessa?
It’s Jamie,” I said.

“I am so sorry… I can’t
hear a word you are saying. I know he’s waiting for your call,
but he stepped out to go get something from his car. Can he call you
back in just a minute?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Shoot, I still can’t hear
you… I’m just going to assume you said yes and I’ll
tell Cameron that you called,” she said.

“Thanks,” I said, hanging
up.

Grabbing a pillow from the head of my
bed, I pushed my face into it and screamed. I screamed until I needed
to come up for air, and then I took a deep inhale, pressed my head
back into the pillow and kept screaming.

After what felt like forever, I dropped
the pillow onto my lap. Squeezing my eyes shut, my fingers rubbed my
eyelids. I looked back to my phone, scrolling down my contact list.
Finding the name of the one person in the world I wanted over at my
house right now, I texted her.

Me:
Will
you spend the night at my house?

After a couple minutes with no
response, I stood up and walked into the kitchen to check on Sarah.

“Hey, angel, are you hungry?”
I asked.

“I am hungry for milk. What are
you hungry for, Mom?” she asked.

“I am
thirsty
for water,”
I said.

My phone beeped and I scrambled to pull
it out of my pocket.

Amy:
Tonight?

Me:
Yeah.

Amy:
Yeah,
sure. Everything okay? Do you still have a wireless connection?

Me:
Yes
to the wireless. I am having a horrendous day, I have a seriously
creepy neighbor, Cameron is on a lunch date with Vanessa and you were
right about Patrick and his family, they’re super villains from
an evil empire.

Amy:
I
definitely didn’t say that. I can be over in about three hours.
I might have to do some work over there, though.

Me:
That’s
fine.

Amy:
How
creepy is your neighbor?

Me:
Like
I need to move creepy. Don’t tell dad.

Amy:
I
won’t, but you have to tell me about what’s going on. I
also want to hear about this Vanessa thing. I’m going to finish
what I have to do here so I can head home and pack a bag to come
over.

Me:
Thank
you so much.

After pouring a glass of milk for
Sarah, I sat beside her.

“Can I have that one?” I
asked, pointing to a picture

She glanced over, “Yes.”

Taking a blue crayon from the box, I
started working the color between the lines. After I had finished
coloring in half the picture, I paused to look over at Sarah.

“Everything is going to be okay.
It’s all really tricky right now, but I am going to make all of
these things right, I promise you. I’m going to make it work.”

Sarah looked up at me, smiled, then
turned back to her drawing.

This is
the end of Volume Two of The Fourteen Day Soul Detox.

Keep
reading for an excerpt from Volume Three.

Volume
Three

Day
Five

Stick
it to the Woman

My eyes opened to a rattling sound on
my roof. Standing, I climbed off the bed and away from where Sarah
was sleeping as carefully as possible. When I lifted up a blind on my
window, faint morning light fed through a stream of rain water.

I cringed as the rattling sound grew in
volume, looking back to where Sarah was fast asleep.

Her leg was hooked over her blanket,
pulling it down and I slid the blanket around her and covered her
again.

Stepping out into the hall, I found
Sarah’s bedroom light on. The scent of freshly brewed coffee
wafted through the air.

I popped my head into Sarah’s
room to find Amy sitting on Sarah’s bed, her fingers clicking
quickly over the keyboard of her laptop.

“You’re killing me, Amy,”
I said, groaning.

“I’m sorry, Jamie, did I
wake you?” she asked, looking up with cheaters poised on her
nose.

“It’s the smell. I’m
going to start floating toward the coffee pot like an old cartoon.”

“I was planning on finishing the
pot before you woke up,” she said.

I walked into the room and took a seat
across from her. Sarah’s toys were organized orderly on their
shelves in a way they definitely had not been last night when we went
to bed.

“Are you always up this early?”
I asked her.

“My alarm is set for
four-fifteen, but I usually wake up earlier,” she said, looking
back to her screen. “So that house near Susan’s is a
little over three hundred thousand, and that’s only because
there’s numerous problems with it. Thankfully, they’re
mostly cosmetic, so since you’re good at that stuff, the house
would be livable and you could get other things fixed over time. The
downside is that most of the loans you might qualify for require a
pretty high down payment.”

“You spent all morning doing
this?” I asked.

She looked over her screen. “I’m
not going to leave you in this situation Jamie, no matter what you
say.”

I pointed at her. “You swore on
Peter’s life you wouldn’t tell anyone.”

“Am I telling anyone? No. But I’m
not leaving you in a house where some psycho is breaking in to play
with your underwear,” she said.

“I’m probably going to have
to get another apartment. I’m just getting the distinct feeling
that they’re not going to help me at the main office.”

“And you’re absolutely
positive about the job?” she asked.

“I knew you’d be rooting
for me to take that stupid job,” I whispered.

She raised her eyebrow at me in
response.

“Yes, I’m sure I don’t
want to take a contract job at evil headquarters.”

“Actually, after I heard that
story, I thought even more highly of Patrick and his family. It
actually sounds like they want to do right by you.”

“And I think you’re biased
by your rich people blinders,” I said.

“I have no idea what that means,”
she said.

“You think that they’re
like a higher breed of human or something,” I said.

“Actually, I don’t think
that at all. If you asked me, you would know what I think. But you
don’t ask me, you just judge me,” she said.

Sighing, I climbed off the bed. “I’m
sorry. I love you and I really appreciate everything you’re
doing.”

“Of course, you’re my
sister, I’d do anything for you,” she said, her focus
returning to the computer. “So, what is on your detox list for
today?”

“Taking on Sarah’s school
board,” I said.

“Because they laid off her
teacher? I thought the school board voted to keep her on part time?”
she said.