Between the Perennial Blooms || Paul Lahote

Twelve | Lily

"Chapter One

—Who were you
before they broke your heart?"

—Unknown | Broken things

• • •

Bailey awoke the next morning to a voicemail notification blinking obnoxiously on her phone screen. She lifted her dainty frame up into a seated position, resting her fatigued spine against the headboard of her childhood bed, and took the cellphone in between her hands. 1 missed call. 1 voicemail message. 12:36 a.m. It read.

Bailey pressed play.

"Hey, Little Wrenning-bird," the soft voice of Jared Cameron crooned down the line. "It's Jared," he paused, awkwardly, as if hoping his first name was enough for her to remember him by. "I was just calling because no one's heard from you since, well... the other night." He cleared his throat. "So I wanted to check in and see how you were doing. Jacob said he called you and tried to explain things, but that was two days ago and he said you never answered your phone yesterday, so I thought, I don't know, maybe you'd pick up for me since Jacob doesn't really seem like your cup of tea right now." He paused again, sighing, and swallowed the thickness in his throat. "Anyway, Pau- I- we are all worried about you, so just give me a call if you're up for it..." his voice trailed off faintly. "Or, you know, don't," he added. "If you're not." She heard him gulp. "Okay, I'm gonna go now." Then the line went silent.

Bailey sighed softly to herself, taking a moment to simply sit back and relax as beams of warm sunlight filtered in through the blinds covering the window. Absentmindedly, she ran her fingers up and down the bandage covering her left arm, mind traveling elsewhere whilst she listened to the rustling of the brush outside. It seemed as if it had been so long since that day in the woods when she fell, yet as she recalled the day's date displayed on her phone, she realized it had been just a little over a week. Time felt as if it had moved so slowly, so lazily, and Bailey failed to understand exactly why. So many things had happened in so little time; so many truths had been revealed in so little distance. She wanted a break -needed a break, and as she leaned her head back against the stucco wall of her childhood bedroom, she agreed she couldn't have escaped to a more relaxing place than her Gran's own little corner of Heaven right there in Acoma Pueblo. Possibly the only thing that could have made it better was her Gran being there with her; however, the truth of the matter remained that her Gran wasn't there with her. For the first time in her entire life, Bailey was back in the place she had made most of her memories, back in the place she had learned to tie her shoes and ride a bike and read a book, and it was all without the one person who had made those memories possible for her -the person who owned the house that bore the scars of her childhood. The doorframe of the kitchen pantry had tick marks scratched in black pen measuring her height from the day she turned two to the last mark on the day she turned seventeen. The back porch had her left and right handprints stamped into the concrete from when her Gran had it build when she was six, and the tile in the only bathroom was cracked along the sink's edge in remembrance of the time Bailey had dropped a magic-eight-ball when it slipped through her too-small fingers back when she was seven. Her Gran had never cared, had always laughed when she accidentally did something destructive, and assuaged her worries by encouraging her to "make as many messes as possible" because she was just a kid -just a silly, reckless kid- and if anyone deserved to make mistakes and learn from them without consequence, it was her "little Bailey-Wren". Because Bailey was special; her Gran had always told her that. She was "beautiful and kind and thoughtful and by-god", she was "everything anyone could ever want in this world". But she also wasn't, because while she was beautiful and kind and thoughtful and so many other things in between, Bailey knew the truth. No one wanted her. No one ever had.