Free Revived Spirits by Julia Watts Page A

tray. “I’ll tell you about it later. I don’t want to tell you how bad it is in front of her.”
    “Hey, Adam. Hey, Miranda,” Caylie says, settling down across from us. “I don’t want to be rude, but not knowing what you saw yesterday when we were with my mom is killing me. So talk.”
    I set down my cheese sandwich. “Okay. Well, I saw your mom with a guy. Good looking, tall. Kind of a cowboy type.”
    “Daryl,” Caylie says. “Mom’s ex-boyfriend. Ex- fiance , really. But things got ugly, and the wedding never happened.”
    “I saw some of that,” I say. “I saw him using...I guess it was meth. Then I saw them fighting and her packing up his stuff and changing the locks on him.”
    “That’s the way it went down,” Caylie says. “But when you were...seeing stuff, did you see her using?”
    “No. I saw him offer it to her, but she said no and called it poison.”
    “It is,” Caylie says. “It poisons your whole life. You don’t even have to use it yourself. Just being where it is is enough.”
    “The thing that confused me,” I say, “is that when your mom got arrested what the police found in the car just looked like soda bottles. Mountain Dew. If possession of Mountain Dew is a crime, half the people around here would be in jail.”
    “I know about the soda bottles,” Adam says. “People make meth in them—they call it the shake ’n bake method. My dad was talking about it because he was reading this series of articles on meth in the Lexington newspaper. Dad’s been reading up on meth because he sees lots of meth-related cases in the hospital. People who are addicts, people who are all burned from accidents in labs.”
    “Daryl did the shake ’n bake thing in our house,” Caylie says. “He tried to hide it but he couldn’t because it made the whole trailer stink like cat pee. That and him using all the time was why Mama kicked him out.” Caylie hasn’t touched her lunch. “The stuff made him crazy. One time he started seeing all these spiders that wasn’t really there. And after Mama broke up with him, he got even worse. He’d show up in the yard yelling about how he knew Mama had the FBI following him—crazy, crazy stuff. Mama was gonna get a restraining order against him, but then the law showed up with a search warrant, and she was the one who ended up going to jail.” Caylie looks me in the eye. “Do you think she’s innocent?”
    “I think if she had been doing meth and making it, I would’ve seen it in her memories,” I say.  “People lie to each other, and sometimes they lie to themselves. But sometimes I can get into somebody’s head so deep I dig deeper than the lies. And I’ll tell you something I did see. Well, I didn’t see it so much as I felt it.”
    “What’s that?” Caylie asks, leaning forward.
    “When I was in your mom’s memory of getting arrested...you were screaming, and I felt her love for you...how much she didn’t want to leave you, didn’t want you to be hurt like this.”
    Tears leak onto Caylie’s cheeks. “Thank you. That was what I needed to know.” She wipes at her face. “I’m sorry, Adam. I’m sure the last thing you want to see when you’re trying to eat your lunch is a girl crying.”
    “That’s okay,” Adam says. He reaches across the table to hand her a tissue. “It’s clean, I promise.” Once Caylie’s had the chance to wipe her eyes and blow her nose, Adam says, “So you think this Daryl jerk set your mom up?”
    “That’s what I’ve thought for a long time,” Caylie says, finally starting to pick at the spaghetti on her lunch tray. “But I ain’t got a way to prove it.”
    “You don’t have a way yet,” Adam says. “Maybe I can dig up some dirt that might be useful. What’s the dude’s last name?”
    “ Chumley ,” Caylie says. “C-H-U-M-L-E-Y.”
    Adam writes it in his notebook. “And his first name is spelled D-A-R-Y-L?”
    Caylie nods.
    “Got it.” He snaps his notebook closed with a