by Ninie Hammon
“We were just about to cross the Mississippi River in Memphis when it hit me. What if Aaron’s parents took Bethany away from María? They didn’t really want her, of course, wouldn’t know what to do with her if they got her. But they would certainly see it as the ‘appropriate’ thing to do. The thought of the two of them and Bethany … I lost it. Started yelling from the back seat. Scared the federal marshals to death. They thought I was having a stroke.”
Bailey had demanded that the officers pull over to the side of the road and contact the agent in charge, the guy she’d called today, Marshal Jordan, and when she got him on the phone, she started screaming at him.
“I told him Aaron and I had named María Bethany’s legal guardian if anything happened to us. She was the sole heir to our estate, which would include considerable sums in life insurance payouts for Aaron. We hadn’t gotten around to buying life insurance for me.”
Bailey told him that if he didn’t keep Aaron’s parents away from the child, she would come back, get Bethany and disappear.
“I was not rational at all, making stuff up on the fly, told him I’d say I’d been in drug rehab and Aaron was taking his girlfriend to the Bahamas behind my back. Mikhailov would assume he’d killed all the witnesses to the accident that day so I wouldn’t be in danger … but there would be nobody to testify against him for the murder of Aaron. Nobody for the feds to put on the stand, point a finger at him and send the monster away.”
She paused, thoughtful for a moment. “After I heard it come out of my mouth, I realized I could probably get away with it. I could have had my life back … but the price tag on that was letting Aaron’s murderer walk free.” There was enough steel in her eyes then to filet a fish. “Not happening!”
“So … what’d this Jordan fella do?”
“I never did find out — what did it matter? He gave me the ‘I know a guy who knows a guy’ line, somebody in the Justice Department who was a good friend of Drayton’s. I’m guessing he hinted that it would come out in court about Claudia’s drug use and the pitiful state of Drayton’s synapses if María had to go to court to fight for custody.”
Bailey paused. He could tell she was fighting tears.
“It wasn’t such a big deal at the time … was only supposed to be for a few weeks … that became months … that became years. I was supposed to get my life back … soon.”
Then she just stopped fighting them tears, let ‘em slide on down her cheeks.
She lifted her wine glass as if she were clinking it against their own upheld glasses.
“Here’s to soon … which has finally, finally become now.”
Chapter Three
“So your little sister, María, has … Bethany.” Brice stumbled only for a second before he said her name, said Bethany, but Bailey understood. The poor man — well, all of them — were trying to get their minds around a whole lot. And her having a daughter, that had to be big pill to swallow.
Bailey was stumbling a little herself, as a matter of fact. She was talking about this, actually tacking words onto the thoughts she’d only dared have in secret for the past two years. It felt awkward. And freeing in a way that felt like chains had dropped off that had been wrapped so tight around her chest she could hardly breathe.
Which was what it must have been like for María most of her life.
“Actually, she isn’t really my little sister. Not blood relative or anything. We just made that part up, but she couldn’t be any more my sister if we’d had the same parents.” She looked from Dobbs to T.J. Yeah, they got that part. “And her name’s not really María, either. But we didn’t make up that part. She did that all on her own.”
It ought to have been no big deal, and Jessie certainly makes it look like it’s no big deal that she has been moved to yet another foster home. It wasn’t a bad thing this time, though. She was glad to get out of the Phelps’s house, where the foster mother stayed drunk all the time and made the girls do all the work. And the father … yeah, he was the touchy-feely kind, though she got out of there before she became a victim.
So she’s not upset to be here, except, of course, for the normal upset of having to uproot herself from everybody and everything familiar and start out fresh with brand new parents and siblings.
This time, she’d be the oldest girl in the Anderson household, the harried social worker told her, giving her the plastic smile that looked like she’d learned how from a manual. There are four boys, and one other little girl and she’s only eight. Jessie is twelve.
The car pulls up in front of a white frame house on the corner in a pleasant enough neighborhood — older homes but well-cared-for. There’s a big live oak tree in the yard with one limb that sticks out straight from the trunk low enough for a kid to reach, which explains why there are three boys now up in its limbs with another on the ground shouting at them.
The social worker doesn’t stop to introduce her to the boys — maybe because she doesn’t know their names, though she was the one who placed them here, or maybe because she’s in too big a hurry. She ushers Jessie inside for a perfunctory introduction to the Andersons, then sits at their kitchen table filling out and signing forms while Jessie “puts her things away.”
She hauls her suitcase into the back bedroom that she will share with the little girl. It’s dark and she starts to flick on the light, but even though her eyes aren’t yet adjusted to the darkness, she can see that there’s somebody in one of the two half beds in the room. She’s sitting propped up on pillows, holding a flashlight and reading a book.
Jessie can hear the little girl breathing from all the way across the room. Wheezing. The social worker’d said the child had asthma, but Jessie had never heard anybody breathe like they were dragging every breath in through wet weeds on the shore of the river.
“It’s okay, you can turn the light on,” came a voice from behind the flashlight. “I like to read ghost stories in the dark. Scary stories are creepier if you have the lights off.”
Only that’s not really how she says it.
“It’s okay” … wheeze … “you can turn the light on” … wheeze … “I like to read” … wheeze … “ghost stories in the dark.”
She only has breath enough to form a few words before she has to draw in another, like maybe there wasn’t enough oxygen in the gulp of air before.
But the little girl doesn’t seem to notice. Clearly, it doesn’t bother her at all.
Jessie feels along the wall by the door for a switch and flips on the overhead light. A bilious yellow glow from a single dirty fixture in the center of the ceiling. Since the curtains are drawn, it doesn’t make the room a whole lot brighter.
But in the glow of it, Jessie can see the little girl sitting up in bed behind the flashlight. She has black hair like Jessie’s, but not shiny like Jessie’s. A kind of duller black. Not like it’s unclean or anything like that. It’s just that it’s almost curly, a wavy kind of curl unlike the smooth, light-reflecting curls that hang on Jessie’s shoulders. The little girl has her hair pulled back in a ponytail and looks at Jessie with large brown eyes.
It’s hard to tell what her … what’s the word, yeah, ethnicity, the little girl is. With a name like María, coupled with the black hair, you’d think Hispanic. In fact, the social worker’d said she was Puerto Rican. But Jessie’s not so sure. She doesn’t look Hispanic. She has large features, full lips and a nose that if it were even a little bit bigger would be unattractive. Now, it’s noticeable, but nothing more than that.
Jessie has been around the block a time or two in her dozen years on the planet, and thinks maybe the little girl is Indian, or maybe Middle Eastern … Lebanese, perhaps. Or maybe Jewish.
The little girl has only stopped speaking in order to grab a breath to continue.
“My name’s María. What’s yours?” Followed by a wheeze. But before Jessie can launch words into the wheezy silence, the little girl continues. She quickly establishes a rhythm of words, wheeze, more wheezi
ng, more words, and after a while, Jessie forgets all about the wheezing that punctuates the unending flow of one-sided conversation.
“I was named after the convent, St. Mary’s Convent, you know the one downtown where the nuns still wear those black dresses all the way down to the floor so the bottoms of their skirts are always dusty, and dust makes me wheeze and that’s how they found out I had asthma — that’s what makes me breathe funny — because the dusty habits, you know, made me wheeze. They named me María Moses.”
The little girl grins at that, showing teeth as white and straight as something off a Crest commercial. She has dark circles under her eyes, too, and Jessie can’t tell if that’s because she’s sick, or she just has them the way some girls just have dark circles. Like the Indian girl who lived with the Phelpses, who always got stuck doing the dishes.
“Yeah, Moses, like the Moses who lead the tribes of Israel out of Egypt in the movie The Ten Commandments that they showed once in school and Charleston Heston was Moses and he got in a chariot race. Have you ever seen a chariot race?”
Jessie starts to answer. But it is surprisingly hard to break into the rhythm of words/wheeze, words/wheeze the little girl has going. So Jessie just hauls her suitcase into the room and hefts it up onto the bed where the little girl isn’t propped up on pillows. The bed has a chenille bedspread that’s probably pink, hard to tell in the yellow light. The curtains on the windows are lacy and look well-worn. That’s easier to tell because the light shining through the pulled shade beyond the curtains shows where there are holes in the lace.
“The Moses part is because of the basket that Moses’s mother put him in — did you know about that? — and floated it down the river, but it’s not like some people think that she just put it in the river and hoped somebody’d find it but she hid in the reeds and was watching since she knew that that place in the river was where the pharaoh’s daughter took a bath and she wanted her to find the basket with the baby in it. Isn’t that cool! That’s where the reed part came from.”
The little girl actually paused after “the reed part” … wheeze … “came from.”
“The reed part?” Those are the first words Jessie has spoken since she came into the room.
“Yeah, my last name” … wheeze … “María Moses Reed” … wheeze … “get it?”
Jessie isn’t quick enough on the uptake and María blows on through.
“Reed … for the reeds. But the basket I was in wasn’t made out of reeds like they made baskets out of back then but was a plain old white plastic laundry basket and my mother didn’t just leave me in the basket and shove me off down the river. She left me a talisman so she can find me when she comes back.”
Talisman is not a word Jessie knows, and she’s pretty good with language. But she doesn’t have to ask, doesn’t have to break in because the little girl continues in her speak/wheeze/speak/wheeze rhythm.
“This.” She holds out a necklace that Jessie has trouble seeing in the dark. “See how it’s a broken heart?”
Jessie can make out that it’s one of those necklaces that has only half a heart with a jagged edge. To symbolize a broken heart, she’s always supposed.
“She left me with this half and she took the other half and when she comes back for me, she’ll hold up her half and I’ll hold up mine and they’ll fit together and I’ll know she’s my mother and not some imposter.”
Jessie has seen necklaces like the one the little girl has in stores. They’re all the same, all have the same jagged pattern. It’s not like they’re so unique you could use one to fit into another half for identification.
And it has also not been Jessie’s experience that there’s a line of mamas waiting at the door with necklaces, trying to claim themselves a little girl by tricking her into believing they’re her mother. It hasn’t been Jessie’s experience that there are any mothers at all out there.
But she doesn’t say that. All she does say is, “Copy that.” Then she opens her suitcase and looks around for where she might be supposed to put her things.
“You get half the closet.” Wheeze. “But you can have more than half.” Wheeze. “I don’t use up all my half.”
She says Jessie can have the bottom two drawers of the chest of drawers, too, and that there are plastic boxes that slide out from under the bed where she can put things as well. Also, there is a chifforobe in the hallway they all share, where she can put bigger things if she has them.
“Did you bring anything besides clothes?” Wheeze.
“Yeah, a few things. They’re in a box in the car.”
“Barbie dolls? Oh, please, tell me you have Barbie dolls. I do!”
The little girl points to a dresser where there’s an opaque plastic container stuffed to capacity with Barbie dolls and their assorted paraphernalia.
“I’m twelve, too old for Barbies.” Jessie doesn’t like that she sounds snotty when she says that. The little girl is cute and innocent, and Jessie doesn’t feel so threatened by her that she has to hold up a cold, hard exterior. “I used to play with Barbies, though.”
She turned toward her bed and the little girl saw the back of her shirt.
“You’re Bailey.”
“Jessica Bailey. Jessie.”
“I like J’s, Bailey. Jessica Joy. Of course, it could also stand for Jumping Jacks. I can’t do jumping jacks because I can’t breathe. Or it could stand for Jack and Jill, or jingle jangle. But Bailey’s good. We’ll go with that.”
And from that moment on, the little girl calls her Bailey. And Jessie calls the little girl María — sometimes María Tortilla — though she soon finds out María is no more her first name than Bailey is Jessie’s. That — in fact, everything the child has said since Jessie walked into the room — has been pure fantasy. No truth in a word of it.
Bailey smiled at the image, remembering the little girl with tousled, unruly curls and a big nose, sitting up in bed in babydoll pajamas, reading a book with a flashlight.
“That’s why I told the WITSEC name-thinker-uppers I wanted Bailey as a permanent first name. I knew I could remember it because it had been on the back of my jersey when I played sports in school, but mostly because it’s what María calls me.”
Bailey discovered at supper that night what the other kids called María — Dawn.
“The foster parents called her Dawn, too. I found out later the true story.”
María’s mother had been a homeless heroin addict who had gone into labor in a laundromat. She’d been living in a box in the alley next to the dryer vent to keep warm. When she’d started bleeding badly, somebody called 911 and they rushed her to the hospital. Placenta previa. She and the baby almost died. She told the nurses the baby’s name was Dawn.
“And the nurses said she must have read that off a bottle of detergent, that it was a good thing she hadn’t named the little girl Tide.”
She had said her last name was McKessen. But that was the brand name of a kind of syringe, and it was printed on the side of each one.
“The nurses said the baby’d been named after soap and a needle.”
She had listed her nationality as Puerto Rican, and that was noted on the baby’s birth certificate, but she could have made that part up, too. Who the mother really was, what her real name was, nobody ever found out. She disappeared from the hospital before the baby was twenty-four hours old, left behind a heroin-addicted infant who had to go through withdrawal.
“With a real story like that, no wonder she made up a tale that felt more palatable,” Dobbs said.
“Yeah, that’s what I thought. So I called her María instead of Dawn. That’s what she wanted, how she wanted life to be, and I figured she hadn’t gotten a whole lot of what she wanted in her short life. She could at least have the name she picked. And she always called me Bailey.”
She smiled again.
“So WITSEC didn’t give me my first alias. I had one going in.”
Chapter Four
The house still smell
ed deliciously of turkey, even in the rooms on the second floor that weren’t even open when the bird was cooking in the oven. Bailey knew that because she went into each one of those rooms every night. It was part of her ritual. She checked every widow in the house every night, making sure it was locked.
She’d started it when she got out of the hospital, with the memory of the man who’d come for her in the night, the one she’d avoided by hiding under the bed until Fletch came riding to the rescue in his siren-screaming squad car.
Oh, she knew a locked window wouldn’t have kept that man out. He was the Beast, a man she and the other girls had beaten to death with rocks, fighting him in the dark of the coal mine. At some point, that memory had gotten tangled up with her memory of Gandalf from Lord of the Rings fighting the Balrog. How the old wizard — Gandalf the White then, not Gandalf the Grey — had described his battle to Merry and Pippin when he ran into them in Fangorn Forest, saying that he had fought the monster in the darkness falling through the mountain. She and the girls had done that, not falling through the mountain, but buried deep under one. And just like Gandalf, they had killed “The Beast.”
As she closed the last of the upstairs bedroom doors and headed back downstairs to take Bundy out to do his business, she found herself standing in front of the mantel, staring in fascinated horror at the photograph that had only a few hours ago changed her whole life. She’d asked Dobbs to leave it with her, had set it on the mantel intending to leave it there. Now, she picked it up and carried it outside with her, shivering in the cold November air.
“Hurry up, go potty.”
She hopped from one house-shoed foot to the other, clutching the picture in her hand. Then she carried it with her as she made a circuit of the bottom floor of the house, turning off lights, then climbed the stairs and got into bed, patting the sheet beside her.