Blue Tears

by Ninie Hammon

  “Okay,” she said and patted the bed again. She was trying to teach Bundy that okay meant she was allowing him to do something; in this case, hop into bed beside her. She had long since given up making the little mutt sleep in his crate downstairs. He got the okay part, but the “leaping part” was still more than his little short legs could manage. So she reached down, picked him up, nuzzled him and snuggled him into the bed beside her.

  But she didn’t turn off the bedside lamp. It was almost like she’d been waiting for this moment all evening, like the whole time she was describing to Dobbs, T.J. and Brice what’d happened that had stolen her life from her, telling them about María and calling Marshal Jordan, she’d been itching for them all to go away, for time to stop completely so she could stare unashamedly into the depths of this picture. To “look the monster in the eye.” To confirm what she already knew to be true. The man standing with a group of people behind her chair in the birthday photo taken at the Nautilus Casino was the man who had killed her husband. He had shot Aaron — twice. She had watched. She had seen.

  It had sounded like a firecracker. An innocent firecracker. But even at the time that didn’t ring true. Who sets off a firecracker in the pouring rain?

  Jessie had been trying to talk to the 911 dispatcher, but she couldn’t seem to form the words. No, there weren’t any words to wrap around the reality of the dead baby in the car seat, his eyes filling with rainwater, his blue sleeper slowly turning purple as it soaked with blood.

  “911 dispatch. What is your emergency?” the voice on the other end of the line had said.

  On her knees behind the open passenger door because she’d dropped her phone, Jessie’d had to lean over and look around the door to see the street signs so she could give a location to the 911 operator.

  When she did, she’d seen two men hauling the young man from the red car back toward the gray car they’d arrived in, while Aaron stood in the street yelling at the third man.

  Bailey put out her hand and touched the image on the photograph, then yanked it away like she’d touched something foul, something so unutterably disgusting that you’d want to wash your hands and then slather them in antiseptic. The man in the picture was not wearing a fedora, as he had been that night. But otherwise, he was as Jessie remembered him. A neatly trimmed beard, white now instead of gray, that came to a ridiculous point at the base of his chin. An eyepatch over his right eye. It was the same. It was him.

  Jessie had opened her mouth to tell the 911 dispatcher that there’d been an accident at the intersection of Akron and Baxter Streets, but that was when she’d heard the firecracker.

  And the scream.

  The homeless woman they’d picked up at the bus stop — what, five minutes before? No, it hadn’t even been that long — was screaming. Not just once but in a continuous shrieking wail. Jessie’d been confused. What was the woman screaming about? Then she’d looked back at Aaron. He was holding his belly, then slowly dropped to his knees like he was praying.

  The man with the eyepatch had been pointing a gun at him.

  He had shot Aaron. Pulled out a gun and shot him.

  When she’d sat in the anonymous room at some equally anonymous police station some unknown time later, wearing the orange jumpsuit they put prisoners in because she had to get out of the wet clothes and that’s all there was to change into, she had learned the name of the man with the beard. Sergei Wassily Mikhailov. The police officers had told her he was the head of the Russian mafia, an utterly ruthless monster who had gained power and retained control over the troops by putting his own personal spin on horror.

  They’d played a tape for her, a recording an informant had made of Mikhailov.

  She was lucky to be alive, they’d told her. Fortunate that Mikhailov had believed the homeless woman was Aaron’s wife. They’d said “nobody looks for somebody they believe is dead.” So Jessie had to stay dead. Which meant she had to let everyone she loved believe she had died in that wreck with Aaron. If she hadn’t done that, Mikhailov would have killed María and Bethany.

  So she’d stayed dead … while the monster disappeared and went back to Russia. She’d stayed dead for almost two years.

  But that time in limbo was over now.

  She again touched the face in the picture as words so vile she couldn’t believe they’d resided somewhere in the recesses of her mind bubbled to the surface, words that if she spoke them, she’d have to cover Bundy’s ears.

  She continued to run her fingers over the face in the photo. The pointy beard. The eyepatch. The face of a murderer.

  A murderer who was now going to pay for his crime. She would see to that. She would put that monster in a little room with a needle in his arm. She’d watch him die and forever after cherish the image of him burning in hell.

  Bundy whimpered and she realized she’d been hugging him to her chest so tight she was hurting him. She set him on the bed, then got up and went barefoot down the stairs in the dark to the chifforobe that Brice and Dobbs had moved to half a dozen locations in her living room before settling on a spot by the front door. She opened the top drawer and took out the yellow minion blanket, and took it with her back upstairs.

  It was the same blanket as the one Aaron had bought for Bethany when they brought the newborn home from the hospital, the one that became the toddler’s won’t-go-to-sleep-without-it blankie. Bailey had searched every store in Albuquerque looking for a blanket just like that one. Not similar. Exactly the same. When she found it, she’d held it to her face night after night, crying herself to sleep.

  It took months before the blanket became a source of comfort instead of grief, before she could hold it and conjure up memories of rocking Bethany to sleep cuddled up in it.

  Easing back between the covers beside Bundy, who was crashed out on the pillow next to hers, she put the picture down on the nightside table and held the blanket up to her face. She closed her eyes and began to rock back and forth, singing softly,

  “Somewhere out there …”

  She and María had a favorite animated movie they watched so often they could quote the dialogue as easily as making up conversations between their Barbie dolls. Then came the night Bailey thought of ever after as the Great Pumpkin Pie Kerfuffle. In a foster home, special treats were religiously regulated and dispensed in painstakingly fair portions, even if the portions were miniscule. That day, Mrs. Anderson had baked a pumpkin pie. But the boys got to it while it was cooling and devoured it — their portions and the girls’ portions, too.

  Suitable punishment was meted out, of course, but that was small comfort when the two of them had to go to bed pie-less.

  Lying in the dark that night, they’d made up new lyrics for the movie’s theme song.

  When Bethany was born, Jessie’d sung the child to sleep every night with the altered version. She’d cuddle the toddler up in the minion blanket and rock her in the old platform rocker she and Aaron had bought at a yard sale — not because they couldn’t afford a new one but because it reminded Bailey of the rocker that’d been in the Anderson house.

  “Somewhere out there …” Bailey sang softly, “beneath a pumpkin pie …”

  Chapter Five

  “… someone’s eating my piece, and I’ll have none tonight.”

  María rocked the little girl slowly back and forth in the platform rocker, singing in an admittedly off-key voice, but Bethany neither noticed nor cared.

  Yeah, an almost four-year-old was too old and too big to be rocking to sleep every night. And the rocker did not go with the decor of the room at all. But María had found it in a pawn shop and hauled it home because it reminded her of the chair in the living room of the house where she’d lived when Bailey came into her life.

  “Somewhere out there, someone’s pretending to cry …”

  The platform rocker had the same squeak/clunk sound as the one where she’d grown up, where she’d sat next to Bailey watching television or reading a book — wheezing. Always wheezing
.

  “Saying they didn’t eat it, but that’s a big fat lie.”

  Bethany snuggled up next to her. She didn’t put her thumb in her mouth, which was a good thing. Instead, she sucked on one corner of the minion blanket with its tattered and frayed edges. María had read a great blankie-sucking hack in a parenting magazine at the pediatrician’s office when she took Bethany in for her shots.

  You took the blanket the kid sucked, and you cut off a small bit of it every day. Like less than an inch. So the little kid didn’t notice. And eventually there’d be no more blankie and no more sucking.

  María hadn’t started the process yet. Bethany so loved that blanket, María couldn’t bring herself to start chopping it up. The little girl was only three and a half, after all; she had a whole lifetime to live not sucking on the edge of a frayed blanket. There was no hurry.

  “‘Cept they did, too, eat it,” Bethany cried, “didn’t they, Mommy!”

  Mommy.

  Oh, how María loved hearing that word, though every time she did she felt a pang of pain for the sister whose death had given her the precious gift of her child.

  That’s how she understood it now. The universe had orchestrated their lives like that.

  At first, right after the accident, María had told Bethany Mommy and Daddy had gone on a trip, but they were coming back for her, because she couldn’t bear to speak the words that made it real. Bailey was dead and she wasn’t ever coming back.

  But as soon as María got over her own stunning grief enough to think about it, she realized she couldn’t keep telling the little girl that she’d only be here with her aunt María until Mommy and Daddy came home.

  At some point, she had to tell her Mommy and Daddy weren’t coming home. At least, she thought she’d have to tell her. But as the heart-ripping days became weeks, Bethany stopped asking when Mommy and Daddy were coming back to get her. And María didn’t remind her.

  After that, time just flowed on. María had dropped out of school that semester, spent every hour of every day with Bethany. Loving her and grieving the gut-wrenching loss of her sister.

  It was that next summer, on Bethany’s second birthday, that she had first called María Mommy. She’d had a party for the little girl and her nursery school chums in the park. All the mothers held parties in the park when the weather was nice. No cleaning ice cream off the floor, lots of toys and playground equipment to play with — the perfect setup. They could even hose the kids down if they had to before they put them in the car.

  It hadn’t been some special, grand thing. One of the other little girls asked if she could go down the slide and Bethany had turned those gorgeous blue eyes on María and said, “Swing me, Mommy, peeeease. Make me go high as the sky.”

  Mommy.

  None of the other women even noticed. They knew María’s story, but they’d probably never noticed that María had insisted Bethany call her Aunt María.

  But that day, María had said nothing. Just took the little girl’s sticky hand and walked her out to the swing set on the playground, not swinging her anywhere near “as high as the sky” but high enough to make her happy.

  It had been as simple as that. From that moment on, María was Mommy. It had been a journey through grief and denial to acceptance.

  María had intended to show the little girl a picture of Bailey every night — the selfie the “sisters” had taken the day they went to the beach, fried lobster red and peeled for weeks afterward.

  She’d intended to tell the child every night before she went to bed that “This is your mommy, Bethany. Her name was Jessie, but to the two of us, we were Bailey and María. She was the best older sister any kid ever had and she loved you so very very much.”

  She’d meant to say that. But in the beginning, she couldn’t get through the first sentence without bursting out sobbing. And that upset Bethany, so she strangled her sobs, told herself she’d try again the next night. And she kept it up for a time — weeks, no, probably a couple of months. The thing was, by the time she was able to get through a recitation about Bailey, how she was Bethany’s mommy and had left her with María because she loved her so much, by the time she could say the words without choking on her own tears, the little girl was not much interested in hearing them. At first, she’d looked longingly at pictures of her mother that María had set out all over her apartment. But after a while, the child seemed to forget all about her.

  And wasn’t that better, really? Was it good for the child to keep reminding her that her mother was dead?

  That couldn’t be healthy.

  Of course, María talked to Bailey about it, as she had always talked over with her every important thing in her life.

  “Bailey, I want her to know she has a mother, that you’re her mother.”

  “I’m not there, María Tortilla. You are.”

  “But I’m not her mother.”

  “Define mother.”

  “I am not … ugh, you know what I mean. I don’t want her to forget you.”

  “She won’t forget me if you don’t forget me. But that doesn’t mean you have to remind her every day that her mommy, who loved her very, very much, burned to a crispy critter in a car wreck.”

  “Bailey!”

  “Truth hurts, but it’s reality.”

  “But—”

  “When she’s older, you can tell her more about me, about Aaron, too. Don’t forget him, Tortilla Head, I know he intimidated you.”

  “He did not!”

  “He did so. He almost gave you a coronary when he told you we were going to name the baby Webster.”

  “Okay, he—”

  “Just make sure she knows — someday, when she’s old enough to understand and handle it, when she’s old enough for the subject not to be painful for her, make sure she knows she did once have two parents who adored her.”

  And so she had allowed Bethany to call her Mommy. Because that was, after all, who she was. She was Bethany Cunningham’s mother. Bailey would have said, “The truth hurts, but it’s reality.” So she admitted it. As she gave Bethany bubble baths and played with her in the sandbox and read her stories and … she acknowledged that Bethany was her child, her daughter. Hers.

  She looked down and saw that Bethany was sound asleep. But she didn’t stop rocking. Not just yet. She loved the warmth of the little girl next to her. The smell of her freshly washed hair, listening to the rhythm of her soft breathing.

  Not singing now, just whispering the words.

  “And even though I know there’s not a crumb left in my cup …”

  “… it helps to think that they’ll get sick and chuck the whole piece up …”

  Bailey sang the words with a feeling in her chest she hadn’t felt in so very long it was almost uncomfortable, like a pair of shoes you wore every day for years … then lost them for a time. Your feet had moulded them and shaped them and the foot still fit. But the fit wasn’t perfect anymore. Bailey’s foot wasn’t the same size and shape as it once had been. The shoe would have to reform around the new — and maybe improved — foot of the new — and maybe improved — Jessie Cunningham.

  The shoe, the feeling, had a name. It was called hope. She would not be rocking an empty minion blanket for many more nights. She wouldn’t let herself go there, wondering how long. That was being greedy. Just knowing that soon finally, finally really did mean soon was something for which she should be so profoundly grateful she had no room in her heart for selfishness or impatience.

  Soon … soon, there would be a baby in that minion blanket.

  No, not a baby. A little girl. Bethany.

  “Somewhere out there, with my very last breath, I’ll get mine and their shares and they’ll just starve to death.”

  For a moment, just an instant, it was like she could hear an echo of the words in her head, as if some other voice were singing them, too.

  Chapter Six

  Fletch opened the door to Brice’s office without knocking.

  �
��… knew you’d want to see—”

  T.J. and Dobbs came into the room before he got the rest of the spiel out.

  The two men settled themselves in the chairs that faced the huge cherry desk that Brice hated to sit behind when he talked to people because he thought his big office chair made the whole setup look like a throne and that was not conducive to putting people at ease.

  But T.J. and Dobbs didn’t need to be put at ease.

  Dobbs looked good, better actually than Brice could ever remember seeing him. After getting shot in the mine flood that’d almost gotten all of them except Brice killed, and then battling pneumonia from all the water in his lungs, the big man had probably lost fifty pounds. He’d gotten new overalls that fit, Brice was glad to see. Buying new clothes was at least some indication that he intended to stay a smaller size, not to put the weight back on.

  T.J., on the other hand, did not look good. He had looked like he’d swallowed a gym sock yesterday when Bailey started telling her tale, and the old black man looked the same today, multiplied by losing a night’s sleep.

  “You look like death on a cracker,” T.J. said, looking Brice up and down. ‘You even bother to go to bed last night?”

  “That’d be the pot calling the kettle black.”

  “I come by my black honest. You so roses-red with all them freckles, you had to earn yours.”

  The deputy stuck his head in the door and asked if Brice needed anything before he left.

  Fletch had taken the early shift that morning at the Best Buy in town, it being Black Friday and they’d advertised the first ten customers in the store could buy a flatscreen television for a dollar — knowing full well they’d have two hundred people parked out front all night ready to fight over the ten available television sets when the store opened at nine.

  Fletch had been there. Now, it was going on noon, and the worst of the grabbing, shoving and mayhem was over.