by Ninie Hammon
María didn’t want that! But she was as powerless to do anything about it as Bailey was.
Bailey had to force herself to leave and María had to force herself to let Bailey leave.
This was too much, overload, fried circuits. María had to get a grip, had to—
Bailey was alive.
Bailey wasn’t … in the grave next to Aaron’s in the Cunningham’s private plot in the little cemetery down the road from their country home in Vermont.
Bailey was alive and she wanted her life back.
Wanted her daughter back.
When María thought about that, her heart took up such a mad beat it seemed to be trying to knock a hole in the wall of her chest.
Bethany was María’s little girl. Except she wasn’t. She was Bailey’s little girl.
And Bailey wanted her back.
Oh, dear God in heaven, María was going to have to … give her daughter up.
No!
No, that wasn’t … she couldn’t … not precious Bethany. How could she?
María stood by the window of her apartment, looking at the empty sidewalk Bailey had run down and felt the whole world collapse out from under her.
Then, finally, she sank down on the floor and began to cry.
“Mommy …?” The pitiful tone of Bethany’s voice broke María’s heart. “Why you cryin’? Did that bad lady make you cry?” María swallowed back the sobs that were ratcheting up in her throat and managed to control her hitching diaphragm. She was scaring Bethany.
Water spiders.
María’s thoughts were water spiders, skittering across the surface of her mind, moving so fast and so randomly she couldn’t grab hold of any of them long enough to think it.
Bailey wasn’t dead.
Bailey had watched Aaron’s … murder. A man shot him while she watched.
The look on Bailey’s face when she pleaded to be allowed to take a photograph.
María’s heart ripped out of her chest when she thought … she’d had no pictures. All this time, two years, not one image to look at.
That’s why María’d grabbed the little framed wedding picture — Bailey and Aaron — and shoved it into Bailey’s coat pocket.
She hadn’t seen Aaron’s face since …
“I need to go potty,” Bethany said, taking her thumb out of her mouth only long enough to produce the words. As soon as the door had closed behind Bailey, Bethany had calmed down. But like every other kid on the planet, she was in tune with the mood of the grownups around her. She knew her mommy was upset, so she stayed close, clingy, wanting to sit in María’s lap or hold onto her leg.
“Hey, kiddo, how about you don’t chew it off — you’re going to need an opposable thumb for something one of these days.”
Bethany ignored her comment, kept sucking on her thumb.
“I need go potty.”
“You forget where the bathroom is?”
“Mommy go wiff Bethy.”
María got up off the floor, took Bethany’s hand — to get her thumb out of her mouth — and walked with her to the bathroom. She helped her get her big-girl pants down and then back up again.
She made the child a peanut butter and banana sandwich. Wiped up the mess when she spilled her orange juice. Kept up some kind of running narrative with the little girl, who had recovered nicely and was now prattling on about everything and nothing.
She cleared off the table and set paper and crayons in front of the little girl — she wasn’t up to the mess of paint, not now — told her to “draw me a picture,” and when the child was finally focused, María sat down in the recliner and went chasing after the water spiders in her head.
Bailey was alive.
Some madman with a Russian name wanted to kill Bailey.
Wanted to kill María and Bethany, too.
María had promised that tomorrow morning she would abandon her whole life and run off to — where? She hadn’t even asked.
How?
How could she possibly do a thing like that?
How could she give up her little girl?
Then she allowed herself to cry. Softly. So quietly Bethany couldn’t hear, could only see Mommy’s shoulders shaking.
Maybe she’d think Mommy was laughing.
Surprisingly, Bailey had slept after all. Hadn’t expected to, but she’d closed her eyes briefly and the next thing she knew the light through glass doors that led to the balcony showed a pink-and-rose-colored sky.
She turned to the couch and saw Brice there, sound asleep.
T.J. was nowhere in sight, had either gone down to the room they’d rented for him and Brice or had arisen early and slipped out for coffee. The man was like a cat. He could sneak dawn past a rooster.
Bailey felt an unfamiliar sensation in her belly and for a moment couldn’t even place it.
Hope.
Maybe just pure joy.
She’d had to smack herself around a little bit last night to get her head on right. Moaning and groaning about having to wait a few more hours to be reunited with her family when she had already waited twenty-three months, twenty-seven days and — she looked at her watch — five hours and fifteen minutes, not that she was counting or anything. She wasn’t entitled to feel sorry for herself now.
She felt around for her phone, knowing she’d fallen asleep with it in her hand. When she located it in the blanket, she punched the button and a red battery icon showed up on the screen, informing her she was down to about three percent. She had forgotten to plug it in last night. With something like desperation, she leapt up and raced into the bedroom, dug in her suitcase for the charger cord and plugged it in to the nearest outlet — on the wall by the bedroom door. Then she knelt on the floor and punched the power button again.
She watched the video. Once. Twice. Then sat for some period of time staring at the photograph, until she felt her legs growing numb by her cramped position. She put the phone on the floor, closed the bedroom door and centered herself.
This was going to be a big day. She almost giggled at the thought, then picked up her overnight bag and headed to the bathroom.
An hour later, she sat with Brice and T.J. at the table in the room, warming their souls on cups of Starbucks that T.J. had brought them. Both men were showered and shaved. Brice was wearing the t-shirt and jeans from his go bag. The sweatshirt he’d bought and his vest were draped over a chair. His go bag didn’t carry spare shoes, however, so he was stuck with the ones he’d been wearing with his uniform.
The men looked like they’d had a full night’s sleep and she suspected that measure of alertness came from years of short nights and long days and getting by on whatever rest you could snatch here and there. She felt her heart swell with affection for both of them. Who didn’t have to be here. Didn’t have to do this for her. Could have been home, sleeping—
“It ain’t like that,” T.J. said.
“What isn’t like what?” she asked.
“It ain’t like me and Brice got other things we’d rather be doing and it is a mighty sacrifice for us to be here doin’ this instead.”
“How did you know I was thinking—”
“If you’s considerin’ a career change to riverboat gambler, I’d advise you not to quit your day job.”
Brice nodded toward her watch. “If you look at that watch one more time there won’t be any numbers there.”
“Your eyeballs have just ‘bout worn ‘em down to nothing already.”
If they could just about read her mind anyway, there was no sense holding back.
“Here’s the thing,” she said. “I know it’s only eight o’clock, but I don’t see any reason for us to sit here—”
“Where it’s warm and comfortable—”
“When we could be sittin’ in a cold car parked on the street staring at your watch, which by then won’t have no numbers on it whatsoever.”
Brice stood. “Let’s go freeze.” He was grinning, though.
“Bring a wint
er coat next time, dummy.”
T.J. had gotten her winter coat out of the closet and was holding it out to her. She slipped her arms through the sleeves and put her hand into her pocket feeling for her gloves.
The room vanished.
Sparklers — bright, sharp sabers of stabbing light.
The white noise of static.
Cold air.
Her breath comes out in a puff of white in front of her as she hurries toward the big building that takes up most of the block. It’s made of gray stone, with three archways in front, each with three sets of double doors beneath a bank of windows. High above the doors is an ornate cupola with a clock that says it’s five minutes after eight, and when she sees it she hurries across the street.
She pushes through the doors into the cavernous open area beyond where big, black boards hang from the ceiling with rows of words on them.
Departures and arrivals.
The room blinks out of existence in a cascading waterfall of sparkling light and sound is muffled, words garbled.
An image slowly forms again behind a screen of snowy white.
“I need to go potty, Mommy.” She looks down at the little girl beside her whose eyes are the color of robins’ eggs.
“In a minute, honey. I’m looking for …”
She glances up at the black boards, then down at the piece of paper in her hand.
Chapter Twenty-Two
AMTRAK eTicket
Present This Document For Boarding
Reservation Number B0733A
BOS > NYP One-Way
Train 2260 Dec. 01, 2015. Seats 14A, 14B Departs 8:30 AM
“We’re in a hurry, sweetie. Can you hold it?”
Bethany nods. María squeezes her hand, and pulls the child along beside her as she rushes across the station.
Bailey heard T.J.’s voice from a long way off.
“Come on back now.”
She felt his hands on her shoulders.
The world of the cavernous room vanished. She was standing between Brice and T.J. in front of a half open hotel room door.
“What …?” T.J. began.
Bailey pulled her hand out of the coat pocket where she’d been digging for her gloves. What she clutched in her fingers wasn’t a pair of gloves. It was a small framed photograph.
It was what María had slipped into her coat pocket as she was leaving the apartment yesterday.
A handsome man in a tuxedo with his arm around a black-haired woman in a white dress.
The man is Aaron.
The woman is Jessie.
It’s their wedding photo.
Bailey looked at the picture and couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t think or be, was so overwhelmed she could do nothing but fall into the depths of it, awash in a sea of memories and random images.
Aaron whispers into her ear with a profound speech defect.
“Mar-widge is what bwings us togevver to-day.” She stifles a giggle and pokes him with her elbow. “Wuuuuve, twoooo wuuuve …”
“Shhhhhh!”
“I bet ministers’ robes are like kilts — they don’t wear anything under them.”
He takes her hand and squeezes. His hand is sticky.
“Is that icing …?”
“Cakes can be poisoned, you know. But unless I drop over dead, this one’s safe.”
“She’s running away!” Bailey gasped out the words, her mind alight with a million synapses all firing at the same time as they’re dropped from a great height into a blender. “María. She’s taking Bethany and running away!”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Bailey didn’t know how they came to be in the car. The three of them were standing in the hotel room as she babbled out what she had seen when she pulled the photograph out of her pocket. The last person who’d touched the photo had been María. When Bailey touched it, she had connected, as she had connected so many times to the people whose portraits she’d been compelled to paint.
Then they were in the car, Brice driving, racing down the street toward the South Boston Amtrak station.
She had no memory of the events in between.
No memory of the events, but clear memories of the mental journey, the emotional one, far longer — in distance and time — than the one the three of them had taken from the hotel to their rental car in the parking garage.
Aaron.
She had not seen his face in more than two years. She had conjured it up in memory a million times. Two million. Then she felt her grasp on it begin to fade. She began to fear thinking about him too much. Like somehow his image, his essence, was like a candle, burning brilliantly, but finite. The image could burn only so long before it finally guttered out.
One day, it would be gone completely. One day, she feared, she would try to conjure up his face and it wouldn’t be there. Nothing but blankness. One day she would not be able to remember what Aaron looked like.
She had gone through months where she literally did not dare think about him. Or about Bethany. She was afraid to call them to mind for fear they would not be there, their images gone forever.
She got over that period. It was one of the stages of … grief — yeah, stages of grief — she’d gone through. Now, she could call up his face, recall every plane and angle of it, could remember his eyes.
But she had not seen him, had not seen his image in two years.
And there he was. Smiling out of the frame. A moment from the past dragged into the present.
Not just any moment. Their wedding day.
For the first few seconds she stared at the photograph, she was afraid she was going to fall into it, fall out of the world and into that moment in time. That she would be consumed by the glory and wonder and love and aching and longing and grief. That it would take her, swallow her and she would never come back up out of it again.
Perhaps she would have. But …
María was leaving, was running away with Bethany.
The urgency of that held her in this world. As the storm of emotions, the tsunami of memories and feelings slammed down on her, she held tight to what she had seen out María’s eyes.
María was at the train station. She was running away with Bethany.
Why? Why would she do a thing like that?
Even as she asked the question, Bailey knew the answer. She understood. She didn’t want to. She wanted to feel a burning fire of anger at the woman who was at that moment running away with, was kidnapping her little girl, her daughter, her precious Bethany.
She wanted to hate that woman. Should have hated her. But she couldn’t because she understood María’s fear. María was terrified that Bailey would take away … her little girl. Her daughter.
María had loved the child, cared for her, rocked her to sleep, taught her how to button her shirt, held her hand when she crossed the street, cried when the pediatrician gave her shots, prayed over her and played with her — had raised her for two years.
Out of nowhere, a spirit returned from the grave to snatch the child out of her arms. She was Bethany’s mommy now, and she flat out couldn’t let that happen.
Bailey understood. She knew how much María loved Bethany, had always loved the child. Having been separated from the little girl for all these months, Bailey understood the stinging anguish of separation, knew what it felt like to have your heart torn out of your chest. She had to catch María, had to stop her, make her understand that she wasn’t losing Bethany. The little girl would just be blessed with two mommies now instead of one.
Even more than that, she had to make her understand the horrible danger she was in.
She finds the air to scream, a shrieking wail that shreds her vocal cords, but cannot express her agony. The flames have ignited the hem of the dress and the fire takes it. Pain consumes her leg and she tries to pull away but she is bound and can do nothing but scream and beg for death.
María was going to die unless Bailey could catch her. And she might be putting Bethany in so much danger that she wo
uld die, too.
The connection had put her inside María’s head, and though Bailey had been there for just a few moments, it had felt like touching an exposed wire in a lamp cord. It had shocked her, stunned her. There was enormous power in the connection because of the bond she already had with her sister who wasn’t her sister, whose name was María only it wasn’t, who had wheezed through her childhood and had been afraid a monster demon would suck out her guts.
She and María were linked as profoundly as any biological sisters — stronger than most. Which meant the connection went both ways. She could sometimes see out María’s eyes and … she could communicate with her, like she had communicated with Jeni and the other girls.
As the car careened around corners to a symphony of car horns, Bailey forced herself to relax, she settled back into the seat and concentrated, reached out with her mind to María.
Brice was looking around frantically for a parking place.
“Put it there,” T.J. said.
“That’s a loading zone.”
“It’s a rental. Let ‘em tow it.”
Brice pulled into the loading zone, threw the car into park and the three of them bailed out of it and raced into the big stone building with the clock tower on top. The clock said twenty-five minutes after eight.
T.J. had been in the South Boston station a couple of times in the past. Once when he was a soldier returning from a mission that wasn’t on the books, that never happened, and once when he’d come to Boston to talk to a Boston police detective about a killer who was stalking the streets of Chicago.
He tried to summon images of those previous times. The essential features of the station had remained the same but the trimmings had changed. Sprint ads on every surface not covered by some other cellphone provider’s advertisement. Banners promoting movies he’d never heard of and sure as Jackson didn’t intend to go see. There was even a banner advertising The Nutcracker at the Boston Ballet. Opening night tomorrow at 8 p.m.