by Carla Damron
Panicked, he looked around for someone to help but they were alone, no joggers or dog walkers were anywhere close. He ran to the street and, just as a traffic light turned green, stepped off the curb, waving his long arms at the cars rushing by.
Horns blared. A man yelled, “Get out the way, nigger.” A van screeched as it maneuvered around him. Joe waved harder, pointing to the park and saying, “She need help, she need help,” but nobody stopped, because it was Joe that was asking.
The church. He could get her to the church and Reverend Bill would help, but that was several miles away. He hurried back to the bench but she hadn’t moved. He worried about touching her, but worse was leaving her alone sick like she was. He wiped his hands against his trousers, wishing he could wash them before lifting the fragile child, but he didn’t have that kind of time. She didn’t weigh more than a sack of turnips. He cradled her against his chest, being so careful, not wanting to jostle her as he crossed the busy street towards the crowded mall. People glared. One man coming from a grocery store yelled, “Hey!” but Joe didn’t think he had any intent to be helpful so he kept moving. He could feel the girl’s heartbeat, a fast, fluttering thing and it made him grateful. A beating heart meant she was alive.
He glanced at the storefronts. If he carried her inside one, would they help? He’d never been one to trust strangers. He was all alone with his terrifying burden. And instructions from the Lord.
“Miss? Can you hear me, Miss?” He lowered his head to speak into her ear. “I’m gonna get you some help, I promise.”
Should he take her to Mr. Mitch’s house? That would take a good thirty minutes of walking and what if nobody was there? The hospital? If he moved fast—and he could, even with the child—he’d get there in a half hour. The girl needed doctoring, and the Lord was counting on him.
She shook in his arms. Cold. That sweatshirt wasn’t enough with the breeze coming in like it was. He hurried to a bench and placed her there so he could remove his coat and wrap her in it. When he scooped her up again, she wasn’t trembling as bad. Still so pale, though. Pale as Mama’s bed sheets.
“Hurry.” The Lord sounded more urgent now, and Joe obliged. He bore her like a toddler, his coat secure around her, ignoring the stares from people he passed.
He was out of breath when he reached the street in front of the hospital. Sweat poured from his face. He eyed the giant white building, all lit up by floodlights, and saw the bright red “Emergency” sign pointing to a covered entrance. As he hurried to that door, a man stopped him.
“What you got there?” He wore a light blue shirt and cap, his thumbs looped in a creaky leather belt. A cop of some kind, looking at Joe the way cops always did.
“He knows you’re a son of a bitch!”
Joe flinched as panic seized him. Satan was right there, in his ear, and he had this child who needed help and a cop not two feet away. The Lord said to help her. That’s what he had to do.
Joe side-stepped the cop and tried to push past but he held out an arm, his hand brushing against Mr. Mitch’s girl. Joe spun around, out of his grasp.
“I said, what you got there! Is it a girl? Did you hurt someone?” The cop’s eyes narrowed.
Joe drew a stuttery breath to calm himself. “It’s Mr. Mitch’s little girl. I gotta get her help.”
“What did you do to her?” When the cop unclipped the Tazer—Joe knew what it was, he’d been buzzed before—attached to his belt, Joe knew what was coming, and no way he’d let the girl get hurt by that thing. He shoved past the man and ran, ran with all he had in him, scrambled between two ambulances, disregarded the shouts from the man and the crackle of his radio as he summoned help. Joe pushed through the glass door, the man at his back, a fierce grip on Joe’s shoulder and metal pushed against his ribs. Joe didn’t care. He yelled, “Please, please . . . help Mr. Mitch’s girl!”
CHAPTER 17
Lena heard squeaks and thuds coming from the laundry room and wondered if it was Elliott. She could do his clothes for him. It might be the distraction she needed after the horrible meeting with Phillip. Soon there would be two of them, her and Becca, and she’d do a few loads a week. How odd to consider the whittling down of her household. For the first time in her whole life, there would be no male in her home. No sons. No husband. She and Becca would have to move into something smaller, given the state of their finances. Where would they go? An apartment? How was she to support them?
“Hope you don’t mind that I used the washer.” Abby heaved a basket on top of the dryer. “I didn’t get to do laundry before I flew out of South America. Pretty tacky of me to bring a suitcase full of dirty clothes.”
“Want me to do it for you?” Lena eyed the tangle of sweaters and underwear awaiting its turn in the wash. Abby’s underpants were like the briefs they wore as children, except Abby’s were wide, with stretched elastic, and a bit yellowed with age. What would it take to get her sister to a lingerie store? The world would end before that happened.
“Hell no. I don’t need you to wait on me, Le-Le.” Abby pointed to a few pairs of jeans she’d stacked on the washer. “I found some of Becca’s stuff in the dryer. I couldn’t believe it when I read what size she’s wearing. A three. That kid is as tall as I am. If she was a size eleven, she’d be plenty slender enough.”
“I know.” Lena glanced at her watch. Becca should have returned from her run, but sometimes she stopped at Kayla’s instead of coming straight home. No need to worry.
“Have you taken her to a doctor about it?”
“Two years ago she was on the chunky side. Girls go through phases. And we’ve had a tough few years,” Lena said. Becca had suffered through Lena’s time with Royce, through Lena’s cancer, and now losing her father. “And yes, I worry. I keep hoping she’ll outgrow it.”
“Well,” Abby said, punctuated by a puff of air. “It is a helluva time. I wouldn’t be her age again for anything.”
Lena felt relieved that the conversation had shifted away from any implied blame about Lena’s mothering. She’d had enough crap dealt to her for one day.
“I brewed more coffee. It seems to be my cure for jet lag. Care to join me?” Abby motioned toward the kitchen. Lena followed, approaching the coffee maker with caution. The beverage smelled like scorched firewood.
“We make it strong in South America,” Abby said. “You’ll like it if you add enough milk.”
She poured Lena half a cup, and Lena added a generous portion of half and half. Abby helped herself to Lena’s seat, the one closest to the window. “You were a mess when you were Becca’s age. You were trying out for cheerleader and you and Sarah Steadmire would practice those damn cheers for hours.”
“I’d forgotten that.” Lena stepped around Mitch’s chair to Becca’s place.
“You obsessed about getting the cartwheel exactly right. Watching you practice that over and over got me nauseated. But damn, you were determined. You and Sarah both made the squad. My preppy little sis.”
“My hippie big sister,” Lena said with a smirk. “Wearing that poncho and braids. Smoking pot behind the shrubs during lunch.”
Abby’s laugh was pitched low, from the belly. “Eddie Pierce dealt some damn fine weed, but you wouldn’t even try it. Goody two shoes. We couldn’t have been more different, you and I.”
That statement rang more true today than when they were young. Abby living a brave life in another hemisphere. Lena hanging on by fingernails in suburbia South Carolina.
“Why did you quit cheering? You loved it. You especially liked Will Waterson making eyes at you when you wore your cheer outfit on game day.”
“He didn’t!” Lena covered her mouth, remembering how it felt to be fifteen with dreamy, blue-eyed Will winking at her. Life for her then was all about Fridays, when she’d take more time with her hair and makeup, when she lingered in front of the mirror to make sure the pleats in the cheerleading skirt hung just right. When she hesitated in the halls between classes, sashaying in purple
and white. On Fridays, she wasn’t anonymous.
“Why did you quit? You cheered for that one year.”
“It took up too much time.” A partial truth. She had loved so much about cheering: the way it felt to move in perfect harmony with the other girls. Bouncing on her toes and jostling the pom-poms before an eager crowd, smiling at the little girls who tried to mimic her. But getting her to practice and games inconvenienced her parents. After the final football game, when her father came to get her, she smelled alcohol each time he exhaled. He drove slowly, the car weaving between lanes and Lena holding her breath that they’d make it home without wrecking. How horrified she’d been when Will Watterson’s red Barracuda pulled up beside their station wagon, Will hanging out the window and asking if everything was okay.
She quit the cheer squad that next day.
“But it got you out of the house,” Abby said. “That was the important thing. I had the school newspaper and that part-time job to keep me away from the parental crossfire. But when you gave up cheering, you were stuck.” Abby said it so matter-of-factly, digging up the family skeleton and plopping it on the table before them. What was the point, after all these years?
“I wasn’t stuck.” A lie, of course, because stuck was how she felt. Not that their parents fought often. More frequent were the quiet, icy times, when Mom looked so worn down by her life, when Dad began his trips to the vodka under the sink as soon as he got home. When he was a gregarious drunk, Lena tolerated him. A few slurred words could be overlooked. But when he was angry, those were the difficult nights. Lena remembered closing the door to the bedroom she shared with Abby, and turning on the radio to drown out the drunken diatribe in the living room. Her mother didn’t stand a chance.
“I abandoned you when I went off to college. But I couldn’t wait to get the hell out of there.”
“Was that why you didn’t ever come home?” Lena’s voice hesitated on that last word as unexpected feelings surfaced. She had felt abandoned. Abby came home a few days for Christmas, a week or so in the summer, but never really connected with the family after she made her college escape, leaving Lena in the rubble of their family.
“Yeah.” She looked into her mug of coffee. “Sometimes I think when I left home, I never found a new one. I’ve lived like a vagabond, haven’t I?”
“You live the way you want to live. Your work has been your life.” Lena had always used their mother’s words in explaining Abby’s departure. Abby was doing important things. Noble things. Abby was unique, brave, brilliant. Too big for Columbia or even South Carolina. Other countries needed her and the US government paid Abby to help them. Lena could still picture her mother’s glowing smile when talking about her stellar firstborn.
“It used to feel that way. Not so much now.” Abby clicked the rim of her cup with a dirty finger nail.
“What are you doing? I never have a handle on that. I always pray you’re somewhere safe and happy.”
Abby didn’t answer. Her eyes, over the rim of her clutched mug, stared at the table. “Safe and happy. Interesting words.”
Outside, there was the click and whir of the automatic sprinkler turning on in the back yard. Mitch had installed it a few years ago for his lawn and flowers, but now the grass had died to a dull brown. No periwinkles or confederate roses bloomed anymore, yet Lena had no idea how to shut off the system. She was watering dead things.
“I’ve been in this remote village in southern Peru. Helping the farmers learn to rotate their crops,” Abby said. “And we built a school for their kids. This place is so poor and isolated, and the villagers worked with us, so proud that they would have a school.
“Only it’s not there anymore. You have to understand—things are different in that part of the world. Like another universe. We do our best to help, but so many things work against us. So many things.” A darkness crept into Abby’s voice.
Lena wasn’t sure she wanted to know why—the weight of worry for her sister piled onto her other burdens. “What happened?”
“They destroyed the school. Burned it to the ground. See, we’d been working with the farmers to harvest root vegetables rather than coca.”
“Chocolate?”
Abby huffed out a laugh. “Not hardly. Coca that they make cocaine from. The traffickers controlling this region wanted to make a point so the farmers would do what they commanded, so they destroyed the school, and any hope that things could change.”
Lena had never seen Abby with tears in her eyes. At least, not as an adult.
“We can’t go back to rebuild because it’s too dangerous. You put in so much hard work and watch it go up in smoke. For nothing. Not one Goddamn thing.” A knife edge gleamed in her sister’s words.
“Can’t the police do something?”
“The politics are dirty, Le-Le. The traffickers are linked to a guerilla group that is very powerful. They make a fortune in the drug trade and don’t give a rip who they hurt. In Tingo Maria, that’s the little village where I’ve been working, the natives are fine, simple people who still practice the customs of their ancestors. But the coca trade has taken over. They kill and destroy anything that stands in their way. Nobody can stop them.” Abby blinked and looked away.
Lena looked away, too, because watching Abby cry disturbed her. Abby was invincible. Abby didn’t cry.
“Shit.” Abby wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “I didn’t mean to lay that on you.”
“No, it’s okay.” Lena moved to the coffee pot and refilled her mug even though she’d hardly drunk a drop. “How do you stand it? It sounds so dangerous.”
She shrugged. “I’ve gotten good at keeping my head down. It was easier doing the work when I felt like I made a difference. Now . . . I don’t know.”
“Then why do you stay? Why don’t you come back to America?” Knowing Abby’s situation made Lena a little angry at her. She could have come home. She could have been a part of Lena’s life. How might things be different if her sister had been here?
“I do have a reason. A very good reason.” Abby flashed a nervous smile. “I have a new love in my life.”
“Really?” Lena heard the impatience in her own voice at the thought of another of Abby’s boyfriends.
“It’s not what you think,” Abby said, rising and taking her cup to the sink. “It’s not a man, it’s a little boy. His name is Esteban.”
Lena heard a different tone in her sister’s voice, like she was suddenly years younger. “Esteban,” Lena repeated.
“He’s only five years old. He’s been in an orphanage since he was one. I’m trying to adopt him.”
“You’re adopting a child?” She tried to picture Abby as a mom. Abby as a fighter, a teacher, an advocate—these roles she could see. But a mother?
“You were the one who played with dolls,” Abby said. “I had the Tonka truck collection. I thought the motherhood gene had skipped me. But then I met Esteban. The orphanage was right beside the school we built. He was this scrawny little creature with huge black eyes and knobby limbs, and he would stare at us from the playground. All the other kids would beg us for things—food, money, anything. But not Esteban. He just watched. One day, I brought him a cookie. He didn’t take it at first, but finally he did. He broke off a small bit and ate it, all the while staring at me. Then he snapped the cookie in half and gave me part of it. This child is nearly starving but he wants to share his cookie. So we ate, and then he gave me the biggest, most adorable smile I’d ever seen. That did it.” Speaking of this made a light shine out of Abby.
“He’s half-native, the Jebero tribe,” she went on. “The orphanage is underfunded so he didn’t get very good care early on. He’s developmentally delayed and too thin but they’ve let me hire help to work with him. He couldn’t say but a few words when I met him but he’s quite the chatterbox now.”
“When will you get him?”
“I’d have gotten him months ago if I could have. There’s some legal BS I have to contest. Cor
ruption is everywhere where I live. They’ve made the red tape more elaborate, which means I have more people I have to bribe. The latest set-back has to do with my age. Some new regulation about nobody over fifty-five adopting, and I’ll reach that milestone this year. More bullshit.”
“Good thing you’re so persistent.” Lena tried to picture her sister in this new role. Reading stories at bedtime. Playing Candyland and Go Fish. Attending PTA meetings at his school. These pictures rushed through her mind and she found she could accept them. Abby was a strong, determined woman who could do anything. Maybe motherhood would make her sink roots into the earth.
“For Esteban, I can be as stubborn as hell. I just wish—” she hesitated, her grin uncertain. “It’s been a long battle. I wish it was over.”
Maybe now Abby would settle down. Maybe not even stay in South America, but come home to the US, to be a part of their lives again. She started to ask about that possibility, but was interrupted by the ringing phone.
CHAPTER 18
How Becca could sleep in the cold, antiseptic hospital room, with nurses and techs in and out, with the light turning off and on, with rattling medication carts out in the hall, baffled Lena. The drugs probably. Needles pressed into Becca’s pale arm. Tubes snaking to plastic sacks on a metal pole. At least she didn’t have as many machines monitoring her as had been attached to Mitch.
Still. The room. The waiting. The crawl of fear.
Ketoacidosis. This is what Dr. Burnside had called it, the condition that made Lena’s daughter collapse on a bench in the park. That almost killed her.
Ketoacidosis happened because her electrolytes were so out of balance that her body turned on itself. It happened because Becca had starved herself. Nearly destroyed herself. Keeping it all a secret—God, there had been too many secrets in their home, and that had to end now.
Slow suicide, Dr. Burnside had said, talking of Becca’s anorexia. Lena had thought him cruel to use that word, but knew Liam Burnside wanted to make sure she didn’t take this lightly. She didn’t, of course. Becca had been drifting away for months, but Lena didn’t know how far she had gone, and now she held on to Becca by less than a thread.