Little Girl Lost

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  For Amelia, there’s no escaping the terrible vigil. Calvin expects her to stay with Bettina whenever he’s working. He works a lot.

  “What about school?” she’d asked in the beginning.

  “Bring your books to the hospital and study. If your teacher needs a note, I can—”

  “It’s college, Daddy! It’s not like that!”

  He wouldn’t know. He’d never made it past high school, and her mother hadn’t even gotten that far. Amelia had heard stories—schoolgirl Bettina, skipping barefoot on dusty antebellum lanes, until her family needed her to drop out and go to work.

  Both her parents have told her how fortunate she is to have CUNY, with free tuition for impoverished students like her. But you don’t get to stay if you don’t do well. When this is over, she can turn things around, especially if it happens before midterms.

  The nurse steps back around the curtain, flashes a rare smile at Amelia to make up for her earlier terse attitude, and pauses to tuck in the blanket at the foot of Bettina’s bed. As if the patient had kicked it askew in her absence. As if the patient might be capable of something more than struggling for breath or contorting her facial muscles in the slightest indication of pain. As if her daughter isn’t sitting here wishing she’d hurry up and die already.

  “You okay?” she asks Amelia. “You want some water?”

  “No, thanks.”

  “I’ll get you water. You need to hydrate.” She sets down her paperwork and disappears into the hall with a brown plastic pitcher no one has bothered—needed—to fill for days.

  Amelia looks at her mother, ashamed, swallows hard, and whispers, “I love you.”

  She isn’t a terrible person. She’s a good person.

  She was, anyway. Before her mother got sick.

  Really? Before the blindside diagnosis, she was her sweet, humble self?

  No, she’s been grappling for a while now with this deep-seated yearning, not even sure what it is that she wants. It isn’t just about material possessions, but about comfort, peace of mind, leisure, stability, freedom, opportunity . . .

  She wants a different kind of life, one built around those elusive facets so many people lack in her world, and take for granted beyond it. Things her parents can’t, or won’t, provide.

  The nurse returns with the pitcher, pours some water, and hands her the paper cup. “Drink. We don’t want you to get dehydrated.”

  We, as in the nurse and . . . who? Her mother? The hospital staff?

  The implication of broad concern irritates Amelia, as if meant to reassure her that her own physical well-being is relevant at a time like this, in a room like this. As if she will ever matter again, to anyone, now that the person who’s always taken care of her is . . .

  Gone.

  Bettina has already departed, her body vacated like a house whose residents stole away in the night. The figure in the bed is a hollow shell. It’s all over but the dying.

  Amelia watches the nurse leave the room, wishing she could stop her and confide that she doesn’t want to lose her mother today, tomorrow, ever. But it’s going to happen. Bettina’s soul can’t live on in this disease-infested body. No further medical intervention or prayer will alter the fact that her organs are shutting down and the next labored breath might be her last.

  “Every moment we have her is a gift,” Calvin said earlier, before she left him sitting in this awful chair, clasping one of his wife’s hands in both his own. Amelia didn’t dare dispute it. She just bowed her head and asked God for a merciful end to the suffering.

  Mouth dry, she sips from a waxy cup already gone soggy. The water is tepid, with an institutional silkiness.

  Bring on the dehydration.

  She looks around for a place to set the cup and sees the patient folders, forgotten on the bedside table. Bettina’s file is right on top. She reaches for it without hesitation, opens it, and scans the staff’s scribbled notes.

  No clue to her mother’s condition; no preordained timeline for her demise.

  She turns the pages. Bettina’s medical history is meticulously outlined on forms detailing not just her diagnosis and illness, but other information, as well. Basic questions like height, weight, date of birth, plus—

  Wait a minute.

  Total number of pregnancies carried to term . . .

  One?

  Amelia’s first thought is that someone—her mother? The hospital?—forgot to count her unnamed brother who’d only lived for a few hours.

  But the date in the file, 1957, coincides with his birth, and death.

  Something is missing.

  Amelia is missing.

  “Life comes down to a series of choices,” the wisest man Stockton Barnes has ever known once told him. “Make the wrong one at any given moment, and you find yourself at a dead-end. If you’re lucky, someone will come along and pull you back onto the right track.”

  He was lucky.

  Smoking a cigarette, striding through the rain toward Morningside Memorial, he spots a kid shuffling toward him, hands in his pockets, hood up, head down. When he gets closer, he glances up through narrowed eyes, looking for trouble.

  Ah, yes. Barnes himself at fifteen.

  He meets the kid’s gaze, sending a silent message. Don’t mess with me.

  They move on past each other. Barnes tosses his soggy Marlboro into a puddle and enters the hospital. It’s across town from the East Harlem one where his father had died fifteen years ago, and that had happened at high noon, not midnight. Barnes thinks of him nonetheless, remembering their last moments together at the kitchen table, wishing they’d been more remarkable. Wishing they’d been having a meaningful conversation instead of gobbling toaster waffles drenched in butter and syrup, Stockton thinking about basketball and his father unaware that his heart was about to give out. It happened so fast—one moment he was sitting there, the next, he was on the floor, fork still in hand, and Mom was shrieking.

  Barnes pushes the memory from his mind as he approaches the reception desk, manned by an elderly black man with a bushy white mustache. Seeing the NYPD uniform, he straightens in his chair. “Hi, Officer. If you’re here about the gang shooting, they’re all in—”

  “Just visiting a friend. He was admitted a few hours ago. George Washington.”

  “George . . .”

  “Washington. Right.”

  “Hell of a name to live up to.”

  “He does.” Barnes flashes a brief smile.

  “Room 707. Lucky sevens—that’s a good sign.”

  “Let’s hope so.”

  He walks toward the elevator, inhaling the stuffy, antiseptic air. Wash must hate it. He’s the kind of guy who likes the windows wide open, regardless of escalating crime rates.

  A little over a decade ago, Barnes had been part of the problem. They called him Gloss, back then. Slick. Smooth. Nothing ever seemed to stick. He got away with shoplifting and worse—escapades he now recognizes as criminal mischief. He blamed grief over his father, poverty, being surrounded by bad influences . . . everything but his own lousy choices.

  Rounding a corner, he passes an orderly rolling a new mother toward the exit in a wheelchair. Plump and disheveled, she’s gazing down at a blue bundle in her arms. A man trails, his face almost obscured by several bags, a couple of blue-tinted carnation arrangements, and a blue ribbon bobbing with a Mylar helium balloon proclaiming, It’s a Boy! Yeah, no kidding. Feeling for the brother, Barnes meets his gaze, but he grins back, giddy as his wife.

  To each his own. At the elevator bank, Barnes pushes the up button and rocks back and forth on his heels, wondering what’s going on with Wash. Yesterday, his friend left a message at the precinct saying not to come over when he got off duty, as was Barnes’s Friday night habit.

  Wash left another message today. Not at the precinct, but on Barnes’s home answering machine.

  “Stockton, I’m at Morningside Memorial. I came in for some tests, and they admitted me. The guy in the other bed got the
damned window. Other than that, I’m fine.”

  He didn’t sound fine. His breathing was labored, words strangled as if he was trying not to cough. He ended the call telling Barnes not to worry, and not to come. Of course, Barnes hurried right over.

  The elevator dings, doors glide open, and a young woman barrels right into him.

  “Sorry!” they say in unison.

  Always one to appreciate a beautiful woman, he smiles at this one, tall and lithe, wearing baggy jeans and a bright pink blouse with lengths of gold chain dangling beneath either side of the collar as if someone yanked it in two. She doesn’t smile back. Her eyes are anguished, face ravaged with grief, or terror, or fury—difficult to discern in passing, but none of those emotions would be unusual in a place like this, at an hour like this. Terrible tales are unfolding all over the hospital.

  Barnes spends his workdays seeing strangers through their darkest hours. Tonight, he has to help Wash. He allows the girl to disappear, running from her tragedy as he steps into the elevator to face his.

  It might just be bronchitis, but lately he’s had a feeling . . .

  Wash hasn’t been well in a while. He’s been coughing and wheezing since Christmas. Longer. Too long for bronchitis.

  Barnes presses the button for lucky seven. The doors close and he looks at the paneled ceiling, asking anyone who might be listening up there to let Wash be okay. His grandmother? His father? Almighty God Himself?

  You guys never listen, though.

  He sighs and stares at his shoes, in need of a shine at the end of a slushy March day on the streets. Something glints on the muddy tile alongside them. He reaches down and picks up a miniature gold signet ring. It’s engraved with a C, the letter filled in with a gleaming, bright blue enamel, and there are tiny blue stones on either side of it.

  It’s far too small to fit on an adult’s hand, or even a child’s. It must be meant for a baby. He thinks of the couple with the newborn son. Or maybe it had fallen from the girl’s broken chain. At the rate this elevator is going, they’ll all be long gone by the time he can get back down to the lobby.

  C . . .

  His father’s name was Charles. Can it be a sign?

  The hospital will have a lost and found. Barnes will turn in the ring downstairs, after he sees Wash. For now, he clasps it in his pocket and looks heavenward again.

  “Hey, Dad. If you’re up there and you can hear me . . . you know what to do.”

  Rain-soaked, shivering, breathless, Amelia bursts into Park Baptist Church.

  Calvin is there alone, mopping the aisle. He sees her rushing toward him and drops to his knees. “She’s gone?”

  Amelia’s question is simultaneous. “Was I adopted?”

  “Is your mother gone?” he asks as if he hadn’t heard, gaping up at her, tears streaming down his cheeks.

  “She isn’t my mother! She lied to me. You both did. I—”

  “Tell me if she’s gone, girl! Tell me right now!”

  “No, she didn’t—she’s . . . alive.”

  He exhales and buries his face in his hands, murmuring a prayer. She watches as if from a great distance as he pulls himself to his feet, his work-roughened hand quaking on the mop handle like it’s a crutch.

  “I told you not to leave your mother alone, Amelia.”

  She turns away from the glint of accusation, muttering, “She isn’t my mother.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I said—” She whirls back. “I saw her file at the hospital.”

  “What are you talking about? What file?”

  “She’s not my mother. And you’re not my—”

  “No! That isn’t true!”

  She exhales in relief. She should have known there was some mistake. It must have been someone else’s file, although . . .

  Her brother’s birthdate was there. All right, then she must have misinterpreted the information. Lord knows she couldn’t even read a textbook page tonight.

  “I am your father, and your mother is your mother, Amelia. We raised you. That’s all that matters. We love you. It doesn’t matter how you came to us.”

  “What?”

  No mistake, then.

  Total number of pregnancies carried to term: one.

  “How . . .” The rest snags on a monstrous ache in her throat.

  How did I come to you?

  No wonder she doesn’t look like them. No wonder they rarely talk about the past. No wonder she’s always felt unsettled, though she’s never known any other home but theirs.

  “It doesn’t matter how,” he says.

  “It does to me. If I was adopted, I deserve to know more about—”

  “Now is not the time for that. Go back to her.”

  “But I—”

  “I said, go. I’ll be there as soon as I’m finished here.”

  She shakes her head, standing her ground. “I need to know.”

  “You need to be with her. She can’t die alone!”

  “You go. She’s your wife.”

  “I have a job to do.”

  “Does it matter more than she does?”

  “Nothing matters more than she does.”

  “I know!” She’s sobbing now. “I don’t want to watch her die, either, okay? Just go!”

  He bows his head, looking for a long time at his worn shoes, at the clean patch of wet floor, and the waiting, dusty patch of dry.

  Then he hurtles the mop toward the altar with a strangled cry. It clatters to the floor, spattering dirty water.

  He grabs her arm and pulls her down the aisle, out the door.

  “I’m going home,” Amelia cries on the church steps, struggling in his grip.

  “You’re coming with me and apologizing to your mother for leaving her.”

  “She can’t even hear me! She can’t see me, she can’t talk to me, she can’t—” She breaks off, turning away.

  She can’t apologize to me for lying.

  Her gaze falls on someone standing on the street, just beyond the lamppost light. Marceline LeBlanc gazes up at them through the curtain of freezing rain.

  Calvin sees her, too, and mutters, “Let’s go.”

  “Everything okay over there?” Marceline calls in her island dialect.

  No, everything is not okay over here, Amelia wants to scream. Everything will never be okay again!

  Calvin ignores the question. He leads her down the steps and past Marceline, who meets Amelia’s sorrowful gaze and asks where they’re going.

  “To the hospital. My—”

  “Hush!” Calvin squeezes her arm. “It’s nobody’s business.”

  They splash on past in solemn silence.

  When they reach Morningside Memorial, the rain has become snow, and the cornrowed Caribbean nurse is waiting.

  They’re too late.

  Lucky seven my ass, Barnes thinks, peeking into Wash’s room.

  The curtain is drawn between the beds, obscuring the guy with the window view. Wash is asleep, mouth open, wheeze-snoring loudly. That doesn’t sound good. Worse than the bronchitis he’s been battling. Pneumonia? Worse than pneumonia?

  Shaken, he settles into the guest chair. Wash didn’t look this frail last week. Has he deteriorated so quickly? Or is it because he was awake, full of spit and vinegar as always? A man, asleep, allows a glimpse of vulnerability. Mortality.

  Barnes has only seen Wash as a stalwart conqueror. A lesser man couldn’t have saved a kid like him.

  Barnes had been about to swing a lead pipe through the window of a parked car when Wash burst from the shadows and collared him. Certain he was going to call the cops, Barnes later discovered that he was a cop. Though six inches shorter than a lanky teenaged Barnes, he had a steely grip and delivered one hell of a dressing-down.

  “And I don’t ever want to see you out on the street again unless you’re going to school! Got it?”

  No meek terror for that kid. Only belligerence, delivered with a glare. “I don’t go to school. I dropped out.
”

  “Who throws away an opportunity to get an education? What’s wrong with you, son?”

  “Ain’t nothin’ wrong with me. What’s wrong with y—”

  “Listen to me. I don’t want to see you again out here unless you’re picking up litter with the Boy Scouts. You got it?” He was shouting again. “Got it? Can you hear me, son?”

  “Yeah, I hear you!” He wasn’t a Boy Scout, either, but the belligerence was dribbling away.

  “Okay, then. Good.”

  And then he did the thing that Barnes would never forget. If the course of his life changed in a moment, in a gesture, that was it.

  Wash released him and extended a hand.

  Years ago, his father had taught him to stand tall, look people in the eye, and give a solid handshake. “It’s how you show you’re a man,” he said, and then scoffed at Barnes’s first few efforts. “Ain’t nobody wants to grab on to a wussy wet noodle like that, boy.”

  It had been years since anyone had wanted to shake his hand.

  The man’s grasp was firm and warm. He introduced himself.

  “Wash? What kind of fool name is that?”

  “Wash is a hell of a lot better than George Washington. I think we agree he was nobody’s fool. That’s my real name, by the way.”

  “George Washington?”

  “Yeah. My ancestors were slaves on his plantation down in Virginia a million years ago, so they took his name. That’s how things worked back then.”

  “A million years ago?”

  “Something like that. Still trying to figure out whether my parents had a mean streak or a sense of humor. What do you think?”

  Barnes shifted his weight, prepared to bolt.

  But then Wash said, “Your name’s Stockton, right?”

  “How’d you know that?”

  “Met your dad a time or two. I’m sorry for your loss.”

  The unexpected condolences were the first pull on Barnes’s adolescent heartstrings in ages. Yet mere words couldn’t release his tangled emotions like a slipknot tug. That complicated snarl of grief and fury would take time and persistence to unravel.

  Wash was a patient man. Thanks to him, Barnes has grown into one. Without his mentor, he would never have chosen a career in law enforcement. Without Wash . . .