by Ninie Hammon
She turned and walked slowly to the kitchen door, fumbling in the pocket of her dress for her cigarettes and lighter. She pushed open the screen and stepped out into the May sunshine, so bright it made her squint, crossed the small patio that looked out over Boundary Oak Lake, walked over to a battered lawn chair, and eased down into it like an old woman. Like she was seventy instead of forty-nine.
It was the lack of sleep, that’s what it was. Hadn’t slept since … she couldn’t even remember when. How were you supposed to sleep with babies crying, wailing all night long?
Shaking a cigarette out of the crumbled pack, she held it between trembling fingers, lit it, and inhaled deeply. She sighed the smoke back out of her nose and mouth, leaned back in the chair, and closed her eyes, felt the sun hot on her eyelids.
Wanda Jean Ingram, you have got to get a hold of yourself!
She took another drag off the cigarette, tried to relax, to empty her mind and enjoy the feel of the sun in her face and the breeze in her hair.
Her mind bobbed on a deep, calm sea. And when his image surfaced there, it was as natural as bubbles popping to the surface out from under a rock. Wanda didn’t fight it. She looked into his face, gazed into his liquid brown eyes, the color of maple syrup, and loved him as purely as any woman ever loved a man.
Dr. Paul Stephenson. Bayside Hospital, Houston, Texas,1955. He was the only reason she took any interest in obstetrics and gynecology. She’d been an army nurse, made it into the military by covering up her family’s history of mental illness and her own bouts with depression and … well, other things. She spent the first part of her career patching up boys who’d lost arms and legs, then switched to rehab. At the expense of everything else in life, dating, maybe even a family, she’d poured herself into helping the wounded.
But life handed her a whole new perspective on “wounded” during that last tour of duty in Korea. Seasoned OR nurses were in short supply in the front-line MASH units and she’d volunteered. She’d only been there three days, wasn’t even completely unpacked, when it happened. They’d called it friendly fire, but it hadn’t seemed very friendly when the operating room vaporized around her. Two patients, three surgeons, two nurses, and an OR tech died instantly. Wanda had thrown herself over the patient on the table and they were the only survivors. She was a hero, had the medals to prove it.
The doctors who stitched her back together told her she was lucky to be alive. But they looked down at their shoes or stared at some spot on the wall behind her when they said it.
Sometimes she’d indulge in fantasy, pretend Paul had fallen for her the way she’d fallen for him. That he hadn’t cared she was ten years older and fifty pounds heavier than he was. That he could see deeper into her soul than her disfigured face, mangled jaw, and missing teeth, a visage that made little kids stare and point.
She’d switched specialties to be near him. Traded shifts to work when he worked. Studied nights to be the best OB/GYN nurse in the hospital so he’d notice her. He finally had. And they became … friends. So close he even asked her to help him pick out an engagement ring for his sweetheart. When he went into private practice, she was his right arm.
And when he started performing abortions on the side, well, he couldn’t have done it without her. Together, they helped so many girls—frightened, desperate girls with nowhere to turn but to some butcher in a back alley. They offered a safe alternative. Sterile. Never had a single infection, not one! Never harmed anybody!
The girl who’d turned him in was crazy. Completely insane. Claimed she’d been pressured into it, said she’d tried to have a baby afterward and couldn’t, that he’d made her sterile. Lies, all lies! But, of course it didn’t matter. And after that, nothing ever mattered again.
The only light in all that darkness, what Wanda clung to like someone drowning to a piece of driftwood, was the indisputable proof that he did care about her, that she really did matter to him. Paul had shielded her, protected her, refused to name his assistant. And his crazy accuser couldn’t identify her. She’d only seen Wanda wearing a surgical mask, and that nightmare day when the police came, the hysterical girl swore it couldn’t have been Wanda, said she’d never have forgotten someone with a monster’s face like that!
Paul had gone to prison; Wanda had gone free.
She suddenly jumped and dropped the cigarette that had burned down to her finger, grinding it out on the concrete with her houseshoe-clad foot. She shook her burned finger, blew on it to ease the pain, and her eyes filled with tears.
“Got to get a grip, Wanda Jean,” she said out loud. “You got to calm down, that’s all. Everything’s going to be just fine.”
She felt something warm brush up against her leg, looked down and there was her cat, Blackbeard, so named because the black patch around his left eye made him look like a pirate.
“Hey boy, where you been?”
She reached down to pick him up and something dropped out of his mouth onto the concrete beside her cigarette butt. It was a mouse, a dead mouse, bloody where Blackbeard had sunk his sharp teeth into its side.
And the limp gray creature looked just like …
Wanda lifted the cat into her arms, buried her face in his fur and cried. In the distance, she could hear the rumble of thunder. A storm was coming.
* * * * *
Oran opened the door and Mac stepped in front of him into a cheerless room as empty and blank as the inside of a manila envelope. Walls, floor, ceiling—all featureless, some neutral color between cream and tan, graced by not a solitary picture, calendar, mirror, or rug. The attorney conference room’s only furnishings were a plain wooden table and two equally neutered slat-back chairs.
The room was located on the third floor of the administration building, on the north end, with an entrance to the top floor cell block of building one down the hallway to the left, and access to the administration building’s civilian areas to the right.
A lone, barred window offered an unobstructed view of the Indian Bluffs. This time of day, the sun should have brightened the dreariness. But during spring storm season, afternoon thunderheads stood daily sentinel in the western sky, dark behemoths poised to roar across the open plains and bludgeon a cotton crop with hail or rip the roof off a barn with a twister.
A bare bulb screwed into the fixtureless ceiling, strategically placed too high above their heads to reach without a ladder, cast a bilious light as lusterless as ashes.
But the thing was, the room didn’t seem to need the bulb’s illumination. It appeared to be filled with warm luminescence that came from the small woman seated with her back turned to the door. It was like she … glowed.
Whoa there, Trigger. Steady boy. Let’s not get spooked by Oran’s overactive imagination.
When the woman turned and faced him, Mac almost gasped out loud. She looked so familiar! Profoundly, eerily familiar. Where could he possibly have seen her before?
His mind frantically thumbed through his mental Rolodex with her description: limp blond hair, severe acne scarring, eyes that, from here at least, looked to be a purple shade of blue, and teeth with the brown stain common to poor people who’d drunk high-fluoride well water as children.
But he couldn’t place her, couldn’t put his finger on who she reminded him of.
She sat as still as a windsock on a foggy morning, simply looked at him, her face benignly expressionless. The moment stretched out, elongated, didn’t seem to be governed by the cranking of the earth on its axis. Then she spoke.
“Yes,” she said.
Just the one word, an affirmation almost like an “ahhhh,” a sigh, in the husky voice Oran had prepared him for, warned him about. Not unpleasant, just odd. It was deeper than sultry, with rounder, fuller tones. Still, in an alternate universe, she could have made a killing as the voice behind some perfume or lingerie commercial on television.
Made a killing. Freudian slip there, pal. Might need to bear in mind why she’s sitting where she is in this universe.
Oran stepped into the room and hooked a professional smile on the front of his face like a surgeon’s mask.
“Miss Prentiss, this is—”
“Oh, I know who this is! It’s the Reverend David Allen McIntosh of Graham, Oklahoma, formerly of Seagram, Arkansas, who has come to see me on this stormy Monday afternoon ’cause ya’ll are fixin’ to fry me on Friday.”
“Well … yes,” Oran said.
He cleared his throat and turned to Mac with a sympathetic look. “Whenever you’re ready to leave, or if you need anything at all, just knock on the door. There’s a guard right outside. He’ll be watching.”
Mac noticed the window in the door for the first time, filled with the face of a guard, like an eight-by-ten glossy suitable for framing.
Blackburn turned back to the woman seated at the table and nodded a farewell. “Afternoon, Miss Prentiss.”
“Afternoon, Warden,” she replied to his back as he rapped on the door; it opened and he closed it firmly behind him.
She turned to Mac. “You’re welcome to sit, Reverend. Promise I won’t bite.”
Then she suddenly opened her arms in an expansive gesture. “Ain’t this here the finest room you ever did see?” She hopped to her feet, the quick, abrupt movement of a squirrel, and rushed to the wall she’d been staring at. “But right over in this corner, there’s a crack.”
She pointed to it. Mac took her word for it; he could see no defect at all from where he stood.
“Don’t know what in the world’d make a crack like that but it’s plain’s day. It’s the only one, though. I checked, been over the whole room lots of times. And there’s a hole in the baseboard over there, not a real big ’un, but it’s new, didn’t see it the last time I—” She stopped, seemed to catch herself and sighed.
“Sorry ’bout that.” She offered a self-conscious laugh. “I don’t spend a whole lot of time with people, as you can well imagine. Sometimes, I spend a whole afternoon a’wondering what folks talk about these days. When they’re just sittin’ around together, not doing nothing special, reckon what they say?”
She walked slowly back to the table and sat down and the absolute quiet and centeredness he’d noticed when he came into the room returned. Stillness gathered around her again, disturbed bees settling back on the hive.
“You can talk, right?” She leaned her head to the side and squinted up at him. “You being a preacher ‘n all, you can speak?”
He found that the smile on his face was genuine. “Well, yes, if you’d give me a chance, I could probably string two or three words together to hold up my end of the conversation.”
He crossed the room, pulled out the wooden chair, sat down in it, and looked across the table at her. Yeah, her eyes, framed in ridiculously long lashes, were almost purple. At least in the bare-bulb light they looked it, an arresting, disquieting color.
“What would you like to talk about?” He fervently hoped she didn’t want to discuss anything spiritual.
“I dunno. How ’bout … weasels?”
“Weasels?”
“Yeah, you know what a weasel is, doncha?”
“Well, yes, I—”
“Them furry little critters used to get in our chicken house. Of a night, I’d hear the hens a’cacklin’ and squawkin’ all crazy like and I’d jump up and go runnin’ out there. But it was always too late. There’d be a hen missin’ sure, carried off into the night.”
She stopped, and he watched emotions he couldn’t identify play across her face. Her voice got quiet, her eyes large.
“How’d you like to be eat alive?” she whispered. “Sharp teeth in the dark a-chompin’ down—with nobody to come save ya?”
Mac sat tongue-tied, looking at a face that might once have been pretty, before what must surely have been a hellacious case of acne sank sharp teeth into it and chomped down.
Maybe talking about something spiritual isn’t such a bad idea after all.
It was like she’d read his mind.
“You think maybe we ought to talk about dyin’ and God and Heaven and Hell and all that?” Her voice seemed to come from the bottom of an oil drum.
“If that’s what you want to talk about. Do you?”
“Yeah—sometime. But not right now. I already know ’bout them things, anyway. I made my peace.” She smiled then, a smile both innocent and as old as the earth. “When you’re fixin’ to get punished for the worst thing you ever done, it sets you free. Ain’t no liberty quite like it!”
“Hard to argue that.”
The silence again. Mac scrambled for something to say. “Look, is there something I can do for you? Is there anything that is troubling you?”
“Uh-huh. You.”
“Me?”
“Oh, nothin’ bad. Tryin’ not to stare’s all. I’m sure the warden told you ’bout the Long Dark. You gotta figure it’s a joy I can’t hardly hold onto just to sit in a room and talk to somebody ’bout anythin’—dying or cracks in the wall or weasels or the Second Coming.”
“What do you know about the Second Coming?” In his head, the question was mere curiosity, but it came out sounding condescending.
“I was in church ever Sunday morning, Sunday night, and Wednesday night of my whole life!” She snapped. Then she shook her head. “That ain’t how I know, though. I never listened to none of that. But I can read. I went to school through the sixth grade ’fore Jackson pulled me out.” The word—Jackson. Somehow she managed to give an inflection to it, a sound almost like a growl.
“I read good and the Bible was the onliest book we had in the whole house. Bunch of it was too tangled up, but I got out what I needed. How God loves us.” Her eyes suddenly puddled with tears and she added in a hushed, reverent whisper: “How Jesus died to save his children.”
She looked out the window and didn’t seem to be talking to Mac at all. “First off, when I read that part, I couldn’t hardly keep all of it in my head. Seemed like I’d try to stuff it in and pieces’d be hanging out my ears. The whole of it seemed so big. But then after—”
She glanced at him, then dropped her eyes. “Well, I finally did understand how you could love that much.”
She stopped. She sat so still, didn’t fidget, he almost couldn’t see her breathe. Her look was like that, too. Quiet and penetrating.
“You don’t like that, do you?” she asked. “Me talking ’bout God and Jesus. Yore face got all closed-up like and squinty-eyed.”
Geez, was he that transparent? His inner struggles so blatant a woman who hadn’t been around another human being in more than a decade could read him?
Her hands suddenly flew to her mouth. “Oh, I’m sorry. Why, inside you’re as cut up and bleedin’ as a hand got stuck in a hay baler. I’m sorry!”
She looked stricken, like his emotional pain had somehow leapt across the space between them and attacked her heart, too.
“It’s about yore wife dying, ain’t it?”
“How do you know my wife died?” The hair on the back of Mac’s neck began to rise like the hackles on a scared dog. Distant thunder rumbled in the west.
“But you ain’t been left alone. You got a little girl, doncha?” Her voice carried the rumble of the thunder in it. “Her name’s Joy and she’s got red hair, just like you got red hair. Ain’t it a wonderment that God done that, give you the child you asked for, a little girl to love who looks just like you, red hair and freckles!”
“Who told you about Joy?”
The air thickened, like the breath of a storm just before the rain hits. But the storm outside was still miles away.
“You don’t have no other children, though. Just the one. The girl with long red hair.”
In all his forty-two years, Mac had not the slightest experience with the supernatural, nor did he ever expect to. Once, he would have said that God could, but seldom did the miraculous. And given the rarity of God’s displays of power, actually seeing one was about as likely as seeing a fatal traffic accident. How many f
atalities occurred every day? Every second? But did you ever see one? It’s a big old world out there, he would have said, and an even bigger God.
And now? Right now, he couldn’t have articulated a compelling case for the existence of God, let alone argued a Deity’s ability—or desire—to dabble in the affairs of mortals.
“Was it Oran? Did he tell you about my family?” There was a tremor in his voice.
“I apologize, I sincerely do.” Her eyes welled with tears again, became deep, shiny pools of purple light. “I truly did not mean to upset you and here I’ve gone and done the very thing I had in mind not to do.”
He spoke slowly, enunciating each word carefully, struggling to keep his voice level. “How do you know these things about me?”
“Why, that new guard on the Long Dark, the Mex’can from Nogales, she told me. She visited your church once.”
Mac let out a breath he didn’t even realize he’d been holding. It came out in a rush as lightening flashed bright behind the Indian Bluffs. The roll of thunder that followed was closer now, louder.
“Well, yes, I do have a little girl.” He managed a small smile, but it was real, more relief than anything else. “But she’s not so little anymore, she’s—”
“Sixteen.”
“Yes.” He was still uneasy. That Mexican guard must have taken a private-eye class from Stu Bailey on 77 Sunset Strip. “She’s sixteen and growing up fast.”
“Can I tell you something? Please?” Her voice was earnest, pleading. She reached out her hand across the table as if to take his, then hesitated and pulled it back. “And you not get all flustered and in a tizzy about it? But you got to believe me. Can you do that?”
“What is it?”
She hesitated, seemed torn. “I’m scared when I say what I got to say, you’re gonna jump up and go runnin’ out of here and not never come back.”
“I promise I won’t do that.”