by Neta Jackson
“She’s tellin’ it,” Florida declared. A murmur of assent rose from several others.
The intruder must have known it was all over, because she quit struggling.
“All right.” A pause. The police officer holstered his gun. “We’ll take her, sir. Get off easy, now. Fellas . . .”
The four police officers each took a wrist or ankle. Denny released his hold on the woman’s wrists and scrambled to his feet. No sooner did the four men start to lift the bandana woman to her feet than she seemed to explode—kicking, scratching, cussing, and calling down all sorts of calamity upon their heads. The rest of us backed off, watching in disbelief. It took all four of them to finally get a pair of handcuffs on her, and still she kicked and screamed all the way to the paddy wagon, which was blinking its hazard lights in front of our house.
“Denny!” I ran to my husband, who was leaning over, hands on his knees. “Are you okay?”
He nodded mutely.
A few moments later, two of the officers came back in the house, brushing off their uniforms as if trying to regain their dignity. “Everybody sit down, please,” said the one who seemed to be in charge. His cheeks were ruddy, giving him a boyish look even though his paunch suggested he was older—forty, maybe fifty. “I’m Sergeant Curry. We’re going to need a statement from each one of you.”
“But my mother!” Hoshi cried. “She’s hurt! She needs a doctor!”
Denny jerked his head toward the sound of another siren that suddenly choked off in midwail directly in front of our house. “We called an ambulance.”
“And that thief just walked out of here with our jewelry in her pocket!” Stu stormed.
“Yes!” Nony wailed. “My wedding ring—please get it back.” Even as she spoke, we heard the paddy wagon pull out to make room for the ambulance. Nony began to weep quietly.
The sergeant punched his walkie-talkie. “We need some ETs here. Lunt Avenue. On the double.” He sighed. “I’m sorry, ladies. We’re going to have to keep everything she had on her person as evidence. We’ll”—he cleared his throat nervously—“be sure to return everything to you.”
For the next few minutes, the house was full of medics who tended to Mrs. Takahashi’s hand then trundled her out to the waiting ambulance. Nony insisted on accompanying Hoshi, so the second police officer also went along to get their statements at the hospital. No sooner had they left than two more police officers arrived. The evidence technicians, I presumed.
Sergeant Curry turned to me. “Ma’am, you mentioned a knife. Where is it?”
“I . . .” For a moment I couldn’t think. “Uh, I put it in the kitchen sink.” I led one of the ETs to the kitchen, where he pulled on a pair of rubber gloves, retrieved the knife, and put it in an evidence bag. Good grief. My fingerprints were all over that knife too!
When we returned to the front of the house, everyone else was sitting down again except Denny and Amanda, who was sobbing quietly under her daddy’s arm as he leaned against the arched doorway. The officer in charge pulled out a small notebook. “Who encountered the woman first?”
I lifted my hand.
“Okay, let’s start with you. Tell me what happened.”
Tell him what happened? I just wanted them to leave! I wanted to hold Denny and Amanda. I wanted to hug my Yada Yada sisters. I wanted to go to the hospital to see if Hoshi’s mother was going to be all right. I wanted to ask Adele if I hurt her when I tied her hands. I wanted to . . . to have a good bawl!
No. I was not going to cry in front of these police officers. I drew a breath. “Okay. We”—I indicated the other women—“were having, uh, a prayer meeting. My husband was out; my daughter was in her bedroom. The doorbell rang, but we weren’t expecting anybody else. A strange woman stood at the door, said she had my Avon order . . .”
Sergeant Curry was busily taking notes. “Describe her, for the record.”
“Well, she was black, wearing a red bandana and wraparound shades—”
Florida snorted. “That wasn’t no black woman.”
Stu frowned. “Sure she was. Light-skinned, maybe.”
“That girl was white,” muttered Adele.
I stared at Florida and Adele. From the moment I laid eyes on the “Avon lady,” I thought she was black. The way she talked black or hip-hop or something. I looked at Avis for help.
Avis shrugged. “Hard to tell behind those shades, light-skinned as she was.”
“Why’d you think she was black?” Adele was downright scornful. “Because she was whacked out on drugs? talked street jive?
cussed you out?”
I looked helplessly at Denny. Could this get any worse?
The sergeant cleared his throat. “Ladies, it doesn’t really matter. We’ve got the suspect in custody. Let’s go on. What happened after she rang your doorbell?”
THE POLICE OFFICERS FINALLY LEFT after taking everybody’s statements and making a list of the stolen jewelry. Adele started to follow the officers out the door, but Avis said, “Wait a minute, sisters. If ever we needed to spend time praying together, this is it. Ten minutes, tops. We’ve got some praising to do. Nobody got killed; everybody’s going to be all right, even Hoshi’s mother. We’ve also got some serious spiritual battle to do. That woman’s drowning in darkness.”
Reluctantly, Adele rejoined the group. Florida pulled Amanda and Denny into the circle, and we all held hands. I held on for dear life to Denny’s hand on one side and Ruth’s on the other. Thank you, Avis! Yes, yes, let’s pray. Otherwise I might just fall apart, right here and now.
THE PRAYER WAS GOOD. It helped me calm down, let me focus on what we could thank God for in the midst of the trauma we’d just experienced. Nony called in the middle of the prayer, saying that Mrs. Takahashi had to have seventeen stitches in her hand but was going to be all right. Both Hoshi and her mother had been given a sedative by the emergency-room staff, and a police officer took them back to the Orrington Hotel. Now could someone come to St. Francis Hospital and pick her up? Nony’s car was still at our house.
That’s when I learned that Josh still had our car and was driving Pete and Jerry home. Which meant he’d dropped Denny off.
It had to be God.
So Stu went to pick up Nony at the hospital and brought her back to get her car. We hugged out on the sidewalk, and Nony shook her head, deeply concerned. “Pray without ceasing for Hoshi. Her parents are terribly upset.”
Understandably. Stu’s “great idea” for Hoshi to bring her mother to Yada Yada had turned out to be an utter disaster.
Can’t go there, Jodi. It’s not Stu’s fault.
Finally everyone was gone. Josh came home and seemed rather disappointed that he’d missed all the excitement. Amanda gave him a blow-by-blow account, puffing up her role a bit, I noticed, describing how she sneaked the cordless out of the house and dialed 911 from the backyard. Well, why not? She had behaved admirably under the circumstances.
At last Denny and I were alone in the living room—after I made sure our front and back doors were locked. “I’m starving,” he announced. “Be back with a four-course dinner in two minutes.” He turned at the doorway. “Turn on that fan, will you? It’s hotter’n blazes in here.”
I picked up the extension cord where it had dropped after someone—Stu, I think—had untied Adele’s hands. I stared at the innocent-looking cord. Had I really tied up Adele Skuggs with this thing? Numbly, I connected the fan cord and the extension then plugged it into the socket. The cooling night air flowed into the room.
Denny returned with chips, salsa, leftover sweet tea, apple slices, and peanut butter. Not exactly the four-course meal he promised, but hey, he brought it out on a tray, and all I had to do was dig in. No complaint from me.
We sat on either end of the couch, our legs entwined, munching quietly for several minutes. Then Denny said, “God spoke to me.”
I stopped eating. “What do you mean?”
“When that woman lunged at me with the knife. God told
me, ‘Grab her wrist. No one is going to get hurt.’ It was as if time slowed down, and everything happened in slow motion. She lunged. I grabbed. I pulled her across and tripped her. Not even sure how I did it, but I wasn’t afraid. I knew God was helping me.”
I shuddered. “I was afraid.”
He leaned forward and began to massage my leg, the one with the steel rod in it. “You’ve had a pretty rough summer, babe.”
Wasn’t that the truth! I could get a good pity party going if given half a chance. Yet if Avis could look for things to thank God for only moments after being grilled by a police officer, maybe I could put the pity party on hold.
“Adele came to Yada Yada, as you saw,” I mused. “Didn’t get to talk to her, though. She seemed pretty distant—even before we got robbed. Avis told me to give her some space.”
Denny heaved a big sigh. “Yeah. What happened tonight won’t make it any easier, will it?”
We sat quietly for a few moments, munching on our snacks and washing them down with sweet iced tea. Then Denny started to chuckle.
“What?” I dug an apple slice into the peanut butter.
He tried to wipe the grin off his face. “It’s really not funny, but . . . while I had that woman pinned, I thought, ‘Does this crazy person have a name?’ I mean, it wasn’t so bad tackling a cutthroat druggie, but what if she has a name like . . . like Susie or Denise or Tammy? I tell you, my superhero status starts to slip if I had ‘Susie’ spread-eagle on my living-room floor.”
“No!” I started to laugh too, which wasn’t easy with peanut butter in my mouth. “She couldn’t have a name like Susie. It’s gotta be some street moniker. Like Krazy Kate or Maniac Mama.”
Denny’s chuckles gave way to belly laughs. “Maniac Mama! That’s it! I pinned Maniac Mama to the floor till the police came!”
All the tension of the evening erupted into hysterical laughter. I laughed so hard I almost lost all the snacks I’d just eaten. Even Denny was holding his side. Josh came out of his room, looked at us, and shook his head. “You guys are nuts.”
Yet in the middle of the night, when I got up to go to the bathroom, my half-awake brain was jolted by the thought: Florida was once a crazy drug addict. My first memory of her flooded back: a tattered woman banging on the hood of my car, begging for money. Years ago. Just a panhandler then. Now she was Florida, my sister, my friend. Who but God could’ve done that?
I had a hard time going back to sleep. What happened to our intruder once that paddy wagon drove off? She wasn’t just a thief; she was a woman—like me. Did they put her in a cell at Cook County Jail? Was she getting any sleep? Did she have a family? Did they know where she was?
Does she have a name?
13
Becky Wallace. That was her name. We found out when Denny called the Twenty-Fourth District Police Station on Clark Street the next day and asked to speak to Sergeant Curry. It was Labor Day; we thought he might have the day off. But he called back a couple of hours later. I quietly picked up the kitchen extension but motioned madly at Denny to do the talking.
Sergeant Curry said “the suspect in question” was already in detox at Cook County Jail—a process that usually took about three weeks. After that, if she was found guilty, she was looking at some serious jail time. “Your wife and the other women she robbed willing to testify at her trial?”
Denny motioned at me to answer, but I shook my head and pointed back at him.
“Uh . . . probably,” he said, rolling his eyes for my benefit. “Do we have to press charges or something?”
“No. We’ve got your statements. That will be enough for an arraignment. The state’s attorney’s office will decide what charges to file and will contact you if there’s a trial.”
I waggled my left hand across the room at Denny, indicating my bare ring finger.
“What about my wife’s wedding ring and the other jewelry?”
A brief pause. “I’m sorry, Mr. Baxter. As I told you, it’ll be awhile. Evidence.”
“Right.” Denny turned his back, as though he didn’t want to get any more sign language from me. “What did you say the woman’s name is?”
“Uh, just a sec. Got it here somewhere.”We heard papers shuffling. “Wallace. She gave her name as Becky Wallace.”
I just stared at Denny after we hung up. Surely the police sergeant was pulling our leg. The crazy woman who’d come charging into our house waving a ten-inch butcher knife and cussing like a gangbanger couldn’t be a Becky.
Denny must have been thinking the same thing as he gave me a sheepish grin. “Sure glad I didn’t know that before I threw her down. What would the guys say if they knew I’d manhandled a girl named Becky?”
I snickered. But knowing her name did feel weird. I kinda wished we hadn’t asked. It was easier thinking of her as “that drugged-out crazy woman.”
The last of the paint went on in Amanda’s room—thanks to Josh and Denny—that morning, then Josh and Amanda took advantage of their last free day before school started to hang out at the lakefront, the last day the city lifeguards would be on duty. Well, let ’em. Tomorrow they’d stagger home with backpacks full of books and homework. And Josh had been getting college information in the mail all summer; soon he’d have to sit down and fill out applications and plan campus visits.
Let ’em have one more carefree summer fling.
As for me, I thanked God at least once every half-hour that today was a holiday. If I’d had to face the first day of school at Bethune Elementary after what happened last night, my emotions would probably be scrambled for life. I was sure Avis was grateful too. Everybody, in fact. We all needed a day to calm down and get our wits about us before facing real life.
Except Hoshi didn’t have that luxury. What was happening with her? Her poor mother got the worst of it, and Hoshi was probably still picking up the pieces.
I dialed Nony. “Have you heard from Hoshi? How’s her mother doing?”
A big sigh greeted my inquiry. “God in heaven, have mercy. The Word says the bruised reed will not be broken, nor the dimly burning wick extinguished . . .”
I waited. Sometimes it was hard to tell whether Nony was talking or praying. “What?”
She sighed again. “I went over to the hotel today. Mr. Takahashi insisted that they were leaving immediately. He was too polite to raise his voice in my presence, but he spoke sternly to Hoshi in Japanese, and when she shook her head, he stalked out of the room.”
“What?”
“I’m getting there, Jodi! When her mother went to the bathroom, Hoshi told me her father said, ‘This is what happens when a disobedient daughter turns her back on her parents and her religion.’ ”
“Oh no.” I groaned. “He can’t blame Hoshi! I mean, good grief!
They’ve got crime in Japan, don’t they?”
“They’re upset, Jodi. Her father wanted her to go home with them.Today. Hoshi said no . . . she wants to finish her education.”
“Are they paying her tuition? Could they—?”
“No. She has a full scholarship. But in Japanese culture, defying your parents’ wishes is a very serious thing.”
I felt heartsick for Hoshi—but part of me sympathized with her parents. How would I feel if Josh jettisoned his Christian upbringing for Shintoism? I’d freak out too. I managed to ask, “So where is Hoshi now?”
“She went to the airport with them by cab. I told her to come back to my house afterward. She really shouldn’t be alone right now, poor thing.”
I hardly knew what to think after I hung up the phone. What a mess.
DENNY DECIDED TO RUN OFF some of his pent-up emotions with a good jog by the lake. With everyone else gone, Willie Wonka followed me from room to room, standing in the way when I tried to move around the kitchen, lying on my feet if I sat down. He was getting on my nerves. Once I yelled at him to leave me alone—a lot of good that did, since he couldn’t hear—but he looked at me reproachfully.
I relented. “Come he
re, guy,” I said, plopping into a chair in the dining room and inviting him closer. Willie Wonka immediately stuck his face in my lap.Humph. Give a dog an inch, and he’ll take a whole city block. I took his sweet doggy face in my hands. “You’re still upset by what happened last night, aren’t you? Well, so am I.”
It was true. I felt so . . . violated. Like being strip-searched in a crowded room. A stranger had pushed her way into my home and threatened my family, my friends. I shuddered at what could have happened.
Willie looked hopefully into my eyes. So patient. As if waiting for me to say, It’s okay, don’t worry, everything’s going to be all right. Why were dogs so trusting? Didn’t they know we humans usually didn’t have a clue? Unlike us, dogs seemed to love with no strings attached.
I stroked Willie’s silky brown ears, my thoughts tumbling. Why was it so hard to trust God when things didn’t go right? Surely God had a clue. I mean, He’s God! That’s His job description! I knew God loved me—and all of us in that room last night. So couldn’t I stop stewing about it and trust God to work it out?
Okay. I was going to stop stewing and start sewing. “That’s it, Willie.” I got up abruptly, ending our little tête-à-tête. I had a sewing project to finish and research still to do on my Welcome Bulletin Board idea. The computer was free; maybe I’d do that first while everybody else was out.
While I was waiting for the computer to boot up, my own thoughts came around again. God loves all of us who were in that room last night. Even—
Whoa. Even Becky Wallace?
I WORKED FOR A WHILE ON THE COMPUTER, using a search engine to chase down the meanings of the names of the students who would be in my class. D’Angelo was easy: “from the angels.” So was Jade (“jewel”) and Cornell (“hornblower”). But I was excited to not only find Ramón (“mighty protector”) and Chanté (“to sing”), but also LeTisha (“joy”) and Kaya (“wise child”).
Hmm. So LeTisha meant “joy.” This was going to be interesting. Last year’s LeTisha had been anything but. I was starting to get excited. How would the children react to learning the meaning of their names?