This was it.
Now or never.
My hands shook as I kicked off and forward, slowly now, like the weight of all the rules I was breaking had wrapped around me, giant rubber bands pulling me back. It was claustrophobic, riding down that narrow little sidewalk on the overpass with cars blowing past beside me. A lousy little cement railing on my other side was the only thing between me and the scream of the highway below.
And then I was on the other side, and farther away from home than I’d ever been on my own.
It took me another fifteen minutes to get to the cemetery, nestled into its forest of trees and clipped grass that didn’t seem to know how to grow dandelions. It was like another world there, all the chatter and roar of the town fading away into a deep, deep quiet, the kind that wove its way into every leaf and blade of grass.
I rode all the way to the edge of the woods, to the place where I’d met Ray and Clara back at the beginning of the school year—not even pausing to say hello to ROBERT FITZGERALD, BELOVED HUSBAND AND FATHER—and then propped my scooter against a tree and stepped inside. Leaves crunched under my feet, loud in the cemetery hush. It was still way colder than a Carolina October had any right to be, and even colder in the shade of the forest. I huddled into my hoodie, wishing I’d brought something heavier.
How far in did these woods go? How far was it to get to Ray’s neighborhood? I’d looked at the map enough to know that Maplewood Cemetery was in the middle of the city, folded into the straight streets and grand old houses that hugged the Duke campus.
Still, out here between these trees, I could’ve been the last person on the whole earth.
I followed the trail for a few minutes, my ears straining for the sounds of cars, people talking, anything besides the chatty robins that hopped through the forest and scolded me when I came too close.
Finally, after I’d walked long enough to feel sweaty and nervous, the trees thinned. I stumbled out onto a narrow, quiet street with no sidewalks and just a couple of small, old houses clustered together. I’d tried to look Ray’s address up online that morning while Mama was in the shower, but the website I found wouldn’t give me his information without a credit card.
Which one of these houses was his?
I walked along the ditch that ran in front of the row of houses, trying to be like a detective on one of those mystery TV shows. Ray wouldn’t live in the house with the little pink bike in the front—he didn’t have any kids. He wouldn’t live in the one that had two cars in the driveway and a sign on the front lawn advertising that a landscaping service kept the yard up, either. And he wouldn’t live in the one with empty windows and a For Sale sign by the mailbox.
That left two others, both squat brick houses with painted shutters and weedy lawns.
I walked slowly past the first one. I could knock on both doors, but what if somebody asked me where my parents were or why I wasn’t in school?
I thought of Daddy, flipping the two-headed quarter over and over in his fingers. It always pays to carry your own luck, Al.
That quarter was gone. But today, I had to figure out a way to make luck—for Ray, not just for me.
I was halfway between the two houses when I heard a sound that made me freeze.
Barking.
It was coming from the last house on the street, the one with green shutters and a crookedy mailbox that looked like it had been rear-ended at least once in its lifetime. It was faint, but I could still hear it—barking. From somewhere inside.
Clara.
I ran up the long driveway and pounded my fist on the door. The barking got louder and more frantic, until I was pretty sure the dog was right on the other side of the door, but nobody came to open it.
“Clara?” I called. “Is that you, girl?” The dog barked even harder. She sounded more than just excited to have somebody knocking—she sounded like she was trying to tell me something.
Where was Ray? He may have been avoiding Queenie, but why would he ignore me?
The feeling of wrongness I’d been trying to shake all week grew even stronger.
“Hang on,” I shouted, hoping hard that dogs really were just as smart as Dr. Hsu had always said they were. “Good girl! I’m coming!”
I tried the doorknob, but it was locked. I could hear Clara pawing at the other side of the door, her nails scratching like she was trying so hard to get to me.
I took a few steps back, scanning the house and yard. The grass was long; I figured Ray probably couldn’t mow much on account of his arthur. A tall wooden fence separated the front yard from the back.
I thought about all the times I’d slept over at Monica’s house. With all those pets, Mrs. Hsu usually left the back door unlocked, so that if they needed to get up to take a dog out during the night, they didn’t have to mess with the locks.
Besides, I figure any burglar who’s willing to climb an eight-foot fence isn’t going to be stopped by a little dead bolt, she always said.
I stepped back toward the door. “Hang on, Clara,” I called. “I’m going to try something else, ’kay?”
Clara barked back.
I ran around the side of the house to the wooden gate. It was locked from the other side, but I pulled a broken wheelbarrow that was lying by the side of the house over and turned it upside down, like a funky step stool. I climbed on the wheelbarrow and breathed in deep, thinking of the summer when I was nine. Me and Monica and Meredith had spent all of June making obstacle courses in Meredith’s backyard, pretending we were on American Ninja Warrior, until Meredith fell off the rope ladder we’d made ourselves and broke her wrist and her mom made us take down the whole obstacle course.
I’d climbed and jumped over way harder things that summer than one wooden gate.
I’m coming, Clara, I thought, and grabbed the top of the gate and pulled myself over.
It was a long drop to the ground on the other side. I landed hard, the shock traveling through my feet and all the way up to my hips, but I hardly even noticed the pain. I went right to Ray’s back door and jiggled the knob.
It opened under my fingers, the door swinging into the house in one try.
I stood in a small room with a couch and an old-fashioned TV set on an end table. It was dark and cold inside—almost as cold as it was outside. “Hello?” I called. “Ray? Clara?”
There was the sound of nails scrabbling on wood and then Clara rocketed into the room. She was barking louder and harder than I’d ever heard her, darting back and forth in front of me like she couldn’t settle down.
I dropped to my knees. “Shh, girl, shh,” I whispered, looking right into her warm-honey eyes. They were deep enough to fall right into, like they held all the secrets of the whole world. Clara looked steadily back, silent now, though her whole body was quivering and her ears were up. “What’s the matter, girl?”
Clara barked again—one sharp, short bark—and turned and padded back out of the room.
I followed her down a little hallway, toward a kitchen with a humming refrigerator. The smell hit me as soon as I got close enough: a putrid, foul stench laced through with the scent of metal and sweat. I slapped a hand over my nose and tried not to gag.
Ray lay on the kitchen floor, his skin sheet-white, groaning and clutching his leg.
39.
His leg was bent in a way it shouldn’t be, and his raggedy jeans were stained with something dark. Blood. Clara burst into a frenzy of barking and barreled into the kitchen, licking at Ray’s face and hands and any part of him she could reach, nudging him with her nose.
But I couldn’t make myself unfreeze. I just stood there, watching as Clara yapped and yapped and Ray tried weakly to calm her down, my thoughts crystallized into one big NO NO NO NO NO NO NO—
It was like every nightmare I’d had since the summer was coming true all over again, like every time I’d closed my eyes and seen Daddy lying motionless on that stretcher was repeating here in real time.
The whole world around me forgot
how to work. The refrigerator stopped humming. The room faded out.
And then Ray moaned again. And just like that, I could move again, too.
I dropped to my knees beside him, trying to think what a person in a movie would do. I pushed my shaking hands together, wishing that Daddy’s lucky quarter was sitting warm in my pocket the way it had been since summer began.
Clara licked at Ray’s face.
“Good . . . girl,” he said, his voice brittle and thin.
“Ray? Are you . . . are you okay?” I tried not to look down at his messed-up leg, and all the other things that showed just how dumb my question was.
Ray blinked and turned his head toward me, slow as tree sap. “Annie Lee?”
“It’s me,” I said, my own voice barely a whisper. “You were missing. All week long. I didn’t know what had happened, so I came here.”
Ray’s eyes drifted closed. I reached out and grabbed his hand—anything to keep him there with me, to keep him from going wherever it was Daddy had gone in June. His skin was made of flame and coal, so hot and dry it was almost painful to touch. When he breathed in and out, the sound was one long rattle.
“Stay with me,” I said.
Right then, my phone buzzed in my pocket. It was so unexpected, so shocking in the middle of Ray’s dark, cold house, it made me jump.
“Annie Lee?” Mama asked, her voice angry and frantic, as soon as I said hello. “I just got an auto-call from the school saying you didn’t show up to your first class. Where are you? Why aren’t you at school?”
“I need your help,” I said, and on help my throat cracked open and the tears came. “I need you to come get me.”
“What’s going on?”
I breathed short and hard, trying to stop the sobs, but it didn’t do any good at all. “I’m in a neighborhood on the other side of Maplewood Cemetery. The street is called Matilda Road. It’s a brick house with green shutters on the end of the street.”
“What?” In the background, I heard something thump to the ground. What had Mama dropped? Some client’s expensive vacuum? A spray bottle filled with all-purpose cleaner? “You better tell me what’s going on, young lady.”
“I’ll explain everything,” I said, hoping she could understand me through the crying, ’cause I could hardly understand my own self. “Just come get me, okay? And you need to call an ambulance, too. I’ve got a friend here and he’s hurt real bad, and sick, too. He needs to get to the hospital quick. I’ll explain everything once you get here.”
There was a long pause on the other end of the phone, but then Mama said, “Okay.”
“My mama will take care of it all,” I told Ray as I hung up, though I couldn’t tell if he heard anything I’d said. He was awake but seemed confused, like he wasn’t quite sure what was going on around him. “She’s coming, and the paramedics, too. You just have to stay with me until then, okay, Ray? Just stay with me.”
I squeezed his hand. Weak as a whisper, he squeezed back.
“They’ll take good care of you at the hospital,” I said. My eyes were wet, tears clumping in my eyelashes and running down my face, so that it looked like I was seeing everything through a rainstorm. “You’ll see. Just concentrate on me and Clara.”
“I’ll . . . try . . . ,” Ray said.
I sat there, holding his hand and talking about anything I could think of until I started to feel hoarse. I told him about going to Brightleaf the last few days, about how on Monday I’d played the big piano and somebody had clapped for me. I didn’t dare stop talking.
I talked and talked and talked, until finally, finally, Clara started barking again and a minute later I heard somebody pounding on the front door.
“Annie Lee? Annie Lee?”
“Here! We’re here!” I yelled back, and Clara barked even harder. “Just a minute,” I said to Ray, and let go of his hand so that I could race to the front door and unlock it.
Mama stood on the doorstep with somebody so unexpected that I had to blink three times to recognize her. Her black salon apron was gone, but her smart black slacks and silky burnt-orange shirt couldn’t have seemed more out of place in Ray’s run-down old house.
I sniffled hard, shocked right out of my tears. “Miss Queenie?”
Queenie nodded, a little half smile on her face.
“You know her, too?” Mama asked sternly. I nodded.
“Couldn’t hardly sleep last night,” Queenie said. “Thinking about Ray, how he’d disappeared without telling either of us. The more I thought on it, the less sense it made. I rescheduled my morning appointments so I could come over. I was just getting out of my car when I met up with your mama.”
Right then an ambulance pulled into Ray’s driveway, sirens wailing. Two people hopped out—a black man and a white woman, both in navy scrubs, with a stretcher between them and identical confused looks on their faces.
The man cleared his throat. “Excuse me, miss. Are you the one who’s hurt?”
I shook my head and led the whole group into the house, where Ray lay unmoving on the kitchen floor.
“Oh my Lord,” Queenie whispered, hand on her bosom.
Mama’s fingers were claws on my shoulder. “Annie Lee. Who. Is. This?”
“His name is Ray Owens.”
As I spoke, the paramedics set down the stretcher and crouched beside Ray, taking his pulse and feeling his leg until he made the most miserable agonized moan I’d ever heard.
“Broken,” the girl paramedic murmured. “Open fracture. Maybe a tib-fib. Going to need surgery.”
“Breath sounds are severely decreased,” the other paramedic said back. “Could be pneumonia.” He cleared his throat and looked up at me. “Do you know how long he’s been here?”
I shook my head, wishing I could rub my missing quarter and blink the whole thing away, go back to it being me and Ray in the sun from the skylight at Brightleaf, music pouring out of him like waves in the ocean.
“Maybe a couple days. I don’t know.” I bit my lip. “He has arthritis. I don’t know if that makes a difference.”
“It does,” said the girl paramedic, and she smiled at me. I felt the tiniest bit of my heart loosen up, like one of the strings tied around it had been cut. “Thanks, hon. It’s a good thing you found him. He’s going to be okay, but we need to get him to the hospital ASAP.”
“Thanks,” I whispered.
Clara whined and came over to rub her head against my leg as the paramedics lifted Ray onto the stretcher and then picked it up. He moaned as they moved him, his leg crooked and wrong, blood soaked through his pants and crusted in layers of brown and red, old and new.
In silence, Mama and Queenie and I followed them out of the house. Clara walked with us, her ears tipped forward and her eyes never leaving Ray’s stretcher.
“It’s a good thing you came by,” the guy paramedic said as they loaded Ray into the back of the ambulance. “Sometimes things like this happen when old folks live by themselves—they get injured, can’t get help. They don’t always get found in time.”
That settled into my stomach like a rock.
“Y’all aren’t his next of kin?” the paramedic asked as his partner jumped into the ambulance and pulled the doors closed behind her.
Mama shook her head. “No, sir. I’ve never seen him before today.”
“He doesn’t have any family close by, but we’re his friends,” said Queenie. I tried not to notice how Mama’s whole face tightened up at that we.
The paramedic nodded, meeting my eyes steadily. “They’re probably not gonna let you in to see him right away at the hospital, but if y’all give me your names, I’ll make sure that they know you’re his contacts.”
“I don’t think I’m comfortable with that,” Mama said.
“Mama, please—”
“I’m sorry, Annie Lee. I don’t have a clue who this man is, or what you’ve been doing with him. I appreciate that he’s in bad shape, but I’d rather you stay away from him from now on.”
She was wringing her hands over and over, scrubbing them together the way she washed clothes in the sink. I felt the tears welling up in my eyes again, sliding down my cheeks.
“If it helps, Miz Fitzgerald, I can vouch for Ray,” said Queenie quietly. “He’s a real gentleman. One of the kindest souls I’ve ever met. I think your Annie Lee has done him a lot of good, too. He’s been awful lonely since his wife died about eight years ago.”
Mama’s nose was flared a little, like a skittish horse. “I’ll think about letting Annie Lee visit sometime. But I’m still not comfortable putting our names down as contacts.”
“That’s just fine,” said Queenie, her voice calm and smooth, even though I could see the sadness and hurt in her eyes plain as day. She turned back to the man paramedic. “Thank you, sir. My name’s Queenie Banks. I run a hair salon in Brightleaf Square.”
If I hadn’t been looking in Mama’s direction I never would’ve seen it, the tiniest raise of the eyebrows and drop of the mouth when Queenie mentioned what she did for work. Queenie didn’t notice. She was busy giving the paramedic her phone number, and Mr. Banks’s name and number too, just in case they couldn’t reach Queenie. The paramedic nodded and climbed up into the cab of the ambulance.
A minute later, the ambulance disappeared down Matilda Road.
40.
Thanks for coming,” I said to Mama and Queenie, staring at my shoes—still the same taped-up silver ones I’d been wearing since school started. They were getting tight around the toe, but I didn’t have the heart to tell Mama.
“I guess I had no need, after all,” said Queenie, a laugh in her voice. It was obvious she could feel the thick-as-butter tension between Mama and me but was too nice to say anything about it. “You’re a real brave girl, Annie Lee, honey. You probably saved Ray’s life.”
Clara barked at the mention of Ray’s name. I’d almost forgotten her sitting there patiently, I’d been so busy watching the ambulance leave and wondering if Mama would ever let me see Ray again.
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