by Alana Terry
Jodie grimaced, as if the sound of Kennedy’s voice hurt her ears. She held her finger up for silence. Kennedy waited. Was she getting worse?
Kennedy walked over to the toilet and put her hand on Jodie’s shoulder. Jodie sucked in her breath at the touch.
“What’s wrong?” Kennedy had a hard time keeping the panic out of her voice. She looked down. The water in the toilet bowl was dark red. For the second time in the past ten minutes, Kennedy regretted eating such a greasy meal.
Jodie whimpered when Kennedy tried to help her to her feet.
Kennedy let go. “Vinny says you need to come out.” How could she get Jodie up?
“I can’t,” Jodie squeaked.
Kennedy felt dizzy. This is just like school, she told herself. It’s like studying for a math test when you have over a hundred pages of reading, a paper, and a lab all due the next day. Panic was a luxury she simply couldn’t afford. She had to assess the problem, figure out what needed to be done, and take care of everything so her world kept on spinning. That’s all this was. Just like school. The setting was different, the teachers more cruel, and the stakes were measured in human lives instead of grade point averages, but the route to success was exactly the same.
“Can you tell me what’s wrong? Where do you hurt?”
Jodie put her hand on her stomach. Kennedy did the same and felt it tighten up like a concrete ball drying in fast-motion. Jodie grimaced and shut her eyes again.
“It’s going to be all right.” Kennedy forced herself to smile even though Jodie wasn’t looking at her and wouldn’t have noticed. “I’m going to get you a new pad, and then I’m going to help you get back to the couch.”
“Get out,” Vinny declared, and Kennedy only had enough time to position herself between the toilet and the door before he barged in.
“She’s not ready!” Kennedy spread out her arms, as if that would give Jodie an extra measure of privacy.
“I said time’s up,” Vinny snarled.
Kennedy didn’t want to move. She wanted to stay there as at least a partial shield blocking Vinny’s view, but she couldn’t help Jodie from where she was. Please, God. Can’t you just make him go away?
Kennedy had lost count of how many prayers God had failed to answer so far today. Blinking back tears of angry frustration, she walked toward the wall and pulled out a new pad from the package in the corner. Jodie’s eyes were still closed, and Kennedy wondered if she realized Vinny was in there with them at all.
“Come on,” Kennedy urged. “We need to get you up.”
Jodie was taking short, shallow breaths. Tiny pearls of sweat beaded on her brow.
“What’s her problem?” Vinny demanded, and Kennedy imagined how rewarding it would be to watch him get shot point-blank like in the movies. She was surprised by the heat of her hatred. Had she grown so vengeful she could actually wish him dead?
Yes, she could.
“I think she might be …” Kennedy lowered her voice to keep Jodie from overhearing, even though she doubted Jodie was paying attention to anything. “I think she might be miscarrying.”
Vinny shrugged. “Good.”
Didn’t he understand? Didn’t he realize? There was no way Kennedy could deal with a medical crisis of this magnitude. Anger boiled up in her gut like the contents of a pressure steamer. “No, that’s not good. This little girl is five months pregnant, and she’s hemorrhaging in this filthy bathroom.”
“She’s not hemorrhaging,” Vinny remarked, and Kennedy wondered if he knew the meaning of the word.
As if on cue, Jodie let out a little groan, and Kennedy heard something plop into the toilet.
Vinny snapped his head back to Kennedy, his nose wrinkled up, his eyes darting from her to the bowl. “What was that?”
“I think it might have been a blood clot.” She braced her queasy stomach and peeked down to confirm her suspicions.
Jodie was ashen. She gripped her midsection. Kennedy reached out to tell her to try to relax when Jodie shifted her position slightly.
“You need to get her to a hospital. Now.” Kennedy stood as tall as she could, even though her leg muscles quivered and threatened to buckle right out from under her.
“But the baby’s dead, you say?”
Couldn’t he see Jodie was in trouble? Did he have no conscience, no sense of remorse or compassion? Kennedy had heard stories from the North Korean refugees in Yanji about horrifically evil people, but somehow in her mind she had compartmentalized those villains. They lived in dictatorships. They thrived in nations with godless, immoral laws and horrific records of human-rights abuses. Not in America. Not in big cities like Cambridge or Boston. And they didn’t prey on girls like Kennedy and Rose, girls from Harvard, girls from important families, girls from churched backgrounds.
She reached out and felt Jodie’s forehead. It was cool and clammy. Even her skin had a strange, sick-smelling odor that immediately reminded Kennedy of those horrible visits so long ago with her grandmother in the hospital. She brought her hand back and balled it into a fist, hoping Vinny couldn’t see how much she trembled.
“She’s losing way too much blood. She has to get medical treatment.”
“But the baby’s taken care of?” Vinny pressed. Was that all these monsters cared about? A dead fetus so Wayne Abernathy could continue his political career? Was murdering a child a reasonable price to avoid a scandal? And even if Vinny had no regard for the baby’s life, didn’t he care that Jodie could bleed to death in his disgusting, germ-infested bathroom?
“I don’t know.” Kennedy felt like throwing up her hands but kept them planted firmly at her sides. “I’m not a doctor.” Couldn’t he see how serious this was? The pointed sheath in her pocket jabbed into her leg. She envisioned herself wielding the knife, demanding Vinny to take Jodie to a hospital, but her mind answered back with a snapshot of their arsenal of weapons in various stages of assembly on the workbench. A move like that would be suicide. And if something happened to Kennedy, Jodie would lose the only advocate she had left.
“I don’t feel good.” Jodie reached her arm out and used Kennedy’s shoulder to hoist herself up a little. Kennedy tried to adjust her position to block the child from Vinny’s view. If he wasn’t going to help, couldn’t he grant them some privacy? Kennedy tried to think back to her physiology unit in AP Biology from high school. What were you supposed to do if someone was losing that much blood? She couldn’t think of any answer except get them to the emergency room as fast as possible.
Jodie raised herself up but stayed positioned over the toilet. There was too much blood. Too many clots. Even if she had been wearing pads, Kennedy guessed she would have soaked through several just in the past few minutes. For the first time, she was glad Vinny was still here. Couldn’t he see?
He wrinkled his nose. “You two will have to clean up the mess when this is over.” He turned to leave.
“I can’t …” Jodie’s face was the shade of chalk dust. Her eyelids fluttered. Her pupils rolled up until for a second only the whites showed. Her body swayed. The scene played before Kennedy like freeze-frame animation, displaying itself in millisecond shots one after another. Jodie reached toward Kennedy before she swayed off balance. Kennedy’s muscles weren’t ready to support her extra weight. They both dropped to the floor, and Kennedy’s knee took the brunt of both their falls.
“Are you all right? Sweetie, what’s wrong?”
Jodie’s head lay in her lap again, but it wasn’t anything like a little bit ago when they rested together on the couch. This time, Jodie’s eyes weren’t closed in the heavy slumber of the weary. She had passed out, the gravity of her condition written in the pallor of her sickly gray face. Kennedy stared at Jodie’s chest and counted five awful, spirit-draining seconds before it rose. She held the girl’s clammy wrist. Her weak, fluttering pulse reminded Kennedy of a dying butterfly’s last desperate attempt at flight.
In the silence that followed, Kennedy could hear Vinny swallow. “I�
��ll go call her uncle.”
CHAPTER 22
The next few minutes could have lasted an hour or more. When Vinny left the room, the unmistakable feeling of total isolation weighed down Kennedy’s whole body. What if Jodie died? How much blood could a person lose and still survive? She sucked in her breath at the sight of the puddle pooling around Jodie’s body and knew they were in need of a miracle.
She lay Jodie’s head flat on the ground, hoping to keep some of the blood going to her brain. Wasn’t there something about elevating the legs as well? Or would that cause more blood to flow out? She wasn’t sure. Her fingers never left Jodie’s wrist, and she fully expected that frantic flutter to cease any minute. How long could your heart keep up such an impossible pace? She knew the basics of CPR but had never taken a class. And was it different on an adult than it would be for a child?
A child. A child who should have never been pregnant in the first place. A child who should have never found herself a pawn in this dangerous political game, where her family members held no regard for her safety. What had her uncle been thinking? Even if it wasn’t the pills he prescribed that did this to Jodie, Kennedy would hold him guilty for it. All of it. No thirteen-year-old should be forced to endure a fraction of the trauma Jodie had suffered.
Kennedy thought about the articles from her dad’s pro-life magazines. She thought about all those testimonies, victims of rape who carried their babies to term and found room in their hearts to love and nurture them. Or the story Willow told her about the lady who died because she delayed cancer treatment that would have killed her child. Kennedy felt like the biggest hypocrite who had ever volunteered to work for a pregnancy center. She couldn’t find room in her heart to worry about the baby. She only had the energy and psychological fortitude to care about one thing right now, and one thing only — Jodie’s safety. If she ever saw Carl or Sandy again, the first thing she would do was resign her position at the center, insignificant as it was.
The seconds passed. The puddle of blood widened, seeping into Jodie’s shirt, creeping its way toward Kennedy’s shoes while she crouched on the floor. In eight years, Kennedy would have the medical skills necessary to handle situations far worse than this. She would know exactly what to do. She could save Jodie’s life. Maybe even the baby’s. But time wouldn’t hold still until she got her medical degree. This emergency was happening right now. Kennedy was just a first-year in college. An undergrad. She had never set foot in a med-school class. She had never completed a single rotation. She had no idea how to start an IV, how to stop a patient from hemorrhaging. She didn’t know how many chest compressions you were supposed to do during CPR. And she still didn’t really understand what she was doing here. Had God allowed her to be kidnapped just so she could care for Jodie? Why couldn’t he have kept them both safe in the first place?
Her body trembled violently, as if all those prayers the Lord left unanswered that day sat festering in her blood like a toxin. Her teeth chattered noisily, her breathing grew shallower. What would Vinny say if he came back to find Jodie and her both passed out on the floor? And what in the world was she supposed to do now? Even if she knew a way to help Jodie, even if she possessed the magic knowledge it would take to stop her bleeding or save the baby inside her, how could she execute any of those lofty plans when it felt like she was going to suffocate?
Kennedy gasped noisily in time with her shivers. The blood beneath Jodie widened with each passing minute. Kennedy had to fight the irrational fear that she would faint dead away if the puddle made it all the way to where she squatted. How many blood-borne pathogens were there, and what were the chances of someone as young as Jodie carrying one of them? Careful not to let her sleeves drip down, she swept her hand against Jodie’s forehead and had to watch her chest for the next ten breaths to assure herself the girl was still alive. She was so cold to the touch, it was almost as if Kennedy had reached out and encountered death’s forerunner seated on Jodie’s brow.
“She’s in here.”
Kennedy never expected Vinny’s voice to bring such a surge of relief. She tried to stand up but was too dizzy. How had she gotten so weak? Was it actually her blood pooling all around them, her life source draining out of her in a steady, unstoppable stream?
“What’d you do to her?”
Kennedy had never seen Jodie’s uncle before, but he had the same build, the same hairline, the same square jaw as his brother. He was taller than Vinny and skinnier, someone who might have passed for a male model if he were ten or fifteen years younger, or the kind of actor who would make middle-aged housewives swoon.
“What happened?”
Kennedy didn’t know if Anthony was talking to her or not. Either way, she didn’t have the strength to respond.
“We think she’s having a miscarriage.” Vinny’s voice lost a little bit of its brusque edge as he glanced up at Anthony Abernathy.
“So you got her to take the pills after all?” It was worded like a question but came out definitively like a statement.
“No, this happened before the pills.”
Kennedy wondered if Vinny was going to tell him about the fight, about how he fell on top of Jodie. She doubted it.
Anthony shrugged. “Well, it got taken care of one way or another.” He spoke casually, as if someone had made plans to take the subway but ended up hopping on a bus instead. “Now why’s she on the floor like that?”
“She’s hemorrhaging.” Kennedy’s voice came out steadier than she expected. “She needs to see a doctor.”
Jodie’s uncle frowned. “Unfortunately, I don’t think that’s possible. What can you do for her from here?”
I’ve already done everything I can think of, Kennedy wanted to scream. Which was basically nothing except for lowering Jodie’s head so the blood didn’t have to travel against gravity to get to her brain.
“She passed out from all the blood loss. She’s …”
“Yes, I hear that’s natural with miscarriages.” Was he even listening? Did he care? Or would he stand here and watch his niece bleed to death? “I’ll send Dustin out for some ibuprofen. That might help if she wakes up with cramps.”
“She’s not sleeping!” This time Kennedy did allow her voice to rise. “She passed out. She may or may not already be in shock.” A blanket. Why hadn’t Kennedy thought to cover her up with a blanket? It’s what the first responders always did in the suspense novels she read, at least.
Anthony frowned. If he gave her another shrug, it might invigorate her enough that she could summon all her strength and attack him with her bare hands.
“Look at the toilet.” Kennedy pointed. “Look how much blood she’s lost in there. That’s on top of all this.” She gestured to the floor. “And that’s just from the past ten minutes or so.”
Jodie’s uncle fingered his chin. “That’s a lot.” He said it thoughtfully, as if they were discussing a late commuter rail. “But a fetus that small should pass easily enough.” He scratched his chin again.
He still had no idea.
“Her baby is five months old. She’s over halfway through the pregnancy.” Kennedy’s voice was steady, but she felt like she was screaming at a small child who refused to accept common-sense reason.
At this point, Kennedy expected one of two things to occur. Anthony would either maintain his stoic demeanor and refuse his niece medical care, or he would spring into action and make rapid plans to get her the attention she needed.
He did neither.
His indifferent stare morphed almost instantaneously. The dull, apathetic eyes narrowed, boring hatred into his niece’s body. The muscles in his face and neck all seemed to flex at once, making some of the veins pop up underneath the smooth skin. The formerly calm, placid voice was now laced with disgust. “The lying little brat.”
His alteration occurred so dramatically, his words spewed out so vehemently that Kennedy nearly lost her balance. Still managing to maintain her squat, she stuck out both arms so she wouldn’t t
opple onto the dirty floor. She had no idea what brought about the sudden change, but she understood now why Jodie lied to him about the pregnancy.
Anthony stomped out of the bathroom, nearly plowing Vinny over on his way out. He stormed back in a few paces later. “Five months you said?”
Kennedy bit her lip. She wanted to believe Jodie was telling the truth about her relationship with Samir. Now she wasn’t so sure. Maybe the two kids really had been together. Had she just betrayed Jodie’s trust? Well, the uncle had to know at this point. He had to realize how serious this was.
Anthony kept pacing and lifted his eyes to the ceiling. A few seconds later, he punched the wall, exclaiming more loudly, “Five months!”
A tiny gurgle of a cough made them all fall silent and lean toward Jodie.
“Is she waking up?” Vinny asked.
They stared expectantly for several seconds, but there was no more movement. Kennedy kept her eyes on the girl’s chest, as if she could keep Jodie’s lungs functioning by sheer willpower.
“She needs a hospital,” Kennedy whispered.
“She doesn’t deserve it.” Anthony resumed pacing the length of the bathroom in two strides at a time, swinging his arms as he went. Vinny had to avoid him more than once. “To think of all that planning, the lengths I went to cover up for a deceitful little …”
So was he going to let her die, then? Is that how this was all going to end?
“Five months.” Anthony shook his head and muttered under his breath. “So she was with him that whole time. The sneaky, conniving, spoiled brat. Five months.”
Kennedy did her best to keep from getting in the way of his boots as he paced. For a minute, she imagined what would happen if he slipped in the puddle of blood. The whole scene played out like a bad Three Stooges sketch. Only there was no comedy in this drama.
“She lied to everyone.” Anthony slowed down and crossed his arms. “If she had told me the truth …” He glanced at Kennedy. For a moment, his eyes reflected a pained, tortured sadness. He shook his head, and the tenderness was replaced with calculating malice. “If she wasn’t family, I’d let her bleed to death right here.”