The spit dried up in my mouth. I didn’t move. I remembered a scene I once saw in a movie, when someone ended up right in front of a poisonous snake. Move, and the snake would strike. Don’t move, same thing.
I don’t think Suki heard me. She didn’t look up. I stood as still as I could, barely breathing. In one part of my brain everything was whirling around. I didn’t know what to do. But in another part, things were clicking into place. All the little signs I’d noticed but not understood. All the pain in Suki’s face. All the nights she couldn’t sleep. All the days she slept too much.
The price of our staying with Clifton was Suki.
What he’d done to me was just a tiny piece of what he’d done to her.
Even with what happened right after, that moment, that knowing, was the very worst thing. This is it. The most awful part of my story:
Clifton hurt Suki for years.
Suki looked up and saw me. She grabbed the knife, quick and hard. I yelled, “SUKI!”
She plunged the knife down.
* * *
■ ■ ■
Snow, snow, snow. If it had ended worse, then that knife, Suki wielding it, would have been the worst thing, of course, but even so, that moment right there was the second-worst thing. It was and is and always will be amazingly snowing hard.
27
Blood splurted like it was coming out a nozzle. Suki stared at it, dazed. I lunged toward her. The knife clattered to the floor. I hollered, “FRANCINE!”
She ran in. “Oh, SNOWFLAKES!” she yelled. She grabbed a kitchen towel, smacked it against Suki’s wrist, and held on tight. “Della,” she said, “Call 911.” So it was me that made the phone call.
* * *
■ ■ ■
The ambulance people wrapped tighter bandages around Francine’s towel. They strapped Suki into a stretcher and heaved her into an ambulance. Then they told Francine there was only room for one of us to ride along.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Francine said. “We’re both going. Della, climb in.”
Suki hadn’t said a single word. She still didn’t. On one side of her stretcher the EMT did stuff to her wrist, trying to get it to stop bleeding. I knelt on the other side, my head against her chest.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” I sobbed.
Suki didn’t move. But she was still breathing. She didn’t die.
* * *
■ ■ ■
She didn’t die in the ambulance and she didn’t die in the hospital.
Suki didn’t die even though she’d slashed an artery. Francine said she’d had amazingly bad luck, slicing it open so wide, but I thought she just had really good aim. They had to take her into surgery to fix it, cut her arm open a little more so they could put stitches in or something, who knows, I’d quit listening by then. I stopped listening right around the time the doctor said “She’s going to be okay.” My ears quit working and my hands went numb and I swear I might have fallen down except that the doctor put her arms around me, right there in the waiting room, and held me up. She talked and talked. It was a good thing Francine was there to listen, ’cause I couldn’t.
Hours later they let us see her. She was in bed in a room by herself, her head propped up on pillows, asleep. Her left arm was all wrapped in bandages. Her right arm had an IV line with medicine dripping into it.
“She’s pretty sedated,” the nurse said. “Don’t expect much.”
I sat down on the edge of the bed and stared at her until she opened her eyes.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
“I’m sorry too,” I said. “I’m so sorry.” I leaned against her. “Please don’t leave.”
“I don’t want to,” she said. “I really don’t.” A pause while her eyelids fluttered shut. She opened them again, and reached for my hand. “I just wanted things to stop hurting. Just for one minute. I just couldn’t—but as soon as I did it I wished I hadn’t. I wanted to take it back.”
“If I hadn’t woke up—”
“I would have yelled,” she said. “I think I would have called for help. I hope so.”
“Does it hurt?”
“My wrist hurts.” Suki closed her eyes. “My brain hurts. Everything. Hurts so much.” By the end her words were slurring.
“Don’t leave me,” I said again, though I don’t think she could hear.
A different doctor came in and started talking to Francine about how, now that they’d fixed Suki’s arm, they needed to treat the stuff going wrong in her brain that made her want to hurt herself like that.
I knew what had gone wrong. “Clifton,” I said. Also Mama. Also me.
My fault, said a voice inside my head. A horrible voice. Persistent. My fault. Myfaultmyfaultmyfault.
If I’d been nicer, or hadn’t gone to Nevaeh’s. If I’d realized what Clifton was doing. Or if I’d let him do it to—
No. Not that.
If I could have kept Suki safe. The way she kept me.
“I’ve been trying and trying to get her help,” Francine said. “I’ve begged the state for mental health care. Snow.”
The doctor looked sympathetic. “We’ll take care of her now.”
“And her sister,” Francine said. “They’d better agree to some therapy. Kids don’t come through what they did without damage. Jeez, you’d think we’d know better by now.”
The doctor said they were going to move Suki to a different hospital, a psychiatric hospital, which was for people whose brains weren’t working right.
“A psychotic hospital?” My voice shook. “She had a psychotic break?” Like Mama. She’d disappear like Mama.
The doctor looked at me. “Psychiatric,” she said. “Different word. People who are psychotic have lost touch with reality. That’s not your sister. Psychiatric hospitals treat all sorts of mental disorders.”
“Suki doesn’t have a mental disorder,” I said.
Francine put her hands on my shoulders. “Remember when you thought I was calling you crazy?” she said. “When I was asking your caseworker to get you help? When bad things happen to people, it can mess with their heads. It’s not your fault, or Suki’s.”
“Your sister needs help,” the doctor said. “She’ll stay in the hospital for a week or two, and then she’ll probably have outpatient therapy. We’ll take good care of her.”
Francine got out her phone. “I’ll get one of my friends to give us a ride home.”
“Hang on,” I said. I took Francine’s phone and dialed Teena’s number.
* * *
■ ■ ■
We waited in the hallway outside Suki’s room. I’d told Teena the room number. Normally it would take at least twenty minutes to drive from Teena’s house to the hospital on the far side of town, but Teena and her mom got to us fast.
I couldn’t help it. The moment I saw Teena, I started to bawl. Teena put her arms around me and rocked me back and forth. “Shh, shh,” Teena said. “Shh, shh.”
Teena’s mom and Francine looked each other over. “She needed help,” Teena’s mom said, in an I-don’t-know-what-was-wrong-with-you tone. “What Teena told me, she should have been getting all kinds of help. It shouldn’t have come to this.”
“I agree.” Francine ran her hand through her hair. “I been asking for mental health evaluations for weeks,” she said. “The state wouldn’t pay attention.” She sighed. “Even I didn’t think she was this bad, and I know all the warning signs. But also, I should have guessed sooner what that snowman did to her.”
“You knew?” I shouted. I jumped forward, ready to punch her. Teena held me back.
“Not until tonight,” Francine said. “Even then—I’m guessing. But I’m right, aren’t I? You think so too? That man—he did terrible things to her. For years, probably.”
I swallowed. Nodded. Tears dripped off my chin.
> Suki was so afraid of Clifton. She hated him so much, even when she pretended as hard as she could that nothing was wrong.
Years.
I’d had sixty seconds of terror. Suki had had years.
Teena’s fingers dug into my shoulders. She said, “It’s true. I asked her—right before the police came. She didn’t say anything, but the way she looked at me I knew the answer.”
Teena knew, and Teena’s mom knew. “That’s why she didn’t want to be around you,” I said. “That’s why she didn’t want me around you, either.” It wasn’t that Teena couldn’t keep a secret. It’s that she shouldn’t keep this one. Probably wouldn’t keep this one.
And Suki didn’t want anyone to know.
Including me.
Especially me.
Even though she was so lost she stabbed herself with a knife.
Even though she was hurting so bad, she’d do anything to try and stop it.
I understood. It kind of made sense, even though—no. Suki was in a hospital. Suki nearly died. I didn’t understand it at all.
For a moment my whole mind blanked out, white and calm and full of nothingness. I took a deep breath. That was easier, but it wasn’t real. I shook my head, and the world came back into view.
“We thought she’d told the police,” Teena’s mom was saying. “That night. We figured she had to. We thought everybody knew the whole story.”
Francine shook her head. “Only the part caught in the photograph. That’s all they reported.”
I said, “Only the part about me.”
Teena went into the room to see Suki.
Teena’s mom said, “At least now she’ll get the help she needs.”
“She should have gotten help before this,” I said.
“Yep,” Francine said. “Someone should have helped both of you. Someone should have paid attention, long time ago.”
* * *
■ ■ ■
Teena’s mom drove us home. Francine sat up front. I sat in the back with Teena. She put her arm around me just like Suki would have. “Thank you for calling me this morning,” she whispered. “Keep calling, okay? Let me know how she’s doing. You too.”
“It was my fault,” I whispered. “She got really mad at me. Last night. She said she had to do everything for me.”
Teena pulled me closer. “It wasn’t your fault.”
“She always had to take care of me.”
“Still wasn’t your fault.”
I felt like it was. When Clifton came after me, Suki’d moved fast to save me. No one had jumped in to save Suki. Including me.
28
At home Francine told me not to step into the kitchen. She said I should go straight to bed. It was daylight. Morning. We’d been up most of the night. Francine said, “Wait. You want some cocoa or something?”
Francine looked more like a pug dog than ever. She was still wearing the flannel pants she slept in, and an old baggy sweatshirt. Her face was all lined and her hair uncombed. It looked almost as ratty as mine on a bad day.
“Why the snow would I want cocoa?”
She shrugged. “Isn’t that supposed to be—I don’t know—comforting? Or something. Seems like something someone would do. Cocoa.”
I thought of how the kitchen would be all over spattered with Suki’s blood. The knife still somewhere on the floor. I thought of walking into that kitchen and heating up a mug of cocoa. Of all things.
I started to laugh.
So did Francine.
“We’re way beyond cocoa, aren’t we?” she said.
I nodded. My laughs started turning into tears. Francine waved me down the hall, and I climbed up into the top bunk and pressed my face into Suki’s pillow. I didn’t fall asleep for a long, long time.
* * *
■ ■ ■
When I woke up it was past lunchtime. Saturday. I was alone. I mean, Francine was there, but not Suki.
Even when I spent the night at Nevaeh’s, I knew exactly where Suki was: Food City, then Francine’s. Now she was somewhere I couldn’t picture at all. She could have been on Mars, for all I knew. Memphis. Kansas, with Mama.
Francine called the psychiatric hospital. They said Suki was admitted and safe, but they wouldn’t let either of us talk to her. They said they’d started a treatment plan. They said we could come get her in a few days, or maybe a week, or maybe longer. They’d let us know.
Francine and I sat on the couch side by side. Neither of us did anything. Francine had already cleaned up the kitchen. I’d checked. The knife was back in its drawer.
Eventually Francine said, “Want to take a walk?”
“To where?” I said.
Francine shrugged. “It’s a pretty fall day.”
It was, sure, but I’d never walked just to walk before. But whatever. I put on my shoes.
First Francine drove us, in her car, to a parking lot a few minutes away. I thought we could have just started walking without getting in the car, but then we got out and there was a path, not a road but also not a sidewalk, just dirt beat down firm beside a stream. Trees grew on hills along both sides. Their leaves were all different colors, red and gold and brown, and the air smelled like toast. “See?” Francine said as we walked down the path. “It’s a park. It’s nice.”
“I suppose. Where we headed?”
“Just along here,” she said. “When you’ve had about half of enough, let me know. We’ll turn around and go back.”
“Really? That’s how this works?”
“Yep,” she said.
Some people passed us because they were walking faster than us. Other people passed us from the other direction. Some of them had dogs on leashes sniffing the dirt. It was a lot of people doing something I never knew people did.
“Are there any wolves around here?” I asked. I saw a dog that looked like one.
“In this park or in Tennessee?”
“Anywhere around here.” We were real close to Virginia.
Francine blew out her breath. “There’s some at Bays’ Mountain, I think. Used to be. That’s a park over by Kings-port.”
“How far away is it?”
“Thirty minutes or so. By car.”
I thought about that. “Can we go there sometime?”
“If you want to,” Francine said. After a while she added, “The wolves are in cages. It’s a wolf exhibit. Like at a zoo.”
I made a face. “Oh.” I didn’t want to see wolves in cages. They’d remind me too much of Suki. “I want to see wild wolves.”
Francine said, “I think you’d have to go out west to do that.”
“Nashville?”
“Montana.”
Huh. We’d learned about the fifty states in third grade, but I couldn’t remember one single thing about Montana. You’d think I’d remember if they told me Montana had wolves.
I said, “Can we go to Montana?”
“Probably not.” Francine didn’t sound sorry. “In the summer, though, we’ll take a trip to the beach. I go for a week every year.”
“Where’s the beach?” I knew what a beach was.
“Usually Myrtle. South Carolina. Lots of hotels. Lots of people, lots of restaurants and mini-golf and stuff going on. Ice cream. You’ll like it. You ever seen the ocean?”
I shook my head.
Francine said, “It’s real nice. I look forward to that week all year.”
Francine knew I had started swimming at the Y. Every school night she reminded me to put my swimsuit in the dryer so it was always dry enough to go back in my backpack the next day.
“I’ll get you a new swimsuit, before our beach trip,” she said now. “Nothing wrong with the one the Y gave you, but it’ll be pretty worn out by then. They stock swimsuits at Walmart in the spring.”
“Suki’ll need o
ne too,” I said.
“We’ll get one for Suki,” said Francine.
It was strange, because we were talking about everything but Suki hurting herself, when I could hardly think of anything else. The trees and the walk and the idea of a beach were all distracting, nice, but my brain stayed on Suki. Mostly, on Suki with the knife. And Suki yelling. Do I always have to take care of you?
And Suki keeping me safe from Clifton. And no one keeping Suki safe at all.
“Can we turn around now?” I asked. “Can we go home?”
“Sure,” said Francine.
* * *
■ ■ ■
Next day—Sunday—we went to Food City. Had to. We were out of stuff to eat. Francine had already called and told them Suki wouldn’t be in to work that week. She told them that Suki was in the hospital but not that she was in a special hospital for people whose brains were malfunctioning because they’d been hurt so bad they tried to hurt themselves. “It’s her story,” Francine said, when I asked her why not. “She can tell it however she wants.”
I supposed.
Food City wasn’t fun on a Sunday. Somebody other than Maybelline was working the deli counter. I couldn’t ask a stranger for a free cookie when I knew I was really too old. I didn’t see Tony, either. We just bought groceries. We didn’t get Suki’s employee discount. I didn’t get to choose a treat.
“What if they fire her?” I asked as we walked out.
“They might,” Francine said. “If they do she can find another job. There’s plenty of places hiring.” She sighed. “Or, you know, she could just not work for a while.”
“She has to work. She’s got to save up.”
“She doesn’t, not really. She could stay in care. You both could.”
Fighting Words Page 11