The Real Mother

by Judith Michael

  “Carrie, I really don’t believe he—” Sara bit her lip. She had to stop this; she couldn’t always be the one to throw cold water on their dreams. But then what? If she thought they were going to be hurt, wasn’t it her responsibility at the very least to warn them, and at the most to try to prevent the pain?

  How often? They’re not with me all the time, in a few years they’ll go to college, make their own lives; I can’t possibly prevent every hurt they’re going to have.

  But I’d be an awful mother if I didn’t try.

  “We don’t know what he meant,” she said a little lamely, seeing Carrie’s look harden.

  “He said he was working on my career. I know what he meant.”

  An elderly man came up to Doug and shook his hand. “You’re okay, young man. Nice work. You have a long way to go: concentrate on proportion and scale, and developing your own style; most of what you’re doing now is obviously derivative. You stick with it, though, and in a few years we could be hearing much more from you.”

  Doug was staring at him.

  “Are you an expert?” Carrie demanded.

  “Sort of,” he said, smiling. “I’m a professor of art at Truman College.”

  Everyone fell silent. “Stick with it,” the man said again, and smiled at them all before walking away.

  “He didn’t know what he was talking about,” said Carrie.

  “Proportion?” Doug asked. “Scale? Derivative? Mr. Albert never talked about those in class.”

  “I think those come a little later,” Sara said gently. “But it doesn’t change what you’ve accomplished here. Just enjoy tonight, Doug; don’t let anyone take it away from you.”

  “Yeah.” Doug sat up straight, then after a moment, slumped. “Abby didn’t come.”

  “She wanted to,” Carrie said. “But she’s sick.”

  “She wasn’t sick at dinner.”

  “She said she started feeling sick at dinner.”

  “Did she throw up?”

  “How do I know?”

  “If she didn’t throw up, she’s not sick.”

  “She could be! She could have…migraine or…sore throat or… gout.”

  “GOUT?”

  “It’s okay, Doug,” said Sara, smiling. “Abby won’t miss your show; she said she’d be here tomorrow or the next day.”

  “I know, but…” Doug’s earlier glee in his starring role was gone. That professor was probably right; he didn’t know anything about proportion and scale. He didn’t even know what derivative meant. But Mack and Frank said his pieces were terrific. Then why didn’t anybody buy anything? Nobody’d bought even one of his carvings. And, look, there weren’t many people left in the gallery. They were supposed to stay from six to eight, but it wasn’t even seven o’clock and most everybody had gone. And nobody was coming in. It was like everybody came, took a look, and that was that. Didn’t they want to look some more? People in museums stood for hours in front of sculptures and paintings, and talked about them, and made notes, and listened to experts explaining things, and sometimes art students came and made copies of them. Why didn’t anybody do that tonight? Didn’t anybody care?

  He hated them all. Especially that professor. They didn’t know anything. They were really boring and dumb.

  And this lousy tie made him feel like he was choking, and he just wanted to go home.

  “I’m glad Abby didn’t come,” he muttered. “It’s no fun here.”

  Sara kissed his forehead. “It’s a very fine show, Doug; we’re proud of you.”

  “She’s probably somewhere where it’s more fun.”

  “She’s sick,” said Carrie impatiently as Abby, miles away, thought, I feel sick. I feel awful.

  She’d lied to Sara, and to Doug and Carrie. (And it was Doug’s show tonight, and he wanted her there.) She had driven her car—against the law until next month, when she’d be sixteen, and certainly against Sara’s rules—and now sat in it, parked a block from a small neighborhood bar, waiting for Sean and his friends.

  “We’ll just be a few minutes,” he had said to her when they took their walk three nights before. They were eating chocolate sundaes and drinking lattes, and Sean was holding her hand, and Abby had not felt so happy as long as she could remember. “See, my little chonai, we’ve got to have money to send back home. The bastards are pounding the hell out of us—”

  “Bastards? Us?”

  “The wankers—Brit bastards—they’re knocking us around. Us, our friends, our guys, our side. It’s like a crisis; we’ve got to get them money, lots of it, they’re out of it until we do. And that’s what we promised when we came here, that they could count on us.”

  “Why do they need money?” Abby asked. “If they don’t have enough to eat, we could collect food and send it—”

  He gave a snort of contemptuous laughter, and her heart sank, knowing how stupid she must sound. He didn’t mean food; he meant guns. She knew that, she just didn’t want to think that Sean was sending money for guns to kill people.

  “What are you going to do?” she asked.

  Sean played with her fingers. “It’s not such a big deal. There’s a bar we know, does a big business on Friday afternoons, people come in early, like getting a head start on the weekend. They come in around four, by seven the place clears out, doesn’t get busy again until nine or ten. And they all pay cash. No credit cards. Isn’t that beautiful?”

  Abby pulled her hand back. “You’re going to rob them.”

  “Not the people, chonai, just the bar, after everyone’s gone.”

  “But it isn’t a bar. It’s a person. Somebody owns it. Somebody tries to earn a living in it.”

  “What is this, a sermon? Look, this isn’t hurting anybody. Whoever it is, he’s got insurance, he’ll get his money back, he’ll be fine; we’ll all be fine. Anyway, it’s nobody you know; why are you worried about him?”

  “Because…” Helplessly, Abby shook her head. “Because he’s a person.”

  “Abby,” he said, and she looked up at the uncommon note of pleading in his voice. “The guys over there, they’re desperate. Do you know how brutal the police are in this thing? They’re not like the police here, you know, they’re the murderers: they torture people and starve them, they threaten their families, their kids. They’re the real enemy; they’re tearing Ireland apart, and all we want is a peaceful country, one country, everybody happy. Wouldn’t you want that, too, if it was your country?”

  “Yes, of course, but…”

  He waited. When she said nothing more, he said, “Some of the guys are my family, Abby. You know, cousins. I can’t let them down. They’re fighting for a grand cause, to get rid of an invader and take back their own country for their children, for the future. It’s our country, Abby, shouldn’t we decide how it’s run? Isn’t that the American way?”

  “Yes, but you’re talking about robbing somebody.”

  “In a greater cause. The cause of freedom. And saving the lives of millions of young people who are trying to throw off the yoke of the invader. Abby, look.” He leaned forward and took her hand in both of his. “You won’t have to do much. I just need you to drive us near the place and then wait for us. When we come back, you drive us home. That’s it. You wouldn’t be doing anything wrong, just driving some friends home. Nobody knows you; you’ll be absolutely safe. You won’t be doing anything wrong. You’ll just be helping us. Me. And”—he kissed her hand—“I’ll be forever grateful.”

  So Abby had agreed. She could have told him it was wrong to be the driver for people who committed a robbery, but she did not. He kissed her hand and looked at her with his smile that melted her, and she thought of the awful months just past when there was no Sean, and she melted.

  But now, sitting in her car on a quiet street, pale gray and sad looking beneath low clouds, she felt sick and lonely. She should be with Doug and her family right now, helping them, showing Doug she loved him. She did love him. But she loved Sean, and she was here, a
nd there was no one she could talk to about how awful she felt. Only Sean, and he didn’t want to know she felt awful and, anyway, she was helping him be a criminal.

  Which made her a criminal. We won’t like each other after this, she thought. And then, in a moment of clarity, she added, At least I won’t like either of us.

  She looked at her watch. Five minutes past seven. They said they’d be back by seven. Nearby, a man came out of a garage, pulled by a dog on a leash. Abby shrank back, trying to be invisible. The man lurched toward her as the impatient dog strained forward. Then, at last, the dog pulled him across the street and they moved slowly away, so slowly—did the dog have to stop at every tree?—until they turned a corner and were gone. Abby looked at her watch. Eight past seven. Lights were going on in the houses on each side of the street; instead of getting darker, it seemed to Abby the street grew brighter by the minute. She looked at her watch. Ten past seven.

  The wail of an alarm cut through the silence, and shouts, and the clatter of running feet as the shouts grew louder. Frozen, Abby stared ahead, and so did not see Sean until he had opened the front door and flung himself inside. “Drive!” he shouted. “Get the fuck out of here!”

  Panicked, she said, “But the others—”

  “DRIVE!”

  She pulled from the curb, pausing to look back to see if any cars were coming (she saw Sean’s friends running, flinging their arms high, screaming at her to stop), and Sean, enraged, snarled, “Fucking cunt, move.”

  Abby gasped in shock. Her foot slammed the accelerator to the floor and the car leaped forward, crossing the street. It rode over the curb onto the grass and careened toward a neat stucco house with green awnings. Abby saw a child in the window, his mouth opened in fear, and that roused her: she wrenched the steering wheel to the right and jerked her foot from the accelerator to stand on the brake pedal. The car skidded across someone’s front lawn and through a flower bed, crossed a sidewalk, and was bouncing off the curb when the left fender crashed into a towering maple tree, sending its leaves spinning down onto the rattling hood and window.

  The air bag exploded from its compartment, ramming Abby backward, crushing the air from her chest. She heard bones snap and then her own wheezing as she gasped for breath. The air bag was already deflating, and as the pressure eased, pain shot through her arm, up into her shoulder and neck, down to her fingertips, and her whole body began to shake. She saw the falling leaves and knew she was not dead, but she hurt everywhere, and her breathing scraped loudly through her chest and throat. She felt cold and hollow, fading in and out of consciousness, knowing that everything was over; nothing would ever be the same. She turned her head to Sean, but he was not there. His door was open; the seat where he had sat, snarling at her, just a few minutes before was empty.

  People came from everywhere. They ran to the car, slipping in the mud of the tire tracks, and tried to open the door to reach Abby. But the edge of the door was smashed, and several men went to the open door on the other side and one of them reached in to grasp her arm. She screamed at the pain, and she and the man looked at the odd angle of her arm and elbow. “Broke,” he said. “You’ll have to scooch over, sweetie, can you do that?”

  She stared at him. He was fading, like a scene in a movie, and then everything was black.

  The house was dark when Sara and Carrie and Doug returned, and Carrie ran upstairs to tell Abby about Doug’s show. In a minute she was back. “She’s not upstairs. Where could she—”

  “Wait,” Sara said. She was listening to the taped telephone messages, and a woman’s voice asking her to call the emergency room at Northwestern Memorial Hospital.

  “She’s not in her room?” Sara asked tightly, dialing the number the woman had given.

  “No.” Carrie looked frightened. “What happened?”

  “I don’t know.”

  A nurse answered. “Mrs. Elliott, Abby’s been in an automobile accident; she’s all right, but she’s in shock and has a broken arm, and is asking for you. How soon can you be here?”

  “Right away.” Picking up her purse and keys, she said to Carrie, “Abby’s been in a car accident. I want you and Doug to stay here; I’ll call as soon as I know anything.”

  “Is she going to die?”

  “The nurse said she’s all right. I’ll call—”

  “Why can’t we go? Sara, we have to be with Abby!”

  Sara nodded. Of course they did. “Okay, get Doug, we’re going now.”

  “Doug!” Carrie yelled, and Doug dragged himself to the stairs, gloomy over the failure of his show, until Carrie told him what had happened, and then he raced with her and Sara to the car.

  Carrie looked back at the house as they drove away—their solid, steady house looking the way it always did. Please don’t let anything change, she prayed. Please keep everything the same, our family, our house, where we belong. I love Abby. Please don’t let anything happen to Abby.

  Abby began to cry when she saw Sara. “I’m sorry,” she sobbed. “Sara, it was terrible, it’s the end of everything, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m—”

  “Hush,” Sara said softly. She closed the curtains encircling the bed and pulled up a straight-backed chair. Abby’s arm was in a cast— “multiple fractures of the bones in her upper arm,” the doctor had said—her other hand lay on the coverlet and Sara held it. “Carrie and Doug are here; we just want you to be all right. The doctor told me you’ll be fine; it’s just your arm and some nasty bruises, and they’ll heal quickly. We can talk about what happened later.”

  “No! You don’t understand! The police are looking for me. They’re going to arrest me and I’ll go to jail and it’s the end of everything.” Her sobs rose in a crescendo of wailing, her shaking made the bed creak, and Sara (thinking, Jail? What is she talking about?) flung the curtains apart, looking for help.

  “Just a little shot,” said a nurse, appearing around the edge of the curtain. “Can’t have her thrashing about, you know. She’ll be fine; your daughter is a brave girl, Mrs. Elliott, didn’t cry at all until you got here and she just couldn’t hold it in anymore. She certainly relies on you. Thanks for coming so soon.”

  But I had no choice. There never was a choice when it came to the children. For hours she had not thought of Reuben or anything else; she wondered now if he ever could have had a place in her life. It’s better that it ended. I don’t have any room for him.

  But… jail? Was Abby delirious? No. Upset and frightened, but not delirious. Police. Jail. What had she—

  And then it struck her and her thoughts switched to a new danger. Abby had been driving. In her car.

  She had assumed it had been a friend’s car. But obviously not. Abby had been the driver. Without a license. And not sixteen.

  But police don’t put youngsters in jail for driving before their sixteenth birthday. There are punishments, but not jail.

  Unless she wasn’t alone.

  Of course she wasn’t alone. That was the point. She was with someone, and they were doing… what? Something that meant jail if they were caught.

  But the doctor had said Abby was alone in the car. Which meant whoever had been with her had fled before anyone arrived. Someone who didn’t care about her, didn’t mind hurting her (or if she was hurt), and ran off. Someone who cared only about…himself.

  Sean.

  Abby was lying still now, turned away, staring at the wall.

  Sara took a chance. “Abby, why was Sean with you in your car?”

  Abby’s head jerked around on the pillow, her shocked eyes meeting Sara’s. “How did you know that? Did you see him? Did he tell you? Or did the others tell you? Or did they tell the police? Are they all talking about me?”

  “As far as I know, no one is talking about you.” Sara’s fear was growing and she tried to keep her voice steady. “I haven’t heard anything about the others. All I care about is you. If you’re worried about being arrested, I need to know why.” Abby turned back to the wall. “Abby, look
at me. Look at me!” She waited until their eyes met again. “This isn’t a game; you’re smart enough to know that. If you’re worried about jail, then what Sean and his friends did was a crime, and you provided a car, I assume to get there and to get away. In other words, you’re an accomplice, and you need help, and I want to help you but I can’t do anything unless I know what they were doing. Abby,” she said urgently into the silence. “What were they doing?”

  Abby rolled her head back and forth on the pillow. “I can’t tell you. I can’t be the one to get them caught.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I…Everybody would know about it. They know Sean and I got together again and… Sara, we don’t tell on each other!”

  “Even for serious crimes? Even when you’ve been betrayed?” Abby flinched, but Sara was angry now. “He abandoned you. He didn’t care whether or not you were hurt, or dead; he didn’t care if the police arrested you; all he cared about was himself. Why would you care about him? Is he worth protecting?” She waited. “Abby, do you still love him?”

  The silence stretched out. “No.” Abby looked at Sara wonderingly. “I guess I don’t even like him anymore.”

  Sara sighed. “Then tell me what he was doing.”

  Abby told her, from the time Sean had first talked about the robbery to his lighthearted wave as he and his friends got out of her car, “See you in a few minutes, chonai. Seven o’clock. Keep the car running.” She could not tell Sara what he said when she did not move quickly enough, words so crude she was shocked into ramming down the accelerator. She would never repeat those words to anyone.

  When she finished, Sara said, “Did they rob the bar?”

  “I don’t know. I heard sirens, and lots of shouting, and then Sean was jumping into the car and yelling at me…”

  “Empty-handed?”

  “What? Oh. I don’t remember. Maybe…” She closed her eyes; she didn’t really want to think about it, ever again, but Sara was trying to help. “It happened so fast…I don’t think he was carrying anything.”

  “Did any of them have guns?”

  Abby’s eyes widened. “I don’t know.”