by Ninie Hammon
This was NOT happening. It couldn’t be happening.
God, where are you? You stop this! Stop it right now. Fix it! Please, oh God, please don’t let her die.
The prayer hit the ceiling above his head with a poof sound, and disintegrated like a snowball hitting a wall.
He stifled a sob, lifted his head to get a breath, and saw a police officer standing in the doorway. The image barely registered on his consciousness and he looked back down at Andi.
“Excuse me, Reverend Burke,” the officer said. “I didn’t mean to intrude, I didn’t know you were…”
Emily had her back to him and didn’t even lift her head when she heard his voice.
“Go away and leave us alone,” she said. It was only a whisper, though, and Daniel knew she couldn’t find any breath either. It was like there was a huge hole below his chest and his whole midsection was gone. The wind blowing through it wailed mournfully.
The officer instantly began to back out of the room.
“I only wanted to say,” he said as his back hit the door. “I didn’t mean to…if I’d known she was in the line of fire, I never would have pulled the trigger. I’m…I’m sorry.”
Daniel felt like he’d been hit by a freight train. The officer came in and out of focus with the pounding of his heart.
“You…?” Daniel’s voice sounded strange to his own ears. “Are you saying you…?”
The officer froze, his eyes huge.
“You didn’t…?” he began.
Emily lifted her head and turned then. Daniel had never seen a look like that on her face. He’d never looked at his wife that he didn’t think she was beautiful, but at that moment her face was as contorted and ugly as a witch.
“You killed my baby?” Her voice was only a whisper, but so intense it bounced off the walls like a shriek in a cathedral.
The officer seemed to be having trouble forming words, too.
“I didn’t know Miranda was—”
Emily snapped then, the dam holding back her hysteria let go, and the flood of raw emotion washed out all the stops. She dropped Andi’s hand and rushed at the officer, grabbed his arm, and began dragging him across the room.
“No,” she screamed, and there was volume to it this time. “No, she is NOT Miranda.” She shoved him in front of her toward the bed. “That’s not who my little girl is, do you hear me? She’s Andi. Andi!” She forced him to lean over the bedside toward the little girl lying there so still. “Say it. Say her name!”
In the breathless stillness that followed, Daniel could hear the monitor that had been beeping slower and slower. It beeped…it beeped…then the beep became a single, long buzzing sound. Daniel looked at the monitor and saw not mountains and valleys anymore but a single, flat green line.
Emily sucked in a horrified gasp. Daniel could not breathe at all as the buzzing sound cored into his soul.
The police officer spoke into the silence, his voice soft, gentle, a whisper on a breath. A single word: “Andi.”
The monitor began to beep again. Not the languid, turgid ever-slowing rhythm from before, but crisply, briskly. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep.
Daniel shot a glance at the black screen above the bed and saw the flat green line begin to form a jagged mountain range. Then a valley. Then more mountains. Up and down, uniformly in rhythm with the steady, beep, beep, beep sound.
He looked at Andi. She’d been so white. Now, color was returning to her face. Her icy hand seemed warmer. This was crazy. This couldn’t be happening. Had he passed out? Had he died?
Then he saw movement in the little face. Andi’s eyelids fluttered once, twice, and she opened her eyes. The beautiful bright blue eyes were clear and alert.
She looked up into the face of the police officer who was still bent over her bed, and she smiled.
“Mr. Jack!” she said.
Suddenly, the room was full of doctors and nurses. They merely appeared, like they had sprouted out of the floor, summoned, he was sure, by what they must have seen on their monitors, too.
A doctor shoved Emily and the police officer roughly out of his way and leaned over Andi, his stethoscope hopping from one spot to another on her chest.
A nurse spoke authoritatively, “I’m sorry, but you’ll all have to leave now.” And she began shooing the three adults out of the room.
“But…” was all Emily was able to sputter before the tank of a nurse shoved her away from the bed.
“You must go. You don’t want to get in the way, do you? You have to leave and let us do our jobs.”
Another nurse took Daniel’s arm and the snowplow effect of both nurses began to shove them to the door.
Above the sudden hubbub, Daniel could hear Andi’s voice—clear and firm.
“I heard you, Mr. Jack. I heard you call me.”
Then they were out in the hallway, the three of them together and the doors swung shut behind them.
CHAPTER 10
Jack, the minister, and his wife stood motionless where they were, like action figures some child had set in place, facing the closed double doors. There were sounds of activity on the other side of the doors. Voices. The swish of hurrying feet. But the sounds didn’t seem frantic or desperate.
Jack took a step back, his heart knocking in his chest like the fist of a lunatic on a padded door. He drew in a deep breath, then another, trying to knit back together the raveled fabric of his composure.
“What just happened?” he asked, surprised his voice was level.
The others turned to look at him. The minister wore the dazed expression of one who has watched an avalanche thunder past, sweeping away the people right in front of him.
But there was something else, something about the man’s face… An image—summertime, a baseball game—flashed into Jack’s mind. But it was gone so quickly he barely caught sight of it before it vanished.
“It was a miracle,” said the minister’s wife.
Jack’s mind backed up from that thought so completely he had a momentary feeling of overbalance, like he was running backward and had lost his footing. It was clear both the minister and his wife were in shock because the minister mumbled, “There’s no such thing as miracles.”
“Well, something happened,” Jack said.
Yep, something that couldn’t possibly have happened. But it did. Jack didn’t have anywhere in his mind to put a thing like that. Oh, he didn’t believe the universe operated with the precision of a pocket watch. You could sentence yourself to a long-term stay in the Funny Farm by insisting everything in life made logical, rational sense, that it followed a this-because-that logic. Occasionally, you had to accept the unexplainable. And Jack was down with that. But this was so far the other side of unexplainable you couldn’t have found it on Google Earth.
How could that child possibly have known his name?
He shook his head, literally tried to shake the fragmented pieces of the past five minutes into some essential, fundamental order. Obviously, the little girl had just—spectacularly—regained consciousness after her surgery. That’s what had happened—right?
The woman turned to her husband, joy and wonder on her face. “She’s alive, Dan. Andi’s alive!”
She was crying as she said it, though she probably didn’t know she was. The minister reached out and took her into his arms, patted her back and Jack suddenly felt like he was an intruder on an intimate moment and wished he could disappear. But there were things he had to know, had to understand.
“So…she just now woke up?” he asked tentatively. “After her surgery, the anesthesia wore off and…”
The minister said no, she wasn’t coming to, she was dying, had been given only hours to live. He said the monitors had shown her heart rate sinking and sinking…and then it stopped.
Jack felt himself beginning to unravel again.
“The doctor said to ‘go tell your little girl goodbye,’” he said, “that her wound was…”
Wound. That sobered all three of th
em.
“What did you mean in there?” The woman’s voice was tear-clotted. “When you said she was in the line of fire? Did you mean—?”
“I fired on the shooter, killed him. And we thought none of the children had been hurt. Nobody knew Mir…Andi had hidden in the supply closet when the shooting started. It was behind the shooter. One of my rounds passed through his body and the closet door and hit your little girl.”
“Then it wasn’t your fault,” she said.
Jack was getting real tired of hearing it wasn’t his fault! He felt more strands loosen in the fabric of his composure.
“It was my fault. I shot your little girl. I could have killed her.”
“You didn’t kill her; you saved her,” she said.
Jack had come to believe a long time ago that the only two absolute necessities to sustain life were air and illusions. Obviously, this woman needed to believe—
How did the child know my name?
—that something happened in there…
Something did happen in there. What?
“Ma’am, I—” Jack began.
“Emily. Officer”—she read his name off the nameplate on his uniform— “Carpenter, I’m Emily. And this is my husband, Dan.”
This was surreal, shaking hands all around like they’d just met at a dinner party or a wedding reception. Jack started to speak again, but before he had a chance, the door to the room they’d been thrown out of opened and one of the doctors appeared. Jack was certain the look on his own face mirrored the one on the doctor’s.
In the room behind the doctor, Jack could hear the little girl’s voice, chattering and giggling.
That was it. Jack was done.
“I’m sorry, I’m on duty,” he said. “I have to go.”
He turned as precisely as a Marine in a dress parade and headed down the hallway, wishing he’d left a trail of breadcrumbs to lead him through the labyrinth of corridors and out to his cruiser. Eventually, he found an exit. He was about to put the key in the ignition of his cruiser when it hit him.
Dan Burke. Daniel. Daniel Burke! No, it couldn’t possibly be…
Like a man in a trance, he reached into his pocket and pulled out his cell phone. He touched the icon that looked like a camera and the last picture he had taken filled the screen. He studied it for a moment, then felt his breathing constrict, like his Kevlar vest was suddenly two sizes too small. He wasn’t much of a drinker, but at that moment he didn’t just want a drink, he needed a drink. A drink strong enough to dissolve the swizzle stick.
* * * * * * *
As Theresa crossed the parking lot, the first fat drops of rain splattered on the asphalt beside her. Daylight was fading. Distant thunder rumbled with the sound of heavy work boots on carpeted stairs. Soon the coming storm would wash darkness down the day.
Theresa’s steps were slow and ponderous. Carrying a heavy weight like she was, wouldn’t have been surprising if she couldn’t move at all. The sky mirrored her pain, gray and brooding. But out west, the storm clouds was the purple of a day-old bruise—this was gonna be a gully-washer for sure, and her without an umbrella. Didn’t think of it what with everybody fluttering around her like a flock of twittering birds, bringing enough food to the house to feed every blond man in the Norwegian army, and all Theresa wanted was to be left alone. ’Cept she didn’t want to be alone, neither. Soon’s everybody finally left last night, she’d wandered from one room in their small house to another, and the presence of Bishop’s absence was everywhere she looked.
Probably wasn’t no lonelier act in all life’s journeys than picking out a casket.
Well, maybe not picking out a casket—because you didn’t have no body to bury—maybe that was worse. But that time Bishop’d been there to hold her as she gave herself up to grief. Not this time. They was gonna put Bishop in the ground tomorrow, gonna shovel dirt in so it made that awful crunching sound when it hit the top of that metal box and slid down the sides, down in a dark hole in the ground where wasn’t never no light or sun or birdsongs.
Theresa bowed her head.
Thank you, Jesus that he ain’t gone be in that dark hole tomorrow, that right now they’s more sunlight and sweet smells and birds singing than all his old senses can take in at once.
She let out a sigh with a half sob tangled on the end of it.
But Lord, I’m still here, and the hurt in my heart is near more’n I can bear.
First thing in the morning, all their friends and relatives was gonna get in them black cars with they little purple “Funeral” flags on the radio antennas and drive behind that hearse the long road back to the little cemetery in the woods so’s Bishop could be buried beside his parents. There was space there for her, too, one day. And space where there’d ought to be another grave, but wasn’t, an empty expanse of dirt—but maybe not. Maybe. These last few years, though, the flame of hope for Isaac had burned down lower every year ’til it wasn’t no brighter than a birthday candle.
Most every minute since that police officer came up to her sitting on the merry-go-round on the school playground and confirmed what her heart had already told her hours before, she’d felt so close to tears she hardly breathed, didn’t dare try to talk because making any sound at all would set the pain free, and some part of her feared if she did that, if she let go of all the pain inside her, the power of the grief would overwhelm her and she’d cry and cry and cry until she couldn’t breathe at all. That she’d grieve herself to death.
’Course, another part of her was sure it was holdin’ onto the grief that was gonna kill her, that it would get bigger and bigger, swell all up inside her ’til she popped like an over-inflated balloon.
She didn’t say none of that to the folks hovering over her, friends and church folks, because a lot of them was real “holy,” thought you hadn’t ought to mourn ’cause he was “in a better place.” Shoot, she wasn’t grieving for the place Bishop was; she was grieving for the place he wasn’t. He would have understood. Bishop understood everything.
Miss Minnie and Mr. Gerald got that part. Old and frail as they was, they figured to go out of this world side by side. They’d been married seventy-three years, and she’d looked after them for ten of them years—five as a hired caretaker, and the next five just ’cause she loved those old folks and they children had up and abandoned them. When they’d showed up with a pineapple upside-down cake still warm from the oven last night, Miss Minnie’d took Theresa’s hand and squeezed it hard, them rheumy blue eyes of hers all brimmed up with tears. She understood. Theresa was certain that soon’s either one of the two of them stopped breathing, the other one would, too. Why wouldn’t God let it be like that for her and Bishop, too?
Theresa’d took it long as she could, but she finally had to run off from them people. But getting away from good, caring people was a sight easier than dodging the self-serving ones. She’d no sooner set foot outside her house than this reporter shoved a microphone in her face and asked her how she felt about her husband giving his life for those children. And she wanted to tell him, “What you think it feels like, fool? It feels like he’s a good man who’s brave and sacrificing, and also dead.”
Only place she could think to go, only place she wanted to go, was to see her sweet Andi. Even as bad as she felt, a small smile warmed Theresa’s face at the thought of the child. She’d always been special, that one had. Theresa’d mentioned it to Bishop once, trying to puzzle out what it was about the little girl that had set her apart from all the other seven-year-olds the year Theresa’d been a teacher’s aide in her second grade class. He’d said if they was people in the world who was naturally bad—not possessed, just bad human beings—then the reverse was true, too, and Andi was one of them.
Folks was saying there’d been a miracle, that Andi had come back just as she stepped over into Glory. Theresa wondered what an experience like that would do to a little girl.
And besides, it was probably time. She and Bishop had talked about it on an
d off ever since the first Sunday they seen the Reverend Daniel Burke preaching on television, standing tall behind a see-through pulpit in the sanctuary of that enormous Voice of Hope Community Church on Market Street. That boy was using language so beautiful it’d take your breath away, but wasn’t no power at all in anything come out of his mouth.
And him so puffed up he even brought his own church bell with him from Chicago. They said his church there had burned, wasn’t nothing left of it but the bell. Still, to bring the thing all the way to Ohio—and it didn’t even fit! They’d took off the top of the belfry, lifted the bell as big as a Volkswagen up with a crane—folks stopped they cars on the side of the road to watch. And then they’d realized the bell was too big! You’d think somebody’d have took the time to measure, Bishop had said when they’d watched clips of it on the local news. Guess they was too proud to admit they’d screwed up, though, because they put the thing in anyway. You couldn’t tell it was too big until it rang. Then the bell stuck out five feet beyond the belfry—first on one side, then the other—bong, bong, bong. Bishop got a big kick out of that.
But mostly they didn’t smile about Daniel and his new church. They talked about what they ought to tell him. And not tell him. But they hadn’t made no decision. Now, Bishop was gone and she was going to have to do it alone—the first of all the hard things for the rest of her life she would have to do without him.
She stopped in the hospital gift shop and bought an overpriced stuffed monkey and rode up in the elevator with a young man who was so covered up with tattoos he didn’t have no unmarked skin to speak of on any body part she could see. She wondered how much he was gonna like them tattoos in fifty years when you couldn’t see no design a’tall on his wrinkled skin. But kids was gone do whatever they was gone do.