by Ninie Hammon
Bishop had got hisself a tattoo after he come home from Vietnam. On the top of his hand—so it was right there in front of him all the time: 1 John 4:4. Whenever he’d get that haunted look in his eye, remembering the awful thing that happened to him over there, she’d hear him mumbling the words under his breath, probably didn’t even know he was talking out loud: He who is in me is greater than he who is in the world. Over and over again. Even old as he was, she could still see that tattoo clear when he’d reach up at night and turn off the bedside lamp. His voice would come out of the darkness then, saying the same thing he’d said ever night of their sixty-year marriage. “You need anything in the middle of the night, elbow me in the ribs and say, ‘Hey, bub, wake up.’”
He hadn’t been there to elbow last night; wouldn’t never be there again.
Wasn’t hard to tell which room was Andi’s, all broke out with balloons and streamers like it was. The door was standing open and Theresa walked in, saw there wasn’t nobody in the bed, but there was so many stuffed animals and toys on it wasn’t no way a little girl could fit in there, anyway. Theresa should have kept her twenty dollars and left that stupid monkey in the gift shop. The room was empty except for the Reverend Burke, sitting in a chair by the window. When he saw her, he got to his feet and came to take her hand, all solicitous like.
“Theresa, isn’t it? Theresa Washington? Andi’s downstairs getting another X-ray, to confirm the one they took this morning, but she and Emily’ll be back up here soon. Please, sit down.”
As she sat, he said, “We met once when I came to pick up Andi from school, practically had to pry her out of your lap.”
He had a good smile, showed lots of teeth and they was all straight. Voice was…modulated. Yes sir, he was smooth, slick as Teflon.
She could almost hear Bishop clear his throat the way he always done as a warning like, that maybe she’d ought to think about what she was about to say ’stead of just blurtin’ it out. And maybe there wasn’t no need to go where she was about to go. But for the life of her she couldn’t think of any reason not to, either.
“You probably don’t remember me, but—“
“Oh, I remember you for a fact,” Theresa said. “A right smart better than you remember me. I remember when you didn’t have your collar turned around backwards, ’fore you was a big, important man of God.”
* * *
The old black woman had appeared during the first break in the non-stop parade of visitors who’d been streaming through Andi’s room all morning—mostly elders, deacons and church staff. There’d have been a hundred times as many people if Daniel hadn’t sent out an appeal—in an email blast and posts on the church’s website and Facebook page—asking the twenty-five-thousand member congregation not to visit, to “give my family some time and space to heal.”
He didn’t know what to make of the old woman. What did she mean she knew him better than he knew her?
Chocolate-chip cookies.
The aroma of hot cookies was suddenly so strong he was momentarily disoriented—was he actually smelling them, or merely remembering what they smelled like? He imagined he felt a blast of heat on his face, and the scent of the cookies on the cookie sheet coming out of the oven made his mouth water.
The memory was so powerful, so real—and then it was gone. Poof. And all he could smell was the cloying aroma of the bouquets of flowers in vases all over the room. Why in the world had he thought about…?
He shook it off and concentrated on the old woman. She was a big woman, had been pretty once, maybe even beautiful. Now, her face was a delicate meshwork of lines and wrinkles, like she’d been made out of black tissue paper that’d been crumpled, then carefully smoothed out again. There was something in her manner that gave him an uneasy feeling, though, as if she were…what? Reproachful.
He reached out and took her hand and said as kindly as he knew how.
“I’ve been praying for you, Mrs. Washington. Your husband’s in a better place now.”
She didn’t let go of his hand, just gave him a look that felt like a slap.
“No, you haven’t,” she said as matter-of-fact as “pass the salt.” “And you don’t believe a word you just said.”
The intensity in her black eyes was sharp enough to peel an onion layer by layer all the way to the pearl.
Daniel was so surprised he was speechless.
“When was the last time you prayed?”
The challenge in those words sent Daniel’s mind reeling back to the agony of dialing and redialing and redialing Emily’s phone—he’d prayed then. And when Andi was—he’d prayed then!
He had, hadn’t he?
“You ain’t been praying for me, or for yourself, or your wife, or your little girl. Or for that big congregation of yours shows up every Sunday for you to impress with your fancy words—and you don’t b’lieve none of what you’re telling them. You don’t b’lieve my Bishop’s in a better place, neither. He is, but you don’t believe that.”
“I beg your pardon…”
“You need to be begging God’s pardon, son, not mine. You done traded in real faith for ‘religion’ from the Dollar General Store—the kind that don’t cost nothing and ain’t worth nothin’. You’s just skatin’ around on the shiny outside of believing, gliding along, barely even touching the surface.”
Daniel stared at her. It was even possible his jaw had dropped open.
“You wasn’t always that way, though.” she continued and her tone softened. “It was real once.” She sighed. “But now you’ve whittled out an image of yourself for everybody to look at that ain’t who you are at all, sticks out phony as a dog in a duck parade. You think God don’t know that? ”
Daniel had no idea how to respond. Gratefully, he was spared having to by Andi’s squeal.
“Miss Theresa!”
To the great dismay of the nurse pushing her wheelchair, Andi hopped out of it and started toward Theresa. The nurse put a restraining hand on Andi’s shoulder, but nobody could resist Andi’s dimpled pleeeease smile, and as soon as the nurse relented, Andi raced to the big woman and threw herself into her arms.
“How you doin’, Sugar?” The old woman’s face was wreathed in a smile as tender as a new mother seeing her baby for the first time. “You lookin’ fine, sweet thing, mighty fine.”
“I didn’t see you at school, and after what happened I was afraid…” Andi’s voice trailed off.
Daniel definitely wasn’t going to allow the conversation to go there.
“Up into the bed you go, sweetheart,” Daniel peeled Andi out of Theresa’s arms and set her on the bed.
“I don’t want to go to bed,” she said. “I’m not sick. I don’t have a fever. I want—”
She was looking over Daniel’s shoulder. Her eyes widened and a smile planted the deep-dish dimples back in her cheeks.
“Mr. Jack!” she cried. “Look, Daddy, Mr. Jack’s here.”
CHAPTER 11
As soon as Jack stepped through the hospital room doorway, he noticed an old woman sitting at the foot of the bed, holding a stuffed monkey just like the one he’d bought in the gift shop downstairs before he came up. When she turned toward him, she must have noticed his monkey, too, because she looked startled, and her eyes widened in surprise.
A sudden flash of memory blew through his mind so intense it took over reality, became reality. Not an image this time, though. Music. The Blue Danube Waltz, played in the hinky-tinky notes of a music box. It flooded his brain, filled his whole head up until there was room for nothing else. Then it was gone. It didn’t fade away; it vanished as if somebody had switched off a radio.
Jack felt like he’d collided with an invisible wall—no, had been swatted by an invisible fly swatter. It took him a moment to refocus on the world outside his mind and when he did, he noticed that apparently he and the old woman weren’t the only ones who’d decided it’d be a plan to buy the little girl a stuffed animal. There was barely room for the child in the bed pil
ed high with all manner of fluffy creatures, a herd of teddy bears, several ducks, rabbits—even a large black-and-white something that was either Shamu the Whale or a stuffed maître d’.
Andi sat in the middle of them, beaming at him.
The little girl was fine. You didn’t need a medical degree to see that. But, of course she couldn’t be. He had felt her warm blood soaking into his shirt when he carried her to the window, had seen her pasty-pale face on the bed in the recovery room, had heard the heart monitor stop beeping, watched the green line flatten.
Now, the child appeared to be in better physical condition than he was. He hoped he didn’t look as bad as he felt—courtesy of a lost night of sleep and hours of pacing, his feet following his mind as it chased thoughts down wandering rabbit trails, meandering tunnels that started nowhere, ended nowhere and went nowhere in between.
He’d found no answers in those dark holes, or in the daylight hours since, and had finally been compelled to come here looking for them. Oh, he’d been able to come up with a plausible explanation to solve one mystery, a lone straw, but he clung to it with the fierceness of a man who’d spent hours grasping at them. It wasn’t something “supernatural” that the little girl knew his name. Unconscious people often heard things nobody knew they heard—didn’t they? Somebody—Purvis maybe, yeah, had to have been Purvis—had said Jack’s name, or perhaps one of the officers had when she’d been wheeled through the cordon of them to the waiting helicopter. She’d heard it somewhere and remembered.
Even that felt hollow, though. And the rest of it—the buzzing sound of the flat, green line—had echoed in his head all night long. Still echoed there now, a serpent of sound with its fangs buried so deep in his skull he feared he would hear that sound every waking moment for the rest of his life.
He’d come here seeking answers, but now he stood in the door as awkward as a hippo on a hamster wheel.
Thunder rumbled in the distance. Gusts of wind quarreled with the treetops he could see out the window. A storm was coming.
“Come in, Jack, and have a seat,” Daniel said. Daniel Burke. Yes, indeed, a storm was definitely coming.
He stepped into the room before the moment could draw out, went to the old woman and lifted from her lap the soon-to-be-sold-out gift-shop monkey that matched the one he carried. He held the two of them out to Andi.
“Twins separated at birth,” he said. “Frick and Frack. Put one on each shoulder when you go to sleep at night and they’ll whisper bedtime stories into your ears.”
Andi giggled. Her dimples were so deep you could eat pudding out of them. “Thank you Mr. Jack and Miss Theresa,” she said, and gathered the monkeys to her chest in a tight hug. “These are my very favorite stuffed animals ever.”
Jack was certain the child had said the same thing about each of the animals in the menagerie on her bed. And had meant it every time she said it. He liked her for that.
“How you doin’, Jack?” the old woman said, in the familiar way of old friends who haven’t seen each other in years.
Suddenly, he smelled chocolate chip cookies. The smell was so strong he actually looked around, as if he expected to see a piping hot plate of them sitting on the bedside table. He noticed Daniel was looking around, too, but he had his head cocked the way you do when you’re trying to determine the direction of a sound.
The smell was gone as quickly as it had come, but its departure left Jack shaken.
What was up with the 3-D memory blasts?
“I’m sorry, but do we know each other?” he asked.
“This is Theresa Washington,” Emily said. “Her husband—”
“Mrs. Washington, I am so sorry for your loss,” Jack said. “Your husband was a brave man.”
“Braver than you know. The rest of you didn’t know what you’s fighting. He understood what he was up against.”
Jack had no idea what she meant by that, but he wanted her to understand her husband hadn’t been a random victim, that he had given his life to save the children.
“He spotted me in the hallway and had the presence of mind to gather all the children in one place, out of the line of fire.” He couldn’t help darting a glance at Andi, who was happily playing with the twin monkeys. “He showed me where the shooter was.”
“Mary Waznuski told me about that. She come over last night, said she didn’t think to tell the police about the desk, though, how that man tossed one across the room with one hand like it didn’t weigh nothing at all.”
“The shooter threw a desk?”
“Right before he shot Miss Lund. Bishop started talking real loud after that and Mary said she didn’t figure out until after you come running into the room why that was.”
“I heard him clearly. He said…” Jack’s voice trailed off. He hadn’t thought about it until this moment, the last thing he’d heard the janitor say to the shooter.
“Said what?” Theresa asked. Her eyes narrowed. “He was talking to that bad man and he said something didn’t make no sense to you a’tall, didn’t he?”
Jack was so surprised he blurted it out.
“He said, ‘you’re not going to find out what you came here to find out,’” Jack said.
The old woman looked startled and something like—no it was—frightened. “Said that, did he?” she said softly, more to herself than to anybody else in the room.
“Why did that bad man want to shoot us?” Andi asked. It had been all over the news that Dumas had been a wack-job, but apparently nobody had told Andi the guy’d been crazy.
Big raindrops splattered against the windows, rattled like a timpani drum, and then cried silently down the panes.
“Honey, there is a mental illness called paranoid schizo—” Daniel began.
“Bishop always said ‘sometimes evil comes from the pit of hell and sometimes evil comes from the hearts of men, and most times you can’t tell which is which,’” Theresa said. “Not this time, though. This time it’s plain it was both.”
“I watched,” Andi said, her voice soft. “There was a slit in the door and I climbed up and looked out before”—she looked down at the front of her hospital gown—“my chest hurt and then I couldn’t get to the door knob. It took a long time to open the door.”
Emily Burke was standing on the far side of the bed, between it and the window. She leaned close to Andi and put her arm around the child.
“Shhhh now, Sweetheart. Try not to think about what happened.”
“But I didn’t see all of it through the slit, not then. Now though, when I think about it, it’s not so dim as before. Everything used to be dim, but I didn’t know it was dim until it got bright. Sometimes it’s so bright now it hurts my eyes.”
Jack saw Emily and Daniel exchange a concerned look.
“You’re tired, Honey, maybe you need to—” Emily began.
“What’s the bright look like, Sugar?” the old woman asked. She heaved herself out of the chair, went to the bed and took the child’s hand, then she looked deep into Andi’s eyes. “Tell me about it.”
A look of concentration stapled itself between the little girl’s eyebrows.
“It’s hard to explain. It’s like the world was smoky, like it’s always been smoky, kinda, or foggy and then somebody turned on a lamp and I can see. Only the bright’s on the inside, in my head, not on the outside. And it lights up…other things in my mind.”
“What things? Theresa asked.
“Like Mr. Bishop’s breath frosted,” she said. “It was so cold you could see him breathe.”
“Cold?” Daniel said.
“Uh huh.” Andi wrapped her arms around herself as if she could still feel a chill. “The man brought the cold into the room with him, the bad man with the thing…”
Andi shuddered, but not from cold. Jack shivered, too. He had a sudden sense of such profound foreboding it took an effort not to leap up and run out of the room. He absolutely did not want to hear what the little girl perched on the edge of the hospital be
d was about to say.
“The thing…made out of wasps that was sitting on his shoulders.”
Daniel looked like he’d just had a stroke. He stared at the child, too shocked to speak for a moment, then he took over.
“You’ve had too much excitement,” he said, his voice father-firm. He moved a teddy bear and a rabbit off the pillow so she could lie back. “You need some rest, maybe take a nap and—”
“She don’t need rest,” the old woman snapped at him. “She needs to talk. And you need to listen to what she’s got to say.”
Tension sparked between them, but before Daniel could form a response Jack stepped in.
“If Andi saw something when she was hiding in that storage closet, I need to hear what it was,” he said, trying to sound dispassionate and as official as it was possible to sound with neither a badge on his chest nor a gun in his holster—though he suspected nobody in the room had noticed either was missing. And it was true, maybe the child had seen something important, but that’s not why he wanted to keep her father from shutting her up
He wasn’t interested in some fanciful swarm of insects. He wanted to find out how she knew him. Oh, not just his name. He’d pacified himself last night about that part—that she’d heard it while she was unconscious. That explanation sounded as hollow now as an empty oil drum. Andi Burke hadn’t just known his name. She had opened her eyes and recognized him.
I heard you, Mr. Jack. I heard you call me.
He spoke more gently, tried to soothe the worried father. “Besides, she needs to get it all out in the open, Dano. It’s better she doesn’t bottle it up. Let her talk.”
Daniel’s attention snapped from Andi to Jack. He opened his mouth to say something, then closed it.
“What thing made out of wasps, Sugar?” Theresa asked.
A haunted look came over the child’s face and she spoke in a whisper.
“It was sitting on the shoulder of the man with the gun. There were so many wasps they were solid, shaped like a rat.” Andi began to tremble. With her arms wrapped tight around herself, she started to rock back and forth on the bed, staring out in front of her. With a look of terror and revulsion on her face, she described a creature that had tusks and claws and pus-yellow eyes with red centers—formed out of a swarm of wasps.