Cray-zee
The clinic’s waiting room was an area roughly twenty by fifteen feet with one large plateglass window facing across Abbott Street to the beach. A rainbow of plastic chairs with contoured seats lined two walls. Wherever there was space on the pale yellow walls, posters illustrated basic health information about good nutrition, dental health, obesity, and childhood vaccinations. The children’s area was in front of the window: chairs and a low table on which were big boxes of drawing paper, crayons, and pencils. On the floor stacked plastic bins were full of toys and books.
For the busy Saturday clinic Harry and Gaby employed a total of three nurses, a physician’s assistant, and a lab technician who could do a quick screen of blood and urine samples. Two retired internists helped out and a handful of other volunteers advised the parents of children being treated about local housing and employment resources. Sometimes this help was rejected but more often than not the clients seemed grateful, for the attention if nothing else.
Frankie hoped to see Domino and Candace that day. She had promised herself that she would get Harry to look at the bruise on Domino’s forehead whether or not she wanted the attention. Midmorning there was a tussle in the children’s corner over a particular red crayon, but generally the boys and girls were well behaved through the long wait to be seen. They demonstrated a touching stoicism with regard to their bug bites and stomachaches. At odd times different staff members came up front to speak to Frankie and to report on how Glory was behaving. She was being allowed to watch Marisol give shots and occasionally swab the puncture points with alcohol—wearing gloves, of course, and closely supervised. This was surely a violation of some kind of law but no one seemed concerned.
After lunch the clinic treated a twelve-year-old boy whose home tattoo oozed infection.
A two-year-old with a dog bite.
Several cases of pink eye.
Head lice, fleas, runny noses.
A dozen tetanus shots.
Four babies with earaches.
A disoriented teenaged girl wandered in without a parent or guardian, her clothes stinking, her hair matted.
On the street a trio of protesters appeared with placards saying variations of “get the homeless out of OB.” A scuffle between the police and several men and women yelling insults at the clinic patients lined up on the beach brought another black-and-white to the scene, but in the end the demonstrators dispersed. A man threw a bottle, shattering it. The police went after him and the protesters reappeared, taunting the old drunk. Those waiting in line observed the dramas but kept their distance. They had brought their children to the clinic to be seen by a nurse or doctor and not to cause trouble.
Late in the afternoon Domino and Candace came through the door. Domino wore a flag-patterned bandanna headband, but it wasn’t enough to control her thick, dark hair or completely cover what remained of her bruise. Like her mother Candace wore jeans and a tee, rubber-soled flip-flops on her feet. As always her dark hair had been tamed into a complicated French braid.
With a delighted cry Glory leapt up and she and Candace grabbed hands and jumped up and down, shrieking, the classic greeting of eight-year-old best friends. In another moment they were at the table whispering and coloring earnestly, their heads—one fair, one dark—almost touching.
“I’ll take a break.” Frankie asked Mirasol to cover the desk. “We’ll be outside on the wall.”
Arno, the security guard, had left early for a dentist appointment, but the cops in the cruiser were still parked nearby.
“Show me your forehead.”
Domino removed her sunglasses and lifted the fold of her bandanna. The bruise had faded to a jaundiced yellow. “Almost back to my own gorgeous self.”
“What happened about the room you went to look at?”
“Way too small.”
Frankie laughed. “Dom, you live in a Dodge Caravan. There’s nothing smaller than that.”
“Shows what you know. It was the size of a closet and it felt like a jail cell. One pissy little window looked onto the next-door wall. And the bathroom was down the hall with rules on the door. Even Dekker said I shouldn’t take it.”
Domino had grown up in a white house with yellow trim and shutters, a mile outside Scanlon, Kansas, population roughly five thousand. It had two stories and a dormered attic, and sat at the end of a gravel road on a gentle rise overlooking a meadow and a broad shallow creek. From Domino’s bedroom window she could see the steeple of the Lutheran church where her family worshipped several times a week. She could see the main street where her father operated the only pharmacy for miles, the high school where she met Jason, and beyond that, the road out of town.
“You know you can’t live in the van indefinitely. You need an address for school.”
“Yeahyeahyeah.”
“Unless.” Frankie held up her hand, anticipating Domino’s objection. “Don’t say no. Just think about this. You can use our address on Newport. That way Candace could at least start school.”
“No.”
“But people use each other’s addresses all the time. She deserves…”
“Don’t tell me what she deserves. No one knows better than me what my daughter deserves. It’s not going to kill her if she misses a few more weeks of school. I work with her. We go to the library almost every day. She’s learning her times tables.”
Frankie wanted to argue the point, but knew better. Though Domino had an attitude that told the world she feared nothing and no one, in the weeks since they’d met, Frankie had seen through this façade; and while she did not doubt her friend’s courage, she knew she had a constellation of anxieties around Candace that she was too proud to show.
“I can’t break the law, Frankie. I can’t do anything that’ll give the welfare people a reason to say I’m not a fit mother.”
“What about your job? I was there the other night and the boss said you were sick. Is that so?”
“It was Candy. She’s got some kind of stomach bug. She gets them all the time. I didn’t want to leave her alone.” Nervously she looked up and down the street. “Did the boss tell you Jason’s been hanging out at Jack’s, bugging him almost every night? If it doesn’t stop, he says he’ll have to fire me. He says he’s not a marriage counselor. The thing is, I can’t even buy gas if I lose my job.”
“Priest Martha might let you park at the church.”
“Yeah, for a day or two but eventually someone would complain. Maybe report us. I just can’t take the chance.” Child protective services would leap at the opportunity to put Candace into foster care until Domino found them a home. Once in the system it would be hard to get her out. “I’ll go back with Jason if I have to.”
“Don’t even think about it, Domino.”
“If we were together I could keep him on his meds and he’d be okay. It’s when he goes off, like now, he gets crazy. And he’s on disability, Frankie. He could support—”
Something moved at the edge of Frankie’s peripheral vision. She glimpsed a running shape, a raised arm, and then, suddenly, there was an explosion of shattering glass and the screams of children.
Chapter 18
Candace had been hit and lay on the floor next to the children’s table, blood streaming into her eye from a gash at her hairline. Whimpering, she smeared it away with the back of her hand. Domino dropped to her knees beside her. A rock the size of a grapefruit lay nearby with a piece of paper taped around it.
Frankie heard the raucous crows spreading the excitement, pegged to the power lines like black rags. Her head spun and she did not recognize the man in a white coat who bent to pick up a girl with blood running down the side of her face. She heard someone say, “She’ll be okay, Domino. We’ll have her fixed up in no time.”
A blond girl clung to Frankie, which seemed odd, a blond child in Iraq. Though she didn’t know who she was, it felt right to hold her and tell her she was safe, that her mother would come soon.
The man in white spoke to
a man in uniform. A policeman, not a soldier or Marine, which to Frankie was another odd thing. So much oddity, nothing was quite right in this place.
A woman in a smock covered with comic book pictures took the blond girl away from Frankie. Another woman crouched before her. She had some kind of accent.
“Who am I, Frankie? Say my name.”
She tried and almost had it. She was ashamed of her confusion. She looked down at her big capable hands and they seemed to belong to someone else. She directed them to stop trembling, but nothing happened. Her mind and body didn’t seem to be connected.
“I am Gaby.” The woman held out her hand, palm up, and Frankie took the pill she offered and water from a paper cup. “Do you need to lie down?”
“I’ll be okay.” She wondered why she said that. She didn’t believe it.
She sat with her back against the wall and gradually her mind came back to itself. Besides Glory and Candace, there had been four children, a teenaged boy, and three adults in the waiting room when the glass broke. None had been injured. Glory had just stepped away from the table to get two paper cups of water from the cooler.
“Not even a scrape,” Harry said later. “But she’s had a shock—you both have.” He paused to make sure Frankie was listening. “There’s likely to be some kind of delayed emotional reaction. Nervousness, anxiety, something like that.”
“I’m fine now.”
“Maybe. Just be aware and take it easy, okay?”
An officer asked her to describe what she’d seen from the corner of her eye. A man or a woman, young or old, was he or she alone? She didn’t know. There had been motion and then crashing glass. Cries and screams and yelling, door-slam, siren-whine, panic, and then she had heard the children crying and it was a sound that cut into her sanity like a sharpened saw. What followed was an off-center, more-than-real time when her body was one place and her mind another. She didn’t tell the police about that.
“Until I knew she was okay, I wasn’t thinking about anything except Glory.”
She organized the cleanup. Creating order out of confusion calmed her mind. She hoisted Glory up onto the reception counter where she could watch the work, clutching a stuffed bear she had dug out of the toy box. Frankie and other volunteers picked up the large pieces of glass and dropped them into a trashcan someone had dragged in from outside. Marisol told her there had been a note attached to the rock. HOMELESS OUT OF OB. Frankie drove a heavy-duty vacuum across the utility carpeting as furiously as if it were a tank. Rick said her name twice before she looked up and saw him lifting Glory from the counter.
“It’s time to go home.”
Before she left she gave Marisol three twenty-dollar bills and asked her to shove them into Domino’s purse, deep into the side pocket where she kept her keys.
At home Glory was amped. She couldn’t stop telling the story—she had just been getting a drink, standing at the cooler and not doing anything when a rock, practically a boulder, came through the window and hit Candace in the head and there was crying and screaming and glass everywhere.
Rick showed his concern. He listened to everything she said and asked questions, but not once did he look at Frankie. She began to dread the time when Glory would go to bed, leaving them alone together.
After dinner Glory was sent upstairs to have a bath and change into her pajamas. She came downstairs in her pink robe and Rick wrapped her in a blanket and held her on his lap as they sat on the deck, watching the orange sun melt along the horizon of the sea. As always they watched for the green flash that was supposedly visible for a second as the sun set. As usual they didn’t see it.
At bedtime Glory had arranged her bed with at least half of it covered with stuffed animals, including, Frankie noted, the hand-me-down bear she had latched on to at the clinic.
“Mommy, I don’t want to go to Uncle Harry’s clinic anymore. Daddy says I don’t have to.”
“Let’s talk about it tomorrow, Glory. We’ll work something out.”
“But when will I ever get to play with Candace? Do you think she’s okay? She was really really bleeding.”
“Uncle Harry took good care of her.”
Glory lay back. She pulled the comforter up under her chin and folded her arms across the top of it. “He’s a good doctor. Remember that time I had to have stitches?”
“I was in Iraq.” Glory had proudly shown her the injury on Skype.
“I was riding my bike down the hill and my feet went off the pedals and I started getting all wobbly and when I fell I hit my foot on the sprinkler thingee in front of Mr. Davies’s house.” She reached for Zee-Zee the snake and smoothed its cobra head against her cheek. “I didn’t cry but there was lotsa blood.”
Frankie struggled to steady her voice. “I should have been here, Glory.”
Her own mother had always been in the bleachers, the audience, the pew at Frankie’s soccer games, her debates and choir solos, so predictably loyal that she was virtually invisible. The parent whose admiration and approval Frankie craved was the General’s. On the day she graduated from Arcadia and gave the valedictory address, he had been in Washington, called there on business he didn’t explain except to say that it was (he added “unfortunately” to soften the blow) more important than a high school graduation. Of course she said she understood because she had been brought up to understand and accept and be a good Marine. As young as Glory she had known to straighten her back and square her shoulders and do the right thing.
“I’m home to stay, Glory. I won’t go away again.” She licked her thumb and wiped away a smudge of toothpaste stuck to her daughter’s cheek. “You’re not going to be able to get rid of me, little kiddo.”
“Are you okay too, Mommy? You didn’t act okay. After. You didn’t even know me. You asked me what my name was. Daddy says you were in shock.”
“Maybe. A little bit.”
“What if it was a gun, not a rock? What if it was a bullet from an M16 that hit Candace? She’d be dead now.”
“How do you know about M16s?”
“I went online. I read a lot about the Marine Corps.”
Sometimes Frankie wished there were a law banning computers.
“Glory, in this country people have a right to own guns but that doesn’t mean they go around shooting them.”
“Bad guys do.”
“But there aren’t many bad guys, Glory. I know it seems like there must be because they’re always on television but this is a big country and most people are peaceful. You know television isn’t the same as real life.”
“The policeman at the clinic had a gun.”
“It’s his job to keep the peace. But police officers are just ordinary people. They don’t want to shoot their guns. That cop at the clinic? He hopes he’ll be a cop all his life and never have to shoot at anyone. That’s what he hopes most of all.”
“You didn’t shoot anyone, did you?”
“No.”
“But you could if you had to, right?”
“I know how to fire a weapon, I’ve been trained. But I went to Iraq to help the people, not kill them. I told you that we built a school.”
Tried to, anyway.
Glory was quiet for a moment. “Candace took a bunch of crayons and put them in her pocket. I told her it was bad to steal but she said there were so many in the box it didn’t matter. No one would notice. And they were old anyway.”
“It is wrong to steal, Glory.”
“But Candace isn’t a bad person, is she?”
“No, honey. She’s just poor.”
“I don’t think crayons are expensive.”
“They are if you don’t have any money for extras.”
“Colette’s got this gold bracelet she wears sometimes. Real gold, Mom. With real diamonds and rubies. That’s like an extra, huh?”
“Glory, it’s not real gold.”
“No, Mom, it is. She says so.”
“Maybe she thinks it’s real but trust me, it’s not.”
“Everyone believes her.” Glory rubbed Zee-Zee’s head against her cheek. “I don’t think crayons are extra. And I think sometimes it’s okay to steal. Like if you were a kid and you were in Iraq and there was a suicide bomber who blew up your house and you didn’t have any parents and you were starving. It’d be okay then.”
Rick was right when he said that there was a lot going on in an eight-year-old head. It was a complicated age, a time of peering into the real world, of weighing options and choosing paths. When Frankie left for Iraq Glory had been more concerned with extending her bedtime by thirty minutes than matters of right or wrong but now she was eight and morality weighed heavy.
Glory scooted farther down under her rainbow comforter. Zee-Zee’s velvety chartreuse cobra hood peeked out from beside her. She said, “When the glass broke were you scared? Like you were in the war again? But I wasn’t scared, Mommy. Maybe I’ll be a Marine when I grow up. Like you and Grandpa.”
Chapter 19
Downstairs Rick had loaded the dishwasher and started it going. There was a bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue open on the counter, a gift from a satisfied client.
“You?”
She nodded and watched him pour a long shot.
“Do I have a lot of catching up to do?”
“I’m one ahead.”
She knew right then that she should tell him she wanted tea instead. But it had been such a day.
On the deck he had connected the heat lamp and arranged their chairs under its glow. Groaning he sank into one of them. After a few moments he asked, “Have you got everything ready for tomorrow?”
She had forgotten that they were hosting the weekly football party, the Chargers playing someone who would probably leave them in pieces on the field.
“I went to Whole Foods.” She leaned back and closed her eyes. The Scotch eased her throat.
“I hope I feel more like a party tomorrow,” he said.
When She Came Home Page 11