by Julia Keller
They were quiet for most of the drive back to the courthouse. When they turned onto Main, Rhonda decided to speak.
“So doesn’t it bother you?”
“What?”
“That awful place. Raylene. Her raising a kid there. All of it.”
Bell thought about it. “Things aren’t as bad for Marla Kay as they could be. I mean—sure, no child ought to be used for fund-raising by her slutty mom. But you know what? Better that than being around drug deals. Maybe Raylene’s given up dealing for good. And the girl’s got a roof over her head. Clothes on her back. Food to eat. That’s more than what half the kids in this county have.”
“So that’s the choice? A mother who’s a con artist or a mother who’s a drug dealer?”
“We can’t save every kid.”
“We can try.”
Bell shook her head. “No, Rhonda. We can’t. We don’t have the staff or the resources. Or the legal right. You and I might not like the way Raylene is bringing up her child—but it’s not up to us. I’ll ask a social worker to stop over there, but you know what they’re going to say. They’ve got their hands full with children who are being actively abused, physically and emotionally.”
“And this is supposed to be cheering me up?”
“If we catch Raylene in a parking lot, claiming her kid’s getting chemo and taking money on that basis—great, we’ll haul her in. A judge will fine her and warn her. She won’t pay the fine or listen to the lecture. The fact is, if she’s not dealing, we have to let her be.”
“Doesn’t seem right.” Rhonda flung herself back against the seat.
“Didn’t say it was. I just said we had to learn to live with it.”
Molly
7:48 P.M.
The child would not stop screaming. She decided to make it Ernie’s problem.
“Get that kid to hush, will you?” Molly said. Typically she was good with children, and liked them, but under the circumstances—no.
It was hard enough to work inside a crowded car while holding a flashlight without having the additional problem of a terrified toddler yelling and crying. They didn’t want to move the unconscious bodies—two in front, two in back—until they knew what they were dealing with. The kid was strapped in a car seat between the two people in the backseat. The kid was fine; they had checked that, first thing. But it would be another few minutes before they could liberate him from the car seat.
“What do you want me to do?” Ernie said.
“Sing to him. Read him a story. I don’t care. Just get him to shut up.”
Molly and Ernie had arrived at the intersection a few minutes ago. Four people in the stopped vehicle. Heads thrown back or twisted to the side, limbs flaccid, mouths open.
They took vital signs, ascertained that all four adults were still breathing. Breathing meant they were alive. Alive was good. Alive was better, certainly, than dead. The paramedics also had needed to ascertain that the car had not been in an accident, and that the four had not suffered traumatic injuries—subdural hematomas, say, or spine or neck fractures—which would mean they shouldn’t be moved until another squad could be summoned with backboards and other accouterments.
They finished the checklist quickly. No injuries consistent with a collision.
So now they knew what they were dealing with. Same thing they’d been dealing with all day: overdoses.
“You got kids, right?” Molly said, snapping on her gloves.
“Four. Plus two of my wife’s.”
“Six kids. Okay, so do a little dad magic back there, Ernie. Get the kid to quit screaming.”
The car had coasted to a stop at a red light on Sayman Street, and when the light turned green, the car stayed right where it was. That lack of motion had caused the driver of the car behind it to honk, curse, shake a fist, curse more, honk more, and then get out of his vehicle and charge forward to give the other driver a piece of his mind—at which point he discovered that the other driver had passed out, as had the three additional adult occupants. There was a child strapped in a car seat in the back. The child, understandably confused and distraught but unhurt, had begun to scream.
The driver called 911. Arriving at the scene, Molly and Ernie opened all four doors. Then they began reenacting the ritual in which they had engaged throughout the day: checking vitals. Administering naloxone.
Leaning in one side of the car and then the other, front seat and back seat, Molly squirted the aerosol dose up the nostrils of each of the four adults while they were still slumped over and motionless.
Ernie, meanwhile, reached into the backseat, keeping clear of the passed-out person leaning against the car seat. Ernie touched the screaming kid’s hand. Once he had his attention, Ernie made funny faces: sticking out his tongue, pulling on his ears. The kid was either amused or appalled. Either way, he stopped crying.
“A kid in the car,” Ernie muttered to Molly while he entertained the kid. “Can’t believe you’d have a kid in the car when you’re shooting up. Christ.”
Molly had finished administering the naloxone. The driver was waking up. He was in his early twenties, she guessed. Same age for the woman beside him. She, too, was quivering back to consciousness. The first word she said was, “Shit,” followed shortly thereafter by, “Why the hell’d you Narcan me? Feels like hell. Fourth time this summer.” Both of them rolled out from their respective sides of the car, chanting obscenities like an incantation. They were black-haired, skinny, pale as ghosts.
The couple in the backseat needed Molly’s help to exit the car. They were heavier, groggier, older. They were in their forties, Molly speculated, which was probably why the overdose had hit them harder. Once the man had cleared the door frame he jerked his arm out of her grasp. From the vehemence of his gesture, and from the curl in his lip, Molly guessed that it was the first time he’d ever been touched by an African-American. In Raythune County, that was entirely possible.
None of the four had asked about the kid. Or looked around to locate him. All of them seemed to be in a daze of longing, as they groped for the fading scraps of their lost high, trembling and cursing.
“What do you want me to do with him?” Ernie asked.
He had unhitched the child from the car seat and gently removed him from the car. He held him in his arms. The kid was playing with Ernie’s mustache.
“Wait for a deputy, I guess,” Molly said. “They’ll get a social worker out here.” Ernie, she noted, was a natural; he knew just how to hold the kid, whom she judged to be mixed-race. He was beautiful, with a soft round face that looked like an oatmeal cookie, and a stubby mat of curly black hair.
A stench rushed out of the kid’s rumpled red shorts. Clearly, a long time had passed since his last diaper change.
“Hey—how are you guys holding up?”
It was Deputy Oakes. Molly had seen the black Blazer arrive at the intersection, but she didn’t immediately think of Jake. The county owned three Blazers. The day had been a blur of brown uniforms and flat-brimmed hats and terse exchanges of data. Could have been the sheriff or Steve Brinksneader. But it was him.
“Just heading back from Route 7,” he said. “Heard the squad call. What’s going on?”
Molly filled him in. The four people had refused transport to the hospital. They were still staggering around the car, alternately retching and threatening the paramedics for canceling their highs with Narcan. A small crowd had gathered on the sidewalk.
“Nothing like a little gratitude to make you love your work,” Jake muttered. He waved at the line of cars, indicating that the drivers should be cautious as they wove around the stopped vehicle with the four flung-open doors.
A few minutes later he and Molly took a break, sitting on the back fender of the ambulance. Ernie still had the kid; he walked around, bouncing the boy up and down, swooshing him around and making rumbly airplane noises. A social worker was on the way. Molly had called Trixie Scoggins in the sheriff’s office, and Trixie had made the arrang
ements.
“Yeah,” Molly said.
“Hell of a day, right?”
“Hell of a day.” She rubbed the back of her neck.
“I keep remembering that girl in the bathroom last night,” Jake said. “The first one. Only we didn’t have a clue that it was the first anything. If we’d known—”
“I don’t know about you,” she said, interrupting him, “but I would’ve run for the hills. Never looked back.”
He laughed. She laughed, too. It felt odd to laugh, given the context. They both seemed to feel that at the same time, and their braided laughter trailed off.
Traffic was moving again. Cars and trucks looped around the vehicle. Molly knew she ought to get back to work—if there wasn’t a call right at the moment, there would be one shortly—but she gave herself the gift of a few minutes. With Jake.
She liked him. She had always liked him. He had a good sense of humor but he wasn’t a smart-ass; that was a fine line, but an important one. He liked her, too. She could sense it. She wondered about his life: Why had he become a deputy sheriff? Some people didn’t have a choice; jobs were scarce around here. You took what you could get. Did what you had to do. But Jake, she thought, did have a choice. And he had chosen this.
He didn’t know, most likely, that she thought about him as much as she did. They were always busy. And when they weren’t—when, for instance, she had stopped by his house this morning—she was careful to be neutral and impersonal.
Molly was keenly aware of how close he was sitting. Their thighs bumped a few times, as they shifted their positions on the bumper. Each time they touched, she felt a small jolt of electricity. Was he feeling it, too? She would bet that he was.
She had had only one serious relationship. It happened back in community college, when she was getting her medic training. Pete LeMay. That was his name. A good-looking black man who worked in the college admissions office. He was very good with Malik. Malik, in fact, still asked about him. “Where’s Pete?” Malik would say, out of the blue. Ten years had passed since Pete was in their lives but Malik would still blurt out the question, prompted by—what? Molly had no idea. She never knew what made Malik suddenly remember Pete, and maybe remember, too, the way he and Pete had tossed a football around the backyard, even though the yard was very small and Malik was so uncoordinated that he never caught a pass. Not once. Ever. He’d scoop it up off the ground after missing the ball and fling it back toward Pete. And Pete—long-legged, graceful, a natural athlete, would catch it and throw it back, and Malik would fumble the catch again, scoop it up, fling it back. When Molly got ready for work she would keep her bedroom window open, even on chilly nights, just so she could hear the two of them in the backyard, laughing, talking.
And then it was over. Pete broke up with her. He’d met somebody else, he said. She thought it was more than that. Malik took up a lot of time, required a lot of effort. Playing ball in the yard was one thing; organizing life for someone with Malik’s many needs was something else altogether.
Or maybe she was kidding herself. Maybe it wasn’t about Malik at all. Maybe he just didn’t love her anymore. It happened.
Molly saw them once, Pete and his new love. At the mall. They were strolling along, wrapped up in each other, literally as well as metaphorically; his arm was tight around her bouncy little butt, her arm was tucked into the back pocket of his jeans. He was much taller than she was. Every few steps he would lean down and kiss the top of her head. The woman—Molly never knew her name, didn’t want to know—responded to that by tilting up her face and then they really kissed, a deep, long, luxurious kiss that seemed to go on for about a day and a half. It was excruciating for Molly to witness.
Did they see her watching them? She didn’t know. It didn’t matter.
I am going to die. She remembered having that thought as she observed them that day at the mall. Kissing. The pain was that bad. Those were the precise words in her head: I am going to die.
She didn’t die. She finished her course that semester at the community college and then she finished the other courses. She became a paramedic. Her pain over Pete changed. It didn’t go away, but it became bearable.
Anyway, the worst part for her wasn’t her own pain. It was trying to find a response to Malik’s question, “Where’s Pete?” Sometimes, even now, a decade after the fact, he would get in a rut with it, following her around the house, increasingly anxious: Where’s Pete? Where’s Pete? Where’s Pete?
She was acutely aware of Jake’s presence there beside her on the back bumper of the ambulance. The sun, its light softened by its gradual decline, made the moment feel intimate. She knew he was feeling it, too. She admired Jake. She liked the way he did his job, the way he carried himself. And there was more to it, too; of course there was. She felt more than just admiration. But she couldn’t go through all of that again. She couldn’t stand hearing Malik say, Where’s Jake? Where’s Jake? Where’s Jake?
She was black and he was white. It would have been challenging. In West Virginia—oh, God, yes. But that wasn’t why she pretended that she didn’t know how he felt about her. She couldn’t take the chance. Where’s Jake?
And that wasn’t all. That wasn’t the only thing that made it impossible. There was something else, too.
“Thirty-one,” he said. “These four bring it up to thirty-one.”
“Yeah.” She had done the math, too. “Unbelievable.” There wasn’t much more to say about it.
A car pulled up. It was the social worker. Their moment was over. They needed to clear the scene, finish their separate reports.
Molly and Jake stood up. Work to do.
Eddie
8:13 P.M.
“You know what, Daddy? I love Tater Tots. They’re my favorite.”
Marla Kay was sitting down but she still kicked out her feet every few seconds. It was almost as if she was back on that swing. Her legs hit his knees under the card table, causing him pain, but he didn’t mind.
“I like them, too,” he said.
“Are they your favorite?”
He thought about the question. He had promised himself he would never lie to her, not even about trivial things. He had listened to Raylene lie to her too many times. Well, Raylene could do whatever she liked, but for him—no. He would always tell his little girl the truth.
“I like them a lot,” Eddie said, “but they’re not my favorite.”
Marla Kay grinned. “Then what is your favorite, Daddy?”
“Probably hot dogs.”
She wiggled all over and kicked out her feet. He had never noticed before how much she wiggled, as if there was so much life and joy in her that sometimes it just had to bubble out of the top, like a carbonated beverage. There were so many things he did not know about her, because he had spent so little time with her, all told. Raylene always made it difficult for him to see her. But now he was making up for that lack. He was noticing everything, all the little nuances.
He had cleared off the top of the card table so they could have their supper there. He had fetched two folded metal chairs from the corner of the basement and he’d unfolded them, setting one on either side of the table. Then he dumped a package of Tater Tots on a paper plate and put it in the microwave. The ding! signaling they were done made her giggle. While he divided up the Tater Tots, Marla Kay had placed a napkin and a plastic fork at each of their places.
It was the third course of the meal. She had a ferocious appetite, which surprised him; as small and delicate as she was, he had assumed she would be a picky eater, the kind of child who frowns at her food while propping up a tilted head with a fist in a small cheek. But no: She roared through two slices of the frozen cheese pizza he had heated up, and then ate an apple. When he asked her if she liked Tater Tots, her eyes answered him even before her words did.
What a night it had been.
Best night of my life, he thought. He tried to keep that kind of thinking at bay, however, because he didn’t want to jin
x it. But it was. Definitely, it was.
“Do you like living down here, Daddy?”
“Yeah.”
“I like it, too.” She was swinging her legs in rhythm with her words. “I like the big thing over there.” She looked over at the furnace. “I was scared of it at first but I’m not now. You’re not scared of it, right, Daddy?”
“Nope.”
“I’m not, either.” She picked up a Tater Tot, holding it between her thumb and her index finger the way a jeweler would lift a precious stone to the light. She turned it around, licked it, popped it in her mouth. “I love Tater Tots.”
“Go ahead and finish your dinner, then.”
“What’re we going to do after that?”
“Do you like to play cards?”
“Sure, Daddy.” Brightly, eagerly. A moment passed. “What’s cards?”
“You know. Like, Go Fish.”
“Oh, yeah. I like it.”
“Okay, then that’s what we will do.”
He looked at his watch. It was almost eight thirty. It was getting dark outside now, which meant he could start to get ready. He was nervous, but it was the good kind of nervous, the kind that keeps you sharp, alert.
He had changed his mind about what was going to happen tonight. This was a better plan. He had moved the rifle over to his bed. It was still wrapped in the plaid blanket. Paul knew he kept a firearm down here. They had discussed it. Paul said he wasn’t comfortable with anyone having a firearm on church property. I’m a veteran, Eddie countered. I’ve got medals for marksmanship. Guns are part of my life. Plus—it’ll help me protect the place. Paul said a firearm should never be discharged in a church, even if someone was breaking in. And Eddie said, You don’t understand, Paul. The point of a gun is that once folks know you have it, you don’t have to use it.
They sat at the card table and played three rounds of Go Fish. He taught her to play Crazy Eights and Kings in the Corner. She was good at card games, which pleased him; she was a smart girl. Her only problem was that her hands were too small to hold more than two cards at a time. She couldn’t spread them out the way he did, making a fan, and it frustrated her. After twice dropping a bunch of cards, she pushed all of her cards to the floor and sat back and crossed her arms, fuming.