by Ninie Hammon
What’d happened after that, the pre-eclampsia and the staying in bed and Cody comin’ early — that was probably the worst time of her whole seventeen years on earth. She woke up every morning so scared she was gonna lose the baby that her stomach was too tied in knots to eat. And she had to eat, had to force herself to swallow food like it was medicine.
When the baby was born early … so little. Didn’t weigh but just over three pounds, so small Shep could have held him in the palm of his hand, Abby’d hung on every breath that child took, watched his little chest rise and fall with every one. She never left his side except to go to the bathroom. Not once, wouldn’t let her mama or her sisters or Shep or nobody take her place beside that basinet. She knew it wasn’t real, but she’d come to believe that her baby son was only breathin’ because she was watching it happen, that it was her love kept his little heart beatin’, and if she wasn’t there, he would stop breathin’ right then and die.
To this day, Abby couldn’t have told you how long that part lasted. He was in the hospital for months, but if it was two or five, she didn’t know. Time smeared together and all them days was like all the others of them, her sitting there, touching him when they’d let her, his little fist curled around her finger.
Willing him to breathe.
And prayin’!
She hadn’t never been very religious, went to the Pentecostal church in the next holler over ever Sunday and believed the things the preacher said, but it hadn’t seemed to apply to her life specifically until Cody was born.
She begged God not to let him die. Pleaded with God to keep his little heart beating. Promised all kind of things to God if he would let her little boy live and come home and grow up.
“God, if you’ll let my Cody live, I will have that boy’s bum on a pew every Sunday morning, Sunday night and Wednesday night for prayer meeting for his whole life.”
“God, if you’ll save my Cody, I will never raise my voice to that boy, won’t never yell at him like them mamas I seen in Walmart, screaming at their kids, cussing. I won’t do nothing like that, God, I promise.”
She’d got herself a little spiral notebook she kept in her pocket where she wrote down them things she’d promised God. She meant to keep them promises, every last one of them because God had answered her prayers and had spared her baby boy and in another couple of hours she’d be holding that child up next to her heart, nursing him, feeding him from her own body. She might not put him down for a month!
Glancing at the needle on the fuel gauge in the truck, she knew she was being silly, like maybe there’d come a big hole in the tank and all the gas’d drained out and her truck’d roll to a stop and leave her stranded. The Welcome to Nowhere County sign was just up ahead and she’d done the math like a hundred times, how many miles it was from there to Lexington and how many miles to the gal—
Suddenly the whole world burst into a million tiny pieces of sparkling black glass, flashing around her like a blizzard with black snowflakes, and there was a great roaring buzz in her head.
Chapter Sixteen
“The county line,” repeated a voice from behind them and the group turned to look at Liam Montgomery who was standing just inside the bus shelter with one hand on the wall, leaning for support. His nose was no longer bleeding, but blood had soaked the front of his uniform and though he had done his best to wipe his upper lip and mouth on his shirt sleeve, blood was smeared across his chin. He spoke slowly and carefully, and Charlie instantly translated the body language. He still had a “needle in his head.” She’d had migraines for years — not like some people she knew, totally debilitated by them, but she vividly remembered the incredible, not-like-anything-she’d-ever-felt-before pain of them. He was struggling to stand tall for all that and she admired him for that. “I was heading toward the county line,” he said carefully. “I was chasing a speeder … with Pennsylvania plates … and I saw the sign—”
“Did you see me?” Fish asked, and Charlie could tell it hurt the deputy to turn his head to face him.
“No.”
“Well, I saw you, threw up my hand and waved and then just kept walking.”
“You were out there, on Barber’s Mill Road?”
“I was.”
“What were you doing—?”
“I don’t give a rat fart what Fish was or wasn’t doing on the side of the road when you passed him by,” said Viola Tackett. She had not tried to rise, just sat in the dirt beside Malachi, who was looking considerably better. The color had returned to his face and his eyes looked like … he was here, with them, at least for the moment. “I want to know what I’m doing here, not what he was doing there.”
Several people spoke at once then, the general mumble expressing the same question. And the young blonde girl curled up in a ball in the puddle was still sobbing, wailing, hadn’t diminished in intensity though she wasn’t making as much noise because she was losing her voice.
“Why are you all … why’d you come …?” That was E.J. It’d probably have been a better idea to have left him out of it, but Sam had wanted somebody with some medical training to … yeah, to what?
“Ya’ll telling me don’t none of you know what you’re doing here?” There was anger in Viola’s customary brusque tone, but Charlie could tell that Malachi Tackett’s mother was as uncertain, upset and confused as the rest of them.
“I think I was at the county line, too. I’d come down Sanders Lane from Route 17 to Lexington Road,” she said. “I wasn’t looking at the signs, but that’s about where I must have been. Then … everything turned black.”
Charlie’d had the most time to recover from … the Jabberwock … and her thinking had cleared enough to start putting some things together.
“And you heard static.” That was the sheriff’s deputy.
“Yeah, like when you can’t get the radio station,” Viola said.
“‘Pears to me you all had the same experience in different places,” said Pete Rutherford, and they turned to look at the old man who’d been hanging back from the crowd, mostly trying to corral Merrie, and had somehow interested her in picking dandelions out of the grass beside the shelter. “You was all on your way somewhere, ain’t that right?” They all nodded. “And then you was suddenly here, sick, throwing up, noses bleeding. Like that.”
“What in the Sam Hill could have … who brought you here?” E.J. wanted to know.
Nope, E.J. was definitely not helping. He hadn’t been there to see the people “appear” like she and Sam and Pete had done and he was still operating under the common-sense assumption that somebody had brought all the people here, individually or at the same time, and he was trying to piece that together with—
“Clearly, you ain’t listening, doc.” Viola Tackett started to rise. Malachi reached to stop her and she slapped his hand away with enough force to deter another attempt. When she got to her feet, Charlie was surprised at how short she was. She’d heard of Viola Tackett since she was a little girl, but had only caught sight of her half a dozen times. And her memory was serving up to her from those occasions the image of a big, ugly, fat old woman with a voice sharp enough to cause internal bleeding and eyes that would pierce your soul. Her memory was conjuring up the physical from the psychological, and psychologically Viola Tackett was all those things. The reality of humanity standing before Charlie was a short, dumpy woman with a big bun of black hair at the back of her neck that made her look like an extra on some movie shot in Eastern Europe. But the eyes were like she remembered — bright and quick as a snake’s.
“Didn’t none of us come here a purpose.” She looked to the others and nobody contradicted. “We’s all on our way somewhere else and then … then we was here. Just here. If we all done what she done,” she turned and gestured to the young woman sobbing on the ground, “we just appeared outta nowhere. I was lookin’ and she just showed up, poof, didn’t come walkin’ up or get out of a car or drop out of a airplane with a parachute or nothin’ like that.
She just appeared.”
Call a spade a spade.
Charlie had been dodging around, doing a mental dance, trying not to recognize that reality and Viola had just nailed it, straight up.
Viola surveyed the group as if they were the convicts on a road crew and she was the guard who’d caught them all leaning on their shovels.
“I want somebody here to tell me what’s goin’ on.”
“I’ve told you, Mrs. Tackett, we all stepped through the looking glass,” Fish said. And then more quietly, his voice tight, “where the Jabberwock lives.”
“I don’t mean some dad-gum story—”
“I’m not talking about a story,” Fish said. “I’m talking about a literal looking glass. A mirror. There was one on the road. I saw it, saw myself approaching it. And when I touched it …”
“You’s probably so drunk you’s seeing double’s all. A mirror in the road is … That’s the craziest thing I ever—”
“It’s no crazier than suddenly being here when none of us intended to be.” Malachi was respectful to his mother, but she didn’t cow him like she did the others. He looked around. “Anybody else see a mirror?”
When nobody said they had, Fish pointed out that he was the only one among them who had not been driving when he saw the— he called it the “shimmer of the Jabberwock.”
“If there’d been a mirror, the others might not have noticed it,” Pete said. “From what I’m hearing, the only thing the whole lot of you’s got in common is the county line. You’s all crossing it — right?”
“So where’s my truck?” Viola demanded. “I’s driving it. It ain’t here. So where’s it at?”
“Must be parked out there somewhere beside my cruiser,” said the deputy, who now had some color returning to his face and the pleat of pain planted between his eyebrows was softening.
Into the momentary silence that followed his words, a small, hoarse voice asked, “What’s happenin’?”
It was the young blonde woman who’d been sobbing. She was sitting up now, with Sam steadying her shoulders, and her eyes looked like a baby owl’s.
“I got to go get my Cody. How’d I get here?”
She sounded so pitiful, so lost and confused and frightened that it hammered home to the rest of them how bizarre and horrifying their situation was.
Charlie turned to E.J. “You got a truck? A van? Something we could all fit into?”
“Well, yeah, it’s parked out back—”
“I don’t know about the rest of you, but I want to take a trip out to the county line.”
“Onliest thing I want is my truck,” said the small voice of the blonde woman. “I gotta go get my baby.”
Chapter Seventeen
Dr. Elijah Hamilton, D.V.M., didn’t know whether to wind his watch or take third base. The day had begun as ordinary as any other, didn’t go off the rails until Sam brought Charlie Ryan … no, it was McClintock now … into his office with her little girl who had a small gash in her forehead above her left eye.
E.J. didn’t ask for specifics. Clearly, Sam was handling it, just needed some sterile supplies to clean the wound and had been nearby so she’d stopped at the clinic. There’d been a wreck or something. Some kind of accident. He had volunteered to take over the surgical duties, assuring Charlie that he could sew up the child’s head so it wouldn’t look like he’d been trying to construct a Frankenstein out of spare body parts in his garage.
He didn’t think she would have agreed if she’d been in possession of all her faculties, but she was mildly disoriented and majorly confused, and while he tended to the child, she told Sam the most amazing story that began when the little girl had cut her head in the driveway of Charlie’s mother’s house, had tripped over a tree limb that’d been deposited by last night’s freak storm.
E.J.’d offered his condolences, when he’d had the chance, said he’d heard about Charlie’s mother’s death and he was sorry for her loss. Didn’t say he’d been told the old woman had washed overboard in the ocean off the Florida coast and they never recovered the body — a story that seemed to be verified by the fact that Charlie had been at her mother’s house and he’d heard nothing about a funeral or even a memorial service.
Not like there was a family plot or anything, though, the grave of her husband to lay her out beside. E.J. remembered when he’d first heard Charlie’s father was a prisoner of war. They were in the third grade — he was in Mrs. Green’s room, as was Sam, and Charlie was in Mrs. Baker’s. There were only two third-grade classes, but there had been enough students among the county’s dwindling population for three second-grade classes the year before and he’d been in the same room with Charlie that year. That was the year he’d fallen in love with her, and why his ears had perked up when he’d heard the teachers mention her name as he’d passed a group of them standing together in the hallway, talking.
“… poor little thing, Charlene probably doesn’t even remember her father,” Mrs. Baker says, with what E.J. recognizes as fake sympathy, like when his grandmother says, ‘oh, bless her heart” about somebody when she’s really glad some bad thing has happened to them.
“What must it be like to be Sylvia Ryan … with Bobby Joe just ‘missing in action?’” said fifth-grade teacher Mrs. Pitt. All the kids were scared of her.
“Four years now,” said Mrs. Green.
“And you know he’s got to be a prisoner of war and they’re just not saying,” says Mrs. Pitt. “You know the North Vietnamese have him somewhere in some squalid prison, torturing him.”
E.J. doesn’t know what missing-in-action means, though he can guess. And he knows that he heard Walter Cronkite say on the news a couple of months ago that President Nixon was bringing American soldiers home from Vietnam. Now, he knows that Charlie not only doesn’t have a father — he already knew that part, everybody did — but he’s in prison somewhere or missing somewhere and nobody can find him. Both of those things sound so awful he wants to cry, but he’s almost ten years old and almost-ten-year-old boys do not cry.
That’s when he gets the idea to do something to make Charlie feel better. It’s springtime and the tulips and roses are blooming in his neighbor’s garden and he takes rose clippers and goes out right after sunrise and cuts a bunch of them for a bouquet. Charlie has a piano lesson every Saturday morning in the basement of the Methodist church and he waits behind Mr. Bohanan’s garage for her to pass by on her way there, hiding so no one will ask him what he’s doing with a handful of wilting roses and tulip stems — most of the tulip petals fell off right after he picked them.
He spots her, steps out and walks toward her as she comes down the sidewalk. When they’re about to pass, he shoves the flowers out in front of him.
“These are for you.” He had other stuff he intended to say, but now he can’t think what it is.
“What for?”
“To make you feel better.”
“Why? I’m not sick.”
“No, but your father’s lost and nobody can find him, or maybe he’s in prison and—”
He surely would have said other equally comforting things like, “they’re probably torturing him,” something sensitive like that, but he hadn’t had the chance because she’d yanked the flowers out of his hands so forcefully one of the thorns on the roses stabbed into his thumb and it started to bleed.
“I don’t want your stupid flowers!” She’d thrown the flowers on the sidewalk and actually stomped on them. But she didn’t run away crying. She’d walked away, back straight, head up.
He’d loved her even more after that.
It’d been unrequited love all through elementary school and junior high school, but he’d gotten a girlfriend — Patty Sheedy — when he was a freshman and he’d forgotten about Charlie altogether.
Until today, he hadn’t seen her since she’d walked across the gym floor to get her diploma the night they graduated. He’d left Nowhere County and gone to college, vet school, and endured a terribly volatile but
blessedly brief marriage, before returning to set up practice here — because his father had built the strip mall and owned all the buildings and E.J. wouldn’t have to pay rent. His clinic was one of, if not the only thriving business in a county that was dead, long dead, they just hadn’t gotten around to having a funeral.
Will the last person leaving Nowhere County, Kentucky, please turn out the lights.
And when he saw Charlie today, he was stabbed with the awareness that maybe one of the worst mistakes of his life was giving up on a relationship with her all those years ago. She was even more beautiful now than she’d been then, her short dark hair shifting in silky strands in the breeze. When she’d first started telling that fantastic story to Sam about the black light and the static, he’d really thought she was joking.
She hadn’t been joking. And now here he was with a van full of the oddest assortment of people he could possibly have assembled. On their way down Danville Pike to the county line, a little more than ten miles away. Since the Middle of Nowhere was … duh… in the middle of the county, it was an equal distance from the county line in all directions. At least as the crow flies. But the roads through the mountains meandered and switched back. The most direct route was the one they were taking, through the little town of Twig and out to the back side of the Welcome to Nowhere County sign to see if there was a mirror in the road there.
Pete watched the van load of people pull out onto Route 17, his eyes following it until it had vanished around the bend. Then all the air kind of whooshed out of him, and he was tempted to go over and sit down on the bench in the shelter. But even though he’d washed away all the mess, there was a lingering odor. He couldn’t smell it, hadn’t smelled much of nothing in a right smart while, but he couldn’t help imagining it and that didn’t sit well with the current state of his stomach, the contents of which were black coffee and dry toast with no butter. Had to watch his cholesterol — you know, so he could live ‘til Christmas.