by Ninie Hammon
And that was the thing. As she recalled, the kiln had been … almost full of boxes.
Bang, her mind backed up from that thought so fast she tripped mentally, stumbled. No, she was wrong. That wasn’t it. There was almost nothing in the kiln. It was … almost empty. And empty, there were eight hours of air.
It’s not empty. The voice spoke in her ear but Charlie wouldn’t listen.
“There was no spare key,” she said, answering the question Malachi hadn’t asked. “Just the one. And Mama almost never locked the thing, just fastened it shut when she was firing something. She only locked it when she stopped using it … to make sure no kid got trapped …”
Reality again dumped a ton of rocks on her head.
“Malachi, my baby’s in there!”
She turned to the kiln and hammered her fists on the door.
The phone in the house rang.
Who could possibly be calling at this hour? She didn’t even turn toward it.
“Maybe it’s Sam, and she …” He stopped, obviously sorry he’d said anything at all.
Her knees again turned to bags of water. If Sam had the key, she’d be on her way here with it. The only reason she’d have to call was if she didn’t have the key.
Charlie looked helplessly into Malachi’s eyes. She couldn’t … she absolutely could not answer that—
“I’ll get it.” He began hobbling across the grass toward the back porch steps. She could see that his wounds were bleeding again, had soaked through the ACE bandage. She ought to care about that but there was nothing left inside her to care with …
She placed her lips close to the not-crack where the door fit so tight you couldn’t have slid a piece of paper between it and the jamb.
“We’re coming, sweetheart. Mommy’s coming. It won’t be long.”
Then she was sitting beside the door, leaning against it, didn’t remember sitting down. She was speaking into the crack but she didn’t know what she was saying.
Merrie’d been a bumblebee last Halloween. She’d been adorable in the costume, yellow and black stripes and tiny bumblebee wings. It even had a rubber stinger on the butt and a little hat with antennae on coiled wires.
Charlie had gone trick-or-treating with her, of course, held her hand, walked her up the sidewalks to each house in the neighborhood. She helped Merrie hold out the sack for the candy. Some of the neighbors had dressed up. Her friend Laverne came to the door as the Wicked Witch of the West and Merrie’d cowered away from her until she popped the fake wart off her nose and lifted the hat with long, stringy black hair attached so Merrie could see her blonde curls underneath.
Charlie didn’t let Merrie keep any of the candy, of course. She had an identical Halloween sack full of candy hidden in the pantry, so she could swap it out and Merrie would never know. She wasn’t about to let the child eat candy that’d been given to her by a stranger!
That was dangerous. No telling what—
Merrie was behind these stone walls in an airless room. If she didn’t get out soon …
Merrie would die. The most horrible words in the English language. No, not the most horrible. The most horrible were only three words, too. Merrie’s already dead.
When she saw the look on Malachi’s face, she didn’t even have to ask.
She heard his words — “Abby’s not there” — and the world went dark. Charlie McClintock left the building.
Chapter Thirty-Six
Sam drove slowly through the night toward Charlie’s house with no urgency and no hope. She had flown down Route 17 to the Middle of Nowhere, looking at her watch every few seconds. If Abby’d been there when Sam arrived in the Dollar Store parking lot, Sam would have snatched the key out of her pocket and raced to Charlie’s. She’d have made it there by ten minutes after four, with time to spare. They’d have used the key to open the kiln while Merrie still had air to breathe.
But Abby hadn’t been there.
As the minutes of Merrie’s life ticked away, Sam had paced around the empty parking lot searching, like she’d suddenly stumble over Abby’s body and she just hadn’t noticed it before.
Sam had waited. And waited. Considering and discarding ways to save the child without the key.
They could … drill a hole in the kiln to let in air.
The walls were solid stone a foot thick with interior ceramic plates two inches thick. Where could they find a drill with a masonry bit that long? And there was no time to look.
Break into the kiln, then use a sledgehammer and a chisel … Would Charlie’s mother have a sledgehammer? Chisels? How long would it take to dig through solid rock?
Longer than ten minutes.
And after a while … they didn’t even have ten minutes.
Charlie pulled in behind Charlie’s mother’s car in the driveway, turned off the key and sat for a moment. Gathered herself. The others in the parking lot had been horrified by her story. Liam, Abner, Rodney and the Tungate brothers wanted to dash to Charlie’s house to … yeah, to what? Break into the kiln? Even if they could have done that — and they couldn’t — by the time they were even considering it, it was too late. Some had wanted to come to Charlie’s with Sam — E.J. and Liam and Thelma Jackson — to … Again, to what? Just be there. But Sam’d told them no, that Charlie didn’t need an audience.
What Sam was about to see was unfathomable grief and horror. Malachi had told her on the phone that Charlie was only a shade this side of completely hysterical and Sam was sure when Malachi told her Abby wasn’t at the bus shelter …
Sam refused to put herself in Charlie’s shoes, to imagine what it would be like if it were Rusty locked in an airless kiln. Dying in there. Dead in there. She had resolutely shoved those horror nightmares out of her mind, but when she picked him up at Damien’s house, whenever that was … she would hug the boy harder than he ever allowed himself to be hugged. She’d kiss his whole face and not care that a twelve-year-old boy did not allow his mother to kiss him. She’d do it anyway. Right there in front of his friend. She didn’t care.
After she got out of the car, she reached back in and got the bundle of gauze, sterile pads and tape she had brought to re-bandage Malachi’s wounds. As she walked toward the back gate leading into the backyard, she noticed it was dawn. Dawn out there on the flat anyway. A new day that wouldn’t officially arrive here in the mountains until the sun cleared the crest of Chisolm Bluff, the tallest mountain to the east, in about an hour and a half. But the sky above was blue, not black. The stars and the moon were gone. Light spilled over the top of the mountain and cascaded into the hollow below to give a golden glow to everything, brighten the puddles of shadows until they melted away and it was day.
She opened the gate. The light above the side door of the garage shined down on Charlie and Malachi but the growing daylight gave texture to the rest of the yard, too. Charlie sat on the ground beside the door of the kiln, appeared to be talking into the crack.
As Sam got closer, she could hear that Charlie was singing.
“… gonna buy you a mockingbird. And if that mockingbird don’t sing, mama’s gonna buy you a diamond ring.”
The lump formed so instantly in Sam’s throat tears literally squirted out of her eyes and down her cheeks. Malachi was on his knees behind Charlie, his hands on her shoulders, looked like he’d been rubbing her back. Sam knew Charlie had no idea he was there. She had gone to a whole other world, another dimension of human misery where there was no light or tenderness or hope.
Sam hadn’t wanted to think about it as she drove to the house, but as she stood now looking at the stone monolith beside Charlie’s garage, she couldn’t imagine how they would ever get the door of the kiln open until they could find Abby and get the key. Liam said he and the Tungate brothers were going down to search the riverbank as soon as it got light. Sam thought that, given the shape Abby was in, she might have finally bled out or been too weak to swim and she’d drowned and her body was lying …. Yeah, lying where? If her dead
body had washed down through the Jabberwock, wouldn’t it have come out in the parking lot? Maybe you had to be alive to … If her body just washed on downstream, as long as the Jabberwock held the county hostage, there was no way to get to it.
And if they never found the key — never found Abby or found her body but the key wasn’t in her pocket — how would they ever get the kiln open? Maybe Lester Peetree who used to run the hardware store in Twig would be able to … he wasn’t a locksmith, though. It would take a locksmith from Lexington or Louisville to get into the lock. And the Jabberwock …
Surely with enough manpower using jackhammers or chisels, there was some way to chisel into the bricks, dismantle the building from the outside. Or simply big men wielding sledgehammers — bam, bam, bam — destroy the building. Somehow, eventually, they’d get it open.
Malachi looked up when she approached. Charlie just kept singing. Sam noticed Charlie’s hands, that her perfectly manicured nails were broken off, her fingertips raw. How had … Then she saw a broken piece of fingernail in the crack between the kiln door and the jamb.
Sam swallowed hard, gritted her teeth to choke off a sob. She tried to take in a deep breath but her diaphragm refused to expand, only allowed her little sips of air. She stood where she was, getting control of herself before she dropped to her knees on the ground beside the other two and told Malachi quietly, “I need to take a look at those bandages.”
“Later.”
“Now. What good are you to anybody if you pass out from blood loss?”
That convinced him, he relented and moved away from Charlie, who hadn’t known he was there in the first place and didn’t miss him when he was gone. He remained on his knees, which allowed Sam access to both the entrance and exit wounds. Though the wounds had continued to ooze, eventually soaking her makeshift bandages, the ACE bandage and his tee shirt, the bleeding appeared to be stopped now. She didn’t remove what she’d stuffed into the bullet holes — that would start the bleeding again. She just unwound the ACE bandage, covered her makeshift bandages with gauze pads, then wrapped strips of gauze around and around his body to hold the bandages in place and taped the gauze down.
“I need to get you to E.J.’s and clean these. It’d be a mess if they get infected. Maybe put in a couple of stitches, too.”
But she was speaking softly and Malachi was only half-listening. Both of them were concentrated on the woman whose grief pulsed off her like heat off a potbelly stove. They would remain with her until … well, for however long she needed them. Sam didn’t know what would happen now, didn’t know what should happen … what was the next step after a thing like this? So she just sat with Malachi while Charlie sang.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Something like waves of consciousness washed over Charlie, periods when everything was grayed out, indistinct and unreal. Then she would snap awake. Aware.
And in awareness was the reality that her little girl was gone. Merrie was dead. That reality stood hot and stinking in front of her when she embraced awareness and the pain of it made it hard to breathe.
Charlie would die here, too. She knew she would cease to be alive in some real, tangible way because living, breathing, feeling the warmth of the sun on her skin while her baby daughter had died … had suffocated … was both a physical and a spiritual impossibility.
Merrie had been asleep. She’d just never awakened. That’s what the coal miners said, the ones who contemplated the possibility of suffocation every time they “went down.” As ways of dying went, suffocating was an easy way to go, they said. It wasn’t painful. You just finally closed your eyes and didn’t open them again.
Merrie had known nothing. Had just closed her eyes … when was the last time Charlie had looked into those eyes?
She didn’t know. Couldn’t remember. And suddenly that thought was beyond too horrible to bear. Couldn’t remember? She’d checked on Merrie-the-Veterinary-Assistant-in-Training often as the nightmare day wore on, but when she’d gone in the last time, Merrie was already crashed on the couch and was sound asleep when she lifted her into her arms to carry her to the car.
So the time before that. The last time she’d checked on her …
Charlie didn’t know. Didn’t know the last words she’d said, either. Surely, it was I love you. She always said that, told Merrie that all the time. I love you. Surely she’d said …
She realized that she was singing. “… diamond ring gets broke, Mama’s gonna buy you a billy goat.” Why was she singing that? She didn’t even like the song, had never sung it to Merrie. She sang her little girl fun songs. Happy songs.
It suddenly seemed very important to get this right, to sing the right song, not some random melody the child had never heard before. It was important that Merrie recognize the song. How could she be comforted by it if she’d never heard it before?
“Puff the Magic Dragon lived by the sea. And frolicked in the autumn mist …”
Merrie in her Betty Boop nightgown, smelling sweet from the bath, is snuggled up close to her. She kisses the little girl’s nose and continues the song. “… in a land called—”
Suddenly, the pain of loss and grief were so great they exploded out of Charlie’s soul into the world. She leaned her head back, closed her eyes and screamed, “Meeerrrrrie!” Shrieked the word. Wailed it. The sound was so harsh and loud it tore her vocal cords in its ferocity.
A hushed silence followed.
A bird in the mulberry tree sang out a three-note melody.
Another bird in the sycamore tree replied.
And a voice spoke from the screened-in porch.
“Mommy, why are you yelling? Are you mad at me?”
Chapter Thirty-Eight
It was a dream, a fantasy, a hallucination. Even as Charlie swung her head toward the porch she knew there’d be nobody there, that she was just imagining—
Merrie stood on the top step of the porch. She was dressed, wearing a plain white tee shirt and cheap denim shorts, the outfit Charlie put on her to replace the Whitney Houston tee shirt and jeans Charlie had thrown away.
She was barefoot. Her hair was a tangle of curls in her eyes.
“Merrie.”
Charlie said the word the way the proctor says a word at a spelling bee. Each of the syllables was pronounced properly but with no intonation or inflection of any kind. Just the word.
Sam choked out some kind of sound and only then, when Charlie glanced at Sam and Malachi — their faces shocked, stunned and delighted — only then did she even consider the possibility that what she was seeing was real.
“Merrie?” The name was a question then and the little girl had begun to pick up on a strange vibe and didn’t like it. “Where have you been?”
Someone asked the question with Charlie’s voice and out her mouth but Charlie was incapable of speech.
“I waked up unner the bed. I don’t ‘member falling out. Then I couldna find you—”
Charlie shrieked then, a wail of utter joy, stumbled to her feet and raced to the back porch, snatching the child up into her arms sobbing.
Merrie, the little drama queen, tuned up and started crying, too.
How long that part lasted, Charlie didn’t know.
She understood that she was upsetting the child with her hysterical delight, knew Merrie was confused and frightened. Fine. Charlie didn’t care. The child would get over it. Or she wouldn’t. Maybe she’d carry with her for the rest of her life the trauma of the morning she’d awakened under her bed, and walked out into the backyard of her grandmother’s house to find her mother contemplating suicide. That was fine, too. Life did that to people. Experiences marked them, sometimes permanently. Much as she’d like to, Charlie couldn’t protect her little girl from the vagaries and vicissitudes of life and if she were going to be marked by something, this day, this experience, this whole new world was certainly worthy of permanent psychological damage.
Sam and Malachi hung back, each wearing looks of such profound ha
ppiness she registered them in some permanent memory cells. She would look back at their faces, again and again, and know that those two people had been with her, had stuck by her, had gotten her through the single worst day of her life and someday she’d thank them for it.
But not today.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Things didn’t turn out like this.
Mothers didn’t miraculously get their children back, alive and unharmed.
Little girls didn’t bump up against bull-moose insanity and live to tell about it.
In the world of Malachi Tackett, mothers and their babies died. Horrible deaths. Every time. They were hacked apart by their neighbors or butchered by strangers. By the hundreds, the thousands, the tens of thousands.
There was never, never a happy ending.
But not this time.
This time, good had won. Evil had lost.
And even though it was just the one, the one against thousands, hundreds of thousands, this mother and this little girl had made it through the valley of the shadow of death and Malachi had been an eyewitness to every second of it.
This mattered. What was happening here in Charlie’s kitchen while Sam made coffee and fussed over his bandages and Charlie could not stop touching her little girl and the adorable child was all giggles and cheeriness, shifted something fundamental in Malachi. He turned some kind of corner. He couldn’t have articulated it and wouldn’t try because to explain or quantify it was to diminish the power of it. He had been walking so very, very long in the darkness that the light of joy and hope made him squint.
The private war of Lance Corporal Malachi Tackett and the horror of Rwanda was by no means over. But this pivotal, seminal moment was a battle won, was at least the end of the beginning.
“… grinning your gums dry, Malachi,” said Sam and he realized that the smile on his face was there because it had chosen to appear there not because it had been summoned as an act of will. “Smiles look good on you.”