We curled together on our sides like spoons. Emptied, I tried to draw life from him.
“Jordan, today was awful. The little girl who watched her mother die—”
He stiffened. “I know. Baby, I’m sorry.” He took a breath. Exhaled, his breath warm against the back of my neck. “But Catherine, will you ever just come home at the end of the day and be with me?”
I stayed still. “I’m with you. It’s just—”
“Once upon a time, I remember that, after work, you used to walk into my arms, and we’d chat casually about both our jobs. I filled your heart. I used to make you happy.”
“I love you.”
“Then, Katie Girl, can you just lie in my arms and go to sleep? And not talk about this?”
“Yes.”
No.
I didn’t know how Bailey might be treated—or mistreated—right at that moment. Father, protect her. Jillian said Bailey would be taken to Thomas’s mother. Once she knew there were no monsters in the closet, she’d feel safe.
Good.
I dozed.
At first, I dreamed terrible things. I dreamed of old eyes set in little-girl faces, and white dresses adorned with little blue-ribbon bows dripping ketchup. At one point, I sat up in the bed fighting to breathe. I looked around, eventually recognizing my room. My home. Jordan slept undisturbed beside me.
Oh, God, help Bailey. Oh, God, help me help Bailey. I slid back under the cover, then wrapped Jordan’s heavy arms around me. This time, I drifted into a more peaceful sleep. This time, I dreamed my mother came into my room. She sat in the green upholstered rocking chair and opened her arms for me to climb into her lap.
And so I did. I wrapped my arms around her, and she stroked my hair and my back.
Just before I woke, she whispered that there was one thing I needed to do …
Heaviness draped over me like a damp blanket as I woke the next morning. I reached for Jordan, but he had already left for work. The weight of the previous day persisted as I taught my classes. And even after, the desolation stayed with me as I drove to the office. I piloted my car under the carport, exited, tripped, and fell flat on my face. Well, I’d hoped something would change my attitude. Not what I had in mind, but it worked. I laughed out loud.
Pulling myself up and looking to see if anyone saw my face plant, I noticed Alicia’s car parked in the front driveway. Thank God, she hadn’t died from compassion. I didn’t know what I would do without her.
I walked in the back door and, cackling with laughter at my slip, ducked into the bathroom to repair myself, then let Alicia know I had arrived.
“Well, thank God,” she said. “I heard you laughing from the back door and worried you’d lost your mind.”
I told her what happened.
She laughed. “Oh, Thomas and Jillian needed to be moved an hour later, and there’s an older lady who’s been trying to see you, so I called and filled their spot.” She looked me over. “You look great, by the way, for the tumble you described.”
I started to thank her when we heard the front door open, so I turned and headed toward my office, calculating the time. In ten minutes or less, Alicia would let me know my next appointment was ready. She would hand me a file, I’d skim it, and then, for the next fifty minutes, I’d work with “an older lady.” And when we were done—after I’d had ten minutes to take notes and get a cup of tea or a sip of water—I’d take a deep breath and walk up front and say hello to the man who had fathered a precious, broken child and a woman I no longer knew. Then I would invite them into my treatment room for the next fifty minutes.
But what I couldn’t calculate was how that near-hour would change Bailey’s life. Or, most especially, how it would change mine.
When I walked from the bathroom to the front of the office for the appointment I half-dreaded and half-anticipated, I was met by Alicia coming out of the file room. “They’re already in your treatment room,” she said, extending a manila file toward me.
The look on her face told me more than enough. “Thank you,” I said, taking it, then turning and, with a cleansing breath, I returned to the treatment room. Jillian sat on the far-right side of the plush sofa, scowling.
A wide-eyed man hovered at the far-left side of the sofa gripping its arm. Had to be Thomas. Were they avoiding touching each other?
I faced them, then placed a bag containing Bailey’s clean clothes on the floor. I greeted Jillian and introduced myself to Thomas before perusing the chart.
Jillian had completed the paperwork. Under insurance information, she wrote: We are not paying anything. You should be able to collect your money from Texas Crime Victims.
Okay.
Under reason for coming, she’d scribbled: I am not raising another kid. I have raised my two. I am finished with raising children. If Thomas wants to raise Bailey, I hope they will be very happy together. I have made it on my own before, and I can do it again. I prayed about this, and God does not expect me to raise her. I’m at peace with my decision.
There was so much wrong with those sentences. I didn’t know where to begin, so I figured I’d just jump right in. I looked up and asked, “You really want nothing to do with Thomas’s child?”
“I know you can read.”
“Yes.” I shifted. “It’s also interesting to me that you consider your two children raised. A quick calculation of ages tells me Jacy has to be eighteen or so, and Justin should be fourteen. Your kids are not raised yet. Actually, at their ages, it’s time to fasten your seatbelt. You have some rocky landscape ahead of you.”
Jillian slammed herself against the sofa’s back. “We’ll talk about this after you have a child.”
I jerked. I’d rather be spitting and stomping Josiah’s grave than sitting here having this conversation.
I looked at Thomas, tall and dark. I pegged him for an out-of-doors worker, very tanned, his skin leathery. He needed a haircut; his side-burns looked like they’d been growing since 1970. But his fingernails were neatly trimmed. Sweat dripped from him, especially his face.
“So,” I began in an attempt to open the door of conversation. “How are y’all?”
“In a bind.” Jillian’s mouth set hard as concrete.
“I know you both have had a tough week.” I looked from one to the other, then settled on Thomas. “I want you to know how sorry I am about Bailey’s mother.”
“It’s all been purty crazy,” Thomas said. “I told Sue soon as I met Josiah that she had no business with a guy like him.” Thomas’s mouth formed a hyphen. “From the looks of her face when I picked Bailey up after Josiah moved in, I knew he’d been smacking her around.” He winced. “She said she had run into the ’frigerator door but looked to me like she run into his fist. Sue was a hardheaded woman.” He stopped, then appeared tentative. “Sorry.” Thomas squirmed on the sofa, grimacing. “I guess that don’t sound right to say, now that we know he purty much blew her head off.”
I hoped my expression showed him compassion because Jillian looked at Thomas like he was a six-year-old who’d farted in church.
I directed my questions to Thomas. “I am very sorry about this tragedy. What are your plans from here? How do you intend to handle Bailey’s future?”
Jillian became antsy.
“Sugar,” Thomas said, leaning forward and resting his elbows on his knees. “She wants to know what we’re going to do about Bailey.”
“I heard her. I’m not deaf. I’m simply unwilling to raise your child.”
“Sugar, please,” Thomas twisted chafed hands. “I don’t know what else to do.”
“You know where I stand on this.” She looked at me. “And, Catherine, if you read what I wrote, you know where I stand on this too. I’m not doing it.”
What is wrong with you, Jillian? My face didn’t change, but my jaws ached. “Where is Bailey now?” I asked.
A suffocating tension hung in the room. Alicia had been correct. This situation was extremely complicated, and no, I didn’t li
ke it.
Thomas hesitated, looking unsure whether he had Jillian’s permission to speak. “She’s with my mother. My mom thought she needed to stay home from school for another day or so. She worried the kids might say something to her about this business about her mother and Josiah.”
What a mess. I looked again at Thomas. “So what do you think Bailey should do?”
The clock clicked. Moving clients along on time was part of my job, so a large clock took up the entire bottom shelf of a hand-made corner four-tier to my right. Because of its size, the rhythmic clicking could always be heard, and I could always read the time.
“About school?” Thomas asked.
“What do you think Bailey should do, period?”
Thomas’s mouth twisted. “I need to pick her up, and we need to do what we need to do. Jillian just don’t understand.” He dropped his head into his hands and sobbed, his broad shoulders quivering under the weight of his emotions.
I turned fully toward him.
“Thomas thinks …” Jillian continued, “that we should just bring Bailey home with us and raise her. I cannot do that. That was not the deal.”
I shot a glance her way. “The deal?”
“Yes, the deal. Thomas told me about Bailey when we married. She was four then. Nearly five. She wasn’t a part of his life and wasn’t supposed to be. I told him,” she said giving Thomas a mad-teacher look and a shake of her finger. “I wouldn’t raise another child. He promised me I wouldn’t have to. I still won’t. Do you understand that I still won’t?” Her eyebrows arched like little tin roofs.
Thomas shifted all over his seat.
My stomach flip-flopped like a nervous girl riding a roller coaster. “Thomas, why wasn’t Bailey a part of your life when you met and married Jillian? You indicated you picked her up and saw that her mother had been hit by Josiah, so …” Thomas’s wail stopped me long enough to pull two tissues from the ever-present box. I handed them to him. “Can you explain?”
He honked into a tissue, then mopped his face on the inside of his shirtsleeve.
“I saw her sometimes when she was with my mama. But you gotta understand. I’m a big man, but I was scared of Josiah. He told me if I came around bothering him, he would kill me. I believed him, and now you can see I was right to believe him. He killed Sue and hisself.” Thomas peered at me through frightened eyes. “I believed him and stayed far away from him. And I was right too.” He nodded as though he hoped I would nod with him.
I straightened in the chair.
“My mother is mad at me ’cause I never went over there, but I didn’t want to get killed. It weren’t no safe place to be. I ain’t stupid.”
I folded my hands in my lap and willed myself to stay calm. “But you thought it was okay for Bailey to stay where you didn’t feel safe?”
“He didn’t kill her.” Thomas stared at me as though he waited for me to understand. Did he think he could get a drop of affirmation from me?
“Bailey appears to know your mother. How did she manage to see Bailey?”
“She was crazy enough to go there ever’ week. She’s eighty-one, so I guess she don’t have that much to lose. He threatened her, but she kept going. She says she don’t understand my fear.” He drew in a breath. “She’s always been too hard on me.”
Dear Lord in heaven …
Chapter 8
The Texas heat beat through the windows, sending warmth through my body as Thomas continued, “My mother is pretty crotchety. Two-three weeks ago, I went by her house and found her already in the car to go visit Bailey. I told her she should stay away from that house.”
I rocked my chair with my right toe. “What did she say?”
If Thomas could be paid for every time he wagged his head, he’d have no need to play the lottery. “Well … it was purty stupid. She just threw her gearshift in reverse.” He pulled dramatically with his right fist. “And started backing out. She lowered all her windows down and started singing like a crazy woman, some old Diana Ross song ’bout no mountain being high enough, or low enough, to keep her from her baby girl. Then she pert’ near run me over in her driveway. I think she’s losing it. She could have got herself killed going over there like I said.”
Thomas’s mother sounded like a member of the Russell family I wanted to meet. Happily.
I doggedly kept my gaze on Thomas. “What are you intending to do about Bailey now?”
“I want to get her and bring her to our house, but Jillian won’t let me.” He wiped his nose first with the tissue, then again on his sleeve while he kept his eyes away from his wife.
“Jillian won’t let you,” I repeated.
“No, she won’t let me.”
“Jillian won’t let you,” I said again. I could hear myself sounding simple— simple like Forrest, Forrest Gump. My heart wouldn’t process what my ears heard. He spoke in Morse code. And I didn’t know Morse code.
Jillian re-adjusted herself on the sofa with exaggerated motions. “Thomas,” she twirled her head toward him. “Like I’ve done told you, you can get Bailey any time you want to; I just won’t be there when you return.”
He looked at Jillian, then wrapped his arms tight around his middle and rocked back and forth. His sobs grew louder this time, and his shoulders heaved.
I extended two more tissues before turning my attention toward his wife. “Jillian, you have children. You’re a mother. I know your life is starting to shape itself different from what you had in mind. I’m trying to factor your shock into this equation, but for goodness sake, this child is six and has lost her mother and has no place to go. Where is your mercy?” I started clenching my hands together. Nails bit into my palms.
Jillian crossed her legs and tapped her heel on the floor but kept her eyes away from mine.
“What if Bailey were Jacy? Or Justin? I remember they were devastated over their father leaving. You desperately worried about their adjustment, and rightly so. They still had you on a full-time basis. Why is Bailey of such lesser value? Jillian, what has disillusioned you so much that I recognize nothing about you?”
Squirrels scurried across the metal roof of the carport outside the window behind Jillian, which brought her gaze from the floor to the window, and then back to me. “Bailey is not Justin or Jacy,” she spat. “She’s ignorant. She knows little about anything. She was allowed to miss a lot of school and can hardly read her own name. During all the funeral mess when people were bringing food and we tried to eat together, Bailey didn’t use a napkin. She wiped her mouth on the back of her arm. Food spilled all over her dress.” Jillian’s eyes closed, and her mouth curled in disgust. “I was so embarrassed.”
That precious grieving child.
“Listen to yourself. Bailey is a baby. Everything you are describing, if it even counted in the grander scheme of things, and it does not, is all learned behavior. She can be taught. Taught quickly. But we are discussing the trivial. Bailey is Thomas’s little girl. Her heart is broken. She’s sick with the grief of missing her mother.”
“She has no manners.”
“She has no home and very few to love her,” I said, even though I knew I pled Bailey’s case before an already-decided jury. And what weighed heavier was the fear that she wouldn’t be safe if they took her home with them. “The only home she’s ever known is a crime scene, complete with yellow police tape and two body-shaped chalk outlines on the floor.”
Jillian finally peeked at me from the corner of her eye. “Don’t be melodramatic.”
Thomas stopped sobbing, honked into another tissue, then stared wide-eyed.
“Melodramatic.” I rolled the word around on my tongue. “Melodramatic.” That Forrest Gump thing was starting to become a theme. “This morning before I drove to class, I called the Port Arthur police department. I have a friend there who sat with Bailey on Friday until you two could sojourn down there to pick her up. At my request, he met me at Sue’s apartment this morning so I could look around their living quarters.”
I then vomited under the tree by the front door. “I had hoped there would be some toy or pillow I could bring here for her. But there was nothing there that didn’t have blood on it. It’s a tiny apartment, and the police can only assume Bailey ran through in frantic shock, tracking blood everywhere before she could be rescued.”
“Why would you want to go there?” Jillian’s face screwed into a picture of distaste.
Thomas stared, whimpering.
“Want to would not be my word choice. Compelled would be more descriptive. After the police officer shared with me his theory concerning the tiny bloody footprints, and I know that someday Bailey will have to talk to someone about what she saw and felt. If I’m that someone—and I don’t see other volunteers—I went there to prepare myself as the right listener. I want to have a feel for where that child walked. Forgive the pun and the melodrama.”
My treatment room fell silent.
After the lull, I asked, “Jillian, who are you? A couple of years ago I thought I knew you. Where did Jillian Reynolds go?”
She crossed her arms over her chest. “I’m someone out of the child-raising business.”
“Then Thomas, who are you?”
“Jillian’s husband.”
“And Bailey’s father,” I reminded him.
He looked at his wife. “We need to go get her. Please, honey.”
“No.”
He extended cupped hands toward her. “I can’t raise her by myself. I have to go to work every day.”
“My point exactly.” Jillian’s fingers squeezed deep white marks into the flesh of her crossed arms. “I would be the one raising her while you mosey off to work.”
“Do you still mosey down to the hospital every morning?” I asked her.
She shot me a look. “No, I got married so I wouldn’t have to work.”
Apparently, Jillian chose not to be picky about anything she said in front of Thomas.
“Being a nurse was hard on my back, you know, having to stand on my feet all day taking care of sick folks. I’m a full-time homemaker and mother.” She harrumphed. “I never did have a strong back. I need lots of rest.”
The Children of Main Street Page 8