True Blend

by DeMaio, Joanne

  Amy agrees and loops the shopping bag handle over the stroller handle. When she approaches the Exit door near the Children’s Department, she hears a voice calling out Miss! Oh Miss? and turns to see Susan hurrying over.

  “I’m so glad I caught you.” She waves Bear in front of her. “Look who was on the floor near the rack of flip-flops,” she says, placing Bear in Grace’s open arms.

  “What do we say to the nice lady?” Amy asks, bending forward to coax words from Grace’s lips. Come on, her mind pleads. You know this one. Say it, she thinks as Grace buries her face in the stuffed animal’s fur. “Thank you. We say thank you, Grace.”

  “That’s okay.” Susan smiles at Grace. “You hold him close now.”

  Outside, Amy reaches into her purse for her aviators. “V-3,” she says, slipping on the glasses and lowering the stroller onto the pavement. The parking lot is still busy with shoppers rushing in on their lunch hour and the strangers pass close, walking with clipped steps, keeping her vigilant. She walks half the length of parking row V-3 before slowing to a stop. Her maroon SUV is nowhere in sight, not in the spaces ahead, not behind her. With her flustered turning around, one of the shopping bags slips from the stroller handle, spilling onto the pavement. She bends over to scoop the flip-flops back in and upon straightening, feels lightheaded. She tips her head into her hand, then backtracks a few car-lengths to get a clear view of the large square sign mounted on the lamppost.

  “V-3,” she reads aloud, squinting back down the long row of parked vehicles. Every space is taken. It just doesn’t make sense. Double-checking the store entrance doors to be sure they are the same ones they entered through earlier, she wheels Grace through them again, back into the store, circles around and exits once more.

  “Well this is ridiculous,” she says. “I must have walked right past it.” Again she steps into the parking lot and walks the entire length of the row of vehicles. There are no maroon SUVs parked in row V-3. Can someone have stolen hers? At the end of the row, she cuts a sharp right into row V-4 and examines the cars packed tight into each space. Maybe the sun is playing tricks on her. By the time she tips the stroller up onto the sidewalk, her heart is pounding and her face is flush with perspiration. Grace squirms in the stroller, stretches her legs out straight and sinks down low in the seat, thumping her Velcro sandals on the sidewalk in a one-two beat.

  Amy wheels over to a wooden bench and unbuckles her daughter, sitting her on the bench while stacking the two shopping bags and Bear into the stroller seat. Grace slips off the bench, reaches her hands up on the stroller handles and starts to push it. Its wheels waggle sideways before straightening.

  “Grace! Hold Mommy’s hand!” Amy lifts one of Grace’s small hands from the stroller and folds her own hand over it. Together they maneuver the stroller up row V-3 once more. Now her mouth has gone dry and she blinks her vision back into focus. “Calm down,” she tells herself. They can’t be victims of yet another crime; it’s just implausible. Grace pulls her hand away right as she turns to scan the cars in the adjacent rows, and just as suddenly the vehicles melt into the color of gray, dissolving into one large pool of gritty pavement until no cars remain. Only the armored truck. Her hand feels painfully empty again, trying to squeeze her fingers around her daughter’s fist. When she spins around, the gunman climbs the steps into the armored vehicle, her daughter’s shoe in his pocket. They have the truck, for God’s sake. Why can’t he relinquish her daughter and leave? Why does it have to come to this? The ground slowly comes up to cradle her as she sinks into a crouch, the warm pavement turning liquid, swallowing her legs. She drops her head low.

  “Please.” The whispered plea begs for her daughter while from behind sunglasses, her eyes watch the armored truck. A voice reaches her ears; its deep inflections sound distant. Muffled, as though on the other side of a mask.

  “Excuse me,” it calls out, drawing nearer. His shadow falls on her and she flinches. “Are you okay?” he asks, extending a hand down.

  Amy raises her eyes and sees Grace in the arms of a stranger. He has taken off his hideous hosiery mask and returned her daughter. She knew all along that he was good; she heard it in his voice.

  “Grace,” she says through tears, taking the stranger’s hand and pulling herself to her feet. He has gotten her daughter off the armored truck.

  “I saw her wander off with the stroller when you lost your balance. She could’ve gotten hurt.”

  Amy takes a breath, letting oxygen reach deep into her lungs. The stroller. Shopping bags spill from the seat. She nearly loses her balance with the realization they are at the mall. “Thank you,” she says to the man. Does he hear her heart slamming inside her? “I just got really dizzy suddenly,” she lies. “The sun’s so bright.”

  “Maybe you need to sit down?” he asks as he places Grace into her arms.

  She notices it right away and is stricken with sadness. Grace’s body has gone limp. She shut down in fear when a man’s arms lifted her up. Amy hugs her close and gently rubs her back.

  “There’s a bench near the door.” The man lifts the stroller with one hand and takes Amy’s arm with the other, walking them slowly through the parking lot.

  And all the while she knows. Her car is gone. There’s no sense in looking further. She hears a noise and embraces Grace’s head to her neck. “Mumumum” comes softly to her ear.

  “Can I call someone for you?” the stranger asks. He is in his forties and dressed in a business suit, apparently on his lunch hour. “You probably shouldn’t be driving.”

  Amy sits on the bench, the warm sun causing her to perspire even more. Does she look the mess she feels? “Thank you. I’ll be fine.” When the man pauses, watching her cautiously, she insists. “Really. I’m feeling better now.” She reaches for her cell phone in her purse. “I’ll call a friend to help me.”

  “Okay then.” He glances at his watch. “I’ll wait to be sure they can come for you,” he says and Amy can’t argue as he stands beside the bench keeping an eye on Grace.

  With her daughter slack in her lap, one arm cradles her while with the other, her fingers carefully press the correct digits she had programmed into her cell weeks ago. She waits through three rings, shifting Grace and imagining George’s shop. Imagining the sun shining through the windows, a few people sitting at the small tables with a roast beef sandwich. Imagining the sound of the telephone lost in the sound of Sinatra. She closes her eyes and sees George, with his dark hair and white shirt, setting down a sharp silver boning knife, wiping his hands on his black apron before picking up the telephone. Finally she hears his voice. A beat of silence passes as she collects herself, strokes Grace’s hair and takes a breath.

  “George?”

  Fifteen

  IN THE SILENT BREATH BEFORE she says his name, George senses something is wrong. He leaves The Main Course and drives to the mall, knowing exactly the entrance Amy is waiting near. Remembering exactly the commotion of construction vehicles and sawhorses and steel girders distracting wary eyes from an armored truck.

  “Are you sure it was V-3?” he asks after his hands lightly stroke the length of her arms twice, coming to a stop holding her hands. When she nods and sits slowly, George sits beside her on the bench. He realizes then that he still has on his black apron and pulls it over his head. “We’ll double-check.”

  “George,” she says so quietly. Grace holds Bear beside her, fidgeting and pulling her knees up, straightening them, turning backward on the bench.

  “What’s the matter?” George hooks a finger beneath Amy’s chin and turns her head. Her skin is warm and perspiring. “You can replace the car.”

  “I had a flashback.”

  “Here?” His gaze moves from her eyes, to Grace, and back to her again.

  “In the parking lot.”

  That was what he heard in her whispered voice on the telephone. Exhaustion. She depleted her energy fighting off a flashback.

  “A very nice man helped us and waited while
I called you.”

  He leans over in front of Amy and pats Grace’s knee, his eyes locked onto Amy’s. “She’s okay?”

  Amy looks at her daughter, her eyes filling with quick tears. “She could’ve been hurt, George. I’m scared now.”

  George did his own research on flashbacks and post-traumatic stress. Much of it boils down to a loss of control and the debilitating vulnerability that follows. Amy needs to be out of this place now. She needs to be home, in her country kitchen with a cup of coffee, making lunch for Grace, filling Angel’s water dish, opening a window, controlling the small things. First they have to call the police to report her vehicle stolen. He surveys the parking lot now.

  “Could it have been parked in B-3? Or D-3?” he asks, taking her hand in his.

  “No. No! I distinctly checked twice to be certain that I parked in V-3. It’s V-3!”

  “I understand. I’m just wondering if the flashback might’ve confused you. Let’s take a another look around before we call the police.” He straightens her shopping bags in the stroller, folding his apron into one of them. “We’ll put these in my truck first, okay?”

  Amy scoops up Grace and walks beside George as he heads left, in the direction of his parked vehicle. Pushing the stroller, he suggests they walk up and down a few rows, just to be absolutely sure she isn’t mistaken. They pass two similar SUVs, one white and one bright red. Five rows over from V-3, halfway down on the right hand side, a maroon SUV is parked.

  “It’s not mine, George. I didn’t park this far away from the door.”

  “What’s your license plate number?” he asks as they near the vehicle.

  Amy’s eyes drop to the plate and her feet stop moving. She leans heavily into him and he knows that the vehicle parked in row V-8 is hers.

  * * *

  Amy wants to go home. She wants to go home and stay home and never leave her property again. She wants to putter in her gown room, repair vintage veils and dresses, order antique purses and necklaces, then push Grace in the swing and read books in the sunshine on her stone patio before falling deep asleep in her bed. Then she wants to wake up, tomorrow or the next day, have a cup of coffee and call her mother and tell her all about this unbearable mall dream from which she has just woken.

  George drives her SUV with one hand on the steering wheel, the other holding her hand the entire way. “I’ll call my brother,” he says when they stop at the railroad crossing, waiting for the gate to rise after a train speeds by. “He’ll give me a ride back to get my truck later.”

  She hears the train pass and hears George’s words, hears the near vibrations of his voice within her air-conditioned vehicle, hears Grace’s silence, and closes her eyes.

  “You’re just tired, Amy. That’s what brought it on. You’ve been through a tough time with Grace. Worry takes a lot out of you.”

  It isn’t fatigue. One fine morning walking out of the bank, a stranger ripped her daughter from her hand. And it wasn’t only Grace who was kidnapped. In a way, Amy was too. Kidnapped into that moment as it replays any time she closes her eyes. Any time the sun shines in just the right way or she turns quickly at a sound. Any time Grace won’t speak. Her life’s been abducted, held still in the one moment that, try as she might, she can’t get past.

  * * *

  “What’s going on?” Nate asks as George gets in the car idling in Amy’s driveway.

  George pulls the car door closed and scans the house. The farmhouse doors are shut and locked, as are the downstairs windows. The twig wreath and wicker porch chairs, the hydrangea bushes and the dogwood tree throwing a pool of shade on the green lawn, all belie the troubles behind the front door.

  “Let’s go. I’m running late.”

  Nate leans low and scans the white clapboard and green gingerbread trim outlining the peaked front. A cultivated bed of wildflowers edges the front yard. “Nice place she’s got here. She takes care of all this by herself?”

  “She manages. Let’s move it.”

  “Where is she? I’d like to meet her.”

  George looks at his brother. He called Nate at a job site and he wears dusty jeans, a T-shirt and construction boots. “After what you put her through that day? Go to hell.”

  “Hey. If you’re going to be seeing her, eventually we’ll have to meet.”

  “Not today, you’re not.”

  Nate slips the car in reverse and backs out of the driveway. “What’s going on?”

  “She had a problem with her car at the mall and called me for a ride.”

  “Couldn’t you follow her home in your car?”

  “It’s a long story. Just step on it, would you?”

  At the mall, Nate cruises by the construction area of the parking lot where they had transferred the money into the van. Dirt and stone clutter the pavement and steel girders reach up from the ground. The men wear hard hats and drive massive equipment.

  “Brings back memories, doesn’t it?” Nate asks, glancing from George beside him back to the spot where the armored truck had been parked. “What a high that was.”

  “Amy had a flashback.”

  “A what?”

  “A flashback, in the parking lot. She got disoriented and couldn’t find her car.”

  “You mean a real flashback? When you’re really out of it?”

  “That’s right. It was a flashback of that morning in the bank parking lot. Of that high.”

  “Hey, I’m sorry. I didn’t know.” He turns his car into the row George indicates and pulls into a space three over from the pickup truck.

  “She’s really upset by it. Her daughter was with her when it happened.”

  “Shit. That’s pretty tough.”

  George gets out of the car and stands in the bright sunlight. “She’ll be all right.”

  Nate gets out too and closes his door behind him. He walks around to the trunk and leans up against it with his arms folded across his chest. “You all set now? I’ve got to get back.”

  “Yeah, I’m good.” George pulls his keys from his pocket and walks toward his truck. As he unlocks the door, a small paper beneath his windshield wiper catches his eye. He lifts the wiper, expecting a flyer for pizza delivery or a financial services seminar. And so at first he doesn’t recognize just what he is seeing and almost tosses it. But when he turns away from the glare of the sun and looks again, he squints closely.

  Amy had an audience. The grainy photograph captured her terrified and sinking into a crouch in the parking lot. Beyond her Grace wheels the stroller unattended. He turns and walks toward his brother’s car. Nate has gotten back in behind the wheel and George raps on the window. “Is this your idea of a fucking high?”

  Nate rolls down the window and takes the picture from George. “Jesus Christ.” He stares longer. “Is this what I think it is?”

  George scans the other windshields around them, half expecting to see a square paper beneath each wiper.

  “Someone’s playing a serious game with you,” Nate says.

  “No shit. And you say no one got hurt? This is what the hell your scheme’s done. What good is your million if someone’s got to live like this?” George grabs the picture back and looks at it again. “Where’s Reid keeping himself?”

  “Reid? Why?”

  “He warned me, that day when he dropped off Grace at Litner’s Market. Told me to lay low or shit might happen to people, including Amy.”

  “Like what?”

  “I didn’t stick around to hear. Just tell him to call off his dogs. She doesn’t deserve this.” He turns and walks toward the parked cars, looking from the pavement to the storefronts, trying to place where the photographer had stood.

  Nate swings open his car door. “Hang on. I’ll come with you.”

  George has had enough of his kid brother. “Back off already.” He grabs a handful of Nate’s shirt and gives a shove. “Get the hell out of here before I turn you and your fucking bankroll in to Hayes. I should’ve turned that lousy gun on you that day. T
his is your fault, man, yours, and I’m sick of it. All because of your God damned need to take down the house and pay me back for some lost dream. You’re taking good people down.”

  Nate straightens his shirt. “What do you mean, pay you back?”

  “You know damn well what I mean. It’s not your fault I quit baseball to run the shop after Dad died. That was my choice. So you can stop trying to make up for what I might’ve lost. Drop it already.”

  “All right, all right.” Nate drags his hand through his hair. “At least let me help you now.”

  “Even if it means turning on Reid?” He watches his brother’s expression, still uncertain how pivotal a part Reid played in the heist and how much sway he holds over Nate. “Tell me right now.” He steps closer. “Straight up. You with me on this or not?”

  “Yeah, I’m in. Someone’s screwing with your head, George. And Amy’s, too.” Nate takes off his sunglasses and wipes the back of his hand across his brow. “I’m in.”

  George walks quickly through the parking lot with Nate following. “Let’s go, then.”

  “You think whoever did this actually moved her car and set her up to get upset?”

  “I don’t know what to think, other than I’ll kill him. If he doesn’t leave her alone, I swear I’ll kill whoever did this or go to the authorities and put a real quick end to all of it.”

  “Cool down.” Nate catches up with him. “Go to the authorities and this gets worse. Don’t worry about Reid. I’ll help you keep an eye out and we’ll take care of this together.”

  They turn left at row V-3 and George points out where Amy said she had parked. In the photo, it all matches up. Someone moved her SUV, played with her head and then caught her at her absolute weakest. They walk to Amy’s space and stand there, uncertain of just what to look for. Nate turns back to face Macy’s and George cuffs his white shirtsleeves beneath the hot sun, then pulls the photograph from his shirt pocket. They study it and try to place any of the cars around them.