“Allie,” Marshall said, “that’s enough.”
“We should probably go,” Mary told them. “Barney, would you like some help getting Mabel to the truck?”
Barney said, “That would be fine, Mary.” He rose from his chair and collected the ticket and Leah’s painting from the coffee table. Tom and Ellen looked at Leah, who was rubbing at her thumb. “I’m sorry if I caused y’all some pain. It’s okay if you gotta work, Tom. Really. But I’d like to see Ellen and Leah there tomorrow anyways, just to share in me an’ Mabel’s joy.”
“We’ll be there, Barney,” Ellen said. “Won’t we, Leah?”
“Yuh-yes,” Leah whispered. She let go of her thumb and turned to Barney. Her tears made her eyes glisten. “I’m suh-so happy f-for you, Mr. Buh-Barney. It’s what you nuh-needed. And d-don’t you wuh-worry. You and Muh-Miss M-Mabel are guh-gonna be just fine nuh-now. Your d-day’s come.”
There was a magic to the little girl’s smile. Barney knew then without a doubt that she had been touched by God. He believed her. He believed her every word.
Monday
Five Days Before the Carnival
1
Tom hated Monday mornings. Hated having to exchange jeans for khakis, hated the drive into the city. Hated having to crawl through that small space between work and home and come out on the other side alone. His client list had been halved, his office hours cut back to Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. He and Ellen had finagled the bills and their investments to such that even with his lower salary, the inheritance from Ellen’s father (that would be Robert Bosserman, who had before his death presided over an empire that included not only Big Bob’s Classic Cars but also Big Bob’s Housewares and Big Bob’s Kountry Kitchen) would allow them to live in relative ease in a town where the cost of living was next to nothing. It was perfect, the American dream, and yet misery still followed.
He stood in his office and watched the rush-hour traffic below stagger and stall along the littered streets of Stanley, Virginia. He’d often wondered how he had managed for so long to think such a panorama warm, even comforting. Now he regarded it as alien. Strange what changes a mere two months among mountains and dirt roads could bring.
Then again, it was not nearly as strange as what changes a mere two days could bring to a little girl.
He reached into his pocket for his cell phone and dialed home. There was no answer, though Tom knew Ellen and Leah hadn’t yet left for the park. The truce had been off again the moment the Moores and Grandersons left the previous afternoon. Even Leah wouldn’t speak to him. Tom had cut back on his patient load and uprooted his family to the boon-docks, but in the end even that hadn’t been enough. He left a message saying he hoped everything went well and that he’d check on them later.
The outer door opened and closed. Tom checked his watch for no reason. That sound could only mean Rita, and Rita meant it was precisely 7:45. The openly callous curmudgeon and closeted saccharine grandmother had been many things in Tom’s twelve years of professional practice—receptionist, bookkeeper, and (twice) bouncer—but she had never been late.
“Morning, Tom,” she called through his closed office door.
“Morning.”
Tom walked from the window to his desk. The polished cherry surface was empty but for a computer, a telephone, and a stack of the day’s patient files. What mementos Tom brought through that small opening between home and work were kept locked in the top left drawer. He removed the brass key from his pocket and pulled out the stack of Leah’s drawings—of himself and Ellen, of Leah and her not-quite-there smile, of their old house in Stanley and their new one in Mattingly. All drawn with the shaky, unskilled hand of a little girl searching for the heart of the matter. None like the one she had produced Saturday afternoon, and none with veiled magical numbers.
“It just doesn’t make sense,” he said aloud.
A knock at the door. Rita entered wearing a powder-blue dress that nearly matched the color of her hair. Her tiny heeled shoes left dimples in the carpet. The deep lines that framed her mouth into an ever-present look of sourness bowed out in their middles—her idea of a smile. The morning newspaper was tucked under her arm, and in one hand she carried a plate bearing two lemon muffins and a cup of coffee. With the other she pushed the door shut behind her.
“How was the party?” she asked. She set the plate and the paper down on his desk.
Tom folded Leah’s drawings and placed them back into the drawer. “You wouldn’t believe it.”
“I told you everything would be fine, even if you’re stuck down there in hillbilly hell. Heard about the guy who won the Powerball. You know him?”
“Barney Moore. He made an easel for Leah as a birthday present. The town’s having some sort of news thing today. He wanted us there. Ellen and Leah are going.”
“Why aren’t you?”
He tapped the stack of files in front of him, but mainly the one on top. Tom could never say it, could barely allow himself to think it, but the one on top was the only one that mattered.
Rita turned around the chair that rested between the desk and the leather sofa in the middle of the office and sat.
“I see,” she said. “I want you to know I respect that, Tom, even if it’s something Ellen and Leah struggle with. I guess you probably even looked over that file this weekend, didn’t you? You had the choice of which patients to keep and which to refer elsewhere, but you hung on to her. You can’t let her go.”
Tom took a sip of his coffee. “Some patients stick with you.”
Rita shook her head. “They all stick with you. That’s why you think you have to be the one to fix everything, or nothing will get fixed. So, you ready?” She stood up as if to say he didn’t have a choice.
“How is she?”
“Nuts and hopeless. Doesn’t take a fancy doctor to see that.”
He did not scold Rita. Tom had realized long ago that along with receptionist, bookkeeper, and twice bouncer, Rita also served as a voice for those things he would not allow himself to accept. She turned to leave.
“Rita, can I ask you something?”
“Sure, but make it quick. There’s an open window and a Gideon Bible out there. Might as well be weapons of mass destruction as far as she’s concerned.”
“Did either of your kids ever have imaginary friends growing up?”
“Of course not,” she said. “You think I raised idiots? Why?”
“No reason.”
Rita walked to the door and stopped. Tom thought she was about to say something, then realized she was merely gathering her strength. She looked like someone pausing at the threshold of home to feel the last bit of warmth before braving the cold. Tom placed a fresh box of tissues on the coffee table and followed her. He breathed, smiled, and walked out.
The woman corresponding to the top file on Tom’s desk sat in the corner of the waiting room leafing through a two-month-old copy of Glamour. The irony had not escaped Rita, who now sat behind her glass cubicle shaking her head and smiling. The gaunt face and sunken eyes of the woman in the waiting room spoke of her weariness in bearing that unnamable weight Tom knew was common to all his patients. Her eyes glanced from the page to the area around her, though never high enough to warrant raising her chin. A car horn blew from the street below, making her flinch. Her jeans and denim shirt were twice the necessary size, as if to give the false hope that she could disappear into them and therefore go unnoticed. And yet despite all this, Tom understood that she had been pretty once and could be again. She looked up as he approached and offered a weak grin.
“Good morning, Meagan,” Tom said. “Come on in.”
She followed Tom into his office and settled herself in her accustomed place at the end of the sofa. Had she waited one moment later to reach for the box of tissues, the eruption of tears and spittle would have spewed everywhere—onto her, him, the leather sofa, maybe all the way to the windows—which would have only upset her more. It would have been a mess, and Me
agan Gladwell was of the opinion that she was not allowed to make a mess.
“I’m so sorry,” she said.
Tom’s voice was flat and soothing. His chin was already in his hand. “You don’t have to apologize for anything here, Meagan. It’s important to let yourself grieve, okay? You’re going through a very difficult time.”
Meagan shuddered and poured her pain into the thick tissue she held over her mouth and nose. She wiped and took her position—legs crossed, head down, toes curled into the carpet as if grasping for something solid—and nodded okay despite the fact Tom knew she did not believe him. Meagan’s life was based upon the necessity of being sorry. Her safety depended upon it, though the mottled green and gray bruises that peeked out from beneath her shirtsleeves confessed that her apologies no longer carried the persuasiveness they once did.
Tom pushed on. “Have you given any thought to what we discussed last week?”
“I’m still at home,” she managed, which was enough for her to lunge for another tissue. “I’m afraid to leave, and I’m afraid to stay.”
“I know.”
“Do you know what’s worse, Dr. Norcross?”
“Tom,” he offered, as he had all the times before.
“Tom. Do you know what’s worse? I honestly think we can work things out. It’s not all Harold’s fault. Takes two to tango, right?”
Tom wrote on the pad in his lap. As mistaken as her words were, they were still good for him to hear. One never knew what could spring forth from the silences of the heart, and what had just sprung from Meagan’s meant she was holding steady. Once among Tom’s thirty regular patients, she was now one of the fifteen he’d kept. She was also his most difficult. It had taken three months to crack the hard shell Meagan had by necessity constructed around herself. Her climb from Denial to Guilt had been slow but steady, but she had stumbled these past months. Months and possibly years from now would come Enlightenment and finally Responsibility, the last and most difficult stage of Battered Woman Syndrome. Assuming, of course, that Harold Gladwell hadn’t killed her by then.
“You’d stand a better chance of working things out if Harold agreed to come here with you.”
Meagan looked around the office—the desk behind Tom, the diplomas on the wall. Cherry bookcases filled with the collected wisdom of his profession’s giants. Water cascaded down the Zen fountain in the corner. The fountain had been Rita’s idea, a good one but not her best, that being reserved for her suggestion to never skimp on the tissues. The thicker the better, she’d said. Rita was a wise woman.
“You know there’s probably more money in here than Harold makes in a year?” Meagan asked. “Not to mention this place is probably bigger than our apartment. I think that’s why he gets so mad sometimes. Life didn’t hand him much. He says that’s my fault.”
“That’s not true,” Tom said. “You can’t believe that, Meagan.”
She sighed and tossed her tissue into the rapidly filling wastebasket next to the sofa. “Maybe I can’t. Do you think God is punishing me for the things I can’t believe, Dr. Norcross? Do you think that’s what He’s doing?”
Tom’s hand tightened around his pen. This, again—this was the reason for Meagan’s stumble.
“I think that’s an issue you should take up with someone of faith. I’m only concerned with your mind, Meagan, not your soul.”
“There’s more going on than my mind.”
“I know this is difficult for you, Meagan, but we’re making real progress. It’s admirable to want to salvage your marriage, but I’m still going to recommend you reconsider staying in the house.”
“God doesn’t want me to leave.”
Tom scribbled on his pad, mostly to rein in his anger. He wished Rita were there to say what he thought, wished she would grab Meagan by the shoulders and shake her, yell into her face, tell her that her notion of God was mauling her spirit just as much as Harold Gladwell was mauling her body. He thought of Reggie Goggins and his simple life of few cares, the sort of existence that lent itself to the very misguided fundamentalism that rendered Meagan a prisoner. It was easy to live one’s life with faith and hope when your needs and wants were few. But when your world became a matter of living and dying, that faith and hope often resulted in more harm than good.
“If there’s a God, Meagan, I’m fairly certain he would not want you to continue in your situation. But I don’t want to talk about theology, I want to help you.”
“You can’t help me if you don’t believe, Dr.— Tom. That’s just it. You can’t understand. God doesn’t want me to leave.” Meagan almost reached for another tissue but didn’t. She merely stared at the box.
“We’ll get through this,” Tom said. He leaned toward her. “Meagan, I know some wonderful shelters in the area—”
“No, I can’t.”
“You have to understand that your faith—”
“It’s not just that,” she said. “It’s something else too.”
“What?”
Her eyes watered. Her lips trembled. She reached for another tissue.
“I’m pregnant.”
Meagan gushed again.
2
Reggie had promised himself he would stay in his office that morning, far away from the hoopla outside. He’d even gone so far as to eat breakfast at the church rather than the diner. The candy bar from the vending machine in the hallway didn’t settle as well as the eggs and bacon down on Main Street, but at least his conscience was calm.
His curiosity, however, wasn’t.
He was at his desk working on next week’s sermon when the first group of people passed the window. Reggie rose from his desk and grabbed the aluminum softball bat by the chair without realizing he’d done so. The thirty-four-inch Easton was pocked and chipped from years of use in the church softball league (Reggie was the starting shortstop for First Church and had no qualms thinking himself to be the best ballplayer in town except for maybe Sheriff Barnett). It was also Reggie’s secret weapon when it came to sermon preparation. Amazing, the thoughts that sprang from the fertile loam of his mind while holding that bat.
Lisa Carver, she of the sour voice, walked by with Rodney and their two children in tow. Reggie went to the open window. The summer air was hot and clung to his face. A lone robin sang from one of the ancient elms in the church’s courtyard. The Carvers continued on past, taking a right at the next corner and heading into the park.
More people followed, other families and groups of friends, many of whom attended First Church and none of whom cast a look in Reggie’s direction. The young ones skipped and hurried, first running past their parents and then doubling back to urge them onward. Some carried balloons or signs that said CONGRATULATIONS BARNEY and WE LOVE YOU. Chatter and laughter filled the air. It was an excitement and expectation normally reserved for the upcoming carnival. Two news vans, one from Stanley and the other from Richmond, drove past. The scene was Reggie’s worst nightmare.
He returned to his desk, where an open Bible lay beside a pad of paper. Reggie tried to concentrate on the task at hand but found his thoughts drifting to his town and his people, to poor Mabel—Barney hadn’t called to ask if Reggie would come sit with her, which meant the crazy old man planned to bring her along—and of the way Barney had left her alone while he wallowed in the congregation’s sudden adulation. He thought of studying the Word and preaching the Word, and then he thought of how it was more important to live the Word.
And that was when Reggie Goggins decided he had to go to the park. In the park was where God wanted him.
He walked outside and fell in step with the gathering stream of people. More—dozens more, maybe even hundreds—hugged the iron fence that bordered the park. A child ran past and clipped Reggie’s leg, bumping his knee into the sharp corner of a Gazette newspaper box beside the pay telephone. Reggie winced, his hand shooting to his leg in reflex, then winced again when he found a small hole in his jeans that matched the deep scrape on his knee. The boy turn
ed to apologize and then ran through the gate into the park.
Mayor Wallis stood on a makeshift stage that had been erected atop the pitcher’s mound and thumped a microphone. Surrounding the stage were wooden frames of the booths and exhibits that would be used for the carnival. As the week progressed, those frames would be covered with tarps and decorated with American flags and banners. For now they served as leaning posts for expectant townspeople. Barney, Mabel, Allie, and Leah sat at a covered banquet table in the middle of the stage. Another microphone sat in front of them, along with a folded sheet of paper that had to be Leah’s painting. Big Jim Wallis made his way over to pat Barney on the back and no doubt offer last-minute instructions. A woman from Away stood smiling nearby and straightened her black pantsuit.
The reporters at the front of the stage busied themselves with microphones and cameras. Townspeople waited under the pavilions on the hill above and in the tree shade below, watching and murmuring to one another about what had happened and how. It looked to Reggie as if a giant hand had scooped up everyone within ten miles and dropped them into that one small place.
He found a quiet spot next to an oak that offered a view of both the crowd and the stage and rubbed his sore knee. Leah scanned the crowd from right to left. Her eyes settled on Reggie. She offered him a quiet wave that was no more than a simple raising of a finger. Reggie tried to smile back but couldn’t.
Big Jim tapped the microphone with a thick finger and thanked everyone for taking time out of their busy day. He introduced Trevor to the reporters, reminded them that his nephew was the one who first broke the story and they shouldn’t forget it. The crowd whooped, not because they were particularly fond of the mayor’s nephew, but because he was one of their own. Big Jim then introduced the woman from Away as Mary Hill Rexrode of the Virginia Lottery, who had at his request taken the unusual step of driving all the way down from Harrisonburg to verify Barney’s ticket. He then uttered seven words that set the wolves to howling.
“Mr. Moore will now take some questions.”
When Mockingbirds Sing (9781401688233) Page 9
