The Love She Craves
Gemma Jenkins
Copyright © 2014 Gemma Jenkins
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 10: 1500279943
ISBN-13: 978-1500279943
DEDICATION
To Mrs. Ferguson,
My second grade teacher who complained on my report card every quarter, “Gemma daydreams.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This is a work of fiction. Although much of it is set in real places, the people are not real and any similarities to anyone living or deceased is a coincident.
Do not attempt to recreate any of the scenes. To do so may lead to injuries.
1
The lunch crowd dwindled to a trickle when Bob put the last order under the heat lamp in the small truck stop diner. “Cigarette time,” he said to Onyx through the opening between the kitchen and the dining room. Bob had the luxury of a break, but Nyxie, as her name tag touted, still had eight tickets open.
She nodded, wishing she could sit down if only for a minute or two. The truck stop, always shorthanded, still bustled with activity and Polly pulled a no-show this morning leaving the waifish twenty-two-year-old as the sole waitress. Nyxie had fallen so far behind; her tips hovered between ten percent and nonexistent.
Just as she finished loading her arms to capacity with hot plates, the phone rang. She glanced back to the kitchen. Bob had already stepped outside. A quiet curse passed her lips as she did her best to ignore the persistent trill.
Onyx Carmichael maneuvered past a crate of clean glasses on the floor, around the speckled Formica countertop to a booth halfway across the diner.
“Okay, who had the cheeseburger?” she said trying to sound cheerful.
“Here.”
She slid the plate in front of the teenaged boy dressed all in black with a diamond nose ring and large bore tunnels in his earlobes. Her head cocked to the side as she looked through the holes. They were obviously not from around here. If she had time later, she’d ask them how their trip was going in hopes of salvaging her tip.
“Hey, I said no onions,” he said lifting the bun.
“Just pick them off, Justin,” his mom said in an irritated tone as she put down the red pebbly plastic Coke cup, the straw coated in coral lipstick. “It took twenty-seven minutes to get that one. Do you really want to wait another half hour to eat?”
“Sorry,” Nyxie said. “The other waitress didn’t show up. Who had the meatloaf?”
“That’s mine,” the father said.
How could she possibly forget that? His burnt orange UT ball cap had a picture of the Longhorns on them. Meatloaf goes to the cow hat. Duh. Her brain must have blocked it in hopes of forgetting the way it clashed with that ugly Kelly green generic polo.
“Chicken fried steak?”
Across the diner, the phone continued its plaintive cry for attention.
“Mine,” the mother said with pursed lips.
“Then the deluxe burrito must go to this little guy.”
The grease from the chili rose to the top and pooled around the edge of the plate making the young waitress’s lip snarl a bit. “Can I get y’all anything else?”
“Ketchup,” the teenager said.
“More tea, please.”
“Do you have any hot sauce?”
“Coming up.”
The phone continued to shrill as she grabbed what she needed from behind the counter. God, the sound pulsated in her brain like an alarm clock waking her out of a dead sleep.
Damn Bob.
She quickly returned to the table, set down the ketchup and picante and filled the man’s clear plastic cup.
“I need my check, miss,” a man at a neighboring table said before she could get away.
She glanced at his empty plate trying to remember what he ordered before quickly rifling through the tickets in her apron pocket. “You can pay at the register when you’re ready,” she said even as he slid out of the booth.
When she finally got to the phone, she was tempted to answer it, “Bob’s Slop and Gas,” to get back at him for abandoning her. She didn’t get the chance.
The child’s scream met her ear before she could speak.
“Lotus? Lotus, what’s wrong?” The child’s hysteria gripped Nyxie with an icy hand. She suddenly understood what people meant when they said their blood ran cold.
The waitress held the phone receiver a foot from her ear, protecting her eardrum from the screams. The eye of every trucker at the counter locked on her as panic spread from the phone to the young woman in the outdated pink polyester waitress uniform. Like ripples in water, conversations all over the restaurant stopped midsentence.
“Lotus, honey, you have to calm down. I can’t understand you,” she yelled into the phone, her raised voice a combination of her own adrenaline kicking in and the need to be heard over Lotus’s screams. “Calm down. Can you put Cody on the phone?”
The waitress’s nerves were taut, fear pounded through her veins. “Where’s Cody? What happened? Oh, my God! Have you called the ambulance yet? Hang up and call 9-1-1. I’ll be home in a minute.”
She slammed the receiver down in her sickening panic and stood frozen for a second trying to keep from shutting down completely.
“Bob!” she yelled into the kitchen. “Bob!”
She took a step toward the two customers at the register to cash them out as she moved by rote then turned and took two steps the other way, her waist long black braid swinging behind her. Her hands flew to the crown of her head, her elbows coming forward as if to protect herself from a physical blow.
“Fuck me!” Her voice sounded choked off and tight with tension.
She couldn’t think. She didn’t know what to do.
“Bob!”
Her scream echoed through every corner of the truck stop making customers in the convenience store turn toward the restaurant.
“For fuck’s sake, Carmichael, is the kitchen on fire?” Bob said, exhaling smoke into the kitchen as he stepped in, tossing his cigarette behind him.
“Cody’s been hit by a pickup. I gotta go,” she said untying the apron around her waist. She rolled it up and put it under the heat lamp.
Bob’s head jerked around to face her. “Is he okay?”
She shrugged, tears spilling all over her face. “Lotus said he was dead.”
“What does a ten-year-old know? Not only did she bury Skittles to see if a tree would grow, but she watered the dirt all spring.”
Normally, the reminder would have made her smile. But not today.
Jimbo Adkins pushed his plate back and lifted his sizable girth from the chrome-rimmed stool. “I’ll drive you, darlin’,” he said and reached for one more bite of his cheeseburger, stuffing half of what remained in his mouth.
Jimbo, a Monday through Friday lunch regular, knew Onyx didn’t own a vehicle. “I’ll take you home to get the girls and then I’ll drive you to the hospital in Lubbock.”
She lived less than a mile from the truck stop but they couldn’t get within a block of the house because emergency vehicles clogged the road. The volunteer fire department, EMS and two city cops sat at awkward angles to prevent cars from passing.
Before he slammed it into park, Nyxie bailed out of Jimbo’s pickup and took off as fast as her secondhand sneakers would carry her. The closer she came, the more the scene unfolded before her. She saw the flashy red pickup first and then her brother’s mangled bike and the teenage driver talking to the cop while holding a cell phone to his ear.
Lotus came out of nowhere and wrapped her arms around her aunt. Onyx put her hand on the girl’s shoulder but kept movin
g forward. “Where’s Reina?”
“She’s h-hiding in the closet,” Lotus hiccupped through her sobs. Big brown eyes peered out from her frightened face haloed in a mess of chestnut hair which had gone uncombed after going to bed the night before with it wet. The girl looked like her mother at that age.
Onyx looked like her father, Jack Carmichael, or Black Jack as he told people to call him, though as far as she knew, no one did. Onyx pretended that’s where her name came from—a play on Black Jack, but Onyx Ebony Carmichael’s name had nothing to do with her father’s nickname.
The thu-thu-thu of the helicopter blades cut through the air as one of the EMTs closed the ambulance doors. Before she could get to it, the siren screamed, covering up her plea to wait as it raced to meet the AeroCare chopper in the cotton field at the edge of town. A glimmer of hope touched a spot in her brain when she remembered someone telling her ambulances didn’t transport dead people. And surely, they wouldn’t have called a helicopter for someone dead.
“Where are they taking him?” Nyxie asked a cop. She didn’t recognize him. He must be new. She had grown up knowing the small town’s police force of six officers, and now most of them came into the diner at least once a week.
“Are you the kid’s mother?”
“The Carmichael women may start squeezing out babies early, but not at the age of ten,” she said sarcastically. “I’m his sister and guardian.”
Their father had died two years earlier leaving her to care for her brother.
“Which hospital?” she asked again.
“UMC,” the cop said. “But I need to ask you some questions.”
“You can ask your questions at the hospital,” she said taking Lotus’s hand and striding toward the garage apartment she shared with Cody and their two nieces.
“Wait…,” he called after her, but she did not slow down.
She called Reina’s name as soon as she entered the one-room apartment next to her landlady’s house, and the girl burst out of the closet and into her arms. Reina, small for her eight years, buried her face in Nyxie’s uniform. The little girl looked nothing like her sister. Although Nyxie had never met Reina’s father, it was obvious he was Latino from the girl’s dark coloring. It made her wonder if the girl would have a slight advantage in life to not be recognized as a Carmichael.
“My friend Jimbo is going to drive us to the hospital. Does anyone have to go to the bathroom before we go?”
Force of habit.
“Can I take Bear-Bear?” the eight-year-old asked. It had taken months to get the girl to leave the house without it after Onyx’s drug-addicted sister, Melinda, abandoned the girls with her a year earlier. She shouldn’t have been surprised. Melinda ran away at fourteen and became a mother less than a year later. Talk about repeating history. That was how old their mother was when Melinda was conceived.
“Take Bear-Bear. Lotus, do you want to take your teddy bear, too?” The older girl nodded and darted to the messily made queen-size bed they all four shared.
A light knock sounded on the doorframe. Nyxie turned to find the chief of police filling the opening. She had known Vincent Hale since she was a kid. He would bring Jack home when he felt too generous to lock her father up or maybe he just didn’t want to make the drive into Lubbock to take him to the county lock-up.
“Onyx, you know I’m not going to be able to turn a blind eye to what’s going on anymore. I know you’re doing the best you can. You’re doing a better job than your daddy ever did, but I’m afraid there’s no way I can keep Child Protective Services out of this. These kids shoulda had a sitter. You know it, I know it.”
Nyxie tried not to cry in front of the man. “Please,” she begged. “We don’t have anything else—just each other.”
“I know it’s not fair but I gotta do my job.”
It wasn’t as if this was a new development. Everyone knew Onyx Carmichael had taken responsibility for all three kids. They were in school every day in relatively clean clothes and if the kids acted up, just the threat of calling Onyx was all it took to settle them down. The teachers and the principals knew. The school bus driver even agreed to drop the kids off at the truck stop after school. Few people kept secrets in a small town like Chimera Flats.
No one expected anything better. Despite her best efforts, people considered the Carmichaels nothing but trash.
“I need to get to the hospital,” she said. It felt like a million years had passed though in truth the exchange barely took a minute.
“Need a lift?”
“Jimbo is taking us,” she said with the small-town assumption that everyone knew everyone.
Nyxie was only vaguely aware of the drive to Lubbock. She couldn’t tell how long it took or how fast they drove. She sat on her hands, rocking back-and-forth, staring at the lights of the chief’s patrol car as he escorted them to the Lubbock city limits. When Jimbo pulled the pickup to a stop at the emergency room fifteen minutes after their escort ended, Nyxie dragged herself out of her daze.
“Shit, I left my purse at work,” she said looking around the cab of the pickup.
Jimbo wrote his cell phone number on the back of a deposit slip floating around the floor of the truck, and handed her his MasterCard.
“Call me if you need anything—a ride, a change of clothes, whatever. Use the card if you need to. There should be about $300 left on it before you hit my limit. If the cafeteria won’t take it, pizza’s only a phone call away.”
“I’ll pay you back, Jimbo,” she said tucking the card and paper into the single patch pocket on the front of her uniform.
“I know you will.”
She helped the girls down and rushed into reception area of the emergency department, the girls clinging to her hands. Nyxie bypassed a few people waiting patiently in a queue at the desk and interrupted the nurse who was talking to the woman in front.
“Ma’am, my brother….”
“I’m helping someone. You’ll have to wait your turn,” the nurse said, copping an attitude as she looked over the rim of her glasses at her and promptly turned back to the woman in line.
She tried again. “They brought him in by helicopter….”
“These people were here before you.”
“Please, can you just tell me if he’s alive?” The plaintive tone in the young woman’s voice moved the lady the nurse was helping.
“I can wait,” the woman said, putting her hand on Nyxie’s shoulder and compelling her forward. “Take care of her first.”
“Thank you. Bless you.”
Nyxie wasn’t religious, but always thought it was nice when someone said that to her. Her only experience with religion was attending Vacation Bible School as a kid and even then, she mostly went because they gave her a cookie and a Dixie-cup of Kool-aid every day.
“The last I heard, he’s still alive,” the nurse said. “Alive, but critical.”
The woman picked up the phone handset and pressed a couple of buttons. A few moments ticked off before the nurse spoke into the mouthpiece. “The AeroCare boy’s family is here.”
“Cody Carmichael. His name is Cody Carmichael,” she said hugging a niece under each arm.
“Right. They’re working on him. Someone will be out to talk to you in a few minutes.”
“We can’t go back?”
“You’d be in the way.” The woman rolled her chair back about four feet and spoke to someone in an area that looked like a closet. “Sylvie, the bike accident’s family is here. Are you ready for her?”
Nyxie soon discovered Sylvie worked as the triage nurse. She only wanted Cody’s medical history and she sent Nyxie to sit in the waiting room afterwards.
Nyxie had no concept of time. Lotus and Reina sat unnaturally still, no one saying a word as the minutes ticked away. Every time the doors opened, Nyxie sat up straight, ready to jump up if they called for her.
Eventually, a young nurse wearing blue scrubs and white Crocs came through a pair of double doors and crouched d
own before her.
“He took the impact on his left side. Left femur, left ulna and radius, broken ribs, concussion and he has internal bleeding. We think it’s his spleen. They’re prepping him for surgery.”
“Please, may I see him before they take him to the OR?”
She looked like she knew she was breaking a rule, but she also knew the boy might die. “Hurry.” The nurse walked quickly and Onyx followed holding her nieces’ hands in a death grip. “Wait here,” the nurse said and frowned when she realized Onyx had brought the girls with her.
Waiting in the corridor for the nurse to return, Nyxie squatted down to speak with Lotus and Reina. “Hold each other’s hand and stay here. I’m going inside,” she said deciding not to let the nurse change her mind. “I’ll only be in there for a couple of minutes. Bear-Bear’s in charge until I get back.”
The girls tried to smile but Reina looked terrified and Lotus’s pale cheeks were streaked with rivulets of tears. She gave them both a quick kiss on their foreheads.
“It’s going to be okay.”
Nyxie hated to lie. Nothing was going to be the same. Even if Cody lived, his recovery would be long and painful. And now CPS would step in. Were they going to take all three children away from her? Would they take them away from the most stable, loving home any of them had ever known—including Onyx?
If CPS needed to get involved, why hadn’t they done it twenty years ago when they could have helped her sister and her, long before Cody was born, long before her sister ran away, gave birth to two babies and became a meth-head?
Dr. Declan Stryker finished consulting with the ER resident, gave the kid a quick glance and was about to head to the OR to begin scrubbing for surgery. He turned and there stood the girl from high school he had fantasized about at least a thousand times.
His eyes darted to the name tag she wore for confirmation and he stood there confused for only a second until he made the connection from Onyx to Nyxie. If she’d used that nickname in high school, he’d never heard it. But then again, he’d never really known her.
The Love She Craves: Selling Her Soul to Declan Page 1
