“ ‘Then another horse came out, a fiery red one,’ ” Oran booms, glaring at Red Beard. “‘Its rider was given power to take peace from the earth and to make men slay each other. To him was given a large sword—’”
“What the hell’s wrong with your friend, Fergus?” Red Beard asks.
“Yeah, if I want church, I’ll go on Sunday when my old lady makes me,” his friend says, getting up.
“ ‘Before me was a black horse! Its rider was holding a pair of scales in his hand. Then I heard—’”
“Hey!” Fergus puts a hand on his arm. “Stop. They don’t need your BS.”
Oran shakes him off. “They need enlightenment. You all need—”
“I need to get out of here.” Red Beard slaps a bill on the bar, and his friend follows suit.
“Suit yourselves,” Oran calls after them as they amble out into the dusk. “Don’t come to me to save your souls from eternal damnation!”
Scowling, Fergus grabs the money. “Take a hike, man. You’re crazy.”
“Crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy, man. I come in here, a paying customer, an old friend, looking for a job, and this is how you treat me?”
Oran swipes a hand across the bar, knocking the beer so that it spills warm suds all over the floor.
“Get out, Matthews, or I call the cops.”
Oran strides to the door and reaches not for the knob, but for the lock. He flips it.
“No one’s going anywhere,” he tells Fergus. “Including you.”
A woman in a white uniform enters Melody’s room. She isn’t Yvonne. Nor is she Darlene, the little blonde who’d curtailed Rodney Lee’s visit earlier. And she’s not Kathy, who’d sent Honeybee home when visiting hours ended.
She introduces herself as Louise, and says she’s on the overnight shift. Tall, stocky and almost masculine in appearance, she’s older than the others and not nearly as nurturing.
Under ordinary circumstances, Melody might find her intimidating. Tonight, however, she welcomes the no-nonsense attitude. Her nerves have been on edge since Rodney Lee Midget’s visit, and she suspects Louise wouldn’t hesitate to wrangle with him if he returns to cause any trouble.
The nurse checks Melody’s vital signs and administers a dose of pain pills. None too soon, as the soreness is creeping in again. But no medication can ebb the current of fear chasing fury through her veins.
I know you like to write nice long letters to Travis . . .
Now she knows what happened to the one she’d written back in February. Rodney Lee had broken into her house, stolen it . . . mailed it? No wonder she hasn’t heard from Travis ever since.
But there’s nothing she can do about it from here, helpless in a hospital bed, other than confide her secret in someone—a nurse? Her parents? The police?
And then what?
Her innocent, vulnerable newborn will become tangible evidence of an illicit, illegal affair. Will the staff continue to care for Martina? Will the grandparents—maternal, anyway—view her as a treasured family member, or pariah? Travis’s parents would certainly turn their backs, at the very least.
“You just try and keep her safe.”
She stares at the painting of the duck and ducklings on a bucolic pond, and she thinks of the scars on Cyril’s face, and the hate-fueled violence that’s tearing apart the world beyond this hospital.
No. She can’t reveal anything to anyone. She isn’t yet strong enough to single-handedly protect Martina, and she has no way of reaching the only other person who’d lay down his life for this child.
“It’s time for the baby to go back to the nursery now, Mrs. Hunter.” Louise reaches for her.
“Please, not yet!” She clutches the swaddled baby to her shoulder and turns away, hearing a faint warble from her daughter. “Oh, no, don’t cry.”
“She’s just hungry for her bottle.”
Or maybe she’s just protesting that her mother is gripping her as a toddler would a toy kept from a playmate’s greedy grasp.
“I’d like to keep her here with me a little while longer.”
“I’m sorry, but we keep a strict schedule in the nursery, Mrs. Hunter. You’ll thank us for it when you get her home next week.”
“Louise . . . do you have children?”
“Me? No. No husband, no children. Never had them, never will,” she adds without an ounce of regret. “Some women just aren’t cut out to be mothers.”
And some women are. Melody strokes her daughter’s precious face with a gentle fingertip. This is what she’d been born to do.
“I know it must be lonely for you here. I understand your husband is in Vietnam.” She clears her throat and shifts her weight. “But Mrs. Hunter—”
“I’m sorry,” Melody says softly. “I know it’s time for her feeding, and I don’t want her to go hungry.”
And I know you don’t understand how I feel every time she’s taken away, and I know that it’s not as if I’m never going to see her again, but that’s how it feels right now. I’m scared, so scared for her . . .
Fighting tears, she looks up, prepared to hand over the baby.
“Do you want to give her the bottle?” Louise asks.
“Me?”
“Ever fed a baby before?”
“No, I . . . no.”
“I can show you how. We’re supposed to wait another day or two for the mothers to get their strength back, but if you want to try it—”
“Oh, I do. And thank you, Louise. Thank you so much.”
The corners of the woman’s mouth bend into what might be a smile before she leaves the room, saying, “I’ll finish my rounds down the hall and come back with the formula.”
Melody leans into the pillows and looks down at her daughter. “Well, how about that? I’m going to learn how to feed you! I’m sure I’ll be right good at it, once I get the hang of things.”
Martina responds with a solemn gaze, as if she’s certain she’ll be in capable hands.
Yes. And the sooner Melody can take care of her baby’s basic needs, the sooner they can get out of here and find Cyril.
In the meantime, we’re sitting ducks, she thinks, gazing at the painting opposite her bed.
“Shame you can’t share the news with her real daddy . . .”
Martina’s little pink mouth quavers and she lets out a faint wail.
“Oh, sweetheart . . .” Melody holds her close, rocking her, and she quiets, but her little body is trembling.
Just hungry? Or is she picking up on Melody’s apprehension?
“It’s going to be okay,” she whispers, to the baby and to herself.
Being Travis’s friend doesn’t make Rodney Lee guilty of Travis’s sins. He’s all talk, a bully all his life. Bullies take pleasure in taunting others, but inside, they’re cowards.
Melody Hunter is anything but.
If Rodney Lee comes back here, she’ll stand up to him.
The baby yawns in her arms, and Melody yawns, too. The pain medication is kicking in. She struggles to stay awake, feeling her eyelids flutter.
They drift closed. She forces them open. They close again.
The next time she opens them, feeling as though she’d drifted off for a bit, a Negro nurse is by the bed. She’s middle-aged, with a coil of cornrows beneath her white cap. Melody can’t think of her name, but she’s seen her before.
“I need to take the baby now.”
“But . . . Louise said I could give her a bottle.”
“No.”
“I thought . . .” Had she dreamed it?
Is she dreaming this? The new nurse sounds like Cyril. So does Yvonne, but she doesn’t look like him. This nurse does.
Melody closes her eyes, opens them again. The woman is still there.
“Come, now. I need to take her back to the nursery, but don’t you worry none. I promise I’ll take good care of her,” she says in her thick patois.
“All right.” Melody sighs, relieved to place her daughter in the nur
se’s outstretched, capable arms. She really is feeling weary.
Her eyes close again as the woman scurries out of the room with a muttered, “T’engky.”
The Bronx
The trouble with night is that you can’t tell, just by glancing at the sky, whether a storm is coming.
Gypsy hears the first rumble of thunder five minutes after leaving the apartment without her rain bonnet. She keeps going, fists deep in the pockets of an ancient spring coat that has never repelled water. Nor is it thick enough for a wind that feels more like early March than the brink of May, even with her violet cardigan layered beneath it.
She’s wearing the sweater not for warmth, but because the shoulder seam has frayed into a gaping hole, and she needs thread in precisely the right shade so that the sweater will be wearable by Monday.
She’d been planning to wear it on her date with Greg tonight, but he’d canceled it yesterday.
“My grandmother’s coming over for dinner,” he’d told her during last period.
“I didn’t know you had a grandmother.”
“I do. And she’s coming over.”
For a moment she’d thought he might invite her to join them. But he’d just said to have a great weekend, as if she’s the kind of girl who might spend it browsing Alexander’s or at Loew’s with a gaggle of friends, or having family dinners of her own.
The first few raindrops fall as she reaches the Grand Concourse and quickly becomes a torrent, stoplights and headlights and neon setting the rain-glossed boulevard aglow. Couples are everywhere, holding hands, splashing in and out of restaurants and stores. Gallant men hold umbrellas above women’s stylish outfits and perfect coifs as Gypsy’s jacket weighs limp and sodden and her hair weeps into her face.
At last, she reaches the Rexall. She smells the deep fryer and hears laughter coming from the back of the store as she browses spools of thread in the notions aisle, looking for just the right shade that matches her sweater. And the spring crocuses that had faded in the garden patch across from school.
“And your eyes,” she hears Greg telling her, as he had just weeks ago. “Has anyone ever told you that you look like Elizabeth Taylor?”
There’s only one shade of purplish thread, and it’s not close enough to the violet she needs. She should have just gone to a sewing store. But this is where Greg was planning to take her tonight and being here, even alone, makes her miss him a little less.
She starts toward the cash register with it and then, impulsively, walks in the opposite direction. She can’t afford to buy the thread and an egg cream, though it’s what she craves. But maybe a soda. She reaches into her pocket to see how much money she has. It’s all in small coins, and a few have fallen through a hole in the lining. Her hand tears the hole even bigger digging them out from along the hem, but it’s worth it when she counts forty-one cents total. Enough for a soda and the thread, with a penny to spare.
The back booths are filled, as always, with teenagers. She sits in an empty stool at the counter between a college-aged couple and a pair of junior high school girls. All are drinking chocolate egg creams.
She wants one, too.
One chocolate egg cream, two straws, across a booth from Greg.
And somehow, when she opens her mouth to order a Coke, that’s what her mouth says. “Chocolate egg cream, please.”
The counter man nods and walks away before she can take it back. She clenches the spool of thread, and then her hand, like her mouth, moves of its own accord to her pocket. Her fingers push the thread in, through the hole in the lining, and it drops to the hem. Glancing down, she sees the rounded outline and hurriedly rearranges the coat so that the telltale bulge is tucked beneath her.
Behind her, she hears a familiar shriek of laughter, and her heart sinks.
Leave it to Carol-Ann Ellis to witness Gypsy here, now, drenched and alone and shoplifting on a Saturday night.
She swivels her head to fix the girl with a dirty look. But as she scans the booth crowd for the trendy blond haircut, she recognizes someone else.
Someone who said his grandmother was coming for dinner.
Stunned, Gypsy turns back to face the counter.
Maybe Greg had confused the night of his grandmother’s visit. Maybe she’d gotten sick and stayed home. Maybe she’d died suddenly.
Please let his grandmother be dead. Please don’t let him be a liar.
She’s jostled by the couple sitting next to her. They’re joking around, taking turns holding an open, overturned glass bottle over their hamburgers in an effort to pour ketchup.
“Oops, sorry,” the girl tells Gypsy, who barely registers her.
If there had been a death in Greg’s family, would he be here in a booth with . . .
She turns her head again.
Carol-Ann.
But they’re not alone, so it isn’t a date, right? They’re with a group—Sharon and her boyfriend, Vinnie, and Ricky Pflueger who’s draped all over . . . is that Connie Barbero?
“Here, let me try again,” the girl sitting next to Gypsy tells her boyfriend, reaching for the ketchup bottle and jostling Gypsy again. “Oops, sorry.”
Connie and Ricky look like a couple. They all, Gypsy realizes, look like couples. Everyone at Greg’s table. Like maybe they’re on a triple date or something, and—
“Roger! Cut it out and give it to me! I keep bumping this poor girl!”
“Fine, here! But it’s not going to come out!”
“You just have to hit it, like—oh, no! Sorry!”
Something red and sticky splatters Gypsy’s hand.
The girl plucks a handful of napkins from the silver holder on the counter and thrusts them at her. “I’m so sorry! My boyfriend is a jerk!”
Gypsy dabs at the ketchup in silence, staring at the frothy beverage in a tall glass with two straws that sits on the table between Greg and Carol-Ann. Carol-Ann is wearing a daffodil-colored bow in her hair.
My boyfriend is . . . so much worse than a jerk. My boyfriend is . . .
The girl next to her taps her arm. “Need more napkins?”
“What? Oh . . . no.”
“Chocolate egg cream.” The counterman sets a tall glass in front of her. There’s only one straw, and a long silver spoon.
She looks back again. Greg and Carol-Ann lean forward and sip from their straws. Their noses bump, and they smile at each other.
She hears Oran’s voice, reading from the book of John.
“When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar.”
Gypsy reaches for her own glass. She’ll march over to that booth and pour it over Greg’s head. Both their heads.
She takes out the spoon, hand trembling. She imagines brown goo spattering into Carol-Ann’s blond hair and yolk-colored bow and fake eyelashes.
No. It wouldn’t be punishment enough for either of them. She closes her eyes and the spoon clenched in her hand becomes a knife, and the brown goo spatters become red. It isn’t ketchup.
Yes. Much better.
She opens her eyes, puts down the spoon, leans into the straw, and drinks the egg cream. She leaves her money on the counter, and walks out into the night.
The street is awash in puddles and high ledges and sills are dripping. The storm has passed.
“Mrs. Hunter!”
Melody opens her eyes to see Louise holding a glass baby bottle.
“Sorry, I had a little problem down the hall, and it took me a little longer than I’d planned. Are you ready to . . . Where is your baby?”
“The nurse took her. She said they needed her back in the nursery.”
“I told them you were going to feed her here,” Louise grumbles, already on her way out the door. “I’ll go find out what’s what.”
Melody closes her eyes again, feeling drowsiness slip back over her like a warm hug.
“Mrs. Hunter!” Louise is back. “Where is your daughter?”
“What do you mean?”
“She isn’t
in the nursery, and we’re not sure why you would think she would be,” a second nurse informs her.
Dazed, Melody sees a third nurse looking around the room as if she’s misplaced her pocketbook.
“I told you, a nurse took her.”
“Which nurse?” Louise asks.
“The one who sounds like Yvonne.”
Cyril.
“You mean a Negro?” Louise shakes her head. “There are no other Negro nurses in this hospital, and Yvonne isn’t on this shift.”
“But a nurse came in while I was waiting for you, and I gave her the baby, and . . .”
“You were sleeping, Mrs. Hunter. Maybe you dreamed about a Negro nurse, but if you think you gave the baby to someone, we need to know who it was.”
“I don’t think I gave her to someone, I know I did. And I wouldn’t have given her to anyone but a nurse, because I was worried after—”
She sees the painting opposite the bed.
Sitting ducks . . .
Panic sucker punches her.
“Someone kidnapped my baby!”
“Kidnapped?” She hears Louise tell one of the nurses to call the police, and she feels the world tilting, spinning, spinning . . .
Someone is screaming, and this time, she knows that it’s her own voice.
Chapter Sixteen
Sunday, April 28, 1968
Marshboro, Georgia
Marshboro sits five miles east of US 17, coastal Camden County’s north-south thoroughfare. About midway between the two, construction is underway to extend Interstate 95 to the Florida state line. When that major north-south route is completed, folks say, little old Marshboro will find itself on the map at last.
For now, it’s a sleepy town populated by fewer than three hundred people, many of whom are related to Marceline. Two of her three surviving sisters live here. Her middle sister is buried in the Baptist churchyard alongside their parents and generations past.
The town proper is clumped along the east-west state road that becomes Main Street for a mile marked by a historic firehouse on one end and a memorial park at the other—a patch of grass barely big enough to hold a Civil War cannon and a flagpole. Between the two landmarks, the road meanders through the business district, past a service station, a laundromat, a bank, three churches, a five-and-dime, a small grocery, and Aunt Beulah’s luncheonette.
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