by Ninie Hammon
That was special. Sam remembered nursing Rusty.
“Shoot, I might as well have gone on back to the hospital when I got done last night because I didn’t sleep a wink.”
“Yeah, that was some storm!” Sam had never seen anything like it.
“Oh, wasn’t the storm kept me awake. Just, you know, the jitters. I would have got in the truck and went on back but I told my sister Eva Joan I’d stop by on my way up Lexington this morning — she lives in Frogtown so it ain’t much out of the way — to fetch them cloth diapers she’s been collecting for me. Me and Shep can’t afford them disposables.”
“Good thing you wasn’t lookin’ to buy no diapers here,” said the bored teenage checker, who needed to wash her hair and stop snapping her bubble gum. “We ain’t got none. Delivery truck didn’t show up this morning.”
Abby put the pack of preemie onesies on the checkout counter.
“Pour little thing ain’t got no clothes that fit — even these preemies is too big, but I’m gonna fatten him up quick as I can, nurse him ever ten minutes if that’s what he wants.” She opened her purse and pulled from it a little snap-shut change purse, withdrawing some folded bills and flattening them on the counter.
“Enjoy him while he’s little,” Sam told her. “Before you know it, you won’t be able to snap those around his fat little butt. You ever need a babysitter, give me a call.”
“Shoot, I ain’t gonna be leaving him nowhere. Once I finally get my hands on that baby, I might not put him down long enough for him to learn to walk.”
Abby went out the door, jingling the bell, and the checker was only half through ringing up Sam’s order when Abby came running back in.
“You got to come help!” Her voice was breathless and frightened. “They’s a woman out on the bench there, sick, puking her guts up, and a little girl’s sitting beside her with blood running down her face. Something’s bad wrong.”
Chapter Six
Charlie blinked but her vision was so blurred she closed her eyes again. That’s when the nausea hit her. From out of nowhere, she was suddenly so sick to her stomach she was barely able to lean over in time to keep from spewing a noxious puddle of this morning’s toast, jelly and coffee into her own lap.
She heaved and heaved, the kind of sick you get from the worst hangover you ever had, the kind that makes your diaphragm muscles strain.
She heaved so violently she could barely get her breath, and all the while she heard a pulsing sound that didn’t really seem like a sound because she didn’t think she was hearing it with her ears. It seemed like the sound was inside her head, bouncing around from one side to the other like a tennis ball in an empty oil drum.
WHUM!
WHUM!
WHUM!
The rhythm seemed to be keeping time with her heaving and gasping.
She was unaware of her surroundings until she finally got her breath, gasped and tried to choke off the next wave of heaving.
The sound in her head gradually subsided to a steady Whum. Whum. Whum. Then whumwhumwhum. Softer, a background, the canvas on which emerging reality was painted.
It was hot. She was sitting in the sun, and when she looked up she had to squeeze her eyes shut and turn away.
Then she heard Merrie’s voice, her tear-clotted voice, the sound of a child who has been crying for a long time. Charlie almost shook her head to get her bearings, but didn’t. She was absolutely positive that her entire skull was filled with blown glass, some kind of fragile crystal, thinner than an egg shell. Any sudden movement of it would …
Just thinking about a sudden movement could shatter it.
Everything was all wrong.
What was happening?
In an accident? A wreck?
Voices were speaking to her and she opened her squinty eyes.
Bad move. The world heaved and swayed when she did and the people leaning over her took on the proportions of images in a funhouse mirror.
People standing over her.
Where was she?
Where …?
She made herself open her eyes, made herself focus and discovered that fighting the vertigo and nausea helped to alleviate it.
There was a red-haired woman standing in front of her.
Where was she?
What is … where are …?
She couldn’t order words in her head enough to speak. Then someone called her name, part of it.
“… Charlie Ryan, aren’t you? Remember me, Sam Sheridan?”
And then reality slammed down around her, the finality of a prison cell door banging shut.
She was sitting on a bench — somewhere … and Merrie was sitting beside her, crying.
Merrie!
Her mind snapped back into focus, a rubber band stretched to the limit and set free.
Merrie had tripped and hit her head. She was bleeding. Charlie had strapped her into the car seat and …
That was it. The memories were gone after that, wiped clean.
She must have been in some kind of wreck … an accident.
Merrie was crying a listless sort of cry. There was enough dried blood on her face to indicate she’d either been attacked by an ax murderer, or had been an extra on the set of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
Though most of the blood was dry, there was an oozing wound under a crude bandage on her forehead.
Charlie had put the bandage on. Had done the best she could to secure it, but there’d been only Band-Aids, no surgical tape, nothing to hold it to the wiggling, wailing child before she strapped the little girl into the car seat to take her—
She’d been on her way to the hospital, to the emergency room. And then …
Again, nothing.
“… need to get her stitched up …” a voice said.
She attended to the last, looked … really looked at the people around her. A woman with long, strawberry blonde hair blowing daintily in the breeze was down on one knee in front of Merrie, carefully examining the bandage. There was a skinny blonde woman there and an overweight teenage girl, but those two weren’t standing near her, and it was clear why. She had puked all over the ground around her. The smell of it caused nausea to roll back in, a wave stretching out up a sandy beach.
“Can you hear me, Charlie? Do you understand?”
That was the red-headed woman who looked familiar but Charlie couldn’t place her. Her voice was husky, low and soothing.
“We need to see to the little girl’s cut.”
Now there was somebody speaking sense.
“Yes, stitches. That’s where I was going when …”
Yeah, when what?
“Where am I?” She hated how much that sounded like every groggy heroine in every cheap movie who wakes up after fill-in-the-blank and can’t remember which guy she went home with.
But where was she?
“At the crossroads,” said the young woman with blonde hair and bad teeth.
“The Middle of Nowhere,” said the redhead who—
“Sam? Sam Sheridan?”
Charlie was surprised she was able to pull that name out of the memory banks because she surely had not laid eyes on the woman since the night of graduation from high school. Sam had played basketball.
Sam nodded, then asked, “What happened to your little girl?”
Reality was settling more permanently around her.
“She fell, tripped over a fallen limb in the driveway of her grandmother’s house. I was taking her to the emergency room when …”
She looked around.
“Where’s my car?”
The people standing in front of her all had the same I-got-no-idea-lady look on their faces.
Sam was taking over and that was a good thing because right now Charlie needed someone taking over.
“E.J.’s office is right there.” Sam pointed to the building next to the Dollar General Store. “He’s got supplies. We can clean her up, get that wound properly bandaged.”
E.J. …
the name. Elijah Hamilton.
Sam had already gotten Merrie to her feet and she held her hand out to help Charlie to hers.
“I can butterfly it, make a sterile bandage. Or he can put in some stitches … and not have to worry that his patient’s going to bite him.”
Elijah Hamilton. A veterinarian.
She burped out a bleat of inappropriate laughter but couldn’t help it. A veterinarian. She’d been upset she couldn’t take Merrie to a pediatric plastic surgeon instead of an ordinary emergency room doctor and this woman was suggesting she let a guy who neutered dogs sew up the wound.
But she allowed herself to be helped to her feet, and didn’t protest because a person really needed to be in much more control of themselves, their faculties, and their memories to exert authority and Charlie was totally confused.
She had at least reverted to default mothering mode. She felt steady enough on her feet that she reached down and picked Merrie up into her arms.
“We’re gonna get you fixed right up, sweetie pie,” she said and Merrie nodded but said nothing. She no longer had a blank stare, but she wasn’t engaging with the world either.
Sam Sheridan led the little parade across the Dollar General Store parking lot toward the building with a sign proclaiming Healthy Pets Veterinary Clinic and Animal Hospital.
“You don’t need my help no more and I got to be going,” said the blonde woman. “Gonna be late as it is.”
“I’m good, Abby, thanks. Hug that little one for me.”
The young woman was homely, had the stamp of ancestors who hadn’t been particular about marrying their cousins. But she looked momentarily beautiful, her face wrapped in a joy that some people never achieved in a lifetime. “I shore will.”
She turned and headed toward an old pickup truck parked in front of the Dollar General Store, followed by the teenager, who had not said a word, merely went into the store.
Charlie could tell that Sam had a lot of questions she wanted to ask, but she was wisely not asking any of them. Charlie instantly liked her for that. No, she recovered affection for her from a well long forgotten.
Sam opened the door of the veterinary clinic for Charlie carrying Merrie, and in the reflection in the window on the door Charlie noticed that the sign was still there on the light pole in the parking lot. The words were backwards, but she didn’t need to be able to read it to know what it said.
The Middle of Nowhere.
Chapter Seven
Charlie wasn’t drunk, though that was the go-to explanation for sitting in a public bus shelter at nine o’clock in the morning, puking your guts out.
Helping the bleeding little girl had taken precedence in Sam’s mind over figuring out the level of sobriety of the child’s mother, and there was something wrong with the little girl, too.
She had a wound on her forehead that had been amateurishly bandaged, using only Band-Aids. It was just oozing now, but it appeared to be a typical minimal-damage, maximum-bleeding head wound. The child’s face and her Whitney Houston tee-shirt were bloodstained. Tears had traced twin tracks of clean through the dried blood on her cheeks.
But the thing was, the little girl looked like a zombie. The child should have been sobbing but she wasn’t. She was crying an energy-less cry, like she’d learned how from a manual, and otherwise was mostly unresponsive. She’d been just sitting there, staring sightlessly, crying her robot cry, while her mother made violent retching sounds next to her on the bench.
Both of them seemed to be the kind of dazed you experienced when the airplane you’re on crashes and you’re the only two survivors. But there was no plane, and no vehicle either, for that matter. Which, of course, begged the question: where did they come from and how had they gotten to the bus shelter? The only vehicle in the parking lot of the Dollar General Store was hers. The disengaged teenage checker must have parked behind the building or had been dropped off at work.
The two came back to reality gradually. The little girl’s thousand-yard stare began to fade. The woman started to try to control her vomiting. And none of it had anything to do with Sam’s efforts to get through to them. They were … it was like they were waking up, coming back out from under anesthesia, maybe.
When the woman finally lifted her head, Sam recognized her.
Charlene Ryan. Charlie. She and Sam had graduated from high school together. As far as she could remember, Sam hadn’t seen her since. And never saw much of her in high school. But in elementary school … the two of them had been inseparable, brought their dolls to school every day. They’d sit in the shade, leaning up against the brick wall during recess “playing babies.” Sam wasn’t sure if that was before the era of Barbie dolls, but even if it hadn’t been, it didn’t matter. Both of them wanted to be the mommies of babies — twins and triplets, preferably. The more the merrier.
Charlie was totally disoriented and appeared to be quite sick, but she wasn’t drunk. Sam knew drunk. There was no smell of booze, and besides, she wasn’t the drunk kind of disoriented. She was the trauma kind of disoriented, which again, begged the questions where had she come from, how did she get here and why?
Which all were questions that could wait. The little girl needed somebody to tend to that wound. And E.J. was right here. Oh sure, he was a veterinarian, but he was certainly a proficient surgeon. She could put a butterfly bandage on it and a dressing until Charlie could get the little girl to a hospital, or E.J. could put in stitches.
Abby had begged off. She needed to get to the hospital and it was a long drive. Sam hollered after the teenager as she went back into the Dollar General that she’d be back later to pick up her purchases, but the kid hadn’t even turned around.
“You two just sit and I’ll go talk to E.J.”
There was no one else in the waiting room until Mrs. Throckmorton — who always put Sam in mind of Tweety Bird’s grandmother — came in with her fat Persian cat as Sam was explaining to Raylynn Bennett, the receptionist, what their problem was. Raylynn said E.J. was in with a Rottweiler right now “and you don’t want to interrupt him, but I’ll tell him you’re here.”
Sam came back to sit beside Charlie as Mrs. Throckmorton told Raylynn, “I’ll just take Mittens on back,” and went through the door leading into the interior of the clinic.
“I don’t know,” Charlie said quietly.
“Know what?”
“Anything. I don’t know how … I was driving down the road with my screaming daughter in her car seat on the way to the hospital in Beaufort and then …”
“You were in a wreck? Ran off the road?”
“No, I wasn’t in a …” She stopped, backtracked. “I don’t know what I was in or wasn’t in or … none of this makes sense.” She shuddered. “And why was I so sick?”
She went pale at the word.
“I’ve never felt nausea like that. Like I … my stomach was in a terrible hurry to … it was overwhelming.” She stopped again. “And last I checked, car wrecks don’t usually cause … why was I so sick?”
Sam had a sudden uneasy feeling, fleeting, there and then gone. A sense that something had shifted somewhere, that the seconds that stacked up on the other side of this moment had been knocked off center and would never line up with what had come before.
Raylynn said E.J. could see them and led them to an examining room where the examining table had a metal, tray-like top rather than the human kind with the miles of white paper in a roll stretching out across it.
“Hey Sam, what can I do for you?” E.J. said, and gave her a hug and a peck on the cheek, then turned to Charlie and her little girl. “Raylynn said you—” She watched recognition spread across his face. “Charlie?”
Until that moment, Sam had not thought about the fact that E.J. seemed older than they were when in fact he was the same age. He’d always been boney, scarecrow skinny, but it was his hair, or the lack of it, that was the issue. He’d started losing it in his early twenties and now all that remained was a soap ring above hi
s ears and a chrome dome. If he’d done the sexy thing and shaved his head to hide it — and chucked the rimless granny glasses parked on his nose — he’d have looked younger. But maybe it was all right with him to slide into middle age in his early 30s.
Charlie smiled a vague smile, still seemed like she wasn’t firing on all her mental cylinders.
“Good to see you, E.J. How are you?” But she didn’t wait for him to answer, just nodded to her little girl. “She fell over a tree branch lying in the driveway and cut her head. And I was on the way to …”
She suddenly seemed about to cry.
“On my way to the emergency room in Beaufort County.”
E.J. was clearly confused.
“I don’t understand what you’re doing—”
“Neither do I!” Charlie was holding onto her emotions by her fingernails. “I was in the car and the next thing I knew I was sitting in the bus shelter puking my guts out and I have no memory of anything in between!” She stopped. “Except static, a buzzing sound like a dial tone and a black light—” She heard herself. “Black light? Oh dear God I sound like I was abducted by aliens. That’d be funny if it weren’t so …”
Taking a deep, cleansing breath, she said, “Would you please … Sam said you might be willing to look at the cut on Merrie’s head. Maybe clean it or put on a proper bandage or something.”
“Of course I can,” he said in a soothing voice, proper bedside-manner mode, and Sam wondered why a veterinarian needed a bedside manner. Then she thought about the Rottweiler.
E.J. concentrated on the little girl Charlie called “Merrie.”
“Merrie, with an ‘ie’, not Mary,” Charlie explained. “Not that anybody but me knows or cares about the difference. Short for Meredith but I was always going to call her Merrie. As in Meriadoc Brandybuck.”
“And Pippin — I get it.”
And Sam absolutely did remember the characters from the three books they’d read in Mr. Fischer’s high school English class. Most of the class hated The Lord of the Rings but Sam had fallen head over heels in love with the story and the characters, as had Charlie … and Malachi Tackett, too, come to think of it. Sam had even tried to get the other girls on the basketball team to learn how to speak Elvish, so they could talk and the other team wouldn’t understand. That was a bust.
