by Ninie Hammon
“You called the vet?” she cried, and her eyes flashed. “I … fell down and hit my head or whatever I done and you called the—?”
“You didn’t fall down, Mama.”
“Then you want to tell me what I’m doing on my butt in the dirt with blood drippin’ out my ears?”
Instead of answering, Malachi simply sat down in the dirt beside her.
“I don’t know what’s going on.” He looked at the people standing around. “I don’t think anybody does.”
“I do.”
Everyone turned to look at Fish, who had gotten off the bench in the bus shelter and had come to stand beside it, completing the mini crowd around Viola that included Sam, Malachi, Charlie and her little girl, Pete Rutherford and E.J., who was accompanied by his receptionist, Raylynn Bennett, a beautiful black teenager whose crush on E.J. was so obvious it was embarrassing. There wasn’t adoration in her startling gray eyes now, though, and they were the size of frisbees.
The only person who hadn’t yet gotten up was Liam Montgomery. He still sat on the bench, holding his head in his hands, the blood from his nose slowed from a torrent to a drip.
“You do know what’s going on?” Charlie asked Fish. “You want to tell the rest of us because we don’t have a clue.”
“There’s a mirror across the road,” he said, as if it were as ordinary a thing to say as “do you want to supersize those fries?” He looked from one to the other with a bemused expression. “You didn’t see it?”
“And you did?” Viola said. “Are you saying that’s how you got here — you stepped through a looking glass?”
At her words, all the amusement drained off Fish’s face, replaced by something like shocked understanding. You could see the change.
“Through the Looking Glass …” he whispered. He didn’t sound drunk or even confused. He sounded scared. “And we must beware the Jabberwock …”
The word raised the hairs on the back of Sam’s neck. Charlie looked like she was about to start projectile vomiting again.
“… with jaws that bite and claws that catch,” Malachi finished for him, in a voice hollow and unnatural.
“What in the world—?”
“It’s nonsense, Mama." Malachi shook it off. "Through the Looking Glass is a book we studied in high school English, that’s all. It doesn’t mean anything.”
And it didn’t. Didn’t mean a thing. But the little crowd was touched by the word and remembered it. It was like a nail in Sam’s head where all the impressions of that morning caught and hung. Whatever it was that had happened to Charlie, Merrie, Malachi, Fish, Liam and Viola now had a name — the “Jabberwock.”
Perhaps it was the sudden sound that hammered the Jabberwock nail so deep into their psyches. They all heard it for the first time at that instant, the sound of someone crying — sobbing.
With the unison of a chorus line, they all turned to look on the other side of the bus shelter. Someone was lying there, not far from where Malachi had crouched from unseen assassins. The spot was wet now, and water flowed out across it from the water hose that lay unattended on the asphalt after Merrie had lost interest in playing with it. Down the sloped parking lot to the shelter it ran, and around it on the downhill side washing away the remains of whatever had been deposited there, creating a small stream of rippling water.
A woman was lying on her side in the stream, sobbing. Sam got to her first, knelt and stopped, somehow reluctant then to touch her, curled up tight in a fetal position, her now wet hair covering her face.
She wasn’t just crying. What she was doing might not even rightly be described as sobbing, either. It was an emotional state bigger than that, on the other side of that. She was wrenched by sobs, they wracked her body like seizures that shook her skinny frame from the top of her head to the bottom of her … she was missing a shoe.
The other shoe was a flip-flop, pink plastic, with a picture of—
No.
Sam backed up from the knowing of it like she’d spotted a scorpion on the ground, literally drew back, shaking her head.
The others now were looking at her.
“What …?” Charlie began.
And then Sam’s body went rogue, refused to obey explicit orders. Her hands reached out, though she had strictly forbidden them to do so. Her fingers touched the wet blonde hair and gently moved it off the face that Sam absolutely could not bear to see.
It was Abby Clayton.
Abby Clayton had driven away from the Dollar General Store … how long ago? How long? Did nobody have a watch — how long? She grabbed Charlie’s arm, who had knelt beside the girl on the other side, yanked it so hard she almost pulled Charlie off balance, had to get a look at her watch.
Ten-thirty.
Abby Clayton had driven out of the parking lot on her way to Lexington to collect her infant son about an hour ago. Stopping, say half an hour, at her sister Eva Joan’s house in Frogtown.
Sam heard herself whisper out loud, “She probably didn’t even make it across the county line.”
Chapter Fifteen
It was going to happen today. It was, it was, it was, and Abby could barely hold onto herself for the knowing of it.
Cody was coming home.
Home.
And before he did, she was going to sit herself down in that armchair where they’d let her sit and hold him, feeding him them little bitty bottles of breast milk. That nurse with the big smile was going to place that precious baby in her arms and she was going to nurse him.
Then it’d be real.
Then she’d be a real mama.
Her baby son would be in a bed right there beside hers tonight, where she could see him and touch him and look after him every minute. The bed was a cardboard box she’d lined with blankets, with the new, soft blue one Shep’s mama’d give her on the top. They didn’t have no proper baby bed yet. They’d get one soon’s they could, in Lexington, in one of them yard sales in some fancy neighborhood. They’d get somethin’ real nice. But they was struggling now. With Shep taking off so many hours to look after her when she was pregnant, they didn’t have hardly no money at all.
She looked down for about the hundredth time at the gasoline gauge on the old pickup truck. She had almost half a tank and that was more than enough to get to Lexington and back. But all she really cared about was getting to Lexington, about them putting that warm little bundle in her arms. After that she didn’t care if they run out of gas and had to walk ten miles to get home. Long’s she had Cody, her life was good as it could be.
The windows was rolled down cause it was a warm morning and the smell of cedar trees when she passed by a grove of them put her in mind of Christmas. She’d done bought the Baby’s First Christmas ornament to put on the tree, seen it in the Dollar General Store last year when she just had found out she was pregnant. She’d gone in there to buy Shep some new socks because what he was wearing to work was so worn thin he was like to get a blister on his heel from his work boots rubbing.
But she come home with that ornament instead of the socks and when Shep seen it, he wasn’t mad or nothing, said he was glad she done it and she’d spent the evening doing the best darning job she could on his socks so they’d hold up least till he got his next check at the end of the month.
She hadn’t never in her whole life been as happy as she was when she found out she was pregnant, and that was a special kind of happiness she wouldn’t never feel again so she treasured it up in her heart like the Bible said Mary done with what them wise men said to her about Jesus. It was special because it had all kind of emotions tangled up in it, and the biggest of the lot was relief. She had got pregnant. She could conceive.
She’d been so scared she couldn’t, so scared that what them drunk high school boys done to her after the ball game when she was in middle school had messed up something. She never told a soul about it, of course, didn’t breathe a word. But she’d bled and bled and after that her periods was real irregular and they hurt. She
was so sure she’d never get pregnant that when Shep started talking about getting married she’d said no, pretended like she didn’t want to get married, didn’t want to marry nobody, but she couldn’t pull it off and he knew she was lying and she’d finally broke down and told him the truth, that she couldn’t marry him cause she’d never be able to give him children. She never told him specific why not, and of course he didn’t ask … talkin’ about female things like that made men uncomfortable. And if she’d told him, if she’d said who, Shep would likely be in jail right now because he’d a took a baseball bat to all three of them and he was big enough to put a world of hurt on them boys.
Shep had said he didn’t care ‘bout kids — he was lying then, too, and they both knew it — said they’d be happy just the two of them and maybe someday they’d adopt kids. And so they’d got married and when she missed the first two periods it never occurred to her that it might be because she was pregnant. She just wasn’t regular, that was all. But after the fourth one, she went to the doctor, worried something was wrong and when he told her what was “wrong” was she was three months along pregnant she had cried so hard she couldn’t get her breath.
What’d happened after that, the pre-eclampsia and the staying in bed and Cody comin’ early — that was probably the worst time of her whole seventeen years on earth. She woke up every morning so scared she was gonna lose the baby that her stomach was too tied in knots to eat. And she had to eat, had to force herself to swallow food like it was medicine.
When the baby was born early … so little. Didn’t weigh but just over three pounds, so small Shep could have held him in the palm of his hand, Abby’d hung on every breath that child took, watched his little chest rise and fall with every one. She never left his side except to go to the bathroom. Not once, wouldn’t let her mama or her sisters or Shep or nobody take her place beside that basinet. She knew it wasn’t real, but she’d come to believe that her baby son was only breathin’ because she was watching it happen, that it was her love kept his little heart beatin’, and if she wasn’t there, he would stop breathin’ right then and die.
To this day, Abby couldn’t have told you how long that part lasted. He was in the hospital for months, but if it was two or five, she didn’t know. Time smeared together and all them days was like all the others of them, her sitting there, touching him when they’d let her, his little fist curled around her finger.
Willing him to breathe.
And prayin’!
She hadn’t never been very religious, went to the Pentecostal church in the next holler over ever Sunday and believed the things the preacher said, but it hadn’t seemed to apply to her life specifically until Cody was born.
She begged God not to let him die. Pleaded with God to keep his little heart beating. Promised all kind of things to God if he would let her little boy live and come home and grow up.
“God, if you’ll let my Cody live, I will have that boy’s bum on a pew every Sunday morning, Sunday night and Wednesday night for prayer meeting for his whole life.”
“God, if you’ll save my Cody, I will never raise my voice to that boy, won’t never yell at him like them mamas I seen in Walmart, screaming at their kids, cussing. I won’t do nothing like that, God, I promise.”
She’d got herself a little spiral notebook she kept in her pocket where she wrote down them things she’d promised God. She meant to keep them promises, every last one of them because God had answered her prayers and had spared her baby boy and in another couple of hours she’d be holding that child up next to her heart, nursing him, feeding him from her own body. She might not put him down for a month!
Glancing at the needle on the fuel gauge in the truck, she knew she was being silly, like maybe there’d come a big hole in the tank and all the gas’d drained out and her truck’d roll to a stop and leave her stranded. The Welcome to Nowhere County sign was just up ahead and she’d done the math like a hundred times, how many miles it was from there to Lexington and how many miles to the gal—
Suddenly the whole world burst into a million tiny pieces of sparkling black glass, flashing around her like a blizzard with black snowflakes, and there was a great roaring buzz in her head.
Chapter Sixteen
“The county line,” repeated a voice from behind them and the group turned to look at Liam Montgomery who was standing just inside the bus shelter with one hand on the wall, leaning for support. His nose was no longer bleeding, but blood had soaked the front of his uniform and though he had done his best to wipe his upper lip and mouth on his shirt sleeve, blood was smeared across his chin. He spoke slowly and carefully, and Charlie instantly translated the body language. He still had a “needle in his head.” She’d had migraines for years — not like some people she knew, totally debilitated by them, but she vividly remembered the incredible, not-like-anything-she’d-ever-felt-before pain of them. He was struggling to stand tall for all that and she admired him for that. “I was heading toward the county line,” he said carefully. “I was chasing a speeder … with Pennsylvania plates … and I saw the sign—”
“Did you see me?” Fish asked, and Charlie could tell it hurt the deputy to turn his head to face him.
“No.”
“Well, I saw you, threw up my hand and waved and then just kept walking.”
“You were out there, on Barber’s Mill Road?”
“I was.”
“What were you doing—?”
“I don’t give a rat fart what Fish was or wasn’t doing on the side of the road when you passed him by,” said Viola Tackett. She had not tried to rise, just sat in the dirt beside Malachi, who was looking considerably better. The color had returned to his face and his eyes looked like … he was here, with them, at least for the moment. “I want to know what I’m doing here, not what he was doing there.”
Several people spoke at once then, the general mumble expressing the same question. And the young blonde girl curled up in a ball in the puddle was still sobbing, wailing, hadn’t diminished in intensity though she wasn’t making as much noise because she was losing her voice.
“Why are you all … why’d you come …?” That was E.J. It’d probably have been a better idea to have left him out of it, but Sam had wanted somebody with some medical training to … yeah, to what?
“Ya’ll telling me don’t none of you know what you’re doing here?” There was anger in Viola’s customary brusque tone, but Charlie could tell that Malachi Tackett’s mother was as uncertain, upset and confused as the rest of them.
“I think I was at the county line, too. I’d come down Sanders Lane from Route 17 to Lexington Road,” she said. “I wasn’t looking at the signs, but that’s about where I must have been. Then … everything turned black.”
Charlie’d had the most time to recover from … the Jabberwock … and her thinking had cleared enough to start putting some things together.
“And you heard static.” That was the sheriff’s deputy.
“Yeah, like when you can’t get the radio station,” Viola said.
“‘Pears to me you all had the same experience in different places,” said Pete Rutherford, and they turned to look at the old man who’d been hanging back from the crowd, mostly trying to corral Merrie, and had somehow interested her in picking dandelions out of the grass beside the shelter. “You was all on your way somewhere, ain’t that right?” They all nodded. “And then you was suddenly here, sick, throwing up, noses bleeding. Like that.”
“What in the Sam Hill could have … who brought you here?” E.J. wanted to know.
Nope, E.J. was definitely not helping. He hadn’t been there to see the people “appear” like she and Sam and Pete had done and he was still operating under the common-sense assumption that somebody had brought all the people here, individually or at the same time, and he was trying to piece that together with—
“Clearly, you ain’t listening, doc.” Viola Tackett started to rise. Malachi reached to stop her and she slapped his h
and away with enough force to deter another attempt. When she got to her feet, Charlie was surprised at how short she was. She’d heard of Viola Tackett since she was a little girl, but had only caught sight of her half a dozen times. And her memory was serving up to her from those occasions the image of a big, ugly, fat old woman with a voice sharp enough to cause internal bleeding and eyes that would pierce your soul. Her memory was conjuring up the physical from the psychological, and psychologically Viola Tackett was all those things. The reality of humanity standing before Charlie was a short, dumpy woman with a big bun of black hair at the back of her neck that made her look like an extra on some movie shot in Eastern Europe. But the eyes were like she remembered — bright and quick as a snake’s.
“Didn’t none of us come here a purpose.” She looked to the others and nobody contradicted. “We’s all on our way somewhere else and then … then we was here. Just here. If we all done what she done,” she turned and gestured to the young woman sobbing on the ground, “we just appeared outta nowhere. I was lookin’ and she just showed up, poof, didn’t come walkin’ up or get out of a car or drop out of a airplane with a parachute or nothin’ like that. She just appeared.”
Call a spade a spade.
Charlie had been dodging around, doing a mental dance, trying not to recognize that reality and Viola had just nailed it, straight up.
Viola surveyed the group as if they were the convicts on a road crew and she was the guard who’d caught them all leaning on their shovels.
“I want somebody here to tell me what’s goin’ on.”
“I’ve told you, Mrs. Tackett, we all stepped through the looking glass,” Fish said. And then more quietly, his voice tight, “where the Jabberwock lives.”
“I don’t mean some dad-gum story—”
“I’m not talking about a story,” Fish said. “I’m talking about a literal looking glass. A mirror. There was one on the road. I saw it, saw myself approaching it. And when I touched it …”
