by Ninie Hammon
“Later.”
“Now. What good are you to anybody if you pass out from blood loss?”
That convinced him, he relented and moved away from Charlie, who hadn’t known he was there in the first place and didn’t miss him when he was gone. He remained on his knees, which allowed Sam access to both the entrance and exit wounds. Though the wounds had continued to ooze, eventually soaking her makeshift bandages, the ACE bandage and his tee shirt, the bleeding appeared to be stopped now. She didn’t remove what she’d stuffed into the bullet holes — that would start the bleeding again. She just unwound the ACE bandage, covered her makeshift bandages with gauze pads, then wrapped strips of gauze around and around his body to hold the bandages in place and taped the gauze down.
“I need to get you to E.J.’s and clean these. It’d be a mess if they get infected. Maybe put in a couple of stitches, too.”
But she was speaking softly and Malachi was only half-listening. Both of them were concentrated on the woman whose grief pulsed off her like heat off a potbelly stove. They would remain with her until … well, for however long she needed them. Sam didn’t know what would happen now, didn’t know what should happen … what was the next step after a thing like this? So she just sat with Malachi while Charlie sang.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Something like waves of consciousness washed over Charlie, periods when everything was grayed out, indistinct and unreal. Then she would snap awake. Aware.
And in awareness was the reality that her little girl was gone. Merrie was dead. That reality stood hot and stinking in front of her when she embraced awareness and the pain of it made it hard to breathe.
Charlie would die here, too. She knew she would cease to be alive in some real, tangible way because living, breathing, feeling the warmth of the sun on her skin while her baby daughter had died … had suffocated … was both a physical and a spiritual impossibility.
Merrie had been asleep. She’d just never awakened. That’s what the coal miners said, the ones who contemplated the possibility of suffocation every time they “went down.” As ways of dying went, suffocating was an easy way to go, they said. It wasn’t painful. You just finally closed your eyes and didn’t open them again.
Merrie had known nothing. Had just closed her eyes … when was the last time Charlie had looked into those eyes?
She didn’t know. Couldn’t remember. And suddenly that thought was beyond too horrible to bear. Couldn’t remember? She’d checked on Merrie-the-Veterinary-Assistant-in-Training often as the nightmare day wore on, but when she’d gone in the last time, Merrie was already crashed on the couch and was sound asleep when she lifted her into her arms to carry her to the car.
So the time before that. The last time she’d checked on her …
Charlie didn’t know. Didn’t know the last words she’d said, either. Surely, it was I love you. She always said that, told Merrie that all the time. I love you. Surely she’d said …
She realized that she was singing. “… diamond ring gets broke, Mama’s gonna buy you a billy goat.” Why was she singing that? She didn’t even like the song, had never sung it to Merrie. She sang her little girl fun songs. Happy songs.
It suddenly seemed very important to get this right, to sing the right song, not some random melody the child had never heard before. It was important that Merrie recognize the song. How could she be comforted by it if she’d never heard it before?
“Puff the Magic Dragon lived by the sea. And frolicked in the autumn mist …”
Merrie in her Betty Boop nightgown, smelling sweet from the bath, is snuggled up close to her. She kisses the little girl’s nose and continues the song. “… in a land called—”
Suddenly, the pain of loss and grief were so great they exploded out of Charlie’s soul into the world. She leaned her head back, closed her eyes and screamed, “Meeerrrrrie!” Shrieked the word. Wailed it. The sound was so harsh and loud it tore her vocal cords in its ferocity.
A hushed silence followed.
A bird in the mulberry tree sang out a three-note melody.
Another bird in the sycamore tree replied.
And a voice spoke from the screened-in porch.
“Mommy, why are you yelling? Are you mad at me?”
Chapter Thirty-Eight
It was a dream, a fantasy, a hallucination. Even as Charlie swung her head toward the porch she knew there’d be nobody there, that she was just imagining—
Merrie stood on the top step of the porch. She was dressed, wearing a plain white tee shirt and cheap denim shorts, the outfit Charlie put on her to replace the Whitney Houston tee shirt and jeans Charlie had thrown away.
She was barefoot. Her hair was a tangle of curls in her eyes.
“Merrie.”
Charlie said the word the way the proctor says a word at a spelling bee. Each of the syllables was pronounced properly but with no intonation or inflection of any kind. Just the word.
Sam choked out some kind of sound and only then, when Charlie glanced at Sam and Malachi — their faces shocked, stunned and delighted — only then did she even consider the possibility that what she was seeing was real.
“Merrie?” The name was a question then and the little girl had begun to pick up on a strange vibe and didn’t like it. “Where have you been?”
Someone asked the question with Charlie’s voice and out her mouth but Charlie was incapable of speech.
“I waked up unner the bed. I don’t ‘member falling out. Then I couldna find you—”
Charlie shrieked then, a wail of utter joy, stumbled to her feet and raced to the back porch, snatching the child up into her arms sobbing.
Merrie, the little drama queen, tuned up and started crying, too.
How long that part lasted, Charlie didn’t know.
She understood that she was upsetting the child with her hysterical delight, knew Merrie was confused and frightened. Fine. Charlie didn’t care. The child would get over it. Or she wouldn’t. Maybe she’d carry with her for the rest of her life the trauma of the morning she’d awakened under her bed, and walked out into the backyard of her grandmother’s house to find her mother contemplating suicide. That was fine, too. Life did that to people. Experiences marked them, sometimes permanently. Much as she’d like to, Charlie couldn’t protect her little girl from the vagaries and vicissitudes of life and if she were going to be marked by something, this day, this experience, this whole new world was certainly worthy of permanent psychological damage.
Sam and Malachi hung back, each wearing looks of such profound happiness she registered them in some permanent memory cells. She would look back at their faces, again and again, and know that those two people had been with her, had stuck by her, had gotten her through the single worst day of her life and someday she’d thank them for it.
But not today.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Things didn’t turn out like this.
Mothers didn’t miraculously get their children back, alive and unharmed.
Little girls didn’t bump up against bull-moose insanity and live to tell about it.
In the world of Malachi Tackett, mothers and their babies died. Horrible deaths. Every time. They were hacked apart by their neighbors or butchered by strangers. By the hundreds, the thousands, the tens of thousands.
There was never, never a happy ending.
But not this time.
This time, good had won. Evil had lost.
And even though it was just the one, the one against thousands, hundreds of thousands, this mother and this little girl had made it through the valley of the shadow of death and Malachi had been an eyewitness to every second of it.
This mattered. What was happening here in Charlie’s kitchen while Sam made coffee and fussed over his bandages and Charlie could not stop touching her little girl and the adorable child was all giggles and cheeriness, shifted something fundamental in Malachi. He turned some kind of corner. He couldn’t have articulated it and
wouldn’t try because to explain or quantify it was to diminish the power of it. He had been walking so very, very long in the darkness that the light of joy and hope made him squint.
The private war of Lance Corporal Malachi Tackett and the horror of Rwanda was by no means over. But this pivotal, seminal moment was a battle won, was at least the end of the beginning.
“… grinning your gums dry, Malachi,” said Sam and he realized that the smile on his face was there because it had chosen to appear there not because it had been summoned as an act of will. “Smiles look good on you.”
Merrie was sitting in her mother’s lap, which Malachi would bet wasn’t where she normally sat for breakfast. She dropped a dollop of grape jelly on her plate from the spoon where she was gleefully digging it out of the jar. He was reasonably certain her mother didn’t allow the child to do something that messy and sticky, either, and Merrie seemed to be aware that she was in a no-harm, no-foul zone for the moment and she best make hay while she had the chance.
Merrie picked up the glob with her fingers and stuffed it into her sticky mouth. Nobody cared.
“Stop dawdling over the toast,” Sam told him. “You promised to let me take you to E.J.’s and disinfect those holes in your belly. Do you think if you put it off long enough I’ll forget? Putting it off isn’t going to make it hurt any less.”
And it did hurt! Oh, my yes it did, not that Malachi let on. He’d been shot before — had the scars to prove it — and as bullet wounds went, this one was unspectacular. But it still hurt! He’d lost a lot of blood, too, felt weak and lightheaded. Get shot in a war and medical care was only a chopper ride away. Here, not so much. He likely needed a transfusion and that wasn’t going to happen.
They were all doing a pretty convincing dance around the gigantic elephant in the middle of the room, the reality of their lives and the bizarre occurrences of the past twenty-four hours. There was, after all, always the possibility that the world had righted itself during the night, that sanity and order and the normal functioning of the universe had returned to Nowhere County. That driving down Route 17 through the county line would be of no more consequence than it had been any one of the hundreds, thousands of times Malachi had done it before.
He didn’t think so, but he suspected he was alone in that assessment. The women wanted to believe normal had blown back in on the heels of the storm he didn’t believe had blown abnormal into their lives in the first place. They wanted to think the Middle of Nowhere would sink back into obscurity today and folks passing it would recall the bizarre happenings there in June of 1995 and comment about how so many people had been bamboozled by some cosmic practical joke, or had been victims of a mass group hallucination.
Folks would drive past the bus shelter and pay it no mind. Just drive away from the Middle of Nowhere and out into the rest of the world.
Oh, how he hoped that was so, how he wished it would be true. But he didn’t for a New York minute believe it.
Charlie had insisted on going back to the Middle of Nowhere with Sam and Malachi. She had her reasons, he supposed, but he didn’t know what they were and wouldn’t likely have understood them if he had. If he were Charlie McClintock, he couldn’t have been dragged to that half acre of the planet by a team of Clydesdales and the Budweiser Beer wagon.
Or maybe he would. He was aware of, and would bet the others were feeling the same thing, that they were involved in something “other.” Something “outside.” And a thing like that wasn’t a thing you just ignored, turned your back on and walked away.
It wasn’t until they were in Sam’s car on their way to the Dollar General Store that the elephant in the room lifted its trunk and blared out a tremendous honk.
“What do you think happened with Abby?” Sam asked Malachi.
Sam was driving. Malachi was in the front seat and Charlie and Merrie were behind. The people at the bus shelter knew what had happened at the county line — about Abby and the key. If Abby had shown up there, E.J. or Liam or Pete would have come dashing to Charlie’s house with it even though it was too late. Nobody’d come. When Sam called E.J.’s office to give the others the news about Merrie half an hour ago, Abby still hadn’t shown up.
“With Abby or to Abby?” Charlie wanted to know.
“You mean, why didn’t she actually put Merrie in the kiln?” Malachi asked. “I’d like to think the whole thing was a bluff, that she was too decent a human being to lock a little girl up in a kiln.” Malachi had picked up on the edge in Charlie’s voice and he didn’t begrudge her a single hard feeling. “But it’s equally possible Abby couldn’t do it. There are a lot of ways it could have played out.”
He’d thought about it. They all had. Maybe Abby had planned to put the child in the kiln but thought it was empty. When she saw how full it was, she knew the child wouldn’t have enough air. Or maybe she didn’t care how full it was, but when she picked the child up, she realized she wouldn’t have the strength to carry her all that way — out of the bedroom, down the hall, across the kitchen, the porch and the backyard. So she’d settled for sliding her under the bed. Behind the poufy ballerina bed skirt, the child was invisible.
“The ‘too decent a human being’ description begs the question: how’d she turn on Malachi and just shoot him?” Sam asked.
“She was crazy, had a stroke, wasn’t in her right mind, wasn’t responsible for her behavior …” Charlie ticked off the phrases. “Any or all of that is supposed to buy her out of everything.” Charlie paused, and her voice was full of the emotion she was concealing from the little girl beside her. “I’m working on that, but I am here to testify that I am not there yet.”
“Malachi’s lucky her aim was off,” Sam said.
“It wasn’t off.”
Both women looked at him.
“The sight’s not zeroed. It’s off, low and to the right. You have to aim high left to hit center. She was aiming at my heart and if the bullet had gone where she intended it to go … she’d have killed me.”
They let that settle before Sam picked up the ball and began dribbling down the court again.
“Then what happened to her?”
“I think she’s dead … somewhere,” Charlie said.
“Where?” Sam asked.
Malachi said nothing, just looked out the window.
Sam ran with it. “Okay, the possibilities are: She drowned and her body washed downstream. Or she swam upstream and got out of the river and … went somewhere. For some reason.”
“Or she went into the Jabberwock and never came out.”
The silence that followed Malachi’s words was as heavy as a down comforter.
“You think somebody could just stay …?” Sam asked.
“Sam’s the only one we know for sure,” Charlie said. “We know exactly when she went in and know she popped right out the other side. Like instantly.”
“I was too busy throwing up to time it, but … yeah, pretty much instantly.”
“The rest of us, though … how long were we … in there?” Malachi said.
“Remember now, we decided we’re going to think positively,” Sam chirped, relentlessly cheery. “Life’s back to normal. I can pick up my dry cleaning in Carlisle. You can catch that plane back to …”
Maybe she didn’t finish because she didn’t know where. But it was more likely that it had occurred to her, as it had to Malachi, that they weren’t going to leave here the same people they’d been. Back out there in the normal world … they’d be different. They’d changed. They’d made connections to each other. No, they’d made re-connections to each other. Involuntary or not, those connections were real. And strong.
“You guys do realize, don’t you, that this is the first time all three of us have been in Nower County at the same time since the night of graduation,” Charlie said.
Malachi did realize that. Did indeed. Had been thinking about it. Turning it over and over in his mind. Considering what possible significance there could be to … Maybe
the others had, too, because nobody said anything after that. They rode the last mile to the parking lot in silence.
When Sam pulled to a stop in front of the Dollar General Store, what they saw dashed their hopes for normal and ordinary. Thelma Jackson and Rodney Sentry had gone home, Pete Rutherford had returned and the Tungate brothers and Abner Riley had never left. Liam and Hank Bayless were loading a body into the back of Hank’s pickup truck.
“We lost one,” Pete said simply when they approached him. Hank got into his truck and Liam got in with him and they drove away. “Willie Cochran — you remember him, got his thumbs mashed off in the mine by a scoop when he was a kid.”
Malachi remembered him.
“He’s what — eighty-five, ninety years old?” Charlie said.
“Was eighty-seven. He showed up like Fish did, choking like he’d swallowed his tongue. But ‘fore anybody could do anything for him, he just went limp. Heart attack, I suppose.”
“He had heart problems,” Sam said.
Malachi looked after where Hank’s truck had disappeared around a bend.
“Where’s he taking the body?”
There was no longer a funeral home in Nowhere County, but the facility remained. Somebody’d bought the Bascum’s Mortuary building while Malachi was deployed, tried to turn the plush viewing rooms into a dress boutique. The business had failed, but Malachi figured the basement embalming parlor hadn’t been part of the renovation, that there were still “body drawers” there that slid out of the wall.
“If the refrigeration system still works at Bascum’s … but if not, Roscoe gave him the key to Foodtown.” There was a beat of silence. “It has a walk-in freezer.”
Sam shooed Malachi into E.J.’s office, where she could do a professional job on his bandage. Merrie accompanied her because the little girl was, after all, the veterinarian’s assistant. Charlie wandered from one of the “front line” people to the next, asking how things had been.
