Exhausted now, she trudged along Main Street, her raised hand still wrapped in the towel. She didn’t like the way people stared at her. Two women were coming toward her. They were struggling to keep a straight face at the sight of the filmy blue cocktail dress over her pants and her old sneakers. As soon as they passed, one of them burst out laughing. Head down, she kept going.
Martha stood in the glare of Mr. Weilman’s messy kitchen. They had been in here again. The lights were on, the cupboard doors were open, and crumpled paper cups littered the counter and floated in the plugged sink, along with a bloated slice of bread. On the table there was a jar of peanut butter with a greasy knife sticking out of it, and the plastic containers Mack had given her. She picked one up and groaned when she saw the holes that had been punched in the blue lid. It was filled with grass and stones and fuzzy reddish caterpillars. Every single container had been cut. Some contained worms. The biggest held a small green toad. In this one there was a salamander. She couldn’t believe it; they had destroyed the only thing Mack had given her. There were in this world a few kind people. She knew she was one, Mr. Weilman was another, but not these children. They were cruel and selfish, and that was the most terrible thing of all.
She dialed Birdy’s number. The phone rang twice, and then a man answered. Getso. The minute she slammed down the phone, she realized it hadn’t even sounded like him. She dialed again. She tapped her foot. “Oh, Birdy,” she sighed. “Oh, Birdy, please answer.”
“Hello,” the same man answered.
She asked to speak to Birdy Dusser, and the man asked her name.
“I see,” he said when she told him. “Just a moment, please … It’s Martha Horgan,” he said and she was sure the high-pitched sound she heard in the background was a cry of joy. She grinned, waiting for Birdy through the scramble of garbled voices, and then she heard a woman’s wrenching wail.
“Martha? Ah, Birdy would like to call you right back if she could. Ah, she says she needs your …”
“… he was afraid of something like this …” Birdy cried.
The muffled silence came like a struggle of dark wings beating in her ear.
“… telephone number,” the man continued.
She hung up. Now she knew and Birdy knew and soon everyone would know that a terrible thing had happened. A terrible thing. The most terrible thing of all. She dialed Frances’s number, and Mack answered on the first ring. “Hello? Hello?” he repeated.
“Hello,” she said finally, her forehead pressed to the wall. “It’s me. Martha.”
“Martha! Where are you? Are you all right? Where are you?”
She could tell by the strain in his voice that Frances was nearby. “Are you at Weilman’s? Is that where you are?” he asked.
She bit her lip. “Mack? I’m … I don’t know what to do, Mack.”
“First tell me where you are.”
“You know what you said about …” She shuddered. “About Getso. Well, those were all lies. He made that all up. I knew the truth about him, so he blamed everything on me.”
“Is that why you went there?”
He couldn’t possibly know she had gone to Birdy’s. That couldn’t be what he meant. She was getting confused. She felt so dizzy. He was calling her name. She closed her eyes.
Outside, a woman was calling, “Joshua! Joshua! Joshua!”
A door slammed. She could hear the voices of children, and then the sudden tinny, insistent ring of a bike bell.
“Martha! Frances wants to know where you are. Are you at Mr. Weilman’s? Martha, answer me. Are you there?”
“Yes,” she whispered.
“All right. She says to tell you she’s on her way there. We’re calling Steve now, and he’ll come too. Frances says to just stay put and don’t talk to anyone. Don’t answer any questions until Steve gets …”
“No, you come! Please, Mack. I need you. I love you. I’m all alone and I’m so sick …”
“It’s going to be okay.” His voice cracked. “Everything’s going to be okay. I swear it will. They’ll understand. It wasn’t your fault. They’ll help you.”
“And it’s not your fault either, Mack. We both …”
“Martha!” he said sharply. “Here’s Frances. She wants to talk to you.”
“Martha, listen!” Frances said, her voice a coil of fear and control. “What happens in the next few hours, everything you say will be of vital …”
The back door burst open, and two small boys flew past her, screeching. They dove under the table. Next came a taller boy in a red football shirt. He grabbed one of the other boys by the arm and yanked him out from the sanctuary of the table, dragged him halfway to the door, cursing and yelling that he had done it this time, he had gone too far, and now he’d have to pay. His face twisted hatefully, inches from the younger boy’s.
“Coming in here,” she muttered, snatching the black iron ladle from its hook over the stove. “Just bursting in on people,” she said, her outrage and shock fixed on the boy’s blatant cruelty, the loathsome bullying cruelty that had nipped at her heels a lifetime—with every step, walking, running—now finally cornered.
“Josh!” warned the boy who still crouched under the table as the ladle struck the taller boy’s back.
“It’s Marthorgan!” screamed the little boy who had been grabbed first and now fled onto the side porch. “It’s Marthorgan. She’s hurting Joshua! Help! Somebody please help!”
So startled was the boy that he never even made it to the door. He was on his knees, his arms huddling his head against the rising and falling ladle. Blood pooled in the indentation at the base of his skull. He sobbed. She looked down at his convulsed shoulders, at his skinny heaving chest. Blood trickled down his neck to a darkening spine under his shirt. Under the table, the third boy pulled a chair close and pleaded through the legs, “Don’t hit me. Please, Marthorgan. Please don’t hit me.”
“Martha! Martha!” demanded a voice from the phone, which turned round and round on its dangling cord.
The boy on the floor moaned.
“I’m sorry,” she gasped. She came toward him, then drew back, turning in a small helpless circle, the layers of chiffon swishing and catching on her pants. “Here,” she said, offering him a dish towel, which he wouldn’t take.
“It’s clean,” she assured him as the younger boy tried to help him stand up. “Tell him it’s clean.”
“My head,” the boy moaned, sinking to his knees. “My head, oh, my head.” His face was dully white, and as he looked up she gasped with alarm at the sorrowful censure of his fading stare.
“Ice!” She thumped her chest. “Ice! You need ice! Just wait! I’ll get some ice!” she panted, spiraling out from this numbing core, this inertia, this paralysis where life’s rules became all longitude and latitude, the invisible bars that kept her in and kept her out. He shouldn’t have barged in here like that.… He shouldn’t have startled her.… Didn’t he know there were rules, that when the rules got broken she got jerked off course? That’s what rules were for, to keep everyone on the right track. Now look what he’d done.… Just look—blood everywhere, and now more people here who didn’t belong. It was all his fault. All these women staring at her like this, as if she were some kind of monster, as if she were crazy, and here she was the only one trying to do something for the boy … the only one, when she had a million other things on her mind. A million other things, and an aching heart.
The door flew open. “Here,” she said. “Put ice on it,” she tried to tell the boy’s mother. It was Laura Hopewood; Hopewood and Horgan; now Barrett. She was a small curly-haired woman not much bigger than her son, whom she squatted next to, while a large blonde woman in a pink jogging suit peered closely at his scalp.
“Cuts,” the blonde woman murmured. “Mostly little cuts.”
“Look at her!”
“Look at her hands!”
“… blood. I know it’s blood.”
“Ice’ll make it stop,” she s
aid again, offering the frosted plastic dish. They wouldn’t listen. Stupid. Stubborn. Well, if anything happened, they had better remember that she had told them. Ice would do it. Ice would stop all that bleeding.
Laura Barrett begged her son to stand up as she tried to rise with him.
“Laura, don’t!” called one of the women in the doorway. Their children peered in between their arms and legs. They looked at Martha. She set the bowl of ice on the counter, picked it right up again, and began to jiggle it, the ice cubes rattling together. She only wanted to help. Couldn’t they see that? Hypocrites, staring at her with such dismay when she had seen the way they yelled at their own kids and thought nothing of whacking them over the least little thing.
“Let him lay down,” said one of the women.
“I’ll carry him,” the blonde said, bending toward the boy.
“No!” Laura Barrett cried, her hand shooting up to block the blonde. “Joshua! Joshua!” she cried, her face close to her son’s. “Oh, Josh! Oh my God!”
“He must’ve passed out!”
“Probably a concussion …”
“Or a fractured skull!”
“The police’re …”
“… already called an ambulance,” a woman said, hanging up the phone.
“Look at her … pathetic.…”
“Is he dead?” a child gasped. “Is Josh dead?”
“Marthorgan killed Josh.…”
A siren wailed and Laura Barrett looked up. Her cheek was smeared with blood.
She should wipe it, Martha thought, her eyes darting around the kitchen for something to wipe her cheek with. “Here,” she said, extending the dish towel.
“Get away from me,” Laura snarled. “You get away from me.”
“Here,” she insisted, touching the towel to the woman’s bloody cheek.
“Aaargh!” Laura Barrett groaned in horror, cringing back into the limp fold of the boy’s body.
“Martha!” one of the women warned, snatching away the towel. Martha tried to pull it back.
“Get her away from me!”
They kept grabbing at her. She batted them away with her good hand. “He just ran in!”
“Martha, get …”
“No! No! You listen! You all listen!” She turned, then turned again. Her fingers dug tracks through her sweaty hair, and she had to keep angling her head to see through her one good lens.
“They’re here,” a woman called at the door.
Her mouth was so dry she had to keep wetting her lips. “I’ve been sick and he just ran in! He was hurting that boy,” she said, pointing to the stern-eyed child by the door. No one listened. They looked outside. Heavy footsteps mounted the porch steps. A man and a woman in dark-blue jumpsuits and dusty black shoes ran into the kitchen. They gently eased the boy onto the stretcher they had just unrolled. Laura Barrett looked on, her arms clutching her stomach. With her thumb and forefinger at the boy’s thin wrist, the attendant nodded, her lips moving silently. The other attendant flipped open a square silver box and plucked out a white plastic ampule, which he split open at arm’s length, then passed back and forth under the boy’s nose. Suddenly the boy’s head twisted to one side.
“Okay?” the attendant asked, bending close. “Can you hear me?” He looked up at Martha as the boy grunted. “What’s his name?” he asked her.
She shook her head. She couldn’t remember.
“Joshua! Joshua! Joshua!” responded a chorus of women’s and children’s voices.
“Joshua? You awake now? Wake up, Joshua. C’mon, kid. C’mon! Open those eyes. That’s a fella.… There you go.… C’mon, now.…” The attendants lifted the stretcher between them.
“Mommy,” the boy groaned.
“Oh, Josh,” sobbed Laura Barrett as she followed him outside.
All the women and children hurried after them.
On the other side of the screen door stood the boy who had been under the table. He had seen everything. He would be able to explain what had happened. To get his attention, Martha snapped her fingers, but his gaze was rapt on the departing ambulance. She pressed so close against the door that the little hairs on her upper lip were drawn like filings to the screen. She could taste the hot dusty metal.
“Little boy! Little boy,” she called in a low voice, but he didn’t hear her. A long blue sedan slid up to the curb, blocking Mr. Weilman’s driveway. From it emerged a short redheaded man and a taller, older man with a cigar stub in his mouth. They were both in shirtsleeves. One of them must be the boy’s father coming to get her, she thought. She opened the door an arm’s width, enough to grab the back of the younger boy’s shirt.
“Help! Marthorgan! Mommy, help!” the boy screamed, and the two men broke into a run.
She yanked the boy inside, slamming the door shut and turning the lock when she saw their grim-faced charge onto the porch. They shook the door and banged on the glass, peering in at her. The little boy gasped as she pulled him into the living room with her. She checked to make sure the front door was still locked, and then she closed the two open windows. Everything she touched was smeared with blood. “You come with me,” she ordered the child as she dragged him toward the stairs. “You’ve got to tell them what happened,” she grunted, wrestling him up each step. He struggled, so that his sweaty arms kept slipping out of her grasp. Her cut hand was bleeding onto his arms. He tried to kick her. She stopped on the top step and shook him, demanding that he calm down and listen to her. “You’re my witness and I want you to tell them the truth!”
“Don’t hurt me. Please don’t hurt me,” he panted as she dragged him from room to room while she locked the windows.
After she locked the door to her room, she ordered the boy to sit on the straight-backed chair in the corner. His feet dangled over the floor. One sneaker had fallen off, and his sock was black with dirt. He watched her pace back and forth, then sink onto the edge of the bed with a sigh.
“You know I didn’t try to hurt Joshua, right?” she asked, and he nodded. “He was hurting that boy, your friend. And it startled me.”
He stared at her.
“Answer me!” she said.
“You didn’t ask me anything,” the boy said.
“I did! I most certainly did! Now, don’t get me mad. That’s all I ask. Just don’t get me mad!”
“I won’t.” He shook his head.
The commotion from the driveway had spread around the house. Voices came from everywhere. They were even in the back yard. A herd of feet stampeded over the hot dry lawn, then up and down the incline at this side of the house. Women’s voices. Children’s. Men’s. There was a scratch on the drawer of the mahogany night stand. She wet her finger and rubbed it. Mr. Weilman had better not blame her for that. He’d better not. Downstairs, the doorbell rang ceaselessly, and there was such banging on the doors that every wall vibrated. The lamp shade trembled. The window shade trembled. And now, from another part of the house, came more banging. “Go away,” she whispered, looking toward the window as a man’s voice, amplified, drowned out all the other sounds.
“Martha Horgan!” the voice boomed. “This is the police. We just want to talk to you, Martha. Please open the door and let Zachary come out.”
There was no sound for a moment other than her own insistent petition, “Leave me alone, just leave me alone, leave me alone, just leave me alone.” She did not thump her chest or wring her hands. Never had she sat so motionlessly. She looked closely at the air, at the thin yellow light in the air. “Shh!” she said to the boy, thinking the sound she had just heard had been him.
“I didn’t say anything,” he whispered. Tears ran down his face.
Next came the loud scrape of metal dragged along metal, then the voices and running footsteps. The footsteps were right under the window, and now they seemed to be ascending the very clapboards.
“Martha! Martha Horgan!”
Reflected in the bureau mirror was a man’s large freckled face at the window screen, the red
-haired man. With a kind of dreamy astonishment, they stared at each other in the mirror. As long as she didn’t turn around, he might not be real.
“Detective John O’Toole, Miz Horgan.” He smiled, and just above the sill held up a plasticized card that flashed in the sunlight. “I’d like to talk with you,” he said. When she didn’t respond, he repeated it, while he jiggled the bottom of the screen and bowed the frame with a springing sound. He lifted the screen a few inches.
He was going to climb in here. No! “No!” she cried, running to the window. “Don’t you come in here! You can’t come in here! You have no right to come in here!”
“I have to talk to you,” he said in that smooth voice, his eyes never blinking from hers.
She saw now that he stood at the top of a metal extension ladder.
“Go sit down now,” he said, lifting the screen a couple more inches, his eyes fixed, as if his stare alone might immobilize her. “I just want to make sure the boy’s all right. I’ve got a son myself and there’s n …”
All the color drained from his face as she rushed toward the window and yanked it down. He stared through the glass while she turned the dull brass lock.
“Martha,” he started to say, but she pulled down the brittle paper shade.
She could hear the hollow thud of his feet on the rungs as he scurried to the ground. Downstairs, the phone had been ringing and ringing. A policeman’s voice boomed up again from the street. “Martha Horgan, come out of the house. Martha Horgan, this is the Atkinson Police Department. We just want to talk to you, Martha.”
“I have to go to the bathroom,” the boy said.
“No!” she snapped.
More cars and trucks were pulling up outside. She stood by the window and peered down the side of the shade at a white van that said “WHVT” on its side. A dark-haired young woman in a yellow suit spoke into a microphone while a man in baggy jeans and a T-shirt trained his shoulder-mounted camera on her. People bunched in behind her and waved at the camera. The woman gestured toward the window, and everyone looked up.
A Dangerous Woman Page 35
