by Jodi Thomas
But something was wrong inside her and had been for three months. If not pregnancy, then what? She didn’t want to think of the possibility of cancer. Even saying the word put form to her greatest fear.
She shrugged, thinking this was one more question she wished she had a mother to ask. But her mom, already ill with cancer, had left her with a neighbor one afternoon swearing she would return soon. She hadn’t even glanced back when Blaine yelled goodbye. Six hours later, when the police knocked on the neighbor’s door, they’d told Blaine simply that her mother wouldn’t be returning.
Maybe that was the real reason Blaine feared having a baby. Maybe she was afraid she would be no better at parenting than her mother had been. In truth, that may have been the reason she never pressed Mark about children. Neither of them had examples to build on. Her mother had thought she was pregnant a month before they found the cancer. She’d fought it for six months without even once explaining anything to Blaine.
Thoughts of going back to her office and forgetting today’s nightmare for a while longer drifted through Blaine’s mind. She liked the tiny space she’d been given in the basement of the old downtown library building that now housed the Travis County records. Though she wandered in unnoticed by the library staff most days, she had a place to go and work waiting for her.
Only, today she knew that if she went to work she’d only spend the day worrying. She had to find out. She’d made it this far, she could face the answer.
The sound of a lawn mower from somewhere beyond the window blended with the voices arguing down the hallway. Sparrows played in the shrubs just below the window. They hopped from branch to branch scolding the approaching mower.
The engine roared as a man riding the mower neared the building. He adjusted the brim of a baseball cap with oily fingers as he glanced first in one direction, then the other. When he raised his head and shoved back the tattered blue cap, Blaine met his gaze. Angry gray eyes, cold as stone, stared at her as if he saw nothing alive beyond the glass.
A cry caught in her throat at the hate smoldering in the tombstone-colored stare. He’d been the man she’d seen carrying the grocery bag earlier.
He lowered slightly, depositing something beneath the window where she stood. The blue brim of his cap now hid his eyes. Then he rode away, not bothering to mow the rest of the grass. When he reached the shed, he jumped from the machine and hurried away.
Blaine almost tapped on the window to point out his error, but she guessed no one would care about the patch of grass out back of a clinic. Her daily routine overflowed with unimportant details, almost as if somewhere in life’s scheme she’d been assigned to see after things no one else wanted to bother with.
But not today, she thought. Today the details would shatter her world. Worry had slowly destroyed the calm of her life until she could stand the uncertainty of it no longer. Today she’d know one way or the other. Cancer, or a baby, either would destroy her life.
Sparrows chirped outside, still calling an alarm.
“Fly away,” Blaine whispered, leaning close to the glass. “Fly away.”
A moment later a rolling blast hit her full force, knocking Blaine through the window with cannon might. At first, all she saw, all she thought was that she might crush the birds. Then a deafening avalanche tumbled over her like death’s black cloud and she flew with plaster, brick and birds through the air.
She landed amid the alley trash and rolled, no more than a doll tossed among the rubble. Boards, bricks, papers blanketed her as dust filled her lungs and fire flickered in her hair. She staggered through the smoke heading nowhere but away.
Blaine fought to scream, but the air was on fire. As she labored to breathe, flames slid down her throat. The air burned again as she coughed it up. She crawled away not caring that the trash scraped her knees and ripped her clothes. Her ears rang, disorienting her, as panic throbbed along with blood.
Reason told her a bomb had just exploded, as she’d seen a hundred times in movies. But was it only the first of many? There was no time to think. Another volley of bricks might kill her. She had to hide. Survival took over.
She scrambled for shelter, instinct short-circuiting all thought. Across the alley she slammed against a brick wall of an abandoned warehouse. Mindlessly, Blaine moved hand over hand along the wall until she found an indentation in the brick. She placed her back against the building and tried to see beyond the smoke. Nothing. Slowly, she slid down, covering her head with her hands as trash tumbled over her and a falling brick hit her head.
Like a friend from old, the need to hide took command. She balled further into herself. Everything would pass if she could disappear as she had years ago when her parents’ fights started. The smell of burnt hair stung her nostrils as boards piled atop her, bruising her, burning her, protecting her.
Blaine covered her ears and blocked out the sounds around her as she tried not to breathe. Don’t think of the noise or the pain. Drift away, she told herself over and over. Drift away.
In the faraway world beyond her hiding place, sirens wailed, people rushed, water sizzled, but, burrowed into her cave, Blaine closed out everything, even the pain. She nestled farther into the space between the bricks, hiding away from the world.
Squeezing her eyes tight, she pushed all trouble aside as she had when she’d been a child hiding beneath blankets in the hall closet. She pushed aside the panic, the noise, the smells. The throbbing in her head eased to a dull ache. She couldn’t tell if she was falling asleep or passing out from the pain. It didn’t matter. She drifted away.
Three
When Blaine awoke, fear kept her still. All was silent around her. Slowly, she made out the sound of water dripping. The air smelled cool and flavored with the odor of a campfire, or more precisely of the trash burning in a huge barrel in her grandmother’s backyard. Darkness pressed against her, so thick she couldn’t tell if her eyes were open. Her leg throbbed with a dull ache, her hands and face crackled with tiny scabs when she moved, and her throat felt raw, as if she’d swallowed slivers of glass while she slept. The pounding in her head had concentrated at one spot just above her hairline.
Slowly, she crawled from her hiding place and retraced her steps. Pale moonlight washed across the alley now littered with parts of the building she had been standing in hours before. Water leaked from huge hoses left on the grass, but the smell of a fire dominated the air. The building was black. Dead now.
She moved out into the open, trying to make sense of what had happened. Boards blocked the space where windows had been. The bush and sparrows were gone. A red light blinked at the corner of the building, flashing an eerie strobe against the clinic’s exposed bones.
Blaine felt she’d passed out in Austin and awoken in a war zone.
“Hey, lady! Get out of there!”
She looked around, but could find no form to the order.
“No one is supposed to be back here.” The man moved from the blackness, his steps faltered as he dragged one foot noisily across the rubble. “This is a crime scene and I’m the only one who’s supposed to be near here.” He tapped a silver badge on his chest that looked more like a name tag than anything official. “Folks died here today. Have a little respect.”
When she did not move, his gloved hand grabbed her arm and yanked.
Blaine stumbled, losing her shoe in the roots of fire hoses as she tried to match his limping strides.
“You’ll have to sleep it off somewhere else,” a man yelled from inches behind her. “You’re the third drunk tonight who wandered off Sixth Street and tried to scavenge among the rubble.” He tightened his grip. “I’ve had a hard day of it. The next one I find in here may get more than just an escort off the property. I’d like to get my hands on that blasted idiot who laid dynamite at the back of the clinic. He’s made one hell of a day for me.”
“But…” Blaine tried to explain. Words couldn’t cut their way up her throat.
She let the man hurry her alon
g until they were on the broken sidewalk in front of what once had been the clinic. Yellow tape roped off the area, as if anyone would want to enter. In the streetlight she noticed his badge had the name Frank Parker printed across it.
“You’re the clinic’s guard,” she whispered, trying not to hurt her throat any more than she had to.
“Yeah.” He straightened. “And I think I may have seen the man who did this. He’d better pray the cops catch him before I do. He just destroyed the best job I ever had. I work twenty-four hours straight and they’re laying me off come sunup.”
She swallowed, her throat too dry to say anything else.
“Don’t come back.” He shoved her toward the street. “Or you’ll be sorry.” His threat sounded hollow with exhaustion.
She wanted to scream that he was the one who would be sorry if he ever laid a hand on her again. She was the wife of one of the most powerful lawyers in Austin. She’d had dinner with the governor last week. She was somebody.
But it was too much effort to force words. It was easier to be nobody for a while. Plus, in her state, if he guessed who she was, he might call the press. If her choice was between being mistaken for a drunk or her name being flashed across the front page as being injured in a welfare-clinic bombing, she’d take the drunk.
She glanced down. Covered by a layer of ash, and standing in the poor light, she looked like a person of the street. Untying the scarf at her neck, she used the hundred-dollar silk as a rag to wipe her face, then tied her hair back in a knot. Her salon-straightened hair felt as if it had been fried with a bad perm. A few places were extra crispy, but she was suddenly too exhausted to care. All she could think of was that in a minute she’d wake up and this nightmare would be over.
Blaine walked up Congress Avenue heading toward the lights of the capitol. She’d driven these streets all her life and could tell what time it was by the type of people who were out. Business hours—suits and convention goers, shoppers and panhandlers. Evening—diners and daters, meeting for happy hour and extending into dinner. The midnight hours—freaks and hard drunks mingled with druggies and college students who wouldn’t make it up for the next day’s classes. But sometime, after three and before dawn, the small town that exploded into a city slept in peace to the snoring sound of a street sweeper.
When Blaine had been in college, she used to run down the center of Lamar Boulevard during this lonely time of night. She’d felt like the last person alive.
The sidewalk was cool on her bare foot as she limped along with no destination. She had no money, no ID. Her wallet had been in the pocket of the jacket she’d handed over. There was no hurry. She’d left Mark a note telling him where she’d gone, half hoping he might find it and ask why. But she doubted he would even see it. He had moved into the spare bedroom a few weeks ago, claiming he needed to concentrate on a case he was preparing for. Concentration meant not bothering to tell her when he came in or left. He’d done it before, several times, and each time it was longer before he moved back in with her.
Work consumed him until there was no time for her, for them. It was so important that he be nothing like his father that Mark left few minutes in the day unplanned.
On the outside she and Mark were the perfect couple. He’d made partner younger than anyone ever had in the almost hundred-year history of the firm. His father had celebrated early and been too drunk to board the flight to Austin.
Mark had simply taken her hand and told Blaine it didn’t matter. They celebrated alone. And though he held her tightly that night, she couldn’t help but wonder if her presence even mattered.
Blaine thought she wanted things to remain as they were, but lately she felt like one of the sparrows she had seen in the bush. Dancing from branch to branch, knowing something was about to happen, but afraid to fly away. If Mark decided to go into politics, he’d need a more outgoing wife. They’d no longer be the perfect match.
She touched her belly feeling nothing. Surely if she’d been pregnant, she would have felt something, even if it was early. The fear that it might be a tumor growing inside her made her hand shake slightly. “Thirty-four,” she whispered to herself. Her mother and grandmother both took their last breath during that year of their life.
A cab passed, honking at her for no reason. She stumbled on the heel of her one shoe and landed against a construction wall covered with paper. Blaine leaned down to pull off the shoe and felt the warm thickness of her own blood at her ankle.
There wasn’t enough light to see her injury. She limped half a block before she found a bus stop occupied by a few sleeping homeless. She sat between two bag ladies while she examined her leg. A deep scratch oozed blood along her calf, wetting one side of her trousers from knee to ankle.
“We have to leave soon, Mary,” a bundle of rags in the darkened corner of the bus stop mumbled. A pink nose appeared, then a tanned face made of wrinkles and a smile.
“I’m not Mary,” Blaine answered kindly, remembering that her mother had often called her Mary Blaine when she was angry. When her mother died, Blaine had shed her first name as easily as she shed her past.
“Well, you be careful out here.” The little woman grinned as though passing on great knowledge. “I worry about you, Mary.”
Blaine realized for the first time in her life she wasn’t afraid of being mugged. She had nothing. She was nobody. “I will be,” she whispered and smiled back at the woman.
“They’re feeding pancakes at the shelter today,” the bundle added. “We want to get there early, Mary. Wouldn’t do to miss that. I’ve heard they sometimes have sausage links, but I ain’t never seen none.”
Blaine felt sorry for the woman. “Thank you.” She smiled again, wishing she had money to buy the old woman a real breakfast. “But I’m not Mary.”
“Shut up, will you.” A head poked out from beneath the larger bundle of rags. A black woman whose age wasn’t written easily across her face, added, “It won’t hurt you none to be Mary, miss, if that’s what she wants. She gets a kick out of making up names for folks. Calls a lot of them Mary. It must be a name that got stuck in what little mind she’s got left.”
Blaine saw the woman’s point.
“You only got one shoe,” the smaller bundle of rags said as she dug in one of her bags. “I can fix that, my dear.”
She handed Blaine a pair of white slippers while mumbling about the price of getting shoes that fit properly. “Your feet have been growing like weeds these days.” She patted Blaine’s arm and snuggled back into her blanket.
When they fell back into silence, Blaine caught herself smiling. She’d never been in more of a mess in her life.
A clock on a wall across the street at a twenty-four-hour copy place told Blaine it was almost six. If she walked toward the capitol and down a few blocks, she could reach the parking garage Mark used. Maybe she could catch him before he went into work and get him to take her home.
He’d be upset that she was hurt and he’d ask a hundred questions, but he’d take her home and insist on doctoring the cut. He was the one person she knew who was more afraid of germs than she.
She walked slowly through the shadows as the city began to awake. It crossed her mind that Mark might want her to go to the police. But what could she tell them? That she’d seen a man mowing the lawn in the back of a clinic she never should have been at in the first place. The thought of having to face questions she couldn’t answer frightened her.
When she reached the law offices, all the windows were still dark. If her luck held, no one would see her looking like this but Mark.
She slipped into a blackened doorway between the parking lot and the employee entrance to the law offices. Her throat hurt so badly, she wasn’t sure she could yell Mark’s name when he passed, but maybe he’d hear her whisper.
A secretary hurried in carrying a box of doughnuts. Her keys rattled against the door as if she was frightened to be arriving so early in the shadows.
Blaine remained ver
y still, not wanting to scare her if she became aware of someone near.
Next came a large man swinging a briefcase like a weapon. When he was within ten feet of her, Blaine recognized him as Harry Winslow, one of the senior partners. His gray hair looked as if he forgot to comb it but, even in the shadows, he appeared powerful and controlled.
Blaine thought of calling out. He would help her. She could go inside and have coffee and doughnuts until Mark arrived. Only, the thought of having to answer questions about why she was at the clinic stopped her. She’d tell Mark first. He had a right to know. Then they’d face the problem together and find out what was wrong with her.
Just as Harry Winslow’s key connected with the door, a thin shadow moved toward him.
Blaine opened her mouth to scream a warning.
But before sound could climb up her throat, Winslow turned and faced the man. “About time you contacted me, Jimmy!” he snapped.
“Mission accomplished.” The thin man tapped his ball cap.
“You got the wife?”
The thin man nodded once.
“Thank God we didn’t have to take out Anderson. I like that boy, but I sent Shorty to watch his apartment just in case you didn’t get the job done.”
“I did what I had to,” the thin man grumbled. “Have I ever not done the work?”
Winslow huffed. “Messy. Couldn’t you think of a quieter way?”
Blaine couldn’t move. Couldn’t breathe. Surely they weren’t talking about the bombing…about her.
“I did the job, didn’t I? You said quickly, not quietly. Had the sticks in my truck, didn’t see no way that would be faster. I still got some cleanup to do with the witness.” The thin man took time to spit before continuing. “A few adjustments under the hood should take care of the problem.”
“Well, do it!” Winslow snapped. “And no witnesses this time around. You can’t expect me to clean up any mistakes this time. I’m lucky to have one friend on the force.”
