by Ninie Hammon
Malachi Tackett had gotten to his feet, though he still looked woozy. He stood, leaning against the piece of graffiti-ed plexiglass that formed one end of the shelter, holding his rifle, looking as thoroughly confused as everybody else. And it occurred to Pete then that there was, indeed, one thing more shocking than watching somebody appear out of nowhere. And that was being the person who done the appearing.
The woman, Merrie’s mother, said she and the little girl had been driving down the road, though she hadn’t filled in the blanks about why she’d decided to take an injured child for a drive or where she’d been going.
She’d been driving and then she was here. Wasn’t no in-between.
Pete put his thumb over the end of the water hose to create more pressure and used the spray as a kind of broom to sweep the foul-smelling vomit off the asphalt and down into the roadside ditch.
If the others had had the same experience, then Malachi Tackett had been out squirrel hunting when the … whateveritwas — a sudden desire to throw up in the bus shelter in front of the Dollar General Store? — had assaulted him. Fish, who was now sitting up with his head leaned back as Sam applied pressure to his nose to stop the bleeding, had been wherever he’d awakened after sleeping wherever he’d spent the night. Maybe he was drunk. Pete couldn’t tell.
“I do it! I do it!” the little girl cried, begging to play with the water hose.
“Okay fine, you do it. Just squirt the water on the ground.”
The child gleefully took the hose and began to squirt water every which way, but that worked because the parking lot was sloped toward the road and no matter where she squirted, the water would flow down that way washing away some of the yuk.
Charlie reached out to the young blond man in a brown Nower County Sheriff’s Department uniform, sitting elbows on knees, cradling his head in his hands … as blood poured out his nose and dripped onto the asphalt.
When she touched his shoulder, he groaned.
“Are you hurt?” she asked him. He heard her, but it clearly took considerable effort on his part to lift his face up toward her and look at her. His eyes were bloodshot, the whites a veined angry red, like he’d just come off a week drunk, and there were dark circles under them. His face was chalky white.
“There’s a needle” — the words rode a ragged whisper where every word seemed to deliver a painful blow — “in my head. A needle in my brain.”
When he’d turned his face up toward her, the gush of blood from his nose had changed direction, pouring down his lip to drip off his chin onto the front of his crisply ironed brown shirt. The name tag said he was Deputy Sheriff Liam Montgomery.
“It … hurts.”
Charlie had no idea what to do or say. But she understood on an empathetical level that if the pain in his head carried with it anything like the force of the nausea that had hammered her, yeah … it hurt. It hurt a lot.
The young man carefully lowered his head back into his hands and held it there the way you’d hold a tray of Waterford crystal.
“Where …?” Fish began at the same moment Malachi Tackett asked, “What?”
Malachi had come around the side to the shelter and was standing, though wobbly, in front of the bench where Fish was sitting up, finally beginning to breathe normally, and the young sheriff’s deputy was cradling his fragile skull in his hands.
Charlie looked at Sam, who was staring at Malachi with an unreadable look on her face. Then Sam’s gaze shifted to Charlie and the two locked eyes. She could sense that Sam felt as she did, that somehow the two of them were “responsible” here, like the in-charge grownups at a party where all the teenagers were falling-down drunk. By virtue of being the first people on the scene of this … yeah, this what? And because the two of them — and the old man, who was helping Merrie squirt water out a hose to wash away the vomit — were the ones most in possession of their faculties.
Fish’s eyes were clearing fast, though, but Malachi Tackett still had a dazed look and Charlie wondered if that might be his normal look, an expression that had nothing to do with suddenly finding himself beside the bus shelter at the crossroads and everything to do with why he thought an invading army was attacking him there.
“Anybody want to tell me what’s going—?” That’s as far as Fish got before Malachi Tackett sucked in a gasp, and then let the air out with a single incredulous word riding it.
“Mama?”
When Charlie and Sam followed his gaze, they saw a woman lying on her side in the grass beside the bus shelter. The woman was Viola Tackett.
Chapter Fourteen
When Malachi cried out to his mother, and Sam turned to see her lying in the grass beside the shelter, something inside Sam switched off. Or maybe switched on. She changed gears in some way then and seemed to go on some kind of autopilot.
Considerations of how and why and what became secondary to the reality that there were several people here in various conditions of physical distress. Physical distress was all she’d allow herself to call it because she didn’t have any other names that didn’t make her skin crawl.
She rushed to Viola Tackett and knelt beside her, with Malachi kneeling on the other side. He was calling out to her, had put his hands on her shoulders to lift her up, but Sam stopped him.
“We don’t know what’s wrong with her, Chai, and until we do, we shouldn’t move her.”
Chai. She hadn’t meant to call him that. It’d just popped out but he was in such a state that he certainly didn’t notice the word and by tomorrow morning wouldn’t remember anybody’d said it.
“What’s wrong with … where …?”
“I don’t know and I don’t know and I don’t know. Until further notice, sprinkle those as needed at the end of every question about what’s going on here.”
As she spoke, she’d been taking Viola’s pulse, which was thin, rapid and thready, but she didn’t know what kind of rhythm would be native to a woman in her seventies who had led the kind of … shall we say “reckless” life Viola had led. Her breathing was shallow but regular. She lifted the woman’s eyelids. Her pupils were not dilated and they were both the same size.
Turning toward Pete Rutherford, she called out, “Would you please go get Eli? I know he’s there. I was just in his office—”
How long ago? Ten minutes? Half an hour? It couldn’t possibly have been such a short period of time, in the world of minutes and seconds because in the world of life occurrences it was something like an epic. “Tell him I need his help.”
Then she turned her attention back to Viola Tackett, who lay on her back in the grass unconscious. Not vomiting. No nose bleed. And until she woke up, they wouldn’t know about the “needle in the brain” phenomena Liam was experiencing.
She groaned.
“Mama!” Malachi was holding her hand, patting it. It was such a tender gesture Sam wanted to look away, fearing she might tear up. She didn’t. “Can you wake up and talk to me, Mama?”
Viola opened her eyes and immediately closed them again.
“Who burnt them beans?” she mumbled.
Sam and Malachi exchanged a look.
“What beans, Mama?”
“How many kinds of beans we got in the garden?” she snapped, but still didn’t open her eyes. The strength in her voice was encouraging.
“Mrs. Tackett, this is Sam Sheridan. You remember me. I came out to the house when Neb got that spider bite and it got infected. Remember?”
“Onliest bite I remember was the goat got ahold of Obie’s backside, tore the whole back out of his pants and got a good chunk of his butt with it.”
Malachi smiled.
Clearly, the old woman was capable of lucid thought. She was confused and disoriented, but it didn’t appear there was any serious—
Her eyes snapped open.
“Where’s them boys?”
She made to sit up and Sam tried to restrain her but she shook Sam off like a pestering fly and sat upright. When she did, blood beg
an to seep out of both ears and run down her neck. Looking around, her confusion quickly morphed into anger.
She spotted Malachi and dumped the anger on him.
“You want to tell me what you’re doing here, and don’t you lie to me, boy, or I’ll snatch the hair off your head so quick your eyebrows’ll be gone right along with it.”
“Where is here, Mama?” he asked. Again, the kind, gentle tone.
“Why here—?” She looked around and closed her mouth. The anger drained off her face slower than it had flashed into place there and what came behind it was bewilderment.
Join the club.
She reached up to feel the wet on her neck and when she saw blood on her fingers, she cried, “What’s goin’ on? Where are … what are we doin’—?”
She made to get up and this time Malachi denied her.
“You sit right where you are until we’re sure you ain’t gonna fall on your face soon’s you stand upright.”
E.J. arrived right then, which wasn’t the most auspicious moment in terms of dealing with a disoriented and confused Viola Tackett. His presence added another whole level of strangeness.
“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 go
ne 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.
