Dream With Little Angels (11 page)

M
y heart started again as the eyes transformed into those of my sisters', and Carry's hand came up and gently knocked on the glass. Unlatching my window, I slid it open, filling my room with the moist smell of pine on the night air and the singing of cicadas.

“What's going on?” Dewey asked me. Carry shushed him.

“It's Carry,” I whispered back. “Where've you been?” I asked her. “Mom's livid.”

“Her car ain't here,” Carry said.

“That's cuz she's out lookin' for you,” Dewey said. We both shushed him. He went back to his pretend gun.

Carry pushed my window all the way open. “What're you doing?” I asked.

“Comin' in.”

“Like heck,” I said. “Come in through the front door.”

“No, Mom might see me. I want to be in bed before she gets back.”

I looked at her sharply. “I'm not helpin' you. You're like five hours late. You deserve to get in trouble.”

“What are you? The Carry Police?” She glanced at Dewey shooting out my ceiling. “What the hell's he doing?”

“Mom showed him her gun. He's been like this ever since.”

I watched while she digested what I had just told her. “She must really be mad if she showed you her gun.”

“You'll be lucky if she doesn't shoot you with it.”

Right then the headlights of my mother's car swept across the yard, lighting up the area outside my window as she pulled into the drive. “It's Mom! Let me in!” Carry demanded.

“No!” I tried to push the window back closed, but Carry was stronger than me. Dewey was no help. He just kept make-believe shooting stuff. “It doesn't matter,” I said, struggling. “Four hours or four and a half hours. Both are late enough that she's gonna kill you, and you know it.”

“You're right about that,” came a voice from the hall. It was my mother. I turned to see her silhouetted in the doorway of my bedroom.

“Shit,” I heard Carry say beneath her breath. Under normal circumstances, I'd tell my mother if I heard my sister cuss, but I figured she was in it deep enough already. I didn't want my mother to
actually
kill her.

“Go round to the front door,” my mother said. Her voice was eerily calm and hollow. It scared me, and I wasn't even the one in trouble. Dewey stopped shooting. Carry stood there frozen with one foot on my window ledge. She looked like that possum on Main Street squatting in the middle of the lane just before my mother runned it over.

“Now!” my mother yelled.

This time Carry moved. She ducked back outside and, I assume, headed for the front door.

My mother looked at me and Dewey. “Now shut your window and go to sleep,” she said. I slid it closed and crawled underneath the covers beside Dewey. “I don't want to hear another word from either of you two.” She closed my door completely by pulling it shut with a solid crack.

Neither of us said a thing for a long while. Finally, Dewey whispered, “Okay, now I'm worried about Carry.”

I told him to shut up.

Carry's door slammed twice. Both were loud and not far apart. The first was Carry and the second was, without question, my mother, whose voice was at least an entire octave and ten decibels higher than usual. She screamed so loud that every single word easily pushed its way under Carry's closed door (or, more likely, right through it) and on into my room. It sounded as though my mother was standing right beside my bed, that's how loud she was.

“How dare you?” she asked Carry. “How dare you take advantage of me like that? Against my better judgment, I give you the benefit of the doubt and let you go into Satsuma, knowing damn well you ain't goin' to no movie with no ‘friends'!”

I still wasn't sure what she meant by that, but I didn't say nothing to Dewey. Both of us were kind of shell-shocked, lying there frozen with the blankets pulled up to our chins. He'd even stopped shooting off finger rounds.

“Oh, don't even give me that look! Do you think I'm stupid? You must! Well, you're gonna find out who's the stupid one, because you're not leavin' this house except to go to and from school. Otherwise, you're grounded. And you're grounded right through to January!”

I blinked. Carry had stayed out well past her assigned time, but even to me this seemed a little extreme. Carry thought so, too. We heard her telling my mother so.

“You can't ground me that long. Nobody's grounded for near on three months! That's not even close to bein' fair!”

“You don't decide fair, young lady,
I
do. And from now on, I'm not even listenin' to you no more. You're a liar, and you can't be trusted. There are girls being
taken
on the streets! Girls your age! And here I am, waiting up all hours at home, worried that you've become one of them. And you don't even have the decency to come back on
time
. I
trusted
you. You're lucky you ain't grounded all the way to summer.”

“You know what, Mother?” Carry had started yelling now too, nearly as loud as my mother. “This isn't about me. This is about
you
and your insecurities and the fact that you failed to save Ruby Mae Vickers!”

And that's when we heard it. The unmistakable sound of my mother's palm slapping hard against Carry's face. After that, the doors, the hallway, my room, everything just fell silent. After a good five seconds, one of them said something. It wasn't loud enough to tell who or what. Then I heard Carry's door open and my mother come out of it before pulling it gently closed behind her.

A long while later, I heard my mother talking to Uncle Henry in the living room, but with my door firmly shut, it all just sounded like mumbles from my bed. I got the feeling Uncle Henry was concerned about what he had just heard transpire.

I decided then that maybe I needed to step in. Carry seemed to be completely out of control. My mother was completely irrational. I was beginning to feel like the most sane one in the house—other than Uncle Henry—and he didn't do much parenting on account of he didn't think anybody should parent other people's kids except their own parents.

“Where're you going?” Dewey whispered as I got out of bed. His voice was shaky. He sounded frightened.

“To talk to Carry,” I said.

“What if your mom catches you?”

“Catches me what?”

“I don't know. But she seems a little . . . scary tonight. I reckon if she finds you out of bed, she'll hit you, too.”

“I'll be fine,” I said. “Go to sleep.”

Quietly, I stepped across the hardwood, trying to make as little noise as possible. The door squeaked when I opened it, and I could almost feel Dewey tense up in the bed behind me. I glanced down the hall toward the kitchen. My mother and Uncle Henry were still safely in the living room at the other end of the house.

“She needed disciplinin', Hank,” I heard my mother say. “All kids need disciplinin'.”

“I can't disagree with you there. And nobody knew how to discipline children better than your pa, but I never knew him to slap one of ya.”

I never heard my mother's response as I quietly opened Carry's door and slipped inside her room. The light beside her bed was on, casting a dim, warm glow across her chest of drawers, baby blue drapes, and the navy comforter strewn across her mattress. She was sitting on the end of her bed, still clothed in pink capris and a blue shirt. Her feet were bare.

She looked up from gazing at the floor as I came in. Immediately, my eyes were drawn to the red mark on her cheek. Tears stood in her eyes. I think she believed I was my mother returning when I first came in, because she kind of flinched, but then she just sneered and said, “What do
you
want?”

“Wonderin' if maybe we can talk,” I said, trying to sound as grown up as possible.

She wiped her eyes and gave me a look as though I'd just told her we were going swimming with the gators in Skeeter Swamp outside Mr. Robert Lee Garner's ranch. “What the hell about?” she asked.

Tentatively, I took a seat beside her. Unlike her, my bare feet didn't touch the floor and I felt very small in my red pajamas. “You wearing perfume?” I asked.

She gave me another one of them looks. “Of course. What's it matter to you?”

“Just never noticed you smellin' before. You smell good.”

“You're weird.”

“You're behavin' badly.”

She closed her eyes and let out a deep breath. “Oh, dear God. Please tell me Mother didn't send you in here for a pep talk?”

“No, I came in here on my own accord. I reckon she's a bit too out of control right now to talk to you proper.”

This seemed to calm her down a little. She even gave me the briefest of smiles as she looked into my face. “So you're gonna talk to me proper? 'Bout my behavior?”

I nodded. Remembering back to what I overheard my mother say to Chief Montgomery in his office, I said, “You know Mom's always been there for us. With money and support and all that.”

“You sound like a commercial for one of them insurance companies. What's your point? It's her
job
to support us. Do you think that's something special? Like most parents just leave their kids out in the woods and let the coyotes raise 'em?”

I breathed deeply, trying to figure out what to say next. Until now, I thought I was doing a fairly good job at talking at her level, but she brought up a good point. Then I remembered my trip into Cloverdale earlier. “Well,” I said, “a lot of folk ain't got nearly as good a life as we do. Think of all them black kids livin' up in Cloverdale. They got garages about to fall in on their cars and some of their kids play naked in the dirt.”

“What're you talkin' about?”

“I seen 'em. I ride to Luther Willard King's every two weeks to give him ten dollars, and he has two little sisters with no shoes or shirts in his front yard sometimes. They're nearly always all covered in mud from their knees right up to their asses.”

She laughed at that.

“And someone in the house wheezes and hacks so loud, every time I go there I expect to arrive at a funeral. It's Luther's father, I think.”

The laughing stopped but she stayed smiling, so I continued my little speech.

“And here, Mom makes sure we have clothes and food and all that. You don't have to sit around outside buck-ass naked in the dirt.”

“Okay, you made a point,” she said. “
Somehow
. I'm not exactly sure how you managed, but
somehow
you did. That still don't give her the right to hit me.”

“No, it don't. And I think Uncle Henry's tellin' her that right now. But she's been under a lot of stress. You know she's worried about those two missin' girls.”

“Two?” my sister asked. “You mean one. Ruby Mae don't count. She went missin' twelve years ago.”

“No, I mean two. While you was gone
out to the movies
”—I said it the same way my mother had even though I didn't understand why we was saying it that way—“Tiffany Michelle Yates turned up gone. Me and Dewey saw her about ten minutes before she disappeared. Mom thinks we might be the last ones to talk to her. We're witnesses in the case.” I stuck my chest out slightly when I said that last part.

It was like a lightning bug suddenly flew into Carry's ear and lit up her brain. With a deep breath, she went back to staring at her feet. “So that's why Mom's so upset.”

“Hell yes, I'd say so. Also because you were so goddamn late and didn't have to be. You could've just shown up on time like a normal person. Especially on your first time out by yourself like that. Me and Dewey went biking today and came back ten minutes early.”

“Yeah, well, I ain't you and Dewey.” She studied me a second, then asked, “When did you start cussin'?”

“That ain't no business of yours,” I said. “But anyway, you could've at least phoned.”

She thought on that a bit. “You're right,” she said. “I could've phoned.”

I smiled. I felt I'd made some real progress. “All I'm sayin' is that, at least until Mom finishes with this case, I think you should try to act a bit nicer.”

“Well, thank you for your concern,” she said. “I'll take your advice under advisement.”

I nodded. “That sounds good,” I said. Even though I didn't quite know what
advisement
meant, it sure did sound like she understood. I stood up. “Now I think you should get to sleep and probably Mom'll have calmed down by morning.”

“Probably,” Carry said, bringing her hand to the red mark on her cheek.

I left her room and tiptoed across the hall, realizing I'd left my bedroom door open. Closing it now, I clamored back under the covers beside Dewey. “I think I really got through to her,” I told him.

“From here it sounded to me like she was making fun of you,” Dewey said.

“That's cuz you don't understand families and keepin' them together the way I do. You don't have a sister.”

“I think your sister's crazy.”

“I think she'll be better from now on. She's just going through a bad patch, is all.”

“Well,” Dewey said, yawning and turning over, pulling most of the covers with him, “don't worry about her so much. You'll always have me.”

I smiled, looking up at my ceiling. I missed Carry—the way she used to be. The way we used to play together. She taught me to read before anyone at school ever did. If it turned out I somehow didn't fix her tonight, I sure hoped the bad part my mother had told me about was near on over.