Tempest Rising (24 page)

R
amona curled herself tighter in a ball on the girls’ bed still snuggled in Shern’s robe. She rocked and moaned and pressed her knees into her stomach to still the grief spinning there. She missed her mother. Had missed her since that day in the park when Donald Booker spoiled it for them. All those years of not being held and rocked and kissed good-night. Keeping her ears perched, waiting to be called lil darling. Waiting. All the time waiting. She reasoned that was why she hadn’t been able to leave. Why her feet would go to cement whenever she thought about walking out of that door for good. Why she would get a twinge that would propel her into grand irritation whenever someone mentioned how Donald Booker disappeared. Not a trace of him. Not his dirty sneakers, not his mean bat. Just vanished, they’d say.

What must her mother have gone through, knowing she killed that boy? Her blood must have gone to ice water every time she looked at me, Ramona thought, probably all the time waiting to see if I remembered. Probably why she treated me like she hated me all these years. Probably did hate me, probaby incapable of love, having to keep that day buried in her heart like that.

This she said out loud as she unfurled herself from the bed. She fluffed the pillow, but a sag persisted in its center. “Guess you done had it with daughters mashing their faces into you of late, crying ’cause they miss their mothers,” she said to the pillow.

She heard the doorbell then, smelled boot polish. Knew it was the police. She smoothed the robe out, tied the belt tighter around her waist, folded the collar down the way she’d seen Shern wear it. She started down the hallway to go to the bathroom to wash her tear-stained face. Then she would go downstairs to tell the police what they needed to know.

M
ae ushered the police into the living room and sat quickly. She had to sit quickly, her knees were bending so. She was wearing one of Ramona’s better dusters; she’d taken it from Ramona’s room last night because she knew that Bernie was staying. But last night she had the barrel-shaped wooden buttons unfastened almost to her waist. She had them fastened up to the collar now, even had the draw
string at the top tied around her neck; she wanted to appear pious.

The sound of the plastic chair covering breathing under her weight as she sat on the couch startled her, and she jumped. She rarely sat on the couch or even in the living room, for that matter. Her usual seat was at the dining-room table; she’d always been more comfortable with a table around her because a table was a prelude for a card game. But she wasn’t inviting these trench coat–wearing detectives into her dining room. She’d worked too hard for nearly the past two decades to keep them out of her house altogether, kept at bay in all that time the shadowy fear of this moment, detective police in her house, asking her questions.

She breathed in and out, slowly, trying to quell the thumping in her chest. She didn’t want to appear nervous; do that, and they’d really go to snooping, she thought. Start to dredging up the present and the past, making the two blend so you wouldn’t be able to tell one from the other.

She cleared her throat. “Have a sit down.”

She was sure she saw them look at each other before they both replied, “No, thanks,” and, “That’s okay.” Had she said it wrong? she wondered. Something in her voice make them think she had something to hide. She glanced from one to the other. They were both tall, beefy, one silver-haired, the other just about bald. One was leaning on the banister that led up the stairs; the other stood in the center of the room, his coat pushed back, showing the
silver handcuffs hanging from his pants pocket. A trail of dirty water sat on top of the plastic carpet runner where they’d tracked in melting snow. Mae was usually particular about her carpet. Had threatened people with their lives over not wiping their feet before tracking through on her new carpet. But now she just sat and watched the water trail off the runner and seep into the carpet fibers. She figured she’d need to keep her wits about her should they try to mess with her mind; she wouldn’t waste her good thinking rebuking them for bringing melted snow into the house.

“Pictures?” the silver-haired one asked.

Mae cleared her throat again. She told herself to stop clearing her throat. “Ugh, Vie, the case manager, I’m sure she has pictures.”

“Describe them, please.” The bald-headed one said this and flipped open a top-spiraled bound notebook. “And also, if you know what they were wearing, that would be real helpful.”

Suddenly Mae couldn’t remember a single item of clothing those girls owned. She couldn’t even remember the color of their everyday coats. “Funny what you remember at a time like this,” she said.

“Excuse me,” the bald one said.

Mae looked at him with his pen poised over his pad. She’d expected a tape recorder. Didn’t the police use a tape recorder on
Perry Mason
when they thought they were close to a confession? What confession? The girls! She let the words burst in her head. They were here for the girls, not for her, not
for Donald Booker. “I’m just saying I don’t remember what they might be wearing. That’s all. And of all times, this time when they done turned up missing, I should remember.”

She thought she heard the silver-haired one clear his throat as if he were signaling his partner. Probably getting ready to ask me what was I doing eighteen years ago that September afternoon, she thought. She decided then that she’d call them out on it, shit, who did they think they were messing with? Didn’t they know that some of the best card sharks in the city had tried to mess with her mind and lost? “Look,” she said. This time she deliberately didn’t clear her throat. “Don’t act like I’m saying something strange or acting strange. I see the way you and your bald-headed partner signaling each other like I got something to hide.” She looked from one to the other. Let her drooping eye blink out of sync with her good one the way she’d always do at the top of her game. “I mean I could tell you what my only child was wearing in September some eighteen years ago. A navy pleated skirt, sky blue nylon knee-highs, a sky blue cotton blouse, and her new maroon oxfords from Shapiro’s. Now. I can tell you that, okay. And I can’t tell you what those girls was wearing yesterday. Is that so strange? Well, if you think that’s strange, all I got to say is fuck you and your mommas.”

“They got on plaid fleece-lined coats.” Ramona’s voice was calm and efficient floating down the stairs. “And their pictures were just in the
Tribune
when their daddy turned up missing a couple of months ago. I have that issue; I’ll get it for you.”

Now the two beefy men did clear their throats and look at each other and at Mae. “Your mother’s tough,” the silver-haired one said.

“Yes, siree.” The bald one half laughed, “Why she got to bring our mommas into it?”

“Um, the shock, you know the girls missing.” Ramona pushed the robe sleeves up on her arms and then smoothed at the back of her French roll. “She has a perfect record in foster care, you know. Isn’t that right, Mommie?”

Mae was just staring straight ahead, fighting to focus on the police, on Ramona, on the melted snow seeping into her new wall-to-wall. But Ramona had just called her Mommie, hadn’t called her Mommie in almost two decades. Mae’s focus was distracted at the sound of that word. And the air in the living room was going quickly from gray to green.

“Um, come with me, please.” Ramona rushed her words to the police when she noticed Mae just staring into space like that. Even guided the silver-haired one by the elbow, curled her fingers to the bald head, “Come, come,” she said. “I can show you the girls’ room just the way they left it. I’ll bring you the newspaper with their picture in it. Coffee? Or water? Anything I can get for you? Um, please don’t mind my mother; you can’t imagine the shock for someone with a perfect record in foster care like hers.”

They both pulled their attention from Mae. Ramona almost breathed out her great relief. She was almost pushing the silver-haired one up the steps, curling her fingers almost frantically for the bald head to follow. And she would have had them too. Would have closed the door on them in the girls’ room while she ran back to help Mae get reoriented. But right then Mae cleared her throat. It was such an impervious sound, and they all three stopped where they were. “Damn!” Ramona said under her breath.

“I had on my fancy yellow sundress.” Mae’s voice was strained, weak. “I’m not a pretty woman, you know, not like my child over there, but I always felt so pretty in that sundress. So I put that dress on to pick Ramona up in, since it was the first day of school, so that the other children would think I looked nice too and maybe then they wouldn’t tease Ramona about the way my eye has a tendency to droop.”

“Mommie, you’re talking silly.” Ramona forced a laugh. “Please, detectives, the girls’ room.”

The bald head motioned for Ramona to be quiet. “The girls.” He drew it out, spoke very slowly as if he were talking to the hearing-impaired. “What happened to the girls? Did you do something to the girls, Mae? This is important, and you have to tell us if you did.”

“That boy’s sneakers were dirty.” Mae continued in the same weak voice. “Which was unusual for the first day of school because everybody wore their best shoes the first day. I could only conclude that
his mother wasn’t taking good care of him, must not have been any grandmother or aunt around either, not even a good preacher or deacon’s wife to take an interest in the boy to make sure he had good shoes to start school in.”

“Mommie—” Ramona’s voice was pleading.

“I always made sure Ramona had good shoes on her feet. Everything I did back then was for Ramona. Mostly. Even when I took a man to bed, I was measuring him up to see what I could persuade him to buy for her, a new bike, some skates, a pink Hula Hoop. God knows I loved that child, that lil darling of mine—”

“The girls, Mae.” The bald head cut her off. “What did you do to the girls? Why are they missing, Mae?”

“No, you wanted her to talk, let her talk,” Ramona snapped at him, at the same time melting inside hearing Mae say what she just had.

Mae jerked to then. All of a sudden. Ramona taking up for her like was just odd enough to bring her back. She jumped up from the couch, pointed at the bald head. “What the fuck you keep talking ’bout those girls for? What I’m talking about don’t have a thing to do with those girls. They ran away. Why you think you was called in? To find them. So why don’t you go on and do just that?”

“Well, what were you talking about?” The silver-haired voice was smooth, persuading. “Who had dirty sneakers on, Mae? Tell us, please tell us.”

“I’m talking about what I remember and what I
don’t, okay. I remember everything about my child’s first day of school, okay. And I don’t remember what those girls were wearing yesterday. So why the fuck don’t you do your job and go find them? Find them! It snowed last night, and they’re out there in it. Dammit. Fucking find them!”

Ramona let her pent-up breaths out. Tried not to smile. Tried not to blush with pride over her mother, her mean, conniving, loose, foulmouthed wizard of a mother whom she couldn’t wait to start learning how to love all over again.

T
he girls slept through the rest of the storm on Mister’s couch and looked like dominoes leaning toward a fall: Bliss half sitting against Victoria, Victoria half sitting against Shern, Shern with her head nestled in her elbows against the arm of the couch. Victoria woke first. She woke all at once with her heart beating in her ears; she couldn’t have slept for more than an hour, she thought. She sat straight up and let out a small moan. Shern’s back had been an uncomfortably hard pillow, and now she had a crick in her neck. Plus her knee had gone through the night unelevated and was throbbing again like it hadn’t throbbed since she’d started on the penicillin. She hoped Shern had remembered to pack her medicine.

She looked down, was half covered over with a big black coat; she guessed it was Mister’s coat and
pushed it over onto Bliss; she was warm enough since she’d slept in all of her clothes except for her plaid pile-lined coat. Her sisters had done the same. Shern had even slept in her gloves. She still had one on; the other she had stuffed into the pocket of the big black coat that had been their blanket. Victoria noticed the incongruity of the purple knitted glove peeking from the pocket of the oversized man’s wool coat.

Gray air poured in through the tall windows and the skylight, and now Victoria could see the room absent the shadows that had been everywhere in here last night, riding up and down the ceiling and the walls whenever Mister moved around the room with that candle flickering under the frosted glass globe. The makeshift coffee table in front of the couch where they’d slept was just that, two crates with a slab of wood on top, not the child-sized coffin, as it appeared to Victoria last night after her sisters had fallen asleep and she was wide-awake staring around the room, afraid to go to sleep, afraid some horrible tragedy would happen to them if she allowed herself to close her eyes on the room. The two overstuffed armchairs catty-corner to the couch were only chairs, not attack dogs waiting for a cue from Mister, the six odd-shaped cannon against the wall were actually their boots, taken off at Mister’s persuasion so that they wouldn’t catch pneumonia sleeping in fur-lined leather boots. Even Mister looked less threatening to Victoria under the gray daylight as he ambled into the room still wear
ing the orange and gray flannel shirt he’d worn the night before; he carried a small pot in one hand, three bowls in the other.

“Ah, you’re up, huh, middle one. Just in time for a bowl of hot cereal. Yeah. You like hot cereal?” He lined the bowls up quietly on the purple and gold scarved table and spooned up smooth clumps of Cream of Wheat into the three bowls.

“Yeah, glad you gals came by and graced my little home here. Not a bad home, I must say, cool in the summer ’cause the ceilings so high, warm in the winter thanks to my potbelly stove over there.”

He spoke softly, slowly. Surrounded with so much silence down here, he knew the power of a human voice. A steady tone of voice could sop up fear like a sponge, no matter what words were being spoken, just the connections of somebody’s breaths shaped and formed through their vocal cords, mixing with another’s ears going from the brain eventually to the heart, to calm it. So he kept his voice hushed and low; he let his words run together but in an unhurried way like a continuous, languishing hum.

“Nice amenities down here too,” he went on. “Running water, yeah. City didn’t shut the water off after the place reverted to them, too expensive to bleed the pipes in this old huge factory, so my man, Real Estate John, asked me to come in once a week and let the water run in the winter so the pipes wouldn’t freeze. I did him one better. I run it every day. Moved on in here and found this to be my best
home yet. And I’ve lived in some good places, let me tell you. Yeah.”

Victoria didn’t say anything except for a whispered “Is that so?” Now that they’d lived through the night, Victoria was irritated, a strange thing for the usually understanding, compliant, peacemaking middle sister. But the sore on her leg was itching, and she had to go to the bathroom, and she was sorry she’d allowed her sisters to talk her away from Mae’s.

Mister opened miniature packets of granulated sugar and sprinkled the sugar over the cereal. The sugar sparkled under the early gray air falling in through the skylight and gave the sugar a pinkish hue. He went back into the other room and returned shortly with a container of powder and a glass of water. “I don’t think I want any,” Victoria said, as she watched the smoke rising off the cereal and realized that she was in fact hungry. But to gobble down the cereal this instant would make Mister feel good, and right now she was tired of making other people feel good. “I can’t eat hot cereal without milk anyhow,” she said.

She shifted on the couch, trying to sit up straighter without moving her leg too abruptly. She stood so she could straighten out her knee, ask to use the bathroom, but the sudden weight on her hurt leg felt like a burst of thunder had exploded in her leg and fizzled into red-hot filings that radiated up and down from her knee and now settled into a stream of pain that was beyond red; she couldn’t
even give this pain a color, it was so hot and searing moving up and down her leg. She cried out and fell back deeper into the couch, and then she just cried and begged for relief from the colorless pain.

Shern and Bliss both woke, clutching their chests, hollering, “What is it? What is it?”

“Oh, my God, are you okay, Tore?” First Bliss asked it.

Then Shern: “Oh no, it’s not your leg again, is it? Darn! No! Don’t tell me it’s gotten that bad all over again.”

Then Mister: “Shs, let’s take a look. Is it still an open wound?”

They made a circle around Victoria as she writhed in pain on the couch.

“It is my knee.” Victoria panted the words out and then started to cry. “I hope you remembered my medicine, Shern, I just hope you did. The infection can’t heal without the medicine. The doctor said it specifically. You did bring it, didn’t you, Shern? Please tell me that you brought it.”

“Now, now, now,” Mister cut in with that slow, steady tone. “What kind of medicine you talking about?”

“Her penicillin,” Shern said. “I can’t believe I forgot it. How could I have forgotten it? I knew how important it was too. I’m sorry, Victoria, I was so careful and organized too. Oh, God, oh, God.”

“You forgot it? What do you mean, you forgot it?” Victoria sat forward on the couch, her lean face pointed like a knife at Shern. “We have to go back,
we have to. Come on, let’s go back so I can take my medicine.” She tried to stand again, but the thunderbolt pain crackled through her leg and forced her down, and she leaned back against the arm of the couch and cried.

“Take it easy, now, middle one,” Mister said slowly. “Let me go out back and get some ice in case if it’s swelling.” He was out of the room, and Shern sat down on the couch, deflated.

“Looks like we have to go back, Shern.” Bliss tried to sound sober, but the excitement about going back to Mae’s crept through her words. “I mean, I know I promised I would leave with you, and I really did keep my promise, we did leave, but Tore has to have her medicine. Don’t you agree? You have to agree that’s the most important thing right now?”

Shern put her hands on her head and jumped up from the couch and then jumped up and down. “Oh, God, I do have to go back there. I don’t want to, I don’t. We’re so close to getting to the aunts and uncles too. We’re just a bus ride away. Oh, God! What else can I do? I’ll have to go back there and get the penicillin for Victoria.” Shern spoke in fast circles, her voice getting higher in degrees. “I’ll have to sneak in, oh, no, how can I sneak in? Everybody’s probably up by now.”

“They probably already called the police by now too,” Bliss said, a smugness to her tone.

“Shut up, Bliss, just shut up and let me think!” Shern shouted and waved her hands around.

“There’s nothing to think about; we just shouldn’t have left.” Bliss jumped up at Shern.

“Stop it!” Victoria covered her ears and screamed. “Stop it! Stop it! Please, just stop it.” Then she startled the gray air in the room and startled herself even more when she began to call for her father.

“Daddy, Daddy, I want my daddy,” she cried.

Then Bliss sobbed too. “I just want to feel his thumb on my forehead the way he used to do when I was sick.”

And Shern joined in. “He would know what to do about Victoria’s penicillin; he would even know where to get more.”

They wrapped their arms around one another in a circle, Bliss and Shern holding their hurt sister up.

“Wait, little gals, I know where to get penicillin,” Mister blurted into their circle. “My main man Smitty get me any kind of medicine I need. Of course I don’t need much these days, yeah. Not like the old days. Stay put, little gals, I’ll be right back; half hour is all I need. If it starts getting a little chilly in here, put a couple more pieces of wood under that black stove there, heat this room back up. But I’ll be back in time before it gets cold, yeah. I’m gonna put this ice in the bathroom bowl; if that knee is swollen, hold the ice close to it. When I get back, we’ll figure out whether you gals going home or whatever you gonna do. Yeah. Eat the cereal while it’s hot, little gals. Mister be right back. Right back. Yeah.” He grabbed his coat from the couch that had
served the girls as a blanket and was out of the room, his footsteps echoing down the hallway as he left, Shern’s purple glove peeking through the slit his pocket made.

The aroma of baking bread was stronger in here this morning after Mister left, intoxicating. The girls’ crying lost its erratic, cutting quality, and they settled down to whimpers and then sniffs. Even Victoria’s leg warmed, and the icy stabs of pain turned to a bearable pulsing. They went back to the couch and moved the makeshift table in closer so that Victoria could prop her leg. They fed one another tastes of the steaming cereal that went right to their stomachs and felt like sunlight. They huddled against one another and fell back asleep as they waited for Mister to return.