This Dark Road to Mercy: A Novel (2 page)

He looked away from me when I called him by his name. Then he blinked his eyes real slow. “I know,” he said, “and I’m sorry. But that don’t mean we can’t spend time together.”

I looked over my shoulder and saw that the inning had already started and Jasmine had taken my place at shortstop. “Great,” I said. “I lost my spot.” I turned back to Wade. “What do you think we’re supposed to spend time doing?”

“Well,” he said, “I don’t know. Your baserunning could use a little work.” He stepped away from the fence and rubbed a hand down each arm, and then he touched both his ears and then the tip of his nose. “I was over here trying to help you, but I guess you didn’t see me.” He started rubbing his hands down his arms again.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m giving you a sign,” he said. “I’m telling you to stay on base, to stay right where you are. Wasn’t no way that scrawny kid was kicking it out of the infield. I still know the game, Easter. I could come check y’all out one day and we could spend a little time out here on the field, tossing a baseball around, fielding grounders.” He smiled when he said it like he thought it was the best idea anybody’d ever had.

“ ‘Check us out’?” I said. “Like a library book?”

“No, not like a library book. I just mean I’d come and pick you up—spend the day with you and Ruby.”

“You can’t do that,” I said.

“Why not?”

“Because it ain’t in the rules. You can’t just come and get us.”

“What kind of place are y’all in?” he asked.

“A home for at-risk youth,” Ruby’s voice said. I looked to my right and saw her standing beside me, so close that I couldn’t believe I hadn’t felt her body up against mine. She stared up at Wade like she was afraid of him, like he might be able to climb right through the fence and pull her back through the chain links to the other side.

“I told you to stay over there,” I said. My hip nudged her back toward the bench, but she didn’t move, and she didn’t take her eyes off Wade.

“At-risk youth?” Wade said. “What are y’all at risk of? Is this the kind of place where kids freak out and hurt each other?”

“That ain’t what it’s called,” I said. “That’s something she’s heard kids at school say. It’s just a foster home.”

“Great,” he said. He pushed away from the fence and put his hands on his hips. “I hope you know y’all ain’t going to be in there long. Somebody’s going to come and get you—probably adopt both of you together because you’re sisters. You’ll probably be the next ones to go.”

“How do you know?” I asked.

“Because,” he said, his voice sounding like I should already know the answer. He looked up at the rest of the kids on the field, and then he looked back down at me. “Y’all are white.”

I heard somebody calling my name, and I turned and looked up the hill, where Mrs. Davis was coming down toward us, moving faster than she would’ve been walking if everything was normal. When she saw me looking at her she waved her arms above her head and hollered my name again. Mrs. Hannah had stayed up on the playground, but she was closer to the school than she’d been before, and I could tell she was watching us and waiting to see what would happen once Mrs. Davis made it down to the field. “They’re probably going to call the police,” I said.

“Yeah?” Wade said, smiling. “For talking to your own daddy?”

“They don’t know who you are,” I said. Then I looked down at Ruby. “We don’t either.” I took her hand and walked back to the bench. I didn’t look back, but I could tell by the way she was walking that Ruby’s head was turned so she could stare at Wade. “Come on,” I said, giving her hand a good yank so she’d walk faster.

Mrs. Davis had made it to the bottom of the hill by the time we got back to the bench and sat down. She walked inside the fence and squatted down in front of me and Ruby. She had light brown skin and short curly hair and wore thick glasses. “Who was that man y’all were talking to?” she asked.

I looked down to where Wade had been standing at the fence, but he was gone. “I don’t know him,” I said. I put my hand on Ruby’s knee. “Neither one of us do.”

C H A P T E R   2

A
re you sure it was him?” Ruby asked.

“Of course I’m sure,” I said. That was about the tenth time she’d asked me that same question since we’d seen Wade that afternoon. It was time for bed, but the lights were still on in our room. Out in the hallway, a couple of kids walked by on their way to the bathroom.

Ruby lay in her bed, staring up at the ceiling. She’d put her hands behind her head, and I could see that she’d crossed her ankles under her comforter. “I don’t know,” she said. “That’s just not how I remember him looking.”

“That’s because you were four years old the last time you saw him,” I said. “And we never had any pictures of him laying around to remind you of what he looked like.”

She rolled over to her side and propped her head on her left hand, and she looked across the bedroom to where I was sitting on top of my bed and leaning against the wall, waiting to hear him tap on the window beside me, even though I knew he wouldn’t be out there for another couple hours. “We don’t have any pictures of Mom either,” she said.

“I know,” I said, “but I’m going to get us some soon.”

“From where?” she asked.

“From her mom and dad,” I said. “I’m going to write them in Alaska once me and you get our own place. And I’m going to ask them to send us all Mom’s old clothes and toys and all the pictures they’ve got of her—all the stuff she left up there.”

“Maybe we should just go live with them,” she said. “Maybe we’d like it.”

“No, Ruby, we wouldn’t.”

“How do you know?” she asked.

“Because,” I said, “we don’t know them, and they don’t know us. Why would they want two girls they’ve never met to come and live with them? Who’d want that?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “But maybe they have a room that’s got all her old stuff in it, and maybe we’d love them once we met them; maybe they’d love us too. Maybe we’d want to stay.” I didn’t say anything. We’d had this talk before, and I hoped she was finished asking those kinds of questions, at least for tonight.

She lay back down on her bed. She was quiet but her eyes were still open, and I could tell she was thinking about something. “I hope you can get some pictures of Mom soon,” she said. “I can’t even remember her.”

“Bull-honky you can’t,” I said. “It’s only been three months.”

“But I just can’t picture her,” she said. “I swear.” I thought about that for a second, and then I thought about how Ruby was only six years old and how three months must seem like a pretty good bit of life to her.

“It’s okay,” I said. “It’s been a while. But she’ll come back to you.”

“I hope,” Ruby said.

“She will,” I said. “Go to sleep.” I reached out and clicked off the lamp that sat on the little table between our beds, and then I rested my back against the wall. I looked through the dark room toward Ruby’s bed.

“You waiting on him?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“Do you think he’ll come tonight?”

“I do,” I said. “Go to sleep.”

I hated it when Ruby talked about not being able to remember Mom, but sometimes I hated that I could remember her so good. Whenever I thought about the day I found her, it seemed like I was another person, like another person with a life other than mine had told me about it. But the telling seemed so real that it was hard to pretend that I’d just heard about it from somebody else. I’ll never be able to forget that it was me who found her, even though I’ve spent plenty of time wishing it hadn’t been.

Mom always said that she’d named us what she’d named us because those were her favorite things: Easter was her favorite holiday and rubies were her favorite jewels. Me and Ruby used to ask Mom all the time what her other favorite things were, and we’d pretend those things were our names instead. She’d told us one time that her favorite kind of dog was a Boston terrier and that her favorite color was purple. And when it came to music, she didn’t hardly listen to nothing but Journey, so I figured that had to be her favorite band. So that’s what me and Ruby started calling ourselves; I was Boston Terrier, and she was Purple Journey. Boston Terrier: I’ll admit it sounds silly when you first hear it, but if you split it up into a first name and a last name I think it sounds kind of pretty—fancy and a little bit dangerous, like the name of a woman in an action movie the hero can’t quite trust but falls in love with anyway. It seems crazy to say we played make-believe like that now, but we used those names so much they almost became real, and sometimes I wanted to call Ruby “Purple” even when we weren’t playing. We’d already promised each other that if we ended up having to run away from the home to keep from being split up then that’s who we’d become. We’d be Boston Terrier and Purple Journey for the rest of our lives. No one would ever know we’d been somebody else back in Gastonia.

It’s easier for me to imagine Boston Terrier and Purple Journey getting off that school bus and walking past Lineberger Park on their way home to a too-quiet house. It’s easier for me to picture a girl with a pretty name like that finding Mom and him lying across the bed in her room, both of them passed out. I don’t know what his real name was, but he called himself Calico. When I found them he was down near the foot of the bed with his feet hanging off on to the floor; he had on a black T-shirt and camouflage shorts. Mom had her head resting on a pillow and looked like she just hadn’t woke up yet; she wasn’t wearing nothing but a pair of blue underwear and a big white T-shirt that had a picture of Tweety Bird on it.

I’d gone into Mom’s room by myself, but I heard Ruby in the kitchen, opening and closing the refrigerator and looking through the cabinets for something to eat. I closed Mom’s door and locked it behind me, and then I walked over to the bed and stared at her chest, hoping and praying to see it move up and down with her breathing. But I wasn’t sure if I could see anything or not. Calico was breathing like he was asleep, and I reached out and touched his leg with my shoe.

“Calico,” I whispered. He didn’t move, and I touched his leg again. “Calico,” I said just a little bit louder.

His eyelids fluttered. I reached out and poked his knee with my finger. When his eyes finally opened he just laid there staring up at the ceiling. I watched him for a second, and then I whispered his name again.

His head popped up, and he looked down the bed at me. His hair was long and wild and stood up everywhere. He blinked his eyes real slow like he couldn’t quite see me, and then he sat up on his elbows and looked around. When he looked over at Mom he just stared at her like he couldn’t quite remember who she was or how she’d come to be lying there beside him. He looked at me again, and I reckon he finally realized who Mom was and that I was her daughter.

“Hey,” he said, jumping up from the bed as fast as he could. “We didn’t hear y’all come in.” He tried to smile at me, and then he looked back at Mom where she was still lying with her eyes closed.

Calico squeezed past me and walked up alongside the bed and bent down and looked at Mom up close. “Corinne,” he whispered. He reached out and put his hand on her shoulder. “Corinne,” he said again. “Wake up, girl.” He looked up at me and gave me a half smile. “She’s okay,” he said. “She’s just sleeping.”

There were all kinds of different pills on Mom’s bedside table, and Calico moved them around with his finger like he was looking for one in particular. Then he gathered them all up and dropped them into a little white medicine bottle and screwed the lid on. There were a couple of cans of beer on the table too. The first one he picked up must’ve been empty because he set it back down. But he picked up the other one and finished it in one long drink.

The bed squeaked when he leaned his knees against it and bent over Mom again and put his fingers on her neck. He closed his eyes like he was concentrating, and then he stood up straight and walked toward the foot of the bed and squeezed by me again before unlocking the bedroom door. His hand stayed on the knob like he didn’t want to let it go.

“Listen,” Calico said. “I’m going to go see about getting somebody to check on your mom. Y’all just wait here, and I’ll be right back. Okay? Y’all just wait here.” He opened the door, and I watched him walk into the hall. He opened the front door and closed it behind him, and I heard his shoes going down the steps. For some reason, and I can’t tell you why, I imagined him running once he got to the bottom of those steps, and I knew he wasn’t running for help.

I sat down beside Mom on the edge of the mattress. My fingers touched her throat where Calico had touched her, and I closed my eyes just like he did. After a few seconds I could just barely feel her pulse, and I knew it meant she was still alive and that she’d be okay and it didn’t matter whether Calico kept his word or not. The floorboards squeaked, and I looked up and saw Ruby in the doorway. She’d already kicked off her shoes in the living room and was standing there in her socks. A little smear of peanut butter was on her cheek. “What’s wrong with Mom?” she asked.

“She’s sick,” I said, pulling the covers up around her so Ruby couldn’t get a good look at her. “But she’ll be okay.”

“What’s she sick with?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “She’s just sick.” Mom’s eyelids were jumping just a little bit, and I wondered if she was dreaming. “We need to let her rest.” When I raised my eyebrows Ruby got the hint and walked back toward the living room. I bent down and whispered into Mom’s ear in case Ruby was out in the hallway trying to listen. “You’re going to be all right, Mom,” I said. “You just rest now and get a little sleep. We’ll be okay for dinner.”

I thought about walking down to Fayles’ on the corner and calling 911 and getting ahold of an ambulance, but after seeing those pills I knew what it meant to find her asleep like this. Anybody who came and found her like that would put her in the hospital and probably arrest her too. I knew for sure they’d take me and Ruby away. I figured if Mom was breathing and her heart was beating, it was good enough to leave her alone and let her sleep. I’d found her like this before, and she’d always woke up a couple of hours later and come walking into the living room like a zombie from a scary movie. Me and Ruby would be watching television or working on our homework or maybe doing both at the same time. “When’d y’all get home?” she’d ask. It would be almost dark outside, and sometimes it would’ve been dark for hours.