Little Lovely Things, page 25
This deliciously bright memory warmed Claire and she looked into Glen’s eyes, which were soft and gauzy. “Remember the bathroom after?” she said. “The piles of suds?”
“And all the wet towels.” He chuckled. “It was a million loads of wash after each bath as I recall.”
A moment passed. And then Claire spoke, “Lily would be five and a half, Glen.”
“I know.”
Claire felt Lily’s perfect shape against her chest and could see her rose-quartz eyelids droopy with sleep. She’d be tired after her bath.
“I’m sorry.” Glen reached over and then dropped his hand. “I shouldn’t have…”
“No. It’s okay. You are right.” She swallowed hard. “We need to talk about our girls.”
Glen settled back into his chair. Claire could smell his tiredness. She, too, felt heavy. It was early, just past nine, but exhaustion, combined with the alcohol, was claiming them both. And then his eyes were shut and he was snoring lightly. Gretchie snuggled into the floor next to him and gave a satisfied wheeze.
Claire managed to lift herself off the couch and stumble into the master bedroom. She returned with an old floral blanket, which she tucked around Glen, and then pulled off his shoes one by one. He looked ridiculous with his black socks sticking out from under the pattern of faded peonies.
She stepped back.
There had been no talk of divorce tonight. And Claire found wonderment in how emotions can go underground and then be revived again like a dormant root system. Shadows in the room became images, but not scary ones. The drapes bunched at the edge of the window became a climbing rosebush. Cracks in the ceiling created some giant puzzle. And then her thoughts went beyond this room to the delicate wings of the moth that had visited earlier. And then to the rich memory of her girls after bath time, which now burned like a brilliant ember deep inside.
Claire kicked off her pumps and lay on the couch. She’d grab a quick nap and then leave. Closing her eyes, while drifting hazily to sleep, she returned, once again, to that underwater place, where Andrea called to Claire.
But this time, there was only silence.
Chapter 23
Jay
Jay hunkered at the end of his driveway, gathering stones. Some drunken teenagers had had fun the previous night fishtailing through the trailer park, knocking into the mailboxes. Now, on his knees, he piled rocks against the teetering pole to stabilize it.
“That should fix it,” Jay announced to himself just as Moira’s green Buick screeched by in reverse, practically smearing Jay into the gravel before lurching to a halt.
It was clear she hadn’t seen him. But he saw her as she stopped to shift gears and light a cigarette with the cylindrical car lighter.
“Fookin’ lighter.”
He heard her through the open driver’s side window even as he remained in a stunned crouch.
Once again, he caught a quick glimpse of that face. While it was just Moira’s profile, he was now certain he had seen her before, but with a different child, not Colly, but a toddler. How was that possible? Wait, where was Colly? She wasn’t in the back of that car, and yet when Jay turned toward the trailer across the street, he could see all was dark. The undercurrent that had been working within him since he’d met Colly was ratcheting up into alarm.
“Jesu…” Moira muttered through the unlit cigarette dangling from her mouth.
A mosquito sang in Jay’s ear. He waved it away.
“Dalon stk sudil!” Moira gunned the Buick forward and disappeared.
Jay rose and stood frozen in the tornado of dust left in the car’s wake. It was the same expression that had come from Colly when she’d cut her hand. What language was that? The tone and cadence reminded him of something vague and oddly familiar. Could it be the Shelta he heard as a child? They were Travellers? But that didn’t fit. Not for Colly, at least. Jay shook his head, mentally working awkward pieces of a puzzle together.
It was as if a silent bell had been struck, but he still wasn’t clear on its message. All his senses tingled as the murkiness of a several-years-old memory grew clearer: he now knew where he’d seen Moira’s face before. That day with Claire Rawlings in the campground, when his car was broken down. The Traveller woman who had asked him to move his car. The certainty that he had felt at the time that the kidnapper was a woman once again rushed through him like an injection of adrenaline.
He closed his eyes and thought of the image on the picture that Claire had given him of her oldest daughter. While the features were now ruined, the spark he’d noticed about that child the first time he’d seen it, somehow remained tattooed on his brain. He did the math. Andrea Rawlings would be eight years old now.
Jay’s mind dipped and weaved with possibilities, ugly possibilities, all leading him in an unimaginable direction. Andrea Rawlings was dead. They had proof. Jay bit into his upper lip, recalling what Claire had told him: a tooth, nothing more than a tooth and the ashes of her clothes. He needed to look in Colly’s eyes to quell his rising panic. He needed to ask her again who Moira was to her. The sheer magnitude of what he was thinking—what it might mean—sent him racing across the street and onto Colly’s porch. Facing the closed door, the trailer seemed different to him somehow, threatening. Like a wild animal in restless sleep. His internal alarm system was screaming, and his body moved as if on autopilot as it finally succumbed to his overpowering instinct.
Get to that girl.
He yanked open the screen and pounded hard on the metal security door common in trailer parks.
No response.
“Colly! Colly!”
He rammed a shoulder into the door. It cracked a half-inch or so along the jamb and then popped back into place. He was aware that there was commotion nearby. People out walking, sensing drama. Soon there’d be a crowd.
He pulled his hair from his face. Calm down, man. Think. A moth dive-bombed into his arm, marking it with a ghost of powdery scales. What if he was wrong and Moira pressed charges? He’d lose everything. But Colly might be in real trouble. Could Moira possibly be a kidnapper? A haunting image of Lily Rawlings’s sweet face flashed through his mind. Could Moira be a murderer?
“Hey, man, whaddya doin’?” someone called from the road. A dog growled, low and angry.
Jay ignored the disembodied voice. No time to fuck around. In truth, he couldn’t say what he was thinking then. He just knew he had to get to Colly. Every fiber of his being screamed at him that she was in there and in real trouble.
The trailer itself was eerily calm, with the exception of the faint strains of a radio inside set to a country-western station. Something was off, way off. Jay leaned closer to the door, trying to listen over the music. And that’s when he smelled a faint, sickly odor. Gas.
He gave up on the door and leaped off the porch and into a sliver of dark alongside Colly’s room. A hollow in the dirt kept him from being able to reach the window. He searched for something, anything to stand on. Stomping the weeds, he kicked away a plastic flamingo, bleached white from exposure until stumbling onto an old plastic birdbath on its side. He righted it and prayed that the base, weighted with sand, would hold. Hoisting himself by the slim window ledge, he managed to maintain a wobbly balance, knees bent, as if on a trampoline. The window was shut.
“Colly! Colleen. I know you’re in there. Can you open the door?”
Two shadowy figures in the street became three.
“Get the manager,” Jay called. “We need to turn the gas off—someone’s in there.”
He tried to hoist himself up higher. But it was impossible with such an unstable base. His palms, moist with sweat, had the slimmest of grips on the feeble sill.
Pressing his face to the filthy glass, he blinked to adjust his eyes in the murky dark of a bedroom. He searched, desperate. Nothing. Straining harder, he flattened his cheek against the pane. His pulse throbbed in his neck. Directly across from the window he saw what looked like movement in a bulge along the wall. Like a sea creature just under a wave. Must be a shadow. But no, the actual wall was moving. And then a small hand emerged between the seams of two panels, followed by the top of a head. Colly’s head.
What on earth? The part in Colly’s hair became visible and then her neck and the beginning of her shoulders. She was squeezing through the wall from a different room. He almost toppled over from the surprise.
“C’mon, Little Bird!”
Did she hear him? He couldn’t be sure. But she kept struggling to pull herself through this gap in the now partially splintered wall. He called again but it came out as an inaudible rasp through his dry throat. He wanted to bang the window but wouldn’t dare risk a shift in his grip. With visible effort she managed to twist sideways—attagirl!—and angle in such a way to crook her neck so her face was visible to Jay.
In this position, with her hair flattened and her bangs swept to either side as if she were running, he now saw something or, rather, someone else. A full-blown spasm wrenched through his stomach to his chest. But it wasn’t painful. Instead, it flooded Jay with the familiar warmth of the feelings that he had suppressed for far too long.
He gasped as the great wheel of the universe, which had been slightly off-kilter for so long, clicked into place.
This was unmistakably Andrea Rawlings.
Tears welled in his eyes, but he held steady and took a deep breath. For the first time since he’d lost his mother and grandmother, maybe for the first time in his life, he was absolutely sure he was where he was meant to be, doing what he was meant to do. That there were no coincidences.
He let go with one hand and shakily tapped against the glass. She didn’t move. He tapped harder.
“Keep coming,” he yelled, wiggling the pane frozen by rust. How could she not hear him? He cupped his hands and repeated his words.
She gained several inches by writhing and then curled her side body upward to pummel the panels with her fists. But they were secured by nails into the wall studs and would open no further to accommodate her torso and hips. She was able to just wave her right arm toward Jay. This simple movement let him know she could hear him, was with him in this. He could also read the exhaustion that was setting in.
Jay clenched his teeth. No telling how long the gas had been on in this small trailer. A timer, like a bomb, began in his head. Tick, tick.
He pounded at the window just hard enough to crack the glass, not wanting the broken pieces falling inside. Luckily, it spider-webbed into three uneven triangles. His legs quivered under him as the bird bath juddered. He wrenched out the pieces of glass, the last one cutting into the side of his hand like a deli meat slicer. He shuddered at the feel of it entering his flesh, but there was no pain, nor would he have cared if there had been. He tossed the broken sheets onto the ground where they shattered like frozen drops of rain, reflecting the twilight sky in a shimmering streak of silver. The foul odor of gas blasted him in the face.
“Little Bird. Come to me. Hurry. Please.”
“I…I can’t, Jay. I’m stuck…”
Jay tightened his jaw. Blood from his wound slopped onto his pants and the ground. He shakily managed his shirt over his head and twisted it around his hand. He didn’t care if he bled to death, he just didn’t want to scare Colly—no, Andrea! There was an air of impossibility around each action and the burning sensation that something terrible was about to happen soon.
He lifted himself as high as he could while keeping the tips of his boots in contact with the birdbath and stretched his arms through the ridiculously tight opening. It was just a bit bigger than a mailbox on its side. He momentarily doubted whether she would fit through even if he was able to reach her. But there was no other answer. Someone was talking to him from the road. Asking if he needed help or what. But they stood back, far away. The damn radio from the other room was louder now that the glass was gone.
“Hold on.”
One of Jay’s feet slipped from the birdbath. His left side listed hard downward. His weird position was slowing blood flow to his arms and upper body. Black dots lurked in his peripheral vision. Every movement, every sound had the quality of being observed through water. Jay waggled his head against the dimming.
“Git outta there, man. I called the utilities.” The manager was somewhere behind Jay. “They’re coming. You need to get down from there.”
“The police,” Jay barked. “An ambulance, now!”
“On their way. Get back!”
Jay counted in his head. Ten one thousand, nine one thousand—tick, tick, tick.
He could easily be undone by panic. But then, right then, Jay stopped. Closed his eyes. Recalling a powerful phrase he had learned from his childhood, he petitioned his dearest loved ones—his mother and grandmother—for their help. Mitakuye Oyasin. He then spoke their names for the first time since they’d passed—Grace and June. He thanked them, pilámaya, for leading Andrea to him. And then he enlisted Lily.
I need you now. She needs you. Pilámaya, too, for your light, your help.
He wasn’t Catholic, but in his mind, he crossed himself anyway. He had seen it done a thousand times at the Catholic Home for Boys.
Exhaling deeply, Jay stretched his arms like an extension rod through the small window and turtled through up to his shoulders, groaning his way to his chest and upper abdomen. A sharp chunk of glass he’d missed punched a hole into his left arm. The tips of his work boots barely grazed the birdbath. Toppling would be disastrous now.
“Come to me, Little Bird.” She was so close, yet a world away from his outstretched hands.
“Can’t, Jay.” She dropped her head to the floor. “I’m stuck.”
“You can. Please try harder.” He heard a truck pull up. A siren growing close. “You can do this.”
“I…I can’t.” The resignation in her small voice almost broke him. But he drew strength from everything he knew to be true.
“Yes you can, Andrea.”
Tilting her head, she looked at Jay with searching eyes.
“You heard me. Your name is Andrea Rawlings. I know your mother.” Her face flashed with a mixture of disbelief and hungry reassurance. “You had a blond-haired, blue-eyed sister named Lily.”
“Lily?”
“You were stolen by Moira.” Jay strained further, beyond all physical capability, all the while fighting to keep his voice smooth and steady. “Your real mom and dad are good people who miss you terribly. I’m taking you home.”
“Step back, please.” A voice was coming from a loudspeaker at the road. “We are evacuating the area.”
“What did you say?” She was clearly straining to hear over the radio, the commotion outside. The megaphone was stealing his words. Still, he continued.
“You are brave.”
She made a fist and punched one of the panels from behind. Jay felt her effort throb through his own aching arms. He said another silent prayer, summoning every ounce of help and strength he could. He would not fail her. Or Claire. Or himself.
“Good girl. Keep coming.” He was losing air in this position as the skinny edge of the windowsill practically sliced him in half, jagged bits of glass attacking from all angles. “Come to me. Push, Little Bird. It is important we do this fast.”
He was growing dizzy and sucked air in uneven breaths. A numbing ache ran from his armpits. “Please.”
He shook to revive his hands, which were white and numb. The cut hand had stopped bleeding. He feared they would soon fail him, that the birdbath would crumble. She bent into more of a tucked position, which brought her out all the way to her hips. He could see her spine, the fine ridges like a dragon’s scales. Why hadn’t he paid attention to just how skinny she was? A curtain of hair fell over the back of her head. There was almost nothing left of her, he could tell.
“No use,” she whispered as her body went limp.
Jay’s body, too, was failing; he’d have to drop down. His deadened arms were of no use. He began to shimmy backward, descend to the ground, sick with defeat.
“You are a warrior,” he said. It would probably be the last thing he’d ever say to her. “My amazing Little Bird.”
Just then she looked up; a wild expression stormed across her face.
Jay felt a life force like a gusting wind so strong it almost knocked him back.
A growl followed by a full-blown grunt boomed through the room. It was a primal sound filled with effort and strain, and, pushing with newfound strength, she burst through the wall with a mighty shove.
Jay strained forward to meet her. She was in his arms, finally! He grasped her firmly, pulled back, and dropping down with all the grace he could manage, yanked her through the open window in one fluid motion. It was a miracle, really. But their combined weight crushed the birdbath, which snapped beneath them. They piled onto the ground with one of his feet bent fully sideways. All his senses screamed pain. But he’d gotten her out. She’d probably scraped her legs and stomach awful coming through, but it didn’t matter, she was with him. She was free.
The rotten odor trailed after them in a foreboding cloud.
“C’mon, c’mon, run.”
Andrea rose and wobbled. Jay’s ankle flared into a stunning pain, but he drag-pulled them both forward. They stumbled together like wounded animals toward the road, heading into a group of people who parted in anticipation. They were almost there, all the way to safety, when…
