Between, Georgia (3 page)

“You need to see a doctor,” said Bernese. “You could have a complication and bleed out on my floor.”

“I won’t do that. I promise,” said Hazel, and the tears spilled down her cheeks. “You said I looked good. And if you make me go to the hospital, I’ll throw myself under a truck. I really will.

I’ll throw Nonny, too.”

Stacia stamped her foot again, signing, and Genny said, “Stacia’s insisting. She says, ‘This baby is my baby. I know it. I don’t know how to do it, how to keep her, but Bernese does. Bernese, you do it.’ ”

Genny got up and walked over, folding back the towel to look at me. “Oh, goodness grief, look at all that red hair. And the teeny feet.”

“This is not like a hamster, Genny,” snapped Bernese. “This is a person. A little Crabtree person.”

Lou’s pale face appeared at the top of the stairs. His brown hair, thin and gingery, was rumpled, and his comb-over was hanging down past his ear on one side. He had wrapped the sheets and towels into a bundle, and he tossed it over the banister to Bernese.

“Get back with the boys,” Bernese commanded, and he disappeared. Bernese began gently packing the towels under Hazel’s bottom to catch the fluids that were oozing out of her and soak-ing into the carpet.

Stacia was signing again, rapid and angry, her free hand flashing. Genny interpreted, and as she spoke, she got the roller-coaster look that she always got when she had to say things out loud for Stacia that she would not have said for a million dollars on her own account. Her eyelids lifted so high that the whites were visible all the way around.

“She says, ‘Don’t lecture me, and don’t dare patronize me. I am telling you something real here, if you aren’t too stupid to hear it.

So shut up and help me.’ ”

Bernese ignored Stacia; she was still carefully arranging the old sheets and talking to Hazel. “Are you comfortable? You want some water?”

“Please don’t tell,” begged Hazel.

“Your mama’s Ona Crabtree?” Bernese said.

“No,” said Hazel.

But Genny said, “Yes, that’s her mama.” Over Hazel’s head, Genny’s eyes met Bernese’s, and Genny mouthed, “Drinks,” then bobbed her head in a wise nod.

Bernese wrapped the afterbirth in the nastiest towel. She noticed Genny’s hands creeping back up her braid and said,

“Genny, for the love of Baby Jesus, get your hands off yourself.

Don’t start picking now when it’s all over but steam-cleaning the carpet. Do you need a pill?”

Genny shook her head and rubbed at her forearm for a second, then went back to signing what Bernese was saying for Stacia.

Bernese said, “Good, then make yourself useful. See if that girl won’t nurse her baby. She should nurse it while it’s awake. I am going to go get some trash bags, and I will call for an ambulance from the kitchen.”

Bernese headed up the long hall, her arms full of filthy towels.

Hazel watched her go, panting, and then she rolled over painfully and got to her hands and knees.

Genny said, “Honey, you should be still.” Stacia, holding me, hesitated. She tried to hand me to Genny, but Genny, still dizzy and faintly green, did not take me. Stacia walked toward Hazel, holding me, and Genny followed, saying, “Honey, you need to lie down on this pad, you are . . . Oh my. You are leaking things.”

Hazel crawled miserably across the foyer. She left the doorway to the den and crept back into the glass. It bit into her knees as she headed for the long table. Stacia followed, with Genny cluck-ing and tutting along behind her. Hazel reared up suddenly on her bleeding knees and grabbed the gun off the sideboard. Stacia froze, and Genny almost ran into her.

Bernese was at the end of the hall when Hazel called, “If you go one step more, I will shoot you.”

Bernese stopped and turned around. Hazel was so weak she was swaying drunkenly from side to side, trying to hold up the heavy gun so she could aim down the hall. “I will shoot you if you tell my mama.”

“Put that down, you idiot. I don’t need more holes in my woodwork,” Bernese said.

“I mean it,” said Hazel.

“Spare me,” said Bernese contemptuously. Blood was trickling out of Hazel, oozing in rivulets down her thighs. “You can barely stay erect. You couldn’t hit me if I stood dead still and gave you all six tries.”

“Fine,” said Hazel. She twisted at the waist, bringing the gun around. Stacia was close behind her, and Hazel pressed the barrel into Stacia’s belly, under me.

“Bet I can hit
her,
” Hazel said.

Bernese became very still, and it was silent for a long, ugly moment.

“Jesus, help us,” whispered Genny, barely above a breath.

“Will you stop with that Jesus? I told you!” Hazel’s voice was shrill.

Stacia moved her free hand up very slowly to sign, making no sudden movements, and Genny managed to look away from the gun and focus on the familiar sight of Stacia speaking. “Hazel, Stacia wants to know where your sweetheart is,” said Genny. Her voice was tinny and high.

Hazel looked in confusion from Stacia’s slowly signing hand to her face and said, “My sweetheart?”

Genny was so afraid that all she could do was watch Stacia’s hand and repeat after it, saying what Stacia’s hand was saying, not looking at anything else. “You have a baby. You must have had a sweetheart.”

Hazel sucked air in through her nostrils, loud. “I had a lot of sweethearts,” she said. She shrugged. Bernese knelt down silently and set her armful of towels on the floor.

“I had a sweetheart,” said Genny for Stacia, her eyes locked on Stacia’s fingers. “Just the one.” Stacia signed, her movements gentle and slow, as the luna moths fluttered up around the light and the barrel of the gun pressed into her soft belly. “His name was Frank. I don’t have him anymore. He did something stupid, and I’m done with him. I thought I’d marry him and we’d live with Genny. Me and Frank and my sister, and I would have my own babies. But that’s not going to happen now.” Stacia kept signing, but her gaze lifted, and she looked over Hazel, meeting Bernese’s eyes as Bernese stood and began creeping up the hall toward them, step by silent step. Stacia glanced back down at Hazel, at her trembling hand on the gun, and then back at Bernese. “Do you know what Usher’s syndrome is?” Genny said for her.

“No,” said Hazel. Her thin arms were trembling with effort, and Genny was terrified that she’d inadvertently pull the trigger.

Genny kept her eyes on Stacia’s hand and interpreted, hardly aware of what she was saying. The gun pressing into Stacia’s belly was a black beast in her peripheral vision.

“It means I’m deaf,” Genny interpreted. “I was born deaf. And it means my eyes are going. I’ll be blind in another ten years, fifteen if I am lucky. The edges are closing in already. It’s dark beside me, like shutters are being drawn. At some point my depth perception will go, and I won’t be able to work anymore. I’m a sculptor; I make molds and cast dolls in porcelain. That’s my work. So I’ve lost my sweetheart. And I’m losing my work. And here’s this baby.

“This baby is mine. You brought her to this house, and she slid into my arms. No one is going to call your mama, because no one is going to take this baby from me. Frank is gone, my work is going, and I’ve been asking God, ‘Why does my heart keep beating?’ And you brought me the answer. Don’t worry about Bernese. She won’t do a thing to take this baby out of my arms.

She’s going to help me keep this baby. Once she sees my side—and she’s seeing it now—she won’t worry about what’s practical or legal or even what’s right. She’ll make it happen. I’ll take this baby, and you can go home. Home or anywhere you like.”

Stacia looked hard into Hazel’s eyes and signed, and Genny said, “But if you shoot me, Bernese is going to have to call your mama.”

After a long moment, Hazel’s arms dropped, pointing the gun down into the carpet. She sagged, and Bernese ran the last few steps up the hall and caught her before she slumped into the glass. Bernese peeled the gun out of her limp hand, flipped the safety on, then set it carefully back on the table.

“Help me,” said Bernese, and Genny darted forward, panting, and together they lifted Hazel out of the glass and half carried her back to her pad of old sheets and towels.

“All right, then,” said Bernese. “Let’s make sure you haven’t ruptured anything. What a mess.”

Hazel closed her eyes. The sun was rising, spilling pale light across the lawn. Stacia turned and shut the front door. After a few minutes, Bernese got up from between Hazel’s legs.

“You look okay,” Bernese said. Her gardening shoes were sitting by the front door, and she slipped them on and crunched into the glass. She picked up the phone.

“Bernese!” said Genny. Hazel’s eyes flew open and she started crying again, making piteous mewling noises deep in her throat.

But Stacia smiled and shook her head, meeting Bernese’s eyes with a cool and level gaze.

“Don’t get your pants in a bunch, Genny,” said Bernese. “I’m calling Isaac.” She added to Hazel, “That’s my lawyer, so stop with that fuss. You sound like a kicked cat.”

Bernese dialed from memory and stood waiting for the phone to wake up Isaac Davids.

“It’s me,” she said when he answered. “Yes, I know what time it is, but this is an emergency. You need to walk down here, quick as you can . . . I know, but pull some pants on and hurry down.

Stacia needs us to help her steal Ona Crabtree’s grandbaby.”

CHAPTER   2

WITH SUCH A loud beginning, small wonder I grew up to be a person who studies silence. The Fretts and the Crabtrees spent the better part of my childhood chafing hard against each other at the point where they connected, and I was painfully aware of it because that point was me. I was barely out of diapers when Ona Crabtree found out I was her grandchild and appeared on our front lawn, drunk and howling for me.

Bernese ran out to meet her with equal force and volume; I was only three, but their enmity was obvious, and I understood enough to realize I was somehow the heart of it. The brawl on my front lawn trained me to look for and interpret the subtler signs that told me how deeply my adopted family despised my birth family and vice versa.

I was raised in my mother and Genny’s quiet, well-ordered house at the end of Grace Street, playing with my boy cousins and, later, the tagalong girl-child Aunt Bernese produced when I was nine. The Crabtrees, Ona especially, paced at the periphery of my life, staring hungrily in at me.

Ona Crabtree was half crazy, all mean, perpetually drunk, but she had a junkyard dog’s sharp memory for injuries against her person. She’d hated all things Frett from childhood: Ona and Bernese first bonked heads when they met up on the jungle gym behind The First Baptist Church of Between. Genny, fresh off a Baptist summer-revival high and aching to fulfill the Great Com-mission, shyly invited Ona to come on in to Sunday school with them. Ona accepted, but Bernese eyed Ona’s filthy sundress and added, “Run home and change first. We wear our nicest things to God’s house.”

I’m sure it never occurred to her that perhaps the sundress was Ona’s nicest. Ona offered me that story ten thousand times as proof that Fretts were “fancy-pants faker Christians.” She never stopped hating them, and after she learned we were genetically connected, she never stopped hounding me. No one ever had a clue who my father was. Not even Hazel, and she’d left town. If not for Ona, I’d have been a Frett free and clear. As it was, my mother and her sisters stood over me like she-bears guarding a shared cub, ever vigilant and suspicious.

The war that would tear up our little town percolated mostly under the surface, with an occasional minor skirmish cropping up here and there. Bernese routinely cut Ona dead in the market, and when I was growing up, the Crabtree boys egged the Frett homes every Halloween. (Or they did until the year Bernese spent all night crouched in her front bushes with a loaded shotgun. Those boys came sauntering down to the end of Grace Street just after three in the morning, and Bernese waited until she could see the whites of their eyes before she discharged the gun into the air, scattering them.)

At eighteen I moved an hour away to study anthropology at the University of Georgia, but my absence did not make the Frett and Crabtree hearts grow any fonder. I came home every other weekend, and after I graduated, my stays became longer and more frequent, so the wounds remained forever fresh and open.

The feud ebbed and renewed in a thousand small ways even during my absence, receding and resurging before it reached crit-ical mass and exploded. The Fretts blamed the escalation on the Crabtrees, and the Crabtrees blamed it on the Fretts. And I, the only one who might have stopped it, was caught up in a battle of my own that was raging through the half of my life I lived in Athens.

Later, when I knelt in the ruins of Between, sifting through drifts of ash and bits of twisted metal and scorched glass, the thwarted archaeologist in me insisted that the only way I could have prevented the war would have been to strangle myself with my own umbilical cord before I pulled my first breath. I never became that archaeologist. My BA prepped me for grad school, but I didn’t go, so I can’t place much store in my findings. I ended up a sign language interpreter, but I’m a good one. I may not be able to reach into the past to reconstruct my family’s losses, but I can read the signs around me and meld them into a single story. One I believe is kissing cousins with the truth.

The morning of the day it all went to hell, I don’t know if it was Jonno or the phone that woke me up. Jonno was in the habit of groaning and muttering himself awake, and he went off at about the same time the ringer did. I looked at the clock and then rolled over and put one hand over his mouth. His eyes opened, and under my palm, I could feel his mouth stretching into a smile.

We’d had our very last ever goodbye sex the night before. For about the twenty-second time.

“Morning, Nonny,” he said cheerfully, his words muffled by my palm.

I said, “Do not talk or make any noise. No reasonable human being calls this early, so that has to be Aunt Bernese. She cannot know you are here. Understand?”

He nodded at me, and as I took my hand away, I added, “And don’t smile at me.”