Between, Georgia (8 page)

The EMTs took one look at the scene and started waving needles and threatening to sedate everyone who wouldn’t shut up.

The warning worked as well as any medicine could have, and the crowd’s hysteria dropped by a dozen decibels. The medical per-sonnel then methodically made the rounds to see who was bleeding and who had only rolled in the blood. The sheriff arrived, and more ambulances, and cool, efficient people who were accustomed to carnage got everyone sorted out and the injured were carted off to Loganville General. It was nominally over.

I pieced it all together later, questioning everyone who had been there, getting the details separately like puzzle pieces I had to put together in both time and space to get a clear understanding of what had happened and when. It was strange, the odd bits that stuck with different people. No one but Bernese had any idea what the male dogs had been up to. Isaac Davids was the only one who noticed Ona’s trail of bloody bare footprints. And Henry told me that while he was fighting with the dog, that trucker walked out of his bookstore with about five Dennis Lehanes on tape.

“It’s terrible to be robbed, of course,” Henry said to me later.

“But looking at the bigger picture, perhaps I’ve created a reader.”

I added the trucker to the scene. I saw him, a big man, thick through the chest with long, meaty arms, looking across the square. He squinted to see down Grace Street where the dog was tearing up Genny. I watched him choose not to help, instead grabbing whatever he could reach and then dashing for his truck in the lot behind the church. I could not forgive him.

I couldn’t forgive myself, either. Mama had needed me to help her choose a head, Genny had needed me to soothe her nerves, and Fisher had simply needed me, like always. But I had been un-willing to lose one of the last days left that I could rightfully call Jonno mine. I’d been simultaneously afraid that if I so much as looked away, Jonno would find a way to gum up the works and stop the divorce himself. Maybe I’d wanted to prove to them all that I wasn’t such an easy dog to call. Whatever my motive, the result was that I found myself in Athens, staring into the vapid honey-brown eyes of Amber DeClue with a cell phone clamped to my ear, listening as Bernese told me everything I’d failed to avert.

CHAPTER  5 

THE BITCH GOT Genny?” I said into the phone, and for a dizzying moment, I thought Bernese was telling me Genny was dead. Amber was still looming over me, blocking me into the booth, or I might have thrown the phone and gone running pell-mell crazy for home.

“She’s in the hospital,” said Bernese. “Serious but stable. She lost a lot of blood. The Bitch tore her up and down.”

“The hospital?” I was suddenly so afraid that I couldn’t bring myself to say it. I helplessly said, “Bernese, Bernese,” while Amber’s eyes got bigger and bigger in her pointed kitten face.

Bernese chose that moment to be intuitive for the first and last time in her life. She said, “No, no, she’ll be able to sign just fine.

It didn’t get her hands at all,” and I could breathe again. Bernese continued, “It went for her throat, but you know podgy Genny doesn’t hardly have a throat you can get to.”

I heard the low tones of a male voice in the background, and then Bernese apparently covered the mouthpiece with her hand.

I couldn’t make out anything my uncle Lou was saying, but I could have heard Bernese braying through a brick wall. “Yes, it’s long-distance—it’s Nonny. Nonny is long-distance.”

I heard the rumbling male voice again. Bernese overrode it and snapped, “You act like I’m sticking a monkey up your nose. I’m just making a phone call.”

“Aunt Bernese, where’s Mama?”

“She’s in the hospital over to Loganville. I couldn’t make her understand what was going on, and she was flushed and flapping around, ill as hornets. Then she went paper-color. The EMT took her pulse, and no one could talk to her. He was worried she’d stroke out, so he pumped her full of Ativan. They admitted her right alongside Genny. Stacia won’t wake up for at least another four, five hours, not with the dose that EMT put in her. Hell, she’s likely to sleep through the night. But I can’t be for sure.”

“I’ll be there before she wakes up,” I said. “I’m on the way now.” Already my brain was ticking back and forth like a metronome, flipping between horrified listening and a to-do list to get myself on the road to Between as quickly as possible.

“Don’t go leaping in the car all harum-scarum and blast over here and have to go back tomorrow because you didn’t get your work squared away. Genny’s not going to be able to do for herself, and when that dog knocked your mama in the road, she scraped half the skin clean off her back. She needs you, Nonny. I have to go.”

“Wait a sec. What aren’t you telling me, Bernese?” I said.

“Just do what you need to do to be able to stay over here with us. If you can’t get here by eight or so, tell me now. I can hire that mealy-faced worm-boy to drive over from Atlanta and interpret.

Someone has to tell Stacia what happened when she wakes up.”

For the ninety-seven millionth time, I silently cursed Bernese for not learning to sign, but the Fretts’ system of communication had been in place for decades and was ingrained and habitual.

Genny and Mama were twins after all, and as toddlers they had made up their own sign language. When Mama started school, Genny picked up ASL almost by osmosis, and to the rest of the family, there was no recognizable transition. Mama had always spoken by gesture, and Genny had always interpreted. The pattern was set.

“I’ll be there before Mama wakes up,” I said.

Amber was bobbing in my peripheral vision, trying to get my attention. When I looked up at her, she mouthed, “Is everything okay?”

I waved her off, but instead of leaving, she slid back into the booth across from me, sinking into the leatherette upholstery.

She folded her legs up into the seat after her, crumpling up into a wad with her knees poking up over the table. She looked about twelve.

I heard Uncle Lou talking in the background again, and Bernese barked, “She needs to know what all is happening. Can you clamber on down out of my butt, please?”

“Good grief,” I said. “Don’t take it out on Uncle Lou.”

There was a slight pause, then Bernese said, “That’s not Lou.

He’s in Loganville.”

“Wait a minute, then. Who are you yelling at?” She didn’t answer me, and I remembered the number on my cell phone had been a Between number, not Loganville. “Where are you, exactly?

Why aren’t you at the hospital?”

“I’m going over there soon as I can,” said Bernese, then didn’t say anything else.

“Bernese,” I said. “You better get straight with me right now.

Where are you, and where is Fisher? Is she okay?”

“Oh, take a pill, Nonny. Your uncle Lou is picking Fisher up at her little friend’s house. She had a playdate set for today after kindergarten, praise Jesus in heaven, or she’d have been there with me and seen the Bitch eating up Genny.”

“Then who is that man I heard talking?” I said.

I could hear Bernese drumming her fingers, impatient and annoyed. Finally, she said, “That’s just Thig.”

“Thig Newell? Sheriff Newell? Are you pressing charges against the Crabtrees?” She didn’t answer me, and my spine began to straighten, elongating involuntarily, until I was sitting up as stiff and taut as if I were being inflated. “Bernese, quit dancing with me and tell me what the fuck is going on.” Amber’s eyes were as round as quarters, and I got dirty looks from a young couple spooning ice cream into a baby at the next table.

“I’m a little bit arrested,” said Bernese primly. “And I wish you wouldn’t use the F-word.”

I sank back down in the booth and covered my eyes with my free hand. “Arrested! What did you do?”

“I did the only thing I could and still look at myself in the mirror, Nonny. What do you think I did?”

I took a deep, cleansing breath that didn’t leave me feeling any cleaner. I lowered my voice and said, “I think you stood there until everyone left for the hospital or went back to the square, and then I think you pulled your illegally concealed pistol out of your purse, and I think you shot the Bitch dead.” Amber gave a little gasp, her shoulders jerking up. I turned sideways in the booth, away from her. “Please, please, tell me I am wrong.”

“Two to the head,” said Bernese, and her voice was creamy with satisfaction. “I would have got those boy dogs next, but they took off running and got under the junk cars when I started shooting.”

“Oh, shit, Bernese. Shit! Are you crazy?”

“Watch your mouth,” Bernese snapped. “I know what I’m doing.”

But she didn’t. She didn’t have a clue. She’d gone up against Ona before, but she’d used lawyers and paperwork and police, all parts of the civilized world that the Fretts inhabited, a world that cowed the Crabtrees. Now she had opened with violence, and that was a language the Crabtrees spoke fluently. I suddenly felt so scared I couldn’t get a breath in. I wished I could simply fold myself up and slide down under the table and hide. “It’s a war, Bernese. It’s going to be an all-out war.”

Bernese snorted rudely into the phone. “Well, I didn’t start it.

My devil dog didn’t eat a Crabtree.”

I had to get home. Not only to see Mama but to intercept Ona before she retaliated. My brain ticked back over to my to-do list and paused. I had several jobs scheduled that my agency would need to get someone to cover. I should probably give up the anthro classes altogether, since the semester was ending in a few weeks and I had no idea when I’d be back. Friday afternoon I was supposed to be at the courthouse, getting my divorce, but I couldn’t leave Genny and little Fisher and my injured mother to the nonexistent mercies of angry Crabtrees. I’d have to gauge Ona’s emotional state before I’d know if I could come back for the hearing.

Maybe I could call Jonno and ask him to go on Friday and get us a new court date. I’d have to beg. As it was, I’d needed to take his hand and lead him through our breakup, showing him where to sign and ferrying him to and from our lawyer’s office. Honestly, he was so disconnected from the process that had he owned anything but a 1987 Chevy Impala, I could have robbed him blind. Even more honestly, there were moments when I had been so angry I probably would have.

I was tired of patting him along through the jocular dissolution of our marriage. Jonno had treated our initial visit to the lawyer’s office like a field trip, a mildly interesting peek at how divorce worked, like going behind the blue door at the donut fac-tory. I was willing to admit that he might take it more seriously if I stopped sleeping with him, but when I was around him, my desire to murder him usually got sublimated. My hands were magnetically drawn toward him; they longed to wrap themselves inexorably around his lovely throat. They would cramp and twitch as I fought to hold them into flat, unthreatening pancakes at my sides, and then in the next breath, they’d be climbing him, never quite making it up to strangle him before I found myself on my back.

“Nonny?” said Bernese. “You got quiet. You’re not bothered about the Crabtrees, are you? Because they can go to hell. This is about our family, about Genny and your mama.”

I glanced over my shoulder. Amber was leaning forward strain-ing to hear, her pretty face avid and her eyebrows lowered. When our eyes met, she looked away fast, turning her whole head so that all I could see was her profile.

“I’m not thinking straight,” I said. “I need to get going. I’ll bail you out if Uncle Lou hasn’t collected you by the time I get there.”

She said goodbye and I hung up.

My busy brain added “Find Jonno” to the running list in my head. I had to try, even though the chances of his actually showing on Friday were slim. After our shared lawyer had filed my petition, Jonno had never returned to sign the acknowledgment. I’d set up three appointments for him, and then he’d missed two and I’d missed one. I’d had our lawyer mail him a copy that he never mailed back. I decided to pay for the sheriff ’s office to send a process server, but before they could serve him, he’d disappeared on a cross-country bar tour with his ska band. When he did arrive home, I was waiting on his stoop with the acknowledgment and a pen, and the second after he signed it, I fell into bed with him. After that, I’d personally driven it to our lawyer’s office, scared that if I left it in Jonno’s mailbox, he’d help it find its way back out and into the trash. It was highly unlikely that he’d spring into helpful action now.

I grabbed my purse and stood up. Amber stood up, too. I glanced at my watch. “I’m going to have to call this a no-show,”

I said. I walked across the restaurant, weaving my way quickly between the tables.

Amber trailed after me. “You’re leaving?”

“Yes. Call the agency if you want to reschedule.”

“You said you would wait thirty minutes. It’s only been a little more than twenty.” Her voice was strident with outrage. “What’s going on?”

“Family emergency.” I was almost to the door, but she ran around me, trying to block me.

“What happened?” she asked. “Is it bad?”

I sidestepped around her and went out, not answering. She followed me outside; I could hear her clicky-clacking along behind me in her ridiculous, strappy sandals. She stopped as I picked up the pace and dogtrotted to the parking lot. I unlocked the Mustang and got in. As I pulled out of the lot, I could see her standing by the entrance, her backpack a bright blotch of yellow at her feet. Her eyebrows were lowered, and she had her cell phone out, one stiff finger violently punching at the numbers. Calling her daddy-or-fiancé to complain that I left six minutes early, no doubt.

Well, she could ask the agency to send someone else next time.

I hoped she would. Her thrilled and horrified face would be forever linked in my mind with this awful day, the awful dog. I would be as happy as whole herds of clams to never see her face again.

Jonno had left my apartment by the time I got home. I called his house, but no one answered. They sometimes turned off the ringer when the band was practicing and then forgot to turn it back on for days. I told myself that the urgency I felt to find him was so I could try to get him to schedule us a new court date, but I wasn’t sure I was buying my story. My hands were shaking as I dialed, and half of me wanted nothing more than some arms to put around me.