Child of My Heart (29 page)
“I have no doubt that you do.”
We had just turned the corner onto our road when we heard the commotion: Rags barking and Petey and Tony shouting, and maybe Janey’s voice and the old man’s mixed in there, too, mixed and carried by the wind. We had not reached the Moran place yet when out of their driveway came Tony, and then Petey, with one of the wooden rabbit traps held aloft’ high above his head, and Rags leaping and jumping and barking beneath it, and Janey and Judy following, trying to bat the dog away. Tony was the first to see us and he pointed, and then Petey saw us and came running, knees high, triumphantly holding up the rabbit trap, Rags snapping at his heels, the girls following, screaming and yelling, all joyous, all oblivious to the old man’s voice, which was still coming from behind their hedge, shouting and swearing. Baby June following up behind.
They descended on us, Petey yelling, “We got one, we got one,” his face flushed and perspiring, his eyes crazy and bright.
He thrust the rabbit trap into Daisy’s hands as Rags followed along under it, barking and spinning, the wind blowing his fur “For you,” Petey shouted. And Tony, like an echo, leaning over her, repeated, “For you, for you.” And then the girls were upon her, Janey crying, “Let me see, let me see,” Judy trying to swat the dog away.
They engulfed Daisy, with their brown limbs and their blond heads, their voices and their quick breaths, their hands on the cage, on her arms, all of them pressing together, Rags barking and leaping. I saw Daisy’s foot go up behind her, either to regain her balance or to move the dog away, and then I saw Rags with his teeth sunk into her ankle. She cried out and Rags was jumping toward Janey and Petey, who were suddenly holding the cage, suddenly stepping away from Daisy as she bent, screaming, both hands to her leg. I saw the blood blossom into her thin white anklet.
I scooped her up and ran to the house. She was crying, holding her leg, screaming in breathless bursts.
“You’re all right,” I told her.
“You’re all right, Daisy Mae. You’re all right.”
I was aware only of the sound of the Morans running behind me. Then of Petey shouting in his adult voice, “I’ll get the cop.” I pulled open the back door and ran through the silent kitchen, through the living room, where the cats bounded from the couch to welcome our arrival.
“You’re all right, you’re all right,” I kept repeating, through her panting tears.
“You’re all right, Daisy Mae.”
I carried her into the bathroom and sat her on the edge of the tub. I pulled off her shoe and the white socks. The bite was precise, two deep tooth marks already beginning to swell and then a smaller set of punctures between them. I turned on the water in the tub. She had her arm around me, she was gripping my hair, burying her face in it. I told her to move her leg under the water, to rinse off the blood, while I pulled a towel down from the rack and wrapped it around her calf. Moe and Larry padded gently around my knees.
“It hurts it hurts it hurts,” she said. I said, “I know, I know.
It’ll be all right.”
I leaned back and found the bottle of hydrogen peroxide my mother kept under the sink and poured it over her ankle as well, making the blood foam. She screamed and tightened her grip on my hair.
“I know,” I said, holding her.
“I know.”
I was hardly aware of the Moran kids, piled like a logjam in the bathroom door, until I heard Mrs. Richardson’s voice saying, “Move away, you children, move away.” And then, “Scat, scat,” to Moe and Larry.
And then—with a dream’s inappropriate and nonchalant merging of people and place—Mrs. Richardson, in her tweed skirt and sensible shoes and her wide, capable body, was behind me in our narrow bathroom, her hand on my shoulder as she leaned to see Daisy’s leg.
“Oh, that’s bad,” she said, drawing in her breath.
“Terribly discolored.” She patted Daisy’s shoulder as well.
“We’re going to get you to a doctor, my dear,” she said, shouting a bit to be heard over the running water. And to me, “She should go straight to the emergency room.”
I felt Daisy’s arm tighten around my neck, her fingers gripping my hair. I leaned to scoop the water over her foot, over the blood, handful after handful.
“It’ll be all right, Daisy Mae,” I told her, trying to keep my voice sure.
“It’ll be okay.”
“The man next door has gotten hold of the dog,” Mrs. Richardson was saying. She seemed to be bustling about, as much as she could in such a narrow space, opening and closing the vanity doors.
“That’s the important thing, in case of rabies.
I gather it’s a stray.”
Daisy was crying so hard by then, I doubt if she heard. I hardly heard myself, with the water running and Daisy leaning over my back, her mouth against my shoulder. One of the Moran kids said, “It was Rags,” and I think there was a sound that I associated with the wind—I had the image of a tree limb breaking, the clap of a black wave—and a few minutes later Tony was shouting, “Here he comes.”
Then I recognized the cop’s voice saying, patiently, “Get out of the way, guys.” Now the cop, Mrs. Moran’s boyfriend, was in the bathroom as well, leaning past Mrs. Richardson’s solid front.
“I’ll drive you to the hospital,” he said. I continued scooping the water over Daisy’s leg.
He moved closer. Mrs. Richardson pressed up against the sink.
“Let me carry her,” he said.
But I blocked him with my elbow and my shoulder.
“The sooner the better,” Mrs. Richardson said.
I looked at Daisy, her little chin raised and her eyes shut tightly against the pain.
“I’ll carry her,” I said.
Slowly, I turned off the water and asked someone to hand me another towel. Mrs. Richardson already had one in her hands. I turned Daisy around and had her place the bitten leg on the towel, and then I wrapped it carefully, bending over her, my hair against her bare legs.
“Apply pressure, dear,” Mrs. Richardson said.
And the cop said, “Let me get my car.”
He squeezed out through the door, herding the Moran kids in front of him, saying, “Come on, guys, give her space. She’ll be okay.”
I carried her through the living room, where the light had begun to take on its peachy, golden hue, through the kitchen, and out into the yard, where the Moran kids were all standing, Janey and Tony dumbfounded, their mouths open, Judy crying into her hands, Petey with his fists balled up tight, his face both furious and full of tears. Mr. Richardson was out there, too, with Angus and Rupert held short-leashed, close to his side. Even old Mr. Moran. He was unshaven, wearing a gray looking undershirt and baggy pants, leaning wearily on our back fence, above my father’s dahlias. He was holding baby June in his arms. The cop pulled his car out of the Morans’ driveway and then swung up to our gate.
Mrs. Richardson placed her broad hand on my shoulder.
“When will your parents be home?” she asked me, and I said, “Soon.”
She called across the lawn to her husband.
“They’ll be home any minute. Tell them we’ve gone to the emergency room in
Southampton
. We’ll meet them there.” And then, to her dogs, “You be good boys, now.”
The cop got out and opened the back door for us. Holding Daisy in my arms, I slid into the back seat, and then Mrs. Richardson slid in right beside me. The cop took a red light out of his glove compartment, wires trailing from it, and put it on the dashboard.
“Well, isn’t this fortunate?” Mrs. Richardson said pleasantly.
“To have a policeman right next door.”
There was a small black radio under the dashboard as well, and as he drove, he pulled a microphone from it and, in an efficient and nasal voice that did not seem his own, reported that he was taking a child to the Southampton emergency room, dog bite, ankle, and then turned over his shoulder to ask us if she’d been bitten anywhere else. Daisy and I both said, “No.”
Then, with his voice lowered, he said, “A stray” and “taken care of.”
He gave the Morans’ address.
“Under a tarp and some pine boards,” he said.
“West side of the house, toward the back.”
Mrs. Richardson was unwrapping the bloodied towel from Daisy’s foot.
“We want to keep some pressure on this,” she said, as she wrapped it again, more tightly, her solid gray bangs moving over her steely eyes. And then she said, in the same determined voice, “Such a pretty shoe, Daisy, you’ll have to tell me where you found them.”
Crying, her head under my chin, Daisy whispered, “It hurts, it hurts.”
I stroked her arm.
“I know,” I said.
“I know.”
Then I remembered the aspirins I had taken from Flora’s room. I slipped my fingers under her head, into the pocket of my shirt, and slid out as many as I could, finding the turquoise jewel as I did. I held the aspirins out to her in the palm of my hand, and she took them one by one.
We were in the hospital only twenty minutes or so when my parents arrived. Daisy’s parents were there by ten. By then the conversations had begun, whispered conversations between the doctors and the parents, mine and Daisy’s, conversations to which I was not privy.
She spent the night there, Aunt Peg and Uncle Jack sleeping on chairs beside her. My parents and I went home and gathered her things, all the new and unused outfits, the hairbrush and toothbrush, the new sneakers still bound together with their plastic string. I added a few of my old clothes to her suitcase—the red-and-blue-checked sundress, the white Sunday dress with the green sash, the red Gypsy skirt, on a whim, certain somehow that it would not meet with Uncle Jack’s approval.
There was only a bit of blood on the inside of her pink shoe and I scrubbed at it with cold water until it was gone.
Then I glued the jewel back into place and brought the shoe to her in her hospital room the next morning. Uncle Jack shouted, “Hey, Cinderella,” but then turned to Aunt Peg, frowning, to say, “Maybe she shouldn’t have been wearing these,” a last attempt to find something he might add to his lengthy list of prohibitions, to find an ordinary and avoidable cause that would yield an attainable antidote for whatever it was that troubled poor Daisy.
They left for
Perhaps, they said, I should have mentioned them to someone.
I said I figured it was just the result of being raised with so many siblings.
“Like the Moran kids,” my parents said together, and I was absolved.
I took care of the Scotties and Red Rover for the rest of the week. And on Saturday night I baby sat for the Swanson kids.
Mr. Clarke had returned Moe and Larry to them that morning.
They were apparently ready to take on the experience of owning pets again. The two cats curled around my legs when I came to the house, oblivious to all, and when I asked Debbie how she’d managed to change her mother’s mind, she gave me a sly look and said she had just asked nicely if the cats could come back. But Donny laughed. He was straddling the back of the wicker couch where we sat.
“Yeah, right,” he said.
“She told the doctor she goes to that she’d kill herself if the cats didn’t come back.”
Debbie turned on him with all the vehemence of a woman betrayed.
“Did not,” she said.
“You know you did.”
I held up my hands. It was another lovely summer twilight and we were on the wide front porch, just below the widow’s watch, waiting for the fireflies to begin to appear once more.
“I don’t even want to know,” I said.
“Don’t even tell me.”
I didn’t go back to Flora’s. When we ran into the cook outside church on Sunday, my mother was the one to explain what had happened to Daisy and why I had been missing. The good lady clucked her tongue and shook her head and said the poor little thing never did look right to her, so pale. She said it was perfectly fine that I hadn’t been by—absolution all around-she was quite enjoying the little girl, Frenchy had returned just yesterday morning, and her own mother was due back next weekend.
“No doubt,” she said to me, “she’ll be giving you a call, to get back into the routine.”
But she never did. That evening I had a call from Mrs. Carew, my first employer. Her sister was visiting from
Princeton
with two young children and she wondered if I’d be free for the week. Then the Swansons moved in for the rest of the summer, and I was busy with them. Then the Kaufman twins and Jill arrived. She had now become “my fiancée” and wore a huge ruby ring about the size and shape of the English muffin I had folded over Daisy’s finger, back on that morning in June.
She slept in the guest bedroom, I was happy to see, and was modest around the pool. She winked at me once, after she had rebuffed Dr. Kaufman for placing his hand on her thigh.