Eight Minutes (17 page)

I hear, “Duck!” but it’s a lonely bellow from a deep well, far away. I am cemented in place. The spinning rifle, after being suspended in air for what seems like hours, finally breaks the spell as it hits a tree with a crack. It clatters to the ground.

I scoop Toby into my arms and bolt down the driveway, jiggling and crying, limping when I lose a flip-flop. We collapse in the backseat of the car. He burrows his head into my neck, reminding me of an ostrich. I hug him, desperation hammering through my veins.

I don’t think I’ve ever been more ashamed of myself. It’s one thing to lose it. It’s another thing to lose it in front of your kid. What if that gun had gone off? Not only have I knocked an old woman to the ground, but I’ve left her there hurt.

What’s wrong with me?

I look at Toby’s light eyes—Eric’s eyes. I can barely stand what’s reflected there in his tears. He’s scared of me. He’s scared of his own mother. I close my eyes and breathe. My scalp prickles with the sensation of a curtain drawing back, a receding of the waters, a tide washing back out to sea. I don’t want Toby to get caught in the undertow.

I have to get a grip.

How can I fix this? I do my best to comfort Toby. I wipe my eyes, shake my head, and fish around in the backpack for some baby wipes. I clean his face and knees. I find a granola bar, break off a piece for him, and say, over and over, everything is fine now. We’re safe. I find his juice box.

I’m kicking myself that I clammed up when she answered the door. If I diagrammed the problem on a flowchart—well, that would be the point at which events departed from the expected path. It was a mistake to think I wasn’t going to have to explain something. I should’ve said something right away—put her at ease.

Now I know.

I’ve come so far. I can’t just sneak back into the condo without waking Eric. What am I going to say to him? No. I can’t be this close and not get what I came for. I’m only going to get one chance.

I hug Toby. “I was wrong, baby, and when you’re wrong, you have to apologize. So now, I think we have to go back up there so I can tell Kay I’m sorry.”

“No.” He shakes his head. “I don’t want to.”

“I’m not looking forward to it, either, but it’s the right thing. If you do something wrong, you have to go and apologize and ask what you can do to make it right.”

“A do-over?”

“Yes, something like that.”

As I’m walking back up the driveway, I find my flip-flop. Fifteen minutes after I knocked Kay Robberson on her backside, I rap on her door again.

Immediately, she throws open the inside wooden door, obviously expecting someone. I can see she has an ice pack on her back. She retreats, pulling the door halfway closed. “Good God almighty. You better get outta here. Ernie’s gonna be here soon.”

“Please. Let me apologize. I’ve never done anything like that before. I’m so terribly sorry. Are you all right?”

“No. I am not all right. Do I look all right?”

“Do you need to get to a doctor or something?”

“If I do, I’ll get there myself, thank you.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“Yeah. You said that.”

She starts to close the door the rest of the way. I block it with my hand. “Please. I had to come back and make sure you’re okay. I’m embarrassed. I don’t know what got into me. I’m here trying to find out something that is extremely important—”

“What can be so important that you need to wake me up at the crack of dawn, come at me like that, throw a loaded gun, and then run away like a nutcase?”

“I know. There’s no excuse for my behavior. I am
so
sorry. Please, if you’ll listen to me for five minutes, I’ll go and never bother you again.”

Kay doesn’t say anything, which may be as good as I’m going to get in this situation, so I take a deep breath. I pick Toby up before I start talking. She stands behind the screen door and shifts the ice pack to her other hand. I’m sure I look crazy, there on the porch with manure on my face, fertilizer beads in my flip-flops, and a big wet muddy smear on my left hip.

“My name is Shelly Buckner, and I live in Arizona. This is my son, Toby. He’s three.”

I hold him up to her, and he buries his face in my neck.

“A few months ago, he started talking about someone I think you know. At first we thought it was his imaginary friend, but now I believe that this person might be real. He talks to my son.”

I pause, waiting for some kind of response.

Nothing.

“You see, I believe the person who talks to my son is your husband, John.”

She narrows her eyes.

“John Robberson,” I say.

Slam.

I knock again.

“Go away!”

“Please, please, Mrs. Robberson. Kay. Toby says that John told him that he needs to come see you.” I raise my voice. Toby is on my hip, and I have the screen door propped open with my shoulder. I rest my forehead on the wooden door.

No response.

Is she on the other side?

I whisper, “Isn’t that right, Toby? Am I getting it right?”

Toby nods and I turn back, putting my mouth near the seam at the doorframe.

“Please!”

Toby and I stare at the closed door.

“John Robberson says Toby needs to talk to you. About a dog. I don’t know what that means. Please, can’t you, won’t you open the door?”

I stand in silence on Kay Robberson’s porch for a long time. I’m prepared to stand here all day if I have to.

A white patrol car pulls up the driveway. I turn to see a tall, stocky man with a gray crew cut striding toward me. He says, “Something I can help you with, ma’am?”

The front door opens and Kay calls out, “Ernie! This is the one.” She breaks down crying, the words coming out in gulps. “This girl’s crazy or something, coming out here on my property, talking nonsense about John to me, and . . . and . . . she knocked me down and took my gun . . . and . . . and . . .”

“She has a gun?” His hand moves to his belt.

“No, she threw it at the trees!”

“Yep. I’m here, Kay. You go on inside now.”

Even thought I am watching him, Ernie creeps toward me. In the final three yards, he lunges, grasps me firmly by the elbow, and forces me off the porch. “Okay. We’re all done here.”

“Let go!” I try to twist my arm away, which makes him clamp down harder. He leads us to his squad car and opens the door. “Why don’t y’all get in the back there?”

I’m still holding Toby but shift him to the opposite hip. My body is tense and hard. I know Toby can feel it. “Fine. We’ll leave. I have a car right here. We don’t need a ride.”

Ernie whispers in my ear, “Come on, little momma. You don’t want me to make a fuss here in front of your boy.” Then, louder, he says, “I’ll give you a lift to your car.”

Defeated, I get in the backseat of Ernie’s patrol car with Toby. I say “Hey!” as he drives past my car, realizing that I don’t have my wallet, my cell phone, or anything with me. “Can you turn around? I need to get my backpack out of the car.”

“You shoulda thoughta that earlier.”

I try to argue but stop when I realize I’m only making Toby cry and Ernie even madder. I start crying. I can barely remember the name of the condos where we’re staying but tell Ernie anyway. I’m sure Eric is awake by now and probably freaking out. I’m exhausted and overcome with despair and embarrassment. I cannot stop crying. I try to tell Toby it’s okay, but he clings to me like a drowning rat.

From the backseat of the squad car, I look up and realize we are heading the opposite direction of our condos. “Where are you taking me?”

“We’ll head on over to the police station, and you can tell me the whole story there, in private. Then we’ll see if Miss Kay wants to press charges against you, then we’ll let you call someone to come and get you, all right?”

“Press charges?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Am I under arrest?”

“Oh, no, nothing like that. Kay’s got a good heart but a quick temper. We’re gonna let her calm down a bit and see what she wants to do. That sound all right to you?”

“No, it does not sound all right to me,” I hiss at him.

“Guess you shoulda thoughta that before you started beating the living daylight outta a defenseless old lady, huh, momma?”

“Stop calling me that.”

I don’t ask what will happen if she wants to press charges. For what? Trespassing? Assault? Can they throw me in jail? What have I done?

“Don’t cry, Momma.” Toby looks at me with concern and puts his hands on the sides of my face. He kisses my eyes, and it slows my pulse. I have to get out of my emotions and use my head. I have to pull it together, for Toby’s sake. I hope he won’t remember this later.

I wipe my eyes with the backs of my hands. “I’m okay now, baby. We’re going to take a drive with the officer here. He’s going to show us where he works, okay?”

“I want to go home.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

EVERYTHING HAPPENS FOR A REASON

T
he Branson police station is located on the ground floor of City Hall, a beautiful old stalwart in the middle of downtown. As the morning sun shines down, I realize I’m walking into a government building with my nipples clearly visible in my tank top. I pick up Toby and hold him to my chest. We both smell vaguely of manure. I have never wanted to be invisible as much as I do right now.

I’m determined to hold it together as we walk to our seats in the waiting room. Toby, less shaken now, finds a
Highlights
magazine, which strikes me as bizarre. How many children regularly visit the Branson police station? Enough to warrant a children’s magazine subscription, evidently.

I pick up the
Branson Courier
, and my eye stops on a statistic that says southern Missouri is considered the meth capital of the entire country. Missouri had more meth-related arrests last year than any other state—by a three-to-one margin. Twenty percent of arrests occurred after an explosion that caused the house to burn. I swallow hard, as if there’s a bitter pill that hasn’t quite dissolved stuck in back of my throat.

Toby complains that he’s hungry. I’m at the mercy of the good people of Branson. The nameplate on the receptionist’s desk reads “Marjorie Miller.” Summoning a smile, I smooth my hair, nod toward Toby, and ask Marjorie, a plainly dressed woman with an impressive salt-and-pepper bouffant, for some crackers.

“Sure, honey, let me reach into the snack basket here and see what we got.”

She twists in her secretarial chair and rolls back to the black file cabinet behind her. Opening the bottom drawer and exposing her oversize pink underpants as she bends over, she comes up with a six-pack of bright orange crackers with peanut butter. “Here ya go, hon.”

I accept them gratefully with no thought that even twenty-four hours ago, I would’ve cringed and rejected the preservative-laden snack.

“They’re orange,” Toby says, as he holds the package about one inch in front of my nose.

Marjorie chuckles.

I kiss his forehead and laugh for the first time since I was in a tube on the lake, behind a boat. Before I heard a clunk on the marina deck. It feels like that was a year ago.

“They’re cheesy,” I say, opening the package for him. “Some kinds of cheese are orange, right?”

“There idn’t no other color of cheese in Branson,” Marjorie says. “Where y’all from?”

“Arizona, right outside of Phoenix.”

“Y’all come for the lake?”

I sighed and shifted Toby from one hip to the other. “Guess we should’ve stayed at the lake.”

“I was wondering,” Marjorie said.

Toby doesn’t want to eat the crackers at first, so I take a bite. With a goofy expression, I make a circle motion in front of my midsection and say “yum.”

Marjorie chuckles again, obviously enjoying having a three-year-old in her office. Toby eats his crackers and plays peek-a-boo with her between bites. When he’s finished, she shows him the trash can and helps us find the water fountain.

“Do you have little ones?” I ask.

“Three grandbabies,” she says, turning around a studio-posed picture for me to see. Her grandbabies are freckled, lanky adolescents. “They’re getting so big. I miss them being little.”

“Good-looking kids,” I say. “They look happy.”

“They’re a handful.” Marjorie glances at the clock. “Ernie should be here pretty soon. I think he’s waiting to see if Kay has cooled off yet. She probably will.”

“I hope so.”

“She’s been through so much. First her boy, then her husband.” Marjorie shakes her head. “And the way John went—well, he loved that dog, didn’t he?”

I nod, sick that my heart leaped at this tidbit of information.

“It’s a shame,” Marjorie said.

I nod again.

“So you gotta bear with Kay. She’s not herself right now. It’s not like her to make a fuss.”

I force myself to leave it alone. “Could I borrow your phone? I need to call my husband.”

Eric’s phone goes straight to voice mail, so I leave a message that I don’t have my phone but to call back on this number. I look for a clock and realize we’ve been here almost forty minutes. How long can it take to clear this up? Toby, thankfully, has settled in on my lap while I read, and he falls asleep in minutes. His body seems to keep me warm and grounded. I realize, too late, that I forgot to tell Eric we’re okay.

Finally, Ernie shows up, but he speaks only to Marjorie. “Kay’s not answering her phone,” he says, “so you might as well add her to the system.” Without even looking my way, he returns to his office.

Marjorie waves me over and asks to see my identification.

“I don’t have it.” Controlling my voice, but feeling that warrior drum in my chest again. “He wouldn’t let me get it out of my car.”

“That darn Ernie. You didn’t argue with him, did you?” She gives a little grunt as she bends and digs in her desk for a preprinted form. “Arguing makes it worse. He’s hardheaded. Everybody knows that.” She squints at her monitor as she hits the same key over and over, until she finds her place. “Okay, hon, this won’t take long. Name?”

I sit in a small kitchen chair at the end of a metal desk while she types the details of my existence. I hope Toby stays asleep until Eric gets here. When she is finished with me, she takes us back into an abandoned office. I guess I’m in the system now.

I am going to have a police record. Me. Toby’s mom. A grown woman with a child in my care and I’m about to be arrested because . . . why? It all starts to collapse on me. What was I thinking? How could I drag Toby along, without any inkling of what we were walking into? We could’ve died. What kind of mother am I? I steer Toby away from processed food like it’s poison, but I lead him into a situation where he’s looking down the barrel of a shotgun? And I completely freaked out in front of him, which makes it a thousand times worse, and I was so stupid that I threw a loaded gun (!), and my son watched me shove a grandmother to the ground like she was the criminal. Who am I? I can’t imagine what Toby must think.

I’m so relieved that he’s still asleep and doesn’t respond when I know my tears are soaking spots on his little T-shirt.

It’s almost 10:00 a.m. before Marjorie tells me I have a call. She transfers it to a rotary phone on the abandoned desk in the office. It’s Eric.

“I don’t even know how to tell you this,” I say in a low voice so Toby won’t hear. “But I’m okay. We’re both okay.”

As soon as he realized I was gone, he called my cell phone. When I didn’t answer, he looked for my backpack and didn’t find it. He never found my note, the one designed to keep him from worrying. He called the police, who told him we had to be missing for twenty-four hours before they could do anything. He lied and told them there was a break-in at the condo so they would come. He stayed and paced, getting madder and madder as he waited for the police to show up and write a report. That’s when he went to the parking lot and realized the car was gone. He called the hospital. Nothing. That’s when he took his cell phone and started out on a run, looking for us. He’d been to the marina and ran all the way to the grocery store, looking over his shoulder as cars passed him on the highway.

It breaks my heart to picture him this way. I’m sick to my stomach as I try to explain. Detained, that’s all. I can’t even say the word
arrested
. It’s not official yet. Not until they confirm whether she wants to press charges.

“Press charges? For what?”

I can barely choke it out. “Trespassing.”

“What?” I can hear him absorbing this. “Where did you trespass? Where did you go?”

“Please. It’s been a long, bad morning. Can we do this later? I’m not trying to be evasive. I’ll tell you everything when I see you . . . but the short version is, I found Kay Robberson.”

“Shit.”

There’s no way to explain myself. I can’t even start.

“Tell me you’re kidding.”

With a big sigh and a completely flat tone, I realize I don’t have a choice. It will only make it worse if I’m too much of a coward to own up to it. I don’t deserve the luxury of choosing my time and place; I have to do this on the phone. Right now. “No, she’s a real person. I found her house; Toby asked for her . . .”

“Dammit, Shelly.” I have thrown one too many rocks against his calm exterior today, and I can hear it crack. He takes a big breath. “I thought you were done with this.”

I break down sobbing. “I am now. I promise.”

“Don’t even start with that,” he snaps. “I don’t want to hear it.”

“Please, Eric. I know you have a lot of questions—”

“No, I don’t.” He pauses. “Yes, I do. I have one question.”

“Anything.”

“Was it worth it, Shelly? Just answer that one. Was it worth it?”

I swallow thickly and whisper into the phone, “No.”

No response.

Finally, he says, “Is Toby safe?”

“Yes.” I clear my throat. “We’re in an office. They won’t release me until . . . They’re waiting to see if she’ll drop the charges.”

No response, but I sense a faint, subtle shift. I push the receiver to my ear and can almost hear him make a decision. I know he can do this—put aside his reaction to something and focus on how to fix it.

In a lower, more deliberate tone, he says, “I’m coming to get my son.”

“You’re so mad at me.” I try to keep my voice from trembling, but I can’t. His fix doesn’t include me.

“We can talk about that later.” I can almost hear him raking his fingers through his hair. “Look. Can you hold it together? Just don’t make things worse, all right?”

I get a visual image of myself windmilling a rifle into the air. Knocking an elderly woman on her ass. Shoving my son to the ground. A shiver of shame rolls over me, and Toby stirs in my lap. I know how I sound.

I whisper into the phone, “I think I’m losing it.”

“I’m on my way.”

I will make it right with him. I have to.

Toby and I sit in a boring tan-carpeted, beige-walled office full of nothing but a metal desk and a secretary’s lopsided swivel chair with the tweed seat coming unraveled. Marjorie brings in another metal folding chair so there are two chairs for us. I’m tempted to try to get her talking again. Once she leaves, I poke around the desk, holding Toby with one arm while I explore with the other. The metal desk drawers are all empty, not even a stray paper clip. The air conditioning fan starts up. I’m freezing in this stupid tank top. I’m glad for the warmth of Toby’s body on my chest.

I sit down in one of the chairs. Toby nestles in and falls asleep again. My eyes are scratchy and dry but I can’t sleep. This thought won’t leave me alone: Toby still didn’t get to deliver whatever message John Robberson wanted him to.

Eric’s question reverberates in my mind. Was it worth it?

No.

That’s the bottom line. I will never know what any of it means—the plane crashes and fires and Thud and Kay—and I have to start making my peace with that. “I’m not going to find out,” I say out loud.

I’ll go back home and repair my relationship with Eric. Get my real life back.

Yes. That’s what I need to do.

Having made a decision, I feel lighter. However, Toby doesn’t. My leg is falling asleep from his weight, so I shift him from one leg to the other. In the process, I jostle him awake. I try to settle him back down, but he’s up now. I can anticipate what’s coming next. I get up and try the door and can’t believe someone locked it from the outside. Toby is holding the front of his pants and giving me the face. I knock on the door.

A police officer, a young guy with a greasy complexion, follows me to the restroom and stands outside the door while I help Toby. The officer waits on me, and I am acutely aware that he is probably listening to me pee and flush, whether he wants to or not.

I wash my hands and face. I run my fingers through my hair and wish I had a scarf or hat or something, but I manage to feel a little more civilized. We return to the office, and I’m still keeping my arms close to my chest to cover my bra-less shape. As we walk back, one of the officers sees Toby and offers him a stale jelly doughnut that was left over in the break room. He likes it. Of course he does; it’s like crack. I think it’s the first time he’s had a jelly doughnut, or any kind of doughnut for that matter, and now I’m going to have to explain to him why we’re not having another one.

I’m getting back to my sense of myself.

Not long after we return to the empty office, there’s a knock on the door. “Someone here to see you, Mrs. Buckner.”

Good. I don’t have a watch and there’s no clock on the wall, so I’m not sure how long we’ve been in the office. When the officer opens the door, I gasp when I see it isn’t Eric but Kay Robberson who walks in.

“Oh. Oh,” I say, eyes refilling, I hold out my hand to shake hers. It seems a completely inadequate gesture for the situation, but I can’t think of anything better to do. All I can do is choke out, “I’m so sorry.”

She shakes my hand but doesn’t say anything. I fuss with Toby and make him stand up in front of me. I put my hands on his shoulders, facing her.

Kay says, “I’m not pressing charges. Ernie told me I didn’t need to come in here, but I believe in doing the right thing. Everything happens for a reason.”

I am speechless.