Rust & Stardust Page 20

  “You’re healing up nicely.” The doctor nodded, examining the wound that traversed her lower abdomen.

  “You’ll be good as new before you know it,” the nurse agreed, after the doctor turned on his heel and went to check on the child in the next bed.

  “How long am I gonna be here?” she asked.

  “Another couple of days, I imagine. I know your daddy sure is ready for you to come home. Calls to check on you twice a day.”

  “Where is he?” she asked. She hadn’t seen him since he’d brought her to the hospital.

  “Visiting hours are Wednesday nights and Sunday afternoons,” she added.

  “People can come and see me?” She thought of Ruth, vaguely recalled Ruth helping her into Mr. Warner’s truck the night she got sick.

  “Only parents, of course,” she said. “Immediate family.”

  “Oh.”

  Mr. Warner came the following night with gifts. Bars of chocolate she was too queasy to eat, and a single red balloon. The nurse fastened the string to the radiator, and it bobbed in the window.

  “Gave me a real scare, kid,” he said, rubbing a hand over his head again and again.

  She nodded. She’d been scared, too. When she first woke up in the hospital, she didn’t know where she was. If she was dead or alive.

  He was sitting at the edge of the seat he’d pulled up next to the bed. His gaze darted toward the other children who were engaged in their own visits, and then leaned toward her. His breath was hot on her ear. Her stomach roiled.

  “You say one word to these people about who you really are, they’ll keep you here. Put you up in the mental ward. You know what that is?”

  Sally shook her head.

  “They won’t believe you, Sally. They’ll think you’ve lost your mind. They’ll put you in the loony bin, lock you up and throw away the key.”

  Sally shook her head, heard her mother’s voice ringing in her ears. She’d told Russell the same thing once. Threatened to drive him to someplace called Greystone Park. Sally had pictured a beautiful grassy field where children flew kites until she asked her first-grade teacher what Greystone was, and the teacher told her that it was a hospital for people who were sick in the head. For crazies. The only crazy person she knew was the man who wandered up and down Federal Street mumbling to himself, striking his forehead again and again with the palm of his hand. Why her mother thought her stepfather should go there was a terrifying mystery.

  “No one will believe you, Sally.”

  With that, he stood up, donned his hat, and leaned over to kiss her forehead. His dry lips felt like razors against her skin. “I’ll be back tomorrow to settle the hospital bill and bring you home.”

  After he left, the nurse helped her get up to use the restroom. She was still sore, and her legs were wobbly. When she sat down on the commode, she saw stars. She was still feeling unsteady as the nurse helped her back to her bed. She was just starting to drift off when the nurse shook her shoulder. “Florence? Wake up, you’ve got another visitor.”

  Why would Mr. Warner come back? Or could it be someone else? No. Only parents were allowed. The nurse had been firm about this.

  “There’s only ten minutes of visiting hours left, but I didn’t have the heart to turn her away.”

  Sally cocked her head curiously.

  “It’s your mama.”

  Mama? Sally’s heart throbbed inside her chest; she felt it pounding in the place where they’d split her open. Had her mama finally found her?

  But then the door opened and it wasn’t her mama at all, but Ruth. She came in, rushed to Sally’s side, and leaned over her, hugging her tightly. Sally held on to her, tears soaking her pillow.

  “I thought you were my mama,” she said, her chest heaving. “I thought she came for me.”

  Ruth stiffened and stood up.

  “But your mama, she’s passed.” A question. An accusation.

  Sally shook her head.

  “Florence?” Ruth said, reaching for her hand and squeezing it, but Sally could think only of what Mr. Warner had promised. That if she said one word to Ruth—a single word about who she really was—he’d make Ruth pay.

  “I didn’t mean that. I’m just confused, is all.”

  “Florence,” Ruth said firmly this time, imploring.

  How she longed to tell, for her own name to come from her lips. Sally Horner. Sally Horner.

  “I just want to go home,” Sally said. At least this was the truth.

  SALLY

  After she came home from the hospital, Mr. Warner didn’t touch her. At first, she thought he was just being considerate. Letting her heal. Instead of leering at her as she changed her clothes, he turned away. And instead of putting his hands all over her whenever he pleased, he kept them to himself. Eventually, the wound healed. The doctor clipped out the dark black stitches, and she was left only with that ragged reminder across her belly. Still, Mr. Warner kept his distance. But after a while, she realized it had nothing to do with the surgery and everything to do with all the other changes her body was going through. Her body was transforming, almost daily. Her breasts went from the painful, marble-sized bumps on her chest into fleshy mounds that made her buttons strain and embarrassed her. She grew hair under her arms and between her legs. Once, in the small bathroom, she’d tried to use Mr. Warner’s razor to shave it away. It made her think of Lena. Would she start to grow hair on her chin? On her chest? Her appetite grew as well; she couldn’t seem to get enough to eat. Mr. Warner mocked her, snorting like a pig as she devoured her supper each night.

  “Maybe I should just pour some slop in a trough for you,” he said, as she wiped her mouth gently with her napkin. “Disgusting pig,” he muttered under his breath.

  He didn’t touch her, but his revulsion, his bitter insults stung almost as much as his angry fists.

  “What am I supposed to do with you now?” he said, sloppy drunk. “It’s like living in a goddamn barn. If you were really a pig, you know what would happen to you come winter?”

  She shook her head, and he took one crooked finger and made a slicing motion slowly across his neck.

  It might not have been as frequent anymore, but when it happened now he was always angrier, drunker, meaner. He called her fat, pinched the places on her body that had started to swell. He said she sickened him, asked where his sweet little girl had gone. She shook her head, thought of little Sally Horner, that girl she used to be. She’d disappeared a long time ago. Just a little bit at a time, so she’d barely noticed. In the undertow of the crashing waves at the shore, in the vaporous heat of a Baltimore summer, with the tumbleweeds along Route 66. Part of her had disappeared with Lena and the circus, in the mournful lament of the elephants.

  * * *

  “Hey,” a girl from her class said to Sally during recess. “Where’d you disappear to?”

  Sally had only been at Our Lady of Good Counsel for a couple of weeks that fall before she got sick. She’d been out of school for as long as she’d been in attendance.

  “I was in the hospital,” Sally answered. “Appendicitis.”

  “Do you have a scar?” the girl asked. She had freckles like brown flecks of paint spattered across her cheeks. She was always getting in trouble with the sisters for cracking gum or passing notes to the other girls.

  Sally’s gaze darted to the playground, where the other children played a game of hopscotch and marbles, before she slowly lifted her blouse. The girl hooked one finger into the waistband of Sally’s skirt and gently yanked it down. Sally’s fleshy belly was exposed, white as a fish’s. Flaccid and loose. The incision ran in a six-inch line, diagonally across her lower belly.

  “Did it bust open?” the girl asked. “My brother knows somebody whose appendix busted and he almost died.”

  “No,” Sally said. “They got it in time. Five more minutes and I woulda been dead, though.”

  That was what the doctors had told her. That if she and Mr. Warner been just five minutes late
r to the hospital, her appendix would have perforated, sending poison throughout her body. She thought of it as a time bomb that no one knew was there. The idea that your own body could one day detonate filled her with dread.

  “Can I touch it?” the bold girl asked, already reaching her finger out to touch the scar.

  Afterward, the two girls stood wordlessly appraising each other until the other girl broke the silence. “I’m Doris. What’s your name?”

  Sally hardly knew her own name anymore. She’d been so flustered trying to remember what to call herself that she’d said “Florence Planette” instead of “LaPlante” when Mr. Warner registered her at school.

  Doris’s face was earnest, friendly.

  “I’m Florence,” she said, and then feeling oddly bold herself added, “But you can call me Sally. Everybody does.” She felt like she might throw up. But saying her name felt so good. Like coming up for air after holding her breath forever in the pool.

  Sally didn’t tell anyone at the trailer court about her new friend, Doris. Certainly not Mr. Warner, and not even Ruth. Ruth had been acting strangely since she went to the hospital. The times she’d come to visit her, she’d looked like she was on the verge of tears.

  Sally could barely remember what she’d said the night she got sick. She remembered crying for her mama. She also remembered Ruth finding her curled up on the floor. But after that her memories were like broken bits of glass: riding in the truck, feeling like she might vomit as they wheeled her through the brightly lit hallways of the hospital, the rough hands of the nurse who reprimanded her when she lay in the bed and felt as if the mattress were falling away from her (the sinking, dropping feeling of her belly, her hands slipping from the bar of the trapeze). In the hospital, she’d dreamed about Francie Nolan from her novel, about that burned smell in the air after the bullet passed through Francie’s mama’s apron and into that bad man’s private parts. When Ruth came to see her, she’d almost told her everything.

  But now that she was back at home, back inside that trailer, back inside her secret, Ruth looked at her with a sort of pity in her eyes. The first week Sally was home, she brought food to their trailer almost every day: fried Spam sandwiches and sloppy joes. She checked in on her every afternoon when Mr. Warner was at work and she was convalescing.

  And then one day, out of the clear blue sky, Ruth had abruptly gotten stern, put her hands on her hips, and said, “Florence, we need to do something about this.”

  It felt like Ruth knew her secret. Sally shook her head. Had she said something about her mama to Ruth that night she went to the hospital? Was that why she was acting so strange?

  “There’s got to be somebody you could call?”

  “What do you mean?” Sally had asked, even as her chest ached.

  Sally didn’t know whom she could call, or what she would even say. She was an outlaw, a troublemaker who’d been lucky enough to stay out of juvenile hall. This life, these bad things, were the price she had to pay for her freedom, a freedom that wasn’t really a freedom at all. Besides, Mr. Warner had legal custody, he said, and if he was telling the truth, then her mama didn’t want her back. Though no matter how hard she tried to believe that, accept that, she just couldn’t. Every time she tried to make sense of it all, her mind went back to those photos she’d found in his valise. The news clipping. Kidnapping. But that article had said the man’s name was Frank La Salle. His name was Mr. Warner. Or Mr. LaPlante. Or, if he truly was her daddy, Bobby Swain. It was too hard to keep track of the lies, and so she kept her mouth shut. She was careful not to say another word to Ruth. She didn’t say much to Mr. Warner, either. To the other girls at school, she kept her lips zipped. But Doris was different. Doris seemed to understand her. Without saying a word, Doris accepted her. She didn’t look at her with pity the way so many others had. She was her friend. Maybe the first true friend her own age she ever had.

  RUTH

  Ruth had picked up a little gift for Florence for Christmas: a hairbrush with a wooden handle and real boar bristles. Florence came over to get her hair done for the Christmas pageant at her school, and Ruth presented the brush to her tied in a red ribbon bow.

  “This is for me?” she asked.

  Tex was jumping, jumping, trying to see.

  “It is,” Ruth said, smiling.

  Ever since Florence got sick, Ruth had felt truly troubled by what she had said about her mama. About her not knowing where Florence was. What could she have meant by that? She’d been delirious, granted, but something didn’t sit right with Ruth. And then there was the way she’d reacted at the hospital when she thought her mama had come for a visit. Even as she watched Florence outside, playing happily with Tex or scooting him away from a solitary game of jacks, it troubled her, like trying to read small print from too far away; no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t make sense of it. Luckily, since she got home from the hospital, Florence hadn’t shown up with any more bruises, and she hadn’t heard any outbursts coming from the trailer. Maybe her getting sick had knocked some sense into Frank. Maybe he’d leave her alone now.

  “You doing okay?” she asked Florence as she used the new brush to work through her tangled curls. “You haven’t been coming by so much lately.”

  Florence shrugged.

  “Must be hard without your mama and Christmas coming so soon,” she said.

  Florence’s mouth twitched. Ruth pressed on.

  “I lost my mama when I was about your age, too. Hardest thing in the whole world was the holidays.”

  Florence nodded but still wouldn’t speak.

  “You know, I would have given up every Christmas present I had just to hear my mama’s voice again back then. Sometimes, I wish I could just pick up the telephone and talk to her.”

  Florence fidgeted.

  “You know, I’m here for you, sweetheart. I mean, if anything’s bothering you. Stuff you don’t want to share with your daddy.”

  She was certain now there was something going on, something Frank didn’t want anyone to know and that Florence was too scared to tell. If she could just get her to open up, then maybe she could help her.

  “Listen here,” Ruth said gently, and slowly untied the ribbon from the hairbrush. “How about this? See this ribbon?”

  Florence nodded.

  “It’s actually a very special kind of ribbon,” she said.

  “It’s pretty.”

  “Well, it’s more than pretty. It’s also a way for us girls to stick together,” she said. “See how I can see your window from here?”

  Florence peered out through the curtains at the trailer across the way.

  “Let’s say maybe you’re feeling sad, or lonely, or scared. Or maybe you’re in trouble? All you got to do is to open up your window just a little crack, and hang the ribbon out. If I see it, I’ll know you’re needing me. And I’ll come to you. Would you like that?”

  Florence studied the ribbon in Ruth’s hand. “You can know all that if I just put that ribbon out there?”

  “Yes. I promise I’ll be there quick as can be.”

  “And won’t nobody know what it means except for you and me?” she asked.

  Ruth held it out to her. “Nobody at all.”

  ELLA

  “That’s a lovely shade of red,” the salesgirl said.

  Ella nodded absently as she studied the bolts of fabric, touching them with her fingers, gauging the softness of each.

  “Making something for Christmas?” the girl persisted. “A nightgown?”

  Ella shook her head and moved down the aisle. “Silver Bells” played through the speakers overhead. Christmas music haunted Ella. Everywhere she went it seemed there was the jingle and jangle of Christmas bells, the ba-ba-ba-boo of Bing Crosby crooning about a white Christmas. She used to love Christmas; she’d always loved shopping and cooking and decorating the house. When the girls were young, she’d found no greater joy than watching the sisters’ faces light up at the sight of a stocking filled with
treats. She and Russell had never had a lot of money to spend on gifts, but she’d always set aside a little each year to splurge on one special thing for her daughters (a new doll, a beautiful barrette). Each year she’d sewn matching Christmas nightgowns for them to wear, flannel with yoke collars and tiny bows at the neck. Now as she walked through the fabric store, her knobby fingers grazing the bolts of fabric, she wondered if Sally even liked red anymore.

  This year, she thought of baby Dee. She was old enough now to wear a nightie, and this winter was predicted to be a brutal one. Though she couldn’t remember a single winter in New Jersey that hadn’t been cruel.

  When she was a child, she had loved winter. Loved the snow that fell from the sky. Her mother had told her that each snowflake was an angel and that if you caught one on your tongue and swallowed it, the angel would protect you. She’d told this story to her own girls and took pleasure as she watched them running about, mouths gaping wide, trying to catch the angels on their tongues. She wondered if it was snowing wherever Sally was.

  If there were any angels there who might keep her safe.

  RUTH

  Two days before Christmas, Hank came home early from his shift.

  “What are you doin’ home so soon?” Ruth asked as he walked through the door.

  Hank, with his white-blond hair and fair skin, was even paler than usual, if that was possible. He looked like he’d not only seen but swallowed a ghost, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down.

  “Somebody got shot,” he said.

  “What?” Ruth asked, feeling her pulse start to thrum.

  “Gangster named Green. Every time he comes into the Sky-Vu, there’s trouble.”

  Ruth knew that the Sky-Vu where Hank worked was frequented by gangsters. That all sorts of nasty things happened behind the Sky-Vu’s closed doors. She’d heard the rumors, about the back room where Hank’s boss, Joey Bonds, hired underaged girls to do the things those men’s wives would never do. Some of the girls with their baby teeth still. It made her sick just thinking about it.