Cross Current - Kling Christine - Страница 13
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“Her name’s Abaco. After some islands in the Bahamas.” Red had continued with the tradition he’d started with my mother—after naming all three of their kids after islands, he had named his dog that way as well.
I reached for another paper towel to start a new drawing and set the sketch of the dog aside. I began sketching the Wind Dancer, a lovely little sailboat I had once sailed down in the Dry Tortugas in what often seemed like another life.
“I see Abaco?” She pronounced the dog’s name with the accent on the last syllable instead of the first. She made my dog sound like some Parisian show dog, instead of the strong-willed, incorrigible squirrel chaser she really was.
“Sure.” I handed her the drawing. She held it up in front of her face, and there was a small smile in her eyes, while the rest of her face held strong. “You can keep it if you like,” I said.
She slid the drawing under the covers then, hiding it carefully on the sheet next to her frail body. After she settled the covers back into place, she lifted them one last time to make sure the drawing was still there, then collapsed against the pillows.
“Have you ever had a dog?” I asked.
She shook her head, pressing her lips tightly together. “Mmmm, it’s probably different in Haiti, I guess. I’ve never been there. I’ve been to the Bahamas. Never to Haiti, though.”
“I been Bahamas.”
“Really?” I tried to sound barely interested, didn’t even look at her as I said it. I just shaded in the shadows on the hull of the sailboat on the napkin.
“Dogs bad, like Haiti. Not nice dog, like Abaco.”
1 looked up. “You saw dogs in the Bahamas?”
She nodded. “I work with Erzulie. Bad dog come many day.”
I decided to press her a little. “Erzulie, that was the woman in the boat with you?”
She nodded and slid her hand under the bedcovers, feeling for the drawing.
“How did you and Erzulie get in that small boat, Solange?” She didn’t speak for over a minute. I figured I’d blown it, I’d pushed her too hard, and she wasn’t going to talk to me anymore.
“Bad man hurt Erzulie.”
“Do you know the bad man’s name?”
She shook her head.
“He hurt her in the Bahamas?”
She shook her head again. “On boat.”
“Oh, you were on the boat that was going to take you to America? Were you coming in that small boat?”
“Big boat.”
“Like my boat, Gorda?"
“More big. Many people. No dog.”
“So you left the Bahamas in the big boat. What happened?”
“Night. Bad man hurt Erzulie.”
“So how did you get into the small boat?”
She shrugged and didn’t say anything more. Could it be she didn’t know how she got there? It was more likely she just didn’t want to or didn’t know how to tell me.
“Solange, I’d like to help you. I want to find your father. Do you know his name?”
“Papa.”
“No, what did other people call him? Other grown-ups?”
“Papa Blan.”
“Was he the one who taught you to speak English?”
She bit her lower lip and nodded. “Papa—no Kreyol.”
I assumed that meant the father didn’t speak Creole, so he must not live in Haiti. He must only have been visiting. “What about your mother? Was she on the boat?”
She shrugged again.
“Do you know your mother’s name?”
She scrunched the features of her face into a tight little knot. “No maman."
“You don’t have a mother? Is she dead?”
Again, just the lifted shoulders, more questions she couldn’t or wouldn’t answer.
She pointed to herself. “Restavek,” she said very quietly, refusing to look at me.
“Restavek? ” I repeated the word and she nodded. “I don’t understand. I don’t speak Creole. Can you say that in English?”
She shook her head and then yawned, her wide mouth showing several gaps where teeth should have been. She slid down, pulled the covers up tight under her chin, and closed her eyes.
“Okay, you sleep. I’ll be back tomorrow. Maybe we can talk some more then.”
At the nurses’ station, I couldn’t get anyone to talk to me. The nice Haitian nurse was not around, and the busty young woman at the desk was far more interested in her manicure than in helping me. When I finally succeeded in getting her to acknowledge my presence, she told me with a flip of her blond hair that I was not next of kin, and therefore she could not speak to me about the girl’s medical condition.
“She has no next of kin,” I said. “Does that mean nobody gets to find out how she’s doing?”
The young woman stood up and tugged at the hem of her uniform. The pink polyester was straining at the seams to contain the bust that was perched at an unnatural height, somewhere above her armpits. Her name tag said “Jenna.”
“I have orders from Dr. Louie not to talk to anyone about her, and I have to do whatever Dr. Louie says.”
I wondered how far Dr. Louie took that willingness of hers.
I stopped off in the lobby at the McDonald’s to grab a burger and fries for the ride home. So many hospitals I’d visited lately had fast-food franchises right on the premises, so I no longer found it ironic to be eating heart-clogging grease a few floors beneath the cardiac surgery suites. I couldn’t resist the smell and had just taken a mouthful of hot french fries out of the to-go bag when a perfectly coifed young Hispanic woman approached me just outside the hospital entrance, identified herself as Nina Vidal from Channel 7 News, and asked if I was the one who had found the little girl. I wondered for a minute how she had recognized me, then realized that the salt-stained deck shoes and the Sullivan Towing and Salvage baseball cap were pretty good clues. I acknowledged that I was the one, and I tried to continue on around her. She stepped into my path again.
“We’ll be doing a live feed from here when we go on air at eleven,” she said as she pointed at the van with the long, extended antenna mast. “Would you be willing to wait around a few minutes and answer some questions for our viewers?”
I swallowed the ball of starch in my cheek. “Sorry. I’m headed home to bed. It’s been a long day.”
She continued to follow me out toward the parking area. “What do you know about this child? Can you confirm that she was not alone in the boat? We understand there was a dead woman. Do you know her identity? Do you know if she’s connected in any way to the other victims?”
I stopped and turned to face her. I was about to tell Helmet Hair what I thought she could do with her extended mast, but I reconsidered. “Lady, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I only know that there’s a sick, scared little girl up there.” I pointed to the upper reaches of the hospital. “Just tell your viewers that she’s a really sweet kid, she’s got the face of an angel, and our government shouldn’t send her back to the streets of Haiti. Okay?”
She rolled her eyes and murmured something under her breath as she headed back to the van.
There was nothing left in the bag but some greasy wrappers by the time I pulled my old Jeep into the drive at the Larsen estate. The canvas top on my vehicle was probably the third or fourth one she’d had since her original owners bought her in 1972, but the wind and Florida sun had done their damage, and the back windows always came loose as I drove. An old boyfriend had nicknamed her Lightnin’ after watching me try to accelerate and merge onto 1-95. Thunder might have been more appropriate, though, given the flapping canvas and the engine’s tractorlike rumble. Coming to a stop and shutting her down created a very sudden silence.
I just sat there a minute, too tired to climb out, enjoying the emerging night sounds of insects and far-off traffic. I’d seen the dark brown sedan that was parked on the street in front of the house, and I was certain I recognized the figure sitting in the front seat. I didn’t want to talk to him. Not tonight. When I finally climbed out of Lightnin’, the sedan’s front door swung open and scraped to a stop on the cement sidewalk.
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