"Where are you
going?" Tammy asked.
"We
are taking her to the hospital and dumping her ass
there, and then
we
can find a place for the night."
Tammy ushered the kids into
the car. "Watch your language. You know I don't like that kind of talk
around the girls."
"Don't you think they're
going to hear worse in jail?"
"Mama, are we going to
jail?" Karla cried out.
"See what you've
done," Tammy hissed as she leaned over to comfort Karla. "No, baby,
they don't put kids in jail. Rona's just being mean."
"Will they put you in
jail, Mama?" Karla sniffed.
"No. I'm not going
anywhere. Rona, tell them." Tammy's tone of voice left little doubt that
she was pissed.
Rona looked back to find Karla
watching her with suspicion clearly written on her face. She rolled her eyes
and sighed. "We're not going to jail. I was just teasing. Now, everyone
get in the damn—in the car. Please."
Chapter Two
It took Rona a moment to
figure out how to turn on the car's headlights. When she accidentally turned on
the windshield wipers, Katie piped up from the back.
"Are you sure you know
how to drive?"
Rona bit back a retort as she
turned on the defroster to help clear away the thin layer of ice forming on the
windshield. She was trying to adjust the defroster fan when the woman reached
over and did it for her. "You seem okay to me. Are you sure you need to go
to a hospital?"
The woman looked at her and
seemed rather dazed.
"Rona," Tammy
snapped.
"Yeah, yeah," Rona
muttered, as she put the car in gear and began to ease her way out of the
parking lot.
"Who are you?" the
woman asked. "What happened?"
"Shirley
Temple," Rona snapped sarcastically. "Two men
attacked you in the parking lot. We're going to drive
you to the hospital."
"Thank you,
Shirley," the woman said as she pulled her coat tighter around her and
began to tremble.
With the woman silent, Rona
ignored her and turned her attention to driving. The steering wheel felt odd,
yet good, in her hands. She hadn't driven in a long time. She used to love to
drive. As she grew more comfortable with the car, she noticed the faint smell
of lavender. The scent reminded her of her grandmother's room. Rona was only
three when her Grandfather Kirby died and her grandmother came to live with
them. She would make lavender sachets and tuck them among the silky
handkerchiefs and undergarments in her dresser drawers. As a young girl, Rona
would sneak into her grandmother's room to open the drawers and smell the
fragrant aroma. She could remember how the beautifully decorated cotton handkerchiefs
had felt beneath her hand. She pushed the memory away. A long time had passed
since the last time she touched anything soft. In her world, softness equated
to weakness. You quickly learned that if you were weak, you didn't survive long
on the streets. She had endured the past sixteen months by being tough and
ruthless. At first, she was too numb to care about anything. A part of her
wanted to die, or at least she thought so at the time. After almost being raped
at one of the shelters, the first tiny spark of self-preservation ignited. She
started trying to escape the streets, but she quickly discovered no one wanted
to hire a homeless woman who possessed only minimal job skills. Even the men
who arrived in trucks each morning at the work centers looking for day laborers
seldom had work for women. In desperation, she tried to do the one thing she
swore she would never do again—music—but no one at the clubs would even let her
audition. They took one look at her dirty, ragged clothes and kicked her out. In
truth, she didn't have much of a voice. She could play rhythm guitar but so
could almost anybody with even the slightest interest in music. Her skills on
keyboards were much better, but she had been forced to sell all of her
equipment. The only area where she felt she stood out from the tens of
thousands of other musicians was her songwriting skills. No one important was
going to take the time to listen to someone looking as she did now.
Rona saw the brightly lit
hospital sign and followed the directions to the emergency room entrance
located at the back of the building. As soon as the car came to a halt, an
orderly came rushing out. Rona eased the window down and called out, "She
fell and hit her head. She seems to be drifting in and out of consciousness."
A wheelchair appeared and the
woman was quickly removed from the car. Before whisking her away, the orderly
leaned down and poked his head into the car. He frowned and drew back slightly
as he took in her appearance. "Admissions will need to talk to you and get
all her information."
Rona nodded. "I'll park
the car and then come back." She held her tongue as she drove away. She
had no intentions of coming back, but first she needed to get Tammy to agree to
her plan.
After parking the car, she
turned off the motor and sat listening to the sweet silence. The three in the
backseat remained motionless, allowing the silence to intensify. Rona had spent
most of her nights on a narrow concrete ledge beneath an overpass—not that she
did a lot of sleeping. There was the constant noise of traffic and the fear of
someone attacking her for her blanket, shoes or something as small as a slice
of bread. Mostly, it was a place to curl up and try to stay warm.
She ran a hand over the smooth
leather of the dashboard and smiled as she remembered the battered interior of
her ancient Chevy Impala. The car had been a gas-guzzler, but its enormous
trunk and backseat were perfect for hauling the band's equipment. For the
briefest moment, she saw Mary sitting in the seat next to her smiling. Without
thinking, she reached out a hand to her, only to find vacant space—the same
vacant space that had been filling her heart since Mary's death.
"We've done all we can.
We'd better get out of here," Tammy said.
"Wait a minute,"
Rona said as she twisted in the seat to look at Tammy. "We could stay warm
in this car tonight."
"Someone would find us
out here," Tammy said as she glanced down at the sleeping kids.
"I didn't say we'd have
to stay here." Rona kept her voice low. "There are plenty of places
where we could park this car and not be found for a couple of days."
Tammy frowned. "We'd be
in a lot of trouble if we got caught."
Rona shrugged. "We're
going to be in worse trouble if we can't find a place to stay tonight. It's
freezing. Even if we got desperate enough to go to a shelter, by now they'd all
be full and they'd turn us away."
Tammy looked at each of the
twins and smoothed down their hair.
Rona glanced away and as she
did, she noticed the woman's purse. She picked it up and began going through
it.
"What are you
doing?"
She heard the disapproval in
Tammy's voice. "I'm looking for something that will tell me who she is.
I'm just curious." She found her wallet and opened it. The driver's
license identified the woman as Anastasia Pagonis. The address was not a street
she recognized, but that didn't mean much. Unless it was a central downtown
address, she wouldn't know it. There was less than thirty dollars in cash in
the wallet, but there were two major credit cards along with a few useless
department store cards. The major credit cards were safe to use for at least a
few hours. She knew of four convenience stores that ignored people using credit
cards bearing names that changed from week to week, as long as the amount being
charged was under twenty dollars. With the car, she could easily hit all four
stores in less than an hour. Eighty bucks would buy several cans of chili and
canned meat. For a moment, she let her imagination run wild. They could drive
down to Brownsville where it was warmer, or maybe all the way to Florida. A
glimmer of guilt tried to worm its way into her conscience, but she quickly
squashed it. The woman probably had scads of insurance on these cards and
wouldn't be held responsible for any of their charges. Even if she did, eighty
dollars wouldn't be that much for someone like her. She probably made more than
that before her morning coffee. Rona slipped the cash and the two major credit
cards into her sock, being careful to get them below the big ragged hole.
The car would be a different
issue. Rona knew that if she took it to any of the areas she was thinking of,
it would soon be stripped down to its chassis. She pushed the thought away.
Keeping this car could mean the difference in the four of them surviving the night.
She and Tammy might be able to make do, but the kids were too small. She looked
over the seat at their sleeping faces. Even beneath the blankets, it was
obvious that they were painfully thin. They should be tucked into warm beds
with nothing more to worry about than whether there would be nursery school
tomorrow or not.
Tammy looked up. "Don't
steal anything from her," she pleaded.
To avoid waking the girls,
Rona forced her voice to stay low. "It's a car. The insurance company will
replace it. What's the big fucking deal?"
Tammy shook her head. "I
don't know. It just feels wrong."
Rona got a handle on her
anger. Tammy never responded well to anger. "Listen," she said
calmly. "We have no place to go. That office building she came out of has
lawyers, realtors and other professionals. You know she's not hurting for
money."
"What if she's just some
clerical flunky?" Tammy hissed back. "Maybe that was why she was
working so late."
Rona suppressed a groan of
frustration. "Look at the car she's driving. It's almost brand new."
She was about to say more when she remembered the statement that Katie had made
about Roach hurting Tammy. "It's because of Roach isn't it? What did
he—"
"Shut up," Tammy
snapped so harshly both girls were startled awake.
Rona remembered the guy who
tried to rape her at the shelter. It had been too dark to see his face, but
from the contact she had
with him while
fighting him off, she came away with a vague sense of his general physical
description—short, not as thin as most, and clean-shaven. For weeks afterward,
she would shake with rage every time she saw a homeless man fitting that
description. Tammy's empathy for this woman was going to be the death of them.
"Rona, put whatever you
took back. We don't need the car. I can't take the chance of being caught. I'd
lose them for sure. Please."
Rona gritted her teeth as she
pulled the items from her sock and stuffed them back into the wallet. "All
right, but if we're going to leave the car here, I'm not taking a chance on
someone else stealing it and me getting blamed." She jerked the car door
open.
"Where are you
going?" Tammy demanded.
"Wait here. I'm going to
take her wallet and her keys in and give them to the doctor or someone. As soon
as I'm done, I'll come back for you."
"Here, take this or
you'll freeze," Tammy said as she tossed Rona's old blanket to her."
Too mad to care, Rona wrapped it around her and headed back toward the
hospital. She was freezing by the time she had crossed the parking lot, which
was much closer to the front entrance than it was to the emergency room. She
raced up the salt-covered steps, already anticipating the delicious warmth that
would greet her inside. She had barely cleared the front door when a security
guard grabbed her by the arm.
"You're not sleeping in
here," he said as he spun her around and pushed her toward the door.
"I brought a woman in and
I need to give her the keys to her car," Rona said as she tried to control
her anger. The son of a bitch wouldn't even listen. Too late, she realized she
should have walked back around to the emergency room entrance where people who
looked like her were a more common sight. This wasn't the first time some
overly zealous security guard had thrown her out of a building.
"Yeah, right. Get out of
here before I call the cops and have your ass hauled downtown." He made a
slight huffing sound. "Course, that's probably exactly what you want. A
night in jail guarantees a free bed and a couple hot meals. I don't know why
you bums just don't get a job."
"Who would you have to
bully then, you dickless wonder?" Rona snapped.
He shoved her out the door.
"If I catch you trying to sneak back in here, I'll give you a taste of
this." He patted the nightstick attached to his service belt.
A young couple was heading up
the steps. Rona saw them scurrying to the far side of the stairs, getting as
far away from her as possible. Embarrassed and angry, she pulled the blanket
more securely around her shoulders with as much dignity as she could muster
before walking back to the car. She would lock the keys and wallet inside the
car. Let Ms. Anastasia Pagonis hire a locksmith.
She strode back to the parking
lot and stopped. She couldn't remember where she had parked. No single vehicle
stood out in the sea of cars. She wasn't even certain what color the car was.
It was a Honda, and she vaguely remembered it was a light color. She walked
toward a silver Honda and glanced into the backseat. It was empty. She saw
another similar-looking car a couple of rows over and went to check it out. As
soon as she leaned over to look through the window, a blinding pain shot
through the back of her legs. Her knees buckled under the pain and sent her
crashing to the ground. Before she could recover, something cold pulled tightly
against her throat.