When I brought Mosey’s dinner to her, she said, “Thanks. Gramma.”
She made the last word into its own sentence, then cocked her head sideways. She sounded curious but a little distant, like a scientist on Discovery Channel waiting to see what the things in his test tube might do.
“You’re welcome. You want milk?” I said, puzzled.
“No thanks,” she said. And then she added that word again, al alone. “Gramma.”
Her bright gaze was fixed on her food, but she was watching me in her side eyes. I found myself going stil , not sure what reaction she was looking for. I’d always been Big to her.
“What’s with the Gramma?” I asked, careful to keep my tone light.
Mosey shrugged. “I think it’s weird I cal you Big. And it’s super weird that I cal my mom Liza.”
I went back to the counter to load Liza’s dinner onto a tray. “You were already cal ing her Liza when you came to live here.”
I hefted the tray, and Mosey leveled a gaze on me so intense it felt like a glare. “Didn’t you want me to cal you Gramma? Or Mee-Maw or something?”
That question seemed as loaded as a pistol. I met her gaze and said, “Wel , Liza named me Big, back when I used to cal her my Little. When you came home, you picked it up from her. Maybe I stil felt too young to be a mee-maw.”
“What about now?”
I felt my lips thinning because, truth told, I thought forty-five was stil young to be already a mee-maw. Mee-maws traded their skinny jeans for those Christmas sweaters with the three-dimensional sequined appliqués of reindeers with jingle-bel harnesses. They knitted and never learned the tango or went to France or had sex again in their whole lives. I wasn’t there yet, please God, but I also wasn’t sure exactly what Mosey was asking. “I am your gramma, doodle, so you can cal me what you like. Let me get this to your mom while it’s stil reasonable hot.”
Mosey’s overbright gaze fol owed me out. The second the swinging door stopped slapping back and forth between us, a whole-body blush heated al my skin, and I felt a thousand miles away from being any kind of mee-maw. Lawrence had been here.
I walked back to Liza’s room fast as I could with a bowl of hot soup sloshing around on the tray. Lawrence had come, and that meant he stil remembered. Maybe too vividly, like me, maybe only in guilty flashes on the side. But he remembered. I pushed down the foolish curl of something almost happy that I felt rising in my bel y and nudged Liza’s door open with my foot. I would think of Lawrence later. If I truly meant to keep Liza’s secret, there were things I needed to know that only she could tel me. Assuming I had truly seen a flash of Liza in the yard. Assuming Liza was alive, way down inside her body.
I went into her quiet room. She was lying down where I had put her, turned onto her good side with her weak arm tucked in close facing the wal .
The last of the day’s sunlight was coming in through the sheers to touch her face. I set the tray down on the wicker dresser that she’d painted up with vines and flowers, and then I crawled over the foot of the hospital bed and crept up into the crack between her and the wal , pressing my back against the cool green plaster.
The sun was close to setting, and I hadn’t turned the lamp on, but I could see that Liza was awake now. Her eyes glittered at me, pitch-black in the dim room, floating a thousand colors like an oil slick. My heart leaped again at the fierceness of her gaze. This was Liza. She was here.
“I need help. You understand me, Liza-Little? You play your cards close. You always have, but you have to help me understand now, for Mosey.”
Liza’s gaze stayed fixed on me. I thought she would keep silent, but she made her “yes” noise. It came quiet, but not faint. A strong whisper of affirmation.
“Oh, God, I wish that you could tel me what happened, Little. I have to ask—only so I can protect you—did you do something? I forgive you already if you did, you understand? You were so young. I need to know about your poor little girl in the backyard, Baby Girl Slocumb. Did you do anything, anything at al that might have hurt her?”
Liza’s good eye blazed up bright, and suddenly I felt a hot pain on the side of my breast, as if a bee had been hiding in the sheets and it had stung me. I jerked and slapped at it and found Liza’s hand. She had reached forward and pinched the first piece of me she came to with every bit of fury she owned.
I felt my eyes wel up. “Of course not. I knew that. I knew you couldn’t.”
Liza met my gaze, steady, waiting for the only question I could ask next. I had to know, and crib death was the only thing I could think of that made any kind of sense. “That night. The night you ran away. Are you saying you woke up and she was already gone?”
Liza made her “yes” noise, a heartbroken, smal sound that seemed to echo in the dim room.
I nodded, and I wished we could stop here. I wanted time for us to lie quietly together and mourn. I wanted to hold my child. Liza had been carrying that silver box, so tiny, but so very heavy, alone, for years and years. But I couldn’t pause just yet. There was more at stake here, more hard questions that had to be asked. My chest felt like it was screwing itself closed. I trusted Liza’s heart, but I’d never had a single skinny reason to trust her judgment.
I said, “Was it bad, the place where you got Mosey?”
Liza didn’t look away or even blink. She hissed out a long, serious “yes” noise.
“Very bad?”
Again her quiet yes.
“Should I go looking for her folks, to let them know that Mosey’s okay?”
Liza made a fierce, unrecognizable noise, hard, pushing it out with al her breath, and this time I felt her good hand coming at me to pinch me. I caught it on my own and held it tight between us. I knew my Liza. She was wild, but I’d never seen her cruel. Look at how she’d buried her own lost child, wrapped warm in a blanket with a stuffed duck for comfort, resting in her special silver box. If Liza stole Mosey, she was making it plain now that Mosey must have needed stealing.
“Don’t you get me wrong,” I whispered. “I am not looking to return her. She’s ours. No question, that’s our girl.”
Another pause, and Liza made a noise, soft and segmented, like a bleat from a baby goat. I shook my head, puzzled, and she repeated it, a jumble of n’s and b’s and vowels.
I shook my head, as frustrated as she was. I was thinking of my lost grandchild and my half-lost girl, who was too broken to tel the police that her own baby had stopped breathing in the night. She couldn’t explain or defend herself. No statute of limitations would apply if they thought the unthinkable, that Liza had kil ed her baby. And even though she’d been blameless there, stealing Mosey was big-time felony bad. It had been Liza’s crime until this moment, but it was mine now, too. Accessory after the fact, they cal ed it on Law & Order. We stil had Mosey, which meant we’d been actively kidnapping her for about thirteen years now. It was al kinds of wrong, and I knew it, but I couldn’t see an open path that led me someplace righter. The law doesn’t let baby stealers keep the kid, no matter how many years have passed, no matter how fond of the thieves the kid has grown.
I realized there was no decision to make. Mosey was mine, and I was hers. Liza hadn’t had the legal right to give us to each other, but it was done. I could no more undo it now than I could stop my own heart beating.
That meant no one else could know that the baby in the yard was Liza’s. No matter what. I needed to find out what Rick Warfield was thinking, if he was sniffing any territory near the truth.
That led me back to Lawrence. He was a statie, but Immita was a big chunk of his territory. He was in thick with our cops. Poker-buddies thick.
He’d know every turn the investigation took.
He was home with his wife by now, but he’d come riding up like a white knight in his black-and-green cop car to kick everyone off my lawn the second he knew I needed him. He must have buried a secret box inside of himself where he stil cared about me. That could be right helpful, if I was wil ing to use
him. I asked myself if I was, and instantly this image rose in my mind: Rick Warfield reaching for the silent bones of Liza’s baby. I thought of rough hands like that reaching for Mosey, taking her as if she had no more say in it than those poor little bones.
I felt pretty wil ing, then.
I said, “It seems to me the best thing I can do is keep a lid on this. At least until Mosey’s eighteen.”
Liza made her “yes” noise three times, emphatic.
I started to squirm backward to get up, but Liza’s good hand caught me again, and she would not let me go. She made a new noise at me, like the caw of a crow. She made it again, her black eyes glittering in the last rays of sun. Since the stroke I’d wondered how much thinking was going on. At the emergency room, they’d stabilized her, but they hadn’t done much else. During the little bit of rehab she had gotten, the main doc told me it was likely she’d been born with a flaw in her brain. Al the drugs she’d done, especial y the meth, could have made it weaker, but the stroke could have happened any minute, al her life. He said her speech center was hurt, but it was possible that inside she was thinking fine. She might talk again. Sometimes the brain could find another way, especial y since she was so young and strong.
She was thinking something now. That was plain. Liza was seeking another way, desperate to tel me something. “I don’t understand.”
She made her noise that meant Mosey-baby, soft. Then she made it again, so desperate that it flat broke my heart in fifteen pieces.
I said, “I’m going to get you out of there.” It came out quiet but so fierce. “I’m going to come down where you are and find you and dig you out and pul you up so you can tel me.”
She exhaled, long and frustrated, then made her “yes” noise. We lay there in the last of the dying light looking at each other, and in that silence I heard the back door open and the buzz of conversation as Rick Warfield and the ME said good night to Mosey. I heard the heavy fal of their booted feet, and my hand reached under the covers for Liza’s hand and found it coming to meet mine. We lay together in the white sheets, clutching each other, listening to the unstoppable sounds of busy men slow-stamping, overburdened, through our house.
They carried the bones of Liza’s baby with them, and their solemn footfal s were the closest thing to a funeral procession our lost girl would ever likely get. In the echoes of that walk, I found myself whispering, “Peace, peace, peace.” I didn’t know if I said it to Liza and me, to soothe us, or if I was saying a funeral prayer, the first unangry words I’d said to God in almost thirty years. But either way, the footfal s passed through and our little girl was gone.
In the silence we heard Mosey digging around in the kitchen, probably hunting my stash of good chocolate.
“I need you back, Liza. We can’t let them take her,” I said.
I stared at Liza, and “dread” was the only word for what was fil ing me up. I clutched her good hand, and an answering word rose up in Liza’s oil-black eyes, so clear she didn’t have to say it.
War.
CHAPTER SIX
Liza
WHEN BIG LEAVES Liza alone in her room, her eyes stay wide, staring down the darkness; she is seeking the right word to give to Big. The bed pitches and rol s underneath her, trying to suck her down into the black of her own past, but she fists the fingers of her strong hand deep in the sheets. She stays, straining toward it.
She can see the word she wants to say shining in her head, clear and hard and empty and sparkling. She can imagine Mosey taking it down from the cabinet, setting it on the kitchen counter. She can see Big fil ing it with water from the tap. She knows exactly how its cool rim would feel against her lip if she lifted it to her mouth and drank, but her mouth can’t find the shape of the word that is this thing. She’s choking on it.
She feels the blood pounding through her, liquid and angry, and her head aches as she struggles toward the way that word used to taste, the way that word used to form itself so simply and spil out with a hundred other words, effortless.
Her head hurts, and it shouldn’t be this hard. She’s done this before. Every person has to learn these mouth shapes, word by word, starting with
“Momma” and “bye-bye” and “uh-oh.” But the first time Liza learned to speak is too far down in the black waters, in a place too deep to ever go.
There is another way to make this word, though. She does remember learning how to write. First grade. At Loblol y Elementary.
She closes her eyes, unfists her hand. Stops fighting it. The bed pitches and tips beneath her, a raft on the waters of memory, and she lets herself rol off it and go under. She tries to move with the tides now, knifing through the roiling black with purpose as she is pul ed and washed and spun through al the Lizas that she used to be. Liza under the wil ow, pressing her nine-year pin into the bark, an offering and a promise to the baby who slipped away in the night. Liza in the middle of the meth year, her blood roaring through her, foamed and violent as white water, riding a nameless man toward unmanageable pleasure while Mosey sleeps in a closet in the room next door. Liza with her arm over Melissa’s shoulder, holding a joint to Melissa’s lips as Melissa sucks in, holds, and chooses the boy she’s going to own tonight.
Liza goes deeper; past al this, looking for fat pencils and composition books. Mrs. Mackey. A class turtle in a terrarium. The mysteries of ABC
plastered in bright colors on the wal s.
She washes up close, very close. It is the tail end of summertime, the week of the double Vacation Bible Schools. First grade and Mrs. Mackey wil come Monday.
Every morning she goes to what Big cal s Hippie VBS at tiny River Bend Baptist. There Miss June has an acoustic guitar and a white rabbit named Angel in a hutch. They don’t do a lot of crafts there. They run outside, Miss June tel s stories, they sing. Mostly about Jesus, but they begin every day with a song that Big has on a record at home. On Tuesday, Liza asks Miss June why they sing a radio song at VBS, and Miss June gets her Bible out and shows Liza that the song is in there, hiding in Ecclesiastes.
“‘To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven,’” Miss June reads, her finger pointing to each word as she says it aloud. To Liza the letters are spindly black lines, as random as bug legs picked off and scattered on the page. “‘A time to keep silence, and a time to speak; a time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.’” Liza watches Miss June’s finger, staring so hard she’s surprised that the onion-paper page doesn’t smoke and curl into ashes, but it’s meaningless. Al Liza knows is that Big would be mad if she knew the Byrds had snuck a Baptist song into the house.
Hippie VBS is over at noon. On her lunch hour, Big picks her up and dashes her to Rich People VBS at Calvary Baptist. They start at one. Liza sits by Melissa, gluing elbow macaroni to construction paper. Melissa is her new best friend, but after VBS, Liza wil go to public school and Melissa wil be here at Calvary Christian. Calvary has not expanded the school past fifth grade yet, so middle school wil bring Melissa back to her.
Rich People VBS has lots of crafts and store-bought snacks, thirty-six-count boxes of brand-new Crayolas that each kid gets to keep, and a basket of shiny blunt-ended scissors with colored handles. There are only two pink pairs, and she and Melissa get them every time. Melissa makes sure, and she gets them the biggest cake at snack and first go on the swings.
Here you don’t cal the teachers Miss or by their first name like at Hippie VBS. She has to cal Melissa’s mom Mrs. Richardson. Story time isn’t like at Hippie VBS either, where it’s only Miss June and a picture book. At Calvary they have a felt board and a ton of people-shaped felties in Bible-times dress to act it out. They have puppets, too, and on Friday the youth group comes and does the Bible story like a play.
Liza likes the stories here. They remind her of the Grimm brothers’ fairy tales that Big says are too bloody, that she begs for anyway. Little Snow-white, making her stepmother dance herself to death in red-hot iron sho
es at the wedding, has got nothing on the Bible. Here King Solomon cal s guards to cut a toddler in half, a man named Samson kil s a thousand people with a bone, and God drowns everyone. Pharaoh murders babies, so one mom floats hers down the Nile, and—Liza knows from her Big Book of World Reptiles—that river is ful of crocodiles. An especial y big and person-eaty kind that only lives in Egypt.
Melissa and the other Calvary kids have heard these stories every week since they were too little to fol ow. They yawn and pick at their shoes and whisper al through story time, but Liza is silent, big-eyed; the tales thril her no end. At the end of story time, she’s the kid leaning forward, eyes bright, cal ing for the puppets to come back and show the awful thing that happens next.
It’s Friday, her last day with Melissa. At the head of the table, Melissa’s mom sits chatting with the other two moms who run the craft room, her hands cupping her potbel y.
Melissa says to her mother, “Can Liza and me have a play date tomorrow?”
Melissa’s mom looks to Liza, surprised, then says, “I don’t think so, Melissa. She lives very far away.”
“So what?” says Melissa, getting whiny. “She’s my best friend.”
Melissa’s mother says, “We’l see.”
Liza shoots Melissa an agonized glance; when Liza’s mom says that, it means yes, but she can tel that Melissa’s mom means no. Melissa’s eyes narrow. She doesn’t like to be told no. Melissa’s mom keeps on looking at Liza, mouth bent funny and her nose in a crinkle. Both her hands rest lightly on her bel y pooch.
Liza says to her, “Melissa says she’s getting a baby sister.”
Mrs. Richardson starts, as if she didn’t realize she was stil looking at Liza in the same way she looked at the bug corpse she had to pick up with a tissue. She speaks too sweet, as if Liza is a baby. “Does she, now? Maybe she is. But she might be getting another little brother.”
Melissa makes a gagging sound in Liza’s ear, whispers, “Brothers have a weenus.”