Broken Wings (45 page)

“You can get out of here, Mama. You can get out of here and be with me. We’ll go to California. I promise,” I said. “I’ll just get some part-time work and raise the money for our trip. I can do that.”

“Can you go out and come back here?” she asked.

“Yes, certainly. I’ll find some place to stay and I’ll find some work.”

“Well, go on and buy some cigarettes and come back,” she said, and waved her hand as if I was dismissed.

“Mama, why are you talking about cigarettes? I’m talking about starting a life together, a whole new life.”

“I started a new life,” she said. She rocked herself again. “I don’t know where my clothes are or anything.” She stopped and looked at me. “You know what I’ve been thinking, Phoebe? I’ve been thinking your daddy did this. Somehow, he did this, got me in here. Well, you go home and you tell him it’s not going to work. I’m not going back there, you hear me, girl? That’s my message and make sure he understands it’s firm and final.”

I stood there staring at her, watching her rock herself, start to say something, stop, and then rock on.

“Mama,” I said softly. I reached out and touched her shoulder. She didn’t turn to me. She kept staring ahead.

Whatever it was that you had to reach back into to find yourself was still quite buried under confusion in her, I thought. I had been too optimistic, even arrogant, to think that I merely had to appear and all sorts of good thoughts and dreams would be revived, the mother in her would come rising to the surface like some corpse dead and under water for too long. The sunshine would resurrect it. The new hope would renew all that naturally binds a mother to her child and a child to her mother. Memories of the umbilical cord would be vivid and startle her and she and I would walk out of here like mother and daughter should.

When do you stop believing in fairy tales? I wondered. Or is it that you never stop? Even on the day you die, you think about doorways to paradise, to places without pain and sorrow where the only shadows that hover alongside you are the ones that want to dance with you.

Well, you don’t dance, Phoebe, I told myself. You walk out of here alone.

I lowered my head.

Doctor Young appeared in the doorway and opened it a bit more. I shook my head at her, and she beckoned me to come out.

“I’m going now, Mama.”

She didn’t turn to me. I drew closer and I kissed her on the cheek. She felt my tears, tears that moved to her skin, and she brought her hand to it.

“Am I crying?” she asked me.

“No, Mama, I am,” I said.

She nodded.

“Doesn’t surprise me,” she said.

“Me neither, Mama. It never does anymore. Goodbye,” I said, and walked out.

“You shouldn’t be discouraged,” Doctor Young said. “We’ve only just begun to work with her. Give it time.”

I smiled at her. Another one who believes in fairy tales, I thought.

“Where are you going now, Phoebe?” she asked.

“I’m not sure,” I admitted.

“Come to my office and rest awhile. We’ll talk some more about your mother’s condition and maybe I can help you understand,” she suggested. “Are you hungry?”

I hadn’t realized it, but I was now that she mentioned it.

“Yes, I am.”

“Good, let’s get you something to eat first.”

She took me to a cafeteria and told the cashier to charge everything to her. She told me how to get to her office and left me. I had a small salad, some macaroni and cheese, and a piece of chocolate cake, much more than I thought I would eat.

Afterward, I walked to her office. She said she had to attend to a patient, but she would be right back and told me to make myself comfortable. There was a very soft leather sofa, and I sat on it and glanced at some magazines. My eyelids grew heavier and heavier. I wasn’t aware of how tired I was from the strain of traveling here and the emotional tension I had just experienced with Mama.

I’ll close my eyes for a little while, I thought, and leaned back and to the side on the sofa. I guess I fell asleep quickly. I woke up when I sensed someone looking down at me. My eyelids fluttered like the wings of a newly hatched baby bird, and I focused on a pair of gray pants. My eyes traveled up until I confronted a state policeman.

Doctor Young stood right beside him. I sat up quickly.

“You weren’t supposed to leave your aunt and uncle’s home,” the state policeman said gruffly.

I looked at Doctor Young.

“They say you ran away, Phoebe. Is that true?” she asked softly.

“I wanted to see my mother.”

“But you didn’t tell your uncle and aunt you were coining here,” she said. “Everyone was worried about you.”

“Sure they were. Just sick with worry,” I said. Then I narrowed my eyes. “I thought you couldn’t reach her. I thought she wasn’t interested.”

“Your uncle spoke to me when I told him you were here. They have the police looking for you. You don’t want to be on the road alone, Phoebe. You’ll only get yourself into more trouble.”

“Thanks a lot,” I said.

“We have to do what’s best for you, Phoebe. You won’t help your mother’s situation by getting yourself into trouble. I’ll keep your uncle and aunt informed about your mother’s condition,” she promised.

“Don’t waste your time,” I said.

“Let’s go,” the state policeman told me, and shook his head at Doctor Young, who stepped back.

“I wish you the best,” she called after us.

“Best of what?” I muttered.

I already had the best of nothing.

What else was there for someone like me?

I was surprised when the state policeman did not bring me straight back to Uncle Buster and Aunt Mae Louise’s home. I wasn’t even sure we were going in the right direction. Most of the roadside looked unfamiliar to me. The late afternoon sun played peekaboo through trees and around houses, putting me in a daze. I dozed on and off. After about two hours on a main highway, the policeman pulled off and into the parking lot of a roadside diner. It was one of those silvery-sided ones shaped like a railroad car that looked like it had been built fifty years ago. It wasn’t very busy. There were only four cars in the dimly lit parking lot.

“I’m not hungry,” I said immediately.

“I’m not bringing you here to eat,” he replied. “Get out.”

Confused, I got out of the vehicle.

“Take your suitcase, too,” he ordered.

“My suitcase?”

“Your uncle is waiting for you in there,” he said, nodding at the diner.

I looked at the other cars and realized one of them was my uncle Buster’s. I could see he was sitting in a booth by a window and looking out at us. I gazed back at the state policeman, who was standing by his car door, and I shrugged. Then I reached in, took my suitcase, and shut the door.

Thanks for nothing, I thought, and strolled up to the diner’s entrance. As I opened the door, the state policeman drove off. I entered the diner. The sound of some country-western female singer with a very heavy twang in her voice came through the small speakers on the wall behind the counter. Two elderly ladies sitting at the farthest booth on my left turned to look at me and then went back to their conversation like two swimmers who had raised their heads for a breath.

I walked down to Uncle Buster’s booth and stood there. Where is Aunt Mae Louise? I wondered. Why would she miss an opportunity to tear into me as soon as it was possible for her to do so?

“What’s going on, Uncle Buster?” I asked. “Why did that policeman bring me here?”

“Sit down, Phoebe,” he ordered gruffly through his clenched teeth. His eyes burned up at me like two small candles flickering in a hot breeze. Rage tightened his lips at the corners. Here we go again, I thought.

“Before you start,” I said after I put down my suitcase and sat, “I wanted to see my mother. I should be able to see my mother if I want.”

“You don’t pack a suitcase to go visit someone, Phoebe. Don’t you ever stop lying? Even when you’re caught with your hand in the cookie jar, you claim you didn’t do it.”

“I took my suitcase because I thought…”

“Thought what, Phoebe? Huh?”

“I was hoping Mama would want me to live with her again,” I said quickly.

He lifted his eyes toward the ceiling and pressed his lower lip up into his upper, scrunching his chin.

“You thought she would want to live with you again? Come on, Phoebe. The woman ran out on you and your daddy. If she was so worried about you and wanted you with her, she wouldn’t have done that, now would she?”

“People change. I was hoping—”

He slapped his palm on the table.

“None of this is the point,” he said sharply. “You were released from police custody into our care, and in order for that to happen, I guaranteed the district attorney and the judge that you would not run off and you would be there to answer the charges. How did you get down to Macon?”

“Bus.”

“Where did you get the money?”

“I had some money.”

He straightened his back and peered at me.

“I kept some of the money those boys gave me.”

“What boys?”

“You wouldn’t listen to my side of the story,” I said, “so you don’t know.”

“Listen to me, Phoebe. It’s one thing to slap someone, to kick someone, even to punch him, but when you hit someone with a statue and so hard you hurt him seriously and put him in the hospital, you are always going to come out looking like the bad one, so whatever your story is, you better first face up to that.”

“If I hadn’t done it, they would have jumped me, Uncle Buster. That’s what they got me over there to do that night. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”

The waitress came to the table.

“Just some more coffee,” Uncle Buster said. “You want something, Phoebe?”

“Coffee’s fine,” I said.

“What were you doing over at the house with all those boys anyway, Phoebe?”

“We were there to…”

“To what?”

“Get revenge. But they lied to me.”

“Who lied to you?”

“Those girls, Rae and Taylor. They said her father was going to arrest the boys for having drugs and for paying for sex.”

“Paying for sex? Is that why you went there?”

“Not to really do it. Just to pretend and get them in trouble.”

“And that’s the money you have?”

“Yes.”

He shook his head. The waitress brought the coffee.

“Anything else?” she asked sullenly.

“No, thanks.”

She ripped off the check and dropped it on the table like a policeman giving someone a parking ticket.

“Trouble just seems to know your name, Phoebe. All the times you were in trouble in Atlanta, being arrested, going to court, we worried for you and for your daddy. I knew your mother wasn’t going to be much help in that area, being she was in trouble a lot herself most of the time. Mae Louise doesn’t know it, but your daddy called me first, called me at work and pleaded with me to get your aunt to agree to taking you into our home.”

I kept my eyes down and stirred my coffee.

“He was desperate, Phoebe. At one point he sounded like he was crying.”

Hearing that brought tears to my eyes, but I held them back for fear that if I didn’t, I would cry forever.

“He said he had no doubt in his heart and mind that you were headed for big trouble, that you were mixing with the worst sort of people. He said we’d be saving your life by letting you live with us.”

I looked up, but not at Uncle Buster. Instead, I gazed out the window and watched a white ambulance pull up and park. No one got out. All that was written on the ambulance were the words Emergency Transport.

“Mae Louise was very worried about Barbara Ann and Jake, but I turned her around so she would at least consider taking you in with us. We even spoke to my father, who helped convince her it would be the charitable thing to do.”

“I’m no one’s charity,” I muttered, still without looking at him.

“We’re all someone’s charity, one way or another,” he said. “Anyway, you can imagine how she feels now. First, you smoke in the house. Then you get into serious trouble in school after less than two days there and then get arrested and charged with a felony crime. On top of that, you violate the agreement I made with the authorities, and we look very bad in the community.”

“I get the idea, Uncle Buster. I’ll just get up and walk out of here and you won’t hear from me again,” I said defiantly.

“I can’t let you do that, Phoebe. Aunt Mae Louise wouldn’t take you in without your father assigning full guardianship to us, remember? She didn’t want any arguments down the road as to whether we had the right to do this or that. You know your daddy agreed to do that,” he said.

The tears were burning under my eyelids now. For some silly reason, a memory returned, the memory of Daddy and me going to a fun park together, I couldn’t remember exactly how old I was, but I wasn’t more than seven or eight at the most. He won a doll for me at the baseball game by knocking over milk containers and I carried that doll everywhere, clutching it as if it was a real baby sister. We rode a modified roller coaster and screamed and held on to each other. I thought we’d never let go of each other.

Now I was in that car alone, and I was going down very fast.

“Your mother deserted you, and she’s not capable of taking care of herself, much less a teenage girl like you.”

I looked at him sharply.

“Like me? I guess I’m just a curse on everyone I meet, right?”

He sighed deeply and looked down at his cup of coffee.

“You’re not a curse, Phoebe, but it’s not much of an exaggeration to say you’re a handful. Mae Louise is right about that, and she’s right that we just don’t have the time and the ability to change you.”

“So?”

“So,” he said, “we don’t want to see you go to women’s prison, either. Young girls your age don’t come out of there any better. Most come out worse.”

“I’m not going to any prison,” I said.

“Keeping you out of places like that means hiring expensive lawyers, Phoebe. That’s not something we can do. Mae Louise is right. It’s just a matter of when, not if, you’ll be put in with hardened criminals and become more like them. We both feel we’d be letting your poor daddy down something terrible if we let it happen.”