Juno's Daughters (32 page)

The emergency room lobby was unnaturally bright. Jenny held Frankie on her lap, with Frankie's head buried under her arm. She glanced at Lilly and in the fluorescent light she could see how these last hours had drained the color from her face. Her older daughter's eyes rose to meet hers, desperate for reassurance.

“She'll be okay,” said Jenny. She was determined, whatever had happened, to make it true.

The receptionist had looked at them through glasses she pushed back on her nose, like a librarian, and told them to have a seat and wait. It had been fifteen minutes now since they'd arrived.

Lilly paced. “She's bleeding! When are they going to call her back?”

Jenny hissed at her, “Sit down, Lilly.”

She rocked Frankie the best she could with her gangly legs stretching nearly to the ground. A woman in a bathrobe was momentarily distracted from her own misery by Lilly's pacing and stared openly at her. The intercom called for a Dr. Malvo to please come to Intensive Care. An ambulance screamed into the circular driveway and a team of people wheeled someone from the van through the lobby to the back with astonishing speed. Jenny barely glimpsed a tuft of white hair on the gurney as they passed. Suddenly a nurse was standing in front of them saying Francesca? Francesca Alexander?

Frankie lifted her head, Lilly paused, and, though Jenny had written the name on the card, all three of them stared at the nurse in momentary confusion. Then Frankie slid her feet to the floor and climbed out of Jenny's lap.

The nurse led them through the double doors by the reception area and into a long corridor. “Do we need to do a rape kit?” she asked gently. She was wearing scrubs with small dinosaurs patterned all over them.

Jenny's tongue felt like a balled-up sock in her mouth. She had not considered this as a possibility. She pulled Frankie away from her body so she could look in her face.

Frankie shook her head no.

“Well, thank God for that,” said Lilly.

The nurse gave Frankie a gown and Jenny helped her change. In addition to the bloody patch on her face, she had purple bruises on her thigh and side that made Jenny suck in her breath when she saw them.

A young doctor came in and washed his hands in the office sink. For the exam, Frankie sat on the table in a gown with her legs dangling over the side. The remnants of her summer tan made her skin look vaguely yellow in the fluorescent light and her bare feet were large and puppyish at the end of her skinny legs.

The doctor placed his hand under her chin and lifted her face toward the light. She started to cry.

Lilly came to stand beside Jenny and Jenny bent her head to Frankie. Jenny held her smaller child's hand and pressed her cheek ever so gently against her damp skin while Lilly stood close by. She breathed in each small gasp or anguished murmur that escaped from Frankie's mouth. She met each of those noises with soothing sounds of her own.

The doctor pressed the pads of his fingers against her jaw. “Does it hurt here?” He turned her head to the side to look in her ears and Frankie winced. “I want you to call if she has lingering pain in the abdomen. I'll give you a prescription for codeine and a few samples of a disinfectant cream.” He directed his instructions at Jenny. “You'll need to put it on three times a day for a week,” he said, and he left the room.

Jenny smoothed Frankie's hair down on her head carefully to avoid the wounds on her cheek. “Why didn't you take the ferry back when you found out that Ariel wasn't here? They said you bought a round-trip ticket. Didn't you have it?”

Frankie brought her fingers up to her mouth and gnawed at her nails, something she had not done for years. “This kid stole my backpack. My ticket was in that little zip purse with the beads, you know, in the side pocket?”

“Oh, honey. Why didn't you call me to come get you? I would have in a second, I . . .”

“There were these other kids . . .” Frankie started to cry again, “Who said they knew the one that did it and they said they would help me get it back again. And if I got it back then I wouldn't have to make you spend all this money to come out here to get me and all, but they were tricking me to get the twenty dollars that guy gave me and I know I shouldn't have listened to them.” She gasped for breath. “I'm so sorry, Mommy. I'm so so sorry.”

Jenny bit her lip. “It isn't important, Frankie. Shhh. I'm here now. Lilly and I are here with you now.”

The nurse returned carrying a pair of scrubs and a sweatshirt that said Seattle Children's Hospital. She set these on the exam table next to Frankie. Lilly's clothes, the ones Frankie had taken, were in a filthy heap on the floor.

“Wait.” Lilly unzipped her hoodie, pulled off her tank top, and then, in front of the nurse, stepped out of her skirt. She handed her clothes to Frankie and reached for the scrubs.

L
illy and Frankie curled up under blankets on the hotel bed to watch
Scooby-Doo
on the Cartoon Network while Jenny ran water in the tub. She scrubbed the sides with a bar of hotel soap and a washcloth before closing the drain. She perched on the side of the tub and moved the hot water around with her hand. She started to call for Frankie and then thought better of it.

Instead she walked to the side of the bed and reached for her hand under the covers. “Come take a bath.”

Frankie let herself be led into the bathroom, but until the very last minute she kept her eyes on Daphne, Fred, Velma, and Shaggy. When they got into the bathroom Frankie looked at the water and began to shiver uncontrollably. Jenny pulled the hoodie over Frankie's head and helped her step out of Lilly's skirt. The bruises had begun to turn new colors by then, an ugly yellow and green. Jenny helped her lift her leg over the side of tub and kept holding on to her until she had sat down in the water.

“Okay?” Jenny reached for the shampoo she had bought in the drugstore on their way back from the hospital. Motel 6 didn't provide any for free.

“Stay here.” Frankie pulled her knees up to her chest and water splashed over the edge. “Please?”

“Sure. Of course.”

Jenny perched on the side of the tub and poured water over Frankie's head with the hotel glass until it was wet through. She squirted some shampoo into the palm of her hand and worked it through Frankie's hair from the scalp all the way down the ends. She soaped the washcloth and washed Frankie's ears, her neck, her back, and holding each one in her hands, her arms. Frankie sat perfectly still with her eyes on the wall of the shower. Tears streamed down her cheeks and her little pointed chin looked soft and dimpled. When she emerged from the hot water Frankie's toes looked like freshwater pearls. Jenny wrapped her in a towel and retrieved a pair of Lilly's tie-dyed long underwear and a long-sleeved shirt from Lilly's backpack.

“How is she?” whispered Lilly.

Jenny shook her head and carried the clothes into the bathroom. A streetlamp in the hotel's parking lot shone directly into their room, so while the girls snuggled under the covers, Jenny anchored the curtains shut with a chair. She turned the television down low and lay on her back and traced the stains on the ceiling with her eyes. First Frankie, then Lilly, fell asleep on the bed, their legs touching and their faces bathed in the flickering cartoon light. Frankie was sucking her thumb.

The girls were still sleeping at noon, and though she hated to do it, Jenny woke them up. She didn't know how long they'd have to spend at the police station, and the last ferry of the day left Anacortes for Friday Harbor at seven-thirty p.m. She was determined that they not spend another night off the island. Officer Arnold was gentle and mercifully brief, and after interviewing Frankie he let the three of them escape to a diner that served breakfast all day. Jenny ordered pancakes and eggs and biscuits with lots of butter and jam. They hit Interstate 5 with the three of them bouncing in the cab together, Jenny behind the wheel, Lilly on the other side, and Frankie, with a pair of Lilly's shorts over Lilly's long underwear, in the middle.

Jenny had slept little, and the late afternoon sun glinted off the oncoming traffic into her eyes. She put on a pair of cheap sunglasses she kept in the truck and adjusted the sun visor.

Lilly looked at her with concern. “Do you want me to drive for a while?”

“No. I'm okay.” It was just over eighty miles now to the ferry landing. They had two hours to get there and get in line.

Frankie stretched her face toward the open window. “I think I'm going to throw up.”

“Mom, pull over,” said Lilly. “She's not kidding.”

Jenny flipped on her blinker and headed for the right lane. Frankie began to gag. They took an exit onto an overpass and just as the truck bounced over the rocks on the shoulder, Frankie vomited down the front of her clothes. Lilly opened the door and tumbled out onto the gravel. Frankie followed, another burst of biscuits and eggs and hot chocolate hurtling from her mouth into a pool on the dirt. She kneeled, retching, until nothing but bile and snot came out of her. Jenny rubbed her back and Lilly fished through her backpack for more clothes. All she could find was the tank top and skirt she had worn the night before.

Frankie wiped at her face with her sleeve and gagged again. “I want to die,” she said. “I can't stand it. I want to die.”

Jenny took some paper napkins that Lilly handed her from the glove compartment and wiped the vomit and the tears from Frankie's face. “Don't say that, sweetheart. Please. Please don't say that.”

Jenny and Lilly helped Frankie change in the truck and then tossed the vomit-covered clothes into the back. Jenny uncapped the water bottle and told Frankie to drink. Just a sip. As soon as they started back toward the freeway, Frankie leaned against Lilly and fell fast asleep.

They drove over the Stillaguamish River and then crossed into Skagit County.

“School will be starting soon,” said Lilly softly.

Jenny glanced down at Frankie. Her eyes were moving underneath her closed lids. Her skin was still faintly green. “I know.”

Lilly looked straight ahead. “I mean for me.”

Now that they were close to home Jenny's exhaustion had been chased away by an end-of-the-road spurt of energy. She took advantage of a straight stretch in the highway to overtake a tractor that was moving so slowly even her own vehicle could shoot past.

“I wish you could stay,” she said. Her eyes filled with tears and she chewed the inside of her cheek to keep from crying. “I know it's wrong of me and I do want you to go to school.” She smiled at a memory of Lilly doing a sudoku puzzle on the ferry. “I want you to be an entomologist, if that's what you want to be. But, God, Lilly. I'm just going to miss you so much.” She gripped the wheel so tightly that her knuckles turned white.

“I know, Mom,” said Lilly softly. “I love you, too.”

An eighteen-wheeler hauling freight for Walmart slowed abruptly, and she put on the brakes and glanced at Lilly. “It's not the same. When you're a mother it's different, it's as if you . . . well . . .” She sighed with the difficulty, with the enormity of it all. “You'll understand someday.”

Lilly shifted Frankie's head to a less bony part of her shoulder. “I
hate
it when you say that.”

“Yeah?”

Jenny turned onto the two-lane road that headed through Anacortes to the ferry landing. From the line of headlights facing the opposite direction she figured the boat had already mostly unloaded. She looked at her watch. Jenny had called Mary Ann from the diner and told her they would try for this boat, but if they made it, it would be just barely. “Well, tough.”

Lilly poked at her sandal with her bare toe. “You are.”

“What?”

“Tough,” said Lilly.

Jenny remembered Lawrence, then Ariel, sitting at her kitchen table stirring his tea with a chopstick and said, “I do what I have to do.”

The shops selling shells and fishing gear were all familiar now, the drugstores and the banks, the grocery where she and Theresa used to go when the kids were young and load up on cheap food and diapers to take back on the ferry.

“We're just going to make it.” Jenny barreled down the hill toward the kiosk where they sold the tickets. “Friday Harbor,” she said, and turned for her bag.

Lilly had the money in her hand.

“Slow down,” said the uniformed woman as she handed over the ticket. “They see you. They'll wait.”

Jenny took the ticket and steered the truck toward the end of the line of cars. She repeated the cashier's words in her mind as they approached.
Slow down
. How much easier that was to say in Anacortes than in Seattle. Soon they would be home and the streets would smell like fish and pine needles rather than urine and garbage. The sidewalks would be full of faces they knew.