A Map of the World - Jane Hamilton [124]
Alice was the second out. She wasn’t to her station when she saw them. I stood up, both trying to get a better look at her, and trying to block her view. She was wearing a pink bandanna around her head. It was tied up tight, in a way that made her look as if she didn’t have any hair. She had a bruise on her forehead, a large purple and black and green circle, like a third eye. She had a panicked, hunted look in her two eyes. I turned to find the girls, trying to think how to keep them from seeing her. They were still watching the operators. I reached for the phone to say something, anything. She pressed against the glass as if she’d forgotten that it separated us. But even as I was yelling, “Pick up the phone,” she was backing away, making for the guard. The girls were at my side then, trying to see over the dividers. I thought for a second that she was going to fight the guard, but the minute he touched her she sank into his arms. She was limp, even as he pushed her off. He was shouting at her to stand up, to get moving. She kept sinking back into him. He finally had the sense to put his arm around her and let her out the door. He shook his head. He kept shaking his head as if to say, Not another crazy one.
Chapter Fifteen
——
THE FIRST TIME I thought we’d have to leave the farm might well have been the day at the beginning, when I called around trying to find a sitter for the girls. I had called Suzannah Brooks and Cathy Johnson to ask them to take the children while I went to visit Alice. I remember standing with the phone in my hand watching Emma and Claire run through the sprinkler. They didn’t know yet that they were blackballed. They were skipping like they had nothing to worry about. Emma figured she’d wear twirling skirts to school in the fall and drink milk out of pint cartons. Kindergarten in her book was in the neighborhood of heaven. I guess I’d known as I watched both of them dancing in the spray that we couldn’t stay in Prairie Center. Still, it would be a lie to say I had seriously thought of selling the farm before that last night Theresa came down. I hadn’t known before just how easy it is to lie. I hadn’t known either, what it costs.
We got out of the visiting room at the jail as fast as we could on Sunday. The girls had at the most only seen Alice’s form, almost a shadow it was. “She can’t come down today,” I said, as we tore along the corridor to the outside.
“Why not? Why not?” Emma cried, running along to catch up with me.
“She’s sick,” I said.
Emma stopped by the locker where we had had to stash the car keys. “She is not sick!” The veins in her slender neck bulged when she screamed. “You made that up. She just didn’t want to see YOU!”
I slammed the locker shut. The door buzzed and I got out. I walked down the block to the car without hearing the girls screech after me. There was glass, a condom on the walk, scraps of Styrofoam in the gutter, paper twisted into the metal of the chain-link fence. “You’re lying,” Emma shrilled at my back.
After we settled in the car I suggested we go find a beach, that we take a look at Lake Michigan. The name comes from an Ojibwa word that means “It is a big lake.” I said so, to the girls. I could see Claire in the rear-view mirror, staring out the window. There were tears slipping down her cheeks. Emma had her head down and was crying to herself. What they were learning, what I was teaching them, was to grieve like adults. “We’ll find a beach,” I said. “We’ll hunt for some good skipping stones.”
“Shut up,” Emma said to her lap.
We did go to the lake, and we did gather stones. We found smooth gray and black and white stones.