Pie Town - Lynne Hinton [62]
“Not with him,” Malene answered. “He had a dream or a message. I don’t know.” She stopped.
“What?” Roger asked.
“He told the nurse that the little girl down the hall . . . the little girl who came in a couple of days ago from the car accident I told you about, remember?” she asked.
Roger nodded. He recalled hearing about the terrible crash that had killed both of the child’s parents and her two siblings and almost killed her. The staff at the hospital had been trying to contact family members, but they lived out of the country and had not been located. Malene had called Roger to see if he knew any way to assist them. He had made some calls to other sheriff’s offices and to a few contacts across the border into Mexico, but he had not found any additional information.
“He told the nurse that something was wrong and the little girl was in trouble,” Malene reported. “We tried to talk Alex out of it, tell him that he was just having a dream. We thought maybe his fever had spiked again, but he finally got so adamant that she go down the hall that she did.” Malene shook her head again.
“And?” Roger asked. He had moved onto the edge of his seat, waiting for the rest of the story.
“And somehow the electric cord to her alarms had come unplugged,” Malene said. “When the nurse entered her room, the little girl had gone into cardiac arrest and wasn’t breathing. They did a code blue and saved her.” She took the last sip of her water.
“And Alex knew this?” Roger asked.
Malene nodded. “He knew it before it happened. It was crazy.”
“Has he talked about it this morning?” Roger asked.
Malene shrugged. “He woke up at six and asked about her, but that’s been it.”
Roger looked over at his grandson. He knew Alex was a special boy, had some relationship with Malene’s dead mother, was more sensitive than any child he had ever met, but Roger had never known anything like this to happen. He glanced back over to Malene. “And how is the little girl?” he asked.
“Critical, but alive,” she replied. “And still has no family with her.”
“I’m sure the local force will figure it out,” Roger responded. “They’ll track down the grandparents.” He watched Alex sleeping, and the conversation paused between the two.
“What do you think this means?” Malene finally asked.
Roger shrugged. “It just means he’s more special than we even knew.”
Malene didn’t respond. “I’m afraid it means he doesn’t have much more time here,” she said softly.
Roger turned to his ex-wife. “I don’t think that’s what it means at all,” he said. “Why would that have to be what this means?”
“Mama,” she answered.
“What about your mama?” he asked.
“You know that she had this extra way of knowing things just before she died,” Malene replied. “She knew Angel was going to give us trouble. She knew we were getting divorced. She knew Lawrence was getting deployed.” Malene shook her head. “It was just like this,” she said. “And it was just a couple of months before she passed.” A tear ran down her cheek.
Roger leaned over and wiped the tear from Malene’s face. “It’s not the same,” he said. “She was sick and he’s just . . . he’s just a little boy.”
“Still. . . .” It was all Malene could say.
“Still nothing,” Roger noted. “It’s not the same,” he repeated. He turned back to look again at his grandson, who was resting more peacefully than Roger had seen him do in more than two weeks. “He’s just special” was all he could think to say while Malene nodded, dropping her face away from him and trying to trust what Roger was trying so hard to make them both believe.
Chapter Twenty-three
When Trina woke up after a nap on the Thursday a few days after Alex came home from the hospital, she knew for sure what she had been trying for weeks to cover up and make go away. She was pregnant. She had fallen asleep after a dinner of leftovers from the diner, curled up on the sofa, the television blaring news of movie stars and their decorating styles. She had worked the breakfast shift for Francine, home from Phoenix but sick with a virus. She had seen Roger before he left to go pick