Slob - Ellen Potter [40]
“I didn’t want to tell her. If I told her, she’d run upstairs and I would run after her and then we’d both be killed. So I told her that I thought it was the furnace.”
I glanced over at Nima to check his expression. He didn’t look appalled. I went on.
“After that there were some thumping noises, like stuff was being thrown around. Jeremy got out of bed and started for the stairs. I ran after her, and grabbed her to stop her, but she squirmed out of my grasp and ran up the stairs. Her hair was long, just like it is now, because our mother told her to wear it like a badge of honor, so I grabbed it and held her back just before she opened the door. Then I ran by her and at the top of the stairs I blocked the door that led out into the deli. She was pounding on me, trying to get around me, but I wouldn’t move. I just stood there and wouldn’t let her by. I was afraid the man was still out there. Jeremy started to scream, but I quickly clamped my hand over her mouth and held it there while I waited. I don’t know how long I waited. It felt like hours. It was probably minutes. Then everything went quiet. Completely quiet. I opened the door. You could hear the hum of the cooler, it was so silent. My parents were lying on the floor behind the counter. It was—” I felt my lips crumpling, so I put my hand in front of my mouth to hide it.
“No need to say,” Nima said, slipping off the sill and shutting the window. He tossed the cigarette butt in a glass and sat down beside me on the couch.
I felt a terrible ache in my throat, but I wanted to finish. “I called 911. It was Zelda who answered. Her voice . . . well, it’s like when you are a little kid and have a nightmare and you’re trembling and your mother holds you close and tells you that everything will be fine, and you just sink into her voice, just sink. She stayed on the phone with me until the police came. She kept telling me that I had done the right thing. She meant about holding Jeremy back from bursting into the deli. I didn’t tell her everything. I didn’t tell her that I had heard the screaming and the two gunshots and didn’t do anything. I never told Jeremy either. I think she would have hated me.
“Later Zelda tracked us down. She told me that she couldn’t stop thinking about us. She hears all kinds of awful stuff every day, but she said that my voice haunted her. I never told her, but her voice haunted me too. Whenever I started to think about that night, just as the memory started to get unbearable, her voice would break in and wrap itself around me and protect me.
“We had nowhere to go to, no relatives, just a grand-mother who was in a nursing home. Zelda stepped up and said she’d take us in. Because of her job, she knew people who were able to speed things up and keep me and Jeremy out of foster care. She adopted us legally last January. She didn’t make us call her ‘Mom’ or anything but she said we could if we wanted to. Jeremy never wanted to. She doesn’t have the same feelings toward Zelda as I do. She wasn’t the one who spoke to her that night. But I told Jeremy that we should at least try to call her Mom. After everything she’s done for us.”
“They did not catch the man who did this?” Nima asked quietly.
“There were no witnesses. It was late at night, and cold, so there weren’t that many people on the street. The magazine store next door was closed, and so was the clothing store on the other side of the deli. The people in the building upstairs had heard gunshots, but no one had seen anything. We had a surveillance camera, a good one, wireless. But my parents weren’t really good about checking it every so often to make sure everything was working. One of them must have taken out the tape at one point and forgotten to replace it. The camera had caught the event, but there was no tape in the machine to record it. So that was that. It looked like the man would never be caught. Then I saw the show about the ghosts in The Black Baron Pub, and I remembered that I still had the deli’s surveillance camera system.