Tempest Rising - Diane Mckinney-whetstone [59]
Suddenly she just needed to hear one or the other of their voices. Needed a link to her life before now, needed it confirmed that what her life used to be wasn’t just a smoky illusion. Suddenly she refused to ponder the consequences, Ramona’s threats about jeopardizing the opportunity ever to see her aunts and uncles again if they made contact while the judge’s order was in effect. Suddenly Shern, the oldest, the most patient, the one who impressed over and over to her sisters that it wouldn’t be much longer, “any day now,” she’d tell them, “just hold on, and before you know it, we’ll be going back home,” right now couldn’t last another second without going back home, even if it was just going home in a sense through the telephone line.
She uncurled herself from the bed and stood and smoothed down her velvet dress. She wiped her face with her hands and then rubbed her hands through her hair; the thick wool of her hair easily absorbed the wetness of her tears in exchange for a slight greasy film. She walked across the bedroom, which was bathed in an orange afternoon sun, and eased the door open and listened for the downstairs sounds. They were eating dinner, she could hear metal against glass, Mae talking; she had an irritating voice, Shern thought, like a fingernail against a blackboard. Now Mae was laughing, sounded like Hettie from across the street was down there too. Good, Shern thought. Ramona’s probably busy serving the meal. Just keep talking, keep laughing, please.
She crept through the hallway, which suddenly seemed long, as she tried to get to the telephone just inside Ramona’s bedroom. How many times she’d seen that phone over the past month when she walked past Ramona’s room. How many times she wanted to pick it up to scream out for her aunts and uncles to come and rescue them. But she had taken Ramona’s threats to heart, plus the phone had a lock on it. She’d seen Ramona pull the key from the pocket to that ugly navy duster she always wore, the one with the huge hideous flowers. Ramona had even sent Shern for the key once when she was getting ready to use the phone in the kitchen and the lock was in. “You, oldest,” she commanded, “go reach in my duster pocket that’s folded at the foot of my bed and bring me down the key that’s in there.”
Shern’s prayer now as she stepped inside Ramona’s room was that Ramona didn’t have the duster on. There was the phone right on the edge of the dresser right next to the door, there was that little cylinder right in the number one on the rotary so that the dial wouldn’t spin beyond that little black tab, and there, thank God, on the foot of the bed was Ramona’s ugly flowered duster.
Shern inched her fingers into the pocket, pulled up a stick of Doublemint gum, went to the other pocket, felt her fingers go weak as she wrapped them around the key and rushed to the phone. It took several tries to insert the key into the cylinder because her hands were slick from when she’d rubbed her hair and now they were sweating too. Finally she turned the key in the cylinder and pulled it out of the number one hole.
Her heart felt like thunderclaps in her chest as she dialed the number, and then she heard it, her uncle Blue say in his sherry-tinged voice, “Speak to me.”
Just hearing his voice loosed a floodgate in her throat. She couldn’t even say hello, just a moan came up from her throat, and then another one, and she had to cover her mouth so that they wouldn’t hear her downstairs.
“Who is this, please? It’s your dime, but it’s my time, so spill it or chill it,” her uncle Blue said.
She tried to speak, but just a huge bubble carrying a sob passed through her lips, and now she could hear her aunt Til in the background. “Who’s that on the phone, Blue?”
And then Blue’s voice got further away as he said, “Some uneducated fool playing on the phone, just breathing hard and saying nothing.”
Then Shern whispered as loud as she could without shouting, “No, it’s me, it’s me, it’s Shern.” And now she was talking to a dial tone and staring in Ramona’s face.