Tempest Rising - Diane Mckinney-whetstone [95]
No, that wasn’t it. It did have to do with those girls. She had become accustomed to emerging from her morning dreams to their sounds, whether it was muffled cries, or Bliss and Shern arguing, or the three whispering, or even just their rustling around on the bed and causing the springs to creak. But this morning there were no sounds sifting through the wall, just a rigor mortis–type stillness, as if even the air in the room were locked into place.
She jumped out of her bed, pounded her feet to the floor, fists balled, face fixed like someone ready to do battle. She punched her arms through the air down the short stretch of hallway to get next door to those girls’ room. She just stood there after she threw open the door, and then she was assaulted by the emptiness in the room, as if the emptiness were an oversized hand that slapped her repeatedly in the face. She turned her head to and fro, trying to shake off the emptiness, cursing it, and yelling for the girls as she did.
She ran through the house, then, snatching open doors and then banging them shut. She called out their names as she ran. “Bliss, Shern, Victoria, don’t pull this shit on me.” She was sweating and shaking and gasping. “Where the hell are you?” she shouted. She went out on the front porch; the only footsteps interrupting the fresh coat of snow were her own. She looked up and down the block in its gray and white stillness, moved like a flooding stream back through the house, then down into the basement, even looked under the furniture down there. She burst through the door to Addison’s bedroom in the shed, yanked the blanket from him just to make sure. Finally she went into Mae’s room. She stilled her shaking by the time she stood at the foot of Mae’s bed, Mae’s ward leader, Bernie, nestled under the sheet against Mae, snoring with his mouth open. The gray outside air rushing through the venetian blinds made the scene on the bed appear like a black-and-white movie on a cheap TV.
Mae sat up all at once. “Who’s that?” she asked squinting through the gray air. “Ramona, is that you? What’s wrong with you busting through my door without announcing yourself? I ought to knock the living shit out of you.” She pulled the bed sheet over to cover herself and, in so doing, left Bernie exposed.
“They’re gone,” Ramona said. She looked away from Mae, preferring to look at the naked mass of the ward leader than watch Mae try to cover her breast, then her thigh, then her breast again. “The girls, they’re gone, they’re gone, gone.”
“What you mean, gone? What the fuck you let happen to those girls?”
Bernie snorted and shook himself awake and let out a small scream seeing himself exposed like that. He grabbed the edge of the sheet wrapped around Mae, and they played tug-of-war with the sheet, leaving them both half naked.
Ramona turned her back on them and talked to the wall. She threw her voice against the wall as if her voice were a sledgehammer and she needed to crack through the wall. “Gone, gone, they’re gone,” she said. “I looked everywhere. They’re gone.”
There was a small knock on Mae’s door, and Addison edged the door open and stepped lightly into Mae’s bedroom, asking, “Everything okay, aunts?” He looked at Ramona quizzically, facing the wall. “You on punishment, cuz? Looks like all you need is a dunce’s hat.” He laughed and then looked at the bed, at Mae and her ward leader fighting over the larger piece of sheet. “Awl, damn,” he said, covering his eyes and backing out of the bedroom. “Shit.”
Bernie huffed and puffed and threw up his hands and didn’t even try to cover himself anymore. He jumped off the bed and grabbed his pants from the chair and did cover his front with the pants. He bounded out of the room and slammed the bathroom