Between, Georgia (12 page)

“At first I didn’t realize it was the dogs. I could only think, ‘I am being killed.’ ” When I spoke for Mama, I did so directly, in first person, but there was rarely any confusion about whether I was speaking for Mama or myself.

Mama felt down the side of the bed to the control buttons and jacked up the bed until she was sitting. She signed,
I was sure I
was going to die, and I thought what would Genny do. I was so
afraid. What would Genny do if I had died?

You didn’t die, and you won’t die,
I told her.

What about the other two dogs?
Mama signed.
Did Bernese shoot
them?

I shook my hand no, and Mama’s lips compressed.
Tell her to
go back and shoot them. She’d better, or we’ll never get Genny home.

I did not interpret this exactly for Henry. I said only, “She’s worried about Genny, Henry. Excuse us for a second? I need to talk to her.” Henry nodded and went to sit in the other chair. He didn’t bother to look away. Henry could slowly grind out the alphabet and sign a few phrases, but he didn’t know enough ASL

to follow the conversation. I stopped interpreting for him and signed to Mama,
I’m taking care of it. I am going to go talk to Ona
Crabtree.

And say what?
Mama demanded.
Genny is going to be gobbling
Xanax and picking herself bloody until she feels safe.

I started to outline my game plan, but my hands stilled. Ona Crabtree was in the hospital hallway, as if mentioning her name had somehow conjured her. She stared me down with a flat gaze as she walked slowly past the open door. Fear trickled icy cold down the length of my spine, and Mama felt the pause in me. She was signing before I could pick up the conversation, asking me what was happening.

Henry, sitting by Genny’s bed, had his back to the door. By the time he turned to see what had caught my attention, Ona had disappeared on the other side of the doorway.

What? What?
Mama signed impatiently, shaking my quiet hands. I wanted so badly to lie, but I couldn’t lie to her. That was Genny’s rule. If it happened in Mama’s presence, if it happened in the room with her, Genny insisted that we never hide it.

Bernese still refused to get that, and 80 percent of our ugliest family fights began with Bernese saying, “Don’t say this to Eustacia, but . . .” While she was saying it, Genny would be simultaneously signing,
Don’t say this to Eustacia, but . . .
into Mama’s hand.

I signed,
Ona Crabtree is here.
I spelled out Ona and used our name sign for Crabtree, snapping one hand in a quick pinch like a claw and then dropping it in the same movement I would use to sign “low.” It was more complicated than a usual name sign, and it carried a negative connotation. We never used it to refer to Henry. It didn’t bother me; the fact that my mother had so named them was only more proof that she thought of me as wholly her own. I looked at the doorway. Ona was passing again, going the other way.

Henry said, “What is it?” I shook my head at him; I did not want Ona to hear me talking about her. Mama started to respond, but I told her I would be right back and stood up. She didn’t let go of my hand.

With her free hand, she signed,
Why is Ona Crabtree here?

“What’s happening?” said Henry.

He was quick enough to have seen Mama and me spelling out

“Ona.” I brought my free hand up to put my finger to my lips, hushing him. For Ona’s benefit I said, “Mama is wanting a drink; will you pour her some water?”

Henry gave me a long, level gaze that said more eloquently than words that he knew I was full of crap. Then he said, “Certainly,” and went to the table between the beds where a small plastic pitcher of ice water sat along with two cups. Ona Crabtree passed the door once more. She was like a shooting-gallery duck, appearing and disappearing, reversing and appearing again.

To Mama, I signed,
Let me go find out.

She let go of me, and I said to Henry, “Can you stay a few more minutes? I need to go see when they’ll release my mother.”

Henry nodded, giving me another assessing gaze. He was trying to hand Mama the water, but since she hadn’t actually asked for it, she was surprised by its sudden presence in her hand.

I went out the door, leaving it open. Ona was moving away from me, down the hall. I followed her. She looked over her shoulder to make sure I was coming and then picked up the pace.

She rounded a corner, and I hurried to catch up, my heartbeat in-creasing and my hands shaping themselves into fists. The coiled anger I had felt on Jonno’s porch was unfurling again inside me.

I felt like a predator going after a stringy beast made of tendons and gristle. When I turned the corner, Ona was waiting right there for me, and she clamped my arm in a bony grasp. I started, and before I could speak, she turned and began dragging me ur-gently up the hallway.

“You could have come in the room,” I said, but I let her tow me along.

“I don’t want to talk with Henry right now. I want to talk with you,” she said. “And what’s Henry doing here? Those Fretts didn’t get enough with you, they have to put a claim on Henry, too?”

She didn’t wait for me to answer but toted me back past the bank of elevators, then into a recessed alcove that held vending machines. She let go of me, but I still felt pinned under her twitchy gaze.

“Whicha one of them got bad bit?” Ona said. She was wringing her rough hands. “The blind one or the crazy one?”

“It was Genny,” I said. Ona looked at me impatiently. I glared back at her. “You know which is Genny.”

“So not the blind one,” Ona said. “That’s good. I swear, I didn’t want it much to be that blind one.”

I said, “You’re talking about my mother.”

Ona lifted her upper lip, baring her teeth like a nervous horse.

Her teeth were gray around the edges and oddly flat. My front teeth had been flat like that before braces.

She was in her early sixties, and she had lived every one of those years hard. She still lived hard, and her face showed it. But I could see my face under it, in the good high cheekbones and the narrow jaw. I had her nose, too, long and skinny and a little crooked, and about a third of her freckles. She was shorter than me now, hunched with age, her shoulders curving inward, but in the pictures I had seen of her as a young woman, she had my body, leggy and long-waisted with not enough on top. I didn’t say anything, and she relaxed her mouth and looked away, turning her head to the Coke machines.

“What happened?” I demanded. “Why did it happen? Who screwed up closing the gate?”

She shrugged. “I think it might well could have been Varner.”

Varner was the most recent in her long chain of common-law husbands. “We got into it pretty bad the night before when we was closing up the station. He went stomping out the back. He was pretty drunk.”

“Why do you even have dogs like that? They’re dangerous if you don’t get them properly trained. And you had to know they hated Genny.”

She shrugged again. “They’s good dogs, Nonny. Cost me more than four hundred apiece as puppies. Maybe I knew they had a little mean to them, but you want a guard dog to have some mean. You got to know I never thought they’d eat nobody. Not unless somebody came in the parts yard that wasn’t supposed to.”

We stood there silently looking at each other. She added, “Not like you ever ast me to get rid of them.”

“I told you I thought they were a menace.”

She couldn’t quite meet my eyes. “You never said get rid of them.”

I  turned my back on her and took two steps away, then faced her again. “I don’t think I can talk to you right now.” But I didn’t leave. I couldn’t leave until I knew she wasn’t going to call her brother over in Alabama, assuming she hadn’t already. I had to know my family was safe.

She lowered her eyebrows and looked up at me from under them, thrusting her chin out. At last she jerked one thumb at the Coke machine and said, “You got any change?”

“I know you didn’t come to check on Genny,” I said. “Why are you here?”

She thrust her chin out even farther. “I came to see you. I knew you’d come running here for them, like always. This machine will take dollars if you don’t got the change.”

I narrowed my eyes. “I don’t feel like giving you a dollar right now, Ona.”

She started rummaging in her pocketbook. At last she pulled out a crumpled bill and started fussing with the machine, trying to thread the dollar through. The machine spat it back out, and she immediately tried to stick it in again. The rollers inside made a tinny, mechanical buzz as they sucked at the bill.

She said, “I bet Bernese is already at home, isn’t she? Shot my dog on the public street with the same kind of gun that put my boy Tucker on probation.” She shook her head as the dollar bill came whirring back.

“Bernese is home on bail,” I said. “Thig did arrest her.”

“Bernese owns Thig Newell, and you know it,” Ona said. “It was wrong what she done, shooting my dog.” The machine spat the dollar back at her for the fourth time.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake.” I snatched the dollar and stretched it tight between my hands, rubbing it back and forth across my thigh to straighten it. “No one is saying Bernese should have shot that dog. Even Bernese probably knows it was wrong.” I put the dollar in the slot, and it stayed in. I pressed the Coke button, and the can clattered out at the bottom. “She was overwrought. We all are. Genny’s hurt. She really got hurt in all this. I hope you see that.”

When I looked back at her, I could see she wasn’t listening. She was staring at me with a lost and hungry look, avid and familiar.

She’d been watching me that way since I was three. That was the year Hazel Crabtree, my birth mother, ran off with a roustabout she met at a traveling carnival. She hadn’t been heard from since.

But she left a note, and in it she told Ona what an awful mother she had been and detailed the horrors Ona had driven her to. As a parting shot, she’d explained exactly why Stacia Frett’s adopted baby had such wild red hair.

My first memory of Ona may well be my first real memory. I was lying in my toddler bed, and I heard a sound like the shrieking of the damned. It was coming from below me, from the front yard. It was Ona Crabtree, beyond drunk, waving her daughter’s Dear Mama note and howling, “Bring me that baby, you bitches.

That baby is my baby, and you better bring her out to me before I light your fucking house on fire. I’ll burn you Frett bitches out and take her!”

I got out of bed and ran to look out of my window, down into the yard at the screaming creature with wildfire for hair. She was so pale and thin that her flailing arms looked like they were made of bones. I started crying, sure she had come to chew me open and eat my guts while she dragged me away into the black night.

Then the light flipped on and I saw Genny in my doorway.

And I saw my mother, hurrying to pick me up and hold me, tucking me close against her. She carried me away from the window and sat down with me on my bed. She tilted my chin so my face was directly in front of hers, within her narrowing field of vision. I looked up into her eyes, gray and calm and reassuring, and she began signing.

That was the first time she told me the story of my birth, our love story. I don’t remember the specifics of that particular telling, swaddled as it is inside the memories of the thousand other times she told me. I do remember the comfort offered by her hands as they moved for me, telling me that I was safe, that I was Nonny Jane Frett, that I was hers and no one else’s. She may have been trying to tell me who I was, or only who she wanted me to be, but either way, the thing I understood most clearly was that I was so, so loved.

As she signed, I could hear people yelling. It was probably Bernese and Ona trying to outscream each other on the lawn. My mother’s voiceless assurance, silent but so eloquent, drowned them both out, and then her moving words were bathed in flickering lights coming through the window, flashing red and blue, as the police came to restore order and take Ona away.

Now I felt Ona’s gaze on my skin like greedy fingers, and I knew, for her, this conversation we were having was not about Genny, and it wasn’t about Bernese shooting her dog. This conversation was twenty-seven years older than that. I felt the terrible force of her love closing in over me. It was fierce and hopeless, close to unrequited.

Some of my anger was pressed out by the palpable weight of her longing. I knew then, in a deep, real place inside of me, that the dog getting out had been an accident. It was just one of those things, and Ona hadn’t called her brother or his crazy sons, demanding violence. Not yet, anyway. She had come here to see if I was blaming her, if I hated her. She’d lost me on so many levels; I could feel how deeply it still mattered to her.

Deflated, I said, “Genny’s going to be fine, though. They say.”

“I looked in on y’all in that room, and she seemed plenty perky to me. She was sitting up and making that witchy-poo hand talk,” Ona said.

“Genny was sleeping in the other bed. I was talking to Mama.”

Ona eased closer to me. “That’s good, then. I was worried maybe the dog got at her voice box. What’s the blind one doing in the hospital when it was that other one got hurt?”

I tried to hang on to my patience, but it was her genes that had left me with such a short supply. “My mother’s name is Stacia Frett. You know her name is Stacia, not ‘the blind one.’ ”

“But she
is
blind,” said Ona, defensive.

“Yes,” I said.

“And deaf, too,” said Ona.

“Yes. She was born deaf.”

“How can that be a mother,” said Ona. She wasn’t speaking angrily; in fact, she sounded like she was musing, but I could tell by the way she refused to meet my eyes that she was riled. “She can’t see what you’re up to, or hear you, and it’s a miracle she didn’t drop you on your head and make you pure retarded.”

“Maybe she didn’t drop me because she was sober,” I said.