Follow the Stars Home (14 page)

“Don't go in there,” Amy said.

“Excuse me?” Buddy asked, one hand on the doorknob.

“I said”-Amy swallowed-“leave my mother alone.”

“I'm not going to be told what I
can and can't
do in my own home,” he said. “Not by you, not by your mother.”

“We live here too,” Amy said. Her heart was thumping again. For courage, she tried to bring Dianne's face to mind. But she was too lost in the monster maze for it to help.

“Shut up, Amy,” he said. “You might try turning off the TV while you read. Your last report card was nothing to write home about.”

Amy's report card was her second sorest subject after the fact that her mother spent most days in bed.
Feeling herself shrivel up like a salt-sprinkled slug, Amy made herself stare at Buddy. “You hurt Mommy,” she said.

“What'd you say?”

“You hurt her,” Amy said. “I saw.”

“Leave fights to the grown-ups,” Buddy said. “You don't understand nothing about it.”

“Anything
about it,” Amy said. “Not
nothing.”

“Wise mouth, just like your mother. She's a show-off bitch, so why should you be—”

Amy's eyes filled with tears. How could some rat like Buddy say that about her mother? How could her mother stay under the same roof as him-and keep Amy there with her? Before she knew it, she was on her feet, flying across the room.

“Don't say that about her.”

“You heard her last night, singing ‘You've Got a Friend’ like she has a voice. Stupid, that's what she was. Karaoke night without a stage.”

“That's her and my father's song!” Amy yelled, staring up at him.

By the stunned look on Buddy's face, Amy could see that he hadn't known. He grabbed Amy's arm and twisted it. His ugly face came to a point, his lips and eyebrows and cheeks meeting at the end of his nose.

“You wanna rub my face in it?” he asked. “Then let's see how you like it.”

Buddy had never been rough with her before. He yanked her arm, pulling her across the room. Amy screamed, but all Buddy did was throw her down while he opened the puppy's cage. Cowering in back, the puppy's eyes were wide with terror. Buddy tore him out of the cage, flinging him across the room.

“Buddy, please,” came Amy's mother's voice. It
was weak and thin, full of fear and panic. “Leave her—”

“Rub your nose in it,” Buddy said, jamming Amy's face down into the puppy's newspapers. “See how you like it, little smart-ass.”

Amy's mother was screaming, tugging at Buddy's arm, and Amy was gagging and crying. The smell choked her, stinging her eyes and the back of her throat. The puppy, in his terror, must have squatted on the carpet, because the next thing Amy knew, Buddy had let go of her neck and was kicking the dog.

“Goddamn son of a bitch,” he bellowed. “Stupid fucking animal. You no-good, mangy mutt-get me a sack. Get me a sack right now.”

Amy's mother ran into the kitchen after him. Amy's face was wet with tears and barf and puppy pee. Her mother was begging him to calm down, Buddy was knocking things over in his rage to make a sack materialize from deep in the utility closet. Amy had no doubt that he intended to drown the dog, and that made her head clear in a hurry.

The puppy had run under the bed. Following him into her mother's room, Amy didn't hesitate. Buddy, for all his vileness, had given her an idea. She yanked a spit-yellowed pillowcase off one of the pillows. Crawling straight under the bed, she didn't waste time with any sweet talk. She just shoved the puppy inside.

Then, with Buddy knocking things left and right in the kitchen closet, cursing out all women, Amy's father, James Taylor, and the weak-bladdered puppy, Amy ran out of the house. The puppy tussled in the sack, scared half to death.

“Going somewhere better,” she promised the puppy
as he bumped against her back. “Somewhere much, much better.”

The puppy yelped and wiggled. His claws were sharp, and he tried climbing Amy as if he were a tree sloth and she were a tree. His jaws snapped in the darkness, occasionally getting her shoulder and the side of her head. In her haste she hadn't grabbed a jacket or hat. She was barefoot-and she didn't have real beach feet yet.

She heard tires squealing. Buddy always peeled out when he was mad. Cutting through backyards, Amy ran two streets over. Her feet hurt, and her shoulder was bleeding from where the puppy kept biting her. She was crying but silently. She had had plenty of practice hiding her tears, and this wasn't the time to have some neighbor deciding to drive her home.

A car glided around the corner toward Amy. It wasn't Buddy, because the muffler didn't sound like a machine gun mowing down an entire village. Amy was crying so hard, she almost couldn't see. She looked over her shoulder, past the puppy flailing in the sack. The car was a truck. It was green. It had seaport and aquarium stickers in the window.

“Hey there, Amy,” Dianne said, grinning as she rolled down the window. “How about a lift?”

“Help me, Dianne,” Amy wept, almost dropping the dog as she opened her arms wide. “Help us, please!”

Dianne drove straight home. Amy sobbed the whole way. The way she looked over her shoulder made her seem like a fugitive on the run. Julia was silent. Her hands drifted questioningly in space. When they had parked the truck and unlocked the workshop door,
Amy ran inside. Crazy-eyed, she stood in the middle of the room, clutching a writhing bag. Blood dripped down her upper arm.

“Amy, what happened?” Dianne asked, approaching slowly.

“I had to take him,” Amy said. Her feet were planted on the floor, her body was tense as a spring. She held the bag with a kind of mad purpose, like a zealot about to commit a terrorist act in the name of patriotism.

“Take who?” Dianne asked. “Honey, you're bleeding….”

“Can I let him out?” Amy asked, starting to cry again. “My arms are tired.”

“Yes-” Dianne said.

Amy lowered the bag, which appeared to be a filthy pillowcase, and a black puppy scrambled out. He was all legs, like a young deer. The whites of his eyes flashed with terror. Squatting where he stood, he peed on the wood floor. Then he dashed under the daybed in the corner.

Dianne walked straight to Amy. She approached her gingerly, unsure of what she might provoke. The child was shaking, pale, close to shock. Her lips were bluish-pink, and they opened and closed like a little fish. She stared at Dianne with helpless longing, and when Dianne opened her arms, Amy ran straight into them.

“You're safe,” Dianne whispered to the sobbing child, not knowing exactly what she needed to be safe from. “I promise.”

“It's the puppy I'm worried about,” Amy cried. “His name is Slash, but I can't call him that. It's an awful name. We have to think of something else. …”

“Yes,” Dianne said, looking down at the blood, at
the darkening red marks on Amy's neck. “I agree. He's much too sweet for Slash.”

Helping Amy take off her shirt, she saw that the bleeding had come from where the dog had scratched and bitten her. Amy said almost frantically that it hadn't been his fault, that he'd been scared and confused, that he hadn't meant to hurt her. Dianne agreed that he probably hadn't. The cuts were superficial, and she washed them gently with soap and water. But there was one mark the dog hadn't made.

All along Amy's shoulder, at the crook of her neck, was a purple handprint. Dianne could see the palm mark, the four fingers on Amy's collarbone, the thumb pressing down her back into her angel wing. There was no medicine Dianne could rub on the bruises. Staring at them made her sick to her stomach.

“Amy, who did this to you?”

“No one,” she said.

“I don't mean the bites. You have a bruise here that—”

“I bumped my shoulder,” Amy said. “Getting the puppy out of his cage.”

Dianne tried to breathe. Whoever had hurt her couldn't have left more blatant evidence if he or she had tried.

“Did someone hit you, Amy?” Dianne asked, and she found her voice shaking.

“No!”

“You can tell me, honey. I promise it's okay—”

“I'm fine,” Amy said. “It's just the puppy. I wanted to show you the puppy.”

After letting Dianne rock her for a few minutes, Amy became anxious. She checked under the bed for the puppy. Raising her eyes, she looked for Stella: nothing but gray ears showing in the basket. Then
she looked out the window. Finally, she went to sit with Julia. Pulling her chair close to Julia's, she put her head down on Julia's tray. Julia's hands formed delicate patterns in the air, as if she were trying to soothe her friend.

Dianne went to her desk. Turning her back on the girls, she dialed Alan's office number. It was late, nearly six-thirty, but Martha answered.

“Hi, Dianne,” he said a few moments later.

“Hi,” she said. “Amy's over here.”

“Good,” he said. “How is she?”

Dianne kept her voice low. She found it shaking, not in her control at all. “Someone hurt her, Alan,” Dianne said. “She says they didn't, but they did—”

“I'll be right over,” he said abruptly.

It's a terrible thing to hope for marks, but that's what Alan was wishing for on his way over to Dianne's house. He had a Polaroid camera in his medical bag. As a pediatrician, he had seen many horrors, heard many lies. The malnourished children deprived of food. The cigarette burns said to have come from the radiator. The belt marks supposedly caused by falling.

In those cases Alan took swift action. One call to the police, and Alan would oversee the caseworker driving the child to the foster home. No questions asked. Beating and burning your child is not allowed.

But other cases were more subtle. The word
abuse
, incredibly enough, had shades of meaning. There were the cold parents who provided food and presents but withheld love. Never hugging or kissing their kids, never reassuring them with that all-powerful loving touch. Several shades more cruel were the parents who punished verbally, who took their own
frustrations and limitations out on their children-called them stupid, ugly, wicked, slutty nobodies. Words the parents no doubt felt applied to themselves, but Alan wasn't their psychiatrist and had no sympathy at all.

Alan had special love for the children of depression. Children whose parents had once meant well, whose love was real and true; caring people who perhaps felt more pain than the rest of us, who couldn't make that pain go away. Some, like Alan's mother, turned to drink. Others, like Amy's, pulled the covers over their head, filling their children with loneliness and despair.

Buddy Slain wasn't a parent, but he was part of Amy's world. If Amy had marks on her body, Alan bet Buddy had put them there. And Alan would take her away from Tess Brooks, no matter how much she said she loved her daughter, before the sun went down.

Amy's heart was pounding. Sitting with Julia, she began to calm down though. Julia was doing her hand dance, casting good spells over Amy's head. Sending all the bad thoughts away, far away. Julia's hands were so gentle. Every so often, passing by Amy's ear, they'd brush her skin, caress her hair. Julia's voice was extra soft today, whispering “gleee, gleee” in a message of sweet peace.

Amy had pretended to be resting while Dianne called Dr. McIntosh, but she'd heard every word. So she had to decide what to do.

In one fantasy Dianne adopted her. She would become Amy's mother. Julia would be her little sister, and they would all be so happy here on the marsh.
Old Mrs. Robbins would be Amy's grandmother. Amy would get first pick of all the library books, and she would have the most perfect grammar in seventh grade.

This fantasy had merit. She continued on, making it more perfect. Why shouldn't she and Julia have a father? Dr. McIntosh. He and Dianne could fall in love. They would be good parents, and everyone would be happy.

Julia sighed as if she were having the same fantasy.

Amy had always loved dreaming. Dreams took her out of herself, away from her fears and worries. She had pretended to be dogs, cats, dolphins, ants, bats. She had imagined Buddy dying and her father coming back to life. She had lulled herself to sleep picturing her and her mother swimming underwater on a coral reef, being pulled through crystal waters by beautiful dolphins, becoming those dolphins themselves, swimming their way back to her father. So many happy dreams …

A tear rolled down the side of Amy's nose. Right then she had to face reality. Dr. McIntosh was coming over. He was going to ask her about the bruise Dianne had seen, and Amy was going to have to lie. It was that simple. She knew the procedure. CWS—Child Welfare Services—had a file on her already. It wouldn't take much for them to take her away from her home.

And sometimes Amy wanted to go.

That was the part that caused her grief. The desire, deep in her heart, to get away from her dark house. To leave the screaming and drinking, the fights and yelling, the drawn shades and Buddy's beer bottles behind. There were families in the world like Dianne and Julia, places where life wasn't perfect but
the people loved one another anyway. Amy would only have to say the word, and Dr. McIntosh would put her in a family like that.

But it would mean leaving her mother.

At that thought Amy swallowed a sob. Amy loved her mother more than anything, more than the perfect girls loved their perfect mothers. The feeling shook her whole body from head to toe. She kept silent so Dianne wouldn't hear and come over. But Julia heard. Or she sensed. Whichever, her hands stopped dancing. They settled onto Amy's head.

Amy just lay there, quietly crying. Julia's hands rested steady, gently patting Amy's hair. She breathed in her Julia way, the air rasping in and out, with no words but whole libraries of meaning. Amy knew the language of no talk. She spoke it herself in a thousand different ways-even then, to the cat on the shelf and the dog under the bed. She lay still, silently communicating with her friend and the animals.

“Amy?” Dianne asked. “Can you talk to us?”

“No,” Amy said calmly for the third time. “No one hit me. I just bumped my shoulder going into the cage.”

“Amy,” Alan said, looking her straight in the eye.

Children were born honest. They came into life knowing nothing but the truth: The bath was wet, the towel was dry, the milk stopped their hunger, their mother smelled like Mother. Some kids learned to lie as they got older, and it always got under Alan's skin. He could almost always tell. Amy had been doing it for a while.