Private Entrance (The Butterfly Trilogy) (8 page)

     The doctor promised her.

     "Let my grandfather know," Emmy Lou said to Mercy who was holding her hand. "Tell him he has to come for the baby. Don't let it go to an orphanage."

     "Don't you worry none," Mercy said, patting Emmy Lou's shoulder.
Mercy was looking at the scalpel and clamps and large obstetric forceps being laid out on a table.

     Emmy Lou clutched her abdomen:
Not yet little one. Wait. Stay with me a while longer. There's no rush to be in this world.

     When the doctor said, "Put her to sleep," Emmy Lou held on tight to Mercy's strong hand.

     As the drug began to work, Emmy Lou felt a sharp pain, and then no pain, and then the sensation of a velvet curtain being drawn around her. After that she saw, heard, felt nothing.

     When she woke she was in an infirmary bed with sunlight streaming across her blanket. A nurse was taking her pulse. "My...baby...?"

     "It died, sugar. Just a little bit of a thing, not fully formed."

     There was no cemetery at White Hills. When an inmate died, a mortician came from Amarillo to pick up the body. If there was no family to take care of the arrangements, the deceased went into the Potter's Field. That was where Emmy Lou's baby had gone, into an unmarked grave.

     She lay on her cot trying to imagine the little grave that contained a tiny wooden box, her baby lying cold and alone in the dark. Why had it died? Was it something she did, or didn't do? If she had eaten right would her baby have lived? If she had prayed harder, slept longer, fought for her innocence, written just one more letter, could she have saved it?

     Her thoughts were dark and jumbled, like the clouds grumbling over the Texas Panhandle, grief encompassing her like the gray blanket on her bed. Why was she still here, in this terrible place? Why was she being punished for a crime she did not commit? Why had the world forgotten her?

     The final straw was the letter from a neighbor back home: "Sorry to have to tell you this but yore Granddaddy died of a heart attack. I'd of come and told you myself in person excepting my arther-itis is acting up and the trip is just too long, you being up Amarillo way and all. Jericho was never the same after you was put away. Folks stopped coming to the nursery. Business went bad. The bank took the nursery and all the property, cause of back taxes. Jericho died broke. He didn't leave you nothing."

     Emmy Lou drifted off into a fitful sleep and dreamed she was burning in hell. It was hot and thick with smoke. She had always thought hell would
stink of sulfur, but it didn't, more like burning tar paper. And then a devil's imp had its clawed hand on her shoulder, shaking her.

     Her eyes snapped open. She looked up into Mercy's wide eyes as she bent over her in the dark. "Get up!" she hissed. "Come on!"

     Before Emmy Lou could ask why, Mercy had her wrist in a strong grip—since her teeth fit Mercy had put on pounds and muscle—and pulled her from the bed. Wordlessly, Emmy Lou stumbled after her, down the center of the rows of sleeping women and out into the night that was suddenly full of smoke.

     "This way!" Mercy said, and she took Emmy Lou a way she had never been before, in the direction of the guards' dormitories. She looked back to see flames leaping from the main building, and people running out now in night dresses, screaming as alarms rang shrilly in the night. More than one fire raged, Emmy Lou saw—the mess hall, the garment factory, the warden's office.

     They ducked behind a building as the guards came pouring from the dorms, pulling up pants, opening the locked gates, racing toward the barracks and huts that were bursting into flame they were so dry and old and wooden.

     Mercy ran through the open gate, and Emmy Lou saw now that she was carrying a suitcase.

     When they got to the guards' cars, they ran from one to another until they found one unlocked. Throwing the suitcase in the back, Mercy jumped behind the wheel, found keys in the sun visor, and shouted, "Get in!"

     Emmy Lou climbed in and Mercy took off before her door was closed. They shot through the parking lot, over the dirt and onto the highway, Mercy saying, "Keep a lookout if we followed."

     Emmy Lou kept looking back, as the blazing prison receded until she couldn't see it anymore, but saw no cars chasing them, no lights or siren on the deserted highway. Then she faced forward scared out of her skin as they plunged into the darkness ahead.

     After miles of not speaking or slowing the car, Mercy finally stopped at a crossroads that couldn't even have a name it was so small, smaller even than Little Pecos. But there was a bus stop sign that said Greyhound, and they
were out of Texas because they had crossed the state line into New Mexico.

     It was still dark but would soon be dawn, and Mercy spoke her first words since the escape. "I set those fires back there coz I had to get out and it was the only way. I brought you with me coz you made it possible for me to smile and eat. I will never forget what you did for me, Emmy Lou Pagan. You gave me back my pride and with it came my old fighting spirit, and I remembered that I am a human being not an animal, and I knew I had to burn that place down. But here we part ways. You have your own road, I have mine. I'm going to ditch this car and head east. You take the bus. One's bound to come along. I will never forget you, first white person ever to treat me with respect."

     She reached into the back and pulled the suitcase to the front, and Emmy Lou realized it was hers. "Before I set the fires, I got this for you. I remembered how important it was to you."

     Emmy Lou opened it and saw magazines, coins for the phone, stationery and stamps, gum and candy gone stale, lipsticks, photographs of the mother who died when she was little. An envelope containing a thousand dollars in cash. All tenderly packed by her grandfather before she was put away.

     She started to hand the cash to Mercy, but Mercy pushed it back. "I got money. Took it out of Warden's desk. Figure she owes me, all those haircuts they forced on me. Now I got some advice for you. Change your name, they be looking for Emmy Lou Pagan."

     "No," Emmy Lou said. "I'm going back."

     "What!"

     "I'm innocent. My granddaddy died of shame because of me. I am going to clear our name. I can't do it if I'm on the run."

     "You go back they lock you up for good."

     "I have to fight them, Mercy. I'll get a lawyer. I'll fight."

     Emmy Lou didn't know what else to do then except reach for the door handle. There were some big boulders at the side of the highway, she would hide behind them to change out of her prison nightdress and into the clothes in the suitcase, then wait for the Greyhound—the one that would take her back to White Hills.

     "One last thing you oughta know," Mercy said. "Your labor was induced. I heard them say. That wasn't no vitamin shot they give you, but some drug that makes the contractions come on. They was in a hurry to take your baby outa you."

     Emmy Lou stared at her. "Why?"

     "Coz your baby ain't dead. She was born alive and healthy with a good set of lungs. Ten fingers and ten toes, we counted. Warden give her to a man come to the prison and drive off with her. Warden told me to keep my mouth shut or she'd make it permanent I never have teeth again."

     Emmy Lou sat like a stone. Her eyes said it all, the big question.

     Mercy's voice softened. "I don't know where your baby went, hon. But I heard Warden say to the doc, 'Bakersfield is in a hurry.'"

     Emmy Lou had to squeeze breath from her lungs, her chest was so tight. "Bakersfield? Is that a person?"

     "Could be, or it could be short talkin', you know, like
the man in
Bakersfield."

     "Where is that?"

     Mercy shrugged. "Car had California license plates. I carried the baby out, wrapped in a blanket. The warden give her to this man driving a white Impala from California. There was a woman in the front seat, and there were two babies bundled in the back. Driver give your baby to the woman and she had a baby bottle for it. That's all I know."

     Emmy Lou stared through the pitted windshield, at the ribbon of highway that rolled off to the horizon. Everything was different now. Her baby was alive. She couldn't go back to White Hills. Not until she had found her child.

     Mercy rested a strong black hand on Emmy Lou's arm, her eyes full of wisdom at twenty. "Remember something as you go through this life. It's men makes the rules. You and I was put in prison coz we are women and coz we would not abide by men's rules. They make us have babies, then they punish us for having babies, and then they take our babies away. I killt a no good pimp and you didn't kill nobody. We wasn't convicted for that. We was convicted because we are women and we wanted to rule our own bodies."

     They were both crying now and using their sleeves. Wondering if there
were tissues in the glove box, Emmy Lou opened it and something black and heavy tumbled out.

     "Good Lord," Mercy said.

     Emmy Lou stared at the gun. It belonged to the prison guard whose car this was. Gingerly picking it up, she put it back in the glove box, slamming it shut.

     Then she said, "I'm going to find her," meaning her baby.

     "Be careful when you do, coz you will be crossing more men and breaking more men's rules and they won't like that. Men who steal and sell babies can't be saints. They be dangerous. And we runaways now, wouldn't stay put in a man's prison. Just you be careful. And change your name," she said again.

     Emmy Lou looked at the photograph of her mother, that Jericho had put in the suitcase, a smiling young woman with red-gold hair like her own. Tyler Abilene Pagan—named for the town she was conceived in and the town she was born in—tragically dying in a car accident with her young husband. Emmy Lou would adopt her mother's name.

     "I will never forget this, Mercy. Someday I will repay you."

     The hugged each other and kissed damp cheeks, then Emmy Lou got out of the car and watched Mercy drive off and disappear into the rising sun. Then she turned her face to the west. Toward California and the town of Bakersfield.

     Standing out there alone on the desert highway with nothing but cactus and wind for miles, Emily Louise Pagan, now Abilene Tyler, still sixteen soon to be seventeen and promising herself she would never fall in love for the rest of her life, made two vows: to find her child, and never to be a victim again...

     She had kept both vows, and now, thirty-three years later, looking at the battered suitcase, she was prepared to use it again. In it she had packed a change of clothes, toiletries, toothbrush, and a one-way airline ticket. Before the week was out, Abby would be gone from this place she had so lovingly created and never come back.

O
H YES!" THE GIRL SCREAMED
. "D
O IT
! H
ARDER
!"

     And Fallon did it, just as she asked, hard and fast and deep. The seamstress—Fallon didn't know her name—loved getting it from behind, which suited him fine because she had an ass like a bass fiddle.

     He had come looking for Francesca and had found the seamstress in the penthouse suite at the top of the Las Vegas Atlantis Casino Hotel. The girl was on her knees making adjustments to the hem of the wedding gown. She told him everyone had gone to lunch and then batted her eyes at him the way she had during the several fittings he had attended, so he had known she wanted it. Fallon made it a policy never to screw women of his own social standing, they got too demanding afterward. But the seamstress would be history after the wedding on Saturday. And to Fallon's pleasant surprise, having sex among virginal lace and bridal satin and maidenly petticoats gave it a uniquely erotic edge.

     Michael Fallon, owner of the Atlantis, the biggest and flashiest casino hotel on the Vegas Strip, was fifty-eight years old, rich and Italian-good-looking.
He had been born out of wedlock to a Las Vegas waitress whose Irish-immigrant parents had come to Nevada in search of work. Her father helped build Hoover Dam and had died in a dramatic plunge into what would one day be Lake Mead. Mrs. Fallon died of a broken heart, leaving eighteen-year-old Lucy to fend for herself. Her beauty and sweet personality had landed her a job at the new Flamingo Hotel, which opened in December 1946 to much publicity and fanfare. She had even had her picture taken with notorious mobster, Bugsy Siegel. When her baby was born the following summer, Lucy was twenty years old, unmarried and waitressing at the Wagon Wheel casino hotel on Highway 91.

     She baptized her baby in the Catholic church, took him to Mass every Sunday, and when he was eight Michael received his First Holy Communion. She never told anyone, not even her son, who the boy's father was, and so, from the start, the kid had problems with his ancestry.

     "Ma, who was my father?" And she would say, "You're too young to understand." Apparently he never got old enough to understand because to this day Mike Fallon still didn't know who his father was.