Unexpected Dismounts (19 page)

“Allison Chamberlain,” she said, as if I dare not try to deny it.

“Who wants to know?” I said.

“Priscilla Sanborn,” she said. “I am Desmond’s aunt, and I have come to see about him.”

CHAPTER TEN

They were Geneveve’s eyes. Only my sweet friend had never looked at anyone with those eyes the way this woman was piercing me with hers. I didn’t need a mirror to know I was piercing right back.

Although she was small-framed like Geneveve, she stood tall, as if she could somehow shrink the rest of us if she tried hard enough. She straightened entitled shoulders and marched, uninvited, up the steps. I moved not at all subtly to put myself between her and the kitchen door. If this woman even thought she was coming into my home—

Okay. Pull it back. Respond in love.

If that was God, he had to be kidding. But I did respond in coldly polite.

“Have a seat?” I said, slicing a hand toward the swing.

She pulled the African lacy thing across her chest.
Yeah, lady, it’s chilly out here in March—deal with it
. The closest I could come to responding in love was not saying that out loud.

The woman finally sat like a plank on the edge of one of the Adirondack chairs and clasped her hands together in a fold halfway between praying and dealing with indigestion. It reminded me that prayer would be a good thing right now.

God, please don’t let me push her off the porch.

“You said you wanted to see about Desmond,” I said. “He’s not here.”

“I am well aware of that.” She pronounced every consonant with the precision of a needle. Hours of practice had obviously gone into erasing any trace of a Southern accent. “I just witnessed him leaving on the back of your motorbike with your boyfriend.”

She couldn’t have made it sound more like a trailer-trash event if she’d tried. I did nothing to correct her.

“I have been watching you.”

“We’re all aware of that,” I said. “If you hadn’t made your intentions known soon, the police would have been called.”

Surprise flickered through her eyes. Had she expected me to talk like a redneck?

“I was not trespassing,” Priscilla said. “I have a right to see what kind of life my nephew is living.”

“Then why didn’t you just knock on the door and ask?”

She refolded her hands. The indigestion was apparently trumping the prayer. “It has been my experience that people are much more themselves when don’t know they’re under scrutiny. Let me just get to the point, Miss Chamberlain: I do not like what I see here.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t recall arranging for a critique.”

“I don’t believe you understand the seriousness of this situation. I am Desmond’s only living relative, and I do not approve of his current lifestyle. He is being driven around like a member of a motorcycle gang. It is Sunday, yet this morning or any other Sunday I have not seen him being taken to church. And despite his living in this blue-blood neighborhood, he is still exposed to his mother’s unsavory friends.” She pursed her lips until they resembled a raisin. She was looking less like my beautiful Geneveve by the minute. “Your way of life embodies everything that is despicable about this town’s wealth and power, and I cannot stand by and watch Desmond be brought up under this kind of influence.”

“I see,” I said.

“
Do
you?”

“I think so. Here’s what strikes me.” I resituated myself against the porch railing so I could face her squarely. “You can’t stand by and watch Desmond be surrounded by love, by people who are living healed, healthy lives despite their pasts. You can’t stand by and see him taking part in a Christian community that worships at least once a week if not more. You can’t stand by and watch him exposed to male role models who embody integrity and generosity.” I put my hand up as she unraisined her mouth. “But you
could
stand by and let his grandfather, your father, die in a nursing home without his family. You
could
stand by and watch your sister try to raise the boy on the street when you knew she wasn’t capable of it. Oh, wait. You
didn’t
stand by. You went to Africa or someplace to do heaven knows what while this nephew you’re so concerned about tried to survive with absolutely no tools in the bag until his mother came to me and asked for help.” I pulled my face back. “Yes, Miss Sanborn, I do see.”

She sat stone still, and I watched her will every syllable I’d uttered to roll from her like so much water off a duck’s behind.

“You are not black,” she said finally.

“That’s the first true thing you’ve said since you got here,” I said.

“Joke if you want, but that is a significant fact. Desmond is not being raised in his own culture.”

“What culture is that? If you want to split hairs, his father was white.”

“The white world is not going to accept him as one of them.”

“You seriously have not heard a word I’ve said.”

Nor did she hear any in
that
sentence. The door from the kitchen fell open, and a forlorn figure wrapped in a towel stumbled onto the porch. Ophelia grabbed for support and landed against the swing. It knocked her to the ground where she lay, towel open, naked and raw.

I went to my knees beside her and pulled the towel across her body.

“Need I say more?” Priscilla said. “You will be hearing from my lawyer.”

I didn’t bother to answer her. Ophelia was weeping into my lap and clawing at my pants like she was trying to dig a den to crawl into. Cries threatened in my throat too, but I ordered them back with a hard swallow and pulled Ophelia up to rock her in my arms.

“I was in the shower,” she sobbed into my chest. “And I felt like it was happening all over again. I can’t get away from it.”

“I know,” I said.

“I want a drink. But I don’t want to want a drink.”

She dug her fingernails into my arm until I was sure she was drawing blood, but I didn’t pull away. It might have been the only way she could keep from crawling to my kitchen and breaking every bottle until she found something that could take away her agony. Chief was wrong. I couldn’t be that something.

“I’m going to call somebody who can help us,” I said. “You just stay right here with me while I call.”

“Don’t let them take me away.”

I found Leighanne’s number in my phone and pressed it with my thumb while I smashed my other hand against Ophelia’s wet hair.

“You’re in the House now, Ophelia. No one’s taking you away.”

Leighanne was there with Nita in less than fifteen minutes. By then I had Ophelia in a terry-cloth robe in the red chair. At first while they talked to her, she clung to my arm like a baby koala. But when Ophelia finally began to shape her story with her hands as she talked to them, I tiptoed out to the kitchen and looked at the clock.

Chief and Desmond should have been back by now, unless they’d decided to take my bike to the beach, which was fine. Actually the longer they stayed gone the better. We needed to get Ophelia past the crisis, and I needed to discuss with God just what I was supposed to do about Priscilla Sanborn.

The woman hadn’t actually said she was going to try to take Desmond from me, but then, she didn’t say she hated my guts either, and it was obvious that she did. I had everything going against me as far as she was concerned. I was white. I was a Chamberlain, although a Livengood or a Todd or an Irwin would apparently have been just as despicable.

But I was also the woman who made sure her father
and
her sister were given decent burials, and the one who had kept her nephew out of the foster-care dead end, not to mention out of his felonious father’s clutches. She didn’t seem to recognize any of that, which was like a jagged piece of glass that refused to fit back in the window it was smashed out of.

I peeked into the living room. Ophelia was crying again, but softly, and she appeared to be pouring her heart out to Nita. I needed to do some pouring myself. Chief probably wouldn’t hear his phone, but if I left a message he’d call me. But he was with Desmond.… Or I could call Hank.… No, she was still at church. Bonner, maybe? Ten to one he was still trying to convince India to ever speak to me again.

The avalanche still hadn’t hit bottom.

Okay, leave Chief a message telling him not to come by here, and then concentrate on finding a place for Ophelia. That’s what I would do.

I didn’t have a chance. The kitchen window was suddenly framing a police cruiser with Nicholas Kent at the wheel. I knew from the reluctant way he pulled himself out of the car that he was coming to tell me something I wouldn’t want to hear. When I met him on the side porch, his freckles stood out in bas-relief from blanched skin.

“Tell me,” I said.

“There’s been an accident, Allison,” he said.

I shook my head even as I said, “Chief and Desmond.”

“Yeah.”

“Are they …”

“Desmond’s injuries seem to be minor.”

“Chief?” I clapped my hand over my mouth.

“He’s alive, okay?”

“But it’s not good, is it?”

“I can’t tell you that.”

“Stop it, Nicholas—yes, you can!”

Nicholas rubbed the back of his neck. “He’s unconscious. They’ve taken them both to Flagler.”

“Okay,” I said. And then I said it at least a dozen more times as if saying it would make it so.

“I can take you to the hospital,” Nicholas said.

“Why don’t you let me do that?”

Owen was suddenly on the porch with us. In the blur of pain, I nodded.

By the time we got to the ER, I discovered a tunnel of sanity to crawl through, so that when I found Desmond sitting on the edge of an examining table with his arm in a sling and his face in a stoic stare, I didn’t sink into a puddle of okay-okay-okay. I hiked myself up next to him and let my legs swing with his.

“You all right?” I said.

“I got a broke collarbone,” he said.

“I know. The doc told me. He said if you hadn’t been wearing a helmet and leathers, it would’ve been a whole lot worse.”

“That didn’t help Chief none,” he said.

I myself knew nothing about Chief’s condition. No one would tell me anything because I wasn’t a relative. I had a feeling Desmond’s conclusions were drawn from being there.

“I couldn’t make him wake up,” Desmond said. “He just lyin’ there, and I couldn’t get him to answer me.”

“He’s not dead,” I said.

He turned his face to me, eyes as angry as they were frightened. “Don’t you lie to me, Big Al. I can’t stand it if you lie and I find out.”

“I’m not lying, son. I promise you. Officer Kent told me he’s still alive.”

The Adam’s apple swelled. “He gon’ be all right?”

I sucked in air. “I don’t know. But you and I are going to do everything we can to get him there.”

“What
we
gon’ do?”

“We’re going to love him,” I said. “And nobody can do it like you and me.”

“I thought you was gonna say, ‘We gon’ pray.’”

“That’s what I did say. Love
is
prayer.”

His mouth hardened, and he looked away.

“What?” I said.

He tried to shrug.

“Don’t you lie to me, either,” I said. “What’s going on?”

It came out in a blurt. “How I’m s’posed to pray to God when he let this happen to Chief? When he let people—”

He choked himself off and jittered his feet so hard the table absorbed his anxiety and vibrated under me.

“He let people do what?” I said. “Maybe we should start with what people we’re talking about.”

“Nobody,” he said. “I don’ feel like talkin’ no more, Big Al. I don’t remember nothin’ anyway.”

Owen appeared then, muttering about not being able to find a parking place. For once he was without similes.

“Will you stay with Desmond?” I whispered to him. “I’m going to get the doctor.”

At his nod I slipped out and headed for the nurse’s station where the still-pimpled resident I’d talked to earlier was staring into a computer screen.

“Could Desmond be suffering memory loss?” I said. “Or is he just traumatized, do you think?”

He looked at me blankly.

“We just talked a few minutes ago,” I said, “I’m Desmond Sanborn’s foster mother? He says he doesn’t remember what happened in the accident.”

“Right. That’s entirely possible,” he said. “Most people don’t, whether they suffer a head injury or not. He’s still in shock, and I’m looking here …” He turned back to the computer. “We haven’t done a CT scan because we didn’t have your permission yet. The sling was just first aid.”