Antoine pulled into a mall and parked.  Harry followed him carrying the kid through the door, between a liquor store and a Goodwill clothing outlet, marked in faded yellow letters:

OFFICE HOURS 10-2

M,W,Th

The doc sat alone at a desk in a single room.  Harry laid Suchin on a bare examining table with metal stirrups on one end.

“That’s repulsive,” the doc said swiveling back and forth in his chair, his short-sleeved pale tan shirt with yellow brush-like swirl patterns unbuttoned halfway down the slope of his hairy chest.  He was a hundred pounds overweight.

“Hit by a car.”

“Take her to Charity.” 

“She’s illegal.”

“I don’t do trauma.”

Suchin’s leg spasmed for a few seconds.

“The big man pays you damn good,” Antoine said.  “Too much.”

“Not for this.”  The doc belched; Antoine was close enough to whiff the scent of decayed oranges and cheap booze–like the man’s insides needed to be flushed down a toilet.

The doc stood up.  He took a wooden tongue blade from his shirt pocket.  He lifted the kid’s dress fabric with the blade careful not to touch anything bloody.  Still with the tongue blade, he pushed up a swollen eyelid and stared at a pupil.

“She’ll live.”

“Aren’t you going to x-ray or something?”

“Do you see an x-ray machine?”

“She could die.”

“She isn’t going to die!” he said.

The doc picked up a wallet off his desk and left through a back door that went straight to a service alley.  “Office is closed,” he said as he slammed the door shut.

Antoine pointed for Harry to get the kid.

“Where we going?”

“Auntie’s,” Antoine said.  “She’ll do something.”

Suchin felt the big arms cradling her again, her mind clear.  Her stomach churned.  Her tongue probed the sore little craters where her teeth were gone.  Her leg ached but she thought she could walk if she had to.  With her non-blurred eye she searched from habit for locks on the doors.  Then, when the sunlight glared on her, she squeezed her good eye closed and went limp to let Harry think her mind had shut down her body for a while.

The Lincoln got to Auntie’s in Plaquemine Parrish just before five, a rooster tail of almost white dust pluming up behind that monster car.  Auntie went downstairs out of the farmhouse, stood there waiting as they drove up, her arms crossed.  She was heavy, big boned, and barren; her blood Indian, Creole, and Black, and every corpuscle heavy with this love-hate feeling for kids.  It was a mystery why she took care of them at all after being in the trade for thirty years.

“You whack this one?” Auntie said to Antoine as Harry worked at getting Suchin out of the car so she didn’t hurt.

“Watch your mouth,” Antoine said.

Auntie’s hands probed Suchin’s thigh while she was still in Harry’s arms.  Suchin cried out.  She pushed on Suchin’s belly.  Suchin moaned.  She looked under Suchin’s swollen eyelid.  Suchin’s eye was seeing well now and she locked on Auntie’s gaze.  Auntie frowned and turned away.

“Put her to the right of the door in the bedroom,” Auntie said to Harry and pulled Antoine’s shirt to move him a few feet so no one could hear.

“Cash up front.” she said.

“She’s big money.  Next to top in the convention trade.  She good for it.  We ain’t got cash.”

“Out of where?” Auntie asked.

“Mere Bull.  In Kenner.”

“Tell Mere Bull she to bring that cash down here personal.”

“You got my word,” Antoine said sincerely.

“Ain’t that a lot of slippery shit?”   

Suchin lay on her back on a cot with no mattress.  The only window had a yellow shade pulled down and the dim light from the filtered sun wasn’t strong enough to define the floral details on the scruffy wallpaper.  Two bunk beds were stacked as a unit against the opposite wall.  The lump of a girl bulged under a sheet, the ends of her straight long hair–shiny as a black, lacquered piano–hung over the edge of the lower bunk.  The upper bunk didn’t have a mattress.

Harry was gone, but his words stayed with Suchin.  “Give it up,” he said as his breath tickled her ear, “The beat don’t work good.”  He didn’t touch her.

Suchin dozed to the sounds of flies chasing each other around the room.  She woke just before all the light faded.  The girl under the sheet hadn’t moved.  Suchin could hear Auntie bumping around somewhere down below on the first floor.

Suchin was achy all over, but less now.  Her leg throbbed but when she stood and pressed down, the pain eased.   

“Who you?” she called to the lump on the bed.

She waited a minute.  “You living?”

She hobbled over slowly and peeled back the sheet.  She sucked in a rush of air.

“You beautiful,” she said suddenly aware of trying to use her very best English.  The girl had the delicate sculpted features of a porcelain doll and her eyes were wide open, the whites showing all around irises so brown they seemed almost as black as the pupil.  She stared straight through Suchin, deep into some other galaxy.

“My name’s Suchin.  From China.  Six months.  Came on a ship.” 

The girl didn’t change.

“You sleep like that?” Suchin asked.  “Your eyes open?”

She thought the girl’s eyes focused a little, her lips parted slightly.

“You like it here?”

The girl closed her eyes slowly, she was breathing faster, and she turned away.  She wasn’t a druggie, Suchin thought.  Her eyes were too hard for that.

Auntie’s mountainous form filled the open door behind Suchin.  Auntie came into the room, light from the hall making a faint halo behind her.

“She talk to you?” Auntie asked.

Suchin didn’t move keeping her back to Auntie.

“Well, don’t you be bothering her,” Auntie said.  “She’s having some time to herself until she talks again.” 

Suchin stayed stone still, not knowing how to feel about Auntie.  But she wasn’t afraid.

Auntie gave Suchin a bowl of red beans and rice with a plastic spoon stuck in it and pulled up a chair next to the girl to begin feeding her soup from a Campbell’s can.  “Mushroom only thing she’ll eat.  Don’t like tomato,” she said, mostly to herself.

When she finished Auntie turned to take Suchin’s empty bowl.  “You moving better than I thought.  You scamming Auntie?”

Suchin stayed quiet.

“Well, you pick up that chamber potty and empty it in the bathroom down the hall before I lock up again.  Wash it out good too.”

For hours after Auntie closed the door and turned the key in the lock, Suchin lay on her cot; but no sleep came.  She wondered where that girl’s eyes were looking, what they saw.  She wondered if she was thinking about the men.  How men treated girls.  She wondered if the girl thought too, if you did right, maybe someday a man take you away and be good to you.  All the girls had heard of that happening—a nice man.  But they never knew anyone it happened to, only knew by the story telling that skipped from girl to girl like a flu bug.

—–

It was still half dark when Suchin woke.  The lump girl was sitting on the floor cross-legged, her hands on her stomach and she was rocking slow–front, back, front.

Suchin eased off the bed and stretched, watching the girl.  Suchin’s leg and chest hurt less.

Two glasses of water and a saucer with two oven-cooked rolls sat on the floor inside the locked door.  Suchin drank and ate a roll.  “You want this?” she said tempted to eat the second roll.  But the girl said nothing and Suchin left the water and the roll close enough for her to reach.

Suchin’s leg didn’t bend easily, and she lay down on her side, her legs straight out to one side, her head propped up on her hand with her arm on the floor bent at the elbow.

The black-haired girl rocked.  Forward.  Back.  Forward.

“My mother’s dead.  Father dead too,” Suchin said staring under the bed as if to find some hidden non-person in the dark recess.

Back, forward, back, the girl went on.  Her eyes never blinking.

“Yours too?  Your parents?”

Forward, back, forward, about as fast as a pendulum in a giant clock.

“It’s okay.  I know you’re like the rest of us.  Sometime you need to get away.”

The girl still rocking.

The door unlocked and Auntie came in.  “In the name of God, leave that child alone.  You too healthy and she too sick for you to keep bothering her.”  She yanked Suchin up to sitting then grabbed the girl’s shoulder to stop her rocking and held the glass of water to the girl’s mouth.  The girl swallowed a few times.

“Now for you,” she said grabbing Suchin.  “I’ll take you to the bathroom to wash that dried blood off.  Then I’ll sew up that dress and give it a good wash.”

That night after Auntie put them both in bed, Auntie came back in with a flashlight because the light socket for the screw-in bulb in the ceiling was empty.  She sat in a chair next to the girl’s bed, her back to Suchin.  She opened a book with a torn red cover.  Suchin was lying on her cot, looking to the ceiling.

“‘It was Toto,’” Auntie read in a low singsong voice.

“Who was Toto?” Suchin asked.

“Shut your face,” Auntie said shining the light straight into Suchin’s eyes.  “This is Helen’s story.”

Suchin turned away but not far enough so she couldn’t hear.

“You don’t need story telling,” Auntie said to Suchin before turning her flashlight back to the book again to read.

“‘It was Toto that made Dorothy laugh, and saved her from growing as gray as her other surroundings.’”  Auntie paused.  “‘Toto was not gray; he was a little black dog, with long silky hair and small black eyes that twinkled merrily on either side of his funny, wee nose.  Toto played all day long, and Dorothy played with him, and loved him dearly.’”

“Who’s Dorothy?” Suchin couldn’t keep from asking.

“She’s an orphan.  Now hold your tongue.”  But the meanness was not in her voice.

Auntie continued loud enough that Suchin could hear.  “‘Today, however, they were not playing.  Uncle Henry sat upon the doorstep . . .’”

Suchin wondered what Uncle Henry would do to Dorothy, then listened all about Kansas and Oz, a world that, as Auntie continued reading, Suchin imagined might be the real America.

The lighting bolt lit up the room bright as day just after two AM.  Suchin sat straight up and in the after-flash, the room seemed pitch black, even the thin strip of pale yellow under the door from the hall overhead bulb was wiped out.  Suchin stood up, limped to the window, and raised the shade.  The sky swirled with grey clouds; sheets of rain streaked across the yard and lightening pulsed the pewter sky.

The girl was sitting too, her eyes fixed on Suchin.

“It’s okay,” Suchin said, recovering quickly.  She had survived too many nights in the open hut of her grandmother–or more recently the lean-to she shared with her uncle for a while–with storms raging around her–to worry.  She sat next to the girl.

“We got to get away,” Suchin said.  “You understand?”

The girl stared at her with eyes black in the darkness.  She turned her head and her black hair flowed around her face.

“Now!”

“No,” the girl said.  Her voice was deep and raspy.

“We can do it.”

“No!”  She shoved Suchin away and she took a deep breath and screamed.

“What are you doing?”

“You go!” the girl said.

“You too.”

“I can’t,” she said.  “I don’t think right sometime.”

The girl’s eyes had shifted from terror to some fierce determination.  She screamed again, getting off the bed and she took a chair that Auntie had been reading in and smashed the window twice so all the glass was gone.

The key in the lock turned and as Auntie rumbled in, the girl, after a quick glance of clear-bolt sanity thrown at Suchin, headed for the window, throwing herself half out, but not far enough to fall.

Auntie lunged across and grabbed the girl by the legs.  “You crazy!” she said.  “It’s a long way down.”

The door was open.  Suchin slipped out, felt her way down the stairs, out the front door, across the porch.  She could see orange groves outlined against the sky.  Rain swept across her face until she reached the protection of the first line of trees.  She stumbled on, running as fast as her sore leg would allow.  It would be many minutes before Auntie could follow.  She heard Helen still screaming, demanding Auntie’s attention.  Even hurting, Suchin knew she could keep her distance from someone as big and slow as Auntie.  In minutes she reached the river and headed down stream looking for something that would float.  Soon the rain stopped, the wind died, and an almost full moon threw glints on the surface of the water.

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