The hour leading up to Jimmy’s death is a mad jumble in my mind. Distraught and unable to reach Jimmy from my hospital bed, I told Lois Belcher I feared for his life. I pointed to his red flip phone on the nightstand. Her eyes widened in horror as I recounted how Tully was on his way to bash in Jimmy’s skull. She grabbed my hand and pulled me up from the hospital bed, disconnected my IV line, and yanked me through the back corridors and stairwells and out the employee entrance and into her little bitty mint-green Chevrolet Spark, about the smallest car imaginable. At one point, she said that if she wasn’t already going to lose her job for giving a KISS bracelet to Tricia, she surely was going to lose it for this. And then she shook her head and said she’d been meaning to find another job anyways.
Lois Belcher drove fast, zipping in and out of lanes. Cars honked at her, their drivers enraged at her recklessness, but we caught all the green lights and were at Tricia’s house within minutes. She waited in the car while I ran inside. I headed upstairs, where I heard voices. When I reached the landing, my heart skipped a beat at the hallway’s disarray. Books, knickknacks, and crystal figurines lay on the floor, broken, all of them presumably thrown off a bookcase that had been turned aslant somehow to open up a narrow cobweb-filled passageway, beyond which Tully and Jimmy skirmished. My palms turned cold and clammy. I hugged the hallway walls, afraid of being seen and afraid of what I might see if I stepped into that narrow passageway and into whatever chambers lay beyond it.
From somewhere in the distance, I heard a siren. Tully must have heard it too, for his voice turned panicky, and he accused Jimmy of calling 911 on him. Thinking the police would soon arrive, I worked up the courage to walk through the narrow passageway and into a disconcertingly snug office filled with shoddy old wooden furniture and shelves of decaying leather-bound accounting ledgers.
Tully’s eyes opened wide upon seeing me. I thought he was going to lecture me again to remain willfully stupid about the things that could land me in the middle of someone’s crosshairs, but then I glanced at Jimmy and the blood that bubbled and oozed from a cut in his neck. Anne Elise lay in a crib. Blood dotted her forehead. Was she wounded too? My whole life got fuzzy and dizzy. I remember Tully urging me to make a getaway with him. He wanted me to abandon Anne Elise and Jimmy, but I couldn’t do that, so he stomped out of the office and made his getaway on his own.
I looked at Jimmy. He smiled. I thought everything was going to be all right. The flow of blood down his neck had slowed. He reached out as if to hug me, but I was a step farther than he could reach, and he fell to the floor. I knelt beside him, saw the pallor that had already replaced the color in his face. No longer did I think everything was going to be all right. Jimmy closed his eyes. A serene smile came over his face. He was alive but just barely. As I convulsed in tears and agony, somehow I managed to summon a moment’s courage. I lifted Anne Elise from her cradle and brought her to Jimmy so she could say goodbye to him.
An ambulance arrived soon after I knew Jimmy was dead. EMTs scrambled into the house, followed by policemen, who detained me for hours with their questions. My presence at the scene of the crime provoked their suspicion. They viewed me as a suspect or an accomplice. A plainclothes officer read me my Miranda rights. EMTs took Anne Elise from my hands. Standing there in the musty nook where Jimmy lost his life, I broke down. Nothing made sense. I looked at my hands, expecting to find Anne Elise, and not finding her, screamed at the police to find my baby. “She’s been stolen!”
I was in shock. Two men from the coroner’s office zippered Jimmy into a thick brown plastic body bag. Police asked me to retrace the events that brought me into this house where I’d never been before. I stuttered. Confusion took hold of me. I said Jimmy had driven me here himself, rushing me out of the bed in my Watergate apartment. And then I told them that, no, I’d been outside, shivering in the hospital parking lot when a cabbie invited me into his cab and brought me here.
The plainclothes officer who’d been interviewing me closed his notepad. “We’re not getting anywhere.”
Luckily for me, Lois Belcher filled the police in about the particulars and the man she saw run out of the house as the ambulance arrived. Police apprehended Tully within an hour after he fled Tricia’s house. Jimmy’s blood was all over the switchblade found in his pocket. After some hours, I was released. A distance of less than four miles separates Tricia’s house and Sibley Hospital, but it seemed like a lifetime was lost in the time it took Lois Belcher to drive me back to the hospital. I sank back onto my hospital bed and cried for two straight hours. My heart was pierced and empty, all hope drained from my soul. Belinda came back and held my hand. My eyes were so sore from crying that I couldn’t keep them open.
A nurse brought Anne Elise to me after the doctors examined her, giving her a clean bill of health. I ran my fingers over her soft shoulders, her smooth neck, her dimpled chin, imagining them slashed and gashed, bleeding. In the back of my head, I heard Jimmy’s voice encouraging me to think happy thoughts, good thoughts. He warned me that a baby instinctually picks up on a parent’s psychic energy, but I couldn’t control the recriminations jamming my thoughts. Although I didn’t kill Jimmy, I was instrumental in bringing about his death. I’d given Tully the address where I thought he’d likely be found. Anne Elise, too, seemed confused. This should’ve been a happy reunion between us. She wanted to be nursed, but as she stared at me, it was as if she was trying to work out whether she knew me. Was I the woman who nursed her a day or two ago, or was I someone she need fear? Someone who was more than a little responsible for killing the man who might’ve been her father? She scrunched her lips, squeezed shut her eyes, making me feel useless, dispirited.
“Give it time,” Belinda said. I hadn’t told her what I did—nor had she asked. We both had our reasons to be quiet—she, too, had known something bad was going to happen when Tully stormed out of the hospital to go to Jimmy’s house. Why else would she choose to watch repeats of The Oprah Winfrey Show on cable TV in the hospital’s waiting room while Tully did whatever he was going to do? “She’s been through a lot. You’ve been through a lot. We’ve all been through a lot.”
I sucked in a breath and tried to beat back the sense of futility that came over me. Jimmy had managed to save two lives—mine and Anne Elise’s—but I wished he was here with me, coaching me how to deal with my betrayal of him. Dark thoughts raced through me. I contemplated throwing up my arms and giving up. Because of me, Anne Elise would not have a father in her life. I could put her up for adoption and concede my failures, just like my father suggested. I could never be the responsible person I wanted to be. All the things Tully suggested about me being ill-equipped to be a single mom came back to me. Honey, don’t you know love’s expensive? How are you going to afford a rug rat?
Anne Elise smiled at me, shocking me with her cuteness.
I swear, if she hadn’t smiled at me at that moment, I probably would’ve killed myself. This is not easy to admit. Her gummy smile reminded me of everything I had to live for: namely, her love, her joy, us together as mother and daughter. In her gummy smile, I found the strength to persevere. I drew her toward me, unsnapped the upper portion of my hospital gown, and felt her open mouth on my breast. And then I smelled something off. I scrunched my nose. Belinda, sitting beside me, smelled it too. Anne Elise hadn’t flashed me a smile; she’d farted.