I looked over the waiting room again. One of the women was staring openly. “Is there anyplace nearby to get coffee?”
The main hallway could have been any corporate office, with its low-pile carpet and framed still-life prints, but signs led to a set of doors that opened automatically onto a hospital setting: clinical, medicinal, familiar. The doors started to close, then bounced back again as I convinced myself to go through them. A few people looked up from their magazines as I squeaked through, concentrating on the cafeteria sign and trying not to look too closely at anyone’s injury or pained face.
I’d almost made it past the waiting area when someone gasped, a tiny whimper meant for no one to hear. I glanced toward the sound. In a chair that had been designed to invite comfort, a young woman sat forward, awkward and careful, her hair hanging into her face. A piece of paper lay near her bright pink sneakers.
“Did you drop—” I had reached for the paper but stopped when she recoiled. Her hair swung away to reveal a violent red, puffy mouth. “Let me get it for you,” I said. I left it on the seat next to her and hurried on.
I found the cafeteria and paid for the coffee with shaking hands. The round-cheeked woman at the register smiled at me. “Maybe it will be OK, baby,” she said.
“Thank you.” I was not the patient, Joshua was safe at school. Maybe it would be OK. “Thank you so much,” I said, meaning it.
When I saw an exit, I took it. Outside the sun was shining, warmth beating down on the top of my head. I closed my eyes and returned to my skin.
The sidewalk led out and around the corner of the building. I could see the door back to Margaret, but also a group of trees across the street, the tops waving gently. I sat on a nearby bench and sipped the coffee. Maybe it would be OK.
These were not thoughts I’d entertained before. Inside, many people were having the worst day of their lives. I had already been that person. I didn’t have to keep being that person. I kept running up against that person. From experience I knew the woman in the waiting room didn’t want to be talked to. She only wanted to fade into that chair until they called the name she’d given them.
When the breeze in the treetops wasn’t enough entertainment, I turned to the comings and goings at the clinic. Old people, being helped along. A woman with two young children, one of them crying and fighting her. At one point I thought I saw Stephanie from the Boosters hurry inside.
A sheriff’s cruiser pulled up and parked in the fire lane, expelling two officers I couldn’t identify. They’d called the cops on that puffy lip. I tried to see it from the side of authority. It had to be reported or nothing would ever change.
But that’s not the way I felt. My pulse battered against my skin as I waited for someone to emerge.
My phone rang in my pocket. I answered distractedly.
“Ms. Winger, Mrs. Percy is ready to be escorted home.”
“Oh—” I held the phone back and checked the time. “Oh, right, yes. I’ll be right in.”
I hurried across the lot, discarding the coffee in a bin near the entrance. As I opened the door, I spotted Stephanie back at the other entrance, this time leaving. She moved cautiously but fast, her arm around a figure in a baggy coat and baseball cap. It might have been her son. It might have been anyone, except for the pink shoes, bright, neon, and running.
Chapter Ten
I woke with the imprint of Aidan’s crackers on my mind. When my cell buzzed on the kitchen counter the second the clock showed 8:00 a.m., I was not surprised. Maybe I could tell the future after all.
Sherry said, “The sheriff wonders if you can come in this morning.”
“What’s going on?”
Sherry paused. I could imagine her craning her neck to make sure the sheriff was at his desk. She whispered, “He won’t tell me anything. I’m dying to know.”
An hour later I had assembled myself and arrived at the same hazy glass door on the third floor of the courthouse. When I opened it, Sherry’s smile drew me in and quickly dimmed. “I think they’re on her trail.”
“Yeah.” I leaned on the counter. Sherry wheeled herself closer. Some officers talked quietly to one another in the back, one of them Chief Deputy Mullen. I nodded when he waved. The other was the young woman who’d given me daggers every time I’d seen her. Deputy Something Lombardi, but I couldn’t think what I’d done to insult her. Beyond them, the sheriff’s door was shut tight. “I think we had better get used to the idea,” I said. “It’s likely she’s a kidnapper. At the very least. She might be a murderer, too. She—well, she’s going to get caught.” The thought of it made my gut go tight with anxiety. Call-in-the-night anxiety. Moving-box anxiety.
Sherry nodded. “I don’t wish she’d get away with it so much as I wish—I wish she hadn’t needed to do it.”
“Exactly.” We considered each other, but I was thinking of Margaret, who spoke gibberish all the way back to our building the day before. I’d put her down for a nap on her couch, trying not to take in too much of the surroundings. I didn’t want to see my own future—elderly, alone—that clearly. “Didn’t Aidan’s mother have anyone?”
“Just the—”
The sheriff’s office door opened. He emerged with his head turned over his shoulder. I took a step in his direction, but he hadn’t come out for me. Behind him, a stout, stooped, gray-haired woman trailed, he the sheep dog, she the sheep. I could sense the sheriff’s gentle impatience with the woman as she inched forward in prim little pumps.
When she looked up, her eyes, though heavy-lidded slits in a leathery face, beamed utter reverence. She nearly shined at the sheriff, reminding me of the collected portraits on his office wall. All those people leaning, grasping, reaching—the walls closing in with the weight of all that need. All those people depending upon him.
I just had the one depending on me, and that was enough. Though now that I thought about it, I should have checked on Margaret this morning. I should have offered to check on her, at least, and let her brush me off.
“I just don’t know what we’d do,” the woman murmured.
“Let’s not think that way, now,” the sheriff said.
On the way past, the woman’s eyes darted all over me, then returned to the sheriff.
“You’re a true hero, Sheriff,” the woman said.
Keller, pink, directed her inch by inch toward the front door. I tried not to watch. There was something magical in the mechanics of how Keller led the woman to the door and coaxed her out. She didn’t seem hurried to leave the sheriff’s company, but she was leaving as fast as he could make her.
I watched, fascinated, until I realized I was the one here at his beck and call, for the third time in almost as many days.
When the door finally clicked behind my back, separating the sheriff from his one-woman flock, Sherry looked up from her papers and waited for him to come around to the counter.