My mother did go with Officer James eventually. Granny Dee went with her. LaoLao stayed with us.
She took us all upstairs, Aaron too, I don’t know why no one thought that he should go home but nobody was thinking any kind of sense – how could we, when nothing was making any kind of sense – and she started running a bath, a scalding hot bath, and stripped the boys down into their little-boy boxers and told them to get in, and they still hadn’t said a word, they were like zombies, and they got into the tub and she poured a whole bottle of shampoo in there, so much that the water frothed and foamed over the sides of the tub, and then she sat down on the rug and pulled me into her lap and enveloped me in herself and held me and rocked me and pet my hair and every once in a while I would feel something wet drip down her face and onto my head or the back of my neck.
Eventually Aaron spoke up.
“Ma’am,” he said. “Why are we in the tub?”
My LaoLao didn’t hesitate. “Because I cannot hold you all at the same time.”
Aaron thought about this and then said, “So the bath is holding us?”
LaoLao nodded. “It’s holding you and keeping you warm. Like how I am doing to Wing.”
Aaron nodded. “But, ma’am? It’s getting cold in here.”
LaoLao took the boys out as if they were just little things, wrapped towels around them, dried them, then got out some old bathrobes and made them put them on. They didn’t protest once. They were ten-year-old boys and they let my old Chinese grandmother wrap them in threadbare terry-cloth robes. She put me in my pajamas and herded us into our parents’ room.
“Get in bed.” She pointed at the bed in case it wasn’t obvious.
And we did. We all got in my mom and dad’s bed. Aaron and Marcus clambered in first, sharing a pillow, and then I squeezed in between Marcus and LaoLao. I saw the shadow of my dragon dancing on the wall. No, not dancing. Raging. I heard my lioness growling under the bed. It was the first time I’d seen them since I’d fallen off the swings, and even though I was hurting so bad, hurting more than when I broke my ankle that time, more than when Heather Parker was mean to me, more than I’d ever hurt before, knowing that my lioness and my dragon were there with me and that they were angry and hurting too made everything just a little bit better. The way having a thin blanket with holes in it was better at keeping out the cold than having no blanket at all. I wanted to peek under the bed, to see my lioness, to pet her and ask her to get in bed with us and keep us safe, but LaoLao was holding me too tightly for me to move.
“It is OK,” LaoLao said.
But nothing was.
Now it is seven years later and Officer James is at my door, telling me that there’s been another accident. I realize I haven’t breathed since I saw who was at the door.
“Wing?” he says, and his tone is the exact same tone as when he said “Winnie?” to my mother and then announced that my father had been shot and killed, but he can’t be here to tell me that because that already happened and it isn’t like it can happen again.
“It’s Marcus.”
CHAPTER 8
I haven’t sat in the back of a cop car in over seven years, not since I used to ride in my daddy’s car when he finished a shift. It makes me dizzy. It makes me sick.
LaoLao and Granny Dee are on either side of me, LaoLao’s girth spilling over onto me while Granny Dee’s bony hip digs into me with every turn.
“My mom,” I say as we fly through a red light, the sirens on and the blue and red lights flashing. I raise my voice to be heard over the rise and fall of the echoing siren. “My mom!”
“I sent someone to the restaurant,” says Officer James, keeping his eyes on the road as he swerves around a pickup truck. “She’ll meet us at the hospital.”
He hasn’t given us any details except that there was a car accident. Marcus was driving. They had to use the jaws of life to cut him out and he was rushed to the hospital. There were two people in the car with him. Officer James doesn’t know their names. One of them was killed instantly.
There was another car too. Just the driver was inside. Officer James doesn’t know if she survived or not – just said that the car was wrecked “real bad.” And then he closed his mouth and wouldn’t tell us anything else.
As we swing into the hospital parking lot, our siren trying to scream louder than the ambulance sirens in a piercing discord, he looks at me with red-rimmed eyes. “I came as soon as I knew who it was,” he says. “I recognized the car. I sent someone else to the restaurant and I came straight to your house. I had to.”
“Thank you,” I say in a wooden voice, which is the strangest thing in the world to say to someone who has shattered your family with their words not once, but twice. A weird thing to say to someone who should have saved your daddy but didn’t.
“It’s the least I can do,” he says, and I wonder whether my daddy’s death haunts him.