loose end. Didn’t your mama teach you that?”
“I can untie my shoe,” Lucy objected haughtily. “They just won’t come off.”
Without asking for an explanation, Lynn tugged on the laces. The rotten ends fell off in her hands. “Sit still,” she ordered, and went to the kitchen for a knife. The rest of the laces split easily under the blade. She gripped the shoe and was about to tug it off when the girl cried out, digging her fingernails into the bar of soap.
“What’s the problem?”
The girl only shook her head, biting down on her lip as Lynn slid the sneaker off her tiny foot. The bloody, pus-encrusted sock answered her question.
“Kid,” she said, covering her nose against the smell, “how long have you been out there?”
The attic brought back memories that Lynn would have preferred to leave buried. It wasn’t a place they had used often, only when putting away the clothes Lynn had outgrown and finding the box that held her next size. Mother had always called it “going shopping,” and encouraged Lynn to try on everything as soon as she found the right box. It had been a game of sorts, one of the few times Mother would rest, reclining on an old chair propped in the corner as Lynn tossed clothes everywhere in her excitement. Clothes. Clothes and shoes.
Lynn was guessing as she made her way through the antique trunks Mother had used for storage. Lucy couldn’t be nearly the size she had been when she was five. It might be best to go for a size lower. She popped the lid on the right trunk, glancing through the contents for something for the girl to put on when she was out of the tub.
“Something warm, something warm,” Lynn muttered to herself as she tossed aside clothes. The rain continued to fall, pounding out a staccato beat on the roof of the attic. What little light there was came from a small circular window. A pair of shoes rolled out of the pile of clothes she was holding and rattled to the floor. She considered them briefly, but tossed them aside. Lucy’s feet had practically become a part of her shoes, the sides had burst long ago and water had seeped into them. Judging by the state of her feet, the little girl hadn’t complained, so no one had told her to take her socks off and dry them.
She made a pile of warm clothes, choosing only two or three outfits. Lucy wasn’t moving in, she reminded herself firmly, she was only staying until . . . until when? The look the boy had shot her yesterday had said Lucy’s mother wasn’t going to make it. Once he was free, would the boy move on or stay to care for the little girl? Lynn hadn’t thought past the initial action of taking Lucy with her, when Eli’s gray eyes had begged her to. Suddenly angry with herself, Lynn snagged two pairs of warm socks out of the trunk and slammed the lid shut.
A high-pitched singing filled the downstairs, along with splashing noises. Lynn paused before opening the door; the unencumbered sound of happiness was so odd to her that she allowed Lucy’s off-pitch, unfamiliar tune to fill her ears, like the rising sound of the filling water tanks. A massive splash and wasted water cresting over the edge of the tub made her crack the door to the bathroom.
“Hey in there, you need to be getting out soon. Water’ll get cold and I don’t need you sick on top of everything. I gotta see to your feet as it is.”
There was a long pause. “Will it hurt? My feet?”
“Probably,” Lynn answered, thinking of the flaps of skin that had peeled off along with the socks.
“I think I’ll stay in a little bit more.”
“C’mon now,” Lynn said, pushing her way into the bathroom. “You’ve been in there long enough.”
Lucy’s frail body floated on the surface of the tepid water. Her ribs stuck out so far that water had rushed into the valleys in between them. More dead skin had sloughed off her feet in the water; strips of it trailed from her heel. Lynn wrapped her in a towel, astonished at the lack of weight in her arms. The girl burrowed into her cotton fortress and admired her new outfits while Lynn picked through her hair for dead lice and nits. There had been a thriving civilization on Lucy’s head, and it took the better part of the afternoon to rid her of them.
Lynn saved the feet for last, once Lucy was happily snuggled into her basement cot and eating corn. The warm bath combined with food and the heat from the fire lulled her. Lynn waited until she had fallen asleep, her small hand still tightly gripping the spoon. Her feet were a mess. Dead skin hung in flaps from blisters long since burst, a fungal infection covered most of her left sole, and all her toenails had grown inward in response to the shoes that hadn’t left her feet. It was a miracle that the girl could still walk.
The dead skin came off first, Lucy’s feet twitched in response but there was no real pain. The baking soda paste Lynn used on the fungus caused her to whimper a little, but she soon quieted. The toenails presented a real problem. Cutting them out was going to be painful. Three of her toes were inflamed with the pressure, two of them had pus-filled cysts under the skin. It would have to wait until Stebbs was there to hold her down.
There was a small supply of painkillers hidden away with the guns, but Lynn could never remember using them. When she was about Lucy’s age one of her eardrums had burst from an infection. It had swollen so tightly that the eventual rupture had spewed pus, blood, and small pieces of her eardrum. She’d held her tongue tightly against the pain, knowing that Mother had been splinting her own broken ankle a week before without so much as a Tylenol.
Lynn’s hand snuck to her ear as she remembered. Mother had been furious with her, even as she had sponged the stinking mess of pus from her face. “You should have told me,” she’d seethed. “I would have given you something.”
But Lynn was partly deaf at the time, and Mother’s words had been muffled. They were both saving the pain medications against another day, a different, more horrible wound. The fever had passed, her eardrum had grown back, and the painkillers remained untouched. Lynn pressed one of Lucy’s infected toes experimentally, and the girl whimpered in her sleep. Lucy had done the same, hidden her pain to save others the worry.
Lynn pulled the covers down over the small white feet, tucking them under her heels. “When it’s time, we’ll use the medicine, little one,” she said softly. “You don’t need to suffer more than you have.”
Stebbs appeared a few hours later, at dusk. The reverberations of his awkward footfall on the basement steps caused Lucy to stir but not wake. Lynn lifted the edge of the sheet that hung drying from the rafters. “Shhh,” she admonished, gesturing toward the small form humped underneath the blankets. “Don’t wake her.”
“Sorry,” Stebbs whispered, then gestured for her to follow him.
Lynn grabbed her rifle and tucked a pistol into her belt. Aboveground, the sun was leaving the last hint of a pink stripe in the sky. Stebbs considered it while talking to Lynn. “Think she’ll sleep long?”
“Don’t know. Not around kids much.”
He grunted in response.
“She fell asleep right after her bath,” Lynn added. “I don’t imagine we’ll be long down at the stream anyway.”
The implied question was not answered, and she glanced at him out of the corner of her eye. “Sorry about last night,” she finally muttered. “I shouldn’t have pushed you.”
“I shouldn’t have pushed you either,” he said.
It was her turn to grunt. They both watched the horizon for a few minutes, their gazes drawn to the south. “All right then,” she hoisted her rifle across her shoulder, “Let’s go and be done with it.”
They made their way to the creek, conscious of the rustling of nocturnal wildlife all around them. A raccoon lumbered across their path. He stood on his hind feet and studied them closely, his black nose wiggling while he tried to place their scent.
“Scat,” Stebbs hissed at him. The coon lowered himself and tumbled into the night, unconcerned by their presence. “Used to be we shot them that acted like that,” Stebbs said. “Meant they were sick with the distemper.”
“And he’s not?”
Stebbs shook his head. “Doubt it. Just doesn’t know what to think of people, is all. We’re not as common as we used to be.” They trudged on a few more minutes in silence.
“Almost there,” Lynn said when she spotted her own boot prints in the wet bank. They stood out black and hollow even in the dying light of dusk. “This is where I spotted the girl.”
