Deanie sucks in breath. “No!” she cries through the mask of bandage and swollen tissue.
Started by her vehemence, Spellman shakes her head. “Really, young lady, I advise against it. I just closed a seven-inch wound in your face. I don’t like the thought it was for nothing.”
“Fuck my face!” Deanie blurts. “ ‘s fucked anyway.”
Spellman pales.
Sam tightens his arms around Deanie. “All right,” he soothes, “all right.”
She thrashes in the enclosure of Sam’s arms, tearing the IV line from the back of her hand and sending the dish of vomitus spinning from the bed. Blood from the IV cut spatters on Sam’s already stained shirt. But she is quickly too exhausted to maintain her hysteria.
In the truck he has started ahead of time to get it warmed up, the heat and whatever’s left of the anesthetic in her system pull her rapidly down into semiconsciousness and she sleeps peacefully with her head on his thigh.
29
“Home,” he tells her in the driveway but Deanie is beyond response. Her head falls back against his shoulder and she is slack and boneless in his arms.
Glimpsing him through the window, Reuben opens the door. Sam carries her into the kitchen. From astride Reuben’s shoulders, Indy chortles her delight at seeing Sam. Pearl looks up from stirring what smells like chicken soup. Her welcoming smile fades to concern.
“This is Deanie,” Sam tells them, “she needs a place to stay.”
Reuben hands Indy off to Pearl and follows Sam as he takes Deanie through the kitchen to the couch in the living room. Squatting next to her, Sam arranges cushions under her head. Reuben fetches blankets and watches anxiously as Sam tucks Deanie up. With a nod of his head, Sam indicates the kitchen and they all withdraw, leaving Deanie unconscious on the couch.
“Her mother’s boyfriend busted her face,” Sam informs them tersely.
Pearl sits down abruptly and Reuben moves closer to her, groping for her free hand. Indy’s little face grows anxious at the tone of Sam’s voice.
“Tell us about it, Sam,” his father urges.
“The creep’s in the hospital—I guess she fought back in spades—and the cops are looking for her mother. The DHS’ll be involved. She needs a place to stay until she has a foster home.”
Pearl converts her distress into practicality. “We’ll make up the bed on the sunporch. Put a heater in there.”
“She can have my room,” Sam offers.
There is a pause for consideration.
“The baby crying might bother her,” Reuben points out.
Sam hadn’t thought of that. They’re all used to it but she won’t be. Everything’s going to be strange for her.
Before he sits down to supper, he makes the call to the principal. Laliberte’s had contact with the cops and in turn has informed both coaches of the situation with their two AWOL team members. The principal sighs heavily over the doctor’s advice against Deanie playing again this season. There’ll be a meeting in Laliberte’s office first thing in the morning.
While they eat, Sam gives them a condensed version of the story he has now repeated three times—once to Dr. Spellman, twice to the cops. He omits his sexual involvement with Deanie, and the Mill, except as a place where he knew she sometimes took refuge. It’s too complicated; he doesn’t know how to explain it, nor does he know what may happen between Deanie and himself. She’s been through so much shit, it might be months or years before she gets over it, if ever. He realizes abruptly she will have to stay in the house alone tomorrow and possibly another day or two while he is at school and his folks are working, and depending on how quickly she is able to return to school and the DHS moves to find her a foster home.
When he proposes staying home with her, his father points out gently that this is exam week. “With the physical shock she’s experienced and the painkillers, she’s liable to sleep all day anyway. Pearl and I can check on her every hour or so.”
Pearl nods. “We’re only a few minutes away, Sammy.”
He moves her to the sunporch daybed off the living room, where a space heater has warmed up the glassed-in, heavily curtained porch to a sickroom temperature. The sunporch is bigger than Deanie’s room in the house on Depot Street. Full of plants and wicker furniture and the mildewy smell of summer in storage, it offers privacy the living room couch does not. It has served as a guestroom on prior occasions when Pearl’s stepfather visited. Morris has left behind an old man’s ribbed cardigan, smelling faintly of cigars, draped on the back of a chair, and sentimentally, Pearl has not tidied it away.
Deanie comes around enough for him to spoonfeed her some chicken broth and afterward, she lies back like the baby after nursing—snake logy with mouse to digest, don’t bother me no more. He gives her medication. When he offers her her pajamas, she barely moves her head in refusal. The painkillers knock her out again quickly.
When he goes up to his own room, it seems weirdly mundane to try to study. He doesn’t use his headphones to create a fortress of noise for fear he might not hear if Deanie calls to him. The words blur and dance; he reads the same passages over and over again with no understanding, no memory of having read them before.
The phone rings and Pearl calls him to answer it. He goes down to the kitchen to take the call—there’s lemon meringue pie, his favorite, to scavenge while he talks.
“Where’d you go to, Sambo?” Rick demands. “Ditchin’ school is one thing but ditchin’ practice again—Coach booted our asses all over the court like it was our fault.”
“I left to check on Deanie. I was right to do it, too. That creep her mother shacks with
