Becca finds herself haunting the women’s shelter three times a week, sometimes four. She could volunteer night and day and nobody would object. Today she’s here to play with the cute little Indian boy again. After dropping in briefly on the mother, Willa, Becca finds the Indian investigator, Mr. Goodnight, sitting alone in the shelter’s darkened observation studio. The lamp-lit playroom past the one-way looking glass casts the man’s face in a goldenrod glow. Inside, Caleb Grimes and the translator Dean has found, a barrel-bodied American Indian woman named Abigail, are both lounging on a mound of green beanbags lumped upon the floor.
“How’s mom?” He doesn’t look up.
“It’s hard to tell,” Becca whispers. She takes a nearby seat. “Willa can be so magnetic.”
“More like bipolar.”
“You should hear the way she makes Caleb laugh. Other times it’s as though he’s taking care of her. She’s erratic. Inconsistent, at best.”
Dean pulls a pained face. He is twirling a yellow pencil up then down the knuckles of his right hand. The big Indian is quiet, a dispassionate gentle giant, but even in this ulterior half-light it looks like he could use a hug.
“A kid needs routine,” Dean says to her. “He’ll pick boring over crazy any day.”
Becca takes in the dark-rimmed eyes and sallow skin and wonders if the man is getting enough to eat.
A glottal string of tuks and toks and pops comes clipping over the observation room’s speaker system. Caleb’s hands flap excitedly about his mouth as he chatters in what must be Choctaw. The translator is all ears: smiling, nodding, drawing the boy out.
“How’s it going in there?” asks Becca.
“She’s almost done.”
“How can you know?”
He holds a finger to his lips rather than answer and, sure enough, before too long the translator has distracted Caleb with a connect-the-dots puzzler. The ample woman lifts lightly from the floor, buoyant as a soap-bubble, excusing herself through the blue playroom door.
“Well?” Dean says when the translator lets herself in.
“Slow down, big guy.” She practically floats over to Becca, pulling her from the chair and into a soft, motherly embrace. “You,” she announces, “are Becca.”
But Becca is too hypnotized by this unexpected intimacy to answer.
The translator holds Becca at arm’s length. “I’m Abigail Whistler.”
Becca wants to say something smart or at least charming but all she manages is “Yes.”
“You were right,” Abigail says, transitioning back to Dean and to business. “He is speaking Choctaw. Or something similar, anyway.” She falls into a chair and the caster wheels grate a plaintive, metallic complaint.
Becca finds her seat. She can’t help but notice these Native Americans are so shamelessly self-contained, so unapologetically at ease in their outsized bodies. Where Dean is tall Abigail is wide, not fat so much as quilted, with pillowed rolls of flesh spilling from her lilac-print muumuu. Her chestnut cheeks are stretched so tightly across her face Abigail’s eyes seem pleated in permanent, guileless glee.
This woman, Becca thinks, she glows.
“Can you get him speaking English?”
“He’s communicating, Dean,” Abigail says. “Let’s don’t push him too far too fast. You say the mother doesn’t speak Choctaw?”
Dean shakes his head.
“Billy was his teacher.”
“It’s unfortunate. In the absence of his father Caleb is freestyling. He’s teaching himself the language now. Inventing portmanteau words and phrases. Compounding, blending, back-forming the phonemes he does know, trying to describe his world. And his tenses are a mess.”
“How do you mean?” Becca says.
“In Choctaw,” Dean answers, “you think and speak in the present tense.”
“Yes,” Abigail adds. “My mother used to say the future, the past—they can’t ever bite you in the ass. But don’t ever turn your back on the present.”
“Seems like a healthy worldview,” Becca says.
“It has its drawbacks,” Dean says.
“Caleb talks about remembering things that haven’t yet happened,” Abigail says. “Going to see his father in jail, for example. Has he visited Billy there?”
Dean shakes his head. No.
“And he seems to believe this horror at the motel—he keeps calling it the big burning—has yet to occur. He’s terrified of it. Honestly I don’t understand half or more of what the boy tells me.”
“Can’t you tutor him?” asks Becca.
“I would dear, but,” Abigail smiles, “it would take more time than I have to give.”
“Abigail’s work is pro bono,” Dean explains. “As a favor to me.”
Becca stands and approaches the window. On the other side of the mirror Caleb’s fist is curled around a red crayon. The boy has abandoned his puzzle and appears to be frozen in place. Becca sees him squeezing, straining, tighter and tighter until the crayon buckles into cherry-colored chunks.
“He talked about that night?”
“Yes,” Abigail says.
“Well?”
“I don’t know how much to give you, Dean.”
“I’m on his dad’s side, remember?”
“He said it was a game. Between the—he said something like midnight-man—and his father.”
A wooden crack! and Becca looks back. Dean has snapped the pencil in his hand.
“Do you think he could testify?”
“Too premature to tell.”
“But what’s your gut?”
Abigail won’t answer. Instead she says, “I didn’t know you were left-handed.”
“I’m not.”
“The watch is on your right wrist.”
“Oh, that. It’s a little protest of mine.”
“Protest against what?”
“It’s a private protest.”
“What good is a protest nobody hears about?”
“Call it a reminder, then.”
“Abigail,” Becca interrupts, “what if we could find a way to fund your time?”
“I love the optimism,” Abigail chuckles. To Dean, “She’s so new!”
Becca presses.
“But would your schedule open up? Could you tutor him then?”
“Sure I could. Sure it would. But this kind of thing just doesn’t happen, Becca.”
“Let me worry about that,” Becca says. “Can I go see him now?”
“By all means,” Abigail says. “He’s been asking for you.”