AUDREY CHANG DIDN’T pick up. It didn’t matter that while her phone was ringing, or while Adam said it was ringing, I had my fingers crossed again. It didn’t matter that I was staring out at the snow flying into the windshield and thinking, please, please, please, begging I don’t know who or what again.
“Voice mail,” Adam said, hanging up. He put his phone back in the front pocket of his shirt, like that was the end of that.
“Call back and leave a message.” David pushed his hand through his hair again. From what I could see of his face in the rearview, he looked pretty stressed out, probably because of Chloe. But maybe because the snow was really coming down now, and the road had gotten slick enough that he was tapping the brakes every now and then. Or maybe it was that traffic had gotten heavier after we’d crossed into Minnesota. Or maybe all of the above.
“Send a text,” he said. “Tell her it’s urgent.”
“An emergency,” I added, and Adam gave me a look like I was being irritating. I didn’t care. I’d moved to the middle of the backseat, closer to Chloe. I had my hand steady on her arm now, just above her elbow. I didn’t know if she wanted my hand there, or if I was just making her feel more caged in. She hadn’t pushed me away.
“She’s probably at work,” Adam said. “She won’t pick up on a personal call. And sometimes her shifts are twelve hours.”
“Can you call the clinic and ask for her?” I’d tried not to sound like he was being dumb, but that was obviously the next step. My ninth-grade English teacher back in Joplin would have said, “I don’t know. Can I?” I tried again. “Maybe you could look up the number?”
“I guess.” He gave me a quick look over his shoulder, like he still thought I wasn’t exactly trustworthy. Little Miss Liar, he’d called me. I had my own doubts about him. This time, after he tapped the screen and put the phone to his ear, I leaned in toward him, my ears straining to hear a voice on the other end. For all I knew, he wasn’t really calling anybody. He might just be pretending to try.
I didn’t hear anyone answer. But before Adam spoke, he took a breath like he was getting ready to sing, and his voice came out deeper than usual.
“Hello,” he said. “I need to speak with Dr. Chang as soon as possible.”
If he was, in fact, talking to someone, then he was being smart about it, making his voice so low and serious. He sounded like he owned the place, or like he was the hero in a movie, and a time bomb was ticking, so everybody better listen up. If I’d been the receptionist hearing that voice, I would have paid attention.
“Please tell her it’s an emergency.” He rubbed his lips together, waiting, and then he said “Thank you,” his voice still deep, but also sincere, like he was trying to stay on the receptionist’s good side.
But the next thing he said was his name and number, and then he said “Thank you” again in the deep voice, and that was the end of the call. After he put his phone away, he looked at his brother, and then at me, like, Oh, well.
I narrowed my eyes. He’d been scared from the beginning. He’d wanted to put us out on the side of the road as soon as he’d known about Chloe. I guess it was nice that he didn’t want the reward money, that he wasn’t going to turn us in. I’d give him that. But I had a feeling he hadn’t called anyone either time he’d dialed, and that the deep voice he’d used had been just for us. And it wasn’t even like he was being patriotic. He just didn’t want to risk his neck.
I hated him for that. I really did. Because he’d heard Chloe cry out. He had to understand how much she was hurting. And there he was, sitting up front and looking out at the snow like he was waiting for a call he knew he didn’t have to worry about, because it would never come. I wanted to reach up and grab hold of his handsome face, digging in with my nails. I thought of the pepper spray in my pocket. Not that. I didn’t want to hurt him that bad. I just wanted to help him think about what it meant to be in pain.
Screw-up, I would say. You selfish screw-up.
His phone rang.
“Hello?” he said, his voice not as deep as before. “Audrey. Thank you. Yeah. I’ll explain. But I just want to say right now—oh my God. Thank you so much for calling back.”
I tried to picture her in my head. She was probably Chinese, or at least half, and she’d be wearing a lab coat and maybe a name tag, with a stethoscope hanging from her neck. She might have her own office, or she might be calling from a common area, leaning on a wall next to a scale and a poster of what a body looked like under the skin. She probably had an annoyed look on her face, listening, on what was likely a busy day in the middle of flu season, as the ex-boyfriend who’d cheated on her tried to explain what the emergency was without really spelling it out.
“Yeah,” Adam said, switching his cell to his other ear. “I get what you’re saying. But I’m pretty sure it’s bacterial . . . No. Okay . . . Right. I know I’m not a doctor. You’re absolutely right. But she said she got water in it. That’s how it started. Like swimmer’s ear . . . Okay. I understand. But the thing is, Audrey, she really can’t come in. I’m not saying it’s inconvenient or too expensive. I’m saying that she can’t.”
He was talking all around it, saying anything he could to avoid having to say the words Muslim or illegal. Maybe he didn’t want to scare her. I stared out at the fast-falling snow, my hand resting on Chloe’s arm. She was taking deep breaths, every inhale and exhale loud enough for me to hear.
“It’s all right,” I whispered, squeezing her arm. “Everything’s gonna be all right.” I wasn’t at all sure this was true.
“Okay,” Adam said. “Please don’t hang up. I know you’re busy. But please just listen. She can’t go to any doctor, is what I’m saying. You see what I’m saying? Okay. How about this?” He slowed his words. “One of the reasons she can’t go to any doctor is that she doesn’t have any ID.” He paused. “That she can use. My brother picked her up just a little while ago. She’s trying to hitchhike to Canada.”
He’d said Canada even more slowly than he’d said everything else, giving emphasis to each syllable, and that must have been what did it. After that, he didn’t have to give any more hints. But it wasn’t a done deal at all.
“I know,” he said, nodding at the dashboard. He picked up his empty coffee cup and set it down again. “And I wouldn’t have called you. I wouldn’t have. The thing is . . .” He turned and looked around the edge of his seat at Chloe. “She’s really in pain. I would say agony, if I’m being honest. David said we at least have to get her something for the pain, you know? And he’s right. He’s right.”
I stared at the back of his head, at his pale little earlobe, feeling so sorry for what I’d been thinking about him before. I’d called him a liar and a coward and a screw-up. I’d done it in my head, but still.
He switched the phone back to his other ear. “Do you want to talk to her? You want me to put her on?”
Apparently the answer was yes, because he turned around and put the phone under Chloe’s head, where she could see it, though I wasn’t sure her eyes were open. “Say something,” he said. “Listen. I know it hurts. But I’ve got a doctor on the other end of the line. If you want her to help, you’ve got to tell her yourself. You’ve got to let her hear what I mean.”
Chloe nodded. I took the phone and held it to her good ear.
“Yes,” she gasped. “Yes, I am in so much pain.” It was good she had her accent now, and also that she was crying, so Audrey Chang would understand this wasn’t a joke. She must have been hard to understand, but she managed to confirm that she’d gotten water in her ear the week before, and that at first her ear had just felt numb, and then it had started to hurt, and then she’d woken up this morning with the pencil jammed in. When she didn’t seem like she could say any more, I handed the phone back to Adam.
“Okay? Audrey? Will you help her? Please?”
I wanted to reach up and put my arms around him. Not in a romantic way. I mean that all at once I felt this tenderness for him, this person I barely knew. And it was strong, almost what I felt for Caleb all the time. I was sorry for thinking that he was a coward and a liar, and I was sorry that he had money problems and that he didn’t have a car, and that things didn’t seem to be working out for him in general, and that he was always borrowing money. Maybe he was a screw-up, but he was being brave right now. I wanted to take off my seat belt and lean forward enough to take his hand and hold it. Sounds weird, I know. But that’s what I felt just then.
He put the phone against his chest and looked at David. “Where are we?”
“Uh. Next exit is Lakeville.”
He put the phone back to his ear. “We’re coming up on Lakeville. Yeah. Okay. Right. Yeah, I can wait. Of course.” He stared up at the roof of the car. “Yeah. Hi. Okay. . . . Yes. Oh, great. That’s fantastic. The CVS on Dodd. In Lakeville. Under my name. Thank you. Oh my God, Audrey. You’re the best. I—” He paused. “Audrey?”
He touched a button, then put his phone back in his shirt pocket.
“Thank you,” I said, even nicer than I’d planned, as it was pretty clear she’d hung up.
Adam’s phone said the CVS on Dodd was only fifteen minutes away.
“Fifteen minutes,” I told Chloe, because I wasn’t sure she’d heard. “We’ll have your medicine in just fifteen minutes. You got that? You’re going to be okay.”
I believed it. Or I wanted to. I at least knew we’d get to the CVS, even with the snow coming down and the taillights in front of us blinking red every time a driver tapped the brakes. We’d passed two cars that had slid off to the side of the road, but the SUV was doing great, and David was a steady driver. I tried not to think about how Audrey Chang might have only prescribed antibiotics, and nothing for the pain. What mattered was that now there was something for Chloe to hold on to, a possibility that she wasn’t going to die without her family in the back of somebody’s car.
But just as we came up on the exit, Adam started shaking his head.
“I’ve got a bad feeling.” He looked at David, not at me. He put his hands on the back of his neck. “I mean it. I just got a real bad feeling about this.”
“Stop it,” David said. “You already called. It’ll be fine. And I’ve got to concentrate.”
Adam shook his head. “Listen to me. Okay? Just listen. Remember that time I got busted? And I knew? Remember? I called you up that morning and told you I had a bad feeling? And what was it, four hours later, there was a knock on the door?”
David didn’t say anything. Good, I thought. Because it was crazy, what his brother was saying. We’d already worked out a plan. All we had to do was pick up the medicine. Was he really thinking we were going to let Chloe keep getting worse because he had a bad feeling? Something his brain just made up?
“I’m telling you, I got that same feeling now, David. I’ve got it bad. What if they’re waiting for us at the pharmacy? They know we’re coming, and they know she’s with us. This is crazy, what we’re doing. We’ve got to stop and think.”
I glared at him, my hand steady on Chloe’s arm. He was the one being crazy. He’d gone from saying “what if” to just assuming it was true.
“What are you saying?” David glanced at him again. “You think Audrey called the police?”
“She might have.”
“Do you think she would do that? Is she that kind of person?”
“I don’t know! I don’t know what she thinks about this kind of thing. And even if she didn’t call them, somebody might have been listening in. You know? She didn’t call me back from her cell. She was calling from the clinic’s line. That receptionist was probably curious what the emergency was. Seriously. Would you just pull over for a second? We need to think about this. We’re talking about prison, David. We’ve got to stop and think.”
“You’re being paranoid.” David made his hand flat, like a wall between them. “We’re just going to a pharmacy. We’re picking up a prescription. There won’t be any police.”
“And what if there is? I’ll tell you what—we’re not talking about a slap on the wrist. We’re getting arrested for treason. Both of us.” His voice was getting louder. “I’m not just thinking about me here. What about Ethan? What about Riley? Huh? What about Stephen? Do they get a say in any of this?”
The fact that he wasn’t saying anything made me think he was getting scared too. I looked down at the coloring book in the seat pocket. There was a ballerina on the cover. Color the Great Paintings of Degas!
“You’d lose everything. And they would too. And my God, what about Mom? I’m just saying we have to think about this. Before we do something we can’t undo.”
The SUV made a sharp right, the back of the car skidding out on the ice. I grabbed David’s headrest to keep my balance.
“Sorry,” he said. He’d pulled into the nearly empty parking lot of a Hardee’s. A man in a Hardee’s jacket was shoveling the front walk. Beyond the roof, I could see the overpass of the interstate that we’d just gotten off, cars flying by in the snow.
“Sorry,” David said again. The snow had covered the lines in the lot, but he eased the car into what seemed like a space and took the keys out of the ignition.
I held my breath, hoping he just meant sorry for turning fast and making the car slide. I knew he might have meant more than that.
Chloe moaned again. I don’t think she did it on purpose, but David put his face in his hands.
“Oh my God.” Adam stared up at the roof of the car. “This is a nightmare.”
“I don’t know what to do,” David mumbled. He was hard to hear through his hands.
Go get her the medicine! I wanted to say. They had to go get it. What would happen to her if they didn’t? I was thinking I’d go myself, no problem, but the prescription was under Adam’s name. Then again, if there really was a chance that the police would be waiting there, then I didn’t want to be the one to convince Adam he had to go give his name to the pharmacist and then see if he’d be arrested. Plus we’d be out in the parking lot. They would get us too.
“Leave us here,” Chloe said. She was wincing, but she’d sat up a little. “We can wait in the restaurant, the Hardee’s. You can get the medicine by yourselves, please, and if there is no problem, you can bring it back to us here. If the police are there, you can say you lied to the doctor. Say there was never any hitchhiking woman, that you pretended to have my voice.” She paused, blinking slowly. “Say it was a test, to see that she still loved you.”
Whoa, I thought. That was good. I was a little jealous that she was the one who thought of it. Of course that was what we should do.
“Is that illegal?” Adam asked. “Lying to a doctor like that?” He looked at his brother, and then at me. “I’m just curious. I don’t care. It’s not like treason. That’s fine with me. Okay. That’s a deal. That’s workable. But that’s where it ends. We’ll drop them off, get the medicine, bring the medicine back here, and then we’ll be on our way. Alone. Okay? I’m good with this new plan. But we can’t do any more.”
“Okay,” David said, his voice so quiet I could barely hear. He put the keys back in the ignition and drove up to an entrance of the Hardee’s, which was considerate, making it so Chloe and I wouldn’t have to walk across the lot in the snow. But now I was the one with the bad feeling. I wanted to see his face.
“Hold on a second,” I said, picking up my backpack. “I’ll get out on my side and then come around to help her out.”
But after I got out and shut my door, I moved up to David’s door and gave his window a tap. The glass rolled down slowly, and I could feel the heat coming out, mixing with the cold around me. His face was more narrow than his brother’s, and his eyes looked kind, though that didn’t necessarily mean anything. That was just the way some eyes looked.
“Um,” I said, because I still didn’t know how to say it.
He lifted his eyebrows like he meant to listen. But he didn’t look at me, and I knew then I was right to be worried. He’d wanted to help. He’d wanted to help from the start. But his brother had gotten him nervous, talking about prison, and his family, and what they would do if he got arrested.
“Do you know how long you’ll be?” I asked.
“No idea.” He still had his hands on the steering wheel, and he seemed to be staring at my flag pin. I was thinking he didn’t want to meet my eye.
“You’ll come right back, though? With the medicine?”
He nodded. Snow was falling in through his window, landing on the front of his peacoat and catching in his hair.
“Okay,” I said. “We’ll be inside. Waiting.”
I suppose I could have asked him to promise to come back. But if he’d already made a decision, a promise wouldn’t make any difference. For some people, that’s just a word.
When we got up to the front of the line, the boy behind the register took a deep breath.
“Smiles-are-free-get-yours-today-may-I-take-your-order?” He smiled with his mouth, but his eyes gave Chloe a worried look. I didn’t think he recognized her face, or even thought she was suspicious. It seemed more like he could tell something was wrong. She wasn’t holding her ear, but her cheeks were still tearstained, and she kept her gaze on the stainless steel counter.
“She okay?” he asked.
I nodded. “She just went to the dentist.” I tapped the side of my cheek. “Still numb. Could I get two sodas? Mediums are fine.”
I figured she wouldn’t be able to eat, and even though I’d only had another pack of mini-doughnuts at the convenience store in Sherburn that morning, I knew I wouldn’t be able to get anything down either. I didn’t even want caffeine—I was wide-awake, jittery, and my eyes felt dry. I’d only bought the sodas so we wouldn’t be loitering.
“Sorry,” I whispered once we were over by the soda fountain. “Did you want coffee?” I was on the side of her good ear. “Or food? I can go back and get whatever.”
She grabbed my arm. I mean, she really grabbed it—I almost spilled my soda. She was still breathing hard, her mouth open, but her grip on my arm stayed tight. For a second, I thought she was getting ready to faint, and I was about to tell her she couldn’t do that. She just couldn’t. Somebody would call an ambulance, like they’d done for me at the Arch. I looked behind each of my shoulders. The lobby of the restaurant was almost empty, as it was the middle of the afternoon, and also maybe because of the snow. If I could just keep her upright, I could get her to a chair without anybody seeing.
“It’s okay,” I said. “Let me help you.”
She shook her head. “I want you to go,” she whispered. “To the hotel across the street.” She paused to swallow, and I could see by the look on her face that the pencil was still jamming in. She let go of my arm and closed her eyes. “It’s just across. Wait for me in the lobby.”
“What?” I waited for her to open her eyes, and I shook my head. I didn’t like this idea at all.
She reached into her bag. “Go.” She swallowed again, looking around to make sure no one was watching. “Check in.” She slipped me a wad of bills. “I’ll come as soon as they bring the medicine.”
“I can’t leave you here,” I said, maybe too loud. Nobody was around, but I turned on the ice machine and leaned in close to her good ear. “What if somebody tries to talk to you?”
She pushed my shoulder. Kind of hard.
“I said go! Go, Sarah-Mary. They could be followed back. I don’t know. And even if they’re not, there is no reason for you to sit with me. It does me no good, and it is dangerous for you.”
I shook my head. She pushed my shoulder again, and I almost lost my balance, my backpack heavy behind me. I stepped back and looked around. Nobody had seen, but if she kept this up, somebody would probably get concerned.
“Please,” she said. I could tell by the way she said it how much it hurt for her to talk. “Please. Just go.”
An old man walked up with an empty soda cup. He stood behind us, waiting. Chloe stayed where she was, staring at me.
She was all business. That was clear. There was nothing to do but go.
I stood just outside the door we’d come in, watching snow fall in front of the drive-thru. The hotel across the street was a Sleep-n-Eat, with a sign promising a free breakfast buffet with WAFFLES. I passed my soda from hand to hand so it wouldn’t feel so cold.
I supposed Chloe was right, or a little right. I’d be safer if I waited for her at the hotel. But then again, did she really think that if the police showed up, I’d just watch it all go down from across the street like I was watching television? Was I going to stay in a room she’d paid for, and wake up and get myself some WAFFLES in the morning? I knew she didn’t feel well, but it was a little insulting. I’d already said, very clearly, that I would see her through.
I walked around the back of the restaurant. One of the drivers waiting in the drive-thru clicked her locks down as I went by, like she was anxious I was a criminal, just trying to look like a high-school girl with her backpack. Which I guess was what I was. When I got around to the other side, I peeked in through one of the windows. The lobby was empty enough that Chloe was easy to spot, sitting by the windows that faced the street. She would have seen me probably, but she was hunched over, her hand on her ear again. Her soda sat on the table in front of her, and her straw lay beside it, still wrapped in its paper sleeve.
I slipped inside and found a seat behind her, with a little divider between us. If I leaned out and stretched my neck a little, I could see the edge of one of her boots.
My gym teacher in Joplin once spent about half an hour telling us we should be careful trying to save a drowning person, and that it wasn’t like in the movies, where you can swim up and grab them and bring them back to shore, both of you coughing a little but otherwise fine. He said that when a body is really getting ready to drown, it gets so frantic that it tries to use anything coming near it as a raft, including you if you swim out to help. So maybe you die and they live, or both of you die together. It doesn’t matter if the person you’re trying to save is a nice person or not. The body takes over, he said. It’s a survival thing.
I believed him. And his main point—that we should try to grab some kind of flotation device before setting out to save someone—seemed like good advice. At the same time, I was thinking that if I were ever drowning, and someone was swimming out to help, I would try hard not to let my body take over and kill them. My gym teacher made it sound like it wasn’t even a choice you could make, but probably a few people had it in them to keep their heads, and turn away from help so as not to take anybody else down with them.
Apparently, Chloe was one of those people. She wasn’t actually drowning, not yet, but she still had that pencil pushed in her ear, and she must have known that the chances of her seeing her family again weren’t looking so good. And here she was, pushing me away, thinking about my safety.
I didn’t know if it was an Allah thing or just a Chloe thing. Whatever it was, all it did was make me know I couldn’t leave her there alone.
Most of the other tables stayed empty. The drive-thru was busy, but not too many people seemed to want to get out of their cars in the snow, though the same guy had to keep going out to shovel the walks. For at least a half hour, if anyone did notice Chloe sitting by herself, hunched over and holding her ear, they didn’t say anything.
But then a man pushing a dust mop through the lobby stopped near her table. I could tell he was a manager, or at least he was dressed like my manager at Dairy Queen, wearing a tie over a button-down shirt. Only this manager looked old enough to be my manager’s dad. He didn’t have any hair except for a couple inches of gray curving around the back of his head.
“Ma’am? Are you okay?”
He sounded nice, like he was really worried about her.
“Are you sure?” he asked. She must have nodded.
“Is there someone I can call for you? Are you not feeling well?”
I held my breath. I should have given her the marker. She could have used a napkin for paper. She would have been smart, writing out that she’d just gotten back from the dentist, and that she was waiting for a ride. But even that might not have helped for long. I’d never seen anybody sitting by themselves in the lobby of Dairy Queen hunched over and holding their ear, and maybe crying, too. It seemed like the kind of thing a manager wasn’t supposed to ignore.
Even when I leaned forward, I couldn’t see anything of her but her one boot. But I could see the manager as he turned around and waved somebody over from the counter. I hoped it would be the boy who’d taken our order, so he could tell the manager what I’d said about Chloe’s cheek being numb. Then again, the boy might recognize me, sitting over by myself, and that would seem pretty strange to him if he remembered we’d come in together.
Anyway, what I was hoping for didn’t matter, as it was an older blond woman who walked into the lobby, her gaze moving over the manager’s face like they were using ESP to talk.
Even with my backpack, I got there before she did.
“Hey there,” I said, sliding into the seat across from Chloe. “Sorry that took so long.” I held up my soda cup to both the manager and the blond woman like it was proof of admission. “Everything okay?”
“That’s what I was wondering,” the manager said. “She seems to be not feeling so well?” His voice was friendly, but the blond woman kept her gaze on Chloe. She wore dark red earrings that matched the shirt of her uniform, and she had small, smart-looking eyes.
“She had a rough day at the dentist.” I looked at Chloe and clicked my tongue. “My dad was supposed to pick us up, but he got stuck in the snow. He’ll be here soon, though.”
“That’s too bad.” The manager gave Chloe a sympathetic look. “I hate going to the dentist.”
“What dentist was it?” the blond woman asked. Now her gaze was on me. She’d asked it in a pleasant way, but I was thinking wow, how lucky for us that a person who maybe should have been working as a gotcha district attorney happened to come out from behind the Hardee’s counter. For a second, she had me stumped.
“Oh no,” I said, waving my straw at her. “Can’t say. I don’t want to give him a bad name.” I laughed, I hoped just enough, wrinkling my nose at the manager. He laughed too, but only like he wanted to be polite. “Seriously,” I said. “My dad should be here soon, and she’s already doing better. Thanks though.”
Chloe nodded, even smiling a little. I actually thought she really might be feeling better, but after the woman went back to the counter, and the manager got far enough away with his mop, she put her palm to her forehead and turned away, and she made a little crying sound. Clearly, the pencil was still digging in.
I leaned across the table. “Can you take any more of the medicine you bought?”
She shook her head, just barely. “I’ve already taken the limit. And it’s not touching it. I have never felt pain like this in my life.” Her voice wavered. “Even giving birth. That was nothing to this.”
She turned her face to the window, looking out at the snow. She was deciding. I knew she was.
I leaned my head back as far as I could, trying to see around the partition to the counter. I was thinking about getting up to see if the blond woman was there, scooping up fries or taking an order, or doing anything besides calling the police because she recognized Chloe, or thought she did, and hadn’t believed me for a second.
“Just hang on a little longer,” I whispered. I turned back to look out the window. People were driving slowly because of the snow, and though it was just a little after four o’clock, most everybody had their lights on. So it made sense that the brothers were taking so long. It didn’t mean they weren’t coming back. They could come back any minute.
A woman carrying a child on her hip shuffled through the snow in the parking lot. The child looked maybe five years old, too big to be carried, but she was wearing tights and ballet slippers, and she cuddled in close to the woman’s neck like she was afraid of the snow. The woman held out her tongue to catch a snowflake, and after she chomped down on one, or pretended to, she smiled and said something. The girl tilted back her head and laughed.
Chloe’s hand was still pressed against her ear, but her eyes were on the girl, and all at once, she looked miserable in a whole new way.
“You thinking about your son?”
She closed her eyes and nodded.
My own mom was probably in Virginia, maybe spending time with that guy she’d met online, working on her own plan. Maybe she sometimes worried that she was a bad mother, or missed us, like Chloe missed her son now. But probably not for long.
If you asked Aunt Jenny what was wrong with my mother, she would say it was that she didn’t have God. If Aunt Jenny ever talked to Chloe enough to not be scared of her, she might even say that’s exactly what was right with her—that believing in Allah was enough like believing in God to make her a decent person, and the kind of mom that would feel guilty about leaving her kids, or letting them leave you. But that’s not right. I mean, obviously I don’t have kids. But clearly, I don’t leave people in fast-food restaurants, either. I think the thing that’s missing in my mom, and maybe a lot of people who do things that are way worse, is that they don’t care so much when other people hurt. Or if they do care, they work around it in their head so they don’t have to feel bad about it. Given some things I’ve seen in the news, I knew there were plenty of religious people, from here and all over, who could pull that trick at least as well as my mom.
But Chloe wasn’t one of them.
“How’d you get water in your ear?” I asked. I wasn’t sure if she would answer or not. She was rocking back and forth again, her eyes closed. I was mostly trying to distract her.
“The bathtub.” She kept rocking, but she opened her eyes. “The friends who hid me, they had a tub in the basement. I couldn’t take showers upstairs because someone might come by. I was in the tub when someone did come by, the neighbor we were worried about. She stayed, and she stayed. The water was getting cold, and I wanted to rinse my hair and get out, but I was afraid to turn on the faucet, in case the neighbor could hear.” She shrugged. “So I dipped my hair back into the water, and some got in my ear.”
That was so unfair. Even with how hard she’d tried, and even with all the good luck we’d had, just a few drops of bathtub water was what was going to do her in. Maybe not. But now it had been almost an hour since the brothers left us. They could be back on I-35 North, headed up to Saint Paul. The medicine, and maybe the police, would be still waiting at the pharmacy, if Audrey Chang had even called the prescription in. Both brothers would probably feel bad about not coming back. They’d wanted to help, at least before they’d gotten scared.
“Still waiting for your dad, huh?” It was the blond woman again. She’d sneaked up to our table. She had a squirt bottle in one hand and a rag in the other, but she wasn’t using them yet. And the empty tables around us all looked pretty clean.
I nodded.
She turned to Chloe, her small eyes steady. “Seems like you should call a cab or something, since you’re hurting so much. Do you live around here? Are you from here?”
Chloe nodded. She looked like the saddest person I’d ever seen.
“Whereabout?”
I leaned forward. “Why do you ask?” I smiled. But we both understood the conversation had just gotten less friendly.
The woman shrugged, keeping her gaze on Chloe. “You look familiar to me.”
I held my breath. She knew. Or she was close to knowing. She knew she was on to something.
“Everybody says that to her.” I forced a laugh. “Aunt Chloe, you must look like a lot of people.”
Chloe didn’t look at me. She probably couldn’t. She was either too scared, or she was hurting too much.
“She doesn’t look like you,” the blond woman said. She smiled, and I thought, my God, how much longer can we keep this up? And why should we even bother? Chloe needed a doctor. The brothers weren’t coming back. If this woman wanted to make ten thousand dollars out of it, well then okay. I guess at least somebody could come out a winner.
And then I saw someone moving toward us: Adam, still just wearing his flannel shirt, and out of breath, his boots tracking in snow. He was holding a white paper bag, the kind you get from a pharmacy.
The blond woman was still looking at me. “I mean being your aunt,” she was saying. “Must be by marriage?”
“Yeah,” I said, looking around her to give him a wave. “Well, hey. What do you know—here’s my dad now.”
We were lucky in that almost as soon as Adam slid into the booth next to Chloe, the manager came out and told the blond woman that a charter bus was coming in fifteen minutes, and that he needed all hands on deck. Adam waited until she was out of earshot before he said anything.
“Sorry for the wait.” He put the pharmacy bag on the table. “There was a line.”
“It’s okay,” I said. Chloe stared at the bag. She had her hand over her ear again.
“I can’t stay long. David’s in the car.” He nodded out the window to where the SUV was parked. The wipers had cleared enough snow off the windshield that I could see David in the driver’s seat. He lifted his hand off the steering wheel to give a quick salute.
Adam opened the bag and took out a small bottle. “These drops, they’re for the pain, okay? The pharmacist said it would numb it instantly, way different than what’s over the counter.” He turned to Chloe. “So let’s get this one in before I explain the rest. If you lay your head down, I’ll put some in right now.”
I looked around. I was surprised he wanted to put the drops in himself, and that he wanted to do it right there in the Hardee’s. But I figured he might as well. Maybe a charter bus was on its way, but for now, the lobby was dead. I wasn’t sure how Chloe would feel about letting him put drops in her ear, since her ear was so close to the hair she wasn’t even supposed to show. That was no problem, though. By the time I’d turned back to Chloe, she already had her head on the table, bad ear up. She left her hat on and closed her eyes.
The drops took about five seconds to work. I’m serious. You could see it in her face, the relief, almost as soon as they went in. I was thinking, thank you, thank you, all the people in the world who spent their lives coming up with medicine. They never even got to meet all the people they helped.
Chloe sat up and looked at Adam, blinking fast. “Thank you,” she whispered. “Oh. Thank you so much.”
“Okay.” He turned to me. “This one’s the antibiotic. It says that you’re supposed to just take one every twelve hours, but the pharmacist said I could double up tonight and tomorrow morning, and that would help it get better faster. But she can keep using the drops until then. Got it?”
I nodded. It occurred to me that Adam must have had to act like his ear was hurting in the pharmacy. He’d had to hold it and wince, just like Chloe had been doing, so the pharmacist would believe he was in pain.
“How much was it?” I asked. I was just asking for Chloe. I knew she’d want to pay him. But he made a face like I’d said something crazy.
“Thank you so much,” Chloe said again. She was sitting up straight, blinking at the ceiling like someone had just turned on bright lights.
“Thank Audrey,” Adam said.
“Yes,” Chloe said. “But I thank you, too.” She smiled at him, pulling her hat back down. “You’ve saved me. One person. You know what that means.”
“Yeah, yeah.” He was already standing up. “I’ve saved the world. You’ve read the Talmud, I guess.” He shrugged. “Weird. But impressive.”
“It is the same for us.” She looked over his shoulder, and then hers. “It is in our book too.”
“Huh.” He tilted his head. They smiled at each other, their eyes talking like they had an inside joke. “That’s good to know.”
“It is,” she said, still friendly, but serious now, like whatever it was they both knew wasn’t a joke at all.
We waited until the bus came and things got busy enough in the lobby that we felt safe to slip out the doors. Adam walked out with us. No one was paying attention, but we still acted like a little family, though none of us looked alike.