DEUCIE HAD BEEN affected by all the commotion in the street. The sirens and the people crowding onto the block. The noise. The sadness. The sadness had even sifted down here to her dark, dusty home. This felt like home now and she even had a routine working. She’d clean during the day when the slant of light through the window and her strength and a break in the headaches allowed. Had folded the clothes that Joe had left all over the place neatly back into the chifforobe. Found a cracked vase in one of the crates that she was able to use to rinse her leavings down the drain in the cellar floor, leavings nice and soft from the cat food. Even lucked out on a washcloth and a plastic bottle of doll-baby shampoo taped inside the box with the Tiny Tears doll. Bathed herself as best as she could using the shampoo for a liquid soap. Smelled nice and sweet when she was done, smelled like strawberry taffy.
But still she’d been affected by the commotion in the street. The one woman’s screams that had gone right to her chest when she heard her crying out No, no, she’s my child, no. Let me fix it, let me. So sad.
Deucie knew what that felt like. A mother’s drive to get to her child in the midst of trauma, believing that if she could just get to her, just kiss her forehead, like magic she could make it all okay. She’d felt that maternal drive during one of her releases from the mental hospital. When she’d left the hospital that time, seventeen years ago now, she set out to see her child. She’d purposely not tried to locate her during other periods when she’d been released. She wanted her daughter to grow up in a secure home with her sense of self intact before knowing who her natural mother was. She’d stopped drinking during that stay at Byberry and felt somewhat worthy now of meeting the child face-to-face. She went immediately to Jeffery, who was, as expected, doing a stint in the Holmesburg prison. She went into a rage at what he told her. That their daughter hadn’t been placed with a well-to-do black family who lived in a three-story single home in Chestnut Hill, as he’d led her to believe. He’d led her to believe it, he swore, because he was afraid of what Deucie might do to Pat, might try to kill Pat. “Talk about evil stepmother,” he said, “that bitch won’t even make my bail anymore. So you do what you gotta do, Deucie. That woman’s got our daughter slinging whiskey bottles and who knows what else at that house of ill repute.”
Deucie knew what else. Knew how Pat had looked at her when Jeffery had first taken her there to live. Pat had looked her up and down the way a farmer sizes up a pig and knows immediately how many dollars’ worth of ham she’s carrying on her ass. Knew also that Pat was a little afraid of her because of the gash on her face and her reputation for being crazy. So Pat never propositioned Deucie to be one of her girls. But Deucie knew what Pat had forced her daughter to do. She could feel it in her bones. She stood up then in the visiting room at Holmesburg and cried out the way she’d heard that mother crying outside the other day in the midst of the commotion in the street. “No, no, not my chile, I got to get to her, got to save her life, got to fix it, I can fix it. Let me. Let me. Me and Jesus can fix it.”
DEUCIE CAUGHT PAT by surprise that night. Snuck up on the house at three a.m., when the bars had closed and the speakeasy/brothel business was booming. She was let right in since she looked like someone badly needing a drink. She knew where Pat would be in the house, having lived there herself when she and Jeffery were a couple. She knew Pat would be in the shed off her kitchen checking her inventory to see how much watering down she’d have to do to make it through the night.
“Pat, you a filthy bitch for turning my daughter out,” she said. Then she went for Pat’s chest with the ice pick. Wanted to see Pat dead for spoiling the only perfect thing she had produced in this life. That baby girl. “Shit,” she said when she felt the ice pick hit bone and she knew she hadn’t stabbed her in the heart. But right then Pat wasn’t even worth the energy it would take to kill her. Needed that energy to find her child. She left Pat dazed and bleeding and ran down to the basement where the card games were, where the men playing would pay Pat’s girls to sit on their laps and bring them luck. She checked their foreheads, looking for her daughter’s mark. Then she ran through the house, unstoppable. She hit every bedroom on the second floor, turning on lights and startling the occupants as she got up close to check for the mark. Then to the third floor, just one bedroom up here. She stopped in the hallway to slow her breathing, then eased to the door and put her ear to it, heard quiet inside. She turned the handle and opened the door an inch at a time. Heard the bedsprings creaking and a thin voice saying No lights, no damn lights.
Deucie walked into the dark bedroom transfixed by the figure in the bed. Thank God, Deucie thought, she’s alone. Still, she hadn’t expected the reunion with her daughter to be in a place like this. Had visions of waiting in a grand parlor while the day help went to fetch her, or at least meeting her in a living room of a nice row house where they kept a Bible on the coffee table and her high school graduation picture in an ornate frame on the mantelpiece. She took a deep breath. “Baby,” she said, then she clicked on the light. She melted then, fell down, though she was still standing as she looked at her daughter, started with her forehead, the mark was there, indentations that were lighter than the rest of her skin. The rest of her skin looked so soft. She looked soft with her pretty brown eyes and her brown hair that was pulled up in a roll on top of her head. She was dressed in an emerald green silky nightgown that didn’t even look like something a whore would wear. At least not to Deucie, not right now, because as far as Deucie was concerned, this was an angel propped up in this bed.
“Don’t be afraid,” Deucie said, reacting to the look of confused terror that came up on her daughter’s face. “I wouldn’t hurt you. You mine. I marked you so I’d know you. You mine. I just wanted you to know that.” She was all the way to the bed now and her daughter was so still she seemed not to be breathing as she stared at Deucie, eyes not leaving Deucie’s face. “You pretty as you wanna be too. And you mine. And you were perfect too. The only perfect thing I ever did. You need to know that. You need to get up from this bed and calmly walk away from this house and never look back here again.” She reached out and touched her daughter’s forehead. The child gasped, though she didn’t scream. Deucie could tell that she was trying hard not to scream. Nice, she thought. What a nice girl I birthed. Don’t want to hurt my feelings by screaming right now. Now the daughter was crying. The softest tears Deucie had ever seen as she put her hand on her daughter’s forehead and held it there.
She could hear them out back now, filling the cat’s bowl. She didn’t go to the window though. Stayed under the steps where she’d laid out her dying bed. She didn’t have an appetite right now. Took that as a good sign as she thought about the feel of her daughter’s mark. It was deeper than she’d expected it would be. And softer too.