When She Was Bad

5

“Anybody home?” a female voice called from the living room. “Carson, Mama Rose?”

Lying on their backs, their hands cuffed through the headboard railing, Mama Rose and Pender exchanged complex, profoundly meaningful glances. We made it! was the primary message in both sets of eyes, but a sincere acknowledgement of the ordeal they’d gone through together was also in there someplace, along with a mutual recognition that their lives were about to get seriously complicated again. “Back here, Dennie!”

Footsteps; then a mahogany-skinned, pie-faced, burstingly pregnant woman, shirtless under faded overalls, appeared in the doorway, staring in horror from the denim-and-tie-dyed-clad body on the floor to the mummified couple on the bed. “Mama Rose? Mama Rose, what happened?”

She doesn’t know, thought the older woman. Doesn’t know L’il T.’s dead. Doesn’t know she’s a widow, doesn’t know that kid inside her is never gonna see his father. “Cut us loose, then I’ll tell you all about it,” she croaked through dry, cracked lips.

It wasn’t quite as simple as it sounded. Big-bellied and awkward, Dennie had to kneel and go through the corpse’s pockets until she found the universal cuff-key in the watch pocket of his jeans, then climb onto the bed and lean across Pender to reach their handcuffs, her swollen, blue-veined breasts swinging free inside the overalls. Ever a gentleman, and unable to avert his glance, he closed his eyes until she had finished.

It took several minutes for sensation, in the form of a thousand agonizing pinpricks, to return to their unused limbs. In the meantime, it was Dennie who cut through their linen mummy wrappings with a pair of shears, and Dennie who held a glass of water to Mama Rose’s parched lips, tenderly cradling the back of Rose’s head on what remained of her lap while the older woman sipped noisily, greedily, water dribbling down her chin.

Then Dennie eased Mama Rose to a sitting position, propped her up with the bed pillows, rolled up Mama Rose’s pant legs, and began massaging her calves with both hands to restore the circulation. “Now will somebody please tell me what’s going on around here?” she asked. “Teddy never came home last night and he’s not answering his cell phone.”

Rose glanced imploringly at Pender, who was busily chafing his crossed wrists with his tingling hands. He refused to acknowledge her unspoken plea: You tell her. She turned back to Dennie. “Worse than that,” she said.

“Is he…is he hurt?”

Tough-talking Mama Rose, who had always scorned euphemisms, found herself unable to get the d-word out. “Teddy’s…he’s gone, Dennie. Carson, too-they’re both gone.”

Dennie kept working, head down, rubbing the life back into Rose’s legs. Mama Rose thought for a minute the pregnant girl hadn’t heard her, or had misunderstood; then the tears began plopping down onto her bare shins, and she remembered something Dennie had told her once: that Eskimo babies were taught to cry silently.

She longed to take the younger woman into her arms, but they weren’t working yet; she longed to cry for Carson-and for herself-but somehow the long night of horror had robbed her of tears. Which was just as well, because with a cry of surprise Dennie suddenly left off massaging Rose’s legs, and pressed her hands to her own great belly.

“What? What is it, honey?”

“I think I felt a contraction,” said the newly widowed mother-to-be.

“Well that fucking figures,” said Mama Rose. “That goddamn fucking well figures.”