“Darren, look at this.”
She held a white slip of paper, stained in places, likely because it had been in the trash. It was smooth, though, barely a crinkle in it. There was a note on one side, written in pale blue ink. Cornflower blue. Jesus, even their pens are color-coordinated, Darren thought. He took the note from his mother, taking in the block-style print, the handwriting of kids who never had to study cursive writing in school. It was gawky, awkward-looking. The note said: JUST CHECKING ON YOU AFTER LAST NIGHT.
It was signed Michelle.
“Hmph,” Bell said, as if the note alone proved something. What, he didn’t know.
“We don’t know this note was for Sera.”
“Except it was mixed up with all the rest of her things.”
“There’s no way to know when it was written, or what ‘last night’ means.”
Darren handed the note back to his mother, asking if any of it rang any bells.
Bell studied it for a few moments. “It’s a girl there named Michelle, I think. Been around since I started.” Then she smiled at the note. “It’s nice to think of one of them girls checking in on her like this.” She gingerly set it on top of a piece of wax paper, then went back to looking through Sera’s other things. From inside a bundle of clothes, a pill bottle rolled out. “Look here,” she said, holding it out for her son.
Darren set aside Sera’s schoolwork. He reached for the pills and turned the bottle over, squinting to make out the small print, before glancing around the room to see if there was another light he could turn on. He caught his mother giving him a wry smile. “Gon’ be needing readers before long.” She cocked her head a little to take him in, her grown boy. “You can borrow a pair of mine. Got a set of ’em in that top drawer.”
Darren made a point of needing no such thing.
“Lenarix,” he said, reading the label.
“Never heard of it.”
“Me either,” he said, already googling the medication on his phone.
Darren gave a low hum about what he saw.
“Sera has sickle cell,” he told his mother.
“Aw, no…” Bell seemed genuinely saddened to hear this, as if receiving news about a relative she hadn’t seen in a while but for whom she still held fond feelings.
“She seem sick to you?” Darren asked.
“I always thought she was kind of thin. She didn’t seem strong, is what I’m trying to say. But I never saw her fall out or nothing. She appeared to make it to her classes.”
“Maybe she had a medical episode of some sort.”
Could the girl have fallen out somewhere and needed help?
“Maybe her parents do know where she is,” Darren said. “Surely they’re keeping tabs on her, checking in to make sure she’s doing okay, especially living away from home with a serious medical condition.” He told his mother about the trip to Thornhill, the fact that there seemed to be something odd and unsavory about Joseph and that Sera’s mom had looked scared. But they insisted they were in contact with Sera.
They’d received texts, he’d been told.
“I don’t see how,” Bell said.
Darren looked up to see Bell holding a small black cell phone.
It was a flip phone, ancient-looking by any nineteen-year-old’s standards, but it had her initials scratched into the side. Darren took it from his mother and opened it, mashed every button.
The thing was dead.
“Did you say this girl was from Thornhill?” Bell asked.
Darren was slow to respond, still noodling over what it meant that they had the girl’s dead cell phone, retrieved from the trash four days ago, after he’d just heard the Fullers suggest they were in constant contact with their daughter via text. Their daughter with a life-threatening illness. “What?” he said, looking up at his mother, who was shuffling through a thin stack of photographs. He wanted a look at those too.
“Thornhill.”
“You know it?” he said while holding out his hand for the photos. Bell, who was perched with one hip hiked on the edge of her bed, passed the photos to Darren, who was now sitting on the carpet with his back against the wall. He had the cell phone at his feet, Sera’s notebooks spread around him. He started flipping through the photos — shots of trees, forestland. They were beautiful. Sun-dappled and a brilliant dark green, the oaks and pines in these pictures were majestic. Simply stunning. Sera was in a few of them, back against the trunk of a tree, her gaze turned to the sky. He wondered who’d taken the pictures, with whom she’d spent time in the woods.
“I put in an application to work there,” she said. “I’m still waiting to hear.”
Darren looked up. “What exactly is it they do? What business are they running?”
“It’s a processing plant, what I heard. Pork or chicken, one of them. Hard work, them kind of jobs, but it comes with free housing out there, all kind of extra perks. She was doing good if her people was living and working out there. It’s pretty, real clean.”
Darren considered the house they were currently in; it was dated, for sure, and there were scuffs and marks on the wall, loose doorknobs, and a few water stains on ceilings, but there was still something inviting about the place. Cozy. The closeness of its walls gave the feeling of strong arms wrapped tightly around you; it felt protective and capable. But Bell said she wasn’t sure of a future here for her and Pete, who, she reminded him, weren’t getting any younger. It was a struggle to make rent and pay his medical bills. “Even after Obamacare, he still come out of pocket for all the kinds of therapy he need since his stroke. Physical and occupational, they call it,” she said. “He’s having a good night. But he forgets things, and sometimes the words he’s looking for be swimming around in front of him like slippery catfish, a thing he can’t catch in time.”
Darren thought of Pete saying that he’d met his father, Duke. He wondered if that had been the older man’s mental confusion talking. Bell sighed, still ruminating on their current situation. She said, “It’s just my little paycheck now.”
“Isn’t he on disability or anything?” Darren said.
“Yes, but it’s the doctors’ visits that’s eating at us. A lot of the good ones don’t be fooling with Medicaid. And Medicare don’t cover it all. It’s a rehab facility in Lufkin I drive him to a few times a week. I come out of pocket almost a hundred dollars every time he has a session.”
She joked that at this rate, Petey ought to be able to whistle and ride a unicycle before they were finished with him. But she guessed she’d settle for him being able to use his right side to do a few odd jobs again. The listlessness of his days wore him down.
It was exquisitely strange listening to his mother talk of caretaking for another.
