“I am stating the obvious fact that if they wanted to lie to you, they could. They could send text messages as if they were from your daughter.” Iris shook her head at Darren, at this whole conversation she wanted so badly to find utterly absurd.
“But why would they do that?” she said.
“I don’t know, but for reasons I don’t understand, Thornhill doesn’t seem to want the Rangers or any other police around here looking into your daughter’s disappearance. They told me to stand down, insisted that she isn’t missing —”
“My daughter is not missing.” She continued scrolling through her phone, looking for something that she was realizing in real time wasn’t there. Her eyes dropped to her lap for a second, then she looked up at both of them, a pinched expression on her face. “It must have been on Joseph’s phone,” she said. “But I know I saw the texts. I wouldn’t go weeks without some contact from my child. Sera has been in touch.”
“We found her phone,” Bell said.
Darren kicked her ankle under the table. There was a rhythm to this, a way you had to take someone by the hand and walk them up to the truth right in front of them.
But Bell swatted back at Darren’s arm. “She needs to know.”
“What do you mean, you found her phone?” Iris said.
“It was in the trash with some other things, battery drained all the way down.”
Iris glared at Bell. “Show me.”
This was why Darren wished his mother had simply followed his lead.
To Iris, he said, “We don’t have her belongings with us.”
“Then I don’t believe you,” she said, crossing her arms tightly, her jaw set tight, her chin jutting out. Darren could practically feel molecules in the air rearranging themselves, could feel the force of Iris’s will, rejecting this entire conversation. “Why would Thornhill try to make us believe that our daughter is safe if she isn’t?”
“You tell me,” Darren said. “Tell me what you really know about this place.”
“This ‘place,’” she said, her tone mocking what she took for Darren’s poorly concealed distaste for the town of Thornhill. “This place saved my daughter’s life.”
21.
SHE SHOWED them pictures. Not from a photo album, but ones she kept, of all places, in a kitchen drawer. They were grouped in stacks, each collection in its own plastic sandwich bag. Sera two months old, then twelve years old, then eight, all mixed together. The same for another set. Darren couldn’t make sense of Iris’s classification system, why certain images had been cataloged together, but it made sense to a mother’s heart, and Iris wanted them to know her child, and to see her as an attentive and devoted mother who’d loved her way through more than her fair share of troubles.
“Sometimes I sit up at night thinking about the pain she was in before she could even talk, before she could tell us what was wrong, where it hurt, nights she would cry for hours and hours, and there wasn’t a thing I could do to calm her down. That brandy,” she said, nodding at the bottle. “I sent Joseph out for that when she was six months old, when we thought maybe she just had a bad case of teething. They said sickle cell when she was born, but she didn’t have symptoms for months, and I guess I just wanted to believe the doctors had figured it wrong. And here I had aunties and grannies on Joseph’s side telling us to run a little of this over her gums. Lord, I liked to have that baby drunk, much as I was trying to get that brandy to calm her.”
She ran her finger over a photo of Sera as a new-ish-born baby, spindly arms and legs in white pajamas with red and yellow hearts all over them, but cheeks as puffed up as rising bread in the oven. The eyes were Iris’s, wide and a deep, almost black brown. They made Darren think of bits of coal, flecks of mica within. There was a sparkle within Sera, a depth to her spirit. “I lay up at night worrying about all the days I didn’t know what it was, all the days she was looking to her mama to make it right, and I let her down because I didn’t know any better. Sometimes Joseph was the only one could get her to stop howling. It was pain still, you could hear her whimper, but in his arms, she would quiet some, find some peace. She’s a daddy’s girl since she was born. I think of how that got down in her somewhere, a feeling that she couldn’t count on her mama. I worry that something like that sticks with a child, a stain you can’t wash away.”
“Naw, don’t do that,” Bell said. She reached across the table and patted Iris’s hand. “You can’t carry that blame. It’ll kill you. Don’t do that to yourself now.”
Iris looked up, her gaze traveling from Bell to Darren and back, sensing a story between mother and son, hearing in Bell’s voice a wisdom born of experience. Darren felt the pain in his mother’s voice. He tried to catch her eye, but she avoided looking at him. From another bag of photos, Iris pulled out a photo of a toddler Sera. “This was the year things started to get really bad. She was barely three years old. No sickle cell on either of our sides that anyone could tell us, going back years and years. And then here it just popped up in my child. It was hard, damn hard. But we adjusted, did what we had to, got to the best doctors in Houston, which are some of the best out there. It was scary, sure it was. But it was relief in it too, to know what was wrong with our baby, what made her hurt so much.”
Luck had it that Joseph had a good job at the time. He was a foreman for a company building homes in Texas and Louisiana. The family — “It was just the three of us back then” — was under his health plan, and they got Sera on the best meds that were available. It wasn’t an easy life and she had “spells,” episodes where nearly every inch of her body hurt. She had to miss school sometimes, but her life was as normal as it could be. “And we were proud of that,” Iris said. “Joseph, oh, it made Joseph feel good that he could take care of us, that he could get Sera everything she needed.” Iris didn’t work. It wasn’t that she hadn’t worked before or didn’t want to, but Joseph could be traditional in his thinking, “and I think he liked the idea of being a man whose wife didn’t have to work, always believed in men taking care of things, resting a family on his shoulders.” She thought it made him feel like the men he saw on television when he was growing up, men who made everything possible for the people in their lives. It seemed to fit the image of himself as a man of substance. It was the yardstick by which he measured his life, and if that meant comparing yourself to white folks, more times than not, well, it only made Joseph satisfied that he was in the game.
He was measuring up, doing better than some of them, actually.
He was running three or four project sites when the bottom fell out of the economy, taking with it any firm foundation beneath their feet. First, they lost the home in the suburbs they had stretched themselves to buy. And then Joseph lost his job with the construction company. They were downsizing, and the men who’d been at the company longer would simply manage more build sites. Joseph was out.
“It messed with his mind,” Iris said.
He’d lost jobs before, but they’d finally been on an upward trajectory as a family. Owned a home, had Sera’s condition under control, and Joseph had thought he might move up within the company; it was a place that had not cared that he hadn’t finished college, long as he was smart, long as he knew about hard work. “I was pregnant with Benny by then, and everything just started to feel like a rock down a hill, gaining speed, us losing things faster and faster every day until our new reality was just a bunch of sad days strung together that we didn’t hardly recognize.”
She looked down and only then noticed that Bell was holding her hand.
She didn’t like that, the condolence in the gesture.
The Fullers were not ones for pity.
Iris gently moved her hand away, folding it with her other one in her lap.
They eventually lost their health insurance, she told them. They cycled through a series of apartments they couldn’t keep, while Joseph tried to find work. Iris too. But someone had to be with Sera during the many weeks she missed school. Without health insurance, they were having a hard time keeping Sera on her medication, even with Iris forgoing prenatal care so they could spend everything they had on keeping Sera well. They got on a treadmill of sorts, always running, but somehow slipping farther and farther back. They began making emergency room visits when Sera fell ill and was in so much pain in her limbs that she would scream her throat raw. Those bills caught up to them, and after wearing out the welcome of a few friends who would let a pregnant woman and an ill child sleep on their floor, they were homeless for a while and living out of a used van that Joseph had traded in his pickup truck for, a loss of a work vehicle but a gain in real estate, the only kind they could claim anymore. By then, Obama was installed in the Oval Office and there was talk about a health-care plan, a way folks wouldn’t go under over a twist of fate, a curl in their DNA that lay in wait.
Bell had her hand on a bag of photos, the top image Sera and her baby brother. Darren might have put them at eleven and two years old. They were on a beach — Galveston, Darren would guess by the grayish color of the sand — and Sera was as thin as ever, with her arm around her chubby little brother. There were dark circles under the girl’s eyes and her neck bulged with swollen lymph nodes. But there was a smile.
There was that light in her eyes still.
“May I?” Bell said, reaching for the picture to get a closer look. Iris’s babies.
Then she looked at Darren to make sure he didn’t think she was overstepping.
He was touched by this, and by her interest in the photos of Iris’s kids.
He was reminded that this had all started with his mother’s care. She was an enigma to him, his mother, a cipher. He thought back to the story of his father, her version of events, Duke as a man who put his child above following the law, felt it tugging at him. If Bell had been telling the truth about Sera Fuller, was she also telling the truth about his father? The idea threatened to undo him.
“Obamacare is when it went really wrong for us,” Iris said.
Darren realized he’d lost the thread of the conversation.
Bell was now looking through a whole stack of photos of Benny and Sera growing year by year, and Iris was smiling at the images of her children, but she was again wringing her hands in her lap. “They passed that law and then it wasn’t really no hope for people like us to get help, people with burdens that are no fault of our own.”
