Before She Was Found(61)

“May I sit?” I asked.

“Sure,” Cora said and I pulled a chair next to her bedside. “What about this one?” I pointed to the remaining bracelet on the tray. She shrugged. “What about your friend Violet? Did you make one for her?”

Cora poked at her oatmeal, cooled now to a gray paste, with her spoon and didn’t say anything.

“How is Violet?” I asked, watching her face carefully.

Again Cora shrugged. “I don’t know. I haven’t talked to her.”

“Ah,” I said. “She hasn’t called or visited you yet.”

“I don’t have a cell phone so she couldn’t call me, anyway, but she hasn’t come to visit.” She was trying to act indifferent but the visible part of her face told a different story.

“Maybe her mom won’t let her. The two of you had something very traumatic happen to you. Sometimes people don’t quite know what to say or how to act.” Cora remained silent. “Have you thought about calling Violet yourself?”

“My mom says that Violet should be the one to call me. Not the other way around. But yeah, I thought about it.”

“How does that make you feel?” I asked the age-old question.

“Sad, I guess. Lonely. I thought we were best friends.”

“What about other kids from your school? Have you heard from any of them?”

“Just Jordyn. No one else.” Cora shook her head and then winced and touched her lips gingerly.

“Are you in much pain? Do you want me to call the nurse?”

“No, that’s okay. My stomach hurts only when I get up. My eye and mouth hurts, but my mom says that once my mouth heals they’ll fix my teeth. I’ll get fake ones. Here and here.” She opened her mouth in a gap-toothed grimace.

“I bet you’re looking forward to that.”

“Yeah, but I don’t like going to the dentist,” she said.

“Me, either.” After all that Cora has been through, I thought, the terror and the pain, the dentist was the least of her worries. “How have you been sleeping, Cora? Are you getting some rest?” It was hard to tell by looking at her because the exposed portion of her face was storm-cloud purple.

“You can’t tell anyone what I say to you, right? You’re my doctor so it’s a secret?”

“Some secrets I can keep,” I said. “Like what you’re feeling. What I can’t keep is if you are thinking about hurting yourself or someone else or if you are taking illegal drugs.”

Cora wrinkled her nose. “No way.”

“And I promise you that I will not share anything you tell me without letting you know first,” I told her. “You can talk to me about anything, Cora. I’m here to help you.”

Cora thought about that for a minute. “Okay. I do sleep better when my mom’s here but it makes me feel bad, too. I’m almost twelve. I should be able to fall asleep without my mom in the room.”

“You had a scary thing happen to you. It’s understandable to want your mom nearby.”

“Yeah, I guess. But when she’s here, she just looks at me all sad. Like I’m going to die or something. I guess she’s scared, too. She keeps asking me what happened and who did it and what did I see. It just makes my head all muddled, so sometimes I pretend to be asleep. Are you going to ask me about what happened the other night?” She rubbed her fingers across her cast where a scattering of signatures decorated the fiberglass.

“Not if you don’t want me to.” I was hoping that as I got to know Cora, she’d open up to me about what she remembered. If anything. “You’ve got a lot of signatures there,” I observed.

“Mostly the nurses.” She pointed to them. “And this one is the doctor who did my face. And this is Jordyn’s. She’s my friend who brought me the bracelet kit. And her grandpa signed, too.”

“Tell me about Jordyn,” I said.

“She’s okay,” Cora said, but begrudgingly. “She’s kind of hard to figure out. One minute she’s really nice and then all of a sudden she’s acting like she hates you.”

“Sounds confusing,” I mused.

“It is,” Cora said emphatically. “Jordyn, Violet and I used to be best friends but we got in a fight right before Christmas and I thought she’d never talk to me again. But then last week she all of a sudden started talking to me again. I think it was because I told her I was sorry about her grandma getting hurt. She fell and broke her hip and is in the hospital. Anyway, Jordyn came over and it was like things were like they used to be.”

“And there’s your sister’s name and your mom’s. How about your dad? Did he sign it?” I thought of Jim Landry and the anger that seemed to rise up off him in waves.

“Not yet. But he will. He’s just pretty mad at me right now.”

“About what?” I kept my voice neutral, conversational.

“We snuck out the other night. I knew we shouldn’t have done it, but we did. I’m not supposed to be out running around that late at night.”

“Your dad told you he was mad at you?” I asked.

“He didn’t have to. He didn’t say anything. That’s how I know he’s mad. He doesn’t say anything, just sits there with his arms crossed.” Cora demonstrated by clumsily folding her own arms across her chest.