The Sound of Broken Ribs(12)

When she glanced back at him, he looked so comically confused that she damn near laughed.

“You tryin’ to tell me something?”

Maybe he wasn’t completely stupid.

She made a sound deep in her throat. Something that might have been a bubbling “Look!” but came out sounding more like “Oog!”

She cut her eyes in the direction of where the cell phone should be for a third time. When she glanced back to the man, he was dropping down into a catcher’s stance beside her.

“You talking about your phone?”

She nodded. Thank God she could do that much.

“It ain’t in the case on your arm, if that’s what you mean. Ain’t no tellin’ where it might be. Likely it was knocked off you when you got hit. Jesus, I just realized somethin’. If you was hit, that means the person who hit you just left. ‘Cause they ain’t here. Ain’t no one on the street but my truck.”

She wanted to tell him that his truck being there still meant that no one was at the street, but she figured that, like most country boys, the guy’s pickup was a member of his immediate family. If not a legitimate love interest.

“I can look for your phone, if you want me to. I mean, I don’t know what else to do while we wait. Or should I stay and keep you company?”

She appreciated his concern for what she wanted, but it wasn’t like she could answer him in any way he was likely to understand, and she was tired. Too tired to try to figure out some abstract means of communication this country bumpkin could understand.

Stop being so rude. This guy’s saving your life.

There was that voice again. It wasn’t her own thoughts. Like any sane person, she could tell the difference between the ever-present inner voice known as Thought and someone else’s voice entirely.

He’s trying his best.

And this time she saw it. Whatever it was.

A flicker of movement behind the man’s jawline on the left side of his face, the right side for her.

A pair of black lips drawing back as a face snatched itself away, vanishing behind the man’s ear. The teeth had been huge—large glistening squares of yellow.

The shock in her eyes must have been apparent, because the man asked, “Are you okay? Holy God, you ain’t dyin’—are you? I don’t know if I could handle watchin’ someone die. Please don’t die. I wanna be here with you, but I can’t watch someone die.”

Something rose in her throat—a large globule of what felt like a massive Gummi bear. It got to her uvula and lodged in the back of her mouth. She choked. Her body bucked and twitched and something stabbed deep into her lung. She could feel it inside her chest like a blade made of fire.

She couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t draw in a breath. If she hadn’t been dying before, she was now.

In the distance, sirens wailed. Lei didn’t think she’d live to see their arrival.

*

When life hands you lemons, you make lemonade. So that’s what Belinda Walsh did. She made lemonade.

She stood at the sink grinding lemons into the stationary drill-like point of the juicer she’d found in Tony’s cupboard. The plastic dish was a bright, traffic-cone orange. It made the juice she extracted from the lemons look like infected urine. Trying not to think about such things, she poured the juice of five lemons into a pitcher she’d preemptively filled to the brim with ice. Then she added two cups of sugar and tap water until the liquid rose to the rim of the pitcher.

Like freshly squeezed anything, it didn’t match the over-sugared products one could buy at their local grocery store, but it was refreshingly tart—did a great job of brightening her mood, anyway.

Tony had gone into the city limits to judge the climate of the small town. They both wanted to know two things: had the woman been found, and, if so, were they looking for a woman in a canary yellow Toyota Corolla like the one currently parked outside in Tony’s turnabout?

Not that anyone would talk to Tony about such things. No one in town cared much for Tony, or the Marchesinies in general. Dad had been an asshole stuck in his ways, and their mother had been a true bitch, especially to her only daughter. Both parents had ruled with an iron fist, and both children’s asses maintained a perfect five-finger outline of those metallic appendages. Belinda recalled beatings so bad that she literally had not been able to sit down for a week. To do so would result in her squealing and sliding off whatever seat she’d been planning to sit down on. Once or twice, Mom had even drawn blood.

At least the beatings had been separated by gender: Dad had beaten Tony and Mom had beaten Belinda. She wasn’t exactly sure why she felt that gender-specific beatings were better, but Belinda assumed it had to do with how her father sometimes looked at her, especially after she’d met Aunt Flow and sprouted her very own pair of sweater puppies. She vividly recalled one evening when she’d been readying herself for a shower and Dad walked in unannounced. He’d apologized and retreated, but his eyes had scanned her one good time before he left her to consider how lascivious his perusal had been of his daughter’s body. She thought he’d enjoyed what he’d seen. Her own father had found her attractive.

That night, she had not been able to get the water hot enough.

Both Mom and Dad were dead now, though, and Dad, for all his faults, had never touched her in a sexual nature. In fact, the worst she had ever gotten from him was a backhand after she’d called her mother a stone-cold bitch. Belinda could not recall why she’d called her mother a bitch, but she remembered the smack of her father’s knuckles across her lips. Blood had skated over her teeth, staining them, but she hadn’t cried out. She took the hit like a prizefighter. Her father watched her, expecting a reaction and not getting one. It wasn’t until he told her to “get the fuck out my face” that she’d turned and peaceably walked to the bathroom where she’d broken down and sobbed and then brushed the blood from her teeth. After that, her smile never was quite white enough for her liking.