Cross Current (7 page)

Jeannie was sitting in a chair next to the bed, her fingers laced together on top of her stomach, watching the TV screen mounted high up in a corner of the room, while a strange man in a dark green uniform sat on the edge of Solange’s bed, speaking to her. The kid looked even smaller in that big white bed, especially because the man sitting next to her had the shoulders of a football player. His biceps stretched the green fabric of his uniform tight and, as he moved, the leather and web belt that held his gun creaked, a continuous reminder that the weapon was there. Again, I felt an odd twist in my gut.

“Well, it’s about time you got here, girl.” Jeannie stood and tugged at her dress to reposition the fabric around her shoulders.

The man stood up and reached his hand out to me. “How d’ya do,” he said. His sandy-colored hair looked a bit shaggy around the ears for a law enforcement type, and the deep tan and white creases at the corners of his blue-gray eyes told me he felt nearly as trapped inside the hospital as I did. “Name’s Elliot. I’m with the Border Patrol.”

In his voice I heard an accent from someplace not too far north of here, which meant the South.

“Border Patrol, huh?” I looked at the writing stitched over his breast pocket.

“Not many folks recognize the uniform. They mostly think we’re park rangers or something.”

I nodded. “You do kind of look like Smokey the Bear. You just need one of those hats.” I made the shape of the flat brim with my hands. He wasn’t smiling at my little joke.

His hand had completely engulfed mine, which doesn’t happen often. I glanced down at the card he’d handed me. It said he was Russell Elliot, Senior Patrol Agent, Border Patrol.

“My friends call me Rusty,” he said.

“Border Patrol? As in Immigration?”

“Basically, yeah.”

“And just what border do you patrol? Georgia? Alabama?”

Jeannie sighed and plopped back down in her chair.

Agent Elliot gave me a look that said that what I thought was a clever line was something he had heard too many times. “Actually, there’s plenty of border down here in South Florida. This state has about seventeen thousand miles of coastline—more international border than any other continental state—and yet we’ve got just one other office on this coast south of Jacksonville. Sixteen people work out of our office, and there’s another ten down at the Marathon branch office in the Keys. We’re the guys who try to catch the folks who don’t come in through normal ports of entry.” His eyes flicked a quick glance at Solange, then he pressed his lips together and raised his brows as though to say “Not my fault.”

Flashing those baby blues at me all innocent like that made me want to yank him off her bed and push him out the door. I squeezed past him and slipped between the bed and the IV stand. “How are you feeling?” I asked Solange.

She looked more alert now, more focused, and it was obvious she had been listening, trying to understand our conversation. But when I spoke directly to her, she blinked once and then lowered her eyes.

“She’s not saying much,” Jeannie said. “She slept for about three hours, though, after we got settled in here. I called my mother, and she came and picked the boys up. This little girl ate a pretty good dinner when she woke up, even though it looked god-awful to me, some kind of clear broth, crackers, and Jell-O. Point is, she kept it down. There was a whole room full of folk waiting for her to upchuck.” Jeannie heaved herself back up to a standing position. “It’s your shift now. I’m heading out.”

I reached across the bed and squeezed her hand. “Thanks, Jeannie. I really owe you this time.”

“Girl, you owe me so much, you’ll never get to even. But today was a pleasure.” She turned to Solange. “I’ll be back tomorrow. You remember what I told you, okay?” She looked at the Border Patrol agent, then gave the girl an exaggerated wink. To me she said, “I’ll call you later.”

After Jeannie was gone, Elliot said, “May I speak to you out in the hall for a moment?”

I wanted to get him out of there, away from Solange, and it appeared I was going to have to hear him out to make that happen. “I’ll be right back,” I told her.

Outside the room, I pressed my back against the wall, and for the first time all day, I felt tired, felt the weight of the day’s events pressing me down. I wanted to slide my butt down to the floor and sit. What I didn’t want to do was stand out there under those fluorescent lights talking to this big man who had come to send that child back to Haiti.

“Can we get this over with as quickly as possible?” I asked. “I’m pretty damn tired, and I’d really rather be in there with that kid than standing out here talking to you.” 

“I’ll agree not to take offense at that, if you’ll agree to tell me what happened out there.” There was a definite country sound to his voice. I guessed Georgia.

“Look, I’ve already talked to the local cops.”

“I know that, but this girl isn’t really their case. Their concern is the murder victim, mine is this girl.”

It was the first time I had heard anyone involved with this case say the word. Collazo had already referred to the woman’s “attacker,” but this word was powerful: murder. “Okay, look. I’ll go through the story again, but I’m going to tell you right up front, if you’re making plans to send that kid back to Haiti, I’m going to fight you every inch.”

He pushed away from the wall and slid his hands in his pockets. “This country’s policy is pretty clear on that.” There was a looseness about him in spite of his size, as though he were incredibly comfortable in his own skin. Under other circumstances I would have found that attractive, but now it merely irritated me. It made me have to work that much harder to not like him.

“I don’t give a damn about your policy.”

“If you would let me finish, what I was going to say was that I am not here this evening to talk about her deportation. Don’t get me wrong, Miss Sullivan, we may get to that, but as an unaccompanied minor, we’re not going to hustle her off into the night and onto a plane bound for Port-au-Prince.” 

Yeah, right. The Border Patrol trying to make out like they’re really just warm and fuzzy? “But you will get to that point eventually.”

“Well” —he shrugged—“if she doesn’t have any next of kin here in the States, then, yeah, probably. I’m not gonna lie to you on that.”

“So, assuming we don’t find any next of kin in the States, how much time do I have before you get there?”

“A week, maybe ten days, max.”

I stared straight into those laser-like blue eyes of his. “You are not sending this one back.
Whatever
it takes, she’s staying.”

“Is that a threat, Miss Sullivan?”

I held his eyes as long as I could, but finally I had to turn my head away. I watched the nurse in the room across the hall as she carried a bedpan to the far patient and drew the curtain around the bed. The sound of the steel rings sliding on the rod reminded me of all the times I had stepped away from my father’s bed, both of us feeling awkward about the last days when his body gave out. That was before I finally said “enough” and took him home so he could die in his own bed, and the awkwardness was replaced with a sense of intimacy. I’d often wondered if that sense I had felt as I bathed him and fed him and carried him to the bathroom, that sense of such profound love, if that was the same feeling a mother got as she cared for her newborn child.

“So tell me what happened,” he said. “How you found her.”

I swung my head back around and blinked at him. I’d forgotten for a moment that he was there. Taking a deep breath, I saw her again sitting in that boat, resting her head just inches out of the bloody water, just staring at me with those eyes. She probably would not have survived another twenty- four hours.

“I’ve tried to get the story from her,” he said, “but she either doesn’t understand or she won’t talk. The local cops had a Creole translator here earlier. Same thing. She wouldn’t say a word.”

I knew how that felt; I’d been there once myself. They said I didn’t speak for three months after my mother died. I’d gone to some inner place where none of it could touch me. Once you’ve found your way to that place, it’s hard to come back.

“I noticed the birds first, lots of birds, circling,” I said and went on to tell him about the boat and the body. The voice I was hearing inside my head was my voice, but it didn’t sound familiar. In a flat monotone, I described how weak she was, how, as I’d dragged her aboard
Gorda
, she’d felt so thin and frail and helpless. “In the end, it was really kind of miraculous that I saw her. I don’t know how much longer she would have lasted out there.”

He put his left hand on the wall next to my head and leaned in closer. “You say she did talk to you. Do you think she understands much English?”

We were close to the same height, our eyes on a level plane, but his shoulders seemed half again as broad as mine, and the muscles in his forearm carved ridges beneath the skin. If his intent was to be intimidating, it was working. “Some, but I’m not sure how much. I believe her when she says that her father is American. That’s probably how she learned the little English she does know, and if he’s here in South Florida like she thinks he is, I’m going to find him.” 

“Do you have any idea how many times we hear that? That they have a relative in America?”

“I’m sure that’s true, but this case is different. This time you’ve got me to contend with, and I believe her.” I ducked under his arm, then turned to face him from the doorway of her room. “I found her out there, and the way I see it, that means I’ve got certain salvage rights.”

VI

When I went back into the room, a middle-aged black nurse was there with a machine, taking the child’s blood pressure.

“How’s she doing?”

“A lot better than I would have thought when they brought her in here this afternoon. She looked half dead.”

1 heard a slight Creole accent in her voice. “Are you Haitian?”

The woman smiled as she unwrapped the cuff from the girl’s arm. “That I am, but this little one doesn’t seem to want to talk to me, not even in Creole.”

When I tried to catch Solange’s eye, she deliberately looked away.

“It happens sometimes to kids when they’re traumatized,” I said. “I’d just like to sit with her for a while. They’re not going to kick me out, are they?”

“The other nurses told me you’re the one who found her. Family can stay after visiting hours, and I think you are about the closest thing to family this child’s got right now.”

After she left, I sat down on the yellow plastic chair and tried to make myself comfortable. There wasn’t a book or a magazine anywhere in sight, so I took one of the paper towels off her bedside table, got a pencil out of my shoulder bag, and began to sketch. I’d dabbled for years with water colors and charcoal sketches, having learned it from my mother, so these were all still-life scenes I had sketched in the past. First, I drew little pictures of
Gorda
, then a beach scene with palm trees and seabirds, a view of my cottage sitting next to the seawall back in Rio Vista.

I knew she was watching every move I made. Her bed was the one closest to the window and, as there was no patient in the other bed, the only sounds came from outside the room— occasional moans, bursts of laughter, or clicking footsteps beyond the walls of our space. I feared she would grow tired of it, just watching me draw, and fall asleep eventually, but there was an intelligence in those eyes that warned me not to underestimate her. It was as though she and I were engaged in a sort of standoff, neither of us willing to be the first to attempt to cross the space that separated us.

It was when I started to draw the picture of Abaco that I heard her shift her position in the bed, trying to get a better look at the drawing. I sketched my dog lying down, her muzzle between her front paws, her big eyes looking up with that funny, guilty look she gets when she has scattered the garbage all over my cottage to get at some chicken bones or is discovered with a squirrel that underestimated her speed.

“What is dog’s name?”

Her voice surprised me, not just because the sound of it broke the long silence, but also because it was strong and clear. She spoke in almost perfect, though accented, English. I found my breathing had gone shallow and sketchy the way it does when I’m nervous.

“Her name’s Abaco. After some islands in the Bahamas.” Red had continued with the tradition he’d started with my mother—after naming all three of their kids after islands, he had named his dog that way as well.

I reached for another paper towel to start a new drawing and set the sketch of the dog aside. I began sketching the
Wind Dancer
, a lovely little sailboat I had once sailed down in the Dry Tortugas in what often seemed like another life.

“I see Abaco?” She pronounced the dog’s name with the accent on the last syllable instead of the first. She made my dog sound like some Parisian show dog, instead of the strong-willed, incorrigible squirrel chaser she really was.

“Sure.” I handed her the drawing. She held it up in front of her face, and there was a small smile in her eyes, while the rest of her face held strong. “You can keep it if you like,” I said.

She slid the drawing under the covers then, hiding it carefully on the sheet next to her frail body. After she settled the covers back into place, she lifted them one last time to make sure the drawing was still there, then collapsed against the pillows.

“Have you ever had a dog?” I asked.

She shook her head, pressing her lips tightly together. “Mmmm, it’s probably different in Haiti, I guess. I’ve never been there. I’ve been to the Bahamas. Never to Haiti, though.”

“I been Bahamas.”

“Really?” I tried to sound barely interested, didn’t even look at her as I said it. I just shaded in the shadows on the hull of the sailboat on the napkin.

“Dogs bad, like Haiti. Not nice dog, like Abaco.”

1 looked up. “You saw dogs in the Bahamas?”

She nodded. “I work with Erzulie. Bad dog come many day.”

I decided to press her a little. “Erzulie, that was the woman in the boat with you?”