Fight Like a Girl - Sheena Kamal Page 0,66
to the soil, and a kind of stillness overtake him.
Pammy takes her hand away. “It’s safe now.”
I hear her on the phone, calling the police. Her calm is gone, she sounds frantic. She’s sobbing again, the same way she’d been the night my dad died. It feels like that night all over again, except worse. The sound of her voice grows distant as I scramble down the side of the ravine, step carefully around Ravi and go to Ma. I sit beside her and take her dirt-streaked hand into mine. “Ma,” I say, “wake up.”
I close my eyes and put my arms around her. That power of hers is gone, the one that came with the night, the one that turned her into a shrieking thing, fire personified, when Ravi dared put his hands on me.
And now, the night fades away and she’s going, too.
The rising sun burns the outside of my lids until I force them open, see her clearly in the morning light. Her skin dry as paper, hair like coarse brush scattered around her head, a dry halo fit for kindling. The light hits it and for a moment it turns red, like it’s alive. It’s my concussion talking, the bone shard in my brain, maybe, because what I think in this moment is she’s going to burst into flames and go shooting across the sky.
I notice for the first time that her eyes are open. I don’t know how long she’s been watching me. “My baby,” she says, her voice rattling out from deep inside her chest. “I heard you calling me. They say there’s a light in the tunnel, but there’s no light. It was only dark. So dark. And then I heard your voice like it was when you were a little girl. My baby.”
I don’t even flinch when her hand finds mine, her fingers wrapping around my palm and squeezing with a strength I never thought would be possible, her on the ground like this, broken into pieces.
“Yes,” I say, brushing the dirt from her hair. “Yours. Always yours.”
“Trish? Is it safe now?” I look up at Pammy, who’s watching over us from the top of the ravine. She’s done with the phone-sobbing. Her tears dry and her calm returns. “Can I come down?”
“Yeah.” I echo her from mere moments ago. “It’s safe now.”
Pammy picks her way carefully down the side of the ravine and sits cross-legged next to me. She takes Ma’s other hand in hers and presses a kiss to the back of it.
thirty-five
The hospital is cold, so Jason has lent me his sweater. He showed up at my house after the cops arrived and hasn’t really left me since. He’s here now, sleeping beside me in the waiting room.
I put my head on his shoulder and close my eyes. When Aunty K finds us, we’re holding hands. Pammy must have called her right after she called 9-1-1 because sometime in the last couple hours she hopped on a plane from New York and all of a sudden she’s at the hospital with us. Maybe it’s not all of a sudden. Maybe we’ve been here for a while and Pammy has been wrapped around me like a shield, sending cops and nurses and nosy busybodies catapulting away like she’s electricity personified. She tried to send Jason away, too, but he refused to go.
“Can I speak to you for a minute, Trisha?” Aunty K asks.
Jason looks at me. “Want me to go, Trish?”
I don’t really want to talk to her, but I know I have to. “No, it’s okay. We’ll go.” I follow Aunty K out of the room. I see Jason staring at us through the glass doors.
She sees him, too. “Pammy says your boyfriend won’t leave. What does he know about what happened?”
“Nothing. Pammy told me what to say to everyone.”
“And the cops?”
“Haven’t talked to them yet.”
She looks relieved. Her hair is loose around her shoulders and there’s a kind of determination about her that reminds me of Ma. “Good. Let’s go over it again.”
“Do we have to?”
“Yes! This is the story.”
She tells it to me, almost word for word what Pammy said. They must have talked about it at some point.
“Are you listening?” Aunty K says, when it becomes clear I’m not.
I force myself to pay attention. This is where the important part comes in. I know this from experience.
* * *
Ravi was an addict. He wandered. Was off his head a lot. Ma must have gone looking for