quick glimpse of the figure moving toward her – the figure had paused ever so slightly at the ring of deputies, but then resumed its bold, don’t-mess-with-me stride – and Carla’s heart gave a funny little lurch. She felt a crazy fizz of joy and a spasm of pure yearning. She’d managed not to cry so far, she’d fought against tears, she’d been calm, so calm, but now she knew she could stop fighting. She didn’t have to worry anymore about being strong.
‘Mom,’ Carla said. Hot tears burned her eyes.
‘Sweetie.’ Bell Elkins reached out and pulled her daughter into her arms.
At first Bell just held her, oblivious to everything that was happening around them, the screams and the moans and the gagging, and the burgeoning noise from outside the restaurant, too, the sirens and the crackling blasts from the bullhorn, urging the world to move back, back, back, and the shouts – muffled by the glass walls, but still audible – from the swelling, swaying, curious crowd that was filling the street in the wake of the police cars and the ambulances and all the excitement.
‘It’s okay now, sweetie,’ Bell murmured. ‘It’s okay now.’ This was said directly into Carla’s ear, a soft chanting coo, a lullaby on the fly. ‘It’s okay now.’
‘Mom, I—’
Carla tried to alter her position ever so slightly within her mother’s arms, arms that made a circle as rigid as a barrel stave.
‘Don’t move, sweetie,’ Bell said. ‘Just a minute.’
It was scarier, somehow, now that she was actually holding her child, now that the reality of what had occurred right next to Carla was so grimly apparent. To keep panic at bay Bell focused on the specific reality of the young woman in her arms, on the fixed dimensions, the visceral details. Bell was keenly aware of Carla’s thin shoulders, of the beguilingly soft texture of her daughter’s short dark shingle of hair, of the jaunty smell of the Herbal Essences Fruit Fusions shampoo that Carla used – all strangely juxtaposed with the solemn proximity of death, death that spread out just beyond this neat little corner into which the customers had been corralled.
‘Mom,’ Carla said. ‘Gotta breathe, you know?’
Bell relaxed a bit, but knew she needed to maintain physical contact, knew she could not afford to break the circuit. Hands still clamped on Carla’s shoulders, she moved her head back, so that she could look directly into her daughter’s eyes.
‘You’re okay? Really?’
‘Yeah, Mom.’
‘Really?’
‘Yeah.’
‘You’re sure?’
Carla nodded. Her lips were tucked in tight. She was afraid to go beyond single-word answers at this point, afraid she’d start sobbing and not be able to stop. Afraid she’d turn into Mr Goatee.
Bell scanned her daughter’s face. That face, she saw, had lost its chronic cockiness. It wasn’t just the shiny tear-trails on Carla’s thin cheeks that accounted for the change. This face had shed the hard ceramic glaze of cool that had so infuriated Bell when it first appeared about a year and a half ago, transforming her sweet little girl into an entirely new person, a stranger, a creature of shrugs and slouches and cynical opinions and constant backtalk, broodingly indifferent to anything Bell had to say.
For the moment, her child had somehow returned, in all of her transparent neediness, all of her soft vulnerability.
‘You’re okay?’ Bell repeated.
‘Yeah,’ Carla said. ‘I think so. Yeah. Yeah.’ A pause. ‘Maybe.’ Her voice was halting, tentative, husky with choked-back emotion. The next words came in a rush. ‘But listen, Mom, it was – it was awful, really, it was so gross and scary because I was sitting right over there and I saw the whole thing and – and their heads, their heads just explo—I saw it, Mom, and I just couldn’t believe that I was actually seeing what I was see—’
Bell quickly removed her hand from Carla’s right shoulder and pressed two fingers against her daughter’s lips, stopping the words.
‘No, sweetie. No, no, no. Not yet,’ Bell said, gently but firmly. ‘Wait for the deputies to take your statement. It’s very important that when you describe what happened, you’re telling it for the first time. That you’re not influenced by hearing what others say that they saw. So that it’s all your own words.’
She didn’t mean to be abrupt, she hated to shush her child, but Bell knew how imperative it was to do things right. To follow protocol.
She was a mother, but she was also a prosecuting attorney, and on the stem of her softly winding maternal thoughts, another