The Sky Beneath My Feet - By Lisa Samson Page 0,62
jaw has ideas of its own that mainly involve hanging there.
Eli edges forward to try to screen me from the nun. I see his feet, the new black sneakers exceptionally clean. Don’t, I think. But there’s no danger of Eli retaliating. He keeps inching forward only to move back again.
“You know what you is? You know? You a kidnapper, that’s what. Aziza, why you open the door to this woman, knowing what she done?”
“What she done?” Aziza asks. “All she done is get that skanky little white girl outta here and she don’t belong here in the first place. Shootin’ up right in front of me like that.”
“This lady a kidnapper,” Mother Zacchaeus says loudly, proclaiming it to the heavens.
“Mom, are you okay?” Eli whispers.
I feel his hands on my shoulders, helping me upright.
“I’m fine,” I manage to say, though the room is spinning. I face the nun. “Why did you hit me?” Clearly we’ve been dreaming at cross purposes. In my dreams, she pins a medal on me, and in hers the stabbing is intentional. “You seem to have completely misunderstood the situation.”
Mother Zacchaeus cocks her head, like she can’t understand me.
“We didn’t kidnap Sam,” I say. “We rescued her.”
“Rescued her from what? From here? This here is a safe place. When you in here, nobody can come in and take you ’way. Nobody.”
“She’s fine now,” I say. “She’s back with her mother.”
“Back with her mother ain’t fine. Back with her mother is the problem. You don’t know nothing, you know that?”
“Maybe not. But I didn’t kidnap anybody. She went willingly.”
Aziza, the smoking girl, laughs at this. “That man with you, he let her shoot up again and then he carried her out. That wasn’t willing, that was unconscious.”
This hits me harder than the slap. It makes sense, though. When I’d first spoken to her, Sam was growing more aware, more belligerent. When I saw her in the backseat of the car, she’d been completely out of it, passive and pliable. I remember Gregory saying once that the rehab counselors actually prefer when their clients check in high or loaded. It makes them easier to manage.
Eli tugs me toward the door. “Mom, let’s just get out of here.”
“Listen to the boy,” Mother Zacchaeus says. “Get out before the police get here. ’Cause they coming to lock your kidnappin’ self away—”
“Don’t you get it?” I tell her. “We’re on the same side. I was trying to help that girl, just like you. I brought my son with me to see what’s happening here.”
“Why, so he can laugh at us, like you doing?”
“No,” I say. “I thought it would help.”
She cocks her head at this too. “What you mean, help?”
I’m not going to elaborate. I’m not going to tell this woman my son’s been smoking weed and I thought a firsthand glimpse of the bedlam that is Mission Up would freak him out sufficiently to get him to stop.
“How it gonna help?” she asks.
“I just . . .”
Eli pulls on my arm again. “Let’s just go.”
“No, wait,” Mother Zacchaeus says. “The lady wanna help. Aziza, you hear? Go get the box. The lady wanna help us. She come down here for our benefit. She here to grace us with her presence. Go on and get the box.”
Aziza disappears with a smile, returning from the lounge with a shiny pink shoe box. The top is taped down with clear cellophane and a jagged slot has been cut into the center. She holds the box toward me and shakes it.
“You wanna help, this is how.”
I reach for the box.
“No you don’t,” she says, snatching it away.
Mother Zacchaeus shakes her head. “It’s for putting your money in. Go on. You gonna help or what?”
“You just slapped me,” I say. “I’m not paying you for the privilege.”
She mulls this over, then smiles. This happened last time too, the sudden change of demeanor when I stood up to her. Mother Zacchaeus, I realize, is a bully. She only respects the people who stand up to her. If I slapped her back, we’d probably end up the best of friends.
But don’t worry, I won’t.
“You know, I think my brother understood this place and I’m the one who didn’t. We’re from two different worlds, I realize, but I left here thinking we were on the same side. Clearly I was wrong.”
“Aw,” she says. “Two different worlds. Now tell me this: in your world, you can just walk into the hospital and check somebody out? In this world here,