Under the Light - By Laura Whitcomb Page 0,22

Jenny remembered anything more, she didn’t speak it aloud. But she did look at my hand where it lay on her arm. She lifted her own hand slowly as I drew mine away. She rubbed the place where I had touched her. Then she flexed her fingers and looked around, her gaze passing through me.

She may not have realized it was me beside her, but I had at least changed something in her world. It was a start.

The doctor must have noticed that Jenny was shaking—he took a folded blanket from the foot of the examination table and handed it to her. “Did you have a recent upset?”

Jenny took the blanket absently.

“Anything frighten you or make you sad?” he asked. “Did you have a fight with someone?”

Cathy took the blanket from Jenny’s hands and snapped it open, then put it around her daughter’s shoulders as she spoke. “She hasn’t been herself for days now.” Cathy sat back down and watched the doctor’s pen as if wanting to dictate what he recorded. “She started seeing a boy in secret.” Her voice dropped. “Intimately.”

Jenny pulled the blanket around her as if trying to hide a scarlet letter her mother had sewn onto her blouse.

Cathy looked humiliated to add what followed, “And her father left.” She folded her hands and held them down in her lap. “He moved out this morning. Jenny found out about it right before her bath.”

This was no surprise to me—I’d still been Jenny then. Cathy had wept with me about her husband, Dan, running off with another woman and then we’d celebrated by burning down the Prayer Corner. But Jenny’s head came up, her eyes wide.

“Do you remember hearing about that?” the doctor asked her, and Jenny shook her head no.

“How does it make you feel?” he asked.

I was afraid Jenny would be hurt—he was, after all, her father. I would have been devastated if my own Papa had left me when I was a girl.

“Confused,” said Jenny.

“That’s understandable,” the doctor told her.

The questions were over for a while, but there were hours of waiting—they performed many tests. There were machines for tracking brain waves, diagramming the inside of the head, making a graph of heart patterns—little tubes of blood were taken from Jenny’s arm. They taped a ball of cotton to the tiny wound and Cathy brought the girl a bottle of orange juice and a muffin. This should have been a sweet gesture, but in the same way Cathy had flicked the hospital blanket around Jenny’s shoulders without asking her if she was cold or frightened, Cathy applied food and drink as if Jenny were a dish that needed drying or a dress that needed mending.

The way the nurses, wearing matching pale blue uniforms, busied themselves around Jenny’s body, measuring blood and checking monitors and applying disinfectant, reminded me of cooks preparing a feast. Jenny, watching them, looked as anxious as the Christmas goose about to be cooked.

Cathy looked nervous, as well, but didn’t include herself in the scene. Couldn’t the woman see that Jenny needed to be held and comforted? I ached with the realization that I had never been able to take my own girl in my arms when she was Jenny’s age. Not one afternoon spent together when she was old enough to tell me her dreams. It was torture to observe Cathy sitting blindly and stupidly beside her daughter when I would have given anything just to brush my daughter’s hair one single night when she was fifteen.

Even though every test showed that Jenny was healthy, I knew she was not all right. I’d made a plan to help her, but this rescue was not an easy thing.

“Where are we going?” Jenny asked her mother.

I had little experience with the order of these streets, but even I could tell that Cathy was not driving us home. And she wouldn’t explain. Jenny watched her with concern.

Eventually we stopped in front a tiny house with a porch swing outside the front window.

“Mom,” Jenny said. “Why are we at Mrs. Morgan’s house?”

There were two cars, tail to nose, in the narrow driveway. One was a white van.

“Why is Dad’s car here?” Jenny asked.

Cathy let the engine idle in the middle of the street for a moment, staring at the lights shining through the curtained windows, then she dug the heel of her hand into the steering wheel, blaring the horn in a savage blast before pulling away.

“Daddy left us for Mrs. Morgan?” Jenny shook her