them as soon as she heard them, and started to cry when she saw them.
“Don’t take me home,” she pleaded with them. “I want to be with Flash and my baby.” She was immediately agitated and her mother tried to calm her down, as Alex turned away so Camille wouldn’t see him crying. They couldn’t take her home anyway, or the baby. She was legally an adult.
“We want you to come home with us, but we can’t force you,” Alex said quietly when he turned around and Camille closed her eyes again, reassured that they weren’t going to kidnap her and the baby. Flash had said they would try to do that. They were the enemy to Camille now. He had convinced her of it. Alex could see it whenever she spoke to them. She turned to her mother then.
“It hurt more than I thought it would, even though she’s so little…and there was blood everywhere.” Eleanor could imagine it and was grateful she hadn’t died. But she looked terrible, and they went to see the baby a few minutes later. She was the smallest infant they had ever seen. She was in an incubator, and they were giving her small puffs of oxygen. Everything about her was tiny. She stared at them through the glass with enormous eyes, and gave a lusty cry when a nurse changed her diaper. She was being bottle fed because Camille was too weak and sick to nurse her.
They went back to see Camille then, and she was asleep. They left and checked into a hotel and for the next two days, they visited Camille. Flash never came to see her. She said he was busy in a recording studio preparing to make the single he had promised her. They tried to convince her to come home with them, but got nowhere. And on the third day when they showed up, Camille was gone and had taken the baby with her. They spoke to the doctors in the nursery who said that being removed at such a low birth weight wouldn’t kill her, but would leave her vulnerable to complications which could prove fatal. Alex and Eleanor had no idea where to find her, where they’d gone, if they’d taken the baby with them, or left her with Flash’s mother, as they said. They didn’t even know Flash Storm’s real name, or his mother’s, or how to reach the band. They had no phone numbers or names. They tried every avenue they could think of to make contact with Camille, to no avail, and a week later, they went home, without their daughter, or the baby. They were both deeply depressed and worried about the baby, and Camille. They had no choice but to accept their own helplessness. Camille sent them a telegram a week later from a Western Union office in New York. “Ruby and I are fine. I’m with Flash and Ruby is with his mother. Don’t worry. I love you.” It was small consolation, and Eleanor could hardly think straight when they went back to the shop and put a good face on for their customers. No one knew that their hearts were breaking. But at least they knew that both Camille and the baby were alive when she sent the telegram. They just hoped that it stayed that way.
It was a rugged Christmas, worrying about both of them. They were haunted by the vision of the tiny baby they had seen in the incubator. They were having breakfast on Christmas Day, the shop was closed until after New Year’s, and they were planning to go to Lake Tahoe for a few days. The phone rang while Eleanor was clearing away the dishes and Alex answered. Eleanor had a sudden premonition that something was wrong and watched his face. He looked stone faced as he wrote down some information, hung up, and bowed his head, bracing himself before he turned to face his wife. He was fighting tears and couldn’t hold them back.
“What is it?” But she knew before she asked him, and took a sharp breath. “Camille?” He nodded.
“It was the Boston police. They played at some bar last night. She and Flash OD’d sometime during the night afterward at their hotel. Their drummer found them this morning. They’d already been dead for several hours. She had us on her ID card in her wallet,” he said, sobbing, as they rushed into each other’s arms. Their little girl