“Did she ever talk?”
“Well, she started to. She’d say ‘Mom-mom,’ that’s what she called her granny. Little baby words like that.” His eyes light then, behind his glasses. “One time she said ‘hen apple.’
That’s what I called eggs, to tease her, when we’d play in the kitchen. And one morning I had her with me down in the yard. One of the hens was stealing the nest, and I was looking for it, and she crawled off through the bean patch and into the weeds and here in a minute she hollers, ‘Hen apple!’ Just as clear as you please.” He wipes the corner of his eye. “My wife never would believe me, but it’s true.”
Taylor and Annawake avoid looking at each other.
“Then after her mama died, seem like she quit talking. Of course, I didn’t see a whole lot of her. She was with my other daughter and a young fella over to Tulsa.”
Taylor bites her lip, then asks, “Did she go to her mother’s funeral?”
He stares at her for a long time. “Everybody goes to the funerals. It’s our way. The funeral is at the stomp grounds, and then the burying.”
“Do you have any pictures?”
“What, of the funeral?”
“No. Of the child.”
He folds himself forward like a jackknife and slides a curved brown wallet from his pocket. He flips through it for a moment like a small favorite book, pauses, then pulls out a tiny photograph, unevenly trimmed. Taylor takes it, afraid to look. But it has nothing of Turtle in it. It’s merely a tiny, dark infant, her features screwed with fresh confusion. Her head is turned to the side and her wrinkled fist holds more defiance than Turtle ever mustered in her life. Until last week.
“Here’s her mother, my daughter Alma. First day of school.” He reaches across with another small photo, and she takes it.
Taylor makes a low noise in her throat, a little cry. It’s a girl in saddle shoes and a plaid dress with a Peter Pan collar, standing tall on a front porch step, shoulders square. Her eyebrows hang an earnest question mark on her high forehead. The girl is Turtle.
Taylor holds the photograph by its comer and looks away.
She feels she might not live through the next few minutes.
The photo leaves her fingers, but she doesn’t watch him put it away.
Taylor says, “The girl I’ve been raising came to me when she was about three. She had been hurt badly, before that.
The night she came to me she had bruises all over her. That’s the reason I kept her. Do you honestly think I should have given her back? Later on when I took her to a doctor, he said her arms had been broken. It was almost a year before she would talk, or look at people right, or play the way other kids do. She was sexually abused.”
Mr. Stillwater speaks in the quietest possible voice to his boots. “I was afraid to death, when they took her to Tulsa.
That boy beat up my daughter. She was in the hospital twice with a broke jaw” He clears his throat. “I should have gone and got her. But my wife was dead, and I didn’t have the gumption. I should have. I done wrong.”
There is a very long silence, and then a yellow leaf falls off the rubber tree. All three of them stare at it.
“I’ve let her down too,” Taylor says. “In different ways. I made her drink milk even though I should have seen it was making her sick.” She continues looking at the curled leaf on the floor, released from its branch. “Since all this came up, we’ve been living on the edge of what I could manage. I had to leave her alone in the car sometimes because I couldn’t afford a sitter. We didn’t have enough money, and we didn’t have anybody to help us.” Taylor tightens and releases her grip on the wadded blue tissue in her hand. “That’s why I finally came here. Turtle needs the best in the world, after what she’s been through, and I’ve been feeling like a bad mother.” Her voice breaks, and she crosses her arms over her stomach, already feeling the blow. How life will be without Turtle. It will be impossible. Loveless, hopeless, blind. She will forget the colors.
She feels Annawake’s eyes turned on her, wide, but no words.
When Taylor’s own voice comes back to her, she hardly recognizes it or knows what it will say. “Turtle deserves better than what she’s gotten, all the way around. I love her more than I can tell you, but just that I love her isn’t enough, if I can’t give her more. We don’t have any backup. I don’t want to go through with this thing anymore, hiding out and keeping her away from people. It’s hurting her.”
Taylor and Annawake gaze at each other like animals surprised by their own reflections.