Page 84 of No Kind of Hero
“Not hard enough.”
“Should I call the cops?”
He couldn’t think. “I don’t know. What do you think? Don’t we need a story? Before, we sort of had a story. What’s our story now?”
April was still crying, Michelle was still talking to Gracie, and the baby was still sobbing, but Beth focused. Finally, she said, “We found out from her friends that she was with this guy and that she might be in trouble, that he might be abusive, so we went to see if we could help her, and help Gracie. We saw them driving erratically. He threw April and Gracie out of the truck, and he struggled with you, and we thanked God we were in time. All of which is true.”
“OK.” He had to slow now. Endless traffic in Coeur d’Alene, inching from one red light to the next on the highway like always, but even worse than usual today. A sunny Monday afternoon, everybody going to the mall and to the lake and nobody getting out of his way. But every journey ended sometime, and at last, he was turning into the hospital’s emergency entrance.
“Stop here,” Beth said. “You take Gracie in, and my mom will take April. Tell my mom the story on the way in. April will tell them the same thing. She’ll have to. The boyfriend, the baby. She’ll blame it on him. I’ll park and come find you.”
It was a good thing one of them was thinking.
He hadn’t reckoned on one thing. When he finally got his arms around his baby girl again? When he was unfastening her from her car seat and she turned that tearstained little face to him, reached out her arms for him, and sobbed her one word?
“Da da daaa.”
Finally, he was picking her up, and she snuggled her head into his shoulder and hung on tight. Her sobs eased, turned to hiccups, and he about lost it. He had to take a moment, and he had to take a few deep breaths, too.
“Let’s get them inside,” Michelle told him. Still sounding like a general, but maybe a general who was being compassionate to her wounded troops. He followed her through the automatic doors, and the nurse took a look at Gracie and April and got Gracie into the back first.
“I don’t know how it happened,” Evan said when the nurse had wiped the blood and fluid from Gracie’s face, her neck, her chest, had taken the baby’s temperature, and had come back with 102.5. Evan was trying not to shake, and he was having to hold himself so rigid to manage that, he could barely speak. “Her mother had her. She’s here too. In another room. The boyfriend beat her up, I think. We found them in the road. I mean, April and the baby. The boyfriend was throwing them out. Of the truck.”
The nurse gave him a long look, which wasn’t a huge surprise, said, “The doctor will be here in a minute,” and left. To call the cops, he was sure. Fine by him.
“Perforated eardrum,” the doctor told him ten minutes later, when Evan was holding an exhausted, too-warm baby again, and she had her head buried in his neck again like he could make it all go away. “But that looks and sounds worse than it actually is. They usually heal up without too much trouble. The infection caused fluid buildup, which caused pressure behind the eardrum, which caused it to rupture. She’ll be hurting less now, though, that that pressure’s eased. I’m going to give her an injection of an antibiotic to be on the safe side. After that, keep on with the amoxicillin and follow up with her pediatrician. Why wasn’t she getting her medication?”
Evan explained again. It was easier the second time. And by the time the cop showed up, which was no surprise at all, he’d calmed down some. He had Gracie changed into clean clothes from the diaper bag he’d brought, and if he’d had a bad moment when he’d put her bunny outfit on her and had had to stop a minute, grab the edge of the table, and hang on? Nobody had seen that.
He spared a thought, now and then, for what was going on with April. But Beth and Michelle would be with her. Of that, he was sure. And somehow, they would be making it better. They’d be making it work.
Beth had expected to hate April. But how could you? She was so fragile, so frightened, and so battered. She needed somebody to hold her while they waited for her to be called into the ER, and there were only Beth and her mother here. So Beth held her, ran her hand over the stick-straight flaxen hair, and said, “You’re all right now. We’re not going to leave you.”
“G-G-Gracie,” April sobbed. “I thought . . . it wasn’t how I thought. I didn’tknow.”Which didn’t make much sense, except that maybe it did.
When the nurse finally opened the door and called April’s name, Beth asked her, “Do you want to go in alone? Or do you want us to come?”
“Please come with me,” April said. “I don’t want to . . . go alone.” So they did.
When they were in the room and the nurse was sponging at April’s scraped cheek, and Beth was on one side of the bed holding her hand, her mother asked the girl, “Do you want me to call your parents? To get your mother here?”
“No,” April said, then gasped as the nurse hit a tender spot. “Please. Not yet. I’m so . . . I don’t want them to know what happened. I don’t want anybody to know. I was sostupid.”
The nurse said, “Doctor will be right in,” and left, and Beth kept holding that slim hand and knew what Evan had felt. Nobody was more protective than Evan, and nobody had ever seemed in more need of protection than April.
The doctor came, eventually, and said, “Ice and ibuprofen, and in a few days, you’ll be fine. The hospital social worker will be stopping by, and the police are coming too.” And April cried.
The police did come, two of them, and Beth ended up sitting beside April on the bed, her arm around her, while the female officer questioned her. April didn’t want to tell them Chris’s name, but Beth did. His address, too, and she had the satisfaction of watching the male officer step away to call it in. April said, “He’s going to think I told. He’ll be so mad. He’s going to be somadat me, and I . . . I . . .”
Michelle said, “Don’t you worry about that. You’re not going to be anywhere he can find you. We’ll see about that.”
The female officer looked at Michelle as if she were wondering who the heck she was, then told April, “There are shelters and resources for you.”
“I don’t want to press charges,” April said. “Please. Ican’t.”
“I’m sorry,” the officer said, “but you don’t get to choose about that. You’ll be protected.”
“The other thing,” Beth said, hardening her heart. This girl—thiswoman,because that was what she was, even though she didn’t seem like it—wasn’t a fit parent for Gracie, and they needed to get that established. “You should know that this all stems from an . . . well, it’s not an abduction, but it’s a custody dispute. April left her boyfriend and child when the baby was three weeks old, and when her ex began the process to go after custody recently, that’s when she and Chris came and took the baby. They took her out of her father’s front yard, and they took her when she was sick with a serious infection.” All right, maybe it had been serious and maybe it hadn’t. It was serious now. That blood running down Gracie’s neck, her wails . . . Beth was going to see that blood and hear those wails when she closed her eyes tonight, and what was worse? Evan was going to be doing the same thing. And that was the absolute opposite of fair.
