Part IV: Spin – Special Delivery #4 (Chapter 77)
A
Special Delivery letter on blue paper from a stranger, a man.
My
mother missing me! My mother, pregnant, not married.
How
could that happen?
Her
baby, my little brother/sister, might die. I don’t want it to die. If it lives,
will she give it away like she gave me and Ruby away? Daddy Platts. I really
miss him, and now he’s gone, off in some foreign country. When will he see my
baby sister again?
Why
couldn’t my mother stay with Daddy Platts?
Who
is Johnny Lawrence, anyway?
Drinking
again. How could she? Has she forgotten what she was like when she drank?
Doesn’t she remember the police?
The
police.
Just
before Nana and Pappa came out to California to take me back to Sioux City, the
police visited our apartment, where I slept on a sofa bed in the living room.
Mother and Daddy Platts, they’re naked,
screaming at each other.
She waves a butcher knife,
he grabs her hand, the knife falls to the floor, she kicks him right in
the...he yelps, she laughs.
The police break in, their
guns drawn, big nasty guns with wooden handles. I hide under the covers.
Ruby cries.
I peek from underneath the
blanket.
A policeman holds Mother
down, but she don’t care, she kicks and screams until she passes out. Daddy
covers her in a blanket and slips into his robe.
Low voices mumble....
Mother opens her eyes.
The police ask questions.
Mother screams again.
“He started it.” She
points at Daddy Platts.
Daddy hangs his head. “I’m
sorry.”
I want to sit up in the
bed and scream, “No, he didn’t, she did it, she started it, she was going to
kill him with a knife! See the knife on the floor?”
But I don’t, I can’t, I’m
frozen under the covers, and the baby’s still crying, and no one’s paying no
attention to the baby, and, besides, Mother might slice me up with the knife if
I squeal.
I
still heard echoes of my baby sister’s cries, the baby now a little girl
somewhere in Arkansas with Daddy Platts’ mother – no one in Sioux City paying
any attention to her.
All
this because of mother’s drinking, and she promised
me she would stop, and she did stop, but now she’s started again.
Why did I ever read this Special
Delivery letter?
The
kitchen clock read 5:30 p.m.; Nana and Pappa would be home soon.
Shaking, I picked the pages up from the floor and slid them back into the envelope, stuck cellophane tape to the flap, and put the letter back where it belonged.
