“Delilah, move!” Rebecca shouted. Only later would it occur to the other teachers, as they gave statements to the police, that she had only shouted a warning to one of the girls in the crosswalk.
Delilah and Shelley looked up as the car barreled toward them, but instead of running, they froze, too terrified to move. Rebecca was the closest teacher, and the girls were too far away for her to reach. And as time seemed to slow, she noticed that the glow around Delilah grew brighter the closer the car came to hitting her. So Rebecca did the only thing she could think of to stop that from happening.
She stepped into the parking lot.
In the instant before the car struck her, Rebecca remembered the little oracle in the petting zoo. She remembered the grimy gray dress, and the orange, and the nursery rhyme the little girl had spoken. The rhyme her mother used to sing to Laura and Erica when they were little girls.
The car smashed into Rebecca Essig with a thunk and the crunch of bone. She hit the hood of the car and slid into the windshield, and she probably would have survived with just a few broken bones. But then the woman behind the wheel screamed and slammed on her brakes. Rebecca flew off the front of the car and cracked her skull on the pavement.
The children seated on the sidewalk were spared the sight by the line of cars waiting to pick them up, but the parents in those cars and the teachers standing on the sidewalk saw the whole thing.
As did Delilah Marlow and Shelley Wells.
Mrs. Turner, whose classroom was across the hall from Rebecca’s, shouted for the driver to call for an ambulance on her flip phone. As she knelt in the parking lot next to her friend and colleague, she realized that though Rebecca Essig’s eyes were closed—though blood was pooling slowly beneath her head—her mouth was moving. She was saying something.
While one of the other teachers escorted two stunned little girls across the street, Mrs. Turner leaned down so she could hear Rebecca Essig’s last words.
“Two little monkeys jumping on the bed. One fell down and broke her head...”
Delilah
Alina turned out to be a screamer.
When she was dry and fed, she either went to sleep or stared up at the world with bright blue eyes. If she wasn’t swaddled, she’d swing her arms happily until her own movement startled her.
But when she was hungry, or tired, or wet, or dirty, or needed to burp, she screamed. And she only slept for two hours at a time.
Which meant that weallonly slept two hours at a time. She was the sweetest, most adorable and consistent alarm clock I’d ever had.
Because we had no crib, and the baby books advised against putting a newborn in the bed with her parents, Gallagher had cleared out a drawer from the dresser and padded it with a folded blanket, then set it next to me on the bed like a bassinet, so I couldn’t accidentally roll over my own daughter in the middle of the night.
At first, he and I took shifts caring for her, so the other one could sleep. But because he couldn’t feed her, our shifts gradually became less about what time it was and more about what the baby needed. I was in charge of feeding and burping. He was in charge of changing and bathing.
I probably shouldn’t have been surprised by his lack of squeamishness in the face of dirty diapers, considering that he regularly, literally pulled people apart. But I was.
I was even more surprised when he turned out to have some kind of magic touch. Most of the time, he could put her to sleep with little more than a few laps around the room, cradled in his arms.
And he was endlessly, miraculously patient. Which was wonderful, because after three days with a newborn, I was more exhausted than I’d ever been in my life, and still recovering from the physical toll of childbirth. I’d turned down repeated offers from Lenore to go into town and pick up some painkillers, but that afternoon, I broke into tears. Not the happy “I love being a mother” tears. The “I have no idea what I’m doing and my baby hates me” tears.
“I’ll be back in two hours,” I heard Lenore whisper to Gallagher as I tried for the second consecutive hour to rock my daughter to sleep, without a rocking chair. “Let. Her. Sleep.”
I wanted to argue. It wasn’t safe in town, and even though Lenore hadn’t been featured on the news, I didn’t want her to take the risk. But I was too tired to talk, much less argue, so I let Mirela tuck me into bed with a glass of ice water. And I let everyone else in the cabin take turns walking Alina around in the front room, until she went to sleep, too.
An instant after my head hit the pillow, Lenore sat on the side of my bed. I groaned and glanced at the alarm clock, and was surprised to find that three hours had passed. The light shining through the window had a distinctly afternoon feel. I must have totally passed out. Yet my nap had only taken the edge off my exhaustion.
“Here.” She set a bottle of extrastrength ibuprofen on the nightstand next to my water glass. “And there are three gel ice packs in the freezer. In an hour, you can sit on one, wrapped in a towel.”
“Thank you.” I pulled her into a quick hug. Then I ripped the seal from the bottle of pills.
“I also got two newborn pacifiers and some baby wipes.”
“I’m sorry. That must have been so expensive.”
Lenore shrugged. “I hit a new town, a little farther out than we usually go, and sold a sob story to a lady carrying a two-thousand-dollar purse and a lot of upper-class guilt. That’s part of what took me so long.”
“Part?” I tossed three ibuprofen tablets into my mouth and swallowed them with a drink of no-longer ice-cold water.
For a moment, she just looked at me, as if she weren’t quite sure how to say whatever she needed to tell me. “Delilah, it happened again. And you were right. This time it was soldiers.”
