CHAPTER 21
1547 Words
CHAPTER 21
“Maybe it was a fluke.”
Kennedy’s spine stiffened when she heard Dustin’s voice. There was a series of six short beeps, but Kennedy’s ears still rang even after the alarm fell silent.
“You don’t get flukes with a ten-grand security system,” Vinny grumbled.
“It might have been nothing.” Kennedy detected a sort of questioning hopefulness in Dustin’s tone. “Hey, where’d they go?”
Kennedy’s spine tingled as footsteps neared the bathroom, and she jumped a little when someone pounded on the door.
“We’re almost done,” Kennedy called out quickly, afraid they might barge in.
“Get outta there.” Vinny pounded on the door again. “Now.”
Somehow, he was less intimidating when she didn’t have to look at his face. “She’s not feeling well.” Kennedy opened the door a crack and slipped out so he wouldn’t feel compelled to come in.
“What’s wrong with her now?”
“She’s been on the toilet since the alarm went off.” Kennedy could judge by Vinny’s expression that she shouldn’t have mentioned the sirens. “I think she’s passing a lot of blood,” she hastened to add.
Vinny shrugged. “That’s why Dustin went to the store. Give her a pad and get back to the couch.”
Kennedy gripped the doorknob, clenching her teeth to keep her mouth shut.
“And be quick about it.” Vinny’s warning made her blood seethe, but she turned around, swallowing her contempt.
Jodie hadn’t moved but sat on the toilet with her eyes closed.
“They need you to get dressed again.” She hated to rush Jodie, but she didn’t want to get Vinny more upset. He was tense enough already, like a shaken can of soda about to burst under all that extra pressure. She looked around the room. “Do you need another pad?”
Jodie grimaced, as if the sound of Kennedy’s voice hurt her ears. She held her finger up for silence. Kennedy waited. Was she getting worse?
Kennedy walked over to the toilet and put her hand on Jodie’s shoulder. Jodie sucked in her breath at the touch.
“What’s wrong?” Kennedy had a hard time keeping the panic out of her voice. She looked down. The water in the toilet bowl was dark red. For the second time in the past ten minutes, Kennedy regretted eating such a greasy meal.
Jodie whimpered when Kennedy tried to help her to her feet.
Kennedy let go. “Vinny says you need to come out.” How could she get Jodie up?
“I can’t,” Jodie squeaked.
Kennedy felt dizzy. This is just like school, she told herself. It’s like studying for a math test when you have over a hundred pages of reading, a paper, and a lab all due the next day. Panic was a luxury she simply couldn’t afford. She had to assess the problem, figure out what needed to be done, and take care of everything so her world kept on spinning. That’s all this was. Just like school. The setting was different, the teachers more cruel, and the stakes were measured in human lives instead of grade point averages, but the route to success was exactly the same.
“Can you tell me what’s wrong? Where do you hurt?”
Jodie put her hand on her stomach. Kennedy did the same and felt it tighten up like a concrete ball drying in fast-motion. Jodie grimaced and shut her eyes again.
“It’s going to be all right.” Kennedy forced herself to smile even though Jodie wasn’t looking at her and wouldn’t have noticed. “I’m going to get you a new pad, and then I’m going to help you get back to the couch.”
“Get out,” Vinny declared, and Kennedy only had enough time to position herself between the toilet and the door before he barged in.
“She’s not ready!” Kennedy spread out her arms, as if that would give Jodie an extra measure of privacy.
“I said time’s up,” Vinny snarled.
Kennedy didn’t want to move. She wanted to stay there as at least a partial shield blocking Vinny’s view, but she couldn’t help Jodie from where she was. Please, God. Can’t you just make him go away?
Kennedy had lost count of how many prayers God had failed to answer so far today. Blinking back tears of angry frustration, she walked toward the wall and pulled out a new pad from the package in the corner. Jodie’s eyes were still closed, and Kennedy wondered if she realized Vinny was in there with them at all.
“Come on,” Kennedy urged. “We need to get you up.”
Jodie was taking short, shallow breaths. Tiny pearls of sweat beaded on her brow.
“What’s her problem?” Vinny demanded, and Kennedy imagined how rewarding it would be to watch him get shot point-blank like in the movies. She was surprised by the heat of her hatred. Had she grown so vengeful she could actually wish him dead?
Yes, she could.
“I think she might be ...” Kennedy lowered her voice to keep Jodie from overhearing, even though she doubted Jodie was paying attention to anything. “I think she might be miscarrying.”
Vinny shrugged. “Good.”
Didn’t he understand? Didn’t he realize? There was no way Kennedy could deal with a medical crisis of this magnitude. Anger boiled up in her gut like the contents of a pressure cooker. “No, that’s not good. This little girl is five months pregnant, and she’s hemorrhaging in this filthy bathroom.”
“She’s not hemorrhaging,” Vinny remarked, and Kennedy wondered if he knew the meaning of the word.
As if on cue, Jodie let out a little groan, and Kennedy heard something plop into the toilet.
Vinny snapped his head back to Kennedy, his nose wrinkled up, his eyes darting from her to the bowl. “What was that?”
“I think it might have been a blood clot.” She braced her queasy stomach and peeked down to confirm her suspicions.
Jodie was ashen. She gripped her midsection. Kennedy reached out to tell her to try to relax when Jodie shifted her position slightly.
“You need to get her to a hospital. Now.” Kennedy stood as tall as she could, even though her leg muscles quivered and threatened to buckle right out from under her.
“But the baby’s dead, you say?”
Couldn’t he see Jodie was in trouble? Did he have no conscience, no sense of remorse or compassion? Kennedy had heard stories from the North Korean refugees in Yanji about horrifically evil people, but somehow in her mind she had compartmentalized those villains. They lived in dictatorships. They thrived in nations with godless, immoral laws and horrific records of human-rights abuses. Not in America. Not in big cities like Cambridge or Boston. And they didn’t prey on girls like Kennedy and Rose, girls from Harvard, girls from important families, girls from churched backgrounds.
She reached out and felt Jodie’s forehead. It was cool and clammy. Even her skin had a strange, sick-smelling odor that immediately reminded Kennedy of those horrible visits so long ago with her grandmother in the hospital. She brought her hand back and balled it into a fist, hoping Vinny couldn’t see how much she trembled.
“She’s losing way too much blood. She has to get medical treatment.”
“But the baby’s taken care of?” Vinny pressed. Was that all these monsters cared about? A dead fetus so Wayne Abernathy could continue his political career? Was murdering a child a reasonable price to pay to avoid a scandal? And even if Vinny had no regard for the baby’s life, didn’t he care that Jodie could bleed to death in his disgusting, germ-infested bathroom?
“I don’t know.” Kennedy felt like throwing up her hands but kept them planted firmly at her sides. “I’m not a doctor.” Couldn’t he see how serious this was? The pointed sheath in her pocket jabbed into her leg. She envisioned herself wielding the knife, demanding that Vinny take Jodie to a hospital, but her mind answered back with a snapshot of their arsenal of weapons in various stages of assembly on the workbench. A move like that would be suicide. And if something happened to Kennedy, Jodie would lose the only advocate she had left.
“I don’t feel good.” Jodie reached her arm out and used Kennedy’s shoulder to hoist herself up a little. Kennedy tried to adjust her position to block the child from Vinny’s view. If he wasn’t going to help, couldn’t he grant them some privacy? Kennedy tried to think back to her physiology unit in AP Biology from high school. What were you supposed to do if someone was losing that much blood? She couldn’t think of any answer except get them to the emergency room as fast as possible.
Jodie raised herself up but stayed positioned over the toilet. There was too much blood. Too many clots. Even if she had been wearing pads, Kennedy guessed she would have soaked through several just in the past few minutes. For the first time, she was glad Vinny was still here. Couldn’t he see?
He wrinkled his nose. “You two will have to clean up the mess when this is over.” He turned to leave.
“I can’t ...” Jodie’s face was the shade of chalk dust. Her eyelids fluttered. Her pupils rolled up until for a second only the whites showed. Her body swayed. The scene played before Kennedy like freeze-frame animation, displaying itself in millisecond shots one after another. Jodie reached toward Kennedy before she swung off balance. Kennedy’s muscles weren’t ready to support her extra weight. They both dropped to the floor, and Kennedy’s knee took the brunt of both their falls.
“Are you all right? Sweetie, what’s wrong?”
Jodie’s head lay in her lap again, but it wasn’t anything like a little bit ago when they rested together on the couch. This time, Jodie’s eyes weren’t closed in the heavy slumber of the weary. She had passed out, the gravity of her condition written in the pallor of her sickly gray face. Kennedy stared at Jodie’s chest and counted five awful, spirit-draining seconds before it rose. She held the girl’s clammy wrist. Her weak, fluttering pulse reminded Kennedy of a dying butterfly’s last desperate attempt at flight.
In the silence that followed, Kennedy could hear Vinny swallow. “I’ll go call her uncle.”
- Writer
