The voice through my front door was low, polite, and patient. “Mrs. Tolbert,” it said. “My name is Dr. Calloway Voss. I am a physician, and this young woman is my wife and my patient. She has not been taking her medication, and she is confused. I have come to take her home, where she can be cared for. If you will just open the door, I will not trouble you any longer.” I stood in my hallway in my housecoat with a cast iron skillet in one hand and my phone in the other. The dispatcher was still on the line, whispering, “Help is four minutes away.”
I looked down at the girl on my guest room floor, with her knees pulled up and her hood over her face. “Is he your husband?” I whispered. She shook her head fiercely. “He bought me,” she said, so low I almost missed it. “He is a doctor at a clinic. He told the judge I was unstable. He took my phone. He took my name.” Her hand found mine, cold as a fish. “Please do not open the door.” I said I would not open it for the Queen of England. I said I had been an emergency room nurse for thirty eight years, and no man in a nice jacket had ever fooled me yet.
I called back through the door in my night shift voice, the one that makes drunk men sit down. “Dr. Voss, I am a registered nurse. If this woman is your patient, then you can tell me her date of birth, her diagnosis, and her medication list. I will wait.” There was a long pause. The doorknob rattled, once, then stilled. “That is not appropriate,” he said, in a voice that had lost its warmth. “I am her physician.” I said that was a fine reason to have the chart. “Her name, Doctor. Her first name.”
He did not know it. I would have bet the house, and I would have won. When a man loves a woman, he can say her name in his sleep, and when a man owns one, he calls her by what she is for. Beside me, the girl was nodding, tears running down. “It is Imani,” she breathed. “My name is Imani Cole.” I said it back to her through the door, loud and clear, so the dispatcher could hear. “Imani Cole is in my house, Doctor, and she is safe, and she is staying here.” The hardest door to hold shut is the one a good woman refuses to open for a man who cannot say a name.
The tires crunched in the gravel then, two cars, then three, and blue lights spilled across the walls of my hallway. Somebody shouted, “Jackson police, step away from the door.” I heard the scuffle on my porch, a grunt, a crash of flowerpots, the clink of handcuffs. I opened the door a crack with the chain on. A young officer with a kind, tired face held up his badge. Behind him, in the yard, Dr. Calloway Voss was face down on my lawn, with a knee between his shoulder blades, and a Rolex shining on the wrist behind his back.
The white disc in my coin purse turned out to be a tracking tag, the same kind sold for car keys. He had slipped it into my purse at the bus station while I was sitting, brushing my arm and apologizing for crowding me. The police found a second one sewn into the lining of the backpack of Imani, and a third in her shoe. He had been a careful man. He had a leather case in his trunk, with the passports of two other women and a ledger of payments, and a county judge who would have some questions to answer by Monday.
An advocate from the shelter for women came at one in the morning, a tall quiet woman named Ms. Pettaway. She sat with Imani on the edge of my guest bed and said she had a bed ready at the safe house in Clinton, with a lock on the door and a hot supper. Imani looked at me, then at the advocate, then at me again. “Could I stay here tonight?” she asked in a very small voice. “Just tonight. I have not slept in a house with a stranger who was kind to me in a year.” Ms. Pettaway looked at me. I said the bed was already made.
Tonight turned into a week, and the week into a month. Imani was twenty two years old, from Greenwood, Mississippi, the daughter of a hairdresser who had died young. She had come to Jackson on a bus to study nursing and met a doctor at a church dinner. Within six months, she had no money, no phone, and no friends. I taught her how to make butter beans and cornbread the way Lucius liked them. She taught me how to use the video on my phone, and we talked to her aunt in Greenwood on Sunday afternoons, with my sister waving from Memphis.
The trial was in January, and I sat in the second row of the courtroom with my church hat on and my purse in my lap. Imani testified for three hours. She did not shake. When the defense lawyer asked her if she had really been in danger, she turned to the jury and said, “A kind woman at a bus station let me use her phone, and I thought, if I can make one call, it will be enough.” I was proud of her down to my bones. The jury was out for forty minutes. Dr. Voss will be an old man before he sees another sunrise from outside a wall.
By spring, Imani had enrolled at the community college. She wears the scrubs of the nursing program, the blue ones, and she studies at the kitchen table with a highlighter in her teeth. She told me one night that she wanted to work the night shift in an emergency room. “Why would anybody want that?” I said. She said, “Because somebody has to be awake when the frightened ones come in.” I put down my dishrag. I was thinking of my husband Lucius, and the way he used to say there were two kinds of angels in this world, the ones with wings and the ones on the night bus.
On a Friday in August, one year to the day after the station, we took the bus to Memphis to see my sister. We sat together near the front, and Imani held the old phone in her lap, the one that had rung fourteen times. “Do you want me to throw it out?” I asked her. She turned it over in her hand and shook her head. “No, Mrs. Tolbert,” she said. “That was the day somebody picked up.” Out the window the cotton fields went by gold and silent. She laid her head on my shoulder, and I let it stay there all the way home.