The woman in the bed opened her eyes, saw my face, and said, in a voice like paper being torn very slowly, “You are Wayne mama. He showed me your picture. He said if anything ever happened, I should go to the lady with the horses.” I stood at the foot of the bed in my good coat with my hair unbrushed and my purse hanging off my arm, and I could not make a sound. She was twenty four years old and weighed ninety pounds, with a tube in her nose and a bruise on her cheek the color of a plum. She said, “Please. Are my babies all right?”
I told her that her son was in the waiting room with a woman from the state, and that her daughter was asleep in a nurse arms down the hall, and that neither one had been hurt. She started to cry. I took her hand, and for a while I said nothing, because there are no words for a thing like that. When she could talk again, she told me about Wayne. He had not left her, she said. He had run. Two months ago he had started carrying packages for a man in a white truck to pay down a debt, and last week he had found out what was in them.
Wayne had gone to the Marion County sheriff the Friday before, Amber Lee said, with his hands shaking, and told a deputy everything. The deputy promised protection and then sent him home. The man in the white truck found out. On Saturday night, two men came to the trailer, looking for Wayne. They tore up the couch and the drawers, and they painted three words on the kitchen wall in red, while Amber Lee lay on the bathroom floor where she had run to hide. They did not touch the children. She could not say why. She had taken something to stop the shaking. She did not remember anything after that.
A boy who learns CPR from a video on a phone can bring his mother back from the edge, and the grandmother he has never met can arrive in time.
The red words on the kitchen wall were PAY UP WAYNE, with the name of my son under them like a signature. I had read them through the window of a trailer, and I had not understood. Now I did. I left the hospital and drove straight to the county jail with the sun going down, and I asked for a visitor pass. They brought him out in orange, a man of forty four with my husband jaw and gray in his beard, thin as a rail. He sat down across the glass and looked at me, and his whole face came apart. “Mama,” he said. “You came.”
I had not seen my son in sixteen years. I had cut him off in 2009, and I had been right to, and I had spent every year since hoping I was wrong. I put my hand flat against the glass. He put his against it.
“Wayne, are you clean?” I asked. He said eleven days. He said it the way you say a number in a prayer. He said the deputy who had ignored him had been fired, and a state agent had taken his statement, and the man in the white truck, whose name was Rudd, was sitting two floors above him in a cell. He had turned himself in on Sunday morning to keep his family safe.
There was a hearing at eight that night, in the family court, with a tired judge in a cardigan and Ms. Delancey, who looked as if she had not slept either. I swore in a loud voice that I would take both children into my home. They fingerprinted me in a hallway. A deputy drove out to my house to look at the spare rooms. The bed in the guest room was made, the dog was in the yard, the refrigerator held a jar of pickles and a half gallon of milk. The woman from the state said it would do. At eleven o clock, I carried the baby out to the car in a borrowed blanket, and Kasen walked beside me in flip flops.
He did not say a single word in the car. He sat in the back seat with his hands in his lap, a skinny fifteen year old with my husband ears, staring out at the dark. When we pulled into the long gravel drive, the porch light came on, and the dog ran out barking. Kasen looked up at the empty pasture where the horses had been. “Did you have horses?” he said. It was the first thing he had said. I said I had eleven, once. He said, “Where did they go?” And I said, “I sold them, honey. I was sad.” He nodded as if that made sense.
Amber Lee went to a treatment center in Gainesville in March, thirty days, and then ninety more. I visited every Sunday with the baby. Wayne took a plea in April. Because he had come forward, and because the state agent spoke for him, the judge sent him to a drug court program instead of prison, eighteen months, with strict rules and a job. I wrote him a letter every week. They were not long letters. I told him about the baby and the weather. In June, I got my first answer, a single page in his careful hand. Mama, I am sorry. I am trying. Tell Kasen I said he did right.
That summer, I bought two horses. A gentle old mare named Pearl and a spotted gelding who was a little too clever for his own good. Kasen learned to ride in the first week, and then to saddle, and then to muck the stalls, which he did without being asked. Every morning I found him in the barn before breakfast, talking low to Pearl. The baby, who is named Willa, said her first word on a Tuesday, at the fence, with her fat hand pointing. “Horse.” We both laughed so hard that the dog started barking. I called my son from the kitchen phone to tell him, and he cried.