“Well, that’s our tough luck. It doesn’t give you anything to fall back on.”
“What’s that noise?”
“Oh, nothing. The Yellow Pages. I just blew my nose on half the landscape contractors in the city.”
“Oh, well. I reckon you showed them.”
“Mama, I’m thinking about going home.”
“Don’t hang up yet!”
“No, I mean back to Tucson. I’m at the end of the line here. Jax offered to send me money for gas. If my tires will just hold out. I’m worried about my tires.”
“Oh, law, Taylor.”
“What?”
“I’ve got some bad news.”
Taylor feels numb. “What is it?”
“I talked to Annawake Fourkiller. She says there’s somebody, relatives of a missing girl they think is Turtle, and they want to see her. Annawake said she was going to send you a, what was it? Something Italian sounding. A semolina?
Papers, anyway. Saying you have to show up here in court.”
“A subpoena?”
“That was it.”
“Oh, God. Then I can’t go home.” Taylor feels blood rushing too fast out of her heart toward her limbs, a tidal wave. She stares at the symmetrical rows of holes in the metal back of the telephone hutch. Her life feels exactly that meaningless.
Alice’s voice comes through the line, coaxing and maternal.
“Taylor, don’t get mad at me for something I’m fixing to say.”
“Why does everybody think I’m mad? I’m not going to get mad. Tell me.”
“I think you and Turtle ought to go on and come down here.”
Taylor doesn’t respond to this. She turns her back on the wall of holes and looks out through the rain at her car. She knows Turtle is in there but the blank, dark windows are glossed over like loveless eyes, revealing nothing.
“Go ahead and borry the gas money and come on. There isn’t nothing to finding us here. Take the interstate to Tahlequah, Oklahoma, and ask around for Heaven. Everybody knows the way.”
Taylor still doesn’t speak.
“It would just be to talk things over.”
“Mama, there’s nothing to talk over with Annawake Fourkiller. I have no bargaining chips: there’s just Turtle, and me. That’s all.” Taylor hangs up the phone.
Taylor has been waiting so long with Turtle in the free clinic waiting room she feels sure they’ve had time to pick up every disease known to science. One little boy keeps licking his hand and coming over to hold it up in front of Turtle, presumably to give her an unobstructed view of his germs. Each time, Turtle withdraws her face slightly on her neck like a farsighted woman trying to focus on small print.
The little boy chuckles and pitches crazily back to his mother, his disposable diaper crackling as he goes.
Every now and then, the waiting-room door opens and they all look hopefully to the nurse as she reads off someone else’s name. In the bright passage behind her, Taylor hears busy people scurrying and saying things like “The ear is in number nine. I put the ankle in two.” The longer they wait, the more vividly Taylor can picture piles of body parts back there.
At last the nurse calls Turtle’s name, in the slightly embarrassed way strangers always do, as if they expect the child answering to this name to have some defect or possibly a shell. As she follows Turtle down the hall, Taylor wonders if she did wrong, legalizing this odd name. She has no patience with people who saddle their children with names like
“Rainbo” and “Sunflower” to suit some oddball agenda of their own. But “Turtle” was a name of Turtle’s own doing, and it fits now, there is no getting around it.
They wind up in a room empty of body parts. The glass jars on the counter by the sink contain only cotton balls and wooden tongue depressors. Turtle climbs onto the examining table covered with white butcher paper while Taylor lists her symptoms and the nurse writes them on a clipboard. When she leaves them and closes the door, the room feels acutely small.
Turtle lies flat on her back, making crinkly paper noises.
“Am I going to get a shot?”
“No. No shots today. Very unlikely.”
“A operation?”
“Positively not. I can guarantee you that. This is a free clinic, and they don’t give those out for free.”
“Are babies free?”
Taylor follows Turtle’s eyes to a poster on the wall, drawn in weak, cartoonish shades of pink, showing what amounts to one half a pregnant woman with an upside-down baby curled snugly into the oval capsule of her uterus. It reminds Taylor of the time she cut a peach in half and the rock-hard pit fell open too, revealing a little naked almond inside, secretly occupying the clean, small open space within the peach flesh.