As Ali walked through the low-lying cloud of pipe smoke, Mindy Farber was already knocking on the door. “Come in,” Bev Forester called.
As soon as Mindy opened the door, Ali saw a gray-haired woman sitting on the edge of a bed. A little girl lay on the far side of the bed, crying inconsolably. When the woman reached out to touch her, the girl shrank away. The woman stood up, then, wringing her hands, she hurried to meet Mindy.
“She’s been like this ever since her father left,” Bev Forester said. “What should I do?”
In answer, Mindy walked past her and took Bev’s place on the bed. “Lindsey,” she said softly. “It’s Miss Farber. Are you all right?”
Without warning, Lindsey sat up and flung herself at Mindy and buried her tearstained face in her young teacher’s breast. “Did you hear?” she hiccuped through her sobs. “Our mother is dead. Somebody murdered her. I heard some people talking. They were saying that they think Daddy is the one who did it. I wasn’t supposed to, but I was peeking out the window when he left. They put handcuffs on him, put him in the back of a car, and drove away. Oh, Miss Farber, if Daddy’s in jail, what’s going to happen to us? Where will we live? Who will take care of us?”
“Maybe your grandparents-”
“They don’t like us,” Lindsey sobbed. “They don’t like Lacy.”
“That’s not true,” Bev interjected. “Of course we like Lacy, we just don’t understand-”
Just then the bathroom door swung silently open. Without so much as a glance in Bev Forester’s direction, Lacy emerged from the bathroom. She went straight to the bed and sat down next to her sister. With a dignity that belied her age, Lacy silently took one of Lindsey’s hands and held it tightly with both of hers while two fat tears tumbled down her own cheeks.
Ali knew Lacy to be a troubled child. Her willingness to emerge from the bathroom in hopes of comforting her grieving sister seemed like a display of raw courage.
Mindy Farber was already holding Lindsey. Ali worried that if Mindy tried to draw Lacy into the same hug, she’d once again withdraw. Mindy must have sensed the same thing. She continued to cradle Lindsey but made no effort to reach for Lacy.
“I don’t know the answers to any of those questions,” Mindy said softly to both girls. “But I do know this much: Wherever you are, I’m sure you’ll be together.”
Ali held her breath. The words were simple enough to say, but if, for some reason, Bryan’s folks were unable to care for the girls and Child Protective Services stepped into the picture, Ali knew that promise might not be easily kept. Where the girls would end up then was anybody’s guess.
While Mindy Farber dealt with the two girls, Ali took Bev by the arm and led her outside, where she sank into her husband’s arms and burst into tears herself. “What are we going to do?” she asked him. “The girls don’t know us, really. Lacy especially refuses to have anything to do with us. How are we going to manage, Harold? And what will become of Bryan?”
“I’ve got a call in to Mitch,” he said. To Ali, he added, “Mitch Gunn used to be our attorney when we lived here. I left him a message. So far he hasn’t called back.”
“Is Mitch Gunn a criminal defense attorney?” Ali asked.
“I’m not sure what his specialty is. Mitch has handled business agreements as well as our wills-that kind of thing,” Harold Forester said. “Up till now, that’s the only legal help we’ve ever needed.”
“If your son has been arrested for murder,” Ali told the Foresters, “he’s going to need a lot more than that.”
“If you know someone who would be better, tell us,” Harold said. “Whatever it costs, we’ll find the money. We have to. He’s our son.”
In the past several years, a series of tough circumstances had forced Ali to retain a whole series of defense attorneys, all of whom had proved reasonably effective. The first one, however, a local named Rick Santos, had been by far the most affordable. Once Harold Forester was on the line with Rick, Ali went back into the girls’ room, where Mindy Farber had somehow convinced Lindsey and Lacy to don pajamas and climb into bed.
“Are you going to stay with us?” Lindsey asked her teacher.
Mindy shook her head. “Not overnight. Your grandparents will be here with you. I have to go home so I can get ready for school in the morning.”
“Can we go back to school, too?” Lindsey asked. “I hate being here. So does Lacy. It’s boring. There’s nothing to do.”
Bev Forester had followed Ali into the room. “Of course you can’t go back to school,” she announced. “Not right now. Not until after the funeral on Friday. What would people think?”
Mindy turned to Bev. “These girls are seven,” she said quietly. “It doesn’t matter what people think. Let them come back to school, Mrs. Forester. Their whole lives have been disrupted. Going to school will give their days some structure. It will also give them something familiar to think about besides what’s happened to them.”
“But-” Bev began.
“Please, Grandma,” Lindsey interrupted. “Please let us.”
“She’s right,” Harold told his wife from the doorway. “They’ll be better off at school than stuck here with us all day long, worrying or else watching CNN.”
“What’s a funeral?”
At first Ali thought Lindsey was the one who had asked the question, but then she saw Lindsey turn toward her sister in drop-jawed amazement.
“What?” Lindsey said.
“What’s a funeral?” Lacy repeated.
Lacy’s unprecedented excursion into the verbal world may not have surprised her sister, but it had left all the adults in the room dumbstruck. Mindy Farber was the first to recover.
“A funeral is like a church service,” she explained. “Funerals are held when people die. They give the people who are left behind a chance to say goodbye. This one will be for your mother.”
“But I don’t want to say goodbye,” Lacy said. With that, she rolled away from them and covered her head with her pillow, signaling with some finality that her brief conversation was over.
Lindsey was determined. She turned back to her grandmother. “So can we go to school or not?” she asked.
“We’ll see,” Bev said, but Ali could tell the woman was wavering. So could Mindy.
“Tomorrow, then,” Mindy said, patting Lindsey’s shoulder as she stood to leave. “See you there.”
When Mindy and Ali exited the room a few minutes later, Bev Forester followed. “You had no right to say that,” she sputtered. “You had no right to tell the girls that you’d see them tomorrow.”
“Did you happen to notice a miracle just happened?” Mindy demanded in return, rounding on the older woman. “Your granddaughter, who has never spoken a single word in my hearing, suddenly said something-something important. She’s not ready to say goodbye, and not just to her mother, either. She’s not ready to say goodbye to life as she knew it. Please let the girls come to school tomorrow.”
“But what if some of the other kids say something to them?” Bev objected. “What if they tease the girls or make fun of them?”
“No doubt the kids will say something,” Mindy agreed. “Ours is a small school, and what happened on Monday was and is very big news. By tomorrow people will probably know that the girls’ father is in custody. But Lacy and Lindsey will be better off if they start dealing with comments-kind or unkind-earlier rather than later. That’s also part of saying goodbye.”
“I’ll take them,” Harold said, cutting short the discussion. “What time does school start?”
“Eight-thirty.”
“All right, then,” he said. “The girls will be there. I’ll drive them there myself.” He turned to his wife. “Now, you go on to bed, Bev. The manager’s going to bring down a roll-away bed. I’ll be here with the girls in case they wake up.”