An Amber alert? She was my own daughter! Or had Uncle Henry come forward and claimed possession of her? Or was it just an excuse, an exploitation of the Amber alert program, the police were using to find me? They obviously knew that I posed no threat to my own daughter. I was mad as hell; my blood was pumping like water through a sprinkler head. My mind was racing. I had wanted to make some kind of splash in Louisville but I had not anticipated bullets and alerts and police. I suddenly heard multiple sirens whining like a host of babies in a hospital nursery somewhere off in the distance. I couldn’t tell if I was heading toward them or away from them. Up ahead in the fast fading light of dusk I saw the dumpy little motel I had just checked into. I shut off my headlights and killed the engine and coasted into the parking lot and around to the rear of the building where I let the car glide to a stop between a heap of rusted metal drums and a patch of woods. It was growing dark outside and I could barely see through the windows in the shadow of the building.
I looked over at Sarah. She was crying and had an incredibly pathetic expression on her face.
“It hurts daddy.”
Then it donned on me: the bullets had struck the car. One of them had hit Sarah. When she first said “It hurts” Sarah’s voice had seemed to come from somewhere far off, as if emanating from the car’s radio speakers. But that was before my scrambled mind could decipher the bombardment of information that had come crashing like a computer virus into my brain. I grabbed Sarah and pulled her to me. It was dark in the car within the cast of the hotel’s shadow. I searched Sarah with my hands; her chest, her legs, her arms: for blood or holes or ripped bone and flesh, but I could find none of these. Without hesitation I turned the dome light on and I searched for blood; for an exit would.
“Tell me where it hurts baby. Are you bleeding?”
I flipped her over onto her stomach and lifted her shirt and felt her back for gushing wounds; torn and severed tissue. I was crying myself now.
“Where does it hurt baby. Tell daddy now.”
“Right here.” Sarah said, pointing to the top of her head.
“Oh my god!” I pulled her back into my lap and gently felt the top of her head.
“I can’t find any blood honey. Show me again!”
“Right here daddy.” She pointed again at the side of her head, “Am I gonna die like mommy did, daddy? Am I gonna die?” She said as the contagion of my panic took hold of Sarah.
“No baby no. You’re not going to die.” I felt again for blood or wounds and I found only a small bump. “Is that it honey, right there?” the thumping strokes of my heart beating against my chest commenced to subside.
“Yes.” She cried, “Am I gonna die daddy?”
“No honey. Is that it? Is that where it hurts?” I turned her head so that I could read her eyes. They were filled with tears and wild with hysterics.
Sarah nodded.
“How did you get that ouchy honey?”
“I bumped my head on the door, am I gonna die?”
“No honey, you’re going to be fine honey. It’s just a bump.” I held her to my chest and squeezed her with a long hug and then kissed the little lump on her head. What had I done? I had exposed my baby to gunfire; how utterly stupid of me. I could have gotten her killed. I should have just walked out. Everything would have been fine if I hadn’t panicked. I should never have threatened that man’s family. The Arabs, they have a different way of thinking. Most men would have stayed out of it. They would have waited, at least, before they called the police. They would not have shot at me.
I sat there listening as unseen police cars, the strobe of their red and blue lights bouncing off of the buildings, with their sirens streaming, passed us tearing west toward the convenience store and then back east; some going north and south on the interstate, all of them flitting about like a swarm of fireflies in the woods. I kissed Sarah on the forehead and I looked up to the sky and wondered if someone up there were not looking down on me; guiding me, as in back to the hotel instead of risking the exposure of the open road where I surely would have been caught and possibly exposed Sarah to more serious injury; looking down on us, Sarah and I, and giving us the good fortune not to be struck by flying bullets. But I refused to put my faith in the someone who was now looking down on us. I would put my faith only in myself. I would not entrust our lives to fate, or the hope that Catherine was remorsefully lending a hand from someplace beyond. I gathered the items that Sarah and I had purchased at the convenience store and on unsteady legs I walked Sarah over to our hotel room, making haste at our exposed door, to get out of sight.
Once inside I took a closer look at Sarah’s little pink skull buried beneath thin blond strands of hair and I rubbed the knot gently and kissed the little bulge that had grown like a mump on the side of her head.
“All better?” I asked.
Sarah forced a smile and nodded, still a little shaken.
I turned the television on and tuned into a local news channel. A picture of Sarah was captioned at the top right corner of the screen.
“Daddy, it’s a picture of me.” Her eyes were excited and cheerful, “I’m on television!”
“Yeah honey, swell. Be quiet now and let me hear what they’re saying, okay?”
Sarah and I watched intently as the newscaster spoke of me, the villain, who had killed my wife and absconded with my daughter:
“There is concern that Mr. Derrick may be distraught and might harm his daughter.” said a husky black reporter, a stern and dire expression blanketing her face. “And the search will continue well into the night if necessary.”
“Is there any indication, Paula, of the direction they were traveling?” Said a voice from the studio.
“All indications are that they were heading south on interstate sixty-five.”
“What kind of car were they driving?” “Authorities aren’t sure, but they think it was an older model blue Pontiac Firebird. They are not sure yet if it was stolen Katie.”
“Thank you Paula, we’ll check in with you later in the news-hour to see if there have been any new developments.” The television reporter looked apprehensively at her male cohort, a tall, slender dark-haired white man with small ears and an English nose in his late twenties, “Scary stuff there Larry, but is it as scary as the cold front you’re looking at on Doppler radar?”
I turned the television off and I planted Sarah in front of me. I donned my most serious expression, “Do you understand what’s going on?”
“I think so.” She raised her eyebrows, unsure of herself.
“What do you think?”
Sarah placed her finger on her lip as though she were in deep thought, “The police are looking for us cuz they think you made mommy die?”
“Yes, that’s part of it.” I affected a smile, “But the truth is that they are never going to stop looking for us.”
“Do we have to live here forever?” Her eyes surveyed the room and her mouth gaped open and her brow furled in concerned.
“No,” I staved off an impending chuckle at her confusion, “but you know the things we bought at the store?” she nodded, “Well I bought them so that we could change the way we look.”
“You mean like on Halloween?”
“Not quite. You don’t want to be a witch for the rest of your life do you?” I made a sinister face.
“How long do we have to change for?” “I’ll have to change forever. You’ll have to change for just a little while. And you can’t tell anybody ever that we changed or anything else about what has happened to us. You can’t tell anyone about mommy dying or where we used to live. We’ll have to change our names too. Okay?”
“Do I have to wear the same clothes for that long?”
“No, silly.” I poked her belly-button, “But I need you to dress up like a boy for a few days. Is that okay?”
“No!” she placed her hands on her hips. On this point she seemed adamant.