It could not happen like this. This wasn’t fair, damn it.
New strength, born of panic and of love for Nina, filled Laura. She wriggled free of Sheener and crawled quickly to her foster mother.
Nina was limp. Her beautiful eyes were open, sightless.
Laura put her bloody hand to Nina’s neck, feeling for a pulse. She thought she found one. Weak, irregular, but a pulse.
She pulled a cushion off a chair and put it under Nina’s head, then ran into the kitchen where the numbers of the police and fire departments were on the wall phone. Shakily, she reported Nina’s heart attack and gave the fire department their address.
When she hung up, she knew everything was going to be all right because she had already lost one parent to a heart attack, her father, and it would be just too absurd to lose Nina the same way. Life had absurd moments, yes, but life itself wasn’t absurd. Life was strange, difficult, miraculous, precious, tenuous, mysterious, but not flat-out absurd. So Nina would live because Nina dying made no sense.
Still scared and worried but feeling better, Laura hurried back to the living room and knelt beside her foster mother, held her.
Newport Beach had first-rate emergency services. The ambulance arrived no more than three or four minutes after Laura had called for it. The two paramedics were efficient and well equipped. Within just a few minutes, however, they pronounced Nina dead, and no doubt she had been dead from the moment she collapsed.
One week after Laura returned to McIlroy and eight days before Christmas, Mrs. Bowmaine reassigned Tammy Hinsen to the fourth bed in the Ackersons’ room. In an unusual private session with Laura, Ruth, and Thelma, the social worker explained the reasoning behind that reassignment: “I know you say Tammy isn’t happy with you girls, but she seems to get along better there than anywhere else. We’ve had her in several rooms, but the other children can’t tolerate her. I don’t know what it is about the child that makes her an outcast, but her other roommates usually end up using her as a punching bag.”
Back in their room, before Tammy arrived, Thelma settled into a basic yoga position on the floor, legs folded in a pretzel form, heels against hips. She had become interested in yoga when the Beatles endorsed Eastern meditation, and she had said that when she finally met Paul McCartney (which was her indisputable destiny), “it would be nice if we have something in common, which we will if I can talk with some authority about this yoga crap.”
Now, instead of meditating she said, “What would that cow have done if I’d said, ‘Mrs. Bowmaine, the kids don’t like Tammy because she let herself be diddled by the Eel, and she helped him target other vulnerable girls, so as far as they’re concerned, she’s the enemy.’ What would Bovine Bowmaine have done when I laid that on her?”
“She’d have called you a lying scuz,” Laura said, flopping down on her sway-backed bed.
“No doubt. Then she’d have eaten me for lunch. Do you believe the size of that woman? She gets bigger by the week. Anyone that big is dangerous, a ravenous omnivore capable of eating the nearest child, bones and all, as casually as she’d consume a pint of fudge ripple.”
At the window, looking down at the playground behind the mansion, Ruth said, “It’s not fair the way the other kids treat Tammy.”
“Life isn’t fair,” Laura said.
“Life isn’t a weenie roast, either,” Thelma said. “Jeez, Shane, don’t wax philosophical if you’re going to be trite. You know we hate triteness here only slightly less than we hate turning on the radio and hearing Bobbie Gentry singing Ode to Billy Joe.”
When Tammy moved in an hour later, Laura was tense. She had killed Sheener, after all, and Tammy had been dependent on him. She expected Tammy to be bitter and angry, but in fact the girl greeted her only with a sincere, shy, and piercingly sad smile.
After Tammy had been with them two days, it became clear that she viewed the loss of the Eel’s twisted affections with perverse regret but also with relief. The fiery temper she had revealed when she tore apart Laura’s books was quenched. She was once again that drab, bony, washed-out girl who, on Laura’s first day at McIlroy, had seemed more of an apparition than a real person, in danger of dissolving into smoky ectoplasm and, with the first good draft, dissipating entirely.