“If they find out Rose somehow saved the girl, and if she saved the girl because of this strange, radical news-truth-thing-whatever that she was bringing with her to the press interview in Los Angeles, then maybe somehow that makes the girl as big a danger to them as Rose herself seems to be.”
“Maybe. I don’t know. I don’t care right now.”
“My point is—she’d use another name for Nina.”
“Not necessarily.”
“She would,” Barbara insisted.
“So what’s the difference?”
“So maybe Nina is a false name.”
He felt slapped. He didn’t reply.
“Maybe the child who came to this house that night is really named Sarah or Mary or Jennifer.”
“No,” Joe said firmly.
“Just like Rachel Thomas is a false name.”
“If the child wasn’t Nina, what an amazing coincidence it would be for Rose to pluck my daughter’s name out of thin air. Talk about billion-to-one odds!”
“That plane could have been carrying more than one little blond girl going on five.”
“Both of them named Nina? Jesus, Barbara.”
“If there were survivors, and if one of them was a little blonde girl,” Barbara said, “you’ve at least got to prepare yourself for the possibility that she wasn’t Nina.”
“I know,” he said, but he was angry with her for forcing him to say it. “I know.”
“Do you?”
“Yes, of course.”
“I’m worried for you, Joe.”
“Thank you,” he said sarcastically.
“Your soul’s broken.”
“I’m okay.”
“You could fall apart so easy.”
He shrugged.
“No,” she said. “Look at yourself.”
“I’m better than I was.”
“She might not be Nina.”
“She might not be Nina,” he admitted, hating Barbara for this relentless insistence, even though he knew that she was genuinely concerned for him, that she was prescribing this pill of reality as a vaccine against the total collapse that he might experience if his hopes, in the end, were not realized. “I’m ready to face that she might turn out not to be Nina. Okay? Feel better? I can handle it if that’s the case.”
“You say it, but it’s not true.”
He glared at her. “It is true.”
“Maybe a tiny piece of your heart knows she might not be Nina, a thin fibre, but the rest of your heart is right now pounding, racing with the conviction that she is.”
He could feel his own eyes shining with—stinging with—the delirious expectation of a miraculous reunion.
Her eyes, however, were full of a sadness that infuriated him so much he was nearly capable of striking her.
Mercy making peanut-butter dough balls. A new curiosity—and wariness—in her eyes. Having seen, through the window, the emotional quality of the discussion on the porch. Perhaps catching a few words through the glass, even without attempting to eavesdrop.
Nevertheless, she was a Samaritan, with Jesus and Andrew and Minion Peter marking the month of August as a reminder for her, and she still wanted to do her best to help.
“No, actually, the girl never said her name. Rachel introduced her. The poor child never spoke two words. She was so tired, you see, so sleepy. And maybe in shock a little from the car rolling over. Not hurt, mind you. Not a mark on her. But her little face was as white and shiny as candle wax. Heavy-eyed and not really with us. Half in a sort of trance. I worried about her, but Rachel said she was okay, and Rachel was a doctor, after all, so then I didn’t worry about it that much. The little doll slept in the car all the way to Pueblo.”
Mercy rolled a ball of dough between her palms. She put the pale sphere on a baking sheet and flattened it slightly with the gentle pressure of her thumb.
“Rachel had been to Colorado Springs to visit family for the weekend, and she’d taken Nina with her because Nina’s dad and mom were on an anniversary cruise. At least that’s how I understood it.”
Mercy began to fill a brown paper lunch bag with the cooled cookies that were stacked on the platter.
“Not the usual thing—I mean, a black doctor and a white doctor in practice together in these parts, and not usual, either, to see a black woman with a white child around here. But I take all that to mean the world’s getting to be a better place at last, more tolerant, more loving.”