Odira Bagby sat on the edge of her great-granddaughter’s rumpled twin-sized bed, soaking a thin washrag with water from an old leaky mixing bowl. She squeezed out the excess and applied it to Crystal’s hot tummy. The rag warmed quickly. Odira winced every time seven-year-old Crystal coughed.

            The hoarse crackle and wheeze sounded loud in their small three-room apartment, and the little girl bent double with the effort to breathe. Her pale, blue-veined face was flushed, and her mouth opened wide as she gasped for breath. The sound of her struggle was worse than any nightmare. Odira caught herself automatically trying to breathe harder and heavier, as if she could take in extra air for Crystal.

            The room smelled like Vicks, even though Odira knew that rubbing the ointment on Crystal’s bony chest probably wouldn’t help. It’d never helped before, except to ease Odira’s arthritis for a while and make her feel as though she was at least doing something. Her hands always stayed sore and swollen from the thumping she did on Crystal’s back and chest. Crystal had cystic fibrosis.

            “Gramma,” Crystal whispered, stiffening her neck to push the bare sound from her throat. She reached up and pressed her hand against her chest. “Hurts.”

            “I know, little ‘un.” Odira felt the tears in her eyes that Crystal never cried. “We’ll get help.” Heaving herself up, she lumbered the few feet across the room to her own bed.

            She peered at the numbers on the secondhand alarm clock. It was almost midnight on a Saturday night. What was she supposed to do? Crystal’s mom, Odira’s granddaughter, had disappeared last year–Greta had never been married, and they didn’t know who Crystal’s daddy was. And Millie, Crystal’s grandma, was dead. The grandpa “didn’t want nothin’ to do” with the whole mess. There was nobody else.

            Bedsprings cried out in alarm as Odira sat down and picked up the receiver of her old black rotary phone. She leaned forward and peered at the list of emergency numbers on the bedside stand. There was no ER in Knolls, not after the explosion last fall. Odira couldn’t afford a car on her social security, so she couldn’t drive Crystal to another ER. Besides, on the hills and curves of these Ozark roads around here, the drive would take an hour. She didn’t want to wait.

            She did all she knew to do. She dialed the home number of Dr. Mercy Richmond.

            Buck Oppenheimer woke to the shock of silent winter darkness in the bedroom he shared with his wife, Kendra. The room felt like the inside of the unheated tool shed out back, and for a moment he wondered if the pilot light in the central heating system had gone out again.

            But as he listened to small sounds gradually creep to him through the house, he heard the furnace popping, and he felt warm air coming from the vent on his side of the bed.

            So why was it so cold?

            He listened for the soft sigh of his wife’s breathing but didn’t hear anything. He reached toward her and felt the emptiness of icy sheets.

            “Kendra? Honey?”

            He didn’t hear any sounds coming from the bathroom and no sound of drawers clattering or silverware clinking in the kitchen–sometimes when Kendra couldn’t sleep she’d go in and make some toast.

            And sometimes when she couldn’t sleep ...

            Buck threw back his covers and scrambled out of bed, switching on the bedside lamp. The bedroom door hung open, but there was no light coming from the rest of the house. He didn’t like the feel of this. He pulled on the jeans he’d worn home from the fire station just a few hours ago. They smelled like smoke.

            “Kendra?” he called again.

            No answer.

            She hadn’t said much when he came home two hours late from his shift tonight. There’d been a flue fire out in an old home north of town, and he couldn’t get away any sooner. Not that she got mad anymore when that happened, but ever since the arson and the hospital explosion last fall, Kendra was scared. Which was understandable–her fireman father had been killed a year and a half ago in the line of duty. Kendra said she knew that would happen to Buck someday, too.

            He went into the kitchen. Kendra wasn’t there, but the door to the back porch stood wide open. Icy January wind blew in, nipping at the bare skin of his chest and shoulders. He stepped to the screen door and looked out, curling his toes up from the cold linoleum.

            “Kendra?”

            Quiet. Had she gone out again? He fought back the memory of two months ago when he woke up at 1 a.m. to find her coming through this very back door, a sweater slung over her arm, her makeup smeared, and the sound of a car motor heading off down the street. She’d acted high on something–not booze, but something. And, man, did they ever have it out that night!

            Now he was hearing a car again ... the sound of a motor, its chug-chug-chug reaching him through the dark. Music drifted faintly through the icy air. He felt the familiar pain rip through him.

            Was she doing it again? After all he’d done for her, didn’t she even love him enough to be true?

            He let out a deep breath and watched the white puff drift from his mouth. The air was as cold as he felt inside. How much was a man supposed to take?

            Kendra wasn’t the woman he thought he’d married five years ago. Over the past few months she hadn’t been the same, and her mood swings were getting worse. If she wasn’t hiding out at home crying, she was laughing too loudly and flirting with all the guys down at the fire station, going to shows in Branson with her girlfriends, and buying things he couldn’t afford on his fireman’s salary, like lots of jewelry and expensive clothes. There was no middle ground.

            He pushed the screen door open and stepped onto the back porch, bracing himself in case she came walking in drunk, or maybe even with another guy.

            He still heard the car motor idling, but the sound didn’t come from the road. And he recognized that idle. With a deepening frown, he looked toward the small garage where Kendra kept her five-year-old Ford Taurus. The music was clearer now. Clint Black. Kendra’s favorite. The doors were all shut. The idle continued steadily.

            But that was stupid. She knew better than to leave the motor running with the–

            “No,” he whispered, then more loudly, “Kendra, no!” He reached inside and flipped on the porch light, then turned and raced down the wooden back steps and across the grass to the side entrance to the garage. Through the windowpane he could see the glow of the car’s interior light, but he couldn’t see around the shelving by the door to tell where she was.

            He grasped the knob and tried to turn it, but the door wouldn’t budge. “Kendra!” He banged on the pane. “Open up! What’re you doing in there?”

            No answer. And she had the only key to the garage–she’d lost the spare one last month.

            Buck bent over and grabbed a broken piece of amethyst crystal about the size of his fist from Kendra’s rock garden. He swung the chunk of rock against one of the windowpanes and shattered the glass, avoiding the shards that flew in every direction.

            He reached in and unlocked the door from the inside, then shoved his way into the garage. “Kendra!”

            His worst nightmare came true as he caught sight of her golden brown hair splayed across the backseat, the car door open, her pale skin illumined by the overhead light in the car. The heavy fumes tried to drive him backward.

            Choking, eyes tearing, he rushed over and knelt beside her still body. He touched her face, her neck, felt for a pulse, and raised her eyelids to check her pupils. She groaned. She was still alive!

            Gagging from the filthy air, Buck reached between the bucket seats in front and switched off the motor, then gathered his wife in his arms. He had to get her to help fast.

            Delphi Bell peered out the small front window of the cluttered living room and saw her husband’s hunched, brooding form on the porch steps, silhouetted by the moon. All he had on was an old pair of holey jeans and a white T-shirt with a pack of Marlboros rolled up in the right sleeve. Like a fifties greaser–dirty, stringy hair falling down over his forehead and into his eyes.

            He might freeze to death. A girl could always hope....

            She saw the glowing tip of a cigarette, then saw his shadow move as he turned and looked at the window. She knew he saw her, and she stepped backward fast.

            He’d been like that all night, quiet and glaring. She got scared when he acted like this. Sometimes the air around him seemed dark, just like it got outside before a bad storm that tore trees up by their roots and blew the shutters off houses. And he didn’t even drink much anymore. He wasn’t drinking tonight, but that didn’t make much difference, not since he got out of the hospital. And that whole thing had been her fault. He kept reminding her of that.

            She thought of the duffel bag under her side of the bed. Inside were a jacket and a sweater, and she’d been saving her tips from her job down at–

            A thump on the porch startled her just before the knob turned and the door swung around and crashed into the side of the coffee table. Delphi cried out and jumped backward.

            Abner loomed in the threshold. “What’s the matter with you?”

            She hunched forward with her arms over her chest, afraid to breathe. She shook her head.

            He looked around the front room, and his face twisted in disgust as he stepped in and allowed the cold air from outside to swirl around him. “Why don’t you get busy, then? What a pigsty. Get me some food.” He kicked a pile of dirty clothes out into the center of the floor and got his foot tangled in one of Delphi’s two pairs of jeans. “What’s this stuff doing in here? Can’t you do anything right?” He grabbed up a handful of clothes and slung them across the room, then turned on her again, arms out to his sides like a fullback getting ready to block a move.

            “I ... I been working, Abner,” she sputtered, averting her gaze from his purple red face and those devil’s eyes she saw more and more often lately.

            “So’ve I!” He swung around and slammed the door shut, looked over his shoulder at her and gave her an evil leer, then deliberately snapped the door lock.

            Delphi’s thoughts scrambled. That was what he did the last time, just before she ran to her so-called friends from work and begged them to take her in. He’d smacked her a good one then, cut her lip and blacked her eye and nearly broke her arm before she could get away. And they’d turned her back over to him as if she were some annoying stray dog they didn’t want around.

            “Come ‘ere,” he muttered, pointing to a spot on the floor in front of him.

            She took a step backward.

            His expression didn’t change. “I said come ‘ere.”

            Delphi thought again about the duffel bag beneath her bed. She would take it after he went to bed–if he went to bed tonight; sometimes he didn’t when he got like this–and then she would head to another town and never come back.

            “You been talkin’ to that Richmond doctor, haven’t you?” His voice deepened and his words slurred, though there was no smell of booze. “Dr. Mercy,” he mocked in a singsong voice. “She been telling you to leave me again?”

            Delphi knew the surprise showed on her face before she could stop it. She’d run into Dr. Mercy at the store the other day, and they’d talked a few minutes.

            Abner snorted, his lips pulled back in a snarl, and his yellow brown eyes gleamed with a crazy light. “She don’t know nothin’! She know you’re the one who banged my head into the garage floor last fall?”

            “Yes.” Delphi felt that rush of guilt she got every time he reminded her of what she’d done. He’d been drunk and yelling at her and hitting her. When he fell and passed out, she’d tried to make sure he’d passed out for good. She couldn’t help herself. But he was smart. Or at least tricky. Maybe he hadn’t really been passed out at first. Maybe he’d been testing ...

            Suddenly his eyes narrowed, and his whole body surged toward her like a black cloud. His right arm raised, and she ducked as his hand came down on her shoulder. She winced and cried out and tried to get away. He grabbed her by the back of her shirt and jerked her toward him. She wrenched away and tried to run, but he stuck out a foot and tripped her.

            She fell face first onto the wood floor. Pain hammered her right cheekbone and elbow as she closed her eyes tight and gritted her teeth, waiting for a kick in the side or a smack in the head.

            Nothing happened. He grabbed a handful of her hair and jerked back. Hard.

            She flinched, but by now she was used to pain. As he lifted her, she drew her feet under her and swung up and around with her left elbow and slammed him in the jaw.

            He grunted and let her go.

            She stumbled and nearly fell, but she caught herself and kicked him hard, low in the gut. Without waiting to see what he would do, she ducked past him and ran for the kitchen, holding her hand over her eye.

            He screamed a curse and came for her. There was no time to grab a coat, let alone the duffel bag. She just ran on out the back door and down the steps and kept on running. She didn’t care where to.

________