Free Frail by Joan Frances Turner Page B

protuberances like tumors. Every fixture, every outside window broken, and in the next, the next. The fourth house had the jackpot: sleeping bags tossed around the enormous front room, a battery-operated space heater—dead, of course—in the center. Ridiculous thinking that little thing could warm a room this big, this many windows, at least the walls of my movie theaters were good and thick against the cold.
    “How do you know it’s really empty?” I said. “These things all have eighty thousand rooms, they could be hiding upstairs—”
    Lisa pointed silently to the staircase’s broken remains. We shook the mouse droppings from two of the sleeping bags and hauled them out.
    There was a cracking sound from far away, then another low rumble, something metallic being dragged across the surface of a vast tin tub. The bottom of the tub split open and rain spattered against the windows, a sudden wet cool breeze dancing around our clothes and hair, spraying stray droplets through the open doorway.
    “I’ll drag everything in,” Lisa said, as she ducked outside. “We need to sleep.”
    The softness of a sleeping bag, after a blanket or two laid flat on concrete floors, industrial carpets, hard-packed soil, was such heaven I was floating. My whole head felt floaty and insubstantial, actually, I wasn’t sure I could get up again on short notice. I burrowed in deeper and Lisa curled up next to me. The light was dim and dark gray, choked with chalky clouds; so much rain was coming down, like someone was pouring it off the eaves from a vast pitcher. The wind picked up, sliding through gaps in the windows, the door frame, the fake-brick siding and I pulled my jacket back on, suddenly cold.
    “It’s too early in the spring for this kind of weather,” Lisa said. She was lying back now with her eyes closed, hands tucked under her head. “Little bit of late May out there.”
    “More like July.” I rested my cheek on my good arm. “August. But cold as March—”
    “Go on and sleep. If the thunder won’t keep you up.”
    “I like it,” I said, closing my eyes. Not a lie. The close-by storms scared me when I was small, the ones where a great overhead rumbling shakes the roof, the walls, the bed frame, and then the lightning flash, the crash! a half-second later, makes you flinch and crouch in your bed gazing vigilant at the window, watching for the angry thing outside to come crashing in. But the gentler thunderstorms, a steady but sedate pounding of water and some pot-and-pan banging from far away, those were just white noise that made you happier to be inside, dry, nesting in the dark.
    I’m inside, I’m dry, it’s as dark as the daytime can get. Nothing’s really changed that much, then, has it? I should be grateful. Lisa was already snoring next to me, the sorts of soft little sounds she couldn’t make anymore while she was conscious. Like sleeping in Dave’s living room, all huddled together, all winter.
    Promise me, Kristin said, lying there on the floor by the woodstove, dazed and sick, that you’ll take care of my baby. That you won’t let anything happen to it. I trust you, Amy. I know I can trust you—
    I promised. Over and over. And I meant it, I always did. It wasn’t a lie. Ms. Acosta heard her sometimes, saw her clutching my hands, and she shook her head. Amy, we’ll all have enough to do keeping ourselves alive—never mind a baby, if it lives. Don’t make promises you can’t keep.
    I could have. I could have kept it. That wasn’t a lie. That’s what nobody, nothing, seems to understand.
    If I’d just stayed in Lepingville, that ghostly black dog wouldn’t have found me on the road, wouldn’t have sniffed out exactly what had happened and—too late for that. I should’ve stayed. That’s what you’re supposed to do, sit, wait, and somebody will find you. That’s how it works. My mother, what if she’d already found her way back, and I wasn’t there?
    What if she were there all along,