The Babysitter. Nancy Bush

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      “I don’t know, Jamie! She hasn’t woken up! I just don’t understand what happened. Tell me what happened tonight. Tell me everything!”

      “Okay . . .” Haltingly, feeling sick with worry, Jamie told her mother about wanting to go to the senior party, bargaining with her sister, leaving the kids with Emma.

      Mom’s face, already grim, grew grimmer still. “Did you tell the Ryersons?”

      “Well, they kind of rushed out and I . . . no, I told Serena and Teddy, and they know Emma.”

      “You shouldn’t have done that.”

      “I know.”

      “By the grace of God it wasn’t you.”

      Jamie felt stabbed herself. Right in the heart. She knew Mom was scared. She knew she probably didn’t mean it. But it felt like the wrong daughter had been attacked.

      They waited in silence. Mom pressed the button on the wall to release the locked doors and went back and forth from the waiting room to the examining cubicles several times. She was with Jamie about an hour later when a doctor she knew came out to see them again. “We’ve moved her to a room,” he said.

      “She’s still unconscious?” Mom asked.

      He nodded.

      Mom looked at the floor for a moment. “Okay, I’m taking my daughter home and I’ll be right back.”

      “I want to stay with you,” Jamie said, but Mom wasn’t listening to her, and they drove home in silence. “Are you mad at me?” Jamie asked weakly when she was getting out of the car.

      “I’m not happy with you,” Mom said.

      “I . . . why weren’t you at work?” Jamie deflected. Her mother never got home much before seven a.m.

      “Half shift tonight. It was my night off, but they needed me.”

      Jamie watched her turn the car around and head back toward the hospital, then walked heavily up the stairs to her room and to bed. She lay awake a long time, unable to stop the all-over quivering that afflicted her. Emma’s words, that she didn’t want to be killed, came back to her. But it’s not my fault, Jamie thought. It’s not!

      What had happened? Was it that same robber from Vancouver? The one in the ski mask they never caught?

      When her mother came back late the following day, Jamie was in the kitchen. She’d made tuna sandwiches and offered one up, but her mother sank onto a chair at the table in silence.

      “Mom?” Jamie quavered.

      “She came to. She’s having trouble speaking. Can’t focus very well.”

      “Ohhh . . .” Jamie felt tears gather behind her eyes, and her nose got hot. “But she’s going to be okay. . . .”

      Mom said tightly, “Yes,” in a way that made Jamie’s blood run cold. She’d seen that determined resolution in her mother once before, when she’d nodded that yes, the marriage was going to last, almost as if her mother was going to make it so by sheer determination.

      But it hadn’t happened for her marriage . . . and it didn’t happen for Emma either.

      She came home three days later, walking with a shuffle, as if she’d forgotten how it was done, silent as a tomb, lost in a distant world outside of reality. Mom took care of her during the day while Jamie was at school, and Jamie was in charge of her at night.

      Emma Whelan, one of the most popular girls in school, Jamie’s outgoing older sister, was gone. In her place was the special-needs woman with the dark memory that would rise up almost every night into shouting screams that Jamie would try to soothe away.

      “I see his eyes!” she would cry. “I see his eyes!”

      And she would say it and say it and say it until she fell back into exhaustion.

      After three years of it, Jamie eloped with the first guy she met at community college. She rode on the back of his motorcycle to her new life in Los Angeles, leaving Emma in her mom’s care. Even though Emma’s nightly fits had subsided by that time, she still was childlike enough to need some supervision. Jamie came to realize that her mother expected her to help out indefinitely, but when Emma was well enough to dress and feed herself and work part-time at Theo’s Thrift Shop, Jamie left.

      Irene Whelan never forgave her youngest daughter, and Jamie never forgave herself.

      Chapter Two

      Now . . .

      Come home.

      Jamie sat straight up in bed, heart pounding, half awake, fumbling for the light switch.

      She’d heard the words plain as day. In her mother’s voice.

      The light switched on, flooding her bedroom with warm, yellow illumination. She could see the worn, marred chest of drawers at the end of her bed, with its untidy array of makeup items, ones she’d used, ones she’d set aside to throw away.

      No one there. The room was empty.

      Her pulse still rocketing, she sank back against the pillows, eyes wide open. She was no stranger to fear. She’d lived with it ever since the babysitting attack eighteen years earlier.

      Five a.m. Too early to call Mom to make sure everything was all right with her.

      Maybe it had something to do with Emma.

      Jamie was swept once more by her age-old guilt. More than half her life had passed since her sister had been changed forever. Closing her eyes, she drew in a shuddering breath and blocked out the memory, but it was etched into the curves and whorls of her brain, never to be forgotten or even diminished. She could push it away, but it was never gone. Just out of reach every time she sought to kill it entirely.

      Throwing back the covers, she jumped out of bed, grabbing up the robe she’d tossed over the end bedstead. She walked to the window and stared out. Beneath the yellowish streetlights, she could see the roofs of other apartment buildings and the cluster of other residences, houses, and condos, all jammed together in this part of Los Angeles. Wires overhead. The beat of helicopter rotors seemingly a daily occurrence. The roads and alleyways crammed with parked cars. She had a designated parking spot for her aging Toyota Camry, but more times than she liked to admit she had to shoo somebody out of her spot. The only positive was that the school where she mainly substitute taught was a quick drive away. She’d been trying to get on full-time, but it was almost fall and she’d yet to be called. Over the summer, she’d been working at a nearby Vietnamese restaurant, serving up banh mi sandwiches and hearty bowls of Pho to make ends meet. She was trying not to dip too far into her meager savings. It was barely enough to get by, and her daughter, Harley, was doing her part by babysitting as well.

      Babysitting . . .

      Everything came back to the night of Emma’s attack. Sometimes Jamie felt a spurt of pure fury. Why hadn’t the police caught the guy? There’d been СКАЧАТЬ