Police had already handcuffed Roy Stafford and were placing him inside a cruiser when Susan Roberts arrived. Betty Stafford lay on a gurney that the EMS team hurriedly lifted into their van. Flashing her ID to one of the cops, Susan asked, “Where are the girls? Are they OK?”
“In the living room. OK? I guess so—physically. He never touches the kids. But they saw everything.”
Susan helped the girls pack some clothes and led them to her car. Neither was crying. A little defiantly, the younger sister, Rochelle, asked, “Where are you taking us? And who are you, anyway?”
“Sorry. I am Ms. Roberts—Susan. I’m taking you to a safe place where you can stay for the next few days.”
Mindy, her voice cracking a little, asked, “Is Mama going to die?”
“No, I don’t think so, but she’ll probably be in the hospital for a while.”
“Is Daddy going to jail agin?” asked Rochelle.
“I don’t know for sure. Maybe. Listen, have you kids eaten?”
“I ain’t hungry,” muttered Rochelle.
“I ain’t neither—I guess.”
“Nothing at all you’d like?” Susan wanted some time to explain things before she took them to the foster homes.
Mindy finally spoke: “I can eat an ice cream cone. Prob’ly.” Rochelle, balled up in the corner of the back seat, pretended not to hear. She was concentrating on making herself look small. And she was succeeding.
“Ice cream it is, then.”
Ten minutes later, the social worker was parking her car in front of a seven-foot plastic Ronald MacDonald who jauntily extended an oversized-black boot forward. His four-fingered white-gloved right hand was raised in a cheery “hi, how are ‘ya?” kind of gesture. Around Ronald’s neck hung a green Christmas wreath wrapped with a string of small blue, blinking lights. Susan preferred the multicolored lights—no one seemed to use them nowadays.
Getting out of the car, she caught her own reflection in the glass. She thought she looked old tonight. Maybe just weary. Had her blouse and pants looked so wrinkled when she left for work that morning? She looked frumpy—someone’s grandmother. No, not grandmother—just some woman growing old, someone who had doubts. Someone, maybe, who was learning quickly, finally, not to give a damn.
She sat the two girls at the round table with the tall yellow and red chairs. It was 5:00 p.m., and it was nearly dark. It was three days before Christmas.
Mindy was wiping the table clean with a fist-full of wet napkins when Susan came back from the cashier. “They don’t clean the tables good, you know. My mama always cleans the tables—it doesn’t matter how clean they look—cause germs are inviz’ble!”
“Good idea, kid! Thanks!” Mindy beamed back shyly, and Susan felt maybe she was warming up a bit. She handed the girls their ice cream cones and then placed her coffee cup across from them. Leaning her arm upon the table, Susan wearily pulled herself up into the tall chair. Her sleeve slid through a small pool of water—Mindy was thorough if she was anything.
A mess, Susan muttered silently. Fifteen years with Protective Services, and Susan had grown to believe that the world was divided into only two camps: those people who made messes and those who had to clean up messes. It took many people to clean up all the messes. Susan was one of them.
The sisters looked nothing alike. Rochelle, the younger, was dark and thin. She was meticulous in appearance and dress: her short brown hair neatly combed, her spotless pink jacket evenly buttoned, her blue jeans clean and stiff, her socks turned exactly the same width. Even her fingernails were neat, manicured, cut straight across, and carefully polished a pink that nearly matched her jacket. Despite the dirty snow, her sneakers, though wet and old, were clean. Susan thought, here was a child who would always watch where she was going—this was good, a characteristic in her favor.
Mindy, on the other hand, seemed to have nothing at all in her favor. Although she was a year older, she was a head shorter than her sister. And she was fat. Mindy was wearing a dirty white tee shirt, conspicuously stained with mustard and ketchup (Susan suspected this was not her first trip to MacDonald’s lately). The tight shirt had risen up to beneath her prematurely developed breasts and exposed her navel. Her red fleece skirt had a ruffled petticoat that came just above her flabby knees. When Mindy leaned over to pick up the little, black satin purse she had dropped, Susan could see that the child’s underpants had rolled up between her buttocks. Her satin heels, ostensively chosen to match the purse, were muddy. Her red hair hung over her shoulder and back in dirty, limp little strands. The child’s polar white face (her mother’s face powder?) was made more hideous by red lipstick and a generous layer of blue-green eye shadow.
Susan looked at the girl carefully, resignedly. No doubt, this was a prepubescent’s notion of sexy. Mindy was a disaster. She was a pedophile’s dream.
Susan Roberts was anxious to get the children to their temporary homes before the rain turned to ice, but she needed to talk to them first. She wasn’t sure if they understood that they were going to be separated through Christmas, perhaps longer. For Susan it was purely and automatically a matter of finding two beds for the girls. And tonight, those beds were in separate houses across town from each other. It was as simple as that.
“Listen, girls, do you understand what has happened tonight? What it means?”
“Sure.” Unexpectedly, it was Mindy who had replied. “Daddy beat up on Mama agin. She’s in the hospital. He’s in jail agin—I hope for a long time, ‘cause, if not, Mama is jest goin’ go right back to him. And he’s goin’ beat her agin and agin.”
“Yeah, Mindy, that’s pretty much it.” The girls understood the routine better than Susan had expected. So much for the innocence of childhood. Suffer the little children, Susan thought.
“Will Rochelle and me get to see each other Christmas Day?”
“I don’t know—no, not Christmas Day, probably not, but I’ll get you back together just as soon as I can.”
“Rochelle,” Mindy began, “Maybe I can call you on Christmas morning. Ms. Roberts, you think that’s pos’ble?”
“I will make sure that happens, girls. I promise.”
In the long silence, the girls finished their ice cream, and Susan drank her second cup of black coffee. I can’t do this—this awful world, without its hope.
Rochelle interrupted the silence. “Ms. Roberts, do you know what today is?”
“Well, it’s three days before Christmas, I know that. Oh my God! It isn’t your birthday, is it? Did I miss your birthday? Again?”
“Ms. Roberts,” Rochelle laughed, “no-o-o, it’s not my birthday. It’s the winter solstice. Mindy and me saw about it on the news this morning: the winter solstice. You know what that means?”
“Yes, the first day of winter.”
“Yeah, but do you know what that means? At ‘exactly 6:38 this evening’, the earth’s goin’ stall and then wobble a little bit. Then it’s goin’ to start up agin, leaning forward, and every day for the next six months, Ms. Roberts, we are goin’ git closer to the sun—“
“In this hem’sphere—be sure to tell her, Rochelle, in the north hem’sphere,” interrupted Mindy.
“Yeah, in the north hem’sphere—like the United States but not places in like Australia—and the days are goin’ keep gittin’ a little bit longer.”
Mindy was anxious to add to the discussion. “People a long time ago, they’d light lot of fires and candles and such on the winter solstice, to in-vite the sun back. It was like a real cel’bration. Like Christmas.”
Susan found the girls’ excitement a little gladdening. “So, the lights come back on, eventually. So to speak. Right?”
The girls were silent for a long time. Then Rochelle, serious and grown-up, spoke: “Tonight, though, this is as dark as it gits.”
The girls cried when Susan dropped Rochelle off. Mindy said very little on the drive to her house. She kissed Susan, and Susan hugged her tightly. “Don’t forgit, Ms. Roberts, you goin’ fix it for Rochelle and me to talk Christmas mornin’. Right?”
“I will talk to your foster parents tomorrow. We’ll set it up. You have my word.”
When Susan got home, she checked her watch: it was a little before 6 p.m. She went directly and quickly to her dining room. She removed the three white candles from behind the small nativity on the table and then carried them outside to her front porch. She then searched her kitchen cabinets, found two bead lamps and filled them with liquid paraffin. In the storage shed behind her house, she found two old oil lanterns she had used on camping trips as a child. She then gathered up various other candles: votives, decoratives, even a can of Sterno. Finally, she retrieved from the shelf in her bedroom closet the mahogany crucifix box that contained the candles for the last sacrament, for the administration of the supreme unction. She slid the crucifix box open, took out the candles—the same candles that the priest had used for her mother—and took them, sans crucifix, to the porch.
“Tonight,” she said, as she prepared the candles, “I need something real to believe in. A real miracle.”
She removed the several pots and planters from the banister, the summer perennials that, in their season, would, she hoped, grow again. After she had lined the lamps and the candle up along the banister, she lit them all—twenty or so small sources of light—perhaps enough, she told herself, to encourage the sun to come back. It was bitterly cold, and the neighbors would surely think her mad, and maybe she was. But she was also hopeful for the first time in good while. She pulled a chair close to the banister and watched as the flames, sputtered and flared around her, each in its own fashion.
A child had said to her earlier in the evening, “Tonight, this is as dark as it gets.”
She looked at her watch. It was now 6:38 p.m., and then the earth stalled and then wobbled. And started moving again slowly toward the light.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay – many candle flames burning gold.
literally stories 