“I don’t know.”
“Does it hurt?”
“No.”
Lauren pulled the pajama top down slowly and said in a forced, cheerful voice, “You hungry, baby?”
“Yes! Yes!” Ainslie said. “I’m starving.”
“Good. Go tell your sister it’s time to eat.”
Ainslie bounced off the bed and ran into her sister’s room.
“What is it?” Emmett whispered.
“I don’t know. You get on the Internet and see what you can find. I’ll call the doctor’s office and leave a message. I’m taking her in first thing in the morning.”
CHAPTER 3
Taking a Ride
Since she was twelve, LaShonda had known how to maneuver the school boat around the snaking river bends from the mainland to the Sandy Island dock. Older children were instructed each year how to guide the boat, cut the chugging diesel engine, throw a life preserver ring. All this was a safety precaution in case the captain, Mr. Heriott, ever fell overboard or had a heart attack.
When she was younger, LaShonda frequently envisioned Mr. Heriott falling off the boat so she could jump to the wheel, cut the engine, and fling the orange donut into the Waccamaw’s gator-infested waters. But the old boat captain was as dependable as sunset and LaShonda had never seen him lose control of the watercraft or the children. When Mr. Heriott spoke, the children listened. They said, “Yes, sir” and “No, sir.” LaShonda had always admired Mr. Heriott as having the same sort of self-control as her father. Both men were sweet-natured, but they saw the world in terms of the right choice and the wrong choice. Both men tended to say things like, “Now, just take a look at the choice you’re making and decide if that’s what you really want to do.”
Low-lying trees trailed tangles of moss in the Waccamaw River. Sunlight scattered flashing patterns on the surface of the water downstream as the white, steel-hulled school boat made way toward Sandy Island. The boat slid smoothly parallel to the dock and a young man tied off the aft while Mr. Heriott stepped off the boat and tied down the fore. The children knew the rules, and they all stayed seated on the wooden benches that lined the hull inside the cabin.
When all was secure, kids began to spill out of the boat, lugging heavy backpacks festooned with superheroes and filled with assignments for the weekend. LaShonda watched the children drift into the woods, disappearing into the underbrush as if they had only been spirits. She threw her backpack on the floorboard of the school Jeep. Mr. Heriott always drove her the last mile to the center of the island, down a sandy, lumpy track where turkey oaks and long-leaf pines scrubbed the sides of the vehicle. The primitive road ended at LaShonda’s house, a place her father had inherited from his great-great-grandfather Philip Washington, a slave who had purchased the land from his former owner and established the Sandy Island community with thirty-two former slaves. Today, their numbers hovered around twelve dozen, depending on births and deaths.
LaShonda saw her father’s legs sticking out from underneath his truck. Some days, if shrimping was bad, her father would be home when she got there, tinkering with his truck or fixing some old lamp or iron for a neighbor. He wriggled out from under the truck and wiped his hands on a cloth. LaShonda stopped for her father to kiss her forehead.
“Welcome home, sweetheart,” he said.
LaShonda went inside to see what she could cook for supper. Her father walked out to the Jeep to speak to Mr. Heriott. They often conferred on island events. While Mr. Heriott held control of the school-boat children, LaShonda had seen her father calm drunks, break up fights, and shame wife-beaters to tears. It was her father, Abraham Washington, the police came to when they had a problem with a Sandy Island resident. Plenty of times that problem had been her first cousin, Ronald, a drifter who always returned to his home community when money ran out, worming his way into an invitation to eat, waiting around afterward for a chance to sleep on couches and porch swings. Abraham Washington felt a responsibility to take in his sister’s son, lecturing him on life choices in return for a bite of food and a place to sack out.
While LaShonda felt no such obligation to her slacker cousin, she was proud of her father, the unofficial leader of Sandy Island. There were no elections, but ask anyone and they would tell you Abraham Washington was their mayor. People came to him to settle disputes, whether over property or over love. He was the man the island turned to back in the 1990s when a development company planned a bridge so they could log Sandy Island. Her father had known it wasn’t just the lumber those people were after. He knew once the bridge was built and the timber cleared that it wouldn’t be too hard to justify throwing up a development. And sure enough, plans had been leaked for an “exclusive and elite” community with marina, golf course, riding stable, and hundreds of houses and condos.
Sandy Island residents knew development companies had been eyeing their land, and they feared it would go the way of other islands where property values and taxes were driven up by unchecked development and poorer residents were quickly priced out of their own homes. LaShonda’s father worked with conservation people and their lawyers to fight the bridge. LaShonda clipped the newspaper articles describing her father’s presentation to legislators in Columbia at the statehouse. One of the tree-huggers on their team claimed Sandy Island was a pristine ecosystem, and that the island is “culturally, biologically, and geographically unique.” Eventually Sandy Island was declared a wildlife preserve under the jurisdiction of the state of South Carolina, the centerpiece of eighty thousand acres of the Waccamaw National Wildlife Refuge. The citizens of Sandy Island were protected just like the red-cockaded woodpeckers and American alligators at least for a while, was what her father said.
The screen door slapped shut behind LaShonda. Her cousin Ronald turned his gaze from the television to her. His budding Afro smashed flat in the back where his head rested against the couch.
“Hey, Ronald,” she said deadpan.
“Hey,” he replied. “What’s for supper?”
LaShonda ignored him as she took stock of the refrigerator’s contents. Cars crashed and gunshots rang from the living room. She was pulling frozen peas from the icebox when Ronald stepped into the kitchen.
“We need more beer,” he said. “I’ll be glad when you’re old enough to buy beer.”
“Buy it yourself,” LaShonda snapped. “And while you’re at the store, feel free to buy some food, too.”
“Whoa, who peed in your cornflakes?” Ronald grinned.
“You’re lucky I don’t pee in your food. What’re you doing here?”
Ronald continued to grin as he leaned against the door facing. “Nothing much.”
“How’s your job with the state?” Ronald had lucked into a well-paying flagman job for road construction.
“Too hot,” he said. “That job’s for suckers.”
“God, Ronald. All you have to do is stand in place and turn a sign around. Why don’t you go out there and help Dad with the truck? Do something useful.”
Ronald snorted. “He don’t need no help from me. Ain’t nothing wrong with that truck. He just likes to think he’s doing something, even when he’s not.”
LaShonda propped her hand on her hip and said in an exasperated tone, “You got that right. The poor man can’t sit down for a minute. Always got to be doing something. He wears me out. Go out and crank up the grill. You can cook the hot dogs.”
“Why, yes, ma’am,” he said, bending low. “I’s be happy to do that fo you, ma’am.”
“Shut up! And pick out that nappy head of hair you got,” she yelled at him as he pushed through the screen door into