24 Hours

Terror closed her throat too tightly to scream. She tried to fight, but another arm went around her stomach and lifted her into the air, so that her kicking legs flailed uselessly between the wide-spaced walls of the hallway. The towel was cold against her face. For an instant Abby wondered if her daddy had come home early to play a joke on her. But he couldn’t have. He was in his plane. And he would never scare her on purpose. Not really. And she was scared. As scared as the time she’d gone into ketoacidosis, her thoughts flying out of her ears as soon as she could think them, her voice speaking words no one had ever heard before. She tried to fight the monster holding her, but the harder she fought, the weaker she became. Suddenly everything began to go dark, even the eye that was uncovered. She concentrated as hard as she could on saying one word, the only word that could help her now. With a great feeling of triumph, she said, “Mama,” but the word died instantly in the wet towel.

Huey Cotton stood outside the Jennings house, nervously rubbing his palms against the legs of his coveralls and peering through Abby’s bedroom window. Abby. Unlike most names, he could remember that one without trouble. His mother had once read letters to a woman named Abby out loud to him. Dear Abby, she would drawl in her cigarette-parched voice, sitting at the kitchen table in her hair-rollers and housecoat. The people who wrote to that Abby never signed their real names. They were embarrassed, his mother said. They signed big words instead of names, and sometimes they signed places, too, like Bewildered in Omaha. He always remembered that one.

Huey heard the scuff of a heel on wood. He looked up to see his cousin walking through the pink bedroom with the little Abby in his arms. She was fighting, kicking her skinny legs to beat the band. Joey held her at the center of the room so that her feet wouldn’t hit the furniture or the tall bedposts. The kicks got weaker and weaker until finally they were just little jerks, like a hound’s legs when it dreamed of hunting.

The little girl looked like another of the hundred or so dolls that lay around the room like the sleeping occupants of some fairyland, only bigger. Joey walked to the open window and passed her through it. Huey accepted Abby as gingerly as he would a wounded bird, his mouth open in wonder.

“You’re a genius,” Joey said, a crooked grin on his face. “I apologize, okay? She’ll be out for two to four hours. Plenty of time.”

“You’re going to call me, right?” Huey asked.

“Every thirty minutes. Don’t say anything but ‘hello,’ unless I ask you a question. And shut off the cell phone when you get there. Just cut it on for the check-in calls. And remember the backup plan, right?”

“I remember.”

“Good. Now, get going.”

Huey turned away and started to walk, then stopped and turned back.

“What’s wrong now?” Joey asked.

“Can she have one of her dolls?”

Joey leaned back inside the window, snatched up a gowned Barbie off the bed, and handed it out. Huey took it between Abby’s hip and his little finger.

“Don’t crank the truck till you hit the road,” Joey said.

“I know.”

Carrying Abby with maternal care, Huey turned and lumbered toward the playhouse and his concealed pickup truck, the gold-lame gown of the Barbie fluttering behind him like a tiny flag.

Karen stood at the kitchen counter, thumbing through the NEJM in spite of her resentment. Two sweating glasses of iced tea stood on the counter beside her, bright yellow lemon rinds hooked over the rims. Beside the glasses lay a plastic device for pricking Abby’s finger; it looked like a ballpoint pen. Without taking her eyes from the magazine, Karen called: “Abby? You okay, sweetie?”

There was no answer.

She took a sip of tea and kept reading, thankful for a few moments of silence before the maddening last-minute details of the flower show would have to be dealt with.

Beneath the tall, sweet-scented pines behind the playhouse, Huey opened the driver’s door of his pickup and slid Abby’s unconscious body across the bench seat to the passenger side. She lay still as a sleeping angel. Huey watched her for a while. He liked standing on pine needles. They were cushy, like deep carpet. He wished he was barefoot.

Suddenly, an image of his cousin filled his mind. Joey would be really mad if he messed up. He reached into the truck, shifted it into neutral, and pushed it backward around the playhouse like a normal-sized man pushing a motorcycle. After the truck cleared the playhouse, he stopped, shifted his weight forward, and began pushing again, steering the pickup across the yard toward the steep driveway. The yard had a pitch to it, for drainage, and gravity soon began to help him.