Educational Experience

Chapter Fourteen

14.

“She looks peaceful now,” Wyatt said, watching me stroke Aisha’s hair. Aisha and Joie were sound asleep, but Wyatt seemed to be waking up instead of getting sleepier. Maybe instinct kicking in—she was in very unfamiliar territory.

Our little cop convoy had pulled over into this strip mall parking lot after Friendly got a call from whoever it was that he was outside having a pretty heated argument with. All we'd heard before we stopped was, “What the hell—why?!” And then he rolled down his window, waved to the other cars as he pulled into the strip mall and leapt out of the car cussing a blue streak.

I looked down at Aisha and finger combed some of that wispy baby hair that goes all around her face. I could see the little girl I knew once when she was asleep. Back then, we would sometimes go hide in a culvert or something and take naps on real hot days—not in a wash or anyplace dangerous. Just in the ones they leave out sometimes, waiting to be put somewhere. We knew all kinds of places to chill. Places safer than home.

“Yeah, I like her like this,” I said, just sort of teasing, though. “Unconscious…”

“Well, she clearly adores you.”

I smiled down at her, and said, “Oh, it’s mutual. We go back, this one and me. I. Whatever.”

Wyatt chuckled and watched a little more.

And then she said, “So you’ve all known each other for a long time.”

“Actually, no. Mike and Cat are sort of recent. Well…more recent. This one grew up with me, sort of. We had pretty messed up childhoods, to be honest. Her mother was in the game, as they call it--worked the streets. Sold dope. And my mother…well…”

I smiled softly and decided to just go there.

“My mother was, like…well, she was…a little slow. Short bus material. I know how that sounds, but…it’s true--aren’t you tired at all?”

She turned her whole body toward me. So from that, I figured I’d gotten my answer.

But she said, “You are.”

“I’m dead,” I said. “I mean, God, what a day, right? Especially for you.”

She let her head fall against the back of the seat and signed.

“I’m in too much pain to be sleepy,” she said.

“Already?”

“Oh, I get my hangovers immediately. I don’t know…what possessed me…”

“I do. I mean, a day like today—anyone’d self-medicate, right?”

She closed her eyes as if she was trying to steady herself and make the headache pass. But with her eyes closed, she said, “We were…talking about your mother…”

“Well, she was what they call MIMR. Or, that Hernandez guy told me the new way they say it. But she was, like…about nine-years-old, mentally. I mean, I’m not sure what the official age range was, but it felt that way sometimes. She was so defenseless, Gracie.”

“I think Aisha mentioned that you raised the children. Your siblings.”

“Yeah, I pretty much did. There’d be some bum there for a while, but they never lasted past that first infatuation with her looks and that…wide eyed innocence. Once they realized it was, like…a mental disability thing…I dunno. It creeped them out. Like they’d been sleeping with a kid, you know—they felt like pedophiles or something.”