The Scattering Read Online Free PDF Page B

done, Jessica showed them to their room.
    â€˜They barely said a word other than “yes Ma’am, no Ma’am”,’ Jessica said to Bobby Jean when they were finally alone together.
    â€˜They’re traumatised, and why wouldn’t they be? They’ve just seen the earth open up and steal away their folks. And they had to navigate some deep and mean floods, too, before they eventually got picked up.’
    â€˜What did you say the parents did?’ Jessica asked her friend, a well-respected realtor who was always doing some kind of good in the community.
    â€˜Father a preacher, mother led the Pineville choir. There are relatives in Atlanta, that’s how come the girls were sent there, but Atlanta can’t find them. Not yet anyway.’
    As the two girls slept, Jessica walked out into the warm air of the Panama City night. She went to the new delivery and brushed her fingers along the thick green shoots. She could hear the surf crashing on the sands and the sandpipers chattering. She thought she could hear, too, the start of new winds gathering. After a while she went to her chair and watched darkness race through her palms and bamboos like the tide. She pressed her face and neck up against the clear wide sky. This was how Jessica found her unity with the world: imaginatively, and in the dark. And sometimes, cast adrift in the night air, Jessica would think of the nights on the beach with Tina and Jules, back when they were a family. Sometimes she might even hear Tina getting in or out of her car, and it would make her jump. It would never be Tina, of course, but usually Jules with some beach girl. It would never be Tina because Tina had been gone a long time. Jessica’s thoughts were just about to slip back to the days of Jules and Tina on the beach when she heard a noise out front. She was ready to chastise her son but turned and saw the taller of the two girls, shaking and crying.
    â€˜Are you alright, Ashleigh?’ Jessica asked.
    â€˜It’s Olivia, Ma’am, my sister,’ the girl replied.
    â€˜What’s wrong with her?’
    â€˜She’s sick and we ain’t got no medication with us.’ Jessica stood up. She could hear thrashing noises coming from the room upstairs.
    â€˜What’s wrong with her, Ashleigh? You needn’t be afraid to tell me. In fact it’s best you do.’
    â€˜Olivia, Ma’am, she’s, well, sometimes she has these fits.’ Jessica ran faster than she had done in an age. On reaching the room, she did what she had seen done in so many movies: she restrained the erratic motions of the child, who was half out of the bed, soaked to the skin in sweat and spit, by holding down a tight and twisted-up cloth between the child’s teeth. When the shaking stopped, Olivia passed out, bone-rattled and exhausted, like the entire State of Louisiana in the weeks after Katrina.
    *
    â€˜Jessica, I did not know. There was no time, and believe me I’m gonna give Atlanta shit on a stick for this.’ Bobby Jean sounded furious. And Jessica believed that her friend would indeed give the Atlanta authorities ‘shit on a stick’. Nonetheless, when she had agreed to Bobby Jean’s requests for shelter for the two girls, Jessica had not planned on offering anything more than that.
    â€˜How come she didn’t have a seizure until now is what I want to know?’ Jessica asked.
    â€˜Well, you know how it is. I guess her body thought if anywhere was a good place to have a fit, yours was it.’
    Jessica sat in the hospital waiting room with Ashleigh beside her. She was beginning to regret letting Bobby Jean get the better of her.
    â€˜Are you gonna give us back to Atlanta now, Mrs Lawson?’ Ashleigh asked.
    â€˜Well, of course I won’t be doing that,’ Jessica replied, and looked furtively at the pale willowy child sitting beside her. There was something odd and overly mature about her, Jessica