LITMIR.BIZ

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the Hollywood sign on the front before climbing beneath the covers. She was wide awake. Unsettled. She’d given up her babysitting job to find Cooper Haynes and he hadn’t even been at Race Stillwell’s party. She recalled Deon’s hand on her crotch and her blood boiled. She punched the pillow several times, furious with herself and the world as a whole.

      Emma was the one who’d scored tonight, which really pissed Jamie off. The Ryersons always stayed out late, which made for good babysitting money, and Emma was reaping the benefits.

      Jamie was still awake when she heard the distant sirens.

      An auto accident? Her mom was an ER nurse. Saw all kinds of bloody, mangled victims. Ugh.

      She covered her head with her pillow.

      Brrrinnnggg!

      Jamie jumped when the landline down the hall started ringing. Middle of the night. Mom?

      Reluctantly, she climbed out of her warm bed and scurried down the hall to her mom’s bedroom and the phone. She opened the door and nearly ran into her mother, who was standing by the side of the bed, nearly right in front of her.

      “Oh, God!” Jamie gasped, surprised, as Mom, who was still fully dressed apart from her shoes, was reaching for the phone.

      “Hello . . .” she answered, hitching her chin to let her know she was handling things and Jamie could go back to bed.

      Jamie, who’d hoped she wouldn’t have to explain why she was home and Emma wasn’t, turned back toward her room.

      “Oh, God . . . oh my God!” Mom gasped.

      “What? What?” Jamie stopped cold, her hand to her throat.

      “Okay, I’m . . . on my way. Right now. Right now!”

      Mom slammed down the phone, reeling.

      “What is it?” Jamie cried.

      “It’s Emma. She’s been hurt. Attacked. The police are there.” She whirled around, staring at the floor, searching for her shoes, grabbing her coat.

      “At the Ryersons’?” Jamie’s voice was a squeak, but she was shrieking inside.

      “Yes. Emma’s at the hospital.”

      Stumbling into her shoes, Mom was heading out, but Jamie said, “I’m going with you,” and ran for her clothes.

      “I’m not waiting,” Mom said, halfway down the stairs.

      “Wait! Wait! Please!”

      “What are you doing here?” Mom suddenly demanded. “You were babysitting them. What happened?”

      “I–I’ve got on my jacket and jeans.” She’d thrown the jacket over her sleeping T-shirt and was hopping on one foot, the other inside her jeans. She grabbed her forgotten socks and sneakers and ran into the hall.

      Mom led the way downstairs and Jamie stumbled after her. They raced to the car. Jamie shivered in the passenger seat.

      “Is she okay?” she asked in a small voice.

      “I don’t know. Why weren’t you there?” Mom demanded.

      “I . . . we traded.”

      Twenty minutes later, they pulled into River Glen General, Glen Gen to the locals. Jamie was told to stay in the ER waiting room while Mom went through the double doors to the inner cubicles. All Jamie could do was shiver. She’d gone to bed without taking off her makeup, and now, after waiting a few minutes, she found the restroom outside the ER and looked at herself in the mirror. Her makeup had turned to dark smudges below her eyes and she was white-faced. She tried to clean herself up a bit with the end of her little finger and water. When she returned to the ER waiting room, Mom was there, pale and stern.

      “You were fixing your makeup?” she demanded in a flinty voice.

      “Well, just . . .”

      “Your sister’s been stabbed in the back and she has a head injury.”

      “What?” Jamie whispered. Did she mean literally stabbed in the back? “With like . . . a knife?”

      “Yes. Someone came into the house and stabbed her.”

      “Oh . . . God . . . Oh my God. She’s gonna be all right, though?” Jamie quavered.

      “She’s unconscious. They think she hit her head on the mantel as she fell. They’ve stitched her wound.”

      “But she’s okay?”

      “I don’t know, Jamie! She hasn’t woken up! I just don’t understand what happened. Tell me what happened tonight. Tell me everything!”

      “Okay . . .” Haltingly, feeling sick with worry, Jamie told her mother about wanting to go to the senior party, bargaining with her sister, leaving the kids with Emma.

      Mom’s face, already grim, grew grimmer still. “Did you tell the Ryersons?”

      “Well, they kind of rushed out and I . . . no, I told Serena and Teddy, and they know Emma.”

      “You shouldn’t have done that.”

      “I know.”

      “By the grace of God it wasn’t you.”

      Jamie felt stabbed herself. Right in the heart. She knew Mom was scared. She knew she probably didn’t mean it. But it felt like the wrong daughter had been attacked.

      They waited in silence. Mom pressed the button on the wall to release the locked doors and went back and forth from the waiting room to the examining cubicles several times. She was with Jamie about an hour later when a doctor she knew came out to see them again. “We’ve moved her to a room,” he said.

      “She’s still unconscious?” Mom asked.

      He nodded.

      Mom looked at the floor for a moment. “Okay, I’m taking my daughter home and I’ll be right back.”

      “I want to stay with you,” Jamie said, but Mom wasn’t listening to her, and they drove home in silence. “Are you mad at me?” Jamie asked weakly when she was getting out of the car.

      “I’m not happy with you,” Mom said.

      “I . . . why weren’t you at work?” Jamie deflected. Her mother never got home much before seven a.m.

      “Half shift tonight. It was my night off, but they needed me.”

      Jamie watched her turn the car around and head back toward the hospital, then walked heavily up the stairs to her room and to bed. She lay awake a long time, unable to stop the all-over quivering that afflicted her. Emma’s words, that she didn’t want to be killed, came back to her. But it’s not my fault, Jamie thought. It’s not!

      What had happened? Was it that same robber from Vancouver? The one in the ski mask they never caught?

      When her mother came back late the following day, Jamie was in the kitchen. She’d made tuna sandwiches and offered one up, but her mother sank onto a chair at the table in silence.

      “Mom?” Jamie quavered.

      “She came to. She’s having trouble speaking. Can’t focus very well.”

      “Ohhh . . .” Jamie felt tears gather behind her eyes, and her nose got hot. “But she’s going to be okay. . . .”

      Mom said tightly, “Yes,” in a way that made Jamie’s blood run cold. She’d seen that determined resolution in her mother once before, when she’d nodded that yes, the marriage was going to last, almost as if her mother was going to make it so by sheer determination.

      But it hadn’t happened for her marriage . . . and it didn’t happen for Emma either.

      She came home three days later, walking with a shuffle, as if she’d forgotten how it was done, silent

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