Some Came Desperate Read online

  “She just left us like this. She knew they’d take us away. She knew they wouldn’t think twice about putting us in those horrible foster places. How could she just—”

  “Listen to me, Jules,” Simone said urgently. “We can’t let them do it, you hear me? We can’t sit up here and be all helpless and let them do it.”

  “But how we gonna stop them? We’re nothing but little kids to them.”

  “I know that. That’s why we’ve got to do something.”

  “But what?”

  Simone didn’t know. But she thought about it. And thought about it. Every idea was a bad one, but they had no choice. Either sit around and lose all control, or try something and at least have a chance. She looked at Jules. “Do everything I tell you to do, okay? Whatever I tell you to do, don’t ask questions, just do it. Okay?”

  Jules looked at Simone. Simone was two years younger, and so small, but she was the leader of their family for as long as Jules could remember. And right now she needed her leadership.

  Jules nodded her head. “Okay,” she said.

  Simone got up and walked over to the bedroom doorway. The whisperers were still whispering and moving, and nobody was giving her and Jules a second look. And that was when Simone made her move. She grabbed Jules by the hand and hurried out of the large bedroom window, a window that was always up because they had no AC, a window that now represented their last chance at remaining connected.

  Their baby sister Serita, known since birth as Shay, had been out playing when the tragedy occurred, so they had to search for her. And they searched frantically for her. From the playgrounds at the end of the block to the park by the school, they searched and searched and searched for seven-year-old Shay. They yelled her name, they went to her friends houses, they went all the way by the old train tracks searching for Shay. But nobody had seen her. Nobody had noticed her.

  By the time they made it back into their neighborhood, as soon, in fact, as they were coming around the corner to see if she was somehow still on the block, they saw her. But they had to stop in their tracks and back up, gasping in horror at what they were seeing. An overweight woman in glasses and run-over shoes had Shay’s tiny hand in hers as she walked her out of the Rivers house, down the wooden steps, and into a car that had not been in front of their house before. The social workers had already arrived and Shay, who had the misfortune of arriving home before her sisters could find her, was now officially in state custody. Simone’s heart dropped. Their separation had already begun. But Jules, who just knew there was no way they could leave Shay, was about to run to her sister, to try with all she had to wrestle her away from that state worker somehow. But Simone pulled her back.

  “We can’t!” Simone cried.

  “But they’re taking Shay away!”

  “I know that, Jules. I know that! But if we go back they’ll take us, too.”

  “But what about Shay?”

  Simone’s heart dropped, but she knew she had to be strong. “If we go back we won’t be with Shay anyway and the two of us won’t be together, either. You know we won’t. They don’t care nothing about us. They’ll place us in those horrible homes and leave us there to rot. Mama’s gone, our daddies don’t want us, and ain’t no relatives no-where willing to claim us. We’ll have to stay with strangers until we’re grown, Jules! They’ll separate us forever!”

  Tears began to stream down Jules face as reality caught her short, and Simone, already stung, looked at Shay, who was looking around for them, the confusion on her sweet little face devastating Simone. But what could she do? God help her, what could she do?

  “Come on,” Simone said stiffly, angrily, bitterly, as she grabbed her sister’s arm and began dragging her away from Parkman Street. “They’re gonna try to get us, too.”

  And although Simone was just as devastated as Jules, undoubtedly more so because of the guilt that weighed her down, she understood too well that they had to go. That they had no choice, no choice at all, but to leave Shay behind.

  TWO

  Simone and Jules walked the back roads nearly all day, their flip-flop shoes slapping against the scorching hot ground in a tat-tat hum. After hours of this, they were lumbering along. They finally came to a stop when they felt they were as far as they could get from Parkman Street. They were in front of Joe’s, a small truck stop café on the outskirts of town. Simone’s goal was simple: find a respectable-looking trucker and hitch a ride with him as far away from Bainbridge as he would take them. And they had many takers; practically every trucker that came out of the café was more than willing to give the attractive sisters a “lift.” But it was Simone who kept balking.

  “What’s wrong with him?” Jules asked with great agitation when Simone, once again, turned down yet another trucker’s offer.

  “I don’t like the looks of him.”

  “Oh, Simone!” Jules said and sat down on the curb in front of the café. “If we don’t get going soon a policeman gonna come ‘round here and start asking questions.”

  “I know that,” Simone said, sitting down, too. “Don’t you think I know that? But we aren’t gonna be stupid, either. God will send us somebody decent. We just got to wait.”

  “That’s all we been doing.”

  “And that’s all we’re gonna keep doing until the right one comes along.”

  “That’s so stupid. You can’t look at somebody and tell if he’s right.”

  Simone knew it too, and that was why she didn’t answer.

  They sat silently, the two sisters, their eyes squinting from the hot Georgia sun, their young bodies exhausted and hungry and angry and sad. So sad. Especially sad.

  “Simone?” Jules finally asked when the silence became too much.

  Simone looked at Jules, who, even with her half-braided hair, still looked so pretty. “What?”

  “What’s gonna happen to Shay?”

  Simone looked away from her sister. She dreaded thinking about it. “She’ll be all right,” she said. “We just got to pray for her.”

  “What if they put her in a bad foster home, like the last time? What if they don’t treat her right, Simone?”

  “They’ll treat her right,” Simone said, more as a prayer than any firm belief. She hated that she wasn’t older, and had the means to get her sisters and protect them for the rest of their lives. But she wasn’t older, and didn’t have a pot to piss in, as their mother would have said, and she knew thinking about things she couldn’t change was nothing but a waste of time and energy, neither of which she had to spare. But she also knew that once she was older, and had the means, she’d never be this helpless again.

  “What about him?” Jules said as an apple red Volkswagen Beetle stopped at the curb and a young man, seemingly in his early twenties, stepped out of the bug-looking car. He was medium height and slender, dressed in a pair of khaki pants and a Hawaiian shirt, and although he had a long, brownish-blonde ponytail down his back, wore shades, and was trying to look cool, even Simone could see that he was head and shoulders above the truckers. Simone quickly rose to her feet, with Jules following.

  “Hey, Mister!” Simone yelled as they approached him.

  “Hey yourself,” the young man said, glancing at the two of them but keeping his stride toward the café.

  “You think we can hitch a ride with you when you come out of there?”

  The young man smiled, a beautiful white smile, Jules thought, and shook his head. “I think y’all better go back home to your mamas, that’s what I think.”

  “Ah, you go back home to yours!” Simone fired back. “Ain’t nobody thinking about you.”

  The young man laughed, glanced at Jules, and went on inside the café.

  Jules and Simone, dejected, headed back for the curb. Jules looked at Simone. “Why you always got to sass people, Simone?” she said as she sat back down. “You scared him away.”

  Simone sat down, too. “He wasn’t gonna give us a ride, anyway,” she said.

  “Y
ou don’t know what he was gonna do. You always got to talk back. That’s why mama. . ”

  Simone and Jules glanced at each other. “That’s why mama what?” Simone asked tentatively, knowing full well the answer. But Jules frowned and looked away. She needed somebody to blame. She needed somebody she could insist was the cause of all of their misery. Simone was usually the one their mother would blame when bad things happened, and Jules was ashamed to admit that she wanted to blame her, too.

  “That’s why mama what, Jules?” Simone asked her again, but Jules only sighed.

  “Nothing,” she said, knowing that Simone would not pursue it.

  For the next fifteen minutes they just sat there, too weary to even speak. Until one trucker, a big-belly man with a toothpick between his stained teeth, was offering them a ride just as the young man with the ponytail was coming back out of the café. The young man looked at them, kept walking toward his VW, then looked again. “I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” he finally suggested, but smiling as he suggested it.

  “You wouldn’t do what?” the trucker, offended, turned and asked him.

  “You’ll be making a big mistake hitching a ride with somebody you don’t know,” the young man said to the girls, ignoring the truck driver.

  Simone, surprised that the young man would have even bothered to say a word, decided to test his resolve. “We accept,” she said to the unsavory-looking truck driver, although her eyes stayed on the young man.

  The truck driver grinned. “Well all right,” he said. “Let’s go then, sugars. My rig’s right over there.” He pointed to a big semi in the parking lot on the side of the café, and began moving in that direction.

  The young man watched as the girls slowly, tentatively, followed behind the trucker, and all he could do was shake his head. But when the bigger girl glanced over her shoulder at him, and the terror that was in her pretty eyes pricked at him, he knew he had to do something. Although the smaller one was feistier, a headstrong kid with the most strikingly beautiful light brown eyes he’d ever seen, he was drawn to the quieter one. The smaller one tried to project this tough girl image, but he knew that her youth and inexperience would render her completely at the mercy of that well-experienced trucker.

  “Wait!” he yelled reluctantly, almost angrily, and both sisters quickly turned around. The trucker, however, kept walking. Time was money for him and he’d already wasted too much of both.

  “You guys can catch a ride with me,” the young man said, and he didn’t have to say it twice. Even Simone showed signs of relief as they hurried for the VW. The trucker started to object, he found them first, after all, but he didn’t bother. They weren’t worth that much trouble. He kept on going.

  When Simone approached the young man, however, she extended her hand before she allowed them to get into his automobile.

  “The name is Simone,” she said business-like, causing the young man to roll his eyes before shaking that hand. “And this is my sister Jules.”

  “Hello Jules,” he said with a smile and Jules moved slightly behind Simone. He laughed. “Now let’s get this show on the road!” He opened his door, fully expecting them to do as he was about to do and get in so that he could take off. They, instead, just stood there. “What now?” he asked, looking back at them.

  “And you are?” Simone asked.

  The young man shook his head. This child was too much. “I am Jeremy Druce. But everybody calls me Jeremy.” He smiled. “Good enough?”

  “What do you do for a living, Mr. Druce?”

  “Whoa now,” Jeremy said with a smile, “I didn’t see you giving that trucker the third degree.”

  “We wasn’t about to get in no truck with that fool,” Simone said testily. “This is different.”

  The young man shook his head. Suckered again, he thought. “I could tell you anything, you know that?”

  Simone hadn’t thought of that, but she knew it was true.

  “Okay,” he said, noticing her discomfort. “I’m a student at UM. Med student.”

  “You’re gonna be a doctor?” Jules asked with wonderment in her voice.

  “That’s right. I’m headed back to school now. I’m a first year med student. So in answer to your question, Miss Simone, that’s what I do for a living. Now does that meet with your approval?”

  “Where’s this UM?”

  “Miami, Simone,” Jules replied and smiled at Jeremy. “The University of Miami. The Hurricanes.”

  “Oh,” Simone said, upset by her ignorance. “First year medical student, you said?”

  “That’s right,” he replied with a kind of sing-song impatience to his voice.

  “Which would make you?”

  “Which would make me . . . a first year med student?”

  “I mean how old are you?”

  “Then why didn’t you say that?”

  “How old are you?”

  “How old are you?”

  Simone wouldn’t respond. Jeremy shook his head again. “I’m twenty-three, okay? Now can we go?”

  “We ain’t no floozies,” Simone said.

  Jeremy laughed. “Okay.”

  “We just want a ride, that’s all we want. And you might be twenty-three and gonna be a big doctor and all, but if you try to give us anything other than a ride you won’t live to be twenty-four or a doctor big or small. So don’t be getting any ideas.”

  Jeremy threw up both his hands. “You have nothing to worry about there, Miss Simone. I wouldn’t dream of getting any ideas with you.”

  Simone glared at Jeremy, she knew a putdown when she heard one, but she ushered her sister into the back seat of the VW just the same, where both of them sat chauffeur-style. Jeremy laughed, put back on his shades, and got into the car, too.

  They arrived in Miami six hours later. The VW stopped in front of a homeless shelter within the hectic inner city, Liberty City, Jeremy called it, and he waited for the girls to get out of his car. He had a mid-term exam tomorrow morning and still had more than a few theorems to review. But when he looked through his rearview, clearly expecting the girls to be well on their way out of his life, they were just sitting there and staring out of the window at the hustle and bustle of the busyness around them. At the winos arguing, at the boosters selling their tapes and t-shirts, at the drug dealers handing off packets, at the hookers. He turned around and looked at them.

  “What’s the matter now?” he asked. “You said to drop you off anywhere. Well, this is anywhere, ladies. At least here you’ll have a roof over your heads for the night. After that, you’re on your own.”

  But the look on the girls’ faces stunned him. Even Simone, even that pillar of toughness, looked terrified. They were babes in the woods and they’d be eaten alive in no time. He knew instinctively, just as he realized when he first saw them at the truck stop café, that he couldn’t just leave them here. “Okay,” he said, “I want you to cut the crap and tell me why you were so hell bent on leaving Georgia. And I mean the truth, Simone!”

  “I told you we just wanted to get away,” Simone said.

  “Okay, fine. Get away. And get out of my car while you’re at it.”

  “Our mama died,” Jules said quickly. She wasn’t about to leave Jeremy’s side. In her mind, based on what she was seeing of this big city so far, he was all they had. “She didn’t just die, but she killed herself. And we saw it. After she’d done it, I mean.” Jules and Simone looked at each other. Jules looked back at Jeremy. “So we had to leave because those social workers wanted to separate us again, like they’d done before. But only Shay wasn’t home at the time, she’s our baby sister, and we couldn’t find her. When we did, it was too late. The state already had her. So we had to run or they would have separated me and Simone, too. Simone said we had to leave Shay behind. We had to leave.”

  By now Jules’ voice was beginning to crack and Simone was looking down and fumbling with her small hands. She didn’t look so tough now, Jeremy thought. Which didn’t help.
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br />   “How old are you?” he asked Jules. “And tell me the truth.”

  Jules wiped her tears with the back of her hand. “I’m sixteen and Simone is fourteen.”

  Jeremy shook his head. Harboring minors, he thought. Transporting minors across state lines, he thought. What other crimes have he broken in this one day? But what was the alternative? Turn them over to the state so they could rot in foster homes? Separated probably forever just like Jules had said? Or take them into his world, into his single, unencumbered life where getting through med school was all that mattered to him?

  “What’s your game plan, Simone?” he asked her, to see for himself if she could actually be humbled. She looked up at him.

  “My game plan?”

  He smiled. She didn’t have a clue, just as he had thought. He cranked back up his car. “You guys can stay with me,” he said and Simone frowned.

  “With you?”

  “Oh,” he said, turning around. “So you object, Simone? What, you got a better offer? Maybe a rich relative waiting here in Miami to take you in? Or should we alert the authorities?”

  “We’ll go with you,” Jules said quickly. She trusted Simone, but knew right now that Simone couldn’t help them, either.

  “It’ll only be for a few days until I can decide what in the world I’m going to do with two teenagers. But if you don’t like the deal, Simone, say so now.”

  Both Jeremy and Jules looked at Simone. Simone didn’t like it, didn’t like it for all the normal reasons and for reasons she couldn’t even begin to express. But what choice did they have? Let him put them out in the middle of this urban jungle? Besides, she knew that if something didn’t smell right, she wasn’t going to hesitate to grab Jules and go.

  “For a few days, okay,” she said.

  Jules smiled, and Jeremy, already regretting his decision, drove away.

  THREE

  Two years later

  Simone spread the table cloth over the small dining table, hurriedly put the candles in place, and then placed all of the food - her fried chicken, her collard greens and cornbread, her mac and cheese - onto that table. She had been cleaning and cooking all day, while Jules, who had promised to help, spent most of the day eating and sleeping and, later, “prettying” herself for Jeremy. Simone, in truth, would have loved to pretty herself for some man too.