Sara Paretsky - Burn Marks

Poor little Cerise had vomited all over the kitchen table. Elena, at her brightest as she enjoyed the drama, wiped her face with a damp towel while I cleaned up the mess.

“It’s the shock, you know,” my aunt cooed. “She’s worried sick about her baby.”

I looked at the younger woman narrowly. She was sick, ail right, but I was beginning to think a little more than shock underlay her behavior.

“I think we’ll have a doctor take a look at her,” I said. “Help me get her dressed and down to my car.”

“No doctor,” Cerise said thickly. “I’m not seeing no doctor.”

“Yes, you are,” I snapped. “This isn’t a one-woman social agency. You just threw up all over my kitchen and I’m not spending the day nursing you.”

“No doctor, no doctor!” Cerise screamed.

“She really doesn’t want to go, Vicki,” Elena stage-whispered at me.

“I can see she doesn’t want to go,” I said brittlely. “Just put her clothes on while I hold her arms still. And please don’t call me Vicki. It’s not a name I care for much.”

“I know, I know, sweetie,” Elena promised hastily, “It keeps slipping my mind.”

Since Gabriella had driven home the point forcefully to Elena all through my childhood-“I didn’t name her for Victor Emmanuel to have people talk to her as though she were a silly ingenue”-I didn’t see how Elena could have forgotten, but this wasn’t the time to argue the point.

Dressing Cerise made me glad I hadn’t chosen nursing in a mental hospital as my career. She fought against my hold, screaming and thrashing around in the kitchen chair. I’m in good shape, but she strained my muscles to the utmost. At one point she raked open my left arm with a long fingernail. I somehow managed to hang on to her.

Elena worked with an ineffectuality that brought me close to the screaming point myself. She put Cerise’s underpants on backwards and only managed to slide her skirt on after a good fifteen minutes of work.

“Just do her shoes,” I panted. “She can wear the T-shirt on top. My keys are in the living room. I left them on the coffee table. Unlock the dead bolts.”

I tried to explain which key worked which lock, but gave it up as Elena grew more confused. By some miracle she managed to undo them in less than an hour. Cerise had stopped fighting me by then. She hunched limply over the kitchen table sobbing to herself and offered no resistance as I escorted her out the door. I took the keys from Elena.

“You’d best get your bag. I’m going to drop you off at your new place as soon as Cerise has seen the doctor.”

Elena tried to put up a fight of her own, but I was past any feelings of guilt. I kept Cerise propped up against the wall and repeated my demand. My aunt finally shuffled back into my apartment. After an absence long enough that I wondered if she was back at the Black Label, she came out again. She’d taken a shower; her graying hair hung around her head in damp ringlets, but her makeup was complete and, for once, on target. The violet nightgown still hung out the side of the duffel bag. She let it trail along the floor as she followed me down the stairs.

A Little Help from My Friends

Lotty Herschel’s storefront clinic is about three miles from my apartment, near the corner of Damen and Irving Park. During the short drive Cerise threw up again in the backseat, then started shivering uncontrollably. I thought I might kill Elena, who knelt on the front seat watching Cerise and giving me minute-by-minute updates on what she was doing.

I jerked the car to a stop next to a fireplug in front of the clinic and jogged inside. The small waiting room, painted to look like the African veldt, was packed with the usual assortment of wailing infants and squabbling children. Mrs. Coltrain was keeping order, handling the phone and typing records with her usual calm. I sometimes suggest to Lotty that she found Mrs. Coltrain in a catalog offering to supply offices with old-fashioned grandmothers-not only does she have nine grandchildren, but she wears her silvery hair in a bun.

“Miss Warshawski.” She beamed at me. “Good to see you. Do you need to talk to Dr. Herschel?”

“Rather urgently. I have a young woman in my car who’s been throwing up and seems now to be going into shock. Can you ask Lotty if she’d see her now if I brought her in, or if I should take her to the hospital?”

Mrs. Coltrain refused to call Lotty or me by our first names-we gave up urging them on her long ago. She relayed my message to Carol Alvarado, the clinic nurse, and after a couple of minutes Carol came out to help me bring Cerise in. Cerise’s skin was cold. It felt thick, like wet plastic, not at all like living tissue. She was conscious enough to walk if we supported her, but her breathing was shallow and her eyes were rolling.

A murmur of resentment swelled around us as we brought Cerise past the waiting room into the examining area-people who’ve been waiting an hour or more for the doctor don’t appreciate line jumpers. Carol got Cerise onto a table and wrapped her in a blanket. Lotty swept in a few minutes later.

“What are you bringing me now, Vic?” She didn’t wait for an answer but went straight to Cerise.

I told her what little I knew about the young woman. “Suddenly this morning she started complaining about feeling cold, then she started throwing up. I don’t know if it was pregnancy or drugs or some combination, but I didn’t feel like dealing with her on my own.”

Lotty grunted and pulled back Cerise’s eyelids. “She’s going to be here for a while. Why don’t you come back in a few hours?” She turned to Carol with a request for a medication.

In other words, it was up to me to find out what to do with her when Lotty finished treating her. Not that I’d expected Lotty to do it, but somehow I’d managed to avoid thinking about Cerise’s future.

My shoulders sagging, I walked on heavy feet back to the car. I’d forgotten Cerise’s eruption, but the smell was a pungent reminder. I returned to the clinic and got some wet rags and a bottle of disinfectant from Mrs. Coltrain. All the time I was cleaning the backseat Elena kept chirping questions about Cerise.

“I don’t know,” I said wearily as I finally turned the engine on. “I don’t know what’s wrong with her or what the doctor will do or if she has to go to the hospital. I’ll find all that out when I go back at noon and I’ll let you know.”

Elena put a tremulous hand on my arm. “It’s only because her mother and me are pals, Vicki-Victoria. It’d be the same if it was you in trouble and I took you to Zerlina. She’d feel responsible for you because of me, don’t you see.”

I took my right hand off the wheel to pat her thin, veined fingers. “Sure, Elena. I understand. Your good heart does you credit.”

We drove in silence for a while, then I thought of something. “What’s Zerlina’s last name?”

“Her last name, sweetie? Why do you care?”

“I want to find her. If she’s in the hospital, I can’t go to the reception desk at Michael Reese and ask for her by her first name. They don’t keep track of patients that way.”

“If she got hurt in the fire, sweetie, I don’t know if she’d be up to seeing you.”

“Not up to seeing me?” I tried to keep my tone conversational, but an overlay of a snarl came through anyway. “If you and Cerise want me to do anything more about the baby, she’d damned well better be up to seeing me. And you should do your best to help me find her.”

“Language, Victoria,” Elena said reprovingly. “Talking dirty isn’t going to solve your problems.”