She scooped her glasses off the table and put them on.
“Wait,” Bitsey pleaded.
“No, Mom. I have to go. Tell Grandpy hello when you see him.” Then she walked away and left us, three women sitting in a Shoney’s booth with a brand-new trouble on the table to worry about.
She walked across the parking lot and headed down the street. She was so thin, but it wasn’t that strong willowy thinness. She looked skinny and brittle, ready to break. Though it was only eight or ten blocks to her house, the choice she’d made, to leave the security of our love and reenter the danger zone of that apartment, made the distance seem enormous, a chasm impossible for us to cross.
Only when she turned a corner past a dry cleaner’s shop did any of us speak. “We can’t let her go back,” Cat said. She’d acted so blasé before, but now her jaw was clenched and it jutted forward like a bulldog’s. Belligerent and determined. Tenacious.
We both looked at Bitsey. Her face was almost as pale as Margaret’s, but she wasn’t crying. She looked at each of us. “You’re right. We have to get her out of there, even if at first she refuses to come. If she won’t protect herself, then we have to protect her. I have to protect her,” she said.
I leaned forward on the table. “Maybe we should call Jack.”
Bitsey shook her head. “Jack doesn’t need to know how his little girl is living, or with whom. First of all, it would kill him. And second of all, we can handle this.” She grabbed each of our hands. “We can. We have to.”
We. My first instinct was to save Margaret. My second was to avoid any kind of ugly scene with her or the creep she was living with. But Bitsey’s quiet conviction and Cat’s unmistakable fury gave me courage.
“So, how are we supposed to do this?” I asked. “I mean, it sounds like you want to kidnap her or something.”
“If I have to, I will,” Bitsey responded.
“You can’t be serious.”
“She was right about stripping your house of all the valuables, wasn’t she?” Cat pointed out.
“Well, yes. But her first suggestion was to burn it down. And don’t forget, she wanted to drown the Jag.”
But Cat didn’t back down. “This is different. Those were things. This is Margaret. Little Magpie.”
So we made a plan. First we staked out her place. Cat and I took turns strolling by, disguised by big straw hats and white plastic sunglasses. It was about quarter after two when some lanky, shaved-head guy with sideburns and a goatee sauntered out of Margaret’s place. He stood on the front steps scratching his belly and lit a cigarette. Then he crossed to a beat-up blue van, climbed in, and with a smoky roar, drove off.
We called Bitsey. “He’s skinny, almost six feet tall. No hair, blue jeans and a black T-shirt. With a hole in it.”
“You just described every other musician on MTV. So he’s gone and she’s inside?”
“It seems that way.”
“I’ll be right there with the car.”
The three of us knocked and knocked, but there was no answer. “Maybe she’s pulling an M.J.,” Cat said.
“Excuse me,” I said. “In case you haven’t noticed, it’s been juice, tea and water for me for over a week.”
“Ignore her,” Bitsey told me. “Cat is just being her smart-alecky self.”
“What? Me, smart-alecky?”
“Y’all! Focus!” Bitsey ordered. “What do we do now?”
Cat and I shared a look. “She’s probably loaded. That’s why she won’t wake up,” Cat said. “I say we break in, get her in the car and go.”
So we did. I was scared to death, so my job was to back the car into the driveway, move everything off the backseat and keep a lookout for the creep in the blue van.
Displaying a talent she had up to now kept hidden from us, Cat pried open a screen, lifted herself up and shimmied through the bathroom window, then came around and opened the door for Bitsey.
When a woman peered out at us through a window in the house next door, my adrenaline, which was already pumping, started speeding. But she must not have called the cops, because it took nearly fifteen minutes to get Margaret out, and no police cars ever showed up to investigate. I watched fearfully as they walked Margaret out the side door, hefting her between them like a limp doll. “Good grief. What’s she on?”
“Probably Vicodin,” Cat said. “We found a half-empty bottle.”
Bitsey looked as if she’d aged fifteen years in the last fifteen minutes. But she had this superhuman strength, because she maneuvered Margaret as if she were still a little kid, heaving her into the backseat and folding her legs carefully inside.
“Get the bags,” she told Cat, who was already on her way back into the apartment.
Just then a van slowed in front of the house. That van with that man. Seeing his parking spot taken, he passed the house.
“Get in. Get in!” I yelled to Bitsey. “Cat! He’s back. Hurry up!”
The woman next door was watching us again, but I didn’t care. I was scared and I wanted us out of there. Bitsey pushed me into the driver’s seat. Not that I needed much pushing. “Drive!” she ordered, climbing in beside Margaret.
“What about Cat?”
“Just get this car out of here! I’ll…I’ll go back to get Cat.”
So I pulled out, laying rubber like a sixteen-year-old the first time out on his own with his mother’s car. A half block down the creep was climbing out of his van, and for a moment I considered running him over. It was only for a very brief moment. But if I hit him the police would definitely come. So we whizzed past him, just a little too close for his comfort. He jumped back, screamed something ugly and shot me the bird. Then he headed for his place.
I stopped two blocks down and around the corner. “Wait here,” Bitsey said. Then she got out and ran back down the street.
I made a mental note not to make her exercise anymore today. If her adrenaline was running as high as mine, she was burning calories at triple speed.
Unfortunately, waiting only seemed to increase my anxiety. I leaned over my comatose passenger. “Margaret? Margaret!” I shook her knee but she was a gone pecan. Her soft snores were even and deep, though. Thank goodness.
When another couple of minutes went by and neither Bitsey nor Cat showed up, I got out and ran to the corner. What I saw might have been a scene out of a Woody Allen movie. Bitsey was leaning against a fence as if she was poking a pebble out of her shoe.
Farther down the street the creep was talking to the lady from the window. I couldn’t hear what she was saying but she seemed pretty agitated. Her hands were flapping and she was pointing back at his house. Was she telling him what we’d
