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Someone had located blankets, and all of the women—curled into themselves and each other, sitting on their asses and lining a wall—had them wrapped around them.
The second she saw us, Cameo came out of her curl and launched herself at us.
We hugged her.
She dissolved into sobs.
Luna took over.
Freed from Cameo, it was then I walked to her, crouched in front of her, caught her lowered gaze, and whispered, “Hey, Christina. I’ve been looking forward to meeting you. Your mom wants you to know she can’t wait for you guys to fight over the phone again.”
I barely finished speaking, in fact, it was on the words “your mom,” when, clawing the blanket to her, she managed to roll to her knees and collapse into me.
By some miracle, I kept my crouch, wrapped my arms around her and held on.
It wasn’t my love I was giving her in my hold, it was her mom’s.
Even so, I knew she felt it.
* * *
Jorge Alvarez wasa good-looking Latino man around the same age as Lee and Mace et al. (in other words, the first generation).
And from the beleaguered looks he gave me, even though our introduction was brief, he didn’t like me much.
Oh well.
It took a whole heckuva lot longer to deal with this mess than it did the Elsie Fay thing (and, uh…I saw it, none of them were dead, even if they looked it, but you couldn’t groan like that and be dead, but we could just say Cap and the guys didn’t fuck around with the men in that warehouse).
Therefore, Luna and I were hanging out, texting Jinx and Jessie and Harlow with the updates when she came tearing in.
She was wild-eyed, wild-haired and out of control.
Some of the uniforms made a move to the waiting area, where we were hanging, and where she was racing, but she was on such a mission, they didn’t get to us before she did.
Betsy Markovic pulled me out of my chair first with a yank so strong, I feared she dislocated my shoulder.
Luna came up next, and I heard her grunt of pain, so I knew she got the same treatment as me.
Then she hugged us both.
“She’s sleeping at the hospital. Sleeping, breathing,” she said in the cadence of an excited prattle. “They say there’s nothing wrong with her, physically, I mean. A little dehydration. They’re on that. She can come home tomorrow. Tomorrow. Tomorrow, she can come home.”
She jumped away from us but cupped her hands on our cheeks with too much excitement, thus she nearly knocked our heads together.
“I had a feeling about you girls,” she said. “I’d lost hope. Then you girls showed up. And I knew. I knew my Christina would come back.”
“We had help,” I told her.
She shook her head in a crazed way. “I don’t care. I don’t care how it happened. She’s coming home tomorrow. That’s all I care about.”
She then moved her hands to the back of our heads, pulled Luna down to press a big smooch on her forehead, then me, and she let us go and raced out of there, just as wild and out of control as she’d arrived.
Luna and I watched her go.
Then we looked at each other.
After that we sat down.
