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Kelle is upon her in a second—the sound of her palm meeting Liv’s cheek cracks loudly around the room. She and Rae and I all suck in the same violent gasp.
And for the first time in my life, I want to hit a woman.
Liv does it for me. She shoves Kelle even more roughly than before and uses the advantage of her staggering to stride forward and backhand the shit out of her.
And Kelle reels just long enough for something to cut through the tense insanity roiling around us: police sirens.
Oh, God, we can hear police sirens.
ThankGod!
I don’t actually know if they’re coming here—this is quick and I don’t know if they’d consider Kelle an emergency or not, even though she seems like one to us. But it’s enough to drain her determination to get her dirty fingers on Rae. Her eyes widen, then narrow in fury at Liv.
“Fine!” she yells with a stomp of her foot. “Okay,fine!You know what? I don’t fucking want her! No one would even give me much money for her because she’s an ugly little bitch and I bet she’d whine and cry all the time just like you used to! She can just go on being your burden! You can just keep her!”
Full of genuine hate for her, I interject in a snap, “We will, so go to hell.”
She’s got Rae bawling into my neck.
She’s got Liv looking so close to exploding that she can’t even speak.
My mind is racing with thing after thing that this woman did wrong when it came to her child, and Ihateher.
The sirens are right on top of us. Kelle pats nervously at her pockets like she’s got contraband in them, and I bet she does. With a glare for each of us, she growls crossly and hurries out the front door.
And she promptly comes stumbling right back in, because even though the sirens are apparently driving past us, there are two policemen coming into the building.
“We’re responding to a call about a violated restraining order,” one of them says. They really must have been nearby already.
Liv and I huff out the same breath of sheer relief before she finds her voice and dashes over to them. Kelle tries to dash, too, back out the door, but the policemen are instantly in no-nonsense mode.
They’ve got her.
And we learn she does have drugs—very illegal drugs—in her pockets, which only adds to the bullshit she’s gotten herself into with Rae.
She’s in big trouble.
I assure crying and quaking Rae of that. She tells me how scared she still is, so I rub her back and kiss her hair, murmur to her that she’s safe, that me and Annie won’t let anything happen to her.
It takes a while for us to be able to head upstairs because of the police report we have to give. When we finally get there, the three of us sit on the couch and try to calm down.
It’s an emotional stretch of time because Liv is furious and so am I, and Rae is badly shaken.
When we finally seem to convince her she’s safe, she turns her attention to her malformed fingers.
Miserably, she wobbles out, “She said I’m ugly.”
My heart aches. “Oh, Rae,no.” I reach for one of her hands just as Liv reaches for the other. “No, no, no. She’s wrong.”
Liv’s emotions were already running high, but now her throat is audibly tight. “Baby, you arebeautiful.Your mama isn’t a good person and she doesn’t have a good mind. She was very angry and acting very selfish, and she wanted to hurt us, hurtyou,so she said some terrible things that weren’t true. I want you to try really hard not to pay any attention to what she said, okay?Your mama is not a good person.”
Rae sobs frailly for a second or two, then whimpers, “I wishyouwere my mama, Annie.” She looks at me for a tearful, swollen-eyed second. “And I wish you were my daddy. I want a mama and daddy who love me.”
There is absolutely no way to describe how that makes me feel.
I know that’s true for Liv, too, whose features crumple just before she starts crying. She’s been rubbing Rae’s back with me, but now she strokes her hair, breathing jaggedly, clearly not knowing what to say.
I swallow past the aching knot in my throat and do the talking. “Well,welove you so much, Rae, even if we aren’t your mom and dad. Don’t you worry, angel. You’re stillourgirl.”
