THUNDER POUNDS IN THE DISTANCE and rain coats the Dodge’s windshield, drifting across it in sheets like the hard spatter against a shower curtain. Taylor bangs on the steering wheel. “This isn’t a city, it’s a carwash!”

Turtle looks away, out the window on her side. They are parked in front of the Kwik Mart, held hostage by the rain, hoping it might lighten up enough to let Taylor make a call from the pay phone.

Taylor grips the steering wheel hard, until the weakness in her forearms runs in slow warm-water currents up into her shoulders and neck. She blows out air. “I’m sorry, sweetheart. I’m not mad at you, I’m mad at the rain.”

Turtle mumbles something, rolling Mary idly in her lap.

“What?”

Still looking away, she pronounces: “You’re always mad at something.”

“Oh, Turtle.” Taylor has to bite her tongue to keep from snapping, “I am not!” If she weren’t so miserable, she would laugh at her terrible mothering skills. She stares out the window on her side, toward the washed-out vacant lot next door, empty tonight. Apparently the criminal element has the sense to stay home in this weather. They probably have nice homes, Taylor thinks, and VCRs. As drug dealers, they would have a decent income. Probably they’re home watching America’s Most Wanted, with their heat cranked up to seventy-five degrees.

“How was school today?”

“Okay, I guess.”

“That’s all?”

“Yeah.”

Taylor turns in the seat to face Turtle, tucking her feet under her. She taps Turtle on the shoulder politely. “Listen, you, I want to talk about it.”

Turtle slowly brings around her face, with its question-mark eyebrows.

“What was the best thing that happened?”

Turtle thinks about it. “There wasn’t any best thing.”

“Okay, what was the worst thing?”

“Lisa Crocker made fun of my pants.”

“Your bicycle pants? What’s wrong with those? All the kids wear those, I’ve seen them.”

“She says I wear them every day.”

“Well, that’s not true. On the other days you wear your jeans.”

Turtle pushes her palms against her thighs. “The other kids have more than two pairs.”

“I know, Turtle. I used to get made fun of in school too. Mama cleaned people’s houses, and they’d give her their kids’ outgrown stuff for me to wear. They thought they were doing us a favor, but I ended up going to school looking like a clown.”

Turtle slides her eyes sideways and suppresses a grin. “With a big red nose?”

“I should have worn a big red nose. I copped an attitude instead.”

“What’s that?”

Taylor notices that the rain is changing from a major to a minor key, maybe letting up a little.

“Copping an attitude? Oh, it just means I acted real tough. Like I wanted to look like that, and everybody else was ridiculous for wearing their little matching sweaters and skirts.”

Turtle thinks this over. “I don’t think I can cop an attitude,” she says.

“You shouldn’t have to! Kids your age should not even like the idea of clothing. You should still be trying to throw everything off and roll in the mud.”

Turtle looks attentively skeptical.

“I’m telling you, this Lisa Crocker character is a social deviant.”

“She’s just like the other girls, Mom.”

“Good grief, they’re all going to grow up to be like Barbie! Can you imagine what that means for the future of our planet?”

“I want them to be my friends.”

Taylor sighs and strokes Turtle’s hair. “I think it’s harder to be an underprivileged kid than it used to be.”

“One time I wore the school’s pants,” Turtle says. “Those gray sweater pants with letters on them. When I had that accident.”

“Well, that’s true. That wasn’t much fun, though, was it?”

“No.”

“I’m glad your stomach’s feeling better these days.”

Turtle is quiet.

“Aren’t you feeling better?”

“No,” Turtle says faintly.

“No?” Taylor feels a wave of panic.

“It hurts mostly.”

“Oh, Turtle. This doesn’t make any sense. You’ve never been sick before.”

“I’m sorry, Mom. I just get the stomach cramps. I can’t help it.”

“Oh, Turtle.”

“Mom, it stopped raining. Look.”

It’s true, the noisy assault is over, but the windshield is still blurred with a serious drizzle. “You poor kid, you’ve forgotten what good weather is. You think a sunny day is when you only need a raincoat instead of an umbrella.”

“No, I don’t. I remember sun.”

“Remember Tucson?”

“Yeah.”

“What do you remember best?”

Turtle closes her eyes for a long time. “There isn’t any best,” she says, finally. “I liked it all.”

“But we didn’t have much money then, either. I think you only had one or two pairs of pants even in Tucson.”

“We had Jax, though. And Lou Ann and Dwayne Ray, and Mattie, down at your store.”

“That’s true. We had them.”

“Will they let us come back?”

“We don’t have enough money for gas. And we can’t tell anybody where we are.”

“But if we did have gas, I mean. Does Jax and everybody still want us to live there?”

“I think he does.”

“He’s not mad because we went away from home?”

Taylor rolls down the window and closes her eyes and lets the hissing night lick her face like a cat. “That’s what home means, Turtle,” she says. “Even if they get mad, they always have to take you back.”

 

Alice answers the phone at last.

“Mama, I’ve been trying to call you all different times today. Where were you?”

“Law, Taylor, I couldn’t even tell you. Someplace called Lip Flint Crick, or Flint Chip Lick, something. On a picnic.”

“A picnic? I thought you were supposed to be arguing with the Fourkiller woman.”

“I did. But then we went on a picnic.”

“You argued, and then you went on a picnic?”

“No, not with her. I’ve got me a boyfriend.”

“Mama, I swear, I can’t turn my back on you for one minute!” Taylor hears a bitterness in her voice like green potato skins, but she can’t stop up the place it’s growing from.

Alice is quiet.

“I’m happy for you, Mama. Really. What’s his name?”

A flat answer: “Cash.”

“Oh, that sounds good. Is he rich?”

Alice laughs, finally. “Believe me, Taylor, this is not the place to come if you’re looking to find you a millionaire typhoon.”

“Tycoon, Mama. A typhoon is a hurricane, I think. Or maybe it’s that kind of snake that strangles you.”

“Well, they got more snakes here than you can shake your tail at, but no millionaire typhoons. The man-about-town is a fellow wears a horsehide suit. He’s a sight. It looks like he got up too early and put on the bath rug.” She pauses. “How are you all doing? I been hoping you’d call.”

“Not hoping bad enough to sit around by the phone, I notice.”

Alice’s voice changes. “Taylor, you got a bee in your bonnet. I don’t know what you’re mad at me for.”

“I’m not mad at you. Turtle said that just a minute ago. She said I’m mad all the time. But I’m not. I’ve just fallen on some bad luck and landed jelly side down.” Taylor digs in all of her jeans pockets for a handkerchief, but doesn’t find one. She rips a yellow page from the damp directory underneath the pay phone. “I think I’m getting a cold.”

“You still got that job?”

“Yeah, but they won’t let Turtle hang around in Ladies’ Wear anymore. She has to go out in the parking lot and sit in the Dodge for a couple hours, till I get off.”

“In the car? Goodness, aren’t you afraid she’ll get lonesome and drive herself to Mexico or something? Remember when we read that in the paper when we was driving across Nevada? That six-year-old that drove the family car to Mexico?”

“That wasn’t a newspaper, Mama, that was one of those supermarket things with Liz Taylor on the front. They make all those stories up.”

“Well, stranger things have happened.”

“I know. But I don’t think Turtle’s thinking in terms of Mexico.”

“Well, good. But you might ought to leave her some stuff in there to play with, just in case.”

“I do. I gave her some packing boxes and stuff from the store. She doesn’t complain, you know how she is. But I feel like a murderer. Everything I’ve been doing, for this whole crazy summer, was just so I could keep Turtle. I thought that was the only thing that mattered, keeping the two of us together. But now I feel like that might not be true. I love her all right, but just her and me isn’t enough. We’re not a whole family.”

“I don’t know. Seems like half the families you see nowadays is just a mama and kids.”

“Well, that’s our tough luck. It doesn’t give you anything to fall back on.”

“What’s that noise?”

“Oh, nothing. The Yellow Pages. I just blew my nose on half the landscape contractors in the city.”

“Oh, well. I reckon you showed them.”

“Mama, I’m thinking about going home.”

“Don’t hang up yet!”

“No, I mean back to Tucson. I’m at the end of the line here. Jax offered to send me money for gas. If my tires will just hold out. I’m worried about my tires.”

“Oh, law, Taylor.”

“What?”

“I’ve got some bad news.”

Taylor feels numb. “What is it?”

“I talked to Annawake Fourkiller. She says there’s somebody, relatives of a missing girl they think is Turtle, and they want to see her. Annawake said she was going to send you a, what was it? Something Italian sounding. A semolina? Papers, anyway. Saying you have to show up here in court.”

“A subpoena?”

“That was it.”

“Oh, God. Then I can’t go home.” Taylor feels blood rushing too fast out of her heart toward her limbs, a tidal wave. She stares at the symmetrical rows of holes in the metal back of the telephone hutch. Her life feels exactly that meaningless.

Alice’s voice comes through the line, coaxing and maternal. “Taylor, don’t get mad at me for something I’m fixing to say.”

“Why does everybody think I’m mad? I’m not going to get mad. Tell me.”

“I think you and Turtle ought to go on and come down here.”

Taylor doesn’t respond to this. She turns her back on the wall of holes and looks out through the rain at her car. She knows Turtle is in there but the blank, dark windows are glossed over like loveless eyes, revealing nothing.

“Go ahead and borry the gas money and come on. There isn’t nothing to finding us here. Take the interstate to Tahlequah, Oklahoma, and ask around for Heaven. Everybody knows the way.”

Taylor still doesn’t speak.

“It would just be to talk things over.”

“Mama, there’s nothing to talk over with Annawake Fourkiller. I have no bargaining chips: there’s just Turtle, and me. That’s all.” Taylor hangs up the phone.

 

Taylor has been waiting so long with Turtle in the free clinic waiting room she feels sure they’ve had time to pick up every disease known to science. One little boy keeps licking his hand and coming over to hold it up in front of Turtle, presumably to give her an unobstructed view of his germs. Each time, Turtle withdraws her face slightly on her neck like a farsighted woman trying to focus on small print. The little boy chuckles and pitches crazily back to his mother, his disposable diaper crackling as he goes.

Every now and then, the waiting-room door opens and they all look hopefully to the nurse as she reads off someone else’s name. In the bright passage behind her, Taylor hears busy people scurrying and saying things like “The ear is in number nine. I put the ankle in two.” The longer they wait, the more vividly Taylor can picture piles of body parts back there.

At last the nurse calls Turtle’s name, in the slightly embarrassed way strangers always do, as if they expect the child answering to this name to have some defect or possibly a shell. As she follows Turtle down the hall, Taylor wonders if she did wrong, legalizing this odd name. She has no patience with people who saddle their children with names like “Rainbo” and “Sunflower” to suit some oddball agenda of their own. But “Turtle” was a name of Turtle’s own doing, and it fits now, there is no getting around it.

They wind up in a room empty of body parts. The glass jars on the counter by the sink contain only cotton balls and wooden tongue depressors. Turtle climbs onto the examining table covered with white butcher paper while Taylor lists her symptoms and the nurse writes them on a clipboard. When she leaves them and closes the door, the room feels acutely small.

Turtle lies flat on her back, making crinkly paper noises. “Am I going to get a shot?”

“No. No shots today. Very unlikely.”

“A operation?”

“Positively not. I can guarantee you that. This is a free clinic, and they don’t give those out for free.”

“Are babies free?”

Taylor follows Turtle’s eyes to a poster on the wall, drawn in weak, cartoonish shades of pink, showing what amounts to one half a pregnant woman with an upside-down baby curled snugly into the oval capsule of her uterus. It reminds Taylor of the time she cut a peach in half and the rock-hard pit fell open too, revealing a little naked almond inside, secretly occupying the clean, small open space within the peach flesh.

“Are they what? Are babies free?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, let me think how to answer that. You don’t have to buy them. Just about anybody can get one to grow inside her. In fact, seems like the less money you have, the easier it is to get one. But after they come out, you have to buy all kinds of stuff for them.”

“Food and diapers and stuff.”

“Right.”

“Do you think that’s why the real mom that grew me inside her didn’t want me?”

“No, she died. Remember? Her sister, the woman that put you into my car, told me your mother had died, and that’s why they had to give you up. You told me one time you remembered seeing your first mama get buried.”

“I do remember that,” Turtle says. She continues to study the peach-pit baby poster. Taylor picks up a magazine and is startled to read news about a war, until she realizes the magazine is several years old.

“Hi, I’m Doctor Washington,” says a tall woman in a white coat who breezes into the room as if she’s run a long way and doesn’t see any point in slowing down now. She has long flat feet in black loafers, and a short, neat Afro that curves around her head like a bicycle helmet. She looks around the room quickly, as if she might in fact be anticipating a blow to the head. Her eyes settle on Turtle for a moment, but the rest of her body remains tense. She holds the clipboard in one hand and a pencil in the other, poised between two fingers, jiggling in the air.

“Stomachache?” she says to Turtle. “Cramps, diarrhea? For two or three months?”

Turtle nods solemnly, owning up to all this.

“Let’s take a look.” Actually she looks at the ceiling, appearing to give it her full concentration as she pulls up Turtle’s T-shirt and probes her belly with long, cold-looking hands.

“Here?”

Turtle nods, making a crackling sound as her head grinds against the white paper.

“How about here? This hurt?”

Turtle shakes her head.

Dr. Washington pulls down Turtle’s shirt and turns to Taylor. “How is the child’s diet.” She states it, rather than asks.

Taylor feels her mind blank out, the way it used to in school during history tests. She tries to calm down. “I make sure she gets protein,” she says. “We eat a lot of peanut butter. And tuna fish. And she always gets milk. Every single day, no matter what.”

“Well, actually, that might be the problem.”

“What, milk?”

The doctor turns to Turtle. “How do you feel about milk, kiddo?”

“I hate it,” Turtle says to the ceiling.

“What kind do you give her?”

“I don’t know,” Taylor says defensively, feeling as if the two of them are ganging up. “The store brand. Two percent.”

“Try leaving out the milk from now on. I think you’ll see a difference right away. Bring her back in, in a week or two, and if that hasn’t taken care of it we’ll check on other possibilities. But I think cutting the milk’s going to do it.” She writes something on the clipboard.

Taylor senses that Dr. Washington is about to move on to an ear or an ankle. “Excuse me, but I don’t get this,” she says. “I thought milk was the perfect food. Vitamins and calcium and everything.”

Dr. Washington slumps against the counter, losing a few of her imposing inches and visibly shifting into a slower gear. “Cow’s milk is fine for white folks,” she says, looking directly at Taylor when she says this, “but somewhere between sixty and ninety percent of the rest of us are lactose intolerant. That means we don’t have the enzymes in our system to digest some of the sugar in cow’s milk. So it ferments in the intestines and causes all kinds of problems.”

“Uck. I never knew that.”

“Yogurt may be okay, and aged cheeses. You can give them a try. And some kinds of orange juice are calcium-fortified, that can help you out some with her calcium. If you’re determined to give her milk, you can get the kind that’s lactose-reduced. There’s a large Asian-American population in this city, so you can find that in most of the markets.”

“My daughter isn’t Asian-American. She’s Cherokee.”

The doctor lifts her shoulders in an offhand shrug. “Asian, Native American, African, we’re all in the same boat. A lot of times it doesn’t present until adulthood, but it can start showing up right around her age.”

Taylor can’t understand how such a major truth could have passed her by. “I always thought milk was the great health food. The people look so perky in those commercials.”

The doctor taps her pencil eraser against her cheek and looks at Taylor with something that could be loosely defined as a smile. Her eyes are so dark the irises appear almost bluish around the edges, and her half-closed lids give her a lizardish look. “Who do you think makes those commercials?”

“The guardians of truth,” Taylor says, sulkily. “Sorry, I didn’t think about it.”

For the first time, Dr. Washington’s superior-reptile look melts into genuine sympathy. “Listen, nobody does. I break this news to parents of every color, a dozen times a week. You were doing what you thought was best, that’s the main thing.”

Her white coat is standing up straight again, then gone.

Turtle slides off the gift-wrapped examining table and bounds out the examining-room door like a puppy let out of its pen. Taylor finds she can’t get up from her chair. She is paralyzed by the memory of Annawake Fourkiller’s final warning, in Tucson, before she drove away: “I bet she hates milk.”

 

Taylor catches up to Turtle outside the clinic. Turtle is shading her eyes and looking straight up at the sky, which for once is miraculously unclouded. A jet has left a white, rubbed-out gash of a trail, ugly as graffiti.

“An airplane makes that,” Turtle informs her, and Taylor wonders how she knows this. It’s one of several million things they have never yet spoken of, precisely. Did she learn it in school? Then again, do you have to be told every single thing about the world before you know it? The idea of rearing Turtle exhausts Taylor and makes her want to lie down, or live in a simpler world. She would like for the two of them to live in one of those old-time cartoons that have roundheaded animals bobbing all together to the music, and no background whatsoever.

“You’re right,” Taylor says. “A jet plane.”

“Why is it doing that?”

Taylor wonders which level of answer Turtle wants. Why does a jet churn up white dust in the sky? (She doesn’t know.) Or, what is this particular jet’s motivation? (This, maybe nobody knows.)

“Remember in Dorothy, when the witch wrote in the sky?”

“Yeah, I do,” Taylor says. “In the Wizard of Oz. She wrote, ‘Surrender Dorothy.’ ”

“Did that mean they were supposed to give Dorothy to the witch?”

“That’s what she was asking for. Yeah.”

“Are you going to give me to the Indians?”

“No. I’ll never do that. But I think we have to go back and talk to them. Are you scared?”

“Yeah.”

“Me too.”