Insomnia

“Get out here,” Ralph told her. “Hold her up.”

“I can’t!” she blubbered. “She’s all bluh-bluh-bloody!”

“Oh for God’s sake, quit it! It’s Helen! Helen Deepneau from up the street!”

And although Sue must have known that, actually hearing the name seemed to turn the trick. She slipped around the open door, and when Helen staggered backward again, Sue curled an arm around her shoulders and braced her firmly. That expression of incredulous surprise remained on Helen’s face. Ralph found it harder and harder to look at.

It made him feel sick to his stomach.

“Ralph? What happened? Was it an accident?”

He turned his head and saw Bill McGovern standing at the edge of the parking lot. He was wearing one of his natty blue shirts with the iron’s creases still in the sleeves and holding (one of his longfingered, oddly delicate hands up to shade his eyes.

He looked strange, somehow naked that way, but Ralph had no time to think about why; too much was happening.

“It was no accident,” he said. “She’s been beaten up. Here, take the kid,” He held Natalie out to McGovern, who at first shrank back and then took the baby. Natalie immediately began to shriek again.

McGovern, looking like someone who has just been handed an over-filled airsick bag, held her out at arm’s length with her feet dangling.

Behind him a small crowd was begi

Gently, he replaced Sue’s arm with his own. Helen’s good eye rolled back to him. She said his name more clearly this time, more positively, and the gratitude Ralph heard in her blurry voice made him feel like crying.

“Sue-take the baby. Bill doesn’t have a clue.”

She did, folding Nat gently and expertly into her arms. McGovern gave her a grateful smile, and Ralph suddenly realized what was wrong with the way he looked. McGovern wasn’t wearing the Panama hat which seemed as much a part of him (in the summertime, at least) as the well on the bridge of his nose.

“Hey, mister, what happened?” one of the baseball kids asked.

“Nothing that’s any of your business,” Ralph said.

“Looks like she went a few rounds with Riddick Bowe.”

“Nah, Tyson,” one of the other baseball kids said, and incredibly, there was laughter.

“Get out of here!” Ralph shouted at them, suddenly furious.

“Go peddle your papers! Mind your business!”

They shuffled back a few steps, but no one left. It was blood they were looking at, and not on a movie screen.

“Helen, can you walk?”

“Yell,” she said. “Fink… Think so.”

He led her carefully around the open door and into the Red Apple.

She moved slowly, shuffling from foot to foot like an old woman.

The smell of sweat and spent adrenaline was baking e)ut of her pores in a sour reek, and Ralph felt his stomach turn over again. It wasn’t the smell, not really; it was the effort to reconcile this Helen with the pert and pleasantly sexy woman he. had spoken to yesterday while she worked in her flower-beds.

Ralph suddenly remembered something else about yesterdayHelen had been wearing blue shorts, cut quite high, and he had noticed a couple of bruises on her legs-a large yellow blotch far up on the left thigh, a fresher, darker smudge on the right calf.

He walked Helen toward the little office area behind the cash register. He glanced up into the convex anti-theft mirror mounted in the corner and saw McGovern herding the door for Sue.

“Lock the door,” he said over his shoulder.

“Gee, Ralph, I’m not supposed to-”

“Just for a couple of minutes,” Ralph said. “Please.”

“Well… okay. I guess.”

Ralph heard the snick of the bolt being turned as he eased Helen into the hard plastic contour chair behind the littery desk. He picked up the telephone and punched the button marked 911. Before the phone could ring on the other end, a blood-streaked hand reached out and pushed down the gray disco

“Dough… Ral.” She swallowed with an obvious effort, and tried again. “Don’t, “Yes,” Ralph said. “I’m going to.”

Now it was fear he saw in her one good eye, and nothing dull about it.

“No,” she said, “Please, Ralph. Don’t.” She looked past him and held out her hands again. The bumble, pleading look on her beaten face made Ralph wince with dismay.

“Ralph?” Sue asked. “She wants the baby.”

“I know. Go ahead.”

Sue handed Natalie to Helen, and Ralph watched as the baby-a little over a year old now, he was pretty sure-put her arms around her mother’s neck and her face against her mother’s shoulder. Helen kissed the top of Nat’s head It clearly hurt her to do this, but she did it again. And then again. Looking down at her, Ralph could see blood grimed into the faint creases on the nape of Helen’s neck like dirt.

As he looked at this, he felt the anger begin to pulse again.

“It was Ed, wasn’t it?” he asked. Of course it was-you didn’t hit the cutoff button on the phone when someone tried to call 911 if you had been beaten up by a total stranger-but he had to ask.

“Yes,” she said. Her voice was no more than a whisper, the answer a secret imparted into the fine cloud of her baby daughter’s hair.

“Yes, it was Ed. But you can’t call the police.” She looked up now, the good eye full of fear and misery. “Please don’t call the police, Ralph. I can’t bear to think of Natalie’s dad in jail for… for Helen burst into tears. Natalie goggled at her mother for a moment in comic surprise, and then joined her.

“Ralph?” McGovern asked hesitantly. “DO you want me to get her some Tylenol or something?”

“Better not,” he said. “We don’t know what’s wrong with her, how bad she might be hurt.” His eyes shifted to the show window, not wanting to see what was out there, hoping not to, and seeing it anyway.

A beer cooler cut off the view. Some of them were cupping their hands v: avid faces lined up all the way down to the place where the to the sides of their faces to cut the glare.

“What should we do, you guys?” Sue asked. She was looking at the gawkers and picking nervously at the hem of the Red Apple duster employees had to wear. “If the company finds out I locked the door during business hours, I’m apt to lose my job.”

Helen tugged at his hand. “Please, Ralph,” she repeated, only it came out Peese, Raff through her swollen lips. “Don’t call anybody.”

Ralph looked at her uncertainly. He had seen a lot of women wearing a lot of bruises over the course of his life, and a couple (although not many, in all honesty) who had been beaten much more severely than Helen. It hadn’t always seemed this grim, though. His mind and morals had been formed at a time when people believed that what went on between a husband and wife behind the closed doors of their marriage was their business, and that included the man who hit with his fists and the woman who cut with her tongue.

You couldn’t make people behave, and meddling in their affairs-even with the best of intentions-all too often turned friends into enemies.

But then he thought of the way she had been carrying Natalie as she staggered across the parking lot: held casually on one hip like a textbook. If she had dropped the baby in the lot, or crossing Harris Avenue, she probably wouldn’t have known it; Ralph guessed that it was nothing but instinct that had caused Helen to take the baby in the first place. She hadn’t wanted to leave Nat in the care of the man who had beaten her so badly she could only see out of one eye and talk in mushy, rounded syllables.