The Pendant Buried with His Daughter

CHAPTER 2 - THE WOMAN IN THE RAIN

Martin was through the door before the bell had finished ringing.

Rain hit his face. The little girl ran after him, small shoes slapping the pavement.

The woman lay half-curled beside the window, one hand under her cheek, the other pressed against her stomach. Her dark hair was soaked. A paper pharmacy slip had turned to pulp in the gutter beside her.

"Mom!" the girl cried, dropping to her knees.

Martin crouched down and touched the woman's neck. Pulse. Weak, but there.

"Call an ambulance," he snapped to the clerk, who had followed them to the doorway with her phone already in hand.

The woman stirred. Her eyelids fluttered.

For one terrible second, Martin forgot how to breathe.

The face was older, thinner, marked by hard years and fresh pain. But it was still Lena's face. His daughter. The daughter he had buried twenty-two years ago after a closed-casket funeral and a car wreck so violent they had told him no father should see what was left.

Lena's eyes opened.

They landed on him.

Confusion came first. Then fear. Sharp and immediate.

"No," she whispered.

It was not the voice he remembered from seventeen. It was a woman's voice now, roughened and tired. But it was hers.

The child looked between them. "You know my mom?"

Martin couldn't answer.

The ambulance arrived in a wash of red light. At the hospital, the girl sat in a plastic chair wrapped in a gray blanket from the ER and finally gave her name.

"Emily."

"And your mother?" the nurse asked.

The woman had not answered questions yet.

Emily looked at Martin because children always looked toward the adult who seemed most certain, even when he wasn't.

He said it carefully. "Her name is Lena Hale."

A nurse glanced up at the chart.

"Actually," she said, "she gave another name before she passed out. Lena Torres."

Then she added the words that shifted the ground again.

"And she asked us not to call any family. She said her father thinks she's dead."