The Duffel Bag on My Porch

I slept in his recliner in the front room, facing the lane. Missy was on the couch. Around two I woke and saw the light of her phone on her face. She was typing something and deleting it and typing it again.

In the morning I telephoned the high school at twenty till eight and asked for the nurse.

I knew Mrs. Okafor only to nod to, from track meets, where she sits by the finish line with a cooler and a kit. She is a small, tidy woman with reading glasses on a beaded chain, and she speaks so softly you find yourself leaning in.

She took us into her office and shut the door and pulled the little curtain over the window in it.

“Kaylee, I’m going to ask you to show me, and I’m going to write down what I see,” she said. “Only what I see. I won’t put words in your mouth and I won’t guess. Is that all right?”

Kaylee pushed up her sleeve.

Mrs. Okafor did not gasp or cluck. She took a small paper ruler from a drawer and laid it beside each mark, and she wrote on a form that had the outline of a body printed on it, front and back, and she drew four small ovals on the arm of the outline and one on the other side. She wrote the date and the time, 8:05. She asked Kaylee who, and where, and when, and wrote down the answers exactly as Kaylee gave them, and read them back to her.

Then she took off her glasses.

“I need to tell you both something, and I’d rather you hear it from me than be surprised by it,” she said. “The law in Kansas says that when a school nurse sees this, she reports it to the state. Today. It isn’t up to me and it isn’t up to you. Someone from the Department for Children and Families will most likely telephone your grandmother, and they may want to talk to you and to your mother.”

Kaylee had gone white. “Are they going to take me away from my mom?”

“I can’t promise you what anybody else will decide. I won’t lie to you about that.” Mrs. Okafor leaned in. “But I can tell you what I am going to say, because I’m the one saying it. I am going to say that the man who did this was out of the house within the hour, and who put him out. And I am going to say that this girl was brought to me at eight o’clock the very next morning by a grandmother who had a deputy at her table before supper was cold. In my experience, sweetheart, that is not the house they worry about.”

I had to look at the eye chart on the wall for a minute.

“Deputy Purcell said you would,” I said. “It’s part of why I brought her.”

“I thought so,” said Mrs. Okafor. She wrote Kaylee a pass for the first two hours and tucked a cold pack into her hand. “You come see me any day you like. You don’t need a reason.”

Missy came home from work that afternoon at half past four with her eyes swollen. She set her purse on the kitchen table.

“He says she mouthed off and he took her arm to turn her around,” she said. “That’s what he says. He says you looked at him like he was a dog.”

“When did he say that?”

“Last night. He called from his brother’s.”