Part 7
A week later Darlene tried to make it true.
She filed an emergency petition for temporary guardianship of her grandson. The boy’s mother had walked out on him, the petition said. The mother was erratic and making wild accusations against her own family, and her health made caring for a child impossible. The magistrate set the hearing for September twenty-first. Until then Sam stayed at his aunt Karen’s in Pinegrove, and he wasn’t allowed to go home.
Leah spent those days in Emmett, learning to walk properly between parallel bars while a therapist counted out loud. At night her legs hurt so much she bit the pillow. Muscles that had slept for years were waking up furious. She saw Sam once, for an hour, at a picnic table outside Karen’s house. He talked about school the whole time, fast, and never asked her anything, and when she left he held on to the sleeve of her cardigan until his aunt called him in.
On the twenty-first she got to the courthouse half an hour early. She sat on a hard bench in the hallway in a white cardigan borrowed from Ray’s sister, with the cane against her knee, and listened to her mother-in-law’s voice through the door.
It was a good voice, tired and warm, cracking in all the right places. Darlene told them how she’d turned her daughter-in-law in the night, bathed her, fed her with a spoon. How the girl had turned suspicious and hard after some old woman from past the ford filled her head with nonsense. How the boy was jumpy around his mother and didn’t sleep.
“I don’t hold it against her,” Darlene said. “She’s sick. She couldn’t get herself to the front porch without us.”
“Let me in,” Leah said to the clerk.
“You’ll be called, ma’am.”
“They’re talking about me. I want them to see who.”
She went in.
It was about twelve steps from the door to the table, and she took them slowly. The cane knocked on the linoleum. Her left leg swung a little wide, and she had to set it down deliberately, like a heavy suitcase. No one said a word. She reached the table and took hold of the back of a chair, and she didn’t sit.
“Good morning. I’m Leah Gunnell, Sam’s mother. You just heard I can’t get to the front porch. This morning I got myself here from Emmett.”
Darlene sat very straight and looked at the wall.
“I didn’t abandon my son. I left that house because for three years I was given something that took my legs. The sheriff is looking into it, and I won’t get ahead of what they find. I’m asking you not to decide anything today.”
The magistrate, a heavyset woman with a dragonfly brooch on her lapel, looked at her over her glasses. “Can you care for him yourself right now?”
“No,” Leah said. “Not yet. I’m learning to walk. I don’t have a place. My house is mortgaged. I won’t lie to you to get him back today and then fail him tomorrow. I’m asking that nobody keep me from seeing him. And that nobody decide things for me while I’m alive and in my right mind.”
The magistrate took off her glasses and folded them.
“The emergency petition is denied. The child stays with his aunt pending the investigation. The mother will have regular visitation. The petitioner will have none, supervised or otherwise, until further order.”
In the hallway Leah sat down on the bench and put her face in her hands. She wasn’t crying. Her legs had simply quit, and she was waiting for them to come back.
The lab results came before the month was out.
The braid had gone to a forensic lab out of state, where they’d cut it into short segments from root to tip. Dana read the report aloud in her office, running her pen down the lines, her watch turned face-in.
The drug was present nearly the whole length. It began in the segment matching the fall three years ago and continued month after month, sometimes higher and sometimes lower. In two segments, the ones matching May of last year, there was nothing. In the next one it came back higher than before.
“Two weeks,” Dana said. “Your Salt Lake.”
Leah looked at the page where her life lay measured out in half-inch pieces.
“And the vials?”
“Two of three, same substance. We pulled the controlled-drug logs at Halvorsen. Doses signed out for animals nobody touched that day. The ranch vet spent a long time telling me every outfit keeps its books a little different. Then he quit. Said Darlene took it, before she retired and after. Nobody told her no. She was one of them.”
Dana closed the folder, then left her hand flat on it. “One more thing. Your husband called this morning. He wants to give a full statement.” She paused. “He asked to talk to you first. You don’t have to…”
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