Mr Hands

by Gary A Braunbeck

  “But what other choices do we have?” asked a man sitting near the end of Lucy’s row. “My God, we can’t…we can’t watch over them every second of every day, no matter how much we want to.”

  “I know,” said Emerson, his voice full of sympathy. “And no one with the common sense God gave an ice cube would expect you to watch over them twenty-four-seven, it just isn’t humanly possible. So you find people you can trust—an older sibling, a friend you’ve known for ten years, a neighbor with children of their own—and you make them part of your child’s social circle. Teachers, the person who drives their school bus…you’d be surprised, if you take the time to sit down and make a list, at just how many people there are in your world that can be trusted with sharing in your child’s welfare. The trick is not to give your grief and fear the upper hand. And one way of making sure that doesn’t happen is to instill caution and knowledge in your child and not resort to scare tactics.”

  A middle-aged woman near the front raised her hand. “But that doesn’t make sense, Detective. Most of the cases you hear about…I mean, it seems like most of the cases you hear about, it involves someone the family thought they could trust, just like you said. How…how’s a person supposed to know that they aren’t asking some pervert to help watch over their child?”

  Several people in the room mumbled their agreement.

  Emerson rubbed at his temple, looked through his prepared notes, then sighed. “I don’t know,” he said, looking back up at the room. “I wish there was something in all this material to answer that question, but there isn’t. You see all these horrified, shocked faces on the news afterward—faces of mothers who thought their nephew was a good kid, so it was okay to leave little Jenny in his care for a few hours, faces of parents who can’t understand why their older daughter would do such a thing to her newborn brother, families looking on as aunts or uncles or the school-bus driver who everyone thought was a wonderful person is hauled off in cuffs while a sheet-covered body is brought up from the basement…I don’t know. I’d go back and say, ‘Trust your instincts,’ but, then, how many people trusted their instincts only to have their child taken from them as yours were from you?”

  “You don’t have to be so apologetic,” said another man in the room. “Hell, it’s nice to hear someone in law enforcement admit that they don’t know the answer to something. I got so goddamned sick and tired of the police and FBI always having a quick response to every question me or my wife had, and every last answer said the same thing, more or less—‘We got it under control and you’ll have your child back with you soon.’ I mean, they never said that directly, but every answer they gave us had that…that undercurrent to it, you know?”

  “I do,” said Emerson.

  Lucy began to tune out Emerson’s voice and those of the other group members who asked the detective questions.

  She fused her fists into one, ten-fingered, white-knuckled knot and continued to press down on her lap. The pressure was a distraction at this point, and that was good, that was fine, because as long as she remained distracted she—

  —turns around for only a few seconds, maybe ten, maybe twenty, but it isn’t that long, Sarah right next to her, holding her hand, and Lucy doesn’t think twice when Sarah says, “I need my hand, Mommy,” so she lets go of her daughter’s—

  —hand came up slowly and began rubbing her temple; stop it, she thought, just stop it, don’t think about it, keep yourself distracted, keep that distance and you won’t—

  —go?” she says to the woman she’s been talking with.

  The other woman looks over Lucy’s shoulder; her eyes narrow and her brow wrinkles with confusion. “I don’t know, Lucy, she was right there a second ago.”

  Lucy turns and shouts Sarah’s name—it has only been a few seconds, that’s all, so she can’t have gone far—but when her call goes unanswered the first thing she feels is irritation at her daughter’s running off like this; okay, sure, it’s a small parking-lot carnival and kids love these things (Lucy loves them herself, there’s something so sad and tacky about them but all the kids see are the rides and the games and the candy and fun fun fun) and anyone who thinks they can keep a child standing still for more than a minute at one of these things deserves the sore feet and headaches they’ll get, but Sarah—who, at age I’m-practically-six, is already a parking-lot carnival veteran of some two dozen excursions—knows better than to do something like this, Lucy had told her she only wanted to stop and talk to Mrs. Shaw for a second and Sarah said, “‘Kay,” and went back to playing with her balloon and that hand-sized wooden rocking horse she’d won at the bottle-toss booth while Lucy asked Mrs. Shaw about the new teacher at Sarah’s pre-school, Mr. Kessler, and Mrs. Shaw, who was in charge of the pre-school, held tight to her six-year-old son’s hand and said that Mr. Kessler came to them with exceptional references and the kids all seemed to like him, why, even Sarah had remarked that he was more fun than most grownups, and that’s when Lucy turns around and finds herself facing a huge, cold, and frighteningly empty space where her daughter had been only twenty or so seconds before, so now she’s walking away from Mrs. Shaw without saying so much as “Excuse me,” because the irritation is giving way to anger and she knows that the anger is only a whitewash over the terror that she feels rising from her gut, and she’s calling Sarah’s name again, much more loudly this time, and doesn’t hear the note of hysteria that’s creeping into her voice until Mrs. Shaw comes up behind her and grabs her arm and says, “It’ll be all right, Lucy, come on, we’ll keep looking on our way over to the security officer—see, he’s right over there?—and we’ll find her, don’t worry, this isn’t a big carnival, she can’t have wandered far,” but there’s something in Mrs. Shaw’s voice that’s a just a little too controlled, and like an instantaneous explosion in Lucy’s brain the music from the carousel is just a little too loud, the twinkling lights over the game booths are far too bright—blasts of aura-light before a really bad migraine—and the smells from the food vendors and cotton-candy machines are taking on a rancid quality as she breathes them in and it seems like it’s taking forever to get to the security guard, but then he turns and looks at them and that’s when Lucy realizes that she’s still shouting her daughter’s name, and for a second, only for a second, just one, that’s all, her shouts become the scream of a million babies doused in gasoline and set aflame because now a bunch of people are looking at them and she forces herself to swallow it back, to bite down hard, to pull it all into a tight knot that will come gloriously loose when she finally holds Sarah in her arms again but then Mrs. Shaw is talking again and that too-controlled thing in her voice is stronger now, which makes it worse, so much goddamn worse because hidden somewhere between the control in Mrs. Shaw’s voice and the actual words she’s speaking is a cold spot that catches the wind and flies toward Lucy, shrouding her, and within that cold spot is a rift, and behind that rift is a demon, one of Unspoken Things, hunch-backed, long-clawed, and chortling sulfur, imparting to Lucy the knowledge that she’s never going to see Sarah again, but she does her best to ignore it and soon it’s gone and there is only the search, the people, the police and volunteers, her reaching into her wallet for a recent picture of Sarah and thanking God that she’d decided to stop at that tacky photographer’s booth at Sears and have a Halloween photo taken of her daughter, and as she’s handing the photo over to the police officer who will have leaflets made within the hour she is suddenly struck dumb by the suspicion that perhaps every parent keeps a recent photo of their child with them not so much to preserve a moment of childhood but because there is the quiet, constant, gnawing fear in their gut that someday the pit will widen and something like this will happen and their child’s life might depend on whether or not they have a memory recently preserved and what in hell are you supposed to do if this is the final memory of your child and soon the leaflets are being distributed and more police are coming in and someone says something about the Ohio branch of the FBI having be
en called but all Lucy can hear is the sound of her own voice, so tiny and weak and ineffectual and useless as she walks through the crowd and hands out the leaflets and asks stranger after stranger, “Have you seen my daughter? Have you seen her? Have you?” and all of the people, they’re so concerned, like Sarah is their daughter, not Someone Else’s Kid—one young man even runs up to Lucy and grabs her by the shoulders and says, “Is there any word? Have they found her yet?” and when Lucy says no the young man looks like he’s going to start crying, but he doesn’t, only pulls Lucy into a quick embrace and whispers, “I’m sorry,” before dashing off to join in the search, and as helpful and concerned as everyone is being, Lucy tries not to notice the pity in their eyes or the way they’re suddenly clutching their own children much, much closer...

  ...and somewhere around eleven-thirty they find the small wooden rocking-horse—its tail snapped off and a few heavy, dark streaks covering its snout—in some bushes just outside the carnival grounds...

  ...along with one of Sarah’s shoes and both of her socks, all three torn and covered in mud...

  ...and just when Lucy thinks it can’t possibly become any more nightmarish, one of the volunteers shines her flashlight into a patch of foliage a few feet beyond the bushes and finds Sarah’s other shoe...

  ...along with her Sesame Street underwear that has her name written inside the waist, and all Lucy can think of when one of the detectives asks her to identify the item—being careful not to tell anyone about the thing she herself found—is that Sarah will be so upset when she finds out that the splotches of blood have forever bound Big Bird’s wings and blotted out Elmo’s grin, sunny day, singing my cares away, can you tell me how to get, how to get to—

  —a few things we need to discuss before breaking up this week,” said Dr. Astbury, taking her place behind the podium as Detective Emerson smiled at the polite applause the group offered.

  “Here it comes,” whispered Lucy to herself. Time to see if the rumors were true.

  Detective Emerson looked to Dr. Astbury and, at her prompting, said, “I’m sure that most of you have read about Timothy Beals in the paper recently. As you may or may not know, Mr. Beals was charged with second-degree murder thirteen years ago in the death of his three-year-old daughter—”

  “—and he was released a month ago after serving twelve years of a twenty-five-year sentence,” snapped Lucy. Everyone in the room turned to look at her.

  “Yes,” said Emerson. “He’s currently residing in the Spencer Halfway House. One of the many conditions of his parole is that he attend therapy sessions twice a week. One session is private, one-on-one, but the other needs to be in a group environment.”

  “I think,” said Dr. Astbury, “that it might be good for both him and us if that group were to be ours.”

  Shocked silence. How dare they suggest that a child murderer become part of this?

  “Look,” said Emerson, “I know this seems…well, thoughtless, under the circumstances, but I can assure you that Tim harbors a great deal of remorse and guilt over what he did. I agree with Dr. Astbury—I think it could benefit everyone involved if you would allow Tim to become part of this group.”

  “I don’t mean to sound crass, either,” added Dr. Astbury, “but the truth of the matter is that, legally, we cannot prevent Timothy from joining. It would be preferable if we agreed to welcome him, but one way or the other, he will be here next week.”

  “He might goddamn well be the only one here, then,” said someone from the back row.

  Several people voiced their agreement.

  Emerson pulled a folded sheet of paper from his pocket. “Look, folks, I can understand your resentment, okay?” He held up the folded paper. “But this is a court order. I’d really rather not have to serve this to Dr. Astbury, but I will if I have to.”

  “Why don’t you want to serve it?” asked Lucy.

  “Because cooperation is preferable to coercion.”

  “Good answer.”

  “What…what exactly did he do to the girl, anyway?” asked another member of the group.

  Detective Emerson opened his mouth to answer but was cut off when Lucy said: “Tim Beals and his buddies were having a party. It was a Friday night and someone had brought along some crank or coke or acid or something like that, and Tim was pretty stoked. His girlfriend, the mother, was visiting her parents in Pennsylvania and had left their daughter with Tim because she was too sick to travel—says a lot about Mommy, doesn’t it? Selfish bitch goes off and leaves a little girl with a guy she knows drinks and parties and—never mind.”

  “No, please,” said Emerson. “Continue.”

  Lucy met his gaze without blinking. “Fine. About one-thirty in the morning, Carol—that was the little girl’s name, if anyone’s interested—gets out of bed because she’d gotten sick and thrown up and needed Daddy to change her sheets. Well, Daddy’s busy going down on some bimbo who was willing to spread her legs for some coke or whatever it was they had there that night, and Tim gets pissed off and hits Carol really hard and knocks her down, and Carol starts crying because it hurts but Tim’s too stoked and horny to want to deal with a bawling brat, so he kicks her—about a dozen times. Then he takes her back up to her room, throws her down onto her vomit-soaked sheets, then closes and locks the bedroom door. He finishes getting it on with his bimbo, then everyone—including Tim—takes off. He doesn’t come back until almost two the next afternoon and finds Carol damn near comatose. He waits awhile to see if she gets better and when she doesn’t he takes her to the hospital.

  “He ruptured her pancreas. That little girl lay there in her own puke for the better part of twelve hours in unbearable agony. She died ten minutes after they arrived at the hospital. I remember seeing news footage of the medical examiner. The man was damn near in tears when he described how she died and how long it took for her to die. That’s what he did to the girl. And the two of you stand up there with your understanding expressions and sympathetic tones and try to convince us that it’ll be for the good of everyone involved if we let this piece of shit come in here and share his grief with us.”

  Emerson was watching her very carefully. “Do you mind, Miss Thompson, if I ask how it is you have so much information about Mr. Beals so readily available?”

  “I read the paper. I listen to the news.” Those weren’t the real reason, but no one in this room would understand that. Lucy wasn’t sure she understood it herself.

  “Did you know the Beals or their daughter?” asked Emerson.

  “Never met them. I don’t think Tim and his wife were the type of people I’d’ve wanted to have over for Sunday dinner, if you read my meaning.”

  “I think I do, yes.”

  Lucy looked around at the faces of the group. “Look, I didn’t mean to use the kind of language I did, I’m sorry. You all know me—well enough, anyway. And I understand that people like Beals need some sort of therapeutic environment when they get out. I just don’t think it should be here.” There—her voice was calm again—in contrast to the storm she felt raging inside.

  “I take it then, Miss Thompson,” said Emerson, “that you’ll be one of the members who won’t be attending next week?”

  It was everything Lucy could do not to laugh. His question was so naive it was insulting, and what calm had been regained by her quickly crumbled. “It makes me sick that I have to share this planet with someone like that. I’ll be goddamned if I’ll sit in the same room with him.”

  Emerson waited a moment before asking: “But don’t you think that you might gain some insight, hearing from a parent who—”

  “—a ‘parent,’ Detective, is a term you can apply to any of the people in this room. Something like Beals is a different species.”

  “Lucy,” said Dr. Astbury. “I don’t think you ought to—”

  “Have you mentioned to the group, Doctor, that you’re one of the therapists Beals is seeing on a one-on-one basis?”

  Astbury seemed to shrug.
“I’m not ashamed of that, Lucy. It’s my job to counsel to victims of grief, no matter what they—”

  “Victims?” Lucy was surprised she didn’t hurl a chair at the good doctor’s skull. “You have the nerve to stand there and call him a victim? I suppose you think that little bitch who strapped her kids into her car and drowned them is a victim, too? The fucking jury sure did.”

  Astbury glared at her. “Lucy—”

  “Don’t. Just…don’t, okay? It may very well be that people who do that to children had something done to them when they were kids that forever ruined them, and if that’s the case then my heart breaks for them as children. But at the same time, as adults, what they’ve done is irredeemable, understand? Without a thought for the fear or pain or loneliness or suffering of their children, they beat, torture, mutilate, and kill them. I’ll shed tears for whatever happened to these people as children, but as adults I think we’d all be better off to expunge them from the face of the earth.”

  Emerson was unblinking now. “So if you had your way...?”

  “If I had my way, I’d kick Tim Beals until he died from internal bleeding. Hopefully his death would be long and painful.”