by Chris Mooney
Mike opened the storm door, then the front door, and when he stepped inside the semi-dark foyer, he was surprised to see Jess standing at the stove, dumping sliced potatoes from a cutting board into a pot of boiling water. A yellow Sony Walkman was clipped to her belt, the Walkman and headphones her signal to let him know she was in that area beyond pissed off and in no mood to talk.
Mike walked down the foyer, half expecting to hear Sarah’s little feet come running across the kitchen floor, Sarah calling out his name and smiling and cutting that sick feeling of razor-wire that had wrapped itself around his heart. It was only Fang who came running. Mike stepped into the kitchen, Fang following, his tail wagging. The kitchen table, he saw, was set for three.
“What are you doing home?”
“Father Jack had to cancel at the last minute. An emergency,” Jess said, her voice cold and detached. “Why don’t you go upstairs and draw Sarah a bath. I’m sure she’s frozen after sledding.”
That razor-wire tightened around his heart. He was secretly hoping someone might have called and left a message. Jess always checked messages when she came home. Nobody had called, and Jess didn’t know what was going on.
He yanked the headphones off her head.
“What are you—”
“There’s been …” What was the word here? Sarah wasn’t missing—at least not in the way he defined the word—and what had happened wasn’t an accident.
“There’s been a what?”
“Sarah went up the hill with Paula but didn’t come back down.”
The color drained from her face.
“Listen to me,” Mike said. “Everything’s under control. The police—”
“The police.”
“She’s just lost. The police are there to help find her.”
“Oh Jesus.”
“It’s going to be okay. Ed Zukowski drove me here. He’s going to give us a ride down to the Hill, but we need to grab Sarah’s pillow—Jess, wait.”
She had already moved around the island. Mike moved around the other side just as she scooped her jacket off the back of one of the island chairs. He went to touch her and Jess stepped back.
“I told you not to go down there, you son of a bitch.”
“Jess, listen to me. They’ve got bloodhounds, they’re these amazing dogs that—”
“What kind of father are you? What kind of father would just leave his daughter alone out there in the freezing cold? She’s somewhere out there terrified and maybe hurt and you just left her?”
Mike tried to think of some grouping of words that would calm her down. It didn’t matter. She had stepped outside, the storm door being held open by the wind, snow blowing everywhere.
CHAPTER 5
Sammy Pinkerton sat in the backseat of his dad’s station wagon, on their way back from the Hill and stuck in traffic and listening to that all-boring, all-the-time news radio station, the weatherman blah-blah-blahing again about how the snowstorm had already knocked out power over half of Massachusetts and could, by the time it was done, turn out to be the worst storm since the Blizzard of ’78. Sammy tuned the guy out and instead thought about how he was only a few weeks away from turning ten—double digits, he was officially a man, baby—and how he only stuttered when he got nervous. That was almost always the case when he listened to his parents fight over who was going to get custody this weekend, and it was especially true when he got around meltdowns like Jimmy Mac Donald.
Why did that skidmark have to show up at the Hill tonight? All Sammy had wanted to do was try out his new snowboard and there, standing just a few feet away, was Jimmy Mac and his jerk friends from the Mission Hill projects, all of them dressed in leather jackets and jeans and trying to act cool as they held their cheap plastic sleds, waiting for their turn to go down the hill. Only that was taking forever. The snow was coming down harder—not blizzard conditions yet, but it was sure difficult to see, the line for sledding backed up and crowded with people.
Jimmy yelled, “This line better start moving or I’m gonna start kicking some ass.”
All Jimmy’s ghetto friends laughing too hard, wanting to impress him, everyone laughing except the two girls standing in front of Jimmy Mac. Sammy recognized the taller of the two girls from school: Paula O’Malley. Her dad was Wild Bill, this totally massive dude with these totally rad tattoos that ran up and down each of his big arms. Sammy had met her dad once when he came to pick Paula up from school—on a Harley motorcycle. Dad who did that, like, had to be the coolest dad in the world.
“That’s it,” Jimmy Mac said and started pushing kids out of the way.
That was the signal to leave. Sammy had learned his lesson a couple of months back when he’d accidentally bumped into Jimmy Mac in the bathroom. A simple mistake, happens all the time, right? The meltdown grabbed Sammy, shoved his face into the toilet bowel and flushed, kept flushing, one of Jimmy Mac’s goons clapping, saying, “Damn Jimmy, we got ourselves a major league floater that just won’t go down.” They left laughing, and Sammy counted to one hundred and then opened the stall door, hoping he was alone. About a dozen eyes stared at him as he scrubbed his face and hair with soap and water, then dried himself under the hand dryer.
“Hey!” Paula O’Malley screamed. “Get your hands off me!”
“The baby hill’s at the other end, pee wee. Beat it.”
“It’s our turn. Come on, Sarah.”
Jimmy Mac picked Paula up, grabbed her by the arms and shoved her down on the snow tube. The little girl in the pink snowsuit, Sarah, she tried to grab Paula, either to help her out or to stay with her, and Jimmy Mac put his big hand on Sarah’s face and shoved her so hard she went flying backwards.
“You’re in big trouble!” Paula screamed, but Jimmy Mac had already kicked her snow tube down the hill.
Just walk away, a voice said. As wrong as all of this was, this wasn’t his fight, and he had no interest in tangling with Jimmy Mac again.
That changed when he looked over at the little girl sitting in the snow, crying the way little kids do, like they just got their arms chopped off.
It wasn’t the girl’s tears that made Sammy keep from running away, it was her glasses, the way they hung crooked on her face. She looked so defenseless sitting there like that, and before Sammy knew what was happening—before he could stop it, his mouth gathered up the words he had wanted to say that day in the bathroom and launched them at Jimmy Mac.
“I hope God strikes you dead, you ugly turd.”
Jimmy Mac whipped around, staring down the crowd of faces.
“Who said that? Who said that?”
Sammy didn’t run away. He wanted to—a part of his brain was screaming at him to haul ass right now—but something was keeping him from running,a new thought about that day in the bathroom. The thing that made him cry and shake with anger later that day wasn’t getting his head dunked or having to walk back inside the classroom with dried toilet water on his clothes. No, the worst part, the thing he didn’t understand until right now, was that he hadn’t fought back. When you didn’t stand up to a bully, they ended up owning a piece of you. They held it in their eyes and in their smile and when they saw you, they used that stolen piece of you and got off spearing you with it because they knew you didn’t have the balls to stand up for yourself. Maybe it was better to fight back. Maybe the pain of a broken nose or a black eye or whatever Jimmy Mac could dish out was better than having to look away from people every day in the hallways, hearing them laugh behind your back, calling you names like Stinky Pinkie. Black eyes and broken noses healed. At least they told people you weren’t a coward.
The little girl, Sarah, was back on her feet, pulling her sled, oh crap, she was heading toward the bad part of the hill, the place where if you slipped and fell you could crack your head open. It happened to a kid last year, Jay Baron. His sled slammed into a boulder and Jay went flying into a tree and an ambulance had to take him away. Sammy was about to make a move to help the girl when Jimmy
Mac stepped right in front of him.
“Stinky, that you who mouthed off?”
“Y-y-you leave me alone.”
“You know why you sta-sta-stutter, Stinky?” Jimmy Mac’s eyes were bloodshot like they were every morning on the bus. A gold loop earring dangled from each ear, the newest piercing a big silver hook stuck through his eyebrow like a fishhook. “It’s ba-ba-because you’re a re-re-retard.”
You don’t stand up to bullies, they end up owning a piece of you forever.
Sammy’s dad said that when it came to fighting, all that mattered was winning. Jimmy Mac may be taller and wicked strong, but there was one spot where he would hurt the most. His face burning, his stomach full of bubbles moving so fast through his body it made his knees knock, Sammy wound up and kicked Jimmy Mac dead center in his apple sack.
Jimmy Mac grabbed his crotch with both hands and dropped to his knees, his eyes tearing up like a girl’s, his mouth forming a silent, quivering O.
One kick to the balls didn’t seem like just punishment. Sammy wanted Jimmy to feel more humiliation, more pain—wanted to get even for all the other kids Jimmy tortured on a daily basis. Sammy saw that silver loop sticking out of Jimmy Mac’s eyebrow and before he could stop himself, reached down and ripped it off.
Jimmy Mac howled, blood bursting across his forehead.
Sammy grabbed his snowboard and fled into the snow. He didn’t see the little girl Sarah until he ran straight into her. For the second time in ten minutes someone had knocked her on her butt.
“I’m wicked sorry,” Sammy said, helping her get back up.
“My glasses,” the girl cried.
Crap. He couldn’t leave her here without her glasses. That wasn’t right.
“I’ll help you find them, okay? Just stop crying.”
Just like his sister, the girl kept on crying. Man oh man oh man, why did they always carry on like this?
“It’s okay, really, stop crying.”
Sammy was on his knees, searching the snow—where did those glasses go?—when a man, the girl’s father, stepped up next to him.
“It was an accident, I swear,” Sammy said. “I didn’t mean to knock into her. I just wasn’t looking where I was going.”
The man wore jeans and had on black gloves and this big blue parka with a hood on it that covered his face, the jacket similar to the one Sammy’s dad wore when he snowplowed the driveway, only this hood had fur running around the edge, the brown colors reminding Sammy of raccoon fur. A blanket was tucked under the man’s arm. Without a word, the man reached down and grabbed the girl’s hand. She yanked it away. Typical girl, being a brat.
“Her glasses fell off,” Sammy said. “I think that’s why she’s crying. I didn’t hurt her, I swear.”
The girl’s dad kicked the snowboard over to Sammy and then made a shooing motion with his hand, the signal for Sammy to beat it.
“I’m sorry,” Sammy said again. Before he snowboarded down the hill, the last thing he saw was the girl’s dad whispering something against her ear as he wrapped the blanket around her body.
The next morning, Sammy wasn’t thinking about Jimmy Mac or the little girl; he was thinking about electricity. It came back on early, around nine, about an hour after the snow stopped. Sammy was deep into playing Tony Hawk on his PlayStation 2 when his dad, Officer Tom Pinkerton, came in and asked Sammy if he knew anything about a girl in a pink snowsuit named Sarah Sullivan.
Next thing Sammy knew, he was down at the police station. He had met almost all the policemen at barbecues and softball games. Normally they would stop and say hi, but this morning, their faces were serious, mad even, and they buzzed around the police station in a flurry of activity, answering phones, shouting questions and orders to each other. Abducted. Missing. Disappeared. Those were the words Sammy kept hearing as Detective Francis Merrick opened the door to his office and asked Sammy to come inside—alone. Detective Merrick shut the door and Sammy sat down in the chair across from the big desk, Sammy thinking, I’m about to talk to a detective, man oh man, I’m in serious trouble.
Tomorrow Never Knows
(2004)
CHAPTER 6
Friday morning, just shy of five A. M., Mike sat alone inside his truck, watching a light snow falling over the Hill. He wanted a cigarette badly but didn’t want to ruin the smell of the lilacs. Every year, on the eve of Sarah’s anniversary, he had them shipped overnight to DeCarlo’s Florist, and now the lilacs sat wrapped in plastic on the passenger seat, the flowers’ overpowering but pleasant scent filling the truck and taking him back to that one spring when Sarah—she must have been all of three at the time—had asked him if she could take some lilacs from the tree in the backyard and place them in her room, Sarah going on and on about how much she loved the way they smelled. He propped her on his shoulders, and after they filled up one of her beach pails with flowers, they headed upstairs and placed the flowers around her room.
No,Daddy, put the flowers under the pillows, not on the pillows.
Her exact words, but the voice was still wrong. It was Sarah’s voice, but it was still stuck at six. He couldn’t remember how she sounded at three or four and he had no idea as to how her voice might sound like now, five years later, at eleven—eleven and a half. Now her body would be on the cusp of puberty, about to begin that slow, awkward transformation from girl to young woman. He could see her trading in her glasses for contacts. Knowing her, the ponytail would be gone—too little girl—her new hairstyle one of those short, messy hairdos he had seen on a lot of young girls lately. Her ears would be pierced—just one on each ear, he hoped, simple and tasteful—and she’d probably be wearing some jewelry, not much, and she would be dabbling with makeup and taking an interest in clothes, seeing how they fit against her growing curves—all of these small changes pushing her down the road to boys. If he saw her right now, he wondered if there would still be some of the last, lingering traces of the little girl who thought a fun afternoon was tossing a Nerf football in the backyard.
Mike could picture all of these things crystal clear in his mind, but Sarah’s face, as always, remained a blur.
Sure, he had pictures. He had the ones he had taken over her six years with him, and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children had provided the new pictures, ones spit out by a computer showing, in dozens of dizzying combinations, what Sarah might look like today. But as good of a job as they did with Sarah’s picture each year—and they did a damn good job—sorting through all of those possible combinations had only muddied his head. At night, he would lie in bed and try to form a face but all his mind’s eye saw was his gap-toothed little girl with her crooked glasses. And now that was fading too. The only time he seemed to have a lock on her was when he drank, but he couldn’t drink anymore because of the court order.
The sun was starting to rise behind the trees in the woods when Mike grabbed the flowers, opened the door and walked around the front of the truck. The floodlight was on, always on, always shining down on the empty, white hill. He walked over to the spot where he had found Sarah’s sled and knelt down, balancing his weight on the balls of his feet, and placed the lilacs on the snow. The fragrance of the flowers was strong, even out here in the wind, and as he stared at the place where Sarah had last stood, he again thought about how the air had no beginning or end, how he liked to imagine the powerful scent of these flowers blowing through other cities, blowing into Sarah’s room where she was sleeping right now, maybe even waking her up, Mike thinking that maybe his daughter would smell the lilacs and it would trigger a memory, Sarah remembering him and the room waiting for her back in Belham. Maybe today she would pick up the phone and call home. Totally ridiculous, maybe, but that was the thing about hope. It made you believe in anything.
Dr. Rachel Tylo’s Boston office had gray walls painted the color of thunderstorms and a white couch and matching chair that were as stiff as her glass-top coffee table. With the exception of the two expensively framed degrees,
both from Harvard, the only personal item was the oil painting hanging above her desk, a wide canvas full of the kind of drips, squiggles and blots found on a housepainter’s drop-cloth.
The door opened and here Dr. T came, looking more like Mr. T, a teetering powerhouse of doughy flesh wrapped in a designer suit and clouds of perfume. Peeking out from the stack of folders clasped under her arm was the past Sunday’s Boston Globe Magazine.
Dr. T saw him eyeing it and said, “ Why didn’t you tell me about it?”
“Not much to tell,” he said. “When Sarah’s anniversary date draws closer, I call up my contacts in the press and ask them if they can run a story. It helps keep interest alive.”
“I was referring to the side story on your father.”
“I had no idea the reporters were going to talk with him.” Which was true. And Mike had to admit he was impressed how the reporter or reporters had managed not only to track Lou down in Florida but had somehow convinced him to talk.
She settled in her chair. “This is the first time he’s spoken out about his granddaughter, correct?”
“I have no idea.”
“What’s your reaction?”
“I don’t have one.”
Dr. T’s eyes were fastened on him, watching and gauging his reactions for what the court called his “anger management issues.” First came the anger management course, followed by this, forty-eight mandatory sessions designed around the ridiculous premise of figuring out why he had attacked Francis Jonah, the man everyone knew was responsible for Sarah’s disappearance and the disappearance of two other girls: five-year-old Caroline Lenville from Seattle,Washington; and Ashley Giroux, age six, from Woodstock,Vermont.
Lou had nothing to do with any of this, but Dr. T, man, she just loved to poke her nose around in this area. Mike had to fill up the time somehow, so he had thrown out some general stories about growing up with Lou, about how Lou started out as a thief, robbing houses in posh suburbs before graduating to the more sophisticated jobs: cleaning out warehouses of computer and electrical equipment, the armored car heists in Charlestown and Cambridge. Lou’s old gang all dead now—all except Lou.