by Jean Heller
I noticed my original burner phone in the bag, and wondered what to do with it now that I’d replaced it. I couldn’t bring myself to throw it away. So I dropped it back in the bag and pulled out Winona’s envelope.
There were twenty-three foster and institutional homes on the list with the names of the owners of record, their addresses, and the names of children who had been placed at each over the past twelve years. There also were hand-printed notes in the margins, the names and birthdates of children who had died in or disappeared from these homes with the dates of their deaths or disappearances.
This was Winona Jackson’s final act for these kids before her life ended.
When the margins were filled, Winona’s notes continued on the back of the pages. I counted the individual listings. Seventy-seven. In the last twelve years, these twenty-three institutions had lost seventy-seven children. That was more than three children per home.
The last of the four pages listed how many children had been removed from each home after substantiated reports of abuse. No names, just numbers.
They added up to two hundred and sixty-eight kids.
No wonder these homes were listed among the worst of the worst. I couldn’t help but be amazed that these places had been allowed to continue operations.
Nothing jumped off the pages at me. None of the owners’ or operators’ names was familiar to me. None of the addresses rang any bells. I didn’t know any of the children. I felt lost. Where was I going to start?
I was so engrossed in the file that my mail carrier had to knock twice at the front door before her presence penetrated my thoughts.
“Hi, Cookie,” I said when I opened the door. Cookie had been my mail carrier at my condo, and my house was part of her route. She was a ceaselessly cheerful and helpful woman who made certain her friends got special service. This day she knocked because she’d seen through the etched glass of the front door that I was home, and she wanted to deliver one piece of mail personally.
“I wanted to make sure you got this,” she said. “I think it’s important.”
She handed me one envelope and a few pieces of mail. The envelope carried a return address of the Juvenile Justice Division of the Cook County Clerk of Courts.
Cookie had met Charles once, and she knew about the burglary. We both had a pretty good idea what was inside the piece of mail.
“I hope it goes the way you want,” she said to me.
“It won’t, Cookie, but there’s nothing I can do about it,” I replied.
“I’m sorry,” she said, and turned away to continue her deliveries.
I returned to the sofa and stared at the envelope for a minute or two, trying to will the contents into telling me the charges against Charles had been dropped. But I’d never had transmuting skills. I was certain the envelope held Charles’s court date and my notice to appear to testify.
I wasn’t wrong. But I was surprised when I saw a drop of water hit the paper and make a small, wrinkled circle just above the clerk’s seal.
A tear.
21
I had a black cashmere watch cap pulled low to cover my ears and a scarf looped around my neck. I wore a knee-length quilted coat with a fur-lined hood if I needed it and knee-high, fleece-lined boots over a pair of thermal socks. My hands were encased in heavy mittens, always preferable to gloves for retaining heat.
The notice from juvenile court was grief heaped on tragedy in my week. The totality of Winona’s murder and Charles’s likely felony conviction was crushing me. The walls of my house made me feel claustrophobic. I had to get out. I headed for my usual refuge when I needed to think, the shores of Lake Michigan.
In the summer I generally found quiet on a small South Side strip of beach behind the Museum of Science and Industry in the tony Hyde Park neighborhood. But in the winter I preferred to go north and walk the water’s-edge trail through the Montrose Point Bird Sanctuary.
The afternoon was sunny and calm. But the vast openness of the park, the barren and empty beach, and the lake produced an easterly breeze that would have chilled me quickly if I hadn’t been dressed for it. I paced the trail for nearly an hour, then found a bench and sat, staring out at the open, iced-over water. I had brought along a baggie of sunflower seeds and tossed some out for any feathered creatures seeking a handout. I couldn’t stop one of my favorite poems from running on a closed loop through my mind.
“I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by;
And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea’s face, and a grey dawn breaking.”
I am neither a sailor nor a swimmer of greater that amateur talent, but I have always been fascinated by big water. And when I can have that big water all to myself, or nearly so, it is one of the few experiences that can enthrall me for hours.
Usually, the first stanza of John Masefield’s classic, Sea Fever, calmed my mind. Today I couldn’t get around “a grey dawn breaking.”
I seemed to be obsessed of late with children: dead children, abused children, lost and neglected children, and a child I had grown to love and continued to love despite his deceit and his attempt to take advantage of my trust. Given his brains, his looks, and his charm, Charles could have made something good of his life.
If only I hadn’t come home early that day, the kids would have gotten away with my belongings, and I never would have suspected Charles. And how would it have mattered? Everything was insured at full replacement value. Having taken what he really wanted from me, he might have disappeared from my life, and I would have been crushed and doomed never to know why. But now he would disappear from my life, and I would be the one who closed the cell door on him.
I tossed out some more seeds. I was collecting quite a bird following.
A voice behind me made me jump.
“I don’t think you’re supposed to feed the wild birds,” he said. “It’s illegal.”
I recognized the voice, and having its owner sneak up to stand behind me was more than a little disconcerting.
“You think everything I do is illegal, Agent Cross,” I said without turning around. “I don’t think the NSA has jurisdiction over wildlife.”
“True,” he said.
“If you have another message for me, could you deliver it without the chloroform this time? I don’t need another headache.”
Without asking, Cross came around and sat down on the bench beside me.
“That’s what I came to talk to you about,” he said.
“I don’t recall inviting you.”
“This is a public park.”
I didn’t answer because I didn’t want to encourage any conversation with the man. My silence didn’t faze him.
“Nice catch recognizing my shoe,” he said. “If you were better at keeping a poker face, I might never have noticed that you put two and two together.”
Again, I said nothing.
He asked, “Who have you told?”
“It’s whom have you told. You went to college, didn’t you? I’d expect an agent of the NSA to be better with English grammar.”
“All right, whom have you told?”
“That’s none of your business.”
“Then I have a word of advice for you,” he said. “Leave it between us. All we were trying to do that night was scare you into backing off. You weren’t really hurt, so there’s no harm done. There’s no proof of what you might write in the paper or tell the police, either. The shoe has been fully repaired. All signs of the damage have been erased.”
“I’m so happy for you.”
“But the message stands. Stay away from the Ryan Woods story.”
“Are you done now?”
“I am.”
“Then would you please get off my bench? You’re wrecking my meditation.”
I pulled my phone from my coat pocket.
Mark answered on the first ring.
“Are you working?” I asked.
“Yeah, I’m still on scene in Ravenswood. What’s up?”
“I need to talk to you. Not to pull you off the job, but when you get home tonight. Is that a problem?”
“Never,” Mark said with a chuckle. “I should be home about seven. You want to go out somewhere?”
“Let’s order pizza in,” I said.
“Your wish is my command. I’ll call Phil’s and have the pie waiting for you. Or if you get there first, maybe you could walk Murphy.”
“Yeah, no problem.”
There was a pause.
“You okay?” Mark asked.
“Not really. But we’ll talk.”
“We will.”
When I got to the front door of Mark’s condo with Murphy, both of us breathing hard after a long fast walk, Mark was at the front desk paying the delivery man from Phil’s, a great pizzeria in Bridgeport. Murphy caught the scent, and his nose went into overdrive.
Mark put the pizza box in the oven to stay warm and opened a bottle of wine. He poured each of us a glass. We settled on his sofa, which faced north and offered a spectacular view of the Chicago skyline through oversized sliding glass doors.
It had started snowing, big wet flakes that fell straight down because there was no wind to toss them around. If it got heavy, as the forecast indicated, it would turn into a dump and make a mess of traffic in the morning. But in the meantime it would be beautiful.
I loved to walk Chicago streets in the early morning after a big overnight snowfall. The sun was coming up, the air was barely moving, and the flakes that drifted off trees floated and sparkled like gemstones in the new light.
I wouldn’t see that the next day. I would be in court sealing the end of hope for a young boy.
I told Mark I had been considering perjury, testifying that I never got a good look at the face of the burglar I caught in my back bathroom. I would say I couldn’t positively identify Charles as the culprit.
“Deuce, the cops had him sitting in your living room for more than an hour while they questioned him,” Mark said. “How can you testify you didn’t see his face?”
“I’d been shopping,” I said. “I was in the kitchen putting stuff away.”
“For more than an hour? That’s not going to fly. Besides, the cops will be able to testify it was Charles you handed over to them. Charles will go away with or without your testimony. And you’ll be charged with perjury. There goes your reputation. There goes your job. And, maybe, there goes your freedom. People go to prison for perjury.”
I sat quietly, knowing Mark was right, and contemplating how to tell him what was really in my heart.
I blurted it out. “My fallback plan is to adopt him.”
“What?” Mark turned sharply on the sofa to face me. “Deuce, that’s nuts.”
“Why?” I demanded.
“Number one, given the demands of your job, how are you going to find time to give him the attention and supervision he needs? Number two, how do you know he’s not already so far into the dark side that he’ll continue to get into trouble that spirals down into much worse stuff than house-breaking and burglary?”
“I’ll hire someone to watch him after school. That little church place next door to my old condo has after-school programs.”
Mark ignored me and continued. “On the very selfish side, how’s this going to affect you and me? For God’s sake, if you want a child, let’s give ourselves a year together, and if it’s still good, we’ll get married and have a baby of our own. I’d love to be a father but not to a kid already predisposed to a life of crime. If I’m going to be a father, I want to be there from day one and be as much a part of my child’s development as you are. I want to start from scratch. Do you understand that?”
I understood completely and said so. But I couldn’t bring myself to throw Charles to the wolves, either. I said that, too.
“Well, so it’s perfectly clear,” Mark said, “you’ll be choosing Charles over me. It’s your choice, no doubt. But I don’t want to be around to see the bad outcome.”
I got up and left.
Neither of us had touched the pizza.
22
The next morning at 10 I was sitting on an uncomfortable wooden bench outside a hearing room in the Juvenile Justice Division waiting to be called and feeling sick. Not only did I have to make a serious decision about Charles, I had to make a serious decision about Mark. He’d made it perfectly clear the night before that if I chose Charles, it was over between him and me.
Either choice was heartbreaking.
I’d tried to talk to Mark again before I went to bed, but he wouldn’t answer his phone. At that point, sleep was a hopeless goal, and I lay awake much of the night trying to find a solution. In the end, there wasn’t one.
I watched the juvenile defendants file up and down the hallway in front of me, many of them in prison jumpsuits and shackles, some led by guards, some followed by weeping or angry parents. I saw myself as one of those parents, and I didn’t like the feeling.
Mark’s questions had been valid. How would I give Charles the attention he needed? How could I focus on work each day not knowing if he had skipped school? Or maybe he was plotting his next crime or meeting with dope dealers or gangbangers. If he lived with me, I would try to enroll him in the Irma Ruiz Elementary School, two blocks east of my house, a direction that would take him away from areas trolled by recruiting gangbangers.
Ruiz Elementary, named in honor of a policewoman killed in the line of duty, was a fine arts magnet school, considered one of the best schools in the city, honored at the White House by Michelle Obama. It served grades K through eight, which meant Charles would have at least four years there in a very good academic environment that would nurture his desire to read and write.
It was the after-school hours that worried me.
I was deep into considering whether I could ask Eric Ryland for permission to work from home when a harried, gray-haired woman with an arm-load of files and way too much nervous energy ran up to me.
“Are you Deuce Mora?” she said, then added, “Of course you are. I recognize you. I’m the case worker handling the boy who broke into your house.”
She introduced herself as Phyllis Metzler of the Cook County Juvenile Court.
“Here’s the deal,” she said. “The boy has a previous record, all small stuff, all misdemeanors. But the value of the merchandise from your home, the electronics he piled up on a chair to steal, elevates this crime to a felony. That means a conviction would be on his record permanently.”
I knew that already and nodded.
“We’ve tested him,” the woman continued. “He’s extremely bright. He’s personable and non-violent. If you would agree to drop the charges to a misdemeanor, which would remain sealed forever with the rest of his juvenile record, we could put him in Faulkner Academy, a special school where he would live and learn under constant supervision. The school doesn’t see a positive outcome with every student, but we think this boy fits the profile for success.”
I’d never heard of Faulkner Academy.
“Where is this school?” I asked.
“In Sheridan Park.”
On Chicago’s North Side. An easy drive.
“Could I visit him there?” I asked.
“No. We cut these children off from everything that links them to their previous lives. It is, in a word, a rebirth. A brand new start.”
A horrible thought draped my mind.
“How do I know he won’t be abused,” I said, “or brainwashed into some cult?”
The woman looked offended.
“We would never abuse or brainwash a child,” she said. “The operation is under court supervision, and the oversight is thorough. The children are expected to conform to the rules, and there are ramifications if they don’t. But the ramifications are never physical or psychological. Their aim is to rehabilitate, not further alien
ate. The children are encouraged to find aspects of education that interest them, and we cultivate those interests to teach them to focus on the positive.”
“I’ll be honest with you,” I said. “I’ve been thinking about adopting him.”
She looked surprised and then skeptical.
“I’m not an adoption expert, Ms. Mora, but I doubt that such an adoption would be approved, not with a felony hanging over the boy. Are you married?”
“No.”
“I imagine your hours at work are more erratic than most people’s. How would you provide for his supervision when you’re not home?”
I had to admit I hadn’t worked that out.
“Then I think you need to let that idea drop for now and do what’s best for the boy,” she said. “Now how about it, Ms. Mora? Can we go down to a misdemeanor? I’m really pressed for time here.”
“Sure,” I said. I sounded more upbeat than I felt.
I signed a piece of paper she thrust in front of me on a clipboard, reading it hastily. It was simply my agreement to reduced charges. She glanced at the signature, nodded, turned and left without another word.
And that was it. It was over.
I debated trying to call Mark to tell him the outcome, but I didn’t want to bother him on the job. I hoped he would call me later to get an update.
I was feeling huge regret. If I had waited one more day to talk to him about Charles’s future, our destructive conversation never would have happened.
I feared I had screwed up the best thing in my life for no good reason.
23
A week slipped by during which I did little more than life required. Writing my column was the only worthwhile endeavor I could manage. I was throwing myself a pity party of historic proportions, mourning at once the fate of my young friend Charles, the murder of my new friend Winona Jackson, and the possible end of my relationship with a man I truly adored.