Little Girl Lost

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  He can’t imagine life without Wash. He has to be okay.

  Eyes swimming, he reaches for the tissue box on the bedside table. Wash stirs and looks at him. A familiar gap-toothed grin spreads beneath the oxygen tubes poking from his nostrils.

  “What are you doing here?”

  He shoves the tear-dampened tissue into his pocket. “That’s my question for you.”

  “They’re crazy.” Wash waves a gnarled hand at the door. “Should’a just ignored them and gone home. I can’t sleep in this place.”

  “You were doing a decent job of it. What did the doctor—”

  “Is it snowing out there yet?”

  “Just raining. What did—”

  “Supposed to snow, though, right?”

  “I don’t know. What—”

  “You know what’s funny?”

  “How you keep interrupting me?”

  “Snow. See, if this was the other end of the year, we’d be all excited about it. Nothing like that first snowfall. Scrubs away the grime, makes everything fresh and pretty. But in March it’s a different story. In March, that snow buries every hint of springtime. It’s all about the timing, Stockton, you see? Same snow, but whether we welcome it depends on when it shows up.”

  “Wash. What did the doctor say?”

  A pause. “I’ll be all right.”

  Is that the answer to Barnes’s question? Or is it unrelated commentary; merely what Wash wants to believe—or wants Barnes to believe?

  “Is it the bronchitis?”

  “No.”

  “What, then? Did it turn into pneumonia?”

  “Aren’t you supposed to be at Hogan’s Pub for a retirement party?” No one can change a subject like Wash.

  “What? No.”

  “Sure you are. You said something about it the other day. Bub Carson’s retiring, right? Moving to Arizona?”

  “Guess we can rule out Alzheimer’s. How about pneumonia?”

  Wash shakes his head, covering a cough that turns into a full-blown spell.

  Barnes pours a cup of water from the brown plastic pitcher and holds it out to him.

  “I can’t drink that lying flat on my back. Can’t have a conversation this way, either.” He presses a button, and the top half of the bed sinks, tilting him backward. He curses and fiddles with the control. It rises, nearly folding him in half. He lowers it to a more comfortable position, grumbling, “Damned thing goes up when I want to go down, and down when I want to go up.”

  “You’ll get the hang of it.”

  “I don’t want to. I want to go home.”

  “Yeah. You said.” He hands Wash the water. “What’s going on, exactly?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it, Stockton. You learn anything interesting at school today?”

  On Saturdays, Barnes takes a Race and Gender class at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. It was Wash’s idea. He’s already earned his associate degree, but the NYPD likes to see initiative, and Barnes is gunning for a promotion.

  “I learned a lot. I’m starting to think there’s only one thing in this world more challenging than being a black man.”

  “Being a black woman?”

  “Ah, you took the same course?”

  “Oldest story there is.” Wash shakes his head. “Back when I was coming up, we didn’t take classes like you do now.”

  “Guess it was a lot easier back then to make detective.”

  “You just work hard on the job and keep up with your course work, Stockton. You’ll get that gold shield one of these days.”

  “More like one of these years. This millennium would be good.”

  “Be patient. I guarantee it’ll happen. There’s no finer man in the NYPD.”

  They talk awhile longer, about everything but Wash’s diagnosis, though the conversation is stalled by several coughing fits. Every time Barnes brings up his health, Wash changes the subject. Finally, he says, “Get out of here now. You still have time to go to that party.”

  Barnes looks at his watch. “Do you know what time it is?”

  “They’ll be there till dawn.”

  He’s right, but Barnes isn’t in the mood for socializing. “I’d rather stay—”

  “Yeah, well, you can’t. I need my . . .” Wash huffs, catches his breath “. . . beauty sleep. But thanks for coming to see me.”

  “You’re welcome. And thank you.”

  “For what?”

  “For thinking I’m going to make detective. For being the only person who ever believed in me.”

  “Your mother does.”

  “Not like you. There’s nothing in it for you.”

  His mother is hoping he might eventually earn enough to bail her out of her ongoing financial crisis. But Wash? He simply loves Barnes and wants the best for him.

  He rides the elevator back downstairs, exits the hospital, and lights a cigarette.

  The rain has turned to snow—fat, feathery flakes, coming down hard. March snow.

  He still doesn’t feel like socializing, but he’s not ready to go home. He doesn’t want to be alone tonight.

  Instead of walking toward East Harlem, he makes his way on slick sidewalks to the subway. The platform is crowded. At this time of night, trains are few and far between. Approaching the turnstile, he feels around in his pocket for a token, and his fingers encounter the little gold ring.

  Damn. He forgot to turn it in at the hospital’s lost and found. He starts back toward the shadowy stairway, then hears the rumble of an approaching downtown train. If he doesn’t get on this one, there’s no telling how long he’ll have to wait for the next.

  He’ll have to keep the ring until tomorrow. He slides it onto his key ring for safekeeping.

  Oran rolls over on his creaky cot, over again, and then back. Sleep is evasive, not just because of the lumpy mattress and blanket too flimsy for the clammy draft. He can’t stop thinking about what lies ahead. Soon, like Cool Hand Luke, he’ll be called upon to lead his followers to salvation. Unlike his long-ago movie hero, Oran will survive in the end.

  He always looks forward to chapel on Sundays, but he doesn’t typically get to anticipate visitors. Tomorrow, he will. Make that today, if midnight has already come and gone. He’s pretty sure it has.

  Alone in the dark cell, a man has no way of knowing the hour, but after nearly two decades, you develop a sense for telling time without a clock or watch. You learn the rhythm of this overcrowded hellhole—guards’ footsteps, inmates’ audible bodily functions, cooking smells, the rumble of distant traffic and train whistles out in the night. Every day, every night, the same events unfold in the same damned order.

  A few years ago, there was a blip. Protesting the atrocious conditions, rioting inmates took seventeen guards hostage on a Saturday evening. It happened during recreational hour for maximum security prisoners, as Oran was delivering a sermon to a basketball-dribbling inmate. He couldn’t tell whether the fellow was paying attention, but he always liked to think he was getting through to someone. From there, he couldn’t see the chaos unfolding over on B Block, where they keep the newcomers. But he could feel it even before it reverberated through the facility.

  The ensuing standoff disrupted the routine that evening, and the next day. It was resolved without violence during the wee hours Monday morning, but even in the aftermath, the air was charged with a different kind of energy.

  Eventually, life—as in a life sentence, six consecutive for Oran—settled back to regimented normalcy. But as a result of the siege, Governor Cuomo and the state corrections officials stepped up prison renovation and reform. That means Oran has access to the outside world—not via a Cool Hand Luke–style escape, but through formerly forbidden print media.

  He still reads his Bible daily. But now he can also peruse publications that used to be censored by the warden and clergy. Now he knows what’s going on out there beyond the concrete and razor wire.

  Now it isn’t just the Bible warning him that Judgment Day is
coming—it’s the newspapers. They’re filled with evidence that his days here are numbered. He hasn’t mentioned his findings to anyone, not even the chaplain or fellow members of his Christian study group. He doesn’t trust them.

  He doesn’t trust anyone, other than his own flesh and blood. That’s why he’s summoned his firstborn child here tomorrow. It’s time to resume the mission that began in 1968, when he crept into a slumbering Brooklyn household and slaughtered the first of four families.

  Chapter Four

  Bettina’s body has already been moved from the shared room to a smaller one at the end of the hall.

  “To give you privacy,” the Caribbean nurse tells Amelia and Calvin, pressing neatly folded tissues into their hands, “so you can say your goodbyes.”

  As they walk past her old room, Amelia glimpses a young woman methodically stripping the sheets from Bettina’s bed. She looks like a bored housewife preparing the guest room for in-laws who are on their way, regardless of whether anyone wants them.

  To the staff, death is all in a day’s work. They moved Bettina because they needed her bed.

  Amelia expects to find that a sense of peace has settled over her mother’s face now that her suffering has ended and she’s gone home to be with Jesus, as Calvin put it after they got the news.

  Indeed, the tubes and wires are gone, as is the perpetual gasp for breath. Yet she looks no different—clasped hands clenched on top of the white sheet, mouth set as if in resignation, brow furrowed.

  Calvin lets out a wail and goes to her.

  Amelia shudders. The window is open, a wet, cold wind blowing in like death itself. She moves to close it, but the nurse stops her.

  “We do that when someone passes,” she says quietly, “to let the spirit escape.”

  Amelia, too, longs to escape. But she dutifully sits in one of the two wooden chairs beside the bed as Calvin sobs into his dead wife’s shoulder. She reaches to toy with her necklace.

  It isn’t there.

  It’s as if Bettina, leaving this world, had snatched that tiny gold ring from her along with everything she’d ever believed about who she is.

  Numb with exhaustion and shock, grief and anger, she clasps her hands on her lap and stares dry-eyed out at the storm that swirls with the dead woman’s spirit and the words Some Kind of Wonderful.

  That’s the name of the movie lit up on the marquee at the theater across the street. Amelia saw it with a guy from her psych class. Not here. He’d taken her to the Beekman on the Upper East Side, where the seats are cushy and the curtains open like in a fancy theater. It was a rare real date, with a nice guy who wanted to see her again. She’d have liked that, except . . .

  This happened. He’s moved on, and she doesn’t blame him. Who wants to wait around for a girl on deathwatch?

  Some Kind of Wonderful . . .

  Oh, the irony on this terrible night when her life has transformed into some kind of nightmare.

  She hates herself for hating Bettina when she should be mourning her, with sorrow untainted by wrath. And Calvin—she hates him, too. She turns away from the window to see him sit back at last, spent, rubbing his miserable eyes and blowing his nose into his handkerchief.

  “You have to tell me.”

  He gapes at her.

  “About my adoption. I have to know—”

  She turns toward a soft knock on the open door. The nurse is back, accompanied by an orderly and a long trolley of some sort. On it, a pile of linens.

  “We’re going to get her ready to go downstairs now.”

  Calvin redirects his bewilderment to her. “Downstairs?”

  “To the mortuary. You can wait right out here in the hall and come along with her.”

  As if they’re tagging along to a party.

  Amelia follows Calvin from the cold, wet room and settles beside him on a bench. The nurse closes the door, and she and the orderly go about their gruesome work.

  Her father is sobbing again.

  Amelia leans back against the tile wall, staring at the ceiling.

  At last, his tears subside. He takes a deep breath and she feels him looking at her, but keeps her eyes trained on the cold fluorescent light overhead.

  “First, you weren’t adopted.”

  She pounces. “Don’t lie! Please, Daddy . . .” Her voice breaks. “I saw the file. It said she only had one baby, and it wasn’t me!”

  “That’s true.”

  “Then how—”

  “We found you. That’s how. I found you.”

  “What?”

  “I was working in the church one Saturday night—Sunday morning,” he amends. “Mother’s Day. I heard a sound, and there you were. Just an itty-bitty baby, lying there like Moses in a basket.”

  She gasps. He found her. He found her. Like some . . .

  Like something someone lost, or threw away.

  “I knew I had to get you out of there, get you someplace safe. But, lawd, it was raining like the dickens. So I got a bunch of rags to cover you and keep you dry.”

  “Rags?”

  “Clean ones. I carried you out of that church and straight home, and never told a soul where you’d come from. You should have seen Bettina’s face. Oh, Bettina.” The name is hoarse, as if he’d momentarily forgotten she was gone. He lowers his head again and wipes his eyes.

  Amelia can only focus on the lies he’d told. Lies they’d told. It had been bad enough to assume she’d been adopted, but this?

  She’d found a dollar on the street once, a few years ago, as they were crossing the street for Sunday services. It was Christmastime, and she’d been saving pennies in a jar hidden under the couch, hoping to have enough to buy her parents each a Woolworths plastic candy cane filled with M&M’s.

  She started to put the dollar into her pocket, but Bettina stopped her. “What are you doing? And right in front of Jesus’s house?”

  “Jesus wanted me to have it!”

  “You don’t keep what isn’t yours,” she said firmly. “That would be stealing, and stealing is a sin.”

  Apparently, that applies only to cold, hard cash. Her mother made her put the dollar into the collection plate.

  “So you found me, and you didn’t even bother to take me to a hospital?” she asks Calvin when he looks up at last.

  “You were healthy.”

  “Why wouldn’t you have a doctor check me out and make sure?”

  “They would have asked where you came from. The police would have taken you away, tried to find the person who left you there.”

  “Exactly!”

  If they hadn’t acted so selfishly, she might have found her way back to her real parents. She’s a human being, not some forgotten treasure chest they’d stumbled across and greedily decided to keep for themselves.

  “Don’t you see, Amelia? Whoever did that didn’t deserve you! But your mother and I . . .” He pauses again, collects his emotions. “You were the answer to our prayers. We knew Jesus had sent you into our arms. You were wearing your ring, and it was etched with a C . . .”

  Her ring. Gone.

  “C, for Crenshaw. You were meant to be ours. Who were we to question His gift?”

  “Didn’t anyone else ask where I’d come from?”

  “They didn’t even know you were there at first. Summer of ’68—we had the war, assassinations, protests, riots . . . the whole city was on edge. The whole world. But especially in this neighborhood. We didn’t go out for a long, long time, except to work.”

  “Because you were hiding me.”

  “A lot of folks stayed locked away inside that summer, out of trouble—or what the cops might decide was trouble.” He shakes his head. “Terrible times for the black man back then.”

  “Yeah, times are just super for the black man now.”

  “We have come a long, long way, Amelia. You don’t know—”

  “I know that we have a long, long way to go,” she said, thinking of what happened in Howard Beach in December. “So you kep
t me locked away in the apartment . . . for how long?”

  “I don’t know. It was probably sometime that fall when we took you to church the first time. I went down to Woolworths in midtown and got you a little pink jumpsuit to wear, and your mama dressed you up and showed you off.”

  “And no one said, ‘Hey, why didn’t you tell us you were pregnant?’”

  “Back then, folks didn’t ask nosy personal questions like they do now. Pregnancy and childbirth were nobody’s business but the parents’.”

  “So that’s why it was okay to lie.”

  “No lies. Everyone figured Bettina must have had a baby, so . . .”

  “So you let them.”

  At his shrug, a thousand accusations spring to Amelia’s lips.

  But the door opens, and the sheet-covered trolley rolls out, and it’s time to resume the business of Bettina Crenshaw’s death.

  As Wash had predicted, the retirement party is still going strong when Barnes makes it to Hogan’s in midtown. Most everyone in his own circle has already left, either stuck with the overnight shift, or headed home to counties north and west of the city—far more affordable, and far snowier.

  His friend Marsha remains. She lives on the Upper East Side with a doctor roommate—not bad for a girl who, like Barnes, grew up in the East Harlem projects. Plus-sized and attractive, with a headful of cornrows and a quick smile, she’s a few years older than Barnes. She’s one of the few women at work—or anywhere, really—who doesn’t flirt with him. Maybe because she’s not interested in the opposite sex, though that assumption makes him seem ridiculously full of himself . . . even to himself.

  But women are drawn to him, and Barnes has always found female company to be one of life’s greatest pleasures. It’s the only one that’s come without a struggle, though the problem isn’t the coming. It’s the going.

  He’s never met a woman who doesn’t eventually want a long-term commitment—nor a woman he couldn’t let go, faced with an ultimatum. He’s just not cut out to be a husband, a father, a family man. He wouldn’t be good at it, and if you can’t excel at something, you should have the wisdom to walk away.