“OK,” Jesse said carefully, rolling with his words, remembering a damp forest, the scent of discount cologne. “So.”
One of the residents of the halfway house, a wiry middle-aged Latino with ravaged skin, exited the front door and, slipping a Marlboro between his lips, descended to Jesse on the bottom steps. Without saying a word, he cupped Jesse’s cigarette hand in both his own and, bowing his head, bummed a light. His touch felt like sandpaper.
The big man smiled down at his shoes as if embarrassed, as if this guy had cut in on a dance. He waited until the guy had disappeared around the corner before resuming.
“So it was 1966 all over again,” Jesse said.
“So I go home, OK? And we talk all week on the phone. She’s going to come down to me in Philadelphia the next weekend. I’m, like, jumping out of my skin. Like…” He held up his hands in surrender. “So she comes down, I meet her at the train station, it’s like we haven’t seen each other since the war or something—kiss, smooch, hug—and she’s got the baby with her again. I kind of forgot about the kid. I mean, he was sleeping in that backpack most of the time the week before, but whatever.” He shrugged. “It’s just a kid, her kid—I don’t have a problem with kids. Don’t have any, but…So we go back to my place. It’s a one bedroom, we go in, the kid’s sleeping, and she knows that we’re heading for the bedroom, so she gently, like, lays the kid down on my couch, puts some chairs up against the pillows so the kid won’t fall off.”
“You have to do that,” Jesse said, surprising herself.
“Yeah, I know.” He hauled a leg up across the opposite knee with both hands. “So the kid’s down. We do a backwards tango into the bedroom, kiss, grab, grind, fling off this, fling off that, the whole nine yards, get about halfway there… the kid wakes up, starts crying. She goes out to the living room, stays with him maybe twenty minutes, comes back in the bedroom. We’re a little out of sync, but not much. We get back into it. Ten minutes, the baby starts crying again. It’s, like, we got to my house at 3:05 in the afternoon, started trying to have sex at 3:09, let’s say, and we were interrupted so many times by that kid that I’d have to say that we didn’t, scientifically speaking, actually do it until maybe five hours later, at which point both of us, we were doing it, like, just to get it done.”
“The job of sex,” Jesse said quickly, not dwelling on it. “How was she with the baby?” She peeked at her brother’s cell phone, making sure the power was on.
“Fine. She was totally unfrazzled about it. I mean, she was apologetic to me—I mean, hey, it’s her sex life too—but the kid came first. Which is fine, I understand that, I honor and respect that. I’m not by nature a selfish individual. In fact, I never complained or got foul on her or anything, but here’s the deal. It went on and on like that for three days, Friday through Sunday. I don’t know if the kid was colicky or disoriented or whatever, but after a while you kind of get into this trance, like this obligation trance, like a worker bee or something. I mean it was get up, lay down, get up, lay down, walk the kid, change the kid, burp the kid, up, down up, down up, down, and I have to admit, that by Saturday afternoon? Those gray eyes had kind of lost their magic on me a little, you know? And by Sunday? Frankly speaking? I couldn’t wait for her to leave.”
“That’s a shame,” Jesse said openly, falling into the story plucking her T-shirt free of her chest—get a little air in there. “But she was totally OK with Cody?”
“Cody?” he said falteringly Jesse realized that he had never known or had forgotten the baby’s name and that the sound of it now had thrown him off, made the squirming, crying mass in the papoose, on his couch, more of a reality.
“Yeah, she was fine with him. I mean, it was her kid. And my theory? It was like, the day we met? In New York? I can’t speak for her, but for me, when we started kissing by the PATH station, I was, I was full-tilt in love. I would have married her on the spot. And all that week? I was like a gut-shot dog. I couldn’t breathe without thinking about her. So let’s say that she maybe felt a little of the same way, OK? So at first I’m thinking, here comes the big Philadelphia weekend, she gets scared of her feelings, right? Scared of losing control. So she brings the kid down with her like a buffer, to keep things from happening. Makes sense, right?” Jesse didn’t answer. “I mean any idiot pop psychologist can come up with that one, right?”
“OK, yeah,” she said quickly, not liking to throw off a narrative with her own opinions on things.
“And it worked, if, you know, if that’s what her game plan was, but here’s the thing. It’s Sunday afternoon. We’re at this park near my apartment. I say, ‘What time’s your train?’ She looks at me, and I see in her eyes…” He peered through his upheld hands. “I see in her eyes, just for a flash, this look of, I want to say disappointment, but stronger.”
“Betrayal?” Jesse volunteered.
“No, more like, puncture. I don’t know, like dejection, deflation, just… I mean it only lasted for, you know, long enough for me to see it, then she was, ‘Oh yeah, I forgot to check the schedule. How often do the trains run, every hour?’ Blah, blah, blah, but it was like she really expected me to ask her to stay or move in or something, like it had been a great weekend experience. I guess, I don’t know, it was so unrealistic a frame of mind. I mean, maybe it was because I never complained about the kid or something. You know, what’s the saying? No good deed goes unpunished?”
“That’s the one,” Jesse said faintly, thinking, Alone is good, thinking, Alone makes you crazy.
“Anyways, I bring her to the train later, and it was like someone had blown out the candle. We both knew that that was it. No kisses, no—I mean, nothing hostile or angry, at least on the skin of things but… Anyways, so I drop her off and I go home. I’m a little depressed, but these things happen. So I’m home. I get a phone call about nine, nine-thirty that night. It’s a cop, an Amtrak cop, asks me if I know a Brenda Martin. I say, ‘Yeah, what’s wrong?’ You know, scared something happened. ‘Is she OK?’ The cop says, ‘I guess.’ I’m like, ‘You guess?’ “He took a breath. “It turns out, what happened was, the Amtrak waiting area? It’s like twenty-four benches, six rows of four facing each other in a square, OK? The baby, her, Brenda’s kid? Is sitting strapped into his stroller in front of the first bench on one side of the inner square. He’s there alone, no one on any of the front four benches, and he starts to cry. Baby’s parked there, by himself, crying. Now, there’s a few dozen people seated throughout the benches but the baby’s all alone. Cop comes over to the stroller, calls out, ‘Whose baby is this?’ Everybody’s, like, ‘Huh?’ More cops come over, looking at each other, another shout-out, ‘Whose baby is this?’ Nothing. Cop tells me they must have called it out half a dozen times, even ran it through the PA system: ‘Whose baby is this?’ So now they think they have an abandoned child on their hands, OK? They’re standing around, ten fifteen minutes, trying to figure out what to do, how to deal with it. This cop who called me said he gave it one last shot, announces, ‘Did anyone see who left this baby?’
“All of a sudden, he tells me, Brenda gets up. She was like only three rows back from the stroller, apparently sitting there the whole time. She stands up and says, ‘I’m right here.’ Very calm. ‘I’m right here.’ They’re looking at her. ‘Did you leave this child here?’ She says, ‘I didn’t leave him there. I put him there. I’m sitting right here.’ And, in truth, she was only maybe twenty feet away the whole time. Cop says, ‘Didn’t you hear us ask who’s the mother?’ She says, ‘Yeah, you just said it.’ He says, ‘You didn’t hear us all those other times?’ ‘I’m kind of tired,’ she says. ‘I guess not.’
“And you know, they’re looking at her, checking her out, and they see she’s apparently sober, calm, what’s that, clear of eye? Cop says, ‘You didn’t hear your child crying?’ She says, ‘Yeah, sometimes he cries. I was just waiting to see if he’d stop on his own. A lot of times he’ll stop on his own. I told you. I’m really tired right now’ So,” th
e big man said, slapping his knees, “this cop tells me they weren’t sure what to do. The baby’s not abandoned, the mom’s right there, she’s apparently, you know, mentally speaking, present and accounted for.” He shrugged.
Jesse pictured it—Brenda physically distancing herself from the baby as she mulled over the lost weekend, shutting down her eyes, shutting down her ears, an experiment.
“Anyways, they take her vital statistics, get my number from her—you know, ‘What were you doing here in Philadelphia?’ et cetera—and she boards the next train for home. And the reason this cop is calling me is because it’s bugging him, her not responding to those call-outs. I mean her letting the baby cry too, of course, but mainly her sitting there twenty, thirty feet away, her child surrounded by uniforms, and not responding to all those call-outs. And this cop, he says to me, ‘The reason I’m calling you, sir, is so that you can reassure me that everything is OK with that lady and her child and that I didn’t fuck up by not calling social services to come and check out that kid.’ And you know, what can I say? I’m, like, ‘Hey if anything, that woman is diligent to a fault.’”
“Do you have that cop’s name?” Jesse asked.
“Even if I did, the thing was a non-incident. There was no report on it the way it sounded to me.”
“Did you ever see her again?”
“Nope.” He shrugged.
“Do you know anyone else she went out with?”
“Nope.”
“So you don’t know if she’s got a boyfriend now.”
“Hey” he said, “I live in Philadelphia.”
Rising to his feet, he dusted the rear of his slacks. “One last thing,” he said. “I left her at the station that day? It couldn’t have been more than twenty minutes before her train was due, OK? There’s a train, that same train, leaves every hour on the hour. I ask the cop when this all happened? It was four hours after I had dropped her off.”
“So what are you trying to say?” Jesse asked, willfully fuzzy, wanting it all laid out for her.
“What am I trying to say?” He looked off, smiling uncomfortably. “I just said it.” And instead of returning to McCoy’s, he trundled off down the street.
Another one for the hold-back bin, for the Brenda-as-bad-player file, Jesse thought. This slowly burgeoning accumulation of anecdote and gesture, of half-remembered utterance and act told her everything, told her nothing.
Heading back inside the bar, she heard her cell phone ring again, and she wheeled around to the bathroom area.
“It’s me,” Ben said. “May I ask where you are?”
“McCoy’s.”
“The bar?”
“Yeah.”
“May I come pick you up?”
“Yes, you may.”
“Ten minutes?”
“Ten minutes.”
“Excellent.”
Back at the rail, they were still going at it—Jane, Deadline, and the two boy reporters. Jesse reclaimed her spot and ordered herself a Stoli neat in preparation for Brenda, for whatever Ben had offered Lorenzo in exchange for Brenda. When her drink came she threw it back, a fireball, and tried to envision Brenda sitting in that square of train station benches, distancing herself from the baby. But for how long? Fifteen minutes? An hour? Four hours?
She began to signal for another shot, then held herself back, not liking the sloppy edge of her current buzz.
Bachelor number two was still seated by himself out there on the floor, still throwing her quick oblique glances. Jesse was confused now, regretting the Stoli altogether.
“You know about the cop’s son?” bow-tie boy asked the others.
“What cop…”
“Council, the catching detective. He’s got a kid doing five to seven for armed robbery.”
“Nice,” Jane said.
“Yeah, Daddy’s on Rolonda Watts telling everybody ‘Just say no,’ he’s got a kid in the slammer for robbing drug dealers.”
“‘Just say mine,’” the black reporter said.
“Yeah, turned out he was using his father’s piece to pull the jobs too.”
“Ho.”
“The cop was on Rolonda?” Jane asked.
“Twice.”
“Whoa.”
“Physician, heal thyself,” Deadline said.
“Yeah, well, he’s also got another son teaches math in a junior high school down in Camden.” They all turned to Jesse, Jesse not a hundred percent sure she had said it, but she had. They eyed her with mild curiosity, taking her for some journalistic foot soldier or other, until the black reporter made the connection.
“You were with her, right?”
“Yup,” Jesse said, vibrating like a tuning fork.
“And?” Deadline said, with a hint of impatience.
“And now I’m down here.” Jesse’s response was a shade pugnacious, the four of them glancing at one another, Jane then pointedly looking off, rolling her eyes.
“So what do you think?” bow-tie boy asked soberly—no more banter.
“I can’t tell,” Jesse answered earnestly trying to make up for her clumsy evasiveness a moment ago.
“Can you, steer us?” Jane asked, breaking balls.
“I’m doing what you’re doing.” Jesse shrugged. “I’m in the same boat.”
“You from here?”
“The Register.”
“Des Moines?”
“Dempsy.”
“How’d you get in?”
“Friend of the family.” She pushed away from the bar, suddenly desperate to get out of there.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“You want to come with us tonight?” bow-tie boy offered quietly. “Show us around?”
“Over to Armstrong?” He didn’t answer, just stared, taking her measure. “I can’t.” She rose to her feet, felt their eyes on her, envisioning herself as a mass of flutters and twitches.
“Do you know where she is now?” the black reporter asked.
“I wish I knew.” Jesse’s bar stool scraped against the floor loudly as she tried to move past herself.
“Who was that big stiff in front of the house this morning?”
“I have no idea,” she said, weaving her way through the tables, aware once again of bachelor number two. He was still studying her, and, blaming it on the Stoli, she impulsively veered off course, intent on asking him about all this eyeball action. Once it became apparent to him that she was heading directly for his table, he tensed visibly, then shot up from his seat, swept up his cigarettes and lighter in one smooth move, and brushed past her for the front door.
Leaving the bar, Jesse saw Ben double-parked parallel to the POW wall. Someone was in the passenger seat, a big Italian-looking lady, square-shouldered, wearing a red satin baseball jacket. Then Jesse noticed the Chevy Blazer double-parked behind her brother’s ride, full up with three more women, two wearing that same red satin jacket. Behind the wheel of the Blazer sat a black man, fortyish, sporting a thin, dapper moustache, this guy, too, wearing the red team jacket of the others.
As she began crossing the street, Ben threw her a big self-conscious grin from the car.
“Jesse, hey.” He sounded like he had never uttered her name before. “This is Karen Collucci from the Friends of Kent.”
He flattened himself against the headrest so the women could size each other up through the driver’s window. The great Karen Collucci, Jesse thought, looking into her muddy brown eyes, Karen’s return gaze both assessing and detached. Jesse began to intuit something about the price to be paid for a continuing relationship with Brenda.
“How you doing, Jesse?” Karen asked in a casual yet authoritative tone, her voice man-deep. She extended a red-nailed hand that enveloped Jesse’s own, holding the grip a shade longer than necessary, as if Jesse’s fingers were laden with data. Beneath an almost blue-black lacquered nest of hair, Karen’s face was dark-toned and long-jawed, the set of her lipsticked mouth, the slightly off-angle tilt of her head, and
the heavy-lidded steadiness of her eyes all coming together to exude an air of unflappable challenge. On the left breast of her bomber jacket was a stylized drawing of two stick figures—an adult and a child, the adult’s left arm draped protectively across the child’s shoulders, FRIENDS OF KENT printed beneath their feet.
Kent was Kent Rivera, a six-year-old found strangled and perfunctorily buried five years earlier in a wooded area behind the boy’s school. Ben, a part-time Friends of Kenter himself, had told Jesse the story more than once: how Karen and her people—originally a loose collection of neighborhood women—assembled in her backyard for a gin game one evening and, hearing the boy’s father trolling the streets in a PA-equipped van, calling out his missing son’s name in a teary panicked voice, impulsively decided to form their own search party that night. To their astonishment and horror, they actually found the boy two hours past dawn.
According to Ben’s awestruck retelling, Karen herself had been the one to discover the body. Drawn by a blue plastic recycling bag near the base of an oak tree, she had tossed it aside to reveal a patch of ground littered with clay balls. Unaware that those knotty clumps were a sign of recently turned soil, she nonetheless brushed the surface with her fingers and quickly came upon five pale toes, like a brace of pearls sprouting from the churned earth.
The gospel according to Ben then continued with the Crime Scene Unit collecting enough forensic evidence at the site to arrest the school’s assistant custodian. Almost religiously galvanized by their gruesome success, Karen and her gin game formed the Friends of Kent, destiny-graced and unblinking, eight former housewives perched at the end of a hot line. Although basically a low-profile ad lib organization with only a dozen hard-core members, it was known well enough by various local police departments to be called on now and then to organize and conduct huge volunteer search parties for missing children. On occasion, its members acted as intermediaries between the child’s family and the local cops, which sometimes meant soft-grilling the frantic parents and other relatives in a way the police couldn’t for fear of snapping the lines of communication.
Freedomland Page 31