A Guide for Murdered Children

by Sarah Sparrow

  Every man in Saggerty Falls had given a palm print to the department for comparison to the one found on Maya’s unicorn birthday card. At the time, it struck Willow as an emotional, largely symbolic act of solidarity, though in later years it bothered him that the women of the Falls hadn’t been asked to do the same.

  Willow started to feel like he was flying a little too close to the flame. He made the decision to come back with Daniel and Lydia in tow, and mentally prepared to take his leave.

  That was when Ronnie said, “Would you like to see Elaine?”

  “Well, yes!”

  “She apologizes for not coming out. I’ll walk you back and you can say hello.”

  2.

  Ronnie brought him to the bedroom door and disappeared.

  Willow’s heart was in his throat. He let his eyes adjust and then saw her lying there, just like the image he’d had before Ronnie greeted him at the door. Was she sleeping?

  “Come in, come in!” she said, without moving a muscle. Like a ventriloquist’s dummy . . .

  He walked to the bed.

  “Hi, Ellie.”

  “Well, for goodness sake, Willow, take off your damn shoes! Lordie, do you know what kind of gunk lives on the bottom of our shoes? I read about it online and it’s worse than a crocodile’s mouth. Worse than a toilet!” she laughed. “That’s why I love the Japanese culture. They take their shoes off when they come home, leave ’em right at the door. That’s just common sense, don’t you think?”

  “I do, absolutely,” he said with a smile.

  Same old feisty Elaine.

  (The patch of light at her feet was the little television.)

  She turned her head to look at him. “Willow Wylde—my, my, my. How good it is to see you.”

  “Nice to be seen,” he said, falling back on the AA retort.

  “And how kind of you to visit! I haven’t seen my husband so excited since the gal from Mary Kay tried to sell him—well, it must’ve been the whole line. She was here for three hours. If I didn’t know Ronnie better, I’d have thought . . . maybe he was interested.”

  He chuckled and said, “I made a play for you a few times. And I wasn’t even working for Mary Kay.”

  “No, but you were drinking like a fish. You were a naughty, naughty boy.”

  “Still am, I hope.”

  “That remains to be seen,” she said flirtily. “Now, do you remember me trying to hook you up with Penny Lancaster?”

  “Oh do I.”

  She got titillated. “Do you mean to say, naughty man, that something happened between you two without my knowledge?”

  “Why don’t we put it this way: something happened, but we were so wasted at the time that it may have been without our knowledge.”

  She howled at that. From the side of his eye Willow caught a glimpse of Ronnie lingering in the hall. It probably did him good to hear his wife laugh with abandon.

  They bantered some more and then got quiet while Elaine stared at the TV. One of those girl-chat daytime talk shows was on, with too much innuendo and energy. She paid strict attention, tittering along with the studio audience. It gave Willow a chance to sneak a look at her disfigurement. The nose was mutilated; a scar like a yellow lightning bolt bisected her face. Reading glasses rested atop a head that was bald in patches. (Afterward, when Ronnie walked him to the car, he jokily apologized for “my wife’s wacky hairdo.”) Elaine later explained that when Troy and Maya were taken from her, she started pulling it out by the handful, and the habit persisted.

  When a commercial came on, she lowered the volume and said, “Have you been well?” The question came from the heart.

  “Yes—pretty well,” said Willow. “I guess you could say I’ve had my time in the ‘dark wood’ but I’m beginning to see the light. At least I hope it’s the light.”

  “And not the flames of Hell?” she said with a laugh.

  How to speak in front of these people, this woman, of dark woods and light, of renewal? Yet it didn’t feel like a faux pas. He could see that Elaine appreciated the intimacy.

  “You know,” she said. “I have my reasons for wanting to see you—oh, of course I wanted to see you, Willow, I love you—but that’s not what I mean.” She struggled with her thoughts. “You see, I’ve been thinking of you, I’ve been wanting to tell you something. And when Ronnie said you called and were coming for a visit, I thought, Well, that’s interesting. See how the universe works? Did my husband give you his spiel about everything happening for a reason?”

  “Most definitely.”

  “It’s become the official mantra around this house.”

  “A pretty good one too.”

  “When Ronnie said that Willow Wylde was coming to call, well, I just knew. Because it’s been on my mind—I didn’t even tell him about it. I’ve already put my husband through enough.” She grew thoughtful. “How I love that man. Ronnie likes to say that God never gives you more than you can handle, but I think our Creator might have said that before He made me.”

  She patted a spot on the bed and told Willow to come sit. When he did, she leaned over and began to whisper, as if aware that her husband might be within earshot.

  “What I wanted to say . . . what I’ve been feeling, Willow—and I can’t pinpoint when it started—”

  She turned to him full-face and he saw her ruined features in the half light. Her skin looked like the polished stones he used to collect as a boy, embedded with ordered, fossilized rows of spindly creatures.

  “I feel them, Willow! I feel my children, I know that they’re here! And it’s—I know that I sound like a character out of . . . like JoBeth Williams in Poltergeist. It’s a wonderful movie and it speaks to me. Lord forgive me, but Poltergeist speaks to Elaine Rummer! When that gust of wind blows through JoBeth and she says that she felt her baby—she could smell her—that her baby’s smell was all over her . . . well, it’s the same, Willow, it’s the very same with me!” Tears filled her eyes. “Look at me, Willow! Look at me.” She took his hands in hers. “Who could live after that? Who could do what I’ve done to myself and live—what I did to myself and to Ronnie? Well, I can tell you, for the first time since it happened . . . I can tell you for the first time, Willow, now, that I want to live. Does that make any sense? Do you believe me, can you believe me? You see, JoBeth saw her baby again and I know I won’t see mine. This I know. But I feel them. And I want to live so that I can keep feeling them. I can smell them, Willow, I can smell my babies!” She laughed with joy as she wept. “Because they are here. I don’t know how and I don’t care to know but they are here. And that’s what I wanted to tell you, that’s what I needed to tell you. I had to tell someone and the Lord chose you.” She turned away and laid her head on the pillow. “I am not a madwoman.”

  “I don’t think that, Elaine. Not for one second.”

  “Then God bless. God bless you and yours.”

  Ronnie quietly appeared. Willow presumed he’d been eavesdropping and prudently decided it was time for his wife to rest. Elaine saw him and smiled. She’d exhausted herself.

  “Troy wanted to be a policeman, didn’t he, Ronnie—did you know that, Willow? Oh, he’d have made a fine one. He was always protecting his sister. One day he cut a little sheriff’s badge out of tinfoil and followed Maya everywhere she went, shooting all the imaginary bad guys! Isn’t that the sweetest thing? And did I ever tell you about the time I came home and Maya was in the garden looking terribly sad? You remember, don’t you, Ronnie. I went over and said, ‘What’s the matter, darling?’ and she led me to a spiderweb. Lordie, she was so unhappy! It wasn’t really a web anymore—looking at it, you could hardly see what it once was. Maya was crying her little eyes out. She said that she touched it with her fingers but was too rough and it broke. That’s what she told me, ‘I broke it.’ Then she said the dearest thing: ‘Do you think the spider will mind?
’ I said, ‘’Course not! He’ll make another one.’ And Maya just looked at the web and looked at me and said, ‘Well—I guess it’s better than coming home to nothing.’”

  She laughed and Willow shivered with emotion.

  “Sweetheart,” said Ronnie, “how about a nap? I’ll cook a little something for dinner. If we’re so honored, maybe Dubya will join us.”

  “Oh, please do!” said Elaine, turning to their guest.

  “That’s awfully kind but I think I’ll have to take a rain check. I really should be getting back.”

  Elaine reached out and touched his hand again. “Thank you for coming. And thank you for listening to the ramblings of an old broad.”

  “It was so good to see you both,” said the detective.

  “G’bye, Willow Wylde. I’d let you kiss my good side,” she said impishly. “If I had one. But as I say to Ronnie, hey, it’s better than coming home to nothing. Though maybe it isn’t.”

  * * *

  • • •

  He stopped at Early World to mull over the impressions of the afternoon—to integrate—and happened to sit in the same booth he shared with Annie, World’s Greatest Volunteer.

  Was he was on his way to becoming that too?

  The Underworld’s Greatest Volunteer . . .

  He sensed the presence of Nana—sometimes beside him, sometimes sitting straight across, like Annie had—and it felt as if she were trying to say something to soothe him and somehow persuade, like she used to when she snuck into his room after the ague. But he couldn’t make sense of her words.

  It was nighttime when he got home.

  He parked the car and sat listening to Mahler awhile, lingering on the image of the bedridden Elaine—the tragedy and, yes, the power and delirious beauty of that orphaned woman’s confessions.

  Grundy Eakins was rattling around in his head.

  As he walked to his apartment, he detoured to Dixie’s. He was about to knock, then thought, I should probably take a shower and make myself pretty. That’s what Dixie was always saying, “Gimme a minute so I can make myself pretty.” When he turned to leave, she ran out.

  “Hi, babe!”

  “Hello there, Darlin’ Dixie.”

  “Sorry I didn’t come over after work . . .”

  “No worries.”

  “I could see you through the drapes but you were on the couch, all lost in detective-like thought. I didn’t want to disturb.”

  “Saw me when?”

  “An hour ago?”

  “Go back in the house,” he said, drawing his gun.

  She did as she was told.

  As he got closer, he saw that his front door was ajar.

  He slowly pushed it open.

  From the sofa, wrapped in darkness much like Elaine was, Annie said, “I’m running out of time—we both are. Soon all will be lost.”

  SINGLE ROOM OCCUPANCY

  Annie invited him to her Skid Row SRO. He didn’t want to go; he didn’t want any part of this phantom that had invaded his untidily tidy life. She looked ill and her frailty laid siege to Willow’s defenses—but that wasn’t what compelled him to obey. As they drove in silence, he remembered something from an AA meeting at a church in downtown Wickenburg, during his stay at the Meadows. A woman shared that a normie asked her why she drank. She surprised herself by answering, “Because I have to.”

  Willow accepted the invitation because he had to.

  Since their “official” meet-and-greet at Early World he’d done a lot of integrating, like it or not. During his workday, the conversation at the diner (hers, anyway, because she’d done all the talking) played nonstop in his head like esoteric Muzak; by night, it became a babble that disrupted his dreams. She’d had the audacity to announce to him his destiny—that he was to become midwife to wayward souls who returned, like so many pint-sized samurai, to dole out bloody, high-toned “moments of balance”! Apart from the complete, unfettered lunacy of it, the scenario sounded like nothing more than straight-up old-school revenge. He resisted succumbing to her bizarro entreaties and explanations, not wanting to sign up for her or anyone’s folie à deux.

  Yet as days went by the mysterious world she spoke of became less far-fetched and the messenger took on indisputable gravitas. It wasn’t only that she spoke of the train he rode in his dreams night after night (he could actually remember her bringing snacks and Tom Collinses to his cabin); no, it went deeper. Annie told him secret things no one else in the world could have known. She knew everything about his experience as a boy at the time of his grandmother’s passing. All his life Willow had been hearing voices and communing with the dead. She told him that he possessed “powerful gifts,” and he couldn’t help getting puffed up when she said he’d been chosen to enlist in a strange mythology, one that would force him to swap the role of cowardly spectator for some kind of Joseph Campbell–sized uber-hero.

  As batshit as it sounded, he couldn’t deny his excitation.

  I invited you to my home because that’s what my mentor did. His name was Jasper—Jasper Kendrick Sebastian—and he ran a kind of boardinghouse for people like me. Like us. A place where Porters trained under one roof. I’m not sure such a thing exists anymore; that was a different time. But it’s always a different time, isn’t it? One day Jasper took me to his room. I thought he was up to something nefarious! See, I was still having all sorts of doubts, just like you. But when I sat at the edge of his bed—the place where he slept and dreamed—all those doubts left me, just drifted away. I finally stopped fighting, stopped trying to understand. We say ‘more shall be revealed,’ not ‘more shall be understood,’ no? We’re funny creatures. We buy a ticket on the train but don’t think to ask where the paper for the ticket came from. We don’t ask who set the price or how the engine operates or if the conductor will come to work. We never ask ‘Why?’—we don’t even want to know how it is that we awakened on that particular day and decided to take the train and not the bus—though we usually took the bus . . . all the dumb little things we never ask that come together to form ‘consensus reality.’ But aren’t there a multitude of other realities? Ones we never notice? Doesn’t that stand to reason? You see, we come to accept the world we live in, this world, and all of its phantasmagoric mysteries . . . but when presented with a new world, suddenly we’re afraid. And we foolishly go about trying to ‘understand’ it, to make sense of it. That’s how we adapt. When Jasper opened that new world to me, the world of the children, I became obsessed with understanding what it was all about. Which didn’t work out so well! So finally, in spite of myself, I surrendered. I stopped trying to ‘understand’—stopped wondering about my place in it. I stopped asking why the train existed and where it came from. How it ‘worked,’ why I’d been chosen . . .

  “Those questions will fall away, Willow, I promise. You’ll come to see there are no answers, not to why the dance began or when it will end or who made the steps. You’ll stop asking why you have a certain partner—and when another dancer cuts in you won’t protest. You’ll just dance.”

  He felt a preternatural sense of calm as she spoke and for a moment contrasted the stillness of the room with the sounds of the street, with the known world’s busy, beguiling banality.

  “I didn’t have your strength, Willow. I didn’t have your special gifts. I certainly didn’t have your life experience! You were able to push away the voices you heard by sheer will—I know the booze and drugs helped—but I couldn’t, and the voices led me to Swarthmore, where I thank God Jasper found me. Once he took me in, I flourished. And there I was, released and rescued—saved!—but still I kept wondering, ‘What exactly is this strange man asking of me?’ Mind you, he’d been clear about the nature of my duties from the beginning: to orient and stabilize the children, to prepare them for their moment of balance. Nothing more, nothing less. But that wasn’t good enough! We are funny creatures, Willow. Mad, a
rrogant creatures. Even from my dingy, forgotten room at the hospital, I was arrogant.

  “The day he invited me to his room, I surrendered. The most poignant thing”—she dabbed the wetness in her eyes—“the most poignant thing was that in an instant I became a mother. I couldn’t have children in this world but I became a fertile queen in that one, a mother to the lost boys and girls. And my heart rejoiced.”

  Without warning, her demeanor became grave and her expression hardened. While she was speaking, Annie managed to summon a girlish youthfulness; now she looked sickly again, deathly so. Her features grew taut, the face floating before him like a memento mori. Her jaw began to clench and tic.

  “But something has gone terribly wrong . . . Jasper warned it would happen when my Portership was ending. He said that was a dangerous time—when things would go ‘haywire.’ He was reluctant to say more but I saw in his face that he’d been through such a time himself. It was the only thing he couldn’t teach me and now I see why: it’s up to the Porter to set things right. The battle is his or hers alone and no one else can fight it.”

  She leaned in close. He smelled her warm breath, fragrant with the spice of desperation.

  “We need to move quickly! The train is about to derail—I worry that it already has. Only you can help the children already here. And the ones who are coming.”

  “But what has gone terribly wrong?” said Willow, in alarm.