Anonymity

by Janna McMahan

  Or maybe there was something else going on. Things had been cool in the bedroom for years. Was it possible he had found a new love interest and guilt was pulling him down? Barbara doubted it was somebody at the office. She couldn't imagine that her husband would ever have enough gumption to rustle up a little ass on the side, but then she'd come to realize that anything is possible.

  Over the past few years, they'd watched their friends’ marriages dissolve as quickly as their bank accounts. When there was plenty of money, everybody could stay together. Even couples that were apparently unhappy continued to vacation together and show up for cocktail parties, less to keep up appearances than just to avoid the drama of divorce. Why upset the kids? Even infidelities could be overlooked when nobody was willing to change their lifestyle.

  But when money problems forced a lifestyle change anyway, couples split up. Love didn't seem to count for much of the equation in modern marriage. Today, marriage was more a partnership, a business venture void of romance, so when things went sour there was very little affection to keep couples together.

  Luckily, she and Gerald had somehow managed to stay glued. They had true affection for each other. At least she still did for him, at least most of the time she did. But he was so stoic that she couldn't always read him. Still, she didn't think he would take a chance on infidelity. Divorce would certainly bankrupt them both, so it seemed that common sense, just basic practicality, would keep him from straying. So perhaps they weren't so different than other couples that stayed together out of convenience.

  Or maybe it wasn't some big secret. Maybe he was just going through a midlife crisis. She'd read a magazine article about male menopause caused by a gradual decline in testosterone. It said the symptoms could be fatigue, weakness, depression and sexual problems.

  Just great, Barbara thought, recalling the article. Something else to look forward to.

  The popcorn maker whined and spun the kernels in its heated centrifuge. She loved the slightly burned smell that always came out first. As the popcorn began its tiny staccato explosions there was a television timeout. A local news brief came on. Barbara couldn't hear it over the popcorn noise, but she could see police sedans and people standing around at night looking concerned and confused.

  The screen cut to people strolling through a mall, shopping bags dangling from their hands, little kids trailing behind. Holiday decorations littered the scene behind them.

  The popcorn maker whirred and spit out fat white puffs. Barbara stared at her husband's bald spot above his chair in the other room. Emily had said she didn't detect anything amiss with her father, but how could she? Gerald had never shown their daughter his weak side, never let her in on problems. He insisted that they always hide troubles from her, never fight in front of her. Always avoid conflict. Act as if nothing is ever wrong. He wanted her life to be easy, but really, had he done her any favors?

  Barbara dumped popcorn into separate bowls and shook organic cheddar salt on top. She had long ago nixed the real salt and butter Gerald liked so much.

  “What was on the news?” she asked when she handed him his bowl. She slid back onto the couch and tucked her feet up under her.

  “Ah, something down around Town Lake. Somebody got mugged or something.”

  “That all? There sure was a lot of response for just a mugging. What was the other story about?”

  “Some big Thanksgiving sale. I don't know what. Apparently, retail sales are projected to be up this year.”

  “Well, that's a relief. I can't wait for this economy to turn around.”

  Emily

  SHE ADJUSTED the flight on one of her darts, aimed and nailed the bull's eye. Her opponent grumbled under his breath. Emily was hot even though she was distracted by thoughts of her lusty night with Travis. She was remembering the scratch of his beard on her skin, their smell lingering in the room when she awoke in the morning.

  Emily was angry with herself for being so quick to jump into bed with him, but old habits died hard. It had been a while since their hookup and not a word from him. She hadn't expected a call the next morning, but by now she expected he would have at least sent her a courtesy text.

  Maybe she'd take another look at that dating site. Figure out how to go on a proper date with a fellow who might actually turn out to have a little moral character or at least some sort of future.

  “Hey Emily, did you hear about the dead girl?” someone behind her asked.

  She stopped mid-throw, “What dead girl?”

  It was one of her regulars. A cop. “Right down there around Town Lake. Street kid, I think.”

  “When did this happen?”

  “I saw the lights coming over here. Just other side of the bridge. Stopped to see if they needed an assist.”

  She handed her darts over to a friend.

  “Here, finish my game,” she said.

  Behind the bar, she opened the drawer where she stashed all the business cards guys left for her. On top was Lorelei's social worker. She stuffed the card into a pocket and punched Travis's number on speed dial on her way out. It certainly wouldn't hurt her position with him if she gave him a lead on a story.

  She rolled her bike into the alley and pressed Travis's number. It rang only once and went to voice mail.

  “Travis, it's Emily. It's about one a.m. and I'm headed down to Town Lake. One of my cop customers said they just found the body of a street kid on the walk. A girl. Call me.”

  It took only five minutes for her to ride down to the lake. The spot wasn't hard to find. She just followed the blue lights raking the dark tree line.

  Emily prayed that the dead girl wasn't Lorelei. The few times Lorelei had opened up she had talked about begging drunks for money. Maybe one of her early morning spanging marks had turned on her. Or she was prostituting. That never turned out good.

  Or maybe she'd overdosed. She'd told of sitting in fast-food joints all night, nursing a cup of coffee so they wouldn't run her off, but nobody could go night after night without sleeping. That meant some sort of stimulant. Meth users didn't sleep. Coke users didn't sleep either, but that was an expensive drug. She could be huffing. Chroming the kids called it now. Maybe she had a run-in with her drug dealer. Finding her passed out in Chuy's landscaping had pretty much solidified her as a user in Emily's mind.

  A group of uniforms and lights collected in a wooded part of the park. The body wasn't yet covered, and Emily caught her breath. The girl was face down in a tangle of autumn leaves, her head covered by a dirty sweatshirt. Her pleated skirt and hole-riddled tights seemed untouched. She looked flung down, discarded, heavy boots at odd angles, arms loose in their sockets. Tears rushed to Emily's eyes.

  She saw Travis was already there, busy talking to people, taking notes. He probably hadn't even listened to her message yet.

  Crime scene took photos. EMS put the body in a black glossy bag and hauled it up out of the park. They walked not ten feet from Emily. A city cop labored up the hill behind them as if he carried the world in the girl's worn out backpack. A weird watch face and a couple of cogs dangled from a zipper. Emily had seen that pack before.

  She suddenly wished for her camera and then felt guilty for the impulse. She heard someone say, “Homicide.”

  David appeared, hands shoved deep into his pockets, his head down as he came up the hill toward her.

  “It's not her,” he said.

  “I thought as much,” Emily said. “That's not Lorelei's backpack. Do you know the girl?”

  “She calls herself Fiona,” he said.

  “Oh, I know her.” Emily couldn't stop herself from raising a hand to her mouth in horror. She now knew a dead person, a murdered person. Someone younger than she was. It seemed impossible.

  “She's a good kid.” He struggled for what to say next. “Was a good kid. A little messed up, but…”

  “I'm so sorry.”

  “What? No. This happens.”

  “Not in my world.”

  He sighed
and hung his head again. “Now I have to make a phone call.”

  She waited for him to go on. Blue lights flashed across his weary eyes.

  “Her mother called a while back looking for her. I'd been trying to get Fiona to respond. Maybe go home. But she wouldn't even talk to me about it. I have to call her mother back. Better coming from me than from the morgue.”

  She looked down the hill at Travis. He was talking to the cops, scribbling on his long notepad, unshaken by any of it.

  “You going to tell the police?” Emily asked.

  “Not yet,” David said. “I mean, I'm pretty sure Fiona is this woman's daughter, but she'll have to provide some positive ID. That is if she even wants to come get the body.”

  Lorelei

  She had accompanied Mook and Elda to the plasma center, a ritual of the homeless who could fake a permanent address. Every week, sometimes multiple times, they sold their plasma for twenty dollars a pop by claiming they lived with his mother.

  Lorelei, who couldn't prove she was of age and didn't have an address, wasn't allowed to join her friends in the donation area with lounge chairs. Instead, she waited in the lobby in hard-molded plastic while her friends had their blood filtered.

  She hadn't told them anything about what had happened in the park the night before. She was afraid they would turn on her for not defending Fiona. After all, Fiona was one of them. They might force her out, or worse, Mook might make her talk to some of the cops he knew. So she had told them that she and Fiona had gone their separate ways after Betsy's.

  Everybody in town already knew about Fiona's death. It was all over the news. Lorelei had watched it twice on the small television mounted to the waiting room wall. Speculation was a drug related crime, an implication that her dealer had killed her. Another theory was tension between street tribes. Then there was the person who saw an old hobo with bloody hands come from the same area of the park. He was a prime suspect. They'd found his shopping caddy near the body.

  Would anyone ever know the truth? The old man made a comeback, ramming her assailant from behind. She was suddenly clawing her way from underneath the fight. She ran and didn't look back. She saw a blue emergency call box. She tore away the shield and flipped the handle. She ran again, staggering up a ramp to street level. She made it down an alley where she crouched behind a dumpster and listened for footfalls. She waited, wild with terror. She watched, hoping her friend would emerge from the park, fearing their attackers would appear instead.

  For many minutes, she waited, blood pounding in her ears, fear like metal in her mouth. She didn't know how long she waited, but her legs began to ache, and she touched the spots where she had been shot and winced. She was about ready to give up and move on when she saw movement on the ramp. Her heart leaped, then fell. Painfully, slowly, the beaten and bloody old man rose from the depths of the park. He walked several feet, then stopped to brace himself against a handrail.

  Lorelei wanted to rush to him and ask what had happened to her friend. She stood and cautiously moved his direction, but sirens suddenly blared, and she stepped back into the alley. Two cop cars converged on the spot. Officers poured out of the vehicles and rushed down the ramps.

  When Lorelei checked again, the old man had disappeared. Only a bloody handprint on a railing remained.

  The old hobo had saved her, but he hadn't been able to save Fiona. Maybe he hadn't intended to save either one of them. Self-preservation was most likely his only ambition. Wasn't that everybody's main goal, including her own? Lorelei figured that as soon as the thugs realized they had killed Fiona they had forgotten all about the old man and fled. He hadn't fought them off, they'd just decided to save themselves too.

  Through the plasma center's grimy windows Lorelei spotted a familiar face across the street. Angel was standing outside a nondescript building with a cluster of smokers. Lorelei knew an AA meeting when she saw one. She could pick them out in every city, no matter the time of day or how clandestine the location. She had a sudden urge to cross the street and throw her arms around the stocky Mexican cook. He'd been kind, but she couldn't risk that he would be sympathetic again.

  Mook and Elda came out with tan bandages around their elbows. Down the street, Mook sprang for a bag of tacos from a corner vendor, then they took a city bus to the Ramp Ranch, the new free skate park. Mook planned to be scarce so cops wouldn't question them about Fiona. Lorelei normally loved skate parks, had practically lived in them in L.A., but today the rasp of boards against concrete wasn't satisfying.

  The skate park was organized chaos. Boys were lined up five deep on each end of the bowl to drop in. Freestyle had scrawled Fiona's name on his board, then pushed off toward a section of stairs where other guys were grinding a rail.

  “She doesn't want to spend eternity with that pedophile stepdad standing over her grave,” Mook said. Elda insisted that he had to clue the police into Fiona's personal life. If he didn't, she would be buried in a pauper's grave. Lorelei kept tight lipped on the subject.

  A boy in skinny jeans zoomed by like a superhero, his shirt flapping behind. His board made a monster zip when he ripped tile at the lip of the bowl below them.

  “If I ever find out who killed her I'm going to kill that fucker myself. I was hoping she just OD'ed. Went out high. That would be the way to go.”

  “It happens,” Elda said to Lorelei. “A bunch of people decide they don't like gutter punks, and they start picking us off one by one.”

  Another bare chested boy sailed by, and Lorelei checked out the winged wheels on his shoulder. Suddenly, he jacked his board onto a rail with a loud ping and scraped down the metal edge. He fell and quickly recovered, but the knees of his pants were mangled.

  A couple of boys on BMX bikes laughed at his wipeout. “Epic fail!” they called. They gave him the hook ‘em horns hand signal every Texas fan knew.

  “Fuck. There's Travis,” Mook said. At the far end of the park was a guy Lorelei recognized. She'd seen him around, talking to other kids.

  “Who's he?” Lorelei asked.

  “Reporter for Be Here Now,” Elda said. “Travis Roberts.”

  A couple of the gay skaters whooshed by, scarves around their heads, the ends flying behind them. A skinhead waited his turn, a cigarette dangling from his snarl. The reporter walked up to the skinhead and started talking. He lit the skater's smoke, then one of his own.

  They watched as the reporter made his way along the edges of the park, talking to clusters of people. Lorelei expected Mook to wander away, but he just sat on the wall waiting.

  “Mook, man. Zup?” the reporter said.

  “I just can't get away from you, can I?” Mook smirked.

  “Now you hurt my feelings. Why don't you introduce me to your friend?”

  Mook gestured. “This here is Lorelei. This is Travis. He's our local do-good reporter of all things political. He's a liberal at heart, but don't cross him or he'll write some shit about you.”

  “I'm flattered. Hey, what do you guys think about the improvements to the park?”

  “That what your story is about? I thought you were probably here to ask around about Fiona. That's why we got the hell out of Dodge. We don't want to talk about her.”

  “So you came out here to avoid the po-po? It's not very far out.”

  “Good enough to lose them. Not good enough to lose you, I guess.”

  “I know she was your woman once. I'm sorry, man.” Travis frowned and kicked at the pavement. He looked into the distance, pulled on his cigarette. “It's got to be hard.”

  Mook stomped one end of his board and popped it into his hand. “Look, I came here to skate.” He shoved off and glided away.

  “What about you? You know anything about Fiona?” Travis asked the girls. Elda just walked away, but Lorelei stayed.

  “You're not really writing about the park. Are you?”

  He shrugged. “Looking for a story.”

  She shrugged back, mimicking him. “Well, I don't talk to re
porters. You guys always get it wrong.”

  “I've seen you around. How long have you been in Austin?”

  “A while.”

  “Where you from?”

  “Everywhere. Nowhere.”

  “Yeah, right. So what do you think happened to Fiona? I understand she had a bad habit.”

  “So? Who doesn't? You should find out what happened to her. That would make you a good reporter. Us kids, we don't know nothing.”

  “Somebody knows something,” he said. He smoked for a while, leaving the line of conversation open.

  Elda returned. “Hey, let's go grab a wash at Mickey D's.”

  “I'm down.” Lorelei grabbed her pack and roll. “Later.”

  They hiked across a field, briars picking at their legs. They dodged traffic to cross a busy road to a McDonald's. A honey-haired mother saw them coming and hurriedly crammed her child into a car seat. She climbed into the SUV and slammed her own door before the girls drew near. As they walked by, the young mother's caution registered in oval reflective surfaces. The car's locks engaged.

  They slipped in a side entrance and went directly to the bathroom, hoping for a single with a lock on the door, but there was no such luck. At least the bathroom had two sinks. Elda filled one with warm soapy water. She took a handful of the brown paper towels and used them to bathe.

  Lorelei brushed her teeth, then flossed. She was pulling the slick thread through her molars when the door opened and in walked a rotund woman with a child dangling from either hand.

  “Oh,” the woman said. “Oh, excuse me.” She tugged the children out the door. One cried out, “But I gotta pee pee!”

  “Better hurry,” Elda said.

  A minute later, the door flung wide, and a manager was standing there, all polyester and greasy face.

  “You have to leave. This restroom is for paying customers only.”

  “We are paying customers,” Elda said bluntly. “If you'll just give us a chance.”

  “Yeah,” Lorelei said. “Can't wait for the Big Mac and fries. Yum. I'm lovin’ it.”