Billy Straight: A Novel (Petra Connor)

by Jonathan Kellerman

  “What did Lisa tell you about the incident?”

  “The incident!” he roared. “He went crazy over something and hauled off and hit her. She said it would be on TV, wanted us to know first. She said she was frightened of him—it’s the same old story every week in the ER, but to have your own daughter—you said you were a detective, right? Miss . . .”

  “Connor. Yes, sir, I am. And I know about domestic violence.”

  “Domestic violence,” said Boehlinger. “More PC crap. All we do is rename things. It’s wife beating! I’ve been married thirty-four years, never laid a finger on my wife! First he woos her like Prince Charming, then it all goes to hell in a handbasket and he’s Mr. Hyde—she was frightened of him, Miss Connor. Scared clean out of her mind. That’s why she left him. We begged her to come back to Ohio, not to stay in that psychotic swamp of yours. But she didn’t want to, loved the movies, had her goddamn career! Now look where it got her—oh Jesus God, my little baby girl, my baby my baby my baby!”

  CHAPTER

  13

  Sharla Straight, queasy, still half stoned, sat on the couch in the trailer’s front room as Buell “Motor” Moran ate cold beef stew out of the can and finished the last beer. She was still sore. He’d been rough with her, doing her from the back, clawing her buttocks. Her thoughts cleared partially and she pictured Billy’s face.

  Her sweet little— Motor grunted and destroyed her thoughts.

  He liked doing it that way because he could stand, not put weight on his hands or strain his back. The only benefit to her was she didn’t have to see his face.

  Even from the back, he smelled. Like unwashed clothes.

  Her whole life smelled like unwashed clothes.

  Her head hurt; tequila wasn’t good for her, specially the cheap stuff Motor got at the Stop & Shop. Beer was better, beer and weed the best of all because it made her feel far away from things, but they were out of weed and he hogged all the beer.

  He was a hog—one big mean, hairy pig, even bigger than Daddy. Remembering his nails digging into her hips, knowing they were black around the edges, she kept thinking: Dirty, he’s dirty, I’m dirty.

  Did she have to end up like this, or was there some other way?

  She didn’t know, she just didn’t know.

  The hot, dead haze that passed for air in the trailer felt smothering. The piece of cloth she’d nailed up to cover the small window over the bed had fallen half loose, but all she could see was a square of black. Everyone in the park was asleep, must be late—what time was it, anyway?

  What time was it where Billy was? If he was somewhere and not—

  Four months since that terrible day, and when she let it, the memory stuck her like a knife.

  Worrying about him lying in some ditch.

  Or cut up by some sicko.

  Or run over by a truck on some lonely road. That small, skinny white body, so small, he’d always been so small, except when he was a baby and had that fat face . . . ’cause she nursed him, she didn’t want to stop nursing him, even when nothing came out and her nipples bled, but the nuns made her stop, one of them, the tall one whose name she forgot ordering her, “Stop, girl. You’ll have plenty of opportunity to sacrifice.’’

  Billy gone. It had taken her almost two days to realize it was really true.

  He wasn’t there when she and Motor got home that night, but sometimes he took walks by himself, so she just fell asleep, not waking up till ten and then she figured he’d gone to school. When it got dark the next day, she knew something was wrong, but she was already stoned and couldn’t move.

  The next morning, no one to bring her instant coffee, she realized it had been way too long. Like a big knife, the panic cut through her and she started screaming silently to herself, Oh no, can’t be—where, why, who, why?

  She never said anything out loud, never showed the way she felt to Motor. To anyone.

  That day, after Motor went out, she left the trailer for the first morning in maybe a month, the sun hurting her eyes, aware now that her dress was dirty and one of her shoes had a big hole in it.

  Looking all around Watson; walking till her feet hurt.

  A real hot day, plenty of birds out, people she never really looked at, cats and dogs and more people. She covered every field and grove, the stores, the Stop & Shop, the Sunnyside, even the school, because maybe he just spent the night somewhere and went to school by himself, even though that made no sense at all—why would he do that?

  But lots of times things didn’t make sense; she’d learned a long time ago not to wait for things to make sense.

  So she kept walking, looking, checking it all out. Buying a Pepsi at the Stop along with a Payday bar, just to keep fueled; those peanuts were good energy.

  Not asking anyone if they’d seen him, just looking, because she didn’t want anyone to think she was that bad of a mother.

  Not telling the sheriff, for sure, because he might get suspicious, go through the trailer, find the stash.

  That night, she told Motor, and he said, Big deal. It was just a fucking runaway situation, happened all the time, hell, he’d run away when he was fifteen after beating the shit out of his old man, and hadn’t she done it, too? Everyone ran. Finally the little shit had developed some balls.

  But Billy, only twelve, looking younger, so small—that wasn’t the same thing as her running or a big hog like Motor, no way.

  The day she looked everywhere, no one asked what she was doing, where Billy was. Not the first day, the second, the third, never. Not once.

  Four months now, still no questions. Not the school, the neighbors—for sure no friends, because Billy never had friends, probably her fault, because when he was little she was living all by herself out in that even worse trailer with some people she was still trying to forget about. Man, she’d been wasted; she didn’t think anyone had hurt Billy.

  He’d always been a quiet kid, even as a baby, so quiet, you’d never know he was even there . . .

  Tears flowed from deep inside her head, flooding her closed eyelids, swelling them, and she had to open them a little to let the water out.

  When she did, she was almost surprised to find herself back in the trailer, nothing changed, seeing the dim outlines of the kitchenette, Motor sitting there stuffing his face, dirty dishes, sour, more sour, everything sour.

  Where was her little man?

  The day after he disappeared, she had a nightmare of it being some dark, damp place, a torture chamber, some crazy person finding him walking in the groves, one of those guys you hear about, cruising near schools, other places, snatching kids, doing what they want with ’em, cutting ’em. She woke up shaking and sweating, her stomach burning like she’d swallowed fire.

  Motor snored as she watched the sun lighten the cloth over the trailer window. Too afraid to move. Or think. Then thinking about the torture chamber and getting sick to her stomach.

  Rushing to the john and throwing up, trying to do it quietly so as not to wake Motor.

  Every night for a week she woke up sweating from the dreams, careful not to move or say anything to wake up Motor.

  Sick with guilt and fear, the horrible person she was, the worst mother in the world, never shoulda been a mother, never shoulda been born herself, all she caused in the world was misery and sin, she deserved to be pronged from the back by a hog . . .

  The nightmares went away when she found the Tampax money missing and knew what had happened.

  Escape. A plan.

  She’d saved that money for a long time, keeping it from Motor and all the others before him, her own stash.

  For what?

  Just in case.

  In case what?

  Nothing.

  Better Billy should have it; let’s face it, she’d never use it, didn’t deserve to use it, the worst mother in the whole world.

  Maybe not the worst—that crazy girl who drove those two babies into a lake, that was worse. And she’d seen on TV about some gir
l jumping off a building holding her baby. That was worse.

  Some people burned their kids or beat ’em—she sure knew about that—but it didn’t say much for her that the only worse thing she could compare herself to was stuff like that, did it?

  The truth was, she was bad enough.

  No wonder Billy’d had to escape.

  No escape for her, she wasn’t smart enough, good enough, just like Daddy had said: Something missing, tapping his head with one hand.

  Trying to say she was stupid or crazy.

  She wasn’t, but . . .

  She could think fine when she wasn’t stoned.

  Okay, reading was hard for her, so were numbers, but she could think, she knew she could think. She herself didn’t understand the things she did sometimes, but she wasn’t crazy. No way.

  Better not to think . . . but where would Billy escape to?

  So small and skinny.

  No surprise there. Look where he’d come from.

  Weird the way it had happened. Because she usually liked the big ones. Big like Daddy. Hogs, like Motor and others. Names and faces she’d forgotten—all those high school football players and wrestlers doing to her just what Daddy suspected they were doing, Daddy beating her ass even though he could never prove it.

  She’d wanted to explain it to Daddy: It ain’t hotpants; it’s the only chance to get close to people with goals.

  You didn’t explain to Daddy.

  Goals . . . it had been a long time since she’d thought about the future.

  Too many years of sour notes.

  Mixed in with one solitary sweet night, the prettiest little baby; those nuns had been grumpy but pretty good to her. She appreciated that, even though she knew they wanted her to give Billy up.

  No way; what was hers, was hers.

  She fed herself a little gumdrop memory of Billy’s fat baby face—she deserved a little sugar, didn’t she?

  That night, the night of—

  She’d been so much younger, prettier, skinnier, lying alone in the grove after midnight. Her choice to be alone—maybe that’s where Billy got it from!

  So maybe they were the same in at least one way!

  She found herself smiling, remembering that night, how she’d actually felt something.

  The warmth between her legs, all over her, the hard dirt didn’t even hurt her back.

  The orange trees green as bottle glass in the moonlight, snowy with flowers, because this was the blossom season, the whole grove smelling so creamy and sweet, a beautiful sky, dark with a halo of nice light overhead because the moon was big and fat and gold and dripping with light, like a butter-soaked pancake.

  Lying there after he kissed her and said sorry, have to go, her skirt still up, floating.

  Then a vibration—loud, close, as fast-moving clouds blocked out the moon.

  Cicadas, millions of them, swarming through the grove.

  She’d heard stories about them but had never seen them.

  Never seen them since, either.

  A onetime thing.

  Maybe it had been a dream, that whole night a dream . . .

  Huge bugs like that, should have been scary.

  Twice as huge as the shiny black wood bees that freaked the hell out of her when they zoomed out of nowhere.

  The cicadas were even noisier, so many of them, she should have been all froze up with fear.

  But she wasn’t. Just lay flat on her back, feeling sweet and female, one big package of pollen and honey, watching as the cicadas settled on row after row of orange tree, covering the entire grove, like bunches of gray-brown blanket.

  What were they doing? Eating the flowers? Chewing away at the tiny green oranges, bitter and hard as wood?

  But no, all at once they were all gone, zipping up into the sky and disappearing like some cartoon tornado, and the trees looked exactly the same.

  Night of the cicadas.

  Magic, almost like it had never happened.

  But it had. She sure had the proof.

  Where was Billy?

  CHAPTER

  14

  Lisa, you coke-snorting bitch.

  Dance with me and this is what happens.

  Dance around me and this is what happens.

  Oh, the joy.

  Ode to joy—wasn’t that Bach?

  He hated Bach. In the hospital where they’d taken his mother when she had to wear a football helmet, they played Bach and other classical crap.

  Trying to soothe the patients.

  Patients. Inmates is what they really were.

  Lisa had tried to drive him crazy.

  Tried to lead.

  Oh, the look on her face . . . dance with me, darling.

  CHAPTER

  15

  The domestic-violence tape played on all the eleven o’clock news broadcasts: Lisa and Cart Ramsey, both smooth and tan, immersed in Jacuzzi bubbles, lining up putts on the home green, doing a Roy Rogers–Dale Evans number on sleek horses, smooching for the paparazzi. Lisa as a beauty queen and a gorgeous bride, cut frantically with close-ups of her post-beating face.

  Then somber reporters intoning about the brutality of the dead woman’s wounds, followed by the department spokesman, a photogenic Parker Center captain named Salmagundi, fielding questions without really answering them.

  Petra watched it at her dinette table, hunched over another sandwich, feeling violated.

  After getting off the phone with Dr. Boehlinger, she’d tried to paint: a desert landscape she’d been working on for months, swirls of sienna and umber highlighted with acra red, the faintest hints of lavender, nostalgic flashes of hikes with her dad. As she dabbed, she was certain it was working.

  But when she stepped away from the canvas, she saw only mud, and when she tried to fix it, her strokes felt clumsy, as if her hands had suddenly seized up.

  Washing her brushes, she turned off the TV and thought some more about Dr. Boehlinger, and the mother who had yet to come home.

  What it was like to lose a child. A real child.

  What it would be like to have a child. That opened up the gates of hell as she remembered what pregnancy felt like, the almost crushing sense of importance.

  Suddenly she was crying, just gushing tears. Uncontrollably, except for one tiny corner of left hemisphere that watched and scolded: What the hell has gotten into you?

  What, indeed?

  She took several gasping breaths before she was able to stop, gave her eyes a brutal swipe with a paper napkin.

  Lord, what a spectacle, disgustingly maudlin. Poor John Everett Boehlinger and his wife have lost a human being, and you go on like the thing you expelled from your womb was close to human.

  A grape-size piece of pulp in bloody soup.

  A mass of bloody potential floating in the toilet as she’d kneeled and retched and cramped in agony, hating Nick enough to kill him for bringing it on.

  Because he had; she was sure of it. The stress, the cold disapproval.

  Walking out on her—exactly what he promised he’d never do. Because he’d been made to understand that she’d grown up without a mother, that her father was wasting away in a Tucson sanatorium, that being alone would be true hell. He must never, never walk out on her.

  Maybe he’d been sincere when he promised.

  A fertilized egg changed everything.

  I thought we agreed, Petra! We were using birth control, for God’s sake!

  Ninety percent effective isn’t one hundred, honey.

  So why didn’t you use something more reliable?

  I thought it was good enough— Apologizing? Was she really apologizing?

  Great, Petra. Fuck around with our lives like that. You’re an educated woman! How could you do anything so stupid?

  Bloody potential. Cramping so badly she felt she was being torn apart, she’d rested her cheek on the cold porcelain rim of the toilet, flushed, listened to it whirlpool away.

  Alone, barely able to stand, she drove herself
to the hospital. Tests, a D and C, more tests, three days in a semiprivate bed next to a woman who’d just birthed her fourth baby. Two boys, two girls, family members all around, cooing and ahing.

  The postcard from Nick came two weeks later. Brilliant sunset over sand. Santa Fe. Taking some time off to think. She never saw him again.

  The hole that opened in Petra’s consciousness expanded, hollowing her, lowering her immunity. More cramps, fever, an infection, back to the hospital.

  Outpatient follow-up. Feet in stirrups, too drained to feel demeaned.

  Dr. Franklin’s sad sympathy. Let’s talk in my office. Charts and pictures.

  Unable to focus any better than she had during all those mind-numbing boarding school health classes, she played dumb.

  What are you saying? I’m sterile?

  Franklin averted his eyes, dropped his glance to the floor. Just like suspects did when they were about to lie.

  No one can say that for sure, Petra. We have all sorts of procedures nowadays.

  She’d flushed away life, flushed her marriage.

  Gravitated toward a career full of death. Using the grief of others as a constant reminder of how bad it could get, her situation was okay—right? In that sense, the more brutal the better. Bring on the bodies.

  So why the hell was she crying? She hadn’t cried in years.

  This case? It had barely begun; she had no feel for the victim.

  Then she heard Lisa’s name and her aching eyes flew to the screen as the story flashed. Feeling stupid for being surprised—how could it be any other way? Now millions of people were viewing sixty seconds of tape that Stu and she hadn’t been allowed to ask for.

  Had Stu seen it? She knew he got to sleep as early as possible, especially when making up for lost nights. If he hadn’t seen it, he’d want to know. She supposed.

  She phoned his house in La Crescenta. Kathy Bishop answered, sounding subdued.

  “Did I wake you? Sorry—”

  “No, we’re up, Petra. We just watched it, too. Here’s Stu.”