Then came his pitch, the way in which he conversed. All carefully worked on. Movies had been studied, endless books read.
And, so long as people didn’t get too close, which they rarely did, his act held up just fine. But that also meant that he could never get too close—a certain distance had to be maintained. Ladies that took a shine to his polished act, which happened often, were taken out two or three times, so that he could practice, and then for reasons they would never know, unceremoniously dropped. The nice young man that they were starting to really like, the one that they had already told their mothers about, the one that might be, well, the one, all of a sudden became much too busy to return their calls, or take them out, or see them ever again.
So he had to keep moving. No ties. No close friends. He couldn’t walk down Main Street and find the sidewalks littered with girlfriends from days gone by. He might start to get a name for himself, or worse, they might start to talk about him. He tried to select with care, seeking out the kind of women that dated often, that wouldn’t make too much of a couple of dinner dates, which was why he found it all the more puzzling that he had chosen to take Elena out. He didn’t like the way that her weird son had looked at him. Still, there was something about her. Something that made him want to ask her out, and not just as a way to practice and polish his act. He liked her. And he didn’t like many people. He had seen something in her eyes, something that he recognized. Toughness, steely determination, maybe. She had been hurt but she was too strong to crumble and fall. He was strong too. So he would take her out. Two strong people having dinner together.
Henrietta stood in front of the door. It was locked. Only she had a key. Roger rarely ventured up to the top floor of their home. The maid, Teresa, was under strict instructions to leave it well alone. Roger thought it was Henrietta’s office. She had even less need for an office than he did.
She took a moment before she went in, a moment to remind herself of what she had done, of what was going to happen. It would come out soon enough, all of it. She found the thought didn’t frighten her as much as it probably should have.
She still felt nauseous though. Nauseous enough to vomit.
She blamed him for it. He had driven her to it. Driven her mad. Not guilty by reason of insanity.
She needed to be a mother again. They’d tried for years and years after Thomas had died. Then the doctors told her that her body repelled Roger’s sperm. It did that to protect her, they’d said. She had thought it an apt metaphor for their relationship from that point onward.
Roger took the news well, stiff upper lip; moved swiftly on, as was his way.
She closed her eyes, pressing her head against the door. She could remember their last discussion about it vividly.
“We could adopt?” she’d said.
“I hear there’s a waiting list for Western babies as long as my arm. We’ll be much too old by the time a suitable one becomes available.”
“How about an older child?”
“They’ll be too set in their ways, and I’m much too set in mine. We might clash.”
“We could look abroad?”
That always got his attention. “A Chinese might be nice. Superb intellect and inbuilt subservience. You know, the children in China start the school day by raising their flag and reciting the national anthem? Can you imagine the English doing that? They wouldn’t know the words. And the ones that did certainly wouldn’t know the second verse.”
“Darling, no one knows the second verse.”
He’d cleared his throat and taken a sip of water. She’d raised her hand to stop the singing before it began.
“I read an article about Russia the other day. We might be able to get a baby there, a white one too. We could say it was our own,” she’d said.
“I’m not sure about Russians. Blunt, serious, and mostly chain-smokers. Corrupt too.”
She banged her head against the door gently, the memory alone enough to sap her energy.
That’s how all the conversations had gone, in one form or another. Every time she’d brought up a serious subject, he’d reduced it to something silly. Over the years it had become perfectly obvious, if never voiced, that he didn’t want children. He was too selfish, too busy and too . . . uncaring wasn’t exactly the right word, but he most definitively wasn’t paternal. No, she couldn’t imagine him cooing over a baby, or chasing after a toddler. He wasn’t a bad man, far from it, he just wasn’t the man for her. And she had known that almost from the day they had met.
On paper they were a good fit: offspring of the wealthy, wanting for nothing. It soon became apparent it was the only thing they shared, the glue that held the fragments of their relationship together. The glue had been like cement at first, with their parents so pleased and their future so effortless. But with the passing of each unpropitious day, the cement had been chipped away, until they were nothing more than polite strangers sailing toward a darkening sky.
She closed her eyes and turned the key, stepped inside and shut the door behind her.
He was in bed, where she had left him. His hair was light, like hers. She wanted to wash it. She would do later, when she was certain Roger wasn’t around.
She stood there for a long time, watching him sleep.
She’d spent nearly a year preparing his room. She’d painted it blue, with doves above his bed. She wasn’t a particularly skilled painter, but with the option of outside help precluded, she’d done her best.
Though he was light, she could see the mattress dip under his weight.
Sometimes she spent hours with him, other times only minutes, whatever time she could spare. She drew comfort from being near him. Roger wouldn’t understand that. Not many would.
She couldn’t keep him for too much longer though. She knew that. But letting go would be difficult. So very difficult.
She crept over to him, her bare feet sinking into the plush carpet.
She leaned down gently, then kissed his head, always dismayed by how cold his skin felt against her lips.
Jerry turned the key in the door, rattling it so that he wouldn’t startle his mother. He wondered if she were awake, and if so what kind of mood she would be in. There was no telling anymore.
He stepped into the hallway Dad had decorated thirty years ago. The house hadn’t been touched since then. Jerry liked the wallpaper—the flowers and the spots, the browns and the yellows. He reached out, running his hand over it. It was textured, bumpy in parts, smooth in others. He could hear noise in the kitchen.
“Hi, Mom,” he called.
He hung his jacket on the peg, next to Dad’s winter coat. His mother had told him to wear Dad’s winter coat when it was cold out. It was far too small though, and he had felt funny the one time he’d tried it on. It smelled of tobacco and cologne. And a little of mothballs.
Jerry liked moths. He liked how they were drawn to the light. He’d watched a movie about them once, or at least about a creature that looked like a moth. Dad had rented it from the video store on Main Street before it closed down.
“Mom, I’m home.”
He put his keys on the side table, next to Dad’s car key. Dad’s car sat in the garage. Jerry couldn’t drive. His mother said that he lacked spatial awareness so would most probably be involved in an accident. Dad had driven the same car for twenty-four years. A 1976 navy blue, Chevrolet Caprice Classic. Sometimes, when he was sure that his mother was asleep, Jerry would creep into the garage and sit in it. The car smelled of tobacco too. Though not of cologne or mothballs.
He unclipped his name badge. The badge was shiny. JERRY, ASSISTANT MANAGER. He’d been assistant manager since his first day. Max took the money for the badge from his paycheck. Jerry didn’t mind, the badge made him feel important.
He’d applied for the position after seeing it advertised in the local newspaper. He’d applied for lots of jobs, though until that point had never been asked to come in for an interview. Dad had said it was because he didn’t hav
e any qualifications. But there wasn’t much Jerry could’ve done about that as his mother had told him he wasn’t college material.
Dad had driven him the seventy miles to the High & Mighty store at the outlet mall by Pleasant Hill, to purchase a suit for the interview. The coat and pants hadn’t matched. It didn’t really matter though because Max said that he was the only person to respond to the advert so he had gotten the position by default. Mom had baked a cake to celebrate. She baked cakes for all sorts of occasions, even minor ones, like the time Jerry had won a goldfish at the carnival. The kids at school had said his mother was even weirder than him. He supposed Dad was weird too. He collected birds’ eggs. Jerry had once seen him get attacked by a blue jay. It didn’t do any real damage, but Dad was shaken enough to spend the next few days recuperating on the couch.
Jerry walked over to the kitchen door. He could hear sizzling. He could smell bacon. His stomach growled as he placed a hand on it.
He opened the door gently.
Mom stood with her back to him, facing the stove. She was naked.
Jerry blushed.
He hadn’t seen many naked women in his life. Last year, for his birthday, Max had given him some photographs of a girl he was seeing. A girl he was seeing even though he was engaged to Lisa. The girl wasn’t nearly as pretty as Lisa, and she was doing things to Max that he couldn’t imagine Lisa doing. Jerry had blushed when he’d seen those too. Max had laughed. Jerry kept the photographs in the drawer in his dark room. He’d wanted to throw them away, wanted to rip them up and throw them away. But something had stopped him. The same something that had stopped him leaving the room when Dad had rented Basic Instinct.
He looked at Mom. A spider web of veins bulged from the backs of her knees. Her skin was mottled, blotchy; stretch marks crept from head to toe, creases and folds as deep as caves.
He cleared his throat.
Mom span around, startled. Her gold crucifix nestled between her sagging breasts.
She screamed.
It was a piercing scream.
He held his hands up, his face stricken.
Mom reached for the pan and threw it at him. The oil splashed over his stomach and legs. He could feel the heat begin to sear his skin.
He stepped back.
Mom reached for a knife.
He tried not to scream himself.
“Mom. It’s Jerry,” he said, trying to keep his tone soft.
She clutched the knife tightly, fear in her eyes.
His skin was burning.
She took a step toward him, raised the knife.
And then he opened his mouth, and he sang.
He sang “Ave Maria,” like he used to when he was in the choir and Mom used to sit on the front pew and cry.
She stopped.
She stopped still and listened.
And then she dropped the knife, and she looked down at his legs, and at the pan on the floor. And she started to cry.
She fell into his arms, and he started to cry too. But he didn’t stop singing, because she loved it so much.
9
SomAli
“How do I look? Honest answers only, please,” Elena said, spinning round slowly, trying to get a read on the four sets of eyes staring at her.
“Hot,” French John said, lying back on her bed, quite exhausted from all the excitement.
“I like it,” Furat said, as she dusted some lint from Elena’s black dress; the dress that Danny had bought for her when he’d first made his money.
“You look pretty, Mommy,” Thalia said, while trying to balance in the sparkly shoes she had found in her mother’s closet.
“It’s too short. Like . . . whore short,” Manny said, wrinkling his nose in displeasure.
French John groaned. “She looks great, Manny. Try to be objective.”
“No offense, French, but you can’t really tell whether she looks hot or not.”
“And why’s that?”
French John braced himself for the answer, as did Furat, Elena, and even Thalia.
“Because she doesn’t have a cock.”
French John laughed.
Elena did not. She picked up the nearest object to hand, her lipstick, and threw it at her son.
“Jesus, Ma, that could have hit me in the head or something.”
“Good. Maybe it would have knocked some sense into you. Apologize to French. And what about your sister? She’s heard enough of your language to last a lifetime.”
Furat picked up a small, framed photograph on the dressing table, beside a dizzying array of powders and creams.
“What’s this? It looks like Manny, only he’s thinner and wearing boxing gloves,” Furat said.
French John snatched the photo before Manny could, smiling as he looked at it.
“Manny took up boxing. He got obsessed with the Rocky movies, you know the ones? Sly Stallone plays a mentally handicapped boxer.”
He looked up just in time to see Manny’s mouth fall open and a fire ignite behind his eyes.
“Shit, French. He wasn’t mental. He just spoke funny. You try getting your head caved in two thousand times and see if you can still function properly. He always won though. Fucking tough that kid.”
Elena ushered Thalia out and toward the television in the living room.
“So what happened? Why did you quit and gain the weight?” Furat asked.
“He trained hard for two months, lost about ten pounds . . .”
“Twenty,” Manny said.
“. . . And then he thought he was ready to fight, so he found this boxing roadshow you could enter online. He chose this little Indian boy as an opponent . . .”
“He was Somali.”
“The morning before the fight he tried to get all the local kids to come out and run with him, like that scene in the movie.”
“Lazy fuckers wouldn’t get out of bed. And then Mr. Walters, in the grocery store, he wouldn’t throw me an apple as I ran past. I had to stop and pay for it first,” Manny said.
“So we all drove to this church hall just outside of Tall Oaks, and the place was full of red necks baying for blood. This Indian boy . . .”
“Somali.”
“. . . he showed up with his dad, and just as he was getting warmed up the lights shut off. We all thought there had been a power cut, and then we hear the theme music from Rocky. And Abe shines a flashlight . . .”
“It was a spotlight.”
“. . . on the door, and we see Manny jumping up and down, draped in an American flag. This poor Somali boy looked terrified.”
“No shit he looked terrified. I was all ripped-up and sexy. Had my hair set all nice with curls on the neck, black shorts with gold trim, fucking deadly. I had Abe in my corner, he was supposed to be like Mickey, all motivational and shit. But the kid knows nothing about boxing. I would’ve been better off with French in my corner, if he could’ve torn his eyes away from all the muscle-bound hunks fighting that night. I had these sweet boots too, cost like two hundred dollars but we got them half off because my feet are so small.”
“So, what happened?” Furat asked.
French John went to speak, but Manny held a hand up to silence him.
“Turned out this kid was some kind of wizard in the ring. Like Ali or some shit. I’m trying to hit him but he just keeps dancing around. When I read his profile, and saw that he was from Somalia, I thought he’d be all skinny and weak, you know, because their water’s full of shit particles. But then, just as I got a read on his rhythm and was about to hand his ass to him, Abe must have pressed the spotlight or something, because for a second I was dazzled. And then this sneaky fucking Somali, who probably had some weights in his gloves, not that anyone checked, saw that I was effectively blind and cracked me on the nose. It was a dirty shot. I thought, fuck this shit. I’m not fighting a cheat. So I ducked out of the ring and walked out. The crowd knew he was dirty, they were booing and cursing.”
“Were you
hurt?”
“Nah, small break in the bone. Wasn’t nothing.”
“He was hurt. My heart broke when he cried in the car on the way to the hospital,” Elena said, catching her son’s hard stare in the mirror.
French John bit his lip hard enough to draw blood, though still couldn’t rein in his laughter.
“I didn’t cry. You get hit in the nose and your eyes water. Everybody knows that.”
“Poor Abe was shaken too. We had to get the doctor to take a look at him. Seeing all that blood made him feel faint.”
“So you just quit? I think you looked good with the weight off, and without that mustache. Why is your mustache that shape by the way?” Furat said.
French John turned away from them, now biting his fist.
“I had to quit. She wouldn’t let me fight anymore. Probably would’ve been champ by now, regional at least. And it’s this shape because it’s gangster,” Manny said, smoothing the arrow down.
Elena stood and spun round again.
French John whistled. Manny glowered.
Jim played the interview tape again. He could repeat it verbatim. After hearing Jess’s latest revelations he hadn’t been able to sleep, hadn’t been able to eat. It was like the beginning all over again. He rubbed his eyes, then his neck. He felt tired, worn to the point of ruin. He could only imagine how Jess felt. He’d have to stop sleeping in the car, his body couldn’t take it.
He opened the Harry Monroe case file, felt the familiar sense of dread. It was heavy, full of interview transcripts, forensic reports, possible sightings and leads. There were photographs of Harry inside, too many to count. Jess had dropped them in. He didn’t need them all, had the kid’s face seared into his mind.
Tall Oaks: A gripping missing child thriller with a devastating twist Page 7