by Brent Coffey
Still bothered at the thought of Bruce eating frozen crap after her home cooked meal, Martha ignored tonight’s charge from Father Mack to “keep the faith.” The sermon provided the background noise she needed to channel her anger against remembered setbacks. This evening was Father Mack’s turn to be the background noise. This evening was Sara Madison’s turn to be the setback remembered…
“I’m sorry, but ulcerative colitis at your age presents a serious obstacle to adopting a young child,” Sara Madison, August’s social worker, had explained. “I’m sure the two of you would make great parents under ideal circumstances, but these aren’t ideal circumstances.”
“You think bouncing around from one foster home to the next is an ideal circumstance?” Bruce countered through clenched teeth. He tried to stay calm, but his anger, born out of disappointment, was too strong.
Sara took offense at Bruce’s accusation that she was “bouncing” August around to different homes. It hadn’t been her decision to place him in three different homes in the past two years. His previous foster parents had bailed on him when the state cut funding for the foster care program. She responded with forced composure, ignored his comment about August’s background, and returned the conversation to Bruce’s health:
“Look, Mr. Hudson, I’m just doing my job. I’m not passing judgment on you. I’m sure you’re a loving man and your wife is a loving woman. I know you want to provide a home for a child, and I commend you for being compassionate. I also know how much this means to you, and I hate to be the one who stands in your way, but August needs healthy parents.”
“I work! I work all the time. I work longer hours than you do. I work longer hours than any social worker in this city. Reconcile that with your perception that I’m an invalid,” Bruce spat out.
“I never said you were an invalid, and I don’t doubt that you work long hours. But, with all due respect, Mr. Hudson, your job is mostly a desk job. Raising a young child takes more energy than organizing a file cabinet. It requires a lot of get-up-and-go, not just the occasional standing that you do in court. According to the results of your physical, you suffer from limited mobility because of your ankles’ severe joint pain, you suffer from occasional loss of vision in both eyes, and your life expectancy is years below the average man’s.
“Again,” she held up both hands in a don’t-stone-the-messenger style, “I’m just repeating the facts your doctor provided our office with. You’re already fifty-five and in bad health, and August may find himself one parent short at an early age.”
“So what? At present he’s two parents short at a very early age!”
This was not going well. Home studies were supposed to be warm and friendly meet and greets. You meet the social worker. You greet the social worker. The social worker tells you what wonderful people you are for opening your home to a needy child. This, however, was no home study. This was a bitch named Sara Madison, Bruce would later tell Martha, hastily writing reasons in a notebook why ulcerative colitis, with all its complications, disqualified him from being an adoptive father.
The painful memory of their home study invited itself over and made itself comfy in Martha’s memory tonight, as she began drying dishes. As she waited for her disqualified (but compassionate!) husband to return, her heart hurt for Bruce, while remembering his fight with Sara. Suddenly, she wanted to cry. She wanted Bruce to come home. She wanted to be with him, to hold him, to tell him it wasn’t his fault they couldn’t adopt. She didn’t blame Bruce’s health for the obstacle in their attempted adoption, and she certainly didn’t blame Bruce. Bruce blamed Bruce. That’s why, she realized, he wants away from me. He’s ashamed. He lost August, and today he lost in court. She resolved not to complain about his trip out for frozen food. He needed his space tonight, and she decided to give it to him.
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Two weeks ago…
The dog, a gentle giant of a white and light brown St. Bernard, smelled bacon. Not imitation meat processed into a treat, but honest-to-god real bacon. The man had lured the dog upstairs, by giving it a few slices outside of the high-rise and then shoving the rest of the meat into his large overcoat’s pocket so the dog would follow him inside. The dog knew the rest of the nice man’s bacon was in his pocket. The dog didn’t know that the man had a serrated twelve inch carving knife next to the bacon in his pocket, and the dog didn’t know that the man wasn’t so nice.
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Toy blocks. She had to remember to bring him toy blocks next time. She’d promised him toy blocks two weeks ago and had forgotten to bring them during today’s visit. Sara Madison liked August. In fact, she liked all kids. She’d told her friends in college that she wanted to be a social worker because she understood kids. She’d grown up with seven siblings, three brothers and four sisters. She was the second oldest child in her family, and she had plenty of experience helping her mom care for the younger Madison clan. Glad to be in her line of work, it wasn’t like her to make a promise to a ward of the state (God! how she hated that term… it’s too formal for a little guy) and not keep it. “Next time, I’m going to bring you a whole bunch of brand new blocks with painted letters and numbers on them, and you’re going to have so much fun stacking them on each other and matching the colored letters with the same colored numbers! You’ll love ‘em, August,” she recalled saying. It was one of the few times she’d seen him smile. Smiling was such a rare occurrence for him that she’d silently applauded herself for a job well done. If she could make him smile after the little man had seen his jackass of a father kill the little tyke’s mother and commit suicide afterwards, then she was doing something right.
Driving home tonight, she felt guilty for not bringing August his blocks. She loved the foster kids in her district’s program, and she kept her promises to them. All her promises. This first broken promise of her career as a social worker troubled her. Never before had she promised to bring a child toys and failed to do it. She didn’t want to admit how scared she was after finding the dog in her bed, but the grip of fear that the dead dog held on her was the only cause she could think of for forgetting August’s blocks.
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Two weeks before tonight, and one week after she’d disqualified Bruce Hudson from being an adoptive father, Sara Madison had arrived home from work to her 1,100 square foot condo on the fifth-floor of East Camelot Towers in Back Bay, one of Boston’s 21 neighborhoods. She liked the location of her condo because it was close to the Charles River and within walking distance of a library. Despite living several floors up and despite having just arrived home from a stressful day of work, she took the stairs instead of the elevator. After all, she told herself, you’ll soon be thirty, and you need to stay in the same shape that you were in during college. She often motivated herself with small nuggets of wise suggestions. Taking the stairs was one such nugget.
Coming in the Towers’ front entrance and walking up the stairs had been a familiar experience. Passing her neighbors on the stairs had been a familiar experience. Walking down the hall of the fifth-floor to room 5C had been a familiar experience. Digging in her purse for her keys, unlocking the door, and letting herself in… all familiar as well. Finding blood splattered on her living room walls, her flat screen television smashed on the floor below its wall mount, her plants uprooted and dumped out of their containers, well, all of that was very unfamiliar. Eventually, she’d find a dead dog, (A whole fucking St. Bernard! she’d tell police) a near two hundred pound fully grown dead dog with the underside of its belly ripped open and its entrails dangling out like tentacles, casually lying in her bed with glossy eyes opened in her direction. That would be unfamiliar too.
As Sara first absorbed the vandalism inflicted on her home, she stood stone still in her condo’s front entrance, unaware that she’d dropped her purse and that she hadn’t removed the keys from her open door. She could only
stare. Then, she could only tremble. With fear coursing through her like so many seizures, she took in the horror of her home’s condition, with the sight of everything she owned spread in a wild fashion. There was her silverware, her fine china, her books, empty dresser drawers, and laundry… flung all over the living room floor. She tried to think, to reason, to explain to herself what she was seeing, but her mind couldn’t answer What happened? Reluctant to recognize the war zone that was her place, she could only stand in the doorway, taking in the chaos of the room. When she finally allowed herself to acknowledge that she was the victim of a break-in, she willed herself to exorcise the demon of terror possessing her, the trembling stopped, and she decided the safest course of action was to call out before entering.
“Hello? Is someone in here?”
An eerie quietness invited her in.
She called again, and there was still no response.
She took a cautious step inside, keeping the door open in case she needed a quick exit.
Quickly and quietly, she surveyed the damage further. Stepping over her belongings, she felt like a federal agent noting the path of a tornado. When she got over the shock of seeing her condo vandalized, she heard a furious noise coming from the kitchen and slowly advanced towards the sound. Coming around a corner, her peripheral vision spied her sink running full blast with a towel clogging the drain, causing an onslaught of water to spill over the sink’s countertop. She hurried across the flooded linoleum to end the downpour. After she shut off the sink, she next heard the quieter sound of her microwave beeping behind her. Turning away from the sink, she saw her microwave’s digital screen flashing “FINISHED.” With a shaky hand, she opened the unit’s door and found her family photo album inside. The album’s cover picture had been melted with wicked electric heat into a glob of distorted faces. Horrified, she backed away from the microwave only to hear the crunching sound of glass. Portions of her coffee maker’s carafe ground beneath her shoes, and she glanced down and spotted its nearby handle with shards of the former pot still attached. She’d had enough of the kitchen.
She stepped back into the living room, too stunned to notice that the wall behind her torn and gutted couch (with her entire screwdriver set stabbed in it like needles in an acupuncture patient) had reddish brown ALL CAPS letters reading, “Give August to the Hudsons,” written in dog blood. She’d see that later. And scream.
For now, she was curious about her bedroom. The condo was quiet enough that she believed that no one else was here. She stepped over her shoes, underwear, and makeup littering the space in front of her bedroom door, peeked inside, and saw the dog in her bed. It was too much. Its mouth open, its drooping tongue connected to the floor by a long trail of bloody spittle, its knotty guts and bits of half-digested bacon spilling out… she’d later realize that it was the source of the blood on her walls, as if someone had dipped a quill pen into an inkwell to send her a message, only this someone had taken a blade to a purebred and bled it for wall paint to make large, sloppy letters.
She was so hopped up on adrenaline that she first mistook the dog’s corpse for a person’s. That was when the first round of screaming began. Channeling her inner 2-year-old, she thrust stiff arms and fists down to her waist and voiced a shrill alarm that she could never have purposefully made. The screaming ended when she realized that, no, she wasn’t looking at a dead person, but, rather, a dead animal. That brought a small element of relief. Too disgusted to be within touching distance of the dog (or her bed ever, ever again), she backed out of her bedroom door and, turning, noticed the dog’s blood making words on the wall that once faced her (no longer) mounted television.
“Give August to the Hudsons,” she read aloud, hardly breathing. She panicked. Someone knew she’d disqualified Bruce from being an adoptive father because of his poor health. And someone was sending her a not-so-subtle message. That dog in your bed look cute to you? You wanna get in bed and cuddle with it? Maybe wrap its arms around you and nuzzle it? You’ll get a chance to cuddle with that dog, if you don’t give that August kid to the Hudsons.
She got the point. She called the police.
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Bruce stood in line with his third six-pack of the week and, precisely, one pot pie. The pot pie had been an excuse to drive to Stop and Run so he could buy more Guiness. Outraged thoughts of Gabriel Adelaide’s acquittal ran through his mind, and he also thought about his curious encounter with Gabe earlier that day. He couldn’t make heads or tails out of what Gabe had said to him. What did it mean for someone to get you your boy? And, then, standing in line waiting to checkout, he recalled the police having visited his home two weeks ago…
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It had been late in the evening, and, as usual, Bruce was sitting in his home’s office plugging away on his MacBook, writing an outline for the state’s presentation of the facts against Gabe. In The People of Massachusetts vs. Gabriel Adelaide, the people sketched the following argument:
I. Store cameras show Gabriel Adelaide entering Arthur Mulberry’s dry cleaning on March 14th, walking behind the counter, opening the register, and emptying its contents into a briefcase. Mulberry is also behind the counter and appears to be keeping a wary distance of him. After Adelaide leaves, Mulberry remains behind the counter instead of calling the police, as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. He didn’t phone for help because Adelaide was collecting his weekly premium for mob protection. If Mulberry had refused to pay the premium, his business would’ve suffered an “accident.”
II. Store cameras show Gabriel Adelaide entering Charles Bronston’s Chinese carryout on March 15th and repeating the events at Mulberry’s. Bronston also stood idly by without muttering a peep in protest and for the same reasons. Bronston didn’t want his establishment to burn to the ground because one of his employees “accidentally” left an oven on, anymore than he wanted to be dumped in the Atlantic with cinderblocks tied to his ankles and tightly wound stretch wrap preventing him from screaming as he drowned.
III. Persons of interest currently in witness protection, who shall remain anonymous due to a court order, have submitted sworn affidavits that they drove, escorted, and protected Adelaide as his associates during these weekly pickups of protection premiums.
IV. Fingerprints and DNA samples link Adelaide to…
That was when a knock on his front door interrupted Bruce’s work. Knowing that Martha had turned in for the evening, he rose from his late night shift at his desk and went to answer the door.
“Hey, Bruce, sorry to bother you at this hour, but we need to ask you some questions. Can we come in?”
Bruce was surprised to see his longtime colleague, Detective Richard Dorsey, and an officer (who he didn’t recognize) standing in his doorway. Bruce and Richard had collaborated on gathering evidence against the Adelaides for several years, and Bruce hoped Richard was stopping by to bring new information to combat Boston’s crime syndicate. Richard, who was around Bruce’s age, had a penchant for overeating, showed his age with gray and thinning hair, and pushed his weight around Boston’s cops to get the evidence he needed for compiling charges. Bruce was excited to see Richard, wanting Richard’s help with his outline.
“Of course, Richard. Come in. What’s going on?”
“I don’t quite know how to tell you this, ask you this really, but I’m sure the name Sara Madison rings a bell,” he said, hiking up his belt as he made himself at home.
“Yeah, I know her. She’s the social worker for this boy that Martha and I are trying to adopt.”
“Well, she says that you broke into her condo today. So, I’m obligated to ask you, even though I’d rather not. Did you do it?”
“What are you talking about? I’ve never been inside her condo. Hell, I didn’t even know that she lived in a condo. I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.”
Richard, without bothering to introduce his nameless co
worker, helped himself to a bowl of candy on the Hudsons’ coffee table and went on to describe the scene that Sara had discovered earlier that evening. Bruce listened, stunned beyond words. He was especially shocked to learn that his last name appeared at the scene of the crime. After listening to Richard’s recap, there was a lengthy period of contemplative silence.
Bruce finally worked up the nerve to ask, “Are you sure that’s what the message read?”
“No doubt about it. I went over to investigate, and I saw it myself. Her wall clearly reads, ‘Give August to the Hudsons,’ and the department has to assume that you’re connected to this crap somehow.”