Delia kept drawing, adding in a ball for Baxter and stylized ocean waves for him to dive into. She needed something to do to quell her rising anxiety as Hayley formed what looked like a family. Where the hell where they? The murky land of art therapy demanded a different language that was more like poetry, all symbols and metaphors.
“He’s so far away. Can those two see him or hear him?” said Regina. She started in on another mouse, following Hayley’s lead.
“He can’t talk. See, he doesn’t have a mouth,” said Hayley, with a tinge of exasperation at Regina’s inability to see the obvious.
“And who is this?” Regina said, pointing her marker at the larger of the two remaining figures. Hayley drew two tear lines cascading from of the eyes of the figure that had hair, eyes, a mouth, arms, and a triangular skirt.
“This is Mommy. She says, be a good girl.” Then Hayley took a black crayon and drew a line under the mommy, then a dark line over the top of her head, and finally two wobbly lines that connected the two, forming a sort of box. “Uncle Ray said, Mommy was naughty and tried to run away with me. Now she has to stay in the naughty place.”
Delia dropped her crayon. Her heart knocked against her ribs. Regina, undaunted, forged ahead, keeping her voice even, soft, and interested, and sticking with the drawing. Delia was familiar with Regina’s approach. “If you talk about their drawing, not their life, suddenly they have the safety and freedom to talk,” Regina told her when they first started working together several years ago. Delia trusted her, even though now she had to squeeze her lips together to keep from asking this little girl for precise details.
“Can the little girl see inside the naughty place? What color goes in the naughty place?” Regina asked. She started to draw an enclosure around one plump mouse. “I’m going to give my mouse a door that she can open.”
Hayley looked at Regina’s drawing. She reached across the coffee table and stroked the mouse. “Come out, Mama Mouse. Baby mouse is waiting for you. She is sad,” said Hayley. She turned back to her drawing and picked up a green marker. She colored a rough green blob in the corner of the naughty room. “Mama likes plants. This plant is for her.”
Regina took a green crayon and drew a single green stalk of a plant, reached over and took Delia’s red marker, and made fat red circles. “Mama Mouse likes flowers too, big red ones, like roses. Oh, they make Mama Mouse wish they could all be together again.”
Delia felt like she was watching a split screen TV. On one screen, a diminutive woman and little girl drew on their papers with crayons and markers, talking about mice and mommies and flowers and naughty rooms. On the other screen, Delia saw a father, distanced from his young family, and a mother who was sad, punished for running away with her child. Both screens were veiled in fog, the dialogue in a foreign language without subtitles.
Tingles of pain brought Delia back to the present. One foot squawked from lack of circulation. She shifted her weight and massaged the abused foot and ankle. Regina wouldn’t go on much longer. She kept her sessions with young children short, twenty minutes, maybe thirty.
“Mama Mouse has a door on her house.” With her fingers, Regina walked an imaginary mouse out of the enclosure. “Come with me, baby mouse! Let’s go,” said Regina.
Louie the cat, absent for the art session, chose this moment to make his entrance, tail held high, stalking in with his mukluk-sized paws. Or maybe he was just announcing the end of the session. He pushed his way between Hayley and the table. Delia wondered if this cat wasn’t more of a butler or personal assistant to Hayley. Or a self-ordained familiar, a spiritual protector.
Regina, forewarned about the cat, reached in her pocket and took out a kitty kibble. Louie leapt over the table and followed Regina’s hand to a spot behind her.
“Where does the mommy run with the baby girl?” said Regina, absently coloring the sky again. This was a quantum leap for the art therapist, and Delia was grateful.
Hayley’s eyebrows rose up in the middle, her lower lip pulled up over her top lip. “Not the bacca barn or Uncle Ray will find you.” She stood up. “I need to pee,” she said.
“Okay, Hayley. I really liked drawing with you today,” said Regina as the child ran out of the room.
Delia stood up. “You are amazing. Can you send me your report later today? I’m going to make some notes as soon as I leave here, but your reports are so much better than my notes.”
Regina picked up each crayon and marker, putting them into zippered pouches. “There is so much sadness pumping off this child,” she said in a low voice. “I’d like to keep working with her if only to give her an outlet. I know you want information, but that can only be a side effect of these sessions.”
Regina’s professional voice always startled Delia, the sharp departure from little mice and crayons to the woman who had logged every emotion that poured out of Hayley onto the drawing. What did it look like inside Regina’s brain?
“I agree. You can work it out with Erica, and I’ll let Ira know that you’re going to keep working with her,” said Delia.
From the other side of the house, a toilet flushed.
“I need to wrap things up with Hayley,” said Regina, grabbing both drawings and shouldering her bag of supplies.
Hayley and Louie cuddled on the love seat that faced the kitchen island. This was a house centered on the kitchen.
“Can we trade drawings? You can have my little mice and I’ll take your drawing. What do you think?” said Regina.
All twenty pounds of Louie pressed against Hayley’s legs. Hayley shrugged in response to Regina.
Erica took the mouse drawing from Regina. “This looks like it needs a place of honor on the fridge.” She found one vacant spot on the fridge door and slapped on a few magnets. “Perfect.”
“I have to run, but I wanted to ask if I could bring my dog, Baxter, to visit the next time. How does Louie like dogs? I won’t bring Baxter if there’s any push-back from Louie,” said Delia.
Erica smiled. “Louie has frightened more than a few dogs, but we can try it. Just don’t expect him to back down. Let’s give it a trial run.”
That wasn’t the answer Delia was expecting. She had second thoughts about Baxter’s safety, the possibility of his tender nose shredded by the long claws of Louie the palace guard.
“I’ll warn him not to underestimate Louie. But I think you would like Baxter. I’ll see you all next time,” said Delia, heading for the door.
“Delia?” said Hayley. This was the first time she had addressed Delia by her name.
Delia turned back.
“Show your drawing to Baxter,” she said, petting the cat along his chin.
“Oh, my drawing. I almost forgot it. . . .”
Regina handed her the canine portrait. “We didn’t forget it.”
CHAPTER 30
Delia wasn’t surprised that the instant she stepped out of Erica’s house, Mike drove by at a ridiculously slow crawl down the street. And it wasn’t his police car. It was a black Maxima, sleek and fast, like a panther. Funny, that wasn’t what she expected him to drive. She took him for a pickup truck kind of guy.
He stopped at the end of the driveway, one elbow resting along the edge of the open window. Delia walked to his car, rolling her drawing into a tight cylinder.
“You’re off duty, aren’t you,” she said.
He smiled up at her. “The Dalai Lama once said that we should all be good to our mothers. That directive stopped me in my tracks. I was in college at UMass and I managed to get a ticket to see him from my favorite criminal justice professor. I thought he would say something more profound,” he said. “And then I realized just how profound it was.”
He looked smaller when he wasn’t in his high-tech cop car.
“You’re patrolling the street because of Hayley, aren’t you?”
He glanced in his rearview mirror as a car approached.
“I must have missed the topic sentence about the Dalai Lama,” she said.<
br />
“I know what you mean,” he said. “It’s like a Möbius strip. What if the mother is terrible, does drugs, and can’t or won’t take care of her kids? What was the Dalai Lama talking about when he said be good to your mother? It’s a chicken and egg kind of thing. If everywhere, all at once, we were all good to mothers, would it make us all kinder people who didn’t cause mayhem?”
“Have you been driving up and down Erica’s street thinking about this?” she asked.
A blue jay started scolding someone with a sharp squawk, and Delia suspected it was aimed at Louie the cat behind Delia’s house.
“I think about this all the time but in a background kind of way,” he said. “What if Hayley really knows where her mother is, but Raymond threatened Hayley that he’d harm her mother if she said anything?”
It was like Mike was walking arm in arm with Delia and Hayley, as if he’d been in the room when the child drew black lines around the mommy on the page. Or was he just that good?
“The Dalai Lama also said we’re screwed unless we keep the global population below six billion. I try not to think of that one.”
Delia wanted to keep talking about the conundrum of mothers, slide into Mike’s car, tilt her seat back, and watch the clouds through the moon roof while he drove. She longed for a moment like that.
“Change of topic,” she said. “I was just sitting in on a session with the art therapist and Hayley. There’s something you need to know. But we should get out of their driveway. Erica tries to live a normal life here. She has neighbors that are probably wondering right now who we are.”
Mike contracted, his muscles firmed along his face. Detective Moretti was back. “Can we go someplace nearby?” he said.
J Bird Café was already a place, not quite finished, but it held who Delia would soon become. “Follow me. There’s a place near Willard Beach.”
Delia led the way in her car. Her eyes flicked to the rearview mirror, watching the outline of Mike, sometimes catching the whites of his eyes latched onto her. The four-mile drive took forever.
She pulled in front of J Bird Café, and Mike pulled around in front of her. Must be a cop thing, she thought. They both stepped out of their cars.
“What do I need to know?” he said.
The squeal of a Skilsaw came from behind the café. J Bird said they’d be working on the back deck for the next few days, a last-minute addition.
“Hayley said that her mother is in the naughty place, that she tried to run away with Hayley, and they hid in the ‘back barn’ or in back of a barn, and Raymond found them and put Mommy in the naughty place,” said Delia.
All ruminations about the Dalai Lama were gone. Mike pulled out a small pad of paper. “I’m going to have to talk with her again,” he said. He had a way of looking through Delia, measuring, anticipating, remembering. A leaf might fall from a tree, land on his car, and he wouldn’t forget it.
“Please wait. This all just came out in the art therapy session. Regina hasn’t even had time to write a report. She promised it to me by the end of the day. But those were close to Hayley’s exact words.”
“Anything else?”
Delia had almost forgotten the first part of the drawing. She was glad that Regina was going to send her a detailed report. “Yes. It was a classic family drawing. She drew a father but he was farthest away. And he had no mouth and no arms.” It was low tide, and even from several blocks away, Delia smelled the large, flat ribbons of seaweed glistening in the sun.
“I need to talk with her tomorrow. We don’t know if this is fantasy or wishful thinking, but if I can get any shred of information from Hayley that helps us find the mother and find the link to this heroin, I’ve got to do it,” he said. He wasn’t asking, but he gave Delia the sense that he respected her and wanted to work with her.
Every part of him straightened and tensed.
“I need to be there when you talk to her. I’ll call Erica after I read Regina’s report,” she said.
“Is Igor coming with us again? The puppet was helpful, but I need to ask her very direct questions,” he said. There it was, the smile, his smooth lips, a tiny spot near the cleft in his chin where his razor had missed the black hairs.
The Skilsaw stopped and something hard, hopefully wood, hit the newly built deck.
“No. This time I’m bringing my dog, Baxter. Well, he’s my sister’s dog, really. Kids love him. There’s a chance that he could be a distraction to questioning, but I have a feeling that he’ll increase Hayley’s sense of safety. Plus, he’s a giant hunk of burning love, and she could use every bit of his special brand of affection.”
“Okay. Let’s hope he works as well as Igor,” he said.
Mike looked like an engine idling, getting ready to charge up. Was he was ready to leave, call headquarters, plug in more information, look again at reports of missing kids nationwide, searching for Hayley’s face? And yet she wanted a few more minutes of him. She wanted to pull him into this next world of hers, currently covered with brown paper over the front windows. How would he fit into her next world of baking bread, white aprons, wiping crumbs off their new counter? Could she keep him here a little longer?
“Is it easier when you work with adults, when you can ask someone directly who did what and when and how? I wish Hayley’s superpower were that she had a secret part of her brain that spoke adult, and she could tell us where her mother was. Or that we could take a picture of her brain and print out a memory card with everything on it like license plates and addresses. I feel more like an archaeologist deciphering hieroglyphics than a caseworker,” she said.
Mike slid the notepad into the back pocket of his jeans. “You’d be surprised how similar art therapy reports are to interviews with adult witnesses. I’ve learned a lot from my daughter, the way kids don’t have a filter installed when they speak the way adults do. The trouble is, their world is one big magical kingdom, and pulling concrete information out is the challenge,” he said. Mike leaned against Delia’s car, letting his legs angle out in front of him.
Where had this man come from?
“But how is that similar to adult witnesses?”
He tilted one shoulder toward her. “We each have a filter of perception that is unique to us. When you see a car accident, what you see will be different from what I see, or anyone else. Two eyewitnesses might not even agree on the color of a car, or the color of someone’s skin. If your art therapist asked each adult witness to draw a picture of the same car accident, she would have decidedly different images,” he said. “But investigators would go on the core similarities, the things that can’t be denied, and it might be something important that the witnesses didn’t know was important, like they might all have a hazy image of a pedestrian stepping off the sidewalk.”
While he spoke, a part of him looked farther away, distracted by the drawing of a child like Hayley.
“You sound like a therapist. Or a profiler. Or a weird shaman dressed up like a detective,” said Delia.
“I get the ‘weird’ part all the time from the other cops,” he said. “Don’t you dare tell them that I was spouting about the Dalai Lama. Now would you tell me why you chose this particular place to stop?” Mike said. “Are you involved in this place?” He turned toward the J Bird Café.
So the detective didn’t know everything. “This is the bakery-slash-café that my sister and I are opening next month. I’m leaving Foster Services in a few weeks. She is a master baker, and I’m a baker in training. Hayley is my last case. Come on in; I want to show you my new venture.”
“You’re leaving your job with Foster Services?” He sounded incredulous, his voice deepening, hovering above them.
“Don’t tell me that I’ve surprised the detective. I thought you knew everything about South Portland.” Surprising this man gave her a surge of pleasure. She reached into her purse and found the keys to the café. “Come on.”
She doubted very much that he didn’t know about J Bird Café. An im
age of him came to mind; a dragonfly whose head was primarily taken up by multiple eyes, able to see everything at once except for that which trailed behind him. What trailed behind the good detective?
He checked his watch and hesitated.
“You can’t do anything about the report until Regina turns it in. We’ve got to give her until the end of the day,” said Delia.
The cry of gulls was carried to them on the breeze.
“It’s not that. Well, it is that, but I’m also due to go to my daughter’s soccer practice. It’s my day to bring cool and original snacks. That was the exact assignment from my daughter,” he said, “even though I don’t know what could be cool or not cool about snacks.”
There was nothing like a daughter to flummox a dad. When J Bird was six, she threw a crying fit because their dad put the wrong barrette in her hair. The barrette was blue and she would only wear the purple one. Their father searched every drawer in the bathroom vanity until he found the perfect barrette. Even later, when medication and delusions exhausted him, Delia never would have drawn a family picture with him far off on the edge of the page, a man with no mouth. She would have drawn him holding her hand, his arm around their mother, and little J Bird in front of them, pressing her head against their father, the purple barrette firmly in place.
“Bring anything, orange slices or fruit Popsicles. Believe me, they will just love that you’re there,” she said, looking down to kick a small stone off the sidewalk. She swallowed the memory of her father and her mother.
When she looked up, he was watching her, full bore, all of his dragonfly eyes fragmenting her. Had he seen her shift into memory?
He lifted his chin toward the café. “Let’s take a look at your new career venture.” He pointed to the front door. “After you, Madam Barista.”
The front door was already open. A pile of round tables crowded the right corner, surrounded by stacked chairs. Two of the walls were painted coral and fuchsia, two more were primed, looking fresh and clean. Greg must have just finished installing the wood trim yesterday. But there was still no counter or display case, and much to Delia’s disappointment, only one of two ovens had arrived.
The Tiger in the House Page 14