The Runaway

by Jo Barney

  * * *

  Five years later, his father doesn’t come home all night or all day. The first few hours alone, Jeffrey is glad his father isn’t around. He smoothes the blanket on the couch and begins to read for the third time his favorite book, The Incredible Journey, the turning of its pages the only sound in the quiet apartment.

  He’s not afraid to be alone, but he is a little worried because the bread bag is empty. He uses his finger as a bookmark and lays the book on his chest. What would happen to him if his dad doesn’t show up for a long time? No way could he be on his own. Ten years old is like being a baby. Not like the teenagers on the street below who push him around and grab his jacket looking for money or candy. Those guys can take care of themselves, their dark shades and tattoos protecting them like the combat armor on the soldiers in the news. Nobody messes with them. He wishes he had a pair of sunglasses.

  The buzzer startles him. “It’s all right,” a voice says, and he presses the button to let her through the front door. Minutes later, a fat lady with a plastic ID tag around her neck walks in and tells him to pack up his clothes and, glancing at the book in his hand, perhaps a favorite book. “Your father won’t be home for a while,” she says. “We have a very nice foster family who will take care of you in the meantime.”

  In the meantime lasts until the trial is over. Mrs. Oscar, a social worker, he has learned, arrives and tells him to pack up again, he is going home. His grandfather is coming to take custody of him. “You are lucky to have a family member willing to take that responsibility. Some kids don’t.”

  Jeffrey looks around the small room that has been his for the past three weeks. What grandfather? He can smell dinner cooking, can hear his foster mother Helen tell the two other kids to wash up and be quick about it. Before he piles his clothes into the bag, he makes sure the bed is neat. That is one of Helen’s rules. She has a lot of rules, and he likes the way her rules make him feel safe, like streetcar tracks that know the way.

  “Come along.”

  In the car, Jeffrey learns that his father has been sentenced to ten years in the state penitentiary after pleading guilty to armed robbery and the attempted murder of a Chinese man who ran the corner market. “Your grandfather is coming in an hour on the train from Las Vegas. He’ll be here soon.”

  “I didn’t know I had a grandfather.”

  “Really!” Mrs. Oscar looks at her watch. “I have another appointment in a few minutes. Will you be all right alone for a little while once I get you settled back at your apartment?”

  “I guess,” Jeffrey says, still feeling the hug Helen gave him when she said good-bye. Maybe he could visit her once in a while? Mrs. Oscar shrugs, says maybe, and Jeff knows he probably won’t.

  After she leaves, he opens his book, but he’s read it too many times. He looks out the window. The mean guys are still there, but he sees someone moving through the tangle of legs and hoodies on the steps. The man, big in an overcoat and hat, takes a piece of paper from his pocket and then climbs up to the apartment house’s entry door. A second later, the buzzer rings, and Jeff picks up the intercom earpiece.

  “Yeah,” he says, not knowing that word is leading him into the next chapter of his life.

  “It is I,” a voice announces. “Your grandfather.”

  “Stupid,” the old man says once he’s gotten into the flat and explains himself. “Your father always was stupid. Never went to school unless the principal threatened no lunch if he didn’t come often enough, and that only lasted until he found ways to get free lunch without having to go to school. But first, let’s find somewhere to eat.”

  “Dad got free lunch?” Jeffrey asks, his mouth full of hamburger bun. He knows what that is, and he gets it, too, every day. He just didn’t know his father also had to put up with the eye-rolling classmates who pay for their food with weekly checks, not the blue ticket his teacher gives him that makes him less a kid than they are.

  “Why?” he asks. His and his grandfather’s fingers touch as they reach for fries on the tray between them.

  “We had very little money. I hurt my back on a job and was on workman’s comp. Mildred, your grandmother, was a good woman, but she died early. So it was Bucky and I on our own. We did quite well for a while, but he probably blamed me for the loss of his mother. That’s why, when he grew up, he left.” His grandfather’s watery eyes look out the window. Then he turns and smiles. “And now I’m here, meeting my grandson for the first time.”

  Jeffrey asks again, “Why?”

  The old man takes Jeffrey’s hand, his touch soft and unfamiliar. “Your father not only found ways to make money outside the usual accepted ways, but he also found ways to spend it.”

  Jeffrey’s savior has gray hair combed in neat ridges across his head, and his bright hooded eyes look at Jeffrey in a way he isn’t used to, into him, it seems like. His grandfather talks different, too, quiet, every word coming out like it is being tasted. Jeffrey listens hard, trying to understand what he is hearing. It isn’t that he doesn’t get the words, despite some of them that slip right by him; it is just the opposite. It seems like he understands more than the old man is saying, his voice sounding just the way a person would imagine a grandfather’s voice would be: low, tangled with laughter and sadness, a rope flung to a foundering boy. Foundering. His grandfather uses that word to describe Jeffrey, and he knows what it means even without knowing.

  “What should I call you?” Jeffrey asks.

  “Grandpa Jack. Does that suit you? And, if it’s okay with you, I’d like to call you Jeff. New names for our new life together.”

  Over the next couple of days, the two of them clean out the apartment, throw away most of the stuff that fills the drawers and the floor of the closet, and call Goodwill to pick up the furniture they won’t be using in their new place. During the packing and sorting and tossing, Grandpa Jack talks and Jeff listens until he feels okay about asking about some things that are bothering him. “How come I never met you before?” Then, even before Grandpa Jack can answer, “What did my father do that made you not want to be around him?”

  By the time their work is finished, Jeff has learned that his father was a thug and a drug dealer early on, and when Grandpa Jack called his son on it, he moved out, lived a dissolute life (his grandfather paused, explained “lawless, lost” when Jeff frowned) until he met Kathi, Jeff’s mother. Kathi was into drugs, but not bad. She meant well, kept their apartment clean, cooked every once in a while. When she got pregnant, she stopped the drugs and laid down the law with Bucky. She told him, who, proud of his woman, then told Grandpa Jack, “We’re going to have a normal life, you’re going to get a job, I’m going to be a mother, and we’re going to have a family.”

  Grandpa Jack sighs, wipes his lips with his paper napkin. “They almost made it. You were the glue holding Bucky and Kathi together for a few years. Then Kathi got bored with motherhood, and she started using again, and your father, who had taken a job as a school custodian, you were that important to him,” he says, pointing a “remember this” finger at Jeff, “flipped out and beat her up when he found her so high that she had left you alone for a day.”

  Jeff remembers a lot of times he came home to an empty house, but never one empty of his mother. In his memory, his red-lipped mother never left him until the day she left forever.

  “I was living in Phoenix at the time, glad that Bucky seemed to be shaping up, coming to adulthood in a satisfying way, when I got the letter from Kathi.” His grandfather takes a piece of paper from his pocket, presses out its creases, reads. “I’m leaving this town because I’ve become a bad mother and because your son has beaten me so bad I spent three days in the hospital. If ever Jeffrey needs a family, please take care of him. Of all the things I’ve done, he’s the very, very best.” Grandpa Jack passes the note to Jeff, and he sees that his mother had signed it with a heart over the i in her name.

  Jeff holds the paper in his hand and feels a weight lift from his body. His mother
did not leave because she didn’t love him. She didn’t love his father. He’d hurt her. Who wouldn’t leave? Then the next thought lands like a bag of rocks across his shoulders. Why didn’t she take him with her? He runs a finger over her name. She loved him. He can feel it, warm as he touches the heart. She was just messed up for a while. She might even be looking for him right now. He glances up, sees Grandpa Jack shaking his head.

  “She is dead, Jeff. The drugs.”

  It is his fault. If she hadn’t gotten pregnant, his mother and father wouldn’t have gotten married, would just have gone on doing what they were doing, nobody’s business. When he was born, he ruined everything. No wonder his father drank so much. No wonder his mother is dead.

  Jeff gives the paper back to Grandpa Jack and tries to pay attention to what the old man is saying.

  “I wrote to Bucky, when I got the note, that I couldn’t condone a man beating up a woman, the mother of his child. I told him I was not his father from that moment on. He was on his own. Good riddance.” Grandpa Jack squeezes Jeff’s hand. “But I didn’t take you into account, Jeff. I thought you’d be with your mother and taken care of. Until a week ago, when Children’s Services called and informed me that you needed me.” He wraps an arm around Jeff’s shoulder. “You and I have a second chance at being a family.”

  Jeff manages a smile. A second chance. This time he will not mess up.

  They move into an apartment a mile away from the old one, and, on his first day outside, on sidewalks that hold only a few old ladies on the porches and a lot of leaves in the gutter, Jeff skateboards into a new friend, Danny.

  * * *

  Grandpa Jack frightens Jeff a little the night he pulls up the bedcovers and slips in beside him. A hand passes over his chest and lies warmly on his penis and after a while, it doesn’t seem so strange.

  In those first months that they’ve lived together, his grandfather has told him that he loves him as he rubs his back or massages his legs. He assures Jeff he will never be unsafe again. He is a special boy, Grandpa Jack says, a wonderful grandson who brings happiness to an old man.

  “Like now,” he says this night, his hand moving a little. “Feels good, doesn’t it?”

  Jeff says yes.

  A few weeks later, Jeff helps his grandfather feel good, too. And when he cries out in pain, Grandpa Jack tells him it is part of growing up, of being a man, and he will be gentle until his body gets used to it. And his body does get used to it, and Jeff begins to sleep on the far edge of his bed and wait for the door to open and the mattress to sink, the covers to be lifted, letting in cold air and his grandfather.

  Chapter Four

  Matt Trommald

  1998-2000

  The boy stands motionless, looks through him, as Matt opens the door. “Collin?” His son seems not to have heard him. As Matt reaches out, asks, “How did you get here?” he notices a movement at the elevator. Marge is slipping into its closing doors.

  “Wait! What is this?” he calls. Too late.

  His fingers on Collin’s shoulder brush against a note pinned to the boy’s jacket sleeve. Collin has not moved, seems not to be breathing. Pee floods his small Nikes, pools on the hallway carpet. This is how it is with his son when he is afraid.

  Matt picks up Collin, who even at seven is small, frail even, and carries him to the bathroom, begins to strip him of his wet trousers. As he tugs on the green jacket’s zipper, the boy stiffens, his arms thrash upwards, his face becomes a terrified mask, and the sounds begin. The first time Matt heard that howl, the hairs on the back of his neck raised. Even now, five years later, his son’s fear stuns him. For a moment, he can’t think of what he is supposed to do. A flailing hand whips past his face, reminds him. He wraps his son in his arms and holds him tight; his It’s okay, buddy’s disappear into the roar erupting from the prisoner he confines.

  When the sounds become gasping sobs, Matt takes Collin into the living room sofa and pulls him onto his lap in front of the television. Collin likes television, the movement, the sounds that divert his attention for long moments. The boy breathes more easily. The tears have left salty white tracks on his cheeks.

  Matt unpins the note.

  I can’t do it anymore, Matt. I am not the mother Collin should have gotten. I am empty of love for him, and I am afraid not only for him, but for myself. He’s yours from now on. Don’t try to find me. I won’t be there. I’m sorry. Marge.

  The paper’s crumpling brings Collin’s head up. His hair brushes Matt’s lips, a breath of a kiss, an affection Collin never offers on purpose. Matt tightens his hug, and Collin sinks back against his chest. For the first time in years, Matt wants a drink, badly. Instead, he takes five deep breaths through his nose, as his rehab counselor taught him, and, while the quiet lasts, tries to think what to do.

  Marge has moved away, beyond their marriage, beyond the disturbing boy it produced, beyond the divorce that for a while offered each of them a few hours of peace as they passed their child from one to the other like a burning firebrand.

  She had gotten the worst of the custody arrangement, of course, spending weekdays and nights driving Collin to treatment and to his special pre-school and attempting to calm his agitation when his clothing itched, when his stuffed toy, a ragged rat, got lost in the blankets, when his class changed rooms and lost him, when the loud noise of a home run at his first and only baseball game stiffened him into a screaming, unmanageable tangle of arms and legs.

  Times like those, and many more, also happened on his watch, but Matt always knew that on Monday morning he could tuck his son’s clothes into a duffel, get into his patrol car, drop his weekend load at an open door, and get on with his real life as a cop.

  However, this warm, still lump in his lap, with its thumb and finger tapping again and again, as they have tapped for years, means that all has changed. At the moment, Matt can’t see beyond opening the suitcase propped against the wall in the hall and finding Rat before Collin misses him.

  The boy doesn’t stir when Matt moves him onto the cushion of the chair. The suitcase holds clothes, Rat, and the vial of meds prescribed to help him sleep. Moments later, Collin swallows the pill with the chocolate milk Matt keeps for him in the fridge, and he lets himself be led into the bedroom he knows as his from the weekends with his father. He wraps his fingers around Rat snuggling at his throat, its tail in his mouth, and that’s how Matt leaves his son, the door open a little, hall light on. If the pill works, Matt will have a few hours to try to figure things out.

  He needs to take a couple of days off. Nothing important is on his desk at the moment, and unless a new case comes in, he can hand his files to the others, keep in touch by phone. His team will understand. They always have.

  * * *

  He never blamed the drinking or the hell their marriage became on Collin’s autism. The falling apart started almost as soon as they got married, the bump not yet visible under her white suit, the truth that they did not love each other also buried under a façade of hope. After Collin was born, Marge changed from a young girl who laughed a lot to a haggard woman who couldn’t stop crying. The two of them crept through a black year. Despite the sadness of his mother, the gnawing feeling of helplessness in his father, Collin grew, grinned at them, slept through the night.

  Then, slowly, Madge recovered her self, learned to love her son. So did Matt. He didn’t understand how much until the night he, a rookie cop, faced a sixteen-year-old whose gun, held by two straight arms like Rambo, was aimed at his badge. Matt yelled a warning three times, his voice, not his own, cracking, and when the frenzied kid kept coming, yelling, “Kill me, kill me, before I kill you,” Matt reached for his weapon.

  His one shot didn’t kill him but sent the teenager into a lifetime of wheelchairs. Weeks later, the review committee’s report identified Sammy Williams as bipolar, damaged goods, known to be dangerous when manic. Matt was exonerated by the committee, but not by himself.

  Dreams brought sleepless nights. T
he contorted face, the screaming plea, the blood on the alley’s rough pavement, played in an endless loop of guilt he could not stop. Often he dreamed that the injured boy had Collin’s fat cheeks, his toothy laugh. He’d wake, go to his son’s crib, weep with relief.

  Matt started dropping by the cop bar for a few beers, coming home late for dinner to a silent wife, TV his evening companion. Arguments with Marge erupted like flash fires, singeing the air.

  Sometime during these unsteady months, Collin morphed from a smiling, talkative two-year-old into a silent, anxious, hyperactive thirty-pound tyrant who specialized in tantrums. He stopped talking. He wouldn’t look at his parents or anyone else who talked to him. He began to cringe when they picked him up. Bribes of ice cream could not make him say “Mama,” or “Papa,” or any other once-familiar word. This silent Collin seemed happiest building block towers, knocking them down, building them up again.

  His parents blamed each other.

  “If you would only give him a little more attention.”

  “If you didn’t pamper him like an exotic pet.”

  “If only…” They went out of their minds with if only’s and out of love with worry.

  When he realized that his son was broken, the phrase damaged goods played like a drum roll in his dreams. In some terrible way, Matt’s midnight tape developed a second loop that replayed all of the moments he’d been a shitty father, impatient, grim-lipped when Collin snatched the newspaper out of his hands, whined at the store, messed his pants as they were about to go somewhere.

  Some mornings he couldn’t get out of bed. When he was on duty, he counted the minutes until he could get to Mickey’s for a drink. The laughter, jokes, buddies who told him he was okay, made him believe it for a few hours. One night, drunk, he rubbed a hand on the uniformed back of a cheerful policewoman as she leaned toward him, listening to a joke someone was telling. Her skin was warm. So was his crotch. His hand drifted lower.