by Jo Barney
Ellie
September 2009
I look up at this feathered crazy person and see the ten-year-old who came home with Danny one day. They’d met skateboarding on the sidewalk outside, and without a hello, he came in and glanced around our messy house, smirked at the drink in front of me, went to the fridge and looked for something to eat. From that moment on—him scrounging and coming up empty-handed, smiling at me, not really smiling, as he muttered “Shit,”—I disliked him. He was slippery. Always. Smiling one moment, leading Danny away the next.
When they were older, teenagers, I marked my bottles to keep track of how much liquor he was stealing from me. Not Danny, I told myself. I didn’t worry much about the beer. At the time I didn’t see any harm in it, until the day I came home and found them watching porn, drunk, cans piled in a wobbly pyramid in front of the TV. I yelled. They sent the cans flying all over the room and laughed as they ran out. That was when I understood I was losing my son. A year or so later, Danny left for good.
I have to keep talking, keep him distracted. Maybe one of the kids…no, they’re as still as the rocks they are hunched on. “You’ve blamed me for ten years because you did something stupid and almost got caught?”
“Not just you, Mrs. Miller. You, in fact, were only a last straw.” Jeff offers me that terrible smile one more time. “No, I blame everyone who has abandoned children—my own father, you, and the parents of children like these.”
Uneasy eyes watch us in the orange light. They must be able to see my body shaking under my heavy coat.
“So I learned to build loyal families like this one, taught them the rules of life.” He spreads both arms this time, like he’s some kind of priest offering a benediction. “I have given these lost children protection and education. At times I might have wanted something in return—love, perhaps—but I soon realized that love is a paltry emotion compared to what I create in my family. Allegiance. Respect. Safety.” He plucks at three fingers, counting his achievements.
“Your son, on the other hand, also blaming you, escaped into drugs, evaporated, a useless derelict. Until this week, when he walked into this camp.”
Jeff steps to a rock by the fire, picks up the knife, unsheathes it. “Recognize this, Mrs. Miller? It’s yours. The guilt for whatever it has done lies on your shoulders.”
It’s all coming back, bad scenes flaring like hot sparks from the coals behind me: a sad burned cat left at the building’s entry; the little neighbor kid who’d been hung out a window, my window, screaming, “Mommy,” his pee dripping on the sidewalk below; the newspapers stuffed into the heat register, set on fire, water from the fire engines pouring through the ceiling into the apartment below; the time the boys were sent home from school for bullying, Jeff laughing, Danny rubbing his bruised knuckles, crying. Me, I was mostly drunk those days, shaking my head; boys will be boys, I said, reaching for my glass. Who knows what else they were up to? Not me. I wasn’t there.
“You’re crazy. You always were.”
“So, Mrs. Miller. Are you surprised that after all these years I recognized you in your sad little disguise? It was the coat, actually, that gave you away, as ugly ten years ago as it is at this moment. Green-and-red plaid, fake-fur collar, you looked like a giant Christmas elf. Danny and I howled. I was glad you weren’t my mother.”
“So am I.”
I was so proud of that bargain coat. $5. When I put it on to show it off, Jeff said the collar looked like road kill, an opossum, and he turned it up around my face, saying he was looking for babies clinging to its underside. I hung it on an old wire hanger in the coat closet and never wore it again until today.
“Then, of course, there’s Smiley. The old man, before he passed out, told the boys and me that a woman took her in, kept her when she was sick. We had to leave before we could find out where this woman lived. I didn’t connect you with our lovely girl. So where is she now?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
He leans over me now, the knife steady in his hand. “No matter. We’ll find out sooner or later, Mrs. Miller.” He taps Danny on the nose with the blade. I see a flick of blueness. “Hit your son. Right there.”
I feel the point of the knife on the back of my neck. I bend down, pick up the bat. My fingers curl around the handle and I’m not thinking anymore.
I lean on the bat to stand up. Then I hold it with both hands, pointing it down at Danny, like I’m practicing, and bring it back up. But instead of aiming it at Danny, I pivot and swing the bat around my knees and against the legs behind me. Jeff laughs. He is so close I can smell him, an ugly, animal odor that somehow sends the pepper-spray can into my hand. I press the button, the spray aimed at his face.
“Fuck!” His palm rubs at his eyes as he lunges at me. I’m thrown to the ground. The weight of his body landing on top of me knocks the wind out of me. A hand reaches out, catches in my hair, and I sense him fumbling for the knife he must have dropped. “You whore!” he screams, his mouth at my ear. “You mother…”
I feel the knife enter my shoulder. I’m about to die, and a little surge of joy spurts through me. He’s right. I am a mother.
Then he grunts and falls hard against me again, and I can’t breathe. Dimly, I feel him being pulled off me. I hear Lila say, “Here, Grandma,” as she holds something against the pain in my shoulder.
I push with my good arm to prop myself up, and I see by the firelight that Jeff is lying face down next to me. A butcher knife with an Italian chef carved into its handle sticks out of his bare back. A dark river meanders along his spine. Around me, a circle is dissolving into fast-moving shadows grabbing at packs and bags, pausing a moment at my feet, whispering good-bye, disappearing into the trees.
Then silence, except for Danny’s groans and the startling crack of dry wood as the fire burns down. The shoulder of my old coat is wet with blood, and pain sends me down onto my elbows when I try to stand up. I’m wondering if I will bleed to death before someone finds us. Danny’s sounds stop with a low gurgle. Three more deaths for Matt Trommald to investigate, transients all of us.
I lie back down, reach my hand toward the cold fingers of my son, squeeze. Maybe he squeezes back. It doesn’t matter. We’re together.
* * *
The yellow of the last few coals is glowing like a faraway moon, when I hear voices.
“Over here.” Flashlights snake around us, blind me. Fingers press against my neck. “She’s alive.”
“So’s this one.”
Then I hear Sergeant Trommald’s voice talking on his phone, directing ambulances to the road above the park.
“Tell them to look for my cart,” I mumble, pleased to be able to help a little. He hears me, touches my cheek.
Chapter Forty-Four
Ellie
October 2009
Danny’s in my bed this time. After a few days in the hospital, they let him come home if someone is here to give him his pain pills and antibiotics. Someone is. Me, his mother.
“A disguise, Mom,” he explains. I’m sitting in the chair next to the bed, listening and pouring ice water when he needs it. “I had to lose what I am, a husband and a father, and turn into a guy working undercover. Took me a while to get the dreads arranged. Part of them is not my own hair.” He pulls on one of those ugly tails and teases me. “I kind of like them.”
The teasing feels like love. Maybe it also was years before and I didn’t get it. “I do, too,” I lie. “I’d like them better if they were red or blue. I got food dye.”
My son’s face is red and blue, and green and purple. So is his body, which I have bathed a couple of times. A man’s body, but the warm, soapy washcloth feels the same as it did twenty-eight years ago. “So you were up in Green River and met a girl and got sober.”
“That’s about it. Only slower. Kristi stuck by me through treatment, my going to school, trying to figure out what I was going to do with my life, when I realized I actually had one. You’ll like her.”
“When will she come down to get you?”
“When I don’t look like a monster. We don’t want to alarm Gavin, and I guess I don’t want to upset her anymore than she’s already been upset. A week or so. So, how good are you at cutting hair?”
“You won’t need it for the next job?”
Danny, clean and sober, with a history of homelessness and living in woods, was hired to work in a special division of the Green River police department. Their assignment was to deal with the increase of violence in the town’s parks, under freeways, and in vacant buildings.
Transients liked the mild climate and the variety of drugs available in the area, but after several murders of young homeless kids, they got worried, asked for help. Danny was sent out to find what the police imagined were a couple of gangs torturing people for recreation. That search led to McLaughlin and this room.
I don’t want to think about the next job. I bet his wife doesn’t, either.
“No, I’ll be going back to school, I think. Regular law enforcement classes. Living in the woods isn’t a good way to be a father.”
Father. Shit. I’ve barely gotten my son back, and now he’s someone else’s father. I’ll have to get used to it. I don’t intend to let him go again, even though he’s three instead of one. I give him a sip of water. “And Jeff?”
“All we knew up north was that when the murders and abuse seemed to drop off up there, reports came in of similar killings down here in McLaughlin, two hundred miles away. We’d found a dead boy wrapped in a sleeping bag in an abandoned camp; the bag also held the DNA of a murdered girl and her unknown assailant. A few kids talked about the “family” they’d lived in the forest with and how they’d all run away, afraid of the guy who called himself their father. Jeff. They didn’t know his last name or anything else about him.
“Then the fingerprints were identified through army records, and I knew we were looking for Jeff. My Jeff. I was sent down to see if I could find him. I did.”
Danny closes his eyes, the meds taking hold again. “You knew he was nuts all along, didn’t you? I was pretty stupid.”
“Nope. You were just a kid who needed a friend, since you didn’t have much of a mother.”
And that is how we begin to apologize to each other.
* * *
I can’t stir or slice with my right arm, it being in a sling. Danny can barely stand up, but he can stir. Together we put together pumpkin pancakes, food bank again, and I find I can turn the cakes over left-handed if I aim carefully. We eat on the bed. I remember eating like this a long time ago when he had the flu and I sat at the foot and he propped himself up at the head and we tried not to spill Lipton noodle soup. Danny remembers, too. He and I have been doing a lot of remembering these past couple of days.
“I was a good mother, some of the time,” I say. “I did my best, until the demons took over. Then…”
“You did okay, Mom. I was a pretty good son, too, for a long time. Then hormones took over. You weren’t so good with the hormones.” He laughs. “You never could take a teenage joke.”
“The coat, for one? I’m still mad about that, and that coat almost got me, and you, killed.”
“No, I was thinking about the time I climbed down the rain spout and went to some girl’s house for the night. You saw the open window and thought I’d jumped two and half stories and was lying in the bushes dead.”
“Instead you were lying in someone else’s bed. No, that wasn’t a joke to me.”
“Only a kid would see the humor in that.”
“What goes around comes around. Better not have rain spouts near Gavin’s bedroom a few years from now.”
He raises his eyebrows, pretends he’s going to watch out for rain spouts. My son, a good man. He tells me that he loves me, that he didn’t call these past few years because he wasn’t sure how I felt about him. I tell him I wasn’t sure either until I saw his broken body, knew that I didn’t want to die without asking for his forgiveness.
So we have forgiven each other. And we are learning to laugh and to try not to spill on the bed and to stir and flip for each other.
We have talked to Sarah at the hospital by phone, so when it rings in the hall, I hope that the knock on the door means it’s a call for me, for us. The super nods and points and smiles. He is pleased to have heroes in his building. He has forgotten that I have given him notice. “It’s Sarah.”
“I’m getting better,” she says in answer to my first question. “I’m talking to a nice lady who works with raped women. I’m still in shock, I guess, but not so much. She says we’ll keep talking for a while, maybe a group, to help me with my dreams, even after I leave here.”
I have dreams, too. I’ll get over mine on my own, as usual, but I’m glad for her. “Good,” I say. “When do you get to leave?” I am not considering what my question means. It is my insides doing the asking.
“I guess I’ll be going to a group home. That’s what we talked about today.”
“And?” I am praying, if you can call it that, for her to ask the next question.
“I’m wondering.” She may be crying. Knowing her, I know she’s crying.
“What?”
“Maybe if I can stay with you? I don’t know…”
“Yes,” I say. “Somehow we’ll…”
Now I’m crying, just a little. I don’t want it to become a habit. The super is standing a few doors away, listening, I’m sure.
“Oh, Ellie. I can’t wait to come home.”
* * *
And two days later she does. Now I have a beat-up son on the davenport, and a beat-up girl in the bed, and I’m sleeping in the Barcalounger some renter has left behind and the super has lent me. Until I move. We move.
We have canned ham, even though it is past the eat-now-or-never date for most folks. We also are cooking boxed mashed potatoes, baked squash, overflow from a local organic garden, and warming a pie from an upscale restaurant that donates gourmet leftovers to volunteers who pick it up, deliver it to the food bank. A feast.
Danny is still on injury furlough, but he’s going home tomorrow. His wife has been advised of the leveling-off of his purple-turned-greenness and scabs. She is anxious to welcome him back. This is the longest time he has been away since Gavin was born, since he went undercover. She’s hoping, she says, he gets a desk job when he’s officially on the force. He’s looking, though, as he repeats her words to me, as if he’s ready for a rainspout escape. They’ll work it out.
I’ve bought a bottle of sparkling apple juice. We are sipping, munching on a pile of off-date trail mix. We have questions.
Sarah first. “Someone stabbed him—good riddance. Does anyone know who?”
“Absolute secrecy?” I ask.
She rolls her eyes yes.
“I have no idea. The knife was from my kitchen, yes. It was in my pocket, yes. I was flat on my stomach when it was used.”
“You must have an idea.” This Sarah will make it to college.
“Secrecy? Like I never said this?”
Eye roll.
“Jimmy was on one side of me, his hand on my knee to shut me up. Leaky was on a blanket at my feet, like a guardian angel, kind of. Everyone else was so petrified they were probably sh…”
“Mom. Conjecture. Facts, please.” Danny is back to being a policeman.
“No one moved. Better?”
“And?”
“When I swung the bat, I felt someone in my pocket, pushing the pepper spray can at me. I felt someone in my other pocket, pulling out the knife whose point had been making a hole in my leg. I may have dreamed all this.” I didn’t.
“One of their talents was pickpocketing,” Sarah says.
“Maybe still is.”
“Someone also knew enough to wipe the prints off the belly of the fat little chef.” Mine and someone else’s. Danny raises a glass to me, to a smart kid, as he catches my eye.
“Where are they?” Far, far away, I hope.
“Sergeant Trom
mald…” Danny begins.
“Matt,” I correct. We’re definitely on a first-name basis after all this activity.
“Matt said that Jimmy and Leaky are in a safe house, a kind of shelter for kids who will be in court, maybe in legal danger. They claim they don’t know who stabbed Starkey. Bebop and Jasper disappeared the night it all happened. Owl is now in a place for people like her, social worker and all. Goose is somewhere on the street; I guess she’s eighteen, on her own.”
“Lila?” I kind of admired her in her finery. Of course she is with Mouse somewhere.
“She’s back at home. Her grandma’s. She’s waiting for Mouse to show up. It might be a long wait.”
We think about these kids, the ways they’ve scattered in just a few days, the separate ways we’re going also, even as we sit here drinking sparkling cider.
“A family is pretty important for growing up, isn’t it?” Danny says.
And for growing old, I want to add.
“Jeff understood that much earlier than I did. I guess that’s why…” Danny is quiet for a minute, then keeps going. “I knew it. I just didn’t know how to get back to mine, and he had none to get back to.”
A knock. Matt comes in, settles down on the davenport, accepts a glass of cider. He’s been by a couple of times. One time he brought his son, a brilliant tech guy, Matt said, starting college. His son didn’t say much, just smiled at his father when Matt mentioned his help in finding the camp. He looked a little anxious to leave after a few minutes. I like that Matt shared his family with us, like we share ours with him. We’ll maybe be friends when things are all settled down.
We always have questions for him. This time he has questions for us. He looks at Danny. “I’ve been wondering. How did you know where to find Jeff in the forest?”
Danny shrugs. “The night Jeff and I ran away, we camped near there. It was a place we had done drugs at, even had a stash hidden about where the tent was—gone of course, by the time we decided to head north. I talked to a few street kids, and rumors of this Starkey person living in the county forest kept coming up. I wandered along the paths until I smelled the smoke and heard voices. And there he was. My old friend. Crazy as hell. Probably a murderer.” He shakes his head like he still can’t quite believe it.