Questions I Want to Ask You

by Michelle Falkoff

  The bag is closed with a binder clip, so I take it off and reach inside. Once I see what’s in it, I know my mother can’t be as monstrous as Aunt Reggie made her seem. She may have done bad things, and maybe she isn’t a great person overall, but I have no doubt that whatever she did, she did for me.

  Inside the bag is Max, my Curious George stuffed animal. As soon as I see it I have the faintest memories of holding it, though maybe that’s just my brain trying to fill in gaps, trying to give myself a history with my mother that isn’t real. But the fact that she kept it, all this time—that’s real.

  I go back to the notebook, looking for some pages I can decipher as a way in. Once I’ve gotten used to my mother’s messy handwriting when she thinks no one’s reading but her, I make out a bunch of drafts of the letter she eventually sent me, with lots of crossed-out words as she figured out exactly what she wanted to say. The last one is a messy replica of the letter I have in my backpack; she must have copied it out on a clean piece of paper to make sure I could read her writing. Aunt Reggie said she must have spent a lot of time working on it, that she’d never cared so much about words before, and here’s the evidence she was right. It’s the letter of someone who would keep Max for all these years.

  The other pages in the notebook are filled with scribbles that I eventually realize form a time line. There are dates written along the pink margin stripe, followed by brief snippets of text. The dates start from when I was really young, and at first some of the words are comprehensible. J started working late. J shot. J in evidence. $$$ from where? XY everywhere but Brooksby. OD. No no no.

  J is obviously for Joe. Dad. She’s tracked him on the job—first he started working late, then he got shot, then he got moved to the evidence room. This all lines up with what Jen and Dad told me. So far so good.

  The dollar signs aren’t hard to figure out either. Aunt Reggie said my mother was worried about Dad bringing home extra money; he said it was all from overtime, but apparently my mother didn’t believe him.

  XY takes me a little longer. I stare at the two letters for the longest time, but I don’t get it until I say them out loud, over and over again, until they lose their meaning, until they sound less like “Ex” and “Why” and more like “Oxy.”

  OxyContin, everywhere but Brooksby. Followed by OD. She’s telling herself the story of how she convinced herself Dad was selling drugs out of the evidence room. She’s showing how she put the pieces together. The pieces that turned out to be wrong.

  I keep reading. Took P. 2 found me. H in suitcase. I understand the first part, though seeing my own kidnapping described so casually feels a little anticlimactic. The last part isn’t too hard, either—the drugs planted in her suitcase must have been heroin. What does 2 found me mean, though? Is she referring to two cops? Did they put the heroin in her suitcase? How else could it have gotten there?

  I put the notebook down so I can think this one through. The cops who found her must have been the ones to plant the heroin; they’re the only ones who had access to her suitcase after she was arrested. She figured that out, but it wouldn’t have been enough to convince her Dad didn’t have a hand in it. He could have been working with those cops, giving them drugs that had been confiscated from dealers.

  Then it gets weirder. Bolo visited. Not J. J and P will be okay. Must keep P safe. Who’s Bolo? What did he tell her? It sounds like this is how she found out Dad hadn’t done what she thought. This is the missing piece I’ve been trying so hard to find. If I can find out who Bolo is, I’ll be that much closer to understanding everything.

  But first, I have to keep reading. There’s not much left. The next line skips ahead five years. Bolo tried to help me see P. 2 found out. Tracking me.

  One more line. I read it and feel a chill pass over me. I look down to see goose bumps all over my arms.

  This will never be over.

  22

  On Monday morning I go to the box in time for my regular class; I’ll start my official workday immediately afterward. The workout—called “Fran”—is a quickie, and we race to complete three rounds of barbell thrusters and pull-ups as fast as we can. Thankfully Dad and his cop buddies aren’t there; staying quiet with all the questions swirling around in my head would have been hard. The routine is quick but exhausting, harder than usual because I haven’t been here in a week, and it takes up so much of my mental energy I almost forget I’m supposed to stay—I find myself heading out to the parking lot after my shower almost reflexively, until I remember I’m not going anywhere until four.

  I spend most of the day learning how everything works: the cash register, the membership programs, the schedule sheets for trainers and nutritionists. I learn how to ring up sales of T-shirts and nutritional supplements and how to make smoothies at the juice bar. It’s mostly routine stuff, though Lainie, one of the trainers, lets me help teach one of the afternoon classes. Not the noon class, though—everyone seems to know about the breakup, so I get sent to pick up lunch for people while Maddie is working out. I see her car pulling into the parking lot as I head for the salad place, but I turn away before I can catch a glimpse of her face. I can’t handle seeing her right now, much as I want to; I’ve fucked things up so badly that I have some thinking to do before I can try and talk to her again.

  The day goes by faster than I expected, partly because working with the trainers and the nutritionist is so interesting, and all the other parts of the job are easy. It’s going to be a good summer. Before I know it four o’clock rolls around, and I can move on to phase two of my day. I decided after looking in the duffel bag that it’s worth doing some research, to see if I can find out what cops were working the drug beat back when my mother left. It’s a place to start, anyway. I’m pretty sure Dad found me by going through my internet search history, so using the home computer is no longer an option. I don’t know whether I have access to the high-school computers anymore, so I figure my best bet is the public library downtown.

  The computer lab is almost empty, so I get myself set up, wishing I’d brought a sweatshirt—the air conditioner seems to think it’s August, not June, and I’m freezing. I get my mother’s notebook out of my backpack, along with my own notebook; I’ll use her time line to see if I can find some possible names, particularly those two cops and this Bolo person.

  I begin my search with back issues of the Brooksby Gazette and start when my parents were in high school, to get a sense of history. I look for stories about drugs, and it’s a bummer how easy they are to find. At first there’s a lot of reporting on the prescription-drug epidemic, how more and more people are getting addicted to drugs like OxyContin and Percocet, leading to them shopping for doctors who are friendlier about giving prescriptions. The stories quickly shift to how people are turning to theft, then heroin, as their prescriptions run out. There are features on how this affected kids as well; I’m in the middle of a story about a hockey player who overdosed on heroin and died when I realize that’s the boyfriend of my mom’s that Aunt Reggie told me about. He can’t be the OD in the notes, though—the time line doesn’t work.

  I keep reading, the stories escalating in their panicky tone as I move through my dad’s first few years on the job, and my first couple of years in this world. I find the story about the heroin bust where my dad got shot—his name isn’t in the paper, but given the description of the shooting I know I’ve found the event he was talking about. He and the rest of the team raided a run-down house in the old part of town that turned out to be where a major dealer stored massive quantities of heroin. The dealer was there, but he wasn’t alone, and there was some sort of gunfight and Dad got hit. No one else was injured, and they never figured out which one of the dealer’s men was the shooter; the gun was unregistered, and they did manage to bust the dealer, so finding Dad’s shooter wasn’t much of a priority, I guess.

  I’m not surprised to find that Tom was the head of the team—that arrest was his big break, and after that he was promoted to lieuten
ant and put in charge of drug crimes. He was given broader authority, with more resources and people on his team. Some of the team members’ names are in the paper, so I write them in my notebook; the only name I recognize is Manny’s. There were op-eds both for and against the new strategy—some people were glad Brooksby was taking more aggressive action, but others pointed to how little progress the United States had made in the “war on drugs” since Reagan created the first federal drug czar position.

  After a few months, it became clear that whatever Tom was doing was working, and the stories start taking a more positive tone. I read one front-page article about a major bust, and then the stories disappear. Well, not entirely, but they aren’t big news anymore; they’re buried in the metro section, along with the rest of the police blotter, which goes from multiple reports of drug arrests for both dealing and use to the occasional drunk-and-disorderly or neighborhood dispute. The next big story doesn’t come for several years, in a weekend-edition update, with reference to a larger story in the Boston Globe.

  I switch over to the Globe website. There’s a profile of Tom for which he refused to be interviewed; he just issued a statement saying his team deserved all the credit and he was pleased Brooksby had turned itself around. He mentions some names; I check them against my earliest list and see that most are the same, though I note that Manny is no longer on it. The article mentions how impressive it is that Tom has basically ended Brooksby’s drug problem, while neighboring communities, like Lynn and Revere, are still struggling. Perhaps, the reporter suggests, the police departments in those cities should start emulating Tom a little more.

  Back to the Brooksby Gazette. But after that update, there’s pretty much nothing. It’s like drugs don’t even matter in Brooksby anymore. I’m not going to find any more names, that’s for sure. I look at the list I’ve written down and start working through each name online, to see if there’s some obvious way to figure out who might have been responsible for my mother’s arrest. I’m flying blind, though—I’ve got nothing to go on, and all I learn is that most of the guys on the list don’t have much in terms of online presence—their Facebook pages are all set to private, and there’s not much to find about them anywhere else.

  I look back at my mother’s time line. The point where she decided to leave comes after the OD; Jen had said the person who died was an old friend who’d moved away from Brooksby, along with some other people. I wonder whether learning the dead person’s name will help me. I’m not sure where to start, since I know looking at the Brooksby Gazette won’t help, so I go to the Lynn and Revere papers first, because those are the cities that came up in the article about Tom, but I don’t find anything that looks right. Of course I don’t—that would be too easy.

  I move on to the archives of the Salem and Danvers papers, and that’s when I find something that seems like it’s worth digging into. There’s a high-profile OD in Danvers, a man who would have been around my mother’s age, maybe a couple of years older. I read his obituary and discover he used to live in Brooksby, used to play hockey with my mother’s boyfriend who died. The date of the obituary doesn’t match the date on the list, but it looks like the date of the actual overdose does. This is it.

  But the man’s name itself means nothing to me, and the article doesn’t give me any other names to look into. I need help, but who should I ask? Usually when I have problems to work through I go to either Dad or Maddie, but neither of them is an option right now. I have to talk to someone who was on the force with my dad back then, someone who I can trust. The only person that comes to mind is Tom, but he’s still in charge of drug crimes, and I’d basically be telling him two members of his team are crooked. What if he doesn’t believe me? What if he starts asking around and I end up causing even more problems for my mother?

  There’s only one person who was around back then but isn’t connected to the drug beat now, and that’s Manny. Except he might be one of the people I’m looking for. It’s hard to imagine, though—he might not be my favorite person, but he and Dad have been friends for years. I think back to all the time I’ve spent with him at the gym, or at barbecues at Tom’s house every Fourth of July. It can’t be him.

  Can it?

  23

  Manny’s at the morning class all by himself—no Tom, no Dad. I’m starting to think Dad’s avoiding me as much as I’m avoiding him, but that’s fine for now. I have to get answers on my own. It’s just a question of how.

  “Heard you got yourself in some trouble,” Manny says while we’re warming up. “Didn’t mean to sell you out when I busted your boys, but man, your dad was pissed! Should’ve warned me you were sneaking off—I could have covered for you.”

  Would someone who ran my mother off be so interested in helping me keep out of trouble? I can’t believe it. Maybe I just don’t want to. “I went to visit my aunt,” I say, and watch to see his reaction.

  His face is stony. “That right?”

  I nod, and wait.

  “Regina, right? Nice girl. Knew her in high school.”

  “I bet you did,” I say.

  “You got something on your mind, little man?” Am I imagining it, or does his voice sound threatening? Maybe it’s just because we went to get our weights for the workout, and he’s picked up a thirty-six-kilogram kettlebell. It looks like a cartoon bomb, round and black. I grab my usual sixteen-kilogram bell and follow him back to the mat.

  “Maybe. Some questions. You have time to talk to me?” I try to sound casual, but my voice shakes a little.

  “Whatever you need,” Manny says. “You want to stop by the station later on?”

  Either he has no idea what I want to talk about, or he’s testing me—there’s no way I’m going to talk to him in front of my dad, let alone other cops. “Can we go somewhere more private?” I ask.

  “You can swing by my place tonight, after my shift. Should be home by six. I’ll pick us up some food. Beef subs from Vincenzo’s sound good? Love that place.” He sounds friendly now, which makes the prospect of going to his apartment alone more reasonable. I realize I’ve never been there, in all the years I’ve known him; every time we’ve socialized, it’s been at Tom’s place. It’s not so strange; it’s not like we have people over either.

  “I’m more into salads these days,” I say. “I’d take a Greek with no feta, if that’s okay.”

  He looks like he wants to make a comment about the salad, but I put on my best don’t-even-try-it face, and he seems to figure it out. “Whatever you say, little man.”

  After the workout we go up to the main desk, and he writes down his address on the back of a membership flyer, and then he leaves. I’ve got the rest of the day to think about whether this is a good idea.

  Work doesn’t go by nearly as fast this time. I spend most of it cleaning—washing towels, wiping down mats, scraping built-up dirt and grime off the weights. I’m not quick enough getting out of the box at lunchtime to avoid Maddie—we pass each other as she’s coming in and I’m heading out, and seeing her feels like getting punched in the neck. She has on the tank top I like with the little straps, her hair in a high ponytail, and I want so badly to talk to her, to tell her everything that’s happened since we last spoke. But she just glances at me like she barely notices I’m there; only her lips tightening tells me she’s even seen me, and that she’s still mad. Of course she is.

  The clock finally crawls its way to four o’clock and I kill time driving around before going to Manny’s at six. He lives in an old factory that was converted into shitty apartments back in the seventies, the logo of the printing press painted on its brick wall. I walk up to the front entrance and press the buzzer, and when the door clicks open I go upstairs to an apartment on the third floor. The building is bare and almost institutional, with gray walls and linoleum floors so stained I’m not sure what color they are. I pass door after door, some of which have garbage bags sitting outside of them that have clearly been there for some time. This isn’t exactly a high-
class establishment. I feel a sudden surge of gratitude for home; it’s not fancy, and sure, it could use some work, but it’s in a nice development surrounded by green grass when the season allows it, rather than patches of dirt and the railway for the train to Boston. And everyone takes out their trash.

  Manny’s apartment is at the end of the hallway. I knock and he yells for me to come in. The place is pretty much what I expect. It’s basically a studio, with a tiny kitchen on one side and a door that must lead to the bathroom right next to it. There’s a mattress on the floor in one corner and a threadbare couch on the other, and on the back wall is a big TV. In between the bed and the couch is a small card table, the kind with vinyl covering an almost puffy surface. Someone cut through the vinyl at some point, so there’s foam poking out. The apartment is making me very sad, and sorry for Manny, who’s standing in front of the fridge.

  “Something to drink, kid?”

  “Water’s good.”

  He pours me a glass from the tap, and I drop my backpack on a chair. There’s a white Vincenzo’s bag on the table, so I get out his sub and my salad and crumple up the bag. He comes over with my water and a beer and motions for me to sit in one of the rickety wooden chairs. Mine creaks when I sit down; I can’t imagine how his doesn’t break, given how big he is. He peels back the waxed paper around his sub and takes an enormous bite. I get out my salad and pick at it with a plastic spork, but I’m not hungry. I haven’t decided exactly how to get Manny to tell me what I need to know. I should have planned this better.

  “Pretty sad-looking dinner there,” he says. “You’re still on that Paleo shit, huh? Sure you don’t want to ditch it and split this sub?”