Unaccompanied Minor
Page 20
“How do you know Alan Bertram’s private cell phone number?”
“Kid, let’s just say he and I go back. I’ve been around, you know” was all she’d admit.
She reminded me to filibuster my incident report as long as possible like Malcolm suggested I do in order to give Old Cinderblock some time to work some angles from his end. “And I don’t have to tell you—do I, kid?—to keep in mind that there might be one or two sleepers left to deal with.” She did not have to remind me.
This is why, when Investigator Peter DeAngelo of the NTSB stepped into the interrogation chamber, something clicked in my memory; it had to do with that slip of notepaper I’d pulled from Kathy’s little purse after I escaped the car trunk. At the time, among the indecipherable scribbling and penciled notations, all I could make out were the words “angel” and “angels,” but when I discovered the context the scribbling began to make more sense to me. First of all, one of the “angels” referred to Angels Among Us, the pet-rescue organization that unwittingly supplied the information mules for her money smuggling.
The other “angel” on the paper was not an angel at all, but “DeAngelo,” as in Investigator Peter DeAngelo of the NTSB. I was able to get a good look at his badge when he first stepped into the interrogation chamber to speak with Detective Henry. Ah, I realized, Agent Kowalski had said he would relay my message to the NTSB, which also explains why the landing coordinates faxed to the cockpit were meant to nosedive us into the tarmac.
“Hello, April,” he said when he finally turned to me. “I’m Investigator DeAngelo of the NTSB.”
Hello, sleeper, I thought to myself as I shook his hand.
5. Elizabeth Coleman Manning
I admire my mother because, though she’s not perfect, she did the absolute best she could given the circumstances, which were far from ideal. She married Ash in a misguided attempt to provide a father for me, and when that blew up in her face she fought with the ferocity of a grizzly bear to make things right. Not every (or hardly any) move she made in this regard helped matters, but considering the deck she had stacked against her, I’m in awe of the fact that she didn’t snap like a turkey bone and just give up. Other mothers have cracked under a lot less, Alby told me. (“And she could be like mine,” Malcolm said.) Also, I think it says something that, in the face of all this strife, she never once asked my granddaddy Roy to dip into my trust to help her out. I really do. It makes me remember the end of her sky stories, when she’d tell me right before I fell asleep, “Remember, April, I love you more than anything. I love you more than Grammy Mae, I love you more than Poppa Max, I love you more than Flo, I love you more than Ash. I love you more than I love myself, and I even love you more than you love yourself. I love you, I love you, I love you… ” and those were the words I heard as I drifted off to sleep.
After seeing my three best friends almost make a no-parachute skydive from the lower galley of the L-1011 on my fifteenth birthday, I understand now how horrifying and helpless it feels when someone you love is in danger. My mother understood I faced a threat in her divorce situation, and she knew the threat was way greater than Ash Manning, but she didn’t know what it was or why, for God’s sake, I faced it. The most she could do was try to learn to navigate the bizarro world of family court, and that takes time, believe me. Alby has been studying family law for five years, and it won’t be until next month when she finally takes the bar exam, “and even then you’re just beginning to map the battleground,” she says. That explains it pretty well, too. My mother was not even present at the right battleground. She was stuck in the real world, not the bizarro world of family law, where a mother’s proclamations of love for her child are used as a weapon against her.
Case in point: Even though Ash was in prison awaiting trial for colluding with hijackers, the court still wouldn’t return my custody to my mother. The reason? Despite everything, Kathy Landry was still my guardian ad litem and, get this, she had the gall to fire off a letter from her hospital bed recommending against returning me to my mother. Never mind that this shebeast had tried to kill me, and steal my trust fund by marrying my stepfather; never mind that my stepfather Ash Manning hasn’t seen me since his idiot actions almost killed me and one hundred fifty other people, including himself; never mind that she was party to the bombing of an aircraft; never mind that she used her status as a court officer to further her money-smuggling agenda. Never mind any of this, because all of this was happing in another court. In the eyes of family court, Kathy still had a paper with Judge Cheevers’s signature on it, and if there’s anything judges hate, it’s to have one of their bad decisions come back to slap them in the face. They hate it so much, in fact, that they’ll invent reasons against having to admit the decision was ever bad in the first place.
In Judge Cheevers’s case, all he did in response to my mother’s petition for emergency custody was file a response that said, simply, “The court sees no reason to readdress custody.”
It’s a good thing I’ve gotten pretty talented at navigating battlegrounds myself. So I took Alby’s advice and submitted a Petition for the Emancipation of a Minor on my own behalf. My mother is behind me on this. Some people would think this meant she was unfit to care for me, but we see that differently.
END.
Copyright © 2014 by Hollis Gillespie.
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ISBN 10: 1-4405-6773-5
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eISBN 10: 1-4405-6774-3
eISBN 13: 978-1-4405-6774-2
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, corporations, institutions, organizations, events, or locales in this novel are either the product of the author’s imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. The resemblance of any character to actual persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.
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