“...was the one right over there,” I finished for her. I pointed to the opposite corner of the diner, where a glass phone booth had been built next to the bar. The phone was still intact, and a frayed old copy of the Hartford Yellow Pages was zip-tied to the wall of the booth.
“You tried to talk me out of it,” Des said.
“I didn’t want you to get hurt.”
“I just wanted to find her…” Des shook her head, eyes glazing over as they locked onto the booth. “You thought it was a bad idea, but you still came here with me. You brought a Ziploc bag full of quarters for the phone, and you sat here and waited while I dialed every number on the list…”
“There must have been dozens and dozens of phone numbers, and they were from all over the place, California, Arkansas, Maine, New Mexico, Oregon…” she shifted her eyes down towards her hands. “Every time I called a different number, I imagined a different version of my mother. I imagined my mom eating guacamole with movie stars on the beach in California, or living on a farm and baking apple pies in Arkansas, or being married to a fisherman and working at a lobster shack in Maine--”
The waitress in the mint-blue smock stomped to the edge of our table and thunked down a frosted shake glass filled with thick chocolate malt.
“One chocolate malt, two straws,” she barked, dropping a pair of paper-wrapped straws on the table between us. Then she turned on her heel and left us alone again.
“There was one thing that every version of my mother had in common,” Des said. “They all wanted me back.”
I swallowed heavily because I knew what came next. Des did, too. She sighed, reaching across the table for the straws. She tore away the paper wrapper and stabbed the straw into the malt, then she brought it to her lips and tried to suck. Nothing happened.
“Too soon,” I teased gently. “You gotta let it thaw, first.”
Des sighed, pushing the malt away.
“You sat right here,” she said, pushing the malt away. “You waited for me while I stuffed quarters into the payphone and dialed number after number…”
Des wrapped the paper straw wrapper around her fingers, looping it over and over until she cut off the circulation and her fingertips started to turn white.
“Some of them just hung up on me. Some of them got angry and threatened to report me to the cops if I tried calling them again. Some of them just laughed…” her voice was growing softer and softer. “But I didn’t care. None of them were my mother.”
I reached across the table and snapped the straw wrapper, breaking the hold it had on her fingers. The blood supply immediately returned to her fingertips, and I wrapped my hand around hers and held onto it.
“I was getting closer and closer to the bottom of the list, but I wasn’t ready to give up. I knew she was out there, somewhere....” Des continued. Her brow wrinkled together and her eyes remained cast downward, locked on our interwoven hands. “It was a Virginia phone number. Waverly, Virginia. I still know the phone number, by heart, but I’m sure she’s changed it by now…”
I squeezed her hand, and her eyes pinched shut as her frown deepened.
“As soon as she said ‘hello,’ I knew it was her. Which doesn’t make any sense, because I was just a baby when she left. I was too young to remember the sound of her voice… but somehow, when she picked up the phone that night, I just knew it was her.”
“I immediately starting crying and I forgot everything that I had planned on saying. The only thing I could say was ‘Mom?’”
I tightened my grip around her hand and rubbed her knuckles with my thumb. Des was silent for several seconds as she waded through the emotions resurging inside of her. Then she licked her lips and continued,
“She didn’t ask me how I was doing, or if I was happy. She didn’t ask anything about me. She just wanted to know where I was calling from, and whether or not my father knew that I had found her.”
A single tear bubbled through her eyelashes and rolled down her cheek, leaving a silvery trail that she didn’t bother brushing away.
“Then her voice got very flat. There was no emotion… she was just calm. She told me, ‘Desiree, you can’t call this number again. You can’t try to contact me again.’ She made me promise… and then she hung up.”
Des sunk back into the booth and sighed. She blinked her eyes open and gazed up at the water-stained ceiling tiles, and the crack in the glass light fixture…
“I started sobbing in the phone booth,” Des recalled. “My knees gave out, but you caught me. You wrapped your arms around me and you carried me back to this table. You sat by my side, and you held onto me until I had cried every last tear I had.”
“You offered to walk me home, but I didn’t want to go,” she sniffed. “So we sat here all night. That bag of payphone quarters was the only money we had… and it was just enough for a double order of fries. We had to split the chocolate malt; two straws.”
After that night, it had become a tradition. We would walk to Marcy’s after school or sneak there late at night. Every time, our order was exactly the same, fries and a chocolate malt, always paid for in spare change.
“I still remember the number, you know,” Des said, chuckling through the tears that glistened in the folds of her eyes. “After all of these years… I still remember that fucking phone number.”
“Did you ever try calling it again?” I asked.
“I thought about it,” Des admitted. “But I didn’t want to hurt her. She was obviously still terrified of the life she left behind in Hartford… of my father.”
Des sighed, pressing her lips together sadly.
“After he passed away, I thought about trying again,” she said. “Sometimes I would even get as far as dialing the first few digits of her phone number into my cell… but I always chickened out. I didn’t see the point of trying again.”
Still, as Desiree’s eyes traced back to the phone booth in the corner of the diner, I saw a flicker of curiosity ripple through her face.
I reached into the pocket of my Levi’s and fished out a pair of quarters, then I dropped them on the table.
“Do you want to try?” I asked.
Des glanced down at the shiny silver quarters, then back at the phone booth.
“No,” she said softly, shaking her head. “It’s taken me nearly my entire life, but I think I’ve finally made peace with it. My mother ran away because she was scared and didn’t know what else to do. Leaving wasn’t a choice… but staying away was. She chose to stay away. She chose to give up on me, and I have to accept that.”
“You could say the same thing about me,” I said, squeezing her hand.
Her eyes flicked up and met mine, and she stared at me sincerely for several seconds before shaking her head.
“You never gave up on me, Rory,” she said without taking her eyes away from mine. “You came back.”
The waitress scuttled back to our table and dropped a plate piled high with greasy, golden french fries drenched in neon orange liquid cheese between the two of us.
“Careful, it’s hot,” she mumbled.
Des wrinkled her nose and smiled down at the heap as the stench of hot grease and canned cheese wafted up from the mess of fries.
“This is absolutely disgusting,” I chuckled.
“No,” Des shook her head. “What’s ‘absolutely disgusting’ is that we used to polish off this whole damn plate.”
“In that case, we better dig in. We can’t head to our next stop until this plate is clean.”
“Next stop?” Des repeated, frowning. “We’re going somewhere after this?”
“Oh yeah,” I grinned. “We’ll be making a few stops tonight, actually…”
***
The sun was starting to set by the time we finished our french fries and chocolate malt, and the streets of downtown Hartford were already crowded with Friday night foot traffic. Pedestrians shuffled in and out of restaurants and bars, and the warm
air was flooded with the smell of food and beer.
Des and I walked hand-in-hand down the sidewalk, and nothing had ever felt more right in all my life…
Well, almost.
There was still a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach that I couldn’t ignore. It had nothing to do with Des… but it had everything to do with me, and what I was about to do.
After walking several blocks, we had gotten away from the hustle and bustle of downtown. The restaurants and bars were behind us, and we had reached a dead zone; a cluster of offices and government buildings that had closed their doors at 5 p.m., and would remain shuttered until Monday morning.
I knew that Des had to be curious about where I was taking her, but she didn’t ask any questions. She just held my hand and walked by my side, holding me steady as waves of emotions tried to drag me deeper and deeper away...
I hadn’t seen this place in over eleven years, but the building was burned into my memory like a cattle brand. I recognized it immediately. The walls were sterile concrete, and the windows were long and narrow rectangular slits. It looked like a prison… but in reality, it was something so much worse than that.
We were still half a block away when I stopped us on the sidewalk and turned to face Des.
“I was thinking about what you said the other night,” I said. “About how I always kept things hidden from you.”
“Rory, I--”
“You were right. You always shared everything with me -- like that night at Marcy’s Diner. But I couldn’t do the same. I always tried to keep my pain hidden from you.”
I glanced up at the building.
“That’s the courthouse,” I explained. “That’s the last place I ever saw my mother.”
Des was silent, but she squeezed my hand supportively and swayed closer towards me so her body pressed into mine.
“There was an emergency hearing the morning after her arrest, to decide what was going to happen to me,” I said, closing my eyes as I remembered the scene from that day. “For whatever fucked up reason, the social worker assigned to my case thought it’d be a good idea for me to be in the courtroom when my mother sat in front of the judge.”
I clenched my jaw, fighting through the chaos of nerves and pain that was exploding inside of me. I had buried this memory a long time ago, and digging it back up was like drilling a hole into a volcano and letting the molten lava spill out…
“I was sitting in the back of the courtroom when they brought her out. She didn’t even see me,” I continued. “She was wearing an orange jumpsuit, and she had handcuffs around her ankles and wrists. She looked so pale and sick. Her skin was grey and purple from all the bruises…”
My voice was growing strained from the unearthed emotions, and Des tightened her grip on my hand.
“We don’t have to do this,” she whispered.
“You deserve to know the truth about me,” I told her. Silently, I added, You deserve to know what you’re getting yourself into…
“She was facing charges… definite prison time,” I said, drifting back to that morning in the courtroom. “The judge asked her what she wanted to do about her son. My mother had her back to me, but I saw her shoulder rise. At first I thought she was crying… but then I realized that she had laughed.”
A scowl dug its way into my forehead and I felt my muscles stiffen with anger.
“The judge asked her why she was laughing. I’ll never forget what she told him. She said, ‘Why the hell should I care? Why don’t you just send him to live with his father? That’s what I should have done years ago.’”
“Oh my God, Rory…” Des sounded horrified. She threw her arms around me and, even though she was only half my size, she somehow managed to pull me into her chest and hold me tight.
“That morning, she signed over any legal right she had to me,” my voice went flat; numb. “She wasn’t my mother anymore. Not in the eyes of the law… and not in her own eyes, either.”
Des didn’t let go of me. For several minutes we stood there just like that, just a tiny woman holding onto a giant hulk of a broken man, on the street outside of the Hartford Courthouse.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO | DESIREE
According to the digital clock display on the dash in Rory’s car, it was nearly midnight.
Rory and I had spent the entire night wandering around Hartford, revisiting old places and memories. Some were good, others bad… but with every stop on the impromptu tour of our hometown, I found myself feeling closer and closer to Rory. Not just the Rory McAlister from my memories… but the Rory McAlister I was getting to know now, too.
Now, we were driving down an empty stretch of road on our way to the next stop on our tour.
“This is it,” Rory announced.
I didn’t even notice the side street until Rory turned the steering wheel to the left and made a sharp turn into nothingness.
At first I thought we were driving straight into total darkness; there was no street lamp or sign to mark the turn, and I didn’t see the road until the high beams flooded the road ahead of us with light.
An old, weathered sign was posted beside the road, reading ‘ROAD CLOSED, NO TRESPASSING’
“Are we supposed to be here?” I asked, even though I already knew the answer to that.
“I have to show you something,” Rory said, gripping tightly on the steering wheel and keeping his gaze pointed through the windshield. “I have to show you the ugliest part of me.”
The road looked like it hadn’t seen life in years. An untamed forest of trees grew freely on either side of us, and the pavement was cracked and eroded away over the years. Weeds had sprouted through the faults in the asphalt; nature slowly re-staking its claim.
As we neared the edge of the road, we reached a clearing where the trees had been plowed away and the earth had been leveled flat. I could see the wooden skeleton of a house erected on the flat land. It had been left unfinished, and over time it had started to rot and wither away.
“This whole area used to be woods,” Rory explained as he brought the car to a stop. “I used to come out here sometimes, just to hide out in the trees and get away. It was one of the few places in Hartford where I felt safe.”
“But... it’s so far away from your house?”
“I know,” Rory nodded. “That’s what I liked about it. Nobody would find me out here. It was like a sanctuary; my own private kingdom.”
Rory squeezed harder on the steering wheel, and he couldn’t look me in the eye. Instead, he stared straight out at the wooden skeleton.
Then, without saying another word, he popped open the latch on the driver side door and stepped out onto the street. Then he walked around to my side of the car and opened the door to help me out.
Crickets and cicadas purred in the distance, and the warm air was soft and still. Rory led the way towards the house, trudging through the overgrown weeds that had grown up from the dirt.
“One night, about a year before I left Hartford, my stepfather and I got into a huge fight,” he said. “He pulled a knife on me and I got on my bike and pedaled away as fast I could. I came here. I just wanted somewhere to hide and feel safe… but when I got here, the forest was gone.”
“Some developer had started hacking down all of the trees and leveling out the land to build a subdivision. They had already poured the asphalt for this road and started construction on the first house.”
He paused in front of a set of wooden steps leading up to a giant gap in the front of the house, presumably where a grand entryway would have been built. We both blinked up at the rotten, weathered framework of the house that never came to be.
“It was like one big fat reminder that nothing in this world was meant for me,” he said, darkness filling his eyes. “I had lost my hiding place. My private kingdom in the woods was going to become a subdivision of million dollar houses.”
He crossed his arms over his chest and glanced down at the ground.
&nb
sp; “I walked around the house, imagining where the kitchen and living room would someday go. All I could think about was the happy family that would live here someday,” he said. “I was never going to be a part of a family like that. I was never going to have a place where I belonged…”
He stared back up at the house and forced his eyes open.
“I wasn’t thinking straight,” he said. “I was so hurt, angry, confused… lost. I had a lighter and a flask of booze in my backpack. I didn’t even think about what I was doing until I saw the flames ignite.”
My heart was thumping in my chest and my eyes were stuck wide open as I listened, trying to make sense of what he was saying.
“As soon as I saw the fire eat through the wood, I realized what I had done,” he said. “I tried to stomping out the fire, but it was spreading so fast. I was panicking, and I threw myself on top of the flames to smother them.”
He slowly pulled up the hem of his t-shirt. It was dark, and at first I jaw the ridges of his sculpted six-pack abs. But when I squinted, I noticed something else, silvery splotches of scar tissue.
“My weight was enough to put out the fire before it spread any further,” he said. “But the burns were pretty bad.”
“Oh my God…” I murmured under my breath. “Rory… did you go to the hospital?”
“How could I? They would have asked me how I got burned,” Rory said. “Besides, we didn’t have health insurance. I had no way of paying for it.”
“B-but you were badly burned,” I stammered. “You must have been in horrible pain! Not to mention the risk of infection!”
“I deserved it,” he said. “I did something horrible.”
“But you made it right! You could have just walked away and let it burn… but you didn’t. You stayed. You stopped the fire--”
“I started the fire,” he cut me off. “I’ve never forgiven myself for that. How could anyone forgive something like that?”
I stared up at Rory. His dark eyes gleamed in the moonlight, waiting for me to react; to be horrified or shocked or appalled. But I was none of those things.
The Complete Firehouse 56 Series Page 73