by Greg Rucka
“Shut up.”
“What I’m saying is that you may be right.”
“Just shut up, Tommy.”
“Miriam, what I’m saying is that for fifteen years, I’ve thought every day about you and Mikel and that accident.” He was blinking rapidly, as if there was grit in his eyes. The strain was making his voice climb little by little. “I don’t want you to forgive me. I can’t even forgive myself.”
“Then what the hell do you want? Is it money? Is that why you’re here?”
He looked horrified. “What? No—”
“I’ll tell you what, Tommy. I’ll go and write you a check right now, this very moment, if you can look me in the eye and stop lying long enough to say that it was murder, that it wasn’t accidental. None of this, I can’t remember, none of this, I was drunk.”
“Miriam—”
“What do you say? Thirty grand, would that do it? Just pulling a number from the air. I can go higher.”
He stared at me.
“Fifty,” I said. “Fifty grand, right now, you tell me you murdered her, you fucker.”
Tommy reached for the door, headed out. The sunlight was bright, and made me wince. He started across the porch.
I stuck with him, feeling the cold of my porch on my bare feet. “Sixty,” I said.
At the end of the walk, he made a right, heading down the block. There was an old gray Chevy parked at the curb, and I thought it was his, but he kept going past it. He’d shoved his hands in his pockets, lowered his head. A wind had risen, tearing leaves from branches up and down the street.
“Eighty, Tommy!” I shouted after him. “Eighty, all you have to do is say it!”
He kept walking away from me.
“I can go as high as a hundred,” I said, but it was more to myself than to him.
My father disappeared around the corner. He hadn’t looked back.
CHAPTER 10
Her life was saved by rock and roll.
Here’s how.
An ambulance came and took my mother and cops came and took Tommy, and our neighbor, Mrs. Ralleigh, came and took Mikel and me. In her living room across the street, she tried to get me to stop crying, tried to get Mikel to say something, anything. She was an elderly African-American woman who lived alone and would bring us fresh squash and green beans from her garden every fall, and her home smelled strange to me, both antiseptic and greasy all at once.
I kept trying to get up and run back outside, and Mrs. Ralleigh had to keep blocking me from the door, finally wrapping me in her arms and holding me on her couch until I stopped struggling and surrendered to sobs alone.
More cops arrived, and we watched them from the window, Mikel and I, working in the rain. There was one not in uniform, and he crossed over to us after a few minutes, knocking on the door. Mrs. Ralleigh went to answer it, and then they came back together.
“This is Detective Wagner,” Mrs. Ralleigh told us.
Detective Wagner sat down opposite us, balancing a notepad on his thigh. He was using a chewed pencil to write with, and I could see he’d made drawings, too, what I know now were diagrams, trying to place positions, but then, I thought they were just doodles. I couldn’t tell how old he was; he was ages younger than Mrs. Ralleigh, who I’d always thought was over a hundred, easy.
“Alice says that your name is Mikel,” Detective Wagner said. “And that your name is Miriam, but that everyone calls you Mim.”
Mikel didn’t respond, just kept staring toward the window. I nodded, tried to wipe my eyes. I still had tears coming, and they weren’t stopping. When I followed Mikel’s gaze, I could see a man taking pictures of my father’s truck, of the driveway, of the stainless steel bowl.
“I need to ask you both some questions. Will you let me ask you some questions about what happened?”
Nothing from Mikel, and again I nodded, and the detective came and sat next to me, gave me a pat on the arm, and started to write in his notepad everything I told him. His handwriting was very bad and I couldn’t read anything on the paper. Mikel never said a word, and I was rambling, talking about trucks and jack-o’-lanterns and pumpkin seeds and yelling. It didn’t matter. Wagner knew what had happened, he’d known it from the moment he entered Mrs. Ralleigh’s home, maybe before.
Just like he knew that even as Mikel remained silent and I couldn’t shut up, my father was already under arrest for the murder he’d committed.
Mrs. Ralleigh walked him to the door, leaving us in her front room. She and Detective Wagner talked before he left, and I caught bits of it, not trying to overhear, unable to avoid it. Words like “testify” and “trial” were used.
It wasn’t until then that Mrs. Ralleigh asked if my mother was dead. The question made me angry, the answer so obvious. When Wagner confirmed that she had died on the way to the hospital, that my father had been arrested in the emergency room, I heard Mrs. Ralleigh say a prayer.
Then she asked, “What do I do with them?”
“We’re trying to determine if there’s family,” Detective Wagner said.
“No, no, there’s no one. Diana, she told me that last year, around Thanksgiving. It was just the four of them.”
“Someone will be by.”
“When?”
“Soon.”
“I can keep them for the night. But I’m . . . I just don’t have it to keep them for longer. I’m too old.”
“Someone will come by. Just keep them here for a couple more hours.”
Then the door shut, and from the window I could see Detective Wagner as he went down the walk, back into the rain. The cops were still working across the street. He started talking to some of them, then used the walkie-talkie in one of the police cars. He glanced over to Mrs. Ralleigh’s house once, and he saw my brother and me in the window.
He turned his back.
We were placed with our first foster family a week later.
I was eleven. Mikel was fifteen. Our father had murdered our mother, and now we were going to live with people we had never met before.
There was no way it could end well.
The Larkins were sweet people, good-hearted, born-again. They wanted it to work. The problem was they already had six kids, and two more with the designation “troubled” was just too much. I was easy. I just wouldn’t speak unless there was no other alternative. At least I wasn’t acting out, yet.
Mikel was acting out all over the place.
He’d been honing his “troubled youth” act even before our own family had been dissolved, and when we were placed with the Larkins, he went pro. If there was trouble, he’d find it; he got into fights, he stole money, booze, even a car. He robbed Mrs. Larkin blind, taking cash out of her purse when her back was turned, then disappearing for days on end. He got arrested three times, the last for a felony assault, and that was the one that did it; he ended up getting sent to Hillcrest, a juvenile facility outside of Salem.
Tommy had already been sentenced and sent off to the Oregon State Penitentiary at that point. He’d taken a plea, and that decision avoided a trial, which was a good thing, since a trial would only have served to make us all look like the Gresham White Trash we truly were; ignorant, barely literate, and certainly a burden on society. Two kids who were unremarkable at school, one of whom was already building a record; a mother with a string of arrests for drinking and disturbances; a father responsible for a record of his own, alcoholic, known to take drugs, unable to hold down a job; a history of State visits, monitoring the status of the kids; police reports on various domestic disturbances; emergency room bills leading to a conclusion of domestic violence.
So my mother was gone, my father was gone, and now Mikel was gone. The world had shifted onto an insane axis, and everything I’d been sure of turned out to be wrong. The only thing I could say was true was that I’d seen my family disappear entirely over the course of eight months.
So I did the inevitable, and picked up where Mikel had left off.
Three weeks
after Mikel went to Hillcrest, I didn’t come home after school, and that was the final straw for the Larkins. When I was finally escorted back to their home at four in the morning, I was drunk, with a Portland police officer at each shoulder. I’d gone home with a friend and stolen a fifth of Early Times from her parents’ pantry, then lied and said I was going back to the Larkin home. Instead, I’d gone up to Mount Tabor Park and gotten shitfaced. Someone who was nice had found me passed out while walking their dogs and called the police.
All the kids were in bed, but Mrs. Larkin was up, and I remember the look on her face when she answered her door. Her eyes were swollen almost shut from crying and she took me from the officers and gave me a hug like I was one of her own. She didn’t ask where I’d been, she just thanked the cops, told them that Mr. Larkin was out looking for me, driving around, but that he’d be back soon.
She put me in the shower, got me cleaned up and into a nightgown. Then she brought me to the room I shared with her two eldest daughters and put me in bed. She knelt beside me and kissed me on the forehead. The other girls were awake, but pretending not to be.
After Mrs. Larkin left, one of the girls said, “You’re not very nice.”
She was right. I wasn’t very nice. There wasn’t anything I could say to that.
Less than a month later I was moved to a new family, named Quick, outside of Salem. The move upset me; I was terrified Mikel wouldn’t be able to find me.
The Quicks were middle-aged, with the father working for the state government, and the mother one of those über-moms who can juggle three Tupperware parties while organizing the school bake sale. They had two boys, both older than I was, one of them just sixteen, the other fourteen. Upon my arrival there was a family meeting where they all told me they understood things had been hard, and that they were willing to try if I was. I told them that I was willing to try, and they said that was good, and it lasted about three weeks, and then the brothers decided that since I wasn’t really their real sister, maybe they could do some of those things they’d been hearing that boys do with girls.
It started with the older brother, Brian, urging the younger one, Chris, to put his hand down my shirt. I didn’t know what he was after until he had his hand on my breast, at which point I shoved him, hard, and he fell down, hard, and hit his head on the corner of the bed and started howling. Mrs. Quick scooted in to find out what the commotion was about, and I told her, and she confronted Chris, who promptly denied it. Brian, standing by, backed him up, and told his mother that my attack had been unprovoked.
Two to one, I lost.
If that had been the end of it, I might have been able to take it.
It wasn’t.
Realizing that they could get away with it, Brian and Chris proceeded to see just how far they could go. One of them figured out how to pick the lock on the bathroom door with a flathead screwdriver, and soon I was taking thirty-second showers. We’d be watching television and the moment a parent left us alone, Brian or Chris would grope me, or poke me, or, on one occasion, expose himself to me.
And I would shout at them to stop, would shout for someone to believe me, and Ma and Pa Quick would tell me that I needed to stop acting out, to stop trying to get attention. I needed to be a good girl, they told me. I needed to behave.
So that’s how this is going to work, I realized, at which point I decided to hell with them. If this was what doing my best was going to get me, they could have my worst, and I gave it to them with both barrels.
That day I came back to the house because I thought Mrs. Quick was going to be at home like she’d said she would be, and I’d be protected. I was in the living room dropping my backpack when Brian and Chris came out of their room and told me they had something to show me.
“I don’t want to see,” I said.
“You do,” Chris said. “You do.”
“Just come in here,” Brian said. “We’ve got something we want to show you.”
It was the way he said it, it turned something in my stomach to lead. Precognition or instinct or something else, but I knew that if I ended up in their room, it would be very bad for me.
I grabbed my backpack and started for the door, and Brian moved to cut me off. Then Chris was coming in at my right, and they were grabbing me and pulling me and I was shouting and kicking and fighting.
“Grab her pants,” Brian shouted. “Grab her by her pants!”
They dragged me, screaming and struggling, after them. Laughing. Like it was funny. I’d lost one of my sneakers, and my jeans were slipping down because of the way Chris was yanking on my pant legs, and I could feel the rug burning my back because my T-shirt was being pulled up by the friction on the hall carpet.
“C’mon, quit fighting!” Brian was shouting at me. “We’re gonna fuck, it’ll be fun!”
I kicked and pleaded, and it didn’t do any good, and then suddenly both boys had let me go, and were staring over me, gone absolutely quiet. Looking like they’d seen their own death, the color just gone from their faces. I twisted and rolled and looked where they were looking.
Their father stood at the end of the hall, holding his jacket in one hand, his briefcase in the other. He’d been in the military, still had the haircut. Black hair with gray scattered through it, as if it was coming in a strand at a time, with no rhyme or reason.
The muscles jumping in his neck.
“What are you doing to Miriam?” he asked them. He set down his jacket and briefcase without taking his eyes from his boys, then moved to where I was on the carpet, lifted me to my feet.
Brian tried to answer. “Nothing, sir, we were just—”
“I heard,” their father said. “I heard everything you said.”
“But—”
“Don’t move. If you move before I come back, God as my witness, I will put you both into the hospital.”
Their father put a hand on my elbow, turned me back toward the kitchen. He set me in a chair at the table. There was perspiration on his upper lip. His hand felt like it was shaking when it let me go.
“Stay here,” Mr. Quick said.
I nodded.
He was removing the belt from his waist as he went out of the kitchen.
When he returned, the belt was again at his waist, and he was carrying a suitcase and my missing sneaker. He told me that he would get the rest of my things later, but for now he was taking me to a hotel, because he didn’t think it was fair to keep me under the same roof as those boys after what they had done, after everything that had happened. He told me that his wife would stay with me if that would make me feel more comfortable, and he told me that he was so very sorry.
Two days later I was placed with a new family.
When I left the Quicks, all I wanted was a place to stay, to be safe, and all I expected was another one of fate’s split-finger fastballs right to my head. I figured if I remained with the new family, whoever they were, for more than six months, it would be a miracle.
The new family was named Beckerman, Steven and Joan.
I was with them for almost ten years.
They had a room ready, and the first thing that made me feel like this was going to be a good thing was that it wasn’t decorated in pink. It didn’t have stuffed animals on the bed. It was a girl’s room, not a princess’s.
And it had its own stereo, a real one, not a boom box, but an old four-component Denon unit, tuner, cassette, CD, and LP, hooked to two brand-new bookshelf Bose speakers. There were headphones, already plugged to the output jack, and it was like they were sending me a message—this is yours, use it whenever you want, but remember that we’re here, too. No cautions about volume. Just, here’s the headphones, knock yourself out.
Steven repaired instruments for a living, mostly tuning pianos. Joan taught music at various high schools throughout the Portland district. After hours or on weekends, they gave private lessons. Each of them called those things their jobs, what they did to keep the roof over their heads from leaking. Their
jobs, not their work.
Music, that was their work.
They did it together, and I blame them both equally.
June, and school had ended, though I was scheduled for summer school in just a few weeks, a desperate attempt to bring me back in line with my classmates. I’d been with Steven and Joan just shy of two months, and the time hadn’t been easy, because as much as I liked the room they’d made for me, I sure as hell didn’t trust them. The longest conversation we’d had so far had concerned how I could get a letter to my brother, and if I could go and visit him soon. The answers were yes and no; I could write him all I wanted, but Mikel wasn’t allowed visitors for the time being.
So for two months, I’d been quiet and self-absorbed, testing their boundaries, stealing their cigarettes, and getting more chores heaped on me as punishment. I wasn’t as bad as I’d been with the Quicks, but I was getting ready to escalate.
They’d done their best to weather it. They’d seen me poking at the various instruments around the house, fiddling the keys on a trumpet, striking notes on the Steinway. Both of them had asked me if I had any interest in playing any of the instruments they had around. The flute, for instance, or the violin, or the clarinet, or the piano.
“No,” I’d said.
A lie. But the last time I’d played an instrument had been when I was ten, and though I could still remember the thrill of it, I remembered the rest, too. The weakness of my hands and the failing of the guitar; Tommy’s impatience with my inept fingers; my mother’s annoyance, her telling me that I shouldn’t play so loudly until I could at least play, you know, well.
It is impossible to practice an instrument quietly. Music, by its very definition, must be heard.
Dinner was finished, and I had cleared the table, doing my appointed chores. I finished drying the last of the dishes just as Joan was pouring coffee for herself and Steven. They both looked at me, the kind of look that always made me nervous. They looked pleased, and that had to mean that I’d done something wrong.