by Ninie Hammon
He fell silent; I backed up emotionally so fast I ran into myself behind me. Anne Mitchell didn’t engage in painful conversations; she didn’t get within rock-throwing distance of that kind of intimacy! This was way above my pay grade.
Dusty read the look on my face and reached over as if to touch my hand, then thought better of it. “You look like you just stepped on a land mine. I shouldn’t have dumped all my dirty laundry out on you like that. I said too much. I’m sorry.”
“Excuse me.” I pushed my chair back and stood, my eyes darting around the room, a panicked ground squirrel looking for a hole. “Do you know where the ladies room—?”
“Over there in the back corner.”
I’d have splashed cold water into my face if I hadn’t been wearing makeup. Since I was, I held my palms under the cold water and let it run, then lifted my hair and patted the back of my neck with my wet hand.
What must Dusty think of me? Any normal woman would have been touched by the vulnerability of a man willing to admit he had an affair that destroyed his marriage and wrecked his life. Any normal woman would have responded with compassion to his honesty.
Well, nobody ever accused me of being normal. I just can’t … do this. I don’t know how.
All I wanted was to find out what the shrink had said about the pictures and go home.
When I got back to the table, Dusty and the restaurant manager were engaged in an animated, laughter-filled conversation in Spanish. I opened my mouth to tell Dusty I was ready to go and closed it again as he described the wonderful Mexican dessert he’d just ordered for us.
While we waited for dessert, we engaged in basic chit-chat, actually discussed the weather, the relative merits of sandstorms versus fog. We talked about Filbert, too—where the story ideas came from, how I crafted them into a plotline. In fact, I began to notice that Dusty repeatedly directed the conversation back to the subject of my books. He asked questions about publishing, contracts, agents.
Then he gave me a look that made me instantly uneasy. It was the same look he’d given me before, the assessing look, gauging how much to tell me.
Don’t tell me anything. Don’t share anything deep with me. I don’t know how to do deep. It’s a stretch for me to do basic shallow.
But what he said surprised me.
“Ok, I’ve got a confession to make.” When he saw the stricken look on my face, he hurried on. “I’ve been pumping you for information about publishing for a reason.” Pause. Then, a little sheepish. “Just call me F. Scott Fitzstupid … I’ve written a book.” He watched my face closely for my reaction. “A novel.”
I was genuinely delighted. “That’s wonderful, Dusty.”
I only realized he’d been tense about my response when I saw him relax.
“I don’t share that with just anybody. Promise you won’t spread it around?”
I wasn’t sure if he was serious or joking. “Your secret’s safe with me. The only person I have to tell is Bobo, and the only people she has to tell are either dead or don’t exist. What’s the book about?”
“It’s just the story of … change. And of choices.” He shifted gears. “I figured you’d know about finding a literary agent.”
“What kind of change?”
“Every story’s about change in one way or another. Stories are about life and life’s about change.”
The sound of a drunken voice, piped through the heat register, echoed in my head.
“I don’t understand how people can change so completely, how somebody can be one person, and then you find out that’s not who they are at all. They’re … I don’t know. It doesn’t make any sense.”
“I think being a grownup means you have to get comfortable with things that don’t make sense. It’s been my experience, in uniform and out, that human beings usually don’t make sense. People make choices, some good, some lousy, then have to live with the consequences.”
He paused.
“Everybody changes. You’ve changed. You’re not at all like the little girl I used to play with.”
I didn’t have to ask him what he meant.
“It’s not just you. I’m a different person than I used to be, too.”
“So which you is the real you?”
Suddenly, he scooted his chair back and stood.
“I tell you what, why don’t we ask Mama García to put our dessert in a box and we’ll take it with us. Let’s go down to my office and take a look at those pictures.”
That was the first time it occurred to me to wonder why he hadn’t brought them with him.
It was almost 10 o’clock so the outer office at the Rutherford County Sheriff’s Department was virtually empty. The dispatcher was there, an old Indian man with his hair in gray braids, and a couple of deputies filling out reports before they headed home. Dusty greeted them as we passed. Even in that brief encounter it was obvious he was the undisputed alpha dog.
Dusty’s office was small and had windows with blinds across the side. Like the one in the precinct house in Law and Order, where the captain can take somebody inside, close the blinds and shut the door when it’s about to get ugly.
I stepped into his office and Dusty reached over and closed the blinds. Then he shut the door behind us.
“Have a seat. It ain’t much, but I call it home.” I sat down in one of the two chairs facing his desk. “Would you like something to drink? There’s a Coke machine in Yellow Moon’s office.”
“No, I’m fine, thanks.” I just wanted to hear about the pictures and go home.
Dusty nodded, picked up a grocery sack off the floor, took a stack of pictures out of it and placed the stack in the center of the desk. Then he settled into the big black office chair behind it. And suddenly he was the sheriff. Uniform or not, he was the sheriff.
Chapter 12
The first time he said it, I didn’t connect. I was sure I hadn’t heard him right. I made him repeat it. “You remember, don’t you, that I didn’t tell Karen the pictures were 25 years old,” Dusty said again. “Well, when she called this morning about them, I wasn’t here so she left me a voice mail, an urgent voice mail.”
He paused, then continued slowly, precisely, gently. “She said, ‘Dusty, wherever those little girls are, get them out of there! Now, today! They’re being abused.”
I started to tremble; I couldn’t stay here. I stood and turned toward the door. “I need to go now.” Home. I had to go home.
Where’s home?
I turned back and looked at Dusty, like he could tell me where home was, like he could take me there. “I have to go home.” When I spoke, I realized I was crying.
Abused. Abused! The word rumbled around in my head like a bowling ball in a kettle drum. Boom! Boom!
Miss Anne Mitchell, I’d like you to meet someone. You’ve known him your whole life but you’ve never been formally introduced. His name’s the Boogie Man. But all his friends just call him Abuse.
Dusty was beside me. Just there, not touching me—I guess he knew that probably wasn’t a good idea.
“See, I came home to remember. I was hollow, and I had to find out…” It was suddenly urgently important to me to explain the blank, emptiness of my past, that it was gone, erased and I didn’t know why.
Now, I know why. I hit the delete button because I was abused.
I sank back into the chair, not because I no longer wanted to leave the room but because my knees wouldn’t hold me anymore. I thought I was crying. I could feel the hot tears running down my cheeks. But I didn’t hear myself crying and I didn’t feel myself crying. So I guess I wasn’t. It was just tears. That’s all I could manage. I couldn’t even screw myself up to a good cry. How pathetic was that?
Dusty picked up the receiver on his black office phone and said something to somebody. Almost immediately there was a timid knock on the door. Standing outside was a little bird of a woman who looked absurd in a brown Sheriff’s Department uniform. She craned her neck, tried to get a look inside the
office at what was going on. At me. But Dusty took the glass of water from her and shut the door in her face.
“Here, drink this.”
I just looked at him.
“Go on, drink it. It’ll make you feel better.”
I took the glass of water, but my hands were shaking so violently it splashed everywhere. Dusty wrapped his hands around mine to steady them and directed the glass to my mouth. I swallowed, felt the cool liquid all the way down, such a distinct sensation that I thought for a moment I’d spilled it on my pale blue sweater from Harrod’s Department Store and I was feeling it run down the front. Maybe I did. It didn’t matter.
I stopped. Breathed. Then Dusty put the glass to my lips again and I swallowed some more. I was not even remotely thirsty, but the liquid felt good going down, soothing. The activity of swallowing, the rhythmic glunk, glunk, glunk was calming. Dusty set the empty glass on his desk and sat down in the chair beside me. He didn’t touch me.
“Annie, look at me.” I turned my head and faced him. His eyes were such a pale green, almost clear, like you could look right through them, look into him and see who he was.
Which who? Which one’s the real who?
“Annie, come back to me. Focus.” His gaze grabbed hold of mine and wouldn’t let go. “Annie!”
“Annie!”
“Shhhhh. Don’t make so much noise. You’re gonna scare ‘em. If they start squawking, Bobo’ll hear them. And you know what she’ll do to us if she catches us in here.”
The chicken house smell fills every breath. Light from the cracks between the wall slats falls like the pin stripes on a suit across the nests. The nervous birds fluff their feathers at us, each giving us a herky-jerky bird look out of first one eye and then the other.
Dusty closes the spring-held wooden door softly behind him and walks carefully down the center aisle between the nests to where the little blonde girl is standing at the end. As he passes, the birds flutter away from him like The Wave rolling across a stadium.
“I don’t know why it has to be in here.” He glances around in disgust at the clucking hens, who return his look with haughty disdain.
“Jericho locked the garage. You got a better idea?”
“I guess not.”
“Then quit complaining.”
“Sorry.”
The two stand there, side by side, in the close, stuffy chicken world.
“Well, I came,” she says. Nearby birds startle and she lowers her voice to a whisper. “I’m here. Do you want to or not?”
“This was your idea, not mine.”
“If you don’t want to …” The little girl starts to step around him toward the door, but he takes her arm.
“I didn’t say that. I didn’t say I didn’t want to. Do you want to?”
“Of course I do or I wouldn’t have suggested it.” She closes her eyes. “Go on, do it. It’s hot in here and it stinks.”
Dusty takes a step toward her, leans in and kisses the little girl on the lips. She’s slightly taller than he is, so he has to stand on tiptoes. It’s more than a peck, but he doesn’t linger. She opens her eyes and smiles.
“I—” she begins, but when Dusty steps back, he lands square on a chicken’s foot, and it squawks in pain, struggling to get away. He jumps, the chicken flutters and cackles in distress, and the other chickens go off like popcorn, flying all around them, feathers in the air.
“Annie!” he says.
“Annie.” Pale green eyes. “I know that was hard to hear. I’m sorry.”
“Could I have a little more water, please?” My voice was shaky; my insides quivering. No, vibrating.
“Sure.” He got up and reached for the phone.
“No, not another glass.” I pointed to the one sitting on the edge of his desk. “Just that little bit. The rest of that is fine.” There was maybe an inch of liquid in the bottom of the glass. I took it and my hands were still shaking, but I turned it up and drank it on my own.
“I’m sorry I had to tell you that. I can’t imagine what it must be like to hear—”
“That I was abused when I was a kid?” My voice was still shaking a little, but it came out in the right tone all the same. “Maybe I was.” Beat. “How would I know?”
Dusty relaxed. He took the glass from me and set it on the desk.
“Whatever happened has obviously been tormenting you for years.” He reached over wordlessly and turned my hand palm-up, revealing the pale line of scars marching up the inside of my arm. Dusty didn’t miss a thing.
“I wasn’t expecting … abuse. But there it is.” I let out a slow, shaky breath, then tried to focus. “What else did your shrink friend say? Just ‘Get those kids out of there!’—was that all?”
“That’s all that was on the message, but when I went by to pick up the pictures, we had a long talk.” He knew I was made out of blown glass, so he spoke quietly, calmly. “She said she’d be glad to talk to you about the pictures. Or she could recommend someone—”
“No shrinks. I don’t do shrinks!” I was surprised at the strength in my voice and the determination behind it. So was Dusty. “Sorry, it’s a lifetime rule.”
Wait a minute. The no-shrinks rule was Mama’s, so I wouldn’t remember she was a drunk. Maybe I ought to back up and take another look at that one. But not right now. I didn’t have the energy or the emotional wherewithal to rethink old assumptions. I couldn’t knock all the pinions down, all the pillars that held together who I was. This wasn’t the time for me to try to exorcize parental programming. Maybe someday; not now.
“Just tell me what she said about them, Dusty. You talked to her. What did she say?” He didn’t want to be the go-between but I wouldn’t let him out of it.
“The first thing she had to do was separate the art—two little girls was all she knew.” He took pictures off the top of the stack that were paper-clipped together. “She could usually tell by the skill level of the artist which pictures were drawn by the older child.” He handed me the paper-clipped pictures. “And which by the younger.” He handed me the other stack. “She said it was particularly easy to separate the two because the older child was so artistically gifted.”
“But there were some pictures,” he picked up the rest of the pictures, only a few, “that could have been yours or Windy’s. They were expressions of pure emotion, without form, that could have been drawn by either one of you.”
A dead feeling settled in the pit of my stomach and my heart had taken up a jack-hammer rhythm, thumping so loud I was certain Dusty could hear it, or see it bouncing my sweater. I tensed.
Here it comes!
“What did she see in the pictures she knew were mine?”
“Abuse. Severe abuse.”
The bottom part of me fell away, leaving a gaping hole in my midsection and I gasped at the sudden emptiness. Dusty pushed ahead. Get it over with; perform the amputation. Then all that’s left to do is stop the hemorrhage.
“The classic indicator is in this picture here.” He took the first stack of pictures back from me, unclipped them and flipped down two or three until he found the one he was looking for.
“Abused children are keeping a terrible secret.” He held up the picture for me to see. It was the face of a little girl with blonde braids, a remarkably accurate self-portrait. She had blue eyes, there were red ribbons in her hair. But she had no mouth.
Fleeting transparent images appeared—a long hallway, crying out a muffled, “Mo!” Then the images faded away.
I stared into the face on the page, trying to see in through her eyes to the secret, wanting and not wanting to know what was happening to her that she couldn’t talk about.
A strangled sob popped out my mouth, like a hiccup. Just one, though. I swallowed hard, grabbed hold of the arms of the chair and squeezed until my knuckles turned white.
“Karen talked a lot about the different kinds of abuse,” Dusty went on. “Psychological. Physical. Sexual. Emotional. She stressed that even children who on
ly witness the abuse of another child display the same symptoms. They’re wounded, too.”
“What about Windy?”
The wrecking ball hung suspended high in the air.
“Windy was being severely abused, too.”
It let go and flew at me.
“Sexually assaulted.”
It slammed into my chest!
My stomach turned over; I was going to vomit. The Mexican food and then all that water. It rose in the back of my throat. I swallowed frantically. It was a near thing, but it went back down.
“Was I …?” I couldn’t even form the word in my mind, let alone the image in my head.
“I wish I could tell you.” There was anguish in his voice. “Karen said Windy’s art was full of the symbols, she called them ‘markers.’ Almost every picture showed her terror and rage.”
He picked up the top picture on Windy’s pile and pulled it free from the paper clip. A crudely drawn house with a square inside it and a stick-figure on top of the square. Maybe a bed. And next to the stick figure was a blob of black, a dark hole, with red stripes across it, slashing back and forth. Then I noticed stick-figure feet poking out from under the blob. Windy was blotting out, destroying, whoever was standing beside the bed.
“But the same markers, the same fear and rage were present in some of the other drawings, too, the emotional free-form drawings where Karen wasn’t sure of the artist.”
“So I was—?”
“Maybe. If you drew the emotional explosion art—yes. If it was Windy’s—no. Karen couldn’t tell.”
“But who?” I couldn’t seem to get out a whole sentence, just the first few words and then all the air was gone.
“I mentioned Little Dove in the office and Yellow Moon remembered her. He said she ran a regular little brothel for airmen out of a trailer house on the edge of town.”
God hates trailer houses.
“If Little Dove was a working girl when Windy was little …” He stopped. “Most of those trailers only have one bedroom. You got to figure … “