by Beverly Bird
She wondered, even if they were successful in locating her family, would any of the Wallaces help her? A wave of dizziness hit her, strong enough to make her consider pulling off the highway for a moment, but she shook her head and kept doggedly on. Her brothers would probably help, she decided. She held nothing against either Jake or Adam. They had done nothing to her that she had not also done to them. They had hidden, they had cowered, they had not come to her rescue—but neither had she ever gone to theirs. In the Wallace household, it had been each man for himself.
As for her mother, Kim had to wonder if Emma Wallace even had any bone marrow left. She’d been drinking heavily even before Kim had run from Texas, using the bottle to hide from her abusive husband.
That left Edward, her father. And he was just as likely to decline to have his blood tested out of pure meanness as he was to help out because he figured something might be in it for him.
“Tell me about them,” Susannah said. “Please.”
“I...I don’t know much,” Kim answered. “Not anymore.”
“Then what did you used to know?”
She had lied to Susannah about them enough, Kim thought. And there was something else, another strong reason to tell her the truth now. She did not want her daughter to be shocked or disillusioned once they found them.
“Adam is...uh, my oldest brother.”
“How old?”
What did it matter? Kim thought helplessly, but she did some quick math in her head. She was twenty-eight now.
“He’d be thirty-eight,” she answered. “No. He just had a birthday. He’s thirty-nine.”
“That old?”
Kim grimaced. “He used to play baseball,” she continued, grasping for what little she had allowed herself to remember over the years.
She remembered in sterling detail the moment she had become aware of the fact that Adam was playing ball. She had been waitressing at a sports bar back then. There had been televisions all over the walls. And even above the raucous crowd, she had heard the announcer speak his name. Adam Wallace. The Astros’ catcher.
Kim had frozen in midstride, looking at each of the screens to catch a glimpse of the player. The catcher wore all sorts of protective paraphernalia, including a cagelike thing over his face. The name wasn’t unusual. It could have belonged to any Adam Wallace. Still, her brother had always loved baseball. He’d been a high school all-star and had been playing in the minor leagues when she had left home.
She had kept one corner of her attention on the game until the guy came up to bat. And then they had shown a close-up of his face. It had been him. Her brother. The same shaggy blond hair. The same blue-gray eyes. The same face roughened by too many years of care. He had escaped, too. Adrenaline and euphoria had rushed through Kim so fiercely she had dropped a tray of beer bottles.
At least two of them had gotten out, she’d thought. It hadn’t mattered that Adam was still obviously in Texas—the Astros were Houston’s team. He had escaped Decataur Avenue and the big white house at the end of it that was always in need of paint or repair. He had escaped Edward Wallace’s clutches.
Impossibly, she heard her father’s voice crystal clearly in that moment, as though he were sitting between her and Susannah, as though it had not been eleven long years since she’d been forced to listen to him: “You’re no better than that pile of dog dirt over there. You’re a Wallace. And the world never gave a Wallace a fair break That’s why we’re on welfare.”
Sometimes it had been unemployment, Kim reflected. Sometimes Edward Wallace had actually worked. But always he had neglected to mention that the Wallace before him, Kim’s grandfather, had gotten a few fair breaks, had worked his way up in the oil business with barely a high-school education, and had built the big white house on the end of Decataur Avenue. Edward Wallace had mortgaged the house to the hilt because he’d long since run through his modest inheritance and he couldn’t hold down a job. He was always too lazy or drunk to repair the holes in the walls.
“Mom?”
“What?” Kim looked over at Susannah quickly.
“Baseball? Real baseball? The big leagues?”
Kim nodded. “He did good.”
“Is he still playing?”
“Uh, no. He just retired all of a sudden. The newspapers said it was because of personal problems.” She had never heard what they were, and had always wondered if Edward had had something to do with them.
“Who else?” Susannah asked. “Who else is there?”
“Jake. My other brother. He’d be...thirty-seven now. He was always, well, the funny one.” Cocky, she remembered, almost smiling. Brazen and arrogant and charming. A real Irish scoundrel.
“What does he do?”
“I don’t know. I lost track of him.” She hadn’t actually tried to keep track of him.
“What about your mom and dad?”
Kim’s stomach clenched at that one. She took a deep, deliberate breath and told Susannah the harsh part. It was better that she find out now, she thought again, before they got there.
“They’re not nice people, Suze,” she said carefully. She softened the judgment with her pet name for her daughter. “That’s why I never told you about them. That’s why you’ve never met them.”
In fact, she had left Texas so her father wouldn’t hurt Susannah. When he’d found out Kim was pregnant, he’d beaten the living daylights out of her. She’d taken her mother’s grocery money to pay to see a doctor, but Edward had wanted it for beer and found it missing. She’d always thought his fury was more because of the missing beer money than because of any real anger at her morals, but it didn’t matter. The bottom line was that she’d known she couldn’t allow it to happen again. Susannah hadn’t been hurt—Kim had kept doubling over so Edward couldn’t punch her in the stomach. But he’d broken her arm. Then she’d run out of the house and she’d just kept going.
She had never been able to tell Bobby what had happened. She couldn’t find him in time. He’d worked for a pizza restaurant that year, and had been out delivering when she went to look for him. Edward had been driving all over the city searching for her at the same time. She’d caught sight of him once or twice, but had always somehow managed to duck into a phone booth or a store to avoid him.
She’d had twelve dollars of her mother’s money left. When Bobby’s boss had told her that he was out on the road, she’d caught the first bus out of Dallas. There hadn’t been time to do anything else. She couldn’t risk having Edward catch up with her. The bus had taken her into Fort Worth. She’d waited tables for a week and slept in a park, wishing for a miracle, hoping either Adam or Jake would tell Bobby what had taken place so he would come looking for her. It hadn’t happened.
She’d never been able to have her arm set properly, either. She’d gone to a free clinic in Fort Worth and they’d put it in a sling when she’d refused a cast. But she hadn’t been able to wait tables in either one. Before the end of the week, she’d tossed the sling aside, and just lived with the pain by favoring it.
By then she’d collected enough in tips to move on to Abilene. She did the same thing there, working a bit, then moving on. She’d kept going west until she got to the Pacific Ocean and there was nowhere left to go. But that had turned out to be far enough. The miles, the emotional distance, the fresh start by the sea had slowly enabled her to put everything behind her.
What she remembered most of those first months, of her time traveling, was feeling dirty, she thought now. It had been almost three weeks before she had accumulated enough money to splurge on a motel room and get a real shower. She’d spent the interim washing up in service station rest rooms. All in all, it had been an ugly time, a terrifying one. She could have died, she thought, as she had a thousand times since then. She could have trusted the wrong person, someone pointing her to a doorway or to a park where it was reasonably safe to sleep. Then again, that was unlikely. Even then she’d known not to trust or depend on anyone other than herself.
/> Kim glanced at her daughter. She could tell none of this to Susannah, she realized. Though Suze had aged far beyond her years in these past months, there were just some things she didn’t need to know. She prayed Susannah wouldn’t ask any more questions, and she didn’t.
While Kim had been woolgathering, her daughter had fallen fast asleep.
At six o’clock the following evening, Kim halted the Mazda on Decataur Avenue at the edge of Dallas. She’d stopped a whole block away from the house, before the street deadended. Susannah was asleep again, her head resting against the window. Kim winced for her. The position had to be uncomfortable, she thought. But Susannah took sleep where she could find it, and she generally found it more than twelve hours a day now.
The ache in Kim’s stomach grew, and she pressed a hand to it. “Okay, baby,” she whispered, needing to speak aloud but not wanting to wake her. “We’re here. Now I can do something about all this. I hope.”
But she would do it carefully. She would do it alone.
She got out of the car, locking the door and easing it shut. She paused and looked down the street in the direction of the humble Wallace abode. She was shaking like a leaf. The tremors seemed to come all the way up from her soul.
They’d finally paved the street, she noticed dispassionately. In her memories, it was dusty, furrowed where cars had passed through the mud after a good rain, before the relentless Texas sun came back and baked everything hard again.
Kim began walking. Susannah would not wake up. Kim was ninety percent sure of that. And if she did, she would probably have the good sense just to wait for her mother to return. Kim was ninety-five percent sure of that, if only because it would take too much energy for Suze to get out of the car and look for her. Good odds, she thought. And there was no sense in subjecting her daughter to Edward Wallace unless she had to. For all she knew, the bastard would still hold that beer money against her.
The house looked even worse than it had when she had lived there. A gutter hung loosely from one eves. She doubted if the place had been painted since the day she’d run. Sheaves of decaying white bubbled and buckled from the sides, revealing something gray and ugly underneath.
The house was dark—not even a single light on within. A torn shade hung lopsided in one of the front windows. Kim stepped up onto the porch, and there was a squeaking sound as one of the boards protested even her relatively insignificant weight.
The aluminum screen door was hanging ajar, connected only at the bottom, the top leaning precariously toward her. She stepped quickly toward it and rammed a hand against the inner door. Nothing. She knocked again.
“Kimmie? Kimmie? Why, as I live and breathe!”
Kim jumped at the voice that came suddenly from behind her. She turned around and searched through the gathering dusk. A round woman in her early sixties rushed toward her. She wore a tattered yellow housecoat, and a pair of glasses dangled from a gaudy metallic chain around her neck. She grabbed the spectacles and pushed them onto her face, but as she came up the walk, Kim saw that she was still squinting anyway.
Mrs. Madigan. Their neighbor.
“It is you!” the woman squealed. “I thought so. I said to Ralph, that’s got to be little Kimmie. Nobody has hair like that. So pretty!”
Kim touched it self-consciously. Given Mrs. Madigan’s eyesight, the woman had probably been pressed to the window with a pair of binoculars trying to see what was happening over at the Wallace house, Kim thought. No surprise there.
“How are you?” Kim answered carefully.
“How am I? How am I?”
Kim remembered too late that the woman had a bad habit of repeating everything.
“How are you?” Mrs. Madigan asked.
“Well, I’m...uh, good,” she lied. “Are my folks around?”
“Oh, dear. Well, of course you don’t know. You’ve been gone so long.”
Kim’s heart started that deep-down, painful kind of accelerating beat again. “Don’t know what?” she asked carefully.
“Well, dear, they’re dead,” Mrs. Madigan said. “They’ve all quite passed on.”
Kim’s heart slammed this time. “All of them?”
“Oh, no. Not your brothers. Just your ma and your daddy.”
Amen. In some part of Kim’s psyche, she wanted to feel shame for her reaction. Yet she couldn’t manage anything but relief, almost a sense of justice. Edward Wallace was dead, and Emma Wallace was probably better off not being alive. Kim did not think her father would be able to follow her mother to heaven. Surely someone up there would slam the door in Edward Wallace’s face.
“What happened?” she managed to ask.
“Well, your daddy died shortly after you left. He drove right off the I-30 beltway into the Trinity River, he did.”
“Was he drunk?” Kim asked flatly. He must have been, she thought.
Mrs. Madigan flushed. “Well, dear, I wouldn’t know about that.”
No, of course not, Kim was certain. She would have looked the other way, just as she had when Kim had screamed for help at the top of her lungs.
“What about Mom?” she asked.
“Her liver got her, it did. Not too long after your daddy went.”
“Ah.” Kim cleared her throat. “And Jake and Adam?”
“Well, now, let’s see. Adam was quite famous, you know. But I heard he sold all his Texas property. Oh, what a grand house he had down in Houston when he was playing ball! I saw pictures in a magazine.”
“Where is he now?” Kim demanded. She didn’t have time to exchange niceties and gossip with this woman. She wanted facts. She needed them quickly. Her gaze went back up the street to the Mazda. Kim didn’t want to leave Susannah alone too much longer.
“Oh, well, he left,” Mrs. Madigan said. “He was married, you see, to a beautiful girl, but I heard she had, well... one of those drug problems.” Her voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper. “She took Adam’s little boy and disappeared. It was horrible, it was. It took him years to find that boy again. And would you believe Bo turned up in one of those religious cults in Pennsylvania? Then Adam married a good girl from up there, and he’s living there now.”
Kim’s brain spun. A religious cult? Adam? The woman had always been a gossipmonger, though inclined to be right. “What about Jake?”
“He’s still here.”
Relief swept her. Between that and her amazement over Adam, she had to grip the porch rail for support. Then she grew angry.
“Is he living here?” she demanded, looking back at the house in disbelief. How could he let the place go like this? She remembered Jake’s being meticulous with his appearance, his car, everything he could call his own.
“Oh, no!” Mrs. Madigan burst out. “No, dear, no one ever bought this place. It’s been sitting empty since your ma died. I believe your brothers listed it for sale—there was a sign here on the lawn forever—but neither of them ever put any money into fixing it up. They just let it rot.” Disapproval crept into Mrs. Madigan’s voice.
Good for them, Kim thought. “So where is Jake living now?”
“Well, last I heard he had an apartment in the city somewhere, one of those garden things. But, of course, he’s married now—and all those kids—so I don’t know if he’s still there or not. And he was with the police department for the longest time, but he left them just this past year and took over Adam’s detective company. Now, what is the name of that place? Wait, dear, I’ll look it up in the phone book. I’ll know it as soon as I see it.”
She waddled off, back to her own home next door. Kim stared after her, her jaw literally hanging open.
What in the name of God had happened to her brothers?
Mrs. Madigan’s words kept buzzing in her head in disjointed sequence: a religious cult... all those kids... married... detective company...the police department. The Wallaces ? she thought disbelievingly.
As far as she could remember, the law had never treated any of them fairly. It had never defende
d or protected them. She couldn’t see any of them going into law enforcement. As for family and children, well, they were the last things Kim would ever imagine either of her brothers getting involved with. She hadn’t been able to hold her engagement to Mark together. Four months into it, Mark had fled. He’d finally given up on her. She’d never been able to entirely trust him. He’d said she just couldn’t learn to give. He’d said she was cold, wouldn’t open up. He was right.
“ChildSearch!” Mrs. Madigan bleated from across the fence several minutes later.
“ChildSearch,” Kim repeated dazedly.
“That’s the name of Adam’s company. Well, it’s Jake’s now. It’s over on Story Road. And I remember now, about his new wife. Tiny wisp of a thing, and pretty? My, is she pretty! She was from that cult, too. He brought her by here once to show her the old house. Now, see, she had four little ones from her previous husband, except it turned out that he was never really her husband And they were all here with them that day, with Jake and his missus—the kiddies, that is. I took the liberty of calling there for you, dear.”
“Where? The cult?” Anything felt possible now, Kim realized. This was preposterous.
“Well, now, I was wrong. It’s not a cult. It’s those Pennsylvania Dutch people. I remember now—once the girl at ChildSearch said it. I wanted to let Jake know his baby sister was back, and of course they have people on the phones there twenty-four hours a day. The girl said that Jake and his wife are visiting up there in Pennsylvania in that settlement. So...”
She finally seemed to run out of steam.
“Jake’s in Pennsylvania, too?” Kim asked. This was not good, she thought. It wasn’t good at all. She was doing this on limited savings.
“Yes, well, for now, that’s true,” Mrs. Madigan answered. “The girl on the phone said Jake isn’t expected back for several weeks.”
“Does she have a number where he can be reached?”
“Oh, no, dear. They don’t have phones up there. That’s what she said.”
Pennsylvania. A considerable drive. “Do you know what might have become of Bobby Guenther?” she asked, shifting her focus, because the possibility of going on to Pennsylvania was daunting. “You remember, I was dating him before I left.”