by Rene Denfeld
The man walked to the gym door, pulled out a mess of keys, tried to find the right one with his shaking hand, finally unlocked the door.
Naomi slipped from her car, softly closed the door, and moved swiftly across the street. In moments she was behind him, following his back as he entered the gym, the door still open. Her leather shoes made no sound.
The door shut behind them.
The door jangled.
Ray turned.
He was an older man with a small face, perched like a dried apple on his oversized neck. The small mouth had a strange beauty: pummeled so much it had taken on the appearance of a purpled fig, radiating lines to his still mercifully full cheeks. His friendly eyes were so cut with scars, they looked like he’d had a date with a hedge trimmer. And under his hat, perched like two little Brussels sprouts, were a pair of cauliflower ears. His face reminded her of the hors d’oeuvres that Mrs. Cottle had made for church socials, with vegetable crudités stuck with toothpicks on a cabbage, the inside hollowed out for dip. Mrs. Cottle called these “horse dubbers.”
He took a step back, startled. Naomi raised her own hands with caution, turning them to show her palms.
“I don’t have no money, miss,” Ray said.
“It’s okay,” she said. “Mistaken identity. I’m sorry to startle you.”
“You come to box?”
“No.” Naomi shook her head, and then reconsidered. As long as she was here. Her bag was in the back of her car.
“Thank you for coming in,” Mike Morton told a still sweaty Naomi, who had rushed to the morgue after his call. She was aware she needed a shower. She pressed her armpits closed.
Mike reached for a model plane and held it in his hands. “I followed your advice and paid a visit down in the capital.” Naomi waited, looking at him across his desk, his gray skin a silver color next to his scrubs. She didn’t think that was why he had called her. She assumed he wanted her to look at the new bodies they had found.
“I found a researcher. She ran what we know about all the girls we’ve found—age, physical specs—through their databases. You were right. Some of the girls had been in foster care before they were on the streets. She’s confirming their identities right now.”
Naomi smiled. It was a vestige of her usual smile, but she was glad to help.
Mike took a deep breath, steadied himself. “There’s more. When I was down there, I was looking at these old photos of the state orphanage outside Elk Crossing, on their office walls.”
Naomi felt a sense of foreboding.
“There was this photo with a line of girls outside, dressed in winter parkas. There was snow on the ground. In the middle of the group stood a little girl who looked a lot like you. She was maybe three or four and holding the hand of her baby sister. I asked the researcher about it. She told me a story how over twenty years ago, two sisters went missing from that orphanage.”
“Who do I talk to?” Naomi barely managed to find the words.
He pushed a number at her. “This is the woman who used to run the orphanage.”
Once called Claremont, then Fairfield, the state girls’ home was a place of sour ghosts. You could feel it, stepping inside. Like in all institutions, only bad things had happened here.
Naomi had driven a few hours to get there, noting as she passed the small towns along the freeway how she was retracing a path back to her captivity. The orphanage wasn’t far from the woods where she and her sister had been held underground. She passed thick forests that would have seemed beautiful to others but sent a shiver of fear through her. Something about the tangled underbrush, the manzanita and sword fern among the chaos of the trees, said here to her. And in the woods of her imagination she ran and ran.
Naomi stood in the decayed main hall and tried to remember. Did she hear the sound of running feet, the hushed whispers of little girls? The wet sweep of a mop, the taste of corned beef and cabbage? She could feel the memories in the background of her mind.
“I’m pleased you could come.” The retired woman held out spring-cold hands. Naomi could see rims of dirt in her broad nails; she liked gardening. She stared deeply into Naomi’s eyes. “I didn’t think it could be true . . . You are her. The older Bolen sister.”
Naomi closed her eyes. She now had a last name. She was someone, not just a nameless girl born from the dirt. A shiver began in her feet and moved up through her legs, making her feel faint. Bolen. My name is Bolen.
“Are you all right?”
“Yes.” Naomi’s eyes were closed.
She now had a past. A mother. This woman was going to tell her about herself. The long-sought past was rushing up to her, a voice crashing through the woods behind her. It might pull her all the way back down the trapdoor, down the metal rungs she now felt with her hands. Into a room where she had whisper-sung to her little sister.
But she had to.
“I’m sorry. It must be hard.”
“Life is always hard,” Naomi said, her own voice tough. She opened her eyes, brought back the smile. “Tell me about myself.”
They walked the grounds, the beds of soil loamy and turned over for spring. A set of gardeners were at work, shoveling compost. Inside, down cavernous halls where girls once lined up for dinner, were various parts of machines, broken down. The dining hall was empty, only the shadows of the tables on the floor. A desolate industrial-sized kitchen in the back where men were tearing the wiring out from the walls.
“You came just in time,” the silver-haired woman said. “The building sold a few months ago. They’re making a lodge out of it, one of those fancy hotels.” She gave a skeptical laugh. “Lord knows the nightmares the guests will have, the ghosts that haunt this place.”
Upstairs, climbing stairwells worn by hundreds of small feet, they reached a narrow hall, with bedrooms off each side. Without thinking, Naomi marched directly down the hall and turned into a bedroom. Peeling wallpaper covered the walls—dogs and puppies. Naomi looked at the wallpaper, then out the window, to where the gardeners were working below. To the east, not far at all, was the town of Elk Crossing and the woods. She hadn’t thought to come here because there had been no reports that even mentioned the orphanage.
“You knew this was your room,” the woman said behind her, in wonder. “You and your sister. We tried to keep siblings together. It’s never good to keep children in orphanages, but . . . we did our best.”
“Do you remember me?”
“Yes.”
Naomi felt the pulse in her neck. She had come without Jerome yet again. But she had told him why. She needed to be alone for this, her genesis. This was where it had started.
“We had a hundred and sixty girls living here, and dozens of staff working. Some of the staff stayed nights. I was one of the ones who came and went, from my house nearby.”
Naomi wondered why the woman was telling her all this. Guilt, probably.
“Staff—we called them counselors—did head counts every morning. One morning they did a head count, and two girls were missing from this room. Naomi and Sarah Bolen.”
Sarah, Naomi marveled.
“At first we thought maybe you had escaped, to run back home. But I knew that wasn’t likely.”
“Why not?” Naomi asked, but part of her knew.
“You were orphans. Your mother died giving birth to Sarah. That’s why you came into care. You had no surviving relatives. You were all alone in the world.”
“Except for each other,” Naomi said in a husky voice. She lifted the back of a hand and wiped her eyes. “Did you check all the staff?”
“You’re smart. I’m not surprised you went into this line of work.”
Naomi waited.
The woman sighed. “All accounted for. There were no clues, no leads. It was as if both of you had just vanished in the night.”
“What happened then?” Naomi’s voice was low.
“Nothing.”
The two women squared off in the room, with its decaying wallpap
er, the marks where the teeth of multiple beds had dug into the floor. “We called the courthouse in Elk Crossing, but nothing seemed to happen.” Naomi frowned. She didn’t recall seeing any reports of missing sisters from that town. “Eventually everyone moved on. Of course we didn’t forget. I never forgot. But everyone else did. Life just moved on. I moved on. I am sorry.”
“I need my records.” Naomi swallowed.
An hour later Naomi left, tires crunching down the long drive. A slim file lay in her passenger seat. She silently talked to it as she drove. Sarah. Now I know your name, too. Sarah Bolen. We are sisters. I was barely four and you were only two when we were taken. That’s why I can’t remember anything before captivity.
And I don’t want to remember what happened during it.
The file said more: Names of her mother and her father, who had died in a factory fire not long before Sarah’s birth. Relatives, all deceased. Hometown. Birth dates. Naomi now had a birthday—until now she simply celebrated it in the spring, the time of birth. “My forever child,” Mrs. Cottle had called her, encouraging her to see every day as her awakening to life. Blood types, medical histories. Each word was a clue, a treasure.
From this Naomi could find her own story. Their mother and father were dead, but she had a past. A lineage. Someplace out there, there would be other Bolens, and she could find them and say, I know you. You are family.
But first she had to find Sarah. And the way to do that was to find the man who had stolen them both.
Driving back, all she could think was, Jerome. I need you, she thought. I hope you are there.
Chapter 25
It took most of a night and a morning for Celia to get downtown because she didn’t have any bus fare and had to walk all the way. By the time she finally got back—to a big hug from Stoner and Rich—her feet and legs hurt. At least the spider bite had stopped bleeding.
She sat outside the Aspire shelter with a few other kids. Rich had taken off as he sometimes did. Celia thought he had probably gone home, like she did, to check on people who didn’t want him. A reporter had come by, asking the street kids if they knew who was killing the girls. “If we knew, wouldn’t we tell someone?” the kids asked.
Celia was outside the shelter because of the popsicles. Every week the popsicle man showed up. He was a skinny old hippie who reeked of pot and body odor, and he brought downtown a big cardboard box filled with half-melted popsicles. Over time the kids had figured out the popsicle man was okay. No one had died from eating one of his popsicles, and to their knowledge he had never skeeved on any of them either. Of course no one was letting his dirty fingers anywhere near them anyhow.
He came now, and the street kids gave a little ironic cheer. They gathered round and he opened his box, handing out the purple, red, orange, and green, Celia’s favorite. The heavyset woman who ran the shelter came to the gated door, wearing her blue Aspire shirt. She watched them, sympathy in her face.
Shaking her head, she hung the sign for the coming night: full.
* * *
“I can tell you like lime.”
It was Naomi again. Naomi was on skid row so much it was like she was part of the streets, and even Celia, she had to admit, was looking forward to seeing her, even if it was a mistake, as the other kids said.
Celia had finished sucking the popsicle stick so dry barely even a stain of green remained. That remained on her tongue, which she had been showing to the other kids. They had been sticking their tongues out at one another, making rainbows of purple, red, orange, and green. Sometimes street life could be fun.
“It’s okay,” Celia muttered, to the ground.
“I’m still looking for my sister,” Naomi said. Then she smiled. “But I’m learning more. I’ve learned her name is Sarah.”
“Have you ever had a shower?” Celia asked, suddenly.
Naomi looked puzzled. “Yes.”
“Once, when I was little, we went to stay in this scummy hotel. It was because our landlord kicked us out of our house for not paying the rent. The hotel was for poor people—they call it section eight.”
Naomi, listening, nodded. She understood.
“I never had a shower before. I didn’t understand the curtain goes on the inside. I left it outside.”
“Did the water flood?”
Celia’s chin trembled. “It poured all over the floor.”
“What happened then, Celia?”
Celia looked away. Her face was blank. Naomi waited a long moment, but the girl never answered. “Maybe,” Naomi said softly, “you forgot.”
Celia’s eyes turned towards her. “I never forget.”
Celia had been thinking of that day, the pour of golden water down the shower curtain. She had seen it. Oh yes, she had. She had felt the delicious way the water poured over her body, and she had raised her face to the pelting warm rain of it.
Then she had noticed the way the water streamed down the inside of the curtain. She had knelt, hair pouring, and traced her small fingers down the rivulets. She had seen the way they meandered, like creeks in the woods. Some wandered away, thin and delicate and yet brave for doing so, but even they changed course and came back and joined the strong ones. And then all of them ran together, a race, faster and faster, down the plastic curtain, to make brand-new exciting puddles and lakes on the bathroom floor.
For at least an hour the water had pounded down, until it went from hot to cool to cold, and her shoulders thrashed with it, until she felt she was swimming in the iciest lake or ocean—Celia had never swum, but she could imagine it—and the water turned from golden warm to refreshing cold blue. She was now a waterborne creature, swimming in the deep. She was a new kind of chrysalis, rising from the shore. She was a pupa. She had wings; she was a golden butterfly flying over open water. She was tired. Her wings were wet.
She had suddenly come to and realized the bathroom floor was covered with water. Not just covered. Flooded. Celia was naked, kneeling in the tub, red with cold, and she saw her hand, shaking, reach out to turn off the tap. Drip. Drip. The last of the cold water ran down the drain. But the floor of the bathroom was still covered. Inches of it, sloshing around the rusted coffee can they used for trash. Soaked through the stack of stiff towels on the floor. Ruining the toilet paper left by the cracked porcelain bowl.
Moaning, she had stepped out. She heard shouts of fury from the hotel room below her. The stampede of feet from outside. Teddy, awoken from his nap in front of the television, buried in beer cans.
That was when Celia did stop remembering, so what she had told Naomi was kind of a lie. She did remember, only she chose to forget. But that was a different kind of pretend.
* * *
Rich got off the last bus to a late-night street sparkling with dew. The buildings were slick with moisture, a fog billowing down the streets. The dead hours, he thought, before dawn. When the world might rise again. But only if Mother Nature allowed it.
He was a boy of many thoughts, all carefully hidden. All through school, even before his dad was sent to prison, before his mother turned into the laughingstock of not just their town but the entire world, he had kept his thoughts to himself. He didn’t want anyone to laugh at him, too.
The video of his mother still pained him. He wondered if any of the millions who watched it ever thought she was a real person, dancing on that roof, smashing a beer can against her head. Rich remembered the video in colors of red and veins of black, taken by a laughing stranger with a phone camera.
Child Protective Services had come a few days after the video went viral. They had put Rich in the social worker’s car. They had left the fetid house, the piles of empty bottles, left his mother. They had punished her for being human, for making the same mistakes others did off camera.
He walked quickly, hurrying through the dark, empty streets. He had waited too long to catch the bus. He figured Celia and Stoner had already gone to the overpass. But to get to the overpass, he had to go through the waterfront park, an
d that, even more so than most their world, was a dangerous place. It was a place without lights, where wilding packs of jocks roamed at night.
Moving as quietly as he could, Rich crossed into the waterfront park, trying to move under the deepest shadows so he wouldn’t be seen.
The last time Rich had seen his mother was the day they took him. No, that wasn’t really true. He had seen her once more, at a visit in the child welfare offices. Her drinking had gotten worse, it was clear. He didn’t blame her. His dad had been sent to prison for doing nothing—literally, his dad had been arrested for loitering—and his mom had been working two jobs ever since and still couldn’t afford their rent. That was how she started. She was so stressed all the time.
His mom had needed a friend. That was what she had needed and never got. Just one good friend, someone who would come to the house and clean up the bottles and encourage her to take a shower and sit with her until she got herself right.
Not the kids who spray-painted LOSER on the side of their house. Or the boss who fired his mom after the video went viral. Or the teachers who looked at Rich and then looked away. Or the group home where he was sent.
There was something behind him.
Rich froze. His thighs prickled with fear, and his stomach somersaulted. Slowly he turned around.
They were right down the path, stalking him. He could see them moving under the cherry blossom trees, coming into view. They came out into the path, and he felt his bowels loosen in terror.
High school jocks. They formed a line across the path.
For a terrible moment he didn’t know what to do. The skid row was behind him, all the shelter doors locked for the night. The footbridge was ahead of him. He could dash there, but they could follow. There was no place to run.
He turned and began running for the bridge as fast as he could, knowing it wouldn’t be fast enough. All the memories of gym classes and sports events, the efforts of his mom to get him to do something besides play video games when she was at work.