The Age of the Child

by Kristen Tsetsi

  “Depends, I guess,” Floyd said. “So? Yeah? No?”

  After a minute, Lenny said, “Yes.”

  For their final collection, Floyd drove the narrow lanes behind the upscale Tinytown shops. Lenny was the front-seat lookout, and Millie sat in back with Pearl on the stacked dog mats they used as chairs or, when necessary, mattresses for the drops. It was Pearl’s introductory ride-along to determine whether she thought she’d want to volunteer next year. As a former drop, herself, she said, she thought it was very wrong that they would or could listen to “Shake, Rattle and Roll” while scouring the area for abandoned children and repeatedly asked Floyd to turn off the music.

  “You act like it’s some joke,” she wailed.

  “You get used to—” Floyd touched Lenny’s arm. “Look there. Might be something.”

  “Great eye!” Lenny said, and Floyd smiled stupidly at her.

  Millie touched his shoulder over the back of his seat. “You’re so observant.” She took her hand away after he blushed at the rearview mirror.

  “Here? Something here?” Pearl looked out the window at the bright buildings and clean sidewalks.

  “Oh, yes. They’re everywhere!” Millie smiled.

  TWENTY

  The woman poked her head around the corner of a store with Fashion Able: Accessorize painted over its loading dock entrance. She wore a light, pretty scarf in a knot around her neck. Lenny thought she had to have seen the van, but then she stepped out into the alley with a boy she’d been hiding between the stores. He was three, maybe. A cowboy hat too big for his head shaded him to his chest. The woman dragged him into a parking area behind Big Beautiful Bagels, then stopped and spun around, swinging the boy off his feet. She stared straight at the van and screamed, “Who’s is in there?”

  Lenny looked at Floyd, who poked out the tip of his tongue and made rings with his finger at the side of his head.

  The woman marched toward them. The toes of the boy’s green shoes dragged behind him and his head hung to the side. His hat fell off. Pearl gasped even though they’d already seen a few like him that day.

  “What do you want?” the woman shouted. “What do you have in there? A child? Help! Help, someone! They’re abandoning”—she pushed the boy to the ground—“a defenseless child!”

  She ran away down the tidy alley, stomping the little boy’s hat under her narrow red heel. It stuck to her shoe and went with her.

  Floyd started the engine. “When I stop, grab the kid fast.”

  He screeched the brakes beside the boy and Lenny jumped out to pick him up. He was limp and heavy and still bleeding. The gouge in his neck looked a little deeper than the others they’d seen. She called to Pearl and got help loading him onto the mats.

  Floyd said, “She took the path,” and was off again before they had the door closed.

  They couldn’t drive on the flower-lined walkway connecting the shopping area to an upscale neighborhood, but Lenny could keep an eye on the woman through the trees while they took the vehicle access road.

  “Stop,” Lenny said once they’d driven inside the heavily manicured subdivision. The woman had broken a heel somewhere and limped around a corner property tucked inside a tall privacy fence. The hat was gone.

  Floyd pulled over short of the end of the road. “What kind of idiot drops a kid so close to home?” He turned off the van. “Probably shouldn’t give him back. She’s too dumb to raise him.”

  Lenny opened her door. “Maybe leaving him so close meant she didn’t really want to. Maybe it was a bad day.” She jumped out of the van, ran on her toes so her shoes wouldn’t stomp, and crouched behind the corner fence. The woman hobbled up a short, wide driveway to a grand front entrance cluttered with pots of yellow pansies.

  “I don’t think the Fact has ever published a story about a returned drop.”

  Lenny turned at the voice and hit her nose hard against Millie’s forehead.

  Millie rubbed her head and nodded at the house. “She went inside.”

  Lenny and Millie hurried back to the van.

  “The one with the yellow pansies,” Lenny said, climbing in. Millie stayed outside and wrote in her notebook.

  Pearl thrust herself between the front seats. “What are you going to do?”

  “Give him back,” Floyd said. When Lenny started to move, he said, “Give it a minute.”

  “But…what about the shelters?” Pearl said. “The police?”

  “Police’ll arrest the lady and drop the kid in the government shelter.”

  “Well,” Pearl said, “I don’t know. I mean, I’m glad no one returned me.”

  “Oh, yes, but you live in a private shelter,” Millie said on the sidewalk.

  “So wh—?”

  Millie popped her head inside Lenny’s open window. “Government shelters release them to anyone willing to take them, and that age is very popular on the dark fuck database.”

  Lenny didn’t like to think about the dark fuck database. If she did think about it, she wouldn’t have any idea what to do with the kids they couldn’t get into private shelters. So, instead of thinking about it, she looked at a tree and traced the length of a branch from tip to trunk. There were terrible things happening all over the world that she couldn’t control, and her thinking about them wouldn’t change a thing. It would only make her unhappy.

  “But he’s so young,” Pearl said.

  Lenny heard shuffling and looked over her shoulder. Pearl was sitting on the floor next to the boy. He hadn’t moved since they’d laid him down. She asked Pearl to check him.

  Pearl wet her finger and stuck it under his nose and said, “Just sleeping, I guess.”

  “Can’t be too young for the dark fuck database,” Floyd said. “Only thing they don’t want is someone that wants it back.”

  Pearl shuddered. “I hate sex.”

  “How do you know all of this?” Lenny said.

  Floyd said, “I read.”

  “And don’t you see how unhappy you are, sometimes?”

  Millie left Lenny’s window to stand in front of the open sliding door, her pen over her notebook. She said, “You’ve had it, then, Pearl? Inter-course, I mean.”

  Pearl stroked the little boy’s shiny green shoe.

  “Oh! OH!” Millie flapped her notebook at Pearl. “Did someone coerce you into having it?”

  “Coerce me?”

  “Well, ‘rape,’ as still defined in dictionaries, but I should use the new terminology I’m sure the AP will adopt per a pending revision to the legal definition meant to reduce the burden on the courts.” After a few seconds of silence, she said, “One-sided heterosexual abstinence?” She sighed at Pearl. “Marital and cohabitational accusations?”

  “What?”

  “Let’s go now,” Floyd said. “Doubt she’s still watching the windows, so she won’t see us come up.”

  “Us” wasn’t really “us.” Floyd wasn’t strong enough to lift a three-year-old. Lenny had been feeding him for the last three years, but he hadn’t gained much weight, muscle, or color. He’d once tried using a sledge-hammer at one of her dad’s sites, and then a regular hammer, but her dad had finally found other things for him to do in return for houses Floyd could live in while they were being renovated. Lenny’s dad said Floyd had “amazing spatial awareness” and “a real knack for motivating workers,” so now he helped with floor plan design and crew supervision.

  Floyd reached back from his seat and pulled at the boy’s foot. “Hey,” he said. “Kid.”

  The boy opened his eyes.

  Lenny set the boy on the mat exclaiming WELCOME! and saw “Chester” markered on his shirt tag before she rang the doorbell. She and Millie raced down the stairs and ducked behind a car parked on the street. Lenny couldn’t see anything, but she heard the door open and the woman hiss, “Damn that van to hell.” The door slammed.

  Lenny peeked up through the car windows and saw that the boy was gone. “Let’s go,” she said. She started toward the van, b
ut Millie headed for the house in a crouching jog.

  “What are you doing?” Lenny tried to whisper.

  Millie showed Lenny her notebook over her shoulder and kept going. Lenny followed her across the driveway to the big front window.

  They saw it all.

  It started in the living room, on the floor. Then it moved to the foyer.

  Lenny wanted to run away, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t do anything. She was afraid to even close her eyes.

  Millie wrote furiously beside her.

  At the end, when there was no question it was over, Lenny kept looking in, transfixed, until the woman saw them. She sneered and lunged for the front door.

  “Go,” Millie said, but Lenny still couldn’t move. Millie pulled her with a strength Lenny didn’t know she had all the way to the van and shoved her in. Lenny fell and rolled and was on her back trying to catch her breath when she saw the woman’s wild face in the open door for a single terrifying second before Floyd peeled away from the curb.

  “What the hell happened?” he said.

  Before Millie could answer, Lenny asked Floyd to please take them to the police station.

  Lenny stayed curled up on the van floor for the return trip to the school. She and Millie had made the report alone, so they—well, and the police—were the only ones who knew what had happened. Whenever Pearl or Floyd asked about the drop, Lenny would give Millie a look that warned her to keep quiet about the boy. Chester. The mailbox at the end of the driveway had read WALTON. Chester Walton.

  She rubbed her cheek on the soft dog mat and tried to convince herself that what had happened to Chester wasn’t her fault. She couldn’t have known. “You weren’t the one who did those things to that poor boy,” her mom would say. “You can’t control the actions of others.” But her mom had also said, once upon a time, “Things don’t happen for a reason, but there is a reason things happen.”

  They were the reason this thing had happened.

  Millie typed on her tablet while turning pages in her notes.

  “No details,” Lenny said.

  Without looking up, Millie said, “The details are the story.”

  “But what happened in there,” Lenny said.

  “Yes? What? What? Did I miss something?”

  “Not everyone’s like you,” Lenny said. “Most people would never want to see what we saw, and I just don’t think you should force it into their heads.”

  Still typing, Millie argued that the details were the only thing about another dead toddler that would make the story “resonate with the public” and that Lenny shouldn’t be so sensitive. “Abuse is a simple fact of life just like drops are.”

  Lenny thought about what her mom had said about her aunt Kat and the snow. She reminded herself of it all the time. But she was sure her mom would agree with her about this.

  “If you write what happened in there,” Lenny said, “I’ll tell Ms. Well that everything you’ve ever written about our team was a lie. And she’ll believe me.” Ms. Well would believe her, too, because her work with the Collectors had earned her a reputation among the school faculty (they understood the identities of the volunteers had to be kept a secret from the student body). If Lenny went to Ms. Well, not only would Millie’s reputation as a writer be destroyed around school, but it would also ruin any future she might have with the Daily Fact.

  “But I do thank you for saving me,” she said as Millie turned off her tablet. “I promise I’ll make it up to you one day.”

  TWENTY ONE

  Without the details, Millie’s story about the abused boy took a single day to reach the Associated Press. She had worked harder on it than she had ever worked on anything, even calling the spokesperson for the Windbury police department to gather what she needed from the police report. Her rough draft had taken half an hour to write and three and a half hours to edit before it was ready to submit to the Fact. The return email from the town’s section editor had arrived within fifteen minutes: Get a quote from Ms. Walton’s attorney (Jeannie Wilson, 860-555-9825) and a hospital update on the boy before 8 a.m. and we’ll run it today.

  Her story had published almost as she’d written it and within three days began appearing in the majority of online publications, whether they were somewhat or not remotely reputable. Some reproduced the article in full and others in part, but none omitted a certain selection of paragraphs from the text, frequently using a line or two for the callout box:

  …The details of the abuse suffered by two-and-a-half-year-old Chester in the family living room are too graphic to document anywhere but in a medical examiner’s report…

  …Delilah Walton was not available for comment. However, according to a police report filed Friday Walton said she had repeatedly told authorities upon discovering she was pregnant that she should not have a baby due to a documented history of mental illness. She told the arresting officers that she had at one time pleaded with the governor to grant her what she called in the report a “pre-offense pardon” that would allow her to terminate the pregnancy without persecution. According to the police report, Ms. Walton shouted at the police, “Do you know what the governor said? ‘No exceptions.’ She said it was her ‘civic and humanitarian duty to protect that unborn.’”…

  …Defense attorney Jeannie Wilson, speaking on behalf of Walton, said she is optimistic about the sentencing hearing. “Six months, maybe eight. A year at worst. It wasn’t first-degree homi-cide, after all. Manslaughter, if anything, and as you know this state has a one-year maximum on child torture. I’m confident Delilah will be out in no time to get the mental health care she desperately needs,” Wilson said. Walton will be arraigned Monday at 8:30 a.m.…

  In addition to going viral online, Millie’s story quickly became a big-network television news sensation with Chester Walton as the leading topic on each of the twenty-four-hour news channels. It was a Saturday that the story took over the television, and while her mother hadn’t accidentally smiled at or touched Millie again, she did bring her to Lenny’s house to watch the news on Lenny’s mom’s newer, bigger projection viewer. Because Lenny’s dad was out working—with Floyd, as usual—on one of his houses, it was just the four of them in the spacious, smoke-free attic office watching commentators debating everything from abortion laws to why Chester Walton’s mother was pregnant in the first place.

  “Because you cannot regulate sexual behavior, you simpleton,” Millie’s mother said to the projection of the rosy cheeked blond man.

  When Millie and her mother arrived home that night, her dad bounced off the couch as they entered and stood beside his largest suitcase. Her mother stormed past her and lit a cigarette from the pack in her pocket. Millie wondered how long he had been there. She wished they all could have watched the coverage together before he left again.

  He opened his arms and Millie stepped into his hug. Behind him, her mother evaporated a cigarette in the kitchen.

  “I sure am proud of you, silly willie Millie,” he said. “Better enjoy it while it lasts! This kind of passing fascination never does.” He snapped out his bag’s handle and turned to look at Millie’s mother. She floated smoke in front of her shining eyes.

  “How long will you be gone this time?” Millie said.

  He gave her shoulders a squeeze. “It’s not how long you’re gone, it’s where you go and what you do when you get there!” He messed up the hair on the top of her head, sailed to the door with his suitcase rolling behind him, and was gone.

  Chester Walton’s death was not a passing fascination. As it turned out, the details Millie had omitted from the story only fueled people’s imaginations, elevating her story into a national conversation and Chester Walton into a national symbol. Because each person’s imagined worst case scenario was different, Chester Walton had, in the mind of the public, suffered every manner of abuse possible. Of those interviewed for on-the-spot reactions to what they believed Chester Walton’s mother had done to him, however, none managed to imagine anything
worse than what had actually happened. (Because her mother always had the television on, now, so they could watch the ongoing reaction to Millie’s work, Millie made sure to never miss the guesses sad-faced people offered for the “On the Street” segment. When once she started to tell her mother just how wrong they were, her mother said, “Millicent, you are never to tell me what happened inside that house.”)

  Millie applied for a full-time reporter position with the Daily Fact following graduation from high school. They immediately hired her for the next position to become available, which the email read was to be determined. In the meantime, she lived with, and did household chores for, her mother, who held firm in her demand that Millie earn her own way whether she was waiting for a job or attending college (a useless…endeavor, since the only reason to go would be to improve her odds of being hired by the Daily Fact). They spoke little when they were home at the same time. Instead, they watched hours a day of base-bait debate over “what should be done,” the suited figures in Congress fighting battle after battle in pursuit of a solution.

  The Wednesday of Millie’s fourth week waiting for word from the Fact, her mother stayed home so the two of them could follow the latest lunchtime development. Whatever was to happen, her mother told her over her breakfast muffin and cigarette, promised to be “momentous.”

  Millie wondered whether her dad had been watching the news lately. Or, at least, whether he’d been watching the one time they’d mentioned her specific article and her name along with it. But, no. He would have called. “Congratulations, silly willie Millie! You’re a star!” she was sure he’d have said.

  Her mother gouged a chunk out of her muffin and held it over the newspaper as she read.

  Without allowing herself time to hesitate, because hesitating would scare her into the same place she’d retreated to every other time she never asked, Millie said, “Did he love me?”