Angels Burning

by Tawni O'Dell

  “This child was sitting on the roof of your car, Chief,” he starts to explain. “When we told him to get down, he said he’s a friend of yours and if we don’t piss off he’s going to have us fired.”

  I step up to the car.

  “So we’re friends, Derk? I’m glad to hear it. But that doesn’t give you an excuse to be disrespectful. If you don’t get down I’m going to arrest you.”

  “You can’t arrest kids,” he tries to shout, his words muffled by the cake and icing in his mouth.

  “Officers,” I say.

  Blonski needs no other encouragement. He heaves himself onto the trunk of my car and lunges at Derk, barely missing him. The boy takes a flying leap onto the sidewalk, where Singer nabs him. If he were willing to drop the goodies, he might be able to wriggle free and make a run for it, but his concern over them throws off his balance and his judgment.

  Blonski pulls his handcuffs off his belt and dangles them in front of Derk.

  “You want us to cuff him?”

  “That won’t be necessary. Put him in my car. He’s Derk Truly. Camio’s little brother,” I tell the two of them before they can ask.

  I don’t provide any other information. They don’t seem to care. They do as they’re told, shut Derk inside my car, then turn back to me practically bursting with something important to tell me.

  “We just took an interesting missing-persons report,” Singer eagerly informs me.

  “Do you remember that sick rat bastard we arrested last year for domestic abuse? Broke his wife’s jaw and almost put her eye out?” Blonski begins. “And when we looked through the house we found all that teen schoolgirl porn?”

  “Britney Spears the early years kind of stuff with even less clothes,” Singer further elaborates.

  “Lonnie Harris,” I answer them.

  “Right,” Blonski confirms, with a nod. “His wife came into the station this morning and said he’s been missing since Friday night.”

  “Why’d she wait until Monday to report it?”

  “He’s been known to go on weekend benders, but she says he always stays in touch by phone. No matter how drunk he gets, hardly an hour goes by that he doesn’t text her something nasty, but she hasn’t heard from him this whole time.”

  “She said she wanted to report it because she knew she’d be the number one suspect if he turned up dead,” Singer adds. “This way it would show she has nothing to hide. Pretty smart.”

  “She’s not that smart,” Blonski throws back at him. “She stayed married to the guy.”

  He turns to me.

  “What do you think, Chief ? You think he could be the killer and he’s split town? We know he’s violent and we know he likes teen girls.”

  “We also know Camio wasn’t sexually assaulted,” I remind him.

  His face falls. Singer looks dejected, too.

  “But you never know. We have to follow all leads. You should take this seriously.”

  They brighten up a bit.

  “Check out his residence. His phone records. See what he was up to these last few months. Talk to everyone who knows him. If you come up with any tie to Camio or any member of the Truly family, no matter how tenuous, let me know right away.”

  Blonski heads for their cruiser. I touch Singer lightly on his arm before he can follow.

  “Can you get those muddy footprints off the roof of my car?” I ask him.

  He nods.

  “Sure thing, Chief.”

  Singer originally put Derk in the back but he’s already climbed into the front, leaving smears and fingerprints of yellow, blue, and brown frosting all over my seats.

  “Why do they call you Chief ?” he asks me once I’m settled behind the steering wheel.

  “Because I’m the chief of police.”

  “No, you’re not,” he snorts.

  I toss a bunch of napkins at him. He ignores them.

  I’m suddenly hit by a memory of Champ: he’s the same age as Derk, sitting next to Gil in the front seat of his big Buick looking lost and small but smiling because Gil has just handed him a big chocolate cupcake out of a red Zuchelli’s box that also held a coconut cream pie he had picked up for dessert, Mom’s favorite.

  I remember the pang of jealousy I felt when Gil gave Champ the treat and wondering why I cared. I didn’t want a cupcake. I was too old for that. And I didn’t want Gil’s attention. Like most of Mom’s boyfriends, he creeped me out. I didn’t care about letting my little brother have the front seat. It was summer, and Neely and I had just spent the afternoon at the public pool and were happy to sit together in the back, smelling of watermelon Lip Smacker and chlorine, where we could whisper about the older girls’ bikinis and the older boys’ developing muscles, and giggle over Gil’s outdated pompadour.

  Later, when I came upon Champ and Gil watching TV together while sharing a plate of Oreos, something Champ usually did with his sisters, I wondered if maybe I wasn’t jealous of what Champ was receiving from Gil but what Gil was giving Champ.

  I knew it was a good thing for him to finally have a dad even if the dad in question wasn’t his real one. The important thing was he would have a man in his life to teach him stuff, to care about him, to play with him, and set an example. Next Father’s Day, while I was putting flowers and a Hot Wheels car on Denial Donny’s grave and Neely was reading her Encyclopedia of Dogs for the thousandth time while musing about the limitless glamorous identities Passing Through might have—astronaut, captain of industry, European royalty, rock star, Olympic athlete, dog owner—Champ would no longer have to content himself with a drawer full of empty envelopes.

  I was happy for him, but Neely and I had always been the center of Champ’s universe, and maybe I was a little worried that he didn’t have enough love in him to share with all of us. Whenever I’d spot a cupcake paper in the kitchen trash can, I’d wish Gil would dump Mom like all the others. Sometimes I’d wish he’d disappear altogether.

  After Mom died, Champ wouldn’t go near cupcakes. Grandma used to bake dozens for him because she knew how much he liked them, and he’d pale at the sight of them. Grandma took it in stride as she did everything and chalked it up to one more strange manifestation of the grief we were all experiencing: boy misses murdered mother who was too pretty to die; can no longer eat cake.

  By then I knew the reason must be something stomach-turning, but I never made him talk to me about his sudden cupcake revulsion or anything else about Gil. At the time, Neely and I thought we were doing him a favor. If we didn’t make him talk about it, he wouldn’t think about it, and maybe it would go away. We were kids, too. We didn’t know any better. We didn’t know living nightmares don’t ever go away because you can’t wake from them. The most you can hope for is to dilute them by spreading them around.

  “When’s the last time you saw Camio?” I ask Derk after ten minutes of driving in silence during which time he’s eaten two more cupcakes.

  I’m amazed when he replies, “Couple days ago.”

  “Which day?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “What was she doing?”

  “Going for a walk.”

  “Where did she go?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “Did she go for lots of walks?”

  “Don’t know.”

  He reaches inside the bag and pulls out a mini blueberry pie.

  “Let’s save that one for when we’re out of the car,” I tell him.

  He smashes it into his face.

  I comfort myself with the knowledge that Singer probably knows how to get blueberry stains out of car upholstery. I don’t know how or why Singer is so accomplished at cleaning. He seems both proud and embarrassed whenever I ask for his assistance in this area and I get the feeling the reason behind his expertise is highly personal. This is why I haven’t pried but I will eventually. He hasn’t worked for me long enough yet.

  “You never followed her? Come on, Squirrel Boy. I know you did. I bet you followed her, hi
ding in the woods the whole time and she never saw you.”

  He eyes me through a mask of blue-black goo.

  “She goes to the main road and her boyfriend picks her up. She goes to Grandma’s house. She goes to Uncle Eddie’s.”

  Eddie Truly is the former owner of Maybe and the eldest of Miranda’s children. He’d be in his late sixties now. He was drafted right out of high school, did one tour in Vietnam, and headed straight for a bottle, a needle, and a dangerous crowd of bikers when he came home. To my knowledge he’s never stopped using the booze or the drugs. He did stop hanging out with his old gang when a couple of members broke into his house one night and stabbed him twenty-two times. Drug deal gone bad was the final verdict the police gave at the time. No arrests were made. Eddie wouldn’t talk. His survival into a sixth decade is nothing short of a miracle. I can’t imagine smart, pretty, Popsicle-loving Camio with the sparkly heart anklet and outdated psychology books having anything to do with him.

  “Why does she go to your uncle’s house?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “Does your uncle have kids, a wife?”

  “He lives by his self.”

  “Himself.”

  “His self.”

  “What does she do there?”

  “Goes inside, then goes back out. Sometimes she’s crying.”

  “You’re sure about that?”

  “I told Tug.”

  “What did he do?”

  He falls silent. I know I’m pushing this. He’s probably said more words to me today than he’s said to his entire family all year.

  “He asked her,” he answers me while staring bewildered at his already empty hands covered in blueberry filling and golden flakes of crust. “She got real mad and told him it was none of his business. Then she started crying again and said people are bad and he was right to spend all his time with the woof dogs.”

  I watch him watching his hands, trying to decide what to do with them.

  “There are napkins sitting right beside you,” I tell him.

  He darts a glance at the pile, then wipes his hands down the front of his shirt, his shorts, and ends at his kneecaps before bringing them back to his mouth and licking between his fingers.

  We finish the rest of the drive in silence. He pushes his face up against the window and watches the town flash by, sits back and stares at his feet once we’re out in the country again, but perks up when we turn onto Neely’s road.

  The flickering bits of sunlight filtering through the leafy netting of the treetops towering over us gives the shadowy green air a hazy, rippling, underwater effect. I ask him if he likes to swim. He says nothing.

  I don’t see Tug and Maybe. The four other dogs and Neely are standing with a man and a boy.

  I park and get out of my car. Upon seeing me, Neely throws her arms wide and runs toward me, beaming, something I haven’t seen her do since before our mother died and our acceptance of the reason why.

  She gestures behind her at the dark-haired duo, carbon copies of each other from their matching outfits of cargo shorts, polo shirts, and sandals to their uncertain smiles and right hands raised stiffly in awkward waves.

  Of course my sister provides the explanation in dog terms.

  “Champ found his way back home,” she calls out to me.

  chapter nine

  I HAVE PLENTY of friends with children, grown children at this point. Some—like Nolan—even have grandbabies. And I’ve been told by them time and again how I can never truly understand what love is since I don’t have kids.

  Although I should qualify this statement by mentioning that it’s always women who tell me this. Men don’t seem to share the same belief; usually when I run across one of them crying in his beer over the greatest love of his life, it’s a woman who’s not his wife, a car, a sports team, or sometimes even a power tool.

  From what I’ve observed over the years, romantic love is largely situational. You fall in love because you’re sixteen, or because he has nice abs, or because he offers to put you on his health insurance. It’s based on moods, superficial whims, and the needy psychological mess that accounts for human personalities combined with basic lust. Once the romantic love dies out, if a couple is lucky, an enduring companionable partnership continues on. If not, it’s splitsville.

  A mother’s love for her child is something altogether different. It’s a force of nature: primal, unrelenting, depthless, inflexible. It can’t be bought or taught, replaced or reasoned with. Mothers will put their own happiness and welfare behind that of their children every time.

  Well, maybe not all mothers.

  Champ was not and is not my child, but I can’t imagine loving anyone more than I did him and still do. When we were growing up together, it was an unforced, senseless kind of love as easy and gratifying as the taste of a drippy soft-serve cone on a summer’s day or the unconscious warmth I felt when Grandma tucked an extra blanket over me on a winter’s night.

  Watching Champ sitting in the plank of sunlight on the staircase landing intently playing with his Matchbox City or hearing the yank of his See ’n Say cord come from another room followed by a barnyard animal sound and his delighted laughter, I’d feel an electric hormonal jolt I was too young to understand. It was a sweet sting, full of pleasure and ache, like the release of finally, secretly scratching a chicken pox scab even though everyone has promised the act will leave a scar.

  I’ve never been upset at him for cutting me out of his life. It would’ve been too difficult and exhausting to maneuver around each other. We would have always been walking a tightrope between too much to say and too much not to say.

  He knew Neely and I knew, and even though he also knew we loved him and would do anything for him, every time he looked at us, he saw something in our eyes we couldn’t hide. Not pity. Not anger. Not even shame over not being able to save him from Gil. We could control these emotions. What we couldn’t control was the pain. Our pain. The pain someone feels for someone she loves who she can’t help, can’t heal, can’t restore.

  I’m not prepared for how bad it hurts to see him again.

  “Dove,” he says, and all the years fall away as completely and perilously as an avalanche.

  I’m left teetering on a precipice of unwelcome memories and the equally unwelcome discovery that time does not heal all wounds. It may have taken the edge and shine off but the blade has remained permanently plunged in the flesh of my soul, a dull, rusty, eternal reminder.

  I try to say his name but nothing comes out.

  “It’s Champ,” Neely explains, calmly and kindly, like I’m awash in senility.

  Champ gives me the goofy, bug-eyed, grandma-without-her-dentures smile he used to make whenever he thought I was taking too long to understand something that was glaringly obvious to him and Neely.

  I bust out laughing and give him a hug.

  “And this is your nephew, Mason,” he tells me once we break our embrace.

  I glance down at the slight little boy dressed exactly like his dad except he’s wearing traffic-cone orange socks with his sandals. The tips of his ears and his nose are sunburned and peeling, both knees have Batman Band-Aids on them, and his hair is shaved into a crew cut similar to Derk’s except he has scabbed-over nicks and cuts on his scalp like he’s been at the mercy of a drunk army barber.

  He has a purple Trapper Keeper clutched possessively to his chest; he shifts it to his left side while extending his right hand to me and says, “I’m named after the jar.”

  “He’s not named after the jar.” Champ sighs. “He recently discovered mason jars and now he tells everyone this is where we got his name from.”

  Mason gives my hand a quick shake.

  “Dad’s right,” he admits. “My mom wanted to name me Jason, but Dad said every guy named Jason he ever met was a jerk. Dad wanted to name me Milo after Milo in The Phantom Tollbooth. That was his favorite book when he was a kid and now it’s mine. But Mom said Milo was a nerd name, and Dad s
aid, yeah, all the Jasons would probably beat me up, so they mushed the two names together and got Mason.

  “I wish I could be named Thor,” he finishes.

  “Who doesn’t?” Neely concurs.

  “Mason and I decided it was time to take a trip and see the country,” Champ explains while placing his hands on the boy’s shoulders, “and he wanted to see where I grew up and meet his aunt Dove and aunt Neely.”

  “He got fired,” Mason says, jerking a thumb in his father’s direction.

  Champ gives the shoulders a squeeze.

  “I didn’t get fired. I quit.”

  “That’s not what Stevie said.”

  “Stevie doesn’t know what she’s talking about.”

  “Who’s Stevie?” I ask.

  “His last girlfriend,” Mason replies. “She dumped him.”

  “We broke up.”

  “She was pretty nice,” Mason goes on with his description. “She never ordered mushrooms on her half of the pizza even though she liked them, ’cause she knew I was afraid they’d touch my half.”

  “He doesn’t like mushrooms,” Champ explains.

  “They’re fungus,” Mason supplies, wide-eyed. “Like the stuff the scrubbing bubbles kill in the bathtub.”

  “It’s not the same thing,” Champ says in a tone that lets us know this isn’t the first time they’ve had this conversation.

  “Fungus is fungus,” Mason asserts.

  “Hey!” he calls out, jabbing a finger around my side. “There’s someone in your car.”

  I forgot all about Derk.

  Kris, Kross, and Owen are standing next to the passenger-side door licking at ten little blueberry stained fingers wiggling at them through the cracked window.

  “It’s okay. You can come out,” I tell him. “They won’t hurt you.”

  “I ain’t scared of ’em,” he yells back at me.

  “Then why are you staying in the car?”

  He doesn’t have an answer for me. He throws open the door and pushes his way into the middle of the three large dogs, and they start licking him all over.

  He holds his hands up over his face and I think I hear a giggle, but I have a hard time imagining this particular child is capable of feeling glee.