Angels Burning

by Tawni O'Dell

  I know what I’m about to do could easily cause me to lose my job. Police officers aren’t allowed to discharge their weapons unless they intend to use deadly force, and I don’t want to kill this boy.

  I shoot out his front and back tires. Nothing more.

  One of the girls screams. Terror briefly wipes away Jared’s practiced sneer of inferiority-bred superiority before his face darkens with rage.

  He lets loose with a string of swear words and flings a savage stare at me before rushing to his bike.

  My officers come charging out of the station house along with everyone else.

  “Nothing to see here, people,” I say as I stride in their direction.

  I stop and watch Jared and his buddy load his disabled motorcycle onto the truck. He stays there beside it. Mindy Dawn joins him. Katy and Madison crawl into the cab with the quiet boy. They screech out of the parking lot.

  “Officers,” I say to Dewey and Everhart, “please follow that driver and ticket him for having passengers in the open bed of a pickup truck.”

  I turn to Singer and Blonski, who watch me with a mix of uncertainty and absolute trust.

  “I’ve had enough of these people,” I tell them, handing over my gun to Blonski. “Go get me Shawna Truly. It’s time for us to have a talk. Here. In my house.”

  chapter seventeen

  I GET OFF THE PHONE with Neely as Singer and Blonski escort Shawna Truly into the station. The timing is perfect, since the reason my sister called was to tell me Derk has shown up at her place with a backpack and a BB gun, wanting to play with Mason. The Trulys live a good ten miles from Neely. I have no idea how he got there: if a family member dropped him off; if he hitchhiked; if he traversed the route by leaping from treetop to treetop.

  I wonder if his mother has any idea where he is.

  I stand in the doorway of my office and watch her follow Blonski to our interview room. Everyone else watches, too. No one can seem to look away. I’m not sure exactly why. She’s a large woman but we’ve all seen larger. She’s wearing turquoise blue and yellow-striped capri leggings that wouldn’t look good on a supermodel let alone a woman with a lot of bulk, and a voluminous sleeveless grubby white blouse that reveals upper arms the size of newborn Jakester, yet we’ve all seen plenty of bad outfits. She has a certain amount of notoriety now, but we all know it’s not polite to stare at a woman who’s just lost a daughter to the county morgue and a son to the state correctional system.

  We all watch because there’s something morbidly magnificent about her. Like a she elephant grandly walking through a group of deadly big cats to get to the water hole, she has a regal disinterest in her surroundings because she knows nothing can touch her. In her mind, she has reached a place where she is separate. She is above us all reveling in an enviable freedom because she doesn’t care about anything anymore.

  I’m about to make her care.

  Our interview room is claustrophobically small, gray, windowless, stuffy, and has a metallic echo if someone speaks too loudly; it’s sort of like hanging out in the drum of a washing machine.

  I let her sit for a few minutes and watch her through our surveillance camera. People do some interesting things when left alone in this room. They pray, cry, sing, whistle, talk to themselves, drum their fingers, tap their feet, put their heads down on the table and nap. I’ve seen women touch up their makeup and men drop to the floor and do push-ups. One guy took out a pack of cards and started playing solitaire.

  Shawna does nothing. She sits and looks straight ahead as motionless and permanent as a boulder.

  She doesn’t turn at the sound of me coming through the door. She doesn’t focus on me when I take a seat across the table from her.

  I slam down her high school yearbook and glance at the tobacco stain on my shoe as I cross my legs. Singer offered to try to get it out, but I told him no. This is my brown badge of outrage.

  “What the hell happened to you?” I ask her.

  Her eyes flicker in my direction but don’t stay stuck on me.

  “I said, ‘What the hell happened to you?’ How much do you weigh? What do you think?” I pick a ridiculous number. “Six, seven hundred pounds?”

  She looks at me again and quickly looks away, but the color’s rising in her face.

  “When’s the last time you washed your hair?” I goad her.

  I reach for a pair of reading glasses hooked to my jacket pocket and put them on while I open the yearbook and start flipping through pages.

  Most people are helpless in the face of their teenage pasts. That time holds something they want to relive or finally bury, something they need to defend or praise, a long overdue apology or clarification they’ve been waiting for. Nothing can make them question everything about their present lives like that backward glance at all the self-doubt and lost possibilities.

  I was everywhere in my yearbook, hamming it up in glossy candids, sitting on bleachers for team group photos, captured in sports action shots (I was the scrappy point guard of our district-champion basketball team and the school record holder in the 400 meters), posed in the library with the other student council officers (I was the president), smiling humbly on the football field in my strapless magenta dress with the handkerchief hem as first runner-up in the homecoming court. (I took the defeat well. I knew there was no way I was going to beat Lori Ann Van Cherry with her Heather Locklear hair.)

  Still there’s nothing in those pages that revealed who I was. It only showed what I did. I don’t feel the need to explain this, but most people must. I’m counting on Shawna being one of them.

  “You think you’re going to be one of those people who has to be buried in a grand piano because they can’t find a casket big enough?” I ask conversationally, returning to the subject of her weight. “I bet if they cremated you, you’d fill two urns. You know . . .”

  I look up at her as if I’ve just thought of something important.

  “. . . your heart could give out at any minute. People your size drop dead all the time. Have you made your peace with Jesus?”

  This last question seems to bother and confuse her. Her cheeks are burning a bright pink.

  “Has Miranda helped you with that?” I wonder sweetly. “Ah, here it is.”

  I spin the yearbook around so it’s facing her and point at an eighteen-year-old Shawna Ridge.

  “That’s a beautiful girl, right there. As pretty as Camio. Look at that smile, all that shiny blond hair, those big blue eyes.”

  She tries not to look but can’t stop herself. Her lips droop in a pained expression, and her head is drawn forward and positioned tautly over the page as if an invisible hand has grabbed her by the back of the neck and is holding her there.

  “A girl like that had big dreams, I bet. What were they? What did you want to do with your life? Be a movie star? You were pretty enough. How about a teacher? A doctor? A roller-derby queen?”

  I pull the book back and flip to another page I looked up earlier. It’s a candid of her and a couple of friends at a football game. She looks happy and alive, waving a cheap plastic pom-pom. I slide the book back to her.

  She lifts one of her hands and touches the picture with two fingers.

  “What were your dreams, Shawna?” I push her. “Did they include spending every minute of every day sitting comatose on a couch in Clark Truly’s house, wallowing in filth, waiting for him to get home from his latest run so he can smack you around?”

  She looks up at me again. She’s paying attention now. Her eyes snap with wary alertness. I notice her throat convulse slightly as she swallows.

  “Or is he afraid of you now?” I ask with a big smile. “Is he afraid you’ll sit on him?”

  Our eyes meet. I lower my glasses down my nose so she can get a better look at mine.

  “I repeat, ‘What the hell happened to you?’ ”

  The next ten seconds seem to take an eternity to pass. I’ve tried to reach the girl in the yearbook who I believe is still alive s
omewhere inside the woman sitting across from me. Be alive, I silently will young Shawna. Don’t be a tomb, I silently beg her older self.

  “I don’t know what you want from me,” she finally speaks.

  Her voice trembles, but I don’t think from nervousness or grief. She’s angry.

  “I got nothing to say about Camio. And if you think you can get me to turn on my family just by being mean to me—”

  “Stop.”

  I hold up my hand, take off my glasses, and sink back in my chair disgustedly.

  “Stop right there. Spare me the ‘I pledge allegiance to the Trulys’ bullshit. You’re not one of them, Shawna. You married in.”

  She stands up, completely throwing me for a loop. I stand up, too.

  “You don’t know nothing about me or them!” she shouts.

  “You want to get into this with me?” I shout back. “You really want to do this? Do you know who I am?”

  Without realizing it, I walk around the table and get right into her face.

  “Don’t you dare give me any of your ‘woe is me, downtrodden redneck, us against them’ bullshit.”

  I push closer. We’re nose to nose. Any closer and we’ll be kissing.

  “I see your drunk, wife-beating husband and witch of a mother-in-law and raise you one dead father, one whore mother, and a fucking pedophile!”

  She’s taken a step back from me and bumped up against the table.

  I stick a finger in her face and hiss, “Now tell me why you don’t care about your children.”

  Shawna’s eyes go dark, and I hear a small intake of her breath. It’s that moment in news footage when a building is about to be demolished—whether it be by a wrecking ball, an earthquake, or terrorists in a plane—when the destructive act has occurred but all there is to show for it is a puff of smoke before the structure suddenly, violently, swiftly collapses.

  She falls back down into her chair and begins to sob.

  I return to mine and watch her. She covers her face with her hands, and her shoulders shake. It’s a noise like nothing I’ve heard before; the heartbreak behind it I recognize as human, but the unfettered pain is an animal’s howling.

  In the midst of her wails, she says something I can’t make out.

  “What, Shawna? What did you say?”

  She throws her head on top of her arms on the table and continues to cry.

  I lean so far forward to hear her response, our cheeks brush against each other and I feel her breath moist inside my ear, but she doesn’t say anything more.

  I sit up again.

  “What did you say, Shawna?” I repeat.

  She raises her head and slams her fists on the table.

  “They’re not mine!” she screams.

  Her body is wracked with fresh sobs. She shakes so hard I fully expect the little room to start to crumble around us. Finally, her crying subsides and she takes a long shuddering breath.

  She looks up at me and I see young Shawna shining in her eyes. She sticks out the tip of her tongue to catch a tear dribbling down her cheek and onto her upper lip.

  “They’re not mine,” she whispers.

  “CAN I GET YOU a glass of water?” I ask her.

  I’ve let five minutes pass. I thought about leaving her alone again, letting her have some time to herself and collect her thoughts, but when I tried to get up, my legs wouldn’t work. Shawna’s revelation has left me stunned, shaky, and exhausted.

  “Some coffee? Tea?”

  She shakes her head. She blows her nose on one of the tissues she keeps pulling from her purse. Women sometimes keep one or two loose ones or one of those mini travel packets, but I’ve never seen this many coming out of one handbag like scarves from a magician’s sleeve.

  She takes the latest used one and places it in the snotty, tear-saturated pile mounting at her elbow.

  “The children aren’t yours.”

  I put it out there as plainly as possible. We’ll see where it goes.

  “Derk and Tug are mine,” she sniffs. “The older three are Clark’s.”

  “So he was married before?”

  She shakes her head.

  “So he wasn’t married to their mother?”

  She nods.

  “This all makes a little more sense now,” I tell her. “I didn’t realize how much younger you are than Clark until I started checking you out and snooping around for your yearbook.”

  We both look down at the book. She’s kept it open to the page of her and her friends and glances at it from time to time. I think the image is giving her strength.

  “There’s ten years between us.”

  “How old were you when you married him?”

  “Nineteen.”

  I must make an unconscious sign of disapproval because she quickly follows with, “No one made me.”

  I smile at her. “That’s kind of a strange piece of information to provide unsolicited.”

  “I just mean I wanted to marry Clark. He was good-looking and nice to me. And I needed to get out of the house.”

  She stops talking and looks guiltily at her hands clutching yet another tissue she’s begun to slowly shred.

  I don’t let my mind wander into Shawna’s childhood home. I don’t want to know what went on there. It’s enough to know she probably had no family support, no one to run to. On the contrary, she had a need to escape. The Trulys sniff out the weak and unprotected.

  I feel bad now about asking her about her dreams earlier. She was probably so beaten down by the time she met Clark Truly, taking care of him and his three kids, that retiring to the couch at the end of the day may have seemed like a dream to her.

  “I’m impressed,” I say, trying to make it up to her. “Really, I am. That’s a lot to take on. Three stepkids when you’re just a kid yourself. How old were they then?”

  “One, four, and six,” she rattles off automatically.

  Her expression softens, maybe from recalling pleasant memories of them at that age or maybe secretly rejoicing in the fact that now one’s dead, one’s in jail, and one’s saddled with a baby of her own.

  “You must’ve really loved Clark,” I say.

  “I didn’t know about them,” she lets slip out.

  She flashes me an embarrassed look.

  “What do you mean?”

  “When I married him, I didn’t know he had kids. They were kind of presented to me afterward.”

  “Wow,” is all I can think to say.

  I sit back in my chair and take a moment to digest yet one more unbelievable ingredient in the steaming stew of Shawna Ridge Truly’s life.

  “How could you not know?” I ask her.

  “He never talked about them. Nobody did. I never saw them.”

  “So what did you do when you found out? If it had been me I would’ve headed straight for divorce court.”

  She smiles. It’s the first time I’ve seen her lips in any shape other than a scowling frown or an angry straight line, and the difference changes everything about her. Years fall from her face. When I met her I thought she might be in her late forties. She’s only thirty-four. Now she looks it. Her posture even improves.

  “I was kind of a hell-raiser back then,” she says. “I had a temper. I said there’s no way I’m staying. I can’t take care of three kids. He lied to me and it was a big lie. I was getting out.

  “We had a huge fight. Miranda was the one who calmed me down and convinced me to stay on for a little while and see if we could sort things out.”

  At the mention of Miranda’s name she swallows her smile and the glimpse of a younger, livelier Shawna is gone.

  I wait. At this point, she wants to tell me her story. I can sense it. We all want someone to know our worst secrets, even if it’s only one other person. It makes them real. I wonder if she’s ever unburdened herself before. I don’t know who she could have possibly confided in.

  She digs back in her purse. I’m surprised when she doesn’t bring out yet another tissue. I
nstead, it’s a wallet from which she extracts an old photograph hidden behind some credit cards. She hands it to me. It’s a picture of a cat.

  “The only thing I brought with me from home besides my clothes was my cat, Sugar. I named her that because she was all black except for white around her mouth and chin like she’d been eating sugar.”

  I get a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach; the tale of Sugar is not going to end well.

  “I’d had her since I was little.”

  The tears begin. They’re silent this time. They stream down her round cheeks.

  “I woke up the next morning after the fight and she was dead. Slit wide-open from her little white chin down through her belly.”

  “Oh, God,” I say.

  I reach out and take her hand across the table.

  “I’m so sorry, Shawna.”

  “I should’ve run,” she says, her voice coming in hitching gulps, “but I didn’t have anywhere to go. Police don’t care about dead cats, and my family cared even less. None of them would tell me who did it. No one was sorry. They acted like it was no big deal.”

  I move my chair around the table until I’m sitting beside her and put my arm around her shuddering shoulders.

  “I woke up the next morning and all my hair had been cut off. And my privates shaved.”

  “Jesus,” I say under my breath.

  “Miranda must’ve put something in my food and drugged me ’cause I’m a light sleeper.”

  I’m rarely left speechless, but this is one of those times. I don’t know what to say to her. I try to imagine what would have been going through her mind back then, the combination of fear, disbelief, and isolation that would have allowed Clark and Miranda to control her and eventually own her altogether, body and soul.

  “Other things happened, too,” she continues but doesn’t elaborate. “Anyway, I decided it was best if I stayed. Tug came along the next year and after a while I got used to Clark’s kids. I came to love them.”