by Phoef Sutton
“No way,” she said. “Just ’cause you can’t handle your liquor doesn’t mean I have to humiliate myself in front of the whole town.”
SIXTEEN
The night air was bracing after the warmth of the Neesons’ kitchen. Kathleen gave Deputy Beirko back his gun.
“I wouldn’t have used this, Kathleen, you know that.”
“I know that.”
He was silent for a moment. “Thanks.”
We walked him to his patrol car.
“Kate,” he said, stopping suddenly, “I’m no good at my job.”
“You will be, Donny.”
“When?”
“When you remember not to let them get you mad.”
All this time I’d been feeling superior to Donny Beirko, seeing him as an incompetent boob. But as she said this, I remembered punching out that kid in the bathroom of Washington Irving High and taking a swing at Bubba by the gator pit, and I realized I was the same boob.
Beirko offered us a ride, Kathleen declined, and he gave me a dirty look and drove off. We strolled on a while in silence.
“You handled all that real well. Did you used to be a social worker or something?”
“God, no,” she said. “I used to be a cop.”
I’d guessed as much, but I tried to look suitably impressed.
“In New York I’d have had to file a report and make an arrest,” she went on. “A place like this, you get to use your own judgment.”
“Does that make it easier?”
“Not easier. But I’d rather make my own mistakes than somebody else’s.”
We picked up my car without calling on Joe and Shara, and I asked Kathleen if she wanted to stop in at the Thorofare for some coffee. As we topped the hill, the house flashed out at us like a firework display. Christmas lights lined the windows, the door frames, the peak and triangle of the roof, the corners, the rafters, the rain spouts, the chimney. Out there in the dark the flickering dime-store lights were blinding, piercing laser beams.
Laughing and singing half-made-up words to “Silver Bells,” we tumbled out of the car and dashed into the house, ready to congratulate one and all on their festive display. But inside, the bright house was dark and empty. There was a note on the kitchen table saying that Neil had taken you and your mother over to the mainland to buy more Christmas decorations and you wouldn’t be back until morning. I remembered their smiles and winks when Neil and Charlotte came in to find Kathleen in the house. This was their stupid idea, I supposed, to give me some time alone with her. Bless them.
Kathleen and I bundled up around our coffee mugs and sat on the porch, watching the moonlight gleam off the chunks of ice in the channel.
“I’ve never been here in the winter,” I said. “It’s so beautiful.”
“And too cold for mosquitoes,” she said.
“Hallelujah.”
She looked over at me from within the two coats and sleeping bag that were piled on top of her. No place on earth had ever looked so cozy as the chair she was sitting in.
“So, I suppose this is when we’re supposed to ask each other what our favorite album and favorite movie is,” she said, smiling.
“Is it?”
“Isn’t that what you do on a first date?”
“Is that what this is?”
“Isn’t it?”
“Well,” I said, “I wish you’d told me beforehand. I’d’a been a lot more nervous and screwed this up more.”
“I’ll remember that next time.”
“There can’t be a next first date.”
“Not with you, no.”
“If this is a first date, does that mean there’s going to be a second?”
“Now you’re screwing things up.”
“Good, I’m making up for lost time.”
I laughed. She laughed.
“What was the question again?” I asked.
“Favorite album.”
“You first,” I said.
“Kind of Blue, Miles Davis. My mom loved that record. And you?”
“Wrecking Ball, Emmylou Harris. Or Bernard Herrmann’s score for The Ghost and Mrs. Muir.”
“That’s two, that’s cheating.”
“Then Kind of Blue.”
“Very smooth.”
“Thank you.”
“I don’t know either of your records,” she admitted.
“I’ll have to play them for you.”
“I’d like that.”
“Does that mean there’s going to be a second date?”
She laughed. But didn’t answer, I noticed.
“Okay. Movies next,” she said. “I know it’s corny, but Sleepless in Seattle.”
I winced inside, but reminded myself that nobody’s perfect. “A lot of people like that movie.”
She looked over at me, amused. “Are you trying to be diplomatic?”
“No, I just, I guess I’m a little harder on movies than most people. I’m kind of a movie critic. That’s my job. Or it would be if I had a job. I write articles for magazines sometimes.”
“Really?” I wished she’d sounded more impressed. “So, what’s your favorite, Expert?”
“The Long Hair of Death. With Barbara Steele. It’s an Italian horror movie from the sixties. You probably never heard of it.”
She gave me a longer amused look. “Can’t say that I have.”
“Well, I’m not surprised.”
“And it’s better than Casablanca or Gone with the Wind or Titanic?”
“Well, I didn’t say better, although it beats that Titanic piece of shit. And you said favorite, not best. Also, Italian horror movies, they’re kind of my field.”
“Why?”
“Well, they’re underrated, so I kind of champion them. Also, if you’re going to write about a genre, you have to pick something kind of obscure, because everything else has been written to death. And these movies are not mainstream. Nobody’s heard of them.”
She was smiling broadly. “And you like that?”
“Sure.”
“’Cause you have them all to yourself?”
“I guess.”
“They’re like your own private treasures?”
“Exactly.” My God, I thought, she understands me. Can I marry her now?
I looked at her fingers holding her coffee mug. Rugged and calloused; nails blunt and broken. I’d never seen such beautiful fingers in my life. (I’m not one for physical types; I fall in love first and adapt my taste accordingly. So, I’ve loved skinny women when I loved an anorexic woman and chubby women when I loved a zaftig girl. Right then I was developing a heavy fetish for broken fingernails.)
“Why did you stop being a cop?” I asked her.
She sighed as if she knew the question had been coming. “Well, not because of the drinking. I started that at fifteen, and I was always very good at it. I guess it was the judgment-call stuff I was talking about before. Other people who don’t know what they’re talking about make bad decisions, and you have to enforce them. I got tired of that.”
She wanted to leave it at that, and I suppose I could have let her, but I didn’t.
“Did it have to do with Jellica?”
She sighed again. “You know, my dad’s a cop, my brother’s a cop. It’s not like I’m not used to nasty shit. I grew up on it. So, I don’t know why this one got to me. I try to figure it out, and I cannot say. I’ve seen worse, I know I have, but….
“Her name, actually, was Jessica Delecourt, but she was four years old so she ran it all together into Jellica. It was a domestic abuse call. The way it works is, some pain in the ass neighbor decides the crack-whore-mom next door isn’t taking care of her kids, so he puts in an anonymous call to Social Services, and they send some scared twenty-year-old psych major, who’s had, like, four hours of training, out to the worst hellblock in the Bronx to go teach this mainlining streetwalker proper child-rearing techniques. Or to take her kid away.
“Now, if the social worker has any br
ains at all, he’s pissing his pants just looking at one of these neighborhoods, so he calls for backup. Which in this case was me. I always hated getting calls like that. I wanted to be out catching ‘real criminals.’ And they deny it, but they always send a woman cop on kiddie cases if they can. They think we’re more nurturing or some kind of shit.
“Worst thing about it is, I’m just there for window dressing. To look like a cop in the background while the idiot psych major from Iowa makes all the decisions. And if he decides to take the kid, well, I gotta take the kid. That’s a trip—walking a child down ten flights of dark, urine-stinking stairs in a building full of homeboys who’d shoot you for no reason at all. Only now they’ve got a reason. Best reason in the world. I’m taking their baby out of there, and even if they have been beating her or fucking her or whatever, she’s still their kid and what right do I have to take her? You feel that bullet about to go into the back of your head all the way down the stairs.”
She set her mug down on the arm of the Adirondack.
“This was a pretty typical deal. A social named George puts in a call, and my partner Dennehy and I meet him in front of this building that no one in his right mind would go into. You know, one of those projects that look like they’re made out of one piece of molded concrete; one big soulless block of rock. Busted, boarded-up windows, stairs that look like somebody takes a sledgehammer to ’em every night. You walk in and there are no lights in the hall and things are scurrying away, and you don’t know if they’re bugs or animals or people or all three.
“This is a Mrs. Delecourt we’re going to see. Lives up on the seventh floor. Usual profile from the usual anonymous source. Possible drug use, possible prostitution. Child observed undernourished, filthy. Heard screaming at night. Now nobody’s seen her for a week. Fun stuff. But you don’t know if it’s true. Could be made up. Some prick of an ex-boyfriend trying to get even. I’ve known that to happen.
“So we make it up the stairs; we knock on the door….”
Kathleen paused and sipped her coffee which must have been as cold as mine. She didn’t seem to notice.
“The mother opened the door. She wasn’t what I expected. I don’t know what the hell she was doing in that building, or how she survived. She was roly-poly and washed out and pasty looking. But more than that, she was…she didn’t belong there. She was what they call here ‘from away.’ You know? Totally out of place. A country girl, for God’s sake. She had a Maine accent. I’d never even heard one before, except for that Pepperidge Farm guy on the commercials. She took us in, real friendly. Said everything was fine. Finest kind.
“The place gave me the creeps. Maybe two pieces of furniture and about twenty crosses on the walls and those pictures of Jesus where the eyes follow you. But no sign of any daughter. So, George asks about her, and the mother hems and haws, and George wimps his way around her, and, finally, I just started opening doors….”
Another sip of cold coffee.
“The girl was in the bedroom. It was black, painted all black, even the floor, even the windows. The only thing in it was a playpen, turned upside down with a big cinder block on top to hold it in place. Jellica was inside. I turned on the light, and she had to cover her eyes—she’d been in the dark a long time. Mrs. Delecourt burst right in, just laughing. I asked about the windows; she said the windows were black because it was so ugly outside. I asked her why her daughter was in a cage; she said Jellica liked to pretend it was her fort. I said that didn’t explain all the shit and piss on the floor.”
She turned to me. “Is this too heavy for you?”
It was. I told her to go on.
“I asked if there was a father on the scene. Jellica said her daddy was in the ‘fort’ with her. Her mom told her shut her mouth, then laughed, like that could somehow be a joke. She said her husband had died a few months ago. He was a martyr, she said, to his beliefs. Whatever that means.”
“Well, Social Services George was getting ticked because I was talking too much, so he tried to take over the interview while I got Jellica out of her ‘fort.’ Mom started getting more and more irrational, especially once she realized we could take the kid away.
“She started telling us that we didn’t understand the situation. Jellica wasn’t an ordinary child. There was something wrong with her. Something in her soul. Demons came and talked with her. And walked with her. Satan was trying to make a home in her, and it was up to her mother to keep him out. Real, full-blown psycho stuff, I’m talking, you could see it in her eyes.
“But old psych major George, he’s talking to her, wussy as ever, trying to reason with her, trying to remind her about hygiene and proper nutrition when this lady is ready to burn her daughter at the stake and tell her it’s for her own good.
“So, I finally pulled George aside and…persuaded him to get the kid the fuck out of there and ask questions later. Which wasn’t my place, I know, but that woman was dangerous, I could feel it. If we left the child with her she was going to make her suffer, I knew it.
“So, we removed Jellica. Her mother screamed curses at us all the way down to the street. And I don’t mean bad words, I mean real curses, like calling the Angel of Death down to take our loved ones and strike us with cancer and blindness and God knows what all. I’ve never been so scared in my life.”
The moon was setting behind Brown’s Head Island, leaving us in darkness.
“Dennehy, my partner, he drove us back. George sat in the front and kept whining about whether we’d done the right thing. Whether there had been a ‘compelling reason’ to take the kid. And I sat in the back and talked with Jellica.”
Kathleen smiled. “I was making fun of that nurturing bullshit before, but I guess I had it in me after all, ’cause I kind of fell for her. I don’t know why. She was just a regular kid. Maybe that was part of it. Coming from that environment, I couldn’t believe how normal she was. Good-natured. Happy, if you can believe that. I mean it; once we got her out of there, she just brightened. Kept saying she wanted to play. How it had been a long time since anybody played with her. So, I played with her. You know, finger games—‘Here’s the church, here’s the steeple, open the door, see all the people.’ She loved that. She laughed and laughed.
“And I thought, ‘She’s okay. She’s young, she’s strong, she’s going to be all right. As long as we keep her away from that fucking maniac of a mother of hers.’”
She tried to take a sip but the mug was empty.
“But when the doctors checked her out…there was no evidence of abuse. No marks, no bruises. No obvious malnutrition. No ‘compelling reason.’
“By then Jellica had gotten to me. I mean, I’d talked to her. Without saying anything bad about her mother exactly, she’d told me what she’d been living through. How the ‘scary people’ came and visited her at bedtime. How they talked to her and touched her. How they sat on top of her and made it so she couldn’t breathe. How they took her by the hand and led her places…. How if someone would just come in and be with her, even just yell her name, then the scary people would go away. But no one ever did.
“She tried to tell her mother about it, and her mother screamed at her and spanked her and locked her in her room. Kept her in the dark, and the scary people came, and Jellica had to tell them to stay away herself. She told her it was her own fault the scary people came to her. Because she was bad and she’d invited them in. But Jellica said she hadn’t; they just came on in anyway. They kept coming. She screamed and screamed, but her mother just left her there, alone. When she cried, when she tried to get out, her mother put her in the cage. Told her she couldn’t run away from it because they’d follow her everywhere because she was bad and they liked that she was bad.
“I dug up some crayons and paper and she drew while she talked. She drew that picture, the one I thought looked like the one your niece drew. I cried when I saw it. It didn’t look like the sort of the thing a kid like her should be imagining.
“I didn’t underst
and half of what she was saying, of course. I’m no psych major. I wasn’t sure if the scary people were real people or if they were just bad dreams. But you know what? I didn’t care. All I cared about was that she was scared to death of her own mother. And she was right to be; I’d seen the look in that woman’s eyes. I knew if she went back there, this kid was going to end up dead or crazy. I wasn’t going to let that happen.
“So Dennehy and I, we got together with George and did some more persuading. We decided to juice up the report a little. George was reluctant, but in the end he agreed that, uh, ‘a purely objective summary of the facts didn’t do justice to subjective experience of the child’s home life’ or some such shit. Fine; whatever it takes. Whatever would keep her out of that apartment.
“Of course, this was wrong. Unethical. A gross violation of policy. An abuse of power.” She smiled, “You know, a judgment call.
“Jellica got sent to a foster home, temporarily. She lucked out there. She got a good one; nice people. I went to visit her a few times, which was also against policy, but I’d already crossed the line with her, so I didn’t care.
“The lady taking care of her, she said Jellica still had bad dreams. Night terrors. Real screamers. I tucked her in one time, and I’m telling you, she wanted all the lights on. She never wanted to be in the dark again. She said there were ‘people in the dark.’ But if you held her, if you talked to her, if you sang to her, if you just cared about her and showed it, she was okay. She was going to be all right.
“I told her everything would work out. She wasn’t ever going to have to go back to that room. I was going to make sure of that. I don’t think she even believed me; she wasn’t stupid. She just asked if I’d play with her, and I said I always would.”
There was a tenderness in Kathleen’s voice; I could hear her trying to hide it.
“I guess maybe it would have worked out if I’d left it at that, but then I did something really stupid. I decided I had to adopt her. I know, I know, but I didn’t want to see her shuttled from foster home to foster home. She deserved better. And I guess I loved her by then, and love makes you do stupid things.