by Liz Moore
Kacey, in turn, withdrew. At thirteen, she began regularly skipping out on the PAL’s after-school program. Gee received a phone call anytime she did, and for a while she tried unsuccessfully to punish Kacey, but soon her groundings piled up on one another, and eventually Gee gave up the chase. She’s old enough to watch herself, I guess, said Gee, dubiously. I was already fifteen then, and years before she had given me the same option that Kacey now had, which was to entertain myself after school each day—or, better yet, to get a steady job. Instead, I elected to participate in a PAL teen group that was meant to provide mentorship and oversight to the younger students.
My choice—though I wouldn’t have admitted this to anyone—was largely motivated by wanting to remain close to Officer Cleare.
By ninth grade, Kacey was generally spending her afternoons with a group of friends headed by Paula Mulroney.
Already, they were distracting her from her schoolwork. They wore mainly black, and smoked cigarettes, and dyed their hair, and listened to bands like Green Day and Something Corporate—music that, though I couldn’t abide it, though it prevented me from studying, Kacey began playing loudly in our house whenever Gee wasn’t home to stop her. She began smoking, too, both cigarettes and marijuana, and she kept a small supply of each in the hollow spot beneath the floorboards of our room—the place we had formerly used for more innocent purposes.
It felt, to me, like a slap.
I remember, with clarity, the first time I found pills in that space. There were perhaps six of them, small and blue, contained in a small Ziploc bag. Incredibly, I recall holding them up and feeling a certain amount of relief that they seemed to be professionally made, imprinted with two neat letters on one side and with a number on the other, well formed and sincere-looking. When I asked Kacey about them, she was reassuring: they were something like extra-strength Tylenol, she told me. Very safe. A boy named Albie had a father who had a prescription for them. A lot of fathers in our neighborhood did: they were construction workers, or ex-longshoremen, or laborers of other kinds who had used their bodies hard all their lives, had ground bones and twisted muscles into painful nubs and knots. It was the year 2000. OxyContin was a four-year-old medication, doled out liberally by doctors, received gratefully by patients. It was purported to be less addictive than prior generations of opioid medication—and therefore nobody knew, yet, to be afraid. Why do you even want it? I remember asking Kacey, and she said, I don’t know. For fun.
What she didn’t tell me was that they were snorting it.
The other activity Kacey was getting into, at this time, was sex. This I found out secondhand, from a cruel tenth-grader I overheard bragging about it to his friends. When I confronted my sister, Kacey simply shrugged it off, saying nonchalantly that he was telling the truth.
At that time, I had never even been kissed.
The two of us pulled farther and farther away from one another. Without her, my loneliness became outrageous, a low hum, an extra limb, a tin can that dragged behind me wherever I went. I missed Kacey, missed her presence in the house. Selfishly, I also missed the efforts Kacey made to draw me out socially. To bring me to parties. To invite me along with her to friends’ houses. Mickey was just saying, Kacey used to begin, when we were younger, and then would accredit to me some witticism or observation that she had actually come up with herself. Now, when Kacey saw me at school, she just nodded. More often, she wasn’t at school at all.
On several occasions, I hopefully placed messages for my sister in our hiding place. I knew it was childish, even as I did it, and yet I persisted. Small notes containing anecdotes about my day, about Gee, about some other member of our family who had done something or other I found amusing or annoying enough to recount. I longed for her to notice me, to come back, to reverse her course and return to the childhood activities we had once enjoyed together.
But each time, the note I left for her went unreturned.
* * *
—
The only occasions, in those days, on which Kacey seemed truly to notice me were when I spoke of Officer Cleare.
Kacey didn’t like him.
He’s full of himself, was how she phrased it, or sometimes she called him stuck-up, but I knew even then that her real criticism of him was darker, that my sister sensed something in him that she couldn’t, or wouldn’t, name.
Ew, Kacey said when I talked about him, or anything he liked, which I did with some frequency. In fact, I began so many sentences with Officer Cleare said that finally Gee and Kacey eliminated the phrase from my vocabulary by mimicking me so mercilessly that I became self-conscious. My fascination with him prompted, for my sister and me, a brief role reversal. For once in our lives, it seemed to me that it was Kacey who was concerned about me, and not the other way around.
The first time Kacey overdosed, at sixteen, in that house full of strangers in Kensington, it was Officer Cleare to whom I turned for help and advice.
It was the summer between my junior and senior years of high school. I was seventeen years old at that time, and by then he and I had become very close. Our conversations had expanded: in addition to making recommendations to me and instructing me in various ways, he now also confided in me about problems he himself had faced as a child, problems he was facing in the department, colleagues who were causing him trouble, problems he had with his family. His mother, he feared, had developed a drinking problem after his father died, and she had recently fallen and broken her hip. His sister was a busybody who was always advising him about his life. I listened carefully, nodding, mainly staying quiet. I hadn’t, yet, told him much about my own family. I still preferred listening to talking. Unlike Gee, he seemed to like how serious I was, how thoughtful. He complimented me frequently on my intelligence, on how observant I was, how sharp.
I had recently graduated from being an unpaid member of the PAL’s teen program to a paid counselor in the organization’s summer program for neighborhood kids—which made me, I told myself, an equal to the officers, in certain ways, anyhow. Along with a dozen other employees, I shepherded day-campers from room to room, planning activities, coaching them half-heartedly in sports that I myself didn’t know much about. Really, though, I used the time to talk to Officer Cleare.
The day after the episode in question, I was distraught. I wandered through the PAL building, pale and abstracted, uncertain whether I should be there at all. Maybe, I thought, I should be at home with Kacey, who was in very serious trouble with Gee, and who was probably in withdrawal.
I was standing in the largest room at the PAL, my arms crossed around myself, lost in thought, when I saw Officer Cleare looking at me across a dozen cafeteria tables. There was enforced silence that afternoon because of too many behavioral infractions, and everyone had been instructed to read or draw quietly.
He walked slowly toward me, glancing at children whose heads popped up to look at him, directing them back to their tasks.
When he reached me, he inclined his head toward me, inquisitively. He looked at me from under his handsome lowered brow.
—What’s wrong, Michaela? he said, with so much tenderness that it surprised me.
Unexpectedly, quickly, my eyes filled with tears. It was the first time in many years that I’d ever been asked. It opened something in me, some chasm of longing I would have trouble closing ever again. It made me remember my mother’s smooth hands on my face.
—Hey, he said.
I kept my eyes on the floor. Two hot tears spilled down my cheeks and I swiped at them furiously. I rarely cried, and I especially avoided crying around adults. When we were smaller, if we cried, Gee often warned us that she’d give us a reason to. Sometimes, before we grew bigger than she was, she made good on this threat.
—Go out back, Officer Cleare said to me, too quietly to be heard by anyone else. Stay there, he said.
* * *
—
&nbs
p; It was 90 degrees that day. The outdoor area behind the building consisted of a basketball court with rickety bleachers and a half-dead field that could be used for soccer or football. The surrounding streets were similarly dead. No passersby, no bystanders, no windows to the inside of the building. Flies buzzed lazily around my head, and I swatted them as I walked.
I found a shadowed spot and leaned against the brick building that housed the PAL. My heart was pounding. I wasn’t sure why.
I was thinking of Kacey: of the hospital bed she’d been put in after her arrival at Episcopal Hospital. Of the silence between us. I don’t understand this, I had said, and Kacey had said, I know you don’t, and that was all. Kacey had looked to be in pain. Her eyes were closed. Her complexion was very, very pale. Then the ward doors swung open and through them stormed our grandmother, her face steely, her hands clenched. Gee has always been a thin woman, full of nervous energy, the kind of person who never stops moving. That day, though, she had stood frighteningly still as she whispered to Kacey through clenched teeth.
—Open your eyes, she had said. Look at me. Open your fucking eyes.
After a pause, Kacey complied, squinting, turning her face away from the fluorescent lights above her.
Gee waited until Kacey was focused on her.
Then she said, Listen to me. I went through this once with your mother. I’ll never go through it again.
She was holding a tight finger out toward Kacey. She took her by the elbow and dragged her from the bed, so that the IV attached to her arm was ripped painfully out, and I followed. None of us had stopped when a nurse called after us that Kacey wasn’t ready to be discharged.
At home, Gee had slapped Kacey once, hard, across the face, and Kacey had run up to our room, slamming the door and then locking it.
After a while I followed, knocking softly, saying the name of my sister over and over again. But there came no answer.
* * *
—
The brick of the PAL building was so warm that it was uncomfortable to lean against, and so I stood upright again. I had my back to the door I’d come out of, and when I heard it open and close quietly behind me, I didn’t turn around. The air was thick with humidity. Trickles of sweat ran down my sides, beneath my shirt. I looked straight ahead as Officer Cleare approached me. I could feel him stop and pause behind me, perhaps to think. I could hear his breathing. Then, swiftly, he put his arms around me. I had reached my full height several years before, and there were not many boys in my school who towered over me the way that he did. But when he enfolded me, he outsized me so completely that he was able to rest his chin on the top of my head.
I closed my eyes. I could feel his heart beating against my back. Ever since my mother died, I had had the same recurring dream: in it, some faceless figure cradled me in its arms, one arm behind my back, one beneath my legs, both hands clasped together on the other side, so that I felt that I was tight inside a little case. And in its arms this figure rocked me back and forth. It’s been years since I have had this dream, but I can still recall the feeling I had whenever I awoke from it: I was comforted. Pacified. Lulled.
Encircled in this way by Simon Cleare, I opened my eyes. Here he is, I thought.
—What’s wrong, said Simon, again.
This time, I told him.
NOW
I regret to say that it takes me quite a while to compose myself after my conversation with Alonzo. I sit in the car for ten minutes and then begin, distractedly, to patrol my assigned sector. The people on the sidewalk are a blur to me. Every so often I think I see my sister, only to discover that it isn’t her, and that it actually looks nothing like her. Although it’s very cold outside, I roll the window down to let the air cool my face.
Several calls come in but I am slow to respond to them.
* * *
—
Enough of this, I tell myself, finally, and I pull over again—too abruptly; a civilian car screeches to a halt behind me—and I ask myself how I would approach the case of a missing person if I were, in fact, a detective.
Hesitantly, I touch the MDT fastened to the center console of my vehicle. It’s something like a laptop, and I’m fairly good with computers, but these systems are notoriously terrible and sometimes even broken. Today, the one in my assigned vehicle is working, but only very slowly.
I’m going to look up Kacey’s name in the PCIC database.
I’m not supposed to: technically, we are required to have a valid reason to search for any individual, and my log-in credentials will reveal what I’ve done to anyone who cares, and I dislike violating protocol in this way—but today, I’m banking on the idea that no one actually does care. No one has time to, in our district.
Still, my heartbeat quickens slightly as I type.
Fitzpatrick, Kacey Marie, I enter. DOB: 3/16/1986.
An arrest record a mile long is displayed. The earliest one I can see—the others, presumably, expunged due to her then-status as a juvenile—is from thirteen years ago, when Kacey was eighteen. Public intoxication. It seems almost mild now, almost funny, the kind of escapade on so many people’s records.
But the kind of trouble Kacey was getting into got quickly more serious, after that. An arrest for possession, an arrest for assault (an ex-boyfriend, if I remember correctly, who used to hit her and then called the police the first time she ever retaliated). Then solicitation, solicitation, solicitation. The most recent item on Kacey’s record is from a year and a half ago. That one is for petty theft. She was convicted; she spent a month in prison. Her third period of incarceration.
What I don’t find—what I was hoping to find—is any indication that she’s been brought in more recently than that. Any indication, I suppose, that she is still alive.
* * *
—
There is a natural next step. Any detective on any missing persons case would, of course, interview the missing party’s family members as soon as possible.
And yet, as I consider the phone in my hands, I am stopped by the same queasy feeling of unease that overtakes me anytime I contemplate getting in touch with the O’Briens.
* * *
—
The simplest explanation is this: They don’t like me, and I don’t particularly like them. My whole life, I’ve had the uncomfortable feeling that I am in some way a black sheep in my family—as is, I should add, anyone who evinces signs of wanting to productively participate in society. Only in the O’Brien family would a young child’s good grades in school, or her reading habits, or her eventual decision to enter law enforcement, be looked at with suspicion. I’ve never wanted for Thomas to experience the very lonely feeling of being an outsider in one’s own tribe, or to be influenced in any way by the O’Briens—who, in addition to dabbling in petty criminality, have a tendency toward racism and other charming forms of prejudice as well; and so I made the decision, after he was born, not to inflict the O’Briens and their strange set of ethics upon him. My rule is not hard and fast—occasionally we see one of them on our annual or biannual visit to Gee’s house, and occasionally we run into an O’Brien on the street or in a store, and on these occasions I have always been cordial—but largely, I avoid them.
Thomas doesn’t, yet, understand why. Not wanting to frighten him, or to overwhelm him with information he cannot, at this age, process, I have told my son instead that our limited contact with my family is mainly a product of my work schedule. Lacking a better reason than this, he often asks after them, asks to see the ones he knows, asks to meet the rest. Once, when he was enrolled in his last school, all the children were given the assignment of constructing a family tree. When Thomas asked somewhat breathlessly for pictures of various members of ours, I was forced to confess that I had none; so instead he drew illustrations of what he imagined everybody looked like, sad smiley faces with mops of curly hair on top in a variety of colors. He has t
his diagram hanging, now, on the wall of his bedroom.
* * *
—
Sitting in my patrol car, I prepare to put aside my pride: to extend a hand to my extended family.
First, I generate a list of people to contact. This time, I do take out my notebook, and find a blank page at the very back, and rip it out. On this page, I write down the following names:
Gee (again)
Ashley (a cousin of ours, around our age, to whom we were very close when small)
Bobby (another cousin, less likable, who is himself mixed up in the business, and who used to deal to Kacey until I found him one day and threatened him with arrest, and more, if I ever caught him doing so again)
Next I move on to others:
Martha Lewis (at one time, Kacey’s parole officer, though I believe she has since been assigned a new one)
Then a few bus acquaintances. Then some of our neighborhood friends. Then some of her grade school friends. Then some of her high school friends. Then some of Kacey’s current friends, who may, for all I know, be enemies by now. One can never be certain.