At the Edge of the Haight

by Katherine Seligman

“I’m sorry, Maddy,” he said. “It’s not your fault. But we’re back to where we started. We have to get busy.”

  I didn’t know what he meant. Shane was gone and his killer was free. There was not much else we could do, unless he was thinking we should kill Jeremiah Wakefield. No way was I getting into that, except that when I let myself think about it, I caught some of Dave’s rage and it occurred to me that maybe I could kill him. Or help kill him.

  “I have to make them appeal,” Dave said, “so we’ll need to know more about Jeremiah and what he was doing in the park. The lawyer told me the police aren’t investigating any further. They have presented their findings and now they’re dropping it. No one wants to know what really happened. We’ll have to do it ourselves.”

  He started talking in a rush about inspecting records at the courthouse, hiring a private eye, coming to spend a few nights with us in the park, when Marva slumped against the wall and started sliding to the floor. Dave put his arms around Marva’s back and pulled her over to the bench.

  “I’ve got to get her home,” he said. “Why don’t you two come with us?”

  “No one has to get me anywhere,” said Marva. “Stop talking about me like I’m not here. There isn’t anything we can do now.”

  I thought about the cabin and how I could not go there and listen to Dave and Marva talk about Shane. Then I thought about how I’d have to stay up all night looking out for Jeremiah if I went back to the park, even if the judge had ordered him not to bother me. Why would he pay attention to her? Maybe it would be a relief to lie down on the beige couch and stay there.

  “We’re going to bounce,” said Ash.

  We shouldered our packs and there was an awkward pause.

  “At least let me put you up in a hotel for a few days, while we figure out what to do,” said Dave. He leaned over and I thought he was going to hug me, but instead he took a card out of his wallet and handed it to me. hotel valencia, a bridge to home.

  “They’ll help you find a place to live, if you want that,” said Dave. “Or you can just stay for a few days. Your choice.”

  “That won’t change anything,” I said. “Jeremiah will still be out there.”

  But Ash said we’d check it out. He snapped the card between his thumb and finger a few times like it was a guitar pick and then put it in his pocket.

  “We should go, at least for a night,” he said when we got into the elevator. The floor was scuffed and the steel walls dented and stained from the millions of trips made by inmates and lawyers and people caught in the middle, trips that decided where they walked in life. They might think they had control over some small part of it, but in the end, decisions were made, they would go to jail or walk free. It would be fair or not, but all of it was out of their control.

  “I guess,” I said. I just wanted to sit, maybe get wasted. And sitting in a hotel room, with an actual bed, sounded comforting.

  “Is that a yes?” said Ash. “Because I can’t tell sometimes. You were amped up back there and now it’s whatever. It pisses me off when you disappear like that.”

  I was about to slap him in the arm, but I knew he was right. I was going around with myself inside, where I was doing all the talking, as usual. Trying to tell myself what to do, until my mind got so busy that I couldn’t do anything. It was like a flood coming into a house slowly, the furniture starting to float and drift around. It was violent, but in slow motion.

  “Okay,” I said. “Let’s go to the hotel. But what about Root?”

  “He’ll be cool with Fleet for one night,” Ash said. “We’ll get him tomorrow. Maybe they take dogs at this place and we could all go there.”

  The Valencia was a skinny brick building next to a deli with a neon welcome sign and bars on the windows. A man sat on the sidewalk out front running a dumpster sale—coffee cups, a big chipped blue bowl, some pants and shirts. He said he’d been living at the Valencia for ten years, give or take. It wasn’t bad. They let you alone if you didn’t bother anyone. He’d worked as a guard at the drug store around the corner, but it folded so he set up his own business, like everyone else in the city.

  “Welcome home,” he said.

  Inside the lobby there was a stand of drooping ferns against one wall. Ash went up to a small tinted window at the end of the room. A loud buzzer sounded and a guy inside asked what we wanted. Ash told him our names.

  “Just a minute,” he said, his voice tinny through the speaker, and we heard the door click open. He made us sign in, looked through our backpacks and then motioned us to a small round table in the middle of the room. The only light came from a bulb overhead. There were more forms on the table, in small piles. He pushed a sheet at each of us, but there weren’t any questions I could answer, except my name. Social security number? Permanent address? Person to notify in case of emergency? Actually, that one I could fill in. But should I put Ash or Root? I laughed.

  “What?” said Ash. I showed him my blank page, except for Root’s name.

  “I’ll put him too,” he said, and wrote it in big block letters that he shaded so they looked 3D.

  “It’s not a test,” said the guy, whose pec muscles bulged from under his shirt. He told us his name was Mick and that he was the manager. He would set up a meeting where he would tell us about our options. For tonight we just had to pick up towels and sheets and a copy of the rules. No drinking or smoking inside. No drugs, unless they were from a doctor and even those he would have to keep locked up in his office. No loud noise after 10:00 p.m. No cooking or hotplates. No fighting with the other residents.

  “Just promote peace and it will all be good,” he said, holding up two fingers in a V.

  “We’re all about peace,” said Ash and returned the sign.

  “Good, we understand each other then,” said Mick and handed Ash a key attached to a small plastic orange. “Your room is on the fourth floor. You got a shared bath down the hall.”

  The elevator was a cage, so small we had to squeeze together. It lurched up and stopped hard, and we banged into the side. I unlatched and folded back the door and we went down the hall. The door to our room was open, but it was stuffy inside. Gauze curtains that had once been white covered the streaked window. I could hear people talking on the street outside. There was a small bed along the wall, a dresser, and a lamp. When I lay down, the mattress felt like it was full of crackers. It crunched and then squeaked. All I wanted was to sleep, even though it was still light outside. Ash wanted food, but he couldn’t just set up outside. No one out there was going to give him anything. I told him to go and I’d stay in the room.

  But as soon as he left, I regretted it. I heard doors opening, water running in pipes overhead, thudding from the stairs. Someone was coughing and then spitting. I had to hit the window a few times to get it open.

  Ash was too far down the street to hear me. “Wait up!” I yelled and then climbed out on the fire escape even though there was a sign telling me not to. But I couldn’t stay in the room. There was no way I was going to fall asleep. I needed air, anything to get me away from what had happened at the court. In the alley below, a small group of guys sat in torn red vinyl chairs, smoking and passing a bottle. The one on the end was asleep with a pipe in his lap.

  Jeremiah was out there somewhere. No one cared what he had done. What difference did anything make? No one was back in Los Angeles all worried about me, waiting for me to call. I stretched out my arms and leaned over the fire escape. No one would care if I stepped off it. The wind might carry me a few feet and I’d land in front of those guys in their chairs. It would give them a start, but they’d go back to normal soon. Everything would. I wasn’t seriously thinking of falling, even though it would have been easy to slip. What would it feel like? There was an instant you could go too far. A few seconds of panic and then nothing or maybe terrible pain and then nothing. The important thing was that it ended in nothing. That’s what happened to Shane. He probably didn’t feel much while the blood drained out of hi
m, while his heart slowly stopped pumping.

  “Get your crazy ass down here,” yelled one of the guys, holding up the bottle. “We got a place for it here.” He slapped a chair.

  I dropped my arms as I climbed back in the window. Shane was gone and I was here. That was never going to change. I lay on the bed and turned on the lamp, which made a popping noise and went off. I would be glad when Ash came back, maybe with food, which he would spread on the floor. We would eat in the dark and then go to bed. I turned over, but it was too much trouble to take off my shoes. I kept thinking about Dave saying he would spend his life staring at a blank wall. I tossed around on the bed until Ash arrived, holding a bag of leftovers from a place down the street, and then tore into them, oblivious. I reached for some of the noodles before Ash devoured them all. Tomorrow, I told him, I was going back to the courthouse.

  chapter 18

  The records room was down a long corridor in the courthouse basement. It looked small for a space that stored up everything bad that people had done. A lady at the counter said I could look up the records myself and that she would get me any I couldn’t find in the computer system. Some people still had trouble getting used to electronic records. She said to let her know, then turned to a stack of folders on her desk. I was used to the computers at the library that went blank for no reason, but the one in front of me clicked and whirred when I typed in his name, taking its time to think. There were three Jeremiah Wakefields. I had to look up each one and wait while the computer searched, flickering, a circle of dots slowly turning around in the center until it finally spit up lines of gray print. I tapped my finger on the table, worried that I would get kicked off before the words came into focus. There was a thirty-minute time limit and people who’d walked in after me were waiting in chairs along the wall.

  Ash and I had stayed two nights at the Valencia. Even with our own room, it was too loud to sleep. An old guy next door put on the same act every night, yelling “Police! Police!” until people came to check and then he would scream and beg them not to hurt him. As soon as it got dark, he forgot where he was. He had a daughter who paid his rent, but she didn’t want him at her house. The man had miseries, like everyone else, the night manager said. Wait until we were his age and trying to get by. Then we’d understand. No one was coming for us.

  Dave and Marva, it was clear, wanted us to stay there. They would know, at least, where we slept. We’d had to meet with a chaplain who invited us to a prayer meeting, and with Mick, who gave us power bars and water that tasted like blueberries and then questioned Ash while a lady social worker talked to me. She said she needed some information so she could find out what I needed. Where was I born she wanted to know. I said I was from New Orleans because Hope told me about how she wanted to go there and see people from all over the world, not just California. You’d be less warped when you saw people like that, she said. If you were there at a certain time of year, the whole city went in the street and got wasted and danced together all night. How long had I lived outside? When is the last time I had a medical check-up? A mental health one? How often did I drink or do drugs? When she started asking sex questions, I stopped listening. I wasn’t going to tell the lady if I liked to have sex with girls or guys, what I knew about AIDS and where I got my condoms.

  She said she could put me on a waiting list for a group house, where there would be counselors and people my age, but a quicker solution would be a bus ticket home if I wanted that. All I had to do was contact my relatives there and get the okay. The city would pay for it, something she called Greyhound therapy, which she knew sounded bad, but the city only had so much money. The thing was, Dave had made the same offer, to send me home, even though he didn’t know where that was. They figured if I was gone I’d be someone else’s problem or maybe I’d decide I wanted to go to school and learn how to cut hair. I told the social worker the same thing I told everyone else. I wasn’t looking to go anywhere, there wasn’t anywhere to go.

  Dave came by the hotel the second day to check on us, like he was afraid we’d disappear. He looked wrung out and empty, the way my mother was the last time I saw her. Maybe he was breaking down. I was going to tell him to let me alone, we were done, but, instead, I felt bad for him. I said I had started to look up everything I could about Jeremiah Wakefield.

  “Technically you’re a digital native so it should be easier for you,” he said, handing over a bag of bagels and fruit. There was a speck of hope in his voice. “I wish you’d let us get you a cell phone so we could stay in closer touch.”

  We didn’t tell him about the hotel, but it would have made anyone freak out. And they didn’t allow dogs, even though some people smuggled them in. One lady on our floor had two cats that yowled at night, adding a layer of noise to the guy shouting for the cops and the body noises, partying, the slamming doors and footsteps. Root was lucky he was staying at the shelter instead of trying to find a corner of peace at the hotel. He would not have closed his eyes there. And Dave, he would not have lasted.

  The first Jeremiah Wakefield I looked up was the wrong one. He lived downtown and had a page worth of charges. There was a number that stood for each crime and you had to look those up, the secret codes – possession of substance, accessory to possession, assault with intent to commit bodily injury. It was plain and unemotional. None of it described exactly what had happened. I researched all of the first Jeremiah’s run-ins. He’d been in county jail and sentenced to a drug diversion program. He was two years older than me.

  The second one was the Jeremiah I was looking for, the one who was out, free. He was fifty-six, with his own list of charges, each with a different number. I wrote them all down, except the last one, filed a few weeks ago. I knew what that was. Drinking from an open container. It never mentioned what he’d done to Shane, as if it didn’t happen. The other numbers I looked up one by one on the computer: misdemeanor theft, public urination, probation violation, violating a restraining order. The judge had ordered him not to bug his wife, but he couldn’t stay away. So why would he stay away from me? I remembered when my mom had drawn an imaginary line around herself on the floor. I had stood right near the line waiting for her to change her mind. I might as well go and get snatched by a stranger, I told her. Maybe a stranger would pay attention to me. I kept poking my toe near her, but she didn’t notice.

  “I’m taking a time out,” she said. “You can do anything you want but don’t cross into my space. I can’t be held responsible for what I’d do if you come close right now.”

  I read the whole record on Jeremiah’s restraining order. I could hear minutes being ticked off by the metal hands of an old wall clock. A lady tapped me hard on the shoulder. “I already gave you an extra five, but you can’t monopolize the terminal here,” she said. I gave her a look I hoped would make her feel bad and then I got up and sat in a chair along the wall, waiting for another turn so I could get back to where they drew a line around Jeremiah’s wife.

  It took me a while to look it up again. His file had so many pages it was like reading a book inside the computer. One of the pages was labeled police report and was filled out by someone with faint handwriting. I could read about every other word, but that was enough. It gave a date and address where police responded to a call by Laurel Wakefield. I wrote it down, looking over my shoulder to see if anyone was watching. I wasn’t sure if they allowed you to copy things from the files.

  Back at the shelter I showed Ash the address and told him about Jeremiah’s wife. The court papers said he had ripped out the phone cord after she called the police and then beat her with his fists and tried to wrap the cord around her neck. She had marks on her face and neck. She said she didn’t want to go to the hospital, but they took her anyway. And later she asked for a restraining order. She wanted Jeremiah to stay away. If the judge knew he’d hit his wife why did she let him go free after he knifed Shane?

  “I’m going to find her,” I said. “His wife. Maybe there’s other stuff he did, th
ings no one knows about.”

  Ash said he’d go with me, even though he thought it was a bad idea. She might think we were harassing her and call the police. Why would she want to talk to us? What was I going to figure out that the lawyers didn’t know? At least, Ash said, we should get Dave to drive us there so we could make a fast escape if we needed to. I said that might scare her more. Some guy pulling up in his car, three people and a dog getting out, like we were hunting her down. We should go by ourselves.

  She lived in the southern part of the city. I looked up directions in the library and wrote them down. It would take two bus rides and a long walk. Ash said I should be a detective because I seemed to get so jacked up thinking about finding Jeremiah’s wife. He started calling me his private dick. I told him to shut up, but my mind felt smoothed out when it was fixed on finding her. I didn’t feel as jumpy. I wasn’t seeing Jeremiah’s face every minute and thinking how he could show up and pull out his knife.

  We waited an hour for the second bus and then walked what felt like miles before we got to Laurel Wakefield’s small house, which was attached to the one next door. The roof was low and flat. The front window was closed and covered with a yellow bedspread. Ash and I had decided we’d wait if she didn’t answer the door, maybe slip a note underneath telling her we’d been there and would come back. There was no buzzer outside, so I knocked. The paint on the door was chipped and scratched.

  The bedspread curtain slid to the side and half a face appeared.

  “What do you want?” said a woman’s voice.

  We had thought about how to find the house, how we’d get there in the late afternoon when she was home from work, if she worked. But we had not planned exactly what to say if she was there. If I’d been an actual detective, I would have known what to ask and what to look for. I’d know if it was normal business for a stranger to stand on someone’s doorstep and wait. It wasn’t like sitting on the sidewalk, which didn’t belong to anyone. It was a house where people did whatever they wanted. Jeremiah could be there. Or maybe his wife had moved away and this was some other woman scared out of her head by us. She might already have called the cops. Or she was inside, with her gun pointed at us.