There Once Was A Child

by Debra Webb

  I can’t catch my breath.

  “Walt, you okay?”

  I whip over to the curb, push the gearshift into Park and shove open the door.

  I’m on my hands and knees on the pavement when Liv reaches me.

  “Can you breathe?”

  I nod jerkily, dragging in a short breath before I start coughing again.

  “Should I call 911?”

  I grab her arm with one hand and shake my head. Tears and snot flow down my face as I try to regain control of my respiratory system. The coughing gets nastier for a half a minute. Son of a bitch, this is the worst one yet. I hack and hack and hack until I feel like my lungs will burst out through my throat.

  Liv hovers next to me, her face cluttered with worry and fear.

  Finally, things start to calm down to a mere wheeze. I sit back on my heels.

  “Let me get you some water.”

  She dashes away. I fumble in my pocket for a handkerchief and swab at my face. My chest heaves but the air just won’t come in fast enough. My heart thuds wildly, trying hard to push enough oxygenated blood through my veins.

  As the coughing spasms subside, the pain gets worse. Sharp, jagged shards of searing pain fire through me.

  My hand shaking, I shove the handkerchief back into my pocket and dig for the small vial of pain pills. I try to open it. Can’t. The damned pharmacy put a childproof top on the damned thing. I’ve never had a childproof top before! Why start now? Goddammit!

  “Let me try.” Liv takes the vial of pills from my hand and places the water bottle there in its place.

  The top is already off the bottle of water so I sip it slowly, let it soothe my raw throat. This is by far the worst coughing jag I’ve had. The pain is excruciating. My whole body shakes with the tension of holding back the howls of agony.

  Liv doesn’t read the label on the vial. She simply opens it. “One or two?”

  “Two.” I spit the word.

  I’ve only taken two when I’m at home. The pain roars, reminding who is master. I need two. My hands are shaking, the water sloshing in the bottle.

  “Open your mouth.”

  I don’t argue. I comply. She pops the pills into my mouth and I swallow. Follow with a swig of water. My eyes close in blessed hope. It takes a few minutes, maybe twenty, but relief will come.

  “I’m taking you one of two places,” she says firmly. “To your doctor’s office or the ER. Which will it be?”

  “Home.” I grab my open vehicle door and pull myself up. My body trembles. “There’s nothing the doctor or the ER can do for me.”

  Her face says she needs an explanation. I shake my head. “I just need to get home. I’ll tell you everything then.”

  “Can you drive?”

  “Better not,” I confess.

  She doesn’t attempt to lead me like a crippled old man. Instead she walks next to me all the way around the vehicle, opens the passenger side door and waits for me to climb inside. Once I’m seated, she closes the door and returns to the driver’s side.

  While she climbs in and adjusts the seat, I shove the bottle of water into a cup holder in the console and fidget with my seatbelt. I can breathe fairly easily now. The pain spike is leveling off, not gone by a long shot but not worsening.

  Liv puts the Tahoe in Drive and rolls away from the curb. I sit in silence and wait for her questions. I’m dying. I don’t want to talk about that reality but I’m confident there will be no escaping the coming interrogation.

  “You want to talk about it?”

  “Nope.”

  “Okay.”

  She drives. I slump in the seat waiting for the painkillers to kick in fully.

  The car stops and I open my eyes to mere slits. They feel too heavy to open wider and besides, pushing the issue might banish the fog I’ve drifted into.

  The pain is floating around me. It’s still there but it can’t touch me through the haze of medication.

  “I’ll be right back,” she says.

  Through the narrow slits I watch Liv go to the front door, unlock it and push it open. Sandy rushes out to greet her, then follows her back to my side of the Tahoe. I try to unfasten my seatbelt but my hands aren’t working so well. Liv opens the door, steps up on the running board and reaches across me to unfasten the damn thing.

  “Take it slow,” she says as she steps away.

  Sandy dances from side to side. Even she looks worried about me. Probably remembering me bringing Stella home looking like this.

  I practically fall out again, this time Liv keeps me from hitting the ground. She leads me away from the door, shoves it closed with her hip and then guides me to the house. Sandy sniffs at my right hand where it dangles at my side. I scrub at her head and make soothing sounds.

  Liv doesn’t stop in the living room, she takes me straight through to my bedroom. She visited Stella there once. Liv and I had just started to work together when Stella was diagnosed. My former partner was still working then. He put off his retirement until I was able to come back to work full-time. Before that, whenever I was able to come in for a few hours, he, Liv and I worked together.

  I wonder who will be Liv’s partner when I’m gone.

  I sit on the side of the bed, shoulders slumped forward as she kneels before me and tugs off my boots.

  “I can do that,” I say, my tongue thick. Oh hell. I sound like a drunk.

  “You just take it easy,” she says as one boot pulls free. “I got this.”

  Once my boots are off, she peels away my jacket next. I hear the rattle of pills as she places the small vial on the table next to the bed. She removes my side arm and clip as well as my badge, places both next to the pain meds.

  She urges me to lie back, then lifts my legs onto the bed. She covers me with the big old afghan at the foot of the bed. Stella made that afghan a million years ago. It has lain draped across the foot of our bed for as long as I can remember.

  Stella. I wish she were here. I blink back the damn emotion. No. That’s not right. I wouldn’t wish this on anyone. The yearning to have someone with me for what’s coming is just selfish.

  I hear the water running in the bathroom that connects to our bedroom. Liv brings a glass of water and places it on the bedside table, then perches on the edge of the bed next to me. For a long time she just sits there, holding my hand. I close my eyes. Can’t ignore the pull of the drugs. The pain has vanished now.

  “Tell me what’s going on, Walt.”

  Her words nudge my eyes open a crack. I lick my lips.

  “You want a drink of water?”

  “Nah.” I drag in a big breath, thankful my lungs are working properly again. “I’m dying, Liv.”

  “Sick of me as a partner already, are you?”

  I hear the teasing quality in her voice but I also hear the uncertainty. “It’s not you, kid. It’s those damn Pall Malls I smoked for half my life. Dumbest thing I ever did.”

  Her soft fingers tighten on my hand. “What’re you doing about it?”

  “Nothing I can do,” I lie. “Terminal. Got three months max.”

  “What about chemo or—”

  “Not after what I watched it do to Stella. No point. I’m dying anyway. Why make my last days suck for no good reason?”

  She wants to argue with me. I can tell. But she doesn’t. I feel those soft fingers trembling now. Well, hell. I didn’t want to put her through this. She has enough going on in her life.

  “I’ve taken care of most everything,” I say. “My final arrangements, the house. I just don’t know what to do with Sandy. I want to make sure she ends up in a good home.”

  “I’ll take her.” Liv’s fingers tighten firmly on mine. “You don’t worry about Sandy. I’ll take good care of her and love her just the same as you do. You have my word.”

  “Are you sure? Preston might not want a dog?”

  “Tough.” She shrugs. “The truth is I’m thinking about moving back to the farm. I’m not so sure David and I were meant
to be.”

  I frown. “What about the baby?”

  She shrugs again. “I don’t know. I haven’t gotten to that yet.”

  “You’ll figure it out.” I reach up and tug at a wisp of hair that’s fallen loose from her ponytail. “You’re good people, Liv. Preston is good people, I think. Maybe.” I feel my lips grinning. “Probably. You should give him another chance. I don’t want you to be alone. It sucks.”

  She laughs, but the smile slips and the sound fades away. “My father was investigating Fanning or digging around in his past. It’s far more than his visits to Fanning in prison.”

  I wait for her to go on. She won’t look at me for a time. I get it. Whatever she’s discovered is confusing, maybe even disappointing.

  “I found a file on each of the seventeen Fanning victims.” She exhales a big breath. “They were hidden in the panic room in the cabinet where he kept the personal files, like the deed to the farm and stuff like that.” She swipes back a tear from one cheek. “I don’t understand it. He never mentioned Fanning or anything about his victims.”

  “Are they case files? Was he treating any of them?” Seems like that’s what she’s saying but I don’t know how one of them wouldn’t have mentioned having seen a shrink with the same name as the detective doing the questioning. Doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

  “I don’t think he was treating them, at least not anyone but Sanchez. The files are more like background information taken from various sources. I don’t understand why he would have wanted this information unless he gathered it for Sanchez or, worst case, for Fanning. That’s the part that really worries me. I can’t believe he would do that.”

  “You’re worried he was working for Fanning?”

  Another big breath heaves out of her weary body. “Yeah. I don’t want to believe it, but there was obviously something going on that involved Fanning.”

  “But maybe not in the way you think,” I counter. “Whatever Dr. Newhouse was doing, it wasn’t to help a man like Fanning. We both know better than that. The only way he would have been working with a piece of shit like that was if the court ordered him to and since he was retired you know that can’t be the case. Like I told the chief, we don’t know what any of this means yet.”

  She nods, some of the worry disappearing. “You’re right. It would just be nice to understand, the sooner the better.”

  “Sanchez will be back tomorrow. Maybe he can tell us what was going on.” I squeeze her hand. “Go home. Get some rest. I’ll be as good as new tomorrow. I promise.”

  “No way, partner. I’m staying until I know you’re good for the night then I’ll get a cab back to my car.”

  I’d argue but Liv is as hardheaded as I am. “Fine. Then make yourself useful and feed Sandy.”

  Sandy barks as if she knows exactly what I said.

  I watch her prance out of the room at Liv’s side.

  Now I can die in peace. Sandy will be okay.

  That damn frown nags at my forehead again.

  But what about Liv? Will she be okay?

  The Child

  I have no idea how many months passed with me in a daze. I didn’t care if I lived or died. I thought of my baby all the time. I begged him to tell me what he’d done with him, but he just laughed at me.

  I made up my mind then and there that he would never hurt me again. I was no longer going to allow him to rule my world. I was old enough to begin to see that I didn’t need him to survive anymore. I could take care of myself.

  The way I saw it, the biggest drawback to my situation was the fact that I couldn’t read. Couldn’t write. Didn’t understand math. I was illiterate. But he always refused to teach me to read. No way was he going to teach me to write and to do math. I wasn’t entirely sure he could do either of those things very well himself.

  So I bided my time. There were always times when he disappeared for a few hours. I had no idea what he was doing since he refused to include me anymore. Since he had stopped rutting into me very often I figured he might be out finding other girls to stick his nasty thing into. The idea made me jealous a little. I belonged to him. He was my family. Then I thought of the baby and I knew all that I had believed was a lie.

  He was not my family. I did not belong to him. I belonged to me. The baby was the only real family I would ever have and he was gone.

  The next time he went out for a while, I sneaked to a neighbor’s house. She wasn’t the old lady who helped get the baby out of me, she had moved away. This one was a younger woman. She worked a street corner. I had seen her a couple of times back when we used to pretend I was one of those girls to fool old men and get their money. But I didn’t care what she was as long as she could read and write, that was all that mattered.

  When I asked her to teach me to read she laughed. She thought I was kidding. “You can’t read? What the hell? You some kinda retard?”

  Angry tears burned my eyes but I refused to cry. “No one ever taught me,” I snarled. “I’ve never been to school.”

  The look on her face told me she suddenly felt bad about what she said. When she agreed to teach me, I made her promise never to tell him. We had to do it in secret. She seemed to like that part most of all. We agreed she would call me girl since I didn’t know my name. I didn’t want her to call me it.

  Learning was slow at first and I started to think maybe I was a retard. But then the words began to click in my brain. The letters and the sounds they made when put together fused in my memory. Pretty soon I could read. I have never been so happy about anything in my life except for those few minutes when I held my baby.

  Writing was harder, but I got it. My handwriting was really pathetic, but I could do it. When I had a good handle on the reading and the writing, she started with the basic math concepts: addition and subtraction. Then she made me memorize the multiplication table. She said her mother had made her do that when she was a kid. Once I knew the multiplication table by heart she taught me about division.

  One day she looked at me and said she’d never realized how much she’d taken for granted her whole life. She’d learned all this stuff as a little kid. Everyone she knew had learned it. To run into someone so young like me who hadn’t had the opportunity, who couldn’t read or write or do math in this day and time, was just weird, she’d said.

  It was weird. I was weird.

  I realized for the first time since I was seven years old that he was not my father or mother or family or friend. He became my whole world because I was his prisoner for all those years. I hadn’t understood that profound fact because I never had a real family. I had no idea what one was supposed to be like. Think about when someone asks you to describe what chocolate tastes like or what closing your eyes and spinning around and around feels like, telling them should be easy, right? But if you’ve never tasted chocolate or never spun around, it’s not so easy.

  At that moment I realized that I might never know what it felt like to have a real family, but I was going to make sure I was smart and strong and that I could take care of myself. No one—especially not him—would ever hurt or control me again.

  That was the day I stopped being his it.

  Detective Olivia Newhouse

  A nightmare wakes me.

  I sit straight up in the bed, struggle to gain my bearings. The darkness crushes against me. I take a deep breath. Remind myself to breath slow and deep. Thunder booms and a streak of lightning flashes, brightening the darkness for an instant. Rain beats against the roof. What the hell was I dreaming? Something about that child I read about in my father’s file. Jesus. I shudder.

  David sleeps soundly next to me. The soft rumble of his snoring should be comforting but it makes me shiver again, reminds me of the nightmare.

  What the hell was the dream about, anyway? Beyond the girl in the file, I mean.

  I can’t remember the details, only snippets. Fear…running. She was lost and then the dream was suddenly about me and I was in my father’s arms. My fat
her morphed into Walt.

  Walt.

  Jesus Christ. Walt is dying.

  Tears flood my eyes and rush down my cheeks. How can I lose him, too?

  I push back the covers and climb out of the bed, careful not to wake David. Dinner was awkward. He barely said a dozen words. I rattled on about all the packing I had done at the farm. I promised to unpack the boxes I’d already brought to his house within the next few days. I assured him the news reports about my father were twisted and blown out of proportion. Mostly I lied with every breath, saying the things I knew he wanted to hear.

  What I didn’t do was tell him about the pregnancy…the baby.

  I slip from the room and move more quickly along the hall, down the stairs and into the kitchen. I need something to help me sleep. What I would give for a couple of beers. Can’t go there. Can’t have a sleeping pill. I have a few of those left over from when my father died. I think I even have a couple of Valium. Can’t go there either.

  My heart still thuds in my chest. The snippets of images and sounds from the nightmare keep haunting me. I need to do something to wear off all the adrenaline. Wear myself out so I can go back to sleep. Walt needs me to be strong, to take the lead if necessary. I’m his partner. He’s counting on me. I need to be at my best in the morning.

  I pad into the entry hall and stare at the boxes. I guess unpacking a few things is as good a way as any to burn off stress. Or I could just go out and take a nice, long run in the rain—except it’s not just raining, it’s storming. A boom crashes outside as if to confirm my assessment. I like storms, but not running in them. I have no desire to test Mother Nature.

  Unpacking it is.

  I pick up the knife I left here the other night. A memory flashes—something sharp jabbing into my upper arm. Pain spears me. I frown. I pull up the short sleeve on my left arm and look. Nothing. But then my skin on the underside seems to burn. I toss the knife aside, walk to the mirror above the hall table near the front door and raise my arm so that I can see the backside—the part I can’t see no matter how I twist my head around unless I have a mirror.