If this is how kids are protected, they should just set us loose in the woods, instead.
“Where are we going?” I demanded. They led us to the same car, thank goodness.
“A foster care home. You’ll be fine.”
“Our mother has a cousin up in the Crossroads Cove,” Gus shouted. “She’s famous. Delta Whittlespoon. Her husband’s the deputy sheriff of Jefferson County. Call her. She’ll take us.”
“That has to be sorted out by a judge at a hearing.”
I wrenched around as they opened car doors. “What about Mr. Sam? He’s hurt.”
“He’ll get help. He needs to be evaluated. He’s a danger to himself.”
“Ralph!” Tal cried. “Our dog!”
“I’m sure you have neighbors who—”
“Then call them,” Gus shot back. “Goddammit. Call Charlie Bowen, Sergeant Charlie Bowen, Asheville P.D.”
“Shut your mouth, you little heathen.” Gus got pushed into the back seat. Tal was handed in next. As I was being steered that way, a long, low dark car, like the kind you see in mobster movies, pulled in. A sensation jolted me. Chocolate with Reese’s cups. Biscuits. And smoked pickles. “Jay!” I screamed.
I launched myself in that direction. Lady Godzilla grabbed me. I kept yelling his name as she wrestled me into the car. At any second, he’d hop out and race over to help. Why else would he have come? Who was he with? He must be here to help.
“Liver, liver, liver,” Tal chanted, crying. As I crashed into the back seat next to her and Gus, I met my brother’s angry eyes.
“It’s Jay out there,” I moaned.
Gus nodded. “And he’s with his uncle.”
Jay
I SAW GABS, I heard her calling me. I pounded the tinted windows, wrestled the locked door, yelled. Sitting beside me, E.W. said in a calm tone, “I hate to say this, but you did this to her. And to her brother and sister. And to their mother. The damage can’t be undone, not now.”
I flung myself at him, fists swinging. But he was a large, powerfully-built man, who ran and lifted weights and sparred with a boxing trainer every morning. He cuffed me along the jaw and pinned me against the deep leather seat, pressing a forearm across my throat. “Here’s what happens next,” he said. “They’re going far away from here. It’s time you put their influence aside. If you cooperate, I’ll make sure they end up in good homes. If not . . .” He let the implication dangle. Then he added, “The mining rights. I want your word.”
I was dying inside. Revenge took the place of every other thought. I can’t trust him. I can’t. I’d find some way to take care of Gabs, Gus and Tal. I swore I would. We were in this nightmare together. I hoped they’d understand. I hoped Gabs would forgive me.
“The mining rights,” E.W. repeated.
“No,” I said.
Gabby
RELAX, GABBY. I like little fat girls. You don’t want to wake up your sister, do you?
His name doesn’t matter. He was fourteen, one of our foster “brothers” among ten luckless boys and girls from six to sixteen; the bunk beds in the girls’ rooms sagged in the middle and smelled funny, the food was processed junk, heavy on starches and cheap cuts of meat. The house was old and drafty, set somewhere on the rolling land east of the mountains. E.W. had made sure we were hidden from Delta, Sergeant Charlie, and anyone else who was demanding to know where Jane and Stewart MacBride’s kids had been sent and why an “undisclosed location” was needed to keep us safe from Mr. Sam, who was locked up in the dementia ward of an Asheville nursing home.
After a month of being cornered and groped during Tal’s afternoon nap times—I wasn’t about to leave her sleeping alone in the girls’ rooms, because when she cried they locked her in a closet—I felt as if I’d never be clean again. Inside or out. I developed a habit of vomiting in the bathroom after meals. It made me feel in control of my body. That’s all I cared about. To feel something resembling control. And to not think about Mama, Daddy, or Jay.
Gus looked like hell, too. I knew he was getting pushed around and punched by the older guys, including the same one who was grabbing me. My worst fear was that my attacker would taunt Gus with it.
There were some givens about Daddy’s children in general and his son in particular.
We would kill people who did what that guy did to me.
Jay
EVERY DAY I asked, “Will you tell Delta where the MacBrides are?” Delta had practically stormed the house. There had been lawyers, confrontations. Sergeant Charlie and a lot of officers were mad as hell. People were talking, and pressure was building on DFACs to explain my uncle’s influence.
But every day, so far, when I asked with brittle formality about Gabs’s fate, Uncle E.W. had said, “I would like to see a two-thousand word essay on the Five Sisters Mine. Tell me about feldspar.” Or, “Write me an article about the use of mica in electrical generators.” Some days it was, “How many push-ups did you do with the trainer?” And others it was, “Tell Arlton (his assistant) I want your hair cut shorter than that, next time.”
A little stab under the fingernails, every day. And my response was to say, “Yes, sir.” And let it go at that. On top of E.W.’s little tortures, I dealt with my cousin Denoto, thirteen years old, E.W.’s oldest daughter. Her mother was long gone. Dark-haired, mean, sadistic, psycho, desperate to please E.W. and happy to share the misery of living under E.W.’s high-pressure thumb, she threw my books in the koi pond, called me names, and did everything short of poison me.
On the other hand, her half-sister, Quincy, whose mother was also a no-show, was a frail blond fairy, about fifteen but looking younger, whose pathological shyness included obsessive compulsive disorder, panic attacks, and regular trips to therapists and psychiatrists. Once she realized I was not going to make fun of her she darted around the shadows of the big Tudor house with stereo headphones over her ears and the disconnected wires dangling around her. She went from one tape player to another in the rooms, floating and touching her talisman spots repeatedly.
Uncle E.W. ignored her, the way you ignore a butterfly until it gets in your way.
I guess that’s how she overheard so much. One day she flittered into the library where I was staring at a book on minerals and only thinking about Gabs, Gus, and Tal. Tap tap tap on the desk, tap tap tap on my arm, and then she slid a little piece of notepaper in front of me.
Tap tap tap on my shoulder, and she fluttered back out.
I stared at the address on it.
I couldn’t use a phone; the housekeeping staff monitored everything I did. But I took a walk in the back garden, where a walled courtyard let in light through the slats of a granite frieze. I laid the slip of paper there with some sunflower seeds on top. My place for feeding the squirrels.
And leaving notes for Lawyer George.
Gabby
IT WASN’T OUR food magic that outted my secret to Gus, it was the plain old smell of vomit, two nights in a row, after dinner. He halted in the dingy hallway as I passed him, his shoulders rigid, his face going tight. A swollen spot bulged above his left eyebrow, and he had a tough edge in his eyes like he’d grown two years for every week we’d been there. I stopped too. It was a no-shit moment. We shared an ability that conveyed intuitions that went far beyond scent-auras, favorite foods and sweet-sour personality tests.
He searched my face, sniffing the awful odor. The instant an image—and scent—filled my mind, I saw it filling his, too. Bruised peaches. He growled like a dog in pain and slammed his hands into the wall on either side of me. I slapped him. “We’re in the middle of nowhere. We can’t call for help! Where would we go? And what if they catch us and divide us up? We can’t risk doing that to Tal!”
“We don’t live like this! We don’t put up with this! We’re MacBrides! We fight back! What if he grabs Tal next?”
I sucked in a breath. “I’ll kill him.”
“We kill him together. Tonight. Or we leave. Tonight.”
Gabby
AROUND MIDNIGHT, with a bag of stolen groceries hanging around Gus’s neck and a second one around mine, we held Tal’s hands and slipped outside. It was a half-mile to a paved road through treeless pastures where beef cattle grazed, then twenty miles in either direction to a convenience store where we could call Sergeant Charlie or Delta.
We started walking. There was a new moon. April was about to pass into May. Insects sang. The two-lane was empty until around dawn, when trucks and cars started to come along. We had a clear view ahead and behind, so we lay down in the roadside ditches each time. There was no other cover.
The plan worked fine until right around daylight. We spotted a big RV coming towards us. “Incoming,” Gus said. We climbed down into a ditch. This one was soggy and littered with beer cans. Tal whimpered as we sank down in the chilly water. We were now cold, wet, filthy, and still at least two miles from a phone.
After the RV was well past, Gus craned his head to check the distance between us and it. When I heard the breath gush out of him I jerked upright. “Backing up,” he said.
Three kids in the middle of isolated farm country at dawn. Just walking home from a spend-the-night-party? Gus and I traded a despairing look. Tal rested her forehead against my arm. “Maybe they’ll be nice people,” she said. “We can tell them we want to go live with Delta.”
“No matter what happens from here on out,” I said to her and Gus, “we’ll take care of each other, and if we ever get away from here, we’re never coming back. North Carolina isn’t home anymore.”
He tilted his head. Agreed.
The RV, puffing diesel fumes, backed up to us and creaked to a halt. The door popped open.
Sergeant Charlie jumped out. Followed by Delta and Pike.
“Ralph, Ralph Ralph,” Ralph said, leaping higher than any heart but ours.
Jay
FOUND THEM.
WE SENT THEM OUT OF STATE.
HIDDEN FROM E.W.
SAFE. DELTA KNOWS WHERE.
I TORE LAWYER George’s note into tiny pieces and scattered it under the roses. It would be a long time before I could find out more details about the where, the how of that rescue. If E.W. could find them, he’d have used them as pawns, hurt them again. I had to stay away, let Gabs go, for now. I doubt E.W. ever intended to send Gabs, Gus and Tal to Delta. He would have let them fade into the foster care system, be separated, be destroyed completely. Mr. Sam was locked up, but E.W. couldn’t care less about his fate, so he let Delta take him to the Cove. He died there, a year later, wandering around Free Wheeler.
At least Gabs and the others were okay. I didn’t know how much damage had been done to them already.
And how much damage had been done to me.
“Straithern School,” E.W. said, tossing a severely crimped binder on his desk. Every crisp movement and acidic tinge to his voice said he knew I’d found a way to help the MacBrides. “Several of our stellar Wakefield men have attended,” he said. “Those who need structure, discipline. It’s a military-style program. Extremely high academic standards, but also demanding personal protocols and, well, it will make a man out of you. It certainly took the rebellion out of me, when I was your age. I was hoping to avoid passing the lesson along. Enjoy.”
That fall I looked out the barracks window at a drill field outside Raleigh in the heart of the Carolina flatlands. My head was shaved, I’d already been beaten up three times by older classmen, and I’d seen my weaker peers reduced to pissing themselves in hazing rituals that weren’t meant to make men out of boys, just sadistic lords of industry out of the survivors. A Wakefield had founded the school in 1892. Four generations had attended, including E.W.
At least I could get mail from Lawyer George, now. He’d been disbarred, but was setting up an office. Part of Dad’s fall-back plan had been a fund to pay his salary in case he got sacked. So George was organizing the bones of the company I would run, one day.Be strong, Jay. Vickie and I love you. You’ll see Gabs again one day.
I WROTE BACK: I’ll find her, and I’ll destroy E.W.
I didn’t want to be loved. I wanted to be feared.
Part Two
2012
Gabby in Los Angeles
On the eve of Christmas Eve, I’d learn whether enough evidence existed to frame me for embezzlement.
“The operative word in John Michael Michael’s charges against you is ‘bossy’,” my attorney said. “So when you face the judge, try to act . . .” Her voice trailed off as she looked up at me. “I’ll visit you in prison,” she finished.
“I was his chef. His managing partner. The boss. I was supposed to be bossy. How could I be anything but bossy when my movie-star investor was doing his best to steal all the profits?”
“Let me do the talking, please? We can’t dispute the assault charge. You stabbed him in the ass with a pickle fork. That’s a given. So now let’s concentrate on the embezzlement charge.”
“I. Did. Not. Steal. One. Penny.”
I’m a MacBride.
“I know that, Gabby. And we’re going to keep digging until we prove he skimmed the money. In the meantime . . .”
Her voice faded in my ears. My reputation will be ruined. I’ll never get another investor. Never get hired as a chef again. I’ll have to tell Tal and Gus that this mess is far worse than the pickle-fork incident. It’s going to hit the tabloids. Their sister, the thief.
“Excuse me,” a lawyerly voice called. We turned to watch a crisp platoon of dark-suited lawyers wearing shiny pastel ties—the women, too—heading toward us.
John Michael Michael’s hit squad. My attorney whispered, “Look at those poker faces. Something’s up. They’re not happy. It’s good for us.”
Lead Attorney stopped inches from her, while the others circled the wagons, watching for roving spies from the National Enquirer. “You’re tougher than you look,” he said to her. “Vicious. Come and see me about a position.”
“Thanks, but I never sign job contracts in blood.”
My mind filled with the scent of avocado and lemon. Her safe place, as usual. But . . . wait a minute. Something was new. A dash of pico de huh? She didn’t know what the hell he was getting at, and neither did I, but we’d play along.
“Would you really go public with that dirt?” he asked. He glanced at me. “You’re a ball-breaker, I’ve heard that much. But you’d ruin him over this? Hurt his family?”
My mind whirled. John Michael Michael didn’t have a lot of secrets. Drug use, girlfriends, boyfriends, wild parties, a fetish for pickles. How much worse could it get? Except for the pickle fetish. Nothing wrong with that.
“Don’t answer that,” my attorney said. To Lead Lawyer she said, “You’re offering us something?”
“We’ll drop everything. The assault charge, the embezzlement accusations. Just walk away.”
After a stunned moment in which she and I traded poker-faced “Hmmm’s,” while inside I squealed and thanked my angels and cried, she turned to him and said, “We want a public statement saying it was a misunderstanding and he has nothing but respect and affection for Gabby, and that as soon as she opens a new restaurant he’ll be one of her first customers.”
“After what you threatened to tell the world about his elderly mother and the monkey?” He looked from her to me. “Congratulations, ladies. You make me feel dirty. I’d forgotten what the sensation is like.”
My god. Even my attorney looked at me with a queasy question in her eyes. I waved a hand. “Just say we had a misunderstanding.”
“It’s a deal.”
I was being freed not by truth, justice and the American way, but by a brutal tactic cooked up by a myste
rious someone who didn’t care who got hurt on my behalf.
Once we were alone in a corner my attorney said, “Do you have a friend in the Mafia? The CIA? The NSA? The Taliban?”
My chest turned into a battleground between two hearts, one squeezing down into a hard knot of resistance and anger, one swelling up with pleasure.
Jay.
This favor was going to cost me. Wakefields never did anything for free. Five minutes later, my phone began vibrating. The text message had an eight-two-eight area code. Asheville, North Carolina.
Payback time.
Jay
The bright crimson stain of regret
Christmas card from Delta to Jay
LISTEN TO ME THIS TIME, Jay, or lose Gabby—and your soul—once and for all, the Christmas card began. CHANGE THE WORLD FOR THE BETTER—NOT JUST IN LITTLE WAYS BUT IN BIG ONES!!! The Dalai Lama said that. Or maybe it was Dolly Parton. Either way, I agree.
I LIKED HOW Delta used wit and subtlety to make a point. Not.
In the light of a single bleak work lamp hung up by the construction crew, my red fingerprints looked like smeared roses on the card’s pale innards. I stood in the haunted confines of the P, B and S Building. When E.W. controlled it, he let it go to hell, just to taunt me. When I turned twenty-one, that changed. I tracked Gabby to California. It didn’t go so well. Actually, parts of it were the best three days of my life. The rest were the worst three days of my life. She never wanted to see me again. Gus had joined the army. Tal was in college.
None of them wanted to come back to North Carolina, ever. Certainly not for me. Not for the man I’d become. Never mind that survival had required it. I’d been left behind to fend for myself, while they had each other and Delta. Maybe they romanticized what life with money was like.
Maybe I’d just romanticized my time at the P, B, and S Diner.
The Pickle Queen: A Crossroads Café Novella Page 6
