Little Girl Lost

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  “No. Feels staged.”

  “So he just . . .” He holds up a plastic-gloved hand, wiggling two fingers in a running motion. “Vamoose?”

  “Most missing persons do.” Especially when there’s a Miss White involved.

  “Loco. A guy who has everything.” Alberto shakes his head, cutting whole pickles lengthwise into paper-thin slices. “Me, I got nada. But I will never want to leave Flora and the kids.”

  “That’s why you’re the one who has everything.”

  “The man who has everything, he has everything to lose.” The old man crosses himself.

  His grandson Tino appears, wearing an apron. He resembles his grandfather, though without the mustache or beer keg belly. He has a young wife, toddler, and newborn whose faint cries filter in from the stairwell until he closes the door.

  “I’ll take over, Papi. It’s time for you to go up to bed now.”

  “No, I will do it,” Alberto says. “You need to work on your técnica.”

  “How much técnica does it take to press a couple of sandwiches?”

  “It’s art, chiquito. Watch and learn.”

  “I’ve watched. I know how to do it.”

  “Knowing is not doing. You don’t have the patience to—”

  “I have patience.”

  “Not for this. Not for letting a man finish a sentence! You have a short fuse, like your grandmother.”

  Alberto presses the sandwiches against the hot griddle with the bottom of a cast-iron pan, and his grandson gives Barnes a World Series recount, this time with player perspective.

  As a standout high school pitcher, Tino had been scouted by the major leagues before he got his girlfriend pregnant and dropped out to marry her. A different path might have led him to the pitcher’s mound at Yankee Stadium across the Harlem River, rather than living here above the store with his grandparents, mother, and an uncle. Eight people, two bedrooms, and no one ever complains.

  Five minutes later, Tino is cleaning the griddle, Alberto has gone to bed, and Barnes has climbed to the third floor, white deli bag in hand.

  Frail and unshaven, wrapped in a reed green cardigan, Wash feigns surprise to see him as he does every Friday night. “You really know how to brighten an old fart’s day, Stockton. Thanks for coming. But I don’t want you doing this anymore. It’s getting dangerous here after dark.”

  “It’s been dangerous for years, Wash. How are you feeling?”

  “Terrific.”

  Yeah. Sure.

  Wash turns off the TV, where Barbara Walters is interviewing someone, and leads Barnes down a short hallway lined with family portraits. Wash as a child with a trio of doting much-older sisters; with his parents, who lived into their golden years; with his beautiful wife.

  He had it all, and lost it. His family is gone, other than nieces and nephews scattered far from New York. When they met, Barnes assumed he was a widower. He and his wife look so happy together in the photos. “No, she ran off with someone else,” Wash told him. “And I don’t blame her. She wanted to start a family. I was never around. She gave me an ultimatum—her or the job. I chose the job.”

  “Why?”

  “I was on a case. Couldn’t walk away. Thought she’d come back when it was over. I was wrong.”

  “Why do you still have her pictures on the wall?”

  “Just because someone leaves doesn’t mean you stop loving them, Stockton. She sends me a Christmas card every year. Last one had pictures of her grandkids.”

  “Doesn’t that bother you?”

  Wash shrugged and changed the subject. He’s good at that.

  As always, the tiny, windowless kitchen is cluttered with plates and bowls, cracker and cereal boxes, orange prescription bottles, and—even now—a couple of full ashtrays.

  They sit on rickety chairs at the small table, and Wash raises his brown beer bottle for their weekly toast. “What are we drinking to tonight?”

  “You tell me.”

  “I haven’t left this place all week, my friend. But some good must have happened to you out there in the world since I saw you on Tuesday.”

  “The opposite, actually.”

  “Uh-oh. What’s going on?”

  Barnes shakes his head. “Forget it. I don’t want to ruin your appetite.”

  “Fine. The Senate rejected Bork today. We’ll drink to that.”

  Now that he’s homebound, Wash spends most days glued to cable news. He’s no fan of President Reagan’s conservative Supreme Court justice pick, Judge Robert Bork, a vocal opponent to affirmative action. Barnes doesn’t like Bork, either, but he’d prefer to toast something more personal. Say, a miraculous cure for his friend’s illness.

  They clink bottles, and Wash unwraps his sandwich. “Extra pickles?”

  “Always.”

  For a few minutes, they eat in comfortable silence. Barnes washes down his Cuban and plantain chips with gulps of beer, while Wash nibbles and sips, going through the motions. The moment Barnes polishes off his meal, he pushes aside his unfinished food and lights a Marlboro, scowling when Barnes does the same.

  “When are you going to quit that filthy habit, Stockton?”

  “When you do.”

  “Too late for me. But it’ll kill you.” Wash wheezes, straining to reach the ashtray on the counter. Barnes allows him to try for a moment, to preserve his dignity, then grabs it and plunks it onto the table. “Thanks. What’s going on at work these days?”

  Barnes tells him about Wayland. Long retired now, Wash is always an avid audience, living vicariously through Barnes’s tales from the job and often providing valuable insight.

  “You know, your five senses can’t pick up on everything, Stockton. Sometimes, you need to rely on your sixth sense.”

  “Like Madame Esmerelda?”

  “Not magical powers. Scientific ones. Biology. Ever seen a mama bear protect a cub?”

  “In New York City?”

  “You’ve been to the zoo.”

  “What does that have to do with this?”

  “Every living creature is equipped with natural instinct, Stockton. Listen to yours. What is your gut telling you about Perry Wayland?”

  “That he might work for a hedge fund and the market might have bottomed out this week, but he didn’t commit suicide. He didn’t take a financial hit like some of the others, because he saw it coming.”

  “Like Madame Esmerelda?”

  “No, and not science this time—math. He watches the patterns. He saw that the market was right where it was in the twenties, before the last major crash.”

  They talk awhile longer about the case before Wash changes the subject in his usual point-blank manner: “You had a bad week. Get some girl into trouble?”

  Barnes stares. “Geez, Wash. About those magical powers . . .”

  “Plain old common sense. It was only a matter of time, Stockton, the way you been messing around. You need to borrow some money? I’ve got some, and I can’t take it with me.”

  “You’re not going any—”

  “Don’t be a fool. We’re all going sooner or later. Just take my ashes home from the morgue in a Maxwell House can, Stockton. But don’t lug me all the way back uptown. You go downtown, see?”

  “Downtown—hey, that Tompkins Square Park is a mess these days, huh?”

  Wash ignores the effort to shift the conversation. “And you take the elevator up to the top of the World Trade Center and you go out on the deck and you open that can and let the wind scatter me.”

  Barnes sighs. “Why there?”

  “Twin towers are the tallest buildings in the world.”

  “I don’t know about that.”

  “In the country, anyway.”

  “I’m pretty sure the Sears Tower in Chicago is taller.”

  “Well, I don’t want to be scattered over Chicago. New York is my home, my heart, my blood. You understand, Stockton? This is where I want to be. You make sure.”

  “And you want . . .” Hoarse, he
tries again. “You want me to be the one?”

  “You’re my family.”

  “Why are we even talking about this? It’s a long ways—”

  “No, Stockton. It isn’t, and you know it as well as I do.”

  Barnes bows his head.

  “Listen, I can handle this, and so can you. I’m not young. There are tragedies in this world, but what’s happening to me isn’t one of them. My mother always said that if you dance, you’d better be prepared to pay the fiddler. Oh, how I’ve danced, Stockton. And so have you. So, getting back to that . . . I’ll give you the money to take care of it. However much you need. A hundred, two hundred? There’s a clinic—”

  “Oh! I thought you meant take care of it. You know—the kid. Not . . . I mean, even if she—it’s too late for that. She’s due soon.”

  “And you’re finally getting around to telling me? You going to marry her?”

  “I just found out about it myself, and I don’t even know her! She’s a complete stranger!”

  Wash levels a look at him.

  “I mean, we were, uh, together one night, but . . . I haven’t seen her since. For all I know, this is some kind of scam. Maybe she’s not even pregnant. If she is, maybe it’s not mine. A shady lady like that—”

  “I thought you didn’t know her.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Then how do you know what kind of woman she is?”

  “Not too hard to figure out.” Sometimes, his old badass self sneaks back in, filtering the world and everyone in it through a disparaging, spiteful lens. “Look, I just feel like she might be lying about the pregnancy. Or trying to nail me with child support for someone else’s kid.”

  “Because she’s shady?”

  “Right.”

  “And she’s shady because she slept with you on the first date?”

  “Not a date. I just picked her up in some bar.”

  “What does that make you?”

  A real douche bag. That’s what you are, Gloss.

  Wash sighs. “Tell me what you’re going to do.”

  “I’m not going to marry her, if that’s what you were hoping. I guess I should . . . uh, talk to her lawyer.”

  “Screw the lawyer. Talk to her.”

  “The lawyer’s the one who sent the letter.”

  “This isn’t about paper. It’s about people. And about perspective. Ask yourself who you are, Stockton. Better yet, who you want to be. Because trust me, someday when you look back—”

  “Screw someday, Wash. I have no idea who I am right now. But I know for damned sure who I can never be.”

  Wash digests that. Nods. “Don’t be weak, Stockton. Do the right thing.”

  “Sure, yeah, no problem.” Barnes thrums his knuckles against the table. “What is the right thing?”

  “What did your father do?”

  “That’s different. He and my mother weren’t . . . like this.”

  “You sure about that?”

  Barnes stops thrumming. “Do you know something about it?”

  “What I know is that your daddy was younger than you are when you came along, and he did whatever he had to do to make it right.”

  “You mean marry my mother?”

  “I mean a lot of things. He stepped up and he made sure he managed to support you, even though . . .” He shakes his head.

  “Even though what?”

  “It wasn’t always easy, Stockton. He tried to do the right thing, though. If you didn’t know that, I’m telling you now.”

  In all the years of their friendship, Barnes has never asked how Wash met his dad, but it’s not hard to figure out. Wash was a cop. According to his grandmother and his mother, too, his father had a wild streak in his younger days. They didn’t elaborate, and Barnes didn’t ask for more information.

  Better to remember the great things about his dad than speculate over the few youthful missteps he’d made before he settled down. It never occurred to him that his father might have considered Barnes himself one of those mistakes, or that the missteps might have continued after he was born.

  “This isn’t helping me, Wash. What am I supposed to do?”

  “You don’t need me to tell you that.”

  “Maybe I do.”

  “A man stands up to his responsibilities.” Wash peers at him, rolling an unlit cigarette between his fingers. “But you don’t want to hear that.”

  Barnes says nothing.

  “You’re playing it out in your head, Stockton, aren’t you? Imagining how things will turn out if you do this, do that. But right now, you don’t have the right perspective. Later, you can look backward and forward and see things differently. Even yourself.”

  “Why do you keep talking about later? This is about right now.”

  “That’s what you think. But you make a choice, and someday you’re either going to regret it, or congratulate yourself that it was the right one.”

  “There is no choice. I’m not going to help raise a kid, period. It’ll be better off without me.”

  “Were you better off without your father?”

  “Hell, no. It’s the same thing, whether you drop dead on your kids, or take off because the stock market crashed, or because their mother is a pain in the ass, or because you’re not cut out for being a dad and you never wanted kids in the first place. The kid gets hurt in the end.”

  “So . . . it’s better to hurt them in the beginning, is that what you’re saying?”

  “Yeah, it is,” Barnes mutters. “It’s exactly what I’m saying.”

  When Amelia looked into Bettina’s dresser after she died, she gave it only a cursory search. Tonight, she’s more thorough, moving the neat stacks of white nylon underwear, bras, and slips from the top drawer to the bed.

  She lifts the yellowed newspaper liner at the bottom. Empty.

  She replaces the lingerie one garment at a time, shaking each piece and hoping to see some clue—her birth parents’ names and addresses, maybe?—drop to the floor. It doesn’t happen.

  She isn’t sure what she’s expecting to find. But that television program had filled her with doubt about the Crenshaws’ story, and newfound urgency to learn about her past.

  She moves on to the next drawer, filled with socks and nightgowns, and finds herself ensnared by the familiar scent of Shower to Shower talcum powder. It lassos her to the past, to the day everything changed. The day Amelia glimpsed the truth in Bettina’s medical file. The day Bettina drew her last breath, alone.

  Calvin will never forgive Amelia for that.

  She’ll never forgive him for a lot of things.

  She looks over her shoulder toward the living room, almost expecting to see him there watching her. Or maybe her mother’s ghost, wearing an accusatory expression.

  I know what you’re up to, child. Don’t you lie about why you’re goin’ through my things.

  The doorway is vacant. Calvin won’t be home from his overnight shift for hours.

  Amelia moves on to his dresser. Nothing there is folded. The top drawer contains a few pairs of rumpled boxer shorts and stray socks and sleeveless white tee shirts gone gray since she took over laundry duties. Most of his things are in the hamper or scattered on the floor around it.

  If she were a good daughter—his real daughter—she wouldn’t let the dirty clothes pile up this way. She might even gather it all up and haul it down to the laundry room right now, waiting her turn with the other women who will either ignore her or ask her questions, equally unappealing scenarios.

  They always want to know how she is, how her father is.

  “We’re good,” she’ll lie, same as always.

  Finished with Calvin’s dresser, she moves over to the closet. The rod is thick with hanging garments, the floor with dusty shoes, a suitcase, a folding step stool, and a plastic bin stuffed with Bettina’s summer clothes. She rotated them into her overcrowded dresser every spring and filled the bin with the sweaters, hats, and gloves that still fill her drawers from las
t winter. Her last winter.

  Amelia swipes at another unexpected wave of tears for the woman she’d thought was her mother; the woman she’d mourned and then tried to forget, if not forgive.

  There are two shelves in the closet: one just above the hanging bar, the other too high to reach. She starts with the lower shelf, peeking into a trio of round hatboxes bearing old-fashioned-looking labels of stores she’s never heard of. Her father’s fedora occupies the first. She tried to talk him into giving it to her last year, when she wanted to dress up like Boy George for a Halloween costume party, but he refused.

  “I can’t have you getting it all crushed and dirty. That’s my good hat.”

  “You never wear it.”

  “I do when I go someplace special.”

  “Like where? It’s out of style.”

  “Then why is Boy George wearing it?”

  At the time, she might have laughed. Now the memory irks her. Selfish of him, not letting her borrow some stupid old hat that’s just been collecting dust on a shelf.

  “You can wear one of my church hats to the party,” her mother offered.

  “And go as who? Princess Diana? In case you haven’t noticed, I’m not blonde. Or white.”

  Replete with bows, feathers, and blusher veils, her mother’s hats did look like something British royalty might wear. There had been nothing fancy or sophisticated about Bettina, with her roly-poly figure and homespun, shabby wardrobe. But on Sunday mornings, when she put on her good dress and angled one of these headpieces over her dark hair, she sometimes looked almost elegant.

  I never told her that, though, did I? Not since I was little.

  Amelia thrusts aside regret with the hatboxes and reaches up to the shelf again.

  She pulls down a cardboard banker’s box filled with financial documents, household bills, tax returns. She’ll go through it some other day, in case something of interest might be tucked among the innocuous papers. But it doesn’t seem likely.

  She unfolds and refolds an afghan Calvin’s grandmother had made for him and Bettina when they got married. It’s crocheted of wool so prickly that Amelia opted to shiver through many a drafty night instead of itching and scratching beneath it. She shudders, seeing that bugs have gnawed holes in the lacy pattern. Her parents should have taken better care to store a family heirloom.