by Regina Doman
“Father Raymond is dead,” Ben had said flatly. “That new priest is never going to let us in.”
“He doesn’t have to know we’re there,” Arthur had said, and made himself walk, to push aside the feeling of desolation. “Come on.”
Since they hadn’t had any money and weren’t yet streetwise enough to do otherwise, they had walked from upper Manhattan to the South Bronx. It took them hours in the cold wind and snow. When they reached St. Lawrence, Arthur had let himself in with the keys Father Raymond had once entrusted to him, and the two brothers had huddled in a corner of the vestibule.
“We have to get out before anyone comes—or they’ll know we have keys—” his younger brother had mumbled before falling asleep. Simply glad to be out of the wind, Arthur slept.
They awoke early and quietly slipped out of the church onto the streets. A few moments later, a vision from their past life appeared in the form of their buddy Stephen Foster getting off of the subway, backpack on his shoulders, on his way to school. His dark brown face lit up when he saw them. “Hey Arthur! You got out, man! What gives?”
There wasn’t much they wanted to say, but Stephen guessed more than they told him, because after he had heard their answers, he said, “You come home with me tonight. My mom won’t mind.”
And that was how the brothers first met Mrs. Foster.
* * *
So it was that when Bear found himself in trouble again, he had no problem with calling Stephen’s mother. The heavyset black woman had accepted the boys as two more sons, and became a sturdy ally. He knew that she, shrewd but solidly certain of his character, would help him without doubting him. And she wouldn’t ask any pointed questions until they were in private.
“My, you boys have a way of getting yourselves into trouble,” was her understated reaction when he had called her from the jail last night and explained their situation. “I’ll be right over to get the keys and go over to the Briers’ house for you. Don’t you fret, Arthur. God’ll take care of your girl. You’ll see.”
The next morning, as soon as they were let out of their cells, Bear found the phones that the prisoners were allowed to use, and called Mrs. Foster back.
“What did you find?” he asked her, after they had exchanged greetings.
She paused. “Blanche is not there,” she stated. “I don’t think she’s been there since Saturday. The mail hasn’t been taken in and there was a Sunday paper in the slot.”
By her voice, he gathered right away that she had more to tell him, but she wasn’t going to tell him on this line.
“The good thing is that I found a phone number for Aunt Cindy on the calendar. The phone book says it’s an area code for San Francisco. Think that might be the one where the Briers are staying?”
“Yes, it’s a very good chance!” Bear said, with some relief. “We have to call them right away.”
“Since you can only call collect, how about I call first and find out if Jean’s really there? If she is, you want me to tell them everything?”
“No, just tell them I’m going to call. I want to be the one to break the bad news,” Bear said. This wasn’t strictly true, but he felt it was his responsibility.
“Can you stay by this phone?”
“I can call back in a half hour or so,” he glanced around the phone room. There were a few other men waiting in line for the phone.
“Then call me back when you can. I’ll see what I can do about calling those folks in San Francisco.”
“Sounds good,” he said with an effort. “Thanks for doing this.”
“How you doing, Arthur?”
“I’m okay, but I’m worried about Blanche.”
“How’s Ben?”
“Oh, nothing gets him down. He says I’ve just gotten us in trouble again.”
“You hang in there, Arthur. I know you must be going crazy in that place. God’ll watch out for Blanche. And you. You’ll see.”
He walked back to his cell. For half an hour he paced around, waiting, wishing there was something else he could do.
“I wish you would stop,” Fish said calmly, sitting on his bunk. “You’re making me nervous.”
Bear forced himself to stand still and rubbed his eyes. He hadn’t slept well last night either. “Sorry.”
“So we’re in jail, and there’s no sign of Blanche,” Fish said to himself. “Well. I wonder if she’s hiding because she knows the police want her?”
“I’m not going to assume that yet,” Bear said doggedly. He couldn’t get the picture of Blanche’s frightened face in the photo out of his mind. “I wish I could know that she’s even still alive.”
“You’re pacing again,” Fish murmured.
Frustrated, Bear sat on his own bunk. After a minute of his mind running crazily along several trains of thought, he asked his brother, “Do you have any paper?”
“Not sure if I have anything. They took everything from me that could be possibly construed as a weapon.” Fish turned out his pockets, looking for scrap paper. Finding the postcard of the Delphic Sibyl in his trench coat pocket, he said, “Well, there’s this.”
“That’ll do,” Bear said. He had a stub of pencil the prison guard had let him have, and started to make notes on the back of the postcard, writing small to save space. “I’m making a timeline. As far as I can tell, Blanche was last seen on Saturday, at the banquet hall where she worked. The police detective said that the management missed several thousand dollars that had been collected as part of a fundraiser that evening. Then someone found Blanche’s backpack in the employee service room with a cache of Ecstasy pills in it.”
Fish stared at the wall. “I don’t envy you having to tell Mrs. Brier all this.”
“Yeah. Me neither.” His mouth went dry at the thought. A feeling came over him that he hadn’t experienced in a while, but was still recognizable. This was how he had felt towards Jean Brier over a year ago, when Blanche and Rose were just beginning to be friends with him. The guilty feeling that he was endangering her daughters by being friends with them, because he was in danger. He had been so relieved when that danger had passed.
But apparently, not all of it was over, after all.
Pushing aside the worry, he wrote some questions: who would resent Blanche? Did she know something? Was she a danger to someone? Something fishy going on at the banquet hall?
“Make sure you get that card back to me, or I’ll face the grave displeasure of Rose,” Fish murmured resignedly as Bear chewed the end of his pencil.
“You only get it back if you do me a favor.”
“What?”
Bear ruminated as he carefully put the card in his shirt pocket and stood up. “Listen to Rose once in a while when she talks to you.”
Fish blew out his breath. “Ah, one of the labors of Hercules.”
“I didn’t ask you to listen to her all the time. Just start by listening attentively every now and then. I think you’ll find she has some good and interesting things to say.”
His brother rubbed his brown hair. “Yes, she’s a smart little kid. It’s a pity she’s so—sixteen.”
“Actually, she’s—”
“I know, she’s seventeen, but it doesn’t seem like it.”
“Actually, she’s eighteen.”
“Is she?”
“Her birthday was this past November.”
“Was it?”
“You were there. You even helped her blow out the birthday candles. Though apparently you didn’t bother to count them.”
His brother was staring, apparently making the mental adjustment. “How did I miss that?”
“You probably had a lot of English literature on your mind and missed it. So are you saying that being sixteen isn’t an age, it’s a state of mind?”
“For some people,” Fish said, and paused. “Are you sure she’s eighteen?”
“Yes, only a year younger than you, the mature nineteen-year-old that you are.”
“I turned twenty in April,
which you’ve apparently forgotten.” Fish eyed his brother with his typical crooked smile. “Nevertheless, I’ll try to start relating to her as a peer. If you stop pacing.”
Sighing, Bear squatted on the floor again.
When he finally got to the phone again, Mrs. Foster gave him a new number and told him that Mrs. Brier was expecting his call. Thanking her and agreeing to call back later in the day, he dialed the number. Anxiously he listened to the phone ringing in far-off San Francisco, and swallowed.
Someone picked up the phone, and the electronic operator came on, indicating that there was a collect call from an inmate in a New York City jail for Jean Brier. Whoever picked up the phone pushed “1” to accept the call. Then suddenly Bear heard Jean’s voice. “Bear? Is that you?”
“Hello, Jean,” he said, and swallowed. “It’s me.”
“I got a call this morning from your friend Mrs. Foster. She said you were back from Europe—and in jail? What happened?”
“Uh, I’m afraid it’s pretty complicated. Jean, let me tell you the most important part first. Have you heard from Blanche?”
Her voice changed abruptly. “No. I hadn’t expected to. Rose and I have been out of touch with her for the past few days. We were up hiking on my uncle’s property and we didn’t have a phone. We got back yesterday and I called her then and left a message but haven’t heard back. Is something wrong?”
“Blanche seems to be missing.” He swallowed again. “I don’t think she’s been back at your house since Sunday. That’s why I came back. We haven’t found her.”
“Have you called the police?”
“Yes, but—Jean, I’m afraid they’re already looking for her. When Fish and I were gone, the DEA found drugs in our apartment. They think Blanche put them there.”
Jean paused. He could tell she was taking this in. “So they arrested you?”
“Yes. Don’t worry, we’ll be getting bailed out soon. The important thing is to find Blanche. She was last seen at the banquet hall on Saturday night. She left her backpack there, and apparently they found drugs in her backpack too—”
Jean listened to his narrative in silence. When he finished, he tried to reassure her. “I’m going to do everything I can to find her as soon as they let us out. But I wanted to get a hold of you because I figured you should know right away.”
“You’re right. Thank you, Bear, for telling me,” Jean said quietly. She was a rather stoic person, but he could tell she was on the verge of tears. “I don’t know why I didn’t see this coming.”
“What do you mean? Has something been wrong with Blanche?”
Jean sighed before she answered. “I think so. She’s gotten very solitary this summer, and very…preoccupied. I knew that she wasn’t happy, but she couldn’t seem to articulate what was wrong. Rose said—” she hesitated. “Rose said she was seeing things.”
“What do you mean? Hallucinating?” A tremor went through Bear.
“I don’t think so. Rose said she thought she was being watched wherever she went. She said she kept feeling an urge to run away and escape from them.”
“What did she mean by that?”
“I don’t know.”
“Jean, I’m sure that these drugs were planted to frame her. Do you know anyone who might have something against her?”
“No, I don’t. I’ll think about it, certainly. But it doesn’t seem likely.”
“We can’t rule out any options right now,” Bear urged. “If there was actually someone watching her, we’ve got to find out who it was. Ask Rose to give you any details she can think of.”
“I feel so irresponsible,” Jean said, almost to herself. “We’ve been so caught up in the play that Rose was in, and work, and vacation plans—I can’t believe I left her alone, knowing that she was feeling so nervous and afraid—I don’t know why I didn’t take her more seriously. I’m her mother, I should have known something was wrong. But she said she was keeping herself busy visiting Mr. Fairston and the nursing home and I didn’t really think to press her for details—”
“Mr. Fairston?” Bear interrupted.
“Yes, a sick man she met at Reflections. He took a fancy to her, and she would go and read him poetry in the afternoons. She’s been visiting nursing homes too. She just really clicks with old people.”
“Er…That’s great,” Bear said with an effort, scribbling on the postcard: check Reflections. Mr. Fairston. Check with all people Blanche visited. Who has something against Blanche?
“But the problem was that between her visits and Rose doing the play and my working, I barely saw her this summer. She said she felt the need to be alone, but I’m sorry now that I gave her so much space. She’s nineteen, but she’s still so young…”
Bear wanted to comfort her but wasn’t sure what to say except, “I wish I had been here.”
“Well, you’re back now,” Jean said with a sigh. “I’m glad you are, and I’m very glad you called. Rose and I will get a plane home as soon as we can.”
“Yes. Let me know if there’s any trouble getting your tickets. I’ll let you go now. I’ll call if I have any more news,” Bear said. “Goodbye.”
“Goodbye, Bear.”
He hung up the phone and stared at the cinderblock wall. It was as if a gulf had opened up between him and the Briers. Blanche ‘seeing’ things. Blanche solitary and paranoid. Images of girls hooked on drugs he had seen when he lived on the streets flashed before his eyes. A familiar voice full of class snobbery spoke derisively in his mind. Her family’s poor. You know that. How do you know she wasn’t using you, after all? You gave her the keys to your apartment and left the country…how do you know she hasn’t been taking things and pawning them all this time?...you always thought she was so good, so wholesome…Can you really believe in her?
He tried to dismiss the thoughts immediately. He told himself that his vision was cloudy because of his stress, because of being in jail. But the picture of the princess in his mind as a girl with emotional problems who turned to drugs to fill some unspoken need tormented him, and he closed his eyes.
Chapter Six
’Tis not that Dying hurts us so,
’Tis Living hurts us more
But Dying is a different way,
A Kind behind the Door
Simple work. Sorting clothing, restoring order. It seemed as though she had been sitting there for hours, surrounded by dust and clothes, working. At least the palpable sense of fear that had tormented her these past few weeks was receding.
An Emily Dickinson summer. She smiled to herself. Emily Dickinson, the pale poetess in white, who spoke of death and God beneath every other phrase—it had seemed a good idea to read her verses to a dying man.
At first, she had felt herself so remote from death. After all, it was summer, and although she was not completely happy, she was alive.
* * *
Not being sure of what she was going to do with her life had left her drifting. “I can’t just wait around for my prince to come,” she had lectured herself. But she knew it was no good. She was waiting. For Bear.
Day after day, she wrote to him. It was almost a mechanical process—taking an envelope, writing “Arthur Denniston” on it, then searching for his last letter to find out his current mailing address in Europe—then writing, “Dear Bear” at the top of a sheet of paper. Then trying to figure out what to say.
She was not the sort of person who told about every detail of her day. Writing about work seemed dull compared to Bear’s letters about his adventures hiking through Italy. Writing about her visits to Mr. Fairston and the people in the nursing home made her feel as though she were trying to broadcast her good deeds. So she restricted her topics to the weather and her reading. Necessarily, her letters to Bear were short. She wished she was like her sister Rose, who always seemed to find something to write about, whose letters were pages and pages long.
At first, it was a pleasant distraction to visit Mr. Fairston. She could talk to him—or at a
ny rate, she could listen to him talk. Unfortunately, his health became worse and worse, and she felt sad as she watched his decline. At first he was only tired, but his coordination was becoming steadily worse. Soon he was confined to a wheelchair, and then to bed as he gradually lost control of the muscles on the right side of his body. A slow paralysis seemed to be coming over him. Fortunately he was an articulate person, and he found ways to talk even though one side of his face was inanimate. From time to time, things would confuse him, but mostly he still had clarity. She could tell he was appreciative of her visits.
When he still had the energy for long conversations, she listened to him talk about current events, about starting his company, about his wife. After a while, she sensed she was listening to an edited history, one that skipped over years of significant material. She guessed those missing years probably concerned people with whom he had broken off all contact. That was depressing.
It bothered her that Mr. Fairston, who, from the look of his house, was incredibly wealthy, couldn’t afford to get a decent home nurse. Of course, there was a nursing shortage, but it didn’t really explain why his nurses seemed even less competent than the ones in the crumbling nursing homes she visited.
His wife, whom Mr. Fairston constantly referred to, was seldom there. According to Mr. Fairston, she was very busy, with a company to run.
“My wife’s quite a smart woman. Oh, she’s a blond, and you know what they always say about blondes, but she’s a smart one, I tell you. She got a hankering to buy this one corporation. I loaned her the money and said, go for it. And she did. Brought it into the Fortune 500 ranks, runs the whole thing herself. Brought me on to be vice-president, but it was more an honorary position than anything else. I told her to fly with it, so she wouldn’t have to be indebted to me. She’s doing quite well, quite well. Doesn’t need me and my money any more. Which I have to say I don’t mind.” He chuckled, and coughed again.
That day, he had sounded particularly bad. The girl almost offered to get him some cold medication, but kept silent. After all, she didn’t want to interfere.
The one or two times the girl and the wife met, the wife was friendly, coolly polite, or distracted, depending on her mood. One time she came in with a huge bouquet of red roses for her husband. Another time she marched in, woke him out of a doze, and demanded to know what was going on with the credit cards. She seemed to regard Blanche as part of the scenery, or, Blanche thought, like a maid who needed to be kept in her place.
