Allie and Bea : A Novel

by Catherine Ryan Hyde

  Allie guessed maybe her father was having an affair. That her parents were about to announce a divorce.

  She did not guess that she would walk downstairs one evening to see her aggressively upper-middle-class father—who had never been in trouble with the law as far as Allie knew—led out of the house in handcuffs as her mother was Mirandized.

  So when that very thing happened, in the hazy shock of it all, Allie let herself off the hook for being a bad guesser. Not in a glib way, as it might sound, but in that jumble of disconnected thoughts that accompany sudden panic. When her mind should have jumped to what was happening, and why, and what it would mean to her future, it instead hung up on that minor point like a pant leg on a protruding nail. It made sense that she hadn’t managed to guess this one, because it was just too far outside the probable.

  She never did see her father’s face that night. He never looked back. He must not have known she had come down the stairs. She saw his back going out the door, and that was all. A man in a suit was walking him out by one elbow. Neither of the strangers wore a uniform, which could have made the situation initially hard to decipher. But some things are simple enough on their face, and can be understood by observation.

  When a man in a suit and tie is handcuffing your mother and telling her she has the right to an attorney—and that if she can’t afford an attorney one will be provided for her—and asking her if she understands these rights, you know your mother is under arrest.

  When she nods her head to indicate that she does understand those rights, and asks no questions, you know your mother is less surprised by her arrest than you are.

  What you don’t know is why.

  Allie had her feet all the way down on the hall floor now. She watched her mother being led away. Just as she was thinking, Wait. What about me? That’s both my parents you’re taking, her mother looked around and saw Allie standing near. She said nothing in actual words, but her eyes spoke volumes. Her eyes said she was sorry, and ashamed, and that the greatest part of her had never once planned to end up this way, even though she was clearly not surprised.

  Then, because she had looked around, the man leading her out of the house looked around, too. He stopped. Her mother stopped. Her mother looked away from Allie, probably worn out from everything her eyes had just been forced to say.

  “Alberta Keyes?” the man asked.

  As though Allie could be any number of different people. As if the house could be a veritable clown car of potential inhabitants.

  “Yes,” she said, but her voice sounded strange. Her tongue felt too thick, the way it might after awakening from a deep sleep.

  Meanwhile all she could think was Reverse. Reverse.

  A few seconds earlier everything had been normal. There had to be a way to get back to that. This strange new disaster was only seconds old. Maybe it didn’t have to stick. Maybe it was too fresh to be necessarily permanent. Maybe she could still jump the gap back to normal from here.

  “We have an officer coming to stay with you until—”

  “He’s here, Frank.” A voice from her front porch. Not a familiar voice. She guessed it must have belonged to the man who had handcuffed her father and taken him away.

  “Oh, good,” the man still in the house said.

  He raised his eyes and looked right into Allie’s. For a split second she allowed it out of sheer surprise. Then she looked away, waves of shock radiating from her gut and up through her chest.

  It’s very bad, what’s happening to you.

  She had seen that in his eyes.

  She looked up again to see a blue-uniformed policeman standing in her foyer. Everybody else was gone.

  “We might as well get comfortable,” he said to Allie a few seconds later, when not talking had already become a strain.

  He was young. Not young like Allie, of course. He was a grown man with a job. He looked about twenty. But Allie wasn’t sure if you got to be a policeman when you were only twenty, so she figured maybe he was deeper into his twenties but looked younger. His face was shiny and clean shaven. He took off his policeman’s cap and held it in his hands. His dark hair was slicked back with some sort of product that made it look wet and preserved the comb marks.

  “What are we waiting for?” Allie asked.

  It felt bizarre, she realized, to have paused even a few seconds before asking. It was such an obvious question. It filled the room so completely that it displaced all the oxygen. Allie could barely breathe.

  She felt her heart beating—pounding—but it seemed to beat in her ears rather than her chest.

  “I have to stay here with you until CPS arrives on the scene. Come on. Let’s sit down.”

  He reached out to take her elbow but she jerked it away. The image in her mind was too fresh: her parents being led out by their elbows. Forced to leave their own home. To leave her.

  “I’ll go,” she said to break the tension. “You don’t have to lead me.”

  She walked with him into the living room. He sat on the couch. She sat on the opposite side of the room in her father’s recliner, but upright. Perched on the edge. The TV was blaring. Some kind of cop show her father must have been watching before that black hole opened up and swallowed their lives.

  Allie reached for the remote and muted it.

  “Thank you,” the cop said. “Couldn’t hear myself think.”

  “What were you trying to think?”

  “I guess how to let you know I’m not the bad guy.”

  “I never said you were.”

  “No. I guess you didn’t.”

  Silence echoed. Allie would have sworn she could poke a stick into all that silence. Follow its waves throughout the room. Meanwhile she could still see the blue-uniformed cops on TV. They were chasing a perp through the streets of some big city. And then there was the cop sitting on her couch.

  “Officer Macklin,” he said. “But Johnnie is okay.”

  More echoing silence.

  “This’s the part where you say your name,” he added.

  “You don’t know my name?”

  “No. Why would I? I just got here.”

  “The other guy knew my name.”

  “The other guy is part of this case.”

  “And you guys don’t talk to each other?”

  “Within the department we might. But those guys are not my department. To put it mildly. Those were the Federales, right there.”

  He put an ominous emphasis on the word, and pronounced it the way a Spanish-speaking villain might in a western movie.

  “I don’t know what that means,” she said.

  “The Feds. Federal agents.”

  “So my parents were just arrested for a federal crime.”

  “Apparently so.”

  “But you don’t know what crime.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t.”

  This is not my life. This can’t possibly be my life. Someone misfiled my karma card. How do I apply for a correction?

  “What do you know?”

  “I know I was headed back to the station when I got a call that a minor needed supervision pending the outcome of a CPS call.”

  “CPS?”

  “Child Protective Services.”

  “Oh.”

  A good four minutes ticked by in utter silence. Literally. Ticked. The clock over the fireplace was an old-fashioned windup, like a miniature grandfather clock. It ticked loudly.

  “I can stay alone, you know,” she said at last. Her voice felt cutting. Shocking. Like a knife violently splitting all that silence. “I’m not a child. I’m fifteen.”

  “Maybe you can,” he said. “But there’s a difference between can and may. You may not. You’re a minor, and till you’re checked into the system at CPS, somebody needs to be with you.”

  “What’s going to happen to me?”

  The question bent her mouth around. Made her lower lip quiver. She couldn’t keep everything lined up anymore. No tears fell—yet. But her mouth gave he
r away.

  He noticed.

  “I have no idea,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  Back to the ticking silence.

  “You know,” she said, and he jumped. “When I was a kid . . . this is weird . . . when I was a kid and I learned about the Miranda thing? How they have to read people their Miranda rights? I thought it had something to do with Carmen Miranda. Remember her?”

  She paused, but he didn’t say if he did.

  “That dancer who used to wear those big hats with all the fruit on them? I thought she’d gotten arrested or something, and that when they came up with the law about the reading of rights they named it for her case. But then my teacher said it had nothing to do with her. But somehow I still got it in the back of my head that it was about someone in her family. Like maybe she had a big, bad sister who got in trouble with the law.”

  Allie stopped talking. A voice in her head expressed relief about that. It said, Wow. What the hell was all that just now?

  The room had fallen silent again. So she figured Johnnie Macklin must have been wondering, too.

  “I guess that’s a weird thing to be talking about at a time like this.”

  Still nothing.

  “I mean . . . is it?”

  He looked up into her face. And there it was again. Just like the last lawman to look into her eyes.

  This is very bad, what’s happening to you.

  Not that she didn’t know it. But her brain was taking time to catch up. Meanwhile other people’s brains had already arrived.

  He spoke, startling her for no apparent reason.

  “You’re asking me what I think?”

  “I guess.”

  “I think this sucks, what you’re going through right now. I think I wish there was more I could do to help you. But I can’t think what that might be. So I figure, you just handle this whatever way works for you. I’m not inclined to judge.”

  That was the moment Allie’s brain caught up to everybody else’s. And she cried. Mouth and eyes, both. She just let it go.

  Chapter Nine

  Controversial Suitcases

  The woman from CPS made Allie wish for Johnnie Macklin back, with his blue uniform and all. Allie had at least felt she and the cop shared some sort of familiar humanity. Allie figured this new person, whose name she had already forgotten—or blocked—had been sent because Allie was supposed to feel more comfortable with a woman.

  It wasn’t working.

  In her fifties, she was one of those women who wore nylon stockings under her polyester slacks. Knee-high or actual panty hose, Allie didn’t know. And didn’t care to know. But Allie could clearly see them at her ankles, because her slacks were too short. And Allie simply had no way to relate to any of her. Plus, she’d introduced herself to Allie as her social worker. There was really no way to wrap her head around that.

  “You should be gathering your things,” the woman said.

  She’d given Allie a sheet of paper with a list of things to pack. A handout of sorts, but for life instead of classwork. It sat on the bed beside Allie’s hip, as untouched as humanly possible.

  Meanwhile, the social worker was filling out a form, or just making notes. She didn’t have a clipboard, only a file folder that kept bending as she pressed her pen down. Allie couldn’t help focusing on the small ironies and weirdnesses of her situation. Rather than looking the big picture right in the eye.

  Allie didn’t make any moves toward packing her things. She wasn’t trying to be difficult. Her body just seemed fresh out of locomotive abilities. She remembered a similar feeling when she’d had the flu the previous year, and then after a week or so she’d tried to get up and go back to school—with astonishingly poor results. Her body felt like a giant bag of lack. Lack of motivation. Lack of strength. Lack of rigidity. Lack of caring.

  Nothing seemed to be in working order.

  “How many of your grandparents, if any, are living?”

  “Two.”

  “Good. That’s good. We’ll contact them and see if they’re willing to take temporary custody.”

  “I don’t think so,” Allie said.

  “It pays to ask.”

  “They both live in nursing homes.”

  “Oh.”

  The woman had been using an artificially upbeat voice. But on the word “Oh” its facade cracked. Because, really, there was nothing to be upbeat about, not anywhere on the premises, and they both knew it.

  “What about aunts and uncles?”

  “No. Neither. My mom was an only child. My dad had one brother but he was much older, and he . . . passed away.”

  Social Worker Lady made notes on her wobbly file in silence.

  “Friends whose parents might let you stay in the very short range?”

  Allie sighed and closed her eyes. She missed Angie. Angie might have gotten her out of this.

  “I really only have three friends. Most people don’t like me much. My best friend Angie just moved to Michigan with her family. And I mean just. They’re probably still driving. They haven’t even moved into a new house yet. And then my other friends . . . well, maybe I was wrong. Maybe there are only two. One of the girls I was thinking of, Paula . . . yeah, she’s my friend all right. But she’s scared to death of her dad and so am I. She could never ask him a thing like that. And I wouldn’t go near her house on a dare. And the other one . . . I don’t know. I don’t think she really likes me. Sometimes even the people I think of as my friends . . . I wonder if they really like me.”

  Then Allie closed her mouth, humiliated at most of what had just spilled from it.

  “Okay,” Polyester Lady said. “Not hearing much there.”

  “So what happens to me?”

  “I’ll figure that out. It’s what I get paid to do. I’ll need to find you a placement.”

  “What kind of ‘placement’? I don’t even really know what that word means. I mean . . . I know what it means in general. But I’m not sure what a placement would look like in a situation like this.”

  “We always strive for a foster home placement. That’s most like the family setting we know children are used to. I’m sorry to say right at the moment there’s not one available. Not even an emergency foster home. I just couldn’t get one.”

  A pang of fear constricted Allie’s chest, making it hard to draw a full breath. Of course she had been afraid before. Many times. Including every minute of that evening. But this feeling was distinctly new.

  “What do we do, then?”

  “Well, I have to find you one.”

  “Where will I be while I’m waiting?”

  “Sometimes, just in a real emergency, we might take a teen to juvenile detention. Short-term, of course.”

  In the silence that followed, Allie noticed her mouth hanging open, but couldn’t focus on how to fix it. There were too many other things standing in line waiting to be figured out.

  “That’s jail.”

  “In this case it would simply be—”

  “I didn’t do anything wrong!” Allie shouted, her voice an embarrassing screech.

  “I understand that, dear, but I’m just temporarily short on options. We have an opening in a group home, but it’s not exactly procedure to use them as an emergency placement. Or to drop a teen off there late at night.”

  “Please don’t take me to juvenile . . . jail. Please. Anything is better than that.”

  “I don’t know. It’s not proper procedure otherwise.” A long, dread-filled silence. “Really, though,” the woman said, “you need to gather your things.”

  Allie pulled a deep breath and stood. It seemed to work. Her body apparently remembered how to stand. She took a few steps toward her open bedroom doorway.

  “Where are you going?” the social worker asked.

  “To get suitcases.”

  “We’d like you to put your things in the bags I brought.”

  She didn’t say exactly who comprised “we.” Was she speaking for the entire county o
f Los Angeles? Nothing seemed out of the question.

  With a flip of her chin, she indicated two folded plastic garbage bags that had been sitting on the bedroom rug. Allie had noticed them, but could not imagine their relevance to her life. Not even her horrible new one.

  “But I have suitcases.”

  “This is standard procedure.”

  “But it doesn’t make any sense. Fine. Bring trash bags with you to a kid’s house. I get that. If the kid doesn’t have any suitcases he can use the bags. But I do. So why can’t I use them?”

  “Not all the girls you’re about to meet are as fortunate.”

  “So I’m supposed to pretend I’m too poor to have suitcases so nobody else will feel bad? My stuff is not garbage. I don’t want to carry my stuff in garbage bags.”

  Allie paused. She ran her comments on a quick instant replay and decided she didn’t like the sound of them. She wasn’t snotty or insensitive to others. At least, not as a rule. Not under normal circumstances. But since normal circumstances had never evaporated on her before, everything would be a surprise now, including her own character. Including the person she would prove herself to be.

  She set off in a different direction, with more of an effort to be clear.

  “Look. I’m having the worst night of my life. My parents were both arrested. I have no idea why. I have no idea when they’re coming back. You can’t even tell me when I’ll be able to talk to them on the phone. I’m on my way to live in a totally strange place with total strangers. And I don’t blame any of that on you. Everything bad that’s happened to me so far tonight . . . there’s nothing you could’ve done about any of it. But this last bit about the garbage bags is too much. It’s too awful. And this is the one part of the horribleness of this night that you can do something about. So give me a break here, all right? It’ll be the only break for me in this whole lousy . . .”

  Then she realized she didn’t have a word for what was happening to her. For what it all added up to. Besides, it hadn’t all added up yet. That was the scariest part.

  She looked up to see Polyester Lady staring right into her eyes with a look that suggested she cared, except to the extent that she was exhausted from caring. For her these disasters were anything but breaking news.