Her partner is already on his feet and tases the assailant, who plunges a Buck Knife into his chest. GQ reels, pulling the dart from his hairless sculpted torso, and turns back to Lydia. He cranes his neck to the sky and gives the dark Gods an offering of a piercing banshee cry. He charges her and Deputy Molloy shoots, three times. Squat-frozen in combat stance, she holds her aim and, when it’s unquestionable that GQ is dead, rushes to Daniel as he struggles to yank out the knife.
Three squad cars arrive.
Everything’s happened in under thirty seconds.
Lydia was directly behind GQ, which was why Daniel had tased and not shot, fearing she’d be struck if he missed. Daniel is bruised and minorly punctured, his vest and ego taking the brunt of the blow.
2.
They lay together that night at Lydia’s place in Richmond, half in shock, half exultant. (One of the quirky things they discovered about each other since beginning their “sleepovers” was that recently—independently—both had developed a thing for wearing kids’ pajamas.) “I don’t think you understand,” said Lydia. “If something happened to you, I know I would die.” Her words surprised them and moved her to tears. He put an arm around her, wincing from the knife wound. (Some stitches there.) “Don’t worry. I’ll always protect you. As long as you’re there to protect me . . . after I fail to protect you.” They laughed at the sardonic remark.
She didn’t know why her feelings toward Daniel were so strong. Am I in love with him? They’d been working together a few months and she’d never felt any sort of attraction. But something changed after she fell on the Orchard Trail—she’d become almost obsessed. Then one day, not long before the shootout at Tim Hortons, he confessed that something had changed in him too. Gossip among the deputies had it that they’d “hooked up,” though they hadn’t, not really, but their denials only made things worse. They tried being with each other in that way. They fucked a few times but neither one seemed to be all that interested. Eventually the lovemaking became rote, an awkward going through the motions before it actually became embarrassing. At first, each was hurt. Am I not sexy to him/her? Does he/she just want to be friends? They finally had a talk about it. “What’s the matter with us!” they said, laughing. It was nice that it never got heavy. They decided that whatever they shared was pure and special, lovely and different, something they’d never experienced with anyone else before. A special bond that didn’t require explaining and just “was.”
The GQ killing was big news. Even Detective Willow Wylde (ret.) read the Internet item aloud during Sunday-morning roundup in his duties that week as elected “mayor” and all-around director of entertainment of the Meadows. Nothing like a singing, Tom Ford lookalike psycho to capture the cynical hearts and minds of rehabbers. The Macomb deputies vivisected the publicly released bodycam footage, celebrating Lydia and razzing Daniel for trying to tase a male model but getting stabbed instead. A lot of emasculating jokes when the two of them were present, like asking Lydia about Daniel, “How’s the missus?” Sheriff Owen Caplan was so pleased that he threw a press conference from his administrative office in Mount Clemens, the county seat, with Deputies Molloy and Doheny front and center. It was the sort of feel-good justifiable homicide that did wonders for the department’s public image and morale.
Daniel left the bedroom to take a call. Lydia knew it was Rachelle, his wife, from whom he was separated. She heard him talk in low tones from the living room, assuring his ex that he was all right, the knife had barely penetrated the skin. She went to the door and listened to him lie to Rachelle that he was back at home, in the little place he’d moved to in Smiths Creek after their marriage fell apart. Lydia didn’t intrude on that space because she loved him, she wasn’t in love (am I?), but rather it was his very special friendship she didn’t want to lose. If that were to happen, if she nosily fudged boundaries and lost him because of that, she knew that what she said earlier would come true—it’d be the death of her. Each day they grew closer and neither could explain the reason or depths of that.
It was like a union of blood.
During his private conversation, the vision came to Lydia again. The first time it showed itself was when she rose from the gully grave and walk-straddled the tracks of the Orchard Trail. But it wasn’t vivid then, not yet, it wasn’t otherworldly and panoramic until that night at home after the fall when she sank into bottomless sleep. Now she was starting to have it again, to feel it, symphonically, everywhere, in waking hours—with the smallest effort, she could summon it. A profound warmth accompanied the vision; the only way she could describe it was that it felt like family.
She wondered if it might be religious in nature. As a girl, she prayed to God to make her a saint.
The imagery was of a train filled with people, but the features of their faces were blurry and impossible to discern. The first time the locomotive roared past—a silent roar—it moved too fast for her to see the figures behind the windows. It blew by like an express, as if belonging to someone else’s sleep, someone else’s dream. Then it slowed down, the way trains do when entering cities. Tonight, lightly focused on Daniel talking in the other room, Lydia imagined, felt it slowing to a stop, as one notices a moth alighting on a book.
Daniel wrapped up the call. It was semi-awkward and besides, he wanted to get back to Lydia. His wife asked if he was sure he didn’t want to stay in St. Clair tonight, at the house they used to share, “in case you need company. I’m worried about you.” The offer was more about sweetness than it was a come-on, but Daniel said, No, I think I kind of need to be alone. Rachelle acted like she wasn’t hurt—she wasn’t, really, because by now both had a lot of experience pretending not to be hurt, enough so that they weren’t sure if the hurting was even possible anymore. One thing would injure her, though: if she knew the emotional gravitas of his involvement with Deputy Lydia Jane Molloy.
He was glad to be off the phone. On his way back to the bedroom, he passed two big shopping bags Lydia had picked up from the Dollar Store, filled with tiny unicorns.
There must have been thirty of them.
AFTER THE DEATH OF DANIEL
Deputy Daniel Doheny wondered why he hadn’t spoken to his partner about it. He felt as close to Lydia as she did to him, yet it was a barrier he couldn’t seem to cross.
He and Rachelle had been through hell. In Afghanistan, he killed three men and a child, a little boy, and nothing—certainly not the circumstances, which cleared him of wrongdoing—could exculpate him. After coming home, he had violent night terrors, occasionally injuring himself when his demons launched him from bed during sleep. He stopped sharing a bed with his wife, fearing he would hurt her. He bought pot and pills off the street, Xanax mostly, never seeking professional help because he still had the dream of becoming a cop. Severe PTSD would have been too much of a strike against him. When they lost their baby boy to crib death, Daniel was convinced it was the result of paying off the karmic debt incurred by the Afghan boy. They tried again to get pregnant but it didn’t happen. When he learned that Rachelle was having an affair with the fertility specialist, he walked. She got depressed and agoraphobic and wouldn’t leave the house for a year. Daniel didn’t go through with the divorce because he thought that without the anchor of marriage, flimsy as it was, she would kill herself. He went to work as a corrections officer, one of 250 at the Macomb County Jail.
He wanted to be a cop, needed to be; it became his only salvation. He would do his time at the Macomb County Jail and become a street deputy, then maybe a sergeant or lieutenant or even captain. Who knew? A year into the job, just before he was scheduled to take his Academy physical, he got into a scuffle with a tattoo-faced convict who “gassed” him with feces. That night he had shooting pains in his arm that continued into the weekend, unrelieved by heroic amounts of Aleve, Xanax and some cortisone of Rachelle’s that was way past its expiration date. He thought that he’d hurt himself in the fight and ignored it. When he finally went
to the ER—something told him to drive the ninety miles to Lansing, “incognito,” to escape the prying eyes of someone in health care who might have dealings with the jail—they said it was a serious heart attack and he couldn’t believe it.
His cop career was over.
The trite fantasies about going on a suicidal killing rampage embarrassed him. When he found out that the man doing cadet physicals was none other than Dr. Orvill Wirtz, he couldn’t believe his luck. Wirtz was the specialist whom Rachelle had sowed her mild oats with. The doc was married and had a lot to lose, including his license. He was weak, and disgusted Daniel; he couldn’t even believe the asshole had a half a dick to fuck his wife with. He’d been cuckolded by a milquetoast. He blackmailed him into supplying a healthy EKG and voilà, it was official: Daniel now had the heart of a teenager. A few months later, he mustered out of the jail in Mount Clemens and joined the day shift at the substation in Saggerty Falls. (Sheriff Caplan personally approved the application; he had a soft spot for vets.) That was where he met Deputy Lydia Molloy. Like him, she began her career as a corrections deputy but had left six months before he started work at the prison.
The last time he slept with his ex was about a month ago, before he and Lydia began “seeing” each other. He’d had one of his recurring nightmares and out of desperation called Rachelle from his bachelor pad in Smiths Creek. In the dream, they were at Macy’s shopping for baby things. There was gunfire in the streets and parts of the store were demolished, like some cavernous World War II cathedral. The dapper salesman—he looked a little like the wacko GQ model from Tim Hortons—showed them cribs while politely speaking through a gurgling hole in his throat. When Daniel awakened, he picked up the phone but could barely talk. Rachelle said to come right over.
That was the night Daniel died, two hours and twenty minutes after they made love. He clasped his chest and fell off the bed to the floor, but Rachelle, out cold from the tranquilizers and the wine, was snoring and oblivious. Approximately a minute before brain and heart would die, a kind of gale blew through his body and as consciousness returned he found himself dreaming not of Macy’s but of the Afghan village that unraveled him. He was shooting and shooting, yet this time his pursuers wouldn’t lie down. The villagers of the damned stood staring and impervious, without fear. Then came a screech of metal—nothing like incoming artillery or anything he’d ever heard in combat—growing louder until it was deafening. When he stepped outside, the blown-out landscape crowded with bodies that kept staring yet would not fall, there it was:
A train, like a giant version of the Lionel set he loved so much as a boy. It waited for him and he boarded.
In the morning, he was confused. He realized he had wet the bed. He could have turned the soaked mattress over while Rachelle was in the bathroom but flipped it around instead so that the urine was on her side. When she groggily came back he touched the sheet and said, “Hey, babe, I think you might have made a little water here.” She inspected and couldn’t believe it, blaming it on the Ambien. “Oh my God,” she said. “That hasn’t happened since I was in college.”
When he left, Daniel was unsteady on his feet though weirdly invigorated. The world looked strange and new. His left arm and chest ached, as if badly bruised. That day in the locker room of the substation, he did a hundred push-ups.
A month had passed and he wondered why he hadn’t told Lydia about the train. It was with him now and seemed always to have been. In the week since he had “boarded” he noticed that his night terrors ceased. He stopped taking pills and smoking weed because the train calmed him, like a form of mindful meditation. Meditation in blue, he called it. Often, he retreated to one of the luxuriously wood-paneled cabins and sat waiting. (For what, he wasn’t sure.) A porter eventually appeared, an elegant woman in her sixties who brought milk and freshly baked chocolate cookies that tasted like the ones his mother used to make. That went on for a week or so—a week of lucid dreaming and cookies—then one morning the porter brought a little girl into the cabin. She sat beside him and smiled at his milk mustache. He smiled back. Night after night he waited expectantly for the porter to usher her in and when she appeared, the girl sat and smiled before gazing with a kind of contented promise at the dark, rushing void outside the cold window. He stole glances. She was so familiar to him. He knew he loved her and that he would until the end of time. Her hair was fiery red and always there was a vaporous halo of blue. She wore her blueness so lightly, so elegantly—sometimes like a shawl, sometimes a chiffon collar, sometimes a dancing rosary of periwinkles.
He caught his own reflection in the window but did not see himself. He saw not an adult but a child, a boy of nearly ten years old, but he didn’t have the features of the boy that Daniel remembered he once was.
It wasn’t him . . .
The girl put her hand on his. Daniel’s revived heart soared and ached and broke and it wasn’t until the night the train arrived at the station that he knew it was Lydia.
THE PORTER
Annie had the same ritual before every Meeting.
She organized the Guides by first names. She wrote the names on the covers in cursive and sorted them into neat stacks before putting them in the old leather satchel that once belonged to her mentor. The Guides were like living, sacred things. She thought of them as her babies. If there was a birthday that night—there were usually one or two a week—she put candles and a disposable lighter that she bought at 7-Eleven in the satchel as well. Then she lit a stick of Om Nagchampa incense, also from 7-Eleven (the franchise was owned by an Indian family), and sat cross-legged, breathing deeply. She’d done this for sixteen years.
She lived in an SRO on Detroit’s Skid Row, beloved and protected by its denizens, many of whom called her Mother. She dispensed money when she could, bandaged and cleaned wounds after brawls and drunken falls, assuaged the despair of what had been irretrievably lost. They brought Annie small, heartfelt gifts and wrote poems to her singing her praises. She shaved her head like a monk; two decades ago, the hair had vanished during chemo but she stayed with the look. The cancer hadn’t recurred but she knew it would one day.
She knew things.
Sixteen years ago, when she presided over her first Meeting, there was only one group a week. The Guide wasn’t even printed—it was passed down by oral tradition. Back then, rules and regulations were spoken out loud to guests, who were asked to memorize what they heard. It was done that way because Annie’s mentor and supervisors were concerned there might be “problems” should the Guides accidentally fall into the hands of those not meant to see them. But she cleverly found a way around that because she thought it was important that her guests had something on paper to refer to, a resource they could turn to in moments of anxiety. She told her mentor that to outside eyes, the Guides’ cryptic content could easily be explained as “jottings” or samples of creative writing. Works-in-progress. Snippets of speculative fiction.
But now she had no overseers, no mentor or supervisors. They’d all vanished as subtly as they had long ago appeared.
She always felt when new children were coming. The sound of the train would grow louder but less whoosh-y. And then it just happened: she found herself on board, walking down long, dark corridors carrying trays of hot tea (the very same flavor she brewed in her tiny rented room) or lemonade, milk and cookies and brownies, all sorts of sugary whatnots. That was how Annie greeted each new arrival, and the ritual always touched her heart. Their blueness appeared to her in the form of jewelry: necklaces, earrings and rings, sometimes tiaras and crowns of cerulean. She never wanted to know what had happened to them—the specific horrors that brought them to this long ride through nothingness—no, that was anathema. Such information wasn’t hers to possess. She was merely happy to serve drinks and cookies and solace, and direct them where to go after the train pulled into the station.
She used to be a schoolteacher, but that was so many years ago. They fir
ed her when she began hearing voices. She wound up in Ann Arbor at a psychiatric hospital called Swarthmore. She had already twice tried to kill herself when a scholarly-looking fellow began to visit. He told the authorities that he ran a halfway house for schizophrenic women in Detroit. His name was Jasper. He was a presentable, reputable man with a nattily manicured white goatee. Over the months, making the forty-five-minute drive from Detroit three times a week, he won Annie’s trust. He went to court and eventually secured her release to his care. He drew her back to this world by tenderly and methodically telling her about the other, the one the trains came from. He told Annie that she was a lot like him, they shared much in common—and that people like them were rare and highly sought after in his line of work. She asked, “What line of work is that?” He said that he was a “Porter” (when he wrote the word, it was always capitalized), and in time she came to know what he meant.
He taught her everything. She loved him like a father. Not long after she joined him, Jasper got sick and she cared for him until he passed. When he died he had no possessions, excepting his leather satchel and a beautiful antique cabinet of dark wood that was filigreed in mother-of-pearl, a parting gift from the Porter—a woman—who had mentored him.
He gave both to Annie and it felt like he had given her his heart.
* * *
• • •
She usually took the bus a good two hours before the Meeting, to be safe. Jasper taught her that being late was a sin. Besides, she needed to pick up Bumble. He didn’t have a driver’s license and liked to ride with her.
She wasn’t training him to be a Porter because that just wasn’t how it went. Being a Porter was a matter of destiny, not schooling. Yet all Porters needed what Jasper called “sentries,” to assist during Meetings. He taught her that the best sentries were the “backward” ones, those who were blunted or socially inept, and indeed, Bumble was a brilliant young man afflicted with Asperger’s. Though Jasper did become Annie’s helper for a time when he got too sick to be a Porter. She suspected he had an ulterior motive, wishing to lend his support through that first critical month when she essentially ran the Meeting by herself. He also told Annie that sometimes sentries were Porters who’d gone mad, having crumbled under the pressure of their duties, but that was a rarity.
A Guide for Murdered Children Page 3
