A Guide for Murdered Children

by Sarah Sparrow

  After the transaction, she used a warm washrag to clean him up, like the gals in places he used to frequent as a Cold Case cop in the Big Apple. He wondered where she learned the technique. Maybe it was just a universal hospitality thing, like stewardesses handing you the hot towel.

  How strange was the world of bodies! That a lonely, mountainous, thrown-away gal could make him feel better with her cut-rate fumblings, could heal him, albeit temporarily—how amazing that a crude, perfunctory act resulting in 5ccs of seminal expectoration could allow him instant access to his old friend Hope! How strange and comical, how sweet and grotesquely sad . . . but in the end, it was just life, or signs of. And where there was life, there was Hope. (Not necessarily Port Hope.) Even though Willow knew that wasn’t necessarily true—Where there are signs of life, there are signs of death, intoned Dark Cop—it seemed to be true. Like the proverbial glass, a person could look at a body and see it as half-alive or half-dead. He preferred to see himself as the former.

  Thirty dollars to be healed. Thirty dollars to feel connected to something larger than himself. For bookkeeping purposes, he put the Miranda invoice in the “necessities” file, like water, electricity and tithing.

  After the check he wrote to Pace, his account was left with about seven large. The 10K for Larkin’s surgery was in the necessities file too; Willow hadn’t helped the girl in her suicidal teens and he’d be damned if he didn’t help her now. But she needed more than that kind of help, she needed a father’s unconditional love, support, protection. A Band-Aid wouldn’t do—reparations and future deposits were in order. By the time he left the planet, he needed to leave behind a trust fund for his grandson, say, two hundred grand for his education, and something for Pace as well. He’d flushed his earnings as a detective, eating his way through whores and fancy restaurants, losing at horse tracks and gaming clubs. For a few years he went on a Rolex binge, trading up and up and up, and the thought of it turned his stomach. He must have stolen a quarter million from drug dealers but had nothing to show for it.

  Asshole.

  He put on his faves, Rachmaninoff and Mahler—CDs, because he still hadn’t gotten the Bluetooth/iTunes thing down—and stared into the mirror at his sad sack self. He wore the gift Pace ordered off the Internet, a nightshirt emblazoned with HERD PEOPLE HERD PEOPLE with a cartoony shepherd and flock of sheep bunched below the letters. (He had told her the “Hurt people hurt people” mantra on a phone call from rehab, and this was her retort.) The shirt was in a crazy XXXXL that came down to mid-shin. Willow moved closer to the mirror, peered into his eyes and saw the shadow of death already upon him. He thought of the line he’d read in a Graham Greene novel that he borrowed from Renata at the Meadows—“the anxieties which are beyond the reach of a tranquilizer”—and knew he was beyond tranquilizers, beyond alcohol now.

  He hoped he wasn’t beyond solace, and a measure of peace.

  * * *

  • • •

  Last Sunday, before returning home, he took his grandson to Marlette Park.

  Now that he was privy to the backstory, Larkin’s waddle seemed more pronounced and Willow treated him with an excess of devotion and tenderness. No reason to be maudlin about it—just a musculoskeletal problem that a surgeon can fix—but he couldn’t help getting mushy. His defenses had crumbled since he got sober. The world was, after all, a poignantly lacerating, sentimental place. It always had been. Booze just softened the edges, making the epic heartbreak of being human manageable. He wept throughout the day, never knowing what might set him off. He covered a post-orgasmic crying jag with a long, stagey cough while Miranda dutifully fetched the après-sex washrag.

  At the park, watching Larkin play, he thought of Pace and the adolescent hell she’d gone through, the hell he’d been absent for. He thought of her mother, Adelaide, and how he once loved her—loved her still. Watching his feisty grandson’s clumsy, twisted, joyful movements, he came to think of other small bodies long gone: Troy and Maya, whom Pace once babysat. Their disappearance really did a number on her. Him too. Because all his life, he’d perversely considered such an event befalling his own, not just Dark Cop’s fantasy but every parent’s. When that terrible day finally came—for the Rummers—the hard-core possibility of such a loss entered his body like a slow-growing, inoperable cancer.

  Pace had just turned sixteen when it happened. Willow was in his early forties, on a surprise visit to the Falls from New York, with a birthday puppy in tow. He had moved to Manhattan at thirty-seven, in flight from Adelaide, the woman he loved—the cheater who mauled his heart. (Of course he ignored the truth, for a while anyway: she’d never strayed until there was nothing left of the marriage, never strayed during his dalliances with waitresses, strippers and whores.) Willow hardened and polished the hurt and humiliation until he hyper-shined as a rookie in the NYPD. Pace came to stay at his place in Midtown whenever his impossible schedule allowed—which it never really did. He invited her twice a year, often canceling at the last minute. As her father’s fuck-yous became predictable, her heartbreak matured into rage, her rage into dangerous act-outs of rebellion. Adelaide blamed him for their daughter’s dance with death—and who was he to say she was wrong?

  When Addie got too crazy and begged him to intervene, he would fly back to Saggerty Falls for long, stressed-out weekends, the travesty of a helicopter parent—a tourniquet parent, crashing with friends and doing triage on his baby girl, if and when he could find her. At the end of his marriage, he fled the Falls to save himself, taking die-hard heed of his therapist’s enabling counsel. “How can you show up for your daughter until you show up for yourself?” During his oh-so-courageous reinvention and self-renewal, abandoned by her warrior-protector, Pace got badly burned in the not-so-friendly fire.

  Hurt people hurt people.

  The damage done was the great, consuming shame of his demolished life. When the Rummer kids vanished, it seemed to Willow they’d been sacrificed for his eyes only, a primordial, custom-made metaphor of the consequences of abandonment that caused him to lose his daughter. The detective was forever changed. Brother and sister became twins in a derogatory constellation of transposed grief, a frozen cell slice of his own tragic DNA—Pace became Maya, and Willow became Troy, the older one who had fatally failed to protect.

  Watching Larkin and another boy on the slide at the park, Willow wondered what his grandson would become. Genes often skipped generations, which meant the boy just might be heading for rehab and general despondency . . . “We’re saving a seat for him” was how folks put it in AA.

  He remembered the haunting desperation in Adelaide’s voice when she called him in New York at 3:00 A.M. to say she couldn’t do it anymore. They needed to hospitalize Pace, commit her, restrain her, do something or their daughter would surely die. She’d just had Abortion No. 3, overdosing in a seedy motel in its wake, and Adelaide told him that Pace was turning tricks with men she met online. She was no longer living up to the family name, as Grandma Wylde used to say about family members’ misadventures, but dying up to it.

  Yet she turned out okay. How did that happen? Dark Cop knew it was just a numbers game. If they made it through their teens without getting hit by a drunk or coming down with a TV-movie disease or getting taken out by bad H—or being shot at school or getting abducted, raped and murdered—actually, they had a pretty decent chance of hanging around awhile.

  Willow went over and pushed his grandson in the swing. He drifted back to his own boyhood, remembering the mothball smells and dark wood of his grandparents’ home. He pictured the faded red metal canopy of the deck overlooking the leafy backyard and recalled the visions he’d had as a child. Once, he had a nightmare that Nana had died. He saw her standing at the foot of his bed in a luminous blue wedding gown; when his mother rushed in to comfort him and Willow told her what he’d dreamed, she immediately picked up the phone to call his grandfather. The old man was startled and told her the ambu
lance had just arrived. Nana was dead in a few hours. After that, Willow stopped sharing his dreams and visions. He didn’t want to cause his mother, or anyone, pain like that again. But he loved Mom for taking his vision seriously, for honoring his gift and giving him that kind of respect. Willow wondered if she’d always known that something was wondrous and peculiar about him from an early age and if such knowledge forced her to listen. To make that midnight call to her father.

  When he got older, the dreams and visions stopped. They didn’t go away, not exactly, but he stifled them, believing them to be useless and borderline destructive. In his late forties, around the time Willow left homicide and began working Cold Case in New York, the visions returned. He stuffed them again. He grew tortured, wondering if their suppression was an act of selfishness and cowardice, of weakness. In the middle of these musings, a chill came over him. The chill was accompanied by a dreamlike whoosh, now familiar—

  —with a shock, Willow realized he’d been standing there lost in thought and that Larkin was gone from his swing. When his panicked eyes found the boy, he ran over to him dramatically enough that it seized the attention of the other parents and guardians. Sitting in the red caboose of the kiddie train, startled by his grandfather’s near-violent, beneath-the-armpit extraction from the car, Larkin burst into tears. Willow carried him to a park bench and sat the toddler on his lap as he tried to soothe. The boy’s tears and squirmings were quickly blotted out by the sight of the small train, soldered to its decorative track for safety. Willow stared at it, shivering with recognition—but recognition of what? Where had he seen it? He remembered now, though the feeling was in fragments. Still, he wasn’t certain if it was a throwback to one of his old-time visions, or something new.

  He was suddenly possessed by the irrational thought that no child deserves to be on a train, any train! But he couldn’t explain his sensations; nor could he trace the feelings behind why a little boy’s benign and playful presence in a miniature locomotive was a mournful and disastrous thing.

  LYDIA TAKES A MEETING

  1.

  When a cop killed someone—a fairly unusual occurrence here—department policy mandated a visit to the shrink. If a deputy was shot, he had to do therapy too. (America’s newest religion was the cult of Trauma.) Daniel Doheny already had his session.

  Lydia hadn’t given a second thought to the “death of the bachelor” (for a few weeks, whenever her substation colleagues saw her they broke into the Panic! at the Disco song the madman was crooning at Tim Hortons), at least not in the conventional sense. If anything, the incident stirred up questions she would never have brought up with the police shrink. No, they were issues more along the line of things she’d talk over with Annie, the woman who led the Meeting and called herself “the Porter.”

  Lydia wrote them down on a pad so she wouldn’t forget.

  Questions! There were so many that even the idea of them was absurd. She was definitely still Lydia—but how much of Lydia? And just how long would the “landlord” Lydia dominate, in brain and in body? She certainly felt like Deputy Molloy; all of those woman’s memories were intact and accountable. She even remembered that ill-fated hike . . . drifting in recollection, she knew she was wholly Lydia, more or less, in the moment. She liked the food and clothes and smells that Lydia liked, and the music too—classical (Copland and Kindertotenlieder), hip-hop (Nicki and Kanye and Big Sean) and Top 20 (Adele and Rihanna). Plus, there were certain men and women whom she worked with (except for Daniel) or passed along the street who made her feel what she called sexybody. But what of the other memories and feelings, those of her tenant-“roommate”? What about being able to recall a set of parents different from her own? What about holding the stuffed unicorn close to her so she could sleep? (Lydia had never been a fan of stuffed animals.) What about her craving for cotton candy—she was a vegan who was nearly phobic about sugar—or when she made plans to buy turtles and goldfishes. What about when she zoned out in front of the TV in front of Rugrats and Dora the Explorer?

  Lydia favored shows like Dr. Who and Black Mirror . . .

  Friends still called her cell and she had no trouble talking to them, no trouble at all—a bunch whom she hadn’t heard from came out of the woodwork right after the shooting—but once Lydia hung up she drifted again, feeling ten thousand miles away. Her mom and dad, proud and worried about the whole Tim Hortons thing, came in from Minnesota to stay with her and she was fine with them too; she loved them in the same way she loved the other parents, Maya’s parents, though Maya’s were so pale, so hard to summon. Lydia was aware that she seemed “different,” especially to her folks; she would have had to because she wasn’t their Lydia anymore, not completely. They never made any remarks about it (though sometimes seemed on the verge), but she also knew that whatever part of her that appeared anomalous or strangely new—being spacey or whatever—would be written off by them to the post-traumatic stress of the Tom Ford lookalike kill. After a Meeting, Annie told Lydia that she was actually fortunate to have had that incident because it was a good “cover” for odd and unfamiliar behaviors.

  At the time of her death, Lydia had two half-casual lovers, a man and a woman, sweet sexybody buddies from different counties, neither of whom knew about each other. But she ended all that because, well, Maya wasn’t exactly thrilled. (One of them even showed up when Daniel was there. Awkward.) They managed their hurt feelings by attributing Lydia’s cooling passions to her shooting that crazy man; the Porter had absolutely predicted how they’d rationalize her pulling away. Out of weakness, she let the man play with her body for a few weeks and it did feel good, but Maya was weirded out so Lydia chose to stop—she was overruled. That’s why it felt so nice to be with Daniel, because he understood. They started talking about secret things, not in detail but enough for Lydia to know that he felt the same way she did. He never talked about his lovers and she wondered if he was in the closet. Not that it would have mattered. She just felt lucky to have found him. It was like a miracle.

  There were so many things to ask Annie, though most of her questions and concerns would soon fall away, the way they always did in a landlord’s journey. They would migrate and become the concerns of another, someone already on their way to the station to greet the train.

  2.

  The first time Lydia went to the Meeting, she was almost late.

  How had she even gotten there?

  She dreamed she was back on the train. The Porter came to her cabin with the usual tray of cookies and lemonade and everything was so clear, unlike the fuzziness she was accustomed to when trying to conjure the same tableau during waking hours. There was a little boy there too but he was fuzzy, even in the dream. The Porter—Annie—told her they would be arriving soon and it was of great importance that she come to see her. She wrote the address down on the back of the coaster the lemonade was on and told the little girl she should commit it to memory. Maya said that she was terrible at remembering things, but Annie assured her that she wouldn’t forget.

  “When should I come?” asked Maya.

  “You’ll know,” said Annie, then smiled and left.

  Maya turned over the coaster.

  The Divine Child Parish

  276 Lafayette Circle, Detroit, MI 48206

  Be there or be square!

  She was supposed to have pizza with Daniel that night but told him she had to meet a friend. He raised an eyebrow, implying she was having a rendezvous with one of her old sexybodies, but was funny and permissive about it. At the last moment, Lydia said, “You didn’t have the dream?”

  “What dream?” he answered, and she felt foolish.

  She said she’d be back at ten.

  Detroit was an hour south of Richmond, where she lived (sharing her home more or less with Daniel now), and she did have trouble with the address Annie gave her—Lydia wasn’t so wonderful with directions, even with GPS. When she arrived at the church,
she couldn’t for the life of her make sense of where she was supposed to go. She’d forgotten that just before leaving her cabin, Annie added that the room she’d be looking for was in the basement. The block was so dark and there were tall, tall trees, what looked like a forestful. She was in tears and about to leave when a funny-looking man with a twitch came out, looked around and waved her over; she got the feeling he’d been sent after her. He introduced himself as Bumble and said he was “the sentry—I help Annie.” He was very odd, to say the least, but his smile disarmed her. Bumble beckoned her to follow and they took the stairway down. At the bottom, he pointed to a half-open door. She smiled at him nervously and he politely but firmly encouraged her to go in. When she gently pushed through, she saw that the Meeting was already in progress.

  Five people sat in chairs that formed a circle in the center of the smallish room. Annie presided, looking more beautiful to Maya than she did on the train. She wore turquoise jewelry, a silver pin in her collar and a long black dress like the ones Spanish royalty wore in the paintings Lydia saw when she visited the Museo Nacional del Prado during gap year. Annie stood and went to the door to hug her. Then she turned to the group and said, “Everyone—this is Maya.” They smiled and shouted, “Welcome!” Annie pointed to one of two vacant chairs and the newcomer went to sit. But before she did, she picked up a pamphlet resting there—Maya was written on it above a glittery unicorn that warmed her heart. Then she glanced at the empty seat beside her; the pamphlet on it was addressed to Troy.