A Guide for Murdered Children

by Sarah Sparrow

  Maybe everyone would have been better off if he had . . .

  The mentor stood, reaching out his hand. Willow shook it and thanked him again.

  “I’m going to give you a number to call,” said Rafael, scribbling something down. When he handed it to him, it made him think of Marlon, his old CI, doing the same. Willow’s head scrambled—it seemed a bizarre notion, but maybe Rafael wanted him to contact one of the influential investigators directly and begin a grovel-fest that might topple the dominoes of interdepartmental opinion that was set against him.

  “What is it?”

  “My dentist,” said Rafael. “She’s awesome. You oughta get that taken care of before you get an infection in your brain.”

  3.

  He came to New York on a Hail Mary pass but the Gods had other plans, decreeing him worthy of a root canal he couldn’t afford. Just another watery notch in the belt of shit around Willow Millard Wylde’s pasty, post-rehab paunch . . .

  He put it on the unused emergency Visa with the $6,500 limit.

  Willow seethed with anger while the doctor yanked and suctioned. You were a terrible Cold Case guy rang in his head like the voice-over flashback of an old B movie—a fair description of what his life had become, or maybe always was. Some folks just don’t have the aptitude! Which royally pissed him off because in his mind he knew he was the “black art” prince; hell, he was a fucking Marvel superhero. But looking back on his time in the Cold Case unit, he was ashamed. He winced as he saw himself futzing around the Spirit Room like some Barney Fife. He would never be able to share with Rafael—or anyone—how he made himself that way by suppressing his natural gifts.

  The Spirit Room . . . where DNA, rape kits, and cartons of flatlined cases were stored. When he first took the tour (a month before crossing over from homicide), the voices overwhelmed. It’d been so long since Willow had heard voices like that—the symphonic choir of the departed—and this time he felt them. When he finally joined Cold Case, they grew quieter over the months, a muffling result of the mixture of self-will and opiates. It made him physically sick to hear them. Still, he was drawn to the Spirit Room, where he torturously loitered, wandered and even sometimes napped. How had he been so arrogant to believe he could acclimate himself to the radioactive field of the forgotten, unburied dead? He could dial down the voices (a skill he’d honed since boyhood, after the death of his Nana), though in so doing Willow suffered the consequences. The expenditure of energy required for their suppression had the effect of turning him into a caricature of incompetence bordering on the cretinous. (Enter Barney Fife.) For the first time in his profession, he felt like a fool. His cohorts nicknamed him Special Needs and he laughed it off but it hurt. Whenever Rafael was on the brink of firing him, Willow allowed himself to briefly tap into his verboten gifts; the voices led to small and occasionally larger triumphs. But most of the time he came off like an ass, a dunderhead, a misfire.

  Like some kind of mutant mistake—

  With his Visa drained and a face numbed by Novocaine, Willow walked to Duane Reade to get the Vicodin script filled. He bought a can of Diet Dr Pepper and a box of straws. Stepping outside, he stood on the sidewalk sipping his soda and peering into space, captive to the black void of his mood. When he came to, he was staring at the bar across the street. Like a man under hypnosis, he walked toward it in a straight line through traffic.

  The darkness and quiet pleased him more than it seemed possible. The bartender was unfazed when he pulled a straw from the box to suck up his Tom Collins. The first taste was so good that he wouldn’t have cared if it were his last. The second was even better because he used it to wash down three Vikes.

  What now?

  His thoughts turned to confidential informants . . .

  Willow wondered just how “inneresting” Marlon’s shit might be. He fantasy-calculated the size of a score that would make his life, at least temporarily, copacetic—25K? Thirty? What would make it more than copacetic too . . . a hundred large? Hell yeah. If whatever Marlon was promoting was in the neighborhood of ten grand—or five—or three—would it even be worth the risk? Possibly. Hadn’t he already risked everything (or what was left of it) with the relapse? Hey, 2K and change would at least pay for the root canal . . . What he really needed was a lotto-size win, something over a mill. Five mill had a nice ring to it. He’d buy Pace a house on a few acres and give her a mill for herself. Maybe buy Geoff a Harley, just to be sportsmanlike, and put two million in trust for Larkin. Then maybe he would move to Maui. Smoke ganja and star in Harrelson home movies for the rest of his days.

  He felt a warm buzz from the booze, though it’d be another twenty minutes or so before he came on to the pills. Liquor would potentiate their effect and he was looking forward to that—old times, he thought, before amending it to not so old times. As he waited, Willow reminisced about his legendary caper from yesteryear. When he first joined the NYPD, he worked narcotics and within a few years had a sweetheart deal with Marlon, his CI—Willow robbed dope houses Marlon tipped him to. His method was to smash in, cuff the dealers and then take the money while calling in the bust. They never got too greedy because the whole enterprise was risky, to say the least. There were a lot of moving parts. And they couldn’t do a “lick” too often because Willow always needed a plausible reason why he’d gone in without backup.

  So Marlon told him about a trap house that always had at least $25,000 on hand, guaranteed. The plan was for Willow to pocket fifteen and give his CI five (leaving five for show), which he did. But the stash was closer to 200K and Willow took 125. When the dealers made bail, they somehow found out about Marlon and tried to assassinate him. Unfortunately, the attempt occurred at the very moment the dirty detective was giving his partner his cut outside Katz’s Deli on East Houston. Willow saved the CI’s life by blowing two of the felons away but was shot in the leg in the process. The tabloids made him a hero, which made it easier for him to transfer to homicide a few months after leaving the hospital. Getting shot was the best thing that could have happened, because his hero status had the effect of tamping down, temporarily anyway, the rumors of illicit gain that had been spreading in the department to explain the source of income behind Detective Wylde’s whoring, gambling and Rolex sprees—

  —Oh. Oh . . .

  Now he was stoned and fuck if it didn’t feel good. Nirvana time. And with that sumptuous, familiar feeling, his plan of action became clear. As Willow worked himself up to making the call to Marlon, he killed time by reflecting on the Meadows. He wondered where Renata and the black fireman and the Rimbaud boy were—wondered if they were sitting somewhere loaded, like him. In the same way he had sleepwalked to the bar, he slid off his stool and strolled to the pay phone outside the restroom.

  He put his hand in his pocket, feeling the paper with the CI’s “digits.” Then his copness kicked in. He went back to his perch, laid down a twenty and told the barkeep, “I shall return.”

  He sun-blink sauntered to Duane Reade and bought a disposable phone—a burner that couldn’t be traced. Returning to the sepulchral quiet of the bar, he stood at the pay phone and dialed. A voice answered:

  “This is Detective O’Connor, who’s calling?”

  Startled, Willow hung there a beat before frantically searching for whatever button would end the call.

  What the fuck?

  Had he been set up?

  No way—no way would Marlon would pull a stunt like that . . . and for what reason?

  The phone had been answered with that flat, clue-seeking aggressiveness of a cop at a crime scene.

  He left the bar in a panic-sweat and stomped the burner into pieces. Threw them in multiple trash bins, just like the asshole perps in his favorite cable shows. A battered Lincoln Town Car pulled up. The gypsy driver asked where he was going.

  “Penn Station,” said Willow, his heart nearly hammering him into a blackout as he settled
into the backseat.

  4.

  He had come by train and was glad to be leaving that way. Airplanes and airports made him nervous. Trains brought out the Dr. Richard Kimble. They were romantic and catered to his fugitive sensibilities. He swallowed five more painkillers at Tracks, the bar in the station.

  It was time to put a smiley face on the wreckage. He had a few hours before embarking and was way, way high. He had a brainstorm and vacated his stool; there was a place he urgently needed to visit. He approached an Amtrak employee—in retrospect, the man looked closer to some kind of scruffy, patchwork character in a dream—to ask directions.

  Willow threaded his way through a hundred travelers, then descended . . .

  As he traversed the gently sloping ramps and jittery-solid iron staircases, it grew cooler and less populated. He made peace with the thought of never again surfacing to see the light. He decided that it would please him immensely to become a Phantom of the Underground. He thought of a documentary he once saw about the “mole people” who lived in forgotten tunnels that stretched from Penn Station to Harlem. In his stonedness, Willow knew that entering that dream would be infinitely preferable to the nightmare he was living.

  He couldn’t determine how many levels down he’d gone. He mused about throwing himself in front of a train. At the Meadows, he became friends with a Londoner who did just that—a posh, witty man whose injuries forced him to scuttle through the rehab halls like a drunken insect. The fellow’s brain was damaged as well but his droll, mordant humor was thoroughly intact. I’d never be that lucky, thought Willow. I’d never live—but if I did, it would be in a hell of physical pain and permanent confusion.

  He was about to plunk himself down on the cold concrete floor and wait for the mole people to claim him when he saw the signage:

  AMTRAK EMPLOYMENT OFFICE

  He roused himself and stumbled toward his destination, feeling nearly whimsical. It was astonishing how quickly one’s mood could change—was nothing real? The reedy, serious-looking Ethiopian with high-boned, acne-scarred cheeks skeptically took him in.

  Willow pulled himself together and said, “I’m interested in working on the train.”

  “I’ll give you a form to fill out.”

  “Is there a union?”

  “Yeah, there’s a union.”

  “I want to be a porter.”

  “We don’t call them that.”

  “What are they now, concierges?”

  “Service attendants.”

  “How long is the training?”

  The man half-smiled, half-scowled. “I don’t have time for this shit.”

  “Say what?” said Willow.

  “Tell you what. If you want to take a urine test—and that test declares you are drug and alcohol free—I’ll get you a uniform and you can start right motherfucking now.”

  “Done!” said Willow, triumphantly.

  The smile-scowl instantly became a mask of brusque indifference. “Listen, mister, sober up and come back Monday when the lady in charge is here. ’Cause I cain’t do shit for you.”

  Willow saluted him. “Thank you, broheem.”

  * * *

  • • •

  He had no memory of how he found his way back to Tracks; it was as if he’d simply materialized there (same stool as before). With some curiosity, Willow noticed he was watching NY1 on the bar’s big-screen. Like a person regaining consciousness, the images slowly coalesced. A street reporter was talking gibberish until the words started making sense . . .

  A shooting in Chelsea—drug deal gone wrong.

  Then, an old mug shot of the dead man filled the screen:

  It was—

  Marlon?

  Holy Jesus, thank God for the burner!

  The death of the CI was an omen of unimaginable proportions. His trip to New York had been nothing less than a snapshot of the disasters that awaited . . . even the root canal loomed large. Again, the detective thought about jumping in front of a train—maybe, like his British friend, he’d survive, returning to scuttle among the tunnels as the Mayor of the mole people.

  He staggered aboard.

  He didn’t even bother telling himself the Big Lie, the Relapser’s Affirmation that falling off the wagon was an essential part of any drunk’s sobriety story . . . what didn’t kill you made you stronger . . . all is God’s will. The lie that when he got home, he would surrender anew to powerlessness, one day at a time.

  He did think about telling Renata he’d picked up again. Though maybe he’d tough it out, keep his own counsel. More will be revealed . . .

  Run silent, run deep—

  If he did throw himself under the train, Pace would get a check for $250,000—he took out a policy in his late forties, when he became certain his hijinks would get him killed. Bullet to the leg notwithstanding, the odds of being killed on the job weren’t great; suicide was by far the biggest cop casualty. Self-removal nullified the contract only in the first few years, so he was good to go.

  He was golden . . .

  The train rumbled, pneumatically hissed and squeak-squealed. He fell into a deep, sweaty sleep, dreaming that he was on the train—not in the passenger car where he was now but a plush private cabin. A handsome, stately older woman came in to see him, carrying a tray with refreshments and a linen napkin. She whispered in his ear but he couldn’t understand what she was saying. At least she’d been kind enough to bring him a drink.

  When he awakened, they were arriving in Pittsburgh. He frantically felt in his pocket for the piece of paper with Marlon’s cell phone number before remembering that he’d torn it up and thrown it away in the street after dismantling the burner. That was when Willow realized it was a different slip of paper he was searching for—the one with the address the woman on the train had given him. But there was no paper. Fragments of her whispers came back to him now.

  She told him to memorize it.

  And indeed an address stuck in his head, as if illuminated.

  MAYA AND TROY

  1.

  It was notable that while Lydia intuited that the empty chair beside her was being saved for Daniel (the name “Troy” on the Guide’s cover still seemed to carry no particular weight), she hadn’t given a single thought to his imminent arrival, not even by her third Meeting. Her indifference had more to do with the fact that everything was still so amorphous—that Lydia’s waking moments lived outside a kind of parentheses provided by the blurry, whooshing train that had brought her tenant, Maya, back to the world, this world, the earthly world of that little girl’s long-ago home. Lydia’s daily life, her practical, deputy life, seemed to be going just fine. Not too many glitches other than a general spaciness that friends and colleagues wrote off to the effects of PTSD related to the Tim Hortons shooting.

  She looked forward to Annie’s church basement gatherings and even began to consider her fellow participants as friends. Not in the sense of grabbing a coffee and learning more about their lives—which the Porter actually discouraged, cautioning that it “pulled focus”—but thinking of them as she would family members. Conversation among the group before Meetings was typically confined to where they grew up and where they went to school. (Some bashfully said, “I stopped halfway through second grade,” meaning that was when their lives had ended.) Everyone seemed to know they were here for a single purpose, even if their shared goals were in various stages of fogginess or razor-clarity.

  The common denominator, the heart glue holding the room together, was Annie. She gave out hugs when they came in and all lined up for hugs at Meeting’s end.

  The ninety-minute Meetings were divided in two. In the first half, the shares tended toward a discharge of frustrations, worries and general fear, a “clearing of the table,” as Annie put it, in metaphorical preparation for the meal about to be served. Landlords and child-tenants both experienced “trans
ition anxiety” (Annie’s phrase, again), rooted in the confusion of the old and new lives that were suddenly conjoined within. Considering the circumstances, it was amazing they hadn’t gone stark raving mad. But the Porter said such a thing never happened, “even if you do sometimes feel like you’re losing your marbles.” Everyone tittered at that old-timey phrase. She assured them that the longer they were here and the closer they came to fulfilling their purpose—what she called the moment of balance—the more focused they’d become, the more grounded, integrated and less afraid. Some, of course, were more integrated than others because they had been here longer. Like Dabba Doo, an older, bookish man who favored three-piece tweed ensembles but eschewed shoes and socks. He’d been coming to Meetings for seven months now, though at some point Lydia remembered Annie saying that six months was the “term limit.”

  The second half was a Q&A devoted to “practical living.” There were a lot of awkward shares around the barfy issue of what Annie called “romantic stuff,” such as the sexual attention of current boyfriends, girlfriends and spouses. When the children of the train first arrived and became tenants, there was a requisite doldrum period of dormancy and indifference. “Landlord sex” confused them, but was no big deal; they were on autopilot, along for the ride. But as their time in the world grew more limited and they moved closer to the moment of balance, the children became dominant. Not only did their landlords lose interest in the sexual act but they found it physically repugnant. When partners and lovers were rebuffed, those individuals grew insecure and tended to become more vocal about their needs. Annie walked the group through various defensive strategies. “Depression and moodiness, backed up by visits to a shrink” was always a good tactic, she said. A protracted, nonspecific illness like mono or Lyme disease was another—anything that provided a plausible excuse for disengagement and overall lack of drive. “Be gentle. If you’re gentle about it and tell them to be patient with you, they usually understand. It will buy you time. Some will get the message, some won’t. Most will. Anyway, by the time you’re focused on your mission, none of that will matter.” In some cases, she advised a breakup as the only solution. “You’ll know what to do, in time,” she said, with that Mona Lisa smile. For thornier issues, she made herself available after Meetings for one-on-ones.