A Guide for Murdered Children

by Sarah Sparrow

  “You had your moments. We all do. But I always thought you were a great cop. Had the potential, anyway.”

  “Thank you for that.” He closed his eyes in penitence. “What I feel the worst about is giving you a shitty rap because I couldn’t admit to myself how badly I’d fucked up. Repeatedly. It wasn’t you, friend. And it’s just . . . it’s taken me a long, long time to admit that. Not just to myself, but to someone else.”

  It was ironic but in all the years in and out of 12-Step, this was Willow’s first real amends. What always stopped him was the fear that the targets of his abuse would either laugh in his face or shower him with justifiable invective for his transgressions. But Owen simply listened, respectfully taking it in, his attention seemingly genuine. Willow felt lighter, even dignified, in spite of himself.

  “I guess I’m kind of a hardheaded S.O.B.”

  “You can be,” said Owen, not without affection.

  “And I know an apology can’t make up for all the crap I pulled, not even close. But I’m hoping . . . well, it was just important for me to say it to your face. Having said that, I really do want you to know that I came for you and for Adelaide, not for myself. I’m not proud of my behavior but I guess I’m not ashamed anymore, either—at least I don’t want to be. I know that might sound like a self-serving contradiction but it’s true.”

  “Dubya, if there’s one thing I’ve learned in getting older it’s that it becomes harder to hold on to stuff. It either gets easier or it gets harder, and believe me—I’ll take the letting go over the holding on, all day long. I once heard someone say, ‘Do you want to be right or do you want to be happy?’ You know what? I’ll take happy. People like to say life’s too short and the trouble is by the time we get it, we’re just about done. I’ve been on the life’s-too-short program awhile now.”

  “I’m trying to get there,” said Willow. “I guess it’s like the scene in that movie, ‘I’ll have what you’re having.’ I’ll have what you’re having, Owen—without the orgasm. Oh, what the hell, I’ll take the orgasm.”

  They laughed.

  “Well, thank you,” said Owen. “For everything you said. I appreciate it. It couldn’t have been easy to get that off your chest.” Willow made a show of wiping cartoon sweat from his brow. “Helps explain the urgency of your arrival.”

  “I couldn’t hold on to my shit anymore.” Willow felt relief all the way around; he was buying his own malarkey. “I kept telling myself I’d give you a call but I woke up in the middle of the night and said, Nuh uh, a phone call ain’t gonna do it. Too easy.”

  “I’m glad. And glad you’re sober, Dubya. I guess there’s always enough blame to go around. Now I have something I’d like to say, in the spirit of clearing the air. The truth is, Adelaide and I never got together until both of you were one hundred percent certain that things were . . . irreparable.”

  “I know that. I mean, actually, maybe I didn’t! Thanks for telling me—but I’m okay with it now. With all of it. And Jesus, Addie deserved . . . you both deserve having someone in your life.”

  He meant it. Willow felt great warmth toward his former partner. In the middle of the strange madness of the situation, he was blessed. “Sorry for barging in—I know y’all just moved and all. Guess that was selfish but what else is new. Seems to be my strong suit! I’m trying not to make it all about me, Owen, I swear I am! Guess I can’t always pull that off.”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  Willow blotted a for-real tear from his eye, half-wondering when he’d be shown the door, having said his peace and all. His host’s impulse was to move on—but in a most unexpected way.

  “Want to know what’s weird?” said Owen. “The weird thing is that I was planning to get in touch with you.” Willow flinched. “I spoke with Rafael Leguerre, your old boss at NYPD.”

  “Uh oh.”

  “He had good things to say about you, friend.”

  “Oh really?” said Willow, trying not to sound sarcastic.

  “Yes, he did. See, our funding just came through and we’re about to start a Cold Case Task Force. I’ve wanted that for a long time. A headhunter brought us a slew of supervisor applicants but one day last week I thought, ‘What about ol’ Dubya?’ Hell, you actually did that for a few years in the big leagues. Macomb ain’t Manhattan—we’ll be the little Cold Case engine that could—but you’d bring a shitload of valuable experience to the party, Willow. I think it’d fit you like a glove.” He chuckled and said, “The glove might have a few holes in it, but hey . . .”

  “Wow,” said Willow. “Does Adelaide know about this?”

  “Just a little.”

  Which meant it was likely she knew everything. At the minimum, she’d given Owen her seal of approval; if she hadn’t been cool with the hire, it never would have been broached.

  “Call the job offer an amends of my own,” said Owen. “Not just to you, but to a lot of people. We are not saints. The point is that we are willing to grow along spiritual lines.”

  The last thing he expected was Owen laying quotes on him from the Big Book. “Are you in the Program?”

  “I’ll have fifteen years in July.”

  “I don’t even know what to say.”

  “Just say you’ll be at the Macomb County Sheriff’s Office in Macomb on Friday morning—sober. Because we’re going to make you pee in a Dixie cup.”

  MYSTERY TRAIN

  The kerfuffle with the odd-looking girl on the train rattled Annie more than she would have liked. For the first time in years, she went to the special cabinet—a low-lying mahogany piece of chinoiserie that her mentor bestowed her on his passing—and retrieved the diary she kept during her apprenticeship.

  His name was Jasper Kendrick Sebastian and he rescued her. The voices she heard as a girl—always those of children—had become a screaming cacophony; to make them stop, she tried more than once to take her own life. By the time she was three years into her stay at Swarthmore Psychiatric Hospital in Ann Arbor, friends and family had abandoned her. Then one day came a visitor, a tall, gaunt man with sunken cheeks and the strangest eyes she’d ever seen. They looked right through her—into her soul, so the cliché went—like sovereign creatures unto themselves. Jasper told her he’d been searching for members of his family and discovered that she was a cousin, a ruse that enabled him to get past the door of that awful, terrible place. He made the trip from Detroit twice on weekdays and on Sunday afternoon. They didn’t talk much at first but his presence soothed her, and the awful, terrible staff approvingly took note. The voices in her head diminished. The softening of Annie’s unruliness gave her caretakers less work. (She even became polite.) In just eight months, she was transferred into Jasper’s care. It seemed like he had done this sort of thing before.

  When she walked out the door, he was her legal guardian.

  Like Annie, he once was a teacher, a professor of English literature at Bryn Mawr. But while his ward had been scandalously expelled from her profession, Jasper retired “in order to take up my new, unlikely vocation.” The halfway house that he founded in the Corktown area of Detroit was presumptively for psychotic women, but Annie learned that too was a ruse. He told her that all the ladies who lived there were “special, just like you.”

  He called them Porters-in-Training.

  One day, when he felt she was ready, he expanded on the topic.

  “The world, as you know, is a very mysterious place. For example, those people at Swarthmore—not the patients but the staff—well, of course they have their lives: private lives and working lives. There isn’t any mystery at all to their working lives; most despise what they do and have come to despise the very people they’re meant to help. There’s no mystery to their private lives either, for the most part . . . I’m not talking about secrets, Annie, because they have plenty of those! Those kind of secrets aren’t mysteries. And what about the patient
s? You were one, not too long ago. Many are damaged, some more than others. There are those who are there for the short term—a crisis of self-harm, a depression that got out of hand, the dangerous manias of bipolar illness, that sort of thing. ‘Malfunctions,’ yes, and sometimes interesting ones—but mysteries? I don’t think so, not in the sense I’m discussing. Are you following me, Annie?”

  “As best I can.”

  “Good. Now, in regards to schizophrenia, in which this house purportedly traffics,” he sniggered. “Well, there is mystery regarding its origins. I don’t mean genetics because everything is genetics. What I really mean is . . .” He literally scratched his chin and meditated. “I may have erred in my little premise. What I meant to say is that all is mystery, everything, even the most commonplace, the most familiar, the most mundane. All is an absolute, inscrutable mystery! Even the working lives of those incompetent people at Swarthmore, even that: a complete and total mystery.”

  He paused, as if it were an opportune time to reprise the question—Are you following me, Annie?—but demurred.

  “I’d go as far as to say it’s a miracle that any of us are able to function . . . not bodily functions, which seem to carry on perfectly well with or without our cooperation, but the functioning of our minds. It’s a miracle the whole lot of us don’t wind up in Swarthmore, completely insane—yet we don’t. Another mystery! We do our grocery shopping and laundry, we go to the bank and obey traffic signals. (Some of us!) We fall in love, get married, have children and so forth.” He threw her an impish look. “You’ve been dreaming of a train, haven’t you, Annie?”

  She thought about it—it wasn’t a conscious thing until he asked—and startled herself by saying, “I have.”

  “Now we have two mysteries! The first is the recurring dream of the train, a mystery wrapped in the mystery of a dream. The second mystery is my knowing it. In your dream, someone—something—wrestles you into a cabin, no?”

  “Yes!”

  “And you wait, you wait very patiently, frightened and bewildered, until a man comes in. A tall, gaunt gentleman much like myself, no? He offers you a tray of refreshments. He seems to know what you’d enjoy: ginger cookies and herbal tea. Your favorites, no? You have this dream for weeks until one night the man tells you to look at the other side of the coaster where you set your tea. You turn it over and find an address written there. He asks you to memorize it. That was the very way I came to be Porter,” said Jasper. “In the same fashion you’ve begun your journey. Except in my case, I came to Portership much later in life than you—sometimes that happens. It’s not ideal but it can’t be helped. My tray,” he said, with a parenthetical gleam in his eye, “came with my favorites: bar nuts and a Tom Collins! That’s how it happened. And it’s been happening forever, the baton passed from Porter to Porter. The longer I’ve been doing this, the more certain I am that what I said earlier is correct: the only thing we can be sure of is that it’s all one great mystery—no one knows anything nor ever will. And that is the least mysterious thing we shall ever be able to comprehend.”

  Annie skipped to the pages that she wrote just before he died.

  Jasper was in hospice care, ending his days on Earth. He was in an upstairs room of the halfway house, tended by Porters in various stages of tutelage who hadn’t yet left for cities unknown. (Among the ladies were a few men, though Jasper said male Porters were far more rare.) He told Annie that a half year before—around the time he scooped her up from Swarthmore—he became aware that he too was departing, “though on a more pedestrian path than our children do after their moments of balance. I’ll be leaving in a most conventional way, and so be it. There’s nothing to be done.” He said that she would know when her own time had come—when she was dying—“by signs and wonders. Things will begin to go . . . haywire.”

  “What do you mean, ‘haywire,’ sir?”

  “When a Porter passes the baton, there’s a period of ‘haywire.’ Inexplicable things will occur—within that which is already inexplicable, of course. Only someone new will be able to set things right again. It’s always been like that. We don’t know why; we don’t ask because we know nothing.”

  She set down the pages and thought of the rambunctious girl—and of Dabba Doo, the gentle, eccentric, barefooted man who wore the same tweed suits favored by her mentor, and had stayed too long. She thought of Maya and Troy, the brother and sister, and how murdered siblings had never arrived in toto before—and the agitated older man whom she’d recently wrestled to his cabin with the help of the shadowy Subalterns. A fully grown man, on the children’s train! She unaccountably had brought him a Tom Collins—Jasper’s drink—but the offering infuriated him and he knocked it off the tray, much like the odd-looking teenage girl had with her lemonade.

  He was the only one aboard who wasn’t awash in blue . . .

  She thought of all those things and knew what she had always known, but long forgotten:

  The time that Jasper foretold had begun.

  HAYWIRE

  1.

  When Lydia and Daniel got there, Annie hadn’t yet arrived.

  The landlords mingled sheepishly, helping themselves to coffee, lemonade and cookies, or just sat in their seats staring straight ahead. The group had never been together without the Porter, who was always there to greet them. Some thought Annie’s tardiness had something to do with the Meeting having been changed to midday from its usual evening spot.

  Lydia spontaneously approached Dabba Doo.

  “How are you?” she said, shy and brave at once.

  Interaction among guests was rare and he was pleasantly surprised. His eyes were pale green and she was drawn to them. He looked to be about sixty, the oldest landlord in the room.

  “I’m very well, thank you,” he said.

  “I guess Teach got stuck in traffic, huh?”

  “She does take the bus, which makes her subject to the rather dependable delays of the Metro.”

  “I wonder why she doesn’t have a car.”

  “It would be more convenient, I suppose.”

  “Where does she live?”

  “A closely guarded secret,” he said affably. “Perhaps an automobile isn’t within her budget—though she never struck me as the driving type.”

  “Well, I’m glad she takes a bus and not a bicycle.”

  “Dangerous, those! This mad push for cyclists’ rights has certainly emboldened them. They tend to make the mistake of believing they’re indestructible. It breeds entitlement.”

  “Why are you called Dabba Doo?” she asked, emboldened herself. It felt nice to make a new friend.

  “I was a fanboy—to put it mildly!—of The Flintstones. Loved running around the house all day screaming Yabba Dabba Doo! I didn’t have all my teeth and ‘dabba doo’ was all that came out. Everyone thought that incredibly amusing. It stuck.”

  “How old were you when you were . . .”

  Murdered, she meant, without supplying the word.

  It felt like a line had been crossed but she couldn’t help blurting it out; something about him gave her permission. He seemed so familiar, ready-made, so much like family. Maya (she felt less like Lydia just then) felt a closeness toward him that was different from her feelings toward the other fellow travelers, an intimacy almost like the blood-closeness Lydia felt for Daniel. Dabba Doo grew thoughtful and when it looked like he was about to answer, Annie strode in and the Meeting began.

  Right away, Lydia noticed something “off”—the Porter looked pale and sweaty, half from hurry, half from something else.

  There weren’t any new guests (Daniel had been the latest), and Lydia surveyed the faces in the room during Q&A time: Daniel, of course, and Dabba Doo . . . the attractive Nordic-looking woman named Violet who worked in IT . . . José, a jovial, portly fellow who didn’t at all look like a “José.” (He was some sort of engineer and was fond of wearing
heavy Pendleton shirts, even though he had a perspiration problem.) Rounding out the tribe was an African-American yoga teacher in his thirties called, of all things, Rhonda. The absurdity of such a creature having that name made Lydia giggle.

  Most of the landlords’ shares were concerned with the subtle, occasionally unsubtle “differences” noticed in them by confused friends and family. Each had been told they were “acting weird,” and some had been urged to seek professional help. The accusations usually fell into two camps: the landlords were perceived as being either inappropriately juvenile or clinically depressed. Some at the Meeting spoke of the rage of lovers who either felt they’d been spurned or suspected they were being cheated on.

  Violet, who Lydia thought looked like a model, was in the middle of some very sticky business.

  “I’m just having . . . a lot of problems!” she exclaimed. Everyone laughed because “a lot of problems” was definitely the theme of the day. “I mean with the men I’ve been seeing. Or dating. Or having relationships with or whatever.” José went “Ewwwww” and Rhonda said, “Get over it, girl!,” eliciting more laughter. “I know! But the problem is, I’m still having feelings toward them. Some of them. Violet doesn’t . . . but I mean, I’m even still ‘doing it’ with some of them.” The whole room yucked and tittered. “I’m trying,” said Violet. “But some of them are just so insistent.”

  Dabba Doo said, almost folksily, “Well, how many of them are there, Violet?”

  “Not too many. But one of them’s kind of my . . . fiancé.”

  Hilarity ensued until Annie took control.

  “It’s a process,” said the Porter. “And it can be messy. But the mess will go away. Your priorities will assert themselves. People’s feelings are going to be hurt, you can’t avoid that. But you’re not here to soothe hurt feelings, you’re here for a purpose. Sometimes you might forget that, but your purpose won’t forget you. So take the time during the day to read your Guide—and be patient.”