Here and Gone

by Haylen Beck

  ‘I’m going to put Sean down for a sleep,’ Audra said. ‘I’m going to take a shower, then I’m going to pack.’

  ‘You have nowhere to go,’ Patrick said.

  ‘I have friends.’

  ‘What friends?’ Patrick asked. ‘When was the last time you saw any of those artsy shitbags?’

  ‘Don’t talk about them like that.’

  Sean stirred in her arms, agitated by her rising anger.

  ‘Whatever, when was the last time you saw one of them?’

  When Audra couldn’t think of the answer to his question, she turned and left the room, went to their bedroom, and closed the door. She swaddled Sean once more and went to the en suite bathroom. With the door open, she showered, her tears melding with the hot water, flushed away into the drain. A cold feeling in her gut as she accepted that Patrick was right: she had nowhere to go. He had never wanted to be around her friends when they were dating, and she had drifted away from them, quietly pulled from their orbits and into his.

  Once she’d dried off, she wrapped her dressing gown around her and lay on the bed, watching Sean through the bars of his crib. Listened to his breathing, allowed herself to be carried away by it.

  Hours later, he woke, hungry again. Audra lifted him from the crib, brought him back to the bed, where she offered him her breast once more.

  He refused it, and she wept bitter tears of defeat.

  Even so, she tried again through the day. And still he squirmed and fussed, his lips slipping away from her. The screeching returned, that drill bit boring into her head. The small cups of expressed milk did not satisfy him, most of it spilled and wasted. She caught glimpses of Patrick watching her from doorways, saying nothing, and she knew what he was waiting for.

  At ten o’clock that night, twenty-four hours after the first and last time that Sean would ever drink from her breast, Audra went to the cupboard by the fridge and took down one of the small cartons of formula. As easy as Margaret had said. Just put it in the bottle, heat it in the microwave. Simple as that.

  She sat on the couch, Sean gulping at formula, nothing but a dry hollowness inside her. Patrick came to her then, sat down beside her. He put an arm around her shoulders, kissed her hair.

  ‘It’s for the best,’ he said. ‘For you and for him.’

  Audra had no strength left to argue.

  16

  DANNY LEE WATCHED the rolling news as he worked out in his living room. He raised the pair of twenty-pound dumbbells from his thighs to his shoulders and back again, keeping his breath steady, not rushing the lift or the drop, letting his biceps do the work. Ten reps in a set, thirty seconds between sets.

  That image of the woman launching herself at the sheriff, over and over. Nothing new had emerged through the afternoon into the evening, yet he kept watching.

  He moved on to lateral lifts, swapping to twelve-pound weights. Sweat-drenched hair fell into his eyes, and he shook it away. On the television, a detective from the Arizona Department of Public Safety, Criminal Investigations Division, talked about search parties and aerial scans. The picture changed to a police helicopter circling over a desert road, then teams of uniformed men picking through the scrub and the rocks and the cacti, two highway patrolmen hunched over a map that was spread across a cruiser’s hood.

  Then a photograph of the woman, a mug shot, her face reading fear and bewilderment. The woman had a history, the anchor explained, of addiction. Booze and prescription drugs, an overdose two years ago. Destroyed her marriage. And Children’s Services had been on her back recently, trying to get the children signed over to the husband. So she had put the kids in the car and taken off. Four days later, she’d made it as far as Arizona.

  But no children.

  Now a photo of the kids, at least a couple of years younger than they were today. Both of them beaming amid piles of torn wrapping paper and Christmas toys. Next, the anchor addressing the camera, saying the search was on to find Sean and Louise Kinney before it was too late. But he couldn’t hide that tone in his voice, the one that said it was already too late, these children were gone as gone could be.

  Danny lowered the weights to the floor, rolled his shoulders, worked the muscles with his knuckles. He closed his eyes for a moment, savored the weary tingle through his upper arms and back, the rush of oxygen as he breathed in through his nose, out through his mouth.

  Mya’s face shimmered in his mind.

  Five years she’d been gone. Sara six weeks before that. Mya just couldn’t take it. Danny had tried to be strong for her. He couldn’t have done any more. By the end, Mya asked him again and again if he believed her.

  Did he believe those policemen took Sara away?

  Of course he did. Of course.

  But she must have seen something in his eyes, some vein of doubt. And hadn’t he asked himself that question some nights? What if the police were right? What if Mya was lying? What if she really did do that awful thing the police and the feds had suggested?

  When Mya took her own life, the cops stopped looking for Sara. But Danny didn’t. Even though his rational mind told him she was almost certainly dead, he had to keep searching until the trail went cold. As senseless as it was, there remained a flicker in him even now, like a candle that won’t be blown out. Maybe Sara was still out there somewhere.

  Almost certainly not. But maybe.

  And now this woman all the way out in Arizona. She looked like Mya, a little. Both of them white, of course, but it was more than that. The cheekbones were alike. The good strong jawline, the curve of the lips.

  ‘Did they take your children from you?’ Danny asked his empty living room.

  He scolded himself for talking to thin air like a crazy man, drained the bottle of water on the side table, and switched off the TV set. Ten minutes later, he was climbing into his cold and empty bed. Mya had never slept in this one – he had replaced their bed after she died, unable to face lying in it without her – but still he missed her shape, curled beneath the sheets, her cheek resting on her palm, the faint purr of her breathing.

  Mya had saved him. There was no question. Were it not for her, he would have wound up locked away, maybe a big man inside, but inside all the same. She knew they called him Danny Doe Jai, Knife Boy, but she never asked why. And he never told her.

  He’d been drawn into the Tong at fifteen. Pork Belly had vouched for him, taken him under his wing. By sixteen, he was living in an apartment off Stockton Street with five other young men with more anger than brains. Collected a few debts here, sold a few wraps there. When he was nineteen he was working the door at a brothel above a restaurant, making sure the drunks stayed out, that the johns had the cash to pay for their pleasure. Making sure the girls didn’t get slapped around by anyone other than the men who owned them.

  It was there that he came to the Dragon Head’s attention. A drunk sailor in his Navy duds had come in when Danny was on a piss break, and whoever was keeping an eye on the door hadn’t had the nerve to send him away. The sailor had broken a girl’s nose and was refusing to leave. Danny came out of the restroom, got hold of the sailor, and threw him down the stairs. At the bottom, Danny drew his knife and cut him so bad that Pork Belly had to come pick the sailor up and dump him out on one of the piers. Danny never found out if he lived or died. Wouldn’t be the last man he killed, anyway.

  Danny never moved up much. He was too useful on the streets, even as smart as he was. Too good with a blade. He hurt a lot of people.

  Until he met Mya.

  She’d been at the next table when Danny was eating and drinking with Pork Belly and his friends in the restaurant below the brothel. The boys had all sniggered as she stood from her table and crossed to theirs.

  In the most musical Cantonese he’d ever heard, this white girl said, ‘You boys ought to watch your language in public. What would your mothers say?’

  The boys had roared with laughter, and Mya had returned to her friend, seemingly defeated. She took the other young
woman by the arm and led her to the counter, where she talked to the cashier before leaving.

  When the check came for Danny’s table, Pork Belly held it at arm’s length.

  ‘This isn’t right,’ he said. ‘Who had this?’

  They passed the check around the table and no one had the answer.

  But Danny knew. By the time Pork Belly had called the waiter back over, Danny was already laughing fit to burst.

  ‘The young lady,’ the waiter said. ‘She said you’d offered to pay for their dinner.’

  Pork Belly had sat quiet and still for a few moments, his eyes burning. Then he threw his head back and his gut wobbled with a peal of laughter.

  It took a week to find her. Another week to convince her that she should allow Danny to take her out sometime. Two more weeks to fall so in love that he knew he would never again take a breath without her approval.

  She was teaching part-time at USF’s Asian Studies Department while working on her doctorate. Her father had been a banker based in Hong Kong through much of her childhood, only returning to the States when he was diagnosed with the cancer that took his money and his life. She was fluent in Cantonese, had a workable grasp of Mandarin, and smatterings of Korean and Japanese. Danny’s friends had at first warned him that she was a tourist, attracted to his exoticism, a rough-boy trophy to parade in front of the other white folks.

  But they were wrong. Danny knew it beyond all certainty. On the day they married, Mya became the first person to call him by his Chinese name since his mother on her deathbed: Lee Kai Lum.

  It was Mya who put him straight. Mya who encouraged him to use his contacts to help keep kids out of the gangs. To work with the police and the community. Make his neighborhood a better place, not worse.

  Danny proposed the night Mya told him she was pregnant. She had come close to a termination, she said, agonizing over the choice, before she accepted that she could be a mother. He swore he would never abandon her, that the life inside her, even if it was only a cluster of cells, was a part of him. And therefore he was a part of Mya. They were tied together forever, like it or not, so why not make it real?

  When those cops stopped Mya on a lonely road and took Sara from her, they might as well have put a gun to her head. They killed her then, even if she seemed to go on living for the six weeks it took for her to give up. And still her death, and Sara’s, did not sever the tie between them. Slowly, steadily, Mya had been dragging him after her into the grave.

  But he still had business to settle.

  Every breath he took now felt like a debt to her, as if the five years between here and there were simply borrowed. God, he missed her and his daughter like they were bones ripped from his body. Especially nights like this, when all he had were the ghosts in his head.

  Somehow, somewhere in the next hour, sleep took him, swallowed him whole. Bloody dreams stalked him; they always did. But now there were new faces among the old: two children and their mother. All the things he could not change, could not reach, and here they were, and maybe if he stretched far enough, bled enough, maybe he could reach them.

  Danny jerked awake in the darkness, his heart thundering, lungs heaving, nerves carrying a jangling charge like bell wire. He checked his clock: not long past midnight.

  When his heart had calmed, and he had his breathing under control, he pulled aside the sheets and got out of bed. Wearing only his underwear, he left the bedroom and walked down the stairs. Only when he reached the bottom did he wonder why he had come down at all.

  ‘Thirsty,’ he said aloud.

  He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth and thought, yeah, thirsty. He remembered the almost full carton of orange juice in the fridge and padded through the living room out into the kitchen. Fetched a glass from the cupboard and poured himself a generous serving. One swallow half emptied the glass, and he turned away from the fridge.

  His laptop sat closed on the table.

  Without thinking, he sat down, set the glass beside it, and opened the computer. The screen flickered on and he entered his password. The web browser open on the Google home page.

  He typed: Fly SFO > PHX

  ‘Huh,’ he said as a list of travel sites and ticket prices filled the screen. ‘So that’s what I’m doing.’

  17

  THE NIGHT HAD dragged on long and slow for Sean. At least, he thought it was night. The temperature had gone from cool to cooler, the quiet entering a deeper silence. Louise had slept on and off for much of the day and night, and her forehead had become hot to the touch, even though she shivered and complained of being cold.

  Sean knew his sister was becoming sick, but he didn’t know what to do about it. He supposed he would ask Deputy Collins for some medicine when she came back.

  If she came back.

  She hadn’t been by since the morning, when she left some more sandwiches, potato chips, and fruit. Sean had devoured two bananas and a fistful of chips. Louise had taken a bite from an apple and had eaten nothing since.

  ‘When can we go?’ Sean had asked.

  ‘Maybe tomorrow,’ Collins had said. ‘Day after at the latest.’

  ‘The police will be out looking for us,’ Sean said. ‘There’ll be search parties. You won’t move us until it’s safe. Until you won’t get caught.’

  Collins smiled. ‘You’re a smart kid. You know, I have a boy maybe a year younger than you.’

  ‘What’s his name?’

  Collins hesitated, then said, ‘Michael. Mikey.’

  ‘What’s he like?’

  Her eyes went distant. ‘Smart, like I said. And funny.’

  ‘Does he have a dad?’

  She shook her head. ‘He’s not around anymore. Truth be told, he was a bit of an asshole.’

  ‘Mine’s not around, either,’ Sean said. ‘I guess he’s an asshole too.’

  ‘You shouldn’t say words like that.’

  Sean ignored her admonishment. ‘What does Mikey like to do? Does he play sports?’

  ‘No,’ Collins said. ‘Mikey gets sick a lot. He has a problem with his heart. Means he can’t do stuff like that. He has to stay in bed a lot of the time and take medicine. So he reads mostly. Comic books and stuff.’

  ‘Me too,’ Sean said. ‘Not the staying in bed part, I mean the comic books. I like comic books. Maybe I could meet Mikey sometime. Maybe we could be friends.’

  Suddenly Collins came back to herself, her eyes hardening, her lips thinning. She reached down and grabbed Sean’s shirt in her fist, pulled him close, so he could feel her breath on his skin.

  ‘I know what you’re doing, you little shit. You’re smart, but you’re not that smart. Now keep out of my head.’

  Sean watched her eyes while she spoke and saw no anger there. Collins couldn’t hold his gaze, looked away as her cheeks grew red. She turned and climbed the steps, let the trapdoor drop closed behind her, bolted it, locked it. Sean heard the buzz of the motorcycle, its engine note rising in pitch as she sped away across the forest.

  How long had passed since then? Could it be twenty-four hours yet? Sean simply didn’t know.

  He reached across the mattress and placed his palm on Louise’s forehead. Still hot, still damp with sweat. Louise moaned and swatted his hand away.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I’m going to get us out of here. We’ll find Mom and we’ll go to California, to San Diego, and we can go to the beach. Just like she promised. You hear me?’

  Louise blinked and said, ‘I hear you.’

  ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Now let’s get some sleep.’

  He watched her close her eyes, then he closed his own, his arm around his sister, her warm body pressed against his. Sleep came like a shadow, slipped over him, and he knew nothing more until the trapdoor opening overhead pulled him awake.

  Sean blinked up at the rectangle of light and the silhouette of Collins descending the steps, a bag of food in one hand.

  ‘I think Louise is sick,’ he said.

  Colli
ns set the bag on the floor and came to the side of the mattress. She hunkered down and reached across to feel Louise’s forehead, then down inside her top. Louise barely stirred at her touch.

  ‘Goddamn it,’ Collins said.

  Sean sat up on the mattress. ‘You need to get medicine for her,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t know if I can get any.’

  ‘What if she gets worse?’

  ‘All right,’ Collins said, standing up. ‘Make sure she takes plenty of water. Take the blanket off her, maybe take her top off, try to cool her down. I’ll be back later.’

  She turned and walked back toward the steps. Sean called after her.

  ‘Deputy Collins?’

  She stopped, looked back over her shoulder.

  ‘Thank you,’ Sean said.

  Her eyelids flickered. She turned and climbed the steps, locked the trapdoor without replying.

  18

  AUDRA’S MIND ACHED. The world had stretched so thin she imagined she could tear a hole in it with a fingertip. Everything moved in jerks, either too slow or too fast, and everyone spoke in jumbles of sound. Part of her knew it was exhaustion, but the other part felt she moved through a dream, that none of this was real. That it was happening to some other woman in some other town, as she watched it all play out like a strange television show.

  She had lain awake through the night watching the red light on the camera, waiting for it to blink out, fearing that when it did, they would come again, put a gun to her head. At moments she wondered if that had really happened at all. Had she simply dreamed it, one of those nightmares that follows you into waking? But she did fall asleep at some point, only to wake again, like dragging herself up through tar, her heart hammering, lungs unable to grab the air they needed.

  When she opened her eyes, Whiteside stood over her.

  He hunkered down next to the bunk.

  ‘You’ve got to let them go,’ he said. ‘They’re gone, and that’s all there is to it.’

  Paralyzed, she couldn’t raise a fist to strike him.