Finn

by Matthew Olshan

  I shrugged, although it was completely obvious that I didn’t need them.

  Soul Patch slammed the steering wheel. The padding in the palm of his gloves absorbed most of the force and made a little squeaky noise, like a bath toy, which irritated him even more because even his angry gesture was a flop. “That’s just what I need,” he said. “Your mother’s going to freak.” Then he turned off his hazards, signaled with his left blinker—he was such a careful driver!—and pulled slowly away from the curb, driving gently, as if I was fragile cargo.

  It all made sense as soon as he mentioned my mother, but the fact that she was involved was quite serious. She wasn’t supposed to come near me any more, at least not according to the judge’s order. I would have been happy if she had just stayed in Texas or wherever and left me alone. As far as I was concerned, the farther away the better.

  Even if it had been legal, my mother wouldn’t have dared to come see me at my grandparents. They were my Dad’s parents, not hers. His parents never liked my Mom, starting from even before they met. They disliked her on principle, because they thought she wasn’t good enough for my Dad. They made it hard enough for her when my Dad was still alive, and then, after he was gone, they didn’t hold anything back. I can’t even count the number of times I’ve sat at the kitchen table and listened to my grandmother badmouth my Mom. She always calls her “that woman.” To this day, I’ve never heard my grandmother speak my mother’s name, which is Claire. “That woman,” my grandmother will say, “never lived up to your father’s level.” Meaning, I suppose, that it’s her fault she was born who she was. It’s annoying to listen to my grandmother say those things. It makes it a lot harder to respect her as a person if, after all these years, she can’t find it in her heart to forgive my mother for what she did. But my grandmother still blames my mother for my father’s death. She says that my mother caused it. “By omission, if not commission,” she says. I wish she could just let it be. I hate the way she stirs things up.

  “So you must be the boyfriend,” I said. My voice felt small rattling around in the back of that big van, which was bare inside, no seats or anything. It wasn’t exactly comfortable back there, bouncing around on the metal floor. He didn’t seem to hear me, so I gave one of my patented folded tongue whistles. You can hear it from about a mile away.

  That got his attention. “Oh my God,” he said.

  “I said, ‘Are you the boyfriend?’” He laughed at that, which surprised me.

  “You make it sound so temporary,” he said. “I’m your mother’s husband, which I guess makes me your step-dad. But you don’t have to call me that right away. I’m Bobby. Sorry about back there. Not a very good first impression.”

  “You could have invited me over. Politely,” I said.

  He laughed again. “Now why didn’t I think of that?” he said sarcastically. Even his sarcasm was babyish. “I’ll try to remember,” he said. “For next time.”

  He was right, of course. Under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t have come near him. I told him so, although I think the way I put it was that under normal circumstances I wouldn’t come anywhere near such a fat stinking bastard. He even thought that was sort of funny. He kept on laughing until I insulted his soul patch, which seemed to touch a nerve.

  After that, he suggested we keep our thoughts to ourselves until we got to where we were going.

  Chapter Five

  Who can explain the river of junk that flows through a person’s mind? Propped up against the back doors of that rancid van, I should have been thinking of a million things, such as: how to fool Bobby into thinking I was carsick, or what I’d whisper to the police if I managed to sneak a phone call, or how I’d calm down my mother when I saw her. Useful things. But what was I thinking about instead? The sky, which was pretty much all I could see through the bug-splattered windshield, and how blue it looked. Blue, and strangely merciful. I can’t really explain why I thought that. I just did. I should have been listening for changes in the road, memorizing the turns we made, studying the branches of trees we passed, for landmarks. Anything but making googly eyes at the clouds like a baby. I swear, sometimes I could shoot myself.

  Even with my temporary lapse, I was confident we were still in the city when Bobby finally parked the van. The potholes had been getting worse and worse, which was a sure sign we weren’t in the suburbs. Bobby got out and opened the side door for me, bowing like a butler after it slid open and locked in place with a loud thunk. He made a big show of helping me out. I ignored his help, pretending I didn’t need it. That was a big mistake. I don’t ever recommend jumping with duct tape around your wrists, because you’re liable to lose your balance when you land, and by then it’s too late to think about how you’re going to protect yourself from the ground when you fall, because you can’t use your hands much for that, either. I ended up face-down in the gutter. My mouth touched wet garbage.

  So I had to accept Bobby’s help in the end, anyway, and now I had some new scrapes on my knees and one on my elbow to add to the list. Bobby brushed off my knees, which I resented, because, in my mind, street filth was still a lot cleaner than his fingers. He stayed close to me as we walked down the sidewalk. He was constantly trying to put his arm around me, not because he was feeling particularly friendly, which he hadn’t been since the soul patch comment, but because he wanted to hide the fact that my hands were bound together with duct tape. In broad daylight. A girl walking down the street like that in my grandparents’ neighborhood would have been surrounded by police before she got ten feet, but no one here seemed to care, or even to notice.

  I had never seen this neighborhood before. It was all row houses, tiny narrow identical ones with fake stone siding and pretentious marble steps, all squeezed in together with about two inches of sidewalk in front of them. The row houses looked as if they were all trying to keep from being pushed into the street by someone who thought they were totally hideous. The puny sidewalk was full of white trash bags, which stank like summer garbage. Some of the houses were abandoned, with plywood sheets nailed over fire-blackened window frames. A lot of them had spray-painted signs saying “If animal trapped inside, call. . .” but there was never a phone number written in. There were no trees anywhere.

  The streets were full of people, unlike my grandparents’ neighborhood, where you’re lucky to see an overweight jogger or a big black nanny out with a blond toddler. Everyone here was black. There were street corner boys dressed up in baggy clothes, waving their long arms and mouthing rap songs. I couldn’t tell if they were trying to be funny, or menacing, or both.

  Gigantic families clustered on the marble steps, as if a smoke alarm had driven them all out half dressed, eating, in curlers, clutching their pathetic belongings. Some of the old men stood there in their pajamas, smoking. It was so noisy! Babies squalled, their fat mamas shrieked, kids whooped, rap music blared, the passing cars honked their horns, sometimes friendly, sometimes not. Everybody seemed to know everybody else, except for Bobby.

  The fact that we were white seemed to make us invisible, which was the opposite of my grandparents’ neighborhood, where it’s black people who are invisible. Wait, I take that back. It wasn’t exactly the opposite. In my grandparents’ neighborhood, they just pretended that black people were invisible. Black people are actually watched very closely there. But here, in this neighborhood, Bobby and I were barely noticed, or if we were, it was with a knowing look, as if all white people wrapped their children up with duct tape and dragged them down the sidewalk.

  There were several men in dreadlocks who actually looked like they knew what to do with a giant heap of knotty hair—unlike the bicycle courier back at Field, who was white and whose dreadlocks were yellowish and scrawny. A squat balding man walked by with something rolled up in a newspaper. He was carrying it at arm’s length. His face was turned away, as if what he was carrying really stank. As he passed, I saw a furry little tail poking out of one end of the roll and some whiskers poking out o
f the other end. I couldn’t tell whether it was a kitten or a very large rat. Whatever it was was definitely dead.

  “This is us,” Bobby said, stepping up to one of the identical steel front doors. It took him a minute to find the key. He had an enormous wad of keys. Most of them looked brand new, as if he had swiped a lot of blanks at the hardware store. He pawed through them, grunting when he found the right one. “Sorry about the mess,” he said, kicking the door open with the toe of his boot, which hit the door like a hammer and made a loud clang. There were a lot of black dents in the bottom of the door. The last thing I saw on the street, before we plunged into the steaming atmosphere of the house, was a big sign nailed to the front of a church across the street. It was one of those temporary churches black people set up in storefronts. The sign was shaped like a rocket. Badly painted fire spewed from its engines. The sign said, “Fly with Jesus to the heavens.”

  “Your mother should be here any minute,” Bobby said, bolting the door. Then he told me to make myself comfortable. I said as if. The air was putrid and sticky. Bobby started to clear some moldy TV dinners off the sofa. The trays left a dusty outline on the upholstery, which was blue denim. The pillows looked like overstuffed plumber’s pants, complete with a butt crack.

  I sat down on the stairs by the front door. I kept moving up the stairs, one by one, trying to find the most comfortable height, but then Bobby came over to the banister and told me to please stay in view, so I moved down to the fourth stair. It was still better than sitting on the denim sofa. I’ve always liked sitting on stairs. It makes me feel like I have options.

  Soon, there was banging at the door. I could hear the crinkle of paper shopping bags, which my Mom always insists on—she thinks they’re classier than plastic—and her shrill voice cursing Bobby and demanding that he open the damn door because her hands were full. Bobby’s thick fingers fumbled with the bolt. He kept saying, “Hold your horses, sweetie.” He sounded nervous. He was a big guy, but he was right to be nervous. Mom was capable of anything.

  Bobby finally got the door open. Mom came in, cursing him for making her drop one of the bags. She was ready to really lay into him, but then she saw me. She smiled one of those smiles of hers which might have been pretty if you didn’t know for sure that there was something bad behind it. “Well, I’ll be,” she said. “If it isn’t my Chloworm.” “Chlo-worm” was her pet name for me. It came from a rubber worm she gave me that glowed in the dark.

  She looked surprised to see me. As if she hadn’t sent her pig-faced boyfriend to kidnap me.

  I didn’t rush up to give her a hug, which seemed to bother her. You wouldn’t think a person as shrewd as my Mom was capable of fooling herself about anything—for instance, the idea that after everything she’d done to me, I’d still run over and give her a big sloppy hug. It just goes to show that even very clever people can deceive themselves.

  “I take it you’ve met Bobby,” she said. I didn’t say anything. I just showed her the cuts on my arms, which looked a lot worse than they felt. I hadn’t bothered to clean them up, since I figured the messy scabs would come in handy. Bobby cringed and started to explain, but Mom cut him off, without looking at him, without saying a word, just by snapping her sharp little fingers and pointing at his throat. “I’ll deal with that later,” she said, in a way that almost made me feel sorry for Bobby, even though he was a grown man. Then she came up to me and tucked my hair behind my ears. She smelled like cigarettes, but not the usual. A new brand.

  “You look good,” she said. “Your grandparents have been fattening you up.”

  “Not too much,” I said.

  “Well, that’s all over,” Mom said. “You’re with us now.”

  By even talking to me, she was breaking the law, but I knew better than to point that out. A restraining order isn’t much help when you’re in immediate danger. Instead, I tried to be all innocent. “Is this where we’re going to live?” I said.

  “What, is there something wrong with it? What’d they do, spoil you? Send you off to finishing school?”

  As if she hadn’t told Bobby where to find me. “I go to Field School now,” I said.

  “Field? That’s private. Very expensive. A waste of money.”

  “It’s a good school,” I said.

  “I’ll bet it is. Full of fancy teachers and spoiled brats.”

  “Are we going to live in the city?”

  “Listen to you, with your little questions. What ever happened to ‘Hey, Mom, long time no see?’”

  I didn’t say anything, because I knew how bad it was to lie to her.

  “That’s just what I thought,” she said. She turned to Bobby. “You see this? Was I exaggerating?”

  Bobby didn’t speak, but at least he looked sorry for me, which was potentially useful. Mom had him take me upstairs. “Make sure she’s not going anywhere,” Mom said. Her bossy tone made Bobby pout.

  “I told you already,” he said. “I put a padlock on the window.”

  “Well then, check it,” Mom said. “She’s been known to jump ship.”

  Bobby muttered to himself, but only after we were out of earshot. “Here’s your new home,” he said, shoving me into a stifling little room with a bare mattress on the floor. The room was full of eerie dark green light from the garbage bags taped over the window. “Neat effect, huh?” Bobby said. “Like Halloween, almost.” I had never seen a window with an iron gate on the inside, but that’s what there was. Bobby went over to it and tugged at the padlock. He didn’t seem to care that he was grinding his grimy boots into the mattress. He punched the padlock a few times, as if his bicycle gloves were boxing gloves. “I told her the lock was fine,” he said.

  “You’re a thorough person,” I said.

  Bobby brightened. “Now that’s what I’m talking about,” he said. “A little trust in my judgment.”

  I decided to push it a little further. “Sorry about back there in the van. You surprised me, that’s all. I get that way when I’m upset. Plus I was just waking up.”

  “Well, that’s okay,” Bobby said. He was practically beaming. “I knew you couldn’t be all the things Claire said. No one could.” Then he wagged a finger at me, which made the glove straps flap a little. “Now you make sure to behave, young lady.” Our relationship had clearly entered a new phase.

  “I’m not looking for trouble,” I said, which was actually true. The less attention they paid me, the better.

  “You just rest now,” said Bobby. “You’re going to be out late tonight. Your Mom needs a little help with something.”

  But I wasn’t out late that night. Or the next day, or the one after that.

  Chapter Six

  They kept me locked up in that coffin of a room for three days and three nights. At first, I thought I was just being punished. That would have been Mom’s style. The fact that I saw only Bobby during that time was like her, too. She knew how to use your imagination against you.

  Bobby brought me a pack of HoHos in the morning and maybe some chips at lunch and McDonalds or something for dinner. He told me we were “laying low.” Meaning, I think, that the police were looking for me.

  Lying there on the bare mattress those three days—Mom hadn’t bothered with sheets, she thought they just made for a lot of extra work—I had plenty of time to think about my predicament. I’m not big on wallowing, but I felt that my life had taken a giant step backward. My grandparents were jerks to Silvia, and they had lots of annoying rules, but at least they tried to be nice. Mom, on the other hand, lived without rules, which was both good and bad, but mostly bad. The lack of rules occasionally worked to my advantage. For instance, the lobster night. We were living in Maine then, in a cabin. Mom and her boyfriend had gone out in a rowboat in the middle of the night and stolen a bunch of lobsters from lobstermen’s pots. They waited until the lobsters were cooked before waking me up, so when they carried me to the picnic table, there was a big plate of steaming lobsters and some melted butter, and my Mom put
a bib on me, which made me feel taken care of. I still remember her breath on my cheek, and the little kiss she gave me, which smelled like white wine and perfume.

  That time was nice. There was also a time when she would wake me up almost every night—she didn’t have a boyfriend then—and take me for long drives. I would be cranky for a while on account of being woken up, but pretty soon I’d roll down my window—it always seemed to be summertime when I was with her—and let the night air blow my hair around. Mom would find some bad country music on the radio and we would just drive and drive wherever, no destination, always winding up somewhere interesting, though, like a truck stop full of men who missed their kids and were extra nice to me. Or the ocean, where she’d drive us right down one of those private little streets, the ones beyond the boardwalk, where only rich people are allowed. Mom would pull the car right up to the end of the street, which would be covered in sand. We’d open the doors and listen to the ocean. I always wanted to go in the water, but Mom was afraid of it. She said that the ocean at night was the most frightening place she could imagine. Hearing her say that only made me want to go in more. I wasn’t the least bit afraid. To me, the night ocean was amazing. Even back then, the idea of a place where Mom couldn’t go appealed to me.

  Mornings after those long drives I’d be too tired to go to school, not that I really wanted to. Mom would let me sleep in. Sometimes, if she was feeling especially guilty about taking me driving, she’d make me breakfast, complete with a big dessert. She didn’t believe in nutrition, which she said was invented by greedy vegetable farmers.