The Runaway

by Jo Barney

  “Come on out,” Matt calls. He is relieved when the kid steps into the room, nothing in his hands, and hesitates a few feet away.

  “You said your son was involved in a robbery. Is this him?” At her nod, Matt pats the boy down––nothing but a can of chew.

  “Yes, but it was a mistake.” The fumes from her breath seep into the stale fog of the room, and Matt looks around. The table holds an empty bourbon bottle, a smudged glass, half a bag of Cheetos. “Danny? That right? The report named a Danny. What do you know about this?” he asks the boy.

  Danny seems sober, even close to tears. “She’s nuts.” When he starts to turn away, Matt puts his hand out and stops him.

  The woman, hard to tell how old she is—fifty-something, maybe, but alcohol and the mess of graying hair may have added a few years—looks about to crumple to the floor. She straightens, lifts her chin, and says, carefully, in control of her words, “It is my fault. I was angry with Danny because the school reported him absent again, and I decided to call the station and say he might have done something bad, to scare him. I’m so afraid that he’ll really go wrong, do something even worse than mugging someone, something that will send him to prison and ruin his life. He’s a good boy, but he was mad when he heard me call. We ended up hitting each other, but we’re over it, aren’t we, Danny?”

  Danny doesn’t look at either of them. “Sure, whatever,” he mutters. This time Matt steps aside, lets the kid go back to the room he’s come out of.

  “I lied.” The woman’s still holding her ribs. “On the phone. Danny was here all yesterday.”

  Matt shrugs, disgusted. He has enough time to pick up Collin if he hurries. “Family disturbance? Is that correct?” He jots a note in his pad, steps to the door. “Don’t let it happen again, Mrs. Miller. Next time he might do some real harm.”

  It isn’t until he’s halfway down the stairs that he remembers he’s met this woman before. When he was in the graffiti office, he was sent to calm down a woman who claimed she was the only person in her end of town doing anything about the graffiti slathered on the mailboxes and street signs.

  “Not only that,” she complained, her frowzy hair waving at him, “it is costing me money, and the stuff the hardware store is selling me is no good. Seems like someone in city hall could lend a hand.” Matt, newly versed in graffiti problems, put her on the list to receive Graffiti X regularly. She wasn’t drunk that time, but he does remember, now that he thinks about it, the acrid scent of pot that hit him when he came through the door. Probably the kid in the back room. Danny.

  Maybe he should have intervened. Like maybe someone should have intervened twenty years ago when a drunk father created havoc for a couple of kids, and his mother wrapped her soft presence around them to protect them. Probably not. Nothing changes until the time is right, or never.

  Matt gets to the school in time to lead Collin to his car, as usual. Collin hates to have his routine messed up.

  Chapter Nine

  Ellie

  September 2009

  Friday is my day to go to the food bank, and if I’m going to have someone living with me for a few days, I have to go out, sick or not. Actually, the girl seems better after a night’s sleep, not eating anything much, but she’s propped up and looking at herself in the mirror she’s found in her duffel. She apparently doesn’t like what she sees, because she’s still rummaging around and pulling out the plastic bag holding her makeup.

  “No eye makeup,” I say. “You look like a corpse in that black stuff, and you look bad enough without it.”

  “Just a little blush,” she says. She is pretty, in a skinny sort of way, her hair straight as a stick and black, but brown near the part. If she lets it grow out a little, she’ll look like a calico cat, orange and black, a look that will suit the way she’s stretching right now, lying back against the pillow.

  “I’ll be gone for a while. Depends on when the buses come and how long the lines are at the food place. Anything special you want me to look for? Not that I’ll find it, but sometimes you get lucky. Last week they had cherries that farmers couldn’t sell because they had a bumper crop. And one time we got canned hams.” I won’t tell her that story now, but later it might get her to laugh a little. “I don’t understand where the hams came from—some ham bumper crop, I suppose.” She wiggles a good-bye finger at my little joke.

  I liked last night, the waiting and watching. I used to be good at it. Back when. Back before. The bus pulls in, and I am too busy trying to find a dollar in change and counting pennies to keep that thought going.

  When I get home a couple of hours later, Sarah greets me with wet hair tucked behind her ears and wearing the red silk robe. She has hot water ready for coffee. We unload my bags and I show her the prize of the day, a bottle of almost-maple syrup. Eggs, too. We’ll have French toast for dinner, if she feels like eating. I hope she does.

  I notice that she has rearranged a few things. A book I had forgotten I had is open on the end table. The table lamp is moved toward her end of the davenport. The picture frame under it is crooked, as if she’s been studying the face it holds. She sees me noticing. “I got bored. I guess I’m getting better.”

  I straighten the photo, and she says, “He’s cute. Is he around?”

  “No,” I say, and I go to the kitchen and fold the paper bags for recycling.

  We spend the rest of the day without talking much, me watching Channel 12 and Sarah looking for a lost earring and then reading the book she turned up instead, a mystery I got for twenty-five cents at Goodwill a while back. I can trade two paperbacks in for an unread one at Mary’s Second Glance bookstore, and I’m glad Sarah found this one under the davenport. If there is another book under there, I’ll go back to Mary’s tomorrow. I‘d like Sarah to take a look, but she’s deep into Sue Grafton and I don’t want to disturb her. I know how that feels, to be carried away.

  * * *

  By the weekend, Sarah’s up and I’m wondering when she will take off again. By now she’s calling me Ellie and I kind of like it, but I know she can’t like living in a dingy apartment with an old lady who gets crabby when she can’t find a paperback mystery or when the cherries turn out to be wormy. She has told me about the man who helped her at the medical bus, and from her description, I know she’s talking about Rick, who lives in a small room in the basement of this building and keeps his grocery cart under the stairs.

  He’s a nice guy when he’s on his meds, and he usually is. Once in a while, I’ll hear him pushing his cart down the middle of the street, arguing with invisible nurses at the VA or yelling about the unfairness of the postal service or whining about being abandoned by a girl, a beautiful girl, at his senior prom, his life not the same since. But usually, he’s fine, and once a week he goes through the recycling bins in the neighborhood and picks up pocket money from the bottles he finds there. He offered me a piece of dark chocolate with hazelnuts from Trader Joe’s on one of those days.

  I can imagine him helping Sarah, and I say sure when she asks if she could thank him with a plate of French toast.

  Sarah comes back with a square of chocolate. “I gave him my earring, too, the mate to the silver star one that I lost, because I remembered the empty hole in his ear. He liked it, he said.”

  I’m a little jealous. Young people make friends so easy. Danny could, too, ten years ago, only what he was trading came in crystals and capsules, rustling plastic bags. He had lots of friends. I didn’t suspect a thing. I’m smarter now.

  That’s why I think she’s lying when she answers my question about leaving by saying she has no place to go, that she doesn’t like the people in the shelters.

  She left one shelter and tried to live on her own, she says, but it didn’t work out. “Then I met some people living in the forest above the park. They invited me to join their camp, and for a while, it was okay. Seven or eight of us, three girls, the rest guys, lived there. We ate whatever we found in garbage bins in back of restaurants, and we h
ad a campfire every night and told stories. About our lives and stuff. I thought it was kind of fun.”

  Sarah stops for a moment, a cloud of a frown passing across her eyebrows. “Starkey called us his family. He said he was like a father because he was older and could take care of us. He told us not to be afraid, we’d all look out for each other, but we had to do what he said, or he might have to punish us. Like a father would. Sometimes, to prove our loyalty to the family, he told us we had to steal something, like beer or Twinkies, or to—you won’t like this, Ellie—to leave messages on buildings or other places so other people would know we were in the neighborhood.”

  “On mailboxes?”

  Sarah nods, shrugs like she’s embarrassed. “But my main job was to collect firewood and to help clean up the camp. And I Dumpster-dived because I was small and could be lifted right into the bin. I made a friend or two, and I felt safe, you know, like somebody cared about me.” She looks at me to see if I understand.

  “You left Starkey and your friends because…?”

  “I stopped feeling safe.”

  I don’t want to hear anymore. I’m surprised at how disappointed I am about guessing right about Sarah and the graffiti. Who knows, maybe about her being pregnant, too. I don’t even want to think about the flower tattoo. Or the brown pills. So I change the subject. “We’re taking another tour of the mailboxes even though tomorrow is only Tuesday. You owe me. Room and board.”

  And I decide that by Wednesday she’ll have to find another family to be safe in. I’m not that family. I’m not good at it.

  Chapter Ten

  Sarah

  September 2009

  We’re walking toward the first mailbox, Ellie frowning and looking at my arm as if she wants to touch it. I can understand that. I like to, too; the pink and fuchsia and purple blossoms feel warm and soft under my fingertips.

  My mother had soft cheeks. I remember my lips kissing them good night, my fingers reaching to pat them as she read to me. She was soft all over, especially her chest with its pillows that my head fit between. Now that I’m older I realize she was probably pretty fat, but little kids don’t notice stuff like that when they are five, which is as far back as I can go. I was sad then, crying a lot, needing to be held.

  Or maybe it was my mother who was sad. Maybe I held her, the two of us crying into each other. My father had left us, gone even to his scruffy bedroom slippers in the bottom of the closet, even to his toothbrush except for its soapy outline against the sink’s edge. He may have told her why he was leaving, but my mother didn’t talk about it. We got through the worst part of being abandoned with me on her lap as she read to me.

  Then I started a new school and met some friends and a teacher I liked. I still had my mother, and my mother had her job at the laundry and her garden on the south side of our rental house, where she grew tomatoes and cut bouquets of flowers that she put in glass vases in all our rooms and on the porches of a few of the neighbors. Tulips and daffodils in the spring, lilies and daisies in the summer, asters and chrysanthemums in the fall. She said she loved the freesias most of all because they were tender and needed loving care, had to grow on the protected side porch where she could sit after work on cool spring evenings and watch their buds open. Sometimes I would sit beside her, and we would tell stories, me the first sentence, her the second, until one of us fell asleep.

  My mother also had her tall yellow drink, rattling with ice cubes every evening.

  How could a little kid know how sad her mother was?

  * * *

  She died when I was eight. Someday maybe I’ll understand why, but on the evening she took the brown pills that killed her, my mother sent me to a neighbor, saying that she was not feeling well; could she watch me for a while? The note I found on the kitchen table told me that she loved me, and I still believe her even though the foster homes I went to over the next seven years made me wonder why she would leave me to strangers. A hand under my nightgown in the last one sent me packing in the middle of the night. If I had to live with strangers, I’d choose them, I told myself.

  I felt very brave that morning as I got on the light rail and headed toward downtown, my bag over my shoulder. I wondered if the woman with the shopping cart sitting next to me could tell I was running away. I smiled at her, but she didn’t smile back. I might have frightened her. I looked like a street kid with my duffel and the boots I stole from my foster mother’s closet. Well, I thought, get used to it. I am a street kid.

  At first I stayed at a teen shelter where I got food and met a woman who encouraged me to make some decisions, go back to school, get involved in activities, find a better place to live. I hated most of the kids who ate and slept there, although I liked her, but going to an art class or writing in a journal didn’t make me feel better about my life or myself.

  I was still an orphan. I still missed my mother. I still wondered why she left me. The best I could do to bring her back was to go with a sort-of friend from the shelter to his buddy Ben’s apartment in Chinatown and have Ben tattoo my arm with the freesia copied from the picture I tore out of a book in the library. All Ben would charge me was a blow job after every session. I guess he realized I was jailbait and didn’t ask for anything more. It seemed like a good deal, and when it was finished, Ben said it was the best piece of art he’d ever done. He took a picture of it the last time I saw him, after I made my final payment.

  I got sick of the shelter after a couple of months—the earnest volunteers, the kids taking advantage of them, the stories they bragged about when adults weren’t listening. One night I just left. I walked around downtown, met a girl with a backpack and a dog, and shared some stale cinnamon rolls and a joint. Then I curled up in a blanket in a doorway, my duffel under my head, the dog at my feet, the girl a little older than me, huddled next to me.

  I can do this, I thought. For as long as I have to. The concrete was hard, and its cold crept into my bones, but I covered my head and had just about fallen asleep when I heard them. Three guys, laughing, standing over us, shadows against the streetlight.

  “Sluts.”

  “Need to be taught a lesson.”

  “They probably know all the lessons.” More laughing. The dog growled, rolled over, still asleep. I felt something poke at me, my shoulder, my stomach. “Wake up, little pussy. Company.”

  “Fuck off,” I answered, trying to sound tough.

  “That’s what we’ve got in mind,” one of them said.

  “Smiley, what’s happening?” Smiley was the street name I had decided on when my new friend told me I shouldn’t use my real name if I was escaping from something. Hers was Fingers. She was good with them, she said, in 7-Eleven’s candy and peanut butter aisles. “What’s happening?”

  I still needed to be tough, so I said, “These shits think we’ve got something they want.”

  Fingers sat up and reached for her dog. “One word and you’re his dinner.” The dog blinked, laid his head back down. The guys laughed, and one put his hand on Fingers’ breast. She swung at him and he caught her arm, pulled her up to standing. The other two moved in on me. One of them leaned down and breathed on my face. I could smell sour beer. “We could take them right here,” he said. His hand wandered over my body, landed on my hip, pressed against me. I wanted to scream, but other hands held me by my hair and throat, and all I could do was croak. I could hear Fingers swearing and saw the blackness of two bodies moving against the wall next to me.

  “Come on,” I heard him say. “Get it wet, darlin.’ I’m coming in.”

  Fingers’ “Like hell you…” was ended by the thunk of something hard against something hollow.

  “What the fuck.” The hand wrapped around my throat and hair loosened. The fingers poking at my body pulled away. I opened my eyes and saw punching arms, kicking legs, and flying bats. Fingers crouched at my side, the two of us watching the three thugs getting the shit kicked out of them.

  When it was all over, Fingers wasn’t crying l
ike I was. She just rolled up her stuff and said thank you to the batboys. “Take it easy, Smiley,” she said to me. “I’m out of here.” And she turned and walked up the street, the dog following at her side.

  Peter and Jimmy, their names were. Peter was tall and looked a little like Jake Gyllenhaal. Jimmy was round and sweaty. They were out patrolling, looking for lowlifes, they said.

  “You found them,” I answered. “Do I qualify as a low-life?” I meant the fact that I was sleeping in a doorway and had a name like Smiley and smelled like the pot I’d shared with Fingers.

  They helped me pick up my stuff and said they had a safe place for a girl like me, who would never be considered a lowlife no matter where she slept.

  I stop remembering stuff like this when I see the shoe in the leaves.

  Chapter Eleven

  Ellie

  September 2009

  The girl’s hiccupping sobs keep me moving fast, past Rick’s cart, down the hall, into the elevator, which for once is waiting for us. As the doors close, I punch the button and whisper, “Hold on and be quiet,” to a frightening slough-off of mascara. All the doors on my floor will be flinging open if she keeps up the noise. My neighbors love any distraction in their Meals On Wheels lives.

  I have my keys out of my pocket and into the locks just as her loudest wail flings itself down the hall. “Oh, God, I shouldn’t have left Peter there with those people.” Actually, there were no people, just a lot of leaves, I want to say, but I open the door instead. “Go wash your face while I phone.” I point to the bathroom door.