I woke up to the sound of eggs sizzling. When I opened my eyes, the girl smiled at me. “Tryin’ to say thanks. Thanks with cholesterol and fat.” She scooped the eggs onto a plate and handed it to me.
“Thanks.” I stabbed the fluffy white pieces and shoveled them into my mouth. They weren’t quite cooked enough but I was too hungry to care. “So you ever gonna tell me your name?”
“Jordyn. It’s Jordyn.”
She sat back on the bed and watched me eat. Occasionally, she would squeeze her giant eyes tight, and I could tell her head was still bothering her. “So, if you work for Maureen, what were you doing with that guy?”
She leaned back against the wall and crossed her arms across her chest. “I tried to work at the house, I really did. But I couldn’t do it. I mean, I could do it…but not there.”
“Why not?”
Jordyn flexed her bare toes, and I wondered if she realized I could see up her dress. “The denial. I couldn’t deal with the denial.” Suddenly, she crossed her legs into a seated position, and then I knew for sure that she didn’t care that I could see up her dress. “I know what I am. And I’m okay with that. But to be around a bunch of people pretending to be some sort of upper class trophy toys that men get to play with one night a week is ridiculous.” Jordyn seemed to stare into nowhere. “Sure, Maureen said she picks all of us because we’re talented and strong, real prizes—I’m the token ballet dancer, by the way—but those guys don’t give two shits if we can play the violin or recite our ABCs. All they want is between our legs, and to pretend otherwise makes me ill.”
Jordyn hopped up and stared out the window and into the streets below us. “Anyways, so I asked Maureen if I could still sleep there after I was done working. Still have a bed, but earn my way in places outside the house. That’s how I ended up in that alley. There’s a hotel a couple blocks from there. He followed me. Wanted a second round for free.” She paced back toward the kitchen, snagging my plate along the way. “A real jackass that one.”
I looked at her. “I’m so sorry that happened to you.”
“Don’t be,” she laughed, like almost being raped and having her skull cracked against a wall instead was no big deal. “Part of the job. Better than starvation, I guarantee that.”
I didn’t know what to say. It saddened my heart to hear such a young girl talk about having sex for money like it was nothing.
It hurt even more when I realized that if my father hadn’t been so wealthy, I may have ended up a drug dealer, or worse, much sooner.
I didn’t want to be thankful for anything related to that man, especially since finding out that he had been one of those disgusting men taking those girls behind the curtains at Maureen’s place. The noises I desperately wanted to shut out had once come from him, not some strangers between the fabric and my post.
After Jordyn left, I had time to think about what happened to Dom. What happened to him was my fault. Maybe it wasn’t my fists plummeting into his ribs, but it might as well have been. They were trying to scare me.
It worked.
But I couldn’t tell them where we had buried Keegan’s brother. They would never stop after that. Once they had what they wanted, it would be all out war with Maureen: no boundaries, nothing to make them hesitate. I doubted they would even let her make it to the holding cell.
I wondered why they hadn’t come after me directly. Perhaps because Dom was at their mercy in jail. Maybe they wanted the information from Maureen because she was smaller than they were. Why not me?
The answer snapped into my brain like an electric shock: they were scared.
I never dreamed of a day when anyone, let alone a group of police officers, would be frightened of me. But they had seen what I did at the warehouse. Maybe they figured out what happened to my father too. Maybe they had found the blood on our basement floor.
Either way, they weren’t coming after me.
Now, after last night, they would find another dead man, sent out of this world by my hand, lying in that alley like a terrible gift, something else that they could hold over my head. I felt like I was being surrounded, and they were inching closer with every mistake.
However, I wouldn’t call saving Jordyn a mistake.
I almost didn’t hear the knock at the apartment door. When I opened it, a flock of little faces stared back at me. Nick spoke first. “Where’s she at?”
I put my hand on his shoulder. “I’m sorry, Nick, she left early this morning.” A collective groan came from all the children. “How about a nice breakfast to make it up to you?” The children smiled. Leave it to food to distract them from losing their new toy.
When they were all seated with a plate of toast and a hard-boiled egg, I turned on the radio, softly, always softly, just in case. As always, the woman was there talking about the bill. I wondered if the children knew about it.
Alexis piped up, “Is that where we get to go?”
I smiled. “Yes, you’ll all go there together once the bill gets passed.”
Felix stared at me. “You’re coming too, right?”
I wasn’t prepared for that question. Of course, I wouldn’t be able to go with them, but a part of me didn’t think they would care. They’d miss me as long as it took to walk through the door into their new home and then I would be forgotten. I didn’t expect to actually be asked. “I can’t live there, no, but I’ll come visit.”
“A lot?” Alexis asked.
“Yeah.”
I hoped she couldn’t tell I was lying.
Before I could go on my shift that night, I heard a pounding on our front door. The kids were already in the basement fast asleep, and as I looked out the window, I prayed I didn’t see Officer Keegan hovering on our porch.
It was Maureen, flanked by two of her girls.
“Hello. Come on in.”
As I pulled the door open, Maureen grabbed the knob from me and slammed it shut. “I don’t need to come in.” She glared at me. “What the hell were you doing with Jordyn?”
I didn’t answer, I just looked at her.
“Well? No answer? I told you, my girls are off limits. You can have all the brats you want but leave my girls alone.” She leaned in. “You did the one thing I asked you not to do. AND you blew off your shift. I’m not someone you get to blow off whenever you feel like it.”
“Maureen, come on. I saved her life.”
She stepped back. “What are you talking about?”
Jordyn didn’t tell her.
“What do you mean what am I talking about? You didn’t see that gash on her head? Some guy attacked her in that alley over there. I just happened to walk by.” I paused, expecting her to say something.
She didn’t.
“Dom…Father Dominic is in the hospital. I had to go see him. When I was on my way back I heard Jordyn screaming.”
She just stared at me. The girls next to her looked at each other, confused. Finally, she spoke. “Well, you’re still late for your shift, so let’s go.”
No apology, nothing. But her rudeness was so typical of her that it made me smile.
I followed them back toward the house.
A month passed by without incident, though every time I left the church, I felt watched, exposed. Not to mention, I felt sick in the pit of my stomach every time I had to leave the children alone. The only consolation I had was that they were in the basement. I didn’t like the idea of them being down there for so long, but the second they exposed themselves, Keegan would make sure they were punished for dealing the drugs they were forced to sell.
And the children were expert at hiding themselves away.
The morning I saw Dom pull up in a taxi was one of the best and worst moments of my life. It came with the giddy anticipation that all the children in Christmas movies felt, along with the hovering dread that someone feels right before they leave home for the last time, which was exactly what I was afraid he would make me do.
I just told him I had something to show him.
A few words swirled around in my head, but none seemed to be quite right. There really wasn’t a good way to tell a priest—as far as I was concerned, that was exactly what he was; I didn’t need a piece of paper to prove it—that I had bought children with heroin and they were now living on cots in his church basement.
He had to lean on me as we took one stair at a time. His ribs were better but still too tender to put too much weight on. Each stair creaked individually, filling the basement one by one. “Cain, what’s this about?”
I flipped on the lights.
Eyes like blinking lights stared at him from their cots. The children all sat on their mattresses, cross-legged and smiling. Of course, Nick was the first one to come greet Dom. “Father, I’m so happy to see you!” Dominic winced as Nick threw his small arms around him.
Dominic hugged him back, but didn’t smile. “Cain, what is this?”
Before I could answer, each child came up and gave him a hug, introducing themselves in the process. Dominic knelt down and shook each of their hands, nodding and saying something to each of them: “I love your hat” or “what big blue eyes,” something to make each of them feel special. I thought I had maybe seen just a hint of a smile, but by the time he turned to me, it had vanished. “Let’s go upstairs.”
Dom didn’t say anything until we got up to the apartment. I could swear I felt him get angrier with me with each painful step. Finally, after the door was closed, he spoke.
I had hoped he would yell. It was what I was used to. Instead, he whispered. He whispered in the quiet, hissing way that makes you feel more shitty than yelling ever could. The first words from his lips were, “What have you done?”
“Dom, these children, they were selling drugs. Nick was selling drugs. I couldn’t just let it happen. But I couldn’t just take them away from it without giving them somewhere else to go. So I took them here.”
“How did you get them in the first place?”
I stood still. His face had hardened and I wondered if he was about to hate me forever. I sucked in a breath. “From Maureen.”
Dom reached out to the kitchen counter to steady himself. “Maureen? Maureen Black?” He paused, and I could see it all coming together in his mind. “She’s the girl they were talking about, isn’t she?”
“Yes.”
Dom swallowed hard. “What did you do to get her to agree to this? If they sold drugs for her, she would have to—”
He didn’t need to finish his sentence. “Dear Lord…you did it instead, didn’t you?”
I swore I saw his eyes gloss over, and I felt my own heart breaking. “It was all I could think of. I couldn’t leave them. I’m sorry.”
Dom didn’t say anything more. He just sat down in his chair and stared out the window.
I waited. I knew the bed no longer belonged to me, so I sat on the floor across from him, bending my knees up to my chest.
I didn’t dare make eye contact, not yet, so I stared at his feet and waited for him to speak. I thought to myself, so this is it, this is when you have to leave again, back to the rain-soaked clothes and the unfriendly faces of the street. I thought about seeing if I could stay with Maureen, but she barely trusted me, and I wasn’t about to ask her to take care of me too.
I could pretend. I could wander during the day, and work for her at night. Maybe she wouldn’t know. Maybe I could hide it.
But what about the children?
Dom would never throw them out, that much was true. But they couldn’t hide forever. I didn’t want to save them from a dangerous life only to give them no life at all.
That bill needed to get passed. That was the only answer. We needed to survive long enough to be able to take the kids to a boarding school where they would be safe from Keegan, safe from all of it.
We just needed to hold on a little longer.
I didn’t realize I had fallen asleep until the sun peeked through the curtain. I awoke with a start, and my body ached from being frozen in one position on the hard ground. I strained to untangle myself, stretching my legs out across from me.
Dom was still in his chair, eyes wide open. It seemed as if he hadn’t moved from the night before. When he noticed me, his lips opened to speak. Like so many months before, I braced for impact. In my mind, I had already put my shoes on.
“Well, we better get those kids up here and get them some breakfast.” Stiffly, he got up and headed toward the kitchen.
I threw my arms around him, just like the children from the night before. “Thank you.”
Dom managed a weak smile. “This is a church after all, right? Helping people is pretty much the point.”
I grabbed our skillet and started on some eggs.
One of the best moments of my life had been that first breakfast with Dom and the children. Back in my parents’ house, I would keep my head down. Maybe my mother and father would spit a few words back and forth at each other, but not me. I didn’t have any desire to tell them what I was up to that day, what art project we were making at school, or whom I planned to play with at recess. Breakfast for me was just a way to feed myself and to stay alive.
But not that morning. The purpose of that meal was to bring joy to a group of people who had suffered more than anyone had a right to. That morning, I found myself laughing as the children each tried to impress Dom with a story. Of course, he always gasped at whatever feat of triumph they claimed, high-fiving them or shaking their hands.
Nick sat next to him and the smile never left either of their faces. Nick had the expression of someone who was reunited with the only person he’d ever loved, who’d ever offered any comfort returned to him.
With a start, I remembered that the woman on the TV had a press conference planned for that morning. I threw my fork on my plate and flipped on the small set that sat on the kitchen counter.
Her voice roared. In my heart, I knew that something had changed.
“I promise you, I will fight for this. This bill was supposed to help the children who needed it most, and no one needs it more than those who are flooding the streets, forced into gangs because they have nowhere else to go. This was going to give them somewhere to go.”
Nick piped up, “What’s she talking about?”
I hushed him.
The woman was cut off, replaced with a tall gray-haired man that slightly resembled my father in the tone of his voice and the way he threw back his shoulders.
I immediately knew he was trouble.
“The children of gangs are beyond help. We can’t have them tainting the progress we make at the boarding schools. Unfortunately, gang children have become criminals. We wish we could have reached them in time, but there comes a point where we must choose to save the children we can, and make sure they are not corrupted by those we can’t.”
My stomach leaped into my throat.
“Our police will be on high alert, their primary mission to cleanse the streets of gangs and the children that they have unfortunately brought into their lifestyle. When this bill passes and becomes law, we can’t afford to waste our resources. We will make D.C. safe again. That is all.”
The microphone clicked off.
The children were all talking to me as I slammed the apartment door closed. I ran out into the street, not sure where I was running to. Maybe I was just running from them or the situation that I created, from which I had no escape. Where would we go? Living between the walls of a basement was no life for a child. But it was only a matter of time before Dom’s parishioners would find out that he was in jail and why. Even the church couldn’t be our refuge anymore.
“Beyond help?”
The anger tingled through my skin as I thought about the gray-haired man. The woman on the television had come up with the idea of the bill, but it was the people in the government who would eventually decide what to do with it. Whoever that man was, he had destroyed the hope that the woman had given us, and all that was left in his wake was silence.
I think inside I knew where
I was heading, but I didn’t know on the surface until I was standing on her doorstep. Maureen opened the door ever so slightly, saw it was me, and quickly rushed me inside. “You have to come with us.”
She folded her arms across her chest. “What in the world are you talking about? It’s too early for non-specifics.”
It was hard to concentrate when she was standing there in a silk blue shirt nightgown that barely brushed the top of her knees.
“The bill. It was passed, but not for gang kids. If we turn over the children, they’ll throw them in jail. We have to go.”
Maureen sucked in her breath. “Go where?”
“No idea.” I sat down on her stairs and rested my head in my hands. She sat down next to me. I felt her hand hover over my back, but she took it away before it fell. “I don’t know what to do. Dom’s life is over as he knows it. I managed to fuck that right up. And for what? The kids are screwed anyway.”
“Don’t say that. Something will turn up. You just need to keep them safe for a little longer, that’s all.” She sighed. “I know I’ve never told you, but I do admire what you’re doing.”
I looked at her. “Really. I told myself I was giving them an alternative to foraging through garbage to survive, and I was. But you…you’re going to give them a chance at a life.”
“How?”
“Don’t know yet. But you will.”
With that, I wrapped my arms around her. I half expected her to pull away, but she didn’t. She stiffened for just a second, but I didn’t let go, and finally she leaned her head on my shoulder. We just sat there, listening to the clinking dishes in the kitchen and the street traffic outside. For that moment, I let myself think that maybe we would figure it out.
I knew something was wrong when I saw Dom standing on the porch as I ran up the street and back to the church. He had shut the door behind him, and his face had stiffened into an expression reserved for emergencies. “Nick’s missing.”
Between the Cracks and Burning Doors: Book 2 of The Extraction List Series Page 9
