His dad was sitting on the couch but stood when Bryce walked in.
“Go ahead and put your things in the chair, son,” Keith Hool directed his boy.
Bryce did, switching his gaze between his parents every second or so. He put his backpack down, and slipped his jacket off. When he was done his father motioned him over to a spot near the coffee table. Bryce stood there, his father sitting back down on the couch. His mother joined him there, leaving Bryce alone and upright, facing his parents like they were some kind of two person court and he was some kind of...
And then he noticed the wrinkled stack of papers on the coffee table, and the rumpled ball of his blue sweatshirt next to it. And he understood—evidence.
...criminal.
His heart did a quick dance in his chest. They’re sending me back. They don’t want me any more. Just like that Jimmy Vincent. My parents don’t even want to know me any more. I’m going to go away somewhere.
He was both right and wrong.
“Bryce,” his father said, and looked his son straight in the eye. “Do you see what’s on the table here?”
“Yes, dad.” Dad. How much longer would he be calling him that? ‘Smile big, Bryce, and maybe we can find you a new dad.’
“Your mother found this part of your story when she was cleaning up.” Bryce stared at the sheets, wrinkles crawling the face of the top one. “She showed it to me along with the sweatshirt you were wearing on Halloween night. I was very...troubled by what I saw.” Keith Hool thought over his words again and said, “I am very troubled, Bryce. Your mother is too.”
Bryce’s eyes stayed fixed on the wrinkles, some carved into the page like tiny valleys, others rising like the knife-edge ridges of miniature mountain ranges. For a second a childish fantasy gripped him and he saw himself living in the wild, roaming real mountains and real valleys, sleeping in caves or hollowed-out trees. Making fires from deadfall, because that was the smart way to make a fire. Because dead wood burned best. His dad had taught him that. His dad had tried to teach him a lot.
“We want you to do something,” Caroline Hool said.
Pack? Bryce wondered. It wouldn’t take long; whatever he had they, the Hools, had given him. He could leave everything behind. Everything but the things inside. The things that you never saw, but you felt. Those things were rocks deep within right now. Rocks that, somehow, had come alive as simple reminders of their presence. Rocks that throbbed now. Throbbed like organs, alive like his heart or some other piece of vital flesh, pounding instead in protest. Bryce looked at his father and mother. ‘They taught you right and wrong. I’m that big rock. Conscience.’ Or, ‘You don’t make fun of people because of who they are, or what they look like, or lots of other things. You don’t tease PJ. You feel for her. I’m that rock next to your conscience. I’m empathy.’ It was only a second’s time after his mother told him they wanted him to do something, but in that brief span Bryce felt all that the people who had become his parents had given him. He felt the weight of it. The value.
Maybe like never before, or ever again.
“What do you want me to do?”
Keith Hool motioned to the hall and tried to look stern. “We want you to go to your room.”
Huh? “My room?”
“Yes,” Keith Hool confirmed. Now he pointed that way. “You’ll understand.”
Bryce looked to his mom for an explanation, but she had looked away.
“Go on, Bryce,” his father said.
Bryce’s gaze turned toward his room first, then his body. He started down the dim hall, glancing back once to find his mother collapsed onto his father’s lap, his arms around her. His feet settled into the carpet softly with each purposeful step and he heard a muffled whimper behind. His mother, he knew.
She’s crying. Why? He had stopped right outside his room, the door shut. He wondered if all his stuff was boxed up or something, and they just wanted him to see it rather than tell him directly. But then why was his mom crying?
Bryce turned the knob and pushed the door. It swung in until fully opened, smacking lightly against the bookshelf tucked into the corner. He could see the whole room, all his things where they should be, nothing packed as if to be sent away. No, he could see everything, including the man sitting in a chair by the window. The kiddie catcher.
“Hello,” Dooley said, looking away from the gray outside.
Bryce stared at the detective for a moment, then his head turned slowly to look back down the hall, toward the living room where his mother’s whimper was now a sob buried against his father’s chest. They’re turning me in...
“Don’t be mad at them, Bryce.” Dooley waited for the burning eyes to turn his way. They soon did. “They’re not doing this to get you in trouble.” He motioned for Bryce to come in.
Stiffly, Bryce entered, feeling alien in his own room. He stopped at the side of the bed farthest from Dooley and glared at him. Real parents wouldn’t do this.
“They asked me to come here so you won’t get in trouble.”
Bryce nodded doubtfully. “Sure.”
“They care about you.”
“Yeah,” Bryce agreed, nothing behind what he spoke. Just plain old sound.
“I’m going to tell you three things.” Dooley stood from the chair and walked to the far end of Bryce’s room, to the long, deep shelf that served as desk and depository for items large and small. Books. Half an egg carton, its depressions filled with rich, dark soil that buds were just emerging from. A lamp. Two dozen or so plastic army men piled together. Pens. Pencils. Dooley picked a bright yellow number 2 up and twirled it in his fingers. “One, your parents love you. They’re not abandoning you because of this.”
Bryce watched the detective sideways. There was a hitch in his breathing now, tweaking air in and out in little spurts. He could still hear his mother in the living room. Just barely, but enough. She was sniffling now.
“Two,” Dooley went on, dropping the pencil and moving along the shelf, “I don’t think you killed Guy.”
Bryce’s head turned fully toward Dooley now, facing him. The anger drained from his eyes. The burning was gone, replaced by a warmth that made him blink quickly and sniffle himself. He drew a sleeve across his upper lip and swallowed hard.
“Three,” Dooley said, his fingers tracing over the cool, checked surface of something half familiar on the shelf. Same landscape, different players. To some it was a game. To others it was a test of strength, a test of cunning. A test of wills. His eyes came up from the chess board and settled easily on Bryce, and he began again, “Three, I’m not going to ask you anything about Guy, or what happened to him.”
Bryce blinked the blur from his eyes and skeptically considered the detective. He shook his head and said, “That’s the only reason you’re here, to find out who killed Guy.”
“That’s right, but I’m not going to ask.”
Again Bryce wiped his nose with his sleeve. “So why are you here then?”
“Just to get to know you. Your parents thought it would be a good idea.” Dooley glanced down at the chess board. “We didn’t have time for a game the other day. How about now?”
Bryce sniffed deeply and looked nervously around. This was all too strange. Unsettling. He felt like he’d just been put in a bottle and shaken until up and down and right and left had little meaning. Add to that maybe right and wrong. Or loyalty and treachery. Or friend and rat.
Bryce watched Dooley bring the chair by the window over to the shelf, and pull out the one tucked into the hollow desk space where he wrote his stories in longhand. He thought of the story pages he’d tossed toward the wastebasket, and about knowing they had missed. And he thought about seeing them on the floor near the computer desk. And he wondered why he didn’t pick them up and tear them up and burn them all and flush the ashes down the toilet. He wondered it now, just as he’d wondered it then as he stared at the balled up ramblings that had invaded The Sun Beam.
I knew she cleaned up after me
. I knew she’d find them.
But knowing wasn’t the issue.
Bryce watched the detective, the man, the Kiddie Catcher, turn the two chairs to face each other next to the chess board. Watched him fiddle with the pieces, moving the pawns to their rank, placing the queen and king correct, the knights and bishops wrong. That could change the game. Change the game completely.
Maybe I wanted her to find them, and read them, and...understand.
“How about it?” Dooley suggested. He sat and spun the dark pieces toward the empty chair. “I’ll let you be smoke.”
“That’s checkers,” Bryce corrected.
Dooley nodded and pushed the empty chair out with his foot. “See how much I know. You’ll probably beat me in no time.”
Bryce stood there for a moment, staring at the misplaced pieces, thinking about the story, his parents, his sisters, his (real?) family, the Kiddie Catcher, and his...friends.
“Well?” Dooley said.
And suddenly it all seemed like nothing. Or he let it seem like nothing. And the Kiddie Catcher was just a detective, was just a man, was just a guy in his room waiting to play a game of chess. Acting like he just wanted to play a game.
“You’ve got some of the pieces wrong,” Bryce said, and went over to the board. He switched the knights and bishops and sat down and they began to play.
Thirty
She strolled haughtily past the jewelry case once, then back a second time, and finally stopped before the display of earrings glinting beneath the glass. Maybe some of them were diamonds— the really small ones, most likely —but Mandy knew, was quite positive, thank you, that the ones throwing off the shine like a roman candle threw sparks were umpteen carat fakes. All show, and that was all. She bent forward to read the tiny price tags of some and stood back up again with her nose crinkled, her pretty face swaying back and forth.
“Overpriced, overpriced, overpriced,” she said softly to herself, not wanting the sales lady helping a very old woman nearby to hear her. She wasn’t rude, after all. Just surprised that Gorton’s Department Store had the gall to charge that much for cheap, imitation jewelry.
Mandy had things much prettier than those at home.
She looked back toward the transaction unfolding between the old woman and the pudgy sales lady not far behind her in years. The sales lady was holding a pair of earrings, dangling in tandem from their stiff, dark velvet backing. Cheap earrings like the ones Mandy had just examined. Cheap and overpriced. But the old woman was eyeing them hungrily.
“They highlight the blue in your eyes,” the sales lady told her, holding them next to the woman’s cheek.
Blue my tiny little ass, Mandy thought. The old woman had a long, red-tipped cane in hand, necessary because her eyes were fogged with cataracts, opaque— not blue —like a skim of nonfat milk on glass.
“Do you think so?” the old woman asked wantingly.
“Of course...not,” Mandy muttered to herself as she walked away from the jewelry counter. If she stayed any longer she would bust out laughing, and that would be rude. Funny as Hades, but rude.
She left the cases of false twinklings behind and moseyed over to a pair of spinable towers rising from the floor near the racks of handbags. Sunglasses sprouted from the towers like the leaves of some stalky plant that held its growth close. Dark, reflective bug eyes stared back at Mandy. She gave one display tower a gentle spin and it began to twirl slowly, creaking at its base and wobbling easily like a top losing its momentum. The stacked bug eyes blurred by row after row, each one capturing her face and flashing it back like a movie shown piecemeal, one dim frame at a time. The face stuttering back at her was frowning.
Mandy turned away. There was no need for frowns. This was a happy day. Saturday. The weekend. Time to get out. Time for fun. She walked away from the towers spinning to a stop and felt her nose crinkle as the scent hit her.
Perfume. Her nose guided her eyes to the counter where bottles were set out, caps off, the fragrances within waiting to be sampled. The smile she’d put on to quash the frown became real as she sniffed the air again. Pretty. It smelled pretty.
Pretty like my drawings, she thought, heading for the perfume counter, then said softly, “Pretty like me.”
* * *
“All right, Bobby,” Vicky Allenton said, putting a hand on her little boy’s head and aiming it away from the football helmets strategically stacked high on a nearby shelf. “Do you like these?” Her hand twisted his head like a dial a few degrees right, at a second pair of shoes she’d pulled from the box; black high tops with some off-brand design on the side. “Or these?” Another turn, this time toward a white canvas model. “Or these?” Finally, a brown pair with hard soles and a 75% off sticker on the box.
Bobby stared sourly at the final choice. “I don’t like those.”
Standing behind her little brother, one hand on each shoulder as her mother knelt at his feet, PJ said, “Get him the black high tops.”
Vicky Allenton eyed the price on the box she’d taken those from. “Five bucks more than the brown ones.”
“He’ll look stupid in those,” PJ said. “Get him the high tops.”
Bobby pointed at the white canvas sneakers. “I want those.”
“These?” Vicky Allenton asked, taking the indicated pair in hand. These were only a buck more than the brown ones. She looked up at her daughter. “These are good...”
PJ frowned. “They’re white, mom. In two weeks they’ll look filthy. The black ones won’t show the dirt.”
“I can wash these,” Vicky Allenton said, and shook the shoes giddily in front of her son’s face. Bobby giggled and grabbed at them, his mother moving them left and right, and up and down, like a trainer working on a fighter’s jabs.
It looked like that, and like something else. Something old, PJ thought. Something familiar.
She had done this. She had been here, doing almost the same thing. At five or six, sitting on the same bench in the shoe department of Gorton’s Department Store, only then it hadn’t been black high tops or canvas sneakers. Then her mother, kneeling on the floor as she was now, had been trying to get PJ to choose between a cheap pair of oxfords and a cheaper pair of patent leather flats with tassels. PJ hadn’t wanted either, so her mother chose the patent leather flats. The patent leather flats that turned out to be more plastic than leather and melted when her mother got the bright idea that she could wash and dry them to keep them clean. She thought any dirt could be gotten rid of with a good wash.
PJ recalled the moment as if it were just a week or two ago, not the five or six years it had been. Except for the giddy joy Bobby was getting out of it, it was like then was now. Nothing had changed.
She was suddenly sad, and close on the heels of that angry. Angry at herself for letting herself be sad. It wouldn’t always be like this. It wouldn’t.
‘You’re so bright. So strong. Don’t put your energy into your fists. Put it into your dreams.’
She had doubted Miss Austin the first time she’d told her that. Then she began to believe.
And she still believed. Was trying hard to believe.
“Mom, can I look around?”
Vicky Allenton skipped the knots her little boy had tied into his laces and simply pulled the shoes off, telling her daughter without looking, “Don’t talk to any weirdoes.”
“I’m not a baby, mom.”
“Ten minutes,” Vicky said, dumping the old shoes into the empty box and slipping one of the white canvas sneakers on her little boy’s foot. “How’s that, my baby?”
PJ left her mother and brother and strolled up one of the aisles, past shelves of toys that she glanced at, but not wantingly. She knew not to want what she could not have. Mostly.
She turned when it would have been better to go straight, down to the displays of boxed dolls that stared blankly, happily through plastic film. Those were no problem. Dolls had never been her thing, so she could have easily just walked on by, or possibly taken
one down and pulled the string that poked conveniently from the box. ‘Mommy, I want a bottle.’ Or, ‘Mommy, change me.’ That would be good for a laugh, a baby old enough to talk that needed a bottle and its diaper changed. A perfect, innocent, happy distraction.
Other things, though, that should have been as harmless were not. Not for her. These things she could have no more than the shiny, homeless toys advertised during cartoons and next to the cereal coupons her mother clipped but never seemed to use. But these other things she dreamed of. These other things she wanted.
The aisles of shelves gave way to an open space forested by circular racks of clothing, one after another, on and on toward the cosmetics section her mother visited every other week to replenish her stock. PJ strolled first down the wide center path, boys clothes to the left, girls to the right. She’d begged her mother for overalls from the boy’s section years before, and a Green Bay Packers sweatshirt to go with it. And Converse high tops.
She’d gotten none of it, and now it seemed silly. Wanting new boys clothes so bad. She had plenty of jeans and overalls and baseball jerseys from the PTA thrift store up on Roman. Enough now that her entire wardrobe could be swapped with Joey, or with Michael, and little would be different, other than the patches sewn into the knees and the mismatched buttons on the straps of the overalls.
Yes, she had plenty of those clothes. But now she was thinking...differently.
She waded slowly to the right, between racks of dresses and skirts hanging prettily, and jeans cut more for girls than boys, and blouses with pads in the shoulders and frills where frills should be. PJ wasn’t sure about the frills, but the rest...well, she could actually see herself wearing them. She thought they’d look...nice on her. And that she’d look...pretty in them. Pretty.
Her hands reached out, fingers feeling the clothes as she moved through the racks. Soft and fresh, she thought. And new. So new. New in many ways.
Past long dresses and short dresses. By turtlenecks and vests with colorful veins embroidered with beads across the front. PJ brushed them and wished. Wished that she could have them. Not all, but some. Enough so she would look like...like...
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