by Audrey Faye
I saw Keenan’s joyous boogie dance out of the corner of my eye. The rest of me was busy watching the hulking giant pick up his giggling daughter by the legs as she dug the ball out of the net.
In the way of informal games, Keenan and his dad hopped into goal next. I saw the grin they exchanged. Two against the world, and happy about it. The kind of afternoon that normal, happy childhoods are made of.
Rosie leaned forward, peering out the van window. “What am I looking at?”
I figured that was pretty obvious. “A soccer game.”
She raised a wry eyebrow my direction.
I gave in. “The two in goal. Keenan and his dad. His mom, Amy Lynn, is over on the sidelines sitting in the red chair.” Nursing a big soda and an even bigger smile. Watching her guys. It hadn’t always been that way. “They were really young, got pregnant, he lost his job. Lots of stress, and he had some friends with dumb ideas about what it means to be a grown-up.”
After three years of that, Amy Lynn had found us.
We’d gone after the twenty-two-year-old screw-up who had fathered Keenan—and found him sneaking into a corner store behind a dude with a baseball bat in his hands. Fortunately for Keenan’s dad, he’d been more scared of Carly’s knife than of his friend with the bat.
Rosie raised an eyebrow. “You scared him straight?” She eyed the guy in goal as he ruffled his son’s hair. “That straight?”
I shrugged. “You asked for our success stories.” They didn’t all turn out that way.
Amy Lynn got up from her red chair, looking back over her shoulder and moving our direction. Carly hastily waved her hands at Rosie to back the van away.
Thy gypsy pulled out of the parking lot and cast an inquiring look at the rearview mirror.
Carly shrugged. “We don’t want her to see us. She doesn’t know we’re still watching.”
Keenan’s dad didn’t, either. The best changes are the ones you own all the way through.
I breathed in as we made our way out of town, feeling the way my ribs moved a little freer, a little lighter. Maybe this hope tour wasn’t an entirely dumb idea.
Given that Rosie hadn’t been in the van most of the last three years, she could probably use a tour guide. One who wasn’t sulking. I reached up and touched her arm. “Take the next left.”
Carly’s head swiveled. “Where are we going now?”
I offered a one-shouldered shrug in reply. She’d see soon enough.
This time, we’d even get out of the van.
-o0o-
Carly, who was leading file, pulled off the path by the playground, keeping us in the shadows. I could see her eyes counting.
I could have told her they were all there. Glynnis looked far too relaxed for it to be otherwise.
A young boy with a mop of sandy hair sticking out from under a baseball cap flew off the end of the slide and headed our way at full tilt. “Miss Carly!”
She crouched down, arms out and laughing, as Moses launched himself and knocked them both over into the wood chips.
“Moses Washington Bright, you cut that out.” Glynnis was shaking her head and huffing our way, her steps full of exasperation and her eyes full of welcome. “I told you you’re way too big now to keep doing that. You could have broken Miss Carly’s ribs.”
“She’s fine.” Moses bounced on my partner’s chest a couple of times to prove his point. “And she’s really glad to see me.”
I could see Rosie surveying the kids. Eleven of them, from every color of the human rainbow.
Glynnis lifted Moses with one hand and pulled Carly to her feet with the other. “Sorry about that. I didn’t know you were coming to visit.”
My partner laid a smacking kiss on the boy’s cheek and laughed as he pretended to gag. “Unscheduled stop—I hope we didn’t interrupt anything.”
“There’s always something to interrupt around here.” The woman corralling Moses gave us a careful look. “You have a package for me?”
“Not today.” I shook my head, noting the thinly disguised, careful attentiveness all over the playground. Eleven kids who had grown up way too fast. “You need anything?”
Glynnis was shaking her head before I finished. “Not a thing.”
“You do so.” Moses looked up at us, eyes fierce. “Minnie grew out of her shoes and Jack needed a new coat and Thimble got really good at this stuff at school so they want her to play an instrument and she picked a trumpet and Glynnis took all the money she was saving for her fancy day and spent it.”
“Moses!” Said in the instant-obedience tones of a woman who herded eleven children every day—and had just been embarrassed down to the soles of her lime-green sneakers.
The kid wasn’t even paying her any attention. His eyes were glued to the three of us. “She goes and has her toenails painted silly colors and they put goop on her face and stuff. For a whole four hours, and it’s the only time in the whole year she gets to remember that she’s a person and not warden to a bunch of little crazies. That’s us,” he added unnecessarily.
Glynnis looked like she wanted the earth to crack open and swallow her up. “It doesn’t matter.”
Carly just raised one firm assassin eyebrow. “How much?”
“You can’t pay for them to paint my toes.” Said in tones of pure, whispered horror.
My partner was already pulling money out of her pocket. “Not gonna.” She eyed Glynnis. “I’m paying for shoes and a coat and because you are clearly insane, for a trumpet, too.” Carly handed the money to Moses. “Think that’s enough, hot stuff?”
He surveyed the bills with the expert gaze of a kid who knew way too much about what things cost. “Yeah, that should do it.” He grinned at Carly. “Thanks.”
My partner made a solid attempt to drop a kiss on his cheek again, and narrowly avoided a solid punch to the nose. Then she wrapped him in a headlock and looked at Glynnis. “Next time, don’t make him tell me.”
“You already do plenty.”
I knew a stubborn face-off to the death when I saw one. I leaned over and whispered in Moses’ ear. The kid had spent a few months living under a bookie’s stairs—he remembered numbers like nobody’s business.
He nodded solemnly. One minion, accepting his duties.
Glynnis had expanded her glare to include me. “What did you tell him?”
I turned to beat a hasty retreat—and smiled sweetly over my shoulder when I figured I was a safe distance away. “Carly’s cell phone number.”
Spluttering followed us all the way back to the van.
“Are any of those kids hers?” asked Rosie quietly, turning for one more look as she climbed in the driver’s side.
All of them. And none of them.
“Glynnis is kind of like the ghetto version of Mother Teresa.” Carly waved out her window at Moses, who was gesticulating wildly from the top of the slide. “She takes in runners.”
Rosie looked confused.
My turn. “Kids who run away repeatedly. Usually there’s abuse, but sometimes it’s hard to prove.”
She looked horrified. “Moses is what, six?”
Terror didn’t wait for kids to grow up first. “He had more reasons to run than most of the other kids combined.” And better hiding skills—it had taken us almost two weeks to track him down. Fortunately, the kid had a serious weakness for French fries with spicy mustard.
“So, wait.” The sexy gypsy was still catching up. “You find these kids, save them from hell, and hand them over to Glynnis?”
“We’ve only brought her three—she’s plenty good at finding them herself.” Something we gave her shit for regularly. She had too many people depending on her to be skulking in dark alleyways.
“And nobody notices they went missing?”
Nobody we wanted to find them. “She keeps them off the radar.” I watched Rosie’s eyes carefully. It was one of our grayer areas. Technically, what Glynnis did was considered kidnapping in a whole bunch of states. We weren’t the only ones
who worked outside the law to do what was right.
Some of the reasons we might end up behind bars one day were really important ones.
Rosie watched the road a long time. “Those kids are really lucky to have you.”
I shook my head. “They’re really lucky to have Glynnis. She lives in the trenches with them—we just buy trumpets.”
Carly snorted. “She’s so not going to thank us for that.”
She didn’t have to. Two minutes with Moses took care of that every damn time.
12
I sat on the saggier of the two beds in our stingy room, trying not to feel like a third wheel.
On the other bed, Carly’s hand had slipped quietly into Rosie’s, and the sexy gypsy nestled her head on my partner’s shoulder.
It was the accountants’ fault. They were having a convention, and they’d booked up every last motel room in the state except for this one.
My fingers twitched. Hanging out this close to the jam-up of hope and hammering futility on the other bed was going to make me crazy. I needed a guitar. Music helped me think. Writing it helped me think even more.
It was a weapon I’d put down for far too long.
I shook my head and squished my pillow viciously. If I was letting thoughts like that loose, Rosie’s little tour had stirred up a lot of very dangerous crap.
The sexy gypsy had a flair for stirring pots. I just wasn’t at all sure to do with what she had simmering. It was good to remember why we did this—right until it smacked us back into the brick wall of Turking and his threats.
I sighed, pulled over a couple more pillows, and tried to veer away from thinking about that particular asshole just yet. I wanted to let some of what Rosie had stirred up percolate first because she was right about one thing—if I did anything at all well, it was letting random dots connect, and that just isn’t possible from under an avalanche of fury and fear.
I was in a strange, uncomfortable, prickly place tonight, but I was no longer buried alive. I owed it to Moses and Keenan and Lelo and Carly and the softly humming woman holding her to try to stay that way. To try to let whatever wisdom I might have bubble its way up from the ooze. My muse had helped with that once upon a time. Tonight I’d just have to do it the hard way.
I closed my eyes, replaying the day in my head. The helpless, listless breakfast. The miles on the road and the blinking signposts along the way—because today had been more than just a tour of hope. The backs of my eyelids could see that clearly enough.
Keenan had been happiness, pure and simple. A dad who had figured out how to keep his promises, a woman who had lost the fear in her eyes, and a boy who had never had fear land in his. A family righted. It didn’t get a whole lot better than that.
We could have kept showing Rosie those stories. I had a whole photo album’s worth of them, and plenty that had never made it onto paper. But as I curled on the bed, contemplating our day, it was clear my tour guiding had headed us off somewhere else.
Moses wasn’t a simple story, although there was plenty of hope if you dug deep enough. He was about the deeper reasons we did this. About the people, the kids who had no one else. The places where the system failed and grungy, needy, terrified human beings fell through. The ones where we got to play angels and heroes. Not all the reasons we helped Moses were pure. He helped us feel shiny—and when your soul holds a lot of darkness, that’s the kind of thing that matters a whole damn lot.
I had been trying to show Rosie the DNA of who we were. Not just hope, but all the reasons we did this—the good and shiny ones, and the ones that placated the dark recesses of our souls.
And we weren’t done. I could feel another line of the song we’d started today pushing to the surface. I adjusted the pillow under my chin, trying to remold lumps that had been that way for the last decade. And tried to listen.
It didn’t take long before three things made themselves very clear. These pillows were going to stay eternally lumpy. There was one more stop we needed to make tomorrow. And there was one that I needed, for reasons that were about as clear as back-alley gunk, to make tonight.
I lay on the bed a long, scowling moment, deeply annoyed at my hermit shell and its muddy intuition. Tomorrow’s stop made a certain kind of sense. Tonight’s lived somewhere in the land between insane and dumb-as-fuck.
My shell didn’t waver.
I growled and climbed quietly off the bed, grabbing my flannel shirt and the van keys. “I’ll be back in the morning.” There would be hotel rooms where I was going. And privacy.
I didn’t answer the thousand questions hanging in the air behind me. I didn’t know the answer to any of them.
-o0o-
I kicked myself as I walked off the subway and into the flow of humanity that could be found on Philadelphia’s streets day or night. The glaring lights, the rumbling behind me on the tracks as the train moved off, the steady push and pull of overly sweaty bodies getting where they needed to go.
It was all taking me back.
Johnny and I had loved this town once. Thrived in it. Sung most nights in one of its seedier bars, and then eventually some of the better ones.
I hadn’t cared. I’d been happy to sing anywhere people were willing to listen. Not for me—I’d have been content to spend all our days and most of our nights holed up in the little apartment we called home. But the songs needed an audience. Music doesn’t live until it’s heard, at least, not the kind I write.
The kind I wrote. Damn, this trip down memory lane was a bad idea and I hadn’t even started it yet.
I merged into the flow of people making their way up the grungy stairs into the fall night. I’d abandoned the van at a really nice hotel in midtown. A smart hermit would have stayed there.
Apparently I wasn’t planning to be smart tonight.
My feet navigated the crowds on autopilot, the same way they’d once dodged trees in a Vermont forest. I had no idea why I was here. Three hours ago, it had seemed like a logical extension of Rosie’s hope tour—collect some pieces, see what bubbled up. Now I was just a tired, aimless wanderer who could feel the phantom guitar under her fingers and the ghosts at her back.
I swerved around a chain of college kids walking six wide down the sidewalk and shook my head at their blithe conviction that the world would make room for them. I’d never been that sure of my own right to take up space. The flow of humanity was getting livelier—fewer people trying to make it home to sleep, more of them out on the town for the night.
I moved on the edges, watching. I’d borrowed a card from Lelo’s deck and come dressed all in black. A shadow, and not one sexy enough to have anyone looking. It wasn’t flannel, but there are all kinds of ways to hide if you want to badly enough.
I turned off the main drag onto a narrow street that had always looked like it belonged in a detective novel—lots of brick and grime and half-dead streetlights. I spied my destination half a block in, music and chatter sliding out the open windows. Once upon a time, it would have been clouds of smoke, too, but I hadn’t been sad to see that particular tradition end.
The sign over the door was barely readable, thanks to fading paint and bad lighting. I was pretty sure that was intentional. This was the kind of place people knew about before they came. There was plenty back on the main drag for the uninformed and the tourists.
The guy on the door gave me a quick look and passed me through. I was just another middle-aged woman in black who looked like she knew where she was going.
Which I did—I just didn’t know why. But this was as good a place as any to ask an awkward question and let it hang in the air for a while. I stepped deeper into the dark and shadows and sound. It was a classic dive—gloomy, atmospheric, and one of the best spots in the world to immerse yourself in live music. Or so I’d always thought. Johnny had wanted more of the lights, more of the glitz.
Eventually, he’d left me for them. Record labels want young and pretty on your arm, not some woman crossing the wrong side of
forty.
I’d never aspired to sing to people I couldn’t see.
I slid into a spot on the wall, the very vocal part of me that still thought I should leave rapidly losing ground to the siren call of something I’d sworn I’d never let get hold of me again. I leaned back against cool concrete and let the sirens sing. There was no point in trying to chase ghosts away in any jazz bar worth its name. They just added to the soul, the mystique.
The guy behind the mike segued into another number, this one an old classic—the kind that entertainers keep in their line-up because they think it’s easy. The crowd tuned in briefly, attention caught by the familiar notes, and then tuned back out again.
The kid didn’t have it. Or he didn’t have it now, anyhow. A couple decades of seasoning and maybe he’d understand the words to the tune he was crooning. Some things just don’t make any sense to people on his side of forty, no matter what the record labels think.
My feet wandered themselves over to the bar, restless, noting all the unfamiliar faces. Saddened by them. Not so very long ago, I’d have known most of the regulars. The street-smart pixie behind the bar gave me the once-over and decided I probably wasn’t a threat or a very big tipper. “What can I get you?”
Nothing that was going to dull my senses. I wasn’t sure what I’d come here to feel, but I didn’t want it lost under a haze of alcohol. Not yet, anyhow. “Just a Coke.”
Her eyes sharpened. “You singing?”
Damn, where had that come from? “No.”
She shrugged a shoulder at the guy with the mike. “You could probably do better than him.”
I waited for her to slide the Coke my direction before curiosity got the better of me. “I used to come here quite a bit. Haven’t been for a few years, but the music used to be pretty good.”
“Still is.” She grimaced a little. “Come back some night when the boss man’s nephew isn’t pulling on the guilt strings to get himself an audience.”
