Out Cold

by William G. Tapply

  “So whaddya think?” he said. “Some runaway or something?”

  I shrugged. “I guess so. I don’t know.”

  Skeeter came over and craned his neck at the photograph. “Whaddya got there?” he said.

  I turned the photo around so he could look at it.

  “She looks dead,” he said.

  I nodded. “She is.”

  “Did I hear you say she’s a runaway?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know who she is or where she came from.”

  He shook his head. “What a world.”

  I nodded.

  “What happened?”

  “She bled to death,” I said. “She was pregnant, had a miscarriage or something. My dog found her in my backyard this morning. I brought her inside, called 911, but she—she died.”

  Skeeter shook his head. His eyes brimmed with sympathy. “Hang on a minute,” he said. He turned and went back to the kitchen.

  A minute later he returned, steering a lanky fortyish woman by her elbow. The woman shuffled along, looking down at her feet. Under her long apron she was wearing baggy overalls, green rubber boots, and a black T-shirt. Her frizzy brownish hair was streaked with gray and cut short all around her head.

  “Let’s go sit,” said Skeeter, and he led the woman and me over to one of the booths against the wall.

  I slid in one side. Skeeter gestured for the woman to sit across from me. She frowned at him, then shrugged and sat down.

  “This is Mr. Coyne,” Skeeter said to her. “Mr. Coyne, meet Sunshine.”

  “Hello, Mr. Coyne,” Sunshine said. She gave me a shy smile.

  I smiled at her. “Hi.”

  “Sunshine lives in the shelter,” Skeeter said. “I give her as much work as I can, but it ain’t enough for her to get by on her own, you know? She’s trying to save up to get her own apartment, get her kids back.”

  “Which shelter?” I said to Sunshine.

  “The Shamrock,” she said.

  “It’s off Summer Street,” Skeeter said. “She’s been there quite a while. Since they took her kids away from her. Close to a year now, right Sunshine?”

  She looked up at Skeeter. “It will have been a year on Ground-hog Day,” she said. “They came at three-thirty in the afternoon.”

  Skeeter looked at me. “I was wondering…”

  I nodded. “Can you give me and Sunshine a few minutes?”

  He grinned. “Take your time.”

  Sunshine frowned at him. “I don’t…”

  “Mr. Coyne’s a lawyer,” he said.

  She looked at me and nodded.

  Skeeter ambled away.

  “You don’t have a lawyer?” I said to Sunshine.

  “No,” she said. “I don’t have any money for a lawyer. I’m saving everything so I can get my kids back. So I can’t—”

  “Don’t worry about that,” I said. “Tell me about your kids.”

  She looked away, and a little smile appeared. It instantly took ten years off her appearance. “Franny, my daughter, she’s fifteen. Bobby’s twelve. No. Thirteen. He just turned thirteen.” The smile faded and died. Sunshine dropped her chin onto her chest and gazed down at the tabletop. “I didn’t see him on his birthday. They’re in foster homes. I can visit them. I mean, I have permission. Except I can’t get there. Franny’s in Medford and Bobby, he’s with a family in Fitchburg. I haven’t seen them in almost a year. How’m I supposed to get there?”

  “That can be arranged,” I said. “Do you want to tell me what happened?”

  “Why they—why I don’t have my own kids?”

  I nodded.

  She let out a long breath. When she looked up at me, her eyes were wet. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It makes me sad.”

  “Of course it does.”

  “Artie Quinlan—that’s my husband—one day he just left. He ran off with some woman. Never said good-bye. Not even to the kids. Just left. This was April three years ago. Next thing I know, my bank account’s empty and they won’t take my credit cards, and then I lost my job….”

  “Why’d you lose your job?” I said. “What happened?”

  She flapped her hands. “I just couldn’t do it, Mr. Coyne. I was a teacher. I couldn’t go.” She looked up at me. “Okay. I started drinking again. I’m supposed to say it, admit it, and there it is. I started drinking and not showing up at school, so they suspended me, and then they got rid of me, and next thing happened, the bank foreclosed on my house and my kids were skipping school….”

  “I want to make some notes,” I said. I flipped over one of Skeeter’s paper menus. The back was blank. Then I slapped my pockets, but I hadn’t brought a pen with me.

  “Here,” said Sunshine. She handed me a ballpoint pen. It had red ink. “What do you think you can do?”

  “I can see about arranging visits with your kids. If you can’t go to them, maybe we can bring them to you. I can check with DSS, see who the caseworker is, figure out exactly what we need to do to get you and them back together. I can track down your husband—Artie Quinlan, you said his name was—and see about getting him declared a deadbeat dad. I can check on that mortgage foreclosure, see if there’s anything we can do about that.” I was writing notes to myself as I talked to her. “There are other things.”

  “You can get me my kids back?”

  “Not today or tomorrow,” I said. “These things take time, and I don’t want you to get your hopes up. But I can get the facts and we can decide how to proceed from there.” I looked at her. “Are you still drinking?”

  She smiled quickly, then dropped her eyes. “Not so much. I’m trying.”

  “It would be really good if you quit.”

  She nodded. “I know.”

  “How can I reach you?”

  “At the Shamrock.” She gave me a phone number, which I wrote down. “And here. Skeeter’s. I work here most nights.”

  “I’ll check back with you, tell you what I’ve learned.”

  “You promise?”

  I nodded. “Promise,” I said. “I wonder if you could do me a favor.”

  “You kidding?” she said. “Anything.”

  I took the girl’s photograph out of my pocket and put it on the table in front of her. “Tell me,” I said, “have you ever seen this girl?”

  She picked it up and narrowed her eyes at it, then shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said.

  “You think you might recognize her?”

  “I might have seen her. I’m not sure.”

  “At the Shamrock?” I said.

  “I don’t think so,” she said. “Not there. There aren’t many girls there. On the street, maybe.”

  “What do you remember?” I said.

  She closed her eyes for a minute, then shook her head. “Nothing. I’m sorry. Maybe it will come to me.”

  “Maybe somebody you know might remember seeing her. Somebody at the shelter, maybe. What do you think?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “Sunshine,” I said, “would you mind taking this photo and showing it around, see if somebody remembers this girl?”

  “All right,” she said.

  I turned the photo over, wrote my home and office phone numbers on it with her red pen, and pushed it to her. “Those are my phone numbers. Give me a call if you learn something, would you? I’m very anxious to find this girl’s family.”

  Sunshine looked at me. “She’s dead, isn’t she?”

  “Yes. She died just this morning.”

  She slid the photo into her pants pocket. “My daughter,” she said. “Franny. She’s about this girl’s age. I’ll see what I can find out.” She tried to smile again. It almost worked. “I think I better get back to the kitchen.” She slid out of the booth, then held her hand to me. “Thank you, Mr. Coyne. You give me hope. I almost forgot what it’s like to be able to hope.”

  I watched her shamble back to the kitchen, and I’ve got to admit, right about then I liked being a lawyer.

/>   A minute later Skeeter came over with my burger.

  “How’d it go?” he said.

  “I’m going to try to help her,” I said. “I’m afraid I might’ve gotten her hopes up too high. She’ll have to be patient. But there are things we can do. I told her she should try to quit drinking.”

  Skeeter nodded. “I been working on that, too. Anyway, don’t get the wrong idea. Sunshine’s pretty sharp. She’s just very cautious, very frightened, very depressed. Life has screwed her over pretty bad. She doesn’t trust many people.”

  “Except you,” I said.

  Skeeter smiled. “Right. She trusts me. I got the feeling she trusts you, now, too.” He arched his eyebrows at me.

  “I won’t let her down,” I said. “I promised her I’d do whatever I can.”

  Five

  I was in bed slogging through some whaling lore in my tattered copy of Moby-Dick, my customary bedtime reading, when the phone rang. I glanced at the clock. Eleven-thirty.

  It had to be Evie. No one else would call me at that time of night, and besides, I hadn’t talked to her all day. Evie and I talked every day when one of us was away.

  I picked up the phone and said, “Hi, babe.”

  “Hi, honey.” Evie had a low, throaty telephone voice that never failed to make me think about sex, no matter what words she happened to say. “All tucked in?”

  “Me and Melville, questing for the white whale.”

  “Beware of white whales,” she said. “They’ll take you down with them.”

  “Why don’t you junk that conference and come home,” I said.

  “It was eighty-seven degrees at the pool today. Not a cloud to be seen. I got in almost an hour of bikini time. How was it there?”

  “Cruddy.”

  “I rest my case, Counselor,” she said. “So how was your day, aside from the weather?”

  “Could have been a lot better, actually.” I told her about finding the girl under the snow, how I carried her inside, and how she was dead. “She couldn’t have been much older than fifteen, sixteen,” I said. “Just a child.”

  Evie was silent for a long minute. Then she said, “I don’t think I ever want to have children.”

  “I understand,” I said. “You never stop worrying about them.” I had two grown boys. Billy, the older, lived in Idaho. He guided fly fishermen in the summer and was on the ski patrol in the winter. He was hard to track down, and sometimes weeks passed between the times we talked. Joey, a couple of years younger, was studying to become a lawyer, of all things, at Stanford. He and I talked and e-mailed regularly. That was the difference between the two of them.

  I loved them equally and boundlessly.

  “This girl,” I said. “She had a scrap of paper with our address on it.”

  Evie was silent for a moment. Then she said, “As if she was looking for our house?”

  “Yes.”

  “Meaning she was looking for you?”

  “I guess so.” I hesitated. “Or you.”

  “Me?”

  “Do you know any sixteen-year-old girls?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I suppose so. I see lots of people at the hospital. Maybe if I saw her picture…”

  “When you get home I’ll show it to you.”

  “Did it have one of our names on it? That note she had, I mean?”

  “No,” I said. “Just our address.”

  “Maybe she was looking for Walter or Ethan.”

  Walter and Ethan Duffy had lived in our townhouse. Evie and I bought it from Ethan after Walter, his father, died a couple of years earlier. “Good point,” I said. “Maybe the girl’s one of Ethan’s friends. Though she looked quite a bit younger than him.”

  “Something to think about,” she said.

  “Yes,” I said. “But I’ve got to admit, thinking about this whole thing is unpleasant. There are other things I’d rather think about.”

  “Like what?” said Evie softly. “Do you miss me or something?”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “Me, too,” she said.

  “A bikini, huh?”

  “That little lime-green job,” she said. “Wait’ll you see my tan.”

  “It’s your tan lines that I’m thinking about.”

  “I’ve got to admit,” she said, “they’re quite dramatic.”

  The next morning, Wednesday, when I woke up, sunlight was streaming in through my bedroom window and Henry was sitting in the doorway whining. The clock on the bedside table read 7:36. I’d overslept by about an hour, not unexpectedly. I’d lain awake for a long time after hanging up with Evie. I was thinking about the dead girl, picturing her face, trying to convince myself that nothing I could’ve done would have saved her life.

  When I finally fell asleep, I had weird, depressing dreams that kept waking me up. They didn’t make any sense, and the specific images and events dissipated instantly, but the vague feelings of dread and horror lingered, and I’d stared up into the darkness for a long time, reluctant to go back to sleep where I feared the dreams were waiting for me.

  Now, with sunlight filling the bedroom, it all seemed long ago and far away. I couldn’t remember any of those dreams. I couldn’t picture the dead girl’s face. I was convinced that what happened to her was not my fault. It had nothing to do with me. I’d done everything I could for her, I really had.

  It had been two weeks since the last time I’d seen the sun. Amazing, what it did for my spirit.

  It was one of those crispy cloudless winter days—bitter cold and dust dry, with a sky so blue it was almost purple. When I walked to the office, the sunlight glittered and ricocheted off the fluffy new snow as if each flake was a tiny gemstone. I smiled at the people I passed on the sidewalk on Boylston Street, and some of them actually smiled back at me.

  It was that kind of day.

  I spent the morning meeting with clients and the afternoon talking on the telephone. Julie, as usual, had scheduled the whole day, but I did find time to talk with DSS. I found out who Sunshine’s kids’ caseworker was and left her a message to call me. I also talked with an ADA in the Attorney General’s office about investigating Artie Quinlan and getting a warrant out on him for nonsupport. He promised to look into it.

  It wasn’t much, but it was progress, and I felt good about it.

  The next day was Thursday. I spent most of it at the district court in Concord, where I managed to accrue a day’s worth of billable hours, to Julie’s delight. Between no-shows and delays and continuances and recesses, I accomplished very little for any of my clients, which bothered me more than it seemed to bother them. Nobody expects much out of lawyers.

  When I got back to the office, Julie reported that neither the DSS caseworker nor the ADA had gotten back to me on Sunshine’s case. Bureaucracy.

  I called both of them again and left messages.

  One my way home that afternoon I talked with Louise outside the Public Library, and Montana John and Big Tony and Clara at their spots along Boylston and Newbury Streets. They all claimed to have shown the girl’s picture around. I wasn’t sure I believed them. Homeless people, I’ve learned, develop the ability to lie convincingly. It’s a survival skill on the street.

  I gave each of them five bucks, as I always did, and asked them to keep trying.

  I got home from work a little after five. I let Henry out, checked my messages, changed out of my lawyer suit, let Henry back inside, fed him, and told him to guard the house.

  Then, under a star-filled winter sky, I walked down the hill and across the Common to Skeeter’s.

  I sat at the bar between a blond portfolio manager wearing a very short skirt and a young guy with an earring who never took his eyes off the television. When Skeeter came over to take my order, I asked him if Sunshine was there.

  He shrugged, said, “Nope,” and shook his head. “Not tonight. You got any news for her?”

  I shook my head. “Not really. I wanted to tell her that I’ve made some phone calls and
expect to hear from her kids’ social worker and a prosecutor who might be able to get some money out of her husband. I was hoping she’d be here.”

  “Sunshine’s a troubled lady, Mr. Coyne,” he said. “Life keeps beating the shit out of her, you know? Sometimes she gets ahold of some wine, or she just gets so depressed she can’t do anything, and then I don’t see her for a few days. I don’t depend on her. When she shows up, I always have work for her. She’s a good worker, when she’s here. Sweeping, washing dishes, stocking the shelves, bussing the booths, like that. She says she wants to cook, says she’s a good cook, and I tell her, I say, I’ve got to be able to rely on you, Sunshine. You gotta be able to promise you’ll show up on time every day, sober and ready to get to work, I tell her. You’d think she’d say, Oh, you can rely on me. I’ll be here. I promise. But she don’t. She just says she’ll do her best, and she gives you that look that says she knows that even her best ain’t that good.”

  “I was hoping she’d stop drinking,” I said. “It would help her cause.”

  Skeeter smiled. “She knows that. She just ain’t there yet.”

  I got home a little after ten-thirty. Evie called around midnight. She told me a funny story about a hospital CFO from Cedar Rapids who Evie was quite sure had been hitting on her. The CFO was a fifty-year-old woman who actually had a great body, Evie said, and was I jealous yet?

  I assured her that I was.

  I read half a chapter of Moby-Dick, and this time Melville did his job. It was all about ambergris, and I had no trouble falling asleep.

  A little before noontime the next day, Friday, I was on the phone with Howard Finch, trying to explain to him that his forty-three-foot Viking Sport Cruiser with its twin 375-horse Volvo engines and custom mahogany woodwork was simply not an acceptable swap for three black Labrador retrievers, no matter how impeccable their AKC papers were and regardless of how much Anna, Howard’s wife, loved them.

  “But,” Howard was saying, “she agreed to it.”

  “We’d never get it past the judge,” I said. “What’d we say that boat was worth?”

  “I paid a little over four hundred for it three years ago.”

  “Almost half a million dollars,” I said. “How about the Labs?”