by Rene Denfeld
“You’re not?” Celia looked up, shaking her rump before pulling on her jeans.
“Ha.” He tightened his belt.
Rich took his backpack and turned it upside down, showering the ground with crumbs. “I could swear there were pancakes in here,” he said, and strapped it on his back.
Celia and Stoner picked up their empty backpacks. Celia felt her belly clench with hunger. Her stomach didn’t even bother making noise anymore. It had learned silence like the rest of her. “Anyone got money?” she asked.
The boys looked away. No one wanted to say what they thought, which was Celia was a bit of a mooch. She was always begging and borrowing off the other street kids, and hardly turning any tricks or panhandling herself. Rich thought she used her tiny size as a charm. Anyhow, everyone was getting tired of it. “Maybe we should be asking you, Celia.”
Stoner was the first one through the bushes, sending a white ray of sunlight back, piercing their night-shadowed eyes. Rich followed, and finally Celia, nursing her shame.
It always felt longer and hotter to walk back downtown in the daytime.
The street kids had to wait an eternity at the busy freeway, finally darting through the bawling cars. They walked back over the footbridge, the river below now pregnant with reflected light, the swells thick and hung with green particles of life. The smell was cold and fertile, like nature was waiting to give birth.
Nearby, in the industrial area, Celia could see the ancient docks reaching into the river. The waterfront there was muddy, torn up by cars. Johns went down there to park. Creeps, too. Celia tried to avoid it now, after seeing that scary house.
Skid row was chastened by day, empty bottles like holiday streamers in the gutter. The shelter doors were locked. They walked down to Sisters of Mercy, where it was almost time for lunch.
Celia had a powerful prayer for lunch. She wanted it to be served.
They were sweaty and tired by the time they reached the end of the line. Celia felt the hot sun melt the top of her head. It was an unusually warm spring day. Dark clouds lay in a sticky line on the horizon, promising a storm later. The air tasted like a copper penny, and Celia relished this, rolling the electric taste in her mouth.
The line moved slowly. None of the kids said anything. They shuffled. Somewhere behind them, two drunks started arguing and a man threatened to cut them if they didn’t shut the fuck up. They did.
Shuffle. Move. Celia could feel the rough sidewalk through the thin soles of her shoes. She could feel each toe pressing down, holding her to the earth. Her mouth felt dusty. Even her ears felt closed, the canals thick. She was inside herself, a contented place to be, buzzing. Butterflies, she knew, live in a world of silence. They do not have to talk.
Rich touched her arm. Celia opened her eyes. He smiled at her, eagerly. She closed her eyes, ignoring him. She wasn’t ready to be friends again yet.
Finally it was their turn. Given a plate each, heaped with the beans and cornbread and rice. They took the last table and sat with something like relief. Within moments the food was gone, and Celia stared at her empty plate.
“Are we gonna stay and help clean up?” Stoner asked. His voice sounded tired, like he was talking from the bottom of a deep well.
“Count me out,” Celia said, scraping her plate to see if a stray bean might materialize.
“We said we would,” Rich said. But when the boys got up, they found there was a ready line of dishwashers working off their meal.
“Come back tonight, to help with dinner,” the nun said to the boys.
Celia wandered back into the annex. Her eyes were drawn to the message board and the posters for the missing and murdered girls, some of whom she had known. There in the middle, surrounded by yellow marker, was a brand-new flyer. She stepped closer, lured to it. Another missing girl, this time years ago. Celia shuddered when she read they had been held in captivity. I am looking for my sister. Tell her I am sorry and I miss her.
At the bottom was a name and number. Naomi, investigator.
“‘Tell her I am sorry and I miss her.’” Celia tried the words out, saying them out loud.
They sounded funny—not ha-ha funny, but sad funny, like that was the last thing she expected anyone ever to admit in public.
* * *
In Celia’s own memory she was six and her mother was pregnant. A girl, her mother announced, after a rare visit to the county health office. Celia was old enough to remember a time when her mother was a different person, the kind who went to doctors and even took Celia to the dentist, though they couldn’t afford it. Somewhere, in her misty recall, was the feeling of her mom reading to her, the warm softness of her arm.
But then came Teddy. One of Celia’s earliest memories was getting up late at night to pee and finding her mother on the couch with her white arm extended. Teddy, crouched as if he were proposing marriage, was sticking a needle in her mother’s arm. Her mother had looked up, her eyes thick with sleepiness and guilt. She had been too high to even really notice her daughter.
But Teddy did, later.
He became the proud owner of a swollen drum of a belly he patted, lasciviously. And then it seemed like the day turned over and her baby sister was born. The infant lay in the hospital, wrapped in blankets. She had a dimple between her legs just like Celia, a confusing place of lies and secrets. From next to the hospital bed her stepdad had watched her, a warning on his mouth.
But Celia didn’t want to tell, not then. What she wanted was to hold her baby sister, love her, protect her as she had not been protected. She had looked into her sister’s sleeping face and promised, in her heart, that she would be her mother.
On the day they left the hospital, no one looked twice at the deflated mother, her eyes closed, sweat of withdrawals on her brow, the tall, lanky man next to her, his face grizzled with a red beard, or the little girl walking alongside, holding no one’s hands but her own. Celia often walked that way, hands entwined in front of her like a monk on a stroll, and adults commented, chuckling, how it made her seem old and wise. They didn’t know Celia clenched her hands like that to keep her limbs from flying off in fear.
Walking next to her mother and baby sister, Celia felt then, as she often did later, that she moved in and out of buildings and schools, waiting rooms and stores, and no one ever saw her. She was invisible, someone to be erased.
But her sister would be seen. Her sister, she promised herself, would be loved.
That night, on the row, Celia turned a trick. It was just her mouth, she told herself. You can always spit it out.
Her friends watched her climb back out of the car. The look in Rich’s eyes was something like sadness. Celia strode up to him, holding out the money. “What I owe you,” she said, voice hoarse.
“You can keep it,” he said, face turning scarlet in the night. Behind them, loud in the dark, they heard sirens. Sirens all night, sometimes, until it seemed the streets turned into a puddle of flashing lights, spilled blood and mercy.
Some nights seemed made for magic, and this was one. It caught Celia unaware, like the hard breeze off the river, like the clouds rushing overhead. One moment she was standing on the sidewalk, rocking in her thin shoes, eyes half closed to the world, and the next a warm feeling swept through her body until her eyes blazed open.
Like she wasn’t really a twelve-year-old street kid, ears closed against the crack of thunder. Like her mouth wasn’t open to the pure cleansing rain.
The next morning, crossing the bridge, they watched the men on the patrol boat pull a body out of the river. It was a naked girl, as pale as a fish. The street kids stood at the railing and watched. A group of day people gathered on the esplanade nearby, and they, too, watched as if death were interesting to them, and not a little bit scary. One of them was the woman with the glossy hair. She had her arms folded as if she was enraged.
As the men on the boat hooked the body, Rich asked, “Do we know her?”
Stoner shrugged. “I think she was c
alled Destiny.”
The officers were touching the girl’s body with more tenderness than she probably ever had felt.
Stoner was watching Celia with his sleepy eyes.
“We’ll keep you safe, Celia,” Rich promised, but Celia didn’t say anything because she didn’t think that was possible. It was one of those nice thoughts that had no power. The three of them walked slowly with their heads down away from the river as the boat churned water.
Chapter 8
The FBI satellite offices downtown looked designed by someone with a degree in ’70s kitsch: glossy mirrors, silver everywhere, burnt orange rugs. The modern desks and the high-tech computers reeked of money, and the receptionist looked like she was trying to fit in. Her silver eyes matched her hair.
“I’m here for Special Agent Richardson,” Naomi said, sliding her license across the desk.
“Winfield said you would come,” the agent said moments later, coming out into the waiting room, where Naomi was contemplating a recipe for stewed chicken in a cooking magazine. She wondered if there would ever be a day when she owned a kitchen and Jerome would come home to find she had stewed a chicken. Something made her doubt this.
Sean Richardson had glossy black hair that went with his title. He wore the classic Fed suit: pinstripe, with a neat little tie that suggested he was one tight asshole. Naomi disliked him instantly but had expected that: she and the Feds never got along. Unlike detectives like Winfield, they resented her for cracking cases they had spent years on.
He signaled at the chair. Naomi stayed standing. She looked out his window, at the river. “You were the one that solved the Nick Floyd case,” Richardson said. He was annoyed at also having to stand, since he didn’t want to sit if she wasn’t about to.
Naomi glanced over. “I was glad to help,” she said, gently.
“I read what you said about our office.”
Naomi smiled, to herself. She didn’t feel bad. Men like this were nothing. All she trusted in life was love, and none of it was here.
“I told the press that you are a bunch of bumblers who would make a beat cop look like a genius, and the only reason you get away with such ineptitude is the public has a bizarre and inexplicable belief in the FBI. I’m pretty sure they quoted most of that.”
“All except the ‘bizarre’ part. No one likes to question the public.”
Naomi turned. She saw the ghost of a smile on the man’s face. Well. Maybe this was a new breed of special agent.
He came to the window. Both of them studied the river. “That’s six now,” he said, quietly.
He turned towards her. She saw his eyes were brown, and his eyebrows unruly. He had freckles on his cheeks. Another human. “I’ve got a good man on it, undercover,” he said. “He’s trying to break it from inside.”
Naomi thought of the Floyd case. Nick Floyd was a generic-looking man who had led a generic-looking life, only he had kidnapped and murdered over twenty children. The previous FBI agent had fumbled the case badly, first releasing confidential information, then targeting a false subject for no other reason than that he was black and mumbled when he talked. By the time that poor man had finally been let out of jail, the trail had gone cold, and since the media had moved on, the FBI had tried to ignore the whole mess.
Naomi had been hired by the parents of one of the boys. It turned out the evidence had been under the agents’ noses the entire time: a wet, almost indecipherable receipt from a feed store stuck in the bottom of the boy’s backpack. The family owned no livestock. The receipt had led to a common point of intersection for all the children: the Floyd Family Feed Store, where kids were welcome to pet the baby chickens.
Naomi knew it wasn’t callousness or indifference. The Feds just didn’t have the right experience. They wanted to think men like Nick Floyd were smarter, more brilliant and cunning and unique than themselves. They didn’t want to accept that the reason so many crimes against women and children went unsolved was not because a handful of brilliant sociopaths were outwitting the police at every turn. It was because people let such crimes happen.
It puzzled Naomi because she knew from experience that most people were good, or wanted to be good. They just couldn’t see that fellow people were capable of being monsters, their own family and friends included. So they had to pretend such men were different, and in pretending they took away their own greatest power to stop them.
For Naomi, the men—and occasional woman—who took children were not her concern. The only thing that mattered was how they got away with it. They were doors to walk through to find the children. She refused to romanticize them by pretending they were extraordinary. This, she told herself, would include her own captor. If she found him—and finding her sister would probably mean finding him—she would look at him and know there was nothing special about him at all. She hoped.
“I still don’t think you guys are right for it,” she said. “Winfield knows more. Hell, I know more. Go back to busting PTA moms stealing the bingo money and claim it was first-degree embezzlement.”
Sean Richardson surprised her by laughing. His brown eyes were on her, and he seemed delighted. Naomi suddenly felt mysteriously close to him. Maybe love was in these offices, too.
“Do you have a daughter?” she asked.
“No.” He swung his hand towards the river, the city. “The world is my child. Funny, I know. But I feel that way. That’s how I came to this work.”
“I like you,” Naomi said.
“Then you are going to leave well enough alone?”
“No.”
* * *
For years Naomi had no memory of her captivity except for running through that strawberry field at night, her naked heels striking the black dirt. Running in terror to escape, only to turn back, horror filling her, not knowing why. Until one morning she had woken from sleep screaming a single word.
Sister.
After realizing she had left her sister behind, Naomi had expected that more memories would come—an avalanche of them, burying her in fear and regret. But that hadn’t happened. What Naomi had willed herself to forget as a child had stayed forgotten. Maybe that part of her mind had erased the experiences, tossing them away like spoiled food. Or maybe the memories were waiting for when she was strong enough to access them.
Only one detail had come back. She was with her sister, deep underground, while the ceiling dripped. It was dark in the bunker, and a lamp cast yellow shadows. Her little sister was looking up, trust in her face, hazel eyes like her own.
Naomi was singing to her sister, softly. The lamplight flicked over them.
“Swing slow, sweet chariot,” she had whisper-sung, “coming for to carry me home.”
The song had a meaning that now filled Naomi with remorse. If you get there before I do, tell all my friends I’m coming, too.
It was a sin, Naomi knew, to forget. People stop existing once you forget them. Naomi had committed an unpardonable sin, and it didn’t matter how many times others made excuses for her, like saying she had been a child or she had lived in terror. She had forgotten the one who mattered the most, and there would be no life, no future, until she found her. When she found her sister, she would beg forgiveness.
Naomi spent the rest of the day exploring downtown, hanging flyers in businesses and talking to people. Not just in the growing skid row district, where the street kids would prostitute themselves later. She walked all of it. The shopping malls, the delis and cafés tucked in the alcoves of buildings. She saw where the drug dealers hung out, and the addicts, and the women leaving department stores, wrangling large shopping bags and chattering like magpies.
Naomi thought about what it would be like to be one of the homeless kids she had seen. She wondered what it was like to live on the streets, where every doorway was a different hiding place, every tall man a knife.
On a deserted street back on the edge of skid row, she went into a corner market and got a drink. Outside she tried calling Jerome. His pho
ne didn’t pick up. She hoped it meant he was finding work. Maybe it was unfair to ask him to work, but the thought of not looking for her sister made Naomi feel sick at heart.
Dusk was falling, and a cold fog was rolling up the emptying streets. Walking along the street, Naomi found the downtown public library. The stone facade was lovely, damp with the mist.
Public libraries were often places where street people hung out.
She would talk to the librarians and post some of her flyers.
Chapter 9
Celia was in the library. It was her favorite place to be, besides her own imagination.
She perched, sneakers swinging, in one of the wood chairs. The hard chair didn’t bother her. Nothing bothered her in the library. Her head floated up to the clouds, the ornate ceiling above, and when her hand touched the burnished rails of the marble staircase, she became part of the world.
The best part of the library was becoming one with the butterflies.
She carefully turned a page. She was reading her favorite book on butterflies, the one with the dull blue cover that gave no hint to the treasures inside. The edges were grayed to the point of silver. Like the dust of butterfly wings, Celia thought. The elderly librarian kept this book behind the counter just for Celia. It was a secret they shared—a good kind of secret. Once, when she was in third grade, a neighbor had invited Celia to her house for soup. The librarian reminded Celia of that neighbor. It helped her remember there were nice people in the world. She didn’t blame them for what happened. They were too busy taking care of each other.
Celia could spend hours inside the book. She touched the color plates with her dirty fingers. The butterfly colors leapt off the page: a skyrocket of red, the brightest blue you ever saw, the gold of a perfect sunset. On pieces of scrap paper nearby she drew pictures of the butterflies, some fantastical, some real. When she was done, she tucked these inside the book, like treasures.
