by Rene Denfeld
“Celia!” Mrs. Wilkerson stopped organizing the papers she had been stacking.
“I’m here for Alyssa,” Celia said, unsure.
Mrs. Wilkerson had a broad backside and a reassuring, firm waddle. “She’s gone home, sweetie.”
“I’m not here to talk to her.”
“What is it then?”
“I want to file a report,” Celia said.
It felt like the room stopped. It didn’t work before, the walls said, and almost the same words came from the teacher. Her voice was incredibly kind. “I believe there’s a thing called double jeopardy, Celia. You can’t try a man twice for the same crime. Even if he was guilty.”
Celia closed her eyes. Someone had believed her.
“The report isn’t for me. It’s for my sister.”
Mrs. Wilkerson moved quickly around her desk, her hand touching Celia lightly, and then she returned to her chair. “Sit down,” she said. She pulled forward a notepad. “How about you start with everything you know.”
“Can she go to the same foster home?”
“I can’t say, Celia. Child Protective Services makes the decision, but if they think she is in danger, they will remove her. Usually they ask the last foster family if they are willing to take the child back.” There was something in her voice that told Celia that Mrs. Wilkerson knew more about the situation than she was allowed to tell. Since she was Alyssa’s teacher, she would have met the foster parents when Alyssa was in their home. Celia felt reassured. If Mrs. Wilkerson felt Alyssa would be safe, then Celia would, too.
“Okay,” Celia said, breathing deep. She knew that if the family wanted to adopt Alyssa, they could change her name and refuse to let Celia see her. The family could move across the country if they wanted. Celia might lose her sister. Forever.
It was worth it. She began. “She told me.”
Celia waited for that night to pass, and another day. Finally she found the girl with the cell phone and offered her the package of Ding Dongs she was eating as a trade. On the corner, she noticed with a sinking sensation, the scar-faced man was back.
“Mom,” Celia said when her mother answered the phone, almost before the first ring was over.
Celia could hear the tears in her voice. “They took her! They came and had her pack a bag and the police were here, too, just in case we tried anything. They arrested Teddy again.” Her mother burst into loud sobs.
“What did Alyssa tell them?” Celia asked, calmly, holding the phone and looking at the ebony sky. Little stars out, watching over her sister right now.
“Alyssa asked if they could make her come home, just like you did after the trial, and the officer said no, not after all this. And then Alyssa said Teddy had been raping her, and now I lost both my daughters and you are never coming back.”
The wind, coming down the street, ruffled Celia’s hair and touched her skin, reminding her that right now Alyssa was being tucked into a safe bed, looking out a window, seeing the same stars. The foster family would keep her, and everything Celia had lost would be okay because she had saved the person she loved more than anyone in the world.
Tell her I love her, she wanted to tell those foster parents. Tell her I miss her.
Her mother was crying over the phone. Celia closed her eyes, felt her own tears. Finally her mother stopped. Celia listened to the clicking sound of her mother’s ragged breath and remembered so long ago, walking through the meadow. The hands over her eyes, lifting. One, two.
“I’m sorry, Mom,” she said, and hung up.
“Why are you saying sorry?” the tall girl asked.
“I don’t know,” Celia said. “I just am.”
The next day Celia fetched her favorite book from the librarian, its pages bulging with drawings. She took one of the stubby pencils from the wood box on the desk and a slip of scrap paper from the stack nearby. Sitting at the table, she closed her eyes to contemplate what she wanted to draw.
She took her time. She paused, her mind tracing the streets. She saw the dark house, remembered the path there. Maybe it meant something. Maybe it meant nothing at all.
After finishing her drawing, she tucked the paper into the middle of the book, between two of her favorite butterfly pictures. She didn’t feel relief. The drawing was for herself. No one was coming for her. Long after Celia was gone, floating in a nameless river called time, this paper would be here. A child of the future would open the book and find . . . her.
Find me, she thought.
Chapter 34
“There’s something bothering you.”
Naomi was with Diane, fixing up the bedroom. Diane had made new curtains and gotten a lighter bedspread out of storage in the attic, for the coming summer. It was soft and fresh, with embroidered flowers.
“It’s this girl,” Naomi confessed, and told her all about Celia.
Diane blinked. “You’ve been keeping all that to yourself?”
Naomi blushed. She kept a lot inside. It wasn’t because she wanted to keep secrets. It just didn’t occur to her to share.
“How old is she?” Diane asked, hanging the curtains and stroking them smooth with her hands.
“Twelve, I think.” Naomi sounded unsure.
“Parents?”
“I don’t know.”
Diane’s eyes slid away. Her expression said that while Naomi had been trying to find one child, she had abandoned another. Naomi lowered her head.
Diane reached out, patted her arm. “You seem to care about this girl.”
“I do.”
“Well, help her find her way home.”
Naomi turned. Jerome was standing in the doorway, truck keys already in his hand. “I found Tasmin,” he said, to Naomi’s blank look. “The daughter of Mary, the woman in the tree.”
“Now that sounds like a story.” Diane chuckled.
* * *
“My mother wanted to keep me safe,” Tasmin Tarseed said.
Jerome and Naomi were sitting with her, in front of a campfire. In the distance were rows of rusted boxcars, used as housing for the migrant workers. Clotheslines were strung between the metal boxcars, and from a cracked green hose trickled the only clean water supply. The evening camp held the pure silence of exhaustion. Their work in the berry fields done, the families gathered around the fires, and even usually frisky children sat slack-jawed at the flames.
Tasmin, wearing an orange vest that marked her as an outreach worker, sat politely away from the families. She added another stick to the fire. Her face was ruddy with sun, the smile lines baked in, making her look older than her age, which was thirty. Her black hair was sun-streaked, and she had a restless air about her. Naomi sat comfortably, radiant in the safety of smoke.
“Will you tell us?” Jerome asked, his voice as low as song.
In the distance an owl hooted. Barn, not horned, Naomi thought.
Tasmin nodded. “My mother was concerned. Panicked, more like it. My earliest memory was her coming back from the graveyard, knocking over things in the kitchen—and she was a gentle, careful person. She was muttering something about the children.”
She reached for a stick, rubbing moss from it. “I didn’t piece it together until later, and by then it was too late. I was too young, you see. Only five. I do remember the tension in town. This one time I went shopping with my mom, and a white man pushed her and called her a drunk Indian. My mother didn’t drink, and this puzzled me. Other kids began teasing me, saying my mother was crazy.”
Naomi hugged her legs to her chest, wrapping herself in her arms. Jerome looked over at her. “Go on,” he told Tasmin.
“It was hard because my mom was acting crazy,” Tasmin said, guiltily. “What could be crazier than saying you had seen the beloved town judge in the woods, carrying a bound child in his arms?”
Naomi’s eyes were wide. She was drinking the truth.
“Did anyone believe her?” Jerome asked, quietly.
“I don’t know. I was a little kid. The judge ran the tow
n. It was his berry fields that brought in the money. And it wasn’t the local kids dying. Just the odd migrant kid turning up in ditches or the woods. It was easy to blame that on accidents. I remember one they said had drowned. My mom said no one drowns with strangulation marks around their neck.”
She put the rubbed stick into the fire. They all watched the flames.
“But then something happened,” Tasmin said. “It had to do with the nearby orphanage.”
Naomi jerked fully alert, her eyes piercing through the smoke. She stared at Tasmin as the woman went on. “My mother confronted the judge and his son. She got in their faces, said she was going to get a ride to the city—my mother didn’t drive, she had never learned—and tell the authorities.”
Tasmin took a deep breath. From one of the nearby fires a migrant boy looked over at her. “The Greyhound used to stop in Elk Crossing once a week. One day my mother packed up a suitcase with my clothes. She pinned a note to my shirt. It said my name, and where I was going, which was to my older cousin on the reservation. She sent me away, and I never saw her again. A few days later she died. My cousin said she went back to find out what happened. The judge claimed it was suicide. My mother had been cut ear to ear.”
The fire crackled.
Tasmin looked across the campfire. “I went back one summer. The farmhouse was empty, looted by those antique hunters, I guess. Her stuff was gone from her bedroom, too.”
Jerome reached into his bag and took out the photograph. Tasmin looked at the picture, turned it over, and read the note in the firelight. She was quiet for a long time.
“I found it in a bundle, tied in the oak tree,” Jerome said.
“She wanted me to be the one to find it,” Tasmin said. “Will you leave me, now?” she asked, and they did.
He wants to stay hidden, Naomi thought, as nameless as his victims.
She was in her own dream state, standing in the living room. In the kitchen Jerome—frustrated, from the sounds of it—was cleaning her dishes. Naomi reminded herself she had better start picking up more. This wasn’t a hotel.
The judge was dead, but Wesley was still alive, and he was here. Naomi could feel it. But Wesley was faceless, just as he wanted to be. Men like him liked to hide. It made them feel bigger to stand in the shadows.
Well, pull him out.
I will, Naomi thought, taking out her phone. Investigations, she thought, were like a ball of yarn. You pulled on one string after another until the whole ball unraveled. And inside, always, was a lost child, arms raised, crying for help.
“Elk Crossing school district,” she asked, dreamy. “I know they’re closed. I need archives.”
Outside birds called. Naomi counted their voices while she waited. Scrub jay. House sparrow. The tee-yee of the lesser goldfinch. She began to see the virtue of waking up to the same sounds every morning. It reminded her of her interlude in Opal—because that was what it had always felt like, an interlude between captivity and work, from age nine to eighteen—and how the sweet rhythms of farm life had allowed her and Jerome to grow close. Naomi had learned love and trust. It was astonishing, she reflected, how quickly Mrs. Cottle had taught her just by embodying both herself. And now Diane was trying to do the same.
The phone clicked. She was being transferred. Records were always somewhere. People had a drive to immortalize their past. Even the evil stuff, like Abu Ghraib or the Holocaust. They liked to take pictures, keep journals. Because they believed in what they were doing. No one, Naomi had learned, did evil without believing it was right at the time. Maybe this was why it was nearly impossible to talk them out of it.
Finally the phone connected to the school district offices in Murky Grove, and there she could imagine a woman in a flowered smock—her name was Patty—making her way into a cold basement filled with files. Getting a call from a real-life investigator was about as much excitement as she could stand, Patty said. Naomi reminded herself to send Patty a box of chocolates later. People liked to be thanked like that.
“Thank you, Patty,” Naomi said warmly, and hung up.
Jerome was behind her, holding a dishcloth in his one hand. Naomi turned, saw his handsome face. “Sorry about the mess,” she said. “We’re getting the Elk Crossing yearbook, express mail. We’re going to find out what Wesley looks like.”
But in her heart she thought she knew.
Later Naomi sat with Jerome on the front porch. It was a cold night, and she wondered again where Celia and the others slept. Behind them the house was dark with silence. Diane usually went to bed early.
Jerome put his arm around her. They always sat like this so Naomi was on his good side—his left—to hold hands or let him touch her. It had already become instinct.
“Tomorrow?” he asked.
“Back downtown,” she answered, and she told him Celia’s story about the butterfly museum.
“Do you think it’s real?” he asked, his voice soft.
“I hope it is, for her sake.”
“She’ll find something else to believe in if it isn’t,” he replied. “People with hope are like that.”
“I know.” She sighed. “I just hope she doesn’t have to.”
He kissed the top of her head. “Come to bed?”
She leaned against his cheek, felt his warm breath. “Yes.”
Chapter 35
“You didn’t come back!”
This, Naomi thought, was not what she had been expecting. Celia, instead of being grateful, was spitting mad. All the rage of her young life was pouring out.
“Well, I’m here now,” Naomi said, her back bristling a bit.
They were down on the waterfront, in front of the river. Naomi had found Celia and Rich crossing the footbridge—the other street kids said they usually came that way late mornings after sleeping under an overpass. Naomi felt bad Celia was sleeping in the dirt, and this made her feel guilty, and that made her mad. That along with waiting for hours, from morning until noon, until she finally saw the two figures nonchalantly crossing the bridge. Her relief, like that of a parent who catches her kid playing in the street, was mingled with frustration.
Celia stopped. “Oh. You,” she said, sarcastically.
Then they were off. Rich backed away, eyes wide, at the sight of the two of them fighting. Catfight, he knew others would joke. But he could see the pain radiating off both of them. So much disappointment in the world.
“Long time no see,” Celia said, her eyes mirroring the river.
Naomi knew she should have stopped there, be the adult to the child, but something in her flared, too. “Sorry, I was too busy trying to save you.”
“You’re not trying to save me or anyone else! All you care about is your sister, and that isn’t even about her!”
All the air in the world could not help Naomi then. Her breath froze in her chest.
“You don’t even want to save her! You just want to stop feeling guilty, and guess what?” The poison was leaving Celia now, collapsing her into tears. “You can’t! She’s dead! She probably fucking died or died fucking, years ago, I bet in that house, and you didn’t care because you are too late.”
Naomi tried to breathe.
“No one can save me now.” Celia had fallen to her knees, her cheeks red, her face shiny with mucus and tears. “No one can save anyone.” Her voice came out dead and remote.
Rich went to lift his friend. He used his loose shirt to wipe her face. The look he gave Naomi was one of reproach. You should have come back, it said.
I’m sorry, Naomi wanted to say, but didn’t. Her backbone felt like fire. Rich was walking Celia away, and pretty soon they disappeared up to skid row. Skin row, Naomi remembered a cop calling it once. Like it was funny.
* * *
Celia had escaped to the place before time. Lemon yellow, an ocher like the reddest of hearts. More of them coming now. Sapphire blue, silver tipped. Eyes gazing in astonishment from the backs of wings. Zephyr. Swallow. Long-tails. Creatures longer than history
, before the Stone Age. There are fossils of butterflies.
Rich was shaking her, saying, “Hey, Celia.” And others were saying “What the fuck” and “Why doesn’t she snap out of it.” But Celia wasn’t there. She could feel the grainy curb outside Sisters of Mercy under her bottom; she could see her limp hands at her side. That didn’t matter. She was floating someplace above them all, her arms as light as the wings surrounding her.
Rich led her to the dumpster behind the Greek restaurant, but it was locked, a bright new padlock on it. Rich leaned against it, putting his face on the metal lid and closing his eyes in despair. Celia just stood there. It figured, she thought. It just did.
“Come on,” Rich said, leading her by the hand like she was a little child. They went back to the row, and Rich carried her a plate of beans from Sisters of Mercy.
Later Celia climbed tiredly up the hill to the overpass. She lay down in the dirt hollow that knew her body. She hadn’t spoken since seeing Naomi that morning.
She felt rather than heard Rich moving in the dark. Slowly, with tenderness, he moved his big body until he was close to her. He reached out, touched her side, felt for her hand. She gave it to him. Rich cradled her hand like it was the most precious gift he had ever been given, and she could hear his breathing in the night.
Closing her eyes, Celia felt the butterflies. Come live, they said, flying all around her. Say you are sorry.
Chapter 36
A sweet chariot, swinging low, flickering out of the light. A wide-open feeling. Her sister laughing, toddling across an orphanage yard. A forgotten memory, returning.
Naomi woke. She untangled from Jerome, his naked skin silky against hers. When she had come back yesterday, he had consoled her, and later they had made love under the quilt and Naomi cried afterwards.
Rising quietly, Naomi slipped into her pair of soft cotton pants and a shirt. Going downstairs, she thought of a big breakfast. Bacon, eggs, toast. A pot of coffee strong enough to make your hair curl, laced with plenty of cream and sugar.
