Long Bright River

by Liz Moore

  —Same reason as you, I guess, he said. I can’t bring myself to miss any of the action.

  * * *

  —

  Ten minutes have gone by, and I’m still gazing at my phone, when I realize I’m the last car in the lot. God forbid Sergeant Ahearn come outside and see me idling there. In the last year—between moving to Bensalem, swapping Thomas’s reliable nursery school for the unreliable Bethany, and losing my longtime partner—my productivity has decreased dramatically, a fact about which Ahearn likes to regularly remind me.

  I back out and drive toward my assigned PSA.

  On the way, however, I make a detour toward Kensington and Cambria. If I can’t find Kacey, at least I might find Paula Mulroney there.

  Paula is not, when I arrive at said intersection, immediately evident. Alonzo’s convenience store is on the same corner, though, so I stop in on Alonzo and on his favored cat, Romero, named after a long-gone Phillies pitcher. From the front window of the store, it is usually possible to see Paula and Kacey.

  For this reason, Alonzo knows my sister fairly well. Like me, she is a regular customer, and has been since before we stopped talking. I know her order by heart: Rosenberger’s iced tea and Tastykake Krimpets and cigarettes, the same treats she has enjoyed since our childhood, excepting the cigarettes. On the occasions when we accidentally find ourselves inside Alonzo’s store at the same time, we studiously ignore each other. Alonzo glances back and forth between us, curious. He knows she is my sister, because if I’m being honest, I do often ask Alonzo about how Kacey has seemed lately, or if he has noticed anything, from his vantage point behind the cash register, that he thinks I should know about. This is not out of concern for her so much as out of a professional concern for the neighborhood and for Alonzo himself. Do you ever want them off your corner? I often say to Alonzo, about Kacey and Paula. Just let me know, and I’ll make sure to get them off your corner. But Alonzo always says no, he doesn’t mind them there, he likes them. They’re good customers, he says. They don’t give me any trouble.

  Sometimes, in the past, I have made it a habit to linger inside the store for a while with my coffee, watching Kacey and Paula as they work, or sometimes as they pray for work, as they begin to look sicker and sicker from withdrawal, as they become desperate. From this position, too, I can watch their customers. I see them every shift, sidling by in their cars, all kinds of men, keeping their eyes straight ahead, on the road, when they notice me or my vehicle. Keeping their eyes on the women and girls on the sidewalk when they don’t. There is something wolfish about these men, low and mean, something predatory. There is no type—or if there is, there are enough outliers to complicate it. I have seen men with children in the backseat driving slowly up Kensington Avenue. I have seen scumbags in Audis, in from the Main Line. I have seen men of all ages and races come to the Ave: men in their eighties and teenage boys in groups. I have seen heterosexual couples looking for a third. Once or twice I have seen women alone: on rare occasions, women are customers too. I don’t like them any better, though I imagine Kacey and her friends might. Or are, at least, less scared of them.

  I can muster sympathy for almost any type of criminal except for johns. When it comes to johns I am not impartial or objective. Quite simply, I hate them: their physicality repulses me, their greed, their willingness to take advantage, their inability to control the basest of their instincts. The frequency with which they are violent or dishonest. Is this wrong of me? Perhaps it is my weakness as an officer. But there’s a difference, I believe, between two consenting adults making a thoughtful transaction and the kind of bargain that happens on the Ave, where some of the women would do anything for anyone, where some of the women need a fix so badly that they can’t say no or yes. People who target these women send me into a state of hot, quick rage that makes it difficult for me to look them in the eye when I have to interact with them. On many occasions, I have been rougher than I have needed to be when cuffing them. I admit this.

  But it’s difficult to be levelheaded when one has seen what I’ve seen.

  Once I encountered a woman, red-haired, fiftyish, weeping on a stoop with no shoes on. She was not hiding her face: instead she had turned it upward, toward the sun, and her eyes and her mouth were open, and she was inconsolably crying. This was when I worked with Truman, and the two of us stopped to check on her. His idea. He was always kind in this way.

  When we approached her, however, she put her head down on her arms so we couldn’t see her face, and another voice called out a front door nearby: She don’t wanna talk to you.

  —Is she okay? Truman inquired.

  —She was jumped, said the voice, female, gravelly. We could not see its owner. The house was dark inside.

  This meant different things. Usually it meant she was raped.

  —Four of them, said the voice. Guy brought her to a house, three of his buddies were there.

  —Shut up, shut up, said the red-haired woman—the first noise she made aside from her sobs.

  —Can we make a report? Truman asked her. His voice was gentle. He was good at this, interviewing women. Sometimes, I will acknowledge, better than I am.

  But the red-haired woman turned her head back into her arms and said nothing more. She was crying so hard that she could not catch her breath.

  I speculated about what had happened to her shoes. Imagined she might have been wearing high heels, might have abandoned them so that she could flee. Her toenails were broken and dirty and painful-looking. There was a little patch of blood on the sidewalk next to her right instep, as if she might have cut it.

  —Ma’am, said Truman, I’m going to leave my number right here for you, okay? In case you change your mind.

  He handed her his card.

  Down the block, another car slowed for another woman.

  * * *

  —

  From Alonzo’s window, I have watched Kacey make her deals. I have watched her lean down as a slow-rolling car comes to a stop. I have watched these cars turn down side streets, and I have watched my sister follow them, disappearing around the side of a building heading toward any number of possible outcomes. This is her choice, I tell myself; this is the choice she has made.

  Sometimes, looking down at my watch, I find that I have been standing there, unmoving, for ten or fifteen minutes, waiting for her to return.

  Alonzo doesn’t object: he leaves me alone, lets me watch, lets me sip quietly from my styrofoam cup. Today he is busy with another customer, and so I assume my regular position in front of the cold window, gazing through it, waiting for Alonzo to be free.

  * * *

  —

  I’m still lost in my thoughts when the other customer in the store opens the front door and leaves, sounding the three silver bells that Alonzo has hung on it.

  Once the store is empty, I approach the counter to pay for my coffee, and it’s then that Alonzo says, Hey. I’m sorry to hear about your sister.

  I look at him.

  —I beg your pardon? I say.

  Alonzo pauses. A look comes over his face: the distinct look of someone afraid he has just revealed too much.

  —What did you say? I ask Alonzo now, a second time.

  He begins shaking his head.

  —I’m not sure, he says, I probably have the wrong information.

  —What information is that, exactly? I say.

  Alonzo cranes his head to the right, looking around me to where Paula normally stands. Noting her absence there, he continues.

  —It’s probably nothing, he says. But Paula was in here the other day telling me Kacey’s gone missing. Told me she’s been gone a month, maybe longer. Nobody knows where she is.

  I nod, keeping my mouth straight, my posture upright. I make sure my hands are resting lightly on my duty belt, and that my expression projects an air of calm collectedness.

 
—I see, I say.

  I wait.

  —Did she say anything else? I say.

  Alonzo shakes his head.

  —Honestly, he says, Paula could be wrong. She’s been bad lately. Ranting. Going on and on. Crazy, says Alonzo, whose face has now become sympathetic, who seems to be thinking of doing something disastrous, like patting me consolingly on the shoulder. Fortunately, neither of us moves.

  —Yes, I say. She could be wrong.

  THEN

  There are some people who ascribe to their suffering the particular cause of a difficult childhood. Kacey, for example, one of the last times we spoke, had recently come to the conclusion that her troubles began first with our parents, who abandoned her, and then with Gee, who, she said, never loved her, and may in fact have disliked her.

  I looked at her, blinking, and said to her as levelly as I could that I grew up in the same household as she did. My implication, of course, was that it is the decisions that I have made in life that have placed me on my specific path—decisions, not chance. And that although our childhood may not have been idyllic, it sufficiently prepared one of us, at least, for a productive life.

  But when I said this, Kacey only buried her head in her hands and said to me, It’s different, Mickey, things have always been so different for you.

  To this day, I don’t know what her meaning could have been.

  In fact, it is possible to argue, I believe—if we were to evaluate who had the more difficult childhood, whatever that may mean—one might find the balance tipped toward me.

  I say this because, of the two of us, I am the only one with memories of our mother, and very fond ones at that. Therefore, the loss of our mother was difficult for me in a way that it would not have been for Kacey, who was too little, while our mother was alive, to recall her.

  * * *

  —

  She was young, our mother. Eighteen years old at the time of her pregnancy with me. She was a senior in high school—a good student, Gee always said, a good girl—and she had only been dating our father for a few months when it happened. As the story goes, it took everyone by surprise, and no one more than Gee, who to this day narrates the shock of the news with urgency and grief. No one believed it, she says. When I told them. They all said, not Lisa.

  Gee was just religious enough to make an abortion out of the question. But she was also religious enough to be enraged by the pregnancy, ashamed of it, to see it as something to hide. The year was 1984. Gee herself had been married at nineteen and had had Lisa at twenty, but times were different then, Gee liked to say. Gee’s husband died very young in a car accident—I wonder, today, if he had been drunk, since Gee often mentions his drinking—and she never remarried.

  I used to imagine that things would have gone differently for Gee if her husband, our grandfather, hadn’t died. So much of her life has been governed by the need to simply keep her head above water: to put food on the table, to pay bills, to pay down the debt that she constantly incurs. If she had had a partner in these endeavors—someone to add a paycheck, someone to mourn alongside when her only daughter died—perhaps her life, and ours, might have been better. But this sort of idle speculation might be pure sentimentality, for to this day Gee claims she has no use for men: thinks of them only as obstacles in her path, nuisances who are only occasionally necessary for the propagation of human life. She mistrusts them implicitly. Avoids them when possible.

  The only thing she really got out of her union, it seems, was the ability to say that she had been married when her daughter was conceived—married, she explained, often, thrusting a finger into an invisible chest. She had done things correctly.

  When Lisa delivered the news of her pregnancy, therefore, Gee had insisted on a wedding. Gee had met this Daniel Fitzpatrick (this Daniel Fitzpatrick was how Gee permanently referred to our father) only once before, but now she sat both of them on her sofa and insisted they see the priest at her parish and formalize their vows. Our father himself was the offspring of a single mother who was notoriously irresponsible: a floozy, Gee often said, who had not been married when her son was conceived, thus sealing forever in Gee’s mind the firm line between the two of them, where respectability was concerned. Worse, in Gee’s estimation: the son was a charity case at the school. Someone who raised tuition, Gee lamented, for other working people. What our father’s mother thought about all of this—the baby, the marriage, Gee herself—is lost to time. I cannot, in fact, ever recall meeting her. She did not attend our mother’s funeral: an offense that Gee will take to her own grave.

  In Gee’s telling of things—the only version of events that I have ever heard—Lisa and Daniel, our parents, got married in private at Holy Redeemer, on a Wednesday afternoon, with Gee and the deacon as witnesses. Then Gee took Dan in, giving her daughter and her new son-in-law the middle bedroom in the house, taking rent whenever the young couple could give it, and telling the rest of the family the news as slowly as she possibly could. Head held high. Defiant.

  Five months later, I was born. Kacey a year and a half after that.

  Four years later, our mother was dead.

  * * *

  —

  Of the years in between my birth and my mother’s death, there are memories, still, if I quiet my mind sufficiently. It is rarer and rarer, these days, that I can. On a shift, sometimes, inside my patrol car, I remember being in the backseat of a car that my mother was driving. No car seat, in those days. No seat belt either. In the front seat, my mother was singing.

  From time to time it happens, too, when I’m at the refrigerator, any refrigerator, at home or at work: a quick vision of my young mother complaining to Gee, in Gee’s kitchen, that there’s nothing inside. Oh really, says Gee, in another room. Then why don’t you put something in it.

  And a pool. Someone’s pool. Rare to be at a pool. And the lobby of a movie theater, though I’m not sure where it was, and every movie theater is in Center City, now, and the others are closed or converted to concert venues.

  I remember my mother’s youth, the way she seemed like a child herself, or a peer, her skin clear and smooth, her hair still the shining hair of a child. I remember, too, the way Gee softened around her, became stiller, stopped moving, for once in her life. She laughed in spite of herself, put a hand over her mouth at her daughter’s antics, shook her head in disbelief. You’re nuts. She’s nuts. This must be the nuthouse, Gee said, looking at me, grinning, proud. Gee, in those days, was kinder, bewitched by her funny, irreverent daughter, unaware of the fate that would befall her, and all of us.

  Harder still to recall are the memories that come to me in the still dark of my bedroom. Whenever Thomas is in close proximity to me, little-boy head right next to me, whenever I am close enough to his skin to breathe its scent—there—just there—is a flash of my own mother beside me in my childhood bed. My mother’s face, young face, my mother’s body, young body, covered in a black T-shirt with writing on it that I cannot read. The arms of my mother around me. My mother’s eyes closed. My mother’s mouth open. Her breath the sweet breath of a grass-eating animal. I am four and I put one hand on her cheek. Hello, says my mother, and she puts her mouth on my cheek, talks into my face, and there are the teeth and the lips of my mother. My baby, said my mother, over and over, the phrase she used most in the world. If I try very hard, I can still hear her saying it in her high, happy voice, which sometimes carried inside it a note of surprise: that she, Lisa O’Brien, had a baby at all.

  * * *

  —

  What I do not recall is anything to do with my mother’s addiction. Perhaps I repressed it; or perhaps I simply didn’t know what it was, what it meant, didn’t recognize the signs of addiction or its trappings. My memories of my mother are warm and loving and made all the more painful by the fact of their happiness.

  Similarly, I do not recall my mother’s death, nor do I recall being informed of it. I ha
ve retained only its aftermath: Gee pacing our house like a lion, tearing at her hair and shirt. Gee hitting her own head with the hard palm of her hand as she spoke on the phone, and then biting the back of her wrist, as if to muffle a cry. People speaking in whispers. People stuffing the two of us, Kacey and me, into stiff dresses and tights and too-small shoes. A gathering in a church: tiny, subdued. Gee sinking down in the pew. Gee grabbing Kacey’s arm to stop her making noise. Our father, on the other side of us, useless. Silent. A gathering at our house. A great sense of shame. The knees and the thighs and the shoes and the suit jackets of adults. The rustle of fabric. No children. No cousins. The cousins kept away. A long winter. Absence. Absence. People forgetting us, forgetting to talk to us. People forgetting to hold us. People forgetting to bathe us. To feed us. Then: foraging for food. Feeding myself. Feeding my sister. Finding and smelling what our mother left behind (her black T-shirt, still unreadable to me; the sheets on the bed in our parents’ room, in which our father still slept; a half-empty soda in the fridge; the insides of her shoes) until Gee had a daylong fit of finding and purging her things. Then finding and smelling her hairbrushes, tucked at the back of a drawer. Wrapping the strands of my mother’s hair around my fingers until the bulbs of them turned purple.

  All of these memories are fading, now. These days, I bring forth each one only sparingly, and then place it carefully back in its drawer. I ration them. Preserve them. Each year they become slighter, more translucent, fleeting shards of sweetness on the tongue. If I can keep them intact enough, I tell myself, then one day I might pass them on to Thomas.

  * * *

  —

  Kacey was only a baby at the time of our mother’s death. Two years old. Still in diapers that often went unchanged for too long. Wandering around the house, lost, climbing stairs she shouldn’t have been climbing, hiding in small places for too long, in closets, under beds. Opening drawers with dangerous things inside. She seemed to like being at eye level with adults, and regularly I rounded a corner to find her sitting on a countertop in the kitchen or the bathroom: tiny, unmonitored, alone. She had a ragdoll named Muffin and two pacifiers, never washed, that she stashed carefully in hiding places where nobody else could find them. Once both of them were lost, that was that: Gee wouldn’t replace them, and Kacey cried for days afterward, missing them, suckling frantically at fingers and at air.