At the Edge of the Haight

by Katherine Seligman

  Two cops got out of the car. I recognized them both and they nodded at me. They probably had notes from the outreach team. Female, twenty, calls herself Maddy, prior warnings about civil sidewalk, attitude issues, no interest in reunification with family, has turned down Homeward Bound. What else did they know? They didn’t say anything to stop the new cop. He wrote down our names and said he was going to cite us as soon as he finished a background check. He went to his car and started pecking at a computer, while the other two waited. Ash went over to talk to them. He sounded like he was arguing, but I couldn’t hear what he was saying.

  “I’m going to have to take you in,” the cop said when he got back. “I want you to walk, and I mean slowly, to the car and put your hands on the hood.”

  I put my hands on the car and he patted my sides and up and down my legs. I wanted to scream about how they should be looking for a killer instead of hassling someone minding her own business, but I pushed it down. I didn’t want to get into it with them. Why would they believe me? We were lucky Hope had moved on because she wouldn’t be good with this. With her mouth, she’d cause more trouble. We’d be hearing how there was a reason they called them pigs. Ash was cursing nonstop under his breath, fuckingshitgoddamnwhatthefuck, but he went limp and let them twist his arms back and put plastic cuffs around his wrists. They did the same to me, with Root standing next to me. They could see he wasn’t wild, but they put a muzzle around his nose. He shook his head back and forth and tried to pull it off with his front paws. I started telling him it was all going to be okay, but I couldn’t even reach down to pet him. He looked at me with his crazy eyes until they grabbed him with a metal stick that had a hook on one end.

  “He’ll be waiting for you at Animal Control,” said one of the cops we knew, sounding like he was apologizing for the new guy. “We’ll get you cited and out.”

  Now there were three squad cars lined up and they loaded each of us in a different one. The new guy put his hand on my head so I had to get in the car butt first. I had never been inside a cop car. It smelled like shoe polish and spray paint, strong and acidic. A gun and a computer were bolted to the dashboard. My mind was going off in a lot of directions, even though I kept telling myself I hadn’t done anything wrong. I wasn’t going to jail for sitting on the sidewalk, not bothering anyone. But the more I told myself that the more I felt the prickle of fear go through my body.

  The cop drove faster than he needed to, then outside the station he put his hand on top of my head again while I climbed out of the car and led me inside. The front door opened into a room lined with wood benches. Fleet and Ash were already there, still in cuffs; Ash nodded at me and wiggled his fingers. I turned around and touched them with my own before I sat down.

  Fleet looked glum. Tiny’s pink nose was sticking out of her sleeve. They had either missed him or figured it was more trouble to get rid of him. I was too afraid to talk, but I looked around the room. Almost every spot on the walls was covered with black-and-white pictures of faces, a collection of fierce eyes and out of control hair, beards, angry mouths, tattoos. Only one was a woman, her short hair in uneven bunches, staring into the distance. To me, they all looked blank. You couldn’t tell anything about what they were thinking. The words in big letters at the top of each photo: wanted.

  “Your mug’s going to be right up there,” said Ash, smiling.

  I rolled my eyes at him and scanned the faces, looking for the man I’d seen in the park. For all I knew the dead kid might be up there too. I could still see his body, the way it was in the dirt and the small bloody slit on his chest. His eyes had been open, but did he feel anything? I hoped I would spot the guy who stabbed him. At least I would not be the only one who knew what he could do. But I didn’t recognize anyone on those walls.

  I had to pee. And I was starting to think the cops had left us with these freaks so we would realize how lucky we were not to be on the wall. A high school counselor once took me to the police station when I got caught shoplifting. The cops talked about the things that happen in jail, how it didn’t take long until you started acting like the people in there. You ended up losing all touch with reality. If you thought you were getting yelled at before, they said, just wait until you are locked up. When you got out you’d have a record that it would take a long time to clear. Everyone would know where you’d been. I started clacking my knees together to keep from leaking pee onto the bench. I was going to yell for someone to get me a bathroom break when the door opened again, and the new cop came in.

  “I wish I didn’t have to do this,” he said.

  He unclipped my cuffs and then Fleet’s and Ash’s and handed us slips of paper.

  “You can pay the fine after you show up in court,” he said. “Hall of Justice. It’s all up there at the top, everything you need to know.”

  Ash crumpled the paper, put it in his mouth and swallowed.

  The cop shook his head. “That was not smart,” he said. “You already have half a dozen citations. Make your court date or you’ll get arrested.”

  Ash nodded his head sideways toward the door and I followed him back onto the street. I turned to look back at the station. Maybe the cops would tear up my ticket if I told them what I’d seen. Wouldn’t they at least protect me? Maybe I should have done something so I’d be put in a cell where the guy couldn’t get to me. Let myself piss on the floor, right in front of them. That didn’t seem bad enough. I went over what I could do. Ash tugged at my arm.

  “We’ve got to go find Root,” he said.

  The three of us walked in a tight line back to Haight Street. We took up the whole sidewalk. It was ours, as long as we kept moving.

  chapter 5

  People didn’t think I was from Los Angeles because I didn’t seem like the type. It’s not just that I had a wild bomb of brown hair, skin the color of baby powder, and was flat chested enough to look like a guy until I was sixteen. It was more that I didn’t act like most people there, all hey baby, and like, oh my god. I never wanted to be a girl who thought everyone was looking at her. I was set on being invisible. Let anyone try to find me because they wouldn’t. The one glamorous thing about me was my name, Madlynne, which my mom pulled out of the air because she liked the way it looked when she wrote it on my birth certificate.

  We lived in a house near the beach where the sand worked its way through the windows and doors, into everything. You felt like you were eating it and sleeping on it. Every night my mom wiped a grainy film off my feet before she tucked me into a blanket on the living room couch. She and my dad stayed in the bedroom, when he was in town. I could hear them yelling at each other, his screaming, her answering in a higher pitch. One day he shoved her against the wall in the kitchen and held her there. “You look at me,” he told her. “You never listen to a thing I say.” He pinned her with his body, his hands turning her face so she had to look at him. “I don’t know why you care,” she said. “You’re never here.” I don’t know how long they stayed like that because I left and hid myself on the sofa.

  My dad drove a truck back and forth across the country, delivering boxes to people. He said they always wanted things faster so he had to stay up all night behind the wheel, slapping his cheek to keep awake. If you fell asleep it was over, he said. When he came back home he’d bring me something, an electric toothbrush, a bright pink princess pillow, a kid-size rocking chair, which he made a show of presenting, here you go, baby doll. My mom said he stole it all off the truck so it didn’t qualify as a present.

  When my dad left for good, my mom tossed it all in the trash. I wanted to tell her not to, it belonged to me, but I just watched. She stuck her foot inside the big metal can and pushed so hard that I could hear things breaking. She hardly ever talked about him after that. I took it in, like it was the next thing that was supposed to happen. I went to kindergarten and then to first grade. My dad disappeared.

  “We are starting over,” my mom said when we moved into an apartment. It was smaller, but I ha
d my own bed and the heater didn’t bang all night like someone trying to break down the door. She wrote up a schedule and stuck it on the refrigerator with a magnet shaped like a thumb.

  Get up

  Eat breakfast

  Go to school

  Do homework

  Clean kitchen

  Wash clothes

  She said chores were good for me. She would do what she called the second tier. Dust, wipe down cabinets and tops of tables. We had to keep moving forward until we accomplished everything. Breathing, I said, why wasn’t that on there? She told me not to act smart. Then she stayed up late, writing more lists.

  “I want to have some order here,” she said. “I don’t want you to think your dad walked out on you. It had nothing to do with you. It was me he left. And now I’m getting myself together.”

  I knew she was trying. She’d put herself through college and finished her degree in accounting because that was something practical. Then she’d married my dad and he didn’t want her to work. He told her his mother worked every day of her life and it got her nothing, only worn down. That was not what he wanted for his wife. But after he left, my mom got a job on the checkout line at the Safeway near my school. She came home full of complaints. The people in charge, what a joke, didn’t know what they were doing. The incompetence flowed down from the top. How was she supposed to ring up specials when they weren’t marked? And why did her register keep shutting off? She reported everything to her boss, who told her he was more interested in winners than whiners. “What goes around, you know, goes around again,” my mom said to me. Things don’t change just because you want them to. How was it that she had a degree in accounting and some idiot was running the department? She hoped the management would get a clue and fire him. She dropped her nametag on the table at night and poured herself a glass of wine. Then we watched our dinner spin in the microwave oven. She tried to keep to the schedule, at least in the beginning.

  We slept in twin beds, so she only had to reach over to shake me awake in the morning. I took a bath while my mom made up her face with red lipstick and black eyeliner around her dark blue eyes. It gave her a startled look, but she was naturally pretty so it didn’t matter. “Show the world an optimistic face,” she said. Then we’d have breakfast, mugs of milky coffee and two waffles each, mine covered with syrup or powdered sugar, hers plain.

  I liked school back then. My second-grade teacher assigned me to the highest reading group so I could read chapter books while most of the other kids were still looking at pictures. I’d say I was fine when I was sick so I could get a perfect attendance award. On weekends my mom sometimes let me invite a friend to spend the night. We only had two beds so she’d help us build a tent in the living room out of sheets. Once she slept in there with us and watched Power Rangers cartoons in the morning. I think she liked them more than we did.

  It was at the end of third grade when she began looking like she was focused on something in the distance I couldn’t see. Then all at once, she would remember I was there and she’d be in a terrible mood. Any small thing set her off: I didn’t say thank you for dinner or I opened the bathroom door when she was in there. I forgot to fold the clean clothes that were in the dryer. It got harder to figure out what she wanted so I performed extra chores. I’d straighten the throw rug, arrange the bottles of shampoo and soap in a perfect line at the back of the bathtub. But that didn’t work. She went into a rage when I forgot to make my bed. “You are impossible!” she yelled. “I don’t know why I had you!” I wanted to yell back something worse, but I went in and smoothed the sheets and cover on my bed. I refused to cry. She came in like nothing happened and put her cheek on top of my head. “Sweet girls have sweet dreams,” she said.

  Then she started forgetting the schedule. I would get up and make my own breakfast and then wake her up so she could walk me to the bus. She didn’t like me to go by myself because she had read about people grabbing children off the street. Nowhere was safe. She was obsessed with the case of some boy who lived in Bakersfield and was snatched on his way home from school. His face was on a flier she’d brought home from the Safeway. “Look at those eyes,” she said. “Isn’t that the saddest thing you’ve ever seen?” He didn’t look sad to me. He looked like a quiet kid about my age, thick bangs, freckles, clear eyes. She never let me go anywhere by myself, so I didn’t know why she was so worried.

  One day I couldn’t get her up even after I started shouting, “Mom!” I shook her shoulder softly, then harder. She rolled over. “If I don’t get some sleep, someone will be paying for it,” she said, and pulled the covers over her head. I went back to my own bed and back to sleep. When I woke up, it was too late to get the bus on my own. I missed being at school, the little carpet squares, one for each of us to sit on at story time, and the neat arrangement of desks on the other side of the room. One of them had my name taped to it, with a picture of a dog. The teacher had asked what animal we wanted to be and my last name was near the front of the alphabet so I still got my first choice.

  I watched TV so I wouldn’t think about school and what kids were playing at recess or eating at lunch. My mom got up in the afternoon. Her eyes were swollen, but she had brushed her hair and looked like she might want to go back on the schedule.

  “Why are you watching TV now? Don’t you have homework?” she said. She didn’t know she’d forgotten to take me to school. She sat down next to me and watched cartoons until it started to get dark. When I said I was hungry, she heated up a can of chicken noodle soup and we each ate a bowl. I smashed crackers into mine and she sat there like she’d never seen anyone do that before. Then she went back to bed.

  She stayed in bed again the next morning. I wondered if there was someone I should tell, but I didn’t know anyone at the Safeway and I didn’t know how to call the school by myself. Maybe they’d wonder where I was because I’d never missed school before. But I didn’t know the number there. Who would I talk to anyway? And what would I do if my mom got mad at me? I put on my clothes, had breakfast and walked down the street to the bus. I only made it the first block when I got scared and turned back. What if something happened to my mom? Or what if I got snatched? I ran back to the apartment, which I’d left unlocked, and sat on the couch with my polka dot Minnie Mouse backpack. I took out a math workbook and did some problems. Addition and subtraction were so easy I almost didn’t need to bother. When I got tired of them I read a chapter book about the Pilgrims that my teacher had given me. I wondered how I would have done, stranded in the freezing weather with hardly anything to eat. I don’t know how long it was before I noticed the doorbell was ringing and then someone was knocking. Whoever it was knocked strictly, like they expected an answer. I put my ear to the door the way my mom usually did, so she could hear who was there before she opened it. The knocking got louder. Someone outside said very loud. “Mrs. Donaldo? Madlynne? ”

  I ran to the bedroom. “Mom, someone is here and it sounds like he might break the door off if you don’t get up.” She opened her eyes, which were still unfocused. “What?” she said. And then she starting screaming that every path in the world led to the same empty hole and anyone who said otherwise was a fool. Why did people keep bothering? She just wanted to be left alone. Leave her alone, she yelled louder, and then she went quiet. I put my hand on her back, but she didn’t look at me. She couldn’t hear me, or the guy outside calling to us.

  She was still in her clothes from the day before when the front door finally opened. I was thinking that might help. She might look like an ordinary mom taking the day off with her kid. But that is not at all what happened.

  chapter 6

  The next day Ash made a sign, need $ get dog out of jail. I held it in my arms, leaning against a wall, because we couldn’t sit down. The one time Root had been to the animal shelter he came back in a bright blue bandana, completely shaved. They said it was the only way to get rid of the fleas. I wondered what they’d do to him this time. The bandana had disappear
ed in a few days, fallen off or gotten snatched by one of the punks. I saw a guy on the street wearing the exact same one up around his face, but I didn’t say anything. It wasn’t worth starting a grudge.

  “Is that true? Your dog’s in jail?” said a lady yanking a limping Chihuahua.

  “The fascists took him while we were being arrested for sitting on the sidewalk right here,” said Ash. “Anything you could do, much appreciated.”

  He could act like he cared, especially for older women. He poured it on for them. This one seemed nice, but pinched, like she measured out every nice thing she ever did. Her dog looked like he was going to croak on the sidewalk in front of us. He was dragging his rear legs and his coat was scraggly. He must have weighed two pounds.

  “Who’s this?” I said, bending to let him smell my hand and then petting his head. He had his own smile, the way dogs do if you give them a chance.

  “Marco,” she said. Like the explorer, but it was also her father’s name. She didn’t have kids and she wanted to keep it in the family. She repeated the name a few times, like I didn’t understand what she was saying. “You probably don’t know about Marco Polo or the Silk Road.”

  “Hell, I do,” said Ash, looking all animated.

  “What is it with you kids?” she said. “Something has broken down and I don’t know what to do.”

  “A donation is good,” said Ash.

  “We should be out protesting,” she said. “Or you should. It’s your future we’re talking about.” She pulled out a twenty. “You don’t even know what I’m talking about.” She handed it to Ash and then dragged her dog on down the block.