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At the Edge of the Haight

Page 11

by Katherine Seligman


  “What does that mean? Am I a stranger?”

  “That depends,” he said. “We see the same people every day. Not much is new to us. Your guy there was involved in some things, unfortunate things, but there is only so much we can do.”

  He shifted and his chair creaked. “We can find you a place to go,” he said. “We can put you at the top of the waiting list and set you up with a caseworker, a bed, counseling. You can even keep your dog with you. You want to know why I walk the beat, instead of staying in here all the time? It’s so I can talk to kids like you. One day you’ll look back on this and hardly remember you were here. I’ve seen hundreds of kids pass through here and sometimes one will come back years later and you know what? The same thing happens every time. They thank us. They goddamn thank us.”

  “I’m not trying to go somewhere else,” I said.

  “Shane’s parents told me they’d like to help you get off the street,” he said.

  “They talked to you about me?” I said, even though I knew. “They practically kidnapped me two nights ago.”

  “They’re here at the station now,” he said. “Most kids don’t get offers like that. Think about it.”

  “Can I ask you one thing?” I said and didn’t wait for him to answer. “Did that guy in the picture know Shane? Was there a reason he was in Shane’s face? Or was it just a freak thing? They think I know something, but I don’t. I mean, if they did know each other and they had some fight, then you should be out there talking to Shane’s parents.”

  “Now you’re thinking like a detective,” he said, crossing his arms over his chest and half-smiling at me.

  “Can I get out of here?” I said. Root was sitting by my side. He had gotten too comfortable at the station, probably because the cops kept dropping dog biscuits on the floor for him. He should’ve been the one identifying the creep in the picture because, after all, he was the only one who’d seen what happened. I came after it was too late.

  “You’re free,” Patz said. “No one’s keeping you here. But we’ll need you when it’s time to testify in court.”

  I didn’t stop to think about what he meant by that. I picked up my pack and Root’s leash and went to the door. Marva was sitting on the bench where I’d waited, her twig legs crossed, her eyes fixed on me as I made my way to the exit. Dave was next to her, his hands bunched in his lap. I wished that I felt like being nice to them, but seeing them there made me angry in a whole new way. I wanted to tell them to leave me alone. Why was I responsible for something I didn’t try to see?

  “Hi, Maddy,” Marva said in a soft voice. I should not have paid attention to her, but of course I couldn’t have known what she was going to unleash.

  chapter 13

  Root knew when someone was keyed up and about to explode. It was like he could smell whatever was going on inside and seeped out onto your skin. He started licking Marva’s arm and tried to climb over the back seat into in her lap.

  “All I wanted was to see him,” she said, like she was talking to Root. “Dave came out here once, but I stayed home. I was the worrier, like that was going to keep bad things from happening, so we both thought it would be better if he went alone. Plus, someone had to be in the store. It wasn’t going to run itself.”

  She cradled Root’s head and he stared at her. I had stomped out of the police station, but she’d called after me, her voice growing louder, as if I’d stolen something and she was going to turn me in. I’d turned around and followed her to the car.

  The thing is, she said, she hated the store. She always had. She’d wanted to live right in Albany. She liked seeing people on the street, knowing they were headed somewhere important. But Dave insisted on staying in the country, near where he grew up. He never liked change. The hardware store, with its front window full of saws, power tools, and light fixtures, was always the same. The wood floor was so old and soft she felt like she was going to fall through. She didn’t mind doing the bookkeeping two days a week; she was good at it, even though the small back office had started to feel like prison. It was so stuffy it was hard to breathe in there.

  “Honey,” Dave said, “I’m not sure Maddy wants to hear about all this.”

  Marva went on. She’d been at home the day they got a call from a police officer in San Francisco, she said. Dave had left early for work. The officer wanted to know if Shane Golden lived there. “Shane?” she’d said over and over, as if it was a question she didn’t understand.

  “What kind of mother doesn’t know where her son is?” she said.

  She must have said she was Shane’s mother or the officer wouldn’t have told her anything else. “I have some bad news,” he’d said. “Shane had been,” and she lowered her voice so I could hardly hear her say it, “the victim of a homicide.” She said she’d started screaming at him, “Why are you telling me this?” She didn’t get it. Who would call and say something like that? She didn’t remember her neighbor coming over, but she must have been there, Marva said, because she found herself wrapped in a blanket, sitting on the couch, when Dave came home.

  He had handled the details, calm and ordered, in the way he always was. It was what made him so good in the fire department, where everyone looked up to him. Stay focused, he always told them. Respond, assess, and then go forward. Don’t rush in without all the information. He was the one who’d arranged for them to go to San Francisco.

  “The worst thing was I never knew where Shane slept,” Marva said. “You want to know that, where they put their head down at night. Then when I went to bed I could have pictured that. It would have helped. I should have been here with him. I thought I’d go later, but I didn’t. You always think you have time.”

  She was the one who wanted to rearrange furniture, get new rugs every spring, cook new dishes from recipes she found in magazines. But ever since Shane had left she kept his room like he left it, the pictures on his wall, mostly cartoons he’d sketched of tiny armies of men facing off, a stockpile of catapults and bows and arrows behind them. She wished she’d asked him more questions when he was there because when she started examining the miniature cartoon faces after he left, she could tell each one was different. From a distance, they looked the same. Maybe he was telling a story, not just doodling.

  The last time he’d called he almost sounded liked he missed her, but maybe she had imagined that. “Where are you staying?” she’d asked. He didn’t answer. She had offered to wire him money and was half glad when he refused because Dave had said that only enabled him, and she should let him go and find his own path, as if she had any choice. He’d gotten off the phone as quickly as he could. “Bye, Ma,” he’d said. “Some guys and I, we’re going for food.”

  “The guys?” she said, turning to me again. “Do you know them? Who was he talking about?” But she didn’t wait for me to answer.

  “I thought he’d come back for Thanksgiving because we’re always together then, no matter what,” she said. “But clearly that didn’t happen.” She looked at me, pleading. “Why didn’t I trace his phone? We could have pinpointed where he was. There is technology for that. At least we’d know where he was.”

  “We should have moved,” she said to Dave, who was hunched in the driver’s seat. Root had made it over the seat and was sandwiched between them. “There would have been more for him in a city. We could have lived out here.” Her voice got louder. Dave reached over Root and put an arm around her. She slid away and turned completely around in her seat. “Ma,” she said. “Just like when he was little. He called me Ma.”

  Marva grabbed at my hand. Maybe she thought that would help. I let her hold it as if it was some stuffed animal she could squeeze. It wasn’t my hand anymore.

  “Maddy, I don’t expect you to understand, but I can’t take it if he thought we didn’t care. That could be the last thought he had. I need to know what was in his head. You have to tell me what he was doing here.”

  Marva was gripping my hand so tight she must have been able to
feel my racing pulse. Root was licking her again. I pulled my hand away and dragged him into the back seat.

  “I don’t know what Shane was doing in the park,” I said.

  I opened the car door and shoved Root out onto the pavement. My arms felt stiff from holding onto him so tight and my throat was achy.

  “Please,” cried Marva.

  “I don’t have anything to tell you,” I said. And then, “I’ll think about it.” I had to say something to make her stop, even if it wasn’t true.

  chapter 14

  Hope and Fleet were sitting outside the smoke shop with the skateboarders from the shelter. Fleet had one of Ash’s signs, with its blocky writing. $ for food. She held it up as a two-story red tour bus passed, burping out a trail of dark smoke.

  “This is for Ash,” she said. “Double decker pussies.” He thought we should be on the tourist maps, along with the head shops and poster stores and famous hippie corners. Make it official. Fleet put the sign down on the sidewalk, on top of a pile of his others.

  “What’s up with those?” I asked her.

  “It’s not like he’s going to need them.” She laughed. “In Wyoming.”

  Fleet put an arm around me. “Ash gave himself up,” she said. “I thought at least he’d resist.”

  There was no legal way they could have made him go, not halfway across the country with some guy he’d never seen, she said, but he did. He looked shocked at first, then mad, swearing and having a fit, and then he gave up.

  “The guy said it was a wilderness camp,” said Fleet. “My mom said she was going to send me to one of those if I got kicked out of one more school. She kept putting me in these weird places where there were only four kids in a class or the teacher wanted me to talk about my relationship to math problems. I spent a lot of time in a chair in the hall, by myself, which was okay because they let me read. There was one where we tutored one another all day. I thought I was going to die in there. A wilderness camp might have been better.”

  I sat on the sidewalk and put my arms around Root. The top of his head still smelled smoky from the fireplace at Dave and Marva’s.

  “Maddy?” said Fleet, watching me press my face into Root’s neck fur. “It’s not like Ash is in jail. He can take care of himself there.”

  The skateboarders were looking through Ash’s signs. One took a few and tied them on top of his pack. I felt knocked in the stomach. Why did he agree to go to Wyoming? What was he going to do in the wilderness?

  Tourists passed, stepping over my pack and around Root, who was flopped beside me, still except for his tail waving around on the sidewalk. Every few minutes one of them dumped a few quarters into a dirty tweed cap Fleet had put on the pavement next to Tiny’s cage. She pulled a book out of her pack.

  “Go ahead,” said a man wearing a Golden Gate Bridge T-shirt, his arm around a little girl with a blond ponytail. “You give it to them.” He pushed her forward and she dropped a dollar in Fleet’s cap. “Can she take a look?”

  “She can hold him if she wants.” Fleet put Tiny’s cage on her lap.

  “We just want to look,” he said, and aimed his phone at her. “And get a picture for Mom.”

  “What an asshat,” she said as he walked away. “Afraid of Tiny, in a cage.”

  “Let’s get going,” I said. Two bike cops were down the street headed toward us, scanning the sidewalk. I stood up, but Fleet didn’t move. She said they had me trained. I said there was no way I was ending up at the cop station again. Then I told her about seeing those photos and pointing out the guy who killed Shane. Fleet wanted to know how I could be so sure it was the right guy. Maybe I didn’t remember and the cops were pushing me into something, she said. They did that. They twisted what you said so they could arrest someone. That was their job so they had to make it happen. It didn’t matter to them if they got the right person.

  “My whole body knew it was him,” I said.

  “The police lie a lot, is all I’m saying,” said Fleet.

  “Everyone lies a lot.” I took the book out of her lap and she snatched it back. I told her I didn’t want to think about the cops anymore so I was going to the library. She said she and Tiny were staying put, she still had business.

  Hope was on the next block in front of the biggest head shop, talking to a couple wearing baseball hats. The skateboarders trailed behind. One stomped on the edge of his board, flipped it in the air and caught it. Hope waved at him, like these were her tourists, stop the show. He gave her the finger, tossed his board into the street and took off, holding onto the back end of a delivery truck. Hope said hey when I walked by, then went on with her talk, telling the couple that she knew the owner of the head shop, he gave great deals to everyone she sent there. They looked at the front window filled with bongs, scented tobaccos, rolling papers, weed crushers, and souvenirs, but it didn’t seem like they were going in. One took out a few bills and thanked Hope. She walked with me to the next corner, where a guy had set up with a guitar and a small amp, a shepherd mix curled next to him. The notes were sharp but sweet. Hope sat on the sidewalk across from him and didn’t seem to notice when I left.

  I tied up Root in a small concrete yard outside the library. There was already a bowl of water there and a pug mix with an underbite that was breathing like an overheated engine. I felt better about leaving Root with company, but he froze, looked stricken, like how could you do this to me, you are a traitor, but I walked up the stairs and didn’t turn around again to look at him. It didn’t matter. I could hear him thinking. Inside, the fluorescent lights almost blinded me at first. When my eyes adjusted, I could see the room was full, the way it got when it was cold out. Jax, sitting in his chair in the back, waved at me. I went past the front shelf of new books, past history, fantasy, and science to a couch next to the computers where I could crash and pretend to wait for a turn, and sank into the plastic hide of the couch, which whooshed underneath me.

  A guy in a torn up khaki jumpsuit sank down next to me. He stretched out, but I pretended he wasn’t there until he started patting the couch like he was giving it a shine. I turned to face the opposite direction and stared up at a mural on the ceiling, blue summer sky dotted with fluffy clouds, like that was going to relax people in this room. I thought about Ash hiking in a valley of orange poppies or whatever wildflowers grew in Wyoming. I was in a library so I could look it up, an idea that suddenly seemed hilarious. The guy on the couch started laughing with me.

  I slid as far from him as I could. It must have satisfied him because he left me alone and dozed off with his head on his pack, which sounded like it was full of empty cans. I retied my boots and ran my fingers through my hair. Maybe I would go on the computer and look up wilderness camps in Wyoming, try to figure out which one Ash was in. How many could there be in a state where most people were cowboys? I could picture it from my elementary school textbook, a state shaped like a lunch box. But I couldn’t remember whether it was filled with pictures of tiny bales of hay, lumps of coal, or only horses and cows. I used to like looking at the products each state produced. California had oranges and vegetables and little cameras that stood for the movies. I should have paid more attention to the other states.

  I wondered if Ash was getting used to the camp. They were giving him food and a bed, even if it was in the middle of nowhere. He would be talking to everyone, like he always did. He might stay there. Fleet was right about Ash. He could take care of himself, but part of me hoped that he hated the camp, that he was yelling and swearing so much they’d throw him out.

  The man next to me shuddered and fell off the couch with a thud that sounded like someone had dropped an armful of books. I couldn’t tell if he was deep asleep or sick. A woman who worked in the children’s section bent down and tapped his arm. His eyes fluttered open and closed.

  “You need water?” She took out her phone and said she was calling for help. “Last time you wanted water.”

  “I don’t need help,” he said, and kicked her le
g.

  I grabbed my pack, ready to run, but instead stood next to her, as if I could save anyone. She kept looking at him, but didn’t say anything. There was a red spot on her shin where he’d kicked her. We stayed there awkwardly until I heard sirens in the distance. Two cops ran up the stairs.

  “Archie,” said one of them, helping him to stand. “What’s going on?”

  The woman from the library described what had happened, how he’d passed out and fallen off the couch. She didn’t say that he’d kicked her.

  “We’ll get him checked out,” the cop said.

  “But then he’ll be right back here,” she said. “What good is that going to do? He needs help.”

  “We have to take him in,” the cop said. “even though it costs more than I’ll ever make in this lifetime.”

  The two cops guided him to the door, Archie tripping to his knees every few steps.

  “At least you’re here,” I said to Root outside, as I untied him. We went by the bookstore to get him a biscuit and then the music store for another one. Fleet was hanging in the doorway, Tiny hiding in the neckline of her sweatshirt.

  “Mad,” she said, and reached for me. My chest started to relax. We both started talking at once.

  “Don’t tell me how stupid I am. I know,” she said.

  “Me too,” I said. “I’m a total idiot in a lot of ways. But you first.”

  She pulled out her money, which was wet, the bills stuck together.

  “I made this whole stack and it was in my pocket,” she said. “And then I sat on the fucking wet sidewalk again. Why don’t I ever know from anything?”

  I laughed. “I knew you’d do that,” she said, and stomped off toward the Panhandle. “Fuck you, Mad.”

  I ran after her and caught her arm.

  “Wait,” I said. “We’re coming.”

  We sat on the grass and I helped Fleet spread out the money. The edges were crisped up, but the centers looked like they were dissolving into pulp. I went back over the bills and patted each one. Even the bank wasn’t going to take them this wet. The only thing to do was lay down next to them, give the sun a chance to do its work. We flopped, Fleet on her stomach, me on my back.

 

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