Authors: Lisa Gardner
“Give her time, Michael. Your mom’s never been on her own before. It’ll take some practice.”
“She’s just gonna find some other asshole,” he predicted, probably accurately.
“Are you guys staying put, or is she talking about moving back?” I hadn’t considered that news of Stan’s death might encourage Tomika to return to their old housing project, maybe even tell people of what she did, how I’d helped her.
“Can’t. They’re closing down the building. Gotta fix it.”
“Do you like the new place?”
“I like the yard. There are trees and stuff. And the apartment’s sunny. Mica likes the windows. She spent all yesterday standing in front of them. She even smiled.”
“Good, Michael, I’m happy to hear that.”
“Mom says we don’t gotta pay yet.”
“No, you’re okay for a bit.” I’d prepaid the first two months of the rental, the top floor of a converted house, within walking distance of a park, as well as a decent elementary school. I’d worked hard to find the apartment, hoping that a nice unit, conveniently paid up, would help Tomika realize that she could live alone and be happy. But maybe that was naïve of me. I wanted to judge Tomika, call her up and tell her to grow a backbone. But mostly, I remembered being a little kid in a big emergency room, injured once again by my own mother and never saying a word.
“Mom wants to go to the funeral. She says now that he’s dead, maybe we could get some money.”
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know.
“I don’t think we should go. We’re supposed to be gone. We should keep it that way. Safer, if you ask me.”
“Maybe the three of you could have a funeral for your father.”
“No,” Michael said, and his voice was hard again, a boy sounding as angry as a man.
“It’s okay to miss him, Michael. He wasn’t always a bad guy. I bet sometimes he was nice to you. I bet you liked those moments. I bet you miss that dad.”
He didn’t answer.
“My mother used to stroke my hair,” I whispered. “In the middle
of the night, when I had a bad dream. She would stroke my hair and sing to me. I loved that mom. I miss her.”
“You gonna see your mom?”
“No.”
“Are you…are you still afraid of her?”
I wanted to tell him no. That I was all grown up now, ready to shoot, hit, and chase all the shadows in the dark. But I couldn’t lie to Michael. I said, “Yes. Always.”
“How’d my daddy die, Charlie?”
“All is well, Michael. You’re a strong boy and your mother and sister are lucky to have you.”
The ground beneath my feet started to tremble, announcing the arrival of a subway in the tunnels below. “I gotta go now, Michael. Thanks for calling. I might be away for a bit. If you call and I don’t answer…Know that I’m thinking of you, Michael. I have faith. You’re a strong boy and you’re gonna be okay.”
“Charlie…Thank you.”
He hung up quickly. I slipped the phone back into my bag and ran for the train.
I
MADE SURE
I
LOOKED BOTH WAYS
before boarding the subway car. I took a seat with my back to the far wall, where I could watch all doors, monitor all people coming and going. My black leather messenger bag sat on my lap, my hands fisted around it.
I studied faces, met stares.
Until one by one, each of my fellow passengers stood up and moved away from me.
I sat alone, and even then, I didn’t feel safe.
“C
HARLENE
R
OSALIND
C
ARTER
G
RANT.
”
Detective D. D. Warren uttered my moniker slowly, allowing each name its own weight and space. She’d met me in the lobby. Asked about my dog, asked about my gun, appeared genuinely surprised,
perhaps even skeptical, that I’d dared to journey to Roxbury without either of them.
Instead of her tiny office, she’d led me to a modest-sized conference room, furnished with a table large enough for eight. Only other person in the room, however, was Detective O. She stood against a huge whiteboard, wearing a button-up men’s dress shirt in light blue.
When Detective Warren moved to her side, I realized they matched, as D.D. wore nearly the same shade of blue, but in silk. She’d paired hers with black slacks, while O had charcoal gray trousers with pencil thin stripes of blue and gray. D.D. had her short blond hair down, in loose curls that almost softened the hard lines of her face, while O’s rich brown hair was pulled back in a fat knot at the nape of her neck.
Two coordinating and contrasting images of female cop. One older, one younger. One athletic, one more feminine. One with direct blue eyes, one with deep brown eyes.
Both of them all business.
I wished I’d brought Tulip, just to have a friend in the room.
“Charlene Rosalind Carter Grant,” D.D. repeated, testing each word. “Why didn’t you tell us?”
“Turns out, my past is a work in progress.”
She eyed me suspiciously. “You gave us the two names to run, Rosalind Grant, Carter Grant.”
I nodded.
She tossed a file on the table. It landed with a faint thwack and I flinched. “There you go. Full report. Sister. Brother. Mother. Ever read it?”
I shook my head, eyed the manila file folder, made no move to touch it.
My aunt said the doctors had advised her that I should remember on my own. That forcing the issue, before I was ready, might do greater emotional harm.
Greater harm than what? Waking up each morning, knowing that when I had nightmares of my mother digging midnight graves with coiling, hissing snakes in lieu of hair, I wasn’t totally wrong?
A perfectly pale and still baby girl. The nearly marble-like form of an even smaller baby boy. That is what I’d spent the past twenty years trying to forget. Rosalind Grant. Carter Grant. The baby sister and baby brother I’d once loved, then lost to my mother’s madness. The babies, crying down the hall, that I’d known, even as a toddler, that I needed to help. Tell a nurse. Bolt with them out into the rain.
I’d tried in my own way. But I’d been small and vulnerable, my mother all-knowing, all–powerful. In the end, what I couldn’t change I’d opted to forget.
One crazy mother. Two murdered siblings.
Was it any wonder my head was so fucked up?
I stared now at the manila file. I thought it was unfair that my sister and brother’s entire lives could be distilled into a single thin folder. They had deserved better. We all had.
“Why you?” Detective O spoke up crisply. “You lived. They died. You must think about that, have some theories on the subject. Were you more cooperative, the good little girl? Maybe they were sniveling little brats—”
“Stop.” I wanted my voice to come out firm. It sounded more like a whisper. I cleared my throat, tried again. “You want to beat me up, fine. But not them. You don’t get to pick on them. They were just babies. You leave them alone, or I’m outta here.”
Detective Warren was scowling at her partner, clearly agreeing with me. Or maybe not. Maybe this was just the latest episode of good cop, bad cop. But then I realized a couple of things: They didn’t need me to come down to HQ to talk about two twenty-year-old homicides from an entirely different state. Nor were they mentioning the Facebook page, or how to bait a killer in preparation for tomorrow evening’s murderous deadline. Instead, they had a single manila folder holding police reports from my childhood.
They wanted something from me. The question was what, and how much it would cost me.
“What do you remember?” Detective Warren asked me now. “About your childhood?”
I shrugged, gaze still on the closed file. “Not much. I can’t…I don’t…” I had to clear my throat, try again. “I don’t even remember
a baby brother. Not a smile, not a whimper…Just, his body. His perfect little form, so still, like a statue.” I paused, cleared my throat again. Still wasn’t working. I looked away from both detectives, stared at the carpet. “I’m sorry.”
“Might be that you never saw him alive,” D.D. suggested. “ME’s office consulted a forensic anthropologist on the remains. Based on the size of the skeleton, the baby boy was approximately full term, but could’ve been born a few weeks premature, maybe even died in utero. Either way, let’s just say he didn’t make it long in this world.”
“Boys are icky,” I heard myself say. “Boys just grow up to be men who want only one thing from girls.”
Not my words, but the memory of an audio fragment, playing back. I caught myself, shook my head slightly, as if to clear the words from my brain. “When was he born?”
“Don’t know. No birth certificate.”
“His name was Carter. I know that, even if I don’t know how I know that.”
“It was written on the outside of the Tupperware container.”
I winced. “She killed him. Gave birth, killed him, that’s what you think.”
The older detective shrugged. “Technically, your mother was charged with abuse of a corpse and concealing the death of a child. Given the skeletal remains, there’s no way to prove if the baby was stillborn, or was killed after birth. Logic would dictate, however…”
“What do you think?” Detective O spoke up, her voice more demanding. “You lived with the woman. You tell us what might have happened.”
“I don’t remember a baby boy. Just his name. Maybe she told it to me. Maybe I found the container. I don’t know. I saw the body. I remember the name Carter. I took it, made it part of mine. My own way of honoring him.”
“But you just said you didn’t remember him.”
I looked up at Detective O. “It’s possible to lie to yourself, you know. It’s possible to both know and not know things. People do it all the time. It’s called coping.”
“Tell us about Rosalind,” the younger detective demanded.
“I loved her. She would cry, and I would try…I loved her.”
“Was she born first?” D.D. asked.
“I don’t know. But she lived longer. Right?”
“Probably a year,” the detective said quietly.
I resumed staring at the floor. Carpet wouldn’t come into focus. My eyes were swimming, turning the blue-gray Berber into a moving sea of regret.
“I was in the ER,” I heard myself whisper. “My mother had fed me a crushed lightbulb. I was in the ER, vomiting blood and there was this nurse, this kind-looking nurse. And I remember thinking I needed to tell her. If I could just tell her about the baby. But I couldn’t. I didn’t. My mother trained me well.”
The detectives didn’t say anything.
“I don’t understand,” I said after another moment. “My aunt is nice, my aunt is normal. I’m really fond of puppies and kitties and I’ve never played with matches. And yet my mom, my own mother…She did such horrible things to me just to get attention. And that still made me the lucky kid.”
“Is that how you view yourself?” Detective O pounced. “As lucky?”
I looked up at her. “What are you, fucking nuts?”
The young detective’s eyes widened in shock, then D.D. stepped between us, placing a hand on her colleague’s shoulder.
“What we’re both trying to understand here,” D.D. stated, with a pointed look at her partner, “is how you survived such a tragic childhood and how it might impact your current situation.”
I stared at her blankly, not following. “I don’t know how I survived. I woke up in a hospital, my aunt took me away, and I’ve done my best never to look back since. The few things I recall mostly come to me as dreams, meaning maybe they’re not even true? I don’t know. I haven’t wanted to know. The first eight years of my life I’ve purposefully blanked from my mind. And if that means the past twenty years are spotty as well, that’s just the way it goes. You rattle off your first day of school, the dog you had in third grade, the dress you wore to prom. I’ll do it my way.”
Both detectives regarded me skeptically.
“You really expect us to believe that?” Bad cop Detective O
spoke up first. “You’ve blanked your entire childhood from your own mind?”
“Please, I’ve blanked most of my life from my mind. I don’t remember things. I don’t know how else to tell you that. The first week of my life, the last week of my life. I don’t know. I don’t dwell on things. Maybe that’s freakish, but it’s also worked. I get up each morning. And from what I do remember of the brief time before my aunt came to take me away, I didn’t want to get up anymore. I was alive, and I was deeply disappointed by that.
“Eight years old,” I whispered. “Eight years old, and I already wished I were dead.”
“Tell us about your dreams,” D.D. said.
“Sometimes, I dream about a baby crying. That one feels real enough. Last night, however, I dreamed of my mother digging a grave in the middle of a thunderstorm. And her hair was filled with snakes, hissing at me, and I grabbed a baby girl out of the hall closet and ran away. Except, obviously my mom’s hair wasn’t made out of snakes, and oh yeah, there’s no way a toddler can climb a tree holding a baby, not to mention that in the dream, the baby’s name was Abigail, when of course, it was Rosalind.”
“Abigail?” Detective O asked sharply. She and Detective D.D. exchanged a glance. “Tell us about Abigail.”
I shook my head, rubbing my temples where a headache had already taken root. “You tell me. Do you have a record of an Abigail? Because I mentioned it to my aunt, and she said no. There were two babies. Rosalind and Carter. No Abigail.”
“No birth certificates, remember? No way to be sure.” D.D. was staring at me as hard as Detective O. “In your dream, what did Abigail look like?”
“Like a baby. She smiled at me. Big brown eyes.”
“Brown eyes,” Detective O interrupted. “What about blue?”
“I don’t know. In my dream, they were brown. But…maybe. Don’t all babies start with blue eyes?”
“But you remember brown,” D.D. said. “Blue eyes could darken into brown, but a baby wouldn’t start with brown eyes, that then turned blue.”
I shook my head, confused by both of them and their intensity. “My aunt said two babies, that’s all the police found.”
“It’s possible there were other babies,” D.D. said softly. “According to the police report, your mother moved around a lot, rarely spent more than a year in the same area. Probably helped her disguise the pregnancies, while keeping people from asking too many questions. The officers searched former rental units, of course, but she might have buried other remains, disposed of them in the woods, that sort of thing.”