Close to the Broken Hearted (5 page)

I looked at him. “What the hell's the matter with you?”

He swallowed. “What?”

“Aren't you pissin'-your-pants scared right now?”

He shrugged. “Not really. I think it's like a movie.”

“You're so weird.” Then, quietly, I added, “I'm really worried. What do we do?” Behind us, Mr. Eakins hadn't even noticed we'd moved on from our conversation with him. He was busy now helping some old lady find a bag of biscuits for her dog.

“I dunno,” Dewey said. “Nobody ever wanted to follow me before.” Then it was like all the shutter blinds opened up in his head. I heard him gasp and his hand came to his mouth.

“What is it?” I asked, looking at him again.

“What if,” he said, “she's after my inventions?”

Oh my God, this guy lived in a fantasy world. “Are you serious?”

“I think it's a strange coincidence that she shows up right when I've decided to start puttin' them in a book, is all.”

“I think you have mental problems.”

“What are we gonna do?” he asked.

“Not much choice,” I said. “I guess we get back on our bikes and head home.”

“And what if she follows us?”

“Then I get my mom.”

“And what if she
doesn't
follow us?”

I stopped and thought about this. “Then . . . then there's no problem.”

“Oh.” Dewey sounded disappointed. “What if she does somethin' else?”

“Like what?”

“I dunno,” he said. “Shoots us?”

I let out a big sigh. “I don't think she's gonna shoot us. Besides, she had the whole ride here to do somethin' and she didn't. That's the weird part. It's almost like she wanted to see where we was headed.”

“I know!” Dewey said. “Maybe she's after our candy.”

“Or our aluminum foil!” I offered sarcastically.

“You think maybe?” Dewey asked, not getting the sarcasm.

“No,” I said. “I don't. Come on.”

We went outside and I kept glancing over at her as we got back on our bikes. The driver's side window of her car was rolled down, so it was easy to see her. She had blondy-brown hair that was tied up, and she wore a lot of makeup. She was probably older than she looked, I guess. Her face was thin. She had big blue earrings on.

We began riding back the way we had come. At first it looked like she was just going to sit in her car, but then I heard it start up. I looked back to see her slowly start moving and go back to following us down Main Street.

“So much for there not bein' a problem,” Dewey said.

I didn't reply. Instead, I just tried not to notice the stone turning over inside my stomach.

A couple blocks later, I heard her car getting closer. Then closer.

Then closer still.

Then I realized she was pulling up beside us.

Part of my brain remembered what Dewey had said in the store. I hoped she wasn't about to shoot us.

“Hey!” she called out through the open passenger window. Her voice had a strange kind of nasally accent.

I ignored her and kept riding. My mother always said never talk to strangers and all that. I was sure it included stalkers.

“Hey,” she said again. “Is your name Abe?” she asked.

That caught me off guard. Now I wasn't sure what to do. Was she a stranger if she knew my name?

“She knows who you are,” Dewey said from the other side.

I decided to answer her. I looked up. “Yes.”

“I need to talk to you,” she said.

What? Why did this strange woman need to talk to me? I didn't know what to do. I had no idea who she was. “I don't know who you are,” I said honestly.

“I'm . . . I'm your aunt.”

I paused. Then I said, “I don't have an aunt.”

“Yes you do. On your dad's side. I'm your daddy's sister.”

Suddenly, it was as if a burst of sparrows sprang into my mind like they were flying from the treetops after a gunshot. I had never known my pa. He died when I was two. I didn't know very much about him. My mother never wanted to talk about him, and whenever I asked anything, she always kept her answers as short and to the point as possible. I certainly had no idea he had a sister.

Wouldn't my mother have told me if he had? Did she even know if he had?

I decided this was too important not to find out.

I hit my brakes.

“What are you doin'?” Dewey asked.

“I need to talk to this woman,” I said.

“You don't know her from Adam,” Dewey said, then stumbled. “—er, or Eve. She could be makin' this all up. She could be one of those child abductors or somethin'.”

“You don't have to hang round here,” I said to him. “You're free to go home and tell my mom where I am, if you like.”

“Hell no,” he said. “If you're stayin', I'm stayin'.”

“Where's a good place to talk?” the woman in the car asked.

 

We wound up sitting with her on the outside steps of the library, the same steps Robert Lee Garner had stood on last fall when Mary Ann Dailey went missing—a time of my life I will probably never forget.

That day, it had been pouring rain, and Dewey had been wearing galoshes ten times too big for him. Today it was so hot I didn't know how long I could survive out here before I fainted. The wind that had been making the ride tolerable on our way into town seemed to have given in to the pounding sun as the day continued into the early morning.

“How come I ain't never heard of you?” I asked the woman as we took our seats.

“I don't know. I guess nobody ever thought to tell you . . .” She sort of drifted off. “I'm sure they had their reasons.”

I kept waiting for reasons that never came. Instead, she held out her hand and said, “My name's Addison, by the way.”

“I'm Abe,” I said, shaking her hand, “which you already seem to know. This here's Dewey.”

Dewey shook her hand, too. “Mighty pleased,” he said.

“I would've just come straight to your house,” she said, “but I'm worried about your mom's reaction to me just showing up like that. I was hoping you might tell her you met me and give her my phone number. I have some important things I need to talk with her about. You know what I mean?”

I had no idea what she meant. I thought this over. It was weird that this woman seemed to know so much about me and my family. “You
do
know my pa died, right?” I asked.

She smiled sadly. “Yes, Abe. I do. I'm really sorry about your loss.”

The steps were white marble and had recently been cleaned. They looked extremely bright today. “I didn't really know him much,” I said. “Carry knew him better than me.” Then something occurred to me. This woman—Addison—had mentioned my mother and followed me, but hadn't said a thing about my sister. “You know about Carry?”

“Yes, I know quite a bit about you and your sister, actually. My mom and dad have pictures of both of you growing up. Lots of pictures.”

“Your ma and pa?” I asked, trying to figure out how that fit. “You mean—”

“Your grandma and grandpa,” she said.

“I have a granddaddy and grandma?” I asked.

She laughed. “Of course. You think the stork brought your dad? How old are you, again?”

“They still alive?” asked Dewey.

I elbowed him. “Don't be so rude,” I said. Then I looked at Addison and quietly asked, “Is they?”

She nodded. “Sure are. That's kind of what brought me here to meet you.”

“What do you mean?”

She sat there as though thinking about whether or not she should answer my question. I suppose she decided not to because the next thing she said was, “I really should be talking to your mother about all of this.”

“How come you know so much about 'em all?” Dewey asked suspiciously, his eyes squinting at her on account of the sun.

She looked over at the other side of the street as if once again contemplating whether she should give out some important information or not. Her eyes came back to mine. “Just get your mom to call me. Then we can figure this whole thing out. I promise it will all become clear soon enough. Okay?”

“Okay,” I said, disappointed in her answer.

She pulled a piece of paper and a pen from her purse and wrote a telephone number on it. Folding the paper once, she handed it to me.

I unfolded it, and read the number. “You don't live in Alvin?”

She laughed. “No, I'm from up in Boston. Can't you tell? Most people know immediately by the way I talk.”

“I just thought you talked strange,” Dewey said. “Some kind of weird accent.”

I shushed him. “Don't be so rude.”

She laughed again. “It's okay. Lots of people think I talk strange. Lots of people where I live would think
you
talk strange.” A starling caught her attention. “A whole bunch of people . . .” she said, trailing off.

“You came all the way from Boston to give me this number?” I asked.

She paused again. “Yes and no. There were a few reasons I came down here. Again, I need to talk to your mom about this. Please get her to call me. But make sure you explain that I won't be back in Boston until the day after tomorrow, so she should wait at least two days before calling. You know what I mean?” She sounded especially funny when she said words like
again
and
about
. I almost expected Dewey to say something. I was glad when he didn't.

“I'll give it to her,” I said, blocking the sunlight with the back of my hand as Addison stood up.

“Thanks, Abe, and let me tell you what a nice experience it's been to finally meet you. You too, Dewey. You seem like very nice boys.”

She walked back down the street to her car and got inside. A moment later she drove off. We watched her go in silence until she was out of sight.

“She seems like a psycho to me,” Dewey said.

“I thought she seemed nice enough.”

“She hunted you down from Boston.”

“Yeah, somethin' weird's going on.”

“Think she's really your aunt?” Dewey asked.

“Dunno.”

“She looks nothin' like you.”

I didn't respond. I just wondered about all the questions she kept refusing to answer. And what did she mean by it's been nice to
finally
meet me? One thing was for sure: She did seem a little bit creepy.

Something was definitely not right.

M
y mother was just getting out of bed when me and Dewey made it back home from the grocery store. We didn't even bother going to Dewey's first to drop off the aluminum foil before heading straight to my place so I could tell my mother about this strange woman who called herself my “aunt.”

My mother met us in the kitchen.

Quickly, I told my mother everything that had happened, the words fighting their way out of my mouth.

“And she wanted me to give you this,” I said when I had finished relaying the story. I handed my mother the piece of paper with the telephone number written on it.

“Abe, what have I told you 'bout talkin' to strangers?” my mother asked.

I looked down at my sneakers, which I had forgotten to take off at the door in my mad rush to come inside and tell the story. “I know,” I said, “but this woman seemed to know who I was. She told me I was her blood.”

“People can tell you a lot of things, Abe.”

My eyes turned up to hers. “So she's not my aunt?” I felt strangely disappointed.

“To the best of my knowledge, your pa never had no siblings,” she said. “Would've been strange for him not to have mentioned 'em to me. We were married five years 'fore he . . .” She trailed off and I knew bad memories had started swooping in like hawks going after field mice.

My pa had married my mother when my mother was just a kid, not much older than Carry. I think the reason they even got married in the first place was all on account of my mother getting pregnant with Carry, but from what I've come to understand they
were
in love. But then, when I was two years old, my pa died.

I never really got to know him. It made me sad that I barely remembered him. When I was older, I found a picture of him in my mother's closet that I kept. I still carried it around with me all the time. I don't think my mother knew that I had it. I found it in a box in her closet with a whole bunch of other pictures of my pa and my mother. They were the only pictures of my pa I'd ever remembered seeing on account of my mother getting rid of all the ones around the house after him dying.

She didn't like to talk about my pa much. Even now, she still seemed very uncomfortable when topics spilled over into anything regarding him. I didn't think she'd dealt with his death properly.

That was something I got from watching the TV, that you had to go through a certain grieving process. And, until you got through it, you couldn't get over the person you lost.

I think my mother was stuck somewhere in the middle, just going round and round.

“Well, how did this woman know so much about Abe and Carry if she's not their aunt?” Dewey asked.

“I don't know,” my mother answered after thinking about it, “but if she tries to talk to you again, you come and find me or go to the station and get Chief Montgomery to talk to her, you understand?” It was funny how Dewey had asked the question, but her answer had been directed straight at me.

“Yes, ma'am,” I said, watching the toe of my sneaker outline one of the checkered squares of our kitchen floor.

My mother seemed upset by our news, and I hadn't wanted to upset her. I thought she'd be happy, or at least interested in knowing more about what was going on, the same way me and Dewey were. Instead, she seemed almost angry, or maybe it was scared I was looking at. I couldn't tell.

“I think she's a nice lady,” I said. “I don't think she means to hurt anyone.”

“She seemed like a psycho to me,” Dewey said. “She hunted Abe down from Boston.”

“You don't know nothin',” I said to Dewey.

“You're too young to know if someone's nice or not,” my mother told me.

“What do you mean?” I asked. I thought this was a ridiculous statement.

“I mean you're naïve, Abe. Anyone can make you think they're nice when really they have ulterior motives.”

“That's not true,” I said. “If anythin' it's the opposite. I tend to think people ain't nice when they really are. Remember what happened with Mr. Wyatt Edward Farrow?”

Mr. Wyatt Edward Farrow had moved in across the street near on a year ago and, at the time, Dewey and I thought for sure he had been up to no good. Little girls were disappearing around Alvin and my mother was trying to figure out who was nabbing them and I thought with all my heart that Mr. Wyatt Edward Farrow had something to do with it. He just seemed so suspicious. Dewey and me even followed him one morning all the way into town to see what he was up to.

In the end, he turned out to be one of the nicest fellers I'd ever met. He was a carpenter, and he made Dewey and me biplanes—real big ones—that we played with all through the winter. We were
still
playing with them. When we weren't, mine hung from fishing line right above my bed. I loved it.

My mother still hadn't answered my question. Maybe she was thinking about something else and hadn't heard me ask it. At any rate, I decided to drop it. It didn't matter what she said, I
knew
I was able to tell bad people from nice ones. It was something I was good at. Like I said, it was the other way around I sometimes had problems with.

“You gonna call the number?” Dewey asked her.

She let out a long sigh. “I dunno.”

What I didn't know was why Dewey's questions were getting answered and mine weren't. “Why wouldn't you call?” I asked. “What's the worst thing that could happen? And even if he didn't talk 'bout them, surely Pa must've had a mom and a pa. So that part's probably true, don't you think?”

Another sigh came to her lips. “Your pa never spoke of his folks,” she said. “I don't
know
why. But—” She stopped as if in deep thought about all this.

“I don't see what callin' the number can possibly hurt,” I said.

“I don't know who this person is, Abe,” she said. “I don't want to call someone I don't know.”

“You gave Miss Sylvie your home number and you're afraid of talkin' to a stranger?” I laughed. “Whoever this number belongs to, she's gotta be more normal than Miss Sylvie.” I regretted saying it as soon as it came out.

Then Dewey followed with, “You
really
gave Miss Sylvie your home number? Are you
crazy?
” And then
he
laughed, and everything got even worse. A
lot
worse.

My mother's eyes narrowed, and if laser beams could've shot right out of them, we'd both have been fried all over the fridge and stove. “I'll hear none of that from either of you!” she said. “Miss Sylvie is
not
to be made fun of. Especially not by
you
two. Especially not in
this
house. Am I clear?”

Dewey's hands went into his pockets. “Yes, ma'am,” he said quietly.

I hung my head and just nodded.

“Good. Now, Dewey, I reckon you oughta get home with that aluminum foil 'fore your ma starts figurin' out she didn't go through two rolls on her own in a single day, don't you?”

Dewey had set the foil, which was sticking out of the top of a brown paper bag, on the counter when he came into the kitchen. “Yes, ma'am,” he said again.

I was about to tag along with him when my mother said. “And, Abe . . .”

I stopped and turned.

“I want your room cleaned.”

“But—” It wasn't even messy.

“No buts. You're stayin' in today. Go take off your shoes.”

“Yes, ma'am,” I said. She was in one of her moods. I knew there was no point in even trying to post a disagreement.

 

Dewey was barely out the door and my sneakers had just been kicked off my feet when the phone rang. I raced from the back door through the dining room back toward the kitchen to grab it when my mother picked up the receiver right in front of me. I could tell she was still upset; I just wasn't sure what she was upset about. I think it was a number of different things, some of which made sense to me, some of which did not. My giving her the phone number of this woman who called herself my aunt seemed to really have knocked her for a loop.

I stood in the kitchen beside the sink listening to my mother's side of the telephone conversation. The sun was higher in the sky now and just edged the top of the window looking outside over the backyard where the cherries hung from the two trees, just waiting to be picked. Their dark red skin glistened under the hot sun.

“Hello?” she answered. “Oh, hi, Ethan. How are you this mornin'?”

Ethan was Ethan Montgomery, the police chief of the Alvin Police Department, my mother's boss.

“What do you mean?” she asked, suddenly on the defensive.

“No, I didn't do it so she could threaten you. I—” Whatever Chief Montgomery was saying to her was making her even more agitated than before. This was definitely not a good day to be stuck inside with my mother. I wished more than ever I had been able to escape with Dewey.

“No, Ethan, listen. I told her she could call me if she
needed
to, but only for emergencies. And I emphasized that she had to call the station
first
.”

I was guessing this had to do with my mother giving Miss Sylvie her home phone number. I don't think anybody would think that was a good idea. I still wasn't quite sure why
she
did.

“Well, I certainly didn't mean for her to use it as leverage.” There was a brief pause and then, “Yes, I'll talk to her. I'll let her know.”

Another pause and, “Ethan, before you go, do you mind if I ask you something about an unrelated issue? It concerns an encounter Abe had with a woman on Main Street this morning.”

And my mother told Chief Montgomery the whole story about the woman claiming to be my aunt. She got most of the details surprisingly accurate. I guessed that's what made her a good detective. When I had told her about it, I hadn't thought she'd been paying that much attention, but I suppose she actually had been.

When she was finished, she fell silent while Chief Montgomery spoke. Then my mother said, “Well, I guess I just wanted your opinion. Do you think it's
possible
this woman might actually be Billy's sister? Could Billy have had siblings and not mentioned them the entire six years we were together?”

Billy was the name of my pa.

Another pause and then, “I don't know. Do you think I should? That seems a bit like using the system for my own personal agenda. And I feel somehow like I'm being disloyal to Billy's memory. Like I'm spyin' on him or somethin'.” She turned a thing over in her mind and then said, “Okay, go ahead and do a background check on Billy.” She let out a deep breath “I don't know how I feel about this, but at least I'll know whether or not to trust this woman. Oh, and she says she's from Boston. Abe said she sounded funny, so she's probably got the accent to go with the claim. Thanks, Ethan. I owe you one. And don't worry 'bout Sylvie; I'll talk to her right away. It won't happen again.”

My mother hung up the phone.

“Why you doin' a background check on Pa?” I asked.

“To see if it turns up any brothers or sisters.”

“Why don't you just call the number?” I asked. “Wouldn't that be easier?”

“Because I don't trust people I don't know, Abe. I'd rather not go into this blind. It's too strange, her showin' up after all this time. It just strikes me odd.”

“Everythin' 'bout Pa strikes you odd.”

“Now what's that supposed to mean?”

“I dunno.”

She searched my face, as though trying to decide if I had insulted her and deserved a good talking to. “I reckon you think too much.”

I had no idea what she meant by that. “What did Chief Montgomery say 'bout Miss Sylvie?” I asked, figuring she'd answer my question by telling me to mind my business.

She surprised me. “Oh, apparently she called the station again with another problem and asked Chris to put her through to Ethan. When Ethan took the call, she immediately threatened him by sayin' if he didn't take her seriously, she would just call me at home. So now I got Ethan thinkin' I'm in cahoots with Miss Sylvie, givin' her ammunition to blackmail the department into attendin' to her.”

“Why would they think that?”

She took another deep breath. “Because apparently you're not the only one who reckons givin' out my home number to Miss Sylvie was a bad idea. And they all know how I feel about the way her calls are treated at the station. I don't keep it a big secret. I think the girl is treated unfairly. I hate injustice, Abe. You, of all people, should know that.”

I thought about it. I reckoned I did know it and it was something I admired about my mother very much. “I hate injustice, too,” I said.

She held out her arms and I moved in close. Pulling me into her chest with a warm hug, she said, “Now you're just tryin' to suck up.”

“Mom?” I asked, while her arms were still wrapped tightly around me. “Did I really do something wrong today by talking to that woman?”

“You did what you thought was right,” she said. “I just wish you hadn't talked to a stranger. At least you did it in a public place. This time it turned out okay. You got home safe. But next time you might not be so lucky. I just don't want anythin' bad to ever happen to you.”

“I don't want anythin' bad to ever happen to you, either,” I said.

She let go of me. I could see a tear standing in her eye. “All right. I reckon it's time for you to go start cleanin' up your bedroom.”

“Okay,” I said reluctantly, and slunk down the hall, wondering what all might show up in that background check Chief Montgomery was doing on my pa. There were sure a lot of things about him that
I
didn't know. I would
love
to find out more.