Sketchy (12 page)

I’m exhausted, confused, bewildered—and now second-guessing my decision to come here. I feel defeated and sink down onto the chair behind Sergeant Daniels’s desk. The short cop, Detective Cole, looks like he wants to pull the chair out from under me.

“Who is ‘she’?” Sergeant Daniels asks.

“Willa Pressman, and this face I drew—he’s the one who raped her, beat her.” I finish taping the scraps of the sketch and mourn the end product. It looks like a Picasso drawing gone bad. “There are some things still recognizable, like the cleft here on his chin, and I guess the shape of his face, his hair.” I hold it out to them.

They look at each other as if they were just punk’d.

“I’ll redraw for it you, no problem. It won’t take me long at all. I’ll do anything you want—even put up with the inevitable shit from Willa. We have to catch him—we do!”

Detective Cole snorts. Sergeant Daniels rubs his jaw and decides not to take the sketch from me. “Uh, thank you for your generous offer, but Miss Pressman doesn’t remember her attacker.”

“She remembers everything,” I argue.

“Well, if that’s the case, Miss Washington—”

“Bea. I would prefer Bea.”

“If that’s the case, we’ll bring her back in here, in front of our forensic artists, and they’ll draw him,” Sergeant Daniels says.

“But you don’t have to. I already drew him, I know I did—this is him.” I stand. “So now you just have to locate him and catch him,” I challenge, still holding out the sketch.

Detective Cole chuckles. “Catch him? Hey, little girl, I have an idea… why don’t you go back to your crack house, or wherever you hang out. We have more important things to do here than chase a Mr. Potato Head drawing.” He laughs at his stupid joke.

This pisses me off big time and taps into my inherited Italian fury. “Hey, I’m not a crackhead! I’m sober, have been for over three months now, and I’m damn proud of it!” I snap up my three-month chip from the pile on the desk and toss it to Detective Cole. “You think I would have walked in here if I were using? Are you nuts? And with all due respect, I wasn’t the one playing a cops-and-robbers video game a minute ago! I didn’t have to come here, believe me. I didn’t
want
to come here. I thought I should for once do something responsible in my life and stop another girl from getting hurt. But forget it. You don’t care. Nobody cares.” I begin to throw all the crap into my bag. “And give me back my chip!” I snatch it from Detective Cole.

Sergeant Daniels pours a cup of coffee and hands it to me. “Detective Cole didn’t mean that, did you, Cole?”

His subordinate rolls his eyes.

“Congratulations on your sobriety—that’s terrific,” the sergeant continues, “and it’s great that you want to help. But I need to understand something. Are you friends with Willa Pressman? Is that why you want to help, why you’re here?”

Now it’s my turn to laugh and almost do a spit-take with the coffee. “Do I look like her type? I mean, come on. Think about it.”

“No, no, you don’t. Not at all.” Detective Cole scoffs.

“So, if you’re not her friend, why the concern?” The sergeant’s blond, bushy brows furrow together. “Do you know something about this we don’t? I mean, besides this sketch?”

I think about the girl in the Arboretum, her voice.
Help me… please, help me…
But I can’t go there with them, not yet—I don’t trust them with that information. “No, I don’t. Let’s just say we have a lot more in common than you’d think, Willa and me.”

“Yeah, right.” Cole is unconvinced.

“Well,” the sergeant interrupts, “like I said, we’ll have to get her back in here. Ask her some more questions and talk about this… this sketch you drew.”

“No! Don’t do that,” I beg.

“But why not?” the sergeant asks. “I don’t understand.”

“Because she’ll deny it, I told you. She’ll deny talking with me, meeting with me. She’ll say that this isn’t the guy.”

“Why would she do that? Why wouldn’t she want to identify him if this really is him, as you say?”

“Just because,” I hedge.

“Just because
why
?” He doesn’t quit.

“She’ll deny everything because she doesn’t want you to know what really happened, okay? Willa won’t talk to you. She hasn’t told anyone, except for me.” I raise my voice.

“And why is that?” the sergeant asks.

“Because of the truth. Willa is afraid of the truth.”

Sergeant Daniels pauses. He stares at me and squints his green eyes.
The Caribbean,
I think to myself. His eyes are the color of the Caribbean Sea.

… Two years ago, Christmas, I was fifteen, and my dad was invited to attend a conference down in Jamaica. It was the first conference Mom wanted to join in on. A happy little family vacation, they imagined, I’m sure.

Well, it didn’t turn out that way, as I immediately zeroed in on another bored teen—a nerd from California. He’d been there a couple weeks and told me that he scored amazing weed from the local maintenance workers. He wasn’t cute and was a bit of a moron, but I decided to hang out with him—for the pot—and got stoned with him on the beach.

Stupid move on my part, because after we got high, he thought I should pay him for the weed. With sex.

I was totally grossed out, said “no way,” and he got pissed—majorly pissed. I tried to run from him, but he was fast, caught up with me, and pulled my hair.

“Fuck you!” I yelled and instinctively elbowed him in
his skinny ribs, and he slumped over. I was surprised—kind of knocked the wind out of him. “Cool,” I thought and swung around and punched, undercutting his jaw. He stumbled back, dazed, and I ran into the ocean and started swimming—fast.

I lucked out—apparently the stooge didn’t know how to swim, because he stayed on the shore in his tacky board shorts, giving me the finger and swearing stupid shit at me.

I swam to an anchored raft, collapsed on my belly, and stared at the water. It was good weed, he was right. I was mesmerized, paralyzed by the beauty, the clarity, the greenness of the sea. I think I must have zoned out on that raft for a good five hours until my mom discovered where I was and called me to shore. She tended to my outrageously burned skin for the rest of the week.

No, it wasn’t a good vacation.

Anyway, that greenness, that clarity is what I see in Sergeant Daniels’s eyes.

“And you happen know the truth? What happened that night?” he asks.

“I do.”

“How?”

I wonder if I should dare go there—to my truth. I give him a nibble. “I sort of drew it out of her.”

Sergeant Daniels raises his eyebrows. “Well, that sounds
like quite a talent, Miss Washington. How do you suppose you were able to do that?”

“Look, that’s irrelevant. All that matters is he’s out there, the rapist. And he looks like this.” I hold up the taped sketch again.

They both laugh this time.

“Well, not like
this
. You know what I mean.”

“Okay, okay. We’ll see what we can do. Why don’t you give me your address and phone number, in case we need to talk to you.”

I jot my information on a piece of paper and hand it to Sergeant Daniels. “This was a waste of my time, wasn’t it?”

“Listen, you’re a sweet kid, trying to help a friend, or whatever she is to you.”

“I’m not a kid—I’m almost eighteen. Oh, and by the way, can I have a note for school, you know, explaining why I’m not there?”

The sergeant could have laughed at me, I realized after I replayed that last line in my head. But he didn’t. He handed me his card. “Give them this. They can call me if they need to.”

I sit in my trusty Volvo, wondering if I should go to school. It was nice of Sergeant Daniels to give me his card, but I
don’t know how that’ll fly with the front office. Like I’m really going to ask them to call the police to find out where I was? And with how I look right now? Not happening—not going to school.

I am cold, wet, dirty, hungry, and man, do I have to pee.

Why do I care so much? Why am I putting myself in this position for her? For Willa Pressman? Jeopardizing school? Ruining my favorite shoes and losing a fabulous coat?

I think about all the sketchy situations I’ve put myself in—the dangerous places, the dishonest, abusive people I’ve confronted—the world of an addict. How have I dodged the bullet?

Luck. Shameful, cowardly luck.

I pull to the side of the road and redraw the sketch of Willa’s rapist.

And in black marker, I write on the top:

WANTED RAPIST
(POSSIBLE MURDERER)
CALL 734-555-1289
WITH ANY INFORMATION!!!

Then I pull into a Kinkos and make one hundred copies.

I run up to my bedroom, collapse on the bed, and pull the covers over my head—and try not to think, not to feel, not to care. Just for an hour, a minute… I’d even take one second.

Knock, knock.

My mom opens the door to my room. “Why are you home from school? You okay, Bea?”

I fake a cough. “I have a sore throat.”

She sits on my bed, pulls down the comforter, and feels my forehead. “Well, you don’t have a fever. But you do look horrible. What’s that in your hair?”

“Bird shit… don’t ask.”

“Oh god. Go take a shower.”

“I just want to sleep, Mom.”

“I’m sure you do, but you have that interview today—at the preschool, remember?”

I put my pillow over my face. “Oh, come on, Mom, please don’t make me do that.
Please
.”

She removes the pillow. “I know you’ve been through a lot. But maybe working with kids will be a good distraction, get your mind off what happened.”

“I doubt that.”

“Bea, I promised the preschool director that you would come. It’s a couple of afternoons a week. Now, why don’t you go take a shower, and I’ll heat up some soup.”

“But the sore throat thing, Mom… I could get the kids sick.”

“Are you kidding me? They’re walking petri dishes.”

Oh great. Just great.

I
can’t believe I’m actually doing this. I’ve never spent more than a couple minutes—that is, consciously—with a kid, and that didn’t turn out too well.

I was hired to babysit my neighbor’s eight-year-old about a year ago, and I thought,
How hard could it be? Watching a kid for a couple hours—a few extra bucks.
I turned on a video for him and fell asleep, into a deep sleep. (I was coming down from a high.) He got hungry and couldn’t wake me, so he proceeded to make his own dinner. The screeching smoke alarms are what woke me—that, and the smell of burnt macaroni and cheese. The house didn’t burn down, no one was hurt, thank goodness, but I was never asked again to babysit—duh—and my mom had to replace the scorched pan.

The perky director of Happy Days preschool greets me with a big smile. “So you’re Annabelle’s daughter. I’m Eve.
Eve Stuart.” She checks me out, seems unconvinced.

“I’m Bea,” I say, wondering how much she knows about me, what my mom has told her.

“Don’t you love the mural your mom painted? The kids sure do.”

The familiar puppy-dog and kitty-cat theme that wraps the walls of my house also wraps the walls in the school. “Sure. It’s great. Original,” I lie.

“So the actual day for the kids ends at three o’clock. But a few of them stay after until their parents pick them up—can be as late as six. I would need your help keeping an eye on them, playing with them, pushing them on swings”—she eyes my platform shoes—“and helping them in the bathroom.”

You’re kidding me. Ick.

“Of course, I’ll be here the whole time—you’ll be assisting me. So, why don’t you have a seat with the kids?” She gestures toward a few brats on the floor playing with LEGO blocks. “Let’s see how you get along.”

“Oh, okay.” I sit down on the rug, cursing the low-rise skinny jeans that I decided to wear. It’s hard to bend my knees and, for sure, my butt crack is peeking out.

I smile at the kids. “Hi.”

They ignore me. I’m not a LEGO piece.

“It’s called parallel play,” Eve says from across the room. “Start playing along with them, you’ll see.”

I pick up one of the blocks and connect it to another.
Doesn’t seem so hard, so I build a box. A little boy uses my arm as a ramp for the car he has constructed.