Don't You Cry (19 page)

Alex

That night, I lie down in bed, and just as I start to drift to sleep, I awaken. That jolt of electricity that comes before sleep, the body ready to retire for the night, the mind not. Or is it the other way around? A hypnagogic jerk, a night start. That's what wakes me, or so I think.

It's quiet and then suddenly I hear the chink of glass on glass. That's what it sounds like to me. It takes a minute to get my bearings, and when I do, I figure out that the noise is coming from the window. I rise from bed and approach the glass just in time to see a small rock get catapulted into it, its trajectory taking it from the ground to the glass. It swats the window and tumbles down, rolling along the shingles of the porch roof.

I open the blinds and peer to the wilted lawn down below and there she stands. Pearl.

She's cloaked in her black-and-white checkered coat, the black beanie set on her head. It's murky outside tonight, making it hard to see clearly. But I see her; she's there, standing in the quiet night like a figure in a blurry photograph. Hazy and imperfect, but still perfect in so many ways. She waves as I open the blinds and gaze outside feeling more than a little bit flummoxed. Why is she here? I don't know why, but I thank the heavens that she is.

All my life I dreamed some girl would come to me in the middle of the night, and now here she is.

I raise my hand and wave back, a shiftless sort of wave, though inside I feel anything but; inside I forget the fact entirely that I was just on the cusp of sleep, brooding over Pops and an unpaid electric bill, the fact that he'd stolen my telescope. Feeling sorry for myself. Sulking. Wanting and hoping for something other than this life.

I hold up an index finger and mouth the words,
One second
, though I doubt she can see. I snatch a sweatshirt from the handle of my closet door and dash outside before she can change her mind and go.

“What are you doing here?” I ask, my voice little more than a whisper as I meet her on the lawn. The grass is wet, covered in dew. It seeps through my gym shoes, moistening my feet, making them cold. Her hair is wet and I want more than anything to reach out and touch it, to graze the ombré hair with my fingertips and see if the texture changes along with the tinge: gritty to coarse to syrupy and silky, like velvet. That's the way it looks to me, like velvet. It's been raining, I think, and that's why her hair is wet. But I never heard any rain. There's dew on the lawn but the concrete of the sidewalks and street is dry. Maybe she was swimming again, treading water in Lake Michigan. Maybe that's it. That's probably it, I decide. She was swimming.

But I don't ask.

“I was bored,” she admits. That's why she's here, then. I don't know what to say to this, or what to think. How bored did she have to be to come see me?

But I try not to let my self-doubt get the best of me. She's here and that's all that matters to me. She's here.

She turns and starts to walk, and like some little lost puppy, I follow. The air outside is brisk tonight, the town eerily quiet. Little more than the sound of our own footfalls fills the night, the involuntary kicking of gravel beneath our feet, the rhythmic squeak of a single shoe. There are no cars, no trains, no gulls or owls. The whole world is asleep save for us—Pearl and me.

We walk. I don't know where it is that we're going, and I don't think she knows, either. As far as I can tell, we're not going anywhere. We don't say much. Sometimes that's best, so that I don't say anything stupid and mess the whole thing up. But every now and then we say something unavailing and dumb like,
That's an ugly house,
or
Looks like the streetlight is out again
.
Just shooting the shit. That kind of thing.

But then, after we've gone halfway around the block for the second time, she says, “My folks gave me up.” The words come out of nowhere, though I bet they've been dwelling there in the back of her mind for a long time now, trying to work their way out, like lab rats trying to work their way through a maze. “When I was a girl,” she adds, and I put her words together in my head, her confession:
My folks gave me up when I was a girl.

Admissions like this seem a lot easier in the dark, when you don't have to see the pitying look on someone else's face, a look that somehow makes you feel worse when it's supposed to make you feel better.

“What do you mean gave you up?” I ask. “Like for adoption?”

“Yeah,” she says.

“Sorry,” I say because I can't think of anything better to say. Doesn't seem like it's my right to try and gouge out more information, anyway. So I settle instead on a listless,
Sorry
, hoping that she knows I really mean it
.
She's not a kid. She's old enough that you'd think she might be over it by now, and yet I guess you don't ever really get over these things. It's not like I've moved past my mother's leaving me. That's the kind of pain that's more of an aching throb than a sudden sting. It goes on forever.

She shrugs her shoulders and says to me, “It's okay. I'm over it,” but somehow I don't think that she is. My best guess is that she's twenty-five, maybe twenty-eight years old, and she's still mad about the fact that her parents gave her up for adoption. That's the thing about stuff like that. It festers. It's human nature to hold a grudge. It's hard looking forward when you have trouble figuring out what you've left behind, or rather, what's left you behind. My own mother's been gone for thirteen years now, and not a day goes by that I don't have bad feelings about it. Truth be told, I'm still mad. And I think about her all the time. I'd tell Pearl about how she needs to forget the past and move forward with the future, but that's what we call the pot calling the kettle black. I'm no hypocrite. Sometimes things like that are easier said than done.

“How come?” I ask her then. “How come your folks gave you up?”

I can't see it, but I imagine that she shrugs.

“Why does anyone give up their kids?” she wants to know. It's a rhetorical question; she's not really looking for an answer. But inside I start to come up with all sorts of replies, such as financial trouble, divorce, a young, unmarried mother, a lack of support, just some lady who didn't have a clue how to be a mom. I'm pretty sure she doesn't want to hear any of these things. She harbors a resentment in her voice; I can hear it, clear as day. If anything, she wants me to tell her that folks give their kids up because they're lousy people and terrible parents. Because they're just mean. But I don't have a chance to say this.

“Bad girl,” she spits then, the intensity of her words making me jump. They're potent and angry, and then there, in the night air, to no one in particular, she points a rigid finger accusatorily, and says again, “Bad girl. You've been a bad girl.”

It's bizarre, that's for sure, Pearl's declaration or memory or whatever it is that just happened. It's not like I don't already know she's a tad bit loony, and this gives me further reason to question her sanity, and yet for whatever reason I don't. Maybe it's nice to be in the company of someone who pays no regard to the norms of society, who doesn't care what other people think. And yet those words, that pronouncement—
Bad girl
—on an otherwise quiet night stays in my mind.
You've been a bad girl.
It's a slogan that sticks with her like mine does me:
Go away, Alex. Leave me alone. Don't touch me.

The night grows silent. I listen to the rhythm of our footfalls, my feet keeping pace with hers. We walk slowly, aimlessly, not even in a straight line.
Ambling
would be a better word. We amble down the street at night, under a canopy of stars and trees. Somewhere off in the distance, a pack of coyotes passes through a forest or field, spouting their high-frequency howls as the pack reunites for a kill. We listen, imagining a pack of coyotes stalking and surrounding a prairie dog, a cat, a squirrel.

“That's what they always told me at least.
You've been a bad girl
,” she says again, but this time her words are quieter, told with reserve. I want to ask her if it was true, if she was a bad girl. I think that maybe it was true, but also, maybe not. Maybe it was taken out of context or blown out of proportion, something along those lines. Really, all kids are bad, anyway, aren't they? Self-absorbed and all that. It's in their nature. I'm guessing I probably was and that's why my mother decided to leave. But suddenly, knowing her folks gave her up makes my mother look not quite so bad for leaving me. At least I still had Pops. She didn't take me away from Pops.

“Did you just find out?” I ask. “About being given up?” But she says no; she's known for a while. “Someone told you?” I want to know, but she says, “I figured it out on my own.”

She started having dreams, she tells me, about another mother, another father. About fingers getting pointed at her, angry, denunciatory fingers, and those same five words repeated over and over again like a broken record:
You've been a bad girl.
It was years ago, many years. She was still at home living with her folks. She told her adoptive parents about the dreams, though she didn't really need to. They'd already heard her, calling out in her sleep. They knew about the nightmares, or what she thought were nightmares at the time. Turned out they were flashbacks. She was remembering. And little by little she put the pieces together and figured it out. There was the fact, too, that she didn't look a thing like her family, all tall and thickset with strawberry blond hair and light green eyes. They looked nothing like her. She was upset, overcome by a sense of abandonment and sadness, whether or not she had a family who loved her. She felt hurt, rejected by the parents who gave her up. But it was more than that, too; she'd been lied to and made to look like a fool.

Her adoptive family was contrite. “They were good people,” she tells me then as we walk down the splintered street. “They
are
good people.” We're closer now, moving in parallel lines. We don't touch, not intentionally, no, but every now and then the swing of her arm grazes the swing of mine. “They wanted to make it better,” she tells me of her adoptive parents. She doesn't tell me their names or anything about them, but she admits that they stuffed her full of love and affection; they sent her for therapy. And at the mention of therapy, a signal goes off in my brain.

Dr. Giles.

“They did the best they could with what they were given, you know? I was a screwed-up kid. Still am, I guess. I made her cry a lot, my mother. I made him mad. But they were good people. They didn't yell, they didn't hit me when I was being bad. And it's not like they were just going to drive on into the next town and leave me with some new family I didn't know. Who does that kind of thing?” she asks with a sardonic laugh. I don't say a thing. She isn't looking for me to say anything. “They were stuck with me, you know? They'd adopted me. They signed the papers and all, though still, I put them through hell. I know I did. Couldn't help it, that's just me. It's who I am. But still,” she says, “when I turned eighteen, I took my cue and decided to leave. They didn't need me sticking around anymore, poaching on their family. It was their family, anyway, not mine.

“I tried to find my family,” she confesses. “My real family, anyway. And I did,” she says, her voice gloomy and withdrawn. There's a long hiatus in her admission. I think that's all she's going to say.
I tried to find my family and I did.
I want to know more; I want to pry. I want to ask what happened. But I don't. I leave it at that, knowing that when she's ready she'll tell me more.

Instead, I unclasp the shark's tooth necklace from around my neck and hand it to her. For strength and protection. Right now, she needs it more than me.

“I can't,” she says, but she does it, anyway, taking the cord from my shaking hands as we continue on into the darkness of night, walking until I think I can walk no more, but even then, I don't want to go home.

“I tried to find my family,” she says again after some time, after a long time, so long that I'd decided she was never going to tell me, “and I did. I tracked them down.” I can hear her breathing in the sleepy night, her breath weighted down like mud. It doesn't come easy. An upshot of the walking—or maybe the stress. Maybe the grief.

“But they still didn't want me,” she adds. “After all those years, they still didn't want me,” and my heart snaps for her, knowing what it did to me after my mother rejected me. I listen as she tells me how she found her family, but as soon as she did, they tried to elude her, to refuse her phone calls, to pay her to go away. And suddenly my mother's one single rejection doesn't seem so bad. If I saw my mother again and she refused me for a second time, I don't know what I'd do. I think I'd likely lose it.

Quinn

“Pipe down, lady,” says the bus driver, a big man with an even bigger voice. He hardly turns in his chair, just enough to see that I'm not being raped at gunpoint. But he doesn't slow down the bus. He doesn't step on the brakes or reach for his walkie-talkie doodad to call for help. “Everything okay?” he asks, his voice as apathetic as if he'd asked if I wanted fries with my meal.

Behind me sits the bum who likes to touch my hair. And it's instantaneous almost, the sense of relief. Not a killer, I tell myself. Just a creep.

But the relief is short-lived.

When he smiles, I see half of his teeth are missing. The rest are yellow and misshapen. He'll lose those, too. I just know it. I'm not sure I've ever looked him in the eye before, other than a sideways glance and a simple request:
Stop touching my hair, please.

He'd be creepy even on a good day, but this isn't a good day. He'd be creepy if the sun was out and it was the middle of day, but this is not the middle of day, and outside the world is quiet and dark. Here and now he's downright scary.

He has a lot of hair, on his head, on his face. It's frizzed and crimped and standing on end. I can hardly see his cratered skin for all the hair. He wears a hat on top of his head, a navy-colored driving cap that doesn't do a thing to keep his ears warm. He carries with him a backpacking pack with the harness and hip belt, and a trekking pole. There isn't much to his coat, a soft-shell hoodie the color of mushrooms. But the size of him—big—might be enough to keep him warm. On his feet are mismatched gym shoes. A handout from some aid organization—Goodwill or the Salvation Army, I'm guessing, or a lucky Dumpster dive. His hands are unwashed. He smells. He wears a lanyard around his neck with a nametag that says
Sam
.
I'd bet my life he's not Sam. He found the nametag or, better yet, he stole it.

I look behind him and realize that, save for a couple of scenester teens in the back of the bus, we're the only people here. They pay us no mind. They wear sunglasses at night. They send text messages to each other. They wear headphones and use words like
tight
and
dope
and
tool
, none of which have the same meaning as was intended by Merriam and Webster. One of the boys rises to his feet and says, “I've gotta bounce.”

Another says, “Bless up, my friend.”

They can't save me. No way.

The rest of the bus is filled with row upon row of empty pews. No one to help.

And then the creep says, “I like your hair,” as he reaches out again to touch it, and I jerk back with haste, dropping my purse so that half of its contents fall to the floor: my wallet, my makeup case, my phone. I reach my hand beneath the grimy bus seat as far as it will go to make sure I haven't managed to miss something, but my hand comes up empty. Well, empty save for the spit off someone else's chewed-up gum.

“It's pretty,” the creep says, and I say to the driver, “Let me off. I need to get off the bus. I need to get off this bus
right now
,” while sweeping my belongings up off the dirty bus floor and into my bag.

And what does the bus driver say to me? “Next stop's a half block away,” is what he says. “Unless it's an emergency, you'll just have to wait.”

And then he yells at the homeless man to leave me alone and for the next twenty seconds he does.

He stops touching my hair. He leans back in his seat and stops talking to me.

I grab my belongings and stand. I pull the cord for the next bus stop, grateful that it's my own. When the bus comes to a halt, I don't walk. I run.

My feet pound the pavement. I'm not entirely alone on the street tonight, but I
feel
entirely alone. Knowing every soul I pass is a potential threat, there's no telling who's good and who's bad.

Who I can trust.

Who I can't trust.

I bypass people, those coming and going through store and restaurant doors; women walking dogs and men with other men, talking and laughing. I watch them all. I watch them all and wonder. Are you the one? Are you? Are you?

The question runs over and over again in my head: Has Esther hired someone to kill me?

I double-and triple-check for cars before crossing an intersection; I sidestep street gutters and storm drains in case they've been intentionally removed so that I will plummet to my death. Can one die in a storm drain? I don't know. There's no telling what kind of accident might befall me. I avoid walking too close to buildings with window air-condition units in case they might become loose and tumble down onto my head. Traumatic brain injury. That can certainly lead to death. Brain hemorrhaging. Intracranial pressure.

As I leave the more bustling streets of Clark and Foster, and head onto sleepy little streets like Farragut, I'm entirely overcome with the creeps. The willies. The heebie-jeebies.

It's entirely possible I wet my pants.

I want to go home. I want to
be
home. And not in the walk-up apartment I share with Esther. I want to be in my mother and father's home with my parents and my sister, Madison. I want to click my feet together and say it three times:
There's no place like home.

But I don't go home.

The wind whips through the trees, tousling my hair, blowing it before my eyes so that I can't see. It wraps around my eyes like a blindfold, inhibiting my vision. But just as I'm about to panic, the wind leaves the hair, slinking down my coat, copping a feel of the bare skin. I shudder, wanting to scream at the wind.

There's the sound of traffic in the distance. A man in a three-piece suit stops and attempts to ask me for directions. “Can you tell me how to get to Catalpa?” he asks, but I tell him to go away, too. “I don't know,” I say. Three or four times I say it, in rapid progression.
I don't know, I don't know, I don't know
—the words all blended together into an amalgam. The man gives me a dirty look and disappears into thin air.

And that's when I hear my name, hissed on the breath of the wind.
Quinn... Quinn...
says the wind, or at least that's what I hear.

And then a laugh, a gut-wrenching laugh.

From the shadows of the trees, he appears.

Him.

The yellow, misshapen teeth, the shaggy hair. He stands close, reaching his dirty hand out to me, trying to touch my hair. I draw back quickly, tripping over the sidewalk and falling to the ground.

“What do you want with me?” I cry from the cold concrete.

He doesn't answer, but instead reaches out that dirty hand and tries to help me to my feet. I resist. I don't want to touch the hand; I don't want to touch him. I push myself up off the ground, cutting a palm on the rugged surface as I do. In the darkness, it starts to bleed. I rub at the injured hand, begging again, “Just leave me alone.”

I turn to run, but suddenly his hand is on my arm, holding tight. Curtailing the blood supply. “Let go of me!” I scream, but he doesn't. Of course he doesn't. I'm a wiggly worm on the end of a fishing hook, kicking and screaming for dear life.

And then there, in his hand, he brandishes something, a weapon, the light from a streetlamp a solid twenty feet away casting a faint glow on the shiny matter—steel, maybe, or maybe metal. Is it a gun, a knife? I don't know. I tug at my arm. I try hard to pull away. I begin to cry.

“Don't hurt me,” I beg. “Please, don't hurt me.” His hand is hurting my arm, making it ache, the ligaments and muscles stretching in ways they aren't meant to go.

But all he does is laugh.

There are three million people in all of Chicagoland and not a single one of them with me on this street tonight. I should scream. That's what I should do.
Help me! Help me!
But my voice is nothing more than a whisper. I open my mouth to scream but nothing comes out.

“Hurt you?” he says. “I ain't trying to hurt you.”

I say it again. “Let me go, let me go, let me go.”

“You left this on the bus, lady,” he tells me. “That's all. You left this on the bus.”

And then I see the item in his hand. It makes a ting, a slight noise hardly audible over the sound of my cry. Not a gun, not a knife. But a phone. Esther's phone. Which must have fallen out when I dropped my bag under a seat where I couldn't reach. As I snatch the phone from his hand, he lets go of my arm and I draw back quickly, tripping again over my own two feet. But this time, I don't fall.

An incoming text message has just arrived.

I don't need a password to read this one. There it is, right on the display screen.

Payback's a bitch
,
it says.