Long Bright River(17)

But it’s difficult to be levelheaded when one has seen what I’ve seen.

Once I encountered a woman, red-haired, fiftyish, weeping on a stoop with no shoes on. She was not hiding her face: instead she had turned it upward, toward the sun, and her eyes and her mouth were open, and she was inconsolably crying. This was when I worked with Truman, and the two of us stopped to check on her. His idea. He was always kind in this way.

When we approached her, however, she put her head down on her arms so we couldn’t see her face, and another voice called out a front door nearby: She don’t wanna talk to you.

—Is she okay? Truman inquired.

—She was jumped, said the voice, female, gravelly. We could not see its owner. The house was dark inside.

This meant different things. Usually it meant she was raped.

—Four of them, said the voice. Guy brought her to a house, three of his buddies were there.

—Shut up, shut up, said the red-haired woman—the first noise she made aside from her sobs.

—Can we make a report? Truman asked her. His voice was gentle. He was good at this, interviewing women. Sometimes, I will acknowledge, better than I am.

But the red-haired woman turned her head back into her arms and said nothing more. She was crying so hard that she could not catch her breath.

I speculated about what had happened to her shoes. Imagined she might have been wearing high heels, might have abandoned them so that she could flee. Her toenails were broken and dirty and painful-looking. There was a little patch of blood on the sidewalk next to her right instep, as if she might have cut it.

—Ma’am, said Truman, I’m going to leave my number right here for you, okay? In case you change your mind.

He handed her his card.

Down the block, another car slowed for another woman.



* * *



—

From Alonzo’s window, I have watched Kacey make her deals. I have watched her lean down as a slow-rolling car comes to a stop. I have watched these cars turn down side streets, and I have watched my sister follow them, disappearing around the side of a building heading toward any number of possible outcomes. This is her choice, I tell myself; this is the choice she has made.

Sometimes, looking down at my watch, I find that I have been standing there, unmoving, for ten or fifteen minutes, waiting for her to return.

Alonzo doesn’t object: he leaves me alone, lets me watch, lets me sip quietly from my styrofoam cup. Today he is busy with another customer, and so I assume my regular position in front of the cold window, gazing through it, waiting for Alonzo to be free.



* * *



—

I’m still lost in my thoughts when the other customer in the store opens the front door and leaves, sounding the three silver bells that Alonzo has hung on it.

Once the store is empty, I approach the counter to pay for my coffee, and it’s then that Alonzo says, Hey. I’m sorry to hear about your sister.

I look at him.

—I beg your pardon? I say.

Alonzo pauses. A look comes over his face: the distinct look of someone afraid he has just revealed too much.

—What did you say? I ask Alonzo now, a second time.

He begins shaking his head.

—I’m not sure, he says, I probably have the wrong information.

—What information is that, exactly? I say.

Alonzo cranes his head to the right, looking around me to where Paula normally stands. Noting her absence there, he continues.

—It’s probably nothing, he says. But Paula was in here the other day telling me Kacey’s gone missing. Told me she’s been gone a month, maybe longer. Nobody knows where she is.

I nod, keeping my mouth straight, my posture upright. I make sure my hands are resting lightly on my duty belt, and that my expression projects an air of calm collectedness.

—I see, I say.

I wait.

—Did she say anything else? I say.

Alonzo shakes his head.

—Honestly, he says, Paula could be wrong. She’s been bad lately. Ranting. Going on and on. Crazy, says Alonzo, whose face has now become sympathetic, who seems to be thinking of doing something disastrous, like patting me consolingly on the shoulder. Fortunately, neither of us moves.

—Yes, I say. She could be wrong.





THEN





There are some people who ascribe to their suffering the particular cause of a difficult childhood. Kacey, for example, one of the last times we spoke, had recently come to the conclusion that her troubles began first with our parents, who abandoned her, and then with Gee, who, she said, never loved her, and may in fact have disliked her.

I looked at her, blinking, and said to her as levelly as I could that I grew up in the same household as she did. My implication, of course, was that it is the decisions that I have made in life that have placed me on my specific path—decisions, not chance. And that although our childhood may not have been idyllic, it sufficiently prepared one of us, at least, for a productive life.

But when I said this, Kacey only buried her head in her hands and said to me, It’s different, Mickey, things have always been so different for you.

To this day, I don’t know what her meaning could have been.

In fact, it is possible to argue, I believe—if we were to evaluate who had the more difficult childhood, whatever that may mean—one might find the balance tipped toward me.