Long Bright River(21)

Our sharing of the back bedroom persisted, out of habit, into our teenage years. We could each have taken our own bedroom at some point, since there were three in the house. But the middle one—Mom’s room, we called it, long after she died—seemed haunted by her memory, and so neither of us claimed it. Besides, it was very often occupied by someone coming or going, an itinerant uncle or cousin who needed a place to stay and was willing to pay Gee a meager sum in monthly rent. Gee herself moved into it for a spell when one of the panes in her front bedroom window fell out after she removed the window-unit A/C. Instead of paying anyone else to fix it, she taped some plastic over the opening, and then she closed the door and taped the door up, too, but the drafts that came from that bedroom in December were enough to have all of us walking around the house wearing blankets like togas.





The question of childcare was always a pressing one for Gee. There was no after-school care at the Hanover grade school, which put her in a pinch.

Eventually, Gee heard about and enrolled us in a free, nearby program run by the Police Athletic League. There—in two large, echoing rooms and on one picked-over outdoor field—we played soccer and volleyball and basketball, urged on from the side of the court by Officer Rose Zalecki, a tall woman who’d been a standout player in her younger days. There, we listened to admonition after admonition to stay in school, to stay abstinent, and to stay away from drugs and alcohol. (The formerly incarcerated stopped by, with some frequency, to drive these points home via slideshows that ended with cookies and lemonade.)

Every PAL officer at the facility was a pleasing combination of authoritative, funny, and kind: a change from most of the other adults in our lives, around whom we were mainly expected to stay silent. Each child had a favorite officer, a mentor, and small lines of children could often be found trailing after their chosen idol like ducklings. Kacey’s was Officer Almood, a small and perpetually bemused woman whose irreverent, wild sense of humor—centered benevolently on the fools around her, the foolishness of the world, the damn foolishness of these kids—sent those in earshot of her into paralyzing fits of laughter. Kacey picked up her mannerisms and style of speech and boisterous laugh and brought them home, trying them out, until Gee admonished her to keep it down.

My favorite was quieter.

Officer Cleare was young when he arrived at the PAL, twenty-seven, but his age seemed to me then to be very adult, a good solid age, an age that carried with it the implication of responsibility. He had a young son already, about whom he spoke fondly, but he wore no wedding ring, and he did not ever mention a wife or girlfriend. In one corner of the large cafeteria-like room in which we did our homework, Officer Cleare read books, glancing up occasionally at his charges to make sure we weren’t distracted, and then back down at what he was reading, his legs outstretched and crossed at the ankles. Every so often he stood up and made his rounds, bending down over each child, asking them what they were working on, pointing out mistakes in their thinking. He was stricter than the other officers. Less fun. More contemplative. For these reasons, Kacey didn’t like him.

But I was drawn to him forcefully. Officer Cleare listened carefully when anyone spoke to him, for one thing, maintaining eye contact, nodding slightly to show he understood. He was handsome, for another: he had black, combed-back hair, and sideburns just slightly longer than the rest of the male officers, which in 1997 was quite fashionable, and dark eyebrows that inched together minutely when he read something he found particularly interesting. He was tall and well built and had an air about him that felt to me then vaguely old-fashioned, as if he had been dropped in from another time, from an old movie. He was extremely polite. He used words like diligent and transcendent and once, while holding a door open for me, he said After you, and swept his hand outward, bowing his head slightly, which struck me at the time as unthinkably gallant. Each day, I positioned myself at tables in closer and closer proximity to him, until at last I was seated directly next to him. I never spoke to him: only did my homework ever more quietly and seriously in the hope that, one day, he would notice my dedication and comment on it.

Finally, he did.

It was on a day when he was teaching us chess. I was fourteen years old and in my most awkward phase: mainly silent, going through a struggle against bad skin, frequently unshowered, dressed in raggedy clothes, always two sizes too big or too small, hand-me-downs or thrift-store finds.

But if I was self-conscious about my appearance, I was proud of my intelligence, which I thought of, in secret, as something that rested quietly inside me, a sleeping dragon guarding a store of wealth that no one, not even Gee, could take away. A weapon I would one day deploy to save us both: myself and my sister.

That day, I concentrated hard on each match in front of me until, at the end of the afternoon, I was one of four players remaining in the impromptu tournament Officer Cleare had staged. Soon, a crowd was watching, and he was among them. I was aware of him, though he was standing behind me, out of sight: I could feel his size, his height. I could feel his breathing. I won the game.

—Nice work, he said, and my shoulders hunched in pleasure, and I lowered them again, saying nothing.

Next, and last, I played against an older boy who was the other finalist in the room.

The boy was good: he had been playing for years. He made quick work of me.

But Officer Cleare paused, his hands on his waist, assessing me even after everyone else had gone away. Under his gaze, I reddened. I didn’t look up.