Lies We Bury(8)

Gia is gesturing to a guy facing away from me. Her eyes widen; then she scans the sidewalk and the clumps of police in front of the brewery. She says something, but the guy raises his arms. Sunlight glints off metal. A shot rings out, scattering homeless kids and blue uniforms, and I don’t hesitate—I sprint back to my car, away from the scene. As I pass Oz, I see he’s hunched over, scribbling notes furiously, the only person not looking for cover.

What the hell was that?

It’s not until I arrive at the address for McHale’s Brewery that I catch my breath. My hands have relaxed enough that the color is returning to my knuckles, but I still can’t grasp what I just witnessed. Why did that boy fire a gun? Was it something Gia said?

I land a spot directly out front. McHale’s has the typical Pearl-area warehouse exterior, and reviews I found online highlight its twenty specialty beers. Adrenaline hums through my limbs as I cross the street toward the first location on my list that might fit the note’s clue regarding twenty beers. All named for leaders.

The closer I get, the more anxious I become, until I’m at the curb and able to read the sign in the window:

AFTER FIFTEEN YEARS OF BUSINESS, MCHALE’S SADLY

CLOSES ITS DOORS.

A laminate banner above the glass entryway announces that Tia’s Taqueria will open for business in a month. Frustration punts the hope in my chest: this can’t be the author’s intended location.

I face my car, debating my next move.

Across the street, someone is staring at me. A man, wrapped in a quilt and wearing swim trunks that reach his knees. We lock eyes. Another moment passes; then he picks up a reusable shopping bag stuffed with clothing and walks to the corner, turning out of sight.





Five

As a child, post-captivity, I was always aware that we were different. We didn’t have a father or a regular nuclear family—we had all the game pieces, but they were spread out. Chet was in prison; Rosemary raised Lily and me after Lily’s mother, Bethel, died in the basement; Jenessa was raised by her mother in the Portland metro area. We were like cousins who saw each other a few times a year, and the ache of not growing up with both my sisters began to weigh on me after only a few months.

Kids in school, once they learned about our sordid past, were merciless. They teased me, calling me Bad Blood, and pinched Lily whenever a teacher wasn’t watching. But I was. Whenever I could get away with it, I made sure to kick those brats in the shin or groin, and I expertly applied burns by gripping their small arms and twisting my hands in opposite directions. I learned at a young age that people assumed the worst of us, due to our origins; I learned to leverage that fear, if that meant safety for the ones I loved.



Too rattled by the day’s events and the closure of McHale’s, I headed home to the safety of my locked door without visiting other breweries. This morning, sunshine streams through the blinds of my east-facing windows. Mrs. Henley’s dog paws around the corporate flower beds outside, snorting as he goes. Rumpus lost a nasal passage to cancer, leaving him with the phantom smell of a treat always just out of reach. He pads insistently around the pansies every morning until Mrs. Henley tugs him away. I’ve taken to leaving him cooked chicken among the flower roots.

Although I only recently moved in, I’ve tried my best to make this studio feel like home—maybe not my home but, rather, a safe space. From my love seat, the framed photos I’ve kept over the years perch on a shoe-rack-turned-display-shelf: an image from my hometown, of Arch’s downtown shopping scene, which always struck me as charmingly normal; a photo of half-drunk coffee cups on a table stained with brown rings; and a shot of the treetops lining the University of Oregon campus, a scene both eerie and tantalizing, suggestive of being unmoored, running loose in this world. An art gallery owner I was trying to sell prints to commented that each image suggested a fascination with the mundane. He didn’t buy any. No doubt he smelled my desperation for both validation and money.

The only nonphoto in my collection is a framed drawing Jenessa sent to me when we were nine years old of a flower in bloom. Beneath its pretty pink-and-yellow petals and its single green leaf, she wrote in messy, little-kid handwriting, Miss you, kiss you, see you soon!

On the shelf beneath the frames sits a cardboard box. Scribbled on the side are the words Wasted $50. Don’t be this dumb again. I kept three dozen of the business cards—out of nostalgia? Fear that someone else might find them and plaster them all over the internet? I’d ordered them out of a foolish desire to advertise my photography business around the college town. Foolish, because within a week of my distributing them to coffee shops in the area, a man with a full gray beard began showing up to the diner I worked at. When he sat at my table and addressed me as Missy, my terror made delight stretch his lined features. He said he’d researched family names on Rosemary’s side—Lou seemed as good as any—and found the website I had created. Said he helped people find their family members on lineage platforms and called himself an adoption angel. He’d used a computer program to age me from a photo that was published when I was seven. More importantly, he said, I carried myself like a dog that had been kicked too many times—probably why I sympathize with Rumpus so well.

After dumping lukewarm coffee—the diner’s specialty—on him, I quit my job. I knew then that any paper trail gave people like him the power to out me, to expose me in record time as Missy Mo, one of three children born of false imprisonment. I shut down the website immediately. Then I returned to each of the coffee shops and dining halls, gathered what was left of the business cards, and threw them into a box. It took me another year to save up enough money to move to Portland, but I knew if the adoption angel could find me, more like him would follow.