Ridley Pearson - Beyond Recognition

Boldt had not realized that LaMoia had remained with him, standing only a few feet behind his sergeant, respectfully awaiting orders. There were times, Boldt thought, when LaMoia actually resembled a cop.

Eyeing the thousands of drums, Boldt said, “He could have enough fuel to burn a dozen Dorothy Enwrights, a hundred! We’ll never know.”

Shaking his head, John LaMoia said, “God bless America.”

Ben missed Emily. Daphne wouldn’t answer any of his questions about her, pretending she didn’t exist. He was shuttled back and forth, between talks with Susan, school classes with juveniles in detention, and evenings with Daphne. He used to think he had it bad living with Jack Santori, putting up with the parade of drunken women and the awful groaning downstairs late at night. But isolation was worse. The only thing keeping him from running away was Daphne’s threat to put Emily out of business. Ben wouldn’t do that for anything, not even his own happiness.

When Daphne showed up in the middle of classes, Ben knew it meant trouble. Anything out of the ordinary routine meant trouble. She briefly consulted with the teacher and Ben was excused, to the heckling of others. He met up with Daphne in the hallway, his heart beating fast with concern.

She was wearing black jeans, a sweater, and a leather jacket. She carried a large purse by a thick strap over her shoulder.

“We need to ask a favor of you, Ben.”

“Who, you and Susan?”

“Boldt and I. The sergeant.”

“I don’t like him.”

“You should,” she said, a little stunned by his remark. “It’s good to have him on your side.”

He was loath to admit it, but he liked Daphne. He even felt sorry for her in a way, because all she seemed to do was work and talk on the phone. She said she liked to go on a run in the evenings, but she’d only managed one run since he’d been staying with her. “What kind of favor?”

“Sergeant Boldt wants to ask you some questions. Show you some pictures. You know what a lineup is?”

“Yeah.”

“Maybe do a lineup.”

He didn’t want to show her how he felt about any of this. “What if I don’t want to?” he asked sarcastically.

“Then I talk you into it,” she answered honestly.

“And how are you going to do that?”

“Bribery, probably.”

“Like what?”

She answered with a question. “How about seeing Emily?”

He felt like shouting a resounding “Yes!” but tried instead to hide his feelings, not give her too much leverage.

“It can’t be at her place,” Daphne said. “Maybe at the library, somewhere like that. I can work on it.”

“Work on it,” Ben said, but she glared at him and he added quickly, “please.”

On their way to her car, Ben asked her, “Are you divorced?”

“No,” she answered, clearly surprised.

“My mom was divorced before she met him .” He had not told her much about himself, though she seemed to know a lot. Initially, he had feared the police were after him for the five hundred dollars, that they would arrest him and lock him up. But that was no longer the case; he knew it had to do with Nick. Putting Nick in jail would be a real pleasure.

“A lot of people get divorced these days,” she explained. “It doesn’t make your mother any less a person.”

“I thought she went away,” he said, his voice catching in his throat. Daphne started the car but glanced over at him before shifting gears. “She did, sort of. Go away. You know?” He felt tears coming and turned to look back at the building from which they had come. “He told me she left me. That she left us both. And I believed him.” He felt a tear run down his cheek then, and he kept his face toward the glass of the window so she couldn’t see. The car backed up.

“Ben, you’re old enough to understand that people like Jack Santori do bad things. They hurt other people. Those of us who end up victims face some tough choices.” She had started to drive, but she pulled the car over and put it in park and turned to face him. Her eyes moved as if she was thinking hard or remembering something. “If we dwell on being victims, we often never escape. The better choice is to move on. Talking about things can help.” Too many memories for her. She felt herself break.

She had tears running down her cheeks; so did he. For an instant she reminded him of his mom, because his mom seemed always to be crying, especially in the months before she left. He thought of the lie-she had never left-and cried all the harder. She had been lying down there in the cold and the damp, down there with mice and spiders and ants and God knows what else. Nothing left but some bones and that gold ring.

He relived the experience of finding that ring for the first time since promising himself not to think about it. As Daphne reached over and hugged him he felt her warmth, and he smelled her sweetness, and he buried his face in her chest and fell apart, images surfacing, feelings surfacing that he had no idea were buried inside him. He saw himself as a child. He saw his mother naked in the bathtub, running her toes under the hot water and laughing. He saw her bruised face, her swollen eye, and her fat lip, and he remembered her warning in a frightened voice, “Don’t you say a thing about this in front of him. When you look at me, you don’t see it. When he looks at you, you act no different, Benjamin. You’re my best boy, right? You gotta do this for me.” She’d been protecting him; he realized that, though too late.

A tape played inside his head and he heard them arguing and he heard her being hit, and he heard her say, “I’ll do it! I’ll do anything. Just not my boy.” After that the bed had pounded against the downstairs wall for a long time, and later he’d smelled smoke and, worried the guy had passed out while smoking, he went to look and found his mother sitting in a chair smoking a cigarette. He went down the stairs quietly and walked right up to her-she didn’t smoke cigarettes, not as far as he knew, and it upset him to see her smoking and he told her so. She was staring at the drawn curtain; she didn’t seem to hear him. The room was dark, and as his eyes adjusted, each time she drew on the cigarette a red light spilled over her body, and he realized she was sitting stark naked in that chair. Then, as the cigarette drew down, he saw that her body was covered in red, angry scratches, some of them deep enough to still be bleeding, black ugly bruises as big as potatoes. She exhaled and, without looking at him, said, “Go to bed.” Tears ran down her cheeks. He hurried up the stairs, but he didn’t go to bed; he sat in the shadows and watched her instead. She smoked four cigarettes in a row, found a coat in the coat closet, and put it on. She sat on the couch for a while, and when Ben awakened from an unplanned nap, she was in a different chair, looking out the window again, as if she wanted to be out there. She smoked two more cigarettes. Ben caught himself hugging his knees, crying into his pajamas. Jack called from the bedroom, “Get in here. We’re gonna play a little more.” Ben’s mom glanced up toward where Ben was hiding, as if contemplating something. She snubbed out the cigarette-he would never forget that because she used her bare foot to grind it into the rug; he had looked at the burned spot often and thought of her. She unzipped the coat, shedding it and leaving it on the couch, and walked slowly toward the bedroom, almost like a zombie. He heard the guy say something, heard his mother’s voice though not her words, and then caught the distinctive sounds of a hard slap and his mother’s groan, and he had covered his ears with his palms and run to his room and buried his head under his pillow, as he had so many nights before.