Sarah Sparrow - A Guide for Murdered Children

“Is she on vacation?”

“Personal business,” she said.

“When you talk to her,” said Honeychile, “I’d very much appreciate it if you not tell her I stopped by—I want it to be a surprise. Will you promise not to tell her?”

“I won’t tell her,” said the woman, with a tortured smile, relieved that the conversation was coming to an end.

After she left, Honeychile thought she might have made a tactical error by asking her not to tell. Being a shitty person and even shittier secretary, now the woman was certain to tell Hildy about the drop-in.

She waved goodbye to Lemoyne on her way out, but he was busy watching a mom go through the metal detector. Her toddler watched in fascination and once she cleared the device, the woman swept him up in her arms. Lemoyne patted the boy’s head.

“That’s a champion you got right there,” he said.

3.

On the street, Honeychile made the spontaneous decision to go to Hildy’s house. It was about a two-hour walk to Clinton River Drive, over by Shadyside Park.

She’d been to the bungalow-style residence on the leafy street many times before. By the time she got off the bus and rounded the corner for the two-block approach, she was rerunning the tape of her epic betrayal of Hildy Collins and felt miserable all over again. Children’s Services employees were discouraged (in some cases prohibited) from inviting children in the system to their homes, for all kinds of reasons—the paramount one being “liability,” that heartless institutional chestnut that drained the blood from any human equation. Liability banned teachers from hugging students, and shut down playgrounds because of potential injury on slides and swings. God forbid a woman like Hildy, acting out of love , love for her children—lost children, damaged children, broken children—God forbid she invite those innocent, beautiful souls to her home to give them treats (a broken child could choke on a treat and die); God forbid she hold them close (a damaged child might accuse her of unspeakable things); God forbid that her love, a love that healed, restored and renewed, be expressed in the small, essential ways that nourish, allowing saplings to grow into mighty oaks… a watering love that provided, sustaining the child until the end of its life. God forbid! Hildy invited Renée into her home and fed her, laughed and cried with her, watched Tangled and The Goonies and The Princess Bride with her, taught her how to bake cookies and put on lipstick, how to look in the mirror at a beautiful girl and not an ogre— and I repaid her love by ignoring her. Oh! How nasty, how awful! Zelda was right!

Through her tears, moving toward the house with dread, she said to herself, “I am the biggest bitch in the world! Soooo nasty to Mom and Dad last night—just because they were terrified I would die! What the fuck is wrong with me?” She shivered with a horrible thought: What if Hildy wouldn’t forgive her? Honeychile had told herself she was special (because Mrs. Collins made her feel that way) but had proved by her abominable behavior how very unspecial she was. What if Mrs. Collins, in shock and disappointment, realized years ago that Renée was just like all the others, the selfish legions who’d flown the nest never to return, not even for a thank-you or hello. Even worse, what if the squadrons of children Mrs. Collins invited to her house through the years had kept in touch, sending birthday cards, get-wells and detailed letters about their wonderful new lives… what if they’d even invited Hildy to their homes? And Hildy had come?

What if Honeychile was the single exception?

Oh! Oh! It was just too terrible to think of—

Again, she pushed the black meditation from her head. She wanted only to be joyful, grateful and thankful when she saw her… she wanted it not to be about her but about Hildy.

When she saw the sheriff’s car in the driveway, Honeychile had a random thought that Mrs. Collins married a policeman, followed by the nervous theory that she’d moved away and a cop was living in her old house.

She rang the doorbell and waited for what seemed an eternity before peeking through the window. She saw Hildy get up from the couch to answer. There were some men with her. One was on a chair, one was standing.

“Renée!” she said, with a startled smile.

“Mrs. Collins!” she exclaimed, hugging the woman close.

“Darling,” said Hildy. “Is everything all right?”

She asked with the concern of a mother—of all mothers.

“Yes, yes!” said Honeychile. “I just… I was so missing you.”

“That’s lovely, sweetheart—and I’ve missed you too. But it’s not a good time, Renée. I have some visitors.”

Honeychile was finally able to see the woman as she was now, not then. Her face had thickened in the intervening years; it was blank and pasty, half-wet with perspiration and tears. The eyes were hollow and dark, rheumy with worry.

“Is everything okay?” said Honeychile.

Mrs. Collins sighed, exhaling a bitter, fearful breath.

“You see”—she smiled incongruously, in the habit of comforting a child, of soothing others—“well, no. You see, Renée—I can’t find my Winston.” The girl silently gasped, and again came the smile from the formidable being who’d so tenderly mentored her. “I just—well—you see, we can’t find my boy.”

1.

He wrote the address on the wall of his Port Hope double-wide.

Day by day Willow added doodles and filigrees—with Sharpies at first, then with a set of multicolored markers he picked up in town—to the numbers, street name and zip code of the locale that the handsome woman on the train had given him. The ornamental designs were becoming almost beautiful. Willow never knew he had it in him; might have to start wearing a beret. He really did think it was the sort of mural that a woman he was trying to seduce would be impressed by. Trouble was, if he spoke of its true origin, the gal might think he’d gone mad. He was wondering if maybe he had.

He still believed that his drinking was controlled, if controlled meant falling short of bingeing. But Dubya was spooked because experience had shown that the illusion of self-will wouldn’t last. He had an inkling about what was keeping him at least temporarily from the cliff’s edge. He told himself it was because he had a goal—to remember what happened each night in the recurring dream he’d been having since awakening on the train in Pittsburgh. In order to do that, he needed to moderate. Blackouts weren’t conducive to memory retention.

The suicidal consequences of relapse had yet to hit him full force; Willow was still in the honeymoon phase of denial. But it sure felt shitty when he telegraphed fake sobriety by getting extra solicitous—almost perky—during phone calls with his daughter. Ugh. He didn’t want to break Pace’s heart for the thousandth time and there was just no upside in being honest with her, other than to expiate his own guilt. (He wasn’t even sure if he felt guilty anymore.) The girl had enough on her plate. She and Geoff were setting a date for Larkin’s surgery at Children’s Hospital in Detroit, and that he could help his grandson swelled Willow’s heart. It was a vaccine that did wonders in tamping down his horror of the thing he sensed was lying in wait.

He’d been manically clipping photos of trains from all kinds of magazines, scotch-taping them to the wall on the periphery of The Address, giving the whole of it a blue watercolor wash. He stepped back now to give it a look.

Jesus. This could be in the fucking Whitney.