Sarah Sparrow - A Guide for Murdered Children

“You had your moments. We all do. But I always thought you were a great cop. Had the potential, anyway.”

“Thank you for that.” He closed his eyes in penitence. “What I feel the worst about is giving you a shitty rap because I couldn’t admit to myself how badly I’d fucked up. Repeatedly . It wasn’t you, friend. And it’s just… it’s taken me a long, long time to admit that. Not just to myself, but to someone else.”

It was ironic but in all the years in and out of 12-Step, this was Willow’s first real amends. What always stopped him was the fear that the targets of his abuse would either laugh in his face or shower him with justifiable invective for his transgressions. But Owen simply listened, respectfully taking it in, his attention seemingly genuine. Willow felt lighter, even dignified, in spite of himself.

“I guess I’m kind of a hardheaded S.O.B.”

“You can be,” said Owen, not without affection.

“And I know an apology can’t make up for all the crap I pulled, not even close. But I’m hoping… well, it was just important for me to say it to your face. Having said that , I really do want you to know that I came for you and for Adelaide, not for myself. I’m not proud of my behavior but I guess I’m not ashamed anymore, either—at least I don’t want to be. I know that might sound like a self-serving contradiction but it’s true.”

“Dubya, if there’s one thing I’ve learned in getting older it’s that it becomes harder to hold on to stuff. It either gets easier or it gets harder, and believe me—I’ll take the letting go over the holding on, all day long. I once heard someone say, ‘Do you want to be right or do you want to be happy?’ You know what? I’ll take happy. People like to say life’s too short and the trouble is by the time we get it, we’re just about done. I’ve been on the life’s-too-short program awhile now.”

“I’m trying to get there,” said Willow. “I guess it’s like the scene in that movie, ‘I’ll have what you’re having.’ I’ll have what you’re having, Owen—without the orgasm. Oh, what the hell, I’ll take the orgasm.”

They laughed.

“Well, thank you,” said Owen. “For everything you said. I appreciate it. It couldn’t have been easy to get that off your chest.” Willow made a show of wiping cartoon sweat from his brow. “Helps explain the urgency of your arrival.”

“I couldn’t hold on to my shit anymore.” Willow felt relief all the way around; he was buying his own malarkey. “I kept telling myself I’d give you a call but I woke up in the middle of the night and said, Nuh uh, a phone call ain’t gonna do it. Too easy.”

“I’m glad. And glad you’re sober, Dubya. I guess there’s always enough blame to go around. Now I have something I’d like to say, in the spirit of clearing the air. The truth is, Adelaide and I never got together until both of you were one hundred percent certain that things were… irreparable.”

“I know that. I mean, actually, maybe I didn’t! Thanks for telling me—but I’m okay with it now. With all of it. And Jesus, Addie deserved… you both deserve having someone in your life.”

He meant it. Willow felt great warmth toward his former partner. In the middle of the strange madness of the situation, he was blessed. “Sorry for barging in—I know y’all just moved and all. Guess that was selfish but what else is new. Seems to be my strong suit! I’m trying not to make it all about me, Owen, I swear I am! Guess I can’t always pull that off.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

Willow blotted a for-real tear from his eye, half-wondering when he’d be shown the door, having said his peace and all. His host’s impulse was to move on—but in a most unexpected way.

“Want to know what’s weird?” said Owen. “The weird thing is that I was planning to get in touch with you.” Willow flinched. “I spoke with Rafael Leguerre, your old boss at NYPD.”

“Uh oh.”

“He had good things to say about you, friend.”

“Oh really?” said Willow, trying not to sound sarcastic.

“Yes, he did. See, our funding just came through and we’re about to start a Cold Case Task Force. I’ve wanted that for a long time. A headhunter brought us a slew of supervisor applicants but one day last week I thought, ‘What about ol’ Dubya?’ Hell, you actually did that for a few years in the big leagues. Macomb ain’t Manhattan—we’ll be the little Cold Case engine that could—but you’d bring a shitload of valuable experience to the party, Willow. I think it’d fit you like a glove.” He chuckled and said, “The glove might have a few holes in it, but hey…”

“Wow,” said Willow. “Does Adelaide know about this?”

“Just a little.”

Which meant it was likely she knew everything. At the minimum, she’d given Owen her seal of approval; if she hadn’t been cool with the hire, it never would have been broached.

“Call the job offer an amends of my own,” said Owen. “Not just to you, but to a lot of people. We are not saints. The point is that we are willing to grow along spiritual lines.”

The last thing he expected was Owen laying quotes on him from the Big Book. “Are you in the Program?”

“I’ll have fifteen years in July.”

“I don’t even know what to say.”

“Just say you’ll be at the Macomb County Sheriff’s Office in Macomb on Friday morning—sober. Because we’re going to make you pee in a Dixie cup.”

The kerfuffle with the odd-looking girl on the train rattled Annie more than she would have liked. For the first time in years, she went to the special cabinet—a low-lying mahogany piece of chinoiserie that her mentor bestowed her on his passing—and retrieved the diary she kept during her apprenticeship.

His name was Jasper Kendrick Sebastian and he rescued her. The voices she heard as a girl—always those of children—had become a screaming cacophony; to make them stop, she tried more than once to take her own life. By the time she was three years into her stay at Swarthmore Psychiatric Hospital in Ann Arbor, friends and family had abandoned her. Then one day came a visitor, a tall, gaunt man with sunken cheeks and the strangest eyes she’d ever seen. They looked right through her—into her soul, so the cliché went—like sovereign creatures unto themselves. Jasper told her he’d been searching for members of his family and discovered that she was a cousin, a ruse that enabled him to get past the door of that awful, terrible place. He made the trip from Detroit twice on weekdays and on Sunday afternoon. They didn’t talk much at first but his presence soothed her, and the awful, terrible staff approvingly took note. The voices in her head diminished. The softening of Annie’s unruliness gave her caretakers less work. (She even became polite.) In just eight months, she was transferred into Jasper’s care. It seemed like he had done this sort of thing before.

When she walked out the door, he was her legal guardian.

Like Annie, he once was a teacher, a professor of English literature at Bryn Mawr. But while his ward had been scandalously expelled from her profession, Jasper retired “in order to take up my new, unlikely vocation.” The halfway house that he founded in the Corktown area of Detroit was presumptively for psychotic women, but Annie learned that too was a ruse. He told her that all the ladies who lived there were “special, just like you.”

He called them Porters-in-Training.

One day, when he felt she was ready, he expanded on the topic.

“The world, as you know , is a very mysterious place. For example, those people at Swarthmore—not the patients but the staff—well, of course they have their lives: private lives and working lives. There isn’t any mystery at all to their working lives; most despise what they do and have come to despise the very people they’re meant to help. There’s no mystery to their private lives either, for the most part… I’m not talking about secrets, Annie, because they have plenty of those! Those kind of secrets aren’t mysteries. And what about the patients? You were one, not too long ago. Many are damaged, some more than others. There are those who are there for the short term—a crisis of self-harm, a depression that got out of hand, the dangerous manias of bipolar illness, that sort of thing. ‘Malfunctions,’ yes , and sometimes interesting ones—but mysteries? I don’t think so, not in the sense I’m discussing. Are you following me, Annie?”