Sarah Sparrow - A Guide for Murdered Children

He was glad to be off the phone. On his way back to the bedroom, he passed two big shopping bags Lydia had picked up from the Dollar Store, filled with tiny unicorns.

There must have been thirty of them.

Deputy Daniel Doheny wondered why he hadn’t spoken to his partner about it. He felt as close to Lydia as she did to him, yet it was a barrier he couldn’t seem to cross.

He and Rachelle had been through hell. In Afghanistan, he killed three men and a child, a little boy, and nothing—certainly not the circumstances, which cleared him of wrongdoing—could exculpate him. After coming home, he had violent night terrors, occasionally injuring himself when his demons launched him from bed during sleep. He stopped sharing a bed with his wife, fearing he would hurt her. He bought pot and pills off the street, Xanax mostly, never seeking professional help because he still had the dream of becoming a cop. Severe PTSD would have been too much of a strike against him. When they lost their baby boy to crib death, Daniel was convinced it was the result of paying off the karmic debt incurred by the Afghan boy. They tried again to get pregnant but it didn’t happen. When he learned that Rachelle was having an affair with the fertility specialist, he walked. She got depressed and agoraphobic and wouldn’t leave the house for a year. Daniel didn’t go through with the divorce because he thought that without the anchor of marriage, flimsy as it was, she would kill herself. He went to work as a corrections officer, one of 250 at the Macomb County Jail.

He wanted to be a cop, needed to be; it became his only salvation. He would do his time at the Macomb County Jail and become a street deputy, then maybe a sergeant or lieutenant or even captain. Who knew? A year into the job, just before he was scheduled to take his Academy physical, he got into a scuffle with a tattoo-faced convict who “gassed” him with feces. That night he had shooting pains in his arm that continued into the weekend, unrelieved by heroic amounts of Aleve, Xanax and some cortisone of Rachelle’s that was way past its expiration date. He thought that he’d hurt himself in the fight and ignored it. When he finally went to the ER—something told him to drive the ninety miles to Lansing, “incognito,” to escape the prying eyes of someone in health care who might have dealings with the jail—they said it was a serious heart attack and he couldn’t believe it.

His cop career was over.

The trite fantasies about going on a suicidal killing rampage embarrassed him. When he found out that the man doing cadet physicals was none other than Dr. Orvill Wirtz, he couldn’t believe his luck. Wirtz was the specialist whom Rachelle had sowed her mild oats with. The doc was married and had a lot to lose, including his license. He was weak, and disgusted Daniel; he couldn’t even believe the asshole had a half a dick to fuck his wife with. He’d been cuckolded by a milquetoast. He blackmailed him into supplying a healthy EKG and voilà, it was official: Daniel now had the heart of a teenager. A few months later, he mustered out of the jail in Mount Clemens and joined the day shift at the substation in Saggerty Falls. (Sheriff Caplan personally approved the application; he had a soft spot for vets.) That was where he met Deputy Lydia Molloy. Like him, she began her career as a corrections deputy but had left six months before he started work at the prison.

The last time he slept with his ex was about a month ago, before he and Lydia began “seeing” each other. He’d had one of his recurring nightmares and out of desperation called Rachelle from his bachelor pad in Smiths Creek. In the dream, they were at Macy’s shopping for baby things. There was gunfire in the streets and parts of the store were demolished, like some cavernous World War II cathedral. The dapper salesman—he looked a little like the wacko GQ model from Tim Hortons—showed them cribs while politely speaking through a gurgling hole in his throat. When Daniel awakened, he picked up the phone but could barely talk. Rachelle said to come right over.

That was the night Daniel died, two hours and twenty minutes after they made love. He clasped his chest and fell off the bed to the floor, but Rachelle, out cold from the tranquilizers and the wine, was snoring and oblivious. Approximately a minute before brain and heart would die, a kind of gale blew through his body and as consciousness returned he found himself dreaming not of Macy’s but of the Afghan village that unraveled him. He was shooting and shooting, yet this time his pursuers wouldn’t lie down. The villagers of the damned stood staring and impervious, without fear. Then came a screech of metal—nothing like incoming artillery or anything he’d ever heard in combat—growing louder until it was deafening. When he stepped outside, the blown-out landscape crowded with bodies that kept staring yet would not fall, there it was:

A train, like a giant version of the Lionel set he loved so much as a boy. It waited for him and he boarded.

In the morning, he was confused. He realized he had wet the bed. He could have turned the soaked mattress over while Rachelle was in the bathroom but flipped it around instead so that the urine was on her side. When she groggily came back he touched the sheet and said, “Hey, babe, I think you might have made a little water here.” She inspected and couldn’t believe it, blaming it on the Ambien. “Oh my God,” she said. “That hasn’t happened since I was in college.”

When he left, Daniel was unsteady on his feet though weirdly invigorated. The world looked strange and new. His left arm and chest ached, as if badly bruised. That day in the locker room of the substation, he did a hundred push-ups.

A month had passed and he wondered why he hadn’t told Lydia about the train. It was with him now and seemed always to have been. In the week since he had “boarded” he noticed that his night terrors ceased. He stopped taking pills and smoking weed because the train calmed him, like a form of mindful meditation. Meditation in blue , he called it. Often, he retreated to one of the luxuriously wood-paneled cabins and sat waiting. (For what, he wasn’t sure.) A porter eventually appeared, an elegant woman in her sixties who brought milk and freshly baked chocolate cookies that tasted like the ones his mother used to make. That went on for a week or so—a week of lucid dreaming and cookies—then one morning the porter brought a little girl into the cabin. She sat beside him and smiled at his milk mustache. He smiled back. Night after night he waited expectantly for the porter to usher her in and when she appeared, the girl sat and smiled before gazing with a kind of contented promise at the dark, rushing void outside the cold window. He stole glances. She was so familiar to him. He knew he loved her and that he would until the end of time. Her hair was fiery red and always there was a vaporous halo of blue. She wore her blueness so lightly, so elegantly—sometimes like a shawl, sometimes a chiffon collar, sometimes a dancing rosary of periwinkles .

He caught his own reflection in the window but did not see himself. He saw not an adult but a child, a boy of nearly ten years old, but he didn’t have the features of the boy that Daniel remembered he once was.

It wasn’t him…

The girl put her hand on his. Daniel’s revived heart soared and ached and broke and it wasn’t until the night the train arrived at the station that he knew it was Lydia.

Annie had the same ritual before every Meeting.

She organized the Guide s by first names. She wrote the names on the covers in cursive and sorted them into neat stacks before putting them in the old leather satchel that once belonged to her mentor. The Guide s were like living, sacred things. She thought of them as her babies. If there was a birthday that night—there were usually one or two a week—she put candles and a disposable lighter that she bought at 7-Eleven in the satchel as well. Then she lit a stick of Om Nagchampa incense, also from 7-Eleven (the franchise was owned by an Indian family), and sat cross-legged, breathing deeply. She’d done this for sixteen years.