Sarah Sparrow - A Guide for Murdered Children

“I don’t think so. I don’t think that we can.”

She began to cry. “But I really want to! I wanted to! I was so happy when you asked—I just wasn’t expecting it… but then part of me said, ‘That wouldn’t be fair , that just wouldn’t be fair to Willow.’ Because I have a feeling ,” she said, trembling. “That I’m not going to be here very long. I have a feeling that maybe I’m not even here now —”

She wept and he held her. He didn’t know whom he was holding but it didn’t matter. In a sense, he was holding himself.

Her tears stopped as if on cue, and she said, “Can we still fuck?”

He gasped at the insanity of the place they had found themselves trapped. “I think it’s better we don’t, Dixie—in a week or so you won’t want to. Trust me. You just won’t want to anymore.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because I’ve met a lot of you—”

“A lot of me?” she said, sounding hurt, and very, very young.

“Children from the train. Someone met you on a train, didn’t they?” She nodded. He smiled at her like a father now. “Did they give you lemonade and cookies?”

“She gave me milk and chocolate cake.”

“What was her name?”

“Lisbeth. She’s from England. She has an accent.”

“Did she tell you what her job was?”

“That she’s the Porter.”

“Well, that’s what I am too.”

“You?” she said with happy, twinkling eyes—as if he’d proclaimed himself to be the Bunny Rabbit King. “You’re a Porter ?”

“That’s right.”

“That is so cool .”

“But there’s something important that I wanted to tell you…”

“Are you gonna ask me to marry you again?” she said impishly. “’Cause you better watch out, this time I’ll say yes!”

“No,” he said, smiling. “I just wanted to say what a wonderful time I had with you, Dixie.”

“Are you crying?”

“Just a little.”

“Why are you crying?”

“I don’t know. It happens sometimes.”

“I loved you,” she said, but this time she spoke like a woman. “And you were the one, Weeping Willow—don’t you ever think otherwise. You were the only one.”

Suddenly the commingling of Dixie and Lacey Beth shone brilliant and blue, lighting up the darkness of the curtained room. It was definitive: his home, like Annie’s, was now an SRO—Single Room Occupancy—but his heart had expanded, becoming the most magnificent of palaces.

2.

He drove her to the Episcopal Church in Royal Oak, about twenty minutes from where they lived and a half hour from where he led his own Meeting. They walked upstairs. In the hallway at the door, a young woman with glasses put up her hand and shouted, “Halt!” Dixie said it was all right, that her escort was a friend who had given her a ride to the Meeting. “He cannot come!” barked the sentry. Willow thought she may have been autistic; she certainly didn’t have Bumble’s finesse.

“Trudy, my friend is a Porter!”

“I don’t care ,” she snapped.

Dixie turned to Willow and giggled. He smiled and said, “That’s fine. I’ll wait for you in the car.” They embraced. When he was halfway down the stairs, Dixie excitedly called after.

“There’s going to be a birthday tonight!”

He sat in the park next to the church, on a bench beneath the trees.

After he told Dixie that he was a Porter, she had all sorts of questions. He held back, thinking it wasn’t his place to provide answers. He wasn’t her Porter, after all. But she was curious about her own death—the death of Dixie Rose Cavanaugh—and he let her explore that. She told him that a few weeks ago she’d had the worst migraine of her life. The part of her that was an RN speculated that her demise might have been due to an embolism, a brain bleed that allowed Lacey Beth to come.

In the car on the way to her Meeting, she said, “If we can’t fuck , Dubya, can’t we at least sleep together? For comfort? Please? Can’t we at least have sleepovers until the moment of balance , when I go away?”

“I don’t know.”

“We won’t do anything bad . But it would be so nice to cuddle! I’d like that, Weeping Willow. And you’d like it too.”

“We’ll see.”

Why not? He’d lost his physical attraction toward her, or thought he had. Probably it wasn’t a great idea.

He wondered how much time they had. She said he was the “only one”—she was the only one for him too—but he’d already lost her. He knew it was dumb, but he hoped Lacey Beth would take her sweet time finding the one who had murdered her. As a Porter, he realized the selfishness of such a desire. But still…

Wouldn’t that be grand?

He looked to the second floor. He could see the tops of the heads of the landlords who sat in the Meeting. Then Dixie appeared at the window, searching for him below. When she found him, she waved excitedly, then vanished a moment before returning with an older woman. Lacey Beth pointed Willow out to her and waved frenetically. Willow waved back.

The woman didn’t wave but she smiled and nodded.

That must be Lisbeth.

3.

The room was full.

On top of the old group, there were ten new guests.

Ten!

All sat petrified on folding chairs with their Guide s.

He remembered asking Annie about what struck him as the improbable numbers—how could it be that so many child-killers lived in this general area? She told him “the ‘area’ can be rather large,” giving the example of Rhonda, who’d traveled all the way to Minnesota for her moment . “That was unusual, but not unheard of—one goes where one needs to go. One of my kids wound up in Vancouver! All in all, though, the system seems engineered for geographical convenience.” She also reminded him that homicides spanned decades (“one of the train children hadn’t been back for sixty years”) and that in most cases, the young ones’ lives came to a close “far, far away from our little Meeting in Detroit. So when you say ‘general area,’ you see, it’s a bit more complicated.” The spectral dragnet was drawn over a diaspora of perpetrators from the scenes of their crimes, some who fled to escape arrest, others because it was simply their nature to be itinerant. “Of course, Troy and Maya were an exception to that rule. They really pinpointed it . Because it’s rare that a landlord happens to be employed in the very community where his tenants were killed.”

For the benefit of the newcomers, Willow paraphrased from the Guide , putting it in his own words.

“A few of you are veterans—but most are here tonight for the very first time. Welcome and well done! You found us and that’s the hardest part. It’s my privilege to help in any way I can while you’re here. You’ll have lots of questions and I’ll do my best to answer them. And I won’t have answers for everything… but what’s most important—and probably the toughest—is that you need to trust . There’s another word for that: surrender. Now, surrender doesn’t mean what it does in a war, when an army ‘surrenders’ and gives up. No. Surrender here means that you trust and let go. You surrender to the idea that all of you are here for a purpose. If you can do that, then you won’t be afraid. There’s a phrase we like to use in this room: ‘More shall be revealed.’ And it’s true. If you don’t understand something today , it’s quite likely you’ll understand it tomorrow . Just don’t try and make sense of it all. If you trust, you’ll be way ahead of the game. You’ll be halfway home.”