Nell Zink - Mislaid

Lee sat down and whispered urgently, “Byrdie.”

Byrdie leaned toward him, and Lee pulled out his wallet. Hidden deep inside it under the tattered business cards of plumbers through the ages was a family portrait snapshot from 1975. He pointed at the little girl.

“Holy shit,” Byrdie said. He stood up and said, “Your Honor, we have a holy shit situation.”

“Sit down! You’re on trial!”

Byrdie sat down. The formalities began. The charges were read. They were very serious. Byrdie didn’t seem to be listening. He swayed and seemed on the verge of leaping up, like he was having an out-of-body experience and fixing to levitate.

Lee sat next to him, looking at the picture, still as a statue. And then, because the room was so small he could almost reach out and touch her anyway, he turned around and handed it to Karen.

Karen looked at it for a second, drew it close to her face, and said “Oh.” She let it fall to her lap and her mouth remained a little round O. She pressed her hands against her cheeks. Then she turned around and yelled “Mom!”

The CA paused in his opening statement and the door to the hallway began to rattle.

“This is a little much,” the judge said. “Don’t make me use my gavel.”

Karen leaped to her feet and grabbed the door handle. She was about to run out, but the bailiff held both her arms.

“Don’t you restrain her,” Byrdie’s lawyer said. “She’s not on trial here.” The bailiff let her go and she opened the door.

“She’s my witness!” the CA said. The bailiff grabbed her arm and shoved the door shut.

“Miss Brown, please, could you tell us what you want?” the judge asked.

Karen was blotchy, with tears on the tip of her nose. She pointed at Lee and screamed “Mom!”

“Is Mom here?” Byrdie said excitedly, leaning toward her.

“Are you feeling ill, Miss Brown?” the judge asked.

“I need to leave, right now!” Karen said.

The door rattled.

“You need your mother to come in here?”

A flash of intellection hit Karen. She realized that whatever was going on, it might be the sort of thing policemen and courthouses only complicate. She said, “No, thanks.”

At this point Meg had done the math. Virginia v. Fleming, her self-sufficient child screaming for her. She slipped away from the door and down the hall. She needed time to think.

“Have her mother come in,” the judge said. The door opened and Dee squeezed into the room. The bailiff struggled to force the door shut behind her. “You’re her mother?” he asked.

“I’m her aunt,” Dee said. “It’s hot in here! Karen, baby, you all right?”

“I’m just fine,” Karen said, sitting down. “Come sit with me.” She patted her own chair.

“If I could have a minute alone with you,” Lee said to the judge, “that would be really helpful.”

“That would be entirely out of order,” the judge said, glancing at the CA.

“Then fuck it. This girl is my daughter and I’ve been looking for her for thirteen years. Her mother ran off with her, and there’s a warrant for her arrest, and she’s out there in your hallway.”

The judge was silent, then said, “How do you know that’s your daughter? She was six.”

“She was three. But, Mickey, sweetheart, you know that’s your mom in the picture.”

Karen nodded and cried.

Byrdie stepped over the back of his chair and squeezed in between her and Dee, which was not easy. He hugged her and patted her head. Karen looked up at him, sobbing, and Byrdie began to cry tears of joy. Lee wept silently. Trip’s eyes were moist. The jury was rapt. They had expected nothing like this.

Even the judge was moved and said, “Well, is this any way to reunite a family?” He shooed the jurors toward their door and glared at the frat boys and the prosecution. “Can we get these people some privacy?”

“Hey,” Byrdie called out, looking up. “Before we get rid of them, can we go back to my trial for a second? Because now I know why I carried her all the way to Dabney and left her that note. I didn’t even go through her pockets! If I had, I would have found the drugs that dweeb put in there and none of this would have happened!” He paused to digest his own statement, forced to admit its incompatibility with the Fifth Amendment of the US Constitution. “So now I’m glad — so glad—” Byrdie was succumbing to the sentimentality that permeated the room like a fog. “You know, I didn’t tell you guys, but I saved her from being, you know. .” He looked at his frat brothers meaningfully. “I can prove it. I still have her T-shirt where you dickwads wrote ‘Sex Receptacle.’”

He didn’t mention the swastika, not thinking it germane to the case, or that the T-shirt fit him, being an old undershirt of Temple’s, and that he’d worn it several times since to masturbate.

Through her tears, Karen said to Lee, “Could you please forgive my mom? If you don’t, she’ll run away to Chihuahua.”

He said, “I hereby drop the charges.”

Karen punched Dee’s arm and said, “Go make Temple catch Mom before she gets in the car!”

Dee tried to do as Karen suggested, but when the bailiff cracked the door, the population of the hallway surged in, with Temple in the lead. He saw Karen cuddling with the Thetan hegemon, and Lee and Trip hovering over them. He pulled his mother out into the hallway to hear what he felt must be an interesting explanation.

Trip was pointing out that abducting Karen had been a crime, the kind where the state presses charges, so it wouldn’t be much help for Lee to lose interest, unless he was planning to bring back Old Testament law.

“Sober up,” Lee said, addressing himself to the judge. “L’état, c’est nous.”

“Ahem,” the judge said. The jurors hadn’t budged. “That’s it, we’re calling it a day. Case dismissed. Trip, Lee, Byrdie, Miss Fleming, I’ll see you in my chambers. Leave those things you call attorneys here to talk to the press.”

Temple was a lot faster on his feet than Meg. He caught up to her next to the Dumpster behind a drugstore, not far away, counting her money. “Lee Fleming’s not mad,” he insisted. “He was really happy to see Karen, once he got over the shock. Come on back with us! We’ll all go out to dinner!”

“My kids are grown up,” she said, staring at the money in her hand. “I’m free. I can start over. I can get on the next bus to New York.”

It wasn’t even self-pity. It was blank denial via panic. Meg looked back at her own life and thought, Did any of that have anything to do with me? She felt strongly that her life had begun the day she met Luke. Luke didn’t know she had a son. Meg didn’t want to disappoint Luke by opening this particular can of worms. She really was a very romantic person.

“No, you’re not. Come on, this is great! The Thetan hegemon is your son! I knew that guy was all right. My trouble times are done. I’m going to marry the King of Elfland’s daughter!” He sang several lines of “God Has Smiled on Me” and did a little heel-and-toe dance.

At that, Meg’s heart softened slightly. She asked, laughing, whether Karen was aware of his plans.

“I don’t know, something about that name ‘Fleming’ has a certain ‘ring’ to it. Get it?”

“You’re counting chickens big time,” Meg said. “You know she’s only sixteen. You think I would let her get engaged to a bratty kid who puns?”

“She’s crazy about me.”

“Everybody’s crazy about you. I’m crazy about you! Half the time Karen makes me feel like I’m raising an iguana. She looks at me all walleyed and I have no earthly idea what’s going through her head. None. You make me feel like a mom, because you’re transparent and you have no common sense. You seriously believe when she figures out she’s rich, her first step is going to be to marry you ? And what makes you think it’s so smart, marrying a kissing cousin of Harry Byrd? They call it a white machine, but it’s people! Individuals. My family, her family, all the other charming people who if they had their way, you’d be picking cotton. That’s who we are. There are nicer people you could get involved with, trust me!”