Dennis Lehane - Gone, Baby, Gone

She looked at them, blinked at the size of Roberta, but eventually shook her head.

“See that big guy out there by the pile?” She pointed at a tall thick guy in his early forties with a bristly crew cut. “That’s Matthew Hoagland. He’s a professional bodybuilder, former Mr. Massachusetts a couple years in a row. A very sweet guy. And he loves his kids. Last year, we had a mangy-looking guy come by the field and watch the game for a few minutes, and none of us liked his eyes. So Matt made him leave. I have no idea what he said to the guy, but the guy turned white and left in a hurry. No one’s come back since. Maybe that type of…person has a network and spreads the word or whatever. I wouldn’t know. But no strangers come to these games.” She looked at us. “Until you two, that is.”

I touched my hair. “How’s my mange?”

She chuckled. “A few of us recognized you, Mr. Kenzie. We remember how you saved that child in the playground. You can baby-sit for any of us any time you want.”

Angie nudged me. “Our hero.”

“Shut up,” I said.

It took another ten minutes for order to be restored in the outfield and play, such as it was, to resume.

During that time, Sonya Garabedian introduced us to some of the parents who’d remained in the bleachers. A few of them knew Helene and Amanda, and we spent the rest of the game talking with them. What emerged from our conversations-other than further reinforcement of our perception of Helene McCready as a creature committed to self-interest-was a fuller portrait of Amanda.

Contrary to Helene’s depiction of some mythic sitcom moppet who lived only to smile and smile, the people we spoke to usually mentioned how little Amanda smiled, how she was generally listless and far too quiet for a four-year-old.

“My Jessica?” Frances Neagly said. “From the time she was two until she was five, she bounced off walls. And the questions! Everything was, ‘Mommy, why don’t animals talk like we do? How come I have toes? How come some water’s cold and some water’s hot?’” Frances gave us a tired smile. “I mean, it was constant. Every mother I know talks about how exasperating a four-year-old can be. They’re four, right? The world surprises them every ten seconds.”

“But Amanda?” Angie said.

Frances Neagly leaned back and looked around the park as the shadows deepened and crept across the children in the field, seemed to shrink them. “I baby-sat her a few times. Never by arrangement. Helene would drop by, say, ‘Could you just watch her a sec?’ And six or seven hours later she’d come pick her up. I mean, whatta you gonna do, say no?” She lit a cigarette. “Amanda was so quiet. Never a problem. Not once. But, really, who expects that from a four-year-old? She’d just sit wherever you left her and stare at the walls or the TV or whatever. She didn’t investigate my kids’ toys or pull the cat’s tail or anything. She’d just sit there, like a lump, and she never asked when her mother was coming back to get her.”

“Is she mentally handicapped?” I said. “Autistic, maybe?”

She shook her head. “No. If you talked to her, she responded fine. She always seemed a little surprised, but she’d be sweet, speak very well for her age. No, she’s a smart kid. She just isn’t a very excitable one.”

“And that seemed unnatural,” Angie said.

She shrugged. “Yeah, I guess. You know what it is? I think she was used to being ignored.” A pigeon swooped in low over the pitcher’s mound, and some kid threw his glove at it and missed. Frances smiled weakly at us. “And I think that sucks.”

She turned away from us as her daughter came up to the plate, a bat held awkwardly in her hands as she considered the ball and tee in front of her.

“Hit it out of the park, honey,” Frances called. “You can do it.”

Her daughter turned and looked at her. She smiled. Then she shook her head several times and threw the bat onto the field.

After the game, we stopped in the Ashmont Grille for a meal and a beer, and Angie had what I can only describe as a delayed-stress reaction to what had happened in the Filmore Tap.

The Ashmont Grille served the sort of food my mom used to make-meat loaf and potato and lots of gravy-and the waitresses all acted like moms, too. If you didn’t clean your plate, they asked you if the starving children in China would waste food. I always half expected to be told I couldn’t leave the table until I’d eaten every last bite.

If that were the case, Angie would have been there until next week, the way she picked at her chicken Marsala. For someone so petite and slim, Angie can out-eat truck drivers fresh off the road. But tonight, she swirled the linguine on her fork, then seemed to forget about it. She’d drop the fork on the plate, sip some beer, and stare off into space as if she were Helene McCready looking for a television set.

By the time she’d reached her fourth bite, my meal was gone. Angie took this as an indication that dinner was over and pushed her plate into the center of the table.

“You can never know people,” she said, her eyes on the table. “Can you? Understand them. It’s not possible. You can’t…fathom what makes them do the things they do, think the way they do. If it’s not the way you think, it never makes sense. Does it?” She looked up at me and her eyes were red and wet.

“You talking about Helene?”

“Helene”-she cleared her throat-“Helene, and Big Dave, and those guys in the bar, and whoever took Amanda. They don’t make sense. They don’t…” A tear fell to her cheek and she wiped at it with the back of her hand. “Shit.”

I took her hand and she chewed the inside of her mouth, and looked up at the ceiling fan above her.

“Ange,” I said, “those guys in the Filmore were human waste. They’re not worth a single moment’s thought.”

“Uh-huh.” She took a deep breath through her mouth, and I could hear it rattle its way through the liquid clogging her throat. “Yeah.”

“Hey,” I said. I stroked her forearm with my palm. “I’m serious. They’re nothing. They’re-”

“They would have raped me, Patrick. I’m sure of it.” She looked at me, and her mouth jerked erratically until it froze for a moment in a smile, one of the strangest smiles I’ve ever seen. She patted my hand and the flesh around her mouth crumbled, and then her whole face crumbled with it. The tears poured from her eyes, and she kept trying to hold that smile and pat my hand.

I’ve known this woman all my life, and I can count on one hand how many times she’s wept in my presence. I didn’t understand completely at the moment what had brought this on-I’d seen Angie face far more dire situations than the one we faced in the bar today and shrug them off-but whatever the cause, the pain was real, and seeing it in her face and body killed me.

I came out from my side of the booth, and she waved me away, but I slid in beside her, and she caved into me. She gripped my shirt and wept silently into my shoulder. I smoothed her hair, kissed her head, and held her. I could feel the blood coursing through her body as she shook in my arms.

“I feel like such a goof,” Angie said.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said.

We’d left the Ashmont Grille and Angie asked me to stop at Columbia Park in South Boston. A horseshoe of bleachers set in granite surrounded the dusty track at the tip of the park, and we bought a six-pack and took it down there with us, dusted some splinters off a bleacher plank before sitting down.

Columbia Park is Angie’s sacred place. Her father, Jimmy, disappeared in a mob hit over two decades ago, and the park is where her mother chose to tell Angie and her sister that their father was dead, corpse or no corpse. Angie returns to the park sometimes during her dark nights, when she can’t sleep, when the ghosts crawl around in her head.