Dennis Lehane - Gone, Baby, Gone

The waitress approached and took our order of two Cokes, a mineral water for Ryerson, and a double scotch for Lionel.

While we waited for her return, no one spoke. Ryerson continued to use his pen like a metronome, tapping it steadily against the edge of the table, his level, dispassionate gaze locked on Lionel.

Lionel didn’t seem to notice. He looked at the coaster in front of him, but I don’t think he saw it; he was looking much deeper, much farther away than a table or this bar, his lips and chin picking up a sheen of sweat. I had the sense that what he saw at the end of his long inward gaze was the shoddy finale of his own unraveling, the waste of his life. He saw prison. He saw divorce papers delivered to his cell and letters to his son returned unopened. He saw decades stretching into decades in which he was alone with his shame, or his guilt, or merely the folly of a man who’d done a dumb thing society had stripped naked under klieg lights, exposed for public consumption. His picture would be in the paper, his name associated with kidnapping, his life the fodder for talk shows and tabloids and sneering jokes remembered long after the comics who’d told them were forgotten.

The waitress brought our drinks, and Lionel said, “Eleven years ago, I was in a bar downtown with some friends. A bachelor party came in. They were all real drunk. One of them was looking for a fight. He picked me. I hit him. Once. But he cracked his skull on the floor. Thing is, I didn’t hit him with my fist. I had a pool stick in my hand.”

“Assault with a deadly weapon,” Angie said.

He nodded. “Actually, it was worse than that. The guy had been shoving me, and I’d said-I don’t remember saying it, but I guess I did-I’d said, ‘Back off or I’ll kill you.’”

“Attempted murder,” I said.

Another nod. “I go to trial. And it’s my friends’ words against this guy’s friends’ words. And I know I’m going to jail, because the guy I hit, he was a college student, and after I hit him, he claims he can’t study anymore, can’t concentrate. He’s got doctors claiming brain damage. I can tell by the way the judge looks at me that I’m done. But a guy who was in the bar that night, a stranger to both parties, testifies that it was the guy I hit who said he was going to kill me, and that he’d thrown the first punch, et cetera. I walk, because the stranger was a cop.”

“Broussard.”

He gave me a bitter smile and sipped his scotch. “Yeah. Broussard. And you know what? He lied up there on the stand. I might not be able to remember everything the guy I hit said, but I know for sure I hit him first. Don’t know why, really. He was bugging me, in my face, and I got angry.” He shrugged. “I was different then.”

“So Broussard lied and you walked, and you felt you owed him.”

He lifted his scotch glass, changed his mind, and set it back on the coaster. “I guess. He never brought it up, and we became friends over the years. We’d run into each other, he’d give me a call every now and then. It was only looking back that I realized he was keeping tabs on me. He’s like that. Don’t get me wrong, he’s a good guy, but he’s always watching people, studying them, seeing if someday they’ll be useful to him.”

“Lotta cops like that,” Ryerson said, and drank some mineral water.

“You?”

Ryerson gave it some thought. “Yeah. I guess I am.”

Lionel took another sip of scotch, wiped his lips with the cocktail napkin. “Last July, my sister and Dottie took Amanda to the beach. It was a really hot day, no clouds, and Helene and Dottie meet some guys who, I dunno, had a bag of pot or whatever.” He looked away from us, took a long pull on the scotch, and his face and voice were haunted when he spoke again. “Amanda fell asleep on the beach, and they…they left her there, alone and unwatched, for hours. She roasted, Mr. Kenzie, Miss Gennaro. She suffered deep burns to her back and legs, one stage less than third degree. One side of her face was so swollen it looked like she’d been attacked by bees. My fucking slut whore junkie douche-bag piece-of-shit waste of a sister allowed her daughter’s flesh to burn. They brought her home, and Helene calls me because Amanda, and I quote, ‘Is being a bitch.’ She wouldn’t stop crying. She was keeping Helene up. I go over there and my niece, this tiny four-year-old baby, is burned. She’s in pain. She’s screaming, it’s so bad. And you know what my sister had done for her?”

We waited while he gripped his scotch glass, lowered his head, took in a few shallow breaths.

He raised his head. “She’d put beer on Amanda’s burns. Beer. To cool her down. No aloe, no lidocaine, didn’t even think about a trip to the hospital. No. She put beer on her, sent her to bed, and had the TV turned way up so she wouldn’t have to listen to her.” He held a large fist up by his ear, as if prepared to strike the table, crack it in half. “I could have killed my sister that night. Instead, I took Amanda to the emergency room. I covered for Helene. I said she’d been exhausted and both she and Amanda had fallen asleep on the beach. I pleaded with the doctor, and I convinced her, finally, not to call Child Welfare and report it as a neglect case. I don’t know why, I just knew they’d take Amanda away. I just…” He swallowed. “I covered for Helene. Like I been covering my whole life. And that night I took Amanda back to my house and she slept with me and Beatrice. The doctor had given her something to help her sleep, but I stayed awake. I kept holding my hand over her back and feeling the heat coming off it. It was-this is the only way I can put it-it was like holding your hand over meat you just pulled from the oven. And I watched her sleep and I thought, This can’t go on. This has to end.”

“But, Lionel,” Angie said, “what if you had reported Helene to Chile Welfare? If you’d done it enough times, I’m sure you could have petitioned the courts to allow you and Beatrice to adopt Amanda.”

Lionel laughed, and Ryerson shook his head slowly at Angie.

“What?” she said.

Ryerson snipped the end of a cigar. “Miss Gennaro, unless the birth mother is a lesbian in states like Utah or Alabama, it is all but impossible to remove parental rights.” He lit the cigar and shook his head. “Let me amend that: It is impossible.”

“How can that be,” Angie said, “if the parent has proven herself consistently negligent?”

Another sad shake of the head from Ryerson. “This year in Washington, D.C., a birth mother was given full custody of a child she’s barely seen. The child has been living with foster parents since he was born. The birth mother is a convicted felon who gave birth to the child while she was on probation for murdering another of her children, who had reached the ripe old age of six weeks and was crying from hunger when the mother decided enough was enough and smothered her, tossed her in a trash bin, and went to a barbecue. Now this woman has two other kids, one of whom is being raised by the father’s parents, the other of whom is in foster care. All four kids were fathered by different men, and the mother, who served only a couple of years for killing her daughter, is now-responsibly, I’m sure-raising the child she took back from the loving foster parents who’d petitioned the courts for custody. This,” Ryerson said, “is a true story. Look it up.”

“That’s bullshit,” Angie said.

“No, it’s true,” Ryerson said.

“How can…?” Angie dropped her hands from the table, stared off into space.

“This is America,” Ryerson said, “where every adult shall have the full and inalienable right to eat her young.”

Angie had the look of someone who’d been punched in the stomach, then slapped in the face as she’d doubled over.