I said, “You get up at night when the residents have issues. Did that ever include Benny?”
“Not often. And he’d never make a fuss, just come down and tell me he couldn’t sleep. We’d chat for a while and I’d walk him back up. He wasn’t malfunctioning or anything, if that’s what you’re getting at. I just got the feeling he sometimes had ideas in his head and didn’t know what to do with them. At night and when he was awake.”
“What kind of ideas?”
“I don’t know, maybe I’m totally wrong,” she said. “But people like him think a lot. They’re just like anyone else. Sometimes he’d get a look”—she tapped her head—“and I’d be like, ‘What’s going on up here, Benny?’ Sometimes he wouldn’t answer, sometimes he’d look up at me with this puppy smile and say, ‘You’re so smart, Justy.’ ”
Tears welled. She wiped them away.
I said, “A gentle guy.”
“The gentlest. Why would anyone hurt him? Unless it had something to do with the neighborhood. Something he ran into while walking back.”
“You’ve had problems in the neighborhood?”
“Fewer than you’d expect, but sure, it’s like any other urban thing. I mean I’m not judging and disparaging an entire region because it’s low-income, but my first year of grad school I had a placement at one of the downtown shelters and it was scary. Not most of the homeless, just a few. You’d get some who were totally irrational with major anger issues.”
She touched her left forearm. “I got my arm sprained once. Ladling out food and a guy, a total schizophrenic, thought I wasn’t moving fast enough and grabbed me and twisted.”
“Scary,” I said.
“Petrifying. So when Benny still didn’t show up, I thought, What if he ran into someone like that? He’d be defenseless. But you can’t imprison them. There are always risks to be weighed. Right?”
We nodded.
She threw up her hands. “Working with the disabled, nothing they teach you in school prepares you. Like that shelter, how could I be ready for that?”
Milo said, “Any problems between Benny and the other residents?”
“Of course not. Andrea selects for gentleness, she doesn’t want to waste time on discipline and control.”
“Okay. What about Benny’s family?”
“He didn’t have any family.”
“No one at all?”
“Isn’t thatsad? That’s how he ended up here. He was an only child, lived with his mother, she had him late, died two years ago when she was in her late eighties. You see that with Down syndrome. Older parents, three of our residents are Down. But Benny wasn’t Down, he was just UDD—undifferentiated developmental delay.”
I said, “He was living with his mother until she died?”
“He was the one who found her, he got all terrified and ran out of their apartment and sat on the curb crying. A neighbor saw him, found out what happened, and called 911. Benny was put in adult foster placement until he got in here.”
Milo said, “No cousins, aunts, that kind of thing?”
“No one,” said Justine Merck. “That’s true of most of our residents. They’re kind of like foundlings. It’s society’s responsibility to take care of them.”
“How about a look at Benny’s room?”
“Sure. You’ll see his art. How much he loved it.”
—
She took us up a mahogany staircase softened by brown shag. The house’s second floor was the same mahogany. Nature prints taken from commercial calendars hung askew at irregular intervals. Five open doors on each side of the hall. Some were set up with a bunk bed, others with a single.
Benny Alvarez had roomed alone in a beige eight-by-eight space at the rear of the house, probably built as servants’ quarters. A single, narrow window, the view partly obstructed by the broad, rust-edged leaves of a towering sycamore. TheSesame Streetquilt on the bed was neatly tucked, a matching pillow fluffed.
I said, “Did Benny make his own bed?”
