“Who was the man who came into the market?” he asked.
“I don’t recall. I’m sorry—it’s been so long.”
Larry looked upset after he and Amanda left the constable’s office. He kept tapping on his wheel. Amanda wondered if it was an old habit, from driving patrol.
“What do you think?” she asked, after a while.
“I think he doesn’t want to talk about it,” he said. “I’m not one to crap on other cops—all right, I do sometimes—but in my experience, if a cop isn’t talking, there’s a reason.”
“I’m sorry to hear about those people. Their little boy.”
“Well, he is right about that. The ocean does take people.”
“How come you’re helping me, Larry?”
He wanted to say something trite, likeI got nothing better to do. And there was truth in that. But he suspected there were other reasons, and he wasn’t ready to share them with Amanda. Maybe he wasn’t sure of them himself.
“What’s next?” she asked.
“We’ve got more questions now than we had before. Your brother, alone on a beach. A man who went in after him. A center no one seems to want to talk about. What the hell happened here?”
4
Brightwood
The oldest monsters are unnamed. Unnamed monsters, Dennis learned before he even knew his own name, were the worst kind of all.
When you gave a monster a name, you had it in hand. There, that one was anger. Rage. Sexual abuse. Dennis learned the names of all these before he was four, as items the child psychiatrists crossed off on their checklists. They were looking for answers. They were looking for monsters to blame.
But the worst monster of all? That one was as cold as sleet. He climbed up the hill at night and played with your feet. He washed the tears from your face and cooed like a mother before slashing your heart to ribbons. The worst monster, Dennis knew, was like Satan from the Bible some parents read to you. He came wearing disguises, and no one knew his real name, because he had none. He pretended to be a lot of things, and the worst thing he pretended to be was love.
Awwooooh.That was the first sound, recognized later as the whistle of a morning train. It came over the hill and split the morning into two halves: before Mother left, and after.
They lived in a tiny flat. No, scratch that. That was the second home. The first had a nursery the color of butter. No. Did it? Maybe that was the third home. The homes began to blur together after a while. No. That wasn’t it. The homes started as a blur, because he was never theirs, and no one really wanted him. They wanted a miracle child, an ideal. A substitute.
Dennis, the doll.
But he wasn’t born to be a doll. Somehow the foster parents looked through his tender, veined chest and saw this. Instead of a terrified, beseeching child unable to voice his needs, they saw trouble.There’s something wrong with him, said one, and a social worker who had picked him up from a home at least had the grace to sayHell, of course there is.The child is only two and has already been through six homes.
Scratch that. Maybe there had been only four homes before he was two.
They say inchoate memory, formed before language, is the worst of all, because it flies like bats in your bones: you cannot heal from what you cannot voice. But Dennis thought memories were like monsters. They filled the world like ghosts at dawn. There were so many, the streets were chockablock with them: You couldn’t enter a new home without remembering the last. And if the memory was bad, well, there went that home too. The smell of bleach on a towel. The way the sunlight came in through a curtain. A crib. A bathtub. A face. All of them cursed by time and the ones who left him, because every time someone abandons you, it is always the first time.
He liked Brightwood at first. Brightwood was a place he could understand. There were rules. No one could leave him, because this was the place the lost were left. All the boys here were throwaways. It was like being in a giant wastebasket filled with dirty tissues. You knew you were lost.
Bed. Dresser. Two shelves. Socks. A blanket. The wind came in through the window. He could press his hand against it if he liked, and no one slapped it away. No one made mouse faces at him, kissy-kissy boo-boo faces that always lied, because those ones were the worst. No one pretended to bementororfriendorcounselor, and mostly, no one pretended to be mom or dad.
He especially appreciated the lack of mom or dad. It was like being in a serene, open place where there wasn’t a threat around every corner. No one would grab and hug and kiss him, then scowl and get angry when he didn’t want to hug or kiss back. No one would pretend to know which story he liked to hear, or want to call him yet another new name—I’m going to call you the name of a son I lost in a stillbirth—and expect him to staple it to his chest, like he was made of latex and not flesh.
“I’m not a doll.” It was what he growled when he first came to Brightwood, and that was okay. No one cared. Most of the time, they left you alone. If you were really bad—like hit another child or bit yourself bad—they put you in a locked room where you couldn’t tear the rubber padding no matter how hard you tried. After a time, Dennis liked the rooms, and then finally they bored him, which maybe meant they worked after all. If they existed to harden a heart already hardened, they worked plenty well.
He could have gone on like that, growing smaller and harder by the year until he turned into one single tear that would later explode into sadness or rage, like so many of the boys of Brightwood, tumbled out into a world that didn’t want them.
But then came Ralph.
Ralph took the custodian job the year Dennis was six. Other boys had come and gone, some to adoptive homes, but the more time youspent at Brightwood, the less likely that was to work out, and those boys boomeranged right back. One moment a boy was being shepherded out the door by hopeful adoptive parents, their hands on his little shoulders, and the next he was returned, a wilted flower, his belongings tossed helter-skelter into a suitcase.
The wide-open air hurt after a while when you are used to closed small rooms.
