Others of My Kind Read online

  To the memory of my mother,

  who knew about secrets

  and hard lives

  Chapter 1

  As I turned into my apartment complex, sack of Chinese takeout from Hong Kong Garden in hand, Szechuan bean curd, Buddhist Delight, a man stood from where he’d been sitting on the low wall by the bank of flowers and ground out his cigarette underfoot. He wore a cheap navy-blue suit that nonetheless fit him perfectly, gray cotton shirt, maroon tie, oxblood loafers. He had the most beautiful eyes I’ve ever seen.

  “Ms. Rowan? Jack Collins, violent crimes.” With an easy, practiced motion he flipped open its wallet to display a badge. “You give me a minute of your time?”

  “Why not. Come on up.”

  Without asking, I spooned food out onto two plates and handed one to him. For a moment he looked surprised, but only for a moment, then tucked in.

  “So what can I do for you, Jack Collins?” I asked between bites. We stood around the kitchen island. Tiles chipped at the edge, grout stained by untold years of spills and seasoned by time to a light brown. The kitchen radio, as always, was on. After six the station switches from classical to jazz. Lots of tenor sax. California bebop beating its breast.

  “Well, first, I guess, you could tell me why you handed me this plate.”

  “You’re not wearing a wedding ring. Your shirt needs pressing, and even with that suit and tie, you have on white socks. A wife or girlfriend would have called you on that. So I figure you live alone. People who live alone are usually up for a meal. Especially at six thirty of an evening.”

  “And here I thought I was the detective.” He forked in the last few mouthfuls of food. “Vegetarian?”

  I admitted to it as he went to the sink, rinsed out utensils and plate, and set them in the rack.

  “I know what happened to you,” he said.

  “You mean how I spent my early years.”

  “Danny and all the rest, yes.”

  “Those records were sealed by the court.”

  “Yeah, well …”

  He came back to collect my dishes and utensils, took them to the sink and rinsed them, added them to the rack. Stood there looking out the window above the sink. Another tell that he’s a bachelor, used to living alone. Maybe just a little compulsive.

  “Look, I’m just gonna say this. I spent the last few hours up at the county hospital. Young woman by the name of Cheryl got brought in there last night. Twenty years old going on twelve. Way it came about was, the neighbors got a new dog that wouldn’t stop barking. They didn’t have a clue, tried everything. Then, first chance the dog had, it shot out the door, parked itself outside the adjoining apartment and wouldn’t be drawn away. Finally they called nine-one-one. Couple of officers responded, got no answer at the door, had the super key them in. Found Cheryl in a closet, bound and gagged, clothespins on her nipples, handmade dildos taped in place in her vagina and rectum. Guy was a woodworker, apparently—one of the responding officers is a hobbyist himself, says this mook used only the best-quality wood, tooled it down to a high shine. Cheryl didn’t talk much to begin with. Then about five this morning she stopped talking at all. Just started staring at us. Like she was behind thick glass looking out.”

  “Yeah, that’s what happens. You get tired of all the questions, you know they’re never going to understand.”

  “Mook got home from work not long after the officers arrived on the scene. Had some sort of club there by the door, apparently, and came at them with it. Junior officer shot him dead, a single shot to the head. Training officer, twenty-plus years on the job, he’d never once drawn his piece.”

  Collins opened the refrigerator door and rummaged about, extracting a half-liter bottle of sparkling water. Mostly flat when he shook it, but hey. He poured glasses for both of us and threw in sliced limes from the produce drawer.

  “Look, you don’t want to go back into all that, I’ll understand. But we’ve got nothing but blind alleys north south east and west. No idea who this girl—this woman—is. Where she’s from, how long she’s been there.”

  “Twenty going on twelve, you said.”

  “Could just be shock. One of the doctors mentioned sensory deprivation, talked about developmental lag. A nurse thought she might be retarded. At any rate—” He put a business card on the island between us. “They’re keeping her at the hospital overnight, for observation. You see your way clear to visiting her, talking with her, I’d appreciate it.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “Anyone ever tell you you have beautiful eyes, Officer Collins?”

  “My mother used to say that. Funny. I’d forgotten….” He smiled. “Thanks for the meal, Ms. Rowan—and for your time. If by some chance you should happen to change your mind, give me a call, I’ll drive.”

  I saw him to the door, tried to listen to music, picked up a Joseph Torra novel and put it back down after reading the same paragraph half a dozen times, found myself in a bath at two A.M. wide awake and thinking of things best left behind. Not long after six, I was on the phone.

  “Hope I didn’t wake you.”

  “No problem. Alarm’ll be going off soon anyway.”

  “Your offer still open?”

  Nowadays whenever anyone asks me where I’m from, I tell them Westwood Mall. I love seeing the puzzled look on their faces. Then they laugh.

  Everyone here’s from somewhere else, so it’s doubly a joke.

  But I really am from Westwood Mall. That’s where I grew up.

  I was eight years old when I was taken. I’d had my birthday party the week before, and was wearing the blue sweater my parents gave me, that and the pink jeans I loved, and my first pair of earrings.

  His name was Danny. I thought he was old, of course, everybody over four feet tall looked old to me, but he was probably only in his twenties or thirties. He liked Heath bars and his breath often smelled of them. He wasn’t much for brushing teeth or bathing. His underarms smelled musty and animal-like, his privates had an acid smell to them, like metal in your mouth. Some days I can still taste that.

  I really don’t remember much about the first year. Danny kept me in a box under his bed. He’d built it himself. I loved the smell of the fresh pine. He took the jeans and sweater but let me keep my earrings. He’d come home and slide me out, pop the top—two heavy hasps, I remember, two huge padlocks like in photos of Houdini—his own personal sardine. He’d bring me butter pecan sundaes that were always half melted by the time he got home. I felt safe there in the box, sometimes imagined myself as a kind of genie, summoned into the world to grant my summoner’s wishes, to perform magic.

  I’m not sure I was much more than a doll for him. Something he took out to play with. But he’d be so eager when he came home, so I don’t know. His penis would harden the moment I touched it. Sometimes he’d come then, and afterward we’d just lie together on his bed. Other times he’d put things up me, cucumbers, shot glasses, bottles, either up my behind or what he called my cooze. He’d always pet my hair and moan quietly to me when he did that.

  He worked as a nurse’s aide at DC General and as a corrections officer at the prison, pool and swing shifts at both, irregular hours, so I never had much idea what time of day it was when I felt my box being pulled out. Sometimes, from inside, I’d smell the heavy sweetness of the sundae. I was always excited.

  Two years after I was taken, we went to Westwood Mall, the first outing we’d ever had. It was our second anniversary, Danny explained, and he wanted to do something special to celebrate. He gave me a pearl necklace, real pearls, he said, and I promised to behave. He’d even bought a pretty blue dress and shoes for me. At Acropolis Greek I stabbed his hand with a plastic knife, kicked of
f the shoes, and fled. I was surprised at how easily the knife went in, at the way it broke off when I twisted. Flesh should not be that vulnerable, that penetrable.

  After that, I lived in the mall. Found safe places to hide from security guards, came out at night or during the rush hours to dine off an abundance of leftover fast food, had my pick of T-shirts, jackets, and all manner of clothing left behind, read abandoned books and newspapers. I had turned from genie to Ms. Tarzan. Periodically I’d watch from various vantage points as Danny prowled the mall hoping to find me. You may remember apocryphal tales of Mall Girl, sightings of which were first reported at Westwood then quickly spread throughout the city’s other malls. Eventually everyone came to believe the whole thing was ex nihilo, spun from vapor to whole cloth, no more than a self-serving stunt. The journalist who first reported these tales and devoted weeks of her column to following up on them, Sherry Bayles, was summarily fired. Lack of journalistic integrity, the paper cited. Later, when she was working as a substitute teacher, more or less by simple chance we became friends. She’s the only one I ever told about my days in the mall. Endearingly, she did no more than smile and nod.

  My Edenic time at Westwood ended after eighteen months. A newly hired security guard believed the stories and lay in wait for me long after his shift was done. I was biting into half a leftover hamburger I’d fished out of one of the trash containers when he came up behind me and said, “I’d be happy to buy you a whole one.” His name was Kevin, a really nice man. He bought me that hamburger, complete with fries and shake, on the way to the police station. There a Mrs. Cabot from Family Services picked me up.

  So the second—third? fourth?—act of my life began.

  Next morning I woke up in what they call a holding facility. Whatever they called it, it was an animal pen, thirty or forty kids all stuffed in there. One of them came snuffling around my bed like a pig after truffles around three A.M. and left with a bloody nose, down one tooth. At eight they gave me a breakfast of underdone, runny eggs with greasy bacon mixed in and carted me off to see a social worker.

  She said her name was Miss Taylor. “The report states that you’ve been living on your own in the mall. Is that right?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And you’re eleven?”

  “Almost twelve.”

  “You told the admitting nurse that before this, you spent two years in a box under someone’s bed.”

  Miss Taylor was sitting behind a desk in an office chair. She rocked back and forth, staring at me. When she rocked back, she went out of sight. There she was. Gone. There she was again.

  “The nurse thinks you made that up.”

  “I don’t make things up.”

  “You also said that during that time he repeatedly abused you.”

  “That’s not what I said.”

  Ignoring me, she went on: “That he touched you in inappropriate places, put his member in you.”

  “His penis, you mean.”

  “Yes. His penis.”

  “Sometimes he did. More often it was other stuff.”

  I’d made her out to be just another office zombie, but now she looked up, and her eyes brimmed with concern. You never know when or where these doors will open.

  “Poor thing,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Why?”

  “Sweetheart—”

  “My name’s Jenny.”

  “Jenny, then. Adults are supposed to care for children, not take advantage of them.”

  “Danny did take care of me. He brought me sundaes. He fed me, he cleaned my box. Took me out when he came home.”

  Tears replaced the concern brimming in her eyes. I had the feeling that habitually they waited back there a long time; and that when they came, they pushed themselves out against her will.

  She tried to cover by ducking her head to scribble notes.

  Three days later Mrs. Cabot showed up again to escort me to what everyone kept calling “a juvenile facility,” half hospital, half prison. (Daily my vocabulary was being enriched.) The buildings were uniformly ugly, all of them unrelievedly rectangular, painted dull gray and set with double-glass windows that made me think of fish tanks. I was assigned a narrow bed and lockless locker in Residence A—a closed ward, the attendant explained. Everyone started out here, she said, but if all went well, soon enough I’d be transferred to an open ward.

  That was the extent of my orientation. The rest I got onto by watching and following along. Each morning at six we had ten minutes to shower. Then the water was turned off, though there weren’t enough showerheads to go around and even when we doubled up, some girls were left waiting. After that we had ten minutes to use toilets in open stalls before being marched in a line through a maze of covered crosswalks to the dining room. Captives from other residences, boys and girls alike, would just be finishing their breakfasts. We waited outside like ants at a picnic. Once the occupying forces were mustered on the crosswalk opposite, we entered.

  School was next, three or four grades and easily twice as many ages lumped into one, with a desperate teacher surfing from desk to desk looking as though this, staying in motion, might be all that kept her from going under. Each hour or so an attendant materialized to cart a roll-call group of us away for group therapy (equal parts self-dramatization, kowtowing by inmates, and surreptitious psychological bullying by therapists), occupational therapy (same old plastic lanyards, decoupage, and ashtrays), weekly one-on-ones with the facility’s sole psychiatrist (a sad man whose hopelessly asymmetrical shoulders accepted without protest the dandruff falling like silent, secret snow upon them). Occasionally one of our troop would be led off for shock therapy only to return with eyes glazed, mother’s milk of her synapses curdled to cheese rind, unable to recognize any of us, to recall where she was or remember to get out of bed to pee or, if she did, to locate the bathroom. One or another of us would take her by the hand and lead her, help her clean up afterward.

  I could provide little useful information about my parents or my origin. Scoop the fish from the bowl, which is the whole of what the fish knows, how can the fish possibly describe it to you? Family Services’s own searches came to naught as well. Back then few enough possibilities for tracking existed. Children’s fingerprints went unrecorded. Enforcement, legal, and support services were not so much islands as archipelagoes. I’d been taken more or less at random and kept, first by Danny, then by myself, in seclusion. Four years had passed. Essentially I had no identity.

  The long and short of it was, I got assigned as a ward of the court and, barring foster placement, which we all knew to be about as likely as universal health care during a Republican administration, was remanded by the court to the juvenile facility “until such time as the aforesaid attains her majority.” This majority, I found as I burrowed into outdated law books for impenetrable reasons ensconced in the facility’s woeful library, was not fixed. I could petition for same after my sixteenth birthday.

  In addition, the court’s ruling decreed twice-yearly reviews by the board. For the first couple of reviews I showed up and said my piece, watching women in sober dresses and men in short-sleeved white shirts nod their heads, claiming they understood. Sure they did. As they went home to their families, Barcaloungers, TVs, chicken-and-mashed-potato dinners. I could see why it was called a board. No bending here, just sheer functionality. Nothing came of those first command performances, of course, and after that I stopped caring. Until age sixteen, when indeed I did petition the court—not the mental-health, juvenile courts to which I’d been restricted the last few years but an adult, open court. I’d spent considerable time in the facility’s library researching this, doing my best to get my ducks all in a row, even if some quackery were involved.

  Mall security guard Kevin, onetime journalist Sherry Bayles, Family Services agent Mrs. Cabot, and social worker Miss Taylor were all there to testify on my behalf. Appropriately demure and deferential, I walked out emancipated. Miss Taylor set up residence for
me in a halfway house. “Just until you get on your feet,” she assured me.

  It was an upscale part of town where, whenever you emerged blinking into sunlight, homeowners on adjacent porches and in neighboring fenced yards stared at you as though you might be a cabbage that had somehow managed to uproot itself and learn to walk. (God knows how the property came to this purpose. Some old-money donation, possibly trying to memorialize an addicted wife or child?) I always smiled my biggest smile, said good morning with eyes steady on these neighbors, and inquired how they were doing on this fine day. By the third week they were calling me over to ask how it was going.

  Not spectacularly well, as it happened. Once prospective employers heard I was sixteen, had spent four years in a state facility, and had never before worked, the interview was pretty much over. Never mind court papers certifying me as an adult, or my own composure and comportment at these interviews. Two months in, I began having the terrible feeling that halfway might be as far as I was going to get. I mentioned this when I stopped to chat with old Miss Garrett at the end of the block. She was out in her garden weeding flowers as usual. How those weeds managed to regrow overnight, every night, I never understood. But there she was each morning in ancient pink pedal pushers and sky-blue straw hat, pulling those suckers up with her own rootlike, arthritic hands.

  “If you don’t mind swing shifts and long hours, honey, I’ve got a nephew with his own business who’s looking for a waitress. Figure you can handle pushy men?”

  Her nephew’s diner turned out to be within walking distance, fourteen blocks away at the far edge of the business district. Miss Garrett had called ahead. Not only did Bernard (“Call me Benny”) have a job, he had a room above the diner for rent, cheap, if I was interested. Miss Taylor wasn’t too happy about that when I called to talk about it, and to tell her I’d got a job. Did I think it a good idea to dump all my eggs in one basket? was the way she put it. But I wanted desperately, after all those years of absolute dependence, to be on my own. I could almost taste it, like that drop of sweet dew you pull out of honeysuckle, like the metallic taste of Danny’s genitals. And it was after all, as Miss Taylor asserted, my decision to make, and mine only.