Little Girl Lost Read online

  His soul tickles with the same butterflies that would flutter whenever he glimpsed the Pavilion of Fun. In his mind’s eye, the legendary Steeplechase Funny Face glimmers high in the glass façade, its broad, painted grin beaming the promise of a glorious day. His heart gallops in rhythm with the carved mechanical horses that once circled the amusement park’s vast circumference—magical creatures that could whisk him away to a better place, if only for the eponymous ride’s duration.

  He thought about those horses and the smiley face long after Pamela and Eddie had wrenched him out of Brooklyn.

  Two years ago, Fred Trump, a scandal-ridden real estate developer, threw a party—a party!—to celebrate the park’s bulldozing. Sulking after the city had denied zoning permits to build fancy oceanfront apartment towers at the site, surrounded by bikini-clad models and reporters, the millionaire handed out champagne along with bricks for gleeful onlookers to hurtle through the Pavilion of Fun’s stained-glass façade. Oran was there that day, on the boardwalk. He watched the joyful smile crack and shatter, raining razor shards onto hallowed ground, and his soul.

  He walks on past the Parachute Jump ride, a relic left to weather the salt air, rising like a tombstone above twisted scrap metal. It’s all that remains of the glorious park. The promised towers have yet to materialize.

  He hums “The First Cut Is the Deepest,” his favorite song from the latest Cat Stevens album. Most fitting, these days.

  He passes the pier, Astroland, the Wonder Wheel and the Cyclone, the New York Aquarium. Turning north along Ocean Parkway, he spots Coney Island Hospital three blocks up and quickens his pace, thinking of Margaret Costello.

  He managed to stay away all day yesterday, smothering his urges in salacious press coverage of Friday night’s triple homicide in Bensonhurst. This time, the “Brooklyn Butcher” had slain four family members in their beds: Joe and Rose Costello, their twelve-year-old son, Danny, and Rose’s mother, Margarita, who lived with them. Seventeen-year-old Margaret had been raped.

  The case echoes similar crimes committed over the past several months: the Myers family of Sheepshead Bay and the Sheeran family of Bay Ridge. In both of those cases, a teenaged daughter was the lone survivor. Christina Myers and Tara Sheeran were released from the hospital within days of their families’ murders, and Margaret will be out soon, as well. Her wounds aren’t life threatening, just cuts and bruises received in the struggle with her rapist.

  At the main entrance, Oran lowers the umbrella, removes his hat and trench coat, and strides inside. A middle-aged woman sits behind the desk. He was hoping to find someone younger, inexperienced. Visiting hours don’t start for another hour, but he’s not just any visitor, as long as she buys his story.

  She looks up from her magazine. He greets her with brisk efficiency, and explains why he’s here. She directs him to the hospital’s Burn Unit on the third floor, saying, “I read about that in the newspaper yesterday. That poor young firefighter’s family will be glad to see you.”

  He thanks her and heads for the elevator. Inside, he presses the button for the third floor, and then the second, his real destination. Just before the doors close, a young nurse in a white uniform slips in, presses the button for seven, and flashes him a smile.

  “Still raining out there?” She gestures at his umbrella, its gleaming metal prong speared in a puddle that trickles like blood across the tile floor.

  “Like cats and dogs.”

  She sighs. “I hope it lets up by the time I finish my shift.”

  “When is that?”

  “Noon. My husband is taking me out to brunch for Mother’s Day. It’s my first one.”

  “Congratulations. Boy or girl?”

  “Girl. She’s the sweetest, most precious little thing in the whole world.”

  “I’ll bet. I have a—” he starts to say, then catches himself, as the doors slide open at the second floor. He steps out, changing it to, “You have a happy Mother’s Day.”

  “I will, thanks.”

  In the deserted corridor, he can hear a transistor radio playing somewhere, quiet conversation from the nurses’ station. They smile as he passes.

  He returns the smile and walks briskly, noting the exits along the way. He scans the patient names taped to the doors until he reaches hers.

  Margaret Costello

  He’s expecting a police guard posted outside the room, as he’d found when he’d attempted to visit Tara. That day, he gave the officer a polite nod and kept right on walking, rounding the corner at the end of the hall. There, he pushed through the stairwell doors and tore down onto the street, propelled by an irrational burst of panic.

  The guard couldn’t have recognized him. There had been no witnesses at the Sheeran house that night, just as there had been none at the Myerses’ the month before. No one had glimpsed the masked intruder who crept into sleeping households to slaughter all but the precious, precious daughters.

  Oran finds a chair positioned in the hall outside Margaret’s room, but the guard must have stepped away. No sign of him down the hall, nor in the dim room, but, ah . . . there she is, sound asleep. Her arms, bared in a hospital gown, are bruised and scratched. One is bent, hand fisted beneath her chin. The other stretches along her side, an IV needle protruding from a vein.

  Oran hurries over to her. Her face is scraped and there’s a bandage on her temple, yet she appears serene. Are her dreams pleasant? She must be sedated. How else would someone sleep so soundly after what she’s endured?

  Soon the medication will wear off, and she’ll wake to the nightmare again. Poor sweet baby.

  A thin clump of long dark hair straggles across her mouth. His fingers itch to brush it away, but he doesn’t dare touch her.

  He reaches into his pocket, pulls out the packet, and tucks it under her pillow. The movement is painstaking, so as not to disturb her, but something is already under there.

  It drops out onto the floor as he pulls his hand away. It’s a small cross, looped and woven from yellowed palm fronds.

  A memory flashes: an usher handing him a pair of long green strips as he walked into church with his grandparents on Palm Sunday. In the pew, his grandfather folded and turned them in his hands and his grandmother didn’t scold him for fidgeting. Oran noticed many other parishioners doing the same thing with their fronds, fashioning them into cross shapes. Grandfather handed his to Oran with a smile and a nod. Back home after mass, his grandmother told him to tuck it under his pillow.

  “Why?”

  “It’s what we do. It will keep you safe.”

  But it was no more a magic talisman than the rosary beads his grandmother slipped into his bag when his mother moved him out of their house one volatile night. Having taken off a few days earlier with Eddie, she came back to collect her things and—almost an afterthought—her child.

  “If you leave this house to go live with that scoundrel,” his grandfather screamed, “don’t ever come back!”

  “Don’t worry! We won’t!”

  A few years later, Oran ran away and returned to his grandparents’ house. Surely they wouldn’t hold him responsible for his mother’s sins. Surely they’d provide a safe haven, if only until he could heal his wounds—not just the lacerations that covered his frail body.

  A sob of relief clogged his throat when he rounded the corner and spotted the familiar clapboard row house. But as he drew closer, he saw children playing on the front walk, and a strange man sitting on the stoop watching them. The door opened, and an unfamiliar apron-clad redhead poked her head out to call them all inside to dinner.

  Oran never did find out what had become of his grandparents. They no longer mattered. The new family that had moved into their home would live—albeit not for very long—to regret it.

  Seething at the memory, he reaches to snatch up the palm cross lying on the floor beside Margaret’s bed. His arm bumps the tray alongside the bed. The rattle is deafening. Her eyes pop open, and she looks at him. He braces himself for th
e scream, accusation, shout for help.

  Her eyes drift closed again.

  Bolting from the room, Oran finds the stairwell exit blocked by an orderly clattering along with a cart, and is forced to stroll in the opposite direction, past the nurses’ station. Still engrossed in their conversation, they don’t seem to notice him.

  He presses the down button on the elevator and waits, pulse throbbing, hand clenched around the wooden umbrella handle. When the doors slide open, there are no other passengers. He rides back down to the first floor, head bowed, inhaling through his nose, holding the breath, and exhaling through his mouth.

  Calm down. Calm down!

  Margaret had looked at him, but had she seen him? Later, when—if—she remembers what happened, she might think she’d been hallucinating from the drugs piped into her arm. Even lucid, she might not connect him to what happened Friday night. Maybe she’s blocked that out anyway. Trauma can trigger protective amnesia.

  He has to escape without calling attention to himself. And he has to stay away from here, from her, until the time comes. A lot can happen between now and next winter, but if all goes as planned . . .

  The doors open, and he forces himself to walk, not run, back to the entrance. The woman at the desk has finished her magazine and set it aside. Now he can see that it’s this week’s copy of Life, with the Columbia riots and Paul Newman on the cover. He played Cool Hand Luke.

  The magazine is a sign. They’re everywhere, if you know how to recognize them. Oran had seen the film at least five, ten times back in November, mesmerized and inspired by the charismatic character who triumphed over what some might interpret as a metaphorical crucifixion to become a savior. If Luke, faced with a harsh prison sentence, could persevere to lead the downtrodden on the path to glorification, Oran can do the same.

  Beyond the plate glass, the rain is still pouring down. He pauses to put on his hat and raincoat before heading for the doors, umbrella at the ready.

  “Have a pleasant Sunday,” he tells the woman at the desk.

  She looks up with a smile.

  “Thank you, Father. You, too.”

  Chapter Three

  Saturday, March 7, 1987

  New York City

  Stepping off the elevator shortly before midnight, Amelia Crenshaw spots her father. Calvin is straddling the threshold—one foot in her mother’s room and the other in the hall.

  “Sorry I’m late getting back,” she calls, hurrying past the nurses’ station and a small solarium where the sun never shines. If she looks in, she’ll see a somber family, or maybe a gaunt, hairless patient, fixated on the television or window, swaddled in too many layers for this overheated place.

  She doesn’t look. You learn not to. Amelia’s first bleak February journey down this hallway at Morningside Memorial Hospital had exposed a priest bestowing last rites, an old man’s withered backside bared between gaping gown flaps, orderlies joking around as if the sheet-covered corpse on a gurney between them were a checkerboard. Now she sees only what’s right in front of her—if that.

  The room feels emptier, as if someone has departed in her absence. But both patients—her mother and the stranger who lies on the other side of the curtain—are still here, still alive. Barely.

  She sets her heavy backpack in the space vacated by Calvin’s duffel bag. It holds the bus driver’s uniform he’d been wearing when he arrived six hours ago. Now he’s in janitor’s coveralls, pulling on his jacket. Amelia hangs her own over the back of the visitor’s chair and sinks onto the warm vinyl cushion.

  “You’re not going home to sleep for a bit, Daddy?” she asks as he leans over the bed and presses a tender kiss to Bettina’s forehead.

  “No. Just going to get my work done and get right back here as soon as I can,” he says—to them both, though Amelia is certain her mother could no longer hear.

  Calvin gives his wife a long last look, then leaves for his custodial job at Park Baptist, giving Amelia’s shoulder a pat on his way to the door.

  Tag—you’re it.

  She settles in with her philosophy text so that her brain, in contemplating her mother’s impending death, can also attempt to absorb applied normative ethics and Dewey’s theory of valuation. She earned a 4.0 in her first semester at Hunter College. Her second was scarcely underway when her mother was diagnosed. So much for As. She could have passed English Comp, History of Jazz, and Intro to Acting without opening a book, but she’s struggling with philosophy, and midterms loom.

  She reads a page, and then reads it again, toying with her necklace. It’s the finest thing she owns. The tiny fourteen-carat gold signet ring, anyway—not the cheap chain from which it dangles. At least this one doesn’t turn her neck green like the first, bought from a sidewalk vendor who claimed it was gold and sold it for a dollar.

  Amelia had been hoping for a blue linde star sapphire ring as a high school graduation gift. Instead, her parents presented her with the ring. It does have two sapphires, but they’re so small you can barely see them, on either side of an engraved, blue enamel-filled C for Crenshaw.

  “It was yours,” Bettina told her, “when you were just a tiny little baby.”

  Her flash of disappointment had given way to sweet sentimentality, and appreciation that despite all the hard times, they’d never resorted to selling it.

  She turns the page of her text, realizes she still hasn’t absorbed what she read, goes back for a third pass, and gives up. Snapping the book closed, she slumps back in the chair, half expecting her mother to say, “Sit up straight, child.”

  Bettina is always nitpicking. Posture is a big concern. “Be proud of your height. When I was your age, I’d have given anything to be tall.”

  Just under six feet in her bare feet even before she started high school, Amelia would have given anything not to tower over both her parents, all the girls, and plenty of the guys. Her mother’s comments never helped. “Go on, try some of this honey fried chicken,” or, “Tall girls can afford to eat pecan pie. Y’all carry a few extra pounds like it’s nothing at all.”

  Like her culinary skills, Bettina’s accent is drenched in rich Southern sugar.

  “Mama, you know I don’t like sweets.”

  “It’s chicken.”

  “It’s sweet chicken. I’m not hungry, and I don’t need any extra pounds.”

  “Neither do I, child. Neither do I.”

  Never a thin woman, Bettina hasn’t been sick long enough to waste away. Even now, her figure beneath the beige blanket appears to be its usual ample self. Her face, always chubby, is still swollen from a new drug that should have given her a good shot at survival. The doctor was optimistic back in January, and sent Bettina home before that first treatment with stacks of information about scientific studies and clinical trials. She didn’t give them a second glance, but Amelia pored over them.

  “See that? I’ll be cured in no time. The doctor said so.”

  “Really? He said you’d be cured?”

  “Sure he did. I haven’t even been sick for more than a week.”

  “But the statistics say that the odds aren’t—”

  “Don’t you worry about statistics, child. The doctor said I’m younger and healthier than all those people who didn’t beat it. I’ll take some medicine, and I’ll get better.”

  The treatments failed to halt the malignant march. By mid-February, the doctor called them off.

  “Keep fighting, baby,” Amelia overheard a devastated Calvin urging her as they wept together behind their closed bedroom door. “You know we believe in miracles.”

  Bettina’s response was cryptic. “We got ours twenty years ago. We need to talk about—”

  “All we need to talk about is getting you better. Don’t you waste an ounce of energy on anything else.”

  “But—”

  “None of it matters right now. You have to beat this. You have to! Amelia and I will do whatever it takes to—”

  “You have three jobs. She has college. Y
ou can’t—”

  “We can. We will. Whatever it takes!”

  Bettina fell silent. Was that the moment she decided to expedite her own death sentence?

  One of the regular nurses bustles in to check her vital signs and administer morphine. She’s in her thirties, maybe early forties, with a Caribbean accent, complicated braids, and an unusual name Amelia keeps forgetting.

  Catching sight of Amelia, she gives a nod. “You’re back. Did you get some sleep?”

  “Yes,” she lies. “Any change since I left?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure? Because something seems . . . different.”

  The nurse shrugs, busy writing something in her folder.

  She closes it, and Amelia clears her throat. “Um, how long do you think . . .”

  “Could be anytime. Tonight, tomorrow . . .”

  “Tomorrow?” White-hot accusation flares. “Yesterday you said that it would be yesterday, and this morning you said—”

  “I said it could be anytime now. That’s all I can tell you. It’s all I know. It’s all anyone knows. Your mama’s just hangin’ on. Sometimes they do that.” She looks at Amelia like she wants to say something more, then shakes her head, saying only, “I’m sorry.”

  She moves past the dividing curtain to check Bettina’s comatose roommate, who never has any visitors. That first day, just over a week ago, Amelia assumed that she must not have any family.

  Now she isn’t so sure. What if the woman’s loved ones just can’t take it anymore? What if they can’t endure another day or hour or minute of sitting and watching and waiting? What if they can’t stand to see a once robust woman lying motionless and pale as the pillow, hearing her lungs gasp for every tortured breath? Trying to think of meaningful things to say, wondering if she’ll hear, wondering whether she’s in pain, wondering what life will be like afterward. Terrified of being here when she passes; terrified of not being here. Either way, the patient will never know. Maybe they’ve decided to remember her as she’d once been and simply walked away, back to the world.