Rust & Stardust Page 8
Susan sent Al home that night, staying with her mother. Ella could barely make it up the stairs, and in the tiny bathroom, Susan had to help her undress, help lower her into the tub. Something about this filled her with anger. As she ran the washrag down her mother’s bony spine, she wondered, where had her mother gone? A mother was supposed to take care of her children, protect them. Not the other way around.
“I didn’t know,” her mother said, as if she were reading her mind. “How was I supposed to know who that man was?”
Susan breathed deeply to keep from saying all the things she wanted to say. “I love you, Mama,” she said instead, though she felt herself seething. “We’ll find her. I know we will.”
When her mother retired, Susan went to the room she used to share with Sally and lay down on her old bed. She could have been sixteen years old again, but she wasn’t a girl anymore. She was about to be a mother herself. As she lay flat on her back, her belly made a steep hill beneath the blanket. The baby was still tonight. She touched the taut flesh of her stomach and thought: Ella had once lain like this, first with Susan and then with Sally inside. Still a part of her. Still safe. Suddenly, Susan didn’t want to have this baby. She wanted to keep her child inside her. The world was a terrifying and dangerous place, a world that could convince you to offer up your own child to the devil without even thinking twice. What if she, like Ella, wasn’t able to protect this child?
ELLA
Ella thought of all the stolen things.
She recalled her childhood marble collection and the way the boy at school had stolen her favorite blue moonie. It looked as she imagined the Earth might look from far away. Holding it in her palm made her feel like she had the whole world inside her fist. The boy had asked her to see it and then pocketed the beautiful blue marble. It was the first time anyone had taken anything from her, and the sick pit it left behind, that wild sense of injustice and longing, plagued her for days.
Later: a favorite doll left at a park, a pair of shoes lent to a friend. Borrowed books never returned. She could track her entire life in things she’d been too careless to keep. Thieves prey on those who trust; this was a lesson she could never seem to learn. One she was afraid she hadn’t managed to impart to Sally.
Even Russell knew she was an uneducable fool. “When will you learn?” he’d asked once, playfully, but his smile belied a sort of baffled frustration. After they’d married she’d had money stolen from her pocket at the market, and once her purse, which she’d left sitting on a chair at the beauty parlor. Recipes, a new hat (plucked from the pew at church of all places). And later, he himself proved to be the worst thief of all; he took everything when he took his life. Just walked out the door one night as though he weren’t about to steal her entire future, rob the girls of the father they deserved. They’d already lost one daddy, and now this.
Her life had been filled with thieves. How did she not see this coming? Though this man had hardly stolen Sally. Ella had practically given her to him, handed her over as easily and stupidly as she handed that beautiful blue marble to the boy who plucked it from her palm and put it in his pocket.
SALLY
The rumble of the tracks was like a lullaby to those passengers who could actually sleep. But Sally didn’t dare to close her eyes, was too afraid to give in to her exhaustion. They’d boarded the train in Atlantic City at dawn and then changed trains in Philadelphia. Now they were hurtling toward Maryland. When they were in Atlantic City, she’d at least known that they were still close to home. Every night in that rooming house, she’d comforted herself with the fact that home wasn’t so far away. And what he said couldn’t be true; of course they’d come looking for her. But Maryland? Baltimore? It was a world away, a big city, she was sure. Even if the letter had reached her mother, how on earth would they find her? Tears seared two tracks down her cheeks.
* * *
“Come on,” he’d said that morning before the sun even came up. “Time to go.”
“Am I going home?” she’d asked hopefully. She’d been half asleep, curled up at the edge of the bed like a pill bug in her stepfather’s garden.
“Home? Don’t you think if they really missed you, they woulda come looking for you by now? It’s been over a month, Sally. They’ve known where you were at the whole time.”
She shook her head. That wasn’t true. He’d made her lie about where she was. He didn’t know about the letter she’d sent that awful night, the one with the rooming house address, the one telling her mother that he planned to take her to Baltimore. Though that was days ago. Surely, her mother would have gotten it by now. But if she had the address, why hadn’t they come looking? No, no, no. He was confusing her.
“Just get up,” he said. “We got a train to catch.”
“I won’t tell nobody what you done to me. I just want to be with my mama. She’s sick. She needs me.”
“I said, get up,” he repeated, and this time he reached out and grabbed her arm, yanked her up out of bed. He shoved her toward the bureau. On top, leaning against the mirror, was that photo he’d had taken of her on the boardwalk. He’d promised she could send the photo home to her mother. She touched the picture, tears streaming down her face.
“Leave it,” he said, yanking open the drawer where he gathered his stash of money and his gun. He opened the next drawer and threw a couple of pairs of trousers and some undershirts into a paper bag, then reached into her drawer for the few items he’d bought for her and did the same.
“Leave that, too,” he repeated as she knelt to get her suitcase from under the bed. “This way we’ll just look like a couple of day-trippers. Won’t call any attention to ourselves.”
“We’re on the run now, Sally,” Mr. Warner had explained. They had to go undercover unless she wanted to find herself in a penitentiary for the rest of her life. Taking her to Baltimore was for her protection, he said; he promised he’d do whatever was necessary to keep her safe. He was going out on a real limb for her, he said. Really sticking his neck out. She could almost picture it—Mr. Warner climbing out on a tree limb, neck stretching as he did, like a Tom and Jerry reel played before the main picture. The image almost made her laugh until what he was saying actually registered. They were leaving New Jersey. She’d never been anywhere outside New Jersey before. Not even Philadelphia.
* * *
Now, as the interior lights on the train dimmed and Mr. Warner started to drift off to sleep in his seat next to her, Sally felt in her pocket for the cold metal ring. She touched it, this talisman, closing her eyes.
They’ll forget you, Sally. It will be like you never was.
She’d made a wish. After she had her photo taken, Mr. Warner had let her ride the carousel, that massive merry-go-round with the terrifying painted ponies with bared teeth, around and around trying again and again to catch the brass ring. As she leaned out, clutching the pole that impaled her horse (the pale purple one with the pink mane) with one hand, she’d whispered before grabbing at the brass ring with her other, Please, don’t let them forget.
She knew that it was easy to forget people once they were gone. Without Susan living at home, it was easy to forget what it had been like to share a room with her, the way she laughed in her sleep. She’d forgotten the scent of Susan’s perfume, the way she smoked cigarettes in their room, the open window doing little to keep the smoke from hovering above them. She’d forgotten the way she always left her bed unmade, her clothes on the floor, her makeup strewn on the bureau. It was like pulling a rock out of the sand; the water just filled the empty space when it was gone. Like it had never been there at all.
Even her stepfather’s absence eventually stopped feeling like a tear in the fabric of her world after a while. She was only six when he went to Daly’s for a drink and never came home, and it seemed that almost immediately her memory of him started to fade. It was his face first. She remembered lying in bed, trying to remember his smile. But she came up blank. She concentrated hard, working o
n remembering one detail at a time. But the memory was like confetti in a kaleidoscope, fragments (nose, chin, grin), never to be assembled correctly again. There were so few pictures. And the photos felt like imposters anyway. Who was that man who’d once lifted her on his shoulders to watch the Fourth of July parade? Who was that man holding her up to pick an apple from a tree? Who was that man standing next to her mother holding the knife in front of the beautiful cake? She remembered trying to recollect the sound of his voice, the tenor and timbre. He’d had two voices really: the soft slurry one after he came home from Daly’s (the one that was light and happy, words tumbling and bumping into each other) and the other voice, the voice that had edges. The one that scared her just a little. But once he was gone, she might have been able to describe the sound, but she couldn’t hear it anymore. It was like trying to explain a melody without being able to recall the music.
As her body gave in to exhaustion, lulled by that odd locomotive lullaby, she thought again, Please, don’t let them forget.
Baltimore, Maryland
August 1948
SALLY
“Your name is Florence Fogg now,” he said, his breath hot in her ear. “Understand?”
Florence. Florence had been her name once, long ago. Florence was the name her real father had given her. Florence Swain. But when he went away, she became Sally, a name she chose herself. It sounded friendlier to her than Florence, like the name of a happy girl who was always smiling. When her mother remarried, her stepfather had wanted her to take Horner, his last name. But now this man, Frank (Warner? Fogg? She hardly knew what to believe anymore), was changing her name again. She was to pretend that he was her father. She wondered if her life would always be like this: always changing who she was, to whom she belonged.
No, she thought angrily. He would not steal her name. I am Sally Horner.
When they arrived at the house in the Barclay neighborhood of Baltimore, Mr. Warner told Sally to keep her mouth shut and play along.
It was hot and so humid her clothes clung to her back, legs, neck. They stood at the steps of the ramshackle row house for so long she figured that it must be unoccupied, when suddenly the door swung open, and a large bald man, half dressed and smoking a cigar, filled the doorway. His trousers were beltless, his undershirt stained. He was twice the size of Mr. Warner, and the skin of his cheeks and nose had the same veiny blossoms of red that her stepfather’s had had.
“Sammy!” Mr. Warner said.
The man, Sammy, looked confused at first, as if Mr. Warner might be trying to sell him something. A vacuum cleaner? A set of encyclopedias?
“Frankie!” he exclaimed. “You old son of a bitch!” He reached out and shook Mr. Warner’s hand, pumping it up and down and shaking his head in disbelief. “Wow! Your little one sure has grown since I last saw her. I thought you said Dot gave you the old heave-ho.”
“Old lady took off, left us to fend for ourselves,” Mr. Warner said conspiratorially, and Sally wondered who Dot was. “Then she comes back wanting the kid. You still got that room to rent? Like I told you, Dot’s on my tail, and we need a place to stay.”
“Sure thing. Hot as hell up there, but it’s all yours.”
“And you know of anybody looking for a mechanic?” Mr. Warner asked. He’d sweated straight through his suit jacket. She could smell him, and her eyes burned at the stink.
“I’ll ask around. Shops are always lookin’ for a good wrench. Come on in,” the man said.
Inside, the air in the small kitchen hung heavy with cigarette smoke. A tobacco fog. They followed him up one narrow stairwell and then another to an attic room. The sun shone in a bright beam, illuminating a single bed. Dust particles spun lazily in the light. It had to be over a hundred degrees in that room; she felt dizzy and put her hand against the wall to steady herself. No, no, no.
“I got an extra mattress if you wanna give me a hand getting it up the stairs,” the man said to Mr. Warner. “You can give the kid the bed.”
Sammy turned to Sally and said, “Bathroom’s downstairs. Second door on the right. No lock on the door, so I’ll make sure to knock. Been a long time since there’s been a lady in the house.” He winked at her, and she started to see stars again.
“I need to sit down,” she said, to no one in particular, as her legs began to fail her, joints melting in this unbearable heat. Her stomach turning. She couldn’t stay here.
“I got a fan I can bring up. And it cools down some at night,” the man said, concerned. Sally wondered if she could maybe trust him. If he was good. Though she wasn’t sure what good was anymore.
He took her elbow and led her to a hardback chair. She sat down and bent over, her ears filling with a loud buzzing. “She okay?” he asked Mr. Warner.
“Been a long trip from Jersey,” Mr. Warner said, but it sounded like his voice was underwater. She was inside that diving bell again, plummeting, the walls closing in.
“Why don’t you get some rest, Florence,” Mr. Warner said.
That name, Florence, also felt like something far away. Something both familiar and completely foreign. She looked up to find both men nodding and smiling.
“Funny, she don’t look nothing like Dot,” the man Sammy said. “But she’s gonna be a real looker one day.”
* * *
The shadows in the new room scared her; the branches of a linden tree outside the window became creeping fingers. That night, she sat on the bed with her back pressed against the wall, her knees to her chest. Sammy had been wrong. The room didn’t cool off at night, save for a few degrees. Her forehead was slick with sweat, her hair drenched.
“When do I get to see a judge?” she asked, boldly at first, but then her voice breaking. “You promised I’d see the judge at the shore. I could get my punishment, and then I could go home. Is there a judge here in Baltimore?”
Mr. Warner sat down on the edge of the bed, leaning toward her.
“Listen up,” he said, stroking her hair out of her eyes. He cupped her chin in his hand. “I’m putting my career at risk for you. If we get found out, it won’t just be you who’s sent to prison. And if they take me, then there will be nobody left to speak on behalf of your character. You understand? You’ll be all alone.”
Sally shuddered as a cloud passed over the moon outside. “I don’t understand. I just want to get my hearing. I’ll do whatever they say. Take my punishment.”
He laughed, and then he scowled. “Don’t you understand? When are you going to get it through your thick skull? You’re a fugitive now, Sally. You know what that is?”
She shook her head.
“You’re wanted.” His fingertips tiptoed across her shoulder. Then he whispered into her ear, and her body tensed electric beneath him. “Won’t matter to them. Understand? Dead or alive.”
ELLA
“Mrs. Horner,” Loretta Hummer, the postman’s wife, cooed, taking Ella’s arm as she made her way to the front doors of St. Paul’s for Sunday services.
Ella had not been to church since Russell died except on holidays, and then only because she figured Sally’s soul should not be at the mercy of her own personal gripes with the Lord.
“How are you?” Loretta continued. She smelled of pie, eye-burning cinnamon and nauseating apples. “I read all about poor little Sally in the paper.”
As soon as the FBI got involved, the reporters had come knocking at Ella’s door. Vultures, every last one of them, pecking, pecking at her. Why Sally? they asked. Why do you think he chose her? As if she were a pot roast at the market, a ripe peach in the produce bin Frank La Salle had plucked out. Though that was easier than the other questions: You’d never met him before? Weren’t you suspicious?
Finally, Al got them all to leave, told them she wasn’t feeling well. That she wouldn’t conduct any more interviews. She had no idea that the articles they wrote would wind up anywhere other than in the pages of The Courier-Post. That anybody outside Camden would give two hoots about what happened to her little g
irl. But when Al and Susan came for supper on Friday night, Al brought a half-dozen papers from Philly to New York City, with that photo of Sally on the swing and that horrid man in his fedora. An eight-state manhunt, the headlines announced. And below the headlines, her horror (her agony, her heart) captured inside the tidy margins of those justified columns.
“It’s a good thing, Ma,” he said. “The more people that see her face, the more likely it is that somebody might see her and recognize her. If she’s in Baltimore, like they think, her picture has been all over The Sun.”
He was right, of course, but Ella couldn’t help but feel like she’d left her dirty laundry out on the line to dry. She could practically smell it the second she started up the steps to the church that morning.
Ella grunted as she reached the door, and tried her best to ignore Loretta’s probing.
“I can only imagine what you must be going through,” Loretta said, frowning and shaking her head. “Your daughter, your little girl, who-knows-where with that, with that…”
“Thank you,” Ella said, and yanked her arm away from Loretta.
She was here for one reason and one reason only. To make her peace with God, before he exacted any more of his vengeance.
Because nobody was expecting her at church, nobody noticed at first as she started slowly up the aisle. She might have been mistaken for any other middle-aged woman with aching joints and squeaky shoes. But all it took was recognition by one observant congregant for whispers to begin to gather and heads to turn toward her.
For a moment, just a single moment, she could have been a young bride again, walking up that aisle to meet her husband. She felt delirious, caught between two times in this single place of colored sunlight and incense. But this time, there was no veil to hide behind, and the faces looking back at her weren’t filled with love and admiration. This time, she was clearheaded, and the eyes that returned her gaze offered nothing but horror, pity, and blame.