Baby Please Don't Go: A Novel (4 page)

4

A colleague nodded hello to Lock and said, “Big Boss has been paging you every thirty seconds.”

“Thanks,” said Lock as he kept moving. “Probably a paper jam in his printer,” he said, smiling. “Huge crisis.”

Under his name on the frosted glass door of Abby’s office was the department’s motto: “Protect the children, protect the future.” Lock touched the words like he always did before entering.

Abby was on the phone, but Lock could barely see him for all the files and clutter piled high on the desk. Abby said goodbye to someone and stood up.

Just then, the phone rang again and Abby answered. He listened for a moment.

“Yes, sir. Of course I have it. It’s right here on my desk.” Abby rolled his eyes for Lock’s benefit. “That’s not a kind thing to say about my filing system. What? Okay, well, you can send her down, I’ll have it ready.”

“The new D.A.,” Abby said to Lock as he hung up. “He wants a file that’s been available for months, and all of a sudden, he’s got to have it instantly.”

Lock surveyed Abby’s office. He’d been there thousands of times, and each time he was amazed at the amount of clutter. “You must have two hundred piles in here,” he said.

“Is that all?”

“Maybe three hundred.”

Abby walked around his desk to a side table with a two-foot stack of papers and folders. He ran his finger down the stack, stopped at one folder in particular, and began to tug on it. He gave up when he saw he was about to topple the whole mess.

“Steady these folders for me, son.”

Instead, Lock walked over and yanked the folder out perfectly. He handed it to Abby. There was a knock at the door. It was the D.A.’s assistant, a heavyset woman with short, cropped hair.

“Here you go, dear,” Abner said, holding the file out to her. “Tell your boss to enjoy himself.”

She left without saying a word.

“You wanted me?” asked Lock.

Abby handed Lock a form. “Four Latino kids are supposedly living in one of those storage rental facilities in Kennett Square. Complaint came from the manager, said the kids sleep there at night. Find out what’s up.”

“And if they’re there?”

“Standard procedure,” Abby said, disappearing into his chair behind a stack of file boxes. “Get them to an E.R. right away for a medical check, then get them to intake.”

Lock nodded and began to leave, complaint form in hand.

“Hey, Lock?” Abby asked. “I have two tickets to the Eagles-Dallas game Sunday. Decent seats.”

“What time is the game?”

Abby walked around his desk to a pile of folders. He ran his finger down the pile again and found the folder that contained the schedule. He tried to yank it out as Lock had. Folders flew everywhere.

“Goddamned shit.”

“Not sure I can go,” Lock said. “Let me know what time when you find your schedule.”

He left Abby’s office and headed to the break room for a cup of coffee.

Back in his cubicle, Lock arranged and re-arranged some papers, but he couldn’t focus his attention on work. He was distracted by the memory of a baseball game he had been excited about when he was fourteen years old.

Lock had saved up one hundred and sixty dollars—he remembered the precise amount—from cutting lawns and shoveling walks. He had planned to use the money to buy a jet-black mountain bike. But then his father invited him to go to a Sunday afternoon major league game. Upon hearing that, Lock quickly headed to the sporting goods store and bought himself a Richie Ashburn fielder’s mitt, hoping that maybe he’d impress his father with his purchase and how he’d earned every cent of it himself. He didn’t think his father even knew he had a lawn-cutting and snow-shoveling business. Lock fantasized about catching a foul ball right in front of his father. If that happened, that would be the greatest day of his life
.
For once, his father would have to say something that would let Lock know he was proud of him. That would have been something.

Another reason being invited out by his father was so important was because, while growing up and living at home, Lock never saw much of him. He was a pretty busy guy. His father wasn’t one of those work-obsessed absentee fathers. It was more like he was always at this bar or that bar, this poker game or that darts tournament. He was around, all right. It wasn’t like he traveled for business, or as if Lock’s parents were separated. It was more that he was a drunken son-of-a-bitch, fully self-absorbed and not really giving a damn about anything other than where he could find the next job to replace the most recent one he’d been fired from, usually for showing up drunk or hungover.

On the day of the game, Lock’s father was too drunk to go. Lock didn’t know why, but he had been buoyed by the certainty that this time he would, for once, actually get to do something fun with his father. Instead, his father fell asleep at noon in a stupor. Lock teared up as he tried to rouse him. He’d been thinking about the game all week long. Lock tried in vain to reach into his father’s trouser pockets in search of the tickets. His father woke just enough to slap him across the face and then pass out again.

Lock’s mother was at work. She had been sick for years with kidney problems, and being unhappily married didn’t help her regain her health. But she worked anyway. She waitressed at a Greek diner a few blocks from the house, but Lock wouldn’t have told her about the slapping incident anyway, even if she were home. At fourteen, he had the sense to protect her from his father. Lock’s father caused her more pain than he caused Lock by hitting him all the time. But what hurt the most was the way he ignored his son. So instead of a ball game with his dad, he sat in his room and watched reruns of
Star Trek
.

The next morning, on the way to school, Lock dropped the glove into a trashcan behind Greene’s drugstore.

Fuck Dad,
he thought.

Lock sat at his desk, fiddling with some papers. He pushed the memory away and tried to ignore the queasy feeling in his stomach. He knew he should go to the game with Abby, but he thought he wouldn’t. It wasn’t fair to Abby, who had been more of a father than his real dad ever had, but as everyone in the office knew too well, things that happened to kids echoed forward through the rest of their lives.

Enough
, he thought. He dialed the phone number of the Kennett Square police and arranged to meet them in thirty minutes at the U–Rent–a–Space to look for the kids allegedly living there. When he hung up, he noticed a waiting voicemail. From the caller I.D., he recognized Natalie Mannheim’s phone number.

He listened to the message. She wanted him to return that night, a day earlier than scheduled. She must have canceled her yoga lesson. At first, he didn’t plan on going, but then he got to thinking about her eyes and the way she had watched him. He decided he would call her after he returned from Kennett Square. He hurriedly left the office.

When he arrived at the storage facility, the police were there. Together with the manager, they found four children, all seemingly in good shape but frightened by the authorities. The group stood outside a shed filled with sleeping bags and a mattress. The manager speculated irritably that the parents were illegal immigrants, and they were nowhere to be found. The children spoke no English, or pretended they didn’t. They shrugged without speaking when one of the police officers questioned them.

Lock addressed the tallest of the children, a girl wearing a red shirt and black pants.

“Dónde está tu madre o padre?” He squatted and spoke slowly and softly.

“En el trabajo,” she said.

“Dónde trabajan?” Lock asked.

“Ellos trabajan en una granja de hongos,” she said. “No te preocupes, ellos vendrán aquí con la comida después.”

Lock stood and turned to the police. “Their parents are working at a mushroom farm somewhere, probably Kennett Square. She says they’ll be back later with food.”

“Let’s go lock up their parents,” one of the officers said. Two of the smaller children cringed and looked at each other. Obviously those two, at least, spoke enough English to understand.

“We’re not arresting anyone,” Lock said loudly and clearly, for the benefit of the children. “We just want to make sure these boys and girls are okay.”

The police officer said nothing. Lock turned to the children and knelt on the asphalt. “Who likes McDonald’s?”

The oldest girl said something to her siblings and their eyes widened.

“We love McDonald’s,” she said. She barely had an accent. “And my baby brother, Miguel, likes the chalupas at Taco Bell, too.” She pointed to a smiling, dirty-faced boy who looked about three.

“Well, that’s good, because I know a McDonald’s very close to here. All we have to do is wait for my friend who has a bigger car so we can all ride together. McDonald’s will be the first place we go.”

The girl translated and the kids lit up, hugging each other and hopping up and down.

After a brief stop at a McDonald’s drive-thru, it took Lock most of the morning to get the children checked out at the hospital and processed into the child welfare system. Lock knew, of course, that the children would prefer to be with their real parents—regardless of the sleeping conditions—rather than be placed in temporary foster care with outsiders who would give them strange foods and unfamiliar accommodations. It bothered Lock that he was the one officiating over the separation, no matter how brief or how necessary.

He kept thinking about a gin and tonic. But why? This situation was nothing compared to some of the things he’d seen in his profession. If he had children, he knew, he’d dedicate his entire being to them, find a way to provide everything they needed. But these four? What was really better for them? He knew what it felt like to be neglected, but there were different kinds of neglect. As far as he could tell, these kids had parents that loved them, even if they weren’t able to take care of them as well as they should have.

Just before noon, after a brief conversation with the temporary foster parents who would care for the kids until the matter was resolved, Lock decided to skip lunch and catch an AA meeting. Something was gnawing at him that he couldn’t identify, but he knew through experience that a meeting could be a great cure-all. Meetings reminded him to seek progress, not perfection. Lock drove to the church in Media that hosted the lunchtime meetings and took a seat in the back row.

That day’s speaker, a young man wearing a flannel shirt and several days of facial stubble, told how he had come to be a member of the group, explaining that after three failed suicide attempts, he decided to take a different approach to solve his drinking and drug problems. He described how two attempts to hang himself didn’t work out—once, the neckties he’d fashioned into a noose broke, and the other time, he didn’t make the rope short enough. On his third attempt to end his life, he thought he’d try a gunshot to the head.

“I actually missed, if you can believe that,” he said. “All I did was mess up the side of my face a little.” He angled his head so the audience could see a deep, angry scar at his temple and a horrifically mangled ear. “Next stop,” he said, grinning, “was AA.”

Lock made a mental note not to try that—not that he’d never considered ending his life. A decade or so before, after a break-up with a woman he had dated for almost a year, he did more than casually think about it. He spent hours on the Internet, visiting the Hemlock Society website to read up on the most painless and effective suicide methods. From that website, his research took him all over the Internet and into bookstores. He found a paperback,
Final Departure
, in which he read about common, non-violent ways people used to kill themselves.

One approach in particular had appealed to him. He studied the details of assembling a “helium hood” and made note of the supplies he’d need. Certain and fast, just like falling asleep. Before proceeding with his shopping list, he’d toyed with the idea of a suicide note and wondered if he really needed one, and if so, who, besides the police and the medical examiner, would ever see it. To whom would it be addressed? He had no one close to him.

He’d worked on a goodbye letter and jotted down some bullet points first—addiction, alcoholism, depression, loneliness, the unlikelihood of ever being attractive to someone decent enough to have a family with—and then wrote and re-wrote and wrote some more. He couldn’t get it to say what he wanted it to say, to where it felt right. He thought it sounded like he was whining, and that was not the impression he wanted to leave.

Lock had then realized a fundamental truth—he didn’t want to die. He simply didn’t want to be so unhappy. He told himself he was long past due getting clean and sober, and now was the time. The right moment had finally arrived. Upon this realization, he poured his remaining supply of alcohol and cocaine into his garbage disposal and flipped the switch. In an instant, it was gone. He grinned and snapped his fingers.
Goodbye, suicide.

He’d gone to his first AA meeting with a neighbor. It had no impact on him, and worse, he hated it. One of the first things he heard was an elderly woman joking that someone, someday, would declare that unceasing attendance at AA meetings was itself an addiction.