Bloodline (7 page)

I walked along slowly with the crowd. There was a gay-rights table, with a couple of guys sorting out literature. They were laughing. One guy had many earrings in his left ear.

There was a nuclear-waste table. A table set up by people trying to save at least a postage stamp of the rain forest. I took a crumpled
five-dollar bill from my pocket and stuffed it into the slot in their donation can. A small young woman looked up at me, startled.

Some guys were selling music tapes of a band called Scum. Snappy name, that. Another guy selling sunglasses was doing more business than the woman at the next table, where the sign said something about AIDS awareness. We will be cool to the death. Sad commentary.

Finally I came to the end. There was some sort of cafeteria ahead, and though it was almost noon, I wasn't that hungry. I turned around and walked back down the hallway and outside, where I stood for a minute until two guys came and stood next to me. They were college-age, wearing bandannas over their hair in a way that made them look like pirate extras in a high-school production of
Peter Pan.
Ever the diplomat, I didn't tell them that. Instead, I asked where I could find a student directory.

One of the guys—blond, tall, gold-rimmed glasses, with the big-boned glow of health that comes from family money—started to tell me. The other guy, who was smaller, with dark hair in a short ponytail, asked me why I wanted to know.

“Because I need to find a student here,” I said.

“You a cop?” he asked.

“No, but I can get one if you need one,” I said.

“No, like, who are you, I mean,” the small guy said. “Like, her father?”

“No,” I said. “I'm, like, her uncle.”

He looked at me silently. The blond guy looked embarrassed.

“What's her name?” the small guy persisted.

“Missy Hewett,” I said. “Who are you? Head of campus security?”

“Hey, you should thank me,” he said. ‘There are a lot of weirdos around here, you know? People aren't always what they seem.”

“They're never what they seem,” I said.

“Down there on the left,” the blond guy interrupted, shaking his head at his buddy and pointing the way. “The big white building.”

“Thanks,” I said.

I turned to the small guy and took a step closer.

“And her uncle Jack thanks you,” I said. “Like, really.”

“No problem,” the small guy said.

That remained to be seen. I backtracked across the parking lot and up the street to the big white building, picked a likely door, and went in. There were offices and bulletin boards covered with brochures about grad schools and internships. A couple of hours in this place and I could find a new direction for my life. In the meantime, I stopped at the information desk and asked a heavyset woman wearing headphones for directions to Missy Hewett. I used the uncle line again and she bought it, thumbing through a worn paper directory.

“Thirteen Fessenden,” she said, the music blaring tinnily around her neck.

“That a dorm?” I asked.

“A street,” she said. “Fessenden Street.”

And she gave me a look that said, What kind of uncle are you?

Fessenden ran from Forest Avenue, the main fast-food drag, up to Brighton Avenue, which cut through the middle of campus. Number thirteen was at the Forest Avenue end, around the corner from a radiator repair shop. It had been a nice old house, once upon a time, but now it was dilapidated and rotting. My truck fit in just fine here.

I parked in front and looked the place over. There was a tipsy picket fence running across the front and someone had replaced a
few of the rails with raw new wood. The new rails stood out like bad false teeth.

The same treatment had been given to the porch, which had once been ornate, but had been repaired crudely with pressure-treated wood. Around the porch, sumac was growing up as nature took back its own. Some blind optimist had placed a house-for-sale sign on the strip of dead sod that constituted a front lawn.

I waited for a minute and watched. There was no sign of life. The first-floor windows were covered with shades, pulled all the way down. A beat-up red Subaru station wagon was parked at the side of the driveway, its front right tire flat. If there were any trick-or-treaters left in the neighborhood, this would be the kind of place they'd skip.

I didn't have that choice.

But before I went up, I took a moment to consider what I knew about Missy Hewett. It didn't take much longer than that.

She was from Prosperity, or at least from that part of Waldo County. She'd gotten pregnant in high school and had a baby but had given it up for adoption. That behind her, she had gone on to college in this relatively big city. She was not living in the lap of luxury, and she was not expecting me.

I walked to the front door but it didn't look like the entrance. That was to the left of the house where there was another door, this one with four mailboxes nailed to the wall beside it. The names were taped on the boxes, one on top of the other, in chronological order of occupancy. On two of the boxes, the tape was weathered, the names washed out. On the other two, the names were legible. The name
M. HEWETT
was neatly printed in what appeared to be a feminine hand.

I pushed the door open and a black-and-white cat slipped out. The hallway was dark and there was a ten-speed bicycle chained to a
pipe at the bottom of the stairs. Bicycle bondage. I went in and closed the door behind me.

There was a door to my right and a pair of men's muddy work boots on the floor. I knocked on that door and waited. Then knocked again. There was no sound from inside.

I walked up the stairs, two flights. The stairs dead-ended at another door, outside of which was a pile of newspapers. The paper on top was a
Casco Bay Weekly.
I nudged it with my boot and exposed a
Portland Press Herald,
a week old. I stood for a moment and listened. A dish clattered. There was a beep, like from a microwave oven. I knocked and the door cracked open.

“Missy Hewett?” I said.

“Yeah?” she said, peering out from behind the door chain.

“My name's Jack McMorrow. I'm a writer, and I met some of your friends at Waldo Regional. I would have called first, but I didn't have your number.”

“About what?” Missy Hewett said.

“Well, it's kind of hard to explain,” I said, smiling. “But it has to do with high school. And babies.”

Her face went gray.

8

I
t took me five minutes to get her to take the chain off the door. I passed my driver's license through the crack. My old
New York Times
ID. If I'd known, I would have brought a portfolio. Maybe Missy would have been convinced by my compelling piece on irises.

“Why should I talk to you?” she said, when I had finally made my way into the very small, very neat kitchen. “I don't know you. Why should I talk to you about this?”

“You don't have to,” I said.

“I know that,” she said.

She was leaning against the counter with her arms folded across her chest. Her arms were thin, and in her plain white T-shirt and jeans, so was the rest of her. Her dark hair was stylishly cut, for a hip college kid, and it had been tinted a very faint shade of red, a tint so faint that you almost thought you imagined it. Even with the hair she was very pretty, with pale skin and large dark eyes. She was wearing purple socks without shoes, and she didn't look old enough to be in college.

“I know this sounds strange,” I said, “but it really isn't.”

“I don't think I'm interested,” Missy said. “It's nobody's business. And I don't think you have any right to come here and ask me to talk about something like this, something personal.”

I waited for her to ask me to leave, but she didn't.

“Yes, it's personal,” I said, moving into the opening she had left me. “But in another way, it's not. It's like I was telling Janice Genest, the guidance counselor at the school. You know her?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Well, it's something lots of women have gone through. Lots more will go through it in the future. This kind of story—not just this one, but other stories like it—helps people to understand what's going on. It might help kids avoid, I don't know, the decision that you had to make.”

“I didn't have to make it,” Missy said. “I chose to make it.”

“Why?”

“Because I was seventeen, and I didn't want my baby to have a shitty life.”

“Why would it have been shitty?” I asked.

“Because I would have been sitting home collecting welfare,” Missy said. “Because I don't have family that gives a shit about me. So it would have been just me and the kid. And the kid deserves better than that. That's what she got.”

“It was a girl?”

“Yup,” she said.

And stopped.

Missy looked away. I looked around the apartment. There was another room with an old sofa and a small television on a cable-spool table. A bedroom after that. The bed was made.

The kitchen we were in was dreary but spotless. There were books and notes spread on the table. It looked like chemistry and biology.

“What are you studying?” I asked.

“I'm in the RN program,” Missy said.

“Pretty tough?”

“Not yet,” she said, “but I've only been here three weeks.”

“Any other kids here from Waldo Regional?”

“Yeah, a couple. But it's a big place. I don't see 'em.”

“What do you do most of the time?” I asked.

“I study. I work in the library. Part of my scholarship deal, you know? I got a big scholarship because I'm poor and from the boonies. But I study mostly. I study a lot.”

“Were you like that in high school?”

“Like what?” Missy said, her arms still folded.

“A serious student,” I said.

“I had to be serious,” she said.

“Why?”

“Because nobody else was gonna do it for me,” she said, her voice hard as stone. “If I blew it, I blew it.”

“Where did the baby fit into that?” I asked.

“She didn't,” Missy said. “She deserved better.”

“It must have been hard.”

She shrugged.

“A lot of things are hard,” she said.

“Do you think talking about it would make it easier for somebody else?”

“Might teach them,” Missy said.

“Teach them what?”

“That you can't trust anybody but yourself. And that guys suck.”

“That's kind of a hard attitude,” I said. “How old are you? Nineteen?”

“Eighteen,” she said.

“That isn't always true, you know.”

“It has been for me,” Missy said.

“The baby's father was no good?” I asked.

“He wasn't a father. He was a sperm cell. One sperm cell.”

“But she has a father now?”

“A real one,” Missy said. “And a mommy, too. She's on her way. She's all set.”

“I think we would have something to talk about, if you wanted to.”

“Maybe,” Missy said. “I'll think about it.”

“I'll leave you my number,” I said.

She nodded and I took out a notebook, scribbled my name and number, and tore out the page. When she took it, I noticed there were no rings on her fingers. None.

I turned toward the door.

“One thing,” Missy said.

“Yeah?” I said.

“Those girls. Dulcy. And Belinda.”

“And Sharon,” I said.

“Yeah,” Missy said, a trace of high school creeping into her voice. “What did they say about me?”

The plan had been to inquire of Missy Hewett, then grab lunch and a good beer or two at one of the Old Port pubs. When it had been conceived, about two minutes into the trip, a mile out of Prosperity village, the thought of an outing in the city, paid for by Dave
Slocum, had made me almost grin. But as I sat at a long bench in an ale house called Three Dollar Dewey's, I could barely muster a smile for the waitress.

She was about Missy Hewett's age, another child hiding under makeup and dyed hair. But if these children had to make decisions like Missy's, what would they have to face as adults? What kind of scars did these decisions leave behind?

Life was hard, as Missy said. Forget the moralizing about kids having kids, about lost opportunities, kids who would never get to Wellesley. Life was hard. Period. In Prosperity, Maine. In most places. If your life wasn't hard, you were one of the fortunate few.

No wonder these kids liked to wear black.

I thought about it over a bowl of chili and a Samuel Smith's Nut Brown Ale. Normally, a Sam Smith's would lead me to thoughts of England and pubs in old stone buildings, thick black stout poured into heavy pint glasses. One nut brown ale would leave me at peace. Two would be a religious experience. There is a God and he is benevolent, for he—or she—invented hops and yeast.