The Moth (23 page)

So I say to the girl, “Where’s your brother? I gotta talk to him.”

And she looks right at me and goes, “My brother’s dead. He was shot and killed last week down the block.” And with that, she goes over to the refrigerator, and she gets a business card, and she hands it to me, and she says, “Here. Talk to this detective. He’s got the case. He knows everything.”

So I take the card, and I hand it to one of my guys, and I say, “Make a call.”

We make a couple of phone calls. Sure enough, everything checks out. Hector was a homicide victim about a week earlier. He got shot and killed down the block, but the paperwork for that case hadn’t caught up with the paperwork for my case. So I tell his mom, “Look. I’m very sorry for your loss. I’m very sorry for the way we had to bust in the way we did, but we had a warrant, and this is the way we do things.” And I explain to her, “Look, I’ll go down to court. I’ll get the warrant vacated. I’ll make sure that nobody comes and bothers you again. I’m very sorry.”

With that, it’s time for us to go. In reality, I got five or six more Hectors we’re going after that morning. But before we leave, I take the mug shot outta my pocket. I just want to make sure there’s no mistaken identity, you know, that we’re talking about the same kid.

So I take the mug shot, and I show it to her, and I say, “Is this your son?”

She takes one look at the photo, and tears start rolling down her face. And she starts sobbing—that really deep, mournful sobbing, that only a mother crying over her child would have in her. So, I believe her. Obviously this is her son.

So I take the photo and stick it back in my pocket, and I tell her again, “Look, I’m very sorry for your loss,” and we turn to leave.

But as I turn to leave, she says to me, “Can I see the picture again?”

I’m like, “This, this picture?”

I’m confused. Didn’t she get a good look at it before? Is she not sure? I’m not sure where this thing is going now. So I take the photo out, and I show it to her. And she reaches out, and she takes it from my hand, and she clutches it to her chest. It’s like she’s hugging him.

And she says to me, “Can I keep this picture?”

I’m thinking:
That picture?
You want to keep
that picture?

So I tell her, “Look, it’s police department property. We don’t normally give them out to the public.”

But she goes on to tell me that she has no photos of him because he was never around. His whole adult life, he was either out tearing up the streets, or he was in jail. He never really came around for Mother’s Day or Christmas or anything like that, and she has no photos of him. She has nothing to remember him by.

When she told me this story, I felt terrible for her. You know, I’m a hard-core guy, but my heart was breaking for her a little bit. She seemed like a nice lady. I mean, this building was a dump, but the apartment, she kept it clean. She put that thick plastic on the sofa so that it wouldn’t get dirty. And she wasn’t cursing me out, like a lotta other mothers do, blaming
me ’cause their son’s got a warrant, and he’s gotta go back to jail. She just seemed like a nice lady who lost her son to the streets, which in that neighborhood happened a lot.

So I told her, “Okay. If you got nothing else to remember this kid by, go ahead, be my guest. It’s yours.”

And she reaches out, and she shakes my hand, and she thanks me. She’s clutching her robe shut, and she still has those little pink fluffy slippers. She shuffles across the room and goes over to this bookcase against the wall that has all these family photos in nice silver and gold frames. You know, there was Grandpa in his World War II uniform, and wedding photos and graduation pictures with the cap and the gown.

And very lovingly and tenderly, like only a mother would do, she took that mug shot and she placed it right in the middle of those family photos.

Steve Osborne
was a New York City police officer for twenty years and retired as a lieutenant assigned to the Detective Bureau.

ERIN BARKER

W
hen I was about twelve years old, my mom said she wanted to talk to me about something. My mom and I didn’t have a lot of talks. I loved her very much, but she was kind of an intimidating figure. She was one of those corporate working moms with the beeper and the pants suit and the rolly suitcase. She yelled important things into phones, and she was away a lot on business.

But she sat me down in the living room, and she told me that she was pregnant. And it was kind of strange the way she said it, almost like she wasn’t that happy about it. It had been eight years since my brother was born, but even I could remember how excited everybody had been—how everyone had ideas for names, how all the grandparents had flown in from out of town, how barely a day went by that we didn’t get some kind of massive delivery of balloons or a giant stuffed animal. But this time there were no balloons. There weren’t even any cards.

But I was still very excited. I had never expected to have another sibling after my little brother, and I was optimistic that
this time I’d get one who could throw a baseball. So I told everyone the big news. I told everyone at school, everyone at church, my Girl Scout troop, the next-door neighbors, the kid who mowed our lawn—everybody. And they were all just as excited as I was. Except after a while, I started to notice that when these people would inevitably congratulate my dad on the big news, there would be this sort of whispered exchange, and then that person would say, “Oh my God, I’m so sorry.” And I didn’t know what that meant until one day when my dad took me out for ice cream.

My dad was my best friend when I was a kid. He was the dad who would read to us every night before bed and would listen very seriously to my thoughts on the Roald Dahl masterpiece
James and the Giant Peach
and the film version’s inherent inferiority. He taught me how to throw a baseball, and at one point really believed he could teach my brother the same. He taught us that Darth Vader had to wear that suit because he had been injured in a car accident, and so my brother and I better always wear our seat belts unless we wanted to end up like him. Imagine my disillusionment when I saw the
Star Wars
prequels. (Disillusionment on so very many levels, but anyway.)

Because my dad and I were so close I knew what ice cream meant. Every time my dad has bad news he takes us out for ice cream. It’s kind of his M.O.

Don’t ever go to the Cold Stone Creamery with my dad—just don’t do it. Unless you want to find out that Grandpa has cancer, or your dog’s been put to sleep, or your nanny’s been fired for stealing your mother’s jewelry, just don’t go.

So we get our ice cream of doom, and my dad takes a deep breath, and he says, “The baby your mother is pregnant with is
not mine.” And I can see him looking at me trying to see if I understand at twelve years old what he means.

As it just so happened, I had conveniently just learned what sex was in school, when my science teacher forced poor Craig Berken to read it out loud from our biology textbook. I can still remember the exact words, as read in Craig’s shaky, giggly voice:
The man jiggles his penis inside the woman’s vagina.

Yes, jiggles. Even at that age I was like
, I really feel like that is not the right word for this context.
“Jiggles” is a word that’s neither sexy nor scientific, and probably only belongs in a Jell-O commercial. But you know, it did the trick. I learned what sex was, and I understood exactly what was going on here. I understood what my dad was telling me, and I could tell how hard it was for him to tell me. And I knew that as much as he didn’t want to tell all of those other people, I was the very last person that he wanted to tell.

And then he says, “Do you know who the father is?” And I realize with sudden clarity that I do know, that I have perhaps always known but have not realized it until this exact moment.

“Andy?” I said, and my dad nodded.

Andy was my mom’s coworker, this British guy about ten years younger than her, who would take me and my mom and my brother on little trips and buy us expensive presents. He’d even, oddly enough, gone to church with us. I thought he was our friend.

I realized now that I’d been wrong, and that I’d been stupid not to realize it. And as a result, not only had I failed to prevent this disaster (and like every child I truly believed in my heart that I could have, with a well-timed tantrum or the right number of slammed doors), but I’d also made it infinitely worse for
the person who deserved it the least, my father. I’d been coming home for months saying things like, “Dad, look at the awesome Lego castle Andy brought us.” I’d been calling him to say, “Dad, guess what, we taught Andy how to play baseball today,” never noticing the tense silence on the other end of the line. Not to mention I’d publicly humiliated him by telling everyone about my mother’s pregnancy.

I was devastated, and I was no longer excited about the new baby. Shortly after this my parents got divorced, and my mom bought a house down the street from my dad’s because the neighborhood didn’t already have enough to talk about. We were supposed to go down there every now and then when my mom was home, and one day I went down and there was cake on the table and my mom said, “Andy and I got married today. Do you want a piece of the wedding cake?”

No, I did not want a piece of the cake of lies.

The next time I went down, I was met with an even bigger surprise, this time in the form of a strange pink baby who I was told was my new sister.

“Do you want to hold her?” my mom asked.

No, I did not want to hold her. I didn’t want to look at her, at this baby who had broken my father’s heart. I loathed this horrible creature, and I decided then that I always would. I made a commitment in that moment to hate this baby for the rest of my life, possibly longer.

There was just one problem… I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to hate a baby, but it is fucking difficult. Because everything they do is magical as shit. And this was especially true in the case of my sister, Emma, who had a little Pebbles Flintstone ponytail on top of her head. Every night that I was at my mom’s house, she would refuse to go to sleep until I came and sang to
her. It was the same song every time, “Shoe Box” by the Barenaked Ladies, which is kind of an inappropriate song to sing to a little girl since it’s about statutory rape. But she’d heard me playing it in my room, and that was what she wanted, so who was I to argue?

Soon I found myself bonding with my mom for the first time in a long time over our mutual love for Emma and our mutual hatred of the Teletubbies. Slowly all my anger fell down like dominoes. When I forgave my sister, it was easier to forgive my mom, and when I forgave my mom, it was easier to forgive myself. I’ll admit I never quite forgave Andy, but that was okay because it turned out that his stay with us was only temporary anyway. He met another married woman with children and started going to church with them, and presumably started this story all over with someone else.

As for my dad, I never had to ask for his forgiveness. It was always there.

Emma is fourteen years old now, and she’s gone from Teletubbies to
Twilight
. Clearly she has questionable taste—in a few years it’ll probably be Dan Brown novels. But despite that, we’re great friends, and I love her very much, and I can’t regret anything that happened because without it we wouldn’t have her. Although she never did learn how to throw a baseball.

Erin Barker
is a writer, a Moth GrandSLAM champion, and the senior producer of science storytelling project the Story Collider (storycollider.org). She would like to thank Justin D’Ambrosio, Ben Lillie, and Jenifer Hixson for their support and advice with this story and others, and her family for being awesome.

EDGAR OLIVER

M
other used to always say to us, “Savannah is a trap. It’ll try to imprison you. Even if you manage to find a way to get away, it’ll drag you back.”

Mother also used to say, “Beware of other people. They won’t understand you. We’re different. We’re artists.” So all throughout my childhood it was just the three of us—Mother, Helen, and me. And then there was the world as though we were lost in it. Never were three more lost children than Mother, Helen, and me.

No one ever made it into our house, especially relatives. Mother was deeply suspicious of relatives. And if some old friend from Mother’s past did dare to pay a visit, they wouldn’t have been there very long when Mother would begin sobbing and screaming, “You’ve been listening to the vicious gossip about me! I can tell! You’ve been listening to the vicious gossip about me!” And she would advance on them, and they would back out the front door and flee, never to return. At which point
we would all three jump in the car and zoom off with Mother driving like a maniac.

All throughout my childhood we drove obsessively, at least two hundred miles a day, sometimes three hundred. They were aimless drives. It didn’t matter where we went just so long as we were on the go. Helen and I did our homework in the car, which to this day I believe deeply affected both Helen’s and my handwriting, which no one can decipher.

At night we would return to the house on 36th Street and lock ourselves in. Then we would plunge the downstairs into darkness and all three make the terrifying journey upstairs together, where we would lock ourselves in for the night. We were all three so terrified of the dark that it never would have occurred to any of us to have a room of our own. So we all three slept together in the upstairs front bedroom. The rest of the rooms upstairs were stacked to the rafters with chests of drawers and trunks and armoires and boxes that were all locked and filled with Mother’s secrets.

We’d all three lie on our narrow beds in the front bedroom beneath dim-shaded lamps, and Mother would shuffle her gypsy-witch cards, and Helen and I would read, which we did madly. And Mother would ask the gypsy-witch cards things like what she should have to eat the next day. Eventually the gypsy-witch cards convinced Mother to go on a banana-split diet.