Moonlight Mile

  I looked over at the guy nearest to me, but he was engrossed in his meat loaf. I looked at Angie. She shrugged. I swiveled my stool and spotted a wire rack by the door that held some kind of printed matter. I crossed to it and discovered the top rack offered a real estate monthly while the lower rack held brochures of the region. Nothing fancy on the outside—local ads mostly. When I opened it, though, we were greeted with a color map. The gas stations were labeled, as were the summer stock theaters and antique shops, the outlet mall in Lee and the glassworks in Lenox, places that sold Adirondack chairs and others that sold quilts and spools of yarn.

  We found Becket and West Becket on the map easily enough. A school we’d passed on a hill this morning was, I learned, the Jacob’s Pillow Dance School, the pond we’d passed a few dozen times was apparently unnamed. Otherwise, the only attractions labeled in Becket were the Middlefield State Forest and McMillan Park, which contained, within its environs, Paw Prints Pet Park.

  “Dog park,” Angie said just as I was noticing it. “Worth a stab in the dark.”

  The counter girl plopped Angie’s cheeseburger on the counter and then placed the turkey club in front of me with a weary drop of her hand and disappeared into the back before I could mention that I’d asked for no mayo. While we’d been looking at the map, most of the patrons had cleared out. We were alone except for a middle-aged couple who sat by the window and stared out at the road rather than at each other. I walked two stools over and found myself a knife and fork wrapped in a paper napkin and I used the knife to scrape most of the mayo off my bread. Angie watched me, bemused, and then went back to her cheeseburger. As I bit into my sandwich, the short-order cook disappeared from behind the kitchen cut-in. A door opened somewhere out back and shortly thereafter I could smell cigarette smoke and hear him talking in low tones to the counter girl.

  My sandwich sucked. Turkey so dry it was chalky. Rubbery bacon. Lettuce that browned as I watched. I dropped it on my plate.

  “How’s your burger?”

  Angie said, “Awful.”

  “Why you still eating it?”

  “Boredom.”

  I looked at the check left behind by Miss Charm School Graduate—sixteen bucks for two crap lunches delivered by a crappier personality. I left a twenty under the plate.

  “You are not tipping her,” Angie said.

  “Of course I am.”

  “But she doesn’t deserve it.”

  “No, she doesn’t.”

  “So . . . ?”

  “All the years I waited tables before becoming a PI?” I said. “I’d tip Stalin.”

  “Or his granddaughter, apparently.”

  We left the money, took the map, and walked out.

  • • •

  McMillan Park contained a baseball field, three tennis courts, a large playground for school-age kids and a smaller, more brightly painted one for toddlers. Just past that were the two dog parks—the one for small dogs formed a fenced-in oval within the park for larger dogs. Someone had put a lot of thought into the park—it was strewn with tennis balls and had four water fountains that also fed large metal dog bowls at their bases. Several lengths of thick rope, the kind you’d use to tie off a boat, lay on the ground. It was good to be a dog in Becket.

  It was the middle of the afternoon, so it wasn’t terribly populous. Two guys, one middle-aged woman, and an elderly couple tended to two Weimaraners, a Labradoodle, and a pretty yippy corgi who bossed the other three dogs around.

  No one recognized Amanda from the photo we passed around. Or maybe no one wanted to recognize her in front of us. Private investigators don’t get much benefit of the doubt anymore. People often consider us just one more symbol of the End of All Privacy Age. And it’s hard to argue the point.

  The two guys with the Weimaraners did note that Amanda looked a little like the girl in the Twilight movies, if not in the hair and the cheekbones, then in the nose and the forehead and the close-set eyes, but then they got into an argument over whether said actress was a Kristen or a Kirsten, and I wandered over to the middle-aged woman before it devolved into a Team Edward vs. Team Jacob imbroglio.

  The middle-aged woman was smartly dressed but you could have stored loose change in the pockets under her eyes. The top third of the index and middle fingers of her right hand were yellowed by nicotine and she was the only one in the park who kept her dog, the Labradoodle, on a leash. Her teeth gritted every time he jerked against her hold, and the other three dogs taunted him.

  “Even if I knew her,” the woman said, “why would I tell you? I don’t know you.”

  “But if you did,” I assured her, “you’d think I was the cat’s pajamas.”

  She gave me an unblinking stare that felt twice as hostile if only because there was nothing overtly hostile about it. “What’d this girl do?”

  “Nothing,” Angie said. “She’s just missing from home. And she’s only sixteen.”

  “I ran away at sixteen,” the woman said. “I came back after a month. To this day, I don’t know why I did. I could’ve stayed out there.”

  When she said “out there,” she chin-gestured past the area where a group of mothers and toddlers gathered around the smaller playground, past the parking lot, and past the hills that rose and were subsumed into the great blue mass of the Berkshires. On the other side of that mountain range, the gesture seemed to say, a better life had waited.

  Angie said, “This girl could very much regret running away. Harvard was waiting for her. Yale. Wherever she wanted to go.”

  The woman yanked on her dog’s leash. “So she could, what, enter some cubicle at a slightly higher rate of pay? Hang her fucking Harvard diploma on the partition wall? She spends the next thirty-forty years learning how to short stock and steal people’s jobs and houses, their 401(k)s? But that’s okay because she went to Harvard. Sleeps like a baby at night, tells herself she’s not to blame, it’s the system. Then one day she finds a lump in her breast. And it’s not okay anymore, but nobody gives a shit, honey, because you made your fucking bed. So do us all a favor and fucking die.”

  The woman’s eyes were red by the time she finished and her free hand shook as she reached into her purse and came back with a cigarette. The air in the park felt raw. Angie looked like she was in minor shock. I’d taken one step back from the woman and both the gay couple and the elderly couple were staring at us. The woman had never raised her voice, but the rage she’d expelled into the atmosphere had been so torn and pitiable it rattled us all. And it wasn’t rare. Quite the contrary. You asked a simple question lately or made an innocuous aside and suddenly you were the recipient of a howl of loss and fury. We no longer understood how we’d gotten here. We couldn’t grasp what had happened to us. We woke up one day and all the street signs had been stolen, all the navigation systems had shorted out. The car had no gas, the living room had no furniture, the imprint in the bed beside us had been smoothed over.

  “I’m sorry” was all I could think of to say.

  She put the shaky cigarette to her lips and lit it with a shaky Bic. “Don’t know what you’re sorry for.”

  “I just am,” I said.

  She nodded and gave me and then Angie a soft, helpless look. “It just sucks. You know? This whole raw deal they sell us.”

  She bit her lower lip and dropped her eyes. Then she and her Labradoodle walked off toward the gate that led out the back of the park.

  Angie lit her own cigarette as I approached the elderly couple with the photo of Amanda. The man gave it a glance, but the woman wouldn’t even meet my eyes.

  I asked her husband if he recognized Amanda.

  He gave the photograph another glance and then shook his head.

  “Her name’s Amanda,” I said.

  “We’re not much on names here,” he said. “It’s a dog park. That woman who just left? She’s Lucky’s Owner. We don’t know her name beyond that, but we know she had a husband once, a family, but she doesn’t have them anymore. Couldn’t tell
you why exactly. Just that it’s sad. My wife and me? We’re Dahlia’s Owners. Those two gentlemen? They’re Linus’s and Schroeder’s Owners. You, though? You’re just the Two Ass-holes Who Made Lucky’s Owner Sadder. Good day to you.”

  They all left. They walked out the side entrance to the park and congregated on the sidewalk. They opened their car doors and their dogs hopped in. We stood in the dog park without a dog, feeling ever the fools. There was nothing to say, so we just stood there as Angie smoked her cigarette.

  “I guess we should go,” I said.

  Angie nodded. “Let’s use that gate, though.”

  She indicated the gate on the other side of the dog park and we turned toward it, because we didn’t want to exit past this group who suddenly despised us. The far gate led into the children’s area and then the sidewalk beyond, where we’d parked our car.

  A different group congregated here—mothers and their children and their baby carriages and sippy cups and formula bottles and diaper bags. There were half a dozen women and one guy. The guy wore jogging clothes and stood by a jogging stroller slightly away from the group as he drank continuously from a water bottle the length of my leg. He seemed to be modeling for the women and they seemed to be enjoying it.

  Except for one. She stood a few feet away, closest to the short fence that separated the children’s park from the dog park. She’d strapped her infant to her chest in a Björn, the baby’s back to her chest so the baby could look out at the world. The baby wasn’t interested in the world, though, she was interested in squalling. She calmed down for a second when the mother put a thumb in her mouth, but then, when she realized it wasn’t the nipple or the pacifier or the bottle she’d been looking for, the howling started again and her body shook like she was being electrocuted. I remembered when Gabby had behaved exactly the same way, how helpless I’d felt, how utterly useless.

  The woman kept looking over her shoulder. I assumed she’d sent someone for the bottle or the pacifier and was wondering where the hell they were. She bounced on her feet and the baby bounced with her but not enough to stop screaming.

  The mother’s eyes met mine and I was about to tell her it gets better, a lot better, but then her small eyes narrowed and mine did, too, both of our mouths opening. The hair on top of my head grew damp.

  We hadn’t seen each other in twelve years, but there she stood.

  Amanda.

  And her baby.

  Chapter Nineteen

  She couldn’t run. Not with a baby strapped to her chest. Not with a stroller and a diaper bag to retrieve. Even if she had track-star speed and Angie and I had blown ACLs, she’d still have to get in the car, turn over the engine, and strap the baby in all at once.

  “Hey, Amanda.”

  She watched me come. She didn’t wear that hunted look worn by a lot of people who don’t want to be found. Her gaze was level and open. The baby sucked her thumb into her mouth, having decided, I guess, that it was better than nothing, and Amanda used her other hand to stroke the top of the baby’s head where thin wisps of light brown hair formed swirls.

  “Hi, Patrick. Hi, Angie.”

  Twelve years.

  “How you doing?” We reached the fence between her and us.

  “Oh, you know.”

  I nodded at the baby. “Pretty girl.”

  Amanda gave the baby a tender glance. “She is, right?”

  Amanda was pretty herself, but not in the way of models or beauty pageant contestants—her face had too much character, her eyes too much knowledge. Her slightly crooked nose was in perfect symmetry with her slightly crooked mouth. She wore her long brown hair down and heat-straightened so that it framed her small face and made her seem even smaller than she was.

  The baby squirmed a bit and groaned, but then she went back to sucking Amanda’s thumb.

  “How old is she?” Angie asked.

  “Almost four weeks. This is the first time she’s been outside for any real amount of time. She liked it up until she started screaming.”

  “Yeah, they do a lot of screaming at that age.”

  “You have one?” She kept her eyes on the baby, fed her a bit more of her thumb.

  “A daughter, yeah. She’s four.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Gabriella. Yours?”

  The baby closed her eyes—from Armageddon to serenity in under two minutes. “Claire.”

  “Nice,” I said.

  “Yeah?” She gave me a smile that was wide and shy at the same time, which made it twice as charming. “You like it?”

  “I do. It’s not trendy.”

  “I hate that, right? Kids named Perceval or Colleton.”

  “Or remember the Irish phase?” Angie asked.

  A nod and a laugh. “All the kids named Deveraux and Fiona.”

  “I know a couple, lived up off the Ave.?” I said. “Named their kid Bono.”

  A great laugh, sharp enough to jostle the baby. “No, they didn’t.”

  “No, they didn’t,” I admitted. “I keed.”

  We were quiet for a moment, the smiles gradually dying on our faces. The mothers and the jogger paid us no attention, but I noticed a man standing in the park halfway between the playground and the road. His head was down and he walked in a slow circle, trying really hard, it appeared, not to look our way.

  “That would be the daddy?” I said.

  She looked over her shoulder, then back at me. “That would.”

  Angie squinted. “Seems a bit old for you.”

  “I was never interested in boys.”

  “Ah,” I said. “What do you tell people—he’s your father?”

  “Sometimes. Sometimes uncle. Sometimes older brother.” She shrugged. “Most times people assume what suits them and I don’t have to say anything.”

  “He’s not missed back in the city?” Angie said.

  “He had some vacation time coming.” She waved at him, and he stuffed his hands in the pockets of his jacket and began trudging across the field toward us.

  “What’ll you do when vacation time runs out?”

  Another shrug. “Fall off that bridge when we come to it.”

  “And this is what you want—to build a life up here in the Berkshires?”

  She looked around. “It’s as good a place as any and better than most.”

  “So you remember some of this place,” I said, “from when you were four?”

  Those clear eyes pulsed. “I remember all of it.”

  That would include the wailing, the crying, the arrest of two people who’d loved her deeply, the social worker who’d had to wrench Amanda from the arms of those people. Me standing there, the cause of it, watching.

  All of it.

  Her boyfriend reached us and handed her the pacifier.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  “No problem.” He turned to me. “Patrick. Angie.”

  “How you doing, Dre?”

  • • •

  They lived just a mile from the dog park on the main road in a house we’d passed at least a dozen times that morning. It was a Craftsman Foursquare, the stucco painted a dark tan that contrasted nicely with the off-white trim and the copper-colored stone porch supports. It was set back off the road a few yards, a wide sidewalk bordering the houses along that stretch of road in such a way that it felt more small-town than country. Across the street was a strip of common grass and then a small access road and a white-steepled church with a brook running behind it.

  “It’s so quiet here,” Amanda said as we exited our cars and met on the sidewalk, “that sometimes the gurgling of the brook keeps you up at night.”

  “Yikes,” I said.

  “Not a nature enthusiast, I take it,” Dre said.

  “I like nature,” I said. “I just don’t like to touch it.”

  Amanda lifted Claire out of her car seat and said, “Would you mind?” and handed her to me. She came back out with the diaper bag and Dre pulled the stroller out of the back of
their Subaru and we headed up the walk to the house.

  “I can take her,” Amanda said.

  “I got her for a sec,” I said. “If that’s okay.”

  “Sure.”

  I’d forgotten how small a newborn was. She weighed, at most, eight and a half pounds. When the sun broke between two clouds and hit us, she scrunched up her face until it looked like a head of cabbage, her tight fists covering her eyes. Then her fists fell away and her face unscrunched and her eyes opened. They were the color of good scotch and they looked up at me with startled wonder. They didn’t just ask, Who are you? They asked, What are you? What is this? Where am I?

  I remembered Gabby having that look. Everything was unknown and unnamed. There was no “normal,” no frame of reference. No language, no self-awareness. Even the concept of a concept was unknown.

  The startled wonder turned to confusion as we crossed the threshold into the house and the light changed again and her face darkened with it. She had a gorgeous face. Heart-shaped, chubby-cheeked, those butter-toffee eyes, her mouth a rosebud. She looked like she’d grow into a stunner. Spin heads, halt hearts.

  But as she began to fuss and Amanda took her from my arms, it also occurred to me that however she looked, she didn’t look anything like Amanda or Dre.

  • • •

  “So, Dre,” I said when we were all sitting in the living room by a hearth of smooth gray stone.

  “So, Patrick.” He wore dark brown jeans, a pearl henley beneath a navy blue pullover with an upturned collar, and a dark gray fedora on his head. He fit in up in the Berkshires about as well as a fire. He pulled a pewter flask from the inside pocket of his jacket and took a small sip. Amanda watched him return the flask to his pocket with something that resembled disapproval. She sat on the other end of the couch and rocked the baby softly in her arms.

  I said, “I’m just trying to imagine how you’ll go back to work for the Department of, uh, Children and Families when your family unit here is a bit, how do you say, fucking illegal.”