Problem Child, page 6
When I get to the huge base of the tower, I hop up eight metal stairs and try to twist the door handle. It’s definitely locked. “Damn it,” I growl, tugging and twisting and cursing. The mechanism doesn’t budge, and I can clearly see the keyhole in the lock. Why oh why didn’t I summon the patience to learn lock picking when I was younger? I watched videos and everything, but the practice wasn’t enough fun to stick with.
Away from the traffic noise, I can hear the blades now, whooshing above me. I put my hand to the tower wall and I feel the whooshing now, along with a mechanical hum.
God. This is so cool. I wonder if there’s a big spiral staircase inside, like a lighthouse. After tugging at the door one last time, I give up and stomp down the stairs.
Bastards.
I loudly mutter curse words as I pick my way back through the stubbly field and beep my vehicle open again. I wanted one little fun thing, but now there’s nothing to keep me from driving straight to my boring destination. I’m thirty minutes away at most.
But I’m not going home. Not really. My parents have nothing to do with Kayla’s disappearance as far as I can tell, and the run-down roadside motel in my hometown isn’t suitable to my tastes. I’ll be staying in the county seat instead, and that would be my first stop anyway. Joylene confirmed that Ricky is currently in the county jail for a six-month stint for parole violations. The penitentiaries are too full for that kind of shit, so he gets to stay in lockup with nine other men and one toilet. What a life, my darling brother. What a life.
When I reach the city limits, I check into the nicest hotel in town. It has an indoor pool and an attached bar, and all the kids I knew who got married right out of high school had their wedding receptions here. I came to each one I found out about. I wasn’t invited or anything. I didn’t have any actual friends. But there was always booze and free cake, so why not help them celebrate?
Sometimes there was a hot young uncle in the parking lot with weed, the kind who would say, “You’re eighteen, right?” with a little wink. I wanted access to the Jacuzzi and their cooler full of beer, so I was more than willing to flirt.
Anyway, this place is filled with memories.
“Inside room,” I tell the scrawny old woman checking me in. “First floor, overlooking the pool.”
“No problem, sweetie. Get to the buffet before five thirty tonight if you want to avoid the rush.”
The rush? I glance around at the empty lobby and shrug. Then I take three of the fresh cookies laid out on a plate next to the American Express sign and roll my bag to my room. It’s a perfect location. I can sit on a chair with my lights off and watch the people in the pool area, and they’ll never even notice me. Unless I want to be noticed. I often do.
But no time for fun now. Visiting hours at the jail end in ninety minutes, and I may as well get this over with.
I grab one more cookie on my way out, eating it as I slide my driver’s license into my jeans and lock my phone and wallet in the glove compartment of my rental. It’s not my first time visiting this asshole, though it is my first time not being dragged along by my parents. Another moment of maturity.
I inform the officer at the front who I’m visiting, then start the half-hour process of getting examined and quizzed and patted.
“You can leave your phone and valuables here,” a guard says, sliding over a numbered plastic bin, as if I’d trust him with my shit.
“I didn’t bring anything. Just my ID.”
“Done this before, have you?” he asks, finally looking up from his paperwork to run his eyes over my breasts before he looks at my face. I’m obviously a desperate bitch and probably a lonely one if I’m visiting a man in jail.
“Sure, I’ve made the rounds,” I volunteer, just to confuse him.
“What?”
“You can have your bin back, sir,” I say, sliding it toward him slowly as if it’s a treasured possession. “I’m all taken care of. Are we done?”
After a blank stare, he finally jerks his chin toward a platoon of dirty plastic chairs. “Wait there.” All my amusement falls away at the sight of the cheap chairs, the stackable kind you can buy for eight dollars outside the grocery store during the summer. They’re meant to be hosed off in the yard every once in a while. These chairs have not been hosed off in a very long time. I stare at the gray grime of layers of skin cells and body oil that’s worked deep into the texture on the plastic and I decide to stand.
There are no pictures or even upbeat slogans on the walls, only tattered paper signs repeating rules and cautions to visitors.
No foul language.
No suggestive clothing or conversation.
No food or drink allowed.
No cameras or phones.
Stay seated during the visit.
No touching of any kind.
Aw, no hugs for Ricky, I guess. What will I do with all this sisterly affection coursing through my veins?
Ricky was always a terrible brother. Always. If he’d been loving and protective, I might not have turned out this way. Though I know my shitty genes helped the process along, I remember feeling scared as a child. Hurt. Vulnerable.
Some people are born sociopaths, but some are created in childhood. I think I felt too much at one point. Those memories are a strange recurring nightmare now. I can remember them existing, but they make no sense in the daylight of my current life. Someone else felt those emotions. Not me.
My lip lifts in scorn at that memory of weakness. I was pitiful, left at the mercy of my neglectful, narcissist parents and my heartless older brother. Abandoned for days to fend for myself and stifle my tears into a blanket at night. I scrounged for food and begged for attention.
Sometimes my parents provided both. Sometimes they took off for days at a time. I was left in the care of a brother who considered me a worthless nuisance. Or I was left with someone worse.
After years of bouncing back and forth between need and fear, my brain learned a better way. A stronger way. And now that it’s stopped developing, I’m permanently wired to look out for myself and only myself. Some people aren’t so lucky.
Eventually I’m led through a steel door into a cement-block hallway. Our footsteps echo above the distant, droning rumble of men’s voices. A door slams somewhere, and then we turn left into a room dotted with school cafeteria–style tables, round with little stools attached for sitting. No loose chairs around that someone might throw.
A female guard in the room points to a table and I sit there. She watches me impassively for a moment before sliding her eyes away.
When Ricky enters, I barely recognize him. Ten years ago he looked bulky and mean, a literal redneck, his nape already leathered and wrinkled from the Oklahoma sun. Now he’s thin and mean, a bushy beard covering most of his pale face. He’s on pills, no doubt. Everyone is these days. It’s a lot easier to get high when you can pick up your drugs from a legal clinic instead of hoping something makes it across the border.
My brother looks around the room blankly, trying to figure out who’s come to visit. “Good afternoon, Ricky,” I drawl.
He turns a frown on me and glares. “Jane?” he finally barks out too loudly.
“Yes! It is I, the prodigal sister!”
He’s not happy to see me. He’s not disgruntled either. I never meant anything to him, and I’m a break in his long day, so he shuffles over. “What the fuck,” he huffs as he sits down on one of the round seats, the words half question and half philosophy.
“I’ve come to visit my big brother!”
“What the fuck?” he ponders more loudly.
The female guard takes a step forward, but I hold up an apologetic hand and scrunch my face into a sheepish smile before turning back to my brother. “Keep your voice down, idiot. I got a call from someone that your daughter is missing.”
Ricky shrugs one shoulder. “I guess. Whatever. She took off.”
“That’s not what your ex thinks.”
“Joylene? That fucking nosy drama queen. She came by here last week. Jesus.”
“So you’re utterly unconcerned that your sixteen-year-old daughter has fallen off the face of the earth.”
“That bitch can take care of herself, believe me. She’s like a vicious goddamn cat.” He smiles, seeming triumphant that he managed a simile; then his lips widen into a grin, revealing that his upper teeth on the right side are dark brown and dying. He probably got punched there and damaged the roots. Or maybe it was a purposeful injury, a good source for a pain pill prescription. “She’s a hateful bitch,” he says, “just like you always were.”
“You still mad about that time I kicked you in the balls in front of your friends, Ricky?”
His grin snaps to an ugly thin line in his ugly thick beard.
“Fuck you, you whore.”
“You were the one commenting on your own sister’s ass. Who exactly is the whore in this situation, you goddamn felon?”
He rolls his eyes and crosses his arms. “What are you doing here? You don’t live here no more. And don’t give me any shit that you care what happens to Kayla.”
“No more than you do, certainly.”
He’s unmoved by the criticism of his parenting. His eyes don’t even narrow. “She’s been thinking she’s grown since she was eleven. If she wants to be grown, she can take care of herself. All I know is I’m not paying any more child support.”
“So you were really keeping up with those payments until now, huh?”
“Fuck off.”
“I just came here for her address. I don’t actually assume you’d know anything about your daughter. I’m going to guess there weren’t any Saturday guilt trips to the arcade whenever you were briefly out of prison.”
“You want her address so much, you’ll have to pay for it. Put twenty bucks in my commissary account.”
I almost laugh in his face at the lowball demand, but better to save that until after I get the address. “Did Dad die yet?” I ask instead.
“Nah. He’s scamming for all the help he can get. Seems fine to me.”
“Of course.” My mother called a year before, demanding help for my father after a stroke. She got a little too sassy for her own good, though, so I simply changed my number and left her behind. Apparently dear old Dad had pulled through without my help. A cozy country miracle.
“Give me Kayla’s address and I’ll put twenty in your account.”
“Go do it now.”
“So they can take you back to your cell and leave me high and dry? No way.”
“That’s the deal.”
“Jesus Christ, Ricky, I’m pretty sure I can find her mom’s address without your help. This is just my first stop. Give me the information or I’ll drive straight to Mom and Dad’s to ask them and you’ll be out twenty dollars. Those pills are rotting your brain, and you didn’t even start off smart.”
Ricky grunts at the insult, but he finally gives in and recites an address I recognize as a block of two-story apartments a couple of towns over. “Great. I’ll go see if I can track down your missing daughter for you. Cheers, Ricky.”
“You’re a bitch,” he grumbles as I signal to the guard that the visit is done.
I walk out of the room without any trouble or any parting hug. There are no searches on the way out, and I have nothing to collect, so I breeze past the checkpoints and stop to sign out at the front window. There’s a plaque there with instructions on depositing into an inmate’s commissary account.
I walk out to my rental car and get in. It’s dinnertime and I hope my favorite restaurant isn’t closed. I want chicken-fried steak and mashed potatoes and coconut cream pie for dinner.
I imagine Ricky’s fury when he goes to buy a bag of Doritos and discovers his balance is still at zero. He can kiss my sisterly ass.
CHAPTER 6
My favorite diner has closed. I have to settle for my second choice, a steak joint that was far too pricey for me when I was young.
I pass a brand-new Walmart with a sign that reads “Visit our new Garden Center!” in excited letters. It probably felt promising in the spring, but summers here really beat dreams of a green garden out of you. The sun and wind suck the life out of everything, be it plant or human.
I loved coming into town as a kid, especially in the winter, when it was dark by six and all the buildings glowed with light. They always put up Christmas lights on the telephone poles that ran through town, and I loved the sparkly angels blowing horns and even the twinkling golden crosses. I thought it looked like the Disneyland parade I’d seen commercials for on TV.
But this county seat is a boomtown, and being a boomtown means being a bust town too. Everyone’s fortunes—everyone’s power bills and car repairs and groceries—depend upon the whims of the oil market and the decisions of billionaires in DC and Houston and Saudi Arabia.
Natural gas came to town to shake things up, but it’s no more stable a market than oil. You can watch fortunes rise and fall in real time here. Shiny new trucks pack the streets one month, only to be taken over by tow trucks repossessing them the next. Right now things look prosperous, but I passed two piping companies with “For Sale” signs on the fences. Trouble is coming. Trouble is always coming here.
The steak house has a light in the window that says OPEN when I pull up, thank God. I breeze into the restaurant, which seemed impossibly fancy when I was young.
It isn’t impossibly fancy. It’s not even kind of fancy. This place is just a salad bar and a hostess station and red stained glass over the lighting fixtures.
I order a giant margarita on the rocks as an appetizer, then ask my waitress about the other restaurant that closed. “What happened to it?”
“Old Mr. Handelson died and left it to his son, Brad. He tried to keep it going for a little while, but . . . you know.” She raises her blond eyebrows at me.
I shake my head. “I know what?”
She glances around to reassure herself that I’m the only one in hearing distance. “Opioids.”
“Ah. I get it.”
The woman sighs deeply. “Frankly, I’m glad I never had kids now.” She looks about fifty, but it’s hard to say out here. No one I knew ever used sunscreen when we were kids. We just burned and peeled and built up an amazing base tan as we weathered away in the wind.
“My sister lost a girl to it already,” she continues. “And one of her three sons is heading down that road too.” She clucks her tongue. “We’ve got to do something about that border.”
I snort and mutter, “Yeah, right,” before raising my menu to study it.
I’m unsure what the border has to do with it. When I was young, the drugs around here were made in trailers by our neighbors, which was why they kept the Sudafed behind the counter and put up bulletproof glass in the pharmacy window. Now the drugs are made by giant corporations in the US and overseas, or ordered on the dark web and shipped in by international mail. No poor brown people are needed to make that shiny pipeline work. There are probably more people at my law office involved in making these drugs happen. Import-export, baby. We know how to work those laws.
I sip my margarita and try to plan the perfect meal. Cowgirl steak? No. Cowboy steak? Yes. Asparagus? No way. I’ll take a loaded baked potato instead. Or would I rather have onion rings? No, onion rings I can get at Sonic Drive-In anytime I want. Definitely baked potato. That’s not a good to-go item.
When the waitress returns to take my order, she’s colder than before. Polite but not warm. I guess I didn’t react correctly to her passing the drug blame to the Others. Oh well.
I can manage empathy. I work hard at figuring out what people are feeling at any given moment. How else would I manipulate them? But it is work, and I’m trying to relax here, damn it, and it’s not my job to regurgitate propaganda for my server.
I place my order and request another margarita too. Traveling makes me tense.
A family comes in, calling out hellos to my waitress. The old man is wearing a tan cowboy hat and battered old boots, and the thirty-something woman with him is dressed the same. Local ranchers, no doubt.
In my imagination, I assume this woman is a second or third wife, but that’s not the norm out here in the heartland. It happens, but you’d better be prepared for people to talk for decades, until you finally keel over in your young wife’s bed and give them even more to talk about at the funeral.
No, out here on the plains it’s more likely the woman is his daughter and the three kids are his grandchildren. But just in case, I eavesdrop to see if I catch anything scandalous.
Nope, no such luck. One of the kids calls out a loud “Grandpa?” before they’re even settled. The woman wears a wedding ring, and I wonder where her husband is. Working? Dead? Or did he run off with his coworker and force her to move back in with Dad to make ends meet? There could be any kind of story there.
God, I wish I could read minds. Life would be so much more fascinating.
Or maybe it would be just as boring. People are all the same. Everyone wants what they don’t have and shouldn’t need. Even me.
I check my work emails, but they’re all standard fare. Smiling to myself, I send a quick email to Rob asking how things are going with the North Unlimited account in the hopes of making him feel terrible.
I don’t doubt that he’s suspicious of me at this point, but in my experience that suspicion will quickly fade. Most people are blessed with a lot of benefit of the doubt, and his belief in his own superiority gives him a cozy layer of comfort and protection. He’d never be bested by me. He’s Rob! And I’m just a girl, after all. Not even a beautiful girl. Just . . . Jane. All I need to do is present myself as harmless to him once again, and he’ll eventually forget his mistrust.
When I was younger I wanted to be the most beautiful woman in the world. I kept waiting for my outside to match the perfect cool surface beneath. I was every lady villain in every 007 movie, and I wanted that to be seen and acknowledged.
