| WASTED
YOUTH by Jean Gilbertson and Kate Tuhy |
CHAPTER ONE
Botticelli might have painted
her face if he'd gotten her to sit still long enough. Nerves
jumped under her translucent skin, and her hands moved randomly,
as if there were a loose connection somewhere. She was fourteen
and whacked out on crystal meth.
Maggie Mayfield had tracked her
to Bowl-a-While in East Eugene. Paige had been missing for three
days, and her father—a state senator from Madras—wanted
her found fast, before she hurt herself and before the papers
got the story.
"Fuck him! I'm not going
back there." Paige’s restless eyes struggled to focus.
With fingers weighted by clunky silver rings, the girl fiddled
with one of the half-dozen hoops she wore in her right ear.
Her pale blonde hair had been fried by perms and peroxide.
"So you're going to set up
housekeeping here in the bowling alley and help your friend
Duncan rent shoes. Sounds nice."
They sat across from each other
in a booth that overlooked the lanes, empty except for a lone
old man who rolled ball after ball with joyless precision. The
place was dark, run-down, and smelled like sweaty leather. Brown
walls sank into cheap brown carpet that didn't do much to muffle
the rumbling of the ball down the alley and the crack as it
hit the pins. Silvery cut-out letters spelled “Happy New
Year 1990" across the lanes.
"I hate him. I hate that
bitch he married. I hate that fucking house. I hate Salem. And
you don't know a fucking thing." She leaned across the
table toward Maggie. Instead of filling the pink tank top, her
bony body shrank away from it.
Maggie was tired after two long
days of prying information out of surly teenagers. Maybe she
was losing her touch with kids. A year ago she would have listened
patiently, but now all she wanted to do was get Paige back to
her father, pick up the rest of her fee and go home. "Let's
go. You can stop and tell Duncan you're leaving," she said.
The boy, a few years older than
Paige, had been sitting like a zombie in the shoe rental booth
behind them, breathing noisily and staring at Time Square revelers
on a small TV screen. When Maggie slid into the booth with Paige,
he had looked up briefly, then shifted his eyes back to the
celebration. Half-inch red stubble covered a bullet head propped
on thin, sloping shoulders, and under the black T-shirt, his
scapula stuck out like stunted wings.
"Duncan doesn't give a shit
what I do." She spat the words towards his back.
As if to prove the point, he turned
up the volume on the set. The TV crowd was counting down to
midnight.
When Maggie reached for her arm,
Paige jerked back against the booth and slapped her hand away.
"I told you, I'm not fucking going back! You can't make
me!"
In one quick move the girl reached
into a dirty canvas bag at her side, pulled out a .38 snub-nosed
revolver and pointed it at Maggie's chest.
Maggie froze. "Paige...."
The girl blinked, then reversed
the gun, stuck the barrel in her mouth and fired.
The official ruling was death
by self-inflicted gunshot wound. The gun had been her father's,
which he hadn't known was missing. The senator, angry and guilty,
blamed Duncan for supplying the drugs, but a search of the kid's
place turned up nothing, and he passed a urine test with flying
colors. The police, after grudgingly exonerating him, blamed
the easy availability of methamphetamines, an angle the Register
Guard played up because it fit nicely with their running series
on the escalating drug trade in Oregon. Nobody blamed Maggie.
She ended up with publicity she
didn't want, and, amazingly, requests to find more missing kids.
She said no to all of them, even though she could have used
the money.
Paul Briscoe, an ex-cop on disability
who had been a good friend since her days as a gofer in the
public defender's office, got drunk with her and told her it
was just one of those things, it went with the territory.
During the day she kept busy whenever
she could. Asset searches, pre-sentence investigations, background
checks—anything as long as it didn't involve teenagers.
She also started but didn't finish a class in conversational
Spanish, took and finished another class in renters' rights,
spent four days at Mt. Hood trying to ski, and began an affair
with a married man.
But at night when she couldn't
sleep, she replayed the scene with the girl over and over, trying
to stop it before Paige reached into her bag. She couldn't.
It always ended the way it had in the bowling alley, with the
girl's blood, tissue, and bone splattered everywhere. She dreamed,
too, and sometimes Paige's face turned into her own. When the
dreams didn't stop even after three months, Maggie knew she
needed help.
Help came in the unlikely form
of a small, round woman with curly hair dyed the color of toffee,
a skirt too short for chubby legs and tan boots that squeezed
her calves. Her name was Esther Silverman.
She sat across from Maggie in
a Scandanavian style chair that looked uncomfortable. A notebook
lay open on her lap. "You've been an investigator for...?"
"Five years. On my own, I
mean. I was with the Public Defender before that."
The woman nodded, jotted something,
then paused as if waiting for Maggie to say more.
What does she want? Maggie wondered.
Does she want to know how I ended up in this line of work?
"You look uncomfortable.
Is this hard for you?" The woman's voice was calm and assured
with an Eastern accent.
"It is. I don't think I believe
in therapy much. Though God knows I've advised lots of clients
to get help."
The woman smiled. "That's
okay. Eighty percent of the people who come to see me start
by telling me they don't believe in therapy."
"I guess it's like telling
the guy in the pick-up bar that you never go to pick-up bars,"
Maggie said.
Esther Silverman laughed. "Exactly."
She's all right, Maggie thought.
"You said on the phone that
you were having terrible dreams. Why don't you tell me about
them."
Maggie told her all about what
happened with Paige and how the girl's face haunted her at night.
"If I'd just listened to her, paid attention to how she
was feeling, I might have been able to save her. When I first
started in this job, I was good at it, especially with kids.
I knew how to talk to them because I understood them, or at
least I thought I did. I remember one boy, another runaway.
When I found him he was hustling in downtown Portland. We talked
for two days and he told me how his father beat him up. No way
was I going to dump him off at home and pick up my check. I
found him a safe house, convinced the father to go to A.A..."
"Wasn't that beyond what
you were paid to do?"
Maggie frowned. "You think
I should have just walked away with my money?"
"I didn't say that. I just
wonder how you would describe your job."
"Somebody has to help these
kids. All kids deserve to have someone listen to them."
"You feel you have to save
them. You blame yourself for not saving Paige."
"I told you. I didn't listen
to her...."
"Maggie, even if you had
listened, Paige might have killed herself. You might not have
been able to reach her. She was high, she was an unhappy, disturbed
girl.”
"I know that. I know that
in my head. It's just that...."
She paused. "I can't feel that it's true.”
Esther Silverman leaned forward
in her chair. "That's what we have to work on. Why you
feel that way."
Week after week Maggie found herself
telling Esther things she hadn't told anyone else. About her
childhood in a small Southern California town of citrus ranches
and narrow minds. About her parents, who bickered over money
so often it was her strongest memory of them, her mother on
the attack with a voice that cut through the house like a chainsaw
through pine, her father, head down, taking it. Neither of them
knew what to do with their only child, a bright kid who was
often in trouble at school, and who felt like an alien in their
cramped house with the plastic covered furniture, endless rules
and Baptist righteousness. When her father died of a heart attack
thirty years before he should have, her mother finally found
a use for Maggie. At thirteen, she became his stand-in, someone
her mother could disapprove of and blame for everything that
had gone sour in her life. Maggie was still a failure in her
mother's eyes—unmarried, thirty-five years old with nothing
to show for it but a hit or miss job that nice people would
never want, living in a ramshackle apartment in a soggy, dead-end
town.
If it hadn't been for an older
woman in Solano, someone who taught her that neither running
away nor self-pity would solve anything, Maggie might have ended
up at fifteen on the streets like so many of the kids she herself
was hired to find.
"So this woman rescued you,"
Esther said during their eighth session."
"I wouldn't say rescued exactly."
Maggie paused. "Well, maybe she did rescue me. If it hadn't
been for her, I doubt if I would have applied for the scholarship
to Berkeley. She helped me get out of Solano and away from my
mother."
"Isn't that what you want
to do now? Rescue kids?"
"It's not the same. Elizabeth
Wheaton became my friend, practically adopted me. I hardly get
to know these kids. I can't rescue them."
Esther closed her notebook. "That's
right. So why don't you forgive yourself for Paige? Why don't
you get back to doing what you're good at?" |
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