Chain of Evidence

PROLOGUE

He heard her coming before she reached the top of the stairs. Wild and angry like someone possessed, the rage welling up within her from an addiction so powerful that two weeks earlier he had discovered her passed out with a bottle of rubbing alcohol still clutched in her spotted hand.

She roared at him as she dared to negotiate the stairs, suddenly a two-hundred-pound ballerina, one hand counseling the banister, one eye held shut to stop the dizzies. “You bring it to me, Boy!”

That was her name for him: Boy-the only name she had ever called him. They both knew what “it” was. The Boy got it from the neighborhood liquor store every day-or the days that she had the money to buy it. The old man with the white stubble beard handed him the brown bag out back in the alley, and the Boy carried it home dutifully. To him it was poison. To her, heaven.

She hadn’t had the money today, but she would have forgotten that by now, and she would have convinced herself that he was holding out on her, and when she became convinced of that then the world became a frightful place for the Boy. She possessed big, powerful hands, like paddles, and the stern will of a self-appointed tyrant. She knew nothing of forgiveness.

He lied about the bruises in school. Made things up. The school nurse had given up asking questions, hearing his inventive tales. People knew about his mother: This town, nestled in the Connecticut countryside, was a tolerant place.

He heard her swollen feet ticking off the eleven stairs. How many times had he counted down along with her descent? He shuddered. Would his reminders, his arguments, be enough today? And why did his feet always fail to run when she approached? Why did he stand there facing her, awaiting her, as if some magnet drew them together? He knew that his survival depended on her not seeing him, not getting that hold on him. He knew that he had to hide.

He stood frozen in place. He could tell what she was wearing just by the swooshing sound of the fabric: the Hawaiian colored housedress, worn like a giant zippered tent about her puffy white skin with its bright red blotches and unexplained black-and-blue marks. Whoosh, she descended. She cleared the bottom step and, faced with the choice of two directions to go, somehow attached to his scent and headed toward him-she, a person who couldn’t smell burnt toast placed before her.

That was all she had eaten for the past three months: one slice of toast that he left by her bedside in the morning before he headed to school. She awakened closer to noon, and then drank well past midnight, her television turned up too loudly, her glassy eyes fixed to it like the eyes on some of the Boy’s stuffed animals. Dead eyes, even when she was trying to slur through her words at him. Dead for years. But not dead enough, he thought, as she charged through the kitchen door, flinging it open with a bone crunching effort.

He passed through the laundry room door, backing up-always backing up, he couldn’t seem to run forward when she pursued him; he allowed her to control him. The cry of the hinges gave him away. A trickle of sweat slid coldly down his ribs and his throat went dry: When he ran from her she hit him harder.

Out through the laundry room window, the sun’s fading rays, muted by a stranglehold of clouds, washed the horizon charcoal gray. A pair of geese, their necks stretched like arrows, cut north over the hardwood forest where the Boy had a clumsy fort built high into a tree. In the summer he could hide in the fort, but this was not summer and he was running out of places to hide-she knew them all.

And here he was in the laundry room. A dead end. Worse: a huge pile of dirty clothes erupted from the plastic laundry basket, and despite the fact that he was in the midst of doing the laundry-as if she didn’t already have enough to be mad about-sight of this dirty pile was likely to add to the punishment.

He reached for the bleach because it occurred to him he might throw it into her face and blind her, though he didn’t have the heart to do so, and besides, he discovered the Clorox bottle was bone dry empty. He stared down the into the neck wishing that by some miracle it would suddenly fill and save him from her wrath.

He glanced around at a room that offered only a back door into the cold. And if he went out there, she would lock him out; and if she locked him out and anyone found out, then they would take her away from him-this had been threatened more than once. And that, in turn, would mean living with his uncle, and if the Boy had it right, the uncle was a drug dealer and small time hood-Italian and proud of it. He went to church twice a week. The Boy wanted none of that.

On the other side of the door, he heard his mother’s footsteps crunch across crumbs on the kitchen floor as she drew closer. Sometimes she forgot all about him a few minutes into the pursuit. Not today, he realized.

The bell to the dryer sounded-ding! — and it called magically to him. The dryer! Why not? he wondered. Without a second thought, he popped open the door and, with her footfalls approaching, frantically gathered the clean clothes and stuffed them into the blue plastic basket with the purple four-leaf clovers. He slid one leg inside the machine but burned his hand on touching the tumbler’s gray-speckled rim. He debated taking whatever it was she had in store for him, deciding instantly that any burn was better than that. He pulled himself into a ball, his knees tucked into his chest in a fetal position, his lungs beginning to sear from the dry, metallic heat. He hooked his fingers onto the filter’s gray plastic tab mounted into the door and eased it quietly shut. Click. He winced. Even in a fit of rage, she had the ears of a mountain lion.

He had inherited those same ears, or perhaps it was something that he had developed, but whatever the case, he heard her push the laundry room’s springed door open, heard it flap shut again behind her like the wing of a huge bird.

He could picture her then, as clearly as if he were standing in the room with her. Her soft, spongy body slouched and immobile, her dazed head swiveling like an owl’s, scanning the room dully, attempting to reason but too drunk to do so. His disappearance would confuse her-piss her off. If he was lucky, she would begin to doubt herself. She would forget how it was that she had found her way into the laundry room, like a sleepwalker coming out of a trance. Whoosh: the sound of her as she patrolled past the dryer, her movements heavy and exaggerated. His heart drummed painfully in his chest. His lungs stung from the heat. Whoosh, her dress passed by again. He grabbed hold of the door in an effort to keep it shut should she try to open it. If he frustrated her, she might give up.

A tickle developed in his lungs, stinging and itching at the same time. It grew inside his chest, scratching the insides of his lungs and gnawing a hole into the back of his throat.

“Where are you, Boy?” she called out hoarsely, the phlegm bubbling up from the caldron.

He swallowed the scratching away-attempting to gulp on a throat bare with searing heat-refusing himself to cough and reveal his hiding place. His chest flamed and his nostrils flared, and he thought he might explode his lungs if he didn’t cough.

“Boy?” she thundered, only a few precarious feet away from him.

Tears ran down his cheek. He exhaled in a long, controlled effort that denied his body any right to a cough. And when he drew air in again it attacked his throat as if he had swallowed burning oil.

But this pain was so small compared to what she might inflict that he gladly accepted it, even allowing a self-satisfied smile to overcome him in the darkness. He was indeed the “clever devil” that she often accused him of being. And as he heard her storm back out of the room, off to another area of the house where she would threaten her terror until blacking out in a chair, or on the sofa, or even on the floor, he debated where and how he might steal some money in order to placate her, and buy himself another night of survival.