Kiss

14

West Palm Drive was dark, but there was a light glowing in Birdie’s window. After his brief conversation with Desoto, Carver had immediately gone back to his car and driven here. It was 12:30 A.M. but he knew the young kept late hours. And this time of night-morning-it was unlikely he and Birdie would be disturbed. The respectable Mrs. Horton was probably fast asleep.

Carver parked the Olds a hundred feet beyond the rambling apartment building and made his way over the shadowed pavement to Birdie’s door.

West Palm could have used a few more streetlights. The main source of illumination on the deserted block was the yellowish floodlight peeking through a thick growth of bougainvillea clinging to the corner of the old apartment building. Moths circled about the dim light, occasionally flitting too close and bouncing off it with enough force for the tap of impact to carry to Carver. The dim bulb wasn’t exactly the flame that lured and devoured, but it would have to do. And it gave the moths a second chance to flirt with destruction. More than most people got.

Fearing the arrival of the protective and suspicious Mrs. Horton, Carver pressed the button alongside Birdie’s door and heard a sputtering buzzing from the depths of the apartment.

The door opened on a chain and Birdie peered out. She squinted up at Carver and recognition flared in her blue eyes. “Why, you’re Mr. Carver, from out at Sunhaven.” She said this as if it were quite amazing. Made him feel like Marley’s ghost in A Christmas Carol.

“I know it’s late, but I’d like to talk to you, Birdie.”

She frowned; it made her look at least twelve, the little dickens. “Nurse Rule pointed right at you and said to let her know if you came to Sunhaven again. I dunno if we oughta talk, Mr. Carver.”

“We’re not at Sunhaven.”

“Well, that’s a fact.”

“You do everything Nurse Rule tells you?”

“Heck, yeah. It’s my job.”

“Let me in, Birdie. Nurse Rule won’t find out. Nobody’ll find out. And my intentions are honorable.”

“I’m kinda uneasy letting strangers into my place this time of night, Mr. Carver. I mean, it’s not like you’re really a stranger, but still it don’t seem a fitting thing to do. I mean, I don’t know a blessed thing about you.”

“I know things about you, Birdie. But I won’t use them to harm you, I promise. I know about Indianapolis. Listen, all I want’s a conversation. Nothing more.”

She stared at him with eyes gone wide and then gone narrow and cold. The door eased all the way shut and he heard the muted rattle of the chain against wood. She opened the door all the way and stepped back to let Carver enter.

She was wearing a blue terrycloth robe with a sash yanked tight around a waist that couldn’t measure more than twenty inches. He was sure he hadn’t awakened her. She was barefoot and her red hair was mussed and still damp. Her freckled face was pale but it glowed. She looked and smelled fresh, as if she’d just stepped from the shower, or maybe been born only a few hours ago.

What he knew about her past couldn’t be true; a fifteen-year-old with her kind of wear should show scars. The things that had been done to her-Christ! Carver knew how Mrs. Horton felt; he also wanted to protect little Birdie, pat her on the head and tell her comforting lies about the world that had dumped so much shit on her. Carver reminded himself there was a fighter inside the frail figure before him. There had to be. Here she was, supporting herself and living out an independent existence when most girls her age were thinking about getting braces removed or whether some boy whose voice hadn’t changed had a crush on them.

She backpedaled to a worn-out, sprung gray sofa, as if doing a dance step, then bent gracefully sideways from the waist to toss an old National Enquirer on the floor. Carver caught a glimpse of headline: DI SECRETLY GIVES BIRTH TO CHILD WITH GOAT’S HEAD. Those things happened in the best of families.

Birdie hadn’t taken her young eyes from him. “Wanna sit down, Mr. Carver?” There was something intense and slightly irregular about the rhythm of her speech, as if she were pumped up from gulping half a dozen cups of coffee.

Carver sat where the Enquirer had been and propped his cane against a sofa cushion. Sitting, he’d be less intimidating to Birdie. In front of him was a produce crate, painted bright green and serving as a coffee table. There was an ashtray on the crate, and a plate crusted with dried egg yolk. Birdie wasn’t the neatest of housekeepers, but then she was young and had problems more pressing than floor-wax buildup.

She sat down in a wood-and-canvas director’s chair facing the sofa. Clasped her hands tightly, welded her knees together beneath the robe. Her bare toes were white and scrunched down into the carpet. There was a hairpin on the floor near her left big toe. In a voice that held the slightest quaver, she said, “You mentioned Indianapolis.”

“Where you ran away from,” Carver said. “From what I know about the situation, I don’t blame you for leaving, and I wouldn’t act to send you back there. You seem to be making your way okay here in Florida.”

Her lower lip trembled, then she gnawed on it and stared hard at him, sizing him up. He could feel himself being categorized and cubbyholed. Though he’d used Indianapolis mainly as leverage to get in the door, he realized he wanted to know more about what had happened to Birdie there.

“You want something in return for not telling on me, don’t you?” she asked, as if she knew the answer. She drew up her legs until she was hugging her knees, as if she wished she could curl herself into a tighter and tighter ball and then disappear. “I didn’t come here to harm you or make a deal,” Carver said. “I only want to find out some things.”

“Such as?” She was suspicious; men the age of her father and foster father didn’t act this way. Wasn’t normal.

“Tell me about what happened in Indianapolis.”

She seemed puzzled. “Because you wanna know, or because you’re kinky?” The question was matter-of-fact and serious.

“I want to know,” Carver said. He smiled. “I’m usually not kinky with women under thirty.”

“You sure?”

“Stretch marks turn me on. Indianapolis?”

Her face went blank and she gazed toward the dark window, as if her past and her hometown were right outside. “Me and my dad never got along. Argued a lot. You know how it is. Then, when I was almost twelve, he came into my bedroom one night after we had a big fight and apologized. He’d whammed me in the back with his fist, and while he was sitting on the edge of the bed he started to massage where he’d hit. To make it feel better, he told me, but it didn’t help at all. Then he started rubbing… other places. One place led to another. I wanted to make him stop but I didn’t know how. I was scared. He warned me not to tell my mom when she got home.”

“Did you?”

“Not at first. He seen to it I stayed scared. Threatened me all the time about what’d happen if I talked, how everybody’d know I was bad and hate me, and all the trouble I’d cause. Other times he’d be nice to me and tell me how pretty I was. It got so he’d come into my room two or three nights a week. Wake me up sometimes with his mouth on me. Kissing me on the ear, sticking his tongue way in. After a while I didn’t wanna tell on him. Know why?”

Carver said nothing. He was beginning to wish he hadn’t asked Birdie about this. But it was as if she were wired to an irresistible energy and couldn’t stop talking. Something had control of her.

“I got to thinking, Mr. Carver, that despite all the hurt and sin, those nights in my bed were the only times my father or anybody else showed me any love.” A tear zigzagged down her cheek and dropped onto one of her drawn-up knees, leaving a dark wet spot on her robe. She didn’t seem to notice she was crying. Somebody else was here in the room with Carver; not Birdie. Somebody from the nightmare.

“Oh, I knew it was wrong. Specially when I got to be about thirteen and seen how the other girls were with their fathers. My dad wasn’t like theirs; not at all. I asked, like it was for somebody I knew, if anyone else’s father did to them some of the things mine did to me. One of the girls said yes, but the others thought the questions were crazy. I wonder how many of them was scared to talk. Scared the way my dad had scared me. He was getting rougher and rougher with me in bed, too. Started to tie me up. Then he started hurting me bad. That’s when I decided to stop what was happening, to tell my mom.”

“What did she say when you told her?”

“Got mad at me. Said she didn’t believe me. That I was like sick in the brain and hated my dad and wanted to break up their marriage and ruin her life. I found out since that’s how a mother acts sometimes, Mr. Carver; she didn’t wanna believe. Couldn’t stand the thought of it, and of him leaving her.”

Carver said, “She would have believed you eventually. Did she confront him?”

“Oh, sure. But he denied it all. Everything. Then he found an excuse and beat me bad and did things to me so I could hardly walk. Said I fell down the basement steps.”

“And what did you say?”

“Nothing. I ran away from there to a shelter I’d heard about from some other kids. The people there believed what I told them and called the police. Both my dad and mom denied everything, though. Nothing could be proved. The shelter was gonna send me back to live at home, because they had no choice legally. So I ran away. Went to another shelter. A social worker, Linda Redmond was her name, raised hell and got me placed in a foster home. That lasted a month, and I woke up one night and found the fat bastard who lived there in my bed. My guardian, so called.”

Carver found himself clenching the worn material of the sofa in anger.

“When I ran away from there,” Birdie went on, “they found me and things got all snarled up in the courts and I wound up at home again. I soon got outta there, though, finally and forever. Outta the city. I never wanna go back.”

“You’re older now, Birdie. Smarter. Why don’t you get a lawyer and formally charge your father with child molestation? Get yourself out from under what happened.”

She shrugged and seemed to come back to her living room. Wiped a tear from her cheek and dragged her wet forefinger over her terrycloth robe. “Well, he’s dead-it don’t matter now.”

“Maybe it matters to you. It’s something you should get resolved.”

“It’s all in the past, Mr. Carver. I read a magazine article once that said time was like a river with an S-shaped curve in it. We’re all drifting on that river. Can’t see ahead into the future or behind into the past. I figure we can’t go back upriver around the bend, even if we want to. So what difference does it make what’s there?”

“Contamination washes downstream.”

“It don’t if you don’t let it. Built a dam, is what I did, and I’m busy getting on with my life, If only people’d let me.”

“Who won’t let you?” Other than limping private investigators.

“People in general, is all. I gotta be careful and not even use my real name. Bea’s what I used to be called. I’ve used a couple of names. Nobody knows me as Birdie except here in Florida. It was Dr. Pauly started calling me that after I answered a classified ad and got the receptionist job out at Sunhaven. Said I reminded him of an injured bird. The name kinda caught on, and I been Birdie ever since. My Florida name. Think of myself as such.”

“Do they know out at Sunhaven you’re a runaway?”

“Some do. They have for some time. I told ’em I was just turned eighteen when I applied for the job, but them kinda places check on their employees. Somebody found out about where I was from. Dr. Macklin called me into her office one day and told me she knew. I broke down and cried and like caused a big scene. Told her everything. My side of what happened. She said she’d look into my story, and if it was true she wouldn’t turn me in. That was almost a year ago, and she hasn’t said anything about it since. I don’t think she will. She likes me, I can tell. And I’m a real good receptionist.”

Carver wondered just how much Dr. Macklin liked Birdie, and in what fashion. “Dr. Macklin ever flatly told you how she actually feels about you? I mean, the way she thinks of you?”

Birdie seemed slightly puzzled. “No, I wouldn’t say that. But she seems to have a kinda big-sister attitude toward me. Tell the truth, Sunhaven might be the closest thing I ever had to a home and family.”

“What about Nurse Rule?”

“Well, what about her?” Wary now.

“Is she, ah, friendly toward you?”

“You talking about her being a bull-dagger?”

Carver blinked. “Right, Birdie. She ever made a play for you?”

“Oh, sure. She was all over me till I told Dr. Macklin. The two of them had a private talk in Dr. Macklin’s office, and that stopped that. We been on a business-only relationship ever since. That’s what Nurse Rule said she wanted, after Dr. Macklin talked with her. And that’s fine with me. I do what I’m told. Nurse Rule’s not the sorta supervisor you cross, if you know what I mean.”

“I know,” Carver said. “Does she hold a grudge about you going to Dr. Macklin?”

“Not any more than she seems to hold a grudge against most everyone. She’s a hard woman. But I gotta say she’s fair as she is firm.”

“You ever seen her with a man named Raffy Ortiz?”

Birdie shrank back into her chair; the canvas and wood creaked. “Never,” she said, too quickly. Fear darkened her midwestern features like a rain cloud over a wheat field.

“You know Raffy Ortiz?”

“Know him enough I can say he gives me the creeps. He’s a friend or something of Dr. Pauly. Comes out to Sunhaven and sees him every great once in a while.”

“How often’s that?”

“Maybe once, twice a month. They don’t like him to come around there.”

“Who doesn’t?”

“Just everybody. I get the idea even Dr. Pauly ain’t all that crazy about Mr. Ortiz.”

“What have you heard about Raffy Ortiz?”

She stared at the ceiling for a moment, letting him know she was thinking hard. “That he’d killed somebody once. One of the residents said he thought he recognized Mr. Ortiz and he heard he’d once killed a man in a knife fight down around Miami.”

“Which resident?”

Birdie almost squirmed with nervousness. She was running on a compulsion to blab, but not about this. “I can’t recall. It was just some loose talk.”

“Is that why you’re afraid of him?”

“Of the resident?”

“Of Mr. Ortiz.”

“That, and the way he looks at me. I caught him a few times staring at me the way I used to be stared at sometimes by my father. Like he wanted to do those same things to me.”

Which might be exactly what a sicko like Ortiz had in mind, Carver thought. Birdie’s instinct for survival had been working well when she’d formed her opinion of Raffy Ortiz. A man who hurt people, and who found in their pain a dark and visceral amusement.

Carver looked at Birdie and wished it had been different for her, wished she’d had a father who felt about her as Carver did about his own daughter, living with his ex-wife, Laura, in Saint Louis. What kind of man would systematically rape his own child? Something that had developed in the human race over millions of years, something in the evolutionary process, must be missing in men like Birdie’s father-the thing that had helped ensure the survival of the species by shorting out sexual desire for one’s own offspring. It was difficult to understand or forgive such people.

Birdie had spent enough time reliving her agony, Carver decided. She’d been made a victim as a child, and would probably remain a victim all her life. He could never fully understand her pain, but he didn’t want to compound it.

“Thanks for talking with me, Birdie.” He angled his cane to support his weight and stood up. “I mean what I said. I won’t mention you to the authorities.”

She stood also, drawing the robe’s sash tighter around her waist. She smiled as if he’d just offered to buy her an ice cream cone at the carnival. She’d always have that kind of smile; it came with desperate hope. “I believe you,” she said. “Don’t know why, but I do. Guess you want me to keep quiet out at Sunhaven about our talk here tonight.”

“It’s up to you. Neither of us broke any laws by having a conversation.”

She crossed her bare feet, wriggling her toes. The nails were painted pink. “I’d just as soon we made it our secret, if you don’t mind. Nurse Rule wouldn’t like it, knowing I let you in and told you things.”

“Our secret, then,” Carver said.

He resisted the urge to pat her shoulder and made his way across the room. When he opened the door the warm night air enveloped him, carrying with it the sweet, wild scent of flowers. He could hear the growl of distant traffic, and a radio or TV tuned too loud somewhere in the building. The darkness seemed ripe with struggle, a void where humans grappled blindly with each other and with themselves.

“Mr. Carver?” Birdie said when he was ready to step outside.

He twisted his torso so he was looking back at her, his cane set firmly on the wide threshold.

“You can come back again and talk if you want. Guess what I’m trying to say is, I could use a friend.”

“You’ve got one to use,” Carver said.

He limped out into the night.

Less than an hour later he stretched out on the cool bed next to Edwina. He lay on his back, his fingers laced behind his head, and listened to the repetitive thunder of the ocean. Moonlight softly outlined familiar forms in the room-a chair, Edwina’s dresser, the tall chest of drawers-and lent them a pliant, dreamlike quality. Carver felt that if he closed his eyes he might wake up.

Edwina’s bare, pale leg stirred, rustling the white sheet. Keeping the rest of her body still, she turned the dark shape of her head on her pillow so she was facing him. Her hair splayed over white linen. He couldn’t see her eyes, but he sensed she was awake.

“Where’ve you been?” she asked.

“To see a child.”

Edwina had a knack for knowing when not to ask questions. She lay quietly. He could see, stark against the moonstruck wall, the silhouetted length of her body. Her stomach and breasts were rising and falling almost unnoticeably as she breathed, in subtle but profound rhythm with the breaking sea.

He knew she’d been physically abused by her former husband. Edwina didn’t talk much about that time in her life, and it was something Carver didn’t pry into. It had all ended more than a year before he and Edwina had become lovers, and he had never met her ex-husband. Knew his name was Larry, but didn’t know much else about him. He used to spend a lot of time thinking about Larry, hating him. He’d seen what Larry had done, and how long it took for it to be made right again.

“Can you ever really forgive someone who’s violently sexually abused you?” he asked.

“You mean as a child?”

“Not necessarily. A man and a woman, maybe. Or a man and a young girl. His daughter.”

“The two situations aren’t alike.”

“Aren’t they?”

“I don’t think so.”

He didn’t speak for a while. She was thinking about Larry. And who knew what else? She’d always be a mystery. Maybe that was why he loved her.

In the dim, cool silence she said, “A woman might forgive being abused by her husband. She can eventually understand it. And after that maybe she can forgive. I doubt it happens often. There’s usually no reason to forgive.”

“So an abusive husband is seldom forgiven. What about an abusive father? One who sexually molests a very young girl over a stretch of several years. Is he ever understood by the victim and forgiven?”

Edwina’s answer came instantly across the shadowed bed. “A father? Never. The only thing is for the victim to get as far away from the situation as possible, and never go back.”

Carver thought about what she’d said, then he slept soundly.