Only Child

“They really are insane about being in a movie, huh?”

“You talked to them, Cyn. What do you think?”

“Fetish is fetish,” she said, nodding agreement.

“Did anybody hear the name Vision?” Terry asked, the next night.

Clarence shrugged a “No.”

“Not me, honey,” Michelle said.

“I’m drawing a blank, too, kid,” I said. “Why do you ask?”

“I was just hanging out with some of the ones who were waiting, you know? One of them says to another, ‘I bet this is killing Vision—a real movie being made right here.’ And the other says he was in one of Vision’s movies. The first guy says, ‘For real?’ And the other guy says, yeah, the whole fraternity was, kind of.

“But when the first guy presses, the other guy says he’s not allowed to talk about the initiations. Then I had to go. One of the girls was saying—”

“Anyone else hear that name? Vision?”

“I did,” Cyn said. “Remember when you had that idea, do two or three of them at a time, get them talking to each other? Well, this Asian girl, Mei-Mei, she said she’d been in a movie before, and the other two gave her a ‘Shut the fuck up!’ look. I let it slide like I wasn’t paying attention.

“But then I got her alone later, like I wanted to see how she did with some other material, blah-blah, and I walked her around to this movie she was in. She says, ‘Oh, it was just one of Vision’s. A video, not a movie.’ I moved on, right over what she was saying, so she couldn’t even be sure I heard her.”

“You played it perfect, Cyn.”

She and Rejji mid-fived with their hips.

“So there is a young man making videos,” Clarence said. “What good could this be to us? Half of these children said they had made some kind of video.”

“Two people mention this ‘Vision’ guy,” I told him. “And, both times, someone asks a question, they dummy up quick. That gets my attention.”

“Probably makes porno,” Michelle said sourly.

“Can you come and see me, please?” Hazel Greene.

“Anytime. Just say the—”

“Right now. I know it’s late but—”

“I’ll be there in under an hour,” I told her.

“I found something,” she said.

“Something about—?”

“I don’t know what it’s about. I don’t know if it...means anything. But Vonni had it...hidden.”

“And you just found it, is that what you’re saying?”

“Does it matter?”

“Not to me.”

“Then why did you ask me?”

“Because, if you had it all this time, then you had your own reasons for not turning it over to the cops.”

“You...you would think like that, wouldn’t you?”

“I don’t want to fight with you, Mrs. Greene.”

“What happened to ‘Ms.’?”

“I don’t...”

“Ms. Greene is what you called me before.”

“My apologies. Just tell me which you prefer and I’ll—”

“I don’t care,” she said.

Not about that, I thought. Said, “All right. Do you want me to—?”

“Vonni was a good girl. I don’t mean a virgin—although she was, I would have known—I mean good in her heart and good in her ways. She was honest and kind and sweet. Everybody loved her.”

“I know Hugh sure did.”

“Yes. Lottie told me how you...That’s why I’m showing you this now. Of course, when your child di...is taken from you, people never want to say anything bad about her. But this was all before. The good things, I mean. Nobody killed my Vonni because they hated her; I know this.”

“People don’t have to have a good reason to hate, Ms. Greene. You should know that, too.”

“My...color, you mean? Yes. Yes, I know that. This isn’t what I wanted to tell you. I’m not making myself clear. I would trade it all. How good she was. How proud she made me. Everything. If I could have my daughter back as a prostitute or a drug addict or brain-damaged or...It wouldn’t matter; I would take her and love her and be grateful forever.”

“I know.”

“Do you? How could you? How could you know a mother’s feeling for her only child? Were you one?”

“A...?”

“An only child? Were you one?”

“I don’t know,” I told her. Thinking, She nailed it. That’s me. Only a child, once. And, now, even being back home, back with my family, an only child, forever. Hazel Greene will never have another child. Neither will Giovanni.

“How could you not...?” she asked.

I just looked at her, waiting for the message to arrive.

“Oh,” she said, when it did.

“I don’t know anything about them,” I told her. “Either of them,” I said, so she’d know I was talking about my mother and father. “If I have biological brothers and sisters, I’ll never know that, either.”

“That’s terrible.”

“Compared to what? It doesn’t matter.”

“It must matter. I’m so sorry.”

All of us down here, only children.

“I believe you are, Ms. Greene. And I believe Vonni had more love in sixteen years than most people get in a lifetime.”

She nodded her head slowly. Said, “I’ll get them,” and walked out of the room.

“Videotapes?”

“Yes. This is all of them. I found them in Vonni’s room. In the bottom of an old army footlocker we got at a flea market. We used to go to them all the time. Vonni said she...”

Her voice trailed off. I stayed silent, afraid to blunder around in the spun-glass forest of her memories.

“I’d never gone in there,” she finally said. “Vonni had a padlock on it—I always thought that was where she’d kept her diary. When the police said they were going to...search everything, I couldn’t bear for them to be the ones to read her private thoughts. So I took the hasp off with a screwdriver.

“You know what’s funny, Mr. Burke?” she said, rage somewhere in her quiet, throbbing voice. “Vonni did have a diary. But it was sitting on her desk, right out in the open. I never knew. She trusted me so much.... The police told me about it. After they were...done with it. They’re keeping it...for evidence.”

I never considered trying to comfort her. Just stayed in my silence.

“All those years, I guess I could have sneaked a look anytime,” she said. “Only I never did. I never saw it until after...it happened.” She went quiet for a long minute. “I always thought her diary was in her footlocker. But it wasn’t. I was looking...and that’s where I found these.”

I looked at the stack of videocassettes. “What’s on them, Ms. Greene?”

“How do you know I looked at them?”