Mask Market

“No,” he said, slowly, dragging out the syllable. “There wasn’t anything there I would…mistrust.”

“But your daughter never did go for lessons?”

“No. As I said, her mother was opposed. And she was entitled to her own instincts. I always respected that.”

“Are you still in touch with your wife? Your ex-wife, I mean?”

“She knows where I live. I know where she lives. That’s about the extent of it. We’re not enemies or anything, but there’s really nothing left between us. Nothing to talk about.”

“Where does she live?”

“In Virginia. Not too far from Washington, D.C.”

“Did she ever remarry?”

“Not to my knowledge,” he said, not faking his lack of interest. “But she could have, for all I know.”

“Did she ever resume her maiden name?”

“Oh yes. Summerdale is her name now. Beryl Summerdale.”

“Your daughter was named for—?”

“Yes,” he said, adding a dash of unhappiness to his depression cocktail. “But she always had my name, too. Beryl Preston.”

“Look,” I told him, “all I wanted to do was to see if she’s doing okay. Don’t ask me why. Maybe I’m just getting older, and I wanted to…look back, see if I ever really accomplished anything back then.”

“You don’t do that sort of work anymore?”

“I…do. But not very much of it. I don’t know if I could find her—”

“But you’ll try?”

“Yeah. But if I do, she’s an adult now. I’m not bringing her back.”

“I understand,” the gray man said. “I want the same thing you do, Mr. Burke. Just to know she’s all right. That’s worth something to me. It always has been.”

I spent another couple of hours there. Half a dozen cups of coffee for Preston, another couple of hot chocolates for me. I kept panning until I was sure there wasn’t another nugget in the riverbed.

He offered me money. I told him that if I did turn something up, it would be the same as last time: COD.

Darkness was dropping by the time I left. It didn’t feel like city night to me. There wasn’t a hint of menace in it. Softer, like a blanket of comfort.

I knew better than to trust it.

I knew how to run different programs in my head at the same time way before anyone heard of “multitasking.” Any kid who’s been tortured learns how to do it. You can call it splitting off. Or compartmentalizing. Dissociating, if that makes you happy. It all comes down to the same thing: not being there while it’s happening. You watch them doing…whatever they want…to you, but you don’t feel it.

Not physically, I mean.

Not every kid learns it the same way. Some learn it so good that pain loses all meaning. It just doesn’t register. Prison guards call guys like that “anesthetics.” When they go, they go. Clubs bounce off their heads; they wear mace like it was a coat of sweat; they pull stun-gun wires out of their bodies and strangle you with them.

You can’t hurt them. It takes death to stop their pain.

Other kids split off for good. When it’s happening to them, they’re not there. It’s not that they go somewhere else like the splitters do; they are someone else.

There’s names for them, too.

I found another way. When it was happening, I watched it. Watched them, watched me. And in a little corner of my mind, a place they could never go, I was watching another movie, on a different screen.

That’s where I found my religion, watching that other screen.

I prayed and prayed. No one answered, but I never lost faith. I had to believe my god was true. Because I knew, if there was no god for kids like me, if the real God was the one the people who beat me and raped me and hurt me for fun had pictures of in their houses, I was lost.

I was still trying to understand when Wesley found me.

We were both just kids, locked-up, powerless kids. But where I had fear, Wesley had hate. I cried; Wesley plotted.

One night, he showed me how to do it.

Years later, I finally had something to show him, too. I had a family. One I made for myself. They chose me; I chose them. I wanted him with us. But it was too late for Wesley. He never came close to the campfire. He watched from the shadows until the day he checked out.

I know Wesley loved me, in the only way he could. When he crossed over, he left me the only thing that ever had meaning for him in life: a weapon.

I drove on autopilot, rerunning the session with Preston in my mind, looking for a loose thread to pull.

Beryl’s mother wasn’t hiding; she had a listed phone number. If I could just 411 her, Daniel Parks could have, too. A man like him would have exhausted every possibility before he ever went near the places where you could find a Charlie Jones.

But the CD Parks had given me hadn’t had a single line of info about parents. He knew where Peta lived, where Peta kept her money, where Peta shopped. He had to have been close with her. Intimate, anyway—those nude photos of her didn’t look commercial.

Daniel Parks had known a lot about Peta Bellingham. But he hadn’t known Beryl Preston. Not even that she existed.

By the time I got the Plymouth docked and walked over to the flophouse, it was too late to do anything but check in with Mama.

“Gardens,” she answered the payphone, the way she always does.

“It’s me, Mama.”

“Baby sister say you call her, okay?”

“Thanks.”

“Sure.”

“It’s me, girl.”

“You took your time,” Michelle said, indignant without asking for my reasons.

“That’s me,” I said.

“Don’t you be sarcastic with me, mister. I knew you’d be anxious to get what I had, that’s all. And I didn’t want to leave anything on a tape.”

“Okay, honey. I’m sorry.”

“My boy says his father wants to see you.”

“Now?” That was plausible. A man who lives underground doesn’t use a sundial.

“No. Tomorrow. In the afternoon.”

“I’ll be there.”

“You’ll pick me up first,” she ordered.

“Two o’clock?”

“Very good,” she said, back to being sweet-voiced. I’m not smart with women, but I wasn’t stupid enough to tell her I had finally snapped to why she hadn’t just left a message.

The next morning, I dipped into my cache of dead-ended cell phones and dialed the number I had for Beryl’s mother. Three rings, a click, then…

Sounds of a baby, gurgling happily. Laid over it, a woman’s pleasant voice: “Hi. This is Elysse and her mommy. If you have a message for either of us, we’d love to hear it. Have a wonderful day.”

Nothing so unusual—a lot of people think it’s precious and special to have their kid record the outgoing