Moonlight Mile

night, amped up on Polish vodka and Mexican cocaine, and bludgeon that baby when she has the temerity to cry because she’s hungry?” Amanda threw back her entire cup of tea like it was a shot of whiskey. “Do you really think I’m giving my baby back to them ?”

“It’s not your baby.”

“That social security card you saw yesterday? That wasn’t mine. That was hers. I already have one with the same last name. She’s mine.”

“You kidnapped her.”

“And you kidnapped me.”

She’d never raised her voice, but the walls seemed to shake just the same. Her lips trembled, her eyes grew red, tremors raced through her hands. Outside of highly controlled fury, I’d never seen her show emotion.

I shook my head.

“Yes, you did, Patrick. Yes, you did.” She sucked wet air through her nostrils and looked up at the ceiling for a moment. “Who were you to say where my home was? Dorchester was just where I was born. I was Helene’s spawn, but I was Jack and Tricia Doyle’s child. You know what I remember about that time when I was so-called kidnapped ? For seven perfect months, I didn’t feel nervous or anxious. I didn’t have nightmares. I wasn’t sick, because when you leave a house where your mother never cleans and there’s roaches and roach bacteria everywhere and rotten food fermenting in the sink-when you leave a place like that, you tend to feel better. I ate three times a day. I played with Tricia and our dog. After dinner, every night, they dressed me for bed and then brought me to a chair by the fireplace-seven o’clock on the dot-and they read to me.” She looked down at the table for a moment, nodding to herself in such a way I doubted she knew she was doing it. She looked up. “And then you came. Two weeks after you returned me to Dorchester, and a DSS caseworker had cleared Helene to raise me, you know what happened at seven o’clock?”

I said nothing.

“Helene had spent the day drinking because she got stood up on a date the night before. She put me to bed at five o’clock because she was too far in the bag to deal with me anymore. And then at seven o’clock-on the dot-she came into my bedroom to apologize for being such a bad mother, feeling all sorry for herself and confusing that with empathy for another human being. And while she was apologizing, she puked all over me.”

Amanda reached out and pulled the small teapot to her. She poured the rest of it into her cup. She didn’t have to blow on it as much this time.

“I’m-”

“Don’t dare say you’re sorry, Patrick. Spare me that, please.”

A long, dead minute passed.

“You ever see them anymore?” I asked eventually. “The Doyles?”

“They’re prohibited from having any contact with me. It’s a provision of their probation.”

“But you know where they are.”

She looked at me for a moment, then nodded. “Tricia did one year in jail and got another fifteen probation. Jack got out two years ago, after ten years in prison for reading me bedtime stories and giving me proper nutrition. They’re still together. You believe that? She waited for him.” She looked at me with shiny, defiant eyes. “They live in North Carolina now, just outside Chapel Hill.” She pulled her hair from its ponytail and shook it violently until it hung straight down beside her face again. From back in its shroud, her eyes found me again. “Why’d you do it?”

“Bring you home?”

“Bring me back.”

“It was a case of situational ethics versus societal ones, I guess. I took society’s side.”

“Lucky me.”

“I don’t know that I’d do any differently now,” I said. “You want me to feel guilty and I do, but that doesn’t mean I was wrong. If you keep Claire, trust me, you’ll do things that make her hate you, but you’ll do them because you’ll believe it’s for her own good. Every time you say no to her, for example. And sometimes you’ll feel bad about it. But that’s an emotional response, not a rational one. Rationally, I know damn well I don’t want to live in a world where people can just pluck a child out of a family they deem bad and raise a stolen child as they see fit.”

“Why not? That’s what the Department of Children and Families does. That’s what the government does all the time when they take kids away from bad parents.”

“After due process, though. After checks and balances and diligent investigation of the charges. You, on the other hand? One day your uncle Lionel snapped when your mother left you in the sun all afternoon because she was drunk. She took you home when she should have taken you to an emergency room, and Lionel came up to deal with your cries. He called a cop who was known for kidnapping kids he felt lived in unsafe environments, and they kidnapped you. No due process for your mother-”

“Don’t call her my mother, if you please.”

“Fine. No due process for Helene. No representation of her side of the story. Nothing.”

“My uncle Lionel had watched Helene ‘raise’ me, for lack of a better word, for four years. I’d say she was the beneficiary of four years of due process and due diligence on his watch.”

“Then he should have filed charges with DCF and asked a court for the right to raise you. It worked for Kurt Cobain’s sister, and she went up against a celebrity with money.”

She nodded. “Nice. When it comes to-what’d you call it?-societal ethics versus situational ones, Patrick Kenzie invokes the memory of Kurt Cobain to represent the interests of the state.”

Ouch. Direct hit.

Amanda leaned forward. “Because here’s what I heard about you many years later-I heard that the child molester you killed while you were looking for me? What was his name?”

“Corwin Earle.”

“Right. I heard-from impeccable sources-that he didn’t have a weapon when you shot him. That he posed no direct threat to you.” She sipped her tea. “And you shot him dead. Shot him in the back, wasn’t it?”

“The back of the neck, actually. And his hand was touching a weapon, technically speaking.”

“Technically speaking. So, you come upon a child molester who poses no direct threat to you, at least not by the state’s definition if they had investigated very hard, and you deal with this by firing one hell of a situational ethic into the back of his head.” She raised her cup to me. “Well done. I’d clap, but I don’t want to wake the baby.”

We sat in silence for a bit and she never took her eyes off me. Her self-possession was, quite frankly, a bit scary. It definitely didn’t fill me with feelings of warmth. And yet, I liked her. I liked that the world had given her a raw deal and she’d dealt with it by playing the world’s game right up to the point where she raised her middle finger to it and walked away from the whole sham. I liked that she refused to wallow in self-pity. I liked that she seemed incapable of asking for anyone’s approval.

“You’ll never give that baby up, will you?”

“They could break every bone in my body, and I’d continue fighting them with whatever muscle I got left. Cut out my tongue or I’ll never stop screaming with it. And if they lose sight of me for one second, I’ll sink my teeth into their eyes.”

“Like I said, you’ll never give up that baby, will you, Amanda?”

“And you?” She smiled. “You would never let me fight the fight alone, would you, Patrick?”

“Maybe,” I said. “Maybe not. But I’m not leaving Sophie out there to die or be shipped to the basement harem of some emir in Dubai.”

“Okay.”

“But Yefim’s going to want a baby.”

“We might be able to stall him on that if he gets the cross.”

“Yeah, but he won’t give us Sophie. He’ll just let us live another day.”

“That twit.”

“Who?”

“Sophie. You know I sent her to Vancouver right after, well, after-”