The Poor and the Haunted Page 14

  And how happy that made him.

  “Don’t say ‘would have been,’ Dad,” Jessica said, air quoting the three words she found offensive.

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “I mean, I don’t like it when you say ‘would have been.’ Aunt Kelly is still part of our family.”

  It touched Jimmy that his daughter was so protective of a memory she never had.

  Jimmy, Jill, and even Jonathan wiped tears from their eyes as the family pulled into their driveway. The garage door opened, and Jill thought there was something she was supposed to remember before she pulled in, something that landed on the garage floor as Jimmy fell. A hammer? The saw? Nails? What was it? She couldn’t remember, and in any event, it was gone.

  The garage floor was clean.

  Each Lansford sat in the car an extra moment before they got out.

  Jimmy hoped life would return to normal. Jill closed her eyes and said a silent thank-you. Jonathan promised himself he would spend more time with his dad.

  Jessica stayed in the backseat and kept looking at the dark corner of the garage as her brother and mom helped her dad into the house. On one of the small shelves in the corner sat a flashlight, no more than four inches long. It wasn’t the sort of flashlight you could use to crush someone’s skull—or genitals.

  It was a small thing, made specifically for the delicacies of suburban darkness.

  Jessica watched as the bulb behind the lens began to glow bright and hot until the lens broke with a soft shatter. Slowly the interior of Jill’s car became brighter as the tiny beam of a four-inch flashlight traveled through the windshield and transformed into an enormously warm, thrumming spotlight; a glowing, vibrating embrace of a young girl who still had a little of her dad’s blood on her collar—a girl brave enough to step forward exactly when it was needed.

  A girl who helped the light rescue someone they both loved.

  Kelly Lansford’s niece smiled, looked into the light, and wrinkled her nose.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Fall 2001

  Carlisle reached for the buzzing Motorola on his nightstand.

  “Mike,” Sergeant Randy McCormick told him, “It’s one of those Lansford kids. You might want to get out there.”

  McCormick was a friend in the department and knew about Carlisle’s friendship with Jimmy and Kelly Lansford. Though Carlisle was cautious about who knew of his relationship with two teenage kids, it was an open and inconsequential secret within the Garrity, Oklahoma, police department. Carlisle’s decision to look after the two children garnered the detective respect, not suspicion. No one in the department questioned Carlisle’s integrity, though perhaps that had something to do with his abundance of caution.

  Carlisle hurriedly put on his clothes, stubbing his toe as he searched for socks in the dark. Claudia woke from her sleep as Carlisle was pulling up his pants, her voice still groggy.

  “Babe,” she said, “is everything okay?”

  “Gotta go.”

  Carlisle laced up his shoes and pulled his GPD windbreaker on.

  “Mike. Hey. Is everything—”

  “Gotta go, Claudia. I’ll call you.”

  By the time he finished his sentence, he was shouting the last few words back into their apartment.

  If anyone else in Garrity thought of a crime that defined the fall of 2001, it would be airplane hijackings almost fifteen hundred miles away. When Carlisle thought of the fall of 2001, he wouldn’t think of skyscrapers. He would think of a Pontiac Firebird found wrapped around a tree in the front yard of an abandoned home north of Diane’s place.

  By the time Carlisle arrived, there were already multiple officers on the scene, along with paramedics and firefighters. The driver, assumed to be Diane Lansford, had fled on foot.

  Residents of still-occupied houses and trailers gathered on their porches and sidewalks to watch. With a car accident, there was no need to put your head down and walk faster. For once the neighborhood was brightly lit, the reds and the blues of various sirens making it practically like daylight, and the residents of this part of town were like the residents of any part of town: They weren’t about to turn down a free show.

  Carlisle stepped out of his cruiser and looked toward the mangled, faded black steel.

  “Mike?” a young officer named Kyle asked. Carlisle turned his head, spotting a boy not much older than Jimmy in a police uniform. “Mike Carlisle? Someone told me you know the victim? I—”

  Carlisle raised a hand to silence the young officer and walked around the rear of the Pontiac. Though there were people all around, the sound that registered to Carlisle was the incessant barking of a dog.

  “Will somebody please tell that thing to SHUT THE FUCK UP!” Carlisle yelled.

  Carlisle took three deep breaths. He had to get closer to see what he already knew was inside: the bloodied body of a young girl.

  It did not take a police detective to know Kelly died long before the first ambulance arrived. The sheer amount of blood running through the crack between what remained of the passenger door and the rest of the car told Carlisle all he needed to know. The girl who could fend off monsters with her teeth met a monster she could not beat: her own mother.

  Kelly was his to watch over, especially with Jimmy gone, and Carlisle failed. He would not sugarcoat that reality. He would do his best to keep it from eating him alive, but he would not edit this part out of his story. Ever.

  The weight of the cell phone in his pocket and the call he knew only he could make drove him to the ground. His back slumped against the rear passenger tire. He closed his fists and silently screamed until his face ached. He dug his fingernails into the palms of his hands hard enough to draw blood. Carlisle cried until he dry-heaved, his body futilely trying to expel something that would always remain.

  With her welfare benefits exhausted, Diane had become a full-time prostitute. Any money she earned came from selling her body. Carlisle was sure later they would find her in a trailer with Dakota Brady and a few of Roger Crowder’s old crew, who would, undoubtedly, give Diane a place to lie down and a little crystal in exchange for a few minutes of her time.

  That is exactly what happened.

  The young officer who approached Carlisle at the scene and two other policemen found Diane with Brady. She was high, though her consumption of crystal meth in Brady’s trailer presented a problem: No one could definitively prove if she was high when she was driving, or if she started using after she fled the scene of her daughter’s death.

  The timing of Diane’s meth consumption was one mystery.

  The other mystery was what Kelly was doing in a car headed toward Dakota Brady’s trailer on a school night, after eleven PM. Carlisle had a theory, though he would keep it to himself. He wouldn’t even tell Claudia.

  Carlisle believed Diane asked Kelly to run an errand with her. Perhaps Diane promised Kelly a Slurpee and some Twizzlers if she went with her to get a fresh sixer of Milwaukee’s Best. Carlisle knew Kelly was lonely, and maybe—against her better judgment—she decided to go with her mother to the store. Carlisle believed shortly after leaving their home, Diane told Kelly they were going to Dakota Brady’s house instead.

  Though Diane might not have said it in so many words, Kelly would have understood: her own mother intended to trade time with the unravaged body of her sixteen-year-old daughter in exchange for more and better meth, and a little money to help her make it through the next couple of weeks. Kelly might have also understood that Brady, with the consent of her mother, would love to put a little meth in her lungs to help ease her mind.

  If Kelly realized this, she would have fought. The little gi
rl who once bit her father’s neck wasn’t going down the same road her mother traveled without a fight. Kelly would have kicked at her mother, screamed at her, told her she wished she was dead before opening the passenger door to jump out. When Kelly went for the door handle Diane pressed down hard on the gas pedal, and almost immediately lost control of the vehicle.

  Carlisle’s theory was correct, but as the Department’s lead detective, he officially concluded it was a tragic accident. A mistake. His decision no doubt influenced the judge’s decision to accept Diane’s Alford plea, which resulted in five years of probation and no prison time.

  He did not want Jimmy to know his sister’s last few moments were spent fighting their mother to keep her from doing to Kelly what she did to herself. The only thing left to give Jimmy that would last were memories unmarred by visions of a panicked, terrified Kelly.

  Once word got back to the crash site that Diane had been taken into custody, Carlisle drove his cruiser to a spot overlooking the new and still unpopulated development where Jimmy taught Kelly to drive. Carlisle got out and leaned against the driver-side door. The air was even cooler, the night still clear. He dialed Jimmy’s cell phone, which was a luxury he purchased so Kelly could call him any time. It took Carlisle three times to dial Jimmy’s number without collapsing in dry heaves.

  Almost a thousand miles away, in a dorm room in Tempe, Arizona, Jimmy saw Carlisle’s number. It was late by then, past midnight even with the difference in time zones. Jimmy opened his phone on the first ring.

  “Jimmy,” Carlisle said.

  When Carlisle dialed his friend after eleven o’clock and didn’t begin the call with “my man,” Jimmy’s world collapsed. Carlisle said more words and no words and all those words were one word SORRYSORRYSORRYSORRYSORRYSORRY and Jimmy felt everything beneath his skin collapse, and collapse, and collapse, and collapse, and collapse and collapse and collapse and collapse and collapse oh my godOHYMYGODOHMYGODOHMYGOD KELLYKELLYKELLYKELLYKELLYKELLYKELLYKELLYKELLYKELLY and collapse and collapse and collapse and collapse KELLYKELLYKELLYKELLYKELLYKELLYKELLY and inside his dorm room a black hole burst that swallowed all light and everything went dark and no lights all the bulbs popped and his lamp winked out and he never saw because it was already so dark especially inside and especially in his heart and KELLYKELLYKELLYKELLYKELLYKELLYKELLY FUCKINGDIANEFUCKINGDIANEFUCKINGDIANEFUCKINGDIANEFUCKINGDIANE—Jimmy lifted his neck and rammed his forehead against the linoleum as hard as he could, the sound like throwing a package of hamburger at a wall. Blood ran through cracks in the linoleum and sprayed—actually sprayed—the second time his forehead hit the floor.

  He needed and wanted to bleed, just like Kelly had.

  That’s how his roommate found him, crying, bloody, and screaming into the floor. He was taken to the medical facilities on campus, where the nurse stitched up his forehead and diagnosed him with shock. The diagnosis was based on the look in Jimmy’s eyes, and it was accurate. Fearing his self-harm would worsen, Jimmy was kept at the medical facility and released the next day when a police officer from Oklahoma called to see if someone on campus would drive Jimmy to the airport.

  Jimmy’s roommate packed a bag and drove him to Sky Harbor. Two hours later he landed in Oklahoma. Carlisle greeted him just past the new TSA security checkpoint, Jimmy still obviously in shock. He spent the next five days zombie-walking around Carlisle’s house. Claudia tried to feed Jimmy as much as possible, even though he usually ended up vomiting a short while later.

  Carlisle handled Kelly’s cremation, including the payment. There was a memorial assembly at her high school. The band kids gathered in the multi-purpose room and played Kelly’s favorite song, “Time after Time.” They were unsure child musicians crying their way through something they couldn’t really understand, and most couldn’t make it through the whole song.

  Jimmy sat through the memorial assembly and the small service held in Carlisle’s backyard without saying a word. When he left for Arizona, the only tether connecting him to the rest of the world stretched as far as it could go. Now, with his sister nothing but dust, that tether snapped.

  Those five days at Carlisle’s house were Jimmy’s last five days in Oklahoma.

  He would never return.

  His mother was tried for vehicular manslaughter, though the trial concluded when the judge accepted the Alford plea, which kept Diane from ever seeing the inside of a jail cell. The judge, in the sort of misplaced sympathy for terrible parents Carlisle hated, believed Diane Lansford had suffered enough. The judge’s logic held that after the strange suicide of her beloved husband, it was no wonder she descended further into madness and addiction.

  One of the conditions of her probation mandated rehab to treat her drug use. Diane moved from the home she shared with Jimmy and Kelly to a trailer outside of town, not far from where her husband committed suicide. The threat of jail did what being a mother could not: kept her off crystal, though she replaced the drug with even greater amounts of Milwaukee’s Best.

  A few years later, her probation officer found her in her trailer, dead from liver failure. She hadn’t spoken to Jimmy since the day he left Oklahoma to return to ASU for his sophomore year. He didn’t attend her trial and didn’t care one way or another what became of his mother.

  For the third time in less than a decade, Mike Carlisle responded to a scene with a dead Lansford. When he did, he picked up his cell phone and made a call.

  “My man,” he said.

  When Carlisle informed him of Diane’s death, Jimmy did not ram his head into the floor until he bled. He stood in his living room as Jill wrapped her arms around his shoulders, her pregnant belly against his back, his young son playing with small toy cars near his feet. Carlisle offered to handle the payment and logistics of the cremation, and though Jimmy accepted the help with logistics, this time he would not take Carlisle’s money.

  When his mother died, Jimmy was still in his mid-twenties. He was proud of many things: his education, his wife, his son, the baby girl on the way, how people didn’t know where and who he came from. And when Carlisle offered to pay for Diane Lansford’s cremation, Jimmy was proud he had enough money to personally send his mother into a scorching fire.

  Part of him wanted to pay someone back in Oklahoma to dig up his father’s body and burn it, too.

  The day his mother’s remains arrived, he took them straight to the storage unit in North Phoenix where he stored his other horrors, including his father’s suicide note and Kelly’s ashes.

  A day after Kelly’s funeral, Carlisle drove Jimmy back to the airport. He knew Jimmy didn’t have any close friends in Arizona. The young man, for all intents and purposes, now lacked any family at all. The Lansfords who attended Kelly’s service were distant cousins who came because they thought there might be free liquor—at a sixteen-year-old girl’s funeral, hosted at the home of a police officer. Though it saddened Carlisle, if the choice was between relatives who came to funerals looking to scam free booze and no family at all, Jimmy was better off without anyone.

  Mike Carlisle and Jimmy Lansford said their goodbyes near the new TSA security checkpoint at the Will Rogers Airport in Oklahoma City. This was as far as Carlisle could take Jimmy. He would go the rest of the way on his own. They stood side by side, looking through the security checkpoint and down toward the terminal. Carlisle could smell Cinnabon everywhere.

  When Carlisle was a child, Will Rogers Airport was glamorous, a place symbolizing escape and adventure for a poor kid like him. Now it was just a place where you rewarded yourself for getting felt up by a TSA agent with a two-thousand-calorie cinnamon roll.

  Things change, and not always for the better. It made Carlisle want to cry.

  “Jimmy—”

  Jimmy pulled Carlisle hard into his body, their
cheeks banging together like a pair of mismatched black and white cymbals.

  “Thank you,” Jimmy said.

  “Wh—Jimmy, I wish—”

  “I know. I know what she meant to you. I know what we meant to you.”

  “Don’t say ‘meant,’ Jimmy. This doesn’t change anything. You hear me?” Carlisle grabbed the back of Jimmy’s neck with his hand. “This doesn’t change anything. You two still mean the world to me. I should have been a bigger part of her life, like I was with you.”

  Jimmy opened his eyes as wide as they would go, trying to dry them with stale airport air.

  Deep down, no matter what they said to each other in the ticketing area of Will Rogers Airport, Jimmy knew he and Mike Carlisle were saying goodbye.

  “You never had to do any of this,” Jimmy said, his voice breaking. “Do you know what our lives would be like without you? I just wish…I wish—”

  Carlisle knew what his friend was trying to say. Jimmy wished there was some way to pay Carlisle back. The two men stood, cheek to cheek, Carlisle’s goatee prickly against Jimmy’s skin. Carlisle kissed his friend, his lips lingering softly on Jimmy’s stubble. Carlisle knew if he didn’t use everything he had, including his touch, Jimmy could just float away, a balloon floating high and cold and alone, a balloon wishing for the moment it popped. They stood in that embrace, not caring who saw. Carlisle learned to do that from Jimmy and Kelly.

  Carlisle whispered in his ear, “Turn around, go through that security gate, and never look back. Ever. Leave this place. If you need me, you have my number. But Jimmy, there’s nothing here for you. Go build your life. Make your own family. Live a long life. I’m tired of you Lansfords dying.”

  As Carlisle spoke into his ear, Jimmy felt the detective’s tears begin to pool in the space where their cheeks touched.

  They stepped away from each other, and Carlisle placed his hands on Jimmy’s shoulders.