It so hot I thought I'd share a Christmas story with you. Every year for the past 7 years or so, I write something for Bern and she makes me something. Lots of writings, lots of art. She really is great about it. Last Christmas she gave me a table in the shape of West Virginia--go figure how she did that.
The Life of Riley
(A story of Christmas)
for
Bern
Christmas 2008
It was snowing.
Aunt Jane and Uncle Luke—and before him, Uncle Bob—had told Riley
that it almost never snowed in Charlotte, but she didn’t know,
being only six. And her name wasn’t “Riley” anymore, Aunt Jane
told her it was “Sarah Ann”. Her name had been “Riley” once
upon a time, she remembered that and she remembered the last time she
saw it snow.
The last time she’d
seen it snow was when she was just barely four. She was standing on
the front porch of a house in a place called “Riley”, just like
her name, though her mommy and daddy laughed when she said that and
told her the place she lived was ‘Raleigh’ and not to forget it.
“If you’re ever
lost and need help,” her mommy told her over and over, “tell
someone that your name is Riley and you live in Raleigh.” Her mommy
also told her the name of the street where she lived and her last
name, but Riley—Sarah Ann—had long ago forgotten all that. She
tried to remember when it started to snow in Charlotte. “My name
is Riley and I live in Raleigh,” she said to herself, but she
couldn’t remember the rest, not even her last name since her name
now was Sarah Ann Smith and she lived in Charlotte with Aunt Jane and
Uncle Luke.
The last thing she
remembered from that previous snow was watching her mommy walk to a
car, all dressed in white like the snow with a blue raincoat around
her shoulders, and her daddy wearing brown and walking to a big brown
truck. Riley—Sarah Ann—had learned her colors early and she
always remembered that, especially on that morning in December when
it started snowing, unusually, in Charlotte, where she was Sarah Ann
and lived with Aunt Jane and Uncle Luke. She couldn’t even remember
her parents’ faces anymore and she hadn’t seen them in a long,
long time.
“What are you
doing Sarah?” Uncle Luke said from behind her. She had her knees on
the couch and her face pressed against the apartment’s living room
window, watching it snow. Uncle Luke’s voice—like Uncle Bob’s
before him—was coarse and nearly angry.
Sarah slid down on
the couch, turning away from the wonder of snow. “Nothing,” she
said, softly. “It’s snowing.”
Sarah glanced up
when he didn’t respond. He was rubbing his eyes. Uncle Luke was
very big and dressed in a white tee-shirt, stained under the arms and
a pair of shorts. His face was covered with the stubble of beard that
she had felt on her cheeks before. Uncle Luke had never hurt her in
the way Uncle Bob had but he had rubbed his rough face against her
face when it was bedtime. She remembered how Aunt Jane had screamed
and turned all red and beat Uncle Bob with her fists when she found
him hurting her. She remembered the policemen coming and taking Uncle
Bob away. She should have told the policemen she was Riley and lived
in Raleigh, but she hurt too much and couldn’t think straight.
She could have told
the people in the hospital, all dressed in white, like her mother as
she disappeared into the snow, that she was Riley and lived in
Raleigh but they were all too busy and too grownup to understand. And
she was too scared to talk. She’d been only five, she reminded
herself and not a big girl of six yet. So Aunt Jane took her out of
the hospital, still in her gown, telling her to be quiet, and they’d
gone to a motel again. Then they moved and sometime after that Uncle
Luke came to live with them. Uncle Luke never hurt her but he was
usually either mean or angry and only sometimes gentle and always
smelled of something smoky sweet—like the soda Aunt Jane loved in
the big brown bottles.
“Jane needs you
to help with breakfast,” Uncle Luke finally said. “Go help her.”
Sarah knew how to
do that. She was always helpful to Aunt Jane, ever since that snowy
morning long ago when Jane told her, “come on, let’s take a
ride.”
Sarah…Riley…had
enjoyed rides with Aunt Jane. Sometimes they went to the park where
there were swings to swing on and other kids to play with. Sometimes
they went to the store where she sat in a cart looking at Aunt Jane
while they went up and down the aisles getting things to eat and
hearing people tell Aunt Jane what a lovely daughter she had.
Sometimes Aunt Jane took her to Uncle Bob’s apartment and Riley
could watch TV while Aunt Jane and Uncle Bob were in the bedroom
crying and making other noises.
But that day, the
day her daddy walked to a big truck and her mommy went to the car,
Aunt Jane had taken her to Uncle Bob’s and after a lot of yelling,
the three of them drove a long way and stayed in a motel for days and
then had an apartment in Charlotte. That’s when her name changed to
Sarah Ann and Aunt Jane told her the awful things that had happened
to her mommy and daddy.
“Your daddy went
to prison,” Aunt Jane told her, though Riley didn’t know what
that meant. “You go to prison in a big truck. And your mommy went
with him. They’ll never come back. You’re going to live with me
now….”
Riley cried for
days and days and always asked for her mommy and daddy and her dog,
but Aunt Jane told her not to cry, she’d see them in heaven and her
name was Sarah Ann now.
“But I’m Riley
from Raleigh,” she told Aunt Jane over and over, through a river of
tears and an ocean of fear.
“No more,
darlin’,” Aunt Jane said softly. “Now you are Sarah Ann and you
live with me…..”
It took a long
time—Riley didn’t understand much about time then, but it was
three months before she stopped asking for her mommy and daddy and
began to hope she’d see them in heaven, wherever that was, and that
she now lived with Aunt Jane and her name was Sarah Ann.
She wasn’t
unhappy, though such a thought as “unhappiness” hadn’t occurred
to her yet. Aunt Jane loved her and took care of her and though Uncle
Bob had been mean, Uncle Luke was just angry—and sometimes, gentle.
So time passed and she became Sarah Ann. Until that unexpected
Charlotte snow.
***
Christmas was coming and Lt. Don Marks of the Raleigh Police
Department was feeling anxious. A week before Christmas, two years
before, Riley Hope Nole had gone missing. Her parents, Joe and Mary
Nole had come home and found the house empty except for their dog
Annie, a mutt they’d adopted, who had defecated all over the house
and was almost catatonic when they found her hiding behind the
Christmas tree.
The
parents claimed they had left for work, leaving Riley in the care of
their baby-sitter, a thirty-something female named Jane, who Mrs.
Nole had met at the gym and who, the parents said, “loved Riley
like her own.” Jane Jones—the name the Noles’ knew her
by—turned up on no voting lists, in no phone books, no public
records of any kind, not even on the membership list of the health
club. Joe and Mary had left their child in the care of a
‘non-person’, and since they paid her under the table, there were
no Social Security or tax traces to follow.
Lt.
Marks’ superiors had suspected that the parents were involved in
the case of the missing child. So, Don Marks had interviewed, vetted,
investigated and hounded Joe and Mary Nole for months. They became
the scourge of central North Carolina. Everyone believed they had
somehow killed their only child. But there was no physical evidence
and no motive, so, after endless weeks of media coverage, the case
had become cold and the parents—damaged greatly—had returned to
whatever ‘normal life’ might be after losing a child.
Don
Marks remembered the last question he ever asked them out of
thousands of questions. He was sitting in their home. The Christmas
tree—almost bare of needles--was still up well into March. He
noticed a tiny crèche on the mantelpiece of their simple house.
Joseph was dressed in brown and had a brown scarf on his head. Mary
was dressed in white with a blue cloak. He didn’t even know why he
noticed that, but the house seemed so empty, even with unopened
presents beneath the unlit tree, that he noticed the two little
figures around a tiny manger.
“I need to ask
you one more time,” Lt. Marks said, still staring at the crèche,
“is there any reason I shouldn’t believe you had something to do
with your daughter’s disappearance?”
Joe Nole, smiled
sadly and said softly, “do you have children, Lieutenant?” Mary
was holding a small dog. She had told him, as she had a dozen times
before, that Annie missed Riley most of all.
Marks nodded. He
had a baby son, he told them, and a daughter, just the age of Riley.
Marcia and Riley might have been born the same week in the same
hospital for all he knew.
Joe motioned toward
the gifts unopened. “Would you have done this for your child if you
meant her harm?”
Lt. Marks sat for a
long time in the chair across from the couch where Riley’s parents
were. For all his training and for his police skepticism, he had no
answer to the brightly wrapped presents, three months late.
Lt.
Marks himself had never suspected them. And he had spent every free
moment since the case was officially closed trying to track down a
health club member, baby-sitter named Jane Jones—to no avail. He
turned up a similar case in Roanoke, Virginia—a baby-sitter named
Sarah Ann Wilson, who had a criminal record and a hospital record of
losing 4 children to miscarriage, had taken a young girl. But police
were called to a fast food restaurant near the North Carolina border
that very night because the girl had started screaming and running to
patrons. By the time the squad car arrived, Sarah Ann Wilson was
gone, never to be heard of again.
As
Christmas drew near, Don Mark’s thoughts turned to the Nole family
and little Riley, wherever she was, and to his own children, their
growing excitement about the presents that would be under the tree.
He knew hundreds of copy shop photos of Riley were going up all over
the state, put up by friends and relatives of Joe and Mary Nole.
Christmas caused them to spring into action, searching for their lost
daughter. So Lt. Marks booted up his computer, as he had so many
times before, and started searches—“Sarah Ann Jones”, “Jane
Wilson”, “Ann Wilson”…every configuration he could
imagine—knowing it would lead to naught.
***
Riley
never went anywhere without Aunt Jane or Uncle Luke. One of them was
always home with her. They kept Sarah Ann isolated from the world.
Riley thought she should be in school, but whenever she asked, Aunt
Jane told her she was too smart for school. Aunt Jane did read to her
every night and tried to teach her numbers from time to time. But
Riley thought there must be something more.
One
day, about a week before that unusual snow, Aunt Jane had taken Sarah
on a ride in the car—a special treat. A few blocks from the house,
Riley had noticed a display in front of a church. There was the
statue of a man, dressed in a brown robe, and another statue of a
woman all in white with a blue cape around her. Both the statues were
leaning toward a baby in some strange bed.
“Who
is that?” Riley/Sarah asked.
Aunt
Jane sniffed and stared at her for a minute. “That’s called a
crèche, it’s Mary and Joseph and their baby.”
Riley
had never heard that word or that story—at least not since her
father and mother went to prison, or heaven, and she had been living
with Aunt Jane. But as they drove on, Riley began to remember.
Something like that had been in her house when she lived with her
mommy and daddy. A man dressed in brown, a woman in white with a blue
cloth around her shoulders, a little baby. She tried with all her
heart to remember…but she couldn’t, not all of it, only flashes—a
crèche (such a funny word) somewhere up high, lights, a mommy
and daddy, a dog licking her face, bright boxes around a tree. But
she was Riley from Raleigh then and everything was different now.
***
There
was Christmas with Aunt Jane—a tiny artificial tree on a table,
some lights in the window, a real meal at the table and a teddy bear
wrapped in colorful paper for Sarah. Uncle Luke gave her some
candy—something red and white striped, since Sarah knew her colors
and there was brown liquid in the glasses that Aunt Jane and Uncle
Luke were drinking. It was very nice, Sarah had thought…not
‘thought’ so much as simply ‘felt’ what she experienced as
‘safe’—but it didn’t last.
Aunt
Jane and Uncle Luke were yelling at each other and Sarah grabbed her
teddy bear, who she had named ‘Annie”, and ran to the hall closet
to shut herself inside. In the dark, she covered her ears with her
hands and shut her eyes as tight as she could—she’d done this
before and knew how to do it—but the yelling got louder and she
heard something break and for some reason she remembered the man in
brown and the woman in white and blue. She struggled with the closet
door knob and the front door, then, holding ‘Annie’ under her
arm, she ran down the two fights of steps and out into the chill
night. She thought she remembered which way to go. If she could only
get to those people—that man in brown and woman in white and
blue—then the yelling would stop and the fear would go away and
something else would be true. Jane and Luke didn’t even notice she
was gone until Jane was pressing a wet dishtowel against her eye and
Luke was picking up the broken plates from the floor.
Suddenly
it began to snow. Sarah didn’t know what snow felt like on your
face, your eyelids, your tongue. She stopped running about a block
from the place where the man and woman were waiting. She began
spinning—wearing only jeans and a thin shirt in the cold. She was
holding her face up to the sky, feeling the snow, tasting it,
spinning and spinning out beyond the sidewalk into the street….
***
Lt.
Don Marks’ cell phone was ringing in the middle of dessert at his
Christmas dinner with his family—his wife and two children, his
brother-in-law, his father and mother and a distant cousin who
happened to be in town. He considered another bite of apple pie but
answered his phone instead.
“Lt.
Marks?”
“Yes.”
“John
Matthews from the Charlotte Police Department,” the voice said.
“Sorry to interrupt your holiday, but I think you’d want to know
about this….”
“What?”
Lt. Marks asked.
“We
have a young girl in hospital here, grazed by a car but doing fine.
She didn’t have on a coat and we found a toy bear near her. No one
has come to claim her and she keeps saying, ‘I’m Riley and I live
in Raleigh’. She looks like the girl on the posters. I knew you’d
want to know.”
Don
Marks—a tough, world-weary cop, was suddenly weeping—tears and
surprise and joy from deep inside himself. His wife was beside him
now, a look of love and concern on her face. Don handed her the phone
and said, between sobs, “get the details….And I have to go now….”
But before he left he hugged his children so tightly they squealed.
***
When
Sarah woke up, the sun was shining through the window of the hospital
room. It was the day after Christmas, though Sarah didn’t think of
that. She pulled her bear close before she looked around. A woman in
white was standing by her bed—where other women in white had
stood—with a man dressed in brown. Mary Nole volunteered to do the
Christmas shift at the hospital in Raleigh where she worked and Joe,
her husband, delivered for UPS on Christmas day. Neither of them
wanted to be home without their daughter in an empty, painful,
haunted house and neither had bothered to change clothes once they
heard from Lt. Marks.
In
the background, near the door, was a man in a suit who was standing
very still. He was as big as Uncle Luke, but not as scary. He seemed
to be wiping tears from his face.
“Who’s
that man?” Sarah asked. “Is he okay?”
“That’s
a policeman,” her mother said. “His name is Detective Marks. He’s
been looking for you for a long time. He’s very happy. That’s why
he’s crying.”
“Are
you my mommy?” Sarah asked.
“Oh,
yes, my love, I am,” Mary answered.
Sarah
seemed calm beyond belief. “And you,” she asked the man, “are
you my daddy?”
Joseph
Nole simply bent over his daughter to hold her.
When
he pulled away at last, Riley said, “I’ve seen you on TV. ‘What
can Brown do for you?’”
“Anything,”
he told her. “Anything….”
“Do we still have
a dog? Was Annie her name?” Riley asked.
“Oh yes,”
Joseph and Mary said together, looking at each other as they did.
“And she misses you so,” Riley’s mother said. “We’ll see
her soon. She’ll be so happy.” And Riley smiled.
“I named my bear
‘Annie’,” she said, holding the Teddy up for all to see. Lt.
Marks came over to the bed to admire the stuffed animal.
Then she asked, “Is
this heaven?”
