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?”
Merry
Christmas, my Love, Merry Christmas….Love JIM
