Mortal Sin (15 page)

The meeting took place in the basement of a church in Lynn, in a Sunday school room that smelled of school paste overlaid with weak coffee. Sarah stood just inside the door, her sweeping gaze taking in the wooden folding chairs arranged in a circle, the portable chalk board, the battered piano. Cardboard cutouts of Jesus adorned the walls. A long table shoved up against the wall at one side of the room held a coffeemaker and a stack of politically incorrect foam cups. Perhaps a dozen women milled about the table; a lone man sat stiffly in a hard wooden chair, staring at his feet, coffee cup clenched like a lifeline in both hands.

A fortyish blonde separated herself from the group near the refreshment table and came forward to greet her. “Sarah?” she said.

“Yes.”

The woman held out her hand. “Adrienne Thibodeau. We talked on the phone.”

Sarah shook the proffered hand. “I’ve never done anything like this before. I’m not sure what’s expected of me.”

“Relax. There are no expectations. Everybody here is friendly, and we’re all here for the same reason, to share our stories and help each other cope. Just sit back and listen. If you feel like contributing something to the discussion, we’d be glad to hear from you. But remember, there’s no obligation to participate. Nobody wants to add to anybody else’s stress level. And sometimes just listening is enough,” She gave Sarah’s arm a friendly pat. “Help yourself to a cup of coffee. It’s not very good, but it’ll give you something to do with your hands. We’ll talk after the meeting.”

She got a cup of coffee and found a seat as Adrienne called the meeting to order. The first person to speak was a young Latina named Anna whose five-year-old daughter had been snatched from a shoe store while she tried on shoes just a few feet away. “Two days ago,” she said in a halting voice, “Carlos moved out of our apartment. He went home to his mother. He blames me. His mother blames me.” Anna’s hands twisted and worried the hem of her cotton blouse. “I blame me.”

The air grew heavy and the silence built as the group waited for Anna to continue. “The thing is,” she said. “The thing is—” she paused on a sob, and the woman sitting next to her rested a hand on hers “—I only went out that day because Carlos and I had a fight. There was this pair of shoes I wanted to buy. Red, with little tiny heels. Real sexy, you know? I wanted those shoes so bad I dreamed about them at night. But Carlos said they cost too much and I couldn’t buy them. I got mad and said he couldn’t tell me what to do, and I took Juanita with me and went out to buy them anyway.” She raised her face to the group, dark eyes brimming with tears. “I traded my daughter for a pair of shoes! It cost me everything. My child, my marriage, my whole life. If I hadn’t been so stubborn, so goddamn vain—” She stopped, unable to continue, and the woman beside her drew Anna into her arms. She turned her face into the woman’s shoulder and sobbed brokenly.

Guilt. It was something Sarah knew well.
If only I had done this. If only I hadn’t done that
. Like a broken record, the intertwined themes of guilt and self-hatred played point and counterpoint through each speaker’s recitation. There was the woman whose ex-husband had picked up their son six months ago for a weekend visit and still hadn’t brought him home. The couple whose eleven-year-old daughter had gotten into a car with a strange man and never been seen again. The woman whose teenage son had flown to Los Angeles to visit a friend and, somewhere between LAX and Santa Monica, had simply disappeared off the face of the earth. Their pain and guilt mirrored Sarah’s, and if it was painful to experience, it was excruciating to witness.

By the time the two hours were over, she was limp and drained. Her emotions felt as though they’d been dragged through a meat grinder. Her hands trembled as she gathered up her purse, slipped into her coat, and headed for the door.

“Sarah, wait.” Adrienne Thibodeau wove around a cluster of gabbing women and caught her by the arm. “A little intense, huh?”

“I’m sorry. I don’t think I can do this.”

Compassion swam in the woman’s lovely green eyes. “The first time’s hard for everyone.”

Sarah wet her lips and said, “I don’t think there’ll be a second time for me.”

“This group stuff isn’t for everybody. Listen, there’s a diner just down the street. You look like you could use a cup of coffee.” She glanced at the coffeemaker and grimaced. “A
good
cup of coffee. You game?”

“Why not? It’s not like I have anything else to do.”

“I’ve been doing some research on runaways.” Sarah listlessly dragged a spoon through her coffee and then laid it on the table. “Everything I’ve read says the majority of kids run away because of intolerable conditions at home. Abuse. Neglect. Drugs and alcohol. That didn’t happen at my house.” She glanced at the photo of Kit lying on the table between them, next to a picture of Adrienne’s Scotty. “I gave her a real home, the first one she’s known since she was four years old. And I gave her love. So much love it almost ate me alive.” She closed her eyes against the threat of tears. “I
gave her normal, damn it! Why would any kid run away from a normal home?”

“It may be the trendy thing right now in psychological circles to blame the parents for everything that’s wrong with their kids,” Adrienne said, “and most of the time it’s probably true. But their fancy little theory doesn’t explain the kids who come from disastrous homes and still turn out okay. Or the runaway teenagers who aren’t abused, the ones who were given everything and chose to reject it.”

“That’s how I feel. As though she took my love and threw it back in my face.”

Adrienne picked up her son’s photo and studied it. “Scotty was the sweetest little boy,” she said. “Full of love and laughter, a real joy to have around. We tried to do all the ‘right’ things with our kids, you know? We took them on family camping trips. Scotty played Little League, his sisters took dance lessons. Ron took him on father-son fishing trips with a couple of his friends and their dads. Our kids have never lacked for anything. We gave them a lot of stuff, but we didn’t just give them stuff. We gave them ourselves, too.”

Adrienne placed Scotty’s picture facedown on the red-flecked Formica tabletop and picked up her coffee. Took a sip. “When he turned fifteen,” she said, “he started to withdraw. It was a gradual thing at first. He stopped wanting to do the things he’d always loved. His grades nosedived, and he started spending more and more time in his room alone, with the door closed. We just thought it was some teenage phase he was going through. We were the typical smug, complacent parents who didn’t believe anything bad could happen to a kid of ours. After all, we’d done everything right. We’d talked to our kids about drugs and alcohol and sex. We’d taught them to Just Say No.” She smiled, but her smile was brittle. “One day, he simply didn’t come home from school. That was two years ago.” She closed her eyes, but
tears leaked from beneath her closed eyelids anyway. “Oh, damn. Excuse me.”

She set down her coffee cup, rummaged in her purse, and pulled out a tissue. Dabbed at her eyes, her nose. Stolidly, determinedly, she said, “I’m sorry. I don’t usually do that. Most of the time I’m okay. Holidays are hard, and of course, his birthday. But most of the time I’m okay.” Adrienne paused, her eyes still too bright, and rubbed her temple. “Last week, my husband suggested that maybe it’s time we did something with Scotty’s room. Maybe it’s time we made a conscious decision to move on and accept the inevitability that he’s not coming back. I went ballistic. We’ve been dodging the fallout ever since.”

A tear trickled in a slow slide down Sarah’s cheek. “I’m so sorry,” she said.

“No. I’m the one who’s sorry. I thought you looked like you needed comfort, and here I am, spilling my guts to you. Some turnaround, huh?” Adrienne swiped at her nose a last time, then tucked the tissue into her coat pocket. She placed both hands palm down on the table and said briskly, “I still haven’t answered your question about why kids run away from good homes. I have my own theory, one that blows the current psychological theories about bad parents sky-high. I believe some kids are born with tumultuous souls, and no matter what kind of family they’re born into, no matter how hard their parents try to raise them right, those kids are going to encounter a shitload of chaos before they grow out of it. Some of them never do grow out of it. The lost ones.”

She slid Scotty’s photo across the tabletop, picked it up without looking at it, and tucked it into her purse. “I have to go,” she said, fumbling with her coat. “But first—” She glanced back up, those lovely green eyes haunted. “I want to offer you some advice. The very best thing you can do for yourself is go back to living a normal life. I realize nothing feels normal right now, but do it anyway, even if you have to force yourself. Get up every day and go to work. Go out for dinner with your girlfriends. Watch Sunday-afternoon football or do the
New York Times
crossword puzzle. If there’s some movie you’ve been dying to see, go see it. Take a friend or go by yourself, but by God, do it. Allow yourself to laugh, allow yourself to take pleasure from life. Stop blaming yourself for something you couldn’t have prevented no matter what you did. Kit made the decision to leave home. Lay the responsibility for that decision at her feet, and don’t use guilt as an excuse to die a slow death.”

While Sarah silently digested her words, Adrienne stood and slid her arms into the sleeves of her coat. Buttoning it, she said, “After Scotty left, Ron and I didn’t have sex for four months. I didn’t think I had a right to pleasure. I didn’t think I had a right to go on living when my baby was out on the street somewhere, alone and cold and hungry, and it was all my fault because I’d been such an incompetent twit of a parent.” She picked up the check from the table without looking at it. “Don’t let that happen to you, Sarah. Fight the guilt monster with every ounce of courage you have in you. If you don’t, it’ll consume you, and the monster will win.”

Rio lived in a single-story loft apartment on the second floor of a converted warehouse. The only access was via a freight elevator that clanked and hummed and moved at the speed of a slug. It worked with a key that Rio kept on him all the time, so when he was at work, she was stuck inside. When Kit asked him why he didn’t give her a key so she could go out, he told her it was for her own safety. Although his apartment was awesome, the neighborhood, he said, was a little rough. The liquor store down the block had been robbed at gunpoint just two weeks ago, and in the past six months, there’d been a couple of rapes and at least one drive-by shooting. There was no way he was allowing her to venture out onto that street without him by her side.

It was sweet of him to care so much about her welfare when nobody else ever had. Besides, staying in wasn’t exactly a hardship. She had Pixel to keep her company. Pixel was a rottweiler-pitbull mix that she’d fallen in love with the first time Rio had introduced them and Pix had placed that soft, warm muzzle in her hand. She and Pix had the whole place to themselves, with nobody to tell them what to do or when to do it. If she wanted to sleep until noon, she could. If she wanted to eat leftover pizza and Froot Loops for breakfast, nobody cared. If she wanted to spend an hour in the shower each morning, there was nobody to yell at her about using up all the hot water. There was no school, no homework, no teachers and no stress.

She couldn’t possibly get bored, not with all the electronic gadgets Rio owned. He had a forty-inch flat-screen television with digital cable, a VCR
and
a DVD player, and a stereo system that would bring down the roof if she turned it all the way up. His CD collection numbered in the thousands, and he owned enough videos and DVD movies to open his own rental franchise. He kept the fridge and the cupboards stocked with everything she liked to eat: pizza and Diet Pepsi, Dove ice cream bars, potato chips and nachos and peanut butter. The only thing off limits was the computer, which he used in his work, but it wasn’t that big a deal, because what was she going to do with a computer, anyway?

Every day, she and Pix would snuggle on the plush leather sofa with a bag of Fritos and a two-liter bottle of Diet Pepsi, and watch TV for hours.
The Young and the Restless. Crossing Over With John Edward. Oprah
and
Dr. Phil
. Every night, Rio brought her a bouquet of flowers he bought in the lobby of the building where he worked, and then they’d eat a candlelight dinner together. He was an amazing cook, and one of the most romantic men she’d ever met. He bought her clothes and lipstick and jewelry. When she complained that she hadn’t been outside in two weeks and needed some fresh air, he put her in his fancy car and drove her all the way to Providence to dine in a luxurious Italian restaurant with prices so high she nearly fainted when she saw them on the menu.

She was pretty sure he was falling in love with her, even though he never said it. Sometimes, she was pretty sure she was falling in love with him, too. Kit wondered how old he was, wondered where he came from and what he did for work when he left her each day. But when she tried to ask about any of that stuff, he only gave her vague answers and then changed the subject. She quickly learned which topics were acceptable for discussion and which weren’t, and she was cool with that. Rio was obviously a very private man, and she respected his privacy. He worked at some kind of regular job during the day, and did his photography during the evenings and on weekends. A couple nights a week, and sometimes on Saturday afternoons, he would go out to work on special projects. When he came back, he invariably locked himself in his studio for hours. She knew, even though he never told her, that photography was his life, and she speculated that he was probably embarrassed about having to work a cruddy day job to pay the bills. That was probably why he wouldn’t tell her where he worked.

Only one thing struck her as odd. Rio didn’t own a telephone. Oh, sure, he had a cell phone. Nowadays, everybody had a cell phone, from the entire student body of her high school right down to the little Chinese grannies walking the streets with their shopping bags and their wheeled carts stacked with produce. But there was no phone in his apartment. Being there during the day, locked in, without even a telephone to connect her to the rest of the world, Kit felt a little like she’d been marooned on a desert island. What if she chopped off a finger and needed to call 911? When she asked him, he just laughed and said if she was worried, he could always lock up the knives. Then she forgot all about it when he went into his studio and came back with a stack of magazines. “I thought we could go through these,” he said, “and look for poses you’d like to use for your portfolio.”