We waited while he gripped his scotch glass, lowered his head, took in a few shallow breaths.
He raised his head. “She’d put beer on Amanda’s burns. Beer. To cool her down. No aloe, no lidocaine, didn’t even think about a trip to the hospital. No. She put beer on her, sent her to bed, and had the TV turned way up so she wouldn’t have to listen to her.” He held a large fist up by his ear, as if prepared to strike the table, crack it in half. “I could have killed my sister that night. Instead, I took Amanda to the emergency room. I covered for Helene. I said she’d been exhausted and both she and Amanda had fallen asleep on the beach. I pleaded with the doctor, and I convinced her, finally, not to call Child Welfare and report it as a neglect case. I don’t know why, I just knew they’d take Amanda away. I just…” He swallowed. “I covered for Helene. Like I been covering my whole life. And that night I took Amanda back to my house and she slept with me and Beatrice. The doctor had given her something to help her sleep, but I stayed awake. I kept holding my hand over her back and feeling the heat coming off it. It was—this is the only way I can put it—it was like holding your hand over meat you just pulled from the oven. And I watched her sleep and I thought, This can’t go on. This has to end.”
“But, Lionel,” Angie said, “what if you had reported Helene to Chile Welfare? If you’d done it enough times, I’m sure you could have petitioned the courts to allow you and Beatrice to adopt Amanda.”
Lionel laughed, and Ryerson shook his head slowly at Angie.
“What?” she said.
Ryerson snipped the end of a cigar. “Miss Gennaro, unless the birth mother is a lesbian in states like Utah or Alabama, it is all but impossible to remove parental rights.” He lit the cigar and shook his head. “Let me amend that: It is impossible.”
“How can that be,” Angie said, “if the parent has proven herself consistently negligent?”
Another sad shake of the head from Ryerson. “This year in Washington, D.C., a birth mother was given full custody of a child she’s barely seen. The child has been living with foster parents since he was born. The birth mother is a convicted felon who gave birth to the child while she was on probation for murdering another of her children, who had reached the ripe old age of six weeks and was crying from hunger when the mother decided enough was enough and smothered her, tossed her in a trash bin, and went to a barbecue. Now this woman has two other kids, one of whom is being raised by the father’s parents, the other of whom is in foster care. All four kids were fathered by different men, and the mother, who served only a couple of years for killing her daughter, is now—responsibly, I’m sure—raising the child she took back from the loving foster parents who’d petitioned the courts for custody. This,” Ryerson said, “is a true story. Look it up.”
“That’s bullshit,” Angie said.
“No, it’s true,” Ryerson said.
“How can…?” Angie dropped her hands from the table, stared off into space.
“This is America,” Ryerson said, “where every adult shall have the full and inalienable right to eat her young.”
Angie had the look of someone who’d been punched in the stomach, then slapped in the face as she’d doubled over.
Lionel rattled the ice cubes in his glass. “Agent Ryerson is right, Miss Gennaro. There’s nothing you can do if an awful parent wants to hold on to her child.”
“That doesn’t get you off the hook, Mr. McCready.” Ryerson pointed his cigar at him. “Where’s your niece?”
Lionel stared into Ryerson’s cigar ash, then eventually shook his head.
Ryerson nodded and jotted something in his notebook. Then he reached behind his back, produced a set of handcuffs, and tossed them on the table.
Lionel pushed his chair back.
“Stay seated, Mr. McCready, or the next thing I put on the table is my gun.”
Lionel gripped the arms of the chair but didn’t move.
I said, “So you were angry at Helene about Amanda’s burns. What happened next?”
I met Ryerson’s eyes and he blinked softly, gave me a small nod. Going straight at the question of Amanda’s whereabouts wasn’t working. Lionel could just clam up, take the whole fall, and she’d stay gone. But if we could get him talking again….
“My UPS route,” he said eventually, “covers Broussard’s precinct. That’s how we stayed in touch so easily over the years. Anyway…”
The week after Amanda’s sunburn, Lionel and Broussard had gone out for a drink. Broussard had listened to Lionel pour out his concern for his niece, his hatred of his sister, his conviction that Amanda’s chances to grow up to be anything but a mirror of her mother were slipping away day by day.
Broussard had bought all the drinks. He’d been generous with them, too, and near the end of the night, when Lionel was drunk, he’d put his arm around him and said, “What if there were a solution?”
“There’s no solution,” Lionel had said. “The courts, the—”
“Fuck the courts,” Broussard had said. “Fuck everything you’ve considered. What if there were a way to guarantee Amanda a loving home and loving parents?”
“What’s the catch?”
“The catch is: No one can ever know what happened to her. Not her mother, not your wife, not your son. No one. She vanishes.”
And Broussard had snapped his fingers.
“Poof. Like she never existed.”
It took a few months for Lionel to go for it. In that time, he’d twice visited his sister’s house to find the door unlocked and Helene gone over to Dottie’s, her daughter sleeping alone in the apartment. In August, Helene dropped by a barbecue in Lionel and Beatrice’s backyard. She’d been driving around with Amanda in a friend’s car and she was fucked up on schnapps, so fucked up that while pushing Amanda and Matt on the swings, she accidentally pushed her daughter off the seat and fell across it herself. She lay there, laughing, as her daughter got up off the ground, wiped the dirt from her knees, checked herself for cuts.
Over the course of the summer, Amanda’s skin had blistered and scarred permanently in places because Helene occasionally forgot to apply the medicine prescribed by the emergency room doctor.
And then, in September, Helene talked about leaving the state.
“What?” I said. “I never heard this.”