bygones

Jane Murphy gets out of lockup and they give her back the clothes she was arrested in. She’s lost some weight. Awkward.

She is released into her mother’s care. She gets into the back of her mom’s car, and her mom doesn’t talk to her. And that’s fine. She leans her head against the window and watches the scenery zip past without really seeing anything at all.

And they drive. And she’s dreading going back to her mother’s home, but it’s all in the terms of her release: she’s on probation and she has to see a counselor twice a week and she can’t leave the state.

Her mom had visited her in juvie. Things will get better, she had said. I promise I’ll do better this time. Just give me a second chance. We can both do it, Jane. Promise you’ll try for me?

She doesn’t want to, but look here: hope softens the rough edge of every promise. And she’s weak, she’s so weak - of course she says yes. Things have been rough in the past, but things can be better.

Her mom opens the car door and she wakes up all the way, very suddenly. They’re not at her childhood home: they’re in a parking lot somewhere downtown. Downtown? Downtown in the city, in Polaris?

Has her mom moved without telling her? She thinks of an apartment, trudging up and down stairs every day, leaning out the balcony. A brief, helplessly cheerful flash: her mom and her tend to a crop of tomatoes out on the fire escape every day. Tomatoes because they’re easy to grow. Hard to fuck up.

Her mom hands her a twenty-dollar bill. Nice. Folded edges, soft enough that she can feel the cotton. “Looks like you broke parole,” says her mom, and Murphy looks up. This isn’t. She didn’t — she couldn’t —

She could. She did. She gets out of the car. She feels numb, all the way through. Get over yourself, Murphy. She can feel tears pricking at the edges of her vision. She tucks the twenty in the front pocket of her jeans.

Her mom gets back in the car. Her mom still has the window rolled down.

“You killed your father,” she says. She rolls the window back up: “See you around, Janey.”

Her fingers burn. Her mouth is a bruise. “Fuck you,” she screams, except maybe she whispers it, and her face is warm and she’s running: shoes/pavement/cars.

—

Jane Murphy survives because she always does. There’s nothing else better to do. She tucks herself into an alleyway and worries about winter.

There’s a panhandler who works the area, and she catches a couple glimpses of his face. The third time, there’s finally a spark of recognition: Mbege.

Mbege is a kid she’d known in juvie: they were friends, or at least the closest thing to friends you can be while locked up. He’s the closest friend that Murphy has ever had, but he got out before she had. She’d wished him ‘the best of luck’, and he’d given her the biggest smile she’d ever seen on him, and ruffled her hair. And, yeah. She’d let him.

It’s fate, right?

It takes her three days of half-starving to get the courage to approach him. And it’s fine. Mbege recognizes her immediately, and ruffles her hair, and there’s six months of old and terrible jokes between them, and secrets spoken in their bunk past lights out, and —

It’s almost worth it, to see him again.

And Mbege says: “Come back to Bella’s with me,” and Murphy’s like who the fuck is Bella, but she’s out of plans for living past today and honestly, her schedule is free. So she’s got no excuses, and she follows Mbege farther into the city; into the manufacturing district: smoke stains into her lungs and her bones.

Mbege leads her down a set of stairs, through a tunnel. He knocks hard on the door at the end. Light peeks out from the crack underneath the door.

The door cracks open. A set of eyes in the dark: then the door slams wide, and Murphy is pressed against the wall with something sharp at her throat. “You’re not Mbege,” says a girl. Teenager. Blonde hair, long.

Murphy darts her eyes to Mbege, unwilling to speak. She’s already thinking it: Mbege brought her here exclusively to kill her, to satisfy some weird desire in his heart, to be used in creepy Satanic rituals.

Mbege shakes his head. “Harper,” he says. “This is Murphy. I’ve talked about her, right? You know me.”

Harper? relaxes her hold on Murphy. The sharp thing lowers. Murphy remembers how to breathe. “You’ve talked about me?” she says, and there’s something warm in the pit of her stomach, and she’s a string pulled taut, and Mbege’s eyes are on her and it’s like Harper’s not even there.

“Yeah,” says Mbege. “‘course I have.” A beat. Harper scowls. “Come on in,” he says. “You have to meet Bella.”

And. Finally the name rings something in the back of her consciousness. She’s heard that name on the street: Bella Blake, and her sister, Octavia. The legend precedes them: the Blake sisters. She’s heard rumors of a gang of child thieves underneath the city. She’s dismissed it as just a myth, but here she is in the heart of it.

She enters the basement. Harper moves past her to scowl somewhere else, and Mbege leads her past nests of blankets, past sleeping kids, past a mess of electronics. There’s a jar of cash just outside one of the back rooms: Mbege tips whatever he just made panhandling into it. Murphy files the information away: if she ever fucks up, there’s her backup plan. Mbege knocks on the door, and then opens it without waiting for an answer.

There’s a girl inside, reading some huge, heavy book. She sets it aside when Mbege enters. “Hey,” she says. “Got anything interesting for me?”

“I get a plus one, right?” Mbege is saying. “This is Murphy,” he says.

Bella Blake is tall. She has burnished brown skin and a near smile. She stands up to shake Murphy’s hand. It’s warm against her skin.

“Hey,” says Murphy, and for some reason, she already feels guilty.