When He Vanished by T.J. Brearton

Author:T.J. Brearton [BREARTON, T.J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Joffe Books
Published: 2019-05-13T22:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN / LELAND

Plain Jane. Plain Jane’s life is a runaway train!

When I was six, a man named Alfred Pinchot moved in with us. He had heavy-lidded eyes and scars on the backs of his long-fingered hands. He was a drug addict. When he became abusive, my mother didn’t go to the police. Eventually, he moved on.

After Alfred Pinchot, Mom told me and my half-brother and half-sister that the Earth had been created by a race of alien beings. One day, in the delicatessen a few blocks from our First Avenue apartment, she had a public meltdown. She told strangers that a massive solar explosion would engulf the planet and bring the end of days.

Pretty soon, kids at my school heard about it.

Plain Jane, your mother is insane. Two girls would rap it like a hip-hop song. One of them, whose name I forget, would beat-box, pursing and popping her lips in rhythm with the singer, Dalia Dannon. Dalia would spit the words like she was on stage: Plain Jane / your mother is insane / your motherfuckin life is a run-a-way train! What? Oh!

My half-brother went into the military and ended up staying overseas. My half-sister lives in Iowa and is married to an Evangelical Christian accountant. I’ve never met my biological father, but their father, Pinchot, is around somewhere, likely sitting in someone else’s living room with that spooky unfocused look, the TV on but he’s not really watching. Pinchot would be unsurprised to hear of my mother finally turning on the next abusive lover, Daryl Chase.

Maybe Pinchot already knows. Maybe, when he saw the news reports of an attempted murder landing a Troy woman in a maximum-security penitentiary further upstate, he snapped out of his daze and took notice. Maybe he patted his chest for bullet holes and counted himself lucky.

When my mother was with Daryl Chase, I was already out of the house. So was Leland, who’s about my age. I saw him only a few times after my mother pointed the small Glock pistol she’d taken from a friend and pulled the trigger — I saw Leland at the arraignment and again for sentencing. His father recovered, though still suffers breathing problems from the bullet that nicked his diaphragm.

Leland’s problems, well, I always thought they were more mental in nature.

* * *

The troopers are back in my driveway, having arrived together in one car. Both men. One of them is outside, going through Leland’s vehicle, a dark blue SUV with rust around the wheels.

Leland is in the back seat of the police car, behind the wire mesh. He could have left before the cops got there; it took them almost ten minutes to arrive yet he remained in the driveway.

The other trooper is inside the house, writing down what I’ve been saying as I watch out of the window. His radio crackles and a voice says, “Clean.”

“Okay, ma’am,” the trooper in front of me says. “We’ve had a look and there are no weapons in this individual’s vehicle — he said he reached into his car to get a pack of cigarettes.

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