Page 47 of And Still Her Voice
I reached the Mission Street station where the next bus wouldn’t be leaving until six a.m.
CHAPTER 17
Homing Pigeon
In a telephone booth, outside the bus station, I held extra coins in my clammy hands prepared to go over the time. There’d be a lot of catching up, a lot of explaining, and so I made sure I had plenty of dimes and nickels. As the phone rang, I picked at a dried piece of gum stuck to the glass. By the third ring, I’d twirled the cord around my finger. I could barely stand I was so nervous. Mom can scold me for as long as it takes, I thought. I deserve it. Pigeons gathered outside. I’d give them the rest of my bread the Coastie gave me as soon as I finished my call. I smiled as the phone rang a fourth time. Silly to think they could be the same birds I’d seen at the church earlier, like St. Ignatius homing pigeons. And then after a couple more rings, a recording came on saying the number I’d dialed had been disconnected and that there was no new number. I dropped the receiver and watched it spin around at the end of the cord.
I panicked, but then just in case I’d misdialed, I tried again. I got the same recording. This time I was the one spinning at the end of a disconnected lifeline.
“Hold on, darling. I’m still with you,” Grandma said, as I got too dizzy to hang on. I wondered what had happened at home. “We’ll find out when we get back,” Grandma said. At once, I felt a sick sort of comfort in being held hostage by my mental captorand I felt an urgency to connect with a human being. I put another dime in the phone slot.
“Hello?” I knew Willow by the bouncy sound of her voice.
“Willow, it’s Anna.”
“Who?”
“Honey. Is River there?” I asked.
“No, the police came and took him away in handcuffs.”
“What?” I squeezed the receiver. “Why?”
“For killing that dude over at Steinway’s.”
The phone booth closed in on me. I needed air and wanted to throw up. I pushed the little door open and spilled out, the pigeons scattering. River had been arrested for something I’d done. No, for something Grandma had done.
“But it was an accident, darling,” Grandma said. “The police are just fishing.”
“Well, I need to fix this.”
The bus would be leaving in the morning, but I couldn’t go home now.
“They’ll have to let him go,” Grandma said. “Let’s just wait for the bus.”
Bent over, hands on my knees, I tried to catch my breath.But whatif—?I dared to imagine.What if River turnsme in?
“Darling, you and he are kindred spirits, he wouldn’t do that.”
“Grandma, you and I couldn’t be more kindred, and look at the mess you’ve gotten me into.” I stood straight, noticing a skeletal homeless man staring at me. Surely, he’d seen plenty of strange people talking to themselves, so I couldn’t be any different. “I need to find River. I’m going to turn myself in. I’ll explain how it was in self-defense.”
“That’s not a good idea.”
“Sir, where’s the police station?” I asked the poor man, handing him my coins.
About half an hour later, I trudged up a slight incline toward the Tenderloin Police Precinct. Classy apartment buildings lined the streets with a mix of houses that looked as if they were run by slumlords. Walls of graffiti-plastered seedy bars and hotels sprouted up on either side of the street as well as plenty of liquor stores and little markets. People doing drugs in broad daylight, I stepped over cigarette butts and used needles and syringes tossed onto the sidewalks. I sidestepped an emaciated, ropy-haired junky and a vacant-eyed prostitute hanging out underneath a giant pink leg suspended over a sign advertising “Live Nude Girls.” The whole street nauseated me with the smells of rotten garbage, vomit, pee, and poop. I wanted to take a shower and burn my shoes and clothes, but first I wanted to find River. And then some creepy guy with shocking wild hair who was wearing tattered rags grabbed me by the shoulder, but I kicked him in the shins and took off running.
As I neared the police station just around the corner, I stepped into a laundromat to catch my breath and look for a bathroom. I followed a sign for one in the back where someone camped out on the floor at the entrance. Inside a filthy restroom, I didn’t recognize my guilty face as I looked into a smudged cracked mirror. I reached into my pocket for my matches. Lighting one, I blew it out and then used the black sulfur to line my eyes like River had taught me. I wanted to look older.
But as soon as I walked out and turned the corner, I felt like a scared little girl again. Headed toward the police station, I’d stepped back into my childhood, back to the Glendale Police Department where they’d been holding my father for driving drunk for something I used to think I’d caused. Never mind what he’d done to us at home before he drove off and crashed into the “Welcome to Glendale” sign on Verdugo. And now here I was again, but this time I was here for River and for something I’d caused. I would turn myself in.
Sucking in a breath of courage, I approached the counter and stared into the balding head of a clerk bent over some paperwork. I cleared my throat. “Excuse me, sir?”
Without lifting his shiny dome, he peeked up over his glasses and furrowed his caterpillar dark eyebrows like he didn’t want to lose his place, like he didn’t have time for me.
“I’m looking for Riv—I mean Levi Smith. Is he being held here?”
He pushed back in his chair, looked around his desk, and then under it. “I don’t see him here. Do you?”
