When a man in a suit and tie is handcuffing your mother and telling her she has the right to an attorney—and that if she can’t afford an attorney one will be provided for her—and asking her if she understands these rights, you know your mother is under arrest.
When she nods her head to indicate that she does understand those rights, and asks no questions, you know your mother is less surprised by her arrest than you are.
What you don’t know is why.
Allie had her feet all the way down on the hall floor now. She watched her mother being led away. Just as she was thinking, Wait. What about me? That’s both my parents you’re taking, her mother looked around and saw Allie standing near. She said nothing in actual words, but her eyes spoke volumes. Her eyes said she was sorry, and ashamed, and that the greatest part of her had never once planned to end up this way, even though she was clearly not surprised.
Then, because she had looked around, the man leading her out of the house looked around, too. He stopped. Her mother stopped. Her mother looked away from Allie, probably worn out from everything her eyes had just been forced to say.
“Alberta Keyes?” the man asked.
As though Allie could be any number of different people. As if the house could be a veritable clown car of potential inhabitants.
“Yes,” she said, but her voice sounded strange. Her tongue felt too thick, the way it might after awakening from a deep sleep.
Meanwhile all she could think was Reverse. Reverse.
A few seconds earlier everything had been normal. There had to be a way to get back to that. This strange new disaster was only seconds old. Maybe it didn’t have to stick. Maybe it was too fresh to be necessarily permanent. Maybe she could still jump the gap back to normal from here.
“We have an officer coming to stay with you until—”
“He’s here, Frank.” A voice from her front porch. Not a familiar voice. She guessed it must have belonged to the man who had handcuffed her father and taken him away.
“Oh, good,” the man still in the house said.
He raised his eyes and looked right into Allie’s. For a split second she allowed it out of sheer surprise. Then she looked away, waves of shock radiating from her gut and up through her chest.
It’s very bad, what’s happening to you.
She had seen that in his eyes.
She looked up again to see a blue-uniformed policeman standing in her foyer. Everybody else was gone.
“We might as well get comfortable,” he said to Allie a few seconds later, when not talking had already become a strain.
He was young. Not young like Allie, of course. He was a grown man with a job. He looked about twenty. But Allie wasn’t sure if you got to be a policeman when you were only twenty, so she figured maybe he was deeper into his twenties but looked younger. His face was shiny and clean shaven. He took off his policeman’s cap and held it in his hands. His dark hair was slicked back with some sort of product that made it look wet and preserved the comb marks.
“What are we waiting for?” Allie asked.
It felt bizarre, she realized, to have paused even a few seconds before asking. It was such an obvious question. It filled the room so completely that it displaced all the oxygen. Allie could barely breathe.
She felt her heart beating—pounding—but it seemed to beat in her ears rather than her chest.
“I have to stay here with you until CPS arrives on the scene. Come on. Let’s sit down.”
He reached out to take her elbow but she jerked it away. The image in her mind was too fresh: her parents being led out by their elbows. Forced to leave their own home. To leave her.
“I’ll go,” she said to break the tension. “You don’t have to lead me.”
She walked with him into the living room. He sat on the couch. She sat on the opposite side of the room in her father’s recliner, but upright. Perched on the edge. The TV was blaring. Some kind of cop show her father must have been watching before that black hole opened up and swallowed their lives.
Allie reached for the remote and muted it.
“Thank you,” the cop said. “Couldn’t hear myself think.”
“What were you trying to think?”
“I guess how to let you know I’m not the bad guy.”
“I never said you were.”
“No. I guess you didn’t.”
Silence echoed. Allie would have sworn she could poke a stick into all that silence. Follow its waves throughout the room. Meanwhile she could still see the blue-uniformed cops on TV. They were chasing a perp through the streets of some big city. And then there was the cop sitting on her couch.
“Officer Macklin,” he said. “But Johnnie is okay.”
More echoing silence.
“This’s the part where you say your name,” he added.
“You don’t know my name?”
“No. Why would I? I just got here.”
“The other guy knew my name.”
“The other guy is part of this case.”
“And you guys don’t talk to each other?”
“Within the department we might. But those guys are not my department. To put it mildly. Those were the Federales, right there.”
He put an ominous emphasis on the word, and pronounced it the way a Spanish-speaking villain might in a western movie.
“I don’t know what that means,” she said.
“The Feds. Federal agents.”
“So my parents were just arrested for a federal crime.”
“Apparently so.”
“But you don’t know what crime.”
“I’m afraid I don’t.”
This is not my life. This can’t possibly be my life. Someone misfiled my karma card. How do I apply for a correction?
“What do you know?”
“I know I was headed back to the station when I got a call that a minor needed supervision pending the outcome of a CPS call.”
“CPS?”
“Child Protective Services.”
“Oh.”
A good four minutes ticked by in utter silence. Literally. Ticked. The clock over the fireplace was an old-fashioned windup, like a miniature grandfather clock. It ticked loudly.
“I can stay alone, you know,” she said at last. Her voice felt cutting. Shocking. Like a knife violently splitting all that silence. “I’m not a child. I’m fifteen.”
“Maybe you can,” he said. “But there’s a difference between can and may. You may not. You’re a minor, and till you’re checked into the system at CPS, somebody needs to be with you.”
“What’s going to happen to me?”
The question bent her mouth around. Made her lower lip quiver. She couldn’t keep everything lined up anymore. No tears fell—yet. But her mouth gave her away.
He noticed.
“I have no idea,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
Back to the ticking silence.
“You know,” she said, and he jumped. “When I was a kid . . . this is weird . . . when I was a kid and I learned about the Miranda thing? How they have to read people their Miranda rights? I thought it had something to do with Carmen Miranda. Remember her?”