Lights Will Guide You Home

Claire

On our drive back home after the meal neither of us spoke much. Rae hummed along to The Fray’s music as she drove while I pondered over the things she’d told me at dinner.

 Seriously, what had happened to all the guys on the planet? First Jerry, then this guy – Harry Vincent.It felt like it was about sex all the time.What happened to fidelity? Asking for a fairy tale romance is probably going overboard, but loyalty? Is that too much to ask for? Harry had a family – a wife and two kids. And yet he thought it was okay to target any young girl in his vicinity? It was sick, twisted, disgusting. It felt like all men have insatiable sexual appetites. I guess I was being biased – it’s not like women are above things like that – but I was really mad at all the men on the planet that night.

 Rae pulled into the garage and shut off the engine. Before locking up, I paused to admire her classy black Porsche (I’d gifted it to her on her birthday) next to my happy pink Beetle.

 “Don’t they look so cute together?” I said happily.

 She turned to our cars and laughed.

 “Now that you mention it, they do!” She smiled at me.

 I laughed with her and randomly hugged her as all the depressing thoughts in my head vanished. Bring on all the assholes in the world! It didn’t matter as long as I had my best friend.

*

 The next morning, a Saturday, I decided to go over to Braveheart.

 “Morning!” I said brightly to Rae as I grabbed my car keys. She had just gotten out of bed, still in her pyjamas. “I’ll be at Braveheart all day, you can come join me after work!”

 She mumbled something intelligible and shuffled to the bathroom.

 Rae wasn’t exactly a morning person.

 I headed out, the faintly warm morning sunlight feeling pleasant on my skin as I drove down the streets.

The Braveheart campus consisted of three buildings – the main office, an orphanage and a schoolhouse. We also had a playground, a medium sized field and a small greenhouse.

 I drove up to the parking lot which was by the office. The office was made of brick, as were the other two buildings. I got out of my car and walked to the orphanage which was up ahead. The path to it was grassy, and flanked by trees. To my left was the schoolhouse – that was where lessons for playschool and elementary school were held. In front of it was a tiny garden that was maintained by the kids who had a thing for gardening. The playground was to my right, just across the schoolhouse. The kids played there during recess, and in the evenings too. Behind it, provided with basketball hoops at one end, extended the field for the older children.

 The orphanage itself was a big four-storeyed building. The ground floor had the kitchen, dining hall, common room and a couple of bathrooms. The remaining floors had dormitories – separate ones for boys and girls. There was also a staff wing on each floor.

I walked into the large dining hall. It was noisy and full of kids as they chatted over their bowls of cereal. There were rows of long tables with long wooden seats running down each side. It had a cheery, cozy air, the smell of warm homemade food filling it at mealtimes. Breakfast was usually a hurried affair on weekdays as the children gulped down their food – the older ones in a hurry to go to the local high school while the little ones tried to finish before the bell announcing the commencement of their lessons at the schoolhouse was rung. But that day, being a Saturday, no one was in a hurry.

 As I walked down the hall, I waved “hi” to a nearby bunch of seven year olds. They smiled back shyly. The boldest of the lot, Jake, waved back, grinning toothily. I spotted Maria across the room, wagging her finger admonishingly at two little girls.

 I love Maria. A stout, coloured, motherly woman – she was the one the children feared the most, but also loved dearly. As I walked up to her, lots of familiar faces called out, “Hey, Miss Claire!” I waved back, smiling.

“Don’t you ever do that again!” I caught the end of Maria’s lecture before she turned to me, “ah, Claire dear!”

 The two girls crept away quietly, glad that it was over.

 “There is a lot I need to talk to you about!” She said, steering me out the hall. “First – that plumber! Doesn’t know a thing about his job! That tap in the 3rd floor bathroom – still dripping, dripping all day!” And all the way down to the office, she went on about the plumber’s lack of skill, how he stank of tobacco, his rudeness, how he wore his trousers too high…

 “Claire!” Ana called out, just as Maria and I entered the main building. “I just received a call – they’ve found a boy beaten up real bad in an alley down on East Letterly! No one’s here yet, I mean Jon’s supposed to be here but I think he’s running late, so – “

 “I’ll go check it out.”

 As I dashed out I could hear Maria cursing, “People these days! Don’t know what’s gotten into them, now they’ve come down to mistreating poor innocent children…”

 It wasn’t the first time a child in distress had been reported to Braveheart. We had gotten our number listed along with the emergency ones, and on quite rare occasions we had received calls about children who needed help.

 I would have missed the alley if a group of teenage boys hadn’t been clustered at the entrance. As I got out of my car, I could hear an ambulance wailing in the distance.

 “Where is he?”

 The boys parted, and I found a guy in a black T kneeling next to the unconscious kid. I knelt down beside him. The child was a skinny boy, barely ten or eleven years old. He was bruised all over, his back had fresh red welts, his knees scraped and bleeding. Tears sprang to my eyes as I picked up his hand to feel for his pulse. Thank goodness, he was alive!

 I heard the ambulance pull up at the entrance to the alley. Everyone backed away as they picked up the little boy on the stretcher and carried him away. I turned to the guy in the black T, noticing he had a pierced lip.

 “Are you the one who made the call?” I asked him.

 “Yeah. We were walking by and I stopped here to take a leak. That’s when I spotted him, lying there half-dead.”

 “Oh.” I looked around at the group. “Do any of you know him?  I mean, does he live he around here or anything? Have you seen him before?”

A guy with lots of pimples, skateboard in arm, spoke up. “I’ve seen him around a couple of times at the park. Can’t say where he lives though.”

 “Thank you,” I said, smiling at them all gratefully. The pimply guy smiled back, the one with the piercing nodded and the bunch slowly dispersed.

I stood there for a while, surveying the narrow alley. It was littered with cigarette butts and all kinds of trash. Who would do something like that to a child so small? The world was so messed up.

 As I turned to go, something caught my eye. I knelt down by the spot where the kid had been lying. It was a knife – small, but lethal. Next to it was a small packet of white stuff…no prizes for guessing its contents, I thought. Along with it was a note which bore, in a childish scrawl, “Ed, $200”. My heart was beating fast, my mind filled with countless theories. I picked up all the articles, wrapping them in my scarf, and hoped fervently that the little boy had nothing to do with it.

Once in my car, I debated whether or not I ought to go to the police. I should, shouldn’t I? I sent Rae a text, asking her to meet me at the police station in an hour, and then drove down to the hospital where they’d taken him.