Sweet Dreams, Irene

I left the parking lot with those good intentions. By the end of the day, I would be wondering if I was on that famous road that is paved with good intentions.

5

I GOT TO CASA DE ESPERANZA before Sammy and Jacob arrived. The place was all decked out for Halloween. Inside, it didn’t look much different than it had fifteen or more years ago – I had to stop and do some math – right, fifteen years ago. The music groups on the posters which adorned its walls had changed, except for one for the Doors. I tried to do a little more math, working out how old Jim Morrison would be today, when a clean-cut, muscular young man came walking toward me. I was wondering if all the runaways looked so well-adjusted these days, when he said, “Irene Kelly? I’m Paul Fremont. My grandmother has often spoken of you.”

As I took the offered hand for a vigorous handshake, I tried to absorb the shock of realizing this “kid” was a twenty-one-year-old college student, not a runaway. “Hello, Paul. Your grandmother has told me a lot about you. She’s certainly very proud of you.”

He looked at me a little oddly, I thought, but I didn’t have time to figure out if I had embarrassed him or if he just didn’t believe me, because at that moment the grandmother in question appeared on the scene.

“Why, Irene! Mrs. Riley told me you’d be coming by this afternoon. And now you’ve met my grandson, Paul. Good, good. Let me show you around, dear. This part of the house hasn’t changed since you worked here, but we’ve been busy out in the back.” She took hold of my arm and led me off. Paul nodded in understanding and went into a small office.

Mrs. Fremont was right. The place had changed. A recreation room had been converted out of a garage. There was a deck and a beautiful garden, including a spot where the residents grew some vegetables. There was some indefinable something that inwardly itched at me about the garden. I knew it wasn’t because I remembered it; the last time I had been in this yard it had just been dirt and grass of dubious parentage.

“Frank and a friend of his built the deck and did all of the landscaping for us,” she said.

I looked at her in surprise, then smiled. “Now I know why something about it seemed familiar.”

“Yes,” she said, returning the smile, “I’m not sure his friend Pete enjoyed the work so much, but Frank put his heart into it. He’s a keeper, Irene.”

“A keeper? As in, ‘my brother’s’?”

She laughed. “No, as in, ‘one you shouldn’t throw back into the pond.’ “She became reflective for a moment. “Come to think of it, Frank is the kind you mention as well. His brother’s keeper. Yes. He certainly isn’t afraid to get involved or lend a hand.”

I looked out at the garden again. She was right. Frank was a keeper by either definition. The Express and the LPPD be damned.

This warm fuzzy moment of ours was rudely interrupted by the sudden blare of a stereo and the simultaneous ruckus that can only be raised by a group of teenagers. I was cringing at the loudness, but Mrs. Fremont was looking at me with laughing eyes. “I’ve lost some of my hearing,” she shouted into my ear. “Probably from when people who were in high school with you used to sit around here and play records by the Who and Pink Floyd at full blast. I count my blessings.”

Judging from the noise outside, Mrs. Fremont had about twenty blessings in tow; but when we got back inside the house it turned out to be about half that.

I looked the group over and didn’t see Jacob; I figured Sammy wasn’t here yet either. I was trying to take in this boisterous sea of energy, released from the school day and excited about a Halloween party to be held that night, when it dispersed in varying directions almost as soon as it had arrived. Some of the residents took over the bathrooms, some headed down the separate wings of the house to their rooms, a group went out into the backyard, and a couple of them tried to raid the refrigerator. Mrs. Fremont moved off into the kitchen to chat amiably with them – the generation gap we had talked about in my day narrowed to a sliver.

Paul walked into the front room and reached for the volume control, cutting the decibels in the room in half. He winced as he turned to me and said, “My ears can’t take it as easily as Grandmother’s.”

“Believe me, I’m with you,” I said.

“Don’t ever let any of the residents know, but I prefer classical.”

“Your secret is safe with me.”

At that moment, the front door burst open with such fury it bounced off the wall and almost closed again on the thin young woman who entered the room. She marched past me, pausing long enough to give me an angry look before heading back into the women’s wing. She was pale, dressed totally in black, and had long hair dyed to a dark, raven color. This spidery young lady had to be Sammy.

Quite a few of the other residents I had seen earlier were wearing black, and some had that same look of bravado over pain as well, but something about the creature who had just flown past me made her a better candidate for a witches’ coven. I had just figured out that part of this impression came from a cloying fragrance that still hung in the air – she had smelled strongly of some kind of incense or spice oil – when the door opened a second time, more gently.

Jacob looked at me and blushed to the roots of his hair. “Sorry, Miss Kelly. I told you she was dramatic.”

“Yes, you did. That was quite an entrance. Do you think she’ll talk to me?”

“Oh yeah. Are you kidding? She loves the idea of being interviewed by the newspaper. I think if we just wait outside, she’ll come out again.”

He spoke with the easy assurance of one childhood friend discussing another. He knew Sammy. I wondered if she deserved such loyalty. I shrugged and followed him out to the deck. We sat on some patio chairs surrounding a table. From the recreation room we could hear a game of Ping-Pong in progress.

Jacob chattered excitedly about his afternoon at school. He had gone in to see the journalism teacher – Michael Corbin, an old friend who had gone to college with me, and who was, as Jacob said, “way cool.” Michael had told him that he could add the class, which was about four days in progress for the winter quarter, and wrote a note to that effect for Jacob’s counselor. The counselor had been obliging as well. I smiled at Jacob’s enthusiasm – a day of conquering potential hurdles of adult permission-giving had his spirits soaring. A different kid from the one I had seen in the morning. I wondered if Michael and the counselor had seen that, too. I’d have to give Michael a call.

Jacob had predicted Sammy’s mood swings well. As he reached the end of his tale about the class, she appeared at the back door, and made her way over to us as if nothing had happened fifteen minutes before. She sat next to Jacob and favored me with a long glowering stare. A summer as a camp counselor had taught me all I needed to know about the likes of Sammy.

“Well, Jacob,” I said starting to rise from my chair, “I guess I’d better go. Sorry about your dad’s campaign and all that. I know it means a lot to you.” It was a mean thing to do to Jacob. I hated myself when I saw the look of hurt on his face. But it worked like a charm on Sammy.

“Hey, wait a minute,” she said. “I thought you wanted to talk to me.”

I took my turn staring, then said, “You haven’t indicated to me that you’re really up for that, and I don’t have time to sit around and coax you.”

I started to turn again, and she fairly shouted, “Wait!”

I faced her.

“I’m sorry,” she said, shocking me – I hadn’t expected an apology. She turned to Jacob, but kept speaking to me. “I’ll talk to you. Jacob says you’re okay.”

I sat back down again, and tried to give Jacob a quick reassuring look. “Okay, Sammy – want to tell me the story of this witches’ coven?”