I found him sitting there in his living room. Alone. I hoped my breath wasn’t fogging up the window, giving some obvious sign that something wasn’t right. But I stayed there, bound to my post, having vowed to myself not to budge until I got the evidence I needed to put him away for good.
It all started last week at McDonald’s. He slinked into the playroom, holding the door with his spindly arm as five kids rushed past him, tore off their shoes, and ran up the structure made to look like a tree. I sat, eating my french fries with extra salt, sipping my chocolate shake, and people-watched. He made no eye contact, no facial expression, just a drab, droll, sagging face that told me nothing other than he was old and tired.
Maybe he was their grandpa, I thought to myself. But he was so unattached. And two of the kids were black, and he was nothing but white all over, skin and hair and all. They varied in age but the oldest couldn’t have been more than five. And the younger one, maybe eighteen months old, sitting on his lap, staring out at nothing—at the play place, at the window, at a memory too far gone to see anymore.
There was something about him that wasn’t right. And so I stayed until they were done. It was a long three hours. I ordered more fries to keep occupied during this initial stake-out. Something I wish I had tonight because I was starving right now but the nerves in my stomach made it impossible to eat all day.
I followed him that day and found where he lived. I couldn’t do anything. I knew that. But I just wanted to know where he lived. And when I went home, I searched the Megan’s Law website in his neighborhood for him. I wanted his identity, to know his name, to know if my suspicions were real or if I was just crazy—a product of an overprotective and always-jump-to-worst-case-conclusions mother.
Still, I was lucky to have her, and I worried these kids had no mother. No real parent to look after them. This man surely had to be a foster parent scammer, or maybe a kidnapper. But he was certainly not some gentle old grandpa tending to his grandchildren with a special outing to McDonald’s. No. That wouldn’t have been so suspicious. And surely this peculiar feeling in my stomach had to amount to something.
The moon was a sliver tonight, making my hiding in the bushes fairly easy as the street lamp was also a ways down the sidewalk. I don’t know what I was expecting to see at this hour, past dark, but it was the only time I could get over here without looking suspicious, or obvious. And so, I hoped it would be good enough to capture some incriminating evidence. Some detail. Some picture. Something to confirm my suspicions.
The trash cans were out at the curb already. But that was Plan B. Nobody likes digging through garbage, but I was willing and prepared to do it. I had a pair of dish gloves in my back pocket just in case.
He got up from the couch. By now I knew his name, Dorian, but that was all I could gather from the kids calling him by that name, which sounded slurred and slopped by their toddler lips. He picked up a magazine off the coffee table. I squinted to read the title but couldn’t. I’d been needing glasses for a while now but keep postponing going to the eye doctor because I’m in between jobs and have no insurance. And usually I don’t have to read things so far away.
I stayed there while he read for an hour at least. I was less than pleased with the uneventful stake-out. It seemed as though I’d be digging through the trash bin after all. If Dorian ever went to sleep, that is. And maybe, I thought, if he went to sleep, before I dug in the trash I could see what room he goes to. I couldn’t get through his locked side-gate, but I could see through the wrought iron enough to watch the other lights in the house turn off or on, and had seen the back bedroom turn dark shortly after I arrived at my spot by the window.
I had this feeling, this unexplainable feeling that seemed to guide me to these conclusions, to tell me what I was looking at. Something so specific formed in my mind from the moment I saw that man. That Dorian, if that was his real name. Something just wasn’t right, and I hadn’t been able to sleep since stumbling upon him that fateful day.
My eyes closed remembering the way he stared that day, the way he refused eye contact. I sat down, closed my eyes some more, leaned up against the shingles of the house. Closed my eyes imagining all the things I couldn’t save those children from.
I woke up in a sudden panic, a dream of falling. The worst thing a spy can do is to nod off at their post. It seemed darker than before, but maybe it was just the quietness and stillness of the street. A glance at my watch showed past 3. The house was dark. Dorian was not in his chair.
I got up, drowsy and staggering like a drunk, rubbing my eyes, trying to remember what I was doing there. What my plan was. I stumbled to the curb, pulled the gloves from my back pocket and lifted the lid of the trash bin. All the bags were black and impossible to see in the lack of light. Still, I ripped the first one open, and sifted around for anything that would stand out.
I pulled out cereal boxes, plastic bags full of diapers, milk jugs. Nothing interesting. I ripped the next one open, and the next, and soon forgot all about being on the side of the street in the early morning. I rummaged through bag after bag, the sun beginning to peek out over the brick grocery store on the other side of the block, and I heard the beeping of the garbage truck as it came down the next street.
I grabbed at things, anything, trying to make the story in my head real by finding proof. There had to be something concrete, something more than just a feeling. And those kids, I needed to save them. Something told me to save them.
I pulled out toilet paper rolls, hair balls, Suave shampoo bottles. A rubber duck. A toy shovel. A doll with it’s head ripped halfway off and a missing arm. The beeping of the truck got louder. If it came around the corner and saw me standing here, digging around, I could be busted.
But still, there had to be more. This wasn’t enough. I kept digging, ripping the bags to shreds, black plastic tearing this way and that, exposing Dorian’s private garbage. His private life of refuse.
Another doll head. A doll leg. A teddy bear head. This had to be the bag with something, something interesting, something that would be decoded and figured out before it could make sense, or tell me what the crime is. How to turn him in. How to put him away for good. How to save the children.
The beeping got closer.
I pulled the whole bin over on its side, dumping its contents into the street. Not caring anymore what kind of ruckus I made because I was running out of time. I kicked the bags out of my way to get to the stuff underneath where I had pulled the doll parts out of. I saw it there, the black trash bag pregnant with mutilated stuffed animals and doll heads that could no longer blink, spilling it’s contents out through the gash I left in it’s side. I grabbed the whole bag, held it together at the seam, and ran down the street, away from the beeping. Away from Dorian.
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