esperanza

Terrence

She by turns played with the radio and stared out the windows and poked idly around in the backpack. Once she produced a white plastic pill bottle, the labels both in English and Spanish. She looked at the bottle, felt idly of one of her breasts, and replaced it in the backpack without opening it or getting out her glasses to read the label.

"You're not dyslexic, at least," I said at one point.

She shook her head, "No, just half blind." She grinned. "And those are the awfullest glasses I have ever seen! Was I in some prison when I got them?"

Neither of us tried to answer that, some sort of juvenile lock-up or foster care did seem likely if she were, if Terry had been, an incorrigible runaway.

Back at the apartment, Kelly asked if she could bathe and maybe do some laundry. "Sure, I've got my own washer and dryer on the patio outside the kitchen. I'll noodle around on the net and see what I can find."

"Find? About Terry Hope?"

Catching me completely by surprise, Kelly pulled the t-shirt she had been wearing off over her head. Her adolescent breasts looked as startled as I felt, the little nipples popping out.

"Sorry," she muttered as she caught me staring and turning her back she hurried into the bathroom, taking her backpack along. "Sorry, oh hell, sorry, sorry!" But I heard her giggling as the bathroom door closed.

I shook my head and reminded my libido, "She's a boy." Part of me was unconvinced, or possibly unconcerned. A moment of considering the tax programs I had once worked on seemed to help deflate things.

I went into my computer office, the second bedroom of the apartment, and just to give her a little privacy in case she wanted to troop through the house naked while her laundry was being done, I shut the door.

I had to move some stuff, I don't think the door had been closed since I put the computers in there. I didn't want to think about her maybe wandering through the house nude but of course I did, i definitelypictured it in my mind.

I wondered if she shaved her legs? Probably, I hadn't seen any armpit hair in my brief glimpse. Of course, I hadn't been looking for any. I couldn't see myself blush, but I could feel the heat on my face. Just what was I thinking about her, about Terrence "Kelly Esperanza" Hope?

"She's a boy," I reminded myself again.

Besides being a boy, Kelly was also the ghost of a man who had been working for the Milwaukee Braves back about the time I was busy being born. That had to make some kind of difference. And once again it hit me, if I believed her.

I had been a rationalist all my life, someone who refused to commit to a belief in the unprovable.... But now, well, when confronted with the inexplicable what does one do? I decided to surf the internet. I'd had enough tortured indecision tonight. Find a technical problem and jump in with both feet. I'd dealt with a lot of life's fuzzy questions that way, little one and big ones. With computers, it comes down to on and off, yes and no, the simplest form of black and white.

My distraction techniques weren't working too well and I had barely got started when she knocked softly on the door. I had heard her bare feet slapping in the hallway outside my office just a moment before the knock.

"You had a few things in the hamper, I'm gonna wash those too. 'Kay? I don't really have enough to make a full load, just my stuff."

"Don't wash the whites with the..."

"Please!" she interrupted me. "Like I've never done laundry before?"

I pictured her smiling and rolling her eyes on the other side of the door. "Laundry stuff in the cabinet above the machines." I said.

"Where else would it be? Duh!" She laughed and soon I heard the kitchen sliding glass door open and close. I grinned at the computer screen. If she wanted to practice domesticity, fine by me, I hate doing laundry. And housework in general, for that matter. If I didn't love living in an orderly place more, my apartment would look like a typical guys' dorm room in a sitcom.

I heard her running feet going back down the hall and into the bathroom. I wondered if she had worn anything onto the back patio. I hoped so, but with the overhanging balconies of the 2nd floor apartments and the six foot redwood fences, she might have risked it. She seemed the sort to take such risks.

I wondered if George Kelly had been driving too fast the night he was killed. I checked the Daily News files on the web and read George's obituary. Services would be Sunday, I noted. Would Kelly want to go? Sunday would be Halloween, too weird to even think about.

I felt guilty again when I realized that I was scanning the obit for facts I could use to check Kelly's story. The birthday listed was the same as the one on the student I.D. The name of the wife was Margaret just as Kelly Hope had said. I noted too that George was survived by two daughters, Constance and Grace, no last names or ages given. Might one of them be the mother of Terrence Hope, or of my houseguest if she was really a she and not the boy in the picture.

I stared at the picture of George Kelly the one that had run above his column for the last several years. I tried to catch a glimpse of my Kelly in the face, a hint of resemblance. Was there something around the eyes? I finally saved the obit to a file and went to the white pages listings, unsure of any conclusions so far.

What the heck was I doing, thinking of her as "my Kelly?"

I heard the shower running. One nice thing about living in a big apartment building is there is almost always hot water enough for both showers and laundry if you don't try to do both at 7 a.m.

I tried not to picture her soapy young body in the shower. I had been on the internet, I had seen photos of those people called she-males. But the mind's-eye picture I had of Kelly did not include such a jarring detail as a superfluous cock-and-balls. In my mind she was all woman, young and virginal, a newly minted girl.

I found six families named Hope living in Tustin, six with listed telephone numbers anyway. And several dozen more in the towns around Tustin; people might have moved in more than two years.

I pondered the problem of locating Terry's parents as a means to distract myself from Kelly's presence in my shower. Runaways are usually reported to the police, perhaps the police would have a record of who Terry's parents were. I couldn't see them just handing it out to someone who called though, not without getting more involved with finding out who I was and what I knew about Terry/Kelly.

She spent a long time in the bathroom and I spent a long time pondering her problems. I even looked up what I could find on laws regarding runaways. Some of it was good news, some bad. If she had ever been in juvenile court she might be technically still under court supervision until she was twenty-five. Screwy law, that one. But she was eighteen, now, and an adult for most purposes under the law.

Don't think about that too hard. She was certainly old enough to decide if she wanted anything to do with parents who evidently had been unable to deal with her as she was. Let alone who she had become now that she was haunted by the ghost of George Kelly.