Chapter 504: Chrissy Memorial Park

Time to put Chrissy and her mom to rest.

We were in a limo at the head of a twenty-two-mile-long funeral procession.

“Corwin’s mom said that the elite families are already at the location. Everyone behind is everyone else coming to the funeral. A brief survey of those who came to the viewing shows that only a few met or spoke with Chrissy’s mom. Over half are Chrissy’s friends and their families. A small percentage is here for your mother and me. The rest said they are coming because Chrissy was your bratty little sister that wouldn’t go away when you had friends,” dad told me.

Mom said, “Steve called when we were getting ready. He said that Paula planned to be here, but the emotions hit her hard when she tried to get dressed.”

“Mommy, not-mommy, needed sleepy medicine to make her stop seeing herself die over and over again,” April said.

That was a bit too much for mom and dad, April.

I was too distracted to notice where we were having the funeral until we went over the first speedbumps. When I looked out the window, I saw we were driving along the main road for the failed megamall amusement park. As we got close to the end of the long road, I noticed some sectioned-off parts of the many parking lots. The security teams were all mercenaries.

The local police were directing traffic into parking lots based on the flags or numbers printed on a piece of paper on their dash. Anyone without either had to go check in, be checked, and then ride a shuttle.

When we got out of the car, I saw that Corwin’s mom had done an outstanding job. Elite families were in dedicated blocks of seats. Each section had a minimum of twenty armed security people sitting among that group. To anyone who didn’t know better, these security people were part of the family, based on similar familial appearances.

I guess that is what makes them good security people.

Mom and dad had found some time to write some short speeches. No one told me I needed to have something ready to go.

They should have given me some notice.

“I was still trying to pull my head out of my butt after spending so many years ignoring everyone because of something that happened when I was a little kid. I had a lot of company and friends sleeping over, including girls. A fourteen-year-old boy’s fantasy,” I started saying. “It would have been mine too, but everyone knew that the two girls were only into each other back in primary school. The girls visiting during the day started looking promising while my parents were at work. I was hoping to get to know some of them better when my mom told me that my new neighbor, who had an eleven-year-old daughter named Chrissy, had to leave town unexpectedly. Chrissy would be staying with us over the Christmas break, and she was my responsibility. That put a damper on things immediately. High school kids could stay home if they wanted to deal with having siblings around. I’d been an only kid all my life. I was right there. I could tell that some girls might be ready to let me see them naked. I got my wish. They say be careful what you wish for. A naked, undeveloped eleven-year-old girl wasn’t what I wanted. I could visit my cousins if I wanted to see a flat-chested, nude eleven-year-old girl with no modesty.”

I paused while most of the people that understood English laughed. Some elite families had it translated for them, and they snicker with everyone else.

“I went from having no parents around during the day and permission to have girls my age over to learning why my friends said I was lucky to be an only child,” I started again. “I soon got used to having a little girl walk in my bathroom while I was in the shower, or on the throne, who wanted to talk about whatever. I don’t even remember when Chrissy decided to climb into the shower with me to wash her hair. She always got the soap in her eyes and could keep a washcloth over her face when I did it for her. Chrissy’s mom apologized for suddenly dumping her daughter on us and going out of town. My parents told her Chrissy could stay over anytime her mom had to go out of town on business. It was only a few days at a time, but then Chrissy slept more than her own at our house. I got used to that, and then she started having sleepovers. Chrissy’s friends had older sisters who told them about me. Instead of their big sisters sitting on the couch watching TV with me, it was eleven and twelve-year-old girls. When school let out for the summer, I got sent to a professional driving school and got my license a year early when I turned fifteen and got a car. I went from Chrissy’s big brother to Chrissy’s taxi driver.”

More laughter.

“People who knew Chrissy knew that she had rough patches as she matured into a woman. Like most kids, Chrissy rebelled and made her mother’s life hell when her mom was home. I was the big brother she looked up to and the shoulder she cried on. I didn’t want to babysit the brat next door any more than I wanted a little sister, but fate didn’t give me a choice. My parents did a great job raising our neighbor’s daughter as their own. My best friends, who are all girls, helped too. It wasn’t one-sided. When my parents decided I was back on track, they gave me a little twin brother and sister. April was born not that much later. They knew I couldn’t care for her, so they adopted her. For those that didn’t already know, my daughter is my sister. She is her brother and sister’s niece.”

The elite families didn’t find that as funny as the others here.

“Now Chrissy had two little sisters and a brother for her to babysit because I was off doing my own thing a lot. Even when Chrissy got old enough to stay at home when her mother traveled, she came over almost every day to go swimming with the babies and have dinner with us. Chrissy wasn’t my parents’ only part-time daughter over the last five years. I met Trudy on the bus on the first day of high school, and she clarified that we played for the same team. Her mom traveled for work too, but Trudy has been a latch-key kid all her life. The house they bought was old, and it made odd sounds. That was when Trudy started crashing at my house when her mom was out of town,” I told them. “It was different than with Chrissy. Trudy was more like a stepdaughter that stayed with us when it was our week. Earlier this week, Trudy’s mom became CEO of a division spun off from the parent company, meaning she had to move to Ireland, and Trudy went with her. It was sudden, but kids grow up and move away.”

I stopped to take a drink of water.

“I had walked Ellen to school and returned to find a swarm of movers packing up Chrissy’s house. Her mom was waiting for me. She couldn’t tell me why, but they were leaving as soon as Chrissy got to say goodbye. It was cut short. I waited all day for a smiley from an unknown number. Chrissy promised to get a Giggle voice number, send me a smiley to say she got wherever they were going, and then delete the account. We are here today because she will never send that text. Chrissy was safe here. Her mom could have just left without a word. My parents had temporary custody of Chrissy when her mom was out of town. If something happened to her mother, my parents filed the already completed adoption paperwork. Why couldn’t her mom just go and leave Chrissy out of whatever she was involved in that had someone blow up their plane?”

Trudy, Crystal, and Annie took me back to my seat.

I watched the elite families start looking for somewhere to escape. It wasn’t because I broke down crying.

The surprises kept coming.

If my outburst had made them nervous, Molly walking up on the stage had panic start setting in.

Molly spoke slowly, clearly, and concisely, “It is out of respect for Chrissy that she and her mother’s ashes are being spread over the ground here.”

How many of them shit their pants when Molly started speaking?

Molly then repeated it in the formal version of the Elder’s language, making most elite families pale.

“Today, we lift the curse from this place,” Molly said before coming over to take me to where my parents and I spread out the small baggies of ashes.

She then guided us in front of where a one-hundred-foot-long string of tarps sat suspended between two cranes.

The first of the kids I met on the day Mom and I started making food to feed Thanksgiving dinner to anyone who wanted it walked over to me to take my hand. I noticed she had on a headset as we walked up the stairs to the stage.

Through the speakers, I heard this little girl say, “Mrs. Jones, my foster-grandmother. Mr. Jones, my foster-grandfather. People say nasty, mean-spirited, and sometimes purely evil things about your son. Nobody is perfect, and everyone makes mistakes. I’m sure David has made his share. On this sad day, I wanted to tell you that you did a great job raising a selfless, caring, kind man, but I am only one small child. You have over ten thousand foster-grandchildren he gave a home, family, plentiful food, and the best people to help show us there are good people in the world.”

“David,” I heard her say over the speakers. “I remember when I asked you why you were helping me. What was in it for you? Nobody does anything without wanting something in return. You explained meeting some kid your age who died suddenly and gave you all of his money, but not how much. I asked you what you would buy, and you said nothing because you had everything you needed. Someone renovated your house, paid all your medical bills, and bought you a car. On that day, your mom was using some of your money to feed anyone who wanted to eat. What started as a piece of turkey, a slice of ham, and some vegetables ended up with you opening the first of your four foster care complexes a short time later. I was your first of over ten thousand, so far, foster children who you gave a forever home beyond anything any of us could ever dream of wanting. You reunited siblings and cousins the foster care system split up. All of us now have a large, caring family. We have people all around us to help us become the best people we can be. That is all you have ever asked of us, David, and you made sure we have the best of everything to make that happen. Every one of your foster children knows the pain of loss. We can’t bring Chrissy back, David. We can dig a hole, push a wheelbarrow, plant a tree, and work as one big family to give you something back.”

One of the cranes dropped its end of the tarp, and the other pulled it out a way.

“People asked where to send flowers. We told them where to send that money instead. Your friends Paula and Molly created the Chrissy Memorial Park L.L.C. It now owns all the land from the failed mega mall amusement park. The nine-thousand, six-hundred, fifty-three dirty children, teenagers, and adults you before us are your foster children. You have over another thousand foster children who aren’t physically able to help out here, but they answered phones, made sure we had a place to sleep, clothes to wear, somewhere to shower, and food to eat,” she told me. “We can’t pour asphalt or the rubberized track coating, but we did pour out the miles of concrete that will go under it. We may not have moved Heaven in two days, but we did move a lot of earth. Everyone tried hard to do all the planting in Molly’s design, but there were no more trees, shrubs, flowers, or any other plants we needed for three hundred miles. They are coming but won’t be here until sometime in the middle of the night. All the people here keeping us safe said we couldn’t work anymore today.”

The group all yelled out, “We love you, Daddy!”

I picked up and hugged the girl on the stage with me. She had only added twenty pounds and four inches in height since the day I opened the first foster care complex when she was eight.

Moving her around to where I could talk into her headset microphone, I said, “The girl in my arms isn’t the one I met two years ago. That little girl was a scrawny, frightened, dirty, orphaned child who spent months on the street trying to survive. The system meant to find her somewhere safe, warm, and dry to sleep, and something to eat failed her. She was a street-hardened, angry little girl, but now she is back to being a happy, delightful, loving child. A woman made many critical and incorrect comments yesterday. I know some people in the crowd today who have a similar view of me and my foster care complexes. I have nine thousand plus of my foster kids behind me who came from all four complexes to honor Chrissy’s memory. They did it independently, and I would never have asked them to do anything. I would hire every landscaper and construction worker who could get here to make it a reality.”

We all heard the deep rumble of a train nearby.

I didn’t think we even have train tracks anywhere in town anymore outside the warehouse district on the far side of the city.

The rumble got louder. Over the trees, at the far end of the property, we began seeing the diesel smoke. Four engines slowly came out from behind the trees, and then we started seeing the train cars. People jumped when the engineer blew the horn a few times. The train slowly pulled past and stopped around a mile away. While I could see it, most couldn’t.

Someone dropped down ramps along the train’s front end, which began a progression of dozens of heavy-load forklifts. It took ten minutes before we saw the first ones arrive with a cloud of dust behind them. Tarps came off from over flatcars, and the forklifts started unloading pallets of blue barrels that they began placing down along where the kids had poured the concrete for the running and walking paths.

Another train arrived, and the six engines pulled to a stop a hundred yards behind the first. We heard many sounds, but it was all hidden behind the trees. It wasn’t long until we saw the big Oshkosh, six-wheel-drive military tank haulers pulling drivable cranes up on the flat ground so the cranes could drive to where needed.

Crane booms began rising behind the trees.

Soon we began to see the Oshkosh tractors pulling trailers carrying construction trailers, port-a-johns, heavy construction equipment, and paving machines. A microphone went in front of the man that drove up in one of the ATVs.

“I think I am in the right place. My boss told me to look for thousands of dirty, tired kids near a stage with this big guy standing there looking surprised. If we made it on time, we would see a few thousand people who came for the funeral. We need someone named Molly to sign that we can start planting the trees according to the plans. We will locate the shrubs and flowering plants in the designated staging areas,” he said as Molly came up to look over the papers and then sign them.

Corwin’s mom began getting the elite families back to Elena’s dad’s resort or the airport from the funeral site. I looked over to see she was frustrated because they weren’t leaving.

From the back of the closest parking lots, we heard air horns. Like a thousand cockroaches scurrying away when someone turned on the lights, people in neon green, pink, and orange jumpsuits began spreading out over the end near us. They all had on hard hats, headsets, and carried something. With perfect precision, they spread out to stand in a specific spot. In ten minutes, I saw this group make up a grid with a distinct repeated pattern.

As a group, they raised what they were carrying. Each color had a specific height pole placed in front of them. I hadn’t noticed the ones in yellow that carried backpacks.

Without a sound, the ones in yellow raised the hand that wasn’t holding the pole. A thick fog began coming out of their poles, spread out, and then hung in the air. It hid the tops of all the other people’s poles.

From the parking lots, things rose off the backs of trailers. Each box was either neon green, pink, or orange. Once at the set height, we all discovered that these were high-power orange, pink, and green lasers. At first, they shot off toward the trees. Slowly the people in the pink, orange, and green jumpsuits nearest the lasers made slight adjustments. They were faster than I expected and perfectly aligned to form a laser grid for each color. I watched the lasers turn off. The people held the poles at arm’s length and turned full circle as spray paint made a circle on the ground. Some had trouble doing it properly, but those in the yellow suits helped. The group then split into two and began moving to do the same task again. Forklifts of pallets of plants were proceeded by mini-excavators lined up over a circle and drilled a hole inside the painted ring without messing up the colored paint.