Stranger Son

by Jim Nelson

  The cot beside hers was empty. The bridge named Michelle was gone. Her parents had picked her up in a Buick SUV the evening before. They escorted her and her precious cargo into the back of the cavernous black transport and whisked her away to the gated suburban enclave she'd escaped from.

  Clean, dressed, made-up, and feeling about as radiant as she could manage, she slung her backpack on and caught the first crosstown bus of the morning. The sun had fully detached itself from the eastern hills when she boarded the commuter express bound for downtown Los Angeles. This ride was more crowded than the county bus. She had to hold her backpack on her lap the entire ride.

  Working as a domestic was not a new strategy. Ruby had employed this tactic once before trying to track down Barry. Four years earlier, she'd learned a distant paternal uncle in Seattle had adopted an infant a few years after Barry was taken away. Ruby did not believe the parents would be amenable to discussing it with a runaway Hagar appearing on their doorstep, so she wormed her way into doing domestic work for them. On her first day, she learned the adopted child was Cambodian. She fled their house that night.

  The woman on the phone was named Peggy. She wore a stiff double-breasted navy jacket over a navy blue skirt of a slightly different tone. She examined Ruby from head to toe, pushing up dress sleeves to examine the insides of her elbows and pulling up the hem of her floppy striped dress to peer at her ankles. She said nothing about Ruby's shoes. Peggy pinched Ruby's cheek and said she'd worn too much blush. She ran her hand down Ruby's back and told her to straighten up. When she put her nose to Ruby's lips, she flinched.

  "Get some breath drops." She assessed Ruby up and down. "You do have a nice figure. That never hurts." She took Ruby's hands and spread her fingertips. "Only natural colors for nail polish. This passes muster but choose a muted red next time."

  "Do they really expect me to wear nail polish while I'm cleaning their house?"

  "No, they expect you to wear nail polish for the interview. Can you cook?"

  Ruby had worked kitchen duty in the state-run bridge houses and picked up short-order cooking jobs here and there. "Nothing fancy," she said.

  "These Abneys aren't gourmands," Peggy said. "They have a part-time cook, but they'll want you in the kitchen for social calls. You've done domestic work before?"

  "Yes."

  "Tell me about it. Who for?"

  Ruby grimaced. "Motel 6. A couple of motels up Highway 101."

  "This isn't a chambermaid job," Peggy said. "You'll be maintaining the house. Yes, scrubbing toilets and ironing shirts, all that and more, but you'll also have a budget to buy household supplies." Peggy stepped close. "Can you read?"

  "I was taught. I went to school."

  "How long?"

  "From six to the year I went into pons—"

  She held up a hand to cut off Ruby. "Don't mention that word around me." Peggy strode to her desk with the goosestep of a portly woman in heels too high for her stature. "And don't you dare mention anything of the sort around the Abneys." She returned holding a magazine with the front pages folded back. "Read this to me."

  Ruby read the article aloud word for word, starting with the title and byline. She struggled with a few longer words, words she was not familiar with. Acquiesce. Benefactor. She pronounced foreigner with a hard g.

  "Good enough," Peggy said and took the magazine from her.

  Of all the indignities, this one stung the most. Most bridge daughters never learn to read. She'd passed her little test, but Peggy made it sound only passable.

  "Can you handle money?"

  Ruby nodded, still flustered from the reading test. Peggy again went to her desk. She returned this time with green bills and coins.

  "You purchased something that costs four dollars and twenty-nine cents," Peggy said. "You paid with a twenty." She dumped the paper and metal in Ruby's hand. "This is the change I've given you. Is it correct?"

  Ruby counted and re-counted the money. She tried to do the arithmetic in her head. Twenty minus four point twenty-nine—she was never good at decimals. Fractions in school were much easier. Subtraction she was okay at—

  She recalled a lesson she learned from a clerk at one of the fast food restaurants she’d janitored for. He taught her how to count change. He was trying to impress her. He asked her out later, but she wasn't interested.

  "Thirty, forty, fifty." Ruby added the coins rather than subtracting. "Seventy-five, five dollars." She counted the paper money. "Six, seven, eight, nine—nineteen." Ruby looked up. "You shorted me a buck."

  Peggy scooped the money from Ruby's hand with a smile. She stepped back and looked Ruby up and down once more with the same grin.

  "Ms. Abney-Rance is particular how her house is kept," Peggy said. "If you're hired—if—she'll give you specific instructions for every aspect of your duties. Follow them to a T. This is why the girl we have up there now is on the chopping block. Doesn't follow orders."

  "I'll do whatever Ms. Abney asks of me," Ruby said.

  "Abney-Rance." She made Ruby repeat the name twice. "To you, she is Ms. Abney-Rance and he is Dr. Abney. Don't call him 'sir.' He finds it too formal. You can call her 'ma'am' from what I understand." Peggy tilted her head. "How old are you?"

  "Twenty-five," Ruby lied. To normal people, a twenty-nine-year-old Hagar was a Hagar not long for this world.

  Peggy didn't seem to buy it. "I'm going to give you some free insight. When it comes to the help, Ms. Abney-Rance is tight with her husband's money. Most rich people are. They'll throw money around in car dealerships and Dubai, but when it comes to a person scrubbing their toilets and washing their sheets, they'll squeeze every penny."

  This was why she was open to hiring a Hagar. White Glove could charge a cut-rate for the illegal help and pocket every penny. Ruby's payment would be a bed and three meals a day, meals taken standing up in the kitchen.

  "Find a way to save them money and you'll get on her good side," Peggy said. "And I know you know better, but I'll also emphasize this: Don't steal. Girls like you with sticky little fingers have been dragged out of gated estates in handcuffs. Don't think the Abneys won't turn you in if you cross them. They will. You can take that to the bank."

  "I'm not a thief," Ruby said.

  "And if you really want to succeed with Ms. Abney-Rance," Peggy said, "don't mess around with her husband."

  The advice caught Ruby off-guard. She'd been standing at attention the entire interview, like a soldier being drilled. She'd assumed her bridge daughter form, chin level and back erect and hands folded before her waist, as though she was twelve again and wearing a bridge daughter dress. Peggy's final bit of advice caused her to fold inwards a touch.

  "Why would I do that?" she asked, genuinely surprised.

  Peggy laughed out loud. "You girls," she said. "You come in here thinking you've seen the world." She shook her head. "You have no idea."

  Six

  She could not afford the ticket to San Luis Obispo. She could not afford much of anything. The easiest way to buy the ticket would have been sex. She'd done it before in bus station bathrooms and behind eighteen-wheelers in truck stops. She could earn twenty-five dollars with only three to five minutes of disinterested manipulation. Later, she calculated she was earning CEO money at that rate.

  She wasn't in the mood today for men and their groaning and their pestering urges. Outside the downtown Los Angeles bus station, she simply asked everyone walking to the ticketing desk if they'd help her out. After two hours, a homely college student with a credit card and a heavy metal mullet bought her a ticket outright. Once aboard the bus, she sat as far from him as possible. She threw her backpack on the overhead rack and locked it in place with the combination lock she carried. She leaned back the seat and pulled over her an old airline blanket from her pack. She slept almost the entire journey to San Luis Obispo.

  The bus unloaded passengers at an old train station of whitewashed stucco and a roof of red half-moon tiles. It was quite cool inside th
e cavernous station. Long wood-slat benches filled the tile floor of the waiting area. She stretched her legs and studied the WPA murals covering the forty-foot-high walls. They depicted the white man colonizing California, laying down train tracks, and constructing the San Francisco dockyards. Men in suspenders and trousers strung grapevines across rolling amber hills while a group of women in long dresses and wide-brimmed hats prepared an outdoor meal. Six bridge daughters, all in plain tan smocks and handkerchiefs holding back their hair, attended to infants in rockers and cribs in the shade of a California blue oak. Those bridge daughters had watched their older sisters die to bear those children.

  "Paradise," Ruby whispered.

  She made her way to the station bathroom. A sense of paranoia grew with every person she passed. Too many of them looked up from their books and newspapers as she passed. Too many dubious expressions and quizzical eyebrows. She was not in Los Angeles any longer. San Luis Obispo was a small town, a white town, and a Protestant town. She'd witnessed Hagars enter public bathrooms in towns like this only to emerge with two or three cops waiting at the door for her. The Hanna Laws only meant the police were free to enforce the law when nothing else was pressing.

  Ruby used the sink to clean up and check her makeup. Unused to wearing cosmetics, Ruby felt buried beneath a thin layer of mud, especially around her eyes and on her cheeks.

  With hands on both sides of the sink, she said to herself in the mirror, "This is for Barry."

  The heatstroke of two days earlier was settling on her again. She didn't understand why she was so tired. She napped most of the trip. Sure, she'd woken early at the Beersheba House, but this was not from lack of sleep, it was exhaustion. She'd avoided the sun for most of the day and drank plenty of water on the ride north. She'd not urinated since Beers House, even though she'd drunk at least three bottles of water since then. That didn't seem right.

  The shivering started in her elbows. It moved up her arms and into her shoulders, where it took the form of the shakes. A cold stabbing shot through her belly as though pierced with an icicle. Her vision went black. If she could have seen herself in the mirror, she would have noticed the color in her face and neck draining, skin almost turning chalk-white, and her jaw clenching tight. When Ruby came to, she was on her back on the bathroom floor, hands twitching.

  She managed to sit up. She gripped the edge of the sink to raise herself back to her feet. She wanted to splash water on her face but dared not with the cosmetics in place just as Peggy had demanded. She stood over the sink for a full two minutes, inhaling and exhaling, thinking she would vomit. She wondered why her lipstick looked so red in this bathroom light. She slouched toward the mirror and realized her mouth was full of salty blood. She coughed and the porcelain sink was sprinkled red.

  No police were waiting outside the restroom door. Ruby felt damn lucky no one had entered while she was sprawled across the floor. Some do-gooder would call for an ambulance, the emergency room doctors would put two and two together, and she'd be shipped to the state bridge house in Atascadero. San Francisco, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Oakland—city hospitals had enough on their hands than to phone social services when a Hagar was wheeled into the emergency room. Little white-bread villages like San Luis Obispo…who knows.

  Ruby went through her backpack for every last coin she could find. She had enough to buy a small plastic carton of orange juice from the concession. She sat on a wood-slat bench taking careful sips of the juice. Eventually, her eyes found the vineyard mural and the nineteenth-century bridges caring for infants in swaddling. She had to admit, it did look a little like paradise.

  Seven

  She hitchhiked from the train station to Pismo Beach. Using her phone map, she walked from the highway to the address Peggy had given her in Los Angeles. It was almost six in the evening when she arrived.

  The bell was answered by a fit older man with a patrician's air about him. He had a head of fine silver hair combed to one side. He wore a polo shirt and a pair of khaki shorts.

  "You must be Cynthia," he said. "Peggy called ahead." He motioned her inside and closed the door. "My name is Frank. Come in."

  The spacious house was in the style of a Mediterranean villa. The tile entryway spilled into a great room populated with divans, couches, and rattan chairs. On the far wall was a tinted panoramic window revealing beach grass, wheat-colored dunes, and the infinite blue of the Pacific Ocean. The orange fireball sun set to the southwest. She heard the roar of the tide and smelled the salt in the air as she approached the house, but the fences and three-story homes had obstructed her view of the Pacific until now.

  Dr. Abney looked down her frame. "Well, how was your trip?" Ruby distinctly felt his eyes on her breasts, her hips, the exposed portion of her legs. "Would you care for glass of water?"

  "I'm fine," Ruby said softly.

  "Please set down your bag," Dr. Abney said. "I'll get my wife."

  Ruby kept her backpack securely over her shoulders. She would wait to hear what the woman of the house said to do and do that.

  Ms. Abney-Rance arrived moments later with her husband trailing behind her. "Very good. In the future, please enter and exit the house through the side door. Frank will show you later where it is. You'll have a key, so please keep it locked. Shoes off, please." When Ruby hesitated, confused, she repeated, "Shoes off."

  Ruby scrambled to untie and kick off her trainers. Ms. Abney-Rance pointed to a squat piece of furniture beside the door, a dark hardwood checkerboard of cubbyholes, some holding shoes, others empty. Ruby pushed her trainers into a free cubby.

  "We'll get you some house shoes to work in," she told Ruby and motioned to follow.

  Surprised at the abruptness, Ruby cinched up her backpack and hurried along. She turned back to Dr. Abney out of some sense of needing guidance, verifying she wasn't in trouble or anything. He merely stood in the entry hall, hands in his pockets and knees slightly bent, and admiringly watched her trail away.

  Ms. Abney-Rance wore a polo shirt and shorts like her husband. They were dressed so similarly, Ruby felt she was interrupting something formal. Perhaps they were preparing to go golfing or play tennis, although either activity would be ridiculous at six in the evening. Ruby had never seen a lighted tennis court.

  "Cynthia," Ms. Abney-Rance said. "Are you paying attention?"

  Ruby nodded and rushed to assure her she was listening.

  "I don't want to have to repeat myself," she told Ruby.

  "I promise you won't," Ruby said.

  Ms. Abney-Rance sighed at Ruby's dress for some unexplained reason. "The last girl left some clothes behind. They might fit you. If not, you can let them out—you can sew, yes?"

  "Of course," Ruby said. Her mother paid good money for a bridge school, but that didn't mean they only taught her and her sister how to read and write.

  "Let's go to your room," Ms. Abney-Rance said. "You can leave your bag there."

  The domestic lived in the rear of the house. It was separated from the laundry room by a utility door. An unmade bed with an empty chest at its foot waited for Ruby. She set the backpack on the bed. It was a relief to have the weight off her shoulders.

  "There's a bathroom across the hallway," Ms. Abney-Rance. "Sometimes when we have guests, they will have a need to use it, so I expect it to be clean at all times. The same goes for in here as well." She made a finger motion indicating her room. "I expect a tidy house."

  Ms. Abney-Rance showed Ruby the kitchen, the bathrooms, all the bedrooms, and the two offices: one for him, one for her. The tour included instructions on tasks Ruby was not expected to perform. All gardening was done on Tuesdays and Saturdays by a crew who arrived via truck in the morning. The pool cleaning service tended to the pool and hot tub. Ruby was to ensure the cabana was orderly and its wet bar and mini-kitchen stocked. The house cleaning supplies were stored in the laundry room outside of her quarters, but the cabana had its own set of supplies, albeit in much smaller quantities.

  The t
our left Ruby exhausted. The three-story house was enormous. Every room and hallway had to be vacuumed, dusted, polished, swept, or mopped. Every bathroom was expected to be as clean and spotless as a showroom model. This was a job for three domestics, not one—and there was no mention of days off or breaks. Ruby felt the heatstroke coming on again. She could not have another episode, at least not in front of Ms. Abney-Rance.

  "You look exhausted from your trip." It was the first sympathetic tone she'd heard from Ms. Abney-Rance. "Tonight, we cook."

  Cooking a full meal too? Ruby, in her weariness, did not hide her exasperation.

  "I mean Frank and myself," Ms. Abney-Rance snapped. "Frank likes to grill on warm nights like tonight. I'll be preparing everything else." She turned aside to allow Ruby access to the hallway to the rear of the house. "I'll call you when dinner is ready. You can unpack and gather yourself."

  Ruby, grateful, stepped for the hall.

  "And please remain in the rear of the house until then," Ms. Abney-Rance said. "We value our privacy."

  Ruby had no problem with that. Lying back on the unmade bed, she counted off in her head the luxuriousness of the situation. A guaranteed bed each night. A room of one's own. A semi-private bathroom and plenty of hot water.

  She desperately wanted to close her eyes and sleep. If the woman of the house found her napping on the first hours of her job, she was done for.

  A funny realization snapped her awake. This was supposed to be an interview. The tour of the house seemed to suggest Ruby had already been hired. Perhaps the situation with the prior domestic—the Hagar who last slept in this bed—was more dire than Peggy understood. Either way, it appeared the job was hers.

  Ruby unpacked most of her possessions into the chest at the foot of the bed. A single lamp on a nightstand illuminated the room. In one drawer, she discovered folded dresses, shirts, and socks. Presumably, these were the effects of the last Hagar that held this job. Ruby held the dresses and shirts to her chest. They might fit without alteration. On top of the nightstand was a small stack of linen: a fitted sheet and a folded sheet, both starched and crisp, and a slipcase for the bare pillow with water stains. She made the bed as she would in a motel room, mindful Ms. Abney-Rance might inspect her work.