Her hands trembled and she shoved them in the pockets of her jeans.
“Do you know where she is?” It surprised her that any sound came out from between her tightly clenched teeth. “I’ll call the police if you don’t answer me.”
His eyes widened. “Michelle’s missing?” He looked around the kitchen as if missing meant hiding.
“Micki. Her name is Micki.”
“Oh.” He nodded slowly, taking this in.
“No one calls her Michelle.”
“I wasn’t aware . . .”
“Are you telling me you don’t know anything about this?”
“I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”
Lana stared at him for a long moment. She heard the rain, a car on the street, and on another street the shrilling of a car alarm. She smelled lemon from the garbage disposal and kibble from Gala’s dish, the old roses on the table in the hall, and Beth’s Miss Dior powder clouding down from upstairs. She felt the grain of the hardwood as she pressed her soles hard against it. She read innocence in his wide open, blue-black eyes. She believed him. And she realized who he was and a new dread inched in around the edges of what she already felt.
She sat down opposite him. “She ran off. Before dinner.”
It was almost two in the morning and still raining. Where was Micki at this hour, on such a night? Huddled in a doorway or asleep on one of those butt-breaking, contoured plastic chairs at the bus station? Eating a hamburger in an all-night Denny’s? Fear for her daughter pressed against her ribcage and she told herself again: breathe, breathe.
Eddie said, “Dinnertime. That’s not too long.”
Fuck you. Who are you to have an opinion?
He smiled—to reassure her, she supposed—and Lana saw braces shining on the top row of teeth. Why hadn’t Wendy told her? Had she been so distracted by meeting him at Bella Luna she failed to notice he had as much tin in his mouth as a fourteen-year-old?
“Why were you crying?” she asked.
He bit his thumbnail and rubbed the torn edge against his cheek. “When you came out the front yelling and started pounding on the door, I just lost it.” Another metallic smile. “I don’t know why, maybe relief? I’ve been wanting to talk to you for a long time, only I never had the nerve.”
Lana let this sink in.
“Who are you?” The question was a formality.
He leaned forward and pulled an alligator skin wallet from the back pocket of his Levi’s. He opened it and withdrew his driver’s license. She read his name, Eddie French, and an address in Los Angeles.
“I didn’t want it to happen this way,” he said. “I thought I could do it gradually but after a while—”
She looked at him straight on, taking in the dark blue eyes, the high cheekbones and square chin. Even his mouth, with its slightly swollen lower lip, was tender like Micki’s.
Lana put her elbows on the table and rested her face in her hands. She thought how a girl like Micki could get lost in many ways. There was the wandering-off kind of lost, the kidnapping kind, and the seduction. And this kind of lost: the real father, the true mother.
“What about her birth mother?” Might as well know the worst. “Where’s she?”
He shrugged.
Well, thank God for something.
“We lost contact after the baby was born. Barbara moved to Texas with her family. For a while her friends told me things and then I moved away from Modesto, went to college.” He took a square, white paper napkin off the lazy Susan in the center of the table. “I never stopped thinking about her, though. Micki.”
He folded the napkin in half and half again, making it smaller and smaller. His fingers were long and thin with thick knuckles. Micki had the long fingers, too, but not the knuckles big as walnuts.
“I wanted to get married,” he said. “I thought that was the right thing to do.”
But they had never been in love. She was an easy girl, and he was a horny virgin boy scared he’d run out of luck if he stopped to put on a condom. When she told him she was pregnant he wasn’t sure at first that he was the father but there was a blood test. His parents demanded it.
When Eddie French was seventeen he might have been scrawny and dorky, but he wasn’t anymore. He had gone from geek to what Mars called a hunk. Micki’s father was a hunk. Why did this seem so wrong to Lana?
“When the adoption went down, I just signed some papers. Didn’t pay much attention. Except for some reason I did remember the name of the lawyer.” He looked apologetic.
“And that’s how you found her.”
He leaned forward and, thinking he meant to touch her, Lana pushed her chair back. Confusion clouded his face for an instant. He sat back and when he spoke again his voice and manner were restrained, less boyish. “I never meant to cause trouble for you, believe me. I didn’t even have any plan to meet her. But I was curious to see what she looked like. Then I saw myself in her.” He looked down at the open palms of his hands and then up at Lana, his expression forlorn as a foggy day. “She ran away because of me?”
Lana surprised herself by laughing.
“Micki has quite a full life without you.”
He flinched as if stung.
Lana laughed again and shook her head. She stood up. “What can I get you, Eddie? Coffee? Milk and cookies?” She sat down. If he wanted something he could get it for himself. She was acting crazy but under the circumstances, who could blame her?
“Why’d she run away?” he asked. “You must know.”
“Must I?” She heard the mean, arch tone of her voice. “You have no idea what it means to be a parent. Certainly not of Micki. She’s a complicated girl and you’ve come along at a very bad time for her.” She told him about The Fives. “You should have had the lawyer contact me. There are ways to do this, proper ways, not skulking around—”
“I never meant to—”
“I don’t care what you meant to do, it’s what you did.” She let her voice rise. On the floor beside her cold, bare feet, Gala pricked up her ears. “I’ll bet you didn’t give five minutes’ thought to how your sudden . . . appearance would affect her. Especially under the circumstances.”
“Circumstances. Yeah.” He rubbed his knuckles as if the size of them caused him pain. “See, that’s what I was thinking. If her dad was still alive, that’d be one thing. But since he isn’t and I know she must be hurting on account of it and now there’s this Fives thing, you say—”
“Stop, wait a minute.” Lana waved her hand at him. “How did you know about Jack? My husband?”
“Research.” He shrugged. “On line.”
As simple as that?
“I want to know her, Mrs. Porter.”
He had never finished college. He went to work with a software company that made video games. He was, he told her, blushing, a kind of computer genius. “I can’t spell and I’m a slow reader, but computers make sense to me.”
With friends he had formed a video game company—Delphic—and begun to create and sell games. “Ghost” was Delphic’s first big hit, a whole-world game of skill and strategy and carnage that had taken off on all the college campuses. Even Lana had heard of it and its television spinoff, Mistique. After that came several more successes.
“But I sold my shares in Delphic a year ago.”
“And now you’re rich.”
He laughed softly and looked embarrassed. “Jesus, yes.”
Lana heard the refrigerator click on and purr. Gala stood and went to her water dish for a noisy drink. Lana was conscious of the rain coming now in squalls as the tail of the storm moved east. Behind the house and across the alley a motorcycle started up, revved, and squealed off.
Dawn.
Lana saw how it would be for Micki, the allure of Eddie French with his money and his glamour. She looked around her kitchen, the most comfortable and familiar room in her comfortable and familiar house, and thought that it would be forever after the room through which Eddie French fir
st entered their lives. Not the room where she and Jack had once made love against the counter, not the room where the girls had learned to read.
“It’s my fault she ran off,” Lana said, surprised by her candor. “She wouldn’t promise not to talk to you again and so I said she was grounded.”
“That’s all it took?”
“All? You think that’s nothing?” Righteous anger. She held onto it and felt more confident. “A stranger stalks her—that’s what you were doing, by the way, stalking a teenage girl.” He held up his hands defensively. “A stranger stalks her and tries to entice her into his car—”
“I never did that.” He planted his palms on the table and his chin jutted forward as Micki’s did when she was indignant. “You make me sound like some kind of pedophile. That’s crap. This thing just happened, like it grew, you know?”
He was a kid, that’s what she knew. A kid who struck it rich building games, a horny kid who got lucky and made Micki. And it was easier to get mad than acknowledge the fear that lay deeper than her anger.
All this thinking and feeling—too much, it was too much. Lana wanted to be numb, grayed-out, bland flour-and-water. She walked to the sink and for a moment stood observing the dawn twilight fill her back garden. The rain had stopped and pools of water stood everywhere and water dripped from the eaves and sang down the rain-chain in shimmering dawn-lit drops.
Eddie French tapped a cigarette on the tabletop.
“You can’t smoke in here.”
“I wasn’t going to.”
“Look . . .” She sat again, leaning toward him with her hands on her knees. Looking at the garden had given her a little clarity. “There may be a time when you and Mick can get to know each other. I’m not ruling that out. And anyway, in three years she’ll be eighteen and then it’ll be up to her what she does. But not now. Now I’m in charge and it’s the clearest thing in the world to me that you just don’t know how to be a father. You stalk her, you frighten me. A father would know how wrong it was to do those things.”
Lana stood. Up-down—she must look like a jackass to him, but so what.
“I want you to go home.” Lana crossed the room to her cluttered kitchen desk, opened a drawer, and dug around in the mess until she found an Urban Greenery business card. “If you need to get in touch, don’t call here. Use my e-mail. Legally, I have the right to keep you away from her and I will do it. I promise you, I will.”
He took the card and she put a hand on his arm to urge him out of his chair. He was compliant, as if relieved that she was taking charge. On the porch they put on their shoes. She handed him his soft leather jacket and walked him across Triesta Way to his car and he got in. At its gate, the Tillmans’ Newfoundland woofled amiably.
“Will you let me know she’s all right?” He reached across the seat and opened the glove compartment. He found what he was looking for, another business card.
How very civilized we are.
“Mrs. Porter, I’m going to worry if I don’t know.” His expression—the brows lifted and knit at the same time—was so like Micki.
“But you’re going to stay away.”
“I said I would.”
“All right then. I’ll let you know when she comes home.”
In her bedroom she lay under the duvet, still wearing her Levi’s and sweater. She had slipped a CD of hypnotic Navajo-ish flute music into the disc player beside the bed and willed the music to take hold as she watched dawn fill the room and the gradual emergence of detail. Line by line, the family pictures on the wall gained definition, the ruby-red-and-turquoise-blue-beaded lampshade grew lustrous, and she made out the tiny figurines on a shelf above her dresser. The dancers were only a few inches tall but perfect in their particulars—forever on pointe, forever waiting for their curtain to rise, having no other function than to wait. Jack had brought them home from Hong Kong for his mother after the war and now they were Lana’s. The light revealed more functional items. The rucked-up rectangle of Tibetan carpet, the wastebasket needing to be emptied, a little overstuffed chair where Lana had held both Beth and Micki when they were small and grumpy. She saw where it had worn at its base from the constant rubbing of her heels. Behind the side window’s silhouette of an olive tree, the sky changed from apple-green to a creamy yellow full of curded clouds. She thought of buttermilk and how she’d never liked the slimy feel of it against the back of her throat.
Norman Coates drank buttermilk. She had forgotten that. Indeed, it was a fact she did not know she knew until that instant when she remembered him standing by an open refrigerator door, drinking from a carton. Micki’s father was a rich computer wizard. What was Norman Coates and why did she resist finding out? Afraid, Mars would say, had said, any number of times. But what did she fear? That he was an ordinary man or a terrible man, a drunk or an ex-con? With a part of her mind, she knew that if all these things were true it would not change who she was. But another part knew that just by knowing him she would be forever changed. As knowing Eddie French would change Micki. She would not be Jack’s little girl anymore. Nor even simply Lana’s. A belt of fear tightened around her, and she brought her knees up against her chest and lay like a baby until the flute music did its stuff and she slept and awoke at just after eight to a quiet house. Beth might have overslept. More likely, she had left for school already. Lana knew that she must get up and make herself walk down the hall to Micki’s room.
In the hall she heard Gala scratch her claws against the wall as she stretched. For her own reasons the dog spent the first half of the night at the foot of the stairs, moving to the upstairs hall near dawn to be near her carelings. Perhaps that was when the wolves came, at first light. Lana imagined her beautiful Gala, vigilant through the long darkness, and was knocked back by an unaccountable rush of grief for all of them, for everybody, for the vulnerability of all living things.
Micki’s door was closed. Lana could not remember if she had closed it herself the night before. She turned the knob and stepped in.
Chapter Fifteen
Dressed in Levi’s and a black hooded sweatshirt, feet bare, Micki stood at the balcony door looking out on the backyard. She turned around.
“Hi, Ma.” She grinned sheepishly.
Relief, coming so fast on fear, paralyzed Lana.
Micki shrugged.
“Where were you?”
“Down at the job.”
Lana put her hand on the doorjamb to steady herself. “The dogs—”
Three Dobermans—Buster, Boz, and Freya—worked nights behind the chain link fence surrounding the nursery, gardens, and shop.
“They like me,” Micki said. “But I think there’s something wrong with Buster. He barely got up the whole night.”
“How did you get in?”
“I have a key.”
Lana had forgotten that both girls did. She had also forgotten that some nights Jack went to the nursery when he could not sleep and came home at dawn with dirt under his nails and a happy report that while the world slept he had pulled a bushel of weeds from the native plant garden. Urban Greenery was the first place Jack would have looked for Micki.
She pressed her hands against her eyes to hold back tears of rage and relief and told herself she could collapse later if she had to. “Do you know what you’ve put me through?” Her voice quivered. “Not just me. I had to call everyone—”
Micki’s eyes widened. “You called people? Who?”
“Your friends.”
“You called Tiff? Omigod, I can’t believe you’d do that.” Micki shoved past Lana on the way to her closet. “She’s a Five now and you called her? Now everyone in the world’s gonna know. You have, like, totally humiliated me.”
“I don’t care if you are!” Lana grabbed her arm. “Damn it, Micki, you ran off! I did what any parent—”
“Not Dad.” Crimson bloomed in Micki’s cheeks. “Dad wouldn’t.”
“You left that note. You knew how I’d react.” Micki had manipulated Lana’
s emotions, run them through a shredder. Reason vanished, and propelled by a black, bilious anger, she charged across the bedroom and slammed the door shut. “You’re in big trouble, little girl, let me tell you. I don’t know who you think you are that you can do whatever you want, think of no one but yourself, but what I do know is it’s got to stop because I can’t, I won’t let you sling me around like a—”
“I hate you, you don’t understand, you don’t get it at all!” Micki uttered a stifled scream and fell back on her bed, arms stretched wide like a sacrificial object. “I can’t go back there,” she moaned. “It’ll kill me. I’ll feel like a freak.”
“Give it up, Micki. You’re not a freak, you know you’re not. Stop telling yourself that story.”
“It’s not a story, and besides you’re not my mother.” Micki tugged on her magenta hair. “Like you really know!”
“Don’t push me, Micki. I am very tired this morning and . . . just don’t push your luck.”
Had parenting always been this difficult? If it were, why would anyone do it? When Micki was a baby, Lana had looked forward to mother-daughter conversations, side by side on the bed, talking about life. What bullshit. She and Micki never talked, they argued. They vied for power, that’s what Jack had said. Micki toe-to-toe with the little girl in Lana.
Micki sat up. “You think I’m exaggerating but you don’t know the kind of shit they talk.”
“Stop being a drama queen. The Fives aren’t everyone.”
“Everyone who counts.” She fell back again.
“But why?” Lana cried, almost yelling. “Why do they count?” She crossed her arms over her chest to keep from exploding with exasperation. “Why do they count if they say terrible things about people? Why do they count if they’re mean and shallow?”
Lana thought, I sound like I leapfrogged adolescence, avoided it altogether, like I don’t remember what it was to be young and never pretty enough or talented or funny. Smart—that was the word that had defined her. Lana had been smarter than anyone else she knew except Mars.
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