The Orphan Daughter

by Cari Noga

  I peer more closely at the screen, waiting to feel something. But our sisterhood became as two-dimensional as the images—no depth, texture wiped away by time. I stand up suddenly, poking Sarge on the floor. He half mews, leaping off to his favorite corner of the blue velvet couch.

  Ignoring another beep from the coffeepot, I follow him into the living room, then walk over to the corner bookcase. It’s loaded, every shelf stuffed end to end, with more books and envelopes and papers wedged crossways atop the books. The photo albums are on the bottom. I settle cross-legged on the floor and select the ivory one third from the end. The binding cracks as I peel the cover back from the vinyl sleeves.

  There we are. Me and Gloria at my high school graduation, San Diego Southwest, class of 1984. Even though it was my graduation, Gloria’s the one who shines in the faded print. Her smile looks natural and happy. Mine is forced, my jaw set, one hand clutching the black cap so it wouldn’t slide off and we’d have the requisite graduation photo. Right after, Gloria had grabbed the cap off my head and flung it into the air, not bothering to notice where it landed, leaving me to chase it down. That was Gloria, carefree and confident I’d clean up after her. I was eighteen, so she was nine or ten.

  Mom must have taken the picture, mustering herself out of her bedroom for the occasion. Esteban was long gone by then. She’d married Gloria’s dad when I was eight. She told me later, just before I married Jim and became a Coastie wife, that the best thing about Esteban was that he wasn’t in the military.

  We moved from Twentynine Palms to San Diego a year after my dad died in Vietnam. Mom got a job in a bank and met Esteban there. He owned a few dry-cleaning stores and visited the bank daily to make deposits. It was good, steady stateside work. He wanted to have a child right away. I remember when she told me, at bedtime one night.

  “You’re going to have a sister or a brother, Jane.”

  “When? Why?” I pulled my knees up under my favorite nightshirt, stretching out the rainbow across it. My stomach lurched as I looked at hers. Esteban had already elbowed past me to first place. Evenings of reading aloud together, grocery shopping for our favorite meals, and matinee movies on weekends had disappeared, one by one.

  “We want to be a family,” my mother said, waving vaguely at the garage where Esteban parked the dry-cleaning van. “Every girl should have a sister, after all. Or a brother.”

  “I thought we were a family. Already.”

  “We are. I just meant—you know what I mean, Jane.”

  I hadn’t. But after Gloria was born, I figured it out pretty quickly. It meant Gloria, Mom, and Esteban. I was the outsider, from my different last name to my blond hair and blue eyes to my English-only vocabulary. Suddenly I wonder if Lucy speaks English. She must, if they wanted her to live in the United States. Assumptions, however, have played me for a fool before.

  When Esteban left, the factions shifted again. Mom, whose early adoption of the aerobic revolution had failed to keep Esteban interested, simply withdrew except to go to work. Gloria, my half sister biologically, became a de facto half daughter, as I spent high school making meals, meeting her bus, checking her homework, forging Mom’s signature on report cards and permission slips.

  Like her dad, Gloria was a born charmer. It was easy to fall under her spell. But twice now I’d felt the backlash of charm’s fickle hand, the jerk of a hairpin life turn. Freshman year at San Diego City College, when I met the Coastie with the serious blue eyes and a straight, secure path ahead of him, I was all in.

  Behind me, Sarge drops lightly from the back of the couch, curling up next to my hip. The sun’s passed over his favorite corner, that’s why. Clouds are gathering again, masking the early sun.

  I shut the album firmly, clapping the covers over the excavated memories, and turn to the present. I’ll need someone to check in on Sarge and have Martha hold the mail. Get someone on standby to plow me out in case we get one of those heavy, wet spring snowstorms. Or on the other hand, if it’s warm, to bring out my seed plugs, acclimating them from the roost in my bedroom’s southern window. Might as well call Miguel. He can check out the driveway while he’s at it.

  Miguel’s phone goes straight to voice mail. I ask him to call back, and poke in the fridge for some yogurt and a muffin. As I swallow the last of my stand-up breakfast, I see his dirty white truck coming up my driveway, arm hanging out the window, even though it’s not yet broken forty-five degrees.

  “¡Hola, Jane!” He sticks his head in my back door. “¿Cómo estás?”

  “Hola, Miguel.” I smile, ignoring the how-are-you. “Thanks for coming so quickly.”

  “I was in the neighborhood, down at Nelson’s. You heard he’s putting in hops this year?”

  “Nope.” English is my first language and Miguel’s second, yet like Martha, when it comes to peninsula gossip, he is far more fluent. Nelson’s decision doesn’t surprise me, though. Seems like a new brewpub opens every month in Traverse City.

  “Ripping out his oldest cherry trees and converting five acres.” Miguel shakes his head.

  “When’s the last time you had a cerveza?” I ask.

  “Anoche,” he says immediately.

  “Last night, OK. And when’s the last time you ate a cherry pie?”

  Miguel pauses, ruminating, running his hand over his bristly black hair he keeps crew-cut short. Like Matt, but by choice, not edict. He grins.

  “Aha. Point made. I can’t keep up with you entrepreneurs. Mañana, mañana, always tomorrow you’re thinking about.”

  He’s right. And that habit goes back to the night in my San Diego bedroom when I learned Gloria was on her way. My ability to live in the present vanished because for the first time, I was worried about what tomorrow might bring.

  “Speaking of tomorrow, what’s going to happen with the group that got picked up over in Leelanau?”

  His grin disappears. “Looks like they’ll all be sent back.”

  “Families, too?”

  He shrugs. “If they want to stay, the timing might work, coming into the season. But most of the time, they go back, too. Want to keep the family together.” He shakes his head, running his hands over his hair again. This time it looks like he’s trying to pull out the short strands. “I wish I could make them see. Mexico is so bad right now. What’s more important, staying together or staying alive?”

  “It’s that dangerous?” I ask skeptically. Overnight I’ve come to resent Luis’s unknown family south of the border, absolved of any obligation to Lucy.

  “Sí. This group is probably headed to Ciudad Juárez. Three cartels are fighting for the smuggling routes. Thousands dead.”

  “Thousands?”

  “Sí.” Miguel nods, holds his hand over his heart. “And now, el presidente has brought in the military.”

  “That’s a good thing, right?”

  “I hope so. But there is so much corruption. Government, police, too. If you don’t want to die, you join a gang.”

  “Has that happened to your family, Miguel?”

  He shakes his head. “No. They are not in a large city. But I worry. Mi hermano, I worry all the time they will try to recruit my brother. And my little sister.”

  “Gangs recruit girls, too?”

  “Not for the business. But they are, how do you say it, collateral goods. Kidnapped as trophies, as hostages, or for prostitution.” His jaw sets. “Ana Maria’s quinceañera is next year. She needs to stay safe. Stay in school. I pay for her school. It’s better than nothing, but it’s not safe like here.” He folds his arms, staring out my window.

  “Well.” I want to put Miguel back to his easygoing self. “I’ll be out of town starting Monday for at least a week. Can you backfill the potholes on my driveway, and check in on Sarge while you’re at it? If it’s warm enough, take the seeds out, too?”

  “Claro, of course, Jane. You can count on me.” He relaxes.

  Miguel’s sister stays with me all afternoon. Safe like here. The lawyer said Lucy’s Me
xican relatives wanted her to stay in the US, too. Maybe they are thinking of Lucy’s welfare, after all. La huérfana. Gloria’s hija. Mi—what was the word for niece? I go back to the computer.

  Sobrina. Lucy es mi sobrina, the translation site tells me. And legally, according to Langley, my child. What’s the word for child? As I type, the crosswinds of memory collide. Esteban’s long-faded voice in our San Diego backyard. A nurse in an antiseptic Alaskan hospital corridor, where Jim’s Coast Guard path led us. Where I learned that it wasn’t charm that was fickle, but life itself.

  Niña. I yank my hands back, as if the keyboard scalded me.

  Chapter 5

  LUCY

  “Can I come in?” Mr. Langley asks through my bedroom door.

  I blink a few times, staring out the window from my bed. After the field trip, I climbed in here and haven’t gotten out since except to go to the bathroom. Deirdre brings me food on trays. I hear her and Mr. Langley talking. They seem in a hurry, but nothing’s happening. They walk around talking on their phones; then they talk to each other; then they call other people.

  Now it’s afternoon, and getting gray and cloudy. Lying with my head on my pillow, all the buildings look like they’re growing sideways.

  “Lucy?” He knocks again.

  “It’s not locked.”

  He opens it and stands there, not saying anything.

  “What?” I roll over. His shiny black shoes are almost buried in my shaggy pink rug. Shaggy like uncut grass. Step on a—

  “Can I sit down?” He points to the foot of the bed.

  I shrug.

  The mattress bounces when he sits. Sometimes Daddy made it do that on purpose, to make me laugh. But Mr. Langley’s a lot fatter than Daddy and does it just by sitting.

  “I want to talk about your parents’ memorial service.”

  My stomach starts doing its elevator drop.

  “I’ve gone ahead and scheduled it for Tuesday. They left fairly detailed instructions, but I wondered if there’s anything you’d like to include.”

  “Like what?” I’ve never been to a funeral, or a memorial service.

  “Oh, it could be a lot of things. Playing a song that was special. Writing something to read out loud. Sharing any kind of special memory.”

  “Would I have to get up and talk?”

  “Not if you don’t want to.”

  I stare out the window, thinking about it.

  “Like this, for instance.” Mr. Langley heaves himself upright and takes a picture from my desk. It’s of me and Mom and Daddy at Disney World, with Mickey Mouse in front of the Magic Kingdom. “This looks like a good memory.”

  It was. Because of Mom’s TV show, we got our own guide and didn’t have to wait in line for the rides or anything.

  “Or this one.” He picks up another photo, of us at the Rockefeller Center ice rink. That was just before last Christmas. Phoebe took it. Mom was really working. She just came down from her office for a few minutes. She didn’t even skate, but you can’t tell from the picture. Daddy and Phoebe and I had fun, though.

  “You’ve got a lot of nice pictures here,” he says, looking around the room. “Maybe we could display them somehow.”

  “You mean take them?” I sit up, grabbing both frames from him. “No.”

  “Not permanently. I was just thinking of reproducing them. Picture’s worth a thousand words. Maybe on a larger scale, mounted on easels—”

  “They’re mine. You can’t take them.”

  “Oh.” He looks disappointed. “So is there anything you would like to have at the service?”

  Mom and Daddy, I think. Just Mom and Daddy.

  Later, though, I decide pictures are what I want to show, after all. Trips, holidays, birthdays. They’re digital, so I don’t have to give them up. I can scan the Disney one. Then I’ll put them all into a slide show, like we did at school in New Media class, with music. Almost like a video.

  Lying on my bed, I find the school slide show on my phone. It’s all about New York and how we represent the city’s diversity, Ms. Kedzie told us. We all took pictures of our neighborhoods, places that were important to us, and the show goes through them while that old song “New York, New York” plays. It ends with a little bit of video, our whole class doing a kick line to the song.

  For my picture, me and Daddy went to one of our favorite bodegas in Sunset Park. They would always give me a piece of candy and tell Daddy, “Señor, tiene una hija muy bonita.” He would smile and say, “Gracias.” Then when it was the two of us, he would tell me that yes, I was pretty, but not to forget that it was important to be smart, too.

  That day it was raining, and I’m standing under the striped red-and-yellow awning that covered up the outdoor shelves, trying not to get wet. Daddy was getting wet, I remember. He was trying to hold a big umbrella and take the picture at the same time, but the umbrella kept falling. I was laughing, and that’s when he took the picture. My mouth is kind of open, but otherwise it’s a good picture.

  That was the last time we went there. Some boys hanging out at the subway called me bonita when we left, but Daddy didn’t say gracias to them. He put his arm around me and made sure he was between me and them as we walked past. Under his breath I heard him say that barrio was getting kind of rough.

  The shelves were full of baskets of all different kinds of peppers. We bought some and made chiles rellenos that night. Daddy wore his long white apron that said el cocinero, the chef. Deirdre was out, so when Mom got home we all ate dinner together, just the three of us. It was still raining, and the raindrops spattered the dark window outside, and it was bright and warm inside.

  Remembering that makes me feel good enough to get out of bed. At my computer I open the pictures folder, but the bodega picture isn’t there. Wait, since Daddy took it, it must be on his computer, on the desk in their bedroom.

  Next to the computer is a wedding photo of him and Mom, one of me when I was a baby, and this year’s school picture, all in frames. I lay the wedding and baby photos down on the desk, to take to my room and scan. I need more old pictures like that, ones that probably aren’t on the computer. I guess I’ll need even older ones, too, of Daddy growing up in Mexico, Mom in San Diego. But thinking of them there, in other places, is scary. Where am I going to grow up? We don’t have family here in New York. Will Deirdre stay? I’ve never had an au pair more than a year. When they met at the network in Miami, Daddy was already, like, thirty. Daddy said he knew two things when she walked into the studio: she was going to be a star, and he was going to marry her. “Then you came along, and all three of us lived happily ever after,” he would tell me.

  All three of us. Tears rise. I blink hard and bite my lip. For a second I want to run back to my room and crawl under my covers. Hide from the grown-ups and their phones and plans and happily ever after.

  The computer beeps, all powered up. Even if it’s not happy, there is going to be an after. After Tuesday. Instead of opening the pictures folder, I click on the contacts and start scrolling through to O, Ortiz. There’s a bunch of names and numbers, all starting with 52—that’s Mexico’s country code, Daddy told me. His sister, Aunt Bonita, still lives there. She has a daughter a little older than me, too. Her name’s Gabriella, I think. We only visited once, a long time ago. A couple of names have email addresses, too. Bonita Ortiz has both an email address and a phone number. Are they coming to the memorial service? What about Mom’s family? She had a sister, too. I can’t remember her name. I look under S for Santiago, but there’s no one listed. Nobody’s told me anything about what’s going to happen. All of a sudden I feel exhausted, but I don’t think I can make it to my room. I flop down on Mom and Daddy’s bed instead, crawling under the covers on Mom’s side. There’s another picture on the nightstand, of me when I was about three, sitting in her anchor chair on set. When I was little l loved to sit in her chair and spin. When I got too dizzy, Mom would stop the chair and hold me until the room stopped spinning. The tears fall.<
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  “Lucy?” A woman’s voice. Mom? Am I dreaming?

  “Let’s just let her sleep.” A man’s voice. Was I dreaming all this time? Am I finally waking up, with Mom and Daddy coming home? My eyelids flutter open. But it’s Deirdre, not Mom, sitting next to me, and Mr. Langley in the doorway. My stomach elevator starts to creak.

  “Why aren’t you sleeping in your own room, Lucy?” Deirdre frowns. “I’m not so sure it’s a good idea,” she tells Mr. Langley, like I can’t hear her.

  “I was making my memorial video. He told me to. And then I just got tired . . .”

  “I’ll take care of it, Deirdre, thank you. If you would give us some privacy, please . . .”

  “Of course.” Deirdre’s still frowning, but she backs out of the room.

  “So.” Mr. Langley closes the door behind her and sits down on the bench at the foot of the bed. “I have some news.”

  I lie back down. It feels so cozy here in their bed. I turn to look at the nightstand, to see the picture again.

  “I was able to reach your aunt Jane today. Your mother’s sister.”

  I close my eyes, imagining spinning in the chair, Mom’s smiling face and everything in the studio blurring.

  “She’ll be here Monday, to attend the funeral and get reacquainted with you.”

  The huge weather map on the wall, the coffee mugs on the desk for Mom and her guests.

  “And then, after the funeral, you’ll move to Michigan to live with her.”

  Wait, what did he say? I turn over, the studio vanished, to look at him. “Michigan? Why?”

  “Your parents named her your guardian.”

  “Guard—what?”

  “I know it’s a lot to absorb right now, but it’s best that you know there’s a plan. This is what your parents wanted for you.” He stands up. “Try to get some more sleep. It’s probably the best thing.”

  When he leaves, I don’t have to close my eyes for everything to be spinning.