If Madora had been alone, she would have pulled the car off the road and sobbed into her hands. Instead, she asked Django a question, knowing he would tell her more than she wanted to know and that when he stopped talking the moment of tears would be behind her.
“How much farther is this place?” Los Gatos.
“Are you sleepy? Maybe we should stop for coffee in Santa Maria.”
“I’m just asking.”
“I don’t know. Maybe five hours.” He described the route they were taking up 101 through San Luis Obispo and Paso Robles to San Jose.
“Are the cops looking for us yet?”
For once Django admitted that he did not know. “It depends on how long it takes them to find the trailer.”
He said that by now his aunt would have reported him missing, and sooner or later the cops would link her to Willis. Linda must be in custody by now and would waste no time blurting out the story of her captivity and the baby, and she would say that Willis had stolen him.
Madora thought about the baby boy and his proud parents. She thought of the clothes they had bought him. The car seat and the crib and the stroller. If Linda decided she wanted the baby back, they would have no legal right to him. More than anything else, even her own safety, Madora wanted him to have a happy life.
Django figured that eventually the sheriff’s people would find the trailer and Willis and see the unmade bed and the other rough furnishings. They would know that everything Linda said was true.
“Do you think Willis will confess right off, tell them everything?” Django asked.
“No.” At first he would refuse to speak. Madora knew how proudly stubborn he could be when he was convinced that he was right. But once he began to talk he would explain over and over that he had been helping Linda, giving her a second chance. He would want the police to admire what he had done.
“Your aunt’ll figure out we’re together,” she said. “By now she’s probably scared blue, calling the police and all. Linda will say I was with you. A boy. Your aunt’ll remember my name.” It would all come together, like the center of a bull’s-eye.
Django slumped down in the passenger seat and for a while he was quiet. Madora knew he was thinking about what they had done.
He said, “We’ve got to get to Huck’s. Once we’re there, we’ll be okay. He’ll take care of things.”
Madora looked at him with a mix of wonderment and disgust. “When’re you going to give up? When are you going to stop lying?”
“It’s true; you’ll see. My brother’ll tell you—”
“You said he was your stepbrother!”
“My half brother. Huck. Me and him have the same dad. Had. And he’s rich, way richer than anyone. He’ll get a lawyer and I’ll call Mr. Guerin…”
Madora leaned forward and gently banged her forehead against the steering wheel.
“Hey! Watch the road. What’re you doing?”
“I’m trying to knock some sense into my head.”
“Just trust me.”
When this was over, she would never trust anyone again, but now… she did not see that she had any alternative.
After another long period of silence, she asked, “Are you sure I didn’t kill him?”
“He’s got a concussion; that’s all.”
“Like brain damage?”
“If we’re lucky he won’t remember his own name, but he’s okay. I told you, Madora. He was starting to wake up when I locked the door. He’s just going to have a headache.”
“I’m going to jail. I know it.”
“Huck and Mr. Guerin’ll get you a lawyer, the best.”
“Oh, great, I only go to jail for ten years, not twenty? Not life?”
“You didn’t do anything wrong. Not much anyway. You were, like, brainwashed.”
“What’s that mean?”
“It means Willis said he was helping Linda. He said it over and over and over and you got so you believed him. That’s brainwashing. Have you ever heard of Patty Hearst?”
Did Django ever get sick of being the smartest kid on the planet?
“She was this really rich girl who got kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army. My friend Roid did a report on her.”
“She got kidnapped by a whole army? How do you know that?”
“Not a real army. Just a bunch of people who wanted to overthrow the government.”
Madora decided to believe him. The alternative, that everything out of his mouth was a lie, was too much to endure and made her want to drive the Tahoe into the side of a hill.
“I fed her and washed her.” She thought of the many days she had looked straight at Linda’s tethered ankle and swept around it. The mornings when she had hauled in warm water and made sure Linda washed herself. All the meals she had carried from the kitchen to the trailer. Detail by detail and day by day, she remembered it all and was awash in guilt and remorse.
She kept her eyes fixed on the busy highway but she felt Django looking at her. She did not have to see his expression to know that he agreed. She had done something terrible.
“Why did you do it?” he asked.
“You said I was brainwashed.”
“But when it was happening, why did you think you were doing it?”
She had loved Willis and believed in him and that without him, she would be lost. And he needed her too.
“I thought he’d kill himself if I gave up on him. Like my dad did.”
In Santa Maria they stopped for gas and Madora bought coffee and a package of white powdered doughnuts. They stayed off the highway and drove west on a narrow road that cut through the middle of hundreds of acres of deep green vegetable fields. Foo whimpered for attention, and Django let him lie on his lap. Madora gave the dog one of the doughnuts. They listened to the radio and Django told a circuitous story of Jett Jones and the Dark Entity.
“Can you just shut up?” Madora couldn’t take anymore. “Can’t you for a few hours stop making up stories? Jett Jones and all that shit; none of it’s real. Get it? It’s just stories. And your brother? He’s not rich; he’s some ordinary guy. Stop pretending. He’s probably a drunk or a needle freak. We’ll get up there and he’ll be living in a trailer and the only lawyer he’ll know is the one got him off a DUI.”
Django gave her a dirty look, which Madora took to mean that her criticism had struck home; and after that, for many miles, he stared straight ahead. Foo snored with his head tucked under one end of the seat belt. In the quiet dark they passed through towns Madora had never heard of, and on either side of the two-lane road fields of vegetables stretched by. Back on 101, the Tahoe’s headlights illuminated the name of a winery or tourist attraction. A motel sign made her yawn but she guessed that if she went to bed she would stare at the ceiling, thinking and worrying and stabbing herself with guilt, so she might as well be driving.
It was midnight and she had a buzzing headache behind her eyes. She did not want to think about Willis, about the mess left behind and the emptiness ahead. The quiet was full of too many possibilities.
“Okayokay,” she said, “I’m sorry I was mean.”
Django made a noncommittal sound.
“Just so you know, it’s hard driving on a road like this. It’s way tense with all the cars coming at us.”
“So? You oughta be glad we’re not on the 5.”
He fiddled with the radio again, picking up the voice of a man, reading from the Bible, and two other men arguing politics. He turned it off.
“Do you wish you were still back there with him?” he asked. “Is that what you want?”
She wanted the baby to stay with the couple who paid for him. For herself, she wanted not to be afraid that she had killed Willis or brain damaged him or that the police would find and arrest her and send her to jail. She never wanted her mother to know what she had done. And she did not want to be scared of what could happen in the next five minutes on this road that seemed in the pitch blackness to become both faster and narrower. Th
e hours passed and her nerve threads stretched until they were like the vibrating strings of a musical instrument. She could not stand another minute of it and pulled off the highway in King City. In the parking lot of a Quality Inn, she opened the car and Foo bounded out and immediately relieved himself. Madora began walking the perimeter. Django hurried with her and had the good sense not to talk. Overhead the sky was clear and full of stars. Foo nosed around in the bushes at the edge of the parking lot but never wandered too far off.
Although Linda would be found by the police eventually, unharmed and obviously healthy, the newspapers and television would surely say that Willis was a demon and a monster. Madora’s name would be part of the story and people would say the same about her, adding stupid as well. Her mother would hang her head in shame. Madora tried to remember why she had let Willis bring Linda into their lives in the first place. He kept saying that they were giving her a second chance, rescuing her the way Madora had once been lifted from the unlucky downward spiral that was her life and set on a new path. Willis said it over and over, and she had believed him. Hearing an assertion repeated was not, by itself, reason to believe, and yet she had done so and even helped him. She wondered if brainwashing was a word Django had made up.
They drove through miles of rolling empty land, the night sky dotted with plane lights and occasional stars and off in the distance the glow of a town.
Was it possible to go from being one kind of person to a completely different person in the space of just a few days? That’s what seemed to have happened to Madora. She had loved Willis and wanted to be with him for the rest of her life. Now the thought of him and of what they had done together filled her with horror. It seemed like Django must have gotten the brainwashing thing backwards. To Madora it meant clearing out and cleansing. That was what seemed to be happening to her now. When had it begun? Holding the baby? The night Willis killed the rabbit? After those experiences, her thinking had begun to change. And then Willis had hurt her, and after that she saw him the way he was.
But like an old-fashioned vinyl record that jumped back and repeated the same word or phrase, she kept trying to understand why it had happened in the first place. Why had she made Willis the center of her life, her guide and support? The question rankled, and no matter how intently she worked to distract herself—counting backwards by threes, making words from the names of towns like Guadalupe and Atascadero—why, why, why interrupted her concentration. She realized she might never know the answer completely. What she had done was unforgivable; that much was as plain as daylight.
The Santa Cruz Mountains lay to the left and the sun was coming up through the tinted window on the passenger side, warming the Tahoe’s interior with the smells of stale coffee and panting dog. In San Jose they were caught in morning rush hour but Highway 17 going west toward the mountains was easy driving. They took the Saratoga Avenue exit into Los Gatos. It was bordered in pink oleander bushes and the plants in the landscaped center strip had been carefully clipped and mulched. A rich-looking town, Madora thought. So maybe Huckleberry Jones wasn’t dead broke.
Django consulted the GPS on his cell phone and told her where to turn, right and left along streets without sidewalks, streets with tall, thick trees and houses behind gates and walls. At a narrow road he said, “Turn here! Turn now!”
Gum Tree Lane curved up and around a hill for almost a mile. Near the top, the clear, crisp view was of Los Gatos and the whole Santa Clara Valley from the Santa Cruz Mountains across to the foothills in the east. Madora had never seen so many streets and buildings and wanted to turn the Tahoe around and drive down into the crowded valley and get lost there.
“Don’t stop.” Django was out of his seat belt, bouncing. “We’re almost there.”
In the backseat Foo picked up on his excitement and began barking.
At the top of the hill there was a turnaround in front of a tall cream-colored stone wall with a wide oaken double gate. Madora put the car in park and dragged on the emergency brake.
“Now what?”
“Wait here.” Django leaped from the car and Foo bounded after him. He ran to where a metal box was set into the wall and pressed several keys and after a moment the gate swung open.
With Foo beside him, Django ran through the gate, gesturing for Madora to follow. Between fearsome cactus gardens, lethal with thorns, and mounds of scarlet bougainvillea, the road narrowed, becoming wide enough for only one vehicle, and there were traffic bumps every few yards. Slowly it was dawning on Madora that all the stories Django had told her were true.
Ahead another wall loomed and another gate, this one constructed of metal bars and ornate curlicues. Through it Madora could see the shape of a house and cars behind banks of shrubs and trees. A man was coming toward them.
“Hey, Junior,” Django called, waving. “It’s me!”
He ran back to Madora and stuck his head in the car window.
“That’s Junior. He’s one of Huck’s bodyguards. Remember? I told you about him?”
Junior was the biggest man she had ever seen. He wore a T-shirt that fit close to his skin, and his forearms were covered with tattoos. She remembered Jammer sitting cross-legged on the floor of the party house, his gold tooth and the scar like a notch cut into his hairline. Reflected in the rearview mirror, the first gate was far behind her, the driveway narrower and the gardens on either side, barbed and thorned and deadly. All someone had to do was push a button and the first gate would close, trapping her, locking her in.
“Hey, kid,” Junior said. “How’d you get here?”
“My friend brought me. Where’s Huck?”
As Madora watched, Junior put his hand in his pocket.
“China, Djang.”
Junior raised his arm and pointed something the size of a phone. Madora waited for the iron gate ahead to open.
It’s true. Everything. All of it’s true.
But the second gate would not open until the first closed. It was a security thing. Madora thought of police and guns and prison, and she knew without seeing it that police cars were parked around behind the bank of trees and shrubs.
She jammed the Tahoe into reverse. Django yelled and ran toward the car but she didn’t stop and made it through the closing gate with only a second to spare, into the turnaround and down the hill.
Chapter 28
Two Years Later
On the day Robin had returned from visiting her father she had been irritated to discover that though it was almost dark, Django was not at home and his bike was gone. He was off riding somewhere, she supposed, and had lost track of time, but he would be home before nine. She had known she would have to tear into him then for disobeying her. He would say that he was safe in the dark because his bike had front and back lights and reflectors on every surface where they would stick. She would have to ground him; she supposed that was what a good guardian would do.
Later, when she realized he was not coming back, she had felt guilty for taking his tardiness so casually. She had been happy to have time alone to think. It would take her the rest of her life to absorb what she had learned from her father.
She made a large gin and tonic and took it out onto the patio behind the house. The drip hoses had been on that afternoon and the soil in the planters near the house where she grew marigolds and petunias every summer smelled sweet and damp. It was a smell she associated with summer as much as the scent of the flowers themselves.
She needed the time alone and had actually thought, Thank God Django’s not here. I couldn’t deal with him now.
The summer after their father left them, their mother had enlisted Robin and Caro in the huge task of tearing out the front lawn, digging up the sod and working in yards of new soil purchased from Reiner’s Nursery. Her mother had painted the house herself, a bright yellow with blindingly white trim, as if she wanted to announce to the neighbors that despite what they might think, she did not need their sympathy. That summer and every summer until she sold the hous
e and moved south to be near Robin, she had planted a vast cottage garden in the front, clusters of common annuals like black-eyed Susan and coneflower, cupflower and nasturtiums and cosmos and rudbeckia. At the height of summer, passersby sometimes stopped their cars to take photos of the yard. Robin remembered her mother standing at the picture window, watching the cars slow as they drove by, a look of stubborn satisfaction on her face.
If the people in the neighborhood and driving by had known how she lied and connived, how she had carved her pound of flesh from Robin’s heart, the house with the flowers would have been notorious.
Caro, Nola, Frank. They had all conspired to keep the secret from Robin. She had gone through her life blaming herself for her father’s abandonment, believing she had done something wrong or not been good enough, while Caro, Nola, and Frank knew the truth. Any one of them could have told her the truth, but each had what seemed to them a good reason not to. Even Caro had been drawn into the cruel compact Nola had forced on their father in exchange for his freedom. Robin did not know what to think now, what to feel except empty. Cavernous.
At nine thirty, she had finally called the sheriff’s office, and in the early hours of the morning, the pieces of the story began to come together. Linda had been found staggering out from behind the Arroyo Elementary School dragging thirty feet of wire rope. She told a story of abduction and a long captivity. She talked about Madora and a boy who seemed to know a lot about everything. He had a name she could not remember. Linda did not know what kind of car they were driving but it seemed to be an SUV and she thought it was black. That was enough for an Amber Alert. Many hours later sheriff’s deputies found the house on Red Rock Road and Willis locked inside the trailer. He connected Django to the case and then Robin.
Early the next morning she had told the officers where she thought Django and Madora were going and they contacted the police department in Los Gatos.
Little Girl Gone Page 20