Little Girl Gone

by Drusilla Campbell

  In August Robin and Django began a seven-month stay in Tampa, Florida. It was odd, Robin thought, looking back, that what neither of them had really wanted turned out to be a good move after all, the best thing they could have done. In a new environment where neither of them felt at home, they kept each other company and had become friends. His spirit of adventure spurred (and sometimes shamed) Robin to try new things. Scuba diving scared her half to death but she liked rock climbing and bicycling. In Florida, where almost everyone seemed to be in transit between one life and another, there was nothing to remind either of them of Caro or the past. Django began to heal, and Robin, without really trying, began to reinvent herself, peeling off the layers of protection one by one. In the Tampa office of Conway, Carroll, and Hyde she made friends and was encouraged to attend law school.

  They returned to Arroyo after seven months away and the house she had once loved felt fussy and dull. One morning she picked up the phone, called a Realtor, and put it on the market. She took the LSAT and, as the attorneys at Conway, Carroll, and Hyde had known would happen, she scored high. She enrolled in a local law school and she and Django moved to a condominium in the urban center of San Diego, only three blocks from Petco Park, where on summer evenings they could sit on the balcony and watch baseball through binoculars. She surprised herself by becoming quite a Padres fan.

  Django was a serious piano student and attended a private school where he had a small, tight circle of friends who envied him for living downtown and often used the condo as home base. Robin had stopped being surprised when stray teenagers appeared at the breakfast table. Sometimes she visited her mother, who, since her successful back surgery, had become a world traveler, taking off for the South Pole or Ulan Bator and returning to her town house only long enough to wash her clothes and repack her bag. Seeing her once or twice a year was all Robin could manage.

  She had never told her mother that she knew about the bargain struck long ago, the separation that was really a divorce. She had many reasons for her silence, but the basement truth was that Robin knew if she once started, the eruption of anger and hurt might never stop. She didn’t want that. Instead of taking it out on her mother, she vented to Dr. Rose, a skillful therapist who seemed willing to stand in for Nola when necessary.

  Conversations with her father were almost always stilted and artificial, as each tried to act as if theirs was an ordinary father-daughter relationship. Though she understood why he had turned his back on her, from time to time the memory of rejection flared up, a laceration that never healed completely. Perhaps, if she could discover the courage to confront her mother, the wound might close forever; but the truth was, as she had discovered in therapy, she was a little afraid of Nola. Confrontation with a woman who could build a life based on a lie and use her daughter’s happiness as a bargaining chip would be an ugly thing.

  In her bedroom Robin kept several framed photos of Caro she’d brought back from the house in Beverly Hills. She often looked at the one taken the day she and Caro went horseback riding. They had been chosen for an excursion sponsored by Holy Rosary Academy to a ranch off Highway 1, in the hills near San Simeon. Eighteen girls wearing trousers under their blue and red academy tunics milled around the ranch, standing and sitting on the fence rails. It came time to ride, and Robin was afraid of her horse, a soft-eyed, sway-backed mare named Chloe. Her confusion about how to place her foot in the stirrup and hold the reins, her fear of being up high and the discomfort of sitting on the hard leather saddle with her legs stretched wide around the old mare’s midsection, the heat of the afternoon, and the dust all conspired to make her unhappy. She turned to Caro for understanding and was just in time to see her sister swing into the saddle and take off around the turnout ring, cantering a figure eight.

  For years their father had been taking Caro to riding lessons in Griffith Park. It was a very Caro moment and Robin did not blame her sister for it. She didn’t blame her for any of it.

  Chapter 29

  Sometimes Django still had a Pavlovian reaction to the ringing telephone. Say he was in the kitchen pouring a bowl of cereal and his cell phone rang. He’d think: Mom.

  For the last year he had been seeing a psychologist, Dr. Belknap. She and Dr. Rose shared an office but Dr. Bee specialized in teenagers. Half the kids Django knew had shrinks. Dr. Bee said Django was depressed—like this was a flash from outer space. A bunch of his friends were on meds for ADD or they were bipolar or whatever. It seemed to Django that it just went along with being alive. He could take meds too if he wanted, but he preferred to go without. He told Dr. Bee that after everything he had been through, he would probably be depressed for the rest of his life; he might as well get used to it. He wasn’t suicidal or anything close. Just flatline.

  Probably music kept him from going crazy. It set him free.

  Lately he’d begun composing—trying to, anyway. He thought of his father spending hours in his music room playing the same few bars over and over, changing the bass line, the beat, the key. Ira said when Django wrote something good enough he would help him get it recorded. Alone in the condo, fiddling on the piano, he talked to his father as if he were sitting somewhere just out of sight, listening. Maybe he was.

  Dr. Bee said he wasn’t crazy. Nowhere near.

  Django also talked to Foo.

  His aunt hadn’t been so hot on the idea of a dog, especially a pit bull with a head like a boulder; but then Foo wagged his tail and panted dog breath in her face and she gave in. He was the best friend Django had.

  If it weren’t for the piano and Foo, he’d wig out.

  During one of his sessions with Dr. Bee he had talked about how Foo seemed to understand him, how he felt safer and not so depressed when Foo was around. This led to explaining where the dog came from. Dr. Bee was the only person Django had ever told the whole story of Madora. Her and Mr. Guerin. The police knew a lot of what happened because they practically gave him the third degree to get it out of him, but Mr. Guerin stayed with him the whole time so it wasn’t so bad.

  He wondered where Madora had gone that day she backed out of the driveway and roared down Gum Tree Lane. To Sacramento probably, but he never let on to the cops. Eventually they had found her mother on their own. Django had watched her interviewed on television, and from the way she was crying, he didn’t need to be an empath to know she was scared and worried about her daughter and telling the truth when she said she had never seen or heard from her. It was like Madora had dropped off the edge of the world. Django hoped she was safe and not hooked up with another pervo. No one had ever mentioned the roll of cash in the Tahoe’s glove compartment, so he hoped that meant Madora had taken it when she dumped the car. For a few months the sheriff made a big deal about finding her, but eventually they lost interest. They had Willis, and he was the sleazebag they wanted.

  Django had never regretted driving up to Huck’s that day, leaving Willis locked in the trailer and Linda back behind the elementary school. For a while he was in a world of trouble, but once he and Aunt Robin got to Tampa, it was like they had moved to another planet. He just wished he knew if Madora was safe. He had asked Mr. Guerin to spend some of his trust money looking for her and he said he would when Django graduated from high school. Dr. Bee said Madora had been as much a prisoner as Linda. She got that right. He wished his mother were around to talk to. She liked philosophical conversations. Aunt Robin preferred facts and was going to make a great lawyer.

  Basically, Django’s life was turning out okay. His new school was okay and he got along with Aunt Robin okay. Okay-okay-okay, but nothing great, except the piano and Foo. They were stellar. Huck too. Django spent vacation time with him. They went up to Canada to a private lake and fished every day, which got sort of boring after a week. But Huck listened when Django talked about music, and his friends were cool. They treated Django like one of the guys and let him drink beer. Another time they went for a cruise in the Caribbean on a big sailboat. More fishing, but he got to scuba,
which was awesome. Otherwise, sailing was boring, but okay.

  Dr. Bee said he should be patient; he wouldn’t always feel flatline. He didn’t believe her but he didn’t disbelieve her either. He was just blah about the future and she said that was fine, take it one day at a time.

  His idea was that he was a prisoner. Like Linda in the trailer he was locked into missing his mother and father and he was never going to be happy until he found the key and got out. Dr. Bee said there wasn’t a key. She told him grief was a process, like learning to play the piano and practicing scales a million times a week, and he just had to trust the process. It sounded like shrink bullcrap to him, but he didn’t have any better answer so he pretended to believe she knew what she was talking about. Sometimes he would go along and start to feel better and then the phone would ring and he would wait to hear his mother’s voice. Instead he would hear the doors slam shut and the locks click and everything would start all over.

  Chapter 30

  Two years later, all Madora had to do was close her eyes, think about her escape from between the double gates, and her whole body remembered how it felt to speed down Gum Tree Lane, careening around corners so fast she scared herself. But what had scared her even more that day was the big man Django called Junior, and the cop cars she was sure lay in wait for her behind the bushes and trees. Her leg shook and jerked as she braked to avoid a ground squirrel’s dash across the road; she overcompensated on the next curve and heard the tattoo of gravel hitting the Tahoe’s hubcaps. At the bottom of the hill she turned right because it was faster than waiting for a green light; and at the next light, a mile farther on, she turned right again. A city block later, a sign had told her she was on Bascom Avenue, eleven miles from San Jose.

  She could not tell where the actual city began. She drove through blocks of houses and apartment buildings, office complexes surrounded by grass and gardens, more houses, and then strip malls and vast parking lots. The surface street expanded to three lanes each way with a wide green and floral center strip, narrowed again, and then widened once more. Almost every intersection had a bank of lights and an array of confusing signs.

  Madora’s chest ached from holding her breath. Her shoulders burned with tension.

  She had ditched the Tahoe in a mall parking lot and waited forty minutes for a city bus that stopped not far from the Greyhound station. In her purse she carried the eight hundred and seventy-two dollars Django had left in the glove compartment. She had not had much experience with money, and at first she felt rich with so much cash in her pocket, enough to last for weeks, she thought. But a one-way ticket to Sacramento cost more than twenty-five dollars, and lunch—a hamburger with stale fries and gluey cheddar cheese—cost five. She had seen right away that her nest egg would not last long.

  Madora sat on a bench outside the bus depot, and for a little while her thoughts had drifted as she watched the busy street; but gradually they focused, and she began to assess the facts of her situation. By now the sheriff’s department was looking for her and maybe cops too. Tomorrow or next week uniformed officers would knock on Rachel’s door and pepper her with questions. If she was still married, her husband might say she had to choose between Madora and him. Madora did not want her to have to make that choice, and she knew that the most loving thing she could do was stay away from Sacramento.

  Without giving it great thought, Madora adapted her plans from those of a girl going home to her mother to those of a girl on the run.

  Two blocks from the bus station, the manager of a modest hotel catering to low-budget travelers was glad to hire Madora for cash at slightly less than minimum wage, no questions asked. No social security number, no driver’s license. She told him her name was Marilyn and he believed her. The hotel company owned a motel about three miles away where she could afford to rent a room by the week.

  For the next two years she had walked to and from work every day in all kinds of weather, setting out before sunup, getting home after dark. As she walked west in the morning, the sun rose and warmed her back as it had when she sat on her boulder at the end of Red Rock Road.

  One day she met a Vietnam vet called Sarge by the people on the block. He and his dog, a bowlegged brindle pit bull named Pokey, lived behind a car repair shop and were the unofficial night watchmen for the area. On her way to work, Madora stopped at a Jack in the Box most mornings and bought the dog a hamburger. She was making a deal with God. If she took care of Pokey, Django would take care of Foo.

  She lived alone and so quietly that after two years none of her neighbors knew her last name, and though she was often too tired at the end of the day to do more than strip to her bra and panties and climb into bed, she did not pine for her old life. But she did miss Foo. If she had time in the morning she sometimes sat beside Pokey on the curb and laid her arm across his muscled shoulders, and he turned his head and licked her ear. Sarge kept a long-running conversation going with himself. It did not seem odd to him that Madora talked to Pokey like a friend.

  Once she had lived in Rachel’s house, following Rachel’s rules. Then she lived in Willis’s house, and he had another set of rules. Living alone, she made her own rules. She started work on time and, when she could, earned extra money staying late or helping in the kitchen of the all-day breakfast joint next door. She ate three meals a day and never watched television after nine p.m. because to do her job, she needed a good night’s sleep. Her life in San Jose was a wide spot in the road, not a dead end. A resting place. A time-out.

  She kept her room at the motel spotless, and despite the worn carpet and burn marks on the dresser, it had the advantage of being her own, with a key and a dead bolt that locked on the inside. Her work at the hotel was physically exhausting, but she was young and strong and smart enough to watch and learn the tricks of the older women who had been cleaning all their lives. She wore a mask and gloves and covered her hair with a plastic shower cap. The hotel was a pass-through for students and underfunded tourists, not an affluent clientele that tossed around hundred-dollar bills; but coins and small-denomination bills were ordinary finds on the closet floor and between the chair cushions. The other maids told her she could keep found money; no one expected her to give it back. She received occasional tips and put away all she could, hidden in an envelope taped flat to the underside of the table next to her bed.

  Cleaning rooms, walking to and from the hotel, standing in line at the corner market, and talking to Pokey: her life had taken shape, and the pattern of the weeks became months and then years. On her day off she liked to go to the movies and sit near the back. Sometimes she moved around the theater, changing her seat three or four times during the feature, just because she could. She visited the library and read the paper. For a while, Willis was front-page news.

  Months after he was sentenced to fifteen years in prison, she did not quite believe that bars would hold him. She remembered how easily he had seduced and conned her and she was sure he would scheme a way to escape punishment. She had an uneasy sense that he might suddenly leap at her from behind a Dumpster or break into her room. Occasionally she worked for tips only at a bar a few blocks from the hotel. One Saturday night when the place was packed and rowdy, a man approached her who was so like Willis that she dashed for the back room, crashing into another server with a tray of beers balanced on her palm.

  A librarian taught Madora how to use the Internet and she read the transcript of the trial. The press and government attorneys called Willis the word Django had taught her: sociopath. Every online article had pages of comments from readers, and no one seemed to believe that he had not raped Linda though she swore he had never touched her that way. Regardless, they all thought he was a monster.

  In a long feature article Madora learned about Willis’s sister, Daphne. After reading it she had put her head down and cried until the librarian came over and asked if she was feeling ill. She had never heard of Daphne, never even knew he had a sister; and it was a betrayal that Willis talked about h
er to a reporter, someone he barely knew. But the story helped her make sense of him and his compulsion to save girls who lived marginal lives. Madora knew that he had taken advantage of her youth and innocence, but she never thought of him as a monster.

  She had been alone and frightened when he found her, teetering on the edge of a precipice. He never said he was her guardian angel. He just held out his hand and she took it.

  Two years passed in this way and she was not unhappy. Gradually and without realizing it, she prepared for the next and necessary stage of her life.

  Clarity came to her one morning as she was cleaning an unpleasant mess left behind by a group of backpackers: beer cans and spilled wine, food wrappers, vomit in the bathroom. It was not the worst she had seen, but it amazed her that people could make such a wreck of their rooms and then walk away, leaving it for her to clean up. As she stood in the doorway wondering where to begin her work, she realized that she had done the same thing when she fled San Diego with Django, and then again, when she abandoned the Tahoe, called herself Marilyn, and walked into another life, leaving the mess of the old one for others to deal with. Now all her nights were restless and filled with troubled dreams that she knew would not end until she cleaned up after herself.

  For the first time that she could ever remember, Madora made a plan for her life.

  First, she would see her mother and tell her everything so that when the detectives and investigators came to question her again—as they were sure to do—Rachel would know the truth. She might not want to see her. Madora tried to prepare herself for that chance. She would beg for just five minutes to say that she had been very wrong to leave Yuma with Willis and foolish not to heed her mother’s warnings. She wanted her to know that she loved her. An apology would just be words, but she wanted to say she was sorry for all the pain she knew she had brought into her life.