Juno's Daughters

by Lise Saffran

  It rang three times and then the ringing was followed by click, and … quiet. She waited for the message directing her to voice mail and heard instead a wide-open-sounding silence with a background of… was that shuffling?

  “Hello? Andre?”

  More muffled noises. Then a deep voice that was clearly not Andre’s. It sounded like a young person trying to seem older. “This is Andre. Who may I ask is calling?”

  “Is your, um, father … ?” Jenny could not finish the question. It had occurred to Jenny suddenly to wonder if Trinculo might not have children of his own. The idea of him as a parent was intriguing. But could it really be possible that he had a son and had not told her about him? Maybe the person on the phone was a stepson from a much earlier marriage? She felt she knew Andre well after their weeks together on the island, but how could she be sure? They both had things in their past they had not discussed.

  “Excuse me?” the voice asked. “Excuuuuse me?”

  Jenny lifted the phone away from her ear. She could hear laughter on the other end.

  “Mrs. Alexander?”

  The officer standing in front of her had blond hair that was combed carefully to the side and a lightly freckled, boyish face. When he held his hand out to her to shake she saw that his nails were short and clean. A wedding ring gleamed on his finger.

  He led her down the hallway to a desk and motioned to the squat wooden armchair beside it. “Please sit.” He sat in the swivel chair and lifted a pad off the desk. “Florence tells me you have a missing child to report.”

  Jenny swallowed. “She’s been gone overnight. She’s somewhere in the city, without any money or anyone to …” Her voice broke.

  The cop lowered his pad and looked at her with compassion. “I know this must be very, very hard. How old is your daughter?”

  “She’s thirteen.”

  He nodded.

  “The first thing we’ll do is enter her name and description into King County and national databases. We can put out an AMBER alert, and they’ll show her picture on the news and to officers around the county. Do you have a photograph of your daughter with you, Mrs. Alexander?”

  “Oh, God no, I …” Jenny’s mind whirled. She could call Mary Ann and ask her to get one from the shoebox under her bed. She thought there was a recent school photograph in that pile. The drugstore had a fax machine. No wait, David had some photographs on his computer. He could e-mail one of them. “Let me call a friend. What e-mail should he send it to?”

  The police officer reached for one of the business cards in his desk and handed it to her. She glanced at it. The name said Skip Arnold. Skip? Her baby’s life depended upon a guy named Skip? She dialed David’s number. He answered on the second ring.

  “Jenny! Have you found her?”

  “No. David, I need you to send a picture. The one you took of Frankie on Jasper’s boat last spring.” Jenny read the address off the card. Frankie had caught a thorne shark that day, she remembered. And the boat had been followed by a pair of Dall’s porpoises halfway back to the harbor.

  The cop nodded again. “Good. In the meantime, you can tell me about her. Distinguishing characteristics? Does your daughter have any visible piercings or tattoos?”

  Jenny shook her head no.

  “Does she have a history of being involved in drugs? Prostitution?”

  “No,” Jenny whispered.

  The officer’s tone was matter-of-fact. “If she left them behind, you’ll want to confiscate your daughter’s BlackBerry, cell phone, computer, anything that might give a clue as to whether she was planning to meet up with someone here in the city.”

  Jenny pulled her knees up to her chest and rested her boots on the edge of the chair. “She doesn’t have any of that stuff. And I know who she came here to see. A friend of ours. Only he’s out of town and now she’s just … lost.”

  How could that be? Jenny asked herself again. Why hadn’t she called?

  The officer looked at her for a moment, considering. She wondered what his wife was like. Did they have children? Probably not yet, she thought. The ring on his finger looked new.

  He said, “Well, one fifth of runaways return within twenty-four hours. The younger ones, in particular, don’t usually go far.” He dropped his eyes to the pad in his hands. “The thing is, runaways are not usually running to something. They’re usually running away.” He met her eyes. “Can you think of anything that your daughter, Frankie, right, that Frankie might have wanted to get away from? A boyfriend, maybe? Something else?”

  Jenny shook her head. He would naturally expect Frankie to have been abused and unhappy, she realized. Most of the children he encountered probably were. He did not know Frankie. He had not seen her nestled under a pile of coats on Peg’s couch or reclining on the prow of a fishing boat. He could not imagine how cherished she was.

  “You can call me if you think of anything. One last thing, there are no other friends or relatives in the area?”

  Monroe, thought Jenny. Monroe, Monroe, Monroe. The word entered her mind and then lingered there like a hiccup.

  “No,” she said. “There’s no one.”

  “Will you be staying nearby?”

  “As soon as I get a room I’ll call and let you know where I am.”

  “There’s a La Quinta hotel right around the corner. You might try there.” He stood and offered his hand.

  She had trouble pulling herself out of the chair. It was as if her legs suddenly would not hold her. The young man bent slightly and with a hand under her elbow, he helped her to rise.

  Jenny waited until she was sitting in her truck again in the parking lot to dial Lilly’s cell phone. She could see the Space Needle in the not-too-far distance, but the area immediately around the station was full of dilapidated warehouses and empty parking meters.

  Lilly answered the phone immediately. “Did you find her?”

  “No.” Jenny rubbed her face with the palm of her free hand. It was going to be a hot day. She had only been in the city for a few hours, but already she felt greasy. “Listen to me. Did you ever tell Frankie where your father lived?”

  “When did you … How?”

  “It doesn’t matter now, Lil. What matters is did Frankie know?”

  “I might have mentioned it,” said Lilly. She added quickly, “Though I seriously doubt she would go there. She didn’t remember one thing about him. And besides, I told her what he was like.”

  What was he like? Jenny wanted to ask. What was he like to you? Instead, she said, “Give me the address.”

  “I don’t remember the exact number. But I can describe where it is.” Lilly paused.

  Jenny wished she could see her daughter’s face. She wanted to scan it for information about her meeting with Monroe. About what it had meant to Lilly to finally see her father after all those years.

  “Mom? Hold on, Aunt Sue wants to talk to you.”

  A car door slammed near her and Jenny jumped in her seat. A few spaces away an elderly Asian woman climbed out from behind the wheel of a rusted Buick and began a slow and deliberate march toward the glass double doors at the entrance to the police station.

  “Jenny?” Sue’s voice was high and panicked-sounding. “I phoned Mom and Dad. They’re waiting by the phone in case Frankie calls.”

  Jenny could picture her parents in the small front room of their house in Sacramento. Her mother would be perched on the edge of a chair, pale and full of frightened speculation. Her father would wear a hole in the carpet with his pacing. They would not understand why Jenny had not called them first.

  She took a deep breath. “Thank you.”

  Sue cleared her throat. “Look, Jen. Lilly wants to fly up to Seattle this evening. I know she wants to help, but I don’t think it’s a good idea to …”

  “Good,” she said, “I’ll send you the money for the ticket.” Where the money would come from she had no idea, but she felt a rush of relief anyway. They would look together, she and Lilly. They would
find her.

  Sue hesitated. “It’s not that. I just think …”

  “Please put Lilly on the phone again.”

  “Lilly?” Sue called and then, quickly into the phone she added, “I’m praying for Frankie.”

  “What?”

  Jenny had barely gotten the word out and Lilly was back on the line.

  “Mom?”

  Jenny heard more shuffling and suspected that Lilly was carrying the phone into another room. Her suspicion was confirmed when she said, “Aunt Sue did not just say what I think she said, did she? That she was praying for Frankie?”

  “Let it go, Lil.” She took a deep breath. “Now where did you see your father?”

  “Here’s the thing.” Lilly cleared her throat. “I won’t tell you where Monroe lives unless you promise, promise, not to go see him until I get there.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I’ve got a seat on a plane from SFO to SeaTac. It gets there at six p.m. tonight. We can go after that.”

  Jenny fished a pen out of her bag. “Okay. Give me the directions.”

  “Okay that I’m coming or okay that you won’t go without me?”

  Jenny wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. She wondered if Lilly, somewhere deep inside her, carried the memory of how she had once had set a stuffed dog, cheaply made with appliquéd eyes, on a sobbing Jenny’s lap. How she had sung a song about a peanut getting squished on the railroad tracks. Whoops, peanut butter.

  “Okay to both,” lied Jenny.

  CHAPTER 17

  Monroe

  Her first ever words to Monroe had been so banal, she still cringed when she tried to recall what they were. Something about the beer in the cooler being colder than the bottles in the fridge.

  She remembered exactly what his reply to her had been, though. He had said, “I’m having a panic attack.”

  Jenny was balancing a paper plate full of salad on her lap. She set it down on the deck in alarm. “What should I do? Do you want me to call someone?”

  He shook his head. “Tell me a story.”

  That was the moment she should have walked away. Jenny turned on her side on the Motel 6 bed and watched through the open door as a bedraggled family unloaded shopping bags and a cooler and beat-up suitcases from their trunk. He needed help, he was panicking, for God’s sake, and what happened was that he told her what to do. Not I want you to tell me a story, or It would help if you told me a story, or even Please tell me a story. He looked at her with those blue eyes, Lilly’s eyes, and a rigid jaw and said, Tell me. And she did. She liked the way he told her what to do. He said it in a way that let her know what she was going to do and there was, at that crazy unsettled time in her life, some relief in that. So she told him about how one year when she was about ten and Sue was twelve, their parents took them on a car trip to Wyoming and they stopped at some hot springs. Their dog, a border collie named Rascal and the only dog she had ever loved, hopped out of the car, bolted toward the springs, dove in, and never came up.

  Monroe laughed.

  Jenny stared at him. She had told this story before a number of times. Usually it was greeted with expressions of sympathy or gasps of horror. Never laughter. At the time it happened she thought she would die of grief.

  “We stood there for a long time,” she continued. “At least twenty minutes. Me and my sister were crying and my dad was poking at the water with a stick.”

  Jenny laughed then, too. She offered it all up to him without a second thought: her imperfect family, her sister’s and her own sadness, her younger self. And this being Monroe, he took it. She left with him that night, and less than a year later they were married.

  And that was what Jenny remembered. Not his face. Not the name of the friend who had brought her to the party or the names of the people whose party it was. What she carried with her even to this day was the way it felt when he touched her. As if her life, her real life, was just then about to start.

  Jenny pulled herself up off the bed to hunt for a phone book. She looked in the As but could find no Monroe Alexander. She would just have to look for him, using Lilly’s memories as her guide. But first she dialed Mary Ann’s number. When there was no answer there, she dialed her own.

  “Jenny, any word?” Mary Ann sounded as exhausted as she felt.

  “No. Lilly’s arriving tonight to help me look.”

  “Oh, good. I’m really glad to hear that. Dale and Peg were by earlier. Phinneas has called at least ten times. Chad brought the halibut by for Frankie, and then when he found out what happened he didn’t leave for an hour. He’s ready to come back at a moment’s notice. Everybody is, Jen. Anything you need, you just say.”

  Jenny rubbed her thumb against a burn spot on the rickety bedside table. It had been left by a cigarette, no doubt. She remembered the pack of Camels in her coat pocket but had no taste for them anymore. Just thinking about smoking made her gag. The hotel room door had been open long enough so that the air had lost some of its musty smell, but the extra light did nothing for the atmosphere. Looking at that room, she felt lonelier than she had in a very long time and she couldn’t help thinking that what had happened to her that summer had something to do with it. If she hadn’t felt Andre’s arms around her before, would she be missing them now?

  She said, “I need you to sell my loom.”

  “What?”

  “Anna Birnbaum on Shaw once said she’d give me $700 for it. Tell her that if she’ll give me $850 I’ll include three boat shuttles, two leash sticks, eight bobbins and, let’s see, eight extra heddles.”

  “Jenny, why?”

  “This room costs $70 a night. Lilly and I will have to eat, and I have no idea how long we’ll have to stay here. I saw a place downtown where you can wire me the money.”

  “For goodness sake, don’t sell your loom. You saved forever for that. I’ll send you the money. How much do you need? $850? $900?”

  “No, Mary Ann. Thank you, but this is what I want to do.”

  “It’s no trouble, really. I have three times that in …”

  “No.” Jenny pressed the phone tightly against her ear. It was either that or throw it with all her might against the terrible reproduction of a watercolor of Pike Place Market that hung on the wall. “I love you, Mary Ann, but you either call Anna Birnbaum or I don’t want you to be in my home when I return.”

  If she allowed herself to, she could picture the older woman’s eyes filling with tears. The way her jaw, already lightly padded, softened when she was wounded. She pushed the image out of her mind. The stalls in the watercolor were purplish blue. The water was gray blue behind. The pavement stones, slick with rain, were tinged aqua. It was all blue, blue, blue. All of it.

  “Okay, Jenny,” whispered Mary Ann. “I’ll call Anna Birnbaum. Good luck.”

  “I need it.”

  The building in which Lilly had found Monroe was in North Seattle, near Aurora Avenue. Jenny found a parking spot in front of Family Pawn, and when she noticed a couple of young guys standing in a doorway noticing her, she rolled up the truck windows. The truck wasn’t worth much, but she needed it to get around. She reached over to lock the passenger door before getting out onto the curb. She didn’t usually lock the truck and so had to remind herself to hold the grip down while she shut her own door, too.

  She followed the numbers of the avenues to 97th and then took a right, keeping her eyes open for the four-story brick building that Lilly had described. Jenny walked with her hands in her pockets. She tried to picture Lilly traveling this same sidewalk a year or two before. Would she have brought someone with her? Probably not. She would have come alone.

  She followed Lilly’s directions to the corner of the building where she’d said Monroe lived. The carpet in the hallway was inky with grime and beer and other liquids too vile to contemplate. She could hear a TV set playing loudly behind one of the doors as she passed. On the door that might have been Monroe’s she saw a drawing of some kind of African queen: long pr
ofile, headdress, soft, full lips. Underneath the drawing was the stenciled name Alicia. Jenny stood and stared at it for a long time before knocking. This was the first floor, far right corner, facing the street, which is what Lilly had described. Could this Alicia be a girlfriend of Monroe’s, she wondered? A wife? It had not occurred to her until now that he might have other children. She wiped her palms on her jeans and knocked.

  She was just about to turn away when she heard some shuffling from inside. A young black woman in a bathrobe opened the door just a crack. Her hair was covered by a shower cap.

  “Hi.” Jenny smiled, but the woman’s expression did not change. “I’m looking for Monroe? Monroe Alexander? Does he still live here?”

  “Cross the hall,” the woman mumbled, and closed the door.

  “Thank you.” Jenny swallowed and turned around.

  Monroe’s door was unmarked. She stood in front of it for what seemed like a long time but was really only a few minutes. The door she had first knocked on cracked open again and the woman peeked out.

  “He’s in there,” she said. “You got to knock loud, you know, cause he takes some shit to get to sleep. Those tweakers upstairs are just too damn noisy.”

  With the other woman watching, Jenny knocked hard, one two three.

  She started to turn away, her heart thumping hard in her chest, when the door opened. Suddenly, there stood Monroe in front of her, close enough to touch, his hair shorter than she remembered it and tousled from sleep. He still stood slouched forward as if he was trying to protect his heart with his shoulders, but his arms and chest were padded with muscles he had neither cultivated nor needed as a guitarist in a rock band. He was wearing a thin white T-shirt and loose green army pants that were buttoned but not zipped, the belt hanging open as if he had just thrown them on to answer the door. She did not say anything while he looked at her. She watched recognition creep over his features in a trajectory that went from half-asleep, to disbelief, to surprise.