Daughter's Keeper

by Ayelet Waldman

  “Oh Arthur, I’m sorry. I really am. But what could I do? I mean, really, I didn’t have a choice.”

  “Of course you didn’t,” he said. Something in his tone made Elaine look up. He glanced away.

  “What?” she said.

  “Nothing.”

  “No, really. Did I do the wrong thing?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Arthur! Please. Don’t do this. Not now. What are you trying to tell me? Are you telling me I should have left her to rot in jail?”

  He stood up, crossed the room, and jerked open the fridge. “Of course not,” he said, then gulped down some orange juice from a cardboard container.

  Elaine closed her eyes. He knew she hated when he did that.

  He wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “I just can’t believe that you would do this without discussing it with me, without even telling me.”

  “I tried to call.”

  “Why did you need to do it right away? You could have waited a day. Or even an hour. You know how much the Tahoe place meant to me. It would have been ours, Elaine. Not mine. Not yours. Ours.”

  “I’m sorry, Arthur. I’m so sorry.”

  He leaned across the counter and took her chin in his hand. “Look, it’s none of my business what you do with your money, or what you do with your daughter, for that matter, but I just have to say one thing.”

  “What?”

  “I can’t stand to see you continuing to deny yourself the things you deserve. You’ve been incredibly good to that girl. You’ve bailed her out of catastrophe after catastrophe ever since she was two years old. When is it going to be your turn?”

  “I don’t know,” she whispered.

  “You’ve got to confront the fact that maybe that’s part of the problem.”

  “What is?”

  “That you’ve always been there for her to land on. Maybe if you weren’t always there waiting to pick up the pieces, she might have learned to land on her own two feet. Maybe what Olivia has needed all along is a little tough love.”

  Elaine didn’t answer. In some ways she knew he was right, but she couldn’t forget the betrayal in Olivia’s eyes when her lawyer had announced to the entire courtroom that Elaine wasn’t willing to put her house up to post her daughter’s bond.

  She reached for his hand and held it tightly. “You’re right. I know you’re right. But this isn’t the time to teach her a lesson. After this is over, I’m going to sit down with her and tell her that enough is enough. I am. Really.”

  He nodded and squeezed her hand in return.

  “There’s one more thing,” Elaine said. She hesitated, watching his face. “As part of her bond, she’s going to have to live here with us.”

  Arthur stared at her for a moment and then got up and began slicing the raw chicken meat, smacking the cleaver down on the cutting board. The force of the blows made the ice in the pitcher of margaritas tinkle and chime.

  ***

  Olivia spent her four days and three nights in jail trying to make herself tiny, mute, and invisible. She refused Queenie’s repeated offer of a joint, afraid that one of the many guards would see her or that they would haul her away for her court-mandated drug testing. She kept her gaze low, avoiding eye contact with everyone. Once, ­walking down the hall to her cell, she saw a small dark woman cowering against the cell bars. Two fat women with bleached-blond hair were leaning against her, rifling through her clothes. One had her knee jammed between the weeping woman’s legs. A guard watched ­impassively from the end of the hall, saying nothing until the blondes had taken a pack of cigarettes away from the small woman and let her go. Only then had he shouted, “Okay, break it up, ladies.”

  The woman, still crying, walked quickly by Olivia. Their eyes met for a moment, and Olivia opened her mouth, wanting to offer some words of comfort and commiseration. But she could not. Instead, she looked away and hurried on down the hall.

  That night Olivia lay in her bunk, her eyes gritty with insomnia and aching from the glare of the ever-present fluorescent lights. Her skin felt like a suit that had shrunk in the wash, and she was overcome by an almost irresistible urge to slice herself open, to escape from the confines of her own body. She began to writhe in her bed, tangling her legs in the coarse acrylic blanket. Suddenly she squeezed her hand into a fist and slammed it into her forehead above her left eye. The dull ache it left quieted her somehow. With an almost clinical detachment, she did it again. The urge to flee subsided enough for her to stop her tortured wiggling, and she tried consciously to loosen the contracted muscles of her legs and back. Olivia wondered if she were losing her mind.

  On the fourth day she was in the common room, staring vacantly at the television, when she heard a voice call her name. She looked around and saw a female guard with lips pursed in a disagreeable scowl.

  “Olivia Goodman?” the guard asked.

  “Yes,” Olivia said, in a small voice, hope fluttering in her chest.

  “Right. Get your stuff.”

  “I don’t have anything,” Olivia said.

  The guard looked at her curiously and then shrugged her shoulders. “Come on.”

  Olivia followed her down the hall, through a gate, and into an elevator. The guard led her into a small room where another woman handed Olivia her clothes. She changed quickly, gingerly pulling on the sour-smelling jeans and sweatshirt. The guard then led her down another corridor and through a series of interlocking gates. Finally, she stood in small passage, at the end of which was a large green steel door.

  The guard stood silently, and after a few moments, the door buzzed. She pushed against it and it opened onto the street. Olivia walked through, and it clanged shut behind her. She stood, blinking in the sudden bright light. She had not been outside since the night she was arrested. She raised her face to the sun, closing her eyes against the glare. The back of her eyelids glowed red, and she breathed deeply. Standing in the street, hemmed in by the freeway on one side and on the other the jail’s towering cement walls, punctuated with narrow slits, Olivia had a sensation of soaring across infinite space. She raised her arms slightly and made as if to spin around in a circle. The blare of a car horn jerked her eyes open. She looked down the block and saw her mother’s Honda Accord parked on the other side of the street. As she watched, the car pulled out of its parking spot and drove slowly toward her. Olivia took another deep breath, then ran across the street to the car and opened the passenger door. She got in and slammed the door.

  “Please, get me out of here as fast as you can,” she said.

  Her mother reached across the seat and hugged Olivia with one awkward arm. Olivia stiffened. When she was a very little girl, she would wrap her arms and legs around Elaine’s neck and waist, clinging as hard as she could to her elusive mother. By the time Olivia was a teenager, however, she learned to prefer the comfort of a long string of more or less willing boys to that of the woman who had never seemed at ease in her embrace. By now, Olivia had grown as uneasy with her mother’s touch as her mother had always been with hers.

  “Are you all right?” Elaine asked.

  “Just peachy.”

  “Was it horrible?”

  Suddenly Olivia wanted to reach across the seat and slap her mother across the face. Instead, she said, “You don’t want to know how it was. You want me to say that it wasn’t too bad, that I’m fine. You don’t want to hear about how the women fuck the guards in exchange for drugs or how I spent half of every day puking because the place stinks like shit and Lysol.”

  Elaine inhaled sharply through her nose and stared straight ahead. They rode in silence for a while. Despite herself, tears filled Olivia’s eyes. She ignored them, and they streamed down her cheeks. She imagined that she could hear the plip plop as they fell from her chin into her lap.

  “Did anyone hurt you?” Elaine whispered.

  Olivi
a’s anger left her in a rush, like air escaping a torn balloon. “No,” she said. “It was disgusting in there, Mama. I can’t go back.”

  “You won’t have to go back.”

  Olivia nodded and flipped down the mirror in the sun shade. Her hair hung in grease-stiffened curls. Her face was mottled and her normally smooth cheeks and forehead were dotted with pimples.

  They continued up the freeway and into Oakland in silence. When the car pulled up in front of Olivia’s apartment, Elaine said, “Should I wait here while you get your things, or do you want me to come in and help you?”

  It was only then that Olivia realized that she was, of course, going to her mother’s house. To her surprise, she felt intense relief at not having to stay alone in the home she had shared with Jorge.

  “Wait here,” she said. “I won’t take too long.”

  Olivia ran up the path to her apartment. When she got to the door, she realized that she had no keys. She tried the knob. It was locked. “Fuck,” she said softly, and began searching for a rock to break a window. She was bent over, rummaging through the dirt under the front window, when she felt something cold and wet on the small of her back. She startled and turned around to find her neighbor’s rottweiler puppy. She kneeled down, scooped the wriggling black dog into her arms, and buried her face in the soft fur of its neck.

  “Hey,” a voice said.

  Olivia looked up and saw the puppy’s owner. He wore baggy black cotton pants with zippers and snaps in random places, and his hair was a sea urchin of short dreadlocks.

  “Hi,” Olivia said.

  “You okay?”

  “Yeah. I’m locked out.”

  “I know,” he said. “Mother-fucking 5-0 left the door wide open the other night. After they cleared out, I locked it for you. Your keys was on the kitchen counter.” He stuck out his hand and dangled Olivia’s key chain with the Virgin of Guadeloupe marble hanging from the ring.

  “You went into my apartment?” she said.

  The young man’s face grew hard. He dropped the keys on the ground next to Olivia and backed away.

  “I didn’t take nothing,” he said, and whistled for his dog. “C’mon 8-Ball.”

  “No! Wait!” Olivia struggled to her feet. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that how it sounded. Thank you. Really, thanks for locking the door.”

  The man seemed to relax.

  “You out on bond?” he said.

  “Yeah,” she said.

  “Federal or state?”

  “Federal.”

  “Yeah. Fucking DEA. My cousin’s at Lompoc doing twenty years on a bullshit DEA crack bust.”

  “Twenty years?”

  “Mandatory fucking minimums.”

  “Jesus,” Olivia said. “What did he do? I mean, what was he convicted of?”

  “Nothin’. He wasn’t convicted of nothin’. Pled guilty.”

  “He pled? Why?” The young man rolled his eyes, and Olivia blushed but continued, “I mean, if it was bullshit.”

  “It was bullshit. All the fool did was introduce people. Ricky, meet Montel. Montel, meet Ricky. Thas it.”

  “And he went to jail for that?” Olivia began to panic. He had to have it wrong. You didn’t go to jail for introducing people. “He ­didn’t, like, buy crack or something? Or help those guys buy it?”

  “Girl, the fool never touched the shit.”

  “Oh, God.”

  “They want you in jail, you in jail. Thas it. You don’t need to do nothin’.”

  “Oh, God,” she whispered, again.

  “Mother fuckers got me for a bullshit note-drop bank robbery.”

  “You were in jail?”

  “Three and a half years. Federal time.”

  “And you’re out now.” Olivia desperately wanted to ask him what it had been like, how he’d survived, but she was afraid he would think her question pushy, or, worse, trite.

  “Yeah. I’m out. Supervised release. You want some help getting your stuff?”

  Olivia started to refuse but saw his face threatening to close up again. “Sure,” she said. “I’m Olivia.”

  “Treyvon. This 8-Ball.” The puppy wriggled its entire body in ecstasy at the sound of its own name.

  Together they walked into the apartment. Olivia, her mind whirring with what Treyvon had told her about his cousin, stood forlornly in the middle of the room, staring around her at the havoc wrought by the police. The belongings strewn about, torn and broken on the floors, looked absolutely unfamiliar to her. She knew, of course, that that piece of pink fabric was her corduroy shirt, but it seemed utterly strange. She nudged a can of soup she didn’t remember buying with her toe, and it rolled across the pitted and scratched wood floor. It bumped into a hairbrush and stopped. She walked across the floor, bent down, and picked up the hairbrush. She weighed it in her hand for a moment, and then let it drop with a small thud.

  “You gonna clean up?” Treyvon asked.

  She stared around at the detritus of her life. Slowly, she shook her head. She couldn’t face it now, and there would be time to do it later, when her bond was lifted and she was able to move back. Izaya had told her the case would be dismissed, hadn’t he? She ­hadn’t done anything. Even if what Treyvon told her about his cousin was true, she had done even less than that. She hadn’t introduced anyone. She hadn’t known anyone, other than Jorge and Gabriel. Olivia threw as many of her clothes as could fit into a black backpack that she dragged out from under her bed. Her wallet was on the dresser, the contents dumped out. It took her a few moments to put back all her cards and slips of paper. The money was gone.

  “Cops,” she said, holding up the empty wallet and wondering, despite herself, who had really stolen the money.

  Olivia took a brown paper bag into the bathroom and tossed toiletries into it. She stood for a moment holding a box of tampons, weighing them in her hand. Then she put them back on the shelf, hoping that this very act would cause her period to arrive. Maybe she would put on a pair of white pants, too.

  Treyvon heaved the backpack onto his shoulder and scooped up 8-Ball in his other hand. They walked together out to the curb.

  As they walked down the path, Elaine popped the trunk. Olivia loaded her stuff into it and turned to thank Treyvon. He nodded and said, “Don’t worry about it.”

  She nodded and got into the car.

  “Who’s that?” Elaine asked.

  “My neighbor,” Olivia said.

  ***

  Arthur had emptied Olivia’s old room of most of his things. His desk was pushed into a corner and cleared of the neat stacks of files and papers that usually decorated its maple veneer surface. His computer was gone, and he’d covered the printer and fax machine with a white sheet folded once down the middle. He’d even taken his framed Greg LeMond Tour de France poster off the wall and stuck it behind the desk. The thoroughness with which he’d erased his presence from the room struck Elaine as vaguely hostile, but Olivia didn’t seem to notice. She dropped her things on the single bed, on the mirrored bedspread that Elaine had brought back from her trip to Rajasthan with Arthur. Elaine remained in the doorway, tucking her hair behind her ear.

  “Honey, do you think you’ll be okay if I head back to work? There are a few things I’d like to take care of,” Elaine said.

  “I’ll come with you. I need to pick up some stuff from the store.”

  “Some stuff?” She had told Warren and the others at work only the barest minimum in order to explain her absences and the calls from the lawyer and pretrial services. Now she didn’t trust Olivia not to blurt out all the shameful details in some misguided confessional moment. “Why don’t you just give me a list of what you need. I’ll get it for you,” she said.

  “No, that’s okay. I could use a walk.”

  “But don’t you want to take a shower?”

&nb
sp; Olivia looked at her sharply, and Elaine blushed.

  “I didn’t mean that you needed one or anything. Just that it might be nice to take a hot shower…you know, to relax.”

  “I’ll take one later.” Olivia’s voice was flat. Elaine opened her mouth to protest one more time, but then snapped it shut.

  The women left the house and headed toward College Avenue. They walked slowly, neither particularly eager to arrive at their destination.

  “You see that house?” Elaine said, trying to make her voice sound as bright and cheerful as possible. “That’s my house.” She pointed at a small Victorian painted in pastel pinks and blues. It was one Olivia usually claimed for her own. But this time, the girl didn’t say anything.

  “I’ll let you live in the carriage house,” Elaine persevered.

  “And I’ll let you live in county jail with seven smelly crack-whores,” Olivia said, and then, an instant later, “Sorry.”

  They walked the rest of the way in silence.

  At the store, Elaine bustled behind her counter and immediately got to work, but she watched out of the corner of her eye as Olivia walked up and down the aisles, grabbing things seemingly at random. Elaine looked back at her computer screen, and the next time she raised her head, found that she could no longer see Olivia. Mounted under the counter was a security monitor installed a few years back when shoplifting had become a ­problem. Elaine watched the fuzzy image of her daughter, crouching down in the center aisle. She was furtively slipping an EPT pregnancy test off the shelf. Olivia opened the packet and took out the foil-wrapped stick. She shoved it into the waistband of her pants, pushed the now empty box behind the others on the shelf, and stood up and walked to the counter. Elaine tucked her hair behind her ear nervously and pretended to be busy counting pills.

  “All set,” Olivia said.

  At that moment, Warren came out from the back room. His mouth was smeared with cream cheese, and he had a bagel in his hand. “I’ll ring you out,” he said.

  Elaine opened her mouth to object, but couldn’t think of a good enough reason to insist on doing it herself. He scanned the items Olivia had chosen into the register one by one. Elaine’s eyes kept drifting to the waistband of Olivia’s pants. She forced herself to look away, back at the pills she’d been counting.