Jane appeared unsurprised by the question and merely shrugged. “Probably. She’s not very old. Fifty-five? Fifty-six?”
“That doesn’t matter,” Ivy said. “Ramona’s mom was younger than mine when she died.”
“Don’t you think you would have heard something?”
“Why? How?”
“I don’t know. It just seems like something that momentous couldn’t happen without you hearing about it.”
Ivy tried to recall the moment in the park last week, when she thought she’d seen her mother. What had been familiar about the woman ducking into the car? Lots of older women had blonde hair—that didn’t mean anything. There was something else, a certain way she had moved or bent her head. Ivy couldn’t pinpoint exactly what it was that had affected her. She was considering confiding this information to Jane, as she had earlier to Ramona, when something small and light sailed over the adobe wall of the backyard and landed in the water, on the steps of the shallow end where it remained, bobbing in the water.
Jane got on her knees and leaned out over the pool, then plucked it up with two fingers and brought it to Ivy. It was an origami bird woven from a palm frond, green, delicate, and perfectly crafted. When she held it up, moonlight backlit the wings. “Weird,” Ivy said. “Let’s go see who threw it.”
Ivy led Jane through the dark house and out the front door, Lucky heavy against her chest, and they stood together on the driveway scanning the street. It was completely empty, dead silent as if no one lived here at all and this was just a movie set or a ghost town. Lights were on in one house down the block, but otherwise the homes around them were shuttered and dark.
“Does origami get thrown over your wall often?” Jane asked with a smile.
Ivy laughed and held up the bird again. “It’s pretty, don’t you think?”
“It is pretty. Maybe your neighborhood’s not so bad after all.”
Ivy shrugged and looked up and down the street. “It’s the door,” she suggested. “Attracting weirdos.”
“Artsy weirdos.”
“Right.” She turned and looked at her red door, slightly ajar from their recent exit. The night she’d painted it Ivy had felt almost frantic in her desire to escape, to leave this place behind. Frank’s father had been over for dinner earlier in the evening, and his sadness had seeped into her, infecting the entire house, so that just sitting on her couch later alone, reading and drinking a glass of wine, was almost unbearable. She had been unable to sit still. Her mother used to paint in moments like those, and Ivy thought she’d do the same.
“The bird on the cliff is my favorite,” Jane said, walking to the door and outlining the painting with her finger. “You’re really good.”
Ivy shrugged. “A lot of good it does me. It’s not exactly a practical talent, covering doors with strange images.”
“So what? Why does everything need to be practical?” Jane said, then turned and gestured for Ivy to follow her back inside. “C’mon, let’s go to bed. The kids will be up in five hours.”
Ivy scanned the street again, looking for the person who’d sent this strange gift sailing over her wall, but there was not a soul in sight.
WEDNESDAY
RAMONA
In the morning, the hotel room looked better than it had the night before. Sunlight improved the beige damask wallpaper and pale green carpet. It gave life to the rich brown satin bedspread, lit the mirror above the dresser with reflected light. Last night it had seemed like an old person’s room, a room of luxury for someone who had given up, and she’d almost turned around right away and driven back to Ivy’s place except for the fact that she’d been so exhausted.
It was only eight o’clock right now, but she guessed that Ivy and Jane had already been up for hours, tending to breakfasts and clothes and all the other needs kids had to get the day started. Suddenly she felt completely isolated from the world here in this strange room. Why had she chosen to separate herself during the one week she was among friends?
She dressed quickly and braided her hair, avoiding her eyes in the mirror. There was no nausea this morning, nothing to indicate she might be pregnant other than the ten-day delay of her period, and she decided to wait another day to take a test. It would be too much information to take in this morning, pregnant or not. It was enough to absorb just being here, back in her hometown.
Downstairs she bought a cinnamon raisin bagel and a cup of coffee to go, then drove to the family division of the district courthouse on Pecos Road. The building was inauspicious—a pale, sandstone rectangle—and Ramona got out of her car and strode across the lot and through the glass double doors before she could change her mind. Inside, the air-conditioning was on overdrive so Ramona shivered a bit as she asked where and how to find the information she was seeking.
It was easier than she had ever anticipated. During the past ten years every Termination of Parental Rights document had been scanned onto microfilm, and all Ramona needed to do was tell the older woman behind the desk her name and the year of her child’s birth. Her voice was shaky as she spoke, and as she stood waiting for the woman to return, Ramona considered leaving. She didn’t feel well standing here, and she had a sudden need to lie down in a dark room and close her eyes. Her surroundings were innocuous enough—sage-colored carpet, long rows of fluorescent lights, an assortment of strangers waiting in various lines or hunched over their own microfilm images on the bank of machines by the window—but the place had a feeling of desolation, of utter despair.
Ramona was considering her escape when the woman appeared, cleared her throat, and said, “Here you go.” She handed Ramona a small flat container and pointed in the direction of the microfilm machines.
The black square of film was cool in her hands, and she took it to a machine by a window and sat down beside a skinny man with acne in an expensive-looking suit. It took her a few minutes to figure out how to insert the cartridge and get the view she wanted, and then there it was, in black and white on the screen: her signature—Ramona White—signing away the rights to her newly born child.
She touched her name on the screen, noting how her writing had been loopier then, neater. It was girlish handwriting, she supposed, and that is what she had been back then: a girl. The screen was cool beneath her fingers, and she wished she had the actual paper before her, something more alive than this cold machine.
The document was only five pages long, mostly with legal explanations of what she was giving up, and on page four she found what she was looking for. Near the bottom were the signatures and printed names of the adoptive parents and beneath this, their county and state of residence. Jim and Celeste Dillman, Clark County, Nevada.
Something about the sound of the names relieved her, especially Celeste. It was a soft, welcoming name that evoked a woman with wispy hair, a demure, high-collared shirt, a tray of lemon cookies and tea. She had met the parents once, very briefly right after the birth, but she couldn’t recall a single aspect of their appearance, and she had never been allowed to know their names.
It was also a relief that these two people lived in Nevada, or at least they had at the time of adopting her baby. Ramona wrote down their names on a sheet of paper, though she couldn’t imagine ever forgetting them, then returned the microfilm to the desk and asked for a phone book.
There were only twelve Dillmans listed, and Ramona was able to rule out many of them based on their first names or initials. What remained was a list of three. There were two J. Dillmans, and one James Dillman. She added these addresses and phone numbers to her sheet of paper, then surveyed the information, calculating where each of these homes might be on a map of Las Vegas, before folding the paper four times and sliding it into her bag.
The first J. Dillman lived fairly close to Ivy’s neighborhood, so Ramona decided to swing by the address and park outside, then decide what, if anything, she might do. It was almost eleven o’clock now, and the day had warmed just enough to make swimming a possibility. She could chec
k out this address then be at Ivy’s in time for a dip in the pool before lunch. The cold brick in her chest was beginning to melt, and Ramona felt the first inklings of anticipation or hope. The piece of paper folded in her purse seemed to emit a subtle hum of promise.
The neighborhood she found was wealthy, with grand stucco homes traveling up the bottom rise of the Black Mountains. Ramona found the address on her list, then parked across the street. Her old Mustang was conspicuous here—it was a place of shiny, expensive cars—and she worried someone might call the police.
The home she watched was surrounded by a high wall, but she could see the doorway and a large portion of the front yard through a wrought iron gate. It was a Spanish-style house with a red-tiled roof and dense, textured walls; the yard, however, had a distinctly Midwestern feel. Beds of tulips flanked the path to the door, and grass rolled out on either side, lush and perfect, as if this place existed in an ecosystem of its own and not in the desert.
Ramona scanned the street and watched a silver BMW pull into a garage up ahead. A girl stepped outside of another house half a block down and began jumping on a pogo stick. The noise echoed over the quiet street and began to give Ramona an immediate headache. She tried to ignore it and focused her gaze on the house across the street, which, as far as she could tell, was empty.
Fifteen minutes passed, and Ramona considered walking up the path and knocking on the door, but just then it opened, and a woman emerged, walking with a jaunty step down the walkway to the gate. She was tall and thin with dark hair cropped close to her delicate skull, and she was walking a German shepherd. She glanced at Ramona’s car, directly across from her gate, and Ramona fought the urge to duck down out of sight. The woman’s gaze was cool and apparently unfazed by the aging Mustang that contained a woman with long, black braids. Ramona tried to guess her age—forty-five? Fifty-five? She turned right with her dog and headed up the hill.
It occurred to Ramona to follow her, but that seemed pointless. What would she say? Are you Celeste Dillman and did you adopt a boy nineteen years ago? It sounded so raw and invasive, even inside her own head, so she stayed put and continued to watch the house. She was soon rewarded by the sight of a tall, gangly boy who ran down the path and out the gate. “Mom!” he called after the woman. “Mom!” But she was too far away to hear him and didn’t look back.
The boy stood there for a moment, as if deciding. He had dark red hair that curled down over his ears, and a nice face covered in freckles and possibly a little acne. He looked nothing like Ramona, or Mark for that matter, but he also looked nothing like the woman with the dog. Had there been redheads in Ramona’s family? She mentally searched what little she knew of her relatives: two uncles with black hair turning to gray; a grandmother, long dead, who had also been dark-haired. There was a bald grandfather—a possibility—but she doubted the hair that used to be on his head was red since he had dark eyes and olive skin.
She knew very little about Mark’s family. He was dark-haired, as was his mother. Ramona had never met his father or any other relatives despite the fact that she’d dated him for over a year. She wondered whether or not this was normal in a high school relationship. Were other people introduced to families? Were they invited to gatherings of aunts and uncles, grandparents, and cousins?
Ramona remembered with sudden vividness the day in the school lunchroom when Mark had begged her in front of everyone to marry him and keep the baby. Ramona had been very far along then, her belly swelling her white XL Hanes T-shirt to the limit. Under that she had on black leggings and Converse high tops, refusing to wear maternity clothes even at the end. Instead, she’d shopped in the men’s section of thrift stores or Kmart. Would she do that a second time around, or would she buy the happy, sleek-fitting maternity outfits she always walked past in Target and JCPenney?
She remembered, too, the constant dark circles under her eyes throughout the pregnancy, the blemishes that had formed on her back—red spots under her hair like a secret garden—then disappeared again once the baby had been born, the insistent craving she’d had for cigarettes. No, she had definitely not been one of those lovely pregnant women. There had been no glow to her skin, no placid smile of contentment on her face.
When Ramona told Mark “no,” that day in the lunchroom, he’d turned and punched the kid closest to him right in the face, then run from the room. After that, most of the attention had turned to the kid who’d gotten punched. Ramona couldn’t remember his name but he’d been well liked, more so than she or Mark, and blood streamed down his face. Ivy had hurried Ramona out of the lunchroom to a semiprivate niche between two buildings. Jane had been there too. The three of them huddled together in the small cove of concrete against the wind, not talking. What was there to say? They had both urged her to get an abortion many months ago, though neither friend said a word about it now that it was too late. After the death of her brother, Ramona couldn’t bear the thought of killing anything, no matter how small and unknown.
The kid standing across the street right now looked too young to be nineteen, but age was such a difficult thing to gauge. He also seemed too tall to be hers, too fluid and lanky. She possessed a compact, athletic frame, and Mark had been husky in high school, heading toward a middle age of fat just like his mother.
The boy loped after the woman with the dog, breaking into an awkward run to catch her. Ramona watched until he reached his mother, then closed her eyes, not wanting to see them together. She doubted very much that this was her child; still, there was a pain in watching him with this other parent that she couldn’t explain.
When she opened her eyes, the woman and boy were far ahead on the sidewalk, and the girl on the pogo stick had gone inside. The street was empty, so Ramona stepped out of her car and walked across the road, through the gate and up the tulip-lined pathway to the front door. She held the paper with the address in her hand, and carefully checked the numbers with the ones beside the door. This was the right place.
She knocked and rang the bell, and when there was no answer she tried the doorknob and found it unlocked, as she somehow knew it would be. Without giving herself time to consider what she was doing, Ramona opened the door and stepped inside the house. A high ceiling soared over her. A wrought-iron, spiral staircase led from the expansive foyer to a shadowy upstairs. “Hello?” Ramona called out, first with a hoarse, unused voice, then louder. “Hello?”
She stepped across the red-tiled foyer then slipped off her flip-flops before padding onto the creamy carpet of the living room, soft beneath her feet. The room was more lived in than she’d expected. Coffee mugs sat on an end table beside an open newspaper; a pair of hockey skates—strange to find those here in the desert—were set in the corner by the television; a discarded pink robe was slung over an armchair. But even these items seemed artfully arranged, as if set in place for a photo shoot.
One more room, she told herself, crossing the carpet to the tile of the kitchen. One more room, then she would leave before the woman and boy and dog came back and arrested her for trespassing. There was nothing in the kitchen of interest, so she headed upstairs, where three open doors revealed bedrooms in various states of disarray.
One door was closed, so Ramona turned the handle of that door, feeling as if this were the important room, the one that would reveal all the home’s secrets, and peered inside.
What she saw made her heart stop: an old man snoring lightly on a twin bed. Ramona closed the door as quietly as possible, her heart beginning to pound with a fury now, and took the stairs two at a time, holding her breath. She stopped at the bottom of the steps and listened but heard nothing. Even the man’s snores were eclipsed by the heavy bedroom door.
Her hand was on the knob to leave, when a stack of mail on a nearby table stopped her. Of course. She would just check the names on their mail. Why hadn’t she thought of that before? There were five letters: James Dillman, Jim Dillman, J. Dillman, James Dillman, and finally, one addressed in slanted handwriting to
Barbara Dillman. Barbara. That must have been the woman she’d just seen walking the German shepherd.
A dog barked outside, breaking the silence, and Ramona set the mail down and looked out a window, already planning how she might escape through a back door if Barbara and the kid were coming up the front walk, but there was no one, so she opened the door and pressed it closed behind her, then ran down the walk and made sure the street was empty before crossing to her car and sealing herself back inside.
It was only when she was five blocks away that Ramona realized she’d left her flip-flops in their foyer. She was driving barefoot and hadn’t even noticed. That’s what adrenaline could do, she guessed, rev your nerves up to the point that you didn’t notice you were shoeless. So they would know someone had been inside, but Ramona couldn’t imagine they would do anything about it, once they realized nothing was missing.
At least the information she’d found had been valuable. Of course it was possible the woman with the dog was Jim Dillman’s second wife, Barbara, and the red-haired boy was still Ramona’s son, but she felt certain this wasn’t the case. That boy could not be hers.
When she parked outside Ivy’s home, Ramona found a pen in the glove compartment and crossed that particular J. Dillman off her list, then slid it back into her bag and got out of the car.
JANE
Jane pushed the stroller up the incline, noticing how much nicer it was than the one she had at home—lighter and sleek as a bird. Also, the awning completely covered Fern so that Jane didn’t have to hear complaints about the bright sun in her eyes.
Rocky ran up ahead, and Ivy pushed Lucky in another, slightly larger stroller. It was warm outside but not too warm yet, and the air was dry and perfect. Mountains rose up in the distance, their cool, dark gray forms pasted onto the blue sky.
“Let’s just walk by, and if we see him, we see him,” Jane suggested again. “I want him to know I don’t wear a nightgown around every day.”
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