by Liza Nelson
For almost five days I had been glad to have my child out of the way and here was my punishment in spades. She was gone God-knows-where—even if I threatened to break her legs, Cass was not about to tell me, that was clear. She probably did not know.
I tried to light another cigarette, but my matches were wet. Instead, I counted the red-tipped sticks like daisy petals. “She loves me. She loves me not.” One at a time, I dropped them on the step until my hands were empty.
Empty. I knew I should be doing something, acting forcefully, making some kind of decision, but I could not think clearly. The sequence of events that formed my life had become a series of smudge marks run together. The poster. When was it that I found the poster? If only I had never noticed it that day with Louise. I remembered leaving The Oyster Shack, the glowering Indian summer heat that sucked the breath out of me as soon as I stepped outside the air-conditioning. I remembered the steering wheel hot against my palms and the swing of tires under me as I made a U-turn to park in front of the post office. Pure luck another car was not coming. Pure luck I went inside with Louise. Pure bad luck— if only I had waited in the car. Pure luck his face was the one on top of the stack. Luck and death, my father always said, come in threes. But it wasn’t simply luck. I took the fucking poster.
I took it and hid it, and Dylan found it. Now she was gone and I had not noticed. I had chosen not to notice. Just as I had chosen to ignore the tension running in lightning streaks up and down her spine that last time I tried to hug her, the day she left, Cass honking from the yard. I had been so ready to let her leave that morning. Unforgivable.
“Dylan is gone,” I said out loud. “Dylan is gone,” I shouted over and over until I could hear the truth I had to face.
I started shivering, suddenly freezing cold. Joe would be back soon, in less than an hour. “Dylan has run away,” I would tell him, and he would offer to hold me. But who was Joe? An outsider. An interloper. It was his fault, our fault. If I had been paying attention. Not that I had time to worry about men now. They were the past, both men, the one due any minute with innocent adulterous intent, the other who had inadvertently set the course of the rest of my life—burdened me with a child I couldn’t live without anymore. Neither Hank nor Joe had the least interest in Dylan. That was the joke.
It was time to decide what to do. I packed up the few personal belongings Joe had left lying around, a shirt, a toothbrush, a few cassette tapes, and put them outside on the porch. I lined up the phone book, a pad, pencils. There would be agencies to call, organizations that put missing children’s pictures on grocery bags and milk cartons. First, there was the police.
“Yes, ma’am. Now, you need to go a little slower.” The cop who answered, a Sergeant Baines, was friendly, but that was about it. I gulped for air while he explained the procedure, which was not comforting. Kids ran away all the time, he said. They’d put out the standard APB they did for runaways. Yes, it would go nationwide. But kids usually showed up when they were ready, not before. I should come down and fill out the forms in the morning or, since it was the New Year’s holiday, the morning after. No reason to rush over tonight, he could take down the basic description on the phone. He sounded tired as he went through the list.
“Name?”
“Evangeline Dylan Blue.”
“Sex—female?”
“Yes, with medium-length brown hair. Five-foot-four, blue eyes, very trusting. Probably wearing black.”
“They’re all wearing black.”
“Yes, well.”
“How old did you say she is?”
“Sixteen, almost.”
Dylan sixteen in three weeks. God, it is impossible to comprehend. I always thought I had been so different from Dylan when I was a teenager. Willful. Defiant. Much tougher than Dylan. More dramatic, melodramatic. At odds with my parents all the time. When I announced I was spending the summer as a volunteer at Freedom House in Roxbury, Massachusetts, my father bellowed over his plate of roast beef that if I left the house, I needn’t bother to come back. Three mornings later, full of moral indignation, I packed the green American Tourister bag I’d been given for my last birthday and walked to the bus station, refusing to acknowledge my mother trailing half a block behind me in her Plymouth station wagon.
My father phoned the center a few times threatening to drag me home, but to my great relief, he never showed up. After a week or two, the calls stopped. Goddamn, what a time I was having. Days I spent teaching crafts to small girls who mostly wanted to comb or touch my red hair. Nights I sat in shadowy apartments suffused with incense, listening to conversations I could only pretend to understand. It was wonderful. In August I called home to say I was thinking of dropping out of high school to stay on.
“It’s your life,” Daddy said and hung up.
I stayed another week. Two days before school started, I left a note to my roommates, college girls who’d treated me as a kind of mascot, and hitched a ride home. Underneath the bravado, I was not ready to stop playing the role of my parents’ good girl after all. Of course, they took me back; they were always taking me back.
What gave them the strength to wait me out? I don’t have it, that’s for damn sure. At sixteen, unaware of the dangers slithering around me like so many cottonmouths, I had gone untouched. I had walked alone down unlit streets late at night. I had lied about my age to sit in smokey bars and drink tequila that made me higher than the pot and hashish available everywhere. I had hitchhiked for God’s sake, picked up by two guys in their late twenties who gave me a joint before they dropped me off at the end of my block. But those were different times. Just the possibility of Dylan hitching rides now makes my stomach clench, Ted Bundy wannabes everywhere, especially here in north Florida.
“Now, don’t worry too much, ma’am.” The policeman was definitely trying, I’ll give him that. “If, like you said, she promised to keep in touch with a friend, that’s a good sign. And at least you’ll know she’s safe.”
Is there such a thing as safe, some way to ensure that your child will grow up without encountering injury or evil? I’m no longer certain that there is. I keep thinking about David Franklin, less than two miles from his house. And Evie holding the package of chicken parts. I can still see Mrs. Pinkston’s lumpish body prostrate across Evie’s open casket, shiny white as new patent-leather shoes. I had listened to Mrs. Pinkston’s keening wails, her unabashed outpouring of grief. I had listened with horror and, there is no other word for it, awe, that love could be so powerful.
Sixteen years ago.
“It’s the letting go that’s hard.” Mrs. Pinkston, becalmed into weary dignity, handed me a glass of milk in her kitchen after the service. “The guilt is hard enough; I surely did not need those chicken parts so bad. But the letting go is worse. I just have to keep reminding myself it’s the Lord’s will. Alive or dead, you got to let them go sooner or later.” She pointed to my belly protruding with my future daughter’s knee or fist. “I expect you’ll learn that soon enough.”
No, I will do whatever it takes to bring her back, and then I’ll never make the same mistakes again. Just bring her back to me, please.
Sixteen
EACH MINUTE PASSES so gradually into the next. My whole metabolism has altered, slowed to an amoebic crawl, only more slithery. I keep thinking of amoebas, what little I know of them, splitting apart to reproduce. And water drops, how they drip along wet glass into a kind of vertical puddle, hold briefly, and then separate. I am one of those droplets, only I cannot quite catch hold. Dylan’s flight, disappearance, running away, whatever you want to call it, her going, has been pushing me to the furthest borders of my emotions.
Somewhere in the house I have a pen-and-ink sketch. Yesterday, I woke up, jolted awake the way I do these days, desperate to find it. I spent all day searching the cottage and my studio. As if the drawing would bring Dylan back. Dylan when she was, God, no more than five years old, sitting with her grandfather in that gray leather recliner of his.
>
He was teaching her to sing “Go Tell Aunt Rhody the Ole Gray Goose Is Dead,” of all things. By then he was quite frail, close to death. He had to be in terrific pain. Bone cancer just wipes you out. But the two of them sat there, singing away, making up verse after verse about the reactions of all the different animals while I drew their faces and Mother did her ridiculous stitch work. I should have framed that picture years ago.
I found plenty of other pictures, but they wouldn’t do. I had decided this one sketch was the only image that would ease the pain. I could barely bring myself to look at the others. I stood at my worktable, ignoring the pile under my hand while I stared through the open door into the tail end of an early winter sunset. As usual, my mind was wandering. Like a dog on a leash, it kept pulling toward Dylan. I tried to tug it elsewhere, toward chocolate ice cream or the tangerine sky, but then it would catch a scent and follow after Dylan again.
A flock of blackbirds scattered up against the lowering sun like blown ash as a car door slammed shut out on the road. I waited until the birds disappeared into the trees before I crossed the yard and made my way through the kitchen and living room to the porch. Cass Culpepper stood there peering through my uncurtained window.
What in God’s name could she want? I wondered, and then wondered again, more excitedly, what information she might be bringing me. I had not spoken to her since our first ugly conversation. Louise and I had spoken briefly. It had been awkward. I had no energy to spare for Louise. Whatever friendship we’d begun was not strong enough for all this. She was not someone I could lean on. It was easier not to interact at all.
Cass I barely recognized. The heavy eyeliner and chalky makeup were gone. She’d washed the black dye out of her hair. It was now mahogany brown and long enough to cover her ears. She wore no earrings, no rings up to her knuckles. Holding a big white TIPTOP BAKERY box in front of her, she looked small, awkward and very young. A little pasty, exactly how Dylan used to look beside her, I realized with a pang.
“Are you going to send me away?” she asked quickly, breathlessly, as if she was afraid I’d slam the door in her face. A realistic fear, actually. “I got another letter from Dyl, and she asked me to tell you she’s okay.”
“And you decided to tell me in person.” I summoned all the self-control I had left. “Well, come on in.” As much as I resented her presence in my home, I wanted whatever information this girl had and bullying her would not get it.
“It came a couple of days ago.” She shifted the weight of the box from one arm to the other but did not step forward. “I guess I should have come right away.”
“Yes, that would have been nice. But hey, I’m not going to eat you, I promise.” I opened the door wider so she could fit through with the box.
“If I didn’t know better, I’d say you brought me a birthday cake.”
Cass stared at me. I thought of Dylan’s sixteenth birthday coming up so soon and possibly away from me. I wouldn’t put it past Cass to bring a cake as some kind of perverse adolescent joke. I repressed a new flare-up of hostility toward this girl. “So what is in there, anyway?”
Cass shook her head, expressionless. “Nothing like that.”
I led her into the kitchen. She put the box in the middle of the kitchen table, then turned to face me, one hand resting on the cover behind her as if otherwise something might pop out. All the cockiness of the other day was gone. I could not read this kid at all. Hell, what was new? I obviously couldn’t read Dylan either, as it turned out.
“Some tea?” I asked, walking pointedly wide of the table on my way to the cupboard.
“Instant coffee would be better.”
“Don’t keep the stuff.”
“Really?” Her eyebrows raised. “Then tea’s okay I guess.”
“Lapsang, Irish Breakfast, Constant Comment, Lemon Zest.”
“I don’t care. I don’t know the difference.”
“We’ll have Lemon Zest, then.” I forced myself to smile and put the pot on to boil. “So?”
Cass met my eye. She was not hostile toward me after all, I decided. Stubborn. A little shy. Maybe even apologetic. I began to calculate what it would take to get her to tell me what I needed to know to find Dylan. I leaned my tush against the sink. “So, it’s a pretty crazy time here, huh, for all of us?”
“What has my mother told you?” Her sharpness caught me off guard.
“Nothing,” I said honestly.
Her chest heaved once. “I can’t let you see Dyl’s letter.”
Td like to read it, to be honest, but I figured you wouldn’t let me.” I worked to keep my voice level. “You certainly are a girl who keeps her word, I’ll say that for you.”
“Right.” She nodded solemnly. “The police called me to find out what I know. Are they going to bug me until I tell them something? Because there’s nothing I’m going to tell them.”
“Hey, they are just doing their job.” Can you believe me saying that? “So what do you know, anyway?”
“I came by here the first night I was back. I looked in the window. You were here with a man.”
“Yes.” I breathed carefully. “I was, but he’s gone.” I wanted a cigarette, but my last pack was in the garbage can. I had quit cold turkey. Call it superstitious, but oral deprivation to expiate my sins seemed in order.
“My mom doesn’t know, does she?” Her voice was not threatening. Not at all. She was trying, in her awkward way, to let me know she could keep my secrets as well as she kept Dylan’s.
“No.” I shook my head and shrugged. It occurred to me for the first time, I’m almost ashamed to admit, that if Dylan and Cass didn’t go to my mother’s, Cass must have gone somewhere else. I wish I could say I was curious, but, frankly, at that moment I did not much care.
The pot began to sputter. I took down two mugs and we sat at the table, the bakery box between us.
“I don’t have any cookies to offer you, so if you have any in there, we should break them out now.”
“Afraid not.” A meager smile flickered across her lips. She sipped her tea while I pretended not to study her. “Those are pretty paperweights,” she offered eventually.
“They are actually prettier earlier in the day, when the sun catches them through the window and brings out the colors.”
“Where did you get them? I bet they were expensive.”
“I made them years ago, when Dylan was a baby.”
“That is way cool.” She finished her tea and refused more.
‘You don’t make them anymore?” she asked.
“Don’t have the time or equipment it takes.”
Cass seemed genuinely interested. She was no surrogate Dylan, far from it, but it was nice to smell once again that young-girl scent of soap and cheap perfume that could fill a room like laughter. Also, there was about Cass an eager nervous energy, a hunger. She had sought me out, and I could not help respecting the courage it must have taken to face me here. She did have spirit.
I explained a little about working with glass, the heat it takes, the delicacy and precision. It had been a while since I thought about those days: the constant warm roar of the furnace, the pure power surging through the blowing iron, squeezing, stretching, bending molten formlessness into glass.
Cass chewed on a straggle of hair. “I wish my mom were more like you.” The compliment startled me. She seemed sincere but I smelled a trap.
“Your mother is great. Caring. Natural. A regular earth mother in panty hose and polyester.”
Cass studied her hands.
“She’s okay, I guess.” I could see she was holding back tears. If I asked the right questions, God only knew what I would hear.
“Shall we open this?” I asked instead, pointing to the box.
Cass immediately leaned forward and slit the taped flaps open with her fingernail. She pulled away the cardboard top and sides.
“I patched it back together the best I could, but it’s not perfect.”
I stared, spe
echless with astonishment, then ran my palm across the oval top of the ceramic egg, along hairline cracks stitched with dried glue.
“Where did you get this?”
“I bought the pieces.”
“It was broken?”
Cass nodded. Standing side by side, I realized she was not much taller than Dylan, coming up just above my shoulder.
“And you put it back together?”
“All the silver people are inside.” She was proud of her work, separate from its meaning, whatever the meaning was. “It’s taken me a while.”
I was horrified and spellbound at the same time. What was this girl doing with my Egg of Life? I thought of Joe. The day we ran into each other at the gallery, the Egg was what had caught his attention. And Cleo. Cleo told me specifically that she’d sold this one. She paid me for it.
“It’s a goddamn wonder.” I lifted the top to count my silver babies, to check how many were actually missing.
Cass cleared her throat and waited until I glanced up.
“I had an abortion.”
“What?” This I did not want to hear. I put the ceramic top down and waited with a sinking heart for whatever else was to come.
“Instead of going to your mother’s, I went to a clinic in Gainesville. All the girls from the university use it, so I knew it was okay.”
“How did you pay for it?” I was in no position to judge her. Cass was what, five, six years younger than I had been when Dylan was conceived. Nevertheless, I was horrified. Poor Louise.
“I had some money saved.”
I took a breath and plunged on.
“Did Dylan know?”
“No.” Then in an avalanche of jagged words, Cass explained that she’d been sleeping with boys—and not just boys, men—for quite a while.
“I can’t tell you why. I just kind of liked it. At least at first.” She didn’t say where she met them or how often, and I did not ask.