by Liza Nelson
“Don’t worry. Dylan was never involved.” Was I supposed to thank God for small favors? Thank you, Jesus, because even if Dylan was living on the streets tonight, prey of every rapist and heroin addict in America, at least she was virginal when she ran away? Thanks, but no thanks. “Does your mother know?”
“Not exactly.” She looked at me, pleading. “Not yet.”
Poor Louise. Still, I would have traded problems with her in a heartbeat. At least she had her daughter safe at home now. Shit. Who was I kidding? No one was safe.
“I’ll have to tell her. You know that?”
Cass nodded. That was why she’d come, wasn’t it? For some reason this girl had decided to trust me. As if I had the strength to deal with another family’s nightmare. Was this some mutant angel’s idea of therapy, a perverse method for getting me to give my Dylan fears an hour’s rest? Was Cass’s dropping her secret in my lap supposed to be a gift? Or was it a test? Maybe the gods had decided that only if I made up for some earlier wrong by doing the right thing for this girl would they open the way for me to get Dylan back.
As if life were simple rights and wrongs. All that bullshit I fed Dylan about truth and honesty, purity and beauty. I don’t know if it was bullshit exactly, but virtue was easy for me all those years because I had no hard choices to face. And I had no hard choices because there were no people in my life. Now people have been coming at me as fast as they’ve been leaving me, and when people are involved, damn if every choice doesn’t have its cost. Well, I am paying, God, I am paying.
Seventeen
FEAR. ANGER. GUILT. My new mantra.
I have been drifting through the hours in a makeshift routine of desperation for I don’t know how long anymore. I have been to every bus station within a hundred-mile radius and put up posters. Even if she were long gone from the area, somebody might remember her buying a ticket and to where. No one has. I have called Sergeant Baines down at the police daily. I have called the FBI. Me calling the FBI. It was odd, but they were very nice and referred me to a runaway hot line. My schedule has become: get up early, since I haven’t slept anyway; make more posters and get them copied; send out posters; call hot lines; take calls from people who mean well but I don’t want to talk to; sit sipping lukewarm tea while staring out the window until it’s time to lie down and stare at the ceiling some more.
Joe? There is no way I could reconcile what went on with Joe, the pleasure and visceral expectation he raised in my molecular structure, with the slough of Dylan’s absence. I told him we were finished, that I could only handle one loss at a time, that there was too much electricity on the line, and I was shorting out all over the place. Actually, I don’t remember what I told him. I was in such a state. He called a few times, but hearing his voice was like twisting the knife. I don’t deny I miss him, but whatever was between us seems so sordid now. I gave him up for the same reason I gave up all my other bad habits, even smoking—to get those stars aligned.
I used to say I was alone but never lonely, didn’t I? Well, now I am both. I have not completely abandoned the Franklins, but David is getting better and doesn’t need my visits, and Myra has gone back to work at the mill. Cleo tries to be supportive, but we are both aware that I am going to screw up her big spring show. There is no way I can concentrate enough to complete the pieces I promised her. As for Louise, when I told her about Cass, I can’t deny experiencing a certain glint of, shall I call it, satisfaction along with my genuine sympathy and empathy.
She seemed almost relieved. “At least I know something concrete and can go from there,” she said and thanked me.
That was that. I have heard nothing more from her or from Cass. I don’t expect to. I don’t imagine Louise is comfortable with my knowing her family secrets or with knowing mine. But I do miss her. She always managed to ask the question that could get under my skin. Even that last morning, as we stood saying our perfunctory goodbyes on her front porch.
“Do you think she’ll find him?” she asked.
“Him? You mean her father?” I rummaged pointedly in my bag for my car keys. “I have not considered the possibility.”
“Perhaps you should.” She spoke kindly, but I stiffened as she turned to go back inside. After all, she knew who Dylan’s father was.
I was not about to admit it to Louise, but of course I have thought about the possibility. I have thought about little else for days. At first a big steering wheel in my brain kept turning all thoughts away from Hank. Why bother about him? I told myself. Hank was not an issue. Hank did not count anymore. Never had. He was not part of our life. Only now he is because Dylan wants him to be. Because every clue that might lead to Dylan counts, and Hank is a central clue. The jilted mother, and lover, may hate to give him that much credit, but the practical, do-anything-to-get-my-daughter-back mother knows I have to.
The local cops obviously do not know where Hank is, much less who he is. Why bring up his name? I asked myself, after my first short interview with Sergeant Baines. Considering who manned Esmeralda’s police station, there was a good chance whatever I disclosed would be all over town in a heartbeat. I wanted Dylan back with as little humiliation as possible. As little as possible for her, that is, not me—humiliation was the least of it for me—because why should everyone have to know the hurtful truth about her father? How many of her friends in Esmeralda would be able to understand that he was not a bad man, not evil in the sense that their Bible teaches about evil. And anyway, what were the chances that Dylan would actually find him, assuming Cass told me the truth?
But somewhere along the line, I decided there was no holding back where Dylan was concerned. Even if I knew for certain that she didn’t know where Hank was, the police might think she did, and that might matter enough to them to ignite their efforts to find him. And her.
“What if you guys had reason to believe,” I asked my new best friend Sergeant Baines in our first face-to-face meeting, “—isn’t that how you put it?—that a missing runaway girl might be in the company of someone who was a fugitive from the law on serious felony charges?”
“I’m not sure I’m following you, Mrs. Blue.”
“A criminal. Someone wanted by the police. By the FBI.”
“How serious? Are you saying the minor would be in danger?”
“Well, I don’t know about that.”
“You should.” I decided I liked Sergeant Baines a lot. “If we had knowledge of a felon who might be dangerous to a minor, the priority on finding that minor goes up.”
“Pictures?”
“Yeah, I suppose so.”
I didn’t hesitate. I spelled out Hank’s name for him in capital letters. Under the circumstances, what I was doing was the only thing to do. I wanted my daughter back, damn the cost. I know there are people I used to respect who would say I was betraying him. I might say so. I had betrayed Dylan by not showing her the damned poster in the first place, and now I was betraying Hank, using him as bait. It was crazy for me ever to think of protecting him. I don’t owe him anything; he owes me.
God, I had been so young once upon a time. And Hank had been so, so what? It seems crazy but the word that comes to mind is “dashing.” I knew him for maybe three days. We were together nonstop for all of seventy-two hours minus a little sleep here and there. Yet I was probably as in love as I have ever been with a man; in comparison, these last few months of Joe Rainey have been a mere blip on the old radar screen. What a thing to have to admit to myself while Dylan is God-knows-where, going through whatever she is going through; but because of her, I have to admit it. Not that I hold any illusions that I still love Hank. That dashing young man no longer exists, except intertwined with my genes within Dylan. Children are the reincarnation of the living. Dylan has inherited pieces of my psyche and his.
Meanwhile, the days keep passing. A lot of the everyday things in my life have begun to take on more ominous souls. The plastic food containers in the refrigerator, Miranda’s steering wheel, the tub and s
ink faucets. Every one a different animal, ready to bite. One morning, Dylan’s chenille bedspread became rows of chattering human teeth. I never hallucinated exactly, but the world that used to comprise my life has become less than solid, and I am not always sure anymore what’s what.
By this afternoon, I had to force myself to pick up my mail because the fish on the mailbox reminded me too much of sharks. I reached in and grabbed the envelopes lying there, then hurried back up the sand path to safety, pushed open the front door with my shoulder and bolted inside. A tan card slid loose from the pastel bundle of bills and flyers I was holding. It fluttered toward the floor and lodged at the bottom of the doorjamb like a wounded wren. I bent down automatically to pick it up, then froze. I didn’t have to read one word to recognize the crabbed left slant. “Unladylike,” a narrow-minded fourth-grade teacher used to condemn across the top margin of every assignment Dylan handed in.
“Who wants to be ladylike, anyway?” That was my easy answer to cheer Dylan, but Dylan would shake her head, sobbing against the injustice. This was before she stopped being interested in my opinion or in needing my advice, before I became an embarrassment, before adolescence drove the first wedge between us. We were still a pair then, to hell with the rest of the world.
“This is the writing of strength and independence, Honeybunch,” I told her, “of an intense depth of mind and soul.”
Now I crouched down, afraid to take the postcard in my hand. I could swear I saw a copperhead about to strike. The other unopened envelopes fell into a ragged skirt around me. Strength and independence. What was it my mother stitched on one of her pillows during her Early Americana period? “If you plant peas, don’t expect to reap beans.” I traced my name with my index finger, each spindly, pressed-down letter. GODIVA BLUE. The letters sunk in, flashed out.
I AM FINE. AM NOT RUNNING AWAY FROM YOU. AM GOING TO MY FATHER. I DON’T HATE YOU OR ANYTHING. I AM NOT IN TROUBLE. CASHED THE SAVINGS BOND SO HAVE ALL THE MONEY I NEED. DON’T WORRY TOO MUCH. DYLAN.
P.S. FORGET TRACING ME THROUGH THE POSTMARK. I’M LONG GONE.
Long gone. The eggshell in which I have been hiding cracked. What spattered out was not relief but pain. No, not pain. Anger. Building toward fury that Dylan could do this to me. Gone off on a wild-goose chase to search for what? A father who for all practical purposes did not exist. As far as Dylan was concerned, whatever he and I shared once was merely an accident of time and place. I was the mother who willed her into being against all odds, who worked like a dervish to create a life for the two of us. Okay, not the perfected, artistic vision I’ve been telling myself, but a damn good life all the same.
“The ungrateful brat.” I grabbed the postcard and was about to rip it apart when, thank the gods, I caught my face in the mirror. Red and distorted as the wicked stepmother witch in every fairy tale I ever acted out while reading to Dylan. I stuck out my tongue, screwed up my nose and lips into a misshapen leer, crooked my finger.
“Come here, my pretty, all my young pretties.” The mirror leered back. As I blinked, a hard chip dissolved. I became merely an almost forty-year-old woman with crow’s feet and a sagging jaw. I looked at myself a second or two longer. Then, and maybe this is pathetic, I picked up the phone and called my mother.
We spoke one other time since she returned from Hawaii. She called to ask what all the messages on her machine were about and I had to break the news to her that Dylan had run away. She offered to come stay with me, but I told her absolutely not. She called several more times, but each time I let the machine pick up. Oh yes, I have a machine now. I can’t afford to ride my anti-technology high horse anymore. What if Dylan phones while I’m out buying milk?
“Hello,” my mother said, her brittle New England precision intact. I’d seen through that voice years ago, recognizing without much sympathy the shyness it masked, but hearing it now—what can I tell you?—I burst into tears at the comfort of its old familiarity.
“What do I do?” I heard myself asking, I who never sought my mother’s advice, assuming ahead, and always dead right, what it would be. Every decision I ever made, including and especially giving birth to Dylan, had been made against that woman’s better judgment.
“I don’t know what I would do, knowing the reason she’s gone, not knowing where she’s gone.” In other words, I told you so. I began to regret the call. “Even that summer you ran off to Boston, we knew where you were. We talked to the settlement-house director frequently.”
“Nathan Pearl? He never told me.” God, everywhere I turn I meet betrayal. Mine and everyone else’s. Or was it just my family? A genetic glitch.
“That’s not the point, dear.” Shit, I have always hated it when she calls me “dear.” First she’d zigged me one way, now she was zagging me the other. “What can you do more than you already have? I’d hate to see her become one of those photographs on the back of my cereal box.”
“That’s exactly what she has become.” The need to justify was disintegrating in the face of my own culpability.
“Judy, I know you are worried sick. You should be, but give the police a few more days, and then we’ll hire a private detective.”
It was too much. My own mother talking this way, probably fingering her pearls genteelly as she contemplated Humphrey Bogart finding her granddaughter on the Orient Express.
“Mother, I hate to tell you.” I took a deep breath. “I’ve already hired one.”
There was a moment of what I took to be stunned silence. Then she started to laugh. So did I. The insane logic of it all was too beautiful not to. The miles of phone wire between us cackling and swaying under our unhappy mirth, we laughed into each other’s ears for ten minutes. Laughed until we cried. What else is there left to do?
Five
Eighteen
STEPPING INTO THE kitchen, Dylan forgets for a moment why she is here, forgets Crescent clutching her hand, forgets everything in the rich grease-flecked steam that envelops her. She breathes in the freshly brewed coffee, the meat dripping fat on the grill, the seared peppers cooling on the chopping block, the sugared pastry dough still in the glass oven, the onions sautéing with garlic and cilantro in an iron skillet. Some smells she recognizes. Others she cannot place, but the delicious wisps of sweet and spicy and tart and even bitter swirl together knotting her stomach with hunger.
At a long table, a group of men and women she assumes is the staff of Los Combientes sits finishing a meal. Another man and woman work at the counter and the stove. It is like a dumb show, everything happening in slow, exaggerated yet hazy motion. Even Crescent letting go of Dylan’s hand registers only at a remove, the slight lessening of warmth beside her. As Crescent shyly approaches the table, Dylan stands rooted to her spot, disembodied more than paralyzed. A woman who introduces herself as Margie puts a phone book on an empty chair and lifts Crescent up. A plate is placed in front of her and a glass of milk. Crescent takes a piece of chicken in one hand and reaches for the milk.
The glass tips over. Blue-white milk flows down the length of oilskin into a plate of butter. Margie laughs while she and two of the others spread napkins where the milk has collected.
“Oopsie,” Crescent sings out, waving her chicken gaily at the mess she is creating.
My god, I am here, Dylan thinks. Everything, the voices, the faces, the smells, jar back into sharp clear focus, the same way she used to find herself startled awake on the bus by a sudden swerve, unaware she’d dozed off to the rhythmic forward sway in the first place.
Iris, the pretty dark-haired woman she approached a little while ago in the parking lot, comes in and rests her hand, light as a bird’s wing, on Dylan’s shoulder.
“She’s looking for a guy named Henry Firestone,” Iris tells the others, and Dylan feels a welling up of gratitude that someone else is doing the asking for her.
“Ain’t me,” says one of the men with a heavy Spanish accent. Everyone laughs as Iris gently leads Dylan to the table and sits down next to her.
Dylan smiles at how lucky she was to meet Iris first. Standing in the parking lot, screwing up her courage to walk through the front door, Dylan watched Iris come out of the restaurant with two other women, women in heavy fur coats. Iris wore only a black turtleneck and kept her arms folded on her chest against the cold as she walked the others to a station wagon. She was turning to go back inside when Dylan, spurred by an adrenaline rush of bravery, picked up Crescent and jogged up to her.
“I’m looking for someone who works here,” Dylan called out.
Iris stopped and glanced over her shoulder briefly. “Your boyfriend?”
“No.” Small icy clouds carried Dylan’s words ahead of her. “My father.”
“Well, come on in, then.” Iris gave her a sharp once-over, maybe searching for a resemblance, before she opened the heavy wood-framed door. “You look as if you could use some warming up. Both of you.”
And yes, at that moment, Dylan felt chilled straight through, but not now. Now she is warm, melting like a block of ice inside her clothes.
“What’s he look like?” asks an older woman with hair in a tight topknot, as she carries the wet napkins to the sink.
“Dark hair,” Dylan answers hesitantly, not sure how forthcoming to be with these strangers.
“Well, that narrows it down,” someone snorts. Every man in the room fits that description.
“He might have a beard.”
“Like Orey said, that narrows it down.”
Dylan flushes. They are teasing good-humoredly, she knows, but what if this place turns out to be a dead end?
“Crescent.” Dylan speaks softly but urgently. Crescent leaves the game she has been playing, wrapping and unwrapping a napkin around some spoons, to climb down from her chair. Dylan lifts her onto her lap, clutches her tightly and takes a deep breath.