by Liza Nelson
“You are my father, aren’t you?”
David Balboa walks over to the window, which faces north to the mountains. She follows him. It is the kind of winter bright morning, late morning now, when a metallic sheen brushes every surface. Looking through the window is like looking at the world reflected from inside a spoon, and her heart is so full that her chest hurts.
A bird is pecking around the empty feeder Iris usually keeps filled.
“She must have forgotten to fill it this morning,” he says.
“Aren’t you?” Dylan is not sure she can wait for another second.
“Your father?” he says, staring at the feeder. “What has given you that idea? I told you I don’t know any Henry Firestone.”
“Stein. Fierstein.” Her voice cracks. “You said Fierstein the other day. I heard you. You are him. I know you are. Sure, you have to hide it in front of the others. I can understand if you have to. But we are alone here.” She begins to tremble despite her best efforts. “Look at my eyes. Look at how I walk.”
She crosses the room to Crescent. “Your friend in Cincinnati said we walked the same and we do.”
“I have no friends in Cincinnati.”
“Yes, you do. Martha.” She touches the top of Crescent’s head, bent over the book, and walks back to him, hoping to catch a reaction that doesn’t occur. Does his forehead wrinkle, just a little? Does his frown deepen? She wishes she knew Martha’s last name. It is too easy for him to deny knowing someone without a specific last name.
“I know all about you.” She hates the pleading tone with which her words emerge. “More than anyone. More than Iris. You are my father, you have to be.”
He folds his arms across his chest and frowns.
“If I were, which I am not, would it honestly make much difference?”
“Yes, yes, it makes all the difference in the world, yes.” Look what she’s gone through to find him. “How can you think it doesn’t make a difference?” She is panting.
He steps toward her, rests his hands on her shoulders to quiet her. She’s been waiting what seems her whole life for him to touch her with this kind of parental concern, but she breaks away. “If you don’t want me, just say so.”
“Poor Dylly, are you sad?” Crescent is watching attentively from the chair. They are not alone after all, even now. Dylan shakes her head and attempts a smile so Crescent won’t begin to cry herself.
“It is not a matter of my wanting you or not wanting you.” He speaks slowly and calmly. “I cannot be your father.”
“Because you’re afraid.”
“Dylan, stop. I am not your father. I am not part of your life. Be honest with yourself. Do you really want me to be?”
“Yes,” she says without a pause, “I do.” But her heart shudders.
He shakes his head and sits down on the rug beside Crescent’s chair. Dylan sits down, too, so they are facing each other, their legs crossed Indian style, the way she sat for her manicure with Iris.
“Listen, Dylan. Your trip here, the way you describe it, it’s as if you were traveling back in time. And it was a strange time, I’ll grant you that. Living on the edge. No, over the edge a lot of the time.” He pushes his glasses up on his forehead, begins to twist his mustache, then stops, a habit Iris has told her he is trying to break. “Everything was so important then, every decision, every act. All the clichés we lived by.”
“What clichés?” Dylan asks, but she knows what he means. Here he is talking to her for real at last. She should be ecstatic but the conversation is going all wrong. She has no control over the sentences coming out of her mouth.
“If you are not my father, where were you on May 5, 1970?” Tears of fear and accusation start again and this time she does hold them back.
“Sweetheart, I haven’t the slightest idea.”
At the window, the hungry bird begins to peck the glass. Crescent climbs down from her chair to see.
“Poor birdy.” She taps the glass in a helpless attempt to comfort. “Please, Davey, let him in.”
David Balboa does not move.
“Please, Davey.” Dylan startles, but no, Crescent did not say “Daddy.” “I share my Cheerios.”
He nods to Dylan to fetch the birdseed from the cupboard, and like a robot she obeys. As soon as she opens the window to fill the feeder, the bird flutters its wings to hover inches out of reach. Dylan pours the seed onto the flat tray and closes the window quickly, her hands already reddening from the cold. While Dylan puts the box of seed away, Crescent stays at the window to watch as the bird circles the feeder before it lands and begins to peck.
David Balboa watches Crescent watching the bird, then stands up and walks over to Dylan. He takes her face between his open hands, the way she’s dreamed he would for so long. He shakes his head once, emphatically.
“I’m just a man in the restaurant business.” He is old and tired. He smells of coffee and aftershave. Lacy red lines trail across the whites of his eyes.
“I hate you. I wish I never found you.” Dylan’s cheeks burn, held stiff in the vise of his dry, hard palms.
“You need to call your mother and tell her you are coming home,” David Balboa says calmly, coldly. “You have reached a dead end here. It’s over. The quest, or whatever it has been for you, is over. Se acabó.”
NO IT IS NOT over. Not for Dylan. Not by a long shot. She runs into the study and slams the door. Crescent calls her name in a perplexed little-girl whimper, but Dylan is beyond responding, even to Crescent. She leans against the door, choking down sobs. She hears them out there, the two of them, Crescent’s soft, high-pitched questions and the male grate of his answers, hears them moving around, then the foot treads on the stairs down to the restaurant. She is alone, more alone suddenly than she’s ever been in her entire life.
She sits down on the edge of the unmade fold-out bed. T-shirts and jeans jumble together on the floor nearby. Crescent’s sweater and a new pair of corduroy pants lie draped over the desk chair. It is his desk but with nothing of his on its surface except a phone and an adding machine. She has inspected the contents of the desk drawers several times already, has found not one clue she could use as proof that the man who calls himself David Balboa is someone else. Not that she will ever think of him again as David Balboa. No, she will never think of him as anyone but The Man Who Refused to Be Her Father.
She opens the top drawer again, with the methodical care of someone who has memorized the contents, which she has. She touches the now familiar ledger books, the folder of printed menus from other restaurants, the scheduling charts. She is still hoping to discover what she’s missed—a stray newspaper clipping, a letter, some scrap of physical memory he saved the way Godiva saved Henry Fierstein’s wanted poster.
Godiva. It would be late afternoon in Florida now. Godiva would be sitting on the porch smoking. Dylan can see the smoke wavering up, smell the bitterness of burning cigarette in the salt air, see her mother’s wide back, the loose flyaway braid that hangs down so long Godiva could almost sit on it. Dylan looks at the phone, her fingers itching to dial home to that unfailing source of too-easy love, but instead she moves to the narrow bank of bookcases across from the bed.
She begins pulling cookbooks down off the shelves, one at a time, then as fast as they’ll come. She read a novel once in which the villain hid a missing will inside a book, but Dylan cannot remember how the other characters discovered the hiding place. She holds the books upside down and jiggles them. From one a small paper card flutters down and she grabs it. A recipe for mango souffle. She tears it up. Similar cards fall from other books. She looks at each. All recipes she tears into pieces and more pieces, then drops into a metal wastebasket. She takes a match from one of the little sliding boxes with LOS COMBIENTES printed on the front in flowing turquoise script. She strikes the match and drops it, lit, into the basket, a little offering to the gods of orphaned and half-orphaned children. The paper is old and dry and burns quickly down to ash the color
of dirty snow.
Not fair, damn it.
She picks up a book lying open on its face. How to Cook a Wolf. The problem is that he caught her off guard today. She should have shown him the poster. She should have shown him the first day.
But how? The first afternoon was such a disaster. She admits she messed up then, saying his name to everyone. But was anyone really paying serious attention? No. And she never said anything about his being wanted by the police, being a criminal, being on the lam. Besides, she has been careful to protect his identity ever since. He knows she’s said nothing to the others. Not even Iris; there is no telling what stories he’s fed Iris. Dylan has eavesdropped on enough of their conversations by now to make a good guess.
Dylan puts the book aside. From the inner pocket of her backpack, propped against a desk leg, she removes Henry Fierstein’s picture. Flattening the edges of the paper, she smooths her father’s face against her hand. With all this travel, her copy is no longer very clear, but she still likes the way he looks. How many kisses has she placed on his smudged forehead? All those conversations they’d shared in her head while she was on the bus. Weird, what a fun time that seems now, the future so full of possibility just a week ago.
She imagines the conversation The Man Who Refused to Be Her Father must be having with Iris about now:
“Where’s Dylan?”
“She needs a little space, some time alone. She’s going to call her mother and get out of our hair. Or else.”
Or else what? He couldn’t very well call the police on her, could he? That’s probably why she’s been able to stay as long as she has—because he doesn’t know how to get rid of her without drawing attention to himself. He’s afraid. She looks at the paper in her hand. Maybe she has more power than she realized.
The Man Who Refused to Be Her Father won’t call the police, but she could. If he could betray her like this, and denying his own child has to be betrayal in the deepest sense, what does she owe him? Besides, he has broken laws and criminals should pay for their crimes. Godiva used to talk about how she knew the risk of getting busted was part of the package when she went to antiwar demonstrations. She was critical of some former friend who wound up in jail and then bellyached about the bad food. “God, Honeybunch,” she proclaimed, slapping her hand into the dough she was kneading. “The whole point was to get arrested, wasn’t it?”
And if Dylan is mistaken, there’d be no harm done then. If he really is not her father, if David Balboa really is David Balboa, then no one has anything to lose except Dylan herself. She’ll have to go back to Esmeralda while he and the cops share a laugh. But at least she’ll know.
“Dylan, are you okay?” Iris opens the door. “Is something burning?” She surveys the mess, sniffing, but does not come in.
“Did he send you up here to check on me?” Dylan quickly folds Henry Fierstein’s picture and tucks it back in her pack. “Well, you can go right down and tell him I burnt his recipe for mocha cheesecake, among others.”
“God, Dylan.” Iris begins to ask the obvious why but stops herself. Dylan can see her mentally backing up as she stares at the scattered books.
“David didn’t send me up. In fact, I haven’t seen him since this morning.” She frowns not so much at Dylan as to herself. “Evidently he brought Crescent into the kitchen a few minutes ago and left her with Orey, then took off. I thought you might know where.”
“Oh sure. He tells me everything.” Why doesn’t Iris just leave her alone. “Isn’t the lunch crowd due about now? Who’s going to seat people if you’re up here babysitting me?”
“Dylan, don’t be so angry at us.” As if Iris were part of the equation. “You need to go home. To get on with your life. You can’t hide here indefinitely.”
“Why not, Miss Almost Lawyer? Isn’t that what you’re doing, hiding here with your David?” Dylan locks eyes with Iris. A direct hit. “How much do you know about your beloved boyfriend, anyway?”
Without answering, Iris turns, slowly closing the door behind her.
Dylan is immediately sorry. Not at what she’s said, but because now she is alone again. She stares at the phone. Late afternoon in Esmeralda. Godiva might still be at the elementary school working. Christmas vacation ended over a week ago. The secretary would have to page Godiva from the office.
No. Calling Godiva like a homesick baby would be way too easy on him, Dylan decides. No. He is denying her rights, and she is not going to let him. Carefully, she steps around the scatter of open cookbooks toward the desk. Carefully, almost reluctantly, she picks up the receiver and dials 911.
Six
Twenty-Three
I PRACTICALLY TRIPPED over myself to pick up by the second ring. I already knew. Maternal instinct, it doesn’t weaken with age or distance after all, not as long as you’re paying due attention, which believe me I am these days. And when I heard Dylan’s voice—well, you can imagine. It was not simply a weight lifting off my heart and lungs and big toe. No, I swear to the gods, when I heard the soft slur of her S, the quick, so-familiar emphasis of her long vowels, my whole being lifted.
“So, Mom, it’s me,” she said, and I began to hover, literally hover, inches above the pull of this earth’s gravity.
She was safe. She was coming home.
“I’m in New Mexico.”
“New Mexico,” I echoed back, not mentioning the call I’d received a few days earlier. A Detective Marks from Albuquerque, letting me know a girl fitting Dylan’s description had been sighted in a mall, not in Albuquerque itself, but near Velasquez, some ski resort town I’d never heard of—skiing has never exactly been my sport. A security guard noticed her acting suspiciously, whatever acting suspiciously might mean. The details Detective Marks had available were fuzzy; the report mentioned two girls, one much younger, which made no sense. But who knows?
Anyway, I’d been living on cigarettes and the edge of my seat ever since. Up to three packs a day again. I know I’d quit as part of my bargain with the gods to get Dylan back, but after I heard from the detective, I had to smoke to calm down, and I had to calm down so I could breathe. It was almost worse waiting to hear more than when I’d heard nothing at all. No, nothing was worse than that. I just had to have faith. And I did. I knew this call was coming. I knew it in my bones.
“The police guy wants to talk to you,” Dylan was saying. She had not made the call of her own volition. A tug of disappointment on the old heart strings but I can’t say I was really surprised. Nothing could surprise me anymore.
“How did they find you?” I wanted to keep her talking to me, mouthpiece to mouthpiece, just a little longer, to regain some kind of rhythm between us.
“They didn’t.” Her voice, so flat, the way Cass Culpepper’s used to be. “I contacted them.”
“Oh, Honeybunch.” Yellow warning light flashing. “Why not just call me?”
What had she been through during these last three weeks? Which of those fears that I had blocked out of hitting range was about to come true? I thought of Cass and Louise. Was it better to know everything, “the concrete details” as Louise would say? I took a quick steadying breath.
“Dylan, did something bad happen? Was someone trying to hurt you?”
“I found him.”
It didn’t quite register. “What?”
“My father, I found him for them.”
“Hank?” I think I spoke out loud then, but maybe not. How in God’s name could she track down Hank Fierstein when the FBI had not been able to find him for twenty years.
“Why didn’t you tell me he was a wanted man?” Her voice pitched upward toward anger. “Why didn’t you show me you had his picture all along?” I could hear the pain almost break through a thousand miles away, but then she paused, collected herself. Even as a toddler Dylan could do that, stop mid-tantrum and pull herself back into control before she really let loose.
“How, Honeybunch? Where?” I couldn’t believe it.
“How I found him isn’
t the point. I just did. But Mom, he said he wasn’t.” And she began to sob, my disconsolate little girl. I wanted to put my arms around her and rock away all that pain the way I could when she was five and she woke sobbing from a nightmare. “He said he didn’t remember you, as if anyone ever forgets you. He was hateful and mean and I didn’t like him from the first minute, just told myself I did because he was my father. And he was a fake, a big fake. All the people here thought he just hung the moon. Well, he didn’t and I proved it to them.”
She sniffled, but I did not know what to say, what to think. Hank could not have forgotten me, could he?
“Here’s the cop,” Dylan said, her voice gone flat again.
“Mrs. Blue?” The policeman was surprisingly polite. Well, they’d all been actually, the FBI men, too. But this one’s Western twang softened his official formality even more.
“Yes.” My hands were shaking so badly I could barely hold the phone. “Where’s my daughter? I want to talk to my daughter.”
“Your daughter’s right here beside me doing just fine. We’ll be getting her back to you quick as we can.”
He said he wanted to outline the situation first though, and that’s all there was, an outline with next to no details. He did not know how Dylan had ended up in Velasquez, New Mexico, and of course she refused to say. When she phoned the local police with a supposed tip about the whereabouts of a wanted felon, no one paid her much attention at first, he said. They figured she was just another kid making a crank call, but then the computer kicked out her name as a runaway in possibly dangerous proximity to a possibly dangerous felon.
“We’d gotten an APB on her almost two weeks ago, but there are so many kids. Now her calling, this was different. And she was naming a pretty respected citizen around town. The guy runs one of those trendy new restaurants, way too high priced for the likes of me,” the cop added.
Dylan had somehow finagled to stay with this man David Balboa for several days. His name and the cop’s physical description added up to nothing, a tallish man between forty and forty-five with a mustache, a receding hairline and a ponytail.