by Liza Nelson
“By the by, do you know a David Balboa, or anyone fitting the description I just gave?”
“No, I honestly don’t.” I tried to imagine the Hank Fierstein I knew running a restaurant. It seemed completely improbable. How did Dylan come up with this particular man?
“Well, if he is Henry Fierstein, he’s a wanted man. No statute of limitations on federal crimes.”
He couldn’t be Hank, could he? Not my Hank, safely tucked away in the deepest pocket of my soul for so long, long before the afternoon at the post office, way back since the first time I felt the baby kicking inside me and knew that through that baby, Hank would be with me, to be cherished and loved whether he wanted me or not.
Had I bartered Hank’s freedom for Dylan’s return? Yes, and I’d do it again. Except, as usual, I was probably giving myself far too much credit. Whatever went on out there in New Mexico had very little to do with me or my mess-making anymore. Dylan found this man on her own. She called the police against him for her own reasons. But what had happened between them—after she went through God-knows-what to find him—that made her feel the need to call the police? Had he been arrested?
“Did he hurt her?” I asked, afraid to hear the answer.
“No, nothing like that it appears.”
“So where do we go from here?”
While the cop explained about minors in custody and possible travel arrangements to get Dylan home, I hoped and prayed to God and the devil both, for Hank’s sake and Dylan’s—not to mention my own—that the man in New Mexico was not her father.
“We’ve got his place under surveillance,” the cop was saying. “We’ve questioned the girlfriend extensively, but she doesn’t seem to know a thing. He seems to have flown the coop completely, but we’ll keep searching. Don’t worry. Your daughter’s safe and sound.”
“Thank the gods.”
“Yes ma’am.” So polite, missing my point entirely.
Twenty-Four
A FEW ROWS forward a child squeals. Dylan presses her head against the small rectangle of cold glass and tries to pretend she’s on a bus. Which bus though? To Delaware? To New Mexico? To Atlanta, before it all began? No, it all began before she got on the bus, even before she found the poster. Anyway, she’s on a plane now, not a bus, and there is no pretending otherwise. She is too tightly strapped in, and the view, even if she ignores the tip of wing, is too forever blue to be anywhere else. Like the wall when she woke up her first afternoon in the bedroom of The Man Who Refused to Be Her Father. Only now it is eleven in the morning and she is probably over the border into Texas.
Texas. She missed Texas coming. The route back will be a lot shorter: a little over an hour and a half to Dallas, then two hours more to Tallahassee. It is laughable. It is unfair.
Since the terrible conversation two mornings ago, everyone in New Mexico has slabbed up an impenetrable wall of vague kindness. Someone is always asking if she’s okay, promising things are going to work out for the best.
“What things?” Dylan spits back, but they pretend not to hear or answer with more mumbo jumbo that avoids saying anything at all.
To hell with them. They are all strangers she’ll never see again, and The Man Who Refused to Be Her Father has turned out to be the most menacing stranger of all. So now she is heading back to Godiva. To Mama. Los Combientes is closed up. Margie, Manuel, Orey, they are all out of a job.
The Man Who Refused to Be Her Father walked through the kitchen that morning, got into his car and drove off. Not particularly unusual, Orey and the others thought, although it was strange that he showed so little interest in the lunch prep. Not particularly unusual except that he never came back.
She doesn’t see how he could have known that Dylan was going to turn him in since she didn’t know herself beforehand. But then the police came. Everybody was there in the kitchen, staring at her. Not angry exactly (well, that, too), but more in a state of disbelief.
No sign of him by dinner, which the staff went ahead and served. Iris jumped every time the reservations line rang, but, of course, he never called. By the next day, it was obvious, even to Iris, that he wouldn’t. Dylan overheard one of the cops tell Iris that he had cashed in two big CDs when he took Crescent on his little errand run. Over $50,000 at two different banks. They found the car yesterday by a railroad crossing. The four doors wide open, nothing inside but the owner’s manual. Did bums still ride the railroads?
What did Godiva say to her years ago, when Dylan begged to watch The Wizard of Oz on TV at Gram’s. “Oh, Honeybunch, you’re old enough to face reality. There is no magic at the end of the rainbow. The magic is in the color itself.”
The baby has stopped squealing, but another somewhere toward the back of the plane begins to howl. An elderly woman in the seat across the aisle puts down her knitting and takes out a stick of peppermint gum.
“For the air pressure. They say it really helps.”
Crying babies and old people. Plane travel turns out not to be much different from bus travel after all.
“You know, this is my first time flying, too, and I’m seventy-three.”
Dylan is disappointed that she looks so obvious.
“I have to admit I’m a little bit afraid at my age, but we’ll be fine, both of us, won’t we?” Both of whom? Dylan wants to somehow make it clear that she has no connection to this woman. None at all. Damn, she does not want to cry again, but her throat constricts.
Crescent did not cry at all when Elise walked away. She did not cry in Velasquez this morning, either. Less than two weeks they were together. For less than two weeks, Crescent has been motherless, or rather Dylan has been her mother. It may as well have been two years. Fifteen years. As if Crescent could tell the difference. Will she even remember, let alone distinguish that Elise chose to leave her behind while Dylan was forced to leave? By next week, what place will Dylan take up on her little memory shelf? Crescent almost never mentioned Elise once they reached Velasquez.
What good will remembering do anyway if Crescent is going to grow up in an orphanage or group home or whatever they want to call it these days, the faceless, dreary dark building of Dylan’s nightmares when she was little, with a concrete play yard where other children, mean and oversized, would torment her?
Dylan takes out the Polaroid snapshot Iris made the day she took Dylan and Crescent shopping. The two of them in their matching scarves stand under a sign to the Gold Mine, a video arcade. Crescent had refused to smile, absolutely refused, shaking her head with great emphasis. Iris tried making faces, sang goofy songs in a squeaky voice, promised her bubble gum, but Crescent would not smile. Finally Iris gave up and stood the two of them in front of the sign so that in the picture the big gold-painted coins appear to be falling around them from the sky. Dylan has not noticed before that Crescent has her hand in Dylan’s jacket pocket, as if she were dropping in a coin while they gaze straight ahead at the camera. Dylan can just make out the underside of a grin despite her tightly clenched lips. How alike they look, the jut of their chins down and to the left. They could be sisters.
On the ride to the airport, a long ride which seemed to Dylan never-ending, Iris promised there would be no concrete playground for Crescent. She had called a friend with connections days ago, a lawyer in Albuquerque who has already begun working on alternatives.
“Please, don’t worry, Dylan.” If Iris was trying to sound convincing, she was failing. “No matter what, I’m not going to send her away.”
Iris tried to reach across the seat, but Dylan shrank back against the locked door.
“Do you really want to stay? Be honest with yourself.” Iris was red-eyed and haggard. Her unwashed hair was stringy. She did not look pretty anymore.
“Stay? With you? Of course not, but Crescent was mine. She liked being mine.”
“People don’t belong to other people.”
“Oh, please.” Iris is such a phony. Dylan hates her. “Everyone seems to think I belong to my mother.”
“Sixteen in a week.”
“You’ve got a life to work out for yourself. So do I, as it turns out.” Iris smiled grimly. Since The Man Who Refused to Be Dylan’s Father vanished, Iris has been making plans to leave Velasquez, too. Heading back to the big city.
“Frankly, Dylan, I don’t know whether to hate you or be grateful.”
So maybe Iris is beginning to get it after all, to realize that Dylan has saved her. How could she practice law while involved with a wanted criminal at the same time, even by mistake? Besides, for Iris to think she had a chance with that man she had to be nuts. If Dylan had not come along when she did, Iris was destined to become just one more in his harem of ex-girlfriends who never got over his slimy charms.
“As for Crescent, I’ll let you know where she is. You can be a kind of aunt. Gifts and visits even.”
“Sure,” Dylan answered to shut Iris up as the car sped past trashy rundown shopping strips one after another. New Mexico turned out to be as ugly as everywhere else, with subdivisions full of artificial haciendas. It particularly bothered Dylan how the garages dwarfed the attached living quarters. But then she decided, after considering all the plaster animals on the lawns, that the garages weren’t so out of keeping, were the one hint of authenticity, because they took the place of what would have been mule sheds a hundred years ago. Maybe, but the houses were depressing any way you looked at them, the pastel stucco peeling from the sides and the grass in the yards uniformly brown.
Dylan is glad to be out of it, up in this airplane where geography loses its harsh edges and becomes only an outline. Up here she can look at the hard facts from the distance of altitude.
Fact one: Dylan will never see or hear from Crescent again. It is stupid to pretend otherwise. Crescent, who has already forgotten Elise, her real mother, will forget Dylan at least as quickly. Probably by next week. And despite Iris and her good intentions, Crescent will end up, if not in an institution, then in foster care. Dylan has seen the kids from foster homes passing like phantoms through the halls at school over the years, the ones who are not out-and-out juvenile delinquents. Crescent’s childhood is going to be as miserable as any of theirs.
Dylan remembers now what it was like for her to be little like Crescent. She remembers Magic House much better than she did six months ago. The wide porch overlooking a river, crowded rooms spilling with music and people she knew less by their faces than by their hands. Not male or female, but rough or gentle, quick or slow. They picked her up and dressed her, fed her and tickled her. Some tickled. Others were more businesslike. No matter what, Dylan felt safe with Godiva watching over her. Yes, Dylan admits to herself, there is something to be said for having a mother who loves you. It’s like owning property that no one, not even The Man Who Refused to Be Her Father, can take away.
At fifteen, what memories will Crescent own? Won’t she wake up one morning and want to solve the mystery of her existence? But her only physical clues, her physical self, are not clues at all. She won’t have as much as a walk to go on. Will some early vision of Elise return to haunt her, will she cling to some secondhand description from Iris, if Iris is still around? If Elise was Crescent’s mother. There’s no knowing for sure.
As for a father, Crescent won’t have even secondhand stories of a father. Stories of a father are all Dylan still has herself, and few enough of them. She looks out the thick oval window at the sky, milkier now with clouds. She considers, what if they track down The Man Who Refused to Be Her Father and he turns out to be somebody else altogether?
He is obviously not David Balboa, that much is clear. She hates him for rejecting her, despises him for denying who he really is—whoever that might be. If he told the truth, if he is not her father, he is still a creep and a jerk with something to hide or why would he disappear? Dylan would be glad to know she doesn’t have to claim him as a relative. Maybe she’ll try to find Henry Fierstein again later, when she is truly independent, maybe in a year or two. She could pick up the trail where she left off in Eden. Even if the clues are colder, she will be more experienced and more savvy. A lot more careful about whom she trusts, whom she cares for.
No, because of fact two: The search is finished. This trip has used up every bit of her energy.
Beyond the wing, a cluster of small clouds float by. In buses Dylan could always see past the electric wires and phone poles to the horizon, the magic line where sky joined land. In an airplane she has to depend on the wing dipping down toward earth to make sure it is still there below, waiting for her. From buses she could count houses, trees, all-night gas stations, ugly but essential mileposts of the dreary everyday life to be passed on the way to what she considered at the time her superior destiny. Now, craning her neck for a glimpse of what looks like a sheet of lumpy brown paper bisected by thin lines but which she must assume are highways or rivers, she is nostalgic for the old bus landscape.
That landscape had not been much different than the landscape she left behind. Travelers passing through Esmeralda on Route 7 and Highway 12 look out on littered vacant lots, a sprawling narrow-windowed school, Esmeralda Estates subdivision, gas stations, the Ocean View Motel with no view of an ocean in sight, the Dairy Queen.
Fact three: Leaving home was a more public act than Dylan intended. More likely to draw embarrassing attention than anything Godiva ever did. And now she is going to return empty-handed, with nothing to show for the time away. What will people think? Over the phone Godiva did not mention how she has been explaining Dylan’s absence to people. Knowing Godiva, she probably hasn’t bothered, or else she’s casually broadcast every detail.
What about Cass? Dylan put a lot of trust in her. How much has she let on? Assuming she received Dylan’s letters, has she kept them to herself? Has she kept them period? What crazy stuff Dylan wrote. She isn’t sure anymore what actually happened; already it seems, most of it, so long ago. But those letters. If they still exist, Dylan wants them back. They are her only record.
The trip has not been all bad. Eden was a good place. She wishes she had stayed there longer. She wishes she had the book Isaac gave her, the one she misplaced half-read on a bus somewhere in the Midwest. She wonders if he or Haiku ever think about her. If she shows up again in a year or two, will they welcome her back? The Wyatts will. They’d welcome anybody.
She even feels a certain fondness for Spider now that she’ll never see him again. To think she was even briefly won over by his peculiar charms. For that matter, to think she once considered Jimmy Cryder crucial to her happiness. He was nice, though. Oh well, by this time he is sure to be dating someone else.
Dylan gazes out across the clouds. More than anywhere else in the world right now, she wishes she were sitting in First Period English, Mrs. Cadwallader knocking her erasers together, Danny Morris and Travis Crain in the row ahead, the soft indentation of pale skin above the rim of their T-shirt collars as they hunch over their books. Cally Jasper’s sharp concentrated profile to her left and Judy Bellamy’s sleepy one to her right. The fake-wood desk with a thin rind of dirt under its metal edging that Dylan likes to scrape with her pencil point. The torn pieces of notebook paper, folded twice so the writing inside cannot be read, her name written in Jimmy’s broad scrawl. The smell of chalk dust and sweat that all schools share.
Two weeks, two years. The clouds and sky dissolve into a mist, silvery and transparent, but endless so that the plane seems to be roaring in place. Dylan’s eyes begin to close. Relaxing into the drone, she allows herself to doze off.
“Coke, fruit juice? Would you ladies like something to drink?” The flight attendant takes Dylan’s silence at face value, but as soon as the cart rumbles on to the next row, Dylan is wide awake and starving.
She pulls up her backpack from under the seat in front of her and takes out a white insulated bag with LOS COMBIENTES printed in iridescent shades of yellow and turquoise. She took it from Iris grudgingly at the departure gate when her flight
was called. Now she is glad to have it. Inside are two pieces of coriander lime chicken, a green apple wrapped in tissue, and a wedge of what Dylan has to admit is the best cinnamon chocolate pound cake in the world. She eats greedily, but when she comes to the cake, it is inedible, dried out and stale. The Los Combientes she knew would never serve stale cake.
Fact four: There is no more Los Combientes. She thinks about a conversation, one of the few when The Man Who Refused to Be Her Father talked at all about himself.
“I didn’t just design the menu.” He was describing how he’d created Los Combientes out of an empty warehouse. “I hung the Sheetrock, refinished old tables and chairs, put in the kitchen stove, worked twenty-four hours a day cooking and serving and cleaning up.” He was talking but it could have been Godiva Dylan was hearing.
“And, damn, if I don’t love what I created.” Godiva got excited the same way about Point Paradise, about her boxes.
“I love to watch customers eat my food and fill my rooms with their best moods. It’s all in the details, kid.” For once he smiled at her or at least in her direction. “The pepper in the pepper mills, the paintings on the walls, the temperature of the wine.”
How could she have ended up with two parents so alike? Aren’t opposites the ones who are supposed to attract?
Dylan sits up and grips her armrests, almost ill at the enormity of what she may have done. What if Martha in Cincinnati made a mistake? Got her aliases wrong? What if he is another man hiding from another past? What will his life be now? What if Dylan has destroyed it for nothing? The truth remains too unclear, too unresolved. She refuses to feel guilt or remorse, yet. She forces herself to swallow the saliva gathering under her tongue and to breathe in and out. Still, she can hardly bear the claustrophobia taking hold. That and a breathtaking impatience to hear the certain rhythm of the Gulf tides breaking against the shore at Point Paradise. She has been inland too long.