Please, I insist, she’s not a street kid, she’s a good girl, something’s snapped, she’s a Hopkins Academy student. This last one raises brows. It is a conservative prep school, one whose girls do not end up on missing posters.
When I post them, my skin crawls. The looks on the faces of sleazy bastards when they see her picture. A mother could kill them with slender, manicured hands.
I have a gut feeling she’s not here. I race home to drop off my mother, then drive to Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade. It’s an outdoor mall, blocks long, a favorite haunt of Mia and her friends. A subculture of street kids is always camped there around a fountain. Dirty, loud, addicted, faces full of steel rings, missing teeth. They’ve no money to buy food, but they buy hair dye, sporting cockscombs and plumages of every color. Some are smart, some drug-fried, some just “not regular” as we West Side moms say, we respectable families who cut this cobbled family a wide berth without interrupting our conversation, like stepping around dog shit. They’re just part of the urban landscape, as if the fountain spawned them, as if they’d swum upstream through the sewers and came spouting out while we slept. Now, I realize there are weeping mothers from here to the Atlantic.
I push through the Friday night crowd, looking, looking, looking. I give posters to store owners, pleading have you seen her, can you watch for her? It is so easy to know which ones have children.
I give posters to the street kids, I say the reward is big, no questions asked. One girl says she’s seen Mia around, a week ago maybe. She gives me nothing useful, but she cares, they all do, one actually pets me and says don’t worry. These kids I’ve avoided and pitied are pitying me. Many won’t live past twenty, twenty-five. A girl with fat, shiny cheeks and a shaved head hugs me and says she wishes her mom was nice like me. She can’t be more than thirteen.
Paul and I lie in bed for a couple of hours, not like people resting, like felled trees. We don’t hug or cling. One touch and I will fall apart. My heart hasn’t stopped beating like a chased rabbit since I saw her empty bed.
I go over the last time I saw her, Thursday morning. She followed me to the door, shivering with fever, hugging me with her little stick arms. She already knew then. She said, I’m glad Bubbie is coming. Why, Mia, so Bubbie can comfort me, provide minor distraction?
Don’t let this disrupt your lives, just think of me like when I was on my student trip in Thailand.
Right, I’ll take Bubbie to Las Vegas as planned, see the Cirque du Soleil and pretend you’re hailing a tuktuk in Chiang Mai. Mia left before my mother came because she knew Bubbie would see through her charade. She knew her grandmother would have seen what her mother was blind to.
Paul and I have gone through a thousand possible scenarios, explanations. We have no more guesses left. We lie on our backs, whispering into the darkness.
“It’s so cold tonight.” “She must be soaking wet—her raincoat is here.” “Her fever will get worse.”
Neither of us says, “Don’t worry, we’ll find her tomorrow.”
Before sunrise, I raise a glass of water to my lips and find that all of my teeth have loosened.
We meet early to strategize, five teams, each taking part of Venice. My brother Henry will search on foot. The Beverly Hills police have sent two off-duty officers on bicycles. By now, I know how rare this is. Even more so because it’s raining and cold.
Venice is Hollywood Boulevard on the beach. Every slimeball who made their way west seems to end up there hawking something—string bikinis, incense, drugs, sex. I’d corner every one of them but the rain’s cleared the streets. I’d follow them into whatever holes they crawled into, if I knew where they were. I’d follow them and figure out what they want more than they might want my daughter. Shop owners here shrug off my pleas and posters. They earn their livings off kids like Mia.
My girlfriend drives me through the tourist areas. It’s hard to see behind Dumpsters or into doorways, the skies are so dark with rain.
“Maybe she’s inside somewhere,” she says hopefully, trying to cheer me.
“Inside is bad.”
I don’t speak much, I can’t manage whole sentences. My brain’s looping images with short captions: defense wounds, dental records, kitchen knife, coroner.
I search the rooms in Venice’s skuzzy youth hostel. I walk into a dank room with a picnic table and fake trellis. A scruffy, pony-tailed guy in leather pants sits there smoking. European for sure. I show him my poster, asking if he’s seen her. He waves me closer with the cigarette, his eyes narrow as he scrutinizes Mia’s face, nodding slightly, as if she looks familiar. My heart starts thumping with hope.
“She’s only fifteen, she’s sick, we’ll pay anything!”
He looks up at me for a moment and then because he thinks I don’t understand him, he says in French that she would make a nice little fuck.
Henry has been walking for hours in the rain. He’s tall and massive, a bodybuilder with a deep, booming voice. His sheer size and sound are frightening, thank God, because when he turns out of an alley to go to home for a rest, he frightens a grubby guy named Rain when they practically walk into each other.
Rain is walking arm in arm with Mia and Talia.
“Mia!”
It takes but a second for Henry to recover his surprise, Rain to backpedal, and Talia to take off running. Mia is so stunned to see her uncle, she hesitates long enough for him to grab her. He yells for Talia but she’s already down the block.
They were walking to the old school bus Rain lives in. He was about to drive the girls to Haight-Ashbury. His bus-house was parked a block beyond Henry’s car. If Henry had turned that corner a minute earlier or later, we may never have seen her again.
Henry has taken Mia to his fiancée Margaret’s apartment. I call him on the way there, breathless with questions, bright with happiness! He’s evasive, just saying that Mia’s not, uh, happy. That’s okay, we’ve found her, she’s safe, I can fix whatever’s wrong, I’m her mother!
Henry and Margaret hug me as soon as I come in, a little too tightly. The look in their eyes makes my stomach sink. His manner on the phone only now kicks in. Mia’s in the bedroom. They don’t accompany me.
Mia’s hunched over on the bed, turned away from the door. Her honey-colored curls are lank and matted, her feet are bare and muddy, she’s got on wet clothes I don’t recognize.
“Mia?” I say softly as I start to put my arms around her.
She twists away and darts to the bathroom.
“Mia!” I rush after her and jam my body into the doorway to keep it open.
“Leave me alone,” she hisses hoarsely.
“Mia, what’s wrong, tell me what’s going on!”
“I didn’t want to be found! Fuck off!”
I am too dumbstruck even to cry. In this speechless moment, I get my first real look at her. She’s higher than a kite, she has a strange reek, her creamy olive skin is streaked with grime, her nose and cheeks are bright red. Mia’s eyes are big and clear. These eyes are slitty, dark and puffed, they’re glassy and bloodshot. But, the animal look in them—what drugs can do this? I can’t reconcile who I’m seeing with my daughter. It’s like she spent the night in Frankenstein’s lab next to a savage little beast and someone hit the switch.
I didn’t think anything could ever be worse than seeing her empty bed. I was wrong—this is. And a cold fear is setting in that after this, there might be another worse, that this worse might just be the frost on the grass before winter falls.
I drive to the Venice police station with Mia to report her found. Paul’s waiting in the parking lot. He looks so small and hapless against the lead gray ocean behind him.
Mia gets out of the car sullen and nasty, sidestepping the stepfather she adores. I stare at the ground to avoid seeing the look on his face when he sees her. He says Talia’s father was upset that Henry only caught Mia. I feel sick for her parents, though there was nothing Henry could have done, unless he let go of Mia. He had t
o choose.
Officer Carol handles our case, a no-nonsense blonde who is harsh with Mia. Mia denies knowing anything about Talia’s whereabouts. She looks sharply at Mia.
“You don’t know how lucky you are, young lady. Very few parents look for their kids and even fewer ever find them.”
She takes me aside to show me 8 × 10 glossies she shows runaways to scare them. Crime scene shots of girls who weren’t so lucky, photos the tourist bureau doesn’t show. I’ve seen enough of them doing research to know those images never leave you. Facedown, twisted-legged girls behind garages with their panties in their mouths, rat-eaten girls in Dumpsters, charred girls in bathtubs, in the pugilist position, as if they stood a chance. Because I still think Mia’s too sensitive, that this won’t happen again, I tell her not to show her.
Paul stays to help Talia’s father look for her while I drive Mia home. I realize how stupid it was to drive alone with her. She could jump out at any stop. I’m careful and sweet, talking about little things, something the cat did, the hat Bubbie knitted her. I don’t know what else to say, I’m so scared and bewildered.
Mia just stares out the window, then suddenly demands to use a pay phone on the way home. Because I’m afraid to make her mad, I find one and obey her command to stand far away. But not so far I can’t catch her if she bolts. Whoever she calls isn’t there, thank God, because I don’t want any Venetians showing up outside her bedroom window. For all I know she was trying to call Rain’s brother, Thunder, to come spring her.
I’m so wasted and shaky, I can hardly pull the car in straight. I rake it along the carport wall. Getting Mia in the back door proves just as difficult, because whatever drugs she took in Venice must be time-release. She suddenly switches from surly and mean to grinning and unsteady. I help her stumble to her bedroom, drop her backpack, sit with her on the bed.
“I like sleeping on the floor,” she rasps and slides to the carpet.
This is creepy, but I just stroke her hair and say cheerfully, “Okay, I’ll make you a bed there.”
“No, it’s cool just like this. It’s just for tonight, anyway.”
“What? Mia, you’re home, you live here, you’re not going anywhere.”
She lets out a squeak of a laugh, “Yes, I am! I belong out there, Mom. They’re waiting for me.”
“Out where, Mia, what are you talking about, who’s waiting?”
She tucks her knees up under her chin and looks up at me. I cup her little face in my hands. And then her face goes slack, her milky-pink, swimmy eyes pop open wide and she looks right through me as if she’s just been possessed.
“Mia?”
She starts a trance-like croaking, “I have to go, I have to go, I have to go…”
This isn’t Mia, this is science fiction, this is a pod. I’m in Kafka’s Metamorphosis, gaping at a giant roach-Mia chanting, “I have to go, have to go, have to go…”
I grab her and shake her, yelling at my child who is here and not here. I sink to the floor in front of her, crying like a broken animal, howling like only a mother can howl.
“Don’t cry, Mommy, don’t cry,” she coos back in her ragged voice, wrapping herself around me. “It’s okay, Mommy, don’t cry.”
But she doesn’t say, “Don’t cry, Mommy, I won’t leave again.” She comforts me with, “Don’t cry, Mommy, I’ll be okay out there, they’ll take care of me.”
Winter is burying us already.
Paul comes home to find Mia asleep on the floor curled around me. He lifts her into her bed. I don’t tell him what happened, I don’t have the words yet to describe it. We drag ourselves to the living room, two dazed parents who have no idea what they’re fighting or how to fight it. But we better learn fast, because we suspect the battle’s just beginning.
First, we shove the piano in front of the front door. Then, Paul starts screwing her bedroom windows shut while I get her backpack and empty it on the dining table. I scour every corner of it, I even smell the lint. I’m treasure hunting for Mia, for clues to whatever is “out there.”
I find three packs of cold medicine capsules and a journal, one I haven’t seen before. It’s obvious why she kept it hidden. It seems our bouncy, bright Mia, the A student who never said a disrespectful word to us, who laughed and cuddled with us, has led a double life for nearly a year. She kept another Mia hidden from us, one several shades darker.
Paul sits beside me as we read poems and entries about whips and chains, broken glass, gutters and blow jobs. Phone numbers of homeless shelters, of people we’ve never heard of. Are these the people who will “take care of her”? Out there where she has to go, has to go, has to go?
There are quotes by street kids doing revolting things with revolting people. I remember a library book she brought home last year for her photography class. A photo essay of LA and San Francisco runaways and addicts, Raised by Wolves, by Larry Clark. Apparently, she thought it was a guide book.
I cannot comprehend a Mia who wanted this. We close the journal. We’ll have to read the rest in small doses. The pages themselves feel slimy, repulsive. How could she possibly hide this so well?
“She’s either very smart or very sick,” Paul says.
The word we’ve been avoiding. Sick. Like the TV commercial—“This is your brain on drugs.” She’s scrambled her eggs permanently. Or maybe the chicken came first—she felt “pretty screwed up” first, then took drugs to feel better.
Enough shock and horror, Claire, think, think of what to do. Okay, right, yes. Detox. Get the drugs out of her system. Get us all into counseling. Take her on a trip, make new house rules, have family meetings. Of course, she’ll come to her senses, we’re a resilient bunch! Who knows, this may even lead to better communication!
But. That journal. What if we detox her and when she comes down she isn’t the same girl that went up? What if she’s the journal Mia? What if Mr. Hyde never returns home to become Dr. Jekyll again?
Ooowww. Too bright. And too early. I stuff my face under my pillow to block out the sun. Now I can’t breathe. Fuuck! I go to get up but I feel like my muscles have turned to gum. I pull the covers back over my head. The sun lights up the pattern on the blanket and it’s actually kinda pretty. Those big blue flowers, they’re somehow comforting. And, somehow, strangely familiar. I’m awake in an instant.
Shit! I can’t be back here. How did this happen?! I’m not supposed to be here!
I make a mad dash across my bed to the window. I shove it up but it won’t go higher than four inches. This is impossible! I crawled out this same window four days ago. Then I see the screws. Motherfuckers!
Wait! There’s a screwdriver in the utility room. I creep down the hallway, skipping the creakier floorboards. I slip into the utility room, slide out the drawer, lift out the screwdriver and tiptoe back to my room.
I hear Mia creeping around and jump up, “Paul, she’s gone for the screwdriver!”
But Paul’s not the least alarmed. I stop, suddenly realizing—
“You hid the Phillips.”
He nods. I know why he did it, but it seems cruel to trick her. I don’t want to do anything to anger her. Too late.
“Mooooommmmmmmmm!!” comes Mia screaming down the hallway.
We run to block the back door, she stops us in the kitchen, clutching the screwdriver.
“You can’t keep me here! Let me out of here!”
“Mia, calm down, we’ll—,” Paul starts to say.
“No! I’m not staying here,” she spits, “I hate you!”
I touch her arm softly to calm her, which only enrages her.
She raises the screwdriver over me. “You better let me go!”
Paul grabs her arms and she fights him like a biker chick. He wrestles her to the floor, uncurls her fingers from the screwdriver. She wriggles and yells as he yanks the screwdriver out of reach and stands up quickly.
Mia lies on her back with Paul standing over her. They stare at each other and time seems to stop. For an eerie moment,
we’re all frozen in place.
Then Mia’s face crumples as she starts to cry.
“Eat, Mia, eat. Just one little slice of pear,” she says. I have no appetite. I just want to curl up into nothingness.
“Come on, honey, just one piece. Mia, you’re probably just depressed, that’s all. We’ll pull through this.”
I stare at her through a fog. “We?” I was about to fix everything, not we. All her so-called help did was ruin everything. She still doesn’t get it, doesn’t realize I’m beyond her now.
I walk behind Paul and Mia to the car. We’ve gotten her a bed in a hospital psych unit for teenagers with problems. Somewhere she can’t escape until she’s better, whatever “better” means now.
I walk behind them as I did a few days ago, on the way to school. I held her lunch bag. Her uniform hung crooked from the way she rolled the waistband like all the girls did. She took Paul’s hand, swinging it as she joked with him. Now, Paul’s holding her hand to make sure she doesn’t get away.
I remember the first time Mia took Paul’s hand, when she was four. I suddenly stop, because I remember something else. Another memory surfaces from the deep end of our history.
I have borne witness to another metamorphosis just as surreal as Mia’s. In another lifetime, one I thought was long behind us.
2.
Chicago, early 1980s. I reached twenty utterly unprepared for life in general and life in the late seventies in particular. As a thick-lensed nerd, my character was shaped by the Brontés, Carolyn Keene, John Wayne, and the Girl Scout Handbook. When I looked up from my beloved books, I never got over the shock.
I expected a world where good guys won, integrity was considered a virtue, and a good heart and a fine mind would take a woman far. What I got was the era of “the evil that lurked within,” of the flawed protagonist, of Transformer action figure heroes that concealed monsters—just a twist of the appendages! Nancy Drew had left the building. There was no right or wrong, no black or white, because the gray area was where the hip hung out. Sans moi, because I never got it—“it” being whatever got you “in,” a condition involving drugs, sex, and a sangfroid I didn’t possess.
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