Blood Father

by Peter Craig

  He was therefore surprised when he had a visitor one day, and the COs were abuzz with how she looked. His status among them seemed to have recovered overnight as they led him to a private room and sat him down at a table across from Ursula.

  It took Link a moment to recover his wits. The scent of her was like a breeze through a citrus grove, and he had not smelled anything for years but the gray soup of the prison: crop chemicals, the methane stench of cows across the irrigation trench, disinfectant, sweat, the brine of the Salton Sea. He waited with his eyes closed. She said, “I’m here because I’m at the end of my rope with Lydia.”

  A guard stood in the back of the room, eavesdropping. Anybody watching this meeting through the camera overhead wouldn’t be able to imagine how Link had ever been with a woman like this. She didn’t look touched by the years, let alone pawed by his big, ugly hands. Her hair was pulled back tightly over her head, streaked blonde; her eyes seemed bright and young; she wore a white sweater with the fuzzy texture of a seeding dandelion.

  She started off talking about Lydia’s medical condition—a fourteen-year-old girl on a cocktail of antidepressants. She talked about panic and rage attacks, and how many therapists and doctors Lydia had seen over the years; and she talked about her own tireless dedication to making her daughter well. Link wanted to say that the little girl had grown up on so much medication that she probably didn’t know her own damned personality; but while Ursula spoke, he could see a politician’s resolve not to stray from planned remarks.

  She said, “So basically, Lydia has just vanished. We thought for a long time that she was living with friends, and we did everything to hunt her down. We talked to every parent. Some of them have even seen her. It’s insane, John. She goes house to house, and she’s got thousands of friends. . . .”

  “How long has this been?”

  “Well. It’s been a couple of months now.”

  They sat in silence. Link noticed the faint puffiness beneath her down-turned mouth, angry chinks along the edges, and it looked to him like the only part of her that had aged.

  So he lowered his voice and said, “Call the cops.”

  “Imagine that coming from you. We didn’t want to right away, because it doesn’t seem like she’s moved out of her circle of friends.”

  “Ursula—come on. She’s fourteen, friends or not—”

  “Now, don’t do that to me. You don’t know the kind of wars I’ve fought with Lydia. If I called the police, and they brought her back—I promise you she’d leave the state. Whatever you do with Lydia, you get a nuclear response. That’s the truth.”

  “So you just let her live with her friends?”

  “We try to keep track of where she is. I’ve tried every possible thing you can imagine. She’s done versions of this since she was two years old. She’s got too much of you in her. You really have no idea what an ordeal it’s been for me. It’s like raising a bomb that’s constantly going off in your face.”

  She took out a little packet of mints and placed one on her tongue.

  “The reason I came is because I think you should understand your position in all of this. She uses you. She believes that you’re a person who’s never compromised in life. That has a kind of glamour to her. She doesn’t see any of this.” She looked around at the walls.

  “Bring her around sometime.”

  “To her, we’re all complete hypocrites because we’ve given her a comfortable life. She has this fantasy about you. She thinks you’re the freest man in the world, all of that Angels bullshit.”

  He sat quietly, nodding at his bound hands.

  “She may still try to write to you,” she continued. She swallowed. The mint seemed to thicken her tongue. “Or contact you in some way. I know she keeps track of your information, and she saves your letters. She has these obsessive scrapbooks. Everything is so dramatic, but she doesn’t know what it’s like to grow up without anything—like we did. Now, I must admit to a certain amount of snooping. I’ve read some of your letters, and I don’t think you ever did much to emphasize the mistakes you made in your life.”

  Link was incredulous. He looked at every wall in the room before staring back at Ursula to say: “I think they’re pretty damn well emphasized.”

  At this, the meeting was over.

  He thought about Ursula the first night afterward with a painfully insistent hard-on, imagining her face again, like it had been burned into his eyes by the overhead lights. He imagined grabbing her tightly bound hair and burrowing his big square fingertips down between the blonde strands, into the earthy brown underneath, holding her head, controlling it. She was surrendering, losing track of her staged speech, her eyes closed, all the muscles in that tense and pretty face loosening as he leaned across the table and stroked her with callused thumbs. And he plucked loose the buttons on that puffy sweater. Smelled the material. He undressed her and picked her up and put her on the table, unrolled stockings to the skin underneath, so pale against the tangled ink on his arms and hands; and, in his mind, she was shivering, aroused and disarmed, unable to lecture him anymore. Once he was holding her just under the ribs, and she was arching her back, she would give in to him at last and completely, hold on like he was racing a hundred miles an hour and she was afraid of falling off. His hands would feel huge around her trim waist. He would find the same skin and the same stomach and—

  And when his fantasy ended abruptly, he faced the ceiling and knew he was a fool. Only the most desperate creep could have gotten himself off thinking about such an unpleasant meeting. How could any real man be so easily aroused by a family crisis and a prolonged insult?

  The following day, Link wrote letters to the LAPD Missing Persons Unit and the National Runaway Switchboard. He asked Rios for advice, breaking the silence as he worked on his tattoo. Together, they concluded that there was something wrong with Ursula’s tone when she discussed her daughter’s chemical imbalance. What was a “rage attack” anyway? He didn’t want to be ignorant, but it sounded like a fancy word for being very, very pissed off. And it seemed to him that Lydia had plenty of good reasons for it. A temper in a young lady shouldn’t be a disease. After all, Ursula had once been the angriest chick in Lakeside, California.

  Rios helped him put these thoughts down in a letter, even though Link complained the entire time about having to get tutoring in English from a Mexican.

  He wrote to Ursula that his correspondence with his daughter was “personal and intimate” and that, no matter how desperate the situation, he would appreciate “her ongoing respect on that matter.” He claimed that Lydia was a very intelligent young girl, smarter than the both of them put together, and that it did her an injustice to pawn everything off on a mental illness. He didn’t believe in her “rage.” He believed that she was like him, too reckless and too restless, and prone to having “a little too much fun.” What was most “imperative”—was to get the girl back home and make sure that she was safe. She was fourteen and didn’t have the ability to take care of herself out there. Ursula spoke about her like a “war” and a “bomb”—but she was just a little girl. He had gone to the police himself, and he hoped to have “her complete cooperation.”

  After much arguing, he added a line from Rios, even though he thought it was heavy-handed: “When a child runs away, she wants to be hunted down.”

  He sent it off and waited only a week.

  Ursula responded with the angriest letter he had ever read. She wrote that a convicted felon had no right to accuse her of anything. He didn’t know his daughter; he didn’t know her volatility; and he didn’t know what it took to raise a hamster. He had not seen the tantrums she threw over the smallest things. At fourteen, the sweet “little girl” was drinking and having sex with strangers and doing drugs and fighting like a banshee to have her way. How dare he accuse her of failing? Did he even know that she used to cut herself? Did he know that she had tried to commit suicide? Ursula had found her unconscious in the bathtub, having taken all of h
er antidepressants and her stepfather’s thyroid medication; they rushed her to the hospital and pumped her stomach. And what had Lydia said upon regaining consciousness fourteen hours later? “Go to hell, Mother.”

  But despite all this, Ursula was the parent here, and she hurt for her in ways that Link couldn’t possibly comprehend. She was sorry if, in their brief meeting, she hadn’t adequately expressed her grief, that she hadn’t satisfied his requirements for suffering. But she was the one who lived with this burden, every day of her life.

  “After all,” she concluded, “I lost my daughter. You lost a souvenir.”

  six

  Back at the trailer after the long drive, Link carried his daughter inside and laid her down on his bed. After a brief farce of trying to sleep on his short, narrow couch, he gave up and paced most of the night in front of the monochrome glow of his old television.

  He should probably have called Ursula now that Lydia was safely asleep, but he so dreaded the conversation that he chose instead to wait until his daughter had cleaned up. Who knew what Ursula would do or say? After the first six months of searching, she had stopped cooperating and acted like every letter or call was another imposition, or, even worse, his ploy to get closer to her. The ugliest moment came when he wrote to Ursula’s husband asking if he would offer a reward for information. After a few weeks, they responded to his suggestion with a counter of thirty thousand dollars—by all means a solid figure, in the higher strata of rewards, but it was a slap in the face to Link. It was barely more than they had paid for Lydia’s private school, probably the equivalent of her years of clarinet lessons, and it was nothing beside what they dropped on her stepbrothers and half siblings, all of them probably riding horses and boats or tinkering on grand pianos. These people gave thirty g’s to charities he had never heard of, to political candidates destined to be nothing more than embarrassing bumper stickers.

  Throughout that night while his daughter tossed in his bed, Link wandered in the dark, whispering responses to these years of unresolved arguments, and checking repeatedly and superstitiously on Lydia. He was like a nervous new parent hovering over an infant. He refilled the water glass beside the bed three times, listening to her gulping it down in the dark. For a while, he was alarmed by the choking cough and the way she sat up in the sheets, still unconscious, scratching furiously as if tied to an anthill; but past three o’clock, her sleep smoothed out like deep water. Around dawn, in the stale air, she shed her jeans and T-shirt, and lay facedown, arms and legs outstretched, looking like a skydiver whose chute had never opened. Her nose was stuffed. He looked in on her, staring at the tangling black hair down her pale back. She was so thin that her spine stood out like a trail of stones. Her joints were scratched, her skin looked like a thumbed gardenia.

  As Link was noticing this, his daughter rolled onto her back. He averted his eyes and left the room, closing the accordion door and retreating to the front step, where he sat down and lit a cigarette. He had just witnessed a woman’s body, and a woman with a lot of aggressive ideas. She had a stud in her navel, and the blue-ink tip of an ornate medieval dagger peeking out of her underwear along the inner thigh. He didn’t like the idea of his daughter having any tattoo, let alone a slutty one that was poorly done. For this, he felt responsible. Besides, he knew the kinds of women with ink down there; he had carved a hundred bleeding hearts and roses, and he couldn’t help observing a pattern of behavior. They were fierce and reckless pieces of ass, women whose youthful looks burned off like kindling in a bonfire, the sorts of women who showed up for the party claiming that no man could ever handle them, and left looking like they’d been handled half to death.

  The morning was heating up as Link cleaned out his car and went through his daughter’s leather satchel. He found condoms, a cigarette lighter, a glass pipe, a hundred scribbled notes to herself, and several Polaroids of smiling bleary-eyed girls. She seemed to save everything. Matchbooks, place mats, paper doilies covered with phone numbers. He found scraps of letters and Post-it notes: “I’ll be back tonight—J” or “Call me—please! Love, Chloe.” Under all this sentimental debris, he fished out a Glock 19, still loaded with half a mag. The discovery made some of his daughter’s earlier ramblings seem more dangerous. Had she considered killing herself out on the beach? He hid the gun on top of his medicine cabinet until he could think of a better place.

  Then he waited, watching the time.

  Just past noon, Lydia rose from bed, asking where she was and only groaning to his response. She threw up, brushed her teeth with her finger, and migrated to the old couch, where she catnapped for a few more hours in front of the TV. Sniffling, she kept asking if she was in prison or rehab; then she was confounded by the fact that the TV had only five channels. Link described how the signal came through the air into the rabbit ears, and she replied: “So I went back in time.”

  When Link had a client at three o’clock, an old trucker from Blythe, she bummed a cigarette from him and lounged on the floor, watching. The client sat with his shirt off, tufts of white hair on his chest and a sunburned border halfway up his left arm. He wanted an eagle with an American flag in its torso, but Lydia convinced him to change the design, saying that it looked too much like the logo for a burger stand in Hollywood. Her nose was stuffy, her eyelids swollen, and she kept opening her mouth and massaging a pain in her jaw. But Link was shocked by how friendly she was to the trucker. While the tattoo machine buzzed, she listened sympathetically to his story about a sick mother. When the conversation lightened, and he began describing a long haul with a million dollars’ worth of concentrated cranberry juice, Lydia laughed at all his jokes with an endearing tilt to her head. The geezer started sucking in his gut. Whenever Link glanced away from his work to see his daughter’s face, he was dizzy with conflicting responses. She had a smile so wide and sincere that it made her look beautiful even during her worst hangover; but, lowering her chin and slapping at the trucker when he made crude puns, she was so inexplicably flirtatious that Link needed to suppress the urge to pick up the old man and sling him out across the highway.

  By the time he had finished the tat, his daughter and the trucker acted like lifelong pals. She hugged him good-bye. Then, once he had driven off in his rig, she became morose, as if she had expended all her energy for the day. While Link sterilized his equipment, cleaned the benches and pigment bottles, he couldn’t deny his jealousy that a passing stranger had so engaged his daughter. He tried to get her to eat something—Pop Tarts or sugar cereal—but she said, “I’d be healthier on just the crank.”

  For the rest of the daylight hours, she kept her distance from him. She talked only to herself, grumbling about the living conditions. The shower was just a dribble of lukewarm water; his coffee was only tasteless granules of instant powder (“Do I drink this or snort it?”); his records were a disheartening collection of Bob Seger albums (“Who in their right mind would listen to a beer commercial?”). By early evening, she was acting like someone who had been badly gypped in a witness relocation program.

  She broke her silence at about half past five to ask him if he missed any of the comforts of jail. Then she sat outside in the twilight, listening to a radio call-in show on a transistor shaped like a Coke bottle, a long, querulous sweep of Valley girls asking advice about their STDs and unwanted pregnancies.

  Link had a plan, but he figured he’d give her some space to detox first.

  She came inside and scanned her old letters and the documents from Link’s search, spread across the wall. She was as hushed and somber as if in a museum, until finally she plopped down onto his couch and flipped through a newsletter about missing children.

  “Wow,” she said. “Check this out. This one chick has been missing since 1978. She must have missing kids of her own by now.”

  When she came across the age-enhanced picture of herself, she started to laugh. But her smile gradually faded. Her eyes narrowed suspiciously—competitively, Link thought—until her face looked me
an and hurt, as if she had just confronted a well-scrubbed twin sister who had gotten all the breaks.

  “If I turn myself in, do I get this thirty grand?”

  “No,” said Link.

  “What a rip.”

  Finally, she joined Link while he ate his dinner. He poured her some cereal, and after she tried a few spoonfuls, she seemed to realize her ravenous hunger and kept refilling the bowl. They faced each other across a rickety card table, crunching. Outside, the highway played the fading notes of passing trucks.

  Finally she said, “Is this some kind of kidnapping?”

  “Maybe.”

  “I don’t even know where I am.”

  “Outside Indio.”

  “You know, I saw this sign once. I was driving to Las Vegas with some friends, and for this turnoff, one big sign just goes, ‘Vegas,’ and next to it, it says: ‘Other Desert Cities.’ I was like—what other desert cities? I mean it’s fucked up that they don’t even bother to list them. That’s like having a sign that says, ‘Everything Else.’ I was all like: let’s go there—I bet nobody ever goes that way.”

  “Did you?”

  “No, we went to Vegas. And I couldn’t get into anyplace because my ID sucked. I wound up spending the whole time at this water slide.”

  At first, Link thought her eyes were so beautiful that he had a hard time listening to her; but then they began to seem blind or crazy, so pale and glazed that she appeared to be staring into a floodlight that no one else could see.

  “Anyway, I’m not staying here for much longer,” she said. “I just have to keep moving.”

  “Yeah, Portland. I know.”

  “I don’t have to go to Portland, I just have to go somewhere.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I’m in a lot of trouble.” She took a big bite of cereal.