by Bruce Wagner
“Dusty, don’t go there. Not now. Because we simply do not know. But I had to talk about it because your eyes need to be open—our eyes need to be open, to everything. And remember what I said, ‘everything’ isn’t true, only one thing is, and we don’t yet know what that one thing will be. We don’t have it yet, we don’t have the information. But we will. And we’ll face whatever it is, together. Okay? Can you hear me, darling? Are you listening?”
“Yes.” She was traumatized, like an animal that knew it was about to be killed.
“Good. Then I’ll call Richie and you’ll meet. Would you meet with Richie, Dusty?”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
“What about Ronny?”
“What about him?”
“Do you think I should call him?”
She sounded like a little girl lost, and Livia stifled a great sadness. The whole world was lost and overrun.
“As I said, he’s a resource. An important one, I think—an important part of your journey. Remember! It’s about keeping eyes and heart open. And reaching out. You’ve done this on your own for too long, Dusty! And I think you need as many allies as you can safely gather.”
—
Allegra offered to come with her to Provo but she wanted to go solo. The idea of a Looking for Aurora documentary was shameful and ludicrous to her now. She’d gotten a lovely letter from Laura anyhow, regretting her unavailability. Laura Poitras! What had she been thinking?
Here’s what she did:
Cold-called Ronny—the wife picked up. Dusty was prepared for that and did a little acting. Used her down-home Middle America persona, which was closest to her real disposition, anyway—frank, sunny, gregarious. Gave her first name and was relieved the woman didn’t joke the way folks on the phone sometimes do: “As in Wilding?” Went on to say that one of the old gang gave her Ronny’s number at a high school reunion. (Mrs. Swerdlow was the type of nostalgic, homespun gal who was thrilled, not threatened, by that sort of development.) Dusty apologized for the weirdness of the call, said she’d just lost a mom and found herself reaching out to all kinds of people from back in the day. Well, that further endeared her to the missus. But Ronny isn’t here just now. He was in Montana with some clients. Dusty asked what he did for a living, and Sam said—she really did sound like a Sam—he was a professional fly-fisherman and guide. Dusty said Wow and meant it. Well, she said, I think I’m going to actually be in Salt Lake City soon and thought it might be fun to come see y’all. When Sam unexpectedly asked what she did for work, Dusty hesitated. She hadn’t thought that one through at all and impulsively threw caution to the wind. “I’m an actress.” It took Sam about two seconds to half rhetorically ask if she was Dusty Wilding, but with a laugh because how could she be? Part of the laugh wound up covering Dusty’s Yes, so again, she averred, “Yes, I am.” Sam was sweetly flabbergasted. Ronny never told me he went to school with a movie star but isn’t that just like him? He’s going to have some explaining to do. In the wake of the reveal, Sam hit a speed bump of self-consciousness. Dusty asked when her husband would be back and Sam said tomorrow. I’ll call again, if that’s okay. They chatted some more about this and that, just normalizing and making nice, and by the time they wound things up Sam was back to her regular self. She ended the call by insisting that when Dusty hit Salt Lake she make a field trip to the house for dinner, to meet her girls—they’d be over the moon. Lord, I think they loved Bloodthrone more than The Hunger Games and that’s saying a lot. Dusty had no intention of talking to Ronny on the phone but wanted, strategically, to leave her number so she gave Sam the dummy-decoy line, the one that silently rang through. The dead line that her mother had all those years.
Three days later she flew private to Provo. (She never planned calling back. She’d try her luck and just drop by.) It felt like half a fool’s errand but she didn’t care anymore. She was biding time till she met with “Snoop” Raskin, Livia’s mucky-muck shamus.
High in the air, she remembered . . .
Tustin, where she grew up. County of Orange. He was a few years older, a football player. Gorgeous. He’d been after her awhile, all the boys were but she never put out. One time a jock called her a dyke and Ronny got him in a headlock until he begged apologies through rank, ugly tears. Dusty had a top-secret girlfriend, an Australian foreign exchange student, and was aloof to such chivalries. It was the year of Grease; when she and Miranda were in bed they used to laugh about which of them was John Travolta and which was Olivia Newton-John. Boy oh boy, that Melbourne girl swallowed her up. It was the first time Dusty ever came with anyone, and the volcanic force of that brand-new unconfused knowledge of who she was at the core of her being scared her shitless. She nearly died when it was time for Miranda to go home. Out of shame, loneliness, and desperation, she ran straight to the football player’s arms, and let him do all the things boys do (which was almost nothing, compared to Miranda). She never came with Ronny, not once, but didn’t stop trying, right up to when she got pregnant. Her mother pulled her from school before she started to show.
How she wanted that little girl . . .
She knew Reina wouldn’t be moved by her entreaties so she cried to her dad but he didn’t stand a chance against that woman either. He was the cuckold in a film noir, his life having effectively ended upon an arrest for exposing himself to an undercover cop at a public toilet in Mission Viejo. Reina somehow—somehow—saved his job as branch manager of City National in Newport. (Dusty wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d slept with someone at the bank to make that happen.) Now her mother had him where she wanted him, which was where she had everyone.
She read Dusty’s diaries and stole the hidden cache of overheated letters from Miranda. One night, when father and daughter attempted a final, tender plea to keep the baby, Reina exploded with rage and said they were perverts that filled her with disgust, she would never abide her grandchild being raised by a faggot mom or a faggot gramps, and if they dared bring it up again she’d publish the diary of what Dusty’d done down under and the pornographic letters too, she’d dump a thousand xeroxed copies on the schoolyard before marching into City National with Arnold’s arrest record, so all the world could see how much she’d suffered, living under the same roof with two weak, conniving, promiscuous queers.
It wasn’t until years later that she learned her father had taken an overdose of pills a week after Reina’s screed; Dusty was told he’d been hospitalized for heart problems. Eventually they separated but never divorced. (Reina had a lover all those years—a Mormon!—who called her his “sister-wife” and assured that he would know her in the afterworld by “Sarah,” her celestial name. She drunkenly told Dusty all about it, the day after Arnold died.) Even before she got famous, Dusty would send him money. God, he wrote the saddest letters. It was pretty much all he did in those last few years, apart from slowly dying of liver failure—write sad and beautiful letters to his daughter from the Skid Row SRO where he would succumb, at fifty-six. She wondered what she’d done with them . . .
Provo—
The neat grid of houses sat on the hem of a serious mountain, as the neighborhoods tended to. She didn’t want to just pull right up. She asked the driver to stop so she could walk the rest of the way.
The streets were empty and the residences large and well-kept, with Disneyfied lawns and facades. The Swerdlows’ had a rustic frontier theme, the only home on the block that departed from the generic. She smiled to herself; that actually struck her as “kind of Ronny.”
Powering through her trepidation, she strode up and rang the bell. The door swung open and they just stared. He beamed at her through his startle.
“Well, hey there! Sam told me you called.”
“Hi, Ronny! I am so sorry to drop in on you like this!”
“Not a problem! You know, I tried calling you back but it just kept ringing.”
Oh! The free-
fall sorrow of it killed her and she started to bawl. He hadn’t really figured out why she’d gotten in touch but knew some of it probably had to do with being of the age when life sandbags you—suddenly, you’re a forced enlistee in that army of brave, conflicted, slap-happy souls not yet ready for the finish line but sure as shit chagrined to have caught a glance of the endgame’s blazing lights not too far off, like a fatal, glittering Oz.
As they held each other, she heard the delicious, tumbling sound of life behind them. Dishes and voices jostling . . .
His tiniest girl shyly snuck up and peered.
“Why is she crying?”
“Aw, she’s just tired from her trip.”
(She loved that he actually said Aw—like Jimmy Stewart would have.)
“Hi there!” said Dusty, yanking on the throttle of acting chops, to pull out of her tailspin.
“Aggie, this is Dusty. We went to school together. Say hi!”
Aggie retreated behind her dad—then Sam popped up.
“Well, look who’s here! Welcome!”
The other daughters scrummed to the door wide-eyed, to Mom’s laughing reproach. Sam hooked her arm in Dusty’s and led her in, adding that most beloved of moviedom tropes—
“You’re just in time for dinner!”
—
The girls were aflutter—the oldest was seventeen—and anxious to know when to expect the sequel to Bloodthrone. Dusty said soon but swore them not to tell. If they Instagrammed or even talked about it she’d be fired. The warning got them excited and they promised that her secret was safe.
She lied about being in Salt Lake for Sylvia & Marilyn, as if anyone cared—they were so happy to have her as a guest in their home. The girls couldn’t get over their dad knowing her; he definitely rose a few notches in coolness. It wasn’t Thanksgiving but sure felt like it: the white tablecloth and platters, the sweating, burnt-orange turkey, the corn on the cob, biscuits, mashed potatoes and perfect gravy, the effortless care and generosity of spirit. It wasn’t even put on, because they didn’t know she was coming! She wondered if that was a “Mormon country” thing or an archetypal American thing or just the bountiful way that certain people—kind, decent, giving people— chose to live their lives. She never had that experience as a child, remotely.
Aggie asked if she was married and got swatted by one of the sisters. When Sam said, “You are though, no?” the eldest rolled her eyes. The actress said yes, she was, and the middle child piped up, “To Allegra. We saw the wedding online.” Dusty said, “You did?” and the older girl said, “Big Sur! We couldn’t really see anything—I hope you don’t think it’s rude that we watched!—but you could see the people arriving. Sort of. Some of them.” “They should have used a drone!” said the middle one. “They didn’t have drones then,” chastised the elder. “It was before drones.” Sam told the girls not to talk so much but Dusty was utterly charmed. When Aggie asked, “You’re married to another girl?” the ponytailed brood pounced. “You are such an idiot, you know that she’s married. To a woman, not a girl.”
After dinner, while Sam and the girls cleaned up, Ronny showed her the den where he did his fly tying. As if in mid-surgery, some of the lures were clamped beneath magnifying glasses; others sat in tiny jewel boxes, each in its own compartment. Dusty thought they looked like miniature rings and broaches created by an aficionado of outsider art.
The mystery of her visit hid in plain sight. It wasn’t the right time, and they both knew it; so many questions would have to wait. The suspense was tolerable because Ronny took the lead—as always—and led well. He was a “true gentleman,” modest and even-keeled, a gracious antidote to her panic. He’d always been that way. Still, she found herself having the somewhat grandiose fantasy that his serenity was born of the delight in her being there, the fateful, miraculous culmination of all the years he’d spent dreaming of this very moment. Narcissism dies hard, she thought, half comically.
He said that he met his wife when he turned forty, coming off a rough divorce. But the kids were theirs. “Babies just never happened till Sam.”
She couldn’t even begin to wrap her head around unpacking that remark.
“How long are you in town?”
“Just a few days.”
“It’s really good to see you, Dusty.”
“It’s great to see you. Oh my God, it’s beyond.”
“Tell you what. We probably have a few things to talk about,” he said slyly. “Why don’t you come to the house tomorrow at six.”
“For dinner?”
“In the morning, kid,” he said. “I’m gonna take you fly-fishing. Ever been?”
“No! I’d like that very much.”
“I’ve got waders and everything you need. I have a feeling you’re going to be pretty good at it.”
—
He was in the driveway, loading equipment in the truck. She was glad. She’d been stressing about the earliness of the hour and wasn’t looking forward to knocking on the front door.
They rode for about forty minutes, mostly in silence, which felt fine. They drank coffee from a thermos and laughed about his kids, especially Aggie, the youngest. Ronny was easy to be with. Old times. When they got to the river, he helped her into the waders. They were Sam’s—she and Dusty were about the same size. He had all sorts of gear clipped to his vest—lures, feathers, delicate pliers—like some fly-fisherman action figure. Grinned like one too. They finished their coffees while Ronny decided where he wanted to cast. A few anglers were already on the water, one on the bank, the other standing in the middle of the wide stream.
“Our dad used to take us here in the summer. Taught me everything I know. He was kind of a legend. He doesn’t come out too much anymore, but when he does I still watch him. He’d get his eye on one—they don’t travel too far—and just stand, for hours. Total focus. He was a freak. My brother and I were pretty good but not like the old man. We’d catch half a dozen fair-sized ones and be all puffed up because Dad didn’t get any yet. Then just before we went home, blip, he’d land it. A fucking beast. The one that he wanted. That’s what I shoot for when I’m out here, that kind of focus and purpose. That stillness. The art of that. It’s what I aspire to.”
Then, like his father before him, he hooked the monster—at least that’s what it felt like to Dusty when he asked, “Did you ever want kids?”
She stared at the ground and gathered herself.
“I got pregnant once. With you.”
Smiling affably—disconnected, as if on tape-delay—he said, “Are you kidding?”
“That’s why I disappeared. I got pregnant and my mother took me to get an abortion.”
“An abortion?” he said, uncomprehending.
“But I never had it—the abortion. I had the baby. A little girl.”
Then, with only slight modulation, he said: “Are you fucking kidding me?”
“No, Ronny,” she said, still looking down and shaking her head. “I’m not.”
“Where is she?” he said, with hollow urgency—a desperation that hadn’t yet coalesced.
“I don’t know.”
“What do you mean, you don’t know?”
“We think—I think maybe—there’s a chance that she’s dead.”
She knew she sounded like a mental patient but there was nothing else to do than lay it all out. Ronny fought through brain freeze.
“I’m not getting this! What are you fucking saying, Dusty?”
“I told you—”
“You told me?”
“I had a little girl—”
“And it’s mine? How do you even know—it’s mine? It’s mine?—”
“It was yours—is yours. But I think she—we think there’s a chance that . . .”
“You show up at my house, like, forty fucking years later to tell me we had a kid together? A
little girl? And you don’t know where she is but you think that she’s dead?”
“I don’t know that for sure. I’m trying to find out.”
“You’re trying to find out?”
“Maybe I shouldn’t have come.”
She hated falling back on that, it was a dumb, cowardly, cliché thing to say. But just then, she wanted be someplace—anyplace—else.
“Damn straight you shouldn’t have! Who do you think you are, Dusty? Who am I to you, one of the fucking little people? The little people the celebrity deigns to drop in on? ‘Hi! Thought I’d walk into your shitty little life and give you some horrible, shitty fucking news before I go back to my fame and my money and my bullshit’—”
“Ronny, it’s not like that.”
“Oh, it isn’t? It’s not like that? Then what is it like? You know what, you don’t know me. You never knew me. And I sure the fuck don’t know you—I’ll tell you something else, I don’t want to. You’re sick, Dusty. You’re fucking sick to come here and tell me this shit.”
She was calm and emotionless. She’d left gaping holes in the story, it just spilled out that way, and his gears kept slipping. (Hers too.) Who could blame him . . .
“How long did you raise her? How could you have raised her and not told me about that?”
“I didn’t raise her. She was taken from me.”
“At what age?”
“Three months—when she was almost four months old.”