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(Click here to read Chapter 5)

Django finally dragged himself up off the floor, dressed for school, and went downstairs to the kitchen, where Aunt Robin ate meals so she could use the dining room as her office.

“I didn’t know what you usually ate before school,” she said, sounding nervous. “Eggs? Or I could make pancakes.” She peered into a cupboard next to the refrigerator. “Oops, sorry, no pancake mix.”

Eggs. Pancakes. He didn’t care.

She broke three brown eggs into a bowl and beat them with a fork. “I’ll drive you this morning, but you’ll have to come home on the school bus. One of the home health care providers from Shady Hills is meeting me here to talk about taking care of Grannie after her back surgery.”

Django had never met his grandmother before yesterday. His mother had almost never mentioned her.

“How come we never see her?” He was seven or eight when he asked the question. His friends often talked about visiting grandmothers and grandfathers and aunts and cousins. These proofs of an extended family had been bsent from Django’s life.

“We didn’t get along.”

“How come?”

She tapped her index finger on the tip of her nose and he knew she was deciding to tell him the truth or not.

“Doesn’t matter, Django, and it’s way too complicated to talk about on a hot day. Ask me again in the wintertime.”

But he forgot.

Aunt Robin served his eggs, and as he ate, he watched her wiping down the counter and putting the timer, the salt and pepper shakers, and a carafe of olive oil in a straight line along the top of the stove. She had a bookcase full of cookbooks. The only thing Django’s mother ever cooked was pasta and grilled cheese sandwiches. The rest of the time they ate in restaurants or either Mrs. Hancock or someone else—a caterer or a hired chef who made great food with low calories—fixed their meals. In the house where Django had grown up, the kitchen was large and brightly lit, shiny with stainless steel. Aunt Robin’s was dinky and dark and the appliances did not match. There was one window over the sink and old-fashioned track lights overhead. If Django had not known Robin Howard was his aunt, he never would have guessed it. She was like the kitchen. Something about her made him think of tight corners and not enough air. She wore her shoulder-length brown hair pulled back and tied with a black velvet bow, old-fashioned and boring. His mother had favored earrings that swung a little when she moved her head and sparkled in the light as her eyes did. He looked at his aunt’s earlobes and saw that they were not pierced. No rings on her fingers or bracelets.

“Don’t you ever wear jewelry?” he asked. “Your ears aren’t pierced.”

“Well, they used to be but they closed over.” She fingered her earlobe. “I’ve got a box full of earrings I never wear.”

“How come?” Django could not believe he was talking about earrings!

“Not my style, I guess.” She rinsed his plate and put it in the dishwasher.

“My mom had three hundred and ten pairs. I counted ’em once.”

His aunt nodded, some opinion apparently confirmed.

“Sometimes she’d get the Monopoly money and we’d play store with them.” He had been a little kid then, just six or seven.

“Hurry now. I’ve got a busy day.”

If he told her his mother had three heads and pointed ears, would she pay attention to him?

“How come I have to go to school? I won’t know anybody, and besides, it’s June already. No one learns anything this close to vacation.”

“I have things to do, Django. I can’t leave you here in the house alone.”

“Why not? I’m twelve years old.”

She smiled a little, and for a second he saw his mother in his aunt’s expression, and inside him something began to tear apart, a slow ripping pain in his chest.

“I don’t need a babysitter.” He managed to get the words out, although he was coming apart inside.

“I think I should be the judge of that, Django. Your mother was smoking in the toolshed behind the house when she was your age.”

“I don’t smoke.”

“She almost burned the place down. If you’re anything like her, you’re better off in school, where someone can keep an eye on you.”

Django stood up and pushed his chair into the table. The suggestion that he might be dumb enough to smoke had offended him; and even though he would have liked to know more about what happened to his mother on that occasion, he wanted to be anywhere but in the kitchen with his aunt. Even school in Arroyo would be better than this.

She touched his shoulder, stopping him. “I’m sorry, Django. That sounded mean, didn’t it? Really, I didn’t mean to be unkind.” She turned away, adding, “You’ll just have to be patient with me.”

Robin turned on the car radio to discourage conversation with her nephew. Though what she and Django would talk about, she had no idea. All they had in common was Caro, and barely that.

After graduating from San Diego State, Robin never had any doubt about what she wanted; and at that time, almost twenty years earlier, Arroyo was a perfect fit. It had been a small town on the move with a forward-looking city council and a town plan that assured her there would always be plenty of affluent residents in need of a good accountant. Like most things Robin did, the move was a measured decision based on research and facts. At the time, her mother still lived in Morro Bay, where she and Caro had grown up, and for a time she had thought she should go back there.

But in the end, climate made the decision for her. Arroyo was inland, thirty miles from San Diego, and its warm, dry climate agreed with her.

Caro had always wanted something that was out there, and right after high school she went looking for it while Robin put down roots in Arroyo and established her business. Caro and Jacky married on a beach somewhere in Australia and, of course, Robin was invited; but it was coming up on tax season and not a good time for her to be away. She sent her regrets and a small gift. She had no idea what to give a couple whose wedding was written up in People magazine.

Sometimes she wished she had rearranged her schedule and gone to Australia. Maybe then she and Caro would have kept their relationship alive. She might have met the man of her dreams in Australia. Maybe, but not likely. There had been men, some lovers, but no one she wanted to spend her life with. She had stopped looking years ago, stopped hoping too. She was resigned to her single life and contented in it. And why wouldn’t she be, when she had challenging and absorbing work, enough money, and a small circle of good friends? Her life was good. She didn’t let herself wonder why she and Caro had stopped being true sisters. It was something she would never understand. Caro had taken her secrets to the grave.

As she drove Django to school that morning, Robin did a mental scan of the busy day ahead. As an accountant she had several clients, including a firm of lawyers, Conway, Carroll, and Hyde, she would be visiting that morning. For some reason CC&H could not keep a bookkeeper more than a few months, and as a result their accounts were always a jumble. Her ability to make sense of them impressed the partners. They were opening a branch in Tampa and had asked her to go there for six months to organize the office. They didn’t seem to care that she was an accountant and what they needed was an office manager. Mr. Conway, the senior partner, insisted she was perfect for the job. She insisted right back that she was not, but he told her not to make a rash decision. “Think about it, think about it.” Well, she had thought about it for the last month and was no closer to saying she would go.

After a few hours with the lawyers’ accounts, she would run some personal errands and then spend the rest of the day in the office at Shady Hills Retirement Home, which was one of several retirement facilities in Southern California for which she kept the corporate books from her office at Shady Hills. She had to be home by three to interview the home health care provider, Willis Brock.

“What do you like to eat for dinner?” she asked Django. He murmured something that sounded like whatever, which was one of the obnoxious responses her friends with teenagers complained about. But Django wasn’t obnoxious. Robin had little experience with children, but she knew sweetness when she met it. And confusion and sorrow, such deep sorrow that if it were a lake it would be bottomless. “Shall I get pizza?”

“I’m not hungry.”

“Well, of course not. You just had breakfast. But you’ll want dinner, I know.”

He sighed and slumped deeper in the car seat.

She almost stopped the car right then—her impulse to comfort Django was that strong. But as quickly as it came to her, it passed with the assumption that he would not want her comfort. If she tried to hug him he would probably push her away and then they would both be embarrassed.

Pausing at a stoplight, she lifted her hands from the steering wheel and saw that they had left moist smudge marks on the dark plastic.

One good thing about Django’s appearance in her life was that the lawyers at CC&H would stop pestering her to go to Tampa. They were family men and would understand that she could not traipse across the country with a grieving twelve-year-old orphan in tow.

The three signal lights on Arroyo’s main street were out of synch. She had to stop at every one. At a few minutes before eight in the morning, the little town was just waking up. The Starbucks across from the Catholic church was already crowded, but in the next block most of the shops were still dark.

Django sat slumped, looking out the window. At the back his hair was a tangled mess. She had not realized that twelve-year-old boys had to be reminded to use a comb. He probably hadn’t brushed his teeth either.

“It’s going to seem pretty quiet in Arroyo. After living in Beverly Hills.” He grunted something. “I beg your pardon, Django? You’ll have to speak up so I can hear you.” She heard herself sounding prissy, like the maiden aunt she was. “Never mind. Maybe I need a hearing aid.” It was a joke but he did not laugh.

She thought about the Tampa job and wanted to be there or anywhere far from this sad, lost boy for whom she could not say or do anything right.

Tampa. She wished Mr. Conway would stop nagging her.

A month earlier Robin and her mother had been having lunch in La Jolla, at a new restaurant Robin had read about online. Over a shared creme brulee, she had mentioned the Tampa offer. Her mother jumped on the idea as if she’d won the lottery. Robin’s cool response prompted her to ask if she was afraid to leave Arroyo. Robin laughed at that, of course. There were many things she knew she would not like about Florida—humidity and reptiles were two that figured prominently—but it was the inconvenience that put her off going, the disruption of her comfortable and efficient routine. All very good reasons, but her mother said they weren’t reasons; they were excuses.

Django said, “You sigh a lot.”

“Really? I wasn’t aware of that.”

“Are you tired?”

“I always sleep soundly.”

“My mom took Ambien.”

“Did she?”

Robin caught herself in midsigh.

She supposed that before her time with this boy ended, whenever that was, she would learn a great deal about her sister. Earrings, sleeping pills: these were things she would have known if they had been close or even if they had seen each other just occasionally. But it had been many years since she had done more than speak to Caro briefly on the phone, and those conversations had always been awkward. It was as if Caro was afraid of what she would say if she didn’t hang up fast.

But Robin had never thought that Caro was angry with her. There was something unspoken between them that had nothing to do with Robin’s failure to attend the big wedding or even the marked differences in their personalities. After Caro and Jacky settled down in Beverly Hills, the time between phone calls had lengthened. In the last five years they’d spoken three or four times, no more.

And now she was gone and Robin was left with regret, a puzzle without a solution. And Django.

Aunt Robin dropped Django off in front of the school ten minutes before the first bell. Arroyo Elementary didn’t look any better or worse than he had expected. It was like all the public schools he had ever seen: flat roof, asphalt, cement, chain-link fencing, and stucco painted a color that wanted to be green.

“After school there’ll be someone, a bus monitor, I guess. She’ll tell you which bus goes by the house. Do you remember the address?”

His aunt was trying so hard to be nice. It would be easier if she just didn’t say or do anything.

“I’ll walk home after.” He wanted to explore Arroyo’s small downtown on the remote chance that he would find something interesting. Driving down the main street a few minutes ago, he’d seen a game store, and that might be worth investigating. He held up his phone. “I’ve got a GPS app. I won’t get lost.”

“Well, don’t dawdle around or I’ll worry.”

Django wondered if she really was concerned about him or if her face was made with a little knot between the eyebrows.

“I’ll be home after three. A man’s coming by for an interview, a home health care nurse. Grannie’s going to need some special help after her back surgery.”

He did not care the first time she told him and he still didn’t care.

“Django, don’t be too quick to criticize the children you meet at this school. You know what I mean? I know they won’t be like your friends from before, but maybe you’ll be surprised.”

She sounded hopeful and Django realized she had no clue what it was like to walk into a new classroom, come face-to-face with thirty strangers, every one defending some small bit of turf, every one looking for something wrong with him, something to laugh at, to judge. He might as well be a creature from Planet X. He had a sudden prick of sympathy for his aunt in her ignorance and felt an impulse to be kind.

“Don’t worry about me,” he said. “I’ll be cool.”

The sixth-grade teacher, Mrs. Costello, a pretty, dark little woman, had been in the classroom for fourteen years and had met all kinds of children with every variety of name and attitude.

“Boys and girls,” she said, clapping her hands together, “we have a new student today. Will you stand up D-jango? Tell us something about yourself.”

D-jango.

He knew she was being nice, but he didn’t want to stand up. He slid down into the seat and fiddled with his pencil. Behind him, someone snorted. Mrs. Costello didn’t force the issue.

“Well, maybe you’d tell us about your interesting name. I’ve never had a student named D-jango.”

He thought about what his father would say.

Django Reinhardt was a great jazz guitarist. He was Hungarian,and Django’s a gypsy name. Django and Stéphane Grappelli played at the Hot Club of Paris.

Instead, he told the teacher, “You’re not saying it right. You don’t say the D. It’s just Jango.”

He heard a girl’s voice whisper, “Jinglejanglejingle bells.” Laughter.

Mrs. Costello said, “Well, I’ll be sure I get it right next time.” She picked up her roll book and began to call out the names of students.

A boy whispered behind Django—“Hey, Jinglebells”—and something hit him in the back of the head. An eraser.

Django knew Arroyo Elementary School was going to be just as bad as he’d feared.

At lunchtime Mrs. Costello appointed a short, stocky boy to be Django’s “buddy,” an honor the boy—Billy—didn’t seem to appreciate. His friends, Halby and Danny, thought it was hilarious when he and Django walked out of the classroom together. On the way to the lunchroom Billy pointed out the boys’ bathroom.

“If you’re smart, you’ll never go in there without protection. I know a kid went in to take a leak, lost all his teeth, and he’s still in the hospital.” He lowered his voice. “Coma.”

In the lunchroom Billy pointed Django toward the food line and then disappeared. Django chose a container of macaroni and cheese and one of chocolate pudding. He looked around the crowded and noisy room for somewhere to sit and saw Billy standing in a knot of boys. He recognized Halby and Danny but none of the others. Judging from their expressions and laughter, they knew him, however. Django could tell that they wanted him to walk over, giving them an opportunity to say or do something mean; but he wasn’t that stupid. He sat in a corner by himself, took one bite of the mac and cheese, and pushed it away. He wasn’t sure what it tasted like, but it sure wasn’t cheese. At least the pudding was sweet, but that was all it was.

At Country Day the cafeteria sold things like tuna subs and roast beef sandwiches and hamburgers and all-beef franks cooked on a grill right there where you could smell how good they were. And salads. Django figured he was probably the only boy at Arroyo Elementary who had ever eaten a salad for lunch.

Back in class he went to his desk and sat without first looking down and knew immediately that someone had put something on the seat. He acted like nothing had happened, though, not wanting to give Billy and his mutant friends the satisfaction of upsetting him. He smelled chocolate pudding.

Mrs. Costello announced a spelling bee and divided the class into ones and twos. The ones stood up by the blackboard and the twos were down at the other end of the room. Django was a two and had to walk past everyone. He knew what he must look like from the back with gluey, gummy brown pudding on the seat of his pants. He tried to act like it didn’t bother him, but everyone laughed when they saw the mess, and he heard one of the mutants say, “Jinglebells pooped his pants.”

At Country Day the teacher would have had the brains to figure out who put the pudding on Django’s chair and sent him to the headmaster; but all Mrs. Costello did was sigh and tell Django to go to the boys’ bathroom and clean himself up. He stood outside the room after she closed the door, remembering Billy’s warning words. Maybe Billy was lying to scare him, but after just a half day at Arroyo Elementary the story sounded plausible, except maybe the part about the coma. He thought about going into the teachers’ bathroom, but being found there would be an additional humiliation. The more he thought about it, the more certain he was that Billy, Halby, and Danny wanted him to go into the bathroom; and in a moment at least one of them would show up. Django would end up getting dunked. Or worse.

There had been mean kids at Beverly Hills Country Day. Nasty kids, even boys and girls who cheated on tests and stole from the little kids just because they could get away with it. Django had stayed away from them and they had never shown any interest in him. The worst name anyone had ever called him was “brainiac,” and he didn’t really mind that because everyone knew he was the smartest kid in the class. He had never been afraid of getting beaten up and put in a coma.

His imagination told him just what would happen if he went into the boys’ bathroom. One of the mutants—probably his “buddy,” Billy—would follow him in, and then it would get nasty. Although this scared Django, at the same time he realized something that surprised him. Part of him wanted to fight with Billy, wanted a chance to punch him, and then when he was down, kick him in the balls. Of course, the other half of Django knew he’d be the one getting punched and kicked.

Instead of going to the bathroom nearest his classroom, Django walked down to the end of the long open corridor—Mrs. Costello had called it the breezeway—with classrooms and sorry-ass, dried-out landscaping on either side, until he got to an area where he could tell by the decorations on the doors that the first- and second-grade classrooms were located. In the little boys’ bathroom the sinks were so low he could pee in them if he wanted to and it smelled really bad, like one of the public bathrooms in Griffith Park where the pervs hung out and his dad had told him never to go alone. He held his breath and grabbed wads of paper towels and rubbed the backside of his jeans until the pudding seemed to be gone. He went back to class.

Mrs. Costello looked at him accusingly when he stepped through the door. “Where were you, D-jango? You’ve been gone ten minutes.”

Django looked at the three snickering mutants, and he tried not to smile as he said, “Billy told me never to use the big boys’ bathroom.” It was sort of embarrassing to talk about bathroom stuff in front of everybody, but he didn’t care. He was enjoying himself for the first time all day. “He told me a boy got beat up in there and had to go to the hospital with a coma and he’s probably gonna die. Billy said I should go down to the little kids’ bathroom.”

“I never!” Billy cried.

Django widened his eyes and made a cross on his chest. “I didn’t want to get beat up, Mrs. Costello.”

“Sit down, D-jango. Django, I mean. And you, Billy, I’ll talk to you after school.”

As he walked to his place in the line of spelling-bee twos, Django flipped the mutants the bird. He didn’t look at them as he waited for his turn to spell, his heart beating like crazy. He’d have to be careful they didn’t catch him after school, but the risk was worth it. Besides, Django had decided, he was never coming back to Arroyo Elementary.

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Reprinted with the permission of Grand Central Publishing.

Little Girl Gone – Chapter 5

Drusilla — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 02:57:57 +0000

Reprinted with the permission of Grand Central Publishing.

Chapter 5

(Click here to read Chapter 3)

(Click here to read Chapter 4)

Willis left to deliver the baby to the attorney, and Madora walked across the dusty yard back to the trailer. On top of a plastic basket full of clean sheets, blankets, and towels, she carried a thermos of chicken noodle soup. At the curbside door of the trailer she put the basket down and returned to the house for soap and a bucket of warm water. Back and forth, Foo tagged along behind her, his stubby tail aquiver with interest. The curbside door was padlocked and Madora’s hands were sweaty with frustration before she got the combination right; it broke apart, and she opened the narrow door to a rush of close, unpleasant air. She jammed the door wide with a stick and brought everything in and set it on the table where Linda ate her meals. Foo watched outside, longing to be invited in, though he never had been.

Madora looked at the girl in the bed, at the mess of bloody sheets and towels Willis had left to be cleaned up. She had an impulse to turn around and walk out the door, lock up, and pretend there had never been a girl named Linda, no baby boy with deepwater blue eyes.

Madora had begged Willis to take Linda to the hospital, reminding him that she was only sixteen, a teenager with slim hips and a flat, boyish figure; but he had been confident, even cocky, about how easy it would be to deliver the baby in the trailer. To everything she said, he had the same reply: “Childbirth is easy. If it was hard, the human race would have died out by now.”

Perfectly still, Linda rested on her side facing the interior side of the trailer’s roll?up door. Her pale hair, darkened by sweat, lay against her neck and shoulders as if painted on. For a moment, Madora wondered if Willis had taken the baby and left her with a dead girl.

“Linda? You okay?” She was afraid to touch her.

Linda turned her head on the pillow. Purple shadows encircled her eyes, making her milk-?white face look almost clownish. A pulse ticked in one lid of her half-?shut eyes, rimmed red-?orange.

She tried to speak, but her words were barely discernable, a groggy, undifferentiated burr. It didn’t matter what she meant to say. Madora took the meaning. The girl’s pain and grief and fear, her shame, and even her rage came into Madora’s consciousness like the shock of a gunshot fired close to her head. She dropped to her knees beside the bed, trembling, and spoke without thinking.

“He’s beautiful.”

“A . . . boy?”

“Oh, God, Linda, I’m so sorry.” Willis had not even shown her the child. “He should have . . .”

Madora stopped herself from saying more. It felt dangerous to criticize Willis.

Linda gripped Madora’s wrist, digging her bitten nails between the tendons.

“It’s too late.” Madora shook her head. “He’s gone. Willis took him an hour ago.”

Linda’s eyes widened, as if it wasn’t enough to hear the words; she needed more light to see the truth on Madora’s face.

“I couldn’t stop him.” And she had not tried because she believed that the baby was better off with the lawyer’s clients than with Linda, a homeless girl, a panhandler.

Madora wouldn’t bother washing the sheets, just bundle them and put them in the trash; and if Willis said that was wasteful, he could try himself to get the blood out. She imagined how it would feel to speak so boldly to him. Then stopped herself. Even imagining was dangerous, for she might become so comfortable in her own opinions that one day she would forget and speak them aloud.

“I hurt . . .”

“You’ll be okay. When Willis gets back he’ll give you some more pain meds. And then you just have to heal.”

Linda dug into her wrist again. “Shower . . .”

Linda was never supposed to leave the trailer without Willis. He told Madora that a pregnant girl needed exercise, so he occasionally took Linda for walks up to the ridge overlooking Evers Canyon. Sometimes they even went for drives: Madora behind the wheel of the big Chevy Tahoe; and Linda, blindfolded for the first ten or fifteen miles, leaning against Willis in the backseat, her arm through his and her head on his shoulder. Willis toyed with Linda’s fair hair, twisting it around his index finger. Seeing them paired this way, Madora felt a stab of jealousy, though she knew there was nothing sexual between them. The single time she had let jealousy get the better of her good sense and mentioned sex, Willis was appalled and withdrew from her as if she had struck him. Later, when he could talk about his feelings, he told Madora that he was attached to Linda as a brother would be, and she believed him.

On the hikes and car trips that were Linda’s reward for being cooperative, she only once made trouble.

They had driven over the mountains into the Anza-?Borrego Desert to see the wildflowers that were bountiful after a wet winter and spring. Near the poppy preserve they had turned off the road and driven a few hundred feet to a roundabout where there were no other cars. Where a trail followed a wash, acres of orange-gold poppies bloomed on either side, interrupted here and there by pools of blue lupine. The air buzzed with the business of bees. Madora had thought for an instant of her father and the care with which he and Rachel had tended the gardens behind the house in Yuma, vegetables in the middle and flowers on all four sides. Lost for a moment in her memory, she had relaxed her grip on Linda’s hand; and when she did, the girl broke away from her and ran back toward the road, yelling for help, though the desert was as empty as a scoured pan. She was seven months pregnant then and unsteady on her feet, a toddler easy to catch; and Willis had laughed at her clumsy effort and let her get as far as the road before he ambled after her. But back in the car he was ominously silent as he bound her feet and hands with plastic zip ties.

“I’m not an unkind man, Linda.” In the rearview mirror Madora saw his dark eyes, drooping with grief. “I thought you’d like a little trip, a chance to see something beautiful. I guess I was wrong. I guess I don’t know you at all, Linda.”

Through the Tahoe’s tinted windows he stared out at the barren mountains as Madora drove up the Montezuma Grade.

“I took you off the streets. You were pregnant, hungry—”

Madora saw such pain and disappointment in his expression that she almost stopped the car. She wanted to slap Linda silly for making this good man unhappy, for being too stupid to realize that without him she would be lying dead somewhere.

Although it was against Willis’s rules, Madora knew it would be safe to take Linda into the house for a shower. She was too weak to run away. Willis had said he’d be working an extra shift at Shady Hills Retirement Home when he finished his business with the attorney and not to expect him before six or seven that night.

Madora handed her a clean sheet. “Wrap this around yourself and then stand next to me. I’ll help you walk.” She folded a cotton dish towel and tied it as a blindfold.

By the time they reached the house, Linda was bleeding. Maybe from inside, maybe the stitches. Madora didn’t know about such things. A trail of blood followed them into the bathroom.

“Stand in the shower, lean against the side, but don’t turn on the water.”

It might not be safe for her to shower if she was bleeding. Possibly she shouldn’t even be standing.

“You’re not going to pass out, are you? I can’t carry you back to the trailer, and if Willis—”

“I . . . can . . . Okay.”

Once upon a time in another life Madora had fallen out of a tree and torn a gash in her forearm. A doctor with a tiny anchor tattooed between his index and middle fingers had stitched it up and told her to keep it dry. That night her mother had covered it with a plastic bag so she could take a shower. A plastic bag didn’t seem feasible under the circumstances, but Linda had to be cleaned up; Madora knew that. And the stitches should probably be kept dry. She was in the realm of guesswork now, going on instinct enhanced by her desire—her need—to help Linda because she owed it to the baby to care for his mother. She felt connected to the girl now, as if through the boy they were related.

She ran back to the trailer and got one of the sanitary napkins Willis had left there. In the kitchen she tore a clean plastic bag from a roll and cut two long strips about ten inches wide, not an easy thing to do until she figured out a way to pull the plastic against the sharp edge of the scissors. In the bathroom Linda stood in the shower stall, resting her forehead against one metal side. Madora handed her the napkin.

“Put this between your legs,” she said and then helped Linda cover the pad with the plastic strip and tie it to another strip that went around her waist. “Now put your hand over the pad and don’t let it move. You gotta keep the stitches dry.”

Showering was a slow process, turning the water on and off, filling the bucket, gently soaping the girl’s long legs and rinsing away the blood and sweat and other fluids from her thighs, sponging beneath her arms and under her small breasts.

“Can you bend over a little? I’ll wash your hair.”

Linda was fair-?haired but her baby was dark. His hair might fall out and grow back blond. Somewhere Madora had learned this often happened. His new parents might not want a blond baby. They would be disappointed. Her stomach tightened. She could not bear that his new parents—Whoever they were—would be anything but thrilled by him. She wanted them to love him in the way she wanted to be loved herself. Completely, without qualifications, forever and ever.

She dried Linda carefully and gave her another napkin to stanch the blood and a pair of her own panties, which hung on the girl like bloomers. She hoped the stitches were still good, prayed the bleeding would not go on and on. She could clean up the blood on the floor and shower stall, but Willis would be suspicious if he saw torn stitches. He would guess that Linda had been out of the trailer. She hadn’t seen much, just the inside of the shower. Not enough to identify where she was being held.

That evening while Willis showered and changed, Madora stood at the stove stirring the Dennison’s chili, listening to the drum of water against the sides of the shower, dreading that Willis would see a drop of blood she’d missed or a long silver-?blond hair caught in the drain. The shower sounds stopped and she heard the whir of the hair dryer. A few minutes later Willis came into the kitchen wearing a pale blue shirt that looked beautiful against his olive skin. He wore his hair long and loose, held back by a bandana around his forehead. After five years, his beauty still struck her as hard as it had that first night. He was a buzz-?cut Marine back then, a Marine medic she mistook for her guardian angel. When he took her hand, she had asked him, “Did Daddy send you?” And he answered that he had, though later he said it didn’t happen that way.

“You were so out of it, Madora. You couldn’t put two words together.”

“I like that shirt,” she said, handing him a beer from the refrigerator. She waited for him to tell her where he’d bought it, but he didn’t want to talk, and as always, she took her cues from him. She laid a spoon and paper napkin on a plastic mat, a souvenir of Arizona with a photograph of a lightning storm over the Grand Canyon. He sat down and crumbled a handful of saltine crackers into the chili bowl.

“Some avocado or something’d be nice here. You got any cheese?”

“We’re out of everything. I can go to the market tonight.” There was a used-?book store in Arroyo that stayed open until ten. On the rare occasions when she went into town alone, she liked to stop there and browse through old magazines; but it had been many weeks since Willis let her use the car alone, and she was not sure how to approach the subject with him.

He said, “I’ll bring stuff home tomorrow. Make me a list but not too long. I’m running short.”

“Did the lawyer pay you?”

“You think I drove all the way to Carlsbad for my health?”

She ducked her head.

“I’m going to medical school. You forget that? It’s going to cost plenty. We need to save every penny.”

“I know that, Willis.”

“Sure you do. You’re a good girl, Madora.” He pushed his chair back and pulled her down onto his lap. “You took care of things for me. I knew I could trust you.”

She laid her head against his shoulder and inhaled the musky scent of his aftershave.

“I couldn’t get along without you, Madora. You know that, don’t you? You’re like the air I breathe.”

The scent and the caress of his voice spread a soft warmth through her.

“Let’s go in the other room, okay?” He lifted her into his arms. She waited for him to say something about the weight she’d gained, but he held her as easily as he would a child. “I don’t think I can go another minute without a piece of you, little girl.”

“What about—?”

“Her? Forget about her. That one’s not going anywhere.”

It was almost midnight when Madora slipped from bed and pulled on a cotton shift. Holding her sandals, she closed the bedroom door against the sound of Willis’s soft snores and went into the kitchen. As she passed through the living room, Foo jumped off the couch and romped toward her, one ear flopping lopsidedly, his backend twisting in anticipation of his delayed dinner. Madora poured kibble into his bowl and put it down for him. She turned on the carport light and went outside to check on the animals in the menagerie. When she reached in to give the hawk-?shocked rabbit a handful of pellets, the terrorized creature cringed against the far end of the cage.

She walked behind the house and let herself into the trailer. Foo obediently lay on the ground by the cinder-?block steps. The interior of the trailer was inky, and Madora used a flashlight to see her way to Linda’s bedside.

The girl lay on her back, her clean hair tangled on the pillow. Sleeping soundly thanks to the pills Willis had given her when he got home from work. Faint lines etched her forehead, and Madora was touched by a wistful sadness. A girl of sixteen should have a silky, unfurrowed brow. As she slept, she seemed to chew on something and dreams danced beneath her swollen eyelids. Imagining that she dreamed of pain and of the baby she had never seen, Madora’s sorrow grew to an ache that spread through her body.

Poor unlucky girl. Madora knew what it meant to be young and lost, frightened of everything and pretending to fear nothing.

She filled a plastic water bottle from the jug on the table and placed it where Linda could reach it. She locked the trailer again and walked back to the house, meaning to return to bed; but she was wide-?awake and taut with emotion. At such a time she would have liked to have a TV, but theirs had stopped working months ago; and though Willis said he would fix it or buy a new one, he did not like to be reminded. A radio would have been company, but reception at the head of Evers Canyon was all static.

The night was long, the day ahead even longer.

She looked in on Willis. He slept soundly, needing his sleep more than she did. He had another full day ahead of him, a few hours at Shady Hills Retirement and then visits to the private clients who doted on him and told him he had a healer’s touch and should be a doctor, not simply a home care provider.

The house smelled of the day’s heat and chili and dog. She couldn’t draw a full breath and went back outside. Overhead, the moon was only a sliver; but far from city lights, stars illuminated the landscape enough to see by. Madora walked around the front of the house and leaned against the Tahoe, thinking of nothing much. Her mind was empty, a bucket under a spigot waiting to be filled.

Red Rock Road came to a dead end marked by a pair of posts and a reflecting sign of a vehicle with a red line drawn through it. Starlight dusted the miles of wilderness that lay beyond, turning rock and soil and scrub to pewter. Madora made a soft kissing sound, and Foo followed her up the trail to the rock that water and erosion had carved a seat in. Standing on his hind legs, Foo pestered to be lifted, and she arranged herself so she could hold him on her lap.

Behind the trailer, an owl lifted out of a sycamore near the creek and cast a shadow along the trail as it flew silently into a scrub oak near Madora. The night was full of hunters.

Linda was sixteen, younger than Madora had been when Willis rescued her. She was seventeen when she left Yuma with him; and if he was sometimes strange, if there were parts of him as tightly padlocked as the trailer, she accepted these things because his quirks and eccentricities were the price she paid for being loved and for being sure that at the end of the day he would always come home to her. He needed her as much as she did him; he had made that clear on a day she tried not to remember but could not forget.

In a motel in Yreka, he sat on the edge of the bed and pressed a pistol against his ear, a pistol she did not know he owned. There had been a job he wanted, orderly in a hospital, good pay and more responsibility than an aide; but something went wrong and he got drunk and came home raving and crying. He made her swear she would never leave him, and she had done so willingly. How could he doubt her? He said he’d die without her; without her he wouldn’t want to live. And in response she said that she was nothing without him either. He had rescued her.

Since that night nothing had changed until today when she held Linda’s small boy, and they looked into each other’s eyes. She had seen all that he was meant to be and do, the wealth of opportunities that lay before him; and he had looked into her heart brimming with love and known her in a way no one else ever had, not even Willis. There had been a click of recognition between them; and because of it, she was different than she had been twenty-?four hours ago.

Chapter 6 of Little Girl Gone will be posted January 24!

Pre-Order Little Girl Gone at Your Independent Bookstore

Reprinted with the permission of Grand Central Publishing.

Little Girl Gone – Chapter 4

Drusilla — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 23:58:41 +0000

Reprinted with the permission of Grand Central Publishing.

Chapter 4

(Click here to read Chapter 3)

A few miles away, in the town of Arroyo, Django Jones dreamed of his mother. She was wearing her favorite red dress with the pleats that flipped out around her knees, and her hair shimmered with lights of silver, copper, and gold. Django had a green garden hose in his hand and he was spraying her and she was laughing. Her laugh was like light, like rain, like water splashing over rocks.

The room in which he awoke—it was the third morning now—was a quarter the size of his bedroom at home, and he could tell from the boxes shoved into the closet and corners that it had been a kind of utility room before his arrival. Across the room on a beat-up old dining room table, Django’s backpack reminded him that he was going to school that day whether he wanted to or not. He tried to imagine Arroyo Elementary School, K through eight, and he knew he wasn’t going to like it.

He fished his laptop off the floor beside the bed, powered on, and checked the time against the clock on the table. He had half an hour before he needed to get up. As he logged on, his hands trembled with hope.

First he Googled Jacky Jones, his father, and there were many new entries: bios and obits and memorials, a lot of people writing about how they knew him when he was the hottest guitarist out of England in the early seventies. He scanned these quickly. A woman wrote about having sex with him after a concert and making a plaster cast of his penis.

Gross.

He went to Facebook and did a quick scroll, not paying much attention to the entries, looking for a clue that his parents were alive. He was sure they would find a way to send him a message. He went to his e-mail, saw nothing interesting. If the story of the accident was part of a top secret government thing, a message from his parents verifying this would be in code, of course. Django was smart; he would figure it out. Or, if they were being held for ransom, the note would come by mail or maybe a telephone call. Django’s father was super rich and famous, and his half brother, Huck, was probably a billionaire. The kidnappers would want a lot of money, but Django had made up his mind that he wouldn’t call the FBI when he heard from them. The feds would tell him to be cagey, not to pay the demand, but he was willing to pay any amount to rescue his mother and father.

There was nada from his homies on Facebook or e-mail or Twitter despite his having written them a couple of times every day since he got to his aunt’s house. Plus texting and tweeting and leaving messages on their cells. He looked up at the ceiling and opened his eyes wide to dry up the tears he felt coming. He blinked hard but it didn’t help. He was twelve and everyone said his parents were dead so it was normal to cry; but Django had never wanted to be normal.

Jacky and Caro Jones had driven to Reno over the Memorial Day weekend because Jacky wanted to try out his new black Ferrari on Interstate 395, the sweeping stretches of highway and long sight lines north of Bishop. If they had left Reno a half hour later or stopped in Bishop for coffee, if they’d gotten sleepy and decided to risk the bedbugs in a roadside motel. If they hadn’t been driving back to Beverly Hills late Monday night along the dark, deserted highway through the Rand Mountains, the hilly, twisty section between Johannesburg and Randsburg. If a drunk in a pickup had not shot out of an unmarked side road: no lights, ninety miles an hour.

Django wanted to jam a pencil through his ear, kill his imagination and obliterate the screams and the sound of metal slamming into metal.

The morning after the accident when Django came into the kitchen, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes, it had not seemed unusual to see his father’s manager, Ira, leaning against the kitchen counter, drinking coffee. Ira had been his father’s manager since the seventies, and they often had morning meetings at the house in Beverly Hills.

It was Ira who had broken the news and swore to Django that his parents had not suffered. Death had come instantly, he said. The news charred Django like a sapling struck by lightning. It burned a hollow space inside him that now, two weeks later, he knew nothing would ever fill. That first morning, Mrs. Hancock, the housekeeper, put her arms around him, and they sat beside each other on the double chair on the kitchen porch. As Django recalled—his memory of those first days had big holes in it—they sat there all day as the sun moved across the wide planks of the whitewashed floor; but it couldn’t have been that long because his parent’s lawyer came, Mr. Guerin; and he and Ira closed themselves in Jacky’s office. While they talked Django went outside and sat by the swimming pool. His father said that exercise was the best thing when a person was upset so he tried to swim laps, but he only got to the middle of the pool before he couldn’t be bothered. He lay on his back and floated, staring up at the gray sky. Typical June gloom.

The truth was, when Ira told him his parents were dead, Django had not felt much of anything except stunned. And later, when he started to think about what automobile accident and dead really meant—what Ira and Mr. Guerin would call the long-term ramifications—he mostly felt scared because no one seemed to know what was going to happen to him. He thought he was probably too rich to go to an orphanage, but he had seen the musical Oliver! when the senior students at Beverly Country Day presented it at Christmas. After the performance he had asked his mother what gruel was and she said oatmeal, and his father said it was oatmeal mixed with sand and lint and dirt and dog hair swept up off the floor. Django knew he would never have to eat anything so awful, but he remembered the song the orphans sang about food, glorious food and it looped through his brain. He went to sleep thinking/singing it and woke up with it still going round and round.

The first day was the longest day in the history of the world. Then, near dinnertime, Huck, his older half brother, turboed through the front door with his bodyguard behind him, talking fast like always. Then Django heard the bawling sounds come out of his mouth and there was no way he could stop them. Huck was almost thirty, the son of Django’s father by his first marriage. He had his San Francisco Giants baseball hat on backwards, and he was crying too.

Time and memory got tricky again after that. Mrs. Hancock packed a bag for him and he loaded his laptop and iPad into his backpack. He hunted all over for his phone, and then he found it, in plain sight, right where it was supposed to be. Ira had driven them to a small airport in the valley where Huck’s plane was parked. Ira told Django, “Your dad was a great guy and you’re his boy all the way.” That was when Ira’s saggy-baggy face drooped even further and he began crying; and seeing an old guy cry embarrassed Django, but he cried too. Junior, one of the buffed-up bodyguards who always traveled with Huck, picked Django up and carried him over his shoulder and onto the plane like he was two years old.

The chopper they took from the San Jose airport landed on the helipad in Huck’s backyard. Huck disappeared into his office, and Junior handed Django over to a girl who said she was his brother’s personal assistant. Time passed and Django ate a lot and watched television and played video games, and every day people came and went and looked at him and there were more phone calls and quiet voices behind closed doors.

Huck’s girlfriend, Cassandra, walked around the house in a bikini, and when she hugged him her boobs weren’t soft like they looked. Django smelled marijuana in her hair, same as in his mother’s after a party. Cassandra brought him cocoa and popcorn and cinnamon toast and asked him how he felt, trying to be motherly.

Once, when they were playing gin rummy, he asked her, “Are you going to marry my brother?” He had been thinking about what it would be like to live in this house with her until he grew up.

She thought he was joking. “My parents’ll kill me if I don’t finish college.”

Huck had given Django some games his company was developing and asked him to test them out, but Django couldn’t take the task seriously. So what if his score went backwards and his avatar got pounded? In real life—every minute—the living, breathing Django was fighting to outrun his misery and the awful sounds and images in his head.

He thought he was going to stay with Huck; but after almost two weeks and lots more murmuring behind closed doors, there was another flight in a small plane, only this time Huck stayed behind because of business. Junior kept Django company and turned him over to Ira and Mr. Guerin at Montgomery Field in San Diego. They drove for an hour to his aunt Robin’s house in a town called Arroyo.

Mr. Guerin told him he was going to live in Arroyo now. “Your mother’s sister, your aunt Robin, will be your guardian.”

“But I don’t even know her. I never met her in my life.”

“I know, Django, I know. But your parents wanted it this way. They rewrote their wills last year for that particular reason.”

“Does she have kids?”

“No. She’s never been married. She’s a spinster.”

Old maid, Django thought. Was anyone, ever, going to tell him some good news?

“I want to stay with Huck.”

“I’m sorry, Django,” Mr. Guerin said, blinking hard. “I’m terribly sorry.”

Not only were Django’s mom and dad gone forever; the Django who lived in Beverly Hills was gone too. The person who woke up in his aunt Robin’s house looked like Django Jones—

Same straight blond hair and brown eyes, five feet four inches tall, one hundred and ten pounds—but he was just a shadow.

He had been with Aunt Robin since Tuesday. Today was Thursday, which was a stupid-ass day to start going to a new school, but nobody had asked him his opinion. Around here he just got told.

His aunt had been kind to him, but she was a chilly kind of person, a perpetual-motion robot who never stopped moving for long enough to really look at him. She was constantly off to do something or go somewhere. She was an accountant with a lot of clients. Around the house she was always cleaning and cooking and sorting through papers and drawers and cupboards, carrying laundry up and down stairs and ironing. Robin had a vegetable garden big enough to feed every kid at Beverly Country Day, and when she wasn’t working in the house she was outside in a big hat pulling weeds and watering each plant by hand to conserve H2O.

No matter what she was doing, there was a subzero negative force field around her like the one that protected Jett Jones when he liberated the children held captive on Planet Chiron in the second Jett Jones Boy of the Future novel.

At BCD Django had a great sixth-grade teacher, Mr. Cody, who told him he should write a science fiction novel because he needed somewhere constructive to put his imagination before it got him into trouble. At first Django thought it would be hard to make up a story with a plot and outer-space scenery, but pretty soon he got the hang of it. His father had started calling him Mr. Spielberg Sir and bought him a new laptop.

Django had called his teacher from Huck’s, but he realized when Mr. Cody’s voice got thick and gravelly that his call had upset him. It was the same when he phoned his homies, Lenny and Roid. They talked, but it was freaky, not like it had been.

Django put aside his laptop and closed his eyes.

Life would not be so demented if his friends would just communicate.

Django had never had a lot of friends, but Lenny and Roid were a couple of weirdoes like him and they were tight. They were math geniuses, but Django was the more creative type, although he aced math and science. Django and his friends were a posse, Mr. Cody said. Something else he said: “Give you dudes time, you’re gonna rule the world.” Django wondered if this was still true, now that everything in the world had changed.

Django’s mom said he was like the empath on Star Trek. Often he could sense what people thought and felt just by watching and listening for the words under their words, the words they didn’t say. In this way, he knew without being told that Aunt Robin was sending him to school to get rid of him for a few hours.

Django got out of bed and stood at the window. In whichever direction he looked he saw hills and scrub and rocks. Except for the radio he heard playing down in the kitchen, the quiet was so intense it made him think of church and funerals and death.

A memorial service had been held at Forest Lawn. A grown-up kind of thing. Django didn’t attend but he read about it online and knew that hundreds of famous people were there, including all the members of his dad’s old band. Huck faxed Django articles from the Los Angeles Times and Variety, and he said there was going to be a story in Rolling Stone. Someone would call him for an interview but he didn’t have to talk if he didn’t want to. All the articles said the same thing, that Jacky Jones was one of the great rock guitarists and composers of the twentieth century. There had been music and speeches at the funeral. Paparazzi. Django was glad to stay away. He didn’t want to be photographed and stared at. The poor little orphan kid.

He dropped to the floor and lay on his back, staring at the cracks in the ceiling, trying not to remember the time before. After a while he rolled onto his stomach and began, slowly, to hit his forehead against the wood. He would keep it up until something good happened.

Read Chapter 5

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Reprinted with the permission of Grand Central Publishing.

Idyllwild

Drusilla — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 01:34:49 +0000

My hero and I just got home from a getaway to Idyllwild, a mountain community about two hours from San Diego. It had been almost ten years since our last visit to an inn where we’d enjoyed a couple of great weekends, and when I made the reservations, I didn’t know what to expect. Of course, I went online, and was pleased to see that the place looked about the same: a line of handsomely designed “cabins” along a rushing creek. But a mouse-smelling cabin with knot holes in the floor can look fairy tale charming on-screen, so I was ready to be disappointed. What a wonderful surprise to discover that the inn is not only as comfortable and welcoming as it used to be but even more so.

Usually, we leave the dogs – a Doberman and a yellow Lab, Diva and Lexy — with our house sitter but alas, she has developed a social life and was otherwise engaged. We paid a little extra to have the dogs with us.

We were ten miles outside Idyllwild at four thousand feet when the snow began, big fluffy wet flakes that stuck on the pines and manzanita and quickly spread a blanket on both sides of the road. Driving wasn’t a problem until we hit town and then I was glad to be with someone who’d lived through many Boston winters. We just made it to the inn before it became too dangerous to drive.

First thing, we let Diva out of the car and she tore off along the path like she’d lived there all her life and then, suddenly, her hind legs were in front of her and she was skating on her butt end. She tried to stand, couldn’t, managed and took off and there she was again, spinning on the ice. We stood in the falling snow and laughed.

Snow doesn’t last long in most of Southern California. Two days later we were able to hike along a fast moving creek for a couple of hours. Lexy who is our surfer dog and rides the waves at Dogs’ Beach if there’s a ball anywhere near, stepped into the creek and out so fast, he looked like he’d been stung. After that he stayed away from ice water.

I felt like I should apologize when we brought them home to a walled, city yard but looking at them now, they seem happy to be home. Dogs don’t compare one place to another. They take what they’ve got and enjoy the day. We should all be more like them.

Little Girl Gone – Chapter 3

Drusilla — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 00:47:44 +0000

Reprinted with the permission of Grand Central Publishing.

Chapter 3

The Great Dane truck trailer where Linda had spent almost five months of her pregnancy was eight feet wide and twenty-seven feet long. Up on blocks, the trailer had been on the property when Madora and Willis moved in. An eyesore, but too big to move.

Like many neglected rural properties, this one had for some time been a dumping ground for derelict machinery and equipment, but Madora disregarded the trash when she saw the little house. Stepping across the threshold for the first time four years ago, she had been afraid to hope that Willis would finally want to settle down, marry her, and have a family. A weight dropped from her shoulders when he said the spot suited him fine. She disregarded the cracked and bumpy orange and brown linoleum, the oven that did not work, the stained sink. These were temporary eyesores and inconveniences. All that mattered was that the gypsy months of wandering the West were over and her real life had begun. As if to prove he felt the same, Willis had taken the time to paint the house a deep, forest green and trimmed the windows in white. Working as a team all one weekend, they had dragged the rusty backhoes and graders, the carcass of a refrigerator, the flat tires and corroded tanks and coils of wire, and dumped them behind a mound of boulders, where they still lay like the skeletal remains of the property’s history. The Great Dane trailer could not be moved without a tow truck, so they stippled its battered aluminum exterior in camouflage shades of gray and green and tan that blended with the sycamores and dusty cottonwoods along the dry creek bed at the back of the property.

Initially, Willis had been fascinated by the trailer, but then he forgot about it and more than three years passed. Eight months ago, he had cut a window-sized hole up high on one side and installed an air-conditioning unit and an electric generator to power it and a few lights. Madora assumed he was making a room for himself, a place to study when he went back to school.

He never mentioned Linda. He just brought her home and put her in the trailer one rainy night.

He had brought her into the kitchen, water dripping off his ankle-length plastic raincoat, his black hair plastered and shining against his head. Behind him, had stood a girl with straggly hair in frayed-out Levi’s and a yellow T-shirt, hip shot out, staring down at her bare feet.

Madora remembered thinking that Linda looked like a Tinkertoy, round in the middle with sticks for arms and legs.

“She’s pregnant, Willis.”

“You think I’m blind?”

“You’ve got to take her to a doctor.”

“Pregnancy isn’t a disease, Madora. Besides, I’m a Marine Corps medic. I can manage a pregnancy. It’s not brain surgery.”

At that moment, Madora was juggling four or five thoughts at the same time, and it was hard to know what to say first. She didn’t mind helping this pregnant teen with nowhere to go, and she admired Willis for his generosity and didn’t want him to think she was stingy. But they were always short of money by the end of the month, and feeding one more was going to be a stretch.

“And where’s she going to sleep, Willis? We’ve only got the one bedroom.”

“I fixed up the Dane.”

“The trailer? But it’s freezing out there.” All the blankets they owned were on Madora and Willis’s bed, plus an old sleeping bag. And still they were cold at night.

“I put a mattress down and a couple of blankets and she can wear those flannel pajamas.”

The ones he had given Madora. A gift of soft, blue flannel pajamas at the start of the cold weather, a surprise. She loved his occasional and unexpected bursts of generosity, and she knew it was small of her to begrudge this girl the comfort of warm pajamas.

“What’s she going to eat?”

“I stopped on the way home and got a couple of burritos.”

“Where’d the mattress come from? And the blankets? We don’t have any extra blankets.” If she asked too many questions Willis would become defensive and then angry and accusing. He would say she did not believe in him and lacked commitment to their shared life, the terms of which he set without consulting her. And that was all right. She was by nature a follower. He was smarter than she and far more worldly. But she needed to know the truth. “Did you plan this ahead, Willis?”

“I’m going to take her over to the trailer now.” He opened a kitchen drawer where this and that collected and pulled out a padlock.

“What do you need that for?” Another question.

“She’s been on the street, Madora.” His tone implied Madora was a stupid girl, perhaps a little retarded. “Do I have to tell you what that means? She’s probably got drugs in her system and she could start hallucinating and walk right out the door. Believe me, Madora, I know about this kind of thing. The lock’s for her own good.” He paused. “Get it?”

All Madora knew of the world was what she’d seen from behind Willis, on tiptoes, looking over his shoulder. What he said made perfect sense.

“She needs a hot drink,” he said. “Make a thermos of tea and put a lot of sugar in it. I’ll come back and get it.” Before he left he smiled at Madora. “I don’t want you getting wet, catching a chill. It’s pretty bad out there. I’ll come back for the tea. Don’t trouble yourself.”

“Just tell me first. Did you plan this out ahead of time?”

He had never hit her, never even threatened her, but sometimes Madora felt the possibility of violence flow between them like an electric current.

“I’ll tell you the truth, and will you then be satisfied or will I have to keep explaining myself?” He sighed like a porter putting down his load after a long day. “I’m not going to lie, Madora, about how much this hurts me, your doubt. After all we’ve been through and all we’ve been to each other, you still don’t trust me. When the person I love most in the world doesn’t trust me or believe in me, do you know the pain, Madora? Trust and love, they’re almost the same thing. If you don’t trust me, it means you don’t love me. You can’t love me.”

The wind rose, whining up Evers Canyon and moaning in the eaves of the house, driving the rain hard against the windows. A draft came in at the floorboards and ran like a spider up the back of Madora’s leg. Along the creek somewhere a branch broke off a cottonwood, sounding like a pistol crack.

Willis sat, resting his elbows on his knees. “Maybe I should have told you before, but it happened too fast. I didn’t do a lot of thinking or planning.”

And yet he had a mattress and blankets in the trailer, waiting. Madora let the thought slide away, out of her mind forever.

“I admit, I’ve been watching Linda for a couple of days. Every time I went into Arroyo she’d be standing by the long stoplight near the freeway, holding up this feeble little sign saying she’s pregnant and hungry, and today when I saw her, in the pouring rain, I knew I had to bring her home.” His dark eyes looked into Madora’s, and she read in his expression a deep and inexpressible longing to be understood. “And I knew—I thought I knew—you’d want to help her too. I guess I just totally misunderstood.” He stood up. “If you really want me to, Madora, I’ll take her back to town. But is it okay if she eats? First? She needs something.”

Awash with shame, Madora laid her hand against his cheek. The goodness of the man brought tears into her eyes. “You’re right; you did the right thing. We’ll make the trailer comfortable for her.” Madora would not think about the mattress and blankets laid out in advance or consider the implications of the padlock. “You go along and get her settled. When you come back I’ll have her tea ready.”

And the flannel pajamas.

Read Chapter 4

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Reprinted with the permission of Grand Central Publishing.

Thanksgiving 2011

Drusilla — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 04:46:24 +0000

Thanksgiving was great! Hope yours was too.

For many years I cooked for the crowd but a few years ago my sister and I switched so now we all go to her house for the yearly November feast. Last year we had ham but this year she went traditional with turkey and all the trimmings which in this case meant Rocky brought carrots he’d done something orangey with and Nikki made the salad. It’s not traditional to have salad at Thanksgiving but in our family we’re big on greens.

We toasted our mother who is ninety four and the prettiest woman at the table (you think I’m kidding). And we remembered Aunty Kath who turned ninety-nine the Tuesday before. We raised our glasses in memory of Aunty Molly and all the beloved Brownes in Oz. Isabelle and Grayson joined in. They especially love the part where we clink glasses. When we went around the table to express our thanks, Izzy was thankful for me. Honestly, aren’t grandchildren the greatest?

Afterwards, with the little ones gone, we nibbled on pie, drank coffee and more wine and brought out the conversation cards. You know what these are. A clear plastic cube of a hundred or so cards printed with statements bound to get people talking. One of these was “Which would you rather be: a world class athlete, artist, scientist, politician or musician?”

At our table of adults ages twenty to ninety-four, there were only three answers. I was in the minority, wanting to be an athlete and confessed to a fantasy of myself loping across the finish line at the Olympics. The second favorite choice was musician. Better than half wanted to be scientists of some sort.

What field of science is it that studies odds? I thought how unlikely it all was that we Brownes and Greens, and Campbells, Germans, Irish, Italians and Native American, connected by blood and good fortune, should be sitting around a table together on a Thursday late afternoon, half-sloshed on champagne, affection and gratitude.

Little Girl Gone – Chapter 2

Drusilla — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 00:48:04 +0000

Reprinted with the permission of Grand Central Publishing.

Chapter 2

(Click here to read Chapter 1 first)

Five Years Later

Madora Welles rose from the living room sectional where she had spent the night and drank a cup of instant coffee, standing in the carport outside the kitchen. The cement was cool and slightly damp, and her bare feet stuck to it in a pleasant way. She ran her fingers through her light brown hair, a color her father had long ago described as mouse. Little Mouse had been one of his pet names for her. Little Mouse, Pug because her nose was pert, Runt because she was short. Sweetheart Girl.

How odd that her father’s voice, though he had been gone ten years, still came into her mind as if he were sending messages by a circuitry available only to them.

Before six on an early summer morning, as the moon dropped below the western horizon, the sky over the Laguna Mountains was a wash of pale yellow, and the cool air smelled of sage and pepper and damp sand and stone. Rough chaparral covered the bottom and slopes of Evers Canyon, softened by the cream-colored blossoms of the chamise and the curves and hollows of the tumbled, biscuit-colored boulders. The rocks were ancient, Willis said, maybe two hundred million years old.

Madora was twenty-two years old, and two hundred million was a number so big she wasn’t even sure how to write it.

From behind the Lagunas, the sun rose and kissed the head of Evers Canyon that loomed directly behind Madora’s house. In the nearest town, Arroyo, and in San Diego, thirty miles west, people were just waking up, but Madora was alert as she and the dog walked across the yard and the cul-de-sac to where a weathered sign marked a trailhead into Cleveland National Forest, a vast, barren territory of mountains, rocks, and chaparral. A rock one hundred yards up the trail resembled a chair, and she often went there to sit and think and watch the land as she waited for the sun; but this morning Willis wanted her to stay near the house. She leaned back against the trail sign and swallowed the last of her coffee as she waited for the sun line to slip down from the canyon rim and melt the stiffness in her shoulders and neck. Willis said she’d feel better if she lost twenty pounds.

It was June and the weather had turned the corner, heading into full summer. The balls of sagebrush scattered across the sloping land were already brown. Soon the house would oven up and stay hot day and night until October. Although Madora opened all the windows to lure the slightest breeze, at the dead end of Evers Canyon the trapped air did not move much. Dust settled on every surface and clung to the curtains’ coarse weave. It powdered Madora’s skin, got in her eyes and hair and ears; her nose was so dry it sometimes bled. June meant that July was on its way and right behind it August and September, the hottest months of the year. Fire season.

The pit bull Madora had found as a puppy pushed against her leg, wanting attention. Though Foo was only a few months old, his personality had begun to organize itself into a mixture of aggression and timidity, curiosity, loyalty, and affection. During the previous night the cries coming from the woman in the trailer behind the house seemed to frighten him. He whimpered until Madora drew him against the curve of her body where she lay on the sectional.

There had been five cabbage-sized pups in the box at the side of the road, only Foo left alive and him just barely. Brown and white and squint-eyed, he had felt in her hands like a small warm loaf of bread. Coyotes would have gotten him if Madora had not seen the box. Coyotes and hawks. Spiders and snakes. The world was full of danger. In Cleveland National Forest even the plants had spikes and thorns.

She buried the puppies in the sand along the dry stream at the back of the house and gathered stones for a cairn. She gave Foo water and then evaporated milk from an eyedropper and put a hot water bottle and a scrap of blanket in a box for him to snuggle up to. Willis said they couldn’t afford a dog, but Madora convinced him otherwise, pointing out that a pit bull would be a good watchdog. He needed shots and a tag with his name: Foo. Madora wanted him to have a proper license from the county, but Willis didn’t like signing forms that required his name and address.

Foo had become part of Madora’s nursery of injured animals and struggling plants. But he was more than that. His companionable presence made the long days less monotonous. She talked to him about the things that mattered to her; and as he listened, his small bright eyes never left her face, as if he believed she had all the answers, if only he could figure out what the questions were.

Under the carport there were pots and planters and whiskey barrels full of zinnias and cosmos and petunias, flowers that endured the heat as long as they were watered. On a shelf made of bricks and boards, a homemade cage held a rabbit with one ear ripped by a hawk. After six weeks it still cowered at the back of the cage. In another cage, she kept a coyote pup she’d raised from skin and bones, wild and mean. She had found him on the far side of the truck trailer where the girl was.

As Madora walked back across the road, back to the house, a stranger, a hiker or a boy riding a mountain bike, would have seen a fair-skinned girl made beautiful by innocence, candid green eyes, and skin turned to gold by the sun. But almost no one ever came this far up Evers Canyon; there were much easier trails into the Cleveland.

Madora and Willis had lived in the three-room house at the end of Red Rock Road for almost four years, renting from a man they had never met who kept the rent low as long as they paid on time and asked no favors or improvements. In Madora’s memory the months and seasons blurred; one summer was as hot as another, one winter as dry as the next. Country life suited her, but nature’s ruthlessness was frightening. On a walk with Willis she had stepped into a spider’s net cast between two trees on opposite sides of the trail. As she pulled the sticky webbing from her hair and face, a butterfly came away in her hand, its wings as dull and dry as paper. Madora wanted to destroy the web, but Willis admired the intricacy of the silken weave. He said there was a circle of life and coyotes and spiders as much as girls and butterflies were part of it.

Madora didn’t believe that life was a circle. Tending her damaged animals, she saw that it was more like a canyonback, where some got trapped and only a few rescued.

In the truck trailer up on cement blocks, the girl named Linda had screamed through the small hours of the night. Willis worked as a home health care provider and before that he had been a medic in the Marine Corps. He promised that compared to fixing men torn up by IEDs and land mines, delivering a baby was nothing. But still she screamed. Willis had given her pills, but Madora guessed from the cries that they had not been sufficient to ease her labor pains. Anyone walking by could have heard the noise she made, but the house was at the end of the road, almost a mile from its nearest neighbor, and the residents of Evers Canyon kept to their own business.

In the kitchen Madora followed the directions Willis had made her repeat back to him a half dozen times. She put a clean plastic tub in the sink with an old towel folded on the bottom. Another towel she folded in half and laid out on the counter beside the sink. On the other side she put a clean sponge and a bottle of lemon-colored extra-gentle bath soap and a third towel. The day before she had scoured every surface in the kitchen with Clorox, making her eyes burn and water. On her hands and knees she scrubbed the kitchen floor until she thought she would wear through the old vinyl to the gappy floorboards beneath. Afterwards she wouldn’t let Willis wear his shoes indoors until he pointed out that if Foo could run in and out, he should be able to as well. Madora could not ban Foo. He would be hurt and confused. She gave him a bath and washed the floor again.

She heard Willis come around the corner of the carport, his boots crunching in the gravel. He opened the screen door and let it slam behind him. He carried a bundle in his arms, wrapped in a flannel blanket.

“Do you remember what I told you?”

She nodded, taking the baby from him.

“When you’re done, put him in that nightgown thing with the cord at the bottom.” Willis’s black hair had come out of its ponytail and hung down thick and straight on either side of his handsome face, casting shadows and deepening the lines of exhaustion that accentuated the slant of his cheekbones. He looked like John the Baptist in a picture on the wall of the Sunday school Madora attended as a child.

In Madora’s arms, the newborn was light, a feather in a balloon wrapped in tissue.

“He’s so small.”

“Around six pounds, I’d guess. Not bad, considering.”

“How’s Linda?”

“Passed out, but she’ll be okay. She tore bad, so I had to give her more pills than I wanted. I stitched her, though. No problemo.” He walked out of the tiny kitchen toward the back of the house, his voice muffled through his sweat-stained shirt as he pulled it over his head. “While I’m gone

I want you to go in there and give her a good wash and change the sheets. I bought some of them female napkin things. She’ll need those.”

“How long will you be gone?”

He didn’t answer.

The baby in Madora’s arms did not feel as she remembered her baby dolls had, the snug way their rubber bottoms had rested in the curve of her arm when she was seven years old. Her grip on this shapeless mass was uncertain, and it was a relief to lay him on the towel beside the sink. She pulled back an edge of the thin blanket so she could see his face. She was sorry to think he was ugly, but it was the truth. His low forehead was covered with black hair, his nose squashy, and his skin as red and scratched as if he’d been in a playground fight. She laid her index finger on his cheek and his puffy eyelids fluttered—such thick black lashes!— and opened just enough so that Madora could see that his eyes were the color of deep water.

“You had a rough time, didn’t you, little guy?” Her voice appeared to startle him. He jerked his arms and legs and made Madora laugh. At the sound, his eyes widened. She smiled at him and put her face close, wanting him to see her smile, as if this might go some way toward assuring him a happy life.

Be lucky, she thought.

As Willis had instructed, she ran a few inches of warm water into the plastic tub in the sink and unwrapped the blanket from around the baby’s body. She stifled a wash of disgust at the sight of his flesh painted with a sticky slime of blood and a white, almost cheesy substance. An inch of tied-off umbilicus hung from his stomach. Madora wished she knew if all babies looked this awful in the first moments of life. It would be a disaster and ruin all Willis’s plans if he tried to give the baby boy to the lawyer and he was rejected. Willis was in a saving frenzy, talking about medical school and how much he needed the lawyer’s twenty-five thousand in cash.

When the water touched the boy, he went rigid and yelped—a cracking huff of surprise that subsided when his chest and arms and legs submerged. After a moment, he seemed to like the water, and Madora wondered if it reminded him of the time before he was born. Did a baby in the womb feel imprisoned or safely cared for? It seemed like the older she got, the more often such crazy and unanswerable questions popped into her mind.

She poured a minute drop of liquid soap into the palm of her hand and smoothed it over his saggy mottled skin. His eyes stayed locked on hers, hardly blinking. She was not sure if he actually saw her; still his fixed, deepwater stare had an absorbing intensity and she believed that he was memorizing her. A year from now, if she saw him in a stroller in a supermarket, he would look up at her, lock eyes, and know her.

From the bathroom Madora heard the sound of shower water hitting the metal wall of the stall. Normally she didn’t like it when Willis used too much water, but this morning she would not mind if he took one of his long scalding showers and drained the tank.

The slippery baby bundle rested on her forearm and she ran her fingers between each digit of his feet and hands. She lathered the thicket of black hair and felt the pulse beneath the softness at the back of his head. Willis had told her what this tender spot was called and warned her to be careful of it. She trembled with the fragility of his body, and her tears salted the warm water. Cradling his buttocks in her palm, she smoothed away the sticky residue of the birth canal, moving her fingers up under his chin and beneath his arms. From between his legs, a cloud of bubbles popped to the surface of the bath and Madora laughed.

She lifted him from the water, long and limp and skinny; and as she did he cried again, a piercing sound Madora understood immediately as surprise and cold. She quickly wrapped him in a fresh towel and held him against her heart, patting and crooning soft assurances that he would soon be warm.

No one needed to tell her how to hold him and pat him dry. The skill was born in her, an instinct. Since she held her first baby doll, she had wanted to be a mother. In high school, career day never interested her. Kay-Kay had talked about joining the army and called Madora a wuss because the idea did not appeal to her.

The water sounds from the bathroom stopped, and the shower’s plastic door banged against the outside of the stall.

“We have to hurry now,” she whispered, fiddling with the disposable diaper, determining front from back. “We don’t want to make Willis cross, do we?” In the dry air of the June morning, his hair was a dark nimbus, floating like the tag ends of sweet dreams from before he was born. Madora slipped the cotton gown over his head and tied it at the bottom with a drawstring, enclosing his feet. The gown was blue for a boy, though they had not known what the sex of the baby would be.

It would have been dangerous to take Linda to a doctor, and so Willis had handled everything. From the perfection of this little boy, it seemed he’d been right when he said a doctor was not necessary. “All over the world women have babies without the help of doctors.”

During her five months in the trailer Linda had never spoken about the baby’s father, even when Madora asked directly. Whoever he was, Madora knew he didn’t deserve anything as precious as the lamb in her arms. Nor did Linda. Willis had arranged for him to be adopted through an attorney who specialized in such matters, a friend of the nephew of one of Willis’s clients. The adoption attorney did not ask many questions and told Willis it would not be necessary for Linda to sign any papers. He would deliver the baby to his new parents. There would be a birth certificate with their names on it.

He would not need to be fed immediately, according to Willis, but she hoped the lawyer had made arrangements just in case. There should be another person with him to hold this small creature and prepare a bottle when he cried. A pain cut through Madora when she imagined him strapped into a cold car seat, hungry and suffering and only hours old, just new in the world and passed from hand to hand like something bought in a store.

Willis came into the kitchen wearing the Levi’s she’d pressed for him and the heavy denim shirt that was as dark as the baby’s eyes. He had combed back his hair and twisted it up on his head. He looked from the baby to her and smiled and lifted his soft, felt cowboy hat off a hook and put it on.

In Madora’s experience even the most attractive people had imperfections—a bump on the bridge of the nose or one eyelid a little droopy—but Willis’s face had no such irregularities. The two sides matched exactly, and this balance gave his face not only beauty but also an appealing serenity because there was nothing about it that needed to be adjusted. The first time she saw him, he was standing in front of her on the porch of the old house in the desert. So beautiful and calm. She thought he must be an angel.

She said, “I’m worried about him.”

“The lawyer? He’ll be there.”

“The baby.”

“I checked him over. He’s fine.”

“What if he gets hungry?”

“The lawyer’ll take care of that. We’re going to meet up in Carlsbad.”

“Let me come with you.”

“I’m tired, Madora. I want to get rid of this—”

“He’s not a this. He’s a boy.”

Willis’s expression said that he had heard enough. “Give him to me.”

She pulled back, ducking her head.

“You ought to try being a little sympathetic, Madora. I’ve been up all night. Linda just had a baby and she’s pretty knocked out, but she’ll come to soon, and when she does, she’ll need you.”

The baby arched his back and twisted his mouth, making sucking sounds as Willis took him from Madora. She opened the screen door.

“Willis?”

He stopped under the carport and scowled at her.

She said, “I want to have a baby.”

“Is that was this is all about?” His chuckle was softly derisive. “You got bit by the baby bug?”

“I’d be a good mother.” She knew this. “Please?”

“Don’t push me, Madora.”

Read Chapter 3