Daughter's Keeper (16 page)

Before Olivia had left him in San Miguel de Allende, she and Jorge had played with the idea of the sweet little baby they could make together. They had compiled a list of names that would work in both English and Spanish: Carla, Sofia, and Isabel, Pablo, Roberto, and Ezekiel. It was a kind of flirtation, with only the faintest blush of possibility, enough to make it entertaining but not so much as to alarm her. On the plane home, when she'd assumed she would never see Jorge again, Olivia had found herself, to her surprise, longing for a baby. She had fantasized about stepping off the plane, a round, brown bundle hanging in a brightly colored sling from her shoulder. She had enjoyed the thought of her mother's shocked and horrified face, at how Elaine would have tried to pretend that the idea of a half-Mexican grandchild didn't dismay her. When Jorge had shown up at Olivia's door in Oakland, they'd both become too immersed in the brutal practicalities of earning a living to allow themselves even the illusory expenditures of an imaginary baby. Now, sitting in the long narrow cell surrounded by strange women, Olivia was sickened by the revived image of that fantasy child, smiling from the nest of a sling woven from rainbow-colored
campesino
fabric.

“I'm not pregnant,” she said firmly.

“Shut the fuck up!” shouted an angry voice from one of the other bunks. The tiny cell held six, three against either wall. All were occupied by women huddled under light-blue blankets. Whenever one of them rolled over, or even turned her head, her vinyl-covered mattress creaked in protest. Olivia's scratchy polyester sheet had slipped off the corner of her mattress, and the discovered smell of urine from the soiled vinyl was what had first sent her tumbling off the bunk and running to the toilet.

Olivia closed her mouth, sick with fear at angering the others trying to sleep.

“What your name, girl?” The woman with the braids said, loudly.

“I said shut the fuck up!” bellowed one of the pale-blue lumps.

A chorus of groans filled the cell, and Olivia felt the gorge rise in her throat. She covered her mouth with her hand and tried to swallow the saliva that filled her mouth. Suddenly, with a clang, the cell door sprung open to let the women know that it was time to get up and out. Olivia heard howls of protest coming from the cells up and down the long hallway. A few of the women in her cell woke up, sitting up on their bunks and rubbing the sleep from their eyes. Nobody looked at her except the woman with the braids.

“Are you deaf?” the woman asked.

Olivia jumped and answered, “No. Sorry. My name is Olivia.”

“I'm Queenie.”

“You ain't no queen, bitch. You just a ugly old skank.” The speaker jumped down from her upper bunk and towered over Olivia. Her skin was the yellow of burnt milk, and her hair stood up from her head in twisted little peaks. Her arms were covered in thick ropy scars and open sores, the bright pink color of which was the only thing that looked alive on her sallow skin. Her open mouth revealed broken brown teeth, and the stench of her breath sent Olivia scrambling toward the toilet once more.

“Get yo' ugly white face out my toilet,” the angry woman said, pushing Olivia out of her way. She sat down, screwed her face up, and with a grunt let loose a raucous, trumpeting series of farts.

Queenie snorted in disgust and leapt out of bed. “You best get out of here before that smell kill your baby.”

Olivia followed the line of women to the row of sinks. She had no toothbrush, so she rinsed her mouth and scrubbed a shaking finger across her teeth. The women were talking and laughing. No one spoke to her. No one looked at her. In fact, the only time she ­hadn't felt like a shadow was when Queenie had spoken to her. Then, and when she had first arrived at the jail. In the intake room, she had bent over in response to the female guard's order and, gripping a buttock in either hand, spread herself open. The guard had stared at her silently, the seconds crawling by. Olivia felt her secret, soft wrinkled parts shrinking and cringing under the glare of the fluorescent lights. Finally, the guard grunted, “Squat down and cough.” Olivia sank to the ground, her anus sore from the unfamiliar sensation of being stretched. When she had finally been given permission to dress, she had done so with clumsy, ­disgusted fingers, trying not to touch any part of herself that the guard had seen.

Olivia splashed her face, thrilling to the shock of the cold clean water. She trudged along in the line of women to the cafeteria and gagged at the sight of the mound of pale gelatinous eggs giving way to the metal spoon of the cafeteria worker with a sickening slurp. She shook her head at the offered portion and again when presented with a clot of mucilaginous grey oatmeal. She took only a piece of cold, hard toast, slick with margarine. The smell of the scorched coffee made her stomach roil, so she left her plastic mug empty. She saw Queenie sit down and almost put her tray down next to hers, but the angry woman from their cell slid quickly into the empty seat. Olivia sat alone at a long Formica table, hunched over her plate, chewing on each bite of toast for so long that it turned to thin paste in her mouth.

After a while, she followed the line of women out of the cafeteria to a large room furnished with a few rows of plastic chairs hitched together with thick metal bars. Olivia sat in a chair at the end of a row. She fixed her eyes on the television set. Sally Jesse Raphael was interviewing an obese mother and daughter who had agreed to undergo gastric bypass together on television. Olivia wished, harder than she had ever wished for anything in her life, that she were a grotesquely fat girl in an Enrique Iglesias T-shirt with lank brown hair sitting in a TV studio. She wished that she and her mother could embark together on something no more horrible than the irrevocable mutilation of their internal organs. She wished she were anybody other than herself. For hour after hour, Olivia watched television shows chosen by the other women in the room. She did not speak. She did not move. She tried to breathe as silently as possible.

***

When Elaine arrived home from Olivia's bail hearing, she found Arthur waiting for her in the kitchen. He had made a pitcher of margaritas and had chicken breasts marinating on the counter. Elaine buried her head in his chest for a moment, and then sat down on a stool. She gulped down her drink.

“What in God's name is going on?” he asked. “I played your message, like, ten times. Livvy got arrested for selling drugs? I can't believe it. I mean, blowing up the Federal Building, maybe, but drug dealing? That doesn't sound like her.”

Elaine wiped the salt from her lips and launched into the story. When she got to the part about the security bond and the house, Arthur stood up. He crossed the room and pulled a pile of papers out from under the telephone. He looked at them for a moment, and then, suddenly, tore them down the middle. Elaine jumped and felt the tequila rise up to the back of her throat. She covered her mouth with her hand.

“So much for Tahoe,” Arthur said, and crumpled up the torn pieces of the mortgage refinancing documents.

“Oh Arthur, I'm sorry. I really am. But what could I do? I mean, really, I didn't have a choice.”

“Of course you didn't,” he said. Something in his tone made Elaine look up. He glanced away.

“What?” she said.

“Nothing.”

“No, really. Did I do the wrong thing?”

He didn't answer.

“Arthur! Please. Don't do this. Not now. What are you trying to tell me? Are you telling me I should have left her to rot in jail?”

He stood up, crossed the room, and jerked open the fridge. “Of course not,” he said, then gulped down some orange juice from a cardboard container.

Elaine closed her eyes. He knew she hated when he did that.

He wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “I just can't believe that you would do this without discussing it with me, without even telling me.”

“I tried to call.”

“Why did you need to do it right away? You could have waited a day. Or even an hour. You know how much the Tahoe place meant to me. It would have been
ours
, Elaine. Not mine. Not yours. Ours.”

“I'm sorry, Arthur. I'm so sorry.”

He leaned across the counter and took her chin in his hand. “Look, it's none of my business what you do with your money, or what you do with your daughter, for that matter, but I just have to say one thing.”

“What?”

“I can't stand to see you continuing to deny yourself the things you deserve. You've been incredibly good to that girl. You've bailed her out of catastrophe after catastrophe ever since she was two years old. When is it going to be your turn?”

“I don't know,” she whispered.

“You've got to confront the fact that maybe that's part of the problem.”

“What is?”

“That you've always been there for her to land on. Maybe if you weren't always there waiting to pick up the pieces, she might have learned to land on her own two feet. Maybe what Olivia has needed all along is a little tough love.”

Elaine didn't answer. In some ways she knew he was right, but she couldn't forget the betrayal in Olivia's eyes when her lawyer had announced to the entire courtroom that Elaine wasn't willing to put her house up to post her daughter's bond.

She reached for his hand and held it tightly. “You're right. I know you're right. But this isn't the time to teach her a lesson. After this is over, I'm going to sit down with her and tell her that enough is enough. I am. Really.”

He nodded and squeezed her hand in return.

“There's one more thing,” Elaine said. She hesitated, watching his face. “As part of her bond, she's going to have to live here with us.”

Arthur stared at her for a moment and then got up and began slicing the raw chicken meat, smacking the cleaver down on the cutting board. The force of the blows made the ice in the pitcher of margaritas tinkle and chime.

***

Olivia spent her four days and three nights in jail trying to make herself tiny, mute, and invisible. She refused Queenie's repeated offer of a joint, afraid that one of the many guards would see her or that they would haul her away for her court-mandated drug testing. She kept her gaze low, avoiding eye contact with everyone. Once, ­walking down the hall to her cell, she saw a small dark woman cowering against the cell bars. Two fat women with bleached-blond hair were leaning against her, rifling through her clothes. One had her knee jammed between the weeping woman's legs. A guard watched ­impassively from the end of the hall, saying nothing until the blondes had taken a pack of cigarettes away from the small woman and let her go. Only then had he shouted, “Okay, break it up, ladies.”

The woman, still crying, walked quickly by Olivia. Their eyes met for a moment, and Olivia opened her mouth, wanting to offer some words of comfort and commiseration. But she could not. Instead, she looked away and hurried on down the hall.

That night Olivia lay in her bunk, her eyes gritty with insomnia and aching from the glare of the ever-present fluorescent lights. Her skin felt like a suit that had shrunk in the wash, and she was overcome by an almost irresistible urge to slice herself open, to escape from the confines of her own body. She began to writhe in her bed, tangling her legs in the coarse acrylic blanket. Suddenly she squeezed her hand into a fist and slammed it into her forehead above her left eye. The dull ache it left quieted her somehow. With an almost clinical detachment, she did it again. The urge to flee subsided enough for her to stop her tortured wiggling, and she tried consciously to loosen the contracted muscles of her legs and back. Olivia wondered if she were losing her mind.

On the fourth day she was in the common room, staring vacantly at the television, when she heard a voice call her name. She looked around and saw a female guard with lips pursed in a disagreeable scowl.

“Olivia Goodman?” the guard asked.

“Yes,” Olivia said, in a small voice, hope fluttering in her chest.

“Right. Get your stuff.”

“I don't have anything,” Olivia said.

The guard looked at her curiously and then shrugged her shoulders. “Come on.”

Olivia followed her down the hall, through a gate, and into an elevator. The guard led her into a small room where another woman handed Olivia her clothes. She changed quickly, gingerly pulling on the sour-smelling jeans and sweatshirt. The guard then led her down another corridor and through a series of interlocking gates. Finally, she stood in small passage, at the end of which was a large green steel door.

The guard stood silently, and after a few moments, the door buzzed. She pushed against it and it opened onto the street. Olivia walked through, and it clanged shut behind her. She stood, blinking in the sudden bright light. She had not been outside since the night she was arrested. She raised her face to the sun, closing her eyes against the glare. The back of her eyelids glowed red, and she breathed deeply. Standing in the street, hemmed in by the freeway on one side and on the other the jail's towering cement walls, punctuated with narrow slits, Olivia had a sensation of soaring across infinite space. She raised her arms slightly and made as if to spin around in a circle. The blare of a car horn jerked her eyes open. She looked down the block and saw her mother's Honda Accord parked on the other side of the street. As she watched, the car pulled out of its parking spot and drove slowly toward her. Olivia took another deep breath, then ran across the street to the car and opened the passenger door. She got in and slammed the door.

“Please, get me out of here as fast as you can,” she said.

Her mother reached across the seat and hugged Olivia with one awkward arm. Olivia stiffened. When she was a very little girl, she would wrap her arms and legs around Elaine's neck and waist, clinging as hard as she could to her elusive mother. By the time Olivia was a teenager, however, she learned to prefer the comfort of a long string of more or less willing boys to that of the woman who had never seemed at ease in her embrace. By now, Olivia had grown as uneasy with her mother's touch as her mother had always been with hers.