Little Girl Gone (14 page)

“Leave it here.” He held out his pencil and a bit of paper. “Maybe next week things will change.”

She backed away, shaking her head. “I don’t have a phone.”

“Madora, everyone has a phone.”

“I’ll come by again.”

It was strange how quickly her confidence evaporated. She felt like someone caught naked in a public place. She looked at the clock and saw that five minutes had gone by since the last time she looked.
Willis, Willis, Willis,
she thought, and a tremor of fear went through her body. She tore off her apron and stuffed it under the counter beside her untouched tea.

“Madora, where you going?”

“I gotta get home, Connie. I don’t know where the time went.” She was making for the door, aware that in every booth, the customers had stopped eating and were watching her curiously. At the end of the diner, Vik had stood up as if he might need to rush forward and rescue her.

Maybe so. Maybe she would faint if she didn’t get out of there fast.

“What about your tips?” Connie called after her.

Willis, Willis, Willis.

Madora was close to tears as she stood beside the on-ramp with her thumb out. Cars sped off the freeway, headed for the acres of parking around the casino, but it seemed that at that particular hour of the day—three, going on four—no one was leaving. Soon her arm and shoulder began to ache from thumbing. Behind her, a motor sounded close enough to mow her down.

She turned around. Walt, the customer from the diner, sat astride a motorcycle. She didn’t know what kind it
was; she didn’t care. What she noticed was the size of it. In the diner he had been wearing Levi’s and a sweatshirt and looked like an ordinary guy. Now he had on a leather jacket and helmet.

“Hey, you want a lift? I’ve got an extra helmet.” He spoke over the noise of the bike’s engine, and he did not sound like the man she had teased less than thirty minutes earlier. “I’m heading into town.”

“I’ll be okay,” she said, though she knew she was dangerously close to tears. She looked at the motorcycle. “I don’t like those things.”

“It’s safe. I’ve been ridin’ for years.” He took off his helmet, and the sight of his red hair reassured her a little. “Just hang on to me and you’ll be fine.”

“Someone’ll give me a ride.”

“Yeah. Me.” He smiled. “Come on, I’ll get you where you want to go. I won’t let anything happen to you.”

The situation felt familiar. In some way, at some time before, she had lived through something like this moment.

“Have you ever been on a motorcycle?”

She shook her head. “Do you know what time it is?”

He pushed up the ragged cuff of his leather jacket. “Quarter to four.”

Her stomach sank. “How fast do you go?”

Speeding west on Interstate 8, her arms wrapped around Walt’s midsection, Madora kept her eyes shut tight the whole time. It was frightening enough to feel the big bike under her, registering every bump in the road, throb
bing with power, enough to feel the wind fluttering her eyelashes and sometimes the sandpaper scrape of grit on her cheeks. And then, just as she had begun to relax and enjoy the ride, he exited the freeway and drove into the parking lot where the air smelled of pizza and chicken. Walt turned off the ignition and she sat with her cheek resting against his leather back, unable to move at first.

“You okay?” he asked and helped her off. Her knees were jellified. When he put his hands on either side of her head and lifted off the helmet, her hair fell around her shoulders but it didn’t feel like hers. Nothing felt like her. She touched her cheek and chin and barely recognized the shape of her face.

Walt said, “I don’t like to leave you here. You sure you don’t want me to take you all the way home?”

“It’s just up the way a little,” she murmured in a voice that was strangely not what she expected to hear.

“It’s awful hot and you don’t have a hat.”

His persistence had begun to alarm her. Every moment he stood talking to her was a moment she should have been walking toward home. She made herself look straight into his eyes. Willis was right; lying was a useful skill.

“I have to go in the market and get some stuff. Thanks a lot for helping me out.” She took a few steps away, stopped, and looked back at him. He was a nice-looking man with cowlicky red hair and a sunburned nose, and even in his leather jacket he didn’t look anything like the bikers at the house in Yuma. “Thank you,” she said. “I feel so grateful. Really. I mean it.”

She walked into the market and stood halfway up the soup aisle, where she could see beyond the check stand through the store’s plate-glass windows. Walt stood a minute staring in her direction, then got back on his motorcycle and drove away. She felt a pang, seeing him go.

She waited inside the market for five minutes to make sure he wasn’t coming back, then walked outside, across the parking lot, and up the county road with the sun beating at her back. When she got to Red Rock Road she started to run.

W
illis Brock’s mother had been admitted to the hospital on the day he graduated from high school in Buffalo, New York. Willis’s father was a general practitioner who had left town with his nurse years before, leaving his wife and son and a daughter named Daphne. Although Willis never had a good word to say for his father, he admired the medical profession and had taken all the Latin and science classes offered at his high school, intending to be a physician. On graduation day, his mother suffered the third or fourth of several heart spells that made her a semi-invalid, and instead of going to college, Willis was forced to remain at home seeing to her many needs as well as those of the anonymous men and women who rented rooms in the big mortgage-free house that was all Dr. Chasen Brock had left his family. He did not really mind; he could go to college later. The time he spent with his mother was precious, and as her health deteriorated he valued it more and more. Some nights they talked late and he fell asleep on the pillow beside her.

When his mother died, Willis kicked the tenants out, sold the house, and joined the Marine Corps.

He still had most of the money retained from the sale of the Buffalo house and all of the cash paid him in exchange for Linda’s baby. Enough to get him into a med school in Antigua that he had read about on a client’s computer. He remembered the counselor’s condescension when she looked over his applications and the curl of her lipsticky mouth when she asked why he left the Corps. After the interview he sat in the Tahoe and thought about waiting for her to come out. He fantasized how good it would feel to beat her up. He pictured the look he would see on her face the moment before his fist broke her jaw. After a while he lost interest in the daydream and started to think about his career. He thought he would never be a doctor and the life went out of him like a lightbulb dying. Then he remembered the medical school in Antigua he had seen featured in a travel magazine at one of the houses where he worked. Although it wasn’t prestigious, he knew it would suit him well enough. The nowhere location of the place might even be an advantage. It was doable, difficult but doable, he assured himself.

He could not afford another lapse like last night, however. Nothing ruined a doctor faster than booze, and it disgusted Willis to recall his drunkenness and the way he’d fallen through the kitchen door. Drinking to excess was a weakness and a shame, and if his mother were alive she would be scolding him, reminding him of the way his father had humiliated the family and brought it low.

In the long summer twilight, it calmed Willis’s nerves and silenced his self-doubt to hide behind the big Tahoe’s tinted windows and watch the girls. There was one he was particularly interested in.

He drove past Grossmont High School and a couple of junior high schools. So many girls, tattooed and pierced. Even the young ones still in their baby fat. The older girls, the skinnies, wore their jeans low on their narrow hips, flaunting butterfly tattoos and the Ts of their thong underwear. There were two or three he had followed home in the past to make sure they stayed safe. He wanted to throw coats and blankets over all of them, bundle them away, lock them up until they came to their senses and found some dignity, some self-respect.

Some weeks earlier, his attention had been taken by a pregnant girl in a pair of baggy-kneed stretch pants and an oversized pink T-shirt with
Sez who?
written on the back in glitter. Near a 7-Eleven, she was cadging hits off her friends’ cigarettes and had a look Willis recognized. This was another one like Madora and Linda, thinking she was all grown-up when she was only a little girl who had gone too far and fast down the wrong road and lost herself along the way.

He had seen the pregnant girl another time when he stood in line at McDonald’s. He had stopped in for a cup of orange juice, the best thing he knew for a quick energy boost. The previous two hours had been spent getting a client, Mrs. Waller, to eat a little oatmeal and then chang
ing her diapers and bedsheets and running a load of wash. On his way home he would stop by again and shift the clothes from the washer to the dryer, and then tomorrow he’d fold them and put them away. She was a pretty-faced old woman with faded blue eyes in which Willis thought he saw a shadow of the devilish girl she had been. But she was addled now, in her eighties, and her only son was a barber in the Bay Area and rarely visited. Willis took good care of her. He imagined she was his mother; sometimes he even called her Mommy. Mrs. Waller was half out of the world, but when she heard that, her head snapped around and for a flash of a second her eyes focused. The poor old sweetie had never missed the ring he slipped off her hand and hocked for eighty dollars.

He liked having a bank account. Liked watching the balance grow. Every penny moved him closer to his dream.

In the McDonald’s he had taken his orange juice to a table where he could watch the children in the tot lot. The girl was supervising a boy of eight or nine, and he was giving her trouble. Willis shoved open the door to the outside in time to hear the boy yell, “You’re not my fucking mother.”

“Hey, you! Kid!” Willis’s shoulders had spasmed with the impulse to grab the brat and shake him until his brains rattled. He towered in front of him. “Clean up your language, son. You don’t talk like that to a young lady.”

“She’s my sister.”

“I never would have talked to my sister that way.”

“Fuck you, old man. I can say what I want.”

The girl must have felt Willis heating up. “It’s okay,” she said quickly. “I’m used to the way he talks. He doesn’t mean nothing.”

Up close Willis had seen her tormented complexion beneath layers of cheap makeup, the flecks of black mascara beneath her eyes, the scabby dandruff at her hairline. The raw vulnerability of the girl had touched Willis as Linda’s had when he saw her panhandling in the rain.

“When’s your baby due?”

“A few months.” She didn’t know exactly, which meant she hadn’t been to a doctor.

“Are you taking care of yourself?”

She squinted at him, quick to be suspicious. “What do you care?”

“I’m a doctor,” he said. “Babies are my specialty.”

“How come you’re here?”

He had talked to her about orange juice and blood sugar. “What’s your name?”

“Shelley. What’s yours?”

“Is your baby a boy or girl?”

“Don’t know.”

“You should see a doctor and get an ultrasound.”

She watched her brother go down the slide backwards. “Where’s your office?”

“I work at the hospital.” The words had come to him as freely as the truth.

As if having a father who boozed and eloped with his
twenty-year-old nurse and pockets full of money embezzled from his medical practice wasn’t scandal enough, Willis’s sister, Daphne, had been foolishly taken in by a smooth-talking someone-or-other. Willis was twelve at the time, a bright and thoughtful boy with few friends, casting about for the direction he would take in life. He remembered the sound of a motorcycle idling in front of the house, the front door slamming and Daphne’s high-pitched giggle followed by the gunning engine and the peel-out squeal of tires.

For days afterwards, Willis wanted to go find Daphne and bring her home. His mother doted on his honorable intentions. But there was nothing they could do, she told him.
“Your sister’s ruined.”

The old-fashioned word—
ruined—
stayed with Willis and carried weight.

Sometime after this—he was inclined to conflate the two events, though they had occurred a year or so apart—his father’s runaway nurse appeared at the front door when his mother was upstairs in her bed and the boarders had not yet come to the table for the evening meal. He had not recognized her, though he vaguely recalled his father once having a nurse in his office downtown in the Passway Building. She was pretty and flirty in those days, but the years since had been hard on her. She was roundly pregnant and told Willis that his father had run out on her, and her own family had turned her away as well. That was the first time Willis forged his mother’s signature on a check, one hundred dollars made out to his father’s ex-girlfriend.
Later he had to confess to his mother; he was that kind of son. He expected to be punished for his crime, but she surprised him, laughed tolerantly, almost with pleasure, and said he was a good boy, a gentleman—already a better man than his father. Willis was confused about sex and sexuality, shy and deeply confused by puberty. His mother told him, and he believed:
“Young women are vulnerable, and men like your father live to corrupt them. But not you, Willis. You’re special.”

Buffalo was a small city, and from time to time he heard that Daphne had been spotted outside a club or speeding through downtown in a convertible late at night. He would never have learned of her death had not one of the boarders pointed out an article in the metro section of the city paper. His mother told him to put the paper in the incinerator at the bottom of the yard and come right back.
“Don’t waste time reading it.”

Though normally an obedient boy, he read the item on the back page, third in a list of crimes committed in Buffalo that week. The paragraph said that not much was known about Daphne Brock except that she was the daughter of Chasen Brock, MD, who had been accused of embezzlement years earlier. Her assailant had done time for selling drugs. Cocaine and drug paraphernalia were found in the apartment they shared.