Little Girl Gone (24 page)

“Even I’m not that cold.”

“I never called you cold.”

“You said I’m like Mam.”

“You have some of her ways, Robin. But that’s to be expected. And I wouldn’t even say she was cold.” He leaned toward her. “Now that you’re here, you should ask your questions.”

“I shouldn’t have to,” she said, affronted. “You owe me an explanation, Daddy.”

“Give me a question. A place to begin.”

She had expected him to defend himself. She wanted to hear him try.

He said, “You don’t know how many times I thought I’d just call you and make a date.” He lifted his hands and stared at them as if by doing so he could understand why they had failed him in this simple task. “In the end, I couldn’t, you see.”

“What? You don’t drive? You didn’t know my address?” She sounded like her mother, and she suspected her father was thinking the same thing. He kept his thoughts to himself, which made it worse somehow. “I was eleven when you left. I’m forty-three almost.” Tears caught in her throat.
“Why didn’t you love me? Did you leave because of me? What did I do wrong?”

“Nothing, you did nothing wrong.”

“You just left and Mam never said why. You just left me.”

She had never meant to pour out her feelings this way. But now that she had exposed herself, she could feel her inhibitions falling away.

“I loved you, Daddy.” And for some mad reason, she loved him still. “You just left me. How could you do that?”

Frank slouched in his chair, avoiding her eyes, saying nothing, patting his lips with his fingertips.
He’s paralyzed,
she thought. He wanted her to go; he wanted her to stay. He wanted honesty but he had lived decades with lies and omissions and made himself comfortable with them. She saw it all clearly because she too was well acquainted with the mind’s ability to hold equal but contradictory thoughts at the same time and to move through life precariously balanced.

She wanted Django to stay; she wanted him to go.

She wanted to go to Tampa; she wanted to stay.

She wanted an explanation from her father and she was afraid of what he would tell her.

He said, “I guess it’s time to show you something.” As he walked across the living room to a maple chest of drawers on which were arranged several framed photographs, Robin noticed that he limped.

“Are you injured?”

“A skiing accident, years ago.”

It tested her imagination to see her father on skis.

“The ankle never mended properly.”

“Are you in pain?”

“A little.”

She did not want to care so much when genes alone connected them, bits of human matter so small she would not believe they existed except that scientists told her they did. What pain or rage had prompted him to scream and throw the lethal clippers that day? After such a long time he might not even remember doing it.

He brought a photo back to the table and handed it to Robin.

“The pain in my leg reminds me of a happy time.”

It was a photograph of a good-looking middle-aged man in steel gray ski pants and parka, a blue tasseled watch cap pulled down to his eyebrows.

Her father asked, “Do you remember him?”

She didn’t.

“You don’t remember Boyd Glover?”

“Should I?”

“He and his wife lived across the street in Morro Bay. On Estero. They had no children. I doubt if you ever set foot in their house.” A sigh rose from deep within him, almost a moan. “I had to divorce your mother, Robin. It was either that or I’d kill myself, and I was pretty sure divorce was the lesser sin.”

She could not make sense of what he was saying.

“I know your mother told you we were legally separated,
but that’s her private version of reality. I’ve got the divorce papers in the next room if you doubt me. I swore I’d never tell you. She thought it would warp you girls somehow if you came from a ‘broken’ home. I guess she was afraid she would turn you and Caro into the kind of girls who hung out with rock stars.” He smiled at the irony. “Marriage, the Catholic Church, sleeping under a picture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and loving Boyd, knowing how deep in sin I was and not caring…” His expression hardened even as his voice broke. “I didn’t care what Nola told you so long as I was set free. But she made me pay.”

Robin had come in search of answers and truth, but it was too much and now she wanted none of it.

“Boyd suffered an aneurism in 2002. I fell apart. Caro and Jacky kept me going for the first year.” Her father put the photo back on the maple chest. With his back to her, he said, “The deal I made with your mother, the bargain was… she would only give me a divorce if…” He paused as if he had been running for years and could only now pause for breath. “She would only give me a divorce if I relinquished all my rights as your father.” He stood looking down at the framed photos, his hand pressed to his forehead. “All the times I thought of how I’d say this and now…” He took another breath and expelled a deep sigh.

“Robin, I promised never to see you or try to get in touch. Your mother needed a pound of flesh and I gave it to her. For my freedom.”

“Are you saying you gave me up in exchange for a divorce?”

“I’m ashamed, Robin, but try to understand the way it was back then.”

“Why not Caro? Why did you choose me? What was wrong with me?”

“Oh, God, Robin, nothing was wrong with you. You were a wonderful little girl. It was your mother who chose. She knew how much I loved you and she wanted to hurt me as much as she could. You were the pound of flesh, the price I had to pay.”

Nola had been a good and responsible mother, hadn’t she? And Robin loved her, didn’t she? How could she take this new information in and arrange it to make sense not only of yesterday, all the yesterdays, but of now, this moment?

Robin said, “I’ve always thought—”

“What she wanted you to think.”

“You didn’t have to accept the deal.”
You didn’t have to trade me for your freedom.
“You used me.”

“I did, Robin. I used you, yes. But I never looked at it that way. I believe, I have always believed, that you saved my life, my sanity. You gave me my freedom. A chance to live. I loved Boyd more than I’d ever loved anyone. If I stayed with your mother, I’d have killed myself. I was that close to doing it.”

“And Mam knew you were gay?”

He nodded.

“All these years, that’s what this has been about? Did Caro know?”

“Not the details, of course. When she was little and came to visit in the summer, Boyd and I were very careful. But she figured it out as she got older.”

“Before, when we were kids, she must have wondered why I never saw you.”

“Oh, she did. And she didn’t like it. Early on, she begged me to invite you to come with her when she visited. She said it was no fun visiting me without you. I couldn’t tell her the truth, of course. I just kept saying it was impossible and eventually she stopped asking. I came out to her when she and Jacky got married.”

“After that, she could have told me. We were all adults by then.”

She felt a growing anger. “You both chose to shut me out. Did you think I couldn’t take it? That I’d be shocked or horrified…? Did you think I’m so backward—?”

“Robin, what I’m going to say to you will be very hard to understand. I made a promise, an oath, to your mother. And I made Caro honor my promise.”

By the force of her rage and unbridled will, Nola had drawn them all into the conspiracy to keep Robin ignorant of the truth.

“And the longer we kept the oath, the harder it was to break it.”

The truth was more awful than Robin had imagined. She felt it in her stomach like a poison she had been forced
to swallow. She wanted to go into the bathroom and stick her finger down her throat, except that she knew nothing would come up. The poison was inside her forever.

“If your mother had chosen to make public what she knew about Boyd and me, she would have ruined not just my life but his as well. He was a public-school teacher. At that time in history, he would have been blacklisted. And no bank would have hired me, a known homosexual.”

“Mam never needed to know. You could have come to me—”

“I would have known, Robin. Nola hauled out the Bible and made me swear on it, made me kiss the page where the commandments are written down.” His cheeks flushed. “And then I kept my word. And I made sure Caro kept it too. I know that must sound old-fashioned or crazy, backwards, but I couldn’t break it. Then a year or so ago, I found a way to keep my word and still open the door. I told Caro that if you ever came to her and talked about me or asked questions about what happened, she could give you my address. That’s probably why you’re here today. In the end, I think she wasn’t willing to keep my secret and I’m grateful to her. You wouldn’t be sitting with me now if she had.” He sagged in the chair. “Maybe this is all horse pucky. Maybe I was just a coward. It’s been a long time and I don’t trust my memory anymore. The way you’re looking at me right now? I just know I never wanted to see that expression on your face.”

He went into the kitchen and began to wipe down the
granite counters. “I still go to church, you know. I went back after Boyd died. I can’t say if anyone knows I’m gay; I don’t make a big deal of it, and so far the priest hasn’t barred me from the sacraments.” Her father stared at the floor and he seemed to be speaking to himself. “Sometimes I wonder what God thinks of me. Nothing good, I’d guess.”

“Daddy, there’s no sin in being gay.”

“I know that. My sins are the small, mean kind, Robin. Cowardice and selfishness.”

Robin wanted to believe that her father loved her, that he was telling the truth when he said he felt he had no choice but to make the bargain with Nola. And certainly she felt sympathy for him. His life had been difficult. But she did not know if sympathy and
wanting
to believe and forgive were enough to get the job done.

“The only brave thing I ever did in my life was those twenty-plus years with Boyd, and that took it out of me; every bit of courage and determination I had went into that.” He stopped wiping circles on the counter. “Mostly I’m just an ordinary man, Robin, a retired banker who wanted a quiet, orderly life with someone who loved me and I loved back. Sometimes Boyd called me a stick-in-the-mud because I never wanted to go anywhere. He liked adventures. I actually walked up to Machu Picchu because of him. Trained for a year to do it.”

Finding nothing to say and without waiting for an invitation, Robin refilled her iced tea and walked out onto the back patio and sat on a bright blue cushioned chaise.
The sun had tipped behind the mountains but the air was still hot. She closed her eyes. Somewhere in the complex children still laughed and splashed, and a radio played what might have been an old Jacky Jones hit. After a few moments, she felt tears behind her eyes and for once she didn’t fight them, let them slip onto her cheeks, let them fall.

Sounds through the screen door told her that her father was working in the kitchen, making a meal. In a little while he would bring a tray and put it beside her chaise. He would pull up a chair and sit, not too far from her. Eventually, she would take a chance, reach out, and he would take her hand and hold it and not let go.

D
jango told Madora where to drive and she did as she was told. Not because she believed in his fantasy but because she knew that without his confidence to guide her, she would still be standing in the trailer staring down at Willis’s body while Linda yelled and Foo barked and the crows in the trees screamed their story. Now, more than three hours after leaving Arroyo, she was driving the Tahoe in the middle of Los Angeles traffic while Django fiddled with the car radio. He couldn’t find a station that satisfied him. When he wasn’t doing that, he talked and talked and talked.

“Lucky we’re not on 15. There’s a mega pileup near Escondido.” He switched the radio from FM to AM and back to FM, found an oldies station, and relaxed a moment. “We might hear my dad.”

Madora tried not to think.

Once she’d been driving thirty minutes or so, she felt comfortable behind the wheel of the Tahoe and remem
bered Willis telling her that once you learned to drive, you never forgot how. On the 405, the big half-circle freeway around downtown LA, they traveled in the carpool lane and she felt safe and literally above it all in the SUV’s high cab. Django kept saying that they were “making good time,” as if he had driven on this highway fifty times before. And maybe he had. Madora wondered if she would ever discover the nugget of truth that lay at the heart of his fantasies about Beverly Hills and Huck and flying in private planes. Occasionally she saw a cop car and a tide of nausea rose in her. Django said it was too soon for them to be looking for the Tahoe. He had called the sheriff as they crossed through Camp Pendleton, north of San Diego County. He told them where Linda was, behind the Arroyo Elementary School, and then threw Willis’s cell phone into a muddy ditch at the side of the road. He said it would take them a few hours to find Willis and get enough details to be on the lookout for the Tahoe. How he came up with that time frame, she had no idea.

Madora wished she could figure out if leaving Willis in the trailer was the smartest, or stupidest, thing she’d ever done.

“Django, stop playing with the radio. You’re making me nervous.” Foo tried to snuggle onto her lap and she shoved him off.

North of Sunset, she maneuvered her way across six lanes of traffic and took the 101 exit to Ventura. Now they were heading north along the ocean.

“It’d be faster if we took the 5,” Django said, “but that’s the way they’ll expect us to go. We’ll take our time this way and just look ordinary, like a family.”

Some family: a girl and a kid and a dog in a dirty black SUV with a bent-up rear license plate. Madora didn’t know if she should laugh or cry.

They stopped to use the bathrooms at a Denny’s restaurant, and Madora spent a dollar on a Snickers bar, leaving her with a total of seventy cents in her wallet. She had seen Django shove an apple-sized wad of bills in the glove compartment. She did not ask him where he’d gotten the money, knowing he would tell one of his whoppers. She thought he had probably stolen it from his aunt, which made her sorry. She had seemed like a nice woman. They were past Santa Barbara, well out of LA, when the sun began to set; and the shield of brilliance reflected on the water gave her a headache.