Little Girl Gone (25 page)

“I’ve gotta stop for a while,” she said and turned off the road around Gaviota. She drove under the freeway and along a narrow road to where half a dozen vehicles were parked.

“Surfers,” Django said. “Let’s go down on the beach. Foo needs to run around.”

At the edge of the sand they removed their shoes and tucked them out of the way behind a tussock. The breeze off the water, stiff and chilly, blew Madora’s hair back from her face, and she faced directly into it. She almost believed that if she stayed that way long enough, the wind would
blow all the confusion and contradiction out of her head, and she would be able to take charge of her life instead of trusting Django.

It didn’t happen. They got back in the car and drove on and she was no more sure of herself than before the wind blew. She began to talk because it was easier than thinking.

“Willis took me to the beach once. If you go way down near the border there’s a long, wide beach, a couple of miles, I guess. We walked almost to Mexico, I think.” Behind them, the tide had come in and filled up their footprints so that when they walked back, there was no sign that they had ever walked that way before. “We only went that one time. Willis didn’t like the sand. He said it was just another kind of dirt and why would anyone want to walk barefoot in the dirt.”

That afternoon was one of the few occasions when Willis ever told her anything about his family. His mother. She had been a fastidious housekeeper and scrupulous about such things as clean clothes and frequent baths. In the heat of the summer Willis had been told to shower twice and sometimes three times a day. It seemed ridiculous to Madora. She laughed and Willis took offense as if she had insulted his family or his mother.

Thinking about it as she drove through the gently rolling coastal mountains, she was struck by how little she knew for sure about Willis’s life before the night they met. She had never thought of him as particularly secretive, but now she realized he must have consciously hidden things
from her. She would never know. Whatever happened in the future, she and Willis were no longer a couple. The waves were coming across the sand, washing away their footprints.

If Madora had been alone, she would have pulled the car off the road and sobbed into her hands. Instead, she asked Django a question, knowing he would tell her more than she wanted to know and that when he stopped talking the moment of tears would be behind her.

“How much farther is this place?”
Los Gatos.

“Are you sleepy? Maybe we should stop for coffee in Santa Maria.”

“I’m just asking.”

“I don’t know. Maybe five hours.” He described the route they were taking up 101 through San Luis Obispo and Paso Robles to San Jose.

“Are the cops looking for us yet?”

For once Django admitted that he did not know. “It depends on how long it takes them to find the trailer.”

He said that by now his aunt would have reported him missing, and sooner or later the cops would link her to Willis. Linda must be in custody by now and would waste no time blurting out the story of her captivity and the baby, and she would say that Willis had stolen him.

Madora thought about the baby boy and his proud parents. She thought of the clothes they had bought him. The car seat and the crib and the stroller. If Linda decided she wanted the baby back, they would have no legal right
to him. More than anything else, even her own safety, Madora wanted him to have a happy life.

Django figured that eventually the sheriff’s people would find the trailer and Willis and see the unmade bed and the other rough furnishings. They would know that everything Linda said was true.

“Do you think Willis will confess right off, tell them everything?” Django asked.

“No.” At first he would refuse to speak. Madora knew how proudly stubborn he could be when he was convinced that he was right. But once he began to talk he would explain over and over that he had been helping Linda, giving her a second chance. He would want the police to admire what he had done.

“Your aunt’ll figure out we’re together,” she said. “By now she’s probably scared blue, calling the police and all. Linda will say I was with you. A boy. Your aunt’ll remember my name.” It would all come together, like the center of a bull’s-eye.

Django slumped down in the passenger seat and for a while he was quiet. Madora knew he was thinking about what they had done.

He said, “We’ve got to get to Huck’s. Once we’re there, we’ll be okay. He’ll take care of things.”

Madora looked at him with a mix of wonderment and disgust. “When’re you going to give up? When are you going to stop lying?”

“It’s true; you’ll see. My brother’ll tell you—”

“You said he was your stepbrother!”

“My
half
brother. Huck. Me and him have the same dad. Had. And he’s rich, way richer than anyone. He’ll get a lawyer and I’ll call Mr. Guerin…”

Madora leaned forward and gently banged her forehead against the steering wheel.

“Hey! Watch the road. What’re you doing?”

“I’m trying to knock some sense into my head.”

“Just trust me.”

When this was over, she would never trust anyone again, but now… she did not see that she had any alternative.

After another long period of silence, she asked, “Are you sure I didn’t kill him?”

“He’s got a concussion; that’s all.”

“Like brain damage?”

“If we’re lucky he won’t remember his own name, but he’s okay. I told you, Madora. He was starting to wake up when I locked the door. He’s just going to have a headache.”

“I’m going to jail. I know it.”

“Huck and Mr. Guerin’ll get you a lawyer, the best.”

“Oh, great, I only go to jail for ten years, not twenty? Not life?”

“You didn’t do anything wrong. Not much anyway. You were, like, brainwashed.”

“What’s that mean?”

“It means Willis said he was helping Linda. He said it
over and over and over and you got so you believed him. That’s brainwashing. Have you ever heard of Patty Hearst?”

Did Django ever get sick of being the smartest kid on the planet?

“She was this really rich girl who got kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army. My friend Roid did a report on her.”

“She got kidnapped by a whole army? How do you know that?”

“Not a real army. Just a bunch of people who wanted to overthrow the government.”

Madora decided to believe him. The alternative, that everything out of his mouth was a lie, was too much to endure and made her want to drive the Tahoe into the side of a hill.

“I fed her and washed her.” She thought of the many days she had looked straight at Linda’s tethered ankle and swept around it. The mornings when she had hauled in warm water and made sure Linda washed herself. All the meals she had carried from the kitchen to the trailer. Detail by detail and day by day, she remembered it all and was awash in guilt and remorse.

She kept her eyes fixed on the busy highway but she felt Django looking at her. She did not have to see his expression to know that he agreed. She had done something terrible.

“Why did you do it?” he asked.

“You said I was brainwashed.”

“But when it was happening, why did you think you were doing it?”

She had loved Willis and believed in him and that without him, she would be lost. And he needed her too.

“I thought he’d kill himself if I gave up on him. Like my dad did.”

In Santa Maria they stopped for gas and Madora bought coffee and a package of white powdered doughnuts. They stayed off the highway and drove west on a narrow road that cut through the middle of hundreds of acres of deep green vegetable fields. Foo whimpered for attention, and Django let him lie on his lap. Madora gave the dog one of the doughnuts. They listened to the radio and Django told a circuitous story of Jett Jones and the Dark Entity.

“Can you just shut up?” Madora couldn’t take anymore. “Can’t you for a few hours stop making up stories? Jett Jones and all that shit; none of it’s real. Get it? It’s just stories. And your brother? He’s not rich; he’s some ordinary guy. Stop pretending. He’s probably a drunk or a needle freak. We’ll get up there and he’ll be living in a trailer and the only lawyer he’ll know is the one got him off a DUI.”

Django gave her a dirty look, which Madora took to mean that her criticism had struck home; and after that, for many miles, he stared straight ahead. Foo snored with his head tucked under one end of the seat belt. In the quiet dark they passed through towns Madora had never heard of, and on either side of the two-lane road fields of vegetables stretched by. Back on 101, the Tahoe’s headlights
illuminated the name of a winery or tourist attraction. A motel sign made her yawn but she guessed that if she went to bed she would stare at the ceiling, thinking and worrying and stabbing herself with guilt, so she might as well be driving.

It was midnight and she had a buzzing headache behind her eyes. She did not want to think about Willis, about the mess left behind and the emptiness ahead. The quiet was full of too many possibilities.

“Okayokay,” she said, “I’m sorry I was mean.”

Django made a noncommittal sound.

“Just so you know, it’s hard driving on a road like this. It’s way tense with all the cars coming at us.”

“So? You oughta be glad we’re not on the 5.”

He fiddled with the radio again, picking up the voice of a man, reading from the Bible, and two other men arguing politics. He turned it off.

“Do you wish you were still back there with him?” he asked. “Is that what you want?”

She wanted the baby to stay with the couple who paid for him. For herself, she wanted not to be afraid that she had killed Willis or brain damaged him or that the police would find and arrest her and send her to jail. She never wanted her mother to know what she had done. And she did not want to be scared of what could happen in the next five minutes on this road that seemed in the pitch blackness to become both faster and narrower. The hours passed and her nerve threads stretched until they were like the
vibrating strings of a musical instrument. She could not stand another minute of it and pulled off the highway in King City. In the parking lot of a Quality Inn, she opened the car and Foo bounded out and immediately relieved himself. Madora began walking the perimeter. Django hurried with her and had the good sense not to talk. Overhead the sky was clear and full of stars. Foo nosed around in the bushes at the edge of the parking lot but never wandered too far off.

Although Linda would be found by the police eventually, unharmed and obviously healthy, the newspapers and television would surely say that Willis was a demon and a monster. Madora’s name would be part of the story and people would say the same about her, adding
stupid
as well. Her mother would hang her head in shame. Madora tried to remember why she had let Willis bring Linda into their lives in the first place. He kept saying that they were giving her a second chance, rescuing her the way Madora had once been lifted from the unlucky downward spiral that was her life and set on a new path. Willis said it over and over, and she had believed him. Hearing an assertion repeated was not, by itself, reason to believe, and yet she had done so and even helped him. She wondered if
brainwashing
was a word Django had made up.

They drove through miles of rolling empty land, the night sky dotted with plane lights and occasional stars and off in the distance the glow of a town.

Was it possible to go from being one kind of person to a
completely different person in the space of just a few days? That’s what seemed to have happened to Madora. She had loved Willis and wanted to be with him for the rest of her life. Now the thought of him and of what they had done together filled her with horror. It seemed like Django must have gotten the brainwashing thing backwards. To Madora it meant clearing out and cleansing. That was what seemed to be happening to her now. When had it begun? Holding the baby? The night Willis killed the rabbit? After those experiences, her thinking had begun to change. And then Willis had hurt her, and after that she saw him the way he was.

But like an old-fashioned vinyl record that jumped back and repeated the same word or phrase, she kept trying to understand why it had happened in the first place. Why had she made Willis the center of her life, her guide and support? The question rankled, and no matter how intently she worked to distract herself—counting backwards by threes, making words from the names of towns like Guadalupe and Atascadero—
why, why, why
interrupted her concentration. She realized she might never know the answer completely. What she had done was unforgivable; that much was as plain as daylight.

The Santa Cruz Mountains lay to the left and the sun was coming up through the tinted window on the passenger side, warming the Tahoe’s interior with the smells of stale coffee and panting dog. In San Jose they were caught in morning rush hour but Highway 17 going west toward
the mountains was easy driving. They took the Saratoga Avenue exit into Los Gatos. It was bordered in pink oleander bushes and the plants in the landscaped center strip had been carefully clipped and mulched.
A rich-looking town,
Madora thought. So maybe Huckleberry Jones wasn’t dead broke.

Django consulted the GPS on his cell phone and told her where to turn, right and left along streets without sidewalks, streets with tall, thick trees and houses behind gates and walls. At a narrow road he said, “Turn here! Turn now!”

Gum Tree Lane curved up and around a hill for almost a mile. Near the top, the clear, crisp view was of Los Gatos and the whole Santa Clara Valley from the Santa Cruz Mountains across to the foothills in the east. Madora had never seen so many streets and buildings and wanted to turn the Tahoe around and drive down into the crowded valley and get lost there.

“Don’t stop.” Django was out of his seat belt, bouncing. “We’re almost there.”

In the backseat Foo picked up on his excitement and began barking.

At the top of the hill there was a turnaround in front of a tall cream-colored stone wall with a wide oaken double gate. Madora put the car in park and dragged on the emergency brake.