Little Girl Gone (26 page)

“Now what?”

“Wait here.” Django leaped from the car and Foo
bounded after him. He ran to where a metal box was set into the wall and pressed several keys and after a moment the gate swung open.

With Foo beside him, Django ran through the gate, gesturing for Madora to follow. Between fearsome cactus gardens, lethal with thorns, and mounds of scarlet bougainvillea, the road narrowed, becoming wide enough for only one vehicle, and there were traffic bumps every few yards. Slowly it was dawning on Madora that all the stories Django had told her were true.

Ahead another wall loomed and another gate, this one constructed of metal bars and ornate curlicues. Through it Madora could see the shape of a house and cars behind banks of shrubs and trees. A man was coming toward them.

“Hey, Junior,” Django called, waving. “It’s me!”

He ran back to Madora and stuck his head in the car window.

“That’s Junior. He’s one of Huck’s bodyguards. Remember? I told you about him?”

Junior was the biggest man she had ever seen. He wore a T-shirt that fit close to his skin, and his forearms were covered with tattoos. She remembered Jammer sitting cross-legged on the floor of the party house, his gold tooth and the scar like a notch cut into his hairline. Reflected in the rearview mirror, the first gate was far behind her, the driveway narrower and the gardens on either side, barbed and thorned and deadly. All someone had to do was push a button and the first gate would close, trapping her, locking her in.

“Hey, kid,” Junior said. “How’d you get here?”

“My friend brought me. Where’s Huck?”

As Madora watched, Junior put his hand in his pocket.

“China, Djang.”

Junior raised his arm and pointed something the size of a phone. Madora waited for the iron gate ahead to open.

It’s true. Everything. All of it’s true.

But the second gate would not open until the first closed. It was a security thing. Madora thought of police and guns and prison, and she knew without seeing it that police cars were parked around behind the bank of trees and shrubs.

She jammed the Tahoe into reverse. Django yelled and ran toward the car but she didn’t stop and made it through the closing gate with only a second to spare, into the turnaround and down the hill.

Two Years Later

O
n the day Robin had returned from visiting her father she had been irritated to discover that though it was almost dark, Django was not at home and his bike was gone. He was off riding somewhere, she supposed, and had lost track of time, but he would be home before nine. She had known she would have to tear into him then for disobeying her. He would say that he was safe in the dark because his bike had front and back lights and reflectors on every surface where they would stick. She would have to ground him; she supposed that was what a good guardian would do.

Later, when she realized he was not coming back, she had felt guilty for taking his tardiness so casually. She had been happy to have time alone to think. It would take her the rest of her life to absorb what she had learned from her father.

She made a large gin and tonic and took it out onto the patio behind the house. The drip hoses had been on that afternoon and the soil in the planters near the house where she grew marigolds and petunias every summer smelled sweet and damp. It was a smell she associated with summer as much as the scent of the flowers themselves.

She needed the time alone and had actually thought,
Thank God Django’s not here. I couldn’t deal with him now.

The summer after their father left them, their mother had enlisted Robin and Caro in the huge task of tearing out the front lawn, digging up the sod and working in yards of new soil purchased from Reiner’s Nursery. Her mother had painted the house herself, a bright yellow with blindingly white trim, as if she wanted to announce to the neighbors that despite what they might think, she did not need their sympathy. That summer and every summer until she sold the house and moved south to be near Robin, she had planted a vast cottage garden in the front, clusters of common annuals like black-eyed Susan and coneflower, cupflower and nasturtiums and cosmos and rudbeckia. At the height of summer, passersby sometimes stopped their cars to take photos of the yard. Robin remembered her mother standing at the picture window, watching the cars slow as they drove by, a look of stubborn satisfaction on her face.

If the people in the neighborhood and driving by had known how she lied and connived, how she had carved her pound of flesh from Robin’s heart, the house with the flowers would have been notorious.

Caro, Nola, Frank. They had all conspired to keep the secret from Robin. She had gone through her life blaming herself for her father’s abandonment, believing she had done something wrong or not been good enough, while Caro, Nola, and Frank knew the truth. Any one of them could have told her the truth, but each had what seemed to them a
good reason
not to. Even Caro had been drawn into the cruel compact Nola had forced on their father in exchange for his freedom. Robin did not know what to think now, what to feel except empty. Cavernous.

At nine thirty, she had finally called the sheriff’s office, and in the early hours of the morning, the pieces of the story began to come together. Linda had been found staggering out from behind the Arroyo Elementary School dragging thirty feet of wire rope. She told a story of abduction and a long captivity. She talked about Madora and a boy who seemed to know a lot about everything. He had a name she could not remember. Linda did not know what kind of car they were driving but it seemed to be an SUV and she thought it was black. That was enough for an Amber Alert. Many hours later sheriff’s deputies found the house on Red Rock Road and Willis locked inside the trailer. He connected Django to the case and then Robin.

Early the next morning she had told the officers where she thought Django and Madora were going and they contacted the police department in Los Gatos.

In August Robin and Django began a seven-month stay in Tampa, Florida. It was odd, Robin thought, look
ing back, that what neither of them had really wanted turned out to be a good move after all, the best thing they could have done. In a new environment where neither of them felt at home, they kept each other company and had become friends. His spirit of adventure spurred (and sometimes shamed) Robin to try new things. Scuba diving scared her half to death but she liked rock climbing and bicycling. In Florida, where almost everyone seemed to be in transit between one life and another, there was nothing to remind either of them of Caro or the past. Django began to heal, and Robin, without really trying, began to reinvent herself, peeling off the layers of protection one by one. In the Tampa office of Conway, Carroll, and Hyde she made friends and was encouraged to attend law school.

They returned to Arroyo after seven months away and the house she had once loved felt fussy and dull. One morning she picked up the phone, called a Realtor, and put it on the market. She took the LSAT and, as the attorneys at Conway, Carroll, and Hyde had known would happen, she scored high. She enrolled in a local law school and she and Django moved to a condominium in the urban center of San Diego, only three blocks from Petco Park, where on summer evenings they could sit on the balcony and watch baseball through binoculars. She surprised herself by becoming quite a Padres fan.

Django was a serious piano student and attended a private school where he had a small, tight circle of friends who envied him for living downtown and often used the condo
as home base. Robin had stopped being surprised when stray teenagers appeared at the breakfast table. Sometimes she visited her mother, who, since her successful back surgery, had become a world traveler, taking off for the South Pole or Ulan Bator and returning to her town house only long enough to wash her clothes and repack her bag. Seeing her once or twice a year was all Robin could manage.

She had never told her mother that she knew about the bargain struck long ago, the separation that was really a divorce. She had many reasons for her silence, but the basement truth was that Robin knew if she once started, the eruption of anger and hurt might never stop. She didn’t want that. Instead of taking it out on her mother, she vented to Dr. Rose, a skillful therapist who seemed willing to stand in for Nola when necessary.

Conversations with her father were almost always stilted and artificial, as each tried to act as if theirs was an ordinary father-daughter relationship. Though she understood why he had turned his back on her, from time to time the memory of rejection flared up, a laceration that never healed completely. Perhaps, if she could discover the courage to confront her mother, the wound might close forever; but the truth was, as she had discovered in therapy, she was a little afraid of Nola. Confrontation with a woman who could build a life based on a lie and use her daughter’s happiness as a bargaining chip would be an ugly thing.

In her bedroom Robin kept several framed photos of Caro she’d brought back from the house in Beverly Hills.
She often looked at the one taken the day she and Caro went horseback riding. They had been chosen for an excursion sponsored by Holy Rosary Academy to a ranch off Highway 1, in the hills near San Simeon. Eighteen girls wearing trousers under their blue and red academy tunics milled around the ranch, standing and sitting on the fence rails. It came time to ride, and Robin was afraid of her horse, a soft-eyed, sway-backed mare named Chloe. Her confusion about how to place her foot in the stirrup and hold the reins, her fear of being up high and the discomfort of sitting on the hard leather saddle with her legs stretched wide around the old mare’s midsection, the heat of the afternoon, and the dust all conspired to make her unhappy. She turned to Caro for understanding and was just in time to see her sister swing into the saddle and take off around the turnout ring, cantering a figure eight.

For years their father had been taking Caro to riding lessons in Griffith Park. It was a very Caro moment and Robin did not blame her sister for it. She didn’t blame her for any of it.

S
ometimes Django still had a Pavlovian reaction to the ringing telephone. Say he was in the kitchen pouring a bowl of cereal and his cell phone rang. He’d think:
Mom.

For the last year he had been seeing a psychologist, Dr. Belknap. She and Dr. Rose shared an office but Dr. Bee specialized in teenagers. Half the kids Django knew had shrinks. Dr. Bee said Django was depressed—like this was a flash from outer space. A bunch of his friends were on meds for ADD or they were bipolar or whatever. It seemed to Django that it just went along with being alive. He could take meds too if he wanted, but he preferred to go without. He told Dr. Bee that after everything he had been through, he would probably be depressed for the rest of his life; he might as well get used to it. He wasn’t suicidal or anything close. Just flatline.

Probably music kept him from going crazy. It set him free.

Lately he’d begun composing—trying to, anyway. He
thought of his father spending hours in his music room playing the same few bars over and over, changing the bass line, the beat, the key. Ira said when Django wrote something good enough he would help him get it recorded. Alone in the condo, fiddling on the piano, he talked to his father as if he were sitting somewhere just out of sight, listening. Maybe he was.

Dr. Bee said he wasn’t crazy. Nowhere near.

Django also talked to Foo.

His aunt hadn’t been so hot on the idea of a dog, especially a pit bull with a head like a boulder; but then Foo wagged his tail and panted dog breath in her face and she gave in. He was the best friend Django had.

If it weren’t for the piano and Foo, he’d wig out.

During one of his sessions with Dr. Bee he had talked about how Foo seemed to understand him, how he felt safer and not so depressed when Foo was around. This led to explaining where the dog came from. Dr. Bee was the only person Django had ever told the whole story of Madora. Her and Mr. Guerin. The police knew a lot of what happened because they practically gave him the third degree to get it out of him, but Mr. Guerin stayed with him the whole time so it wasn’t so bad.

He wondered where Madora had gone that day she backed out of the driveway and roared down Gum Tree Lane. To Sacramento probably, but he never let on to the cops. Eventually they had found her mother on their own. Django had watched her interviewed on television,
and from the way she was crying, he didn’t need to be an empath to know she was scared and worried about her daughter and telling the truth when she said she had never seen or heard from her. It was like Madora had dropped off the edge of the world. Django hoped she was safe and not hooked up with another pervo. No one had ever mentioned the roll of cash in the Tahoe’s glove compartment, so he hoped that meant Madora had taken it when she dumped the car. For a few months the sheriff made a big deal about finding her, but eventually they lost interest. They had Willis, and he was the sleazebag they wanted.

Django had never regretted driving up to Huck’s that day, leaving Willis locked in the trailer and Linda back behind the elementary school. For a while he was in a world of trouble, but once he and Aunt Robin got to Tampa, it was like they had moved to another planet. He just wished he knew if Madora was safe. He had asked Mr. Guerin to spend some of his trust money looking for her and he said he would when Django graduated from high school. Dr. Bee said Madora had been as much a prisoner as Linda. She got that right. He wished his mother were around to talk to. She liked philosophical conversations. Aunt Robin preferred facts and was going to make a great lawyer.

Basically, Django’s life was turning out okay. His new school was okay and he got along with Aunt Robin okay. Okay-okay-okay, but nothing great, except the piano and Foo. They were stellar. Huck too. Django spent vacation time with him. They went up to Canada to a private lake
and fished every day, which got sort of boring after a week. But Huck listened when Django talked about music, and his friends were cool. They treated Django like one of the guys and let him drink beer. Another time they went for a cruise in the Caribbean on a big sailboat. More fishing, but he got to scuba, which was awesome. Otherwise, sailing was boring, but okay.