Little Girl Gone (27 page)

Dr. Bee said he should be patient; he wouldn’t always feel flatline. He didn’t believe her but he didn’t disbelieve her either. He was just blah about the future and she said that was fine, take it one day at a time.

His idea was that he was a prisoner. Like Linda in the trailer he was locked into missing his mother and father and he was never going to be happy until he found the key and got out. Dr. Bee said there wasn’t a key. She told him grief was a process, like learning to play the piano and practicing scales a million times a week, and he just had to trust the process. It sounded like shrink bullcrap to him, but he didn’t have any better answer so he pretended to believe she knew what she was talking about. Sometimes he would go along and start to feel better and then the phone would ring and he would wait to hear his mother’s voice. Instead he would hear the doors slam shut and the locks click and everything would start all over.

T
wo years later, all Madora had to do was close her eyes, think about her escape from between the double gates, and her whole body remembered how it felt to speed down Gum Tree Lane, careening around corners so fast she scared herself. But what had scared her even more that day was the big man Django called Junior, and the cop cars she was sure lay in wait for her behind the bushes and trees. Her leg shook and jerked as she braked to avoid a ground squirrel’s dash across the road; she overcompensated on the next curve and heard the tattoo of gravel hitting the Tahoe’s hubcaps. At the bottom of the hill she turned right because it was faster than waiting for a green light; and at the next light, a mile farther on, she turned right again. A city block later, a sign had told her she was on Bascom Avenue, eleven miles from San Jose.

She could not tell where the actual city began. She drove through blocks of houses and apartment buildings, office complexes surrounded by grass and gardens, more
houses, and then strip malls and vast parking lots. The surface street expanded to three lanes each way with a wide green and floral center strip, narrowed again, and then widened once more. Almost every intersection had a bank of lights and an array of confusing signs.

Madora’s chest ached from holding her breath. Her shoulders burned with tension.

She had ditched the Tahoe in a mall parking lot and waited forty minutes for a city bus that stopped not far from the Greyhound station. In her purse she carried the eight hundred and seventy-two dollars Django had left in the glove compartment. She had not had much experience with money, and at first she felt rich with so much cash in her pocket, enough to last for weeks, she thought. But a one-way ticket to Sacramento cost more than twenty-five dollars, and lunch—a hamburger with stale fries and gluey cheddar cheese—cost five. She had seen right away that her nest egg would not last long.

Madora sat on a bench outside the bus depot, and for a little while her thoughts had drifted as she watched the busy street; but gradually they focused, and she began to assess the facts of her situation. By now the sheriff’s department was looking for her and maybe cops too. Tomorrow or next week uniformed officers would knock on Rachel’s door and pepper her with questions. If she was still married, her husband might say she had to choose between Madora and him. Madora did not want her to have to make that
choice, and she knew that the most loving thing she could do was stay away from Sacramento.

Without giving it great thought, Madora adapted her plans from those of a girl going home to her mother to those of a girl on the run.

Two blocks from the bus station, the manager of a modest hotel catering to low-budget travelers was glad to hire Madora for cash at slightly less than minimum wage, no questions asked. No social security number, no driver’s license. She told him her name was Marilyn and he believed her. The hotel company owned a motel about three miles away where she could afford to rent a room by the week.

For the next two years she had walked to and from work every day in all kinds of weather, setting out before sunup, getting home after dark. As she walked west in the morning, the sun rose and warmed her back as it had when she sat on her boulder at the end of Red Rock Road.

One day she met a Vietnam vet called Sarge by the people on the block. He and his dog, a bowlegged brindle pit bull named Pokey, lived behind a car repair shop and were the unofficial night watchmen for the area. On her way to work, Madora stopped at a Jack in the Box most mornings and bought the dog a hamburger. She was making a deal with God. If she took care of Pokey, Django would take care of Foo.

She lived alone and so quietly that after two years none
of her neighbors knew her last name, and though she was often too tired at the end of the day to do more than strip to her bra and panties and climb into bed, she did not pine for her old life. But she did miss Foo. If she had time in the morning she sometimes sat beside Pokey on the curb and laid her arm across his muscled shoulders, and he turned his head and licked her ear. Sarge kept a long-running conversation going with himself. It did not seem odd to him that Madora talked to Pokey like a friend.

Once she had lived in Rachel’s house, following Rachel’s rules. Then she lived in Willis’s house, and he had another set of rules. Living alone, she made her own rules. She started work on time and, when she could, earned extra money staying late or helping in the kitchen of the all-day breakfast joint next door. She ate three meals a day and never watched television after nine p.m. because to do her job, she needed a good night’s sleep. Her life in San Jose was a wide spot in the road, not a dead end. A resting place. A time-out.

She kept her room at the motel spotless, and despite the worn carpet and burn marks on the dresser, it had the advantage of being her own, with a key and a dead bolt that locked on the inside. Her work at the hotel was physically exhausting, but she was young and strong and smart enough to watch and learn the tricks of the older women who had been cleaning all their lives. She wore a mask and gloves and covered her hair with a plastic shower cap. The hotel was a pass-through for students and under
funded tourists, not an affluent clientele that tossed around hundred-dollar bills; but coins and small-denomination bills were ordinary finds on the closet floor and between the chair cushions. The other maids told her she could keep found money; no one expected her to give it back. She received occasional tips and put away all she could, hidden in an envelope taped flat to the underside of the table next to her bed.

Cleaning rooms, walking to and from the hotel, standing in line at the corner market, and talking to Pokey: her life had taken shape, and the pattern of the weeks became months and then years. On her day off she liked to go to the movies and sit near the back. Sometimes she moved around the theater, changing her seat three or four times during the feature, just because she could. She visited the library and read the paper. For a while, Willis was front-page news.

Months after he was sentenced to fifteen years in prison, she did not quite believe that bars would hold him. She remembered how easily he had seduced and conned her and she was sure he would scheme a way to escape punishment. She had an uneasy sense that he might suddenly leap at her from behind a Dumpster or break into her room. Occasionally she worked for tips only at a bar a few blocks from the hotel. One Saturday night when the place was packed and rowdy, a man approached her who was so like Willis that she dashed for the back room, crashing into another server with a tray of beers balanced on her palm.

A librarian taught Madora how to use the Internet and she read the transcript of the trial. The press and government attorneys called Willis the word Django had taught her:
sociopath
. Every online article had pages of comments from readers, and no one seemed to believe that he had not raped Linda though she swore he had never touched her that way. Regardless, they all thought he was a monster.

In a long feature article Madora learned about Willis’s sister, Daphne. After reading it she had put her head down and cried until the librarian came over and asked if she was feeling ill. She had never heard of Daphne, never even knew he had a sister; and it was a betrayal that Willis talked about her to a reporter, someone he barely knew. But the story helped her make sense of him and his compulsion to save girls who lived marginal lives. Madora knew that he had taken advantage of her youth and innocence, but she never thought of him as a monster.

She had been alone and frightened when he found her, teetering on the edge of a precipice. He never said he was her guardian angel. He just held out his hand and she took it.

Two years passed in this way and she was not unhappy. Gradually and without realizing it, she prepared for the next and necessary stage of her life.

Clarity came to her one morning as she was cleaning an unpleasant mess left behind by a group of backpackers: beer cans and spilled wine, food wrappers, vomit in the
bathroom. It was not the worst she had seen, but it amazed her that people could make such a wreck of their rooms and then walk away, leaving it for her to clean up. As she stood in the doorway wondering where to begin her work, she realized that she had done the same thing when she fled San Diego with Django, and then again, when she abandoned the Tahoe, called herself Marilyn, and walked into another life, leaving the mess of the old one for others to deal with. Now all her nights were restless and filled with troubled dreams that she knew would not end until she cleaned up after herself.

For the first time that she could ever remember, Madora made a plan for her life.

First, she would see her mother and tell her everything so that when the detectives and investigators came to question her again—as they were sure to do—Rachel would know the truth. She might not want to see her. Madora tried to prepare herself for that chance. She would beg for just five minutes to say that she had been very wrong to leave Yuma with Willis and foolish not to heed her mother’s warnings. She wanted her to know that she loved her. An apology would just be words, but she wanted to say she was sorry for all the pain she knew she had brought into her life.

That conversation would be the hardest, and afterwards, Madora thought she could face anything.

In San Diego the police station was only a few blocks
from the bus depot; Madora had checked the address. She did not know what the police would say or do when she walked in off the street and confessed that she had been Willis Brock’s accomplice. She had not taken Linda off the street herself, nor had she bought the generator and the padlock and devised the tether. But she was as guilty as Willis because she cooperated and supported him. Worse than any specific act was her silence through it all. She had not spoken up until after the baby was born. That was the mess she had made and wanted to clean up.

A little more than two years after coming to San Jose, Madora gave notice to her employer, who offered her a raise if she would stay, packed her belongings, and walked to the bus station. On the way she stopped to say good-bye to Pokey and Sarge, and the old guy’s bleary eyes teared up when she kissed his cheek. They were the only friends she said good-bye to.

It was a dry, hot day in Sacramento, not a day to be walking on a sidewalk that fried through the soles of her sandals, but Madora had a swing in her step anyway. She turned right off Sixteenth Street onto D and spontaneously sighed, grateful for the massive sycamores whose wide-leafed canopies stretched and met in the middle of the street, creating a tunnel of dappled shade. On a lawn a sprinkler circled, raining over the sidewalk in flagrant disregard for city water restrictions. She walked right into it and stood a minute, feeling as she had when she was a child, that God was in the blessing of water. A small girl
watched her from the window and grinned, showing two gaping spaces in her teeth.

Be lucky,
Madora thought and waved and walked on.

Making beds, cleaning tubs and toilets, and pushing an old commercial Hoover six days a week: for two years Madora had done hard physical labor and lost the weight she had gained living with Willis. Her legs were strong from walking to and from the hotel, and despite the heat she moved quickly down D Street, faster than she wanted to. She almost did not want to find her mother’s house.

Looking over his fence, a man admired the pretty girl in a turquoise T-shirt, wet and clinging, striding along with purpose. He did not see when, two blocks on, her pace slowed. She had brought her courage with her to Sacramento, but like a pond in July, it had shrunk to a puddle.

She had learned that lives change, turn around, go up one hill and down another; they ended in a cul-de-sac or staring down a long highway. Some disappeared over a cliff. The compulsion to make amends had brought her to Sacramento and would send her south to San Diego in a few hours. She had already bought her ticket. Whatever happened there would mark the end of one life and the beginning of a new one. She would finally be free.

The houses on D Street were old and each was unique. A few had additions and fancy landscaping, but for the most part the tidy homey residences showed their years. It was garbage pickup day. Black and blue and green barrels butted up against the curb in front of every house. The
black and blue gaped open and empty, but the green barrels crammed with yard clippings awaited the automated truck Madora heard groaning and clanking a few blocks away.

A special sense keyed to her mother told Madora that Rachel and Peter Brooks had been happy on this street.

She scanned the house numbers and realized that she was on the wrong side of the street. She could cross; there was no traffic; but the street seemed more like a moat than a strip of asphalt. Behind her a curtain moved; a blind cracked half an inch. A round Chinese woman stepped onto her porch and stood snapping the rubber band around yesterday’s rolled shopping news as her gaze followed Madora, who walked more slowly now. In one of the houses a phone rang and Madora had a crazy thought that up and down the street neighbors were calling each other, talking about her.