Little Girl Gone (28 page)

She felt sure that her mother had been happy on this street where the neighbors knew each other’s histories, their griefs and disappointments as well as their triumphs. In the gutter a six-foot strip of red, white, and blue crepe paper was the last reminder of an Independence Day celebration. Madora saw in her imagination a long table set up on the sidewalk, laden with chili beans and fried chicken and potato salad, festooned with flags and patriotic bunting. A band comprised of neighborhood boys and girls gathered on a lawn and made happy noise until after dark. Madora knew all this without knowing it. She stopped, closed her eyes, and saw Rachel and Peter dancing in a driveway.

A trio of pugs barked at Madora and jumped against a chain-link fence.

She smiled at their ferocity.

Madora’s plan for the future went beyond Sacramento and the police station in San Diego. When she could, she would get her high school diploma and then take a course in junior college that Django had told her about, one of the five hundred subjects he had yakked about as they drove north up Highway 101. Trained as a veterinary assistant, she would be around animals all day and good at that. The last step would come when her life was completely settled. Then she would try to find Django and thank him for what he had given her. He was only a boy, a kid. But what a boy, what a kid. And the last person who would ever have to rescue her.

Rachel’s house had no fancy room addition, but the lawn was mowed, and under a window, bright-headed zinnias grew up from mounds of sweet alyssum. The house was freshly painted and a small porch finished off with a rail stretched across the front. The door was painted violet. Madora smiled because violet had always been her mother’s favorite color. She imagined her laying on one coat after another until she got the perfect shade.

The door opened and a woman stepped off the porch and down the path, tossing her hair—gray!—back from her eyes. She was thin, barefoot, tanned. She grabbed the black trash bin with a hint of familiar fierceness, tilted it back onto its wheels, rolled it off the street, up the driveway, and behind a fence. A moment later she strode back onto
the street and reached for the blue bin. The pugs yapped to get her attention. Rachel looked across the street.

“Quiet down,” she said. “You know me.”

Madora whispered, “Mommy,” too softly to be heard.

But Rachel stared across the street at her. “Madora?” She stepped off the curb and Madora went to meet her.

Along D Street, in every front yard and at the same precise moment, the sprinklers—every one—clicked on and filled the air with light and sparkle. From every house Madora seemed to hear the voices of men and women and children, the sound of news on the radio and announcements on television; dogs barked and cats jumped up to a dozen windowsills; children ran down the hall and up the yard, calling for their parents to
“come quick, come see.”
Birds in their cages sang and crows in the tops of the sycamores sent the message up and down the street and over the hedges and fences.

“Rachel’s girl is here. Madora has come home.”

• In the opening pages of
  Little Girl Gone
  we are introduced to Madora and we learn that her father committed suicide when she was a young adolescent. How did this affect Madora’s emotional development? No one talked to her about his death; no one helped her to understand what happened. In what ways could she have been helped through the experience?
  

• Both Madora and Robin grew up without fathers. Why is a father important in a girl’s life?
  

• Neither Madora nor Robin fully understood the circumstances of their fatherlessness. How much should children be told about what goes on in their family? Are secrets an unavoidable part of family life? Has there been a time in your life when a secret caused a family crisis?
  

• Django is a highly imaginative boy. What were the circumstances of his growing up that led to the development of his creative thinking? Does it empower or
  endanger him? Is there a point where imagination becomes a hindrance more than a help?
  

• Why does Madora love Willis? Does he love her? Can you understand her love for him?
  

• Why is Linda’s baby important in Madora’s maturation? What does the reader know about Madora because of her scene with the baby? And later the same day with Linda?
  

• At first glance the friendship between Madora and Django seems an unlikely match. What factors contributed to their strong bond? Have you ever had an unusual friend, someone who came to mean a lot to you?
  

• The theme of
  Little Girl Gone
  is captivity and all the different ways people can feel imprisoned. Linda is a literal captive, but what about Robin and her father?
  

• For Django, freedom is his half-brother’s walled and gated home. Is there somewhere you have visited or lived that seemed to free you to be more completely self-expressed?
  

• When we read in headlines about girls held captive, it’s natural to wonder about the people who cooperated in the crime. Can you understand why Madora lived as she did, helping Willis to keep Linda locked in the trailer? Was there any excuse for her behavior?
  

• Willis didn’t physically hurt Linda. She wasn’t sexually abused. According to Robin he was well liked by the old people at the retirement home. Was he actually
  a bad man? It might be an interesting exercise to try arguing both the yes and no position.
  

• Why was Foo an important character in the book?
  

• How did the setting—the house at the end of Red Rock Road, arid countryside—contribute to your experience of the story?
  

• How will Robin be changed by what she learned when she visited her father in Temecula?
  

• At the end of the book we learn that Madora intends to turn herself in to the San Diego police. Why does she choose to do this? What do you think will happen to her?
  

• What is the mood at the end of the book? Did you find it uplifting, confusing, or depressing? Or some other feeling?
  

O
n the first day of Simone Duran’s trial for the attempted murder of her children, the elements conspired to throw their worst at Southern California. Arctic storms that had all winter stalled or washed out north of Los Angeles chose the second week of March to break for the south and were now lined up, a phalanx of wind and rain stretching north into Alaska. In San Diego a timid sprinkle began after midnight, gathered force around dawn, and now, with a hard northwest wind behind it, deluged the city with a driving rain. Roxanne Callahan had lived in San Diego all her life and she’d never seen weather like this.

In the stuffy courtroom a draft found the nape of her neck, driving a shudder down her spine to the small of
her back: she feared that if the temperature dropped just one degree she’d start shaking and wouldn’t be able to stop. Behind her, someone in the gallery had a persistent, bronchial cough. Roxanne had a vision of germs floating like pollen on the air. She wondered if hostile people—the gawkers and jackals, the ghoulishly curious, the homegrown experts and lurid trial junkies—carried germs more virulent than those of friends and allies. Not that there were many well-wishers in the crowd. Most of the men and women in the courtroom represented the millions of people who hated Simone Duran; and if their germs were half as lethal as their thinking, Simone would be dead by dinnertime.

Roxanne and her brother-in-law, Johnny Duran, sat in the first row of the gallery, directly behind the defense table. As always Johnny was impeccably groomed and sleekly handsome; but new gray rimed his black hair, and there were lines engraved around his eyes and mouth that had not been there six months earlier. He was the owner and president of a multimillion-dollar construction company specializing in hotels and office complexes, a man with many friends, including the mayor and chief of police; but since the attempted murder of his children he had become reclusive, spending all his free time with his daughters. He and Roxanne had everything to say to each other and at the same time nothing. She knew the same question filled his mind as hers and each knew it was pointless to ask: what could or should they have done differently?

Following her arraignment on multiple counts of attempted murder, Simone had been sent to St. Anne’s Psychiatric Hospital for ninety days’ observation. Bail was set at a million dollars, and Johnny put the lake house up as collateral. He leased a condo on a canyon where Simone and their mother, Ellen Vadis, lived after her release from St. Anne’s. Her bail had come with heavy restrictions. She was forbidden contact with her daughters and confined to the condo, tethered by an electronic ankle bracelet and permitted to leave only with her attorney on matters pertaining to the case and with her mother for meetings with her doctor.

Like Johnny, Roxanne visited Simone several times a week. These tense interludes did nothing to lift anyone’s spirits as far as she could tell. They spent hours on the couch watching television, sometimes holding hands; and while Roxanne often talked about her life, her work, her friends, any subject that might help the illusion that they were sisters like other sisters, Simone rarely spoke. Sometimes she asked Roxanne to read to her from a book of fairy tales she’d had since childhood. Stories of dancing princesses and enchanted swans soothed Simone much as a lullaby might a baby; and more than once Roxanne had left her, covered by a cashmere throw, asleep on the couch with the book beside her. Lately she had begun to suck her thumb as she had when she was a child. Roxanne faced the truth: the old Simone, the silly girl with her secrets and demands, her narcissism, the manic highs and the
black holes where the meany-men lived, even her love, might be gone forever.

A medicine chest of pharmaceuticals taken morning and night kept her awake and put her to sleep, eased her down from mania toward catatonia and then half up again to something like normal balance. She took drugs that elevated her mood, focused her attention, flattened her enthusiasm, stifled her anxiety, curbed her imagination, cut back her paranoia, and put a plug in her curiosity. The atmosphere in the condo was almost unbearably artificial.

Across the nation newspapers, magazines, and blogs were filled with Simone stories passing as truth. Her picture was often on television screens, usually behind an outraged talking head. Sometimes it was the mug shot taken the day she was booked, occasionally one of the posed photos from the Judge Roy Price Dinner when she looked so beautiful but was dying inside. The radio blab-meisters could not stop ranting about her, about what a monster she was. Spinning know-it-alls jammed the call-in lines. Weekly articles in the supermarket tabloids claimed to know and tell the whole story.

The whole story! If Roxanne had had any sense of humor left she would have cackled at such a preposterous claim. Simone’s story was also Roxanne’s. And Ellen’s and Johnny’s. They were all of them responsible for what happened that September afternoon.

Roxanne’s husband, Ty Callahan, had offered to put his work at the Salk Institute on hold so he could attend the trial with her, but she didn’t want him there. He and her friend Elizabeth were links to the world of hopeful, optimistic, ordinary people. The courtroom would taint that.

The night before, Roxanne and Ty had eaten Chinese takeout; and afterward, while he read, she lay with her head on his lap searching for the blank space in her mind where repose hid. They went to bed early and made love with surprising urgency, as if time pressed in upon them, and before it was too late they had to establish their connection in the most basic way. Roxanne should have slept afterward; instead she got up and watched late-night infomercials for computer careers and miraculous skin products, finally falling asleep on the couch, where Ty found her in the morning with Chowder, their yellow Labrador, snoring on the floor beside her, a ball between his front paws.

“Don’t look at me,” she said, sitting up. “I’m a mess.”

“You are.” Ty handed her a mug of coffee, his smile breaking over her like sunlight. “The worst-looking woman I’ve seen this morning.”

She rested her forehead against his chest and closed her eyes. “Tell me I don’t have to do this today.”

He drew her to him. “We’ll get through it, Rox.”

“But who’ll we be? When it’s over?”

“I guess we just have to wait and see.”

“And you’ll be here?”

“If I think about leaving, I’ll come get you first.”

In the courtroom she closed her eyes and pictured Ty with his postdocs gathered around him, the earnest young men and women who looked up to him in a way that Roxanne had found sweet and faintly amusing back when she could still laugh. She knew how her husband worked, the care he took and the careful notations he made in his lab notebooks in his precise draftsman’s hand. With life falling apart and nothing certain from one day to the next, it was calming—a meditation of sorts—to think of Ty at work across the city in a lab overlooking the Pacific.

Attorney David Cabot and Simone entered the courtroom and took their places at the defense table. Cabot had been Johnny’s first choice to defend Simone. Once the quarterback for the San Diego Chargers, he had not won many games but was widely admired for qualities of leadership and character. His win-loss statistics were much better in law than in football. He had made his name trying controversial cases, and Simone’s was definitely that.

Simone, small and thin, her back as narrow as a child’s, sat beside Cabot, conservatively dressed in a black-and-white wool dress with a matching jacket and serious shoes in which she could have hiked Cowles Mountain. In her ears she wore the silver-and-turquoise studs Johnny had given her when they became engaged. As intended, she looked mild and calm, too sweet to commit a crime worse than jaywalking.