Little Girl Gone (3 page)

She said, “I’m worried about him.”

“The lawyer? He’ll be there.”

“The baby.”

“I checked him over. He’s fine.”

“What if he gets hungry?”

“The lawyer’ll take care of that. We’re going to meet up in Carlsbad.”

“Let me come with you.”

“I’m tired, Madora. I want to get rid of this—”

“He’s not a
this
. He’s a boy.”

Willis’s expression said that he had heard enough. “Give him to me.”

She pulled back, ducking her head.

“You ought to try being a little sympathetic, Madora. I’ve been up all night. Linda just had a baby and she’s pretty knocked out, but she’ll come to soon, and when she does, she’ll need you.”

The baby arched his back and twisted his mouth, making sucking sounds as Willis took him from Madora. She opened the screen door.

“Willis?”

He stopped under the carport and scowled at her.

She said, “I want to have a baby.”

“Is that was this is all about?” His chuckle was softly derisive. “You got bit by the baby bug?”

“I’d be a good mother.” She knew this. “Please?”

“Don’t push me, Madora.”

T
he Great Dane truck trailer where Linda had spent almost five months of her pregnancy was eight feet wide and twenty-seven feet long. Up on blocks, the trailer had been on the property when Madora and Willis moved in. An eyesore, but too big to move.

Like many neglected rural properties, this one had for some time been a dumping ground for derelict machinery and equipment, but Madora disregarded the trash when she saw the little house. Stepping across the threshold for the first time four years ago, she had been afraid to hope that Willis would finally want to settle down, marry her, and have a family. A weight dropped from her shoulders when he said the spot suited him fine. She disregarded the cracked and bumpy orange and brown linoleum, the oven that did not work, the stained sink. These were temporary eyesores and inconveniences. All that mattered was that the gypsy months of wandering the West were over and her real life had begun. As if to prove he felt the same, Willis had
taken the time to paint the house a deep, forest green and trimmed the windows in white. Working as a team all one weekend, they had dragged the rusty backhoes and graders, the carcass of a refrigerator, the flat tires and corroded tanks and coils of wire, and dumped them behind a mound of boulders, where they still lay like the skeletal remains of the property’s history. The Great Dane trailer could not be moved without a tow truck, so they stippled its battered aluminum exterior in camouflage shades of gray and green and tan that blended with the sycamores and dusty cottonwoods along the dry creek bed at the back of the property.

Initially, Willis had been fascinated by the trailer, but then he forgot about it and more than three years passed. Eight months ago, he had cut a window-sized hole up high on one side and installed an air-conditioning unit and an electric generator to power it and a few lights. Madora assumed he was making a room for himself, a place to study when he went back to school.

He never mentioned Linda. He just brought her home and put her in the trailer one rainy night.

He had brought her into the kitchen, water dripping off his ankle-length plastic raincoat, his black hair plastered and shining against his head. Behind him, had stood a girl with straggly hair in frayed-out Levi’s and a yellow T-shirt, hip shot out, staring down at her bare feet.

Madora remembered thinking that Linda looked like a Tinkertoy, round in the middle with sticks for arms and legs.

“She’s pregnant, Willis.”

“You think I’m blind?”

“You’ve got to take her to a doctor.”

“Pregnancy isn’t a disease, Madora. Besides, I’m a Marine Corps medic. I can manage a pregnancy. It’s not brain surgery.”

At that moment, Madora was juggling four or five thoughts at the same time, and it was hard to know what to say first. She didn’t mind helping this pregnant teen with nowhere to go, and she admired Willis for his generosity and didn’t want him to think she was stingy. But they were always short of money by the end of the month, and feeding one more was going to be a stretch.

“And where’s she going to sleep, Willis? We’ve only got the one bedroom.”

“I fixed up the Dane.”

“The trailer? But it’s freezing out there.” All the blankets they owned were on Madora and Willis’s bed, plus an old sleeping bag. And still they were cold at night.

“I put a mattress down and a couple of blankets and she can wear those flannel pajamas.”

The ones he had given Madora. A gift of soft, blue flannel pajamas at the start of the cold weather, a surprise. She loved his occasional and unexpected bursts of generosity, and she knew it was small of her to begrudge this girl the comfort of warm pajamas.

“What’s she going to eat?”

“I stopped on the way home and got a couple of burritos.”

“Where’d the mattress come from? And the blankets? We don’t have any extra blankets.” If she asked too many questions Willis would become defensive and then angry and accusing. He would say she did not believe in him and lacked commitment to their shared life, the terms of which he set without consulting her. And that was all right. She was by nature a follower. He was smarter than she and far more worldly. But she needed to know the truth. “Did you plan this ahead, Willis?”

“I’m going to take her over to the trailer now.” He opened a kitchen drawer where this and that collected and pulled out a padlock.

“What do you need that for?”
Another question.

“She’s been on the street, Madora.” His tone implied Madora was a stupid girl, perhaps a little retarded. “Do I have to tell you what that means? She’s probably got drugs in her system and she could start hallucinating and walk right out the door. Believe me, Madora, I know about this kind of thing. The lock’s for her own good.” He paused. “Get it?”

All Madora knew of the world was what she’d seen from behind Willis, on tiptoes, looking over his shoulder. What he said made perfect sense.

“She needs a hot drink,” he said. “Make a thermos of tea and put a lot of sugar in it. I’ll come back and get it.” Before he left he smiled at Madora. “I don’t want you getting wet, catching a chill. It’s pretty bad out there. I’ll come back for the tea. Don’t trouble yourself.”

“Just tell me first. Did you plan this out ahead of time?”

He had never hit her, never even threatened her, but sometimes Madora felt the possibility of violence flow between them like an electric current.

“I’ll tell you the truth, and will you then be satisfied or will I have to keep explaining myself?” He sighed like a porter putting down his load after a long day. “I’m not going to lie, Madora, about how much this hurts me, your doubt. After all we’ve been through and all we’ve been to each other, you still don’t trust me. When the person I love most in the world doesn’t trust me or believe in me, do you know the pain, Madora? Trust and love, they’re almost the same thing. If you don’t trust me, it means you don’t love me. You
can’t
love me.”

The wind rose, whining up Evers Canyon and moaning in the eaves of the house, driving the rain hard against the windows. A draft came in at the floorboards and ran like a spider up the back of Madora’s leg. Along the creek somewhere a branch broke off a cottonwood, sounding like a pistol crack.

Willis sat, resting his elbows on his knees. “Maybe I should have told you before, but it happened too fast. I didn’t do a lot of thinking or planning.”

And yet he had a mattress and blankets in the trailer, waiting. Madora let the thought slide away, out of her mind forever.

“I admit, I’ve been watching Linda for a couple of days. Every time I went into Arroyo she’d be standing by the long
stoplight near the freeway, holding up this feeble little sign saying she’s pregnant and hungry, and today when I saw her, in the pouring rain, I knew I had to bring her home.” His dark eyes looked into Madora’s, and she read in his expression a deep and inexpressible longing to be understood. “And I knew—I
thought
I knew—you’d want to help her too. I guess I just totally misunderstood.” He stood up. “If you really want me to, Madora, I’ll take her back to town. But is it okay if she eats? First? She needs
something
.”

Awash with shame, Madora laid her hand against his cheek. The goodness of the man brought tears into her eyes. “You’re right; you did the right thing. We’ll make the trailer comfortable for her.” Madora would not think about the mattress and blankets laid out in advance or consider the implications of the padlock. “You go along and get her settled. When you come back I’ll have her tea ready.”

And the flannel pajamas.

A
few miles away, in the town of Arroyo, Django Jones dreamed of his mother. She was wearing her favorite red dress with the pleats that flipped out around her knees, and her hair shimmered with lights of silver, copper, and gold. Django had a green garden hose in his hand and he was spraying her and she was laughing. Her laugh was like light, like rain, like water splashing over rocks.

The room in which he awoke—it was the third morning now—was a quarter the size of his bedroom at home, and he could tell from the boxes shoved into the closet and corners that it had been a kind of utility room before his arrival. Across the room on a beat-up old dining room table, Django’s backpack reminded him that he was going to school that day whether he wanted to or not. He tried to imagine Arroyo Elementary School, K through eight, and he knew he wasn’t going to like it.

He fished his laptop off the floor beside the bed, powered on, and checked the time against the clock on the
table. He had half an hour before he needed to get up. As he logged on, his hands trembled with hope.

First he Googled
Jacky Jones
, his father, and there were many new entries: bios and obits and memorials, a lot of people writing about how they knew him when he was the hottest guitarist out of England in the early seventies. He scanned these quickly. A woman wrote about having sex with him after a concert and making a plaster cast of his penis.

Gross.

He went to Facebook and did a quick scroll, not paying much attention to the entries, looking for a clue that his parents were alive. He was sure they would find a way to send him a message. He went to his e-mail, saw nothing interesting. If the story of the accident was part of a top secret government thing, a message from his parents verifying this would be in code, of course. Django was smart; he would figure it out. Or, if they were being held for ransom, the note would come by mail or maybe a telephone call. Django’s father was super rich and famous, and his half brother, Huck, was probably a billionaire. The kidnappers would want a lot of money, but Django had made up his mind that he wouldn’t call the FBI when he heard from them. The feds would tell him to be cagey, not to pay the demand, but he was willing to pay any amount to rescue his mother and father.

There was nada from his homies on Facebook or e-mail or Twitter despite his having written them a couple of times
every day since he got to his aunt’s house. Plus texting and tweeting and leaving messages on their cells. He looked up at the ceiling and opened his eyes wide to dry up the tears he felt coming. He blinked hard but it didn’t help. He was twelve and everyone said his parents were dead so it was normal to cry; but Django had never wanted to be normal.

Jacky and Caro Jones had driven to Reno over the Memorial Day weekend because Jacky wanted to try out his new black Ferrari on Interstate 395, the sweeping stretches of highway and long sight lines north of Bishop. If they had left Reno a half hour later or stopped in Bishop for coffee, if they’d gotten sleepy and decided to risk the bedbugs in a roadside motel. If they hadn’t been driving back to Beverly Hills late Monday night along the dark, deserted highway through the Rand Mountains, the hilly, twisty section between Johannesburg and Randsburg. If a drunk in a pickup had not shot out of an unmarked side road: no lights, ninety miles an hour.

Django wanted to jam a pencil through his ear, kill his imagination and obliterate the screams and the sound of metal slamming into metal.

The morning after the accident when Django came into the kitchen, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes, it had not seemed unusual to see his father’s manager, Ira, leaning against the kitchen counter, drinking coffee. Ira had been his father’s manager since the seventies, and they often had morning meetings at the house in Beverly Hills.

It was Ira who had broken the news and swore to
Django that his parents had not suffered. Death had come instantly, he said. The news charred Django like a sapling struck by lightning. It burned a hollow space inside him that now, two weeks later, he knew nothing would ever fill. That first morning, Mrs. Hancock, the housekeeper, put her arms around him, and they sat beside each other on the double chair on the kitchen porch. As Django recalled—his memory of those first days had big holes in it—they sat there all day as the sun moved across the wide planks of the whitewashed floor; but it couldn’t have been that long because his parent’s lawyer came, Mr. Guerin; and he and Ira closed themselves in Jacky’s office. While they talked Django went outside and sat by the swimming pool. His father said that exercise was the best thing when a person was upset so he tried to swim laps, but he only got to the middle of the pool before he couldn’t be bothered. He lay on his back and floated, staring up at the gray sky. Typical June gloom.

The truth was, when Ira told him his parents were dead, Django had not felt much of anything except stunned. And later, when he started to think about what
automobile accident
and
dead
really meant—what Ira and Mr. Guerin would call
the long-term ramifications—
he mostly felt scared because no one seemed to know what was going to happen to him. He thought he was probably too rich to go to an orphanage, but he had seen the musical
Oliver!
when the senior students at Beverly Country Day presented it at Christmas. After the performance he had asked his mother
what gruel was and she said oatmeal, and his father said it was oatmeal mixed with sand and lint and dirt and dog hair swept up off the floor. Django knew he would never have to eat anything so awful, but he remembered the song the orphans sang about
food, glorious food
and it looped through his brain. He went to sleep thinking/singing it and woke up with it still going round and round.