Little Girl Gone (4 page)

The first day was the longest day in the history of the world. Then, near dinnertime, Huck, his older half brother, turboed through the front door with his bodyguard behind him, talking fast like always. Then Django heard the bawling sounds come out of his mouth and there was no way he could stop them. Huck was almost thirty, the son of Django’s father by his first marriage. He had his San Francisco Giants baseball hat on backwards, and he was crying too.

Time and memory got tricky again after that. Mrs. Hancock packed a bag for him and he loaded his laptop and iPad into his backpack. He hunted all over for his phone, and then he found it, in plain sight, right where it was supposed to be. Ira had driven them to a small airport in the valley where Huck’s plane was parked. Ira told Django, “Your dad was a great guy and you’re his boy all the way.” That was when Ira’s saggy-baggy face drooped even further and he began crying; and seeing an old guy cry embarrassed Django, but he cried too. Junior, one of the buffed-up bodyguards who always traveled with Huck, picked Django up and carried him over his shoulder and onto the plane like he was two years old.

The chopper they took from the San Jose airport landed on the helipad in Huck’s backyard. Huck disappeared into his office, and Junior handed Django over to a girl who said she was his brother’s personal assistant. Time passed and Django ate a lot and watched television and played video games, and every day people came and went and looked at him and there were more phone calls and quiet voices behind closed doors.

Huck’s girlfriend, Cassandra, walked around the house in a bikini, and when she hugged him her boobs weren’t soft like they looked. Django smelled marijuana in her hair, same as in his mother’s after a party. Cassandra brought him cocoa and popcorn and cinnamon toast and asked him how he felt, trying to be motherly.

Once, when they were playing gin rummy, he asked her, “Are you going to marry my brother?” He had been thinking about what it would be like to live in this house with her until he grew up.

She thought he was joking. “My parents’ll kill me if I don’t finish college.”

Huck had given Django some games his company was developing and asked him to test them out, but Django couldn’t take the task seriously. So what if his score went backwards and his avatar got pounded? In real life—every minute—the living, breathing Django was fighting to outrun his misery and the awful sounds and images in his head.

He thought he was going to stay with Huck; but after
almost two weeks and lots more murmuring behind closed doors, there was another flight in a small plane, only this time Huck stayed behind because of business. Junior kept Django company and turned him over to Ira and Mr. Guerin at Montgomery Field in San Diego. They drove for an hour to his aunt Robin’s house in a town called Arroyo.

Mr. Guerin told him he was going to live in Arroyo now. “Your mother’s sister, your aunt Robin, will be your guardian.”

“But I don’t even know her. I never met her in my life.”

“I know, Django, I know. But your parents wanted it this way. They rewrote their wills last year for that particular reason.”

“Does she have kids?”

“No. She’s never been married. She’s a spinster.”

Old maid
, Django thought. Was anyone, ever, going to tell him some good news?

“I want to stay with Huck.”

“I’m sorry, Django,” Mr. Guerin said, blinking hard. “I’m terribly sorry.”

Not only were Django’s mom and dad gone forever; the Django who lived in Beverly Hills was gone too. The person who woke up in his aunt Robin’s house looked like Django Jones—same straight blond hair and brown eyes, five feet four inches tall, one hundred and ten pounds—but he was just a shadow.

He had been with Aunt Robin since Tuesday. Today was Thursday, which was a stupid-ass day to start going
to a new school, but nobody had asked him his opinion. Around here he just got told.

His aunt had been kind to him, but she was a chilly kind of person, a perpetual-motion robot who never stopped moving for long enough to really look at him. She was constantly off to do something or go somewhere. She was an accountant with a lot of clients. Around the house she was always cleaning and cooking and sorting through papers and drawers and cupboards, carrying laundry up and down stairs and ironing. Robin had a vegetable garden big enough to feed every kid at Beverly Country Day, and when she wasn’t working in the house she was outside in a big hat pulling weeds and watering each plant by hand to conserve H
₂
O.

No matter what she was doing, there was a subzero negative force field around her like the one that protected Jett Jones when he liberated the children held captive on Planet Chiron in the second
Jett Jones Boy of the Future
novel.

At BCD Django had a great sixth-grade teacher, Mr. Cody, who told him he should write a science fiction novel because he needed somewhere constructive to put his imagination before it got him into trouble. At first Django thought it would be hard to make up a story with a plot and outer-space scenery, but pretty soon he got the hang of it. His father had started calling him Mr. Spielberg
Sir
and bought him a new laptop.

Django had called his teacher from Huck’s, but he real
ized when Mr. Cody’s voice got thick and gravelly that his call had upset him. It was the same when he phoned his homies, Lenny and Roid. They talked, but it was freaky, not like it had been.

Django put aside his laptop and closed his eyes.

Life would not be so demented if his friends would just
communicate
.

Django had never had a lot of friends, but Lenny and Roid were a couple of weirdos like him and they were tight. They were math geniuses, but Django was the more creative type, although he aced math and science. Django and his friends were a posse, Mr. Cody said. Something else he said:
“Give you dudes time, you’re gonna rule the world.”
Django wondered if this was still true, now that everything in the world had changed.

Django’s mom said he was like the empath on
Star Trek
. Often he could sense what people thought and felt just by watching and listening for the words under their words, the words they didn’t say. In this way, he knew without being told that Aunt Robin was sending him to school to get rid of him for a few hours.

Django got out of bed and stood at the window. In whichever direction he looked he saw hills and scrub and rocks. Except for the radio he heard playing down in the kitchen, the quiet was so intense it made him think of church and funerals and death.

A memorial service had been held at Forest Lawn.
A grown-up kind of thing.
Django didn’t attend but he read
about it online and knew that hundreds of famous people were there, including all the members of his dad’s old band. Huck faxed Django articles from the
Los Angeles Times
and
Variety
, and he said there was going to be a story in
Rolling Stone
. Someone would call him for an interview but he didn’t have to talk if he didn’t want to. All the articles said the same thing, that Jacky Jones was one of the great rock guitarists and composers of the twentieth century. There had been music and speeches at the funeral. Paparazzi. Django was glad to stay away. He didn’t want to be photographed and stared at. The poor little orphan kid.

He dropped to the floor and lay on his back, staring at the cracks in the ceiling, trying not to remember the time
before
. After a while he rolled onto his stomach and began, slowly, to hit his forehead against the wood. He would keep it up until something good happened.

W
illis left to deliver the baby to the attorney, and Madora walked across the dusty yard back to the trailer. On top of a plastic basket full of clean sheets, blankets, and towels, she carried a thermos of chicken noodle soup. At the curbside door of the trailer she put the basket down and returned to the house for soap and a bucket of warm water. Back and forth, Foo tagged along behind her, his stubby tail aquiver with interest. The curbside door was padlocked and Madora’s hands were sweaty with frustration before she got the combination right; it broke apart, and she opened the narrow door to a rush of close, unpleasant air. She jammed the door wide with a stick and brought everything in and set it on the table where Linda ate her meals. Foo watched outside, longing to be invited in, though he never had been.

Madora looked at the girl in the bed, at the mess of bloody sheets and towels Willis had left to be cleaned up. She had an impulse to turn around and walk out the door,
lock up, and pretend there had never been a girl named Linda, no baby boy with deepwater blue eyes.

Madora had begged Willis to take Linda to the hospital, reminding him that she was only sixteen, a teenager with slim hips and a flat, boyish figure; but he had been confident, even cocky, about how easy it would be to deliver the baby in the trailer. To everything she said, he had the same reply:
“Childbirth is easy. If it was hard, the human race would have died out by now.”

Perfectly still, Linda rested on her side facing the interior side of the trailer’s roll-up door. Her pale hair, darkened by sweat, lay against her neck and shoulders as if painted on. For a moment, Madora wondered if Willis had taken the baby and left her with a dead girl.

“Linda? You okay?” She was afraid to touch her.

Linda turned her head on the pillow. Purple shadows encircled her eyes, making her milk-white face look almost clownish. A pulse ticked in one lid of her half-shut eyes, rimmed red-orange. She tried to speak, but her words were barely discernable, a groggy, undifferentiated burr. It didn’t matter what she meant to say. Madora took the meaning. The girl’s pain and grief and fear, her shame, and even her rage came into Madora’s consciousness like the shock of a gunshot fired close to her head. She dropped to her knees beside the bed, trembling, and spoke without thinking.

“He’s beautiful.”

“A… boy?”

“Oh, God, Linda, I’m so sorry.” Willis had not even shown her the child. “He should have…”

Madora stopped herself from saying more. It felt dangerous to criticize Willis.

Linda gripped Madora’s wrist, digging her bitten nails between the tendons.

“It’s too late.” Madora shook her head. “He’s gone. Willis took him an hour ago.”

Linda’s eyes widened, as if it wasn’t enough to hear the words; she needed more light to see the truth on Madora’s face.

“I couldn’t stop him.” And she had not tried because she believed that the baby was better off with the lawyer’s clients than with Linda, a homeless girl, a panhandler.

Madora wouldn’t bother washing the sheets, just bundle them and put them in the trash; and if Willis said that was wasteful, he could try himself to get the blood out. She imagined how it would feel to speak so boldly to him. Then stopped herself. Even imagining was dangerous, for she might become so comfortable in her own opinions that one day she would forget and speak them aloud.

“I hurt…”

“You’ll be okay. When Willis gets back he’ll give you some more pain meds. And then you just have to heal.”

Linda dug into her wrist again. “Shower…”

Linda was never supposed to leave the trailer without Willis. He told Madora that a pregnant girl needed exercise, so he occasionally took Linda for walks up to the ridge
overlooking Evers Canyon. Sometimes they even went for drives: Madora behind the wheel of the big Chevy Tahoe; and Linda, blindfolded for the first ten or fifteen miles, leaning against Willis in the backseat, her arm through his and her head on his shoulder. Willis toyed with Linda’s fair hair, twisting it around his index finger. Seeing them paired this way, Madora felt a stab of jealousy, though she knew there was nothing sexual between them. The single time she had let jealousy get the better of her good sense and mentioned sex, Willis was appalled and withdrew from her as if she had struck him. Later, when he could talk about his feelings, he told Madora that he was attached to Linda as a brother would be, and she believed him.

On the hikes and car trips that were Linda’s reward for being cooperative, she only once made trouble.

They had driven over the mountains into the Anza-Borrego Desert to see the wildflowers that were bountiful after a wet winter and spring. Near the poppy preserve they had turned off the road and driven a few hundred feet to a roundabout where there were no other cars. Where a trail followed a wash, acres of orange-gold poppies bloomed on either side, interrupted here and there by pools of blue lupine. The air buzzed with the business of bees. Madora had thought for an instant of her father and the care with which he and Rachel had tended the gardens behind the house in Yuma, vegetables in the middle and flowers on all four sides. Lost for a moment in her memory, she had relaxed her grip on Linda’s hand; and when she did, the girl
broke away from her and ran back toward the road, yelling for help, though the desert was as empty as a scoured pan. She was seven months pregnant then and unsteady on her feet, a toddler easy to catch; and Willis had laughed at her clumsy effort and let her get as far as the road before he ambled after her. But back in the car he was ominously silent as he bound her feet and hands with plastic zip ties.

“I’m not an unkind man, Linda.” In the rearview mirror Madora saw his dark eyes, drooping with grief. “I thought you’d like a little trip, a chance to see something beautiful. I guess I was wrong. I guess I don’t know you at all, Linda.”

Through the Tahoe’s tinted windows he stared out at the barren mountains as Madora drove up the Montezuma Grade.

“I took you off the streets. You were pregnant, hungry—”

Madora saw such pain and disappointment in his expression that she almost stopped the car. She wanted to slap Linda silly for making this good man unhappy, for being too stupid to realize that without him she would be lying dead somewhere.

Although it was against Willis’s rules, Madora knew it would be safe to take Linda into the house for a shower. She was too weak to run away. Willis had said he’d be working an extra shift at Shady Hills Retirement Home when he finished his business with the attorney and not to expect him before six or seven that night.