Owen's Daughter (38 page)
Authors: Jo-Ann Mapson
“You’ll find her,” she said. “You always were stubborn, even as a toddler.”
“Mama, I don’t mean to rush you, but I need that gas money.”
Her mother opened her purse and took out her wallet. She took out twenties and fifties and even a few hundred-dollar bills.
“Mama, that’s plenty. Listen, do you want to come with me?”
Her mother’s eyes glistened in the moonlight. “No. Pearl’s waiting for me back at the house. You go on. Text me what happens.”
“Thank you for the dress,” Skye said, and gave her mother a one-armed hug.
“You do look beautiful,” her mother replied, and began to walk back to the party.
Skye was pumping gas into the Mercedes at the Allsup’s when her cell phone rang. Who on earth could it be, unless maybe Mama had changed her mind? “Hello?”
“Wolfgang here. By any chance is your daughter named Eleanor?”
“Her name’s Grace. But her middle name is Eleanor. Have you found her?”
“There’s an Eleanor Grace Ellis in foster care in the T or C area
.
Could be a typo for Elliot.”
“Foster care? Man, oh, man, do I have an earful for Rocky when I get there.”
“Don’t drive angry. And keep in mind you don’t know the whole story yet.”
“Who on earth puts their own child in foster care?”
“Let me give you the number to call. Got a pen?”
Skye laughed. “As a matter of fact, I have a gold Cross pen with the initials
W.S.
in case you want it back.”
“Thank you. I appreciate that, though I have a million of them. Pens are what your children give you when your ex marries a rich guy.”
“You’re divorced?”
“Isn’t everyone?”
“Did you represent yourself?”
He laughed. “Every judge will tell you, ‘When you decide to represent yourself, you have a fool for a client.’ How about I tell you all about it when you get back? Over dinner?”
Whoa. Well, thanks to Mama, she had a date dress. “Let me think it over. Do your close friends call you Wolfgang?”
“Mainly they call me Wolf.”
“That’s light-years better than Wolfgang.”
She heard him chuckle. “Now that’s settled, here is the number for Social Services. You want to ask for Mrs. Rodriquez. Skye, I’m not a hundred percent sure this is your daughter. Even if it is, the return process can take a while. You can’t let this upset you. I’ve faxed paperwork from Judge Iglesias to speed things up for you.”
Skye twisted the gas cap closed and got in the car, the phone still pressed to her ear.
Traffic was light, and no drunk drivers seemed to be out. Skye couldn’t help wondering where Gracie was, and if she was hungry, or cold, or worse, having an asthma attack.
Damn Rocky anyway, and what the hell was Rita thinking? Where was Grandma? Playing the slots at Fort Sill Apache?
“Hey, Skye?” Wolf asked, bringing her focus back to the road. “Drive carefully.”
“I
am
driving carefully.”
“You going to find a motel to stay in until morning?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I can’t afford a motel. I’ll sleep in my car.”
“Skye,” he said, “absolutely not. I’ve just now made a reservation for you at the Comfort Inn off Date Street.”
“What? I told you, I don’t have the money.”
“I’ve put it on my corporate card. Right now, I consider you my client. Once the case is settled, we’ll talk about repaying me.”
“How am I your client? I don’t recall hiring you.”
“Lawyers are allowed to take on cases pro bono. You go get a good night’s sleep, and call me tomorrow. I have to go now. Good luck.”
“Wait,” Skye said. But he was already gone. She pressed END on her cell phone.
She drove for miles and miles in silence, passing by red rock, the yellow-brown plains covered with rabbit brush, interrupted only by scrubby piñon. The appearance of a cottonwood tree meant there was a water supply nearby, because cottonwoods were water suckers. She smiled to think of rehab being named Cottonwoods, but how close she had come to drinking tonight made her shiver.
The farther south she drove, the drier things got. Small rocks kicked up by passing big rigs dinged her windshield like shrapnel. She hated the wind.
“Nil-chi-tsosie,”
Duncan would say. “It’s only a small wind.” Maybe she and Gracie should move somewhere else, like California or Hawaii? No, she knew she wanted to be near her dad. Her mother, well, she’d have to wait and see what was going on there.
There was the exit for the Comfort Inn. Skye clicked on her blinker, slowed down, and took the exit. She pulled up to the registration office, shut her engine off and got out. It was warmer here than Santa Fe. Stars were out big time.
She knew for certain that she wouldn’t sleep a wink. If I shut my eyes, she thought, she’ll disappear again. I can’t take the chance.
Margaret had lain awake for hours after the kids were in bed. After stories, a video, cuddles, and kisses, she felt pinned to the couch, unable to muster the energy to go down the hall into the bedroom, but surprisingly awake, mentally. Glory’s kids were a lot of work, but the entertainment factor made up for that. Margaret felt an urge to call Nori in London, but she couldn’t remember the time zone hours. How was she going to explain everything that had happened in the last week?
She heard the car pull up, the engine turn off, and the driver’s door open and slam shut. The gate creaked as Peter headed to the casita without stopping in to say good night. Good for him. He was building his new life, and as a mother it was her role to watch from the sidelines. She thought of Aunt Ellie and the letters she sent, those checks always seeming to arrive at the exact right times. How did Ellie always seem to know? That reminded her of the letters she’d brought in from the casita, which she’d taken from the grocery bag and tucked into a shoebox in her closet without reading. Now was the perfect time to read them. She wanted to know what would make her unsentimental aunt hold on to them for so many years.
She got up, leaning against the arm of the couch until her feet felt steady. Joe had given her one of his hiking canes, saying as if it were perfectly normal conversation, “This is a good starter cane. Bear your weight on the cane as you step with your strongest side. Get used to it for a few days. If it doesn’t suit you, then we’ll try another. And I think you should start trying to get your handicapped parking sticker. Believe me, those things are lifesavers.”
She took the cane into her left hand and made her way down the hall, checking on Aspen and Sparrow, who were sleeping like angels in her studio. Echo was stretched out at the foot of the foldout bed. She wagged her tail and Margaret smiled at her. In her bedroom, she took the shoebox of Ellie’s letters out of her closet, opened it, and tucked the lid under the box. She turned, intending to take them to bed, read a few, and then doze off. Who could say? Maybe she would have a lovely dream in which her aunt made an appearance. But she dropped the box, and the first packet of letters fell out, scattering on the floor. “Darn it,” she said, trying to believe this was simply late night clumsiness. She sat on the floor and gathered the letters to her, arranging the postmarks by date. The letter that had fallen farthest from her was the last one she picked up. She recognized her mother’s handwriting on the envelope at once. Mother had a distinctive way of breaking a single word into two when she wrote in cursive. It had always intrigued Margaret. The postmark was around forty-one years prior. Margaret opened it, and the faint scent of roses came from the tissue-thin pages.
Dear Eleanor,
Ted and I have discussed the matter for a week now. I’ve prayed about it as well. While I admire you for continuing the pregnancy, I wish you’d learned from your earlier mistake with Margaret. Nevertheless, we’ve come to a conclusion that we hope will work well for all of us.
We’ll send Margaret to Lake Bryn Mawr Summer Camp for three months. When she returns, we’ll have the new baby and tell her I was several months pregnant when she left. And that the baby came early.
Margaret smoothed the crease in the letter. What the hell? Was this why Ellie and her mother always seemed on the brink of fighting? In fact, when letters or packages from Ellie arrived for the girls, her mother always wore a disapproving expression and insisted on reading the letters first.
Just as we have done with Margaret, this new child will be raised as our own, unequivocally, and must never know of our arrangement. You can’t expect them to grow up with us as disciplinarians without believing we are their parents. If one day you step into their lives and reveal you are their birth mother, they will rebel, have no respect for their elders, and then who can say what path they’ll take? If you want them to grow up properly, that simply cannot happen. This has to be a one-hundred-percent parenting situation or none at all. Consider this. If they find out that you’re their mother, then surely they’ll wish to know who their father is, and that’s the whole point of keeping this secret, is it not?
Margaret pressed her hand to her mouth and set the letter down in her lap. She barely heard the rattle of the bedroom window. It was the only window moving in the entire house and there wasn’t any wind outside, so it had to be Dolores’s work. Margaret sat there on the rug while images played in her mind. Christmases when Aunt Ellie came for Christmas Eve dinner but left before morning. Her father had never liked Ellie, saying her sense of humor was bawdy and inappropriate. The way Nori’s laugh sounded so much like Ellie’s that Margaret accused her of copying her. She remembered the occasional drawing Ellie scrawled in the margins of letters she sent, one of tide pool life in Maine, another of the Eiffel Tower. How Margaret had sent a drawing back. The out-of-the-blue present of colored pencils from England for Margaret and the Native American wooden flute for Nori. Margaret had made a life being an artist, and Nori still played the flute. There was the birthday she had given them matching turquoise bracelets. Margaret still had hers. She’d wondered why if it was Nori’s birthday, there was always a present for Margaret and the other way around? They’d spent a summer riding horses at Ellie’s lake house, the prize for a year’s worth of straight-A grades. Until Santa Fe, Ellie never really had a home base other than that lake house, but it was primarily a summer cabin. She rented it out but always kept the month of August for them, though Mother, the killjoy, didn’t allow them to go except for that one summer.
When her mother was dying of cancer, why didn’t she tell them? Dad had followed shortly after, but he didn’t say a word, either. Margaret and Nori were grown up, already living independently. What better time was there to reveal their true parentage? Worse, where was Ellie when that happened? Off to China, or Ethiopia, or Nepal? And in Ellie’s last few years, not once did she bring up the topic.
Why had Ellie kept the secret long after it no longer needed to be a secret? It struck her like a bolt. The answer was, just as Mother said, because she was protecting their father. Who was he?
Margaret looked up at the window, which quieted immediately. What did she do with this information? Should she wait to read the rest of the letters? Stay up all night and be good for nothing tomorrow? Not with two children in her care. Not with Owen planning to spend the day with her. She placed the letter back into its envelope and reached for the phone to call her sister. She pressed in the numbers for an international call and waited. When Nori answered, she said, “Maggot, what is so freaking important you are calling me at this hour of the morning?”
Margaret said, “Seaweed, just you listen.”
On Thursday morning, Skye woke up fully dressed. She looked at the motel alarm clock, blinking twelve o’clock, and for a moment she thought she’d slept in far too late to start this day. But her watch said eight fifteen, so she slid on her boots and brushed her teeth with the complimentary brush and toothpaste they’d given her at the desk when she’d checked in. She accepted the continental breakfast—coffee and a Danish—and got in her car.
It was nearly nine
a.m.
when she found Rocky’s address.
Oddly, it wasn’t a residential area. It looked more like a doctor’s office, or a medical complex, where a person could get lab work done, see a doctor, and get a recommendation for a specialist, all within a few steps. She parked the Mercedes and read the sign:
Outpatient Clinic
,
Bio Laboratory
, the names of four doctors, and
Sierra Hills Rehabilitation and Assisted Living
.
Skye felt a chill even before she entered the automatic door, when air-conditioning blew over her like a wave. “I’m probably in the wrong place entirely,” she told a woman dressed in flowered scrubs sitting behind the counter. “I’m looking for Rocky Elliot. I was told this was his address.”
“He’s here,” she said, turning away from the computer and getting up to come around the counter. A large TV on the wall was tuned to CNN, but nobody was there to watch it. “Are you next of kin?”