Virgin Territory (18 page)

“Whoa,” Doug says, when we saunter onto the scene. “What the hell happened? You guys all right?”

“We’re fine,” Crispy replies, turning away from Angela so she can’t get a good look at the damage on his right cheek. “We both fell from a great height. But no one was hurt. Not seriously.”

Satisfied that Crispy and I are both relatively unharmed and are still talking to each other, Doug jumps up and announces that we need to get cracking if we want to do this video. Everybody immediately gets to work. Doug walks Desirée toward a milk crate that he’s set up for her under a large shade tree. Crispy mans the camera, fiddles with the focus, and pretends to be
a professional cinematographer. Angela fluffs Desirée’s hair, touches up her makeup, assures everyone that this is going to be great, really great, and somehow manages to totally ignore me.

I imagine that there will be plenty of hot, humid Florida afternoons before I’m able to figure this all out. September will arrive; Crispy and Des and Angela will all leave Jupiter. My life will go on; things will happen. I might even forget that I was once in love with a girl named Angela who cared for me hardly at all.

“You just gonna stand there like an idiot?” Doug asks me. “Here. Clip this microphone to Desirée’s blouse.”

I do as I’m told, robotically going through the motions of clipping the mic to one of Des’s buttonholes. I know the drill. As usual, I’m in close when Doug gives his last-minute instruction.

“Just remember, kid, this isn’t a contest about who’s prettier or smarter or better dressed. This is about whose got the biggest heart. Just let it shine.”

We step back out of frame. Doug yells, “Roll ’em.” Desirée shoots us all a beauty-queen smile, and then she does as she’s told—she shines.

When I open my eyes, Doug is looming over my bed; he’s shaking my shoulders, telling me that I’d better get myself dressed
and come downstairs, because Mrs. Ramirez is in our living room and she’s in a terrible state.

I try to remember if we have a neighbor by the name of Ramirez. Then I remember. Mrs. Ramirez—Angela’s mother!

“What time is it?” I mumble.

“It’s the middle of the night,” he says. “Or, if you prefer, the morning.”

When I come down the stairs, Mrs. Ramirez is sitting on the edge of the sofa. She’s wearing a green hoodie and sniffling into a ragged bit of tissue. Her eyes are puffy, and her nose is red from crying.

“Careful,” Doug warns her as he hands her a cup of coffee that he’s just made fresh. “It’s hot.”

“My name’s Dolores,” says Mrs. Ramirez, taking the cup with one hand and flattening her messed-up bangs with the other. “What is yours?”

“Doug.”

“Bless you, Doug,” she says, and then blows a few cooling breaths over the rim of her cup before continuing. “I don’t know anywhere else to go. I’m sorry it is so late. I hope I didn’t wake your wife.”

Doug closes his eyes and gives his head a little shake.

“It’s fine,” he says.

“It’s terrible,” Mrs. Ramirez remarks. “The coffee, I mean. But still it is so nice of you. Bless you.”

“What’s going on?” I finally ask. “Is Angela all right?”

Startled, Mrs. Ramirez looks up from her coffee. She blinks at me and then begins to sob again. Doug takes the coffee cup away from her so that she doesn’t spill it on the carpet. He stands with a cup of hot coffee in either hand and shoots me a look as though I’m the one who’s making Mrs. Ramirez cry.

“She disappeared,” Doug explains to me, which isn’t much of an explanation, but it’s a start.

“Do you know where she could be?”

“Me?” squeaks my voice. I sound, even to myself, like a guilty party who knows more than he’s saying.

Doug turns his attention back to Mrs. Ramirez. He sits beside her and tells her that everything’s going to be okay; they will find Angela. He suggests going to the police and filling out a missing-persons report. But at the mention of the word
police
, Mrs. Ramirez sits up and begins madly wiping away her tears with both hands.

“No, no, no!” she says emphatically. “Not the police. You don’t understand. You cannot call the police. That would be very bad for us.”

She tells us that Angela’s father is not a good man and that she escaped from Tucson with Angela in order to keep her safe. Although Mr. and Mrs. Ramirez are now separated, he’s been making her life a living hell, and he won’t stop until he has full control of Angela.

“And this can never happen,” she assures us. “Never. Angela belongs with me.”

Doug nods and gives her a smile of grim determination to prove he knows what’s going on, but I can tell he’s as lost as I am. He doesn’t know what to do in order to find Angela or how to get this woman out of our living room.

Mrs. Ramirez leans toward me, touches my knee, and says, “You really don’t know where Angela is? You were such good friends. She talked of you all the time. You must have some idea. She must have said something.”

Doug jumps in with a few questions of his own—all of them directed toward Dolores. How long has Angela been missing? Why would she leave town? Did she leave a note? Is she on her own?

Mrs. Ramirez doesn’t have a clue where Angela might be. That’s why she’s come to our house. Her worst fear is that Mr. Ramirez has kidnapped the girl and taken her back to Tucson. “It’s not like my daughter not to call me. No. Something is wrong.”

“Did you have a fight?” Doug asks as kindly as he can. “Has she been acting strange? Maybe in the past day or so? Something out of the ordinary?”

“No,” Mrs. Ramirez replies. “No, nothing strange. We never fight.”

“Why don’t you tell me how you and Angela came to be in Jupiter,” Doug suggests. And though he’s sitting there all calm and concerned looking, I just know that he’s wishing that he had his camera handy. He’d give anything to be filming Mrs. Ramirez as she wipes her nose and begins her story.

Mrs. Ramirez tells us how she and Angela took to the road a few months ago, how they became devoted to the Virgin Mary. The lines of her story run parallel to the one Angela told me, but I can’t help noticing certain discrepancies. For example, according to Mrs. Ramirez, Angela has a true devotion to “Our Lady in Blue,” and they didn’t leave Tucson in search of a miracle. In fact, there is no mention of the fact her daughter was paralyzed. I begin to wonder if it ever happened. I’m about to mention it, and I also want to find out if the father is, in fact, wanted by the police for stealing, but every time I open my mouth to speak, Mrs. Ramirez introduces another new detail that takes my breath away.

“He is an evil man,” she whispers, referring to Mr. Ramirez. “Pure evil. Do you know what Our Lord said about the children? ‘And whosoever shall offend one of these little ones that believe in me, it is better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he were cast into the sea.’ This is a fate fit for Angela’s father. For what he did to her, even Our Lord could not forgive. No. Not even Jesus. And he did worse than offend.”

“What did he—?”

But before Doug can finish the sentence, Mrs. Ramirez is raising her hand and turning her head away. Then, after a short pause, as though she refuses to be silenced by her own sense of propriety, she adds, “I will say this: because of him there is a hole in Angela’s heart where the world used to be.”

Mrs. Ramirez and Angela escaped Tucson, but apparently
they had a hard time escaping Mr. Ramirez. First they went to Austin, Texas, where Mrs. Ramirez’s sister lived. One night, while they were asleep, an angel came to Mrs. Ramirez in a dream and warned her that her husband was on his way.

“An angel?” I ask, trying to get a few more details. “Like with wings and a halo?”

“A real angel,” she says, which seems the only description she’s willing to provide. I don’t press her any further.

“Go on,” says Doug.

“I woke Angela, put her in the car, and off we went. It only took a couple of days for us to find our way to Lubbock. Everywhere we stopped, people guessed where we were headed and gave us directions, whether we wanted them or not.
‘Headed to Lubbock?’
a stranger would say to us.
‘Fifty more miles. Straight through to Lubbock. Lubbock’s up ahead there.’
I didn’t have a plan of my own, you see, so I accepted Lubbock as our divinely inspired plan.”

Once in Lubbock, it wasn’t hard for them to get lost in a crowd of mostly women and children; all they had to do was smile, nod, wear a BVM T-shirt, and follow the movements of the faithful as they went about their business. Considering their financial situation, Lubbock was the safest place for them to disappear; they had about four hundred bodyguards free of charge. After a few weeks, they began to understand that the Virgin Mary could offer protection to women who were on the lam from husbands and fathers, and that was exactly what they’d been looking for.

“Maybe this was our miracle,” Mrs. Ramirez concludes. “We found a safe place.” But she doesn’t look like a person who has experienced a miraculous healing, nor does she seem particularly safe. She just looks sad and upset.

She takes a sip of coffee and then starts fishing around in her purse, muttering in Spanish. Doug and I involuntarily lean forward. But then she surprises us by pulling out Marie’s little gold god and placing it on the glass coffee table in front of her. We stare at it as though it is Exhibit A presented for consideration in an ongoing trial.

“And there is this!” she says. “I found this … this thing in Angela’s bag last night. I know what this is! A false idol. So I took it away from her. I had to. Do you know your Bible? God said, ‘I am the Lord thy God, which brought thee out of the land of Egypt, from the house of bondage. Thou shalt have none other gods before me. Thou shalt not make thee any graven image—’ ”

“That belongs to my mother,” Doug announces. He then turns to me and adds, “How’d she get ahold of it?”

Did Angela steal the little gold god from Marie’s room? In all the excitement and confusion about Desirée’s new outfit, she could have easily slipped the thing into her purse without anyone’s noticing, no questions asked.
“It wasn’t like we stole from anyone in particular. We just took stuff that no one would miss.”
But I didn’t see Angela actually take it, so how could I accuse her?

Doug is tired of waiting for me to respond, so finally, in a voice that is louder than necessary, he says, “Dylan?”

I visibly jump and then, after I’ve swallowed hard and regained the use of my voice, I say, “We went to visit Marie. She gave it to Angela because Angela said she liked it.”

I explain to Mrs. Ramirez that the little gold god isn’t a false god; it’s just a decoration, something Marie picked up on her travels around the world, something to remind her that she once had a life. “She gave it to Angela. She did.”

“She stole it from your grandmother, didn’t she,” Mrs. Ramirez says wearily.

My silence is damning.

She turns toward Doug. “Do not judge her too harshly,” she tells him. “We have run out of money, and she was trying to help out. But it was wrong. And to me this is still a false idol. This is how I see it. ‘For I, the Lord thy God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children … ’ ”

Suddenly, a look of panic washes over her face as a new thought occurs to her. She turns to me and asks, “Do you think this is the reason my Angela ran away? Because I took the god from her? I didn’t mean to cause her harm. I meant to save her from harm.”

More tears.

Doug and I exchange a look, and suddenly, we’re in this together. And then Doug tries to reason with Mrs. Ramirez the way anyone might reason with a crazy person. He gets all matter-of-fact and tells her that it would be better if she drove back to the motel where she can lie down and get some rest.
There’s nothing that anyone can do for Angela in the middle of the night. And who knows? Maybe Angela has already returned. What then? Who will be there to greet her?

As Mrs. Ramirez gets to her feet, Doug asks, “You feel okay about going back to the motel, Dolores? I mean, we’re not trying to get rid of you, it’s just—”

Doug gives Mrs. Ramirez a handful of dollar bills that he keeps stuffed in his jeans pocket—beer money. Then he and I stand by the living room window watching Dolores drive off in her dusty Subaru. Even after the car has turned the corner and disappeared, Doug and I stare out into the night. Neither of us says a word.

“You okay?” Doug asks me.

“Yes,” I reply. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

“No reason. I was just asking.”

Under the circumstances, sleep is out of the question. I’m too busy thinking about everything that has happened—Mrs. Ramirez’s showing up, Angela’s going missing, the little gold god still sitting downstairs on the coffee table. What is it that Mrs. Ramirez said?
“And to me this is still a false idol. This is how I see it.”
But when Marie looks at the little gold god, she doesn’t see a false idol; it reminds her that once upon a time she had a heyday and her life wasn’t always about slipping the knot. To her, it’s a solid gold connection to her imaginary friend, Frankie Rey, and a world of adventure. It’s one of the treasures Frankie Rey looted from a grave in Colombia and gave to her as a gift. More likely, she and Granddad bought it in some dusty South American marketplace for a few pesos. To Doug, the god is proof that he has a mother. To Angela, it’s something to be auctioned off on eBay in exchange for cash. Each of us sees the thing differently. We each have a story, according to our needs. Who’s to say which story is the true one?