Little Girl Gone (20 page)

One side of the pillow was velvet, the other silk. If she was very quiet, Rachel would let her sleep there in the afternoons. The sleep of childhood, deep and long and uninterrupted.

She whispered, “What about medical school? The island?”

“Oh, we’re still going, but it’s gonna take me a while to figure out how to swing it. Trust me, you’ll see your mom before we go. Of course you will. Don’t I know a girl needs to be with her mother sometimes?” His eyes were so dark, they seemed to have no pupils. “But right now, I need you more than she does. Okay?”

Madora looked into his eyes, and she knew she had been hoodwinked, lied to, and cheated. She had wasted her innocence and betrayed herself. But she had known no better. And as clearly as she saw this, she felt no anger. Here was the truth: as she was an unlucky girl, Willis was a boy with his own sad history. Thinking this, a mothering pity welled in her. For him and for herself.

W
illis stayed a while with Madora and allowed her to brush his hair, but it was as if a stranger’s hands touched him. The girl he had rescued and with whom he had shared the most private yearnings of his heart would never—either now or in the future—beg to visit her
mother
, a woman she despised and rightly blamed for her father’s suicide. But as Madora had grown fat and lazy, her vision of what was possible had been cut short and thickened like scar tissue. Now she limped through life on a stump, like most of the world.

She was nothing to him except a problem.

He left her in the bedroom and went back to the trailer, taking with him some of the chicken and two cans of orange soda. The trailer smelled of tuna and the unemptied toilet, and immediately Linda started in.

“I don’t know where Madora is. She never came to see me. Not all day. I can’t live like this, in this filth—”

“She’ll clean it up tomorrow. I’ll see to it, Linda.” He left the door open, letting in fresh air.

“There’s bugs,” Linda complained. “They come to the lights.”

Willis chuckled, feeling wise and tolerant. “Imagine we’re having a picnic.”

He let her sit in the open door with her legs dangling out of the trailer in the fresh night air, facing the cottonwoods and sycamores that crowded the sandy creek bed. He turned off all the lights but one.

“Isn’t that better?” he asked her. “Go ahead and eat. You need to keep healthy.”

She sneered. “What does it matter? I don’t have to be healthy so you can kill me.”

“Linda, no!”

“Don’t give me that bullshit look. I know you can’t just let me go, and you don’t want to keep me locked up forever. You’re weird, but I don’t think you’re that kind of crazy.”

“You have no idea what I want.” She started to speak and he put his finger on her lips. “Just listen for a change. Please?”

She shrugged elaborately and tore at a drumstick.

“I have a vision, Linda. A calling.” He saw her greasy fingertips, her bitten nails, and felt a profound sorrow. He did not expect her to understand what he was talking about, not right away. A girl like Linda who had lived on the streets and knew the roughest kind of life might not even believe that there were men motivated by a desire to do good in the world.

“I know you better than you know yourself,” he said. “I
know what you can be, the potential in you. I want to help you realize that potential; that’s why I brought you here in the first place.”

“You wanted my baby. To sell it.”

A sigh shuddered through Willis.

Was it was too much to ask that girls like Linda and Madora stop thinking of themselves and consider the risks he had taken in order that they might have a second chance? If his mother were there, she would understand. For a moment, his mind left the trailer and went back to the days in Buffalo when he lay on his mother’s bed and she stroked his forehead with her long white fingers and her sweet voice spoke about the wonderful future that lay ahead of him.
What should I do now, Mother?
The future had arrived and he was trapped in the company of girls who beat on his heart with their fists.

Linda tossed the chicken bone out the door into the dust. Madora had never been as coarse and raw as this girl. But given time Linda would learn, and with knowledge would come gratitude and appreciation. He must learn patience. He would look upon Linda as a means by which he would grow wiser, more tolerant, an even better man. He jumped to the ground and picked up the bone, brought it back, and dropped it on her plate. “You can’t just leave garbage around. It brings raccoons and rats, and if the dog was to eat it—”

“Yeah, yeah, I get it.” She spooned mashed potatoes and gravy into her mouth.

In the beginning Madora had been almost as feisty as Linda. He missed that now. And she had been so pretty, shy-wild, like a young doe in her first season. Until her eighteenth birthday he had been weak with longing for Madora and exhilarated by the willpower it took to restrain his desire. After he had given himself to her, his desire diminished. Now he still made love to her occasionally because she expected it, but he would have been happier to live without sex altogether. As for Linda, he felt no yearning at all for her. She was too shopworn for his taste, but perhaps after a year or two she would regain at least the illusion of purity.

“I know you’re mad at me right now, but we can have a life, Linda. A good one.”

“I wish you were dead. I want to see maggots crawling out your eyes.”

Her bravado was a welcome change from Madora’s whining.

“I’m gonna get out of here and I’ll tell the police where you are. You and your fat girlfriend.” Her eyes were pale blue with a spark of amber near the center. “They’ll lock you up forever.”

He chuckled.

“What’s that mean?”

“It means you don’t really know what’s going on and you should stop talking and listen. You might learn something.”

Her little mouth shone with a gloss of chicken fat.

He said, “I’m going to live on a tropical island for a while.”

“Not if the cops get you first.”

“Place called Antigua.”

“Never heard of it.”

“It’s an island in the Caribbean Sea. You know where that is?”

“I guess.”

“Antigua’s way out in the middle of it, with beautiful beaches, like pearls and diamonds all ground up fine like sugar. It’s near the equator, so the water’s warm year-round and clear like glass.” Linda probably didn’t know what the equator was, but it didn’t matter to Willis that she was ignorant. With time and training she would learn.

“You could go to school in Antigua.”

“You’re some kind of pervert.”

The word stung, but he didn’t blame her for using it. Girls her age had to be vigilant, and expecting the worst helped keep them safe. Linda had been too trusting in the past, and now she was making sure she didn’t fall for another line. She was ignorant but not stupid. Willis respected this.

“You could lie on the beach and get a tan. You could sleep or go to the movies. You wouldn’t have to do anything you didn’t want to.”

She curled her lip. “Except fuck you.”

“Don’t say that.” He hated to hear that word on lips so young. “I’m not that kind of man.” Mental pictures distracted him: this child-girl lying with boys and men for love or drugs or money or attention. Like Daphne, she had used her body as bartered goods.

He had never told Madora, or anyone, about Daphne. It made him sad enough to carry her face and story in his memory; speaking it aloud would add shame to his sorrow. But he wanted Linda to comprehend the danger she had been courting with her slutty ways so that she could better appreciate what he was offering her.

“My sister was murdered.”

“So?” She tried to pick a bit of chicken out from between her molars, but she had no fingernails.

“She was like you.”

“Oh, Jesus, get me out of here. I knew it. You’re a loon.”

She squirmed and pulled on her plastic wrist cuffs with her teeth.

“Daphne was young; she left home and got mixed up with bad people. I’m not going to let that happen to you.”

“What do you care about me?” Her shoulders were up around her ears and fear had cinched her throat, breaking and cracking her voice so it hurt him to listen. “What do you do, just go around looking for girls to kidnap?”

“You were pregnant.”

“That’s it? You got a kink for pregnant girls?”

A kink? What did that mean?

The color in her cheeks had washed out, giving her blemished face a lunar pallor in contrast to the wild light in her eyes. “Oh, Jesusjesusjesus. I am so screwed, so totally screwed.”

She was afraid, and why wouldn’t she be? He imagined her pulse racing beneath his fingers, and he didn’t blame
her for lashing out at him. Still, it hurt to be misunderstood.

“Drink some of this.” He poured orange soda into a paper cup and held it out to her. “It’ll help you calm down.” In medic training he had learned about panic attacks.

Despite her fear, she grabbed the cup and gulped the soda.

“Slow down.” It would help her to see that he was levelheaded and in control. “You’ll make yourself sick.”

He listened to her ragged breath. He gave her more soda and eventually she leaned against the doorjamb, her shoulders dropped and relaxed. Willis did not press her and five minutes passed.

“Why are you going to Antigua?” She selected another drumstick from the bucket.

“I still need a few classes to get my MD. There’s a great medical school in Antigua. One of the best.”

Willis knew the school would be mediocre, his professors and classmates second-rate. But for a man such as himself this would not matter; degrees and certificates were a formality. Already he was a better doctor than most.

“What about Madora? I’m not goin’ if she is.”

“Madora has decided to visit her mother.”

“How do I know I can trust you?”

“When I say I’ll take care of you, I mean it. I’m an honorable man, Linda.”

She looked at him for a long time, and he could almost see her mind at work as she decided whether to believe him
or not. She had been close to flying off in all directions, but he’d helped her control herself, and probably done a better job of it than most doctors. And he had delivered her baby with skillful efficiency. On some level of understanding she recognized all this and felt safer with him because of it. Her eyes had opened wider; she wasn’t squinting at the world anymore. She was seeing him and—maybe for the first time—noticing that he was a handsome man.

Good looks, his mother always said, were an advantage. Like being a good liar, they gave a man a leg up in the world. Right now Linda was thinking that maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to live on an island with a handsome man who paid all the bills.

“Who did it?” she asked.

“What?”

“Who killed your sister?”

“Her boyfriend.”

The man had beaten Daphne’s face with his fists, shattering her jaw and cheekbones and even the sockets of her eyes, and with a bowie knife he slashed crisscrossing wounds across her chest and left her to bleed. Willis had searched out the metro section reporter, who was willing to describe the scene only when he told him he was her brother.

“It could happen to any girl. Alone like she was.”

She pulled away from the door, her fear rekindled.

“I’d never hurt you, Linda, but there’s guys… You must be careful.”

He was too tired to make the pretty speech that would express the depth of his commitment to her safety. “Just trust me—you don’t have to be afraid anymore.”

Tired though he was, he could not go back into the house and lie beside Madora. Instead he sat with Linda and talked to her for hours. She asked about Antigua, and he described the kind of place he thought the island might be, remembering movies and television and ads in magazines. When she was asleep he dampened a cloth with water and wiped the chicken grease from around her lips. As he was leaving the trailer he picked the bits and pieces of the tuna sandwich off the floor and dropped them into the trash with the bones of their chicken dinner and the paper plates. He dumped the trash in the can behind the carport.

It was after midnight and the moon had gone, abandoning the empty landscape to the stars’ surveillance. The air was bone-chillingly cold, as it often was in dry desert country in the deep night hours. Though he knew the chaparral was full of small life, he could not feel its presence. He seemed to be the only living creature under the indifferent stars.

He leaned against the hood of the Tahoe, and his mind, set free, circled back to the story of his sister, and he wished he had not told Linda about her. Who was Linda to him, really, that he should tell her the story closest to his heart? He knew what his mother would say. She would warn him to be cautious with girls. They were foolish and greedy and could not be trusted. That was probably why he liked the old ladies he cared for. Their minds rambled into parts
unknown, but in their sweet withered expressions he saw their gratitude.

The longing for his mother came upon him again. He had believed in her in a way he doubted most boys and young men did these days. He wore his hair long because she liked it that way, and it soothed her mind to comb and braid it, sometimes working in bits of bright ribbon and beads from a broken necklace. She said he was beautiful. He laughed aloud now, remembering how upset that word,
beautiful
, had made him before he understood the power it gave him.

You can have the world, Willis. A few well-told lies and a beautiful face will get you anything you want.

After she died, Willis had not sold the house immediately. Instead, he chucked the boarders out, and after that it was a month before he settled on a plan for his life. Until then, he walked about the rooms mourning his mother and looking for her ghost in dark corners.

“I’ll never leave you, Willis. I promise if you look, you’ll find me.”

Sometimes he saw her in old ladies’ faces, but never for long enough. Eventually he realized what these passing glimpses meant. Even his mother could not be trusted, not completely. In the end, it was all up to Willis. The weight of responsibility weighed heavy upon him.