Little Girl Gone Read online

  She heard Willis come around the corner of the carport, his boots crunching in the gravel. He opened the screen door and let it slam behind him. He carried a bundle in his arms, wrapped in a flannel blanket.

  “Do you remember what I told you?”

  She nodded, taking the baby from him.

  “When you’re done, put him in that nightgown thing with the cord at the bottom.” Willis’s black hair had come out of its ponytail and hung down thick and straight on either side of his handsome face, casting shadows and deepening the lines of exhaustion that accentuated the slant of his cheekbones. He looked like John the Baptist in a picture on the wall of the Sunday school Madora attended as a child.

  In Madora’s arms, the newborn was light, a feather in a balloon wrapped in tissue.

  “He’s so small.”

  “Around six pounds, I’d guess. Not bad, considering.”

  “How’s Linda?”

  “Passed out, but she’ll be okay. She tore bad, so I had to give her more pills than I wanted. I stitched her, though. No problemo.” He walked out of the tiny kitchen toward the back of the house, his voice muffled through his sweat-stained shirt as he pulled it over his head. “While I’m gone I want you to go in there and give her a good wash and change the sheets. I bought some of them female napkin things. She’ll need those.”

  “How long will you be gone?”

  He didn’t answer.

  The baby in Madora’s arms did not feel as she remembered her baby dolls had, the snug way their rubber bottoms had rested in the curve of her arm when she was seven years old. Her grip on this shapeless mass was uncertain, and it was a relief to lay him on the towel beside the sink. She pulled back an edge of the thin blanket so she could see his face. She was sorry to think he was ugly, but it was the truth. His low forehead was covered with black hair, his nose squashy, and his skin as red and scratched as if he’d been in a playground fight. She laid her index finger on his cheek and his puffy eyelids fluttered—such thick black lashes!—and opened just enough so that Madora could see that his eyes were the color of deep water.

  “You had a rough time, didn’t you, little guy?” Her voice appeared to startle him. He jerked his arms and legs and made Madora laugh. At the sound, his eyes widened. She smiled at him and put her face close, wanting him to see her smile, as if this might go some way toward assuring him a happy life.

  Be lucky, she thought.

  As Willis had instructed, she ran a few inches of warm water into the plastic tub in the sink and unwrapped the blanket from around the baby’s body. She stifled a wash of disgust at the sight of his flesh painted with a sticky slime of blood and a white, almost cheesy substance. An inch of tied-off umbilicus hung from his stomach. Madora wished she knew if all babies looked this awful in the first moments of life. It would be a disaster and ruin all Willis’s plans if he tried to give the baby boy to the lawyer and he was rejected. Willis was in a saving frenzy, talking about medical school and how much he needed the lawyer’s twenty-five thousand in cash.

  When the water touched the boy, he went rigid and yelped—a cracking huff of surprise that subsided when his chest and arms and legs submerged. After a moment, he seemed to like the water, and Madora wondered if it reminded him of the time before he was born. Did a baby in the womb feel imprisoned or safely cared for? It seemed like the older she got, the more often such crazy and unanswerable questions popped into her mind.

  She poured a minute drop of liquid soap into the palm of her hand and smoothed it over his saggy mottled skin. His eyes stayed locked on hers, hardly blinking. She was not sure if he actually saw her; still his fixed, deepwater stare had an absorbing intensity and she believed that he was memorizing her. A year from now, if she saw him in a stroller in a supermarket, he would look up at her, lock eyes, and know her.

  From the bathroom Madora heard the sound of shower water hitting the metal wall of the stall. Normally she didn’t like it when Willis used too much water, but this morning she would not mind if he took one of his long scalding showers and drained the tank.

  The slippery baby bundle rested on her forearm and she ran her fingers between each digit of his feet and hands. She lathered the thicket of black hair and felt the pulse beneath the softness at the back of his head. Willis had told her what this tender spot was called and warned her to be careful of it. She trembled with the fragility of his body, and her tears salted the warm water. Cradling his buttocks in her palm, she smoothed away the sticky residue of the birth canal, moving her fingers up under his chin and beneath his arms. From between his legs, a cloud of bubbles popped to the surface of the bath and Madora laughed.

  She lifted him from the water, long and limp and skinny; and as she did he cried again, a piercing sound Madora understood immediately as surprise and cold. She quickly wrapped him in a fresh towel and held him against her heart, patting and crooning soft assurances that he would soon be warm.

  No one needed to tell her how to hold him and pat him dry. The skill was born in her, an instinct. Since she held her first baby doll, she had wanted to be a mother. In high school, career day never interested her. Kay-Kay had talked about joining the army and called Madora a wuss because the idea did not appeal to her.

  The water sounds from the bathroom stopped, and the shower’s plastic door banged against the outside of the stall.

  “We have to hurry now,” she whispered, fiddling with the disposable diaper, determining front from back. “We don’t want to make Willis cross, do we?” In the dry air of the June morning, his hair was a dark nimbus, floating like the tag ends of sweet dreams from before he was born. Madora slipped the cotton gown over his head and tied it at the bottom with a drawstring, enclosing his feet. The gown was blue for a boy, though they had not known what the sex of the baby would be.

  It would have been dangerous to take Linda to a doctor, and so Willis had handled everything. From the perfection of this little boy, it seemed he’d been right when he said a doctor was not necessary. “All over the world women have babies without the help of doctors.”

  During her five months in the trailer Linda had never spoken about the baby’s father, even when Madora asked directly. Whoever he was, Madora knew he didn’t deserve anything as precious as the lamb in her arms. Nor did Linda. Willis had arranged for him to be adopted through an attorney who specialized in such matters, a friend of the nephew of one of Willis’s clients. The adoption attorney did not ask many questions and told Willis it would not be necessary for Linda to sign any papers. He would deliver the baby to his new parents. There would be a birth certificate with their names on it.

  He would not need to be fed immediately, according to Willis, but she hoped the lawyer had made arrangements just in case. There should be another person with him to hold this small creature and prepare a bottle when he cried. A pain cut through Madora when she imagined him strapped into a cold car seat, hungry and suffering and only hours old, just new in the world and passed from hand to hand like something bought in a store.

  Willis came into the kitchen wearing the Levi’s she’d pressed for him and the heavy denim shirt that was as dark as the baby’s eyes. He had combed back his hair and twisted it up on his head. He looked from the baby to her and smiled and lifted his soft, felt cowboy hat off a hook and put it on.

  In Madora’s experience even the most attractive people had imperfections—a bump on the bridge of the nose or one eyelid a little droopy—but Willis’s face had no such irregularities. The two sides matched exactly, and this balance gave his face not only beauty but also an appealing serenity because there was nothing about it that needed to be adjusted. The first time she saw him, he was standing in front of her on the porch of the old house in the desert. So beautiful and calm. She thought he must be an angel.

  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.”

  Chapter 3

  The 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.

  Chapter 4

  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.