Bebe Moore Campbell (29 page)

“And with all that, he still supports you? Maybe
you
have the issues.”

I let that sink in.

“You’re lucky,” Bethany said. “If this doesn’t work, I’ll have to walk away. And then what will happen? She’ll become homeless. I’ll have to accept that, right? I’ll have to accept the fact that I gave birth to the crazy lady and people will laugh at her and exploit her and be afraid of her and not want to be around her. Because if I don’t walk away, she’ll end up killing me. So the program has to work, because this is my last go-round. After this, I give up.”

I sat still, listening to Bethany but not believing that she’d give up on Angelica under any circumstances. She would stagger on, dragging her child and all the fractured pieces of herself behind her. I gave her hand a squeeze. I am lucky, I thought.

“You don’t think I could walk away, do you?”

“No,” I said.

“But don’t we have to, at some point? I mean, are we supposed to take care of them for the rest of their lives? Do we owe them that?”

“Oh, God, Bethany. I don’t want to think about it. Let’s just get through this.”

We both looked up when we heard the shouting. A rousing game of swimming pool dodgeball was under way. Angelica and Trina darted back and forth with the other swimmers. Margaret’s boys were not only discreet, they got A+ in security. They flanked Trina and Angelica while they played the game and later when they were swimming and floating. The girls had only to move inches from the pool, and they were instantly trailed. But Angelica and Trina didn’t try to go anywhere. They played in the water as long as we let them, and after they got out they collapsed on the plastic chairs, stretching their legs out in front of them, and devoured the potato chips that Margaret set out. I turned my head. When I looked back, Trina was draining a can of Coke.

When I told Brad about Trina’s caffeine jolt, he looked disturbed. “Obviously every house isn’t as strict as Jean’s about nutrition and stimulants. This was an emergency situation. We won’t be staying here long, tonight or tomorrow morning at the latest. I’m sure we’ll have the car by then.”

AS IT TURNED OUT, THE CAR WASN’T READY IN THE MORNing. The Volvo had been towed to a garage in town. It was late that afternoon before Brad received a phone call from the mechanic.

“Transmission,” he said, and even I recognized that as bad news when I heard it. Two or three days would be needed to repair it.

“You can stay here, no problem,” Margaret said.

“You ever meet anybody so goddamn cheerful in all your life?” Bethany asked me later, when we were sitting alone on the back patio. The girls were with Brad and Jean, doing yoga. “I mean, if six people, two of them mentally ill, came to my house unexpectedly, I’d be giving them the number for Motel Six. I don’t know why anybody would sign up for this. Not that I’m not grateful.”

“I get the impression that the program recruits from within. So don’t be surprised if we’re asked to take in people after the girls are better,” I said.

After the girls are better.
What a beacon those words were. Our world would expand. We would be givers. We could be human again.

Angelica and Trina returned from yoga and shared a cigarette break. They wandered through the yard and chose a spot where they could sit near each other. They appeared to be having a conversation and laughed at times. They were discovering each other, maybe becoming friends. Trina hadn’t made a friend in a long time, and she’d lost most of her old ones.

“Wouldn’t that be funny,” Bethany said when I mentioned it.

There were no barracks this time. That first night, Bethany, Angelica, and Jean were given a room right next to the one I shared with Trina and Brad. Trina didn’t protest Brad’s presence, although she asked to sleep next to me. Brad put her in the middle of the three single beds. When he went into the bathroom, I could hear Trina mumbling to herself. “Are you talking to me?” I asked.

“I’m saying my prayers.”

SINCE MARGARET’S HOUSE WASN’T IN THE HEALTH BAR industry, Jean gathered the girls together for what she termed a “group session” right before dinner. Jean, who’d been vacillating between a mental stupor and fits of self-flagellation since Eddie’s call, appeared to rally. Never mind that Angelica was more likely to retreat into her shell of self-damage and mayhem than she was to be introspective, group was on the agenda, so group it was. They went into a room in the back of the house, closed the door, and didn’t come out for two hours.

After dinner, the doorbell began ringing. “Summer school buddies,” Margaret dubbed the friends of her children who sought them out, carrying laptops and books as they trailed through the hall that led to the teenagers’ bedrooms.

Trina and Angelica sat on the sofa, watching a movie and talking. I could see them from where I sat in the kitchen. Margaret’s daughter came to her, carrying her math book. Margaret shooed her away.

“Do you need help?” I heard Trina ask. The girl showed her the work. “I love geometry. This is how you do it.” She explained the steps of the problem to Margaret’s daughter and patiently answered her questions. It was an ordinary interaction, lasting no more than ten minutes, but it lifted me through the roof.

Almost as soon as Trina had finished working on the problem, a group of young people trailed into the family room, plopped down on the sofa, chairs, and floor, and began watching television. Trina and Angelica were part of the group. Margaret was passing them snacks and sodas when Jean rushed in, followed by Brad. There were Cokes on the tray. I meant to say something about that. Jean beckoned to me.

“We need to talk,” she said.

“I’ll watch the girls,” Margaret said.

We went into the kitchen, where I could still see Trina.

“The police came back,” Jean said.

Brad folded his arms across his chest, lowered his head a bit.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Eddie called me. The police just left our house. Somebody saw us with Trina.”

“You mean the woman in the car?”

She shook her head. “No. When she was at our house. Somebody saw Trina and me the day we were walking. She started to run away, so I chased her and grabbed her arm. Somebody saw me pulling on her. I don’t remember any cars, but I guess one must have passed us that I didn’t notice.”

“You didn’t tell me about that,” Brad said.

“It was over in three seconds. She didn’t run that far. There was never any danger. It’s happened before with other people. I’ve never told you about those times either.”

“Well, you should have. Why did you take her to the road? It was too soon for that. You’re the first stop, dammit,” Brad said.

“I didn’t mean—”

“What the hell are you talking about, you
didn’t mean
? You’ve jeopardized everybody, the entire program. Jesus!”

Jean’s mouth twitched. She looked down at her feet.

“What did you learn in training, huh? Keep away from people. It’s like a commandment.”

Her mouth twisted just a little, and then she was right in his face, snarling like a pit bull. “Don’t you dare talk like that to me. I give up my time and take the same risks you do.”

So that’s how she was. She wore the calm Earth Mother brand well, but there in the dark she morphed into a spitfire right before my eyes.

“I have to go to the bathroom,” I heard Trina say. I watched her walk down the hall.

“Look, the car is going to be ready tomorrow,” Brad said, his voice lower, his tone softer. He looked at Jean. “We’re about six hours from your house, six hours from the site. We’ll drop off Trina and Angelica at the site and take the car back to your house. We’ll see the police and explain what happened, leaving out a few details.”

Jean didn’t answer. Brad looked at me. “What do you think?”

“I don’t know.” The idea that the police were looking for us was one I still couldn’t process.

“Tea? Coffee?” Margaret held up a cup. I looked into the family room and didn’t see Trina or Angelica.

“Tea,” I said.

“What do you want in it?”

“Sugar. I’ll get it.”

Minutes later, cup of tea in hand, I knocked on the bathroom door. No answer. Knocked again and went in. The bathroom was empty; the window was open.

“Trina! Trina!” As I called, I raced from room to room.

“What’s the matter?” Margaret asked, coming out of the kitchen.

“I can’t find Trina.”

“Maybe she’s with one of the kids.”

Behind me I heard Bethany, calling Angelica.

We rushed from room to room. No Trina. No Angelica. I heard Margaret loudly asking her children if they’d seen the girls. Which of their friends had left?

Justin.

“Oh, goodness!” said Margaret.

Brad and Jean were waiting for us when we returned to the kitchen. One look at their faces told me both girls were gone. “It’s that blond boy,” Margaret said to Bethany and me. I remembered him.

I heard Margaret’s children talking. I heard the word
stoner.

Bethany grabbed my hand. The way she squeezed was like screaming.

My cell phone rang. It was Frances. “I’ve been calling and calling. What’s wrong with your phone?” she asked.

As soon as I heard her voice, I started crying. She couldn’t make out what I was saying.

“What’s wrong?” she kept asking. “Where are you?”

I just cried some more until I could say good-bye and hang up.

Jean stayed behind in case, by some miracle, the girls returned. Bethany and I got in Margaret’s SUV. Brad drove. Backing out of the driveway, he caught my eye in the rearview mirror, then looked away.

She’sgoneshe’sgoneshe’sgone.
Same sinking feeling as that time at the flower market when she had wandered off while I was bargaining for birds-of-paradise. I looked at Bethany; she stared back at me. By now we should have been used to losing our children. But really, when does that time come?

26

THE BLOND BOY LIVED WAY PAST WHERE THE PRETTY flowers grew. Even in the dark, I could see that the lawn in front of his house was more dirt than grass, and what grass there was appeared half dead. There were sheets at the windows, dingy and torn. Paint was peeling all around the sides of the house; the ledges of the windows were the worst. The wood on the door was splintered; no one answered when we rang the bell. So the four of us stood there, trying to come up with a magic word.

Nobody really knew where to go next, but Brad pretended he did. Around the corner. Around the next corner. To his right, his left. The park, the 7-Eleven;
zoom, zoom, zoom,
as if speed meant being in charge. That resolute chin looked as though it were made of chiseled rock. Bethany and I sat in the back. She held her head. I kept pressing down on the area above her thumb, but the acupressure wasn’t working. We drove to a mall, which by LA standards wasn’t very large. The four of us fanned out and did a thirty-minute search. Like a storm trooper, I marched into and out of the hot girls’ clothing stores that Trina favored when she was manic. Saleswomen flinched when they saw me coming, and shoppers stepped aside. Have you seen a girl, two girls, one is white and the other is . . . about so tall and so big and very pretty and—No? Sorry. I raced back to the car, trying to tell myself that Trina would be waiting for me, because I needed something to keep my legs moving, my heart pumping. But Trina wasn’t there, and neither was Angelica.

Bethany was the last person to return; she was panting, her movements labored. She seemed to favor her left leg.

“You okay?” I asked her.

“Are you kidding?”

“Don’t you fall apart on me,” I said.

“We’re going to find them,” Brad said. “I’ve put out an alert. We have other people in this area. It’s not just us looking for her.” His voice was conversational, but the vein in his neck was throbbing. He was in charge again.

“Well, then, find them,” I said. “Find them before anything bad happens. Find them so this will turn into an amusing little anecdote I can tell at select cocktail parties. Okay? You’re trained, aren’t you?”

“This in no way reflects on the program,” Brad said. “These things happen. We’re dealing with—”

“I know what we’re dealing with, Brad.”

“This place isn’t that big, compared to LA,” Margaret said. She started going on and on about her son, how he used to run away when his meds weren’t right. Even the happy endings were irritating at this point. I saw Bethany wincing.

“Margaret,” I said, “your voice is too loud. Bethany has a migraine.”

“Oh, goodness. Sorry. There’s another place,” Margaret went on, her volume turned down, “where all the kids hang out. A hamburger joint. Not far away. Well, not all the kids.”

No, just the black kids with gangbanger and teenage-pregnancy aspirations. A mile from the mall, we crossed tracks and landed on the dark side of town.
Depressed area
didn’t begin to describe the urban blight that surrounded Woodie’s Hamburgers, which appeared to be the only survivor of an economic bomb that had blown up an entire block. The buildings adjacent to Woodie’s were boarded-up tragedies. Woodie’s exterior was none too prepossessing: The front was dirt-colored and sprayed with graffiti, a crack ran from one end of a large picture window to the other. The interior consisted of a scarred counter, a few booths, and a couple of tables and chairs, some of them broken. There was a greasy fry kitchen in full view of the clientele. Rap music blared, the lyrics more profane than poetic. The young people who looked up when I walked in—and kept checking me out the entire time I stood there— may have been teenagers, but their souls were much older.

“Jesus,” Bethany said, inhaling sharply. She was standing next to Brad, who was making his own quiet assessment.

I was about to return to the car in defeat when I heard the woman behind the counter.

“Margaret, you looking for your son?”

She was scraping well-done burgers from a grill and lowering a steel basket of French fries into scalding grease. The woman was large and moved slowly, and I could tell that none of the patrons would even think about giving her a hard time. Her quick glance sized me up efficiently.

“Charlene,” Margaret said. “How are you?”

“I’m doing all right. How about you?”

“I’m good. No, not my son. We’re looking for two young women.”

“How’s he doing?”

“Much better, thank you.”

“They was in here.”

Bethany clutched my hand.

“A white girl, a white boy, and a light skin-ded girl who favor that lady,” she said, pointing to me, “came in here about thirty minutes ago. They left in a hurry.”

“Did they happen to say where they were going?” I asked.

Charlene shook her head. “They was looking for something.”

“Like what?” I asked.

“What do white boys come down here looking for?”

Our eyes met. “What were they looking for specifically?”

She turned around to check the food, then faced us. “They wanted some weed, mostly. The white girl wanted some meth.” She looked at Margaret. “They kids like your son?”

“Our children have mental illnesses too,” I said.

“Had me an auntie like that. She was—uh, mentally ill.” Charlene had a completely different accent for the words
mentally ill:
proper, refined, an educated woman’s language. She was used to saying
crazy.

“So, are you all like a club or something like that?” Charlene asked.

“No,” I said.

I felt Bethany’s body brushing against mine. “The white girl, how did she seem?”

“She wasn’t talking much.”

Margaret thanked Charlene. We headed toward the door.

“Chasing them down don’t do no good. Just wear you out,” Charlene said.

“I’m her mother,” I said.

“Mamas wear out too.”

“My son Conrad used to hang out at that place,” Margaret said when we were back in the car. “He made all his weed connections there. I met Charlene when I used to go looking for him. When he moved up to meth, the dealers were on the white side of town. Equal opportunity, my dear,” Margaret said.

“Every time Angelica seems to have kicked meth, it turns out she was only on vacation. It’s a hard, hard drug,” Bethany said.

Maybe I should have fallen on my knees right then and there and thanked God it was marijuana Trina was after and not something that would whiplash her and leave her reeling. But marijuana could do that to her. Marijuana and no meds equaled mania plus delusions plus paranoia. Speed and crack would have been worse, but a trip to hell is a trip to hell, no matter what’s taking you there.

Brad, Bethany, and I agreed that it didn’t make sense to drive back to Justin’s house when he, Angelica, and Trina were either parked somewhere in his car smoking weed or else driving around looking for meth. But Margaret said we should go there and wait, in case they returned.

“They wouldn’t smoke at his house, would they?” I asked.

“A lot goes on over there,” Margaret said.

After Margaret gave us directions for getting to the bus station, the train station, and a couple of other weed-friendly places that the young local like-to-get-high people knew about, we dropped her off at Justin’s house, where she’d volunteered to wait while we drove around. Our efforts proved futile. After about forty-five minutes, we returned. Margaret and Justin were standing on the walkway that led to the house.

I could tell that Justin was high. He wasn’t cool enough to disguise his spacy expression and the teenybopper buzz that glazed his eyes.

“Where are our daughters?” I asked him.

“They, uh—I was gonna . . .” He looked from Bethany to me, back and forth, like the branch of a thin sapling being blown by the wind. His eyes settled on Bethany’s. “Angelica hooked up with this dude at Woodie’s. She left with him.”

“Where did they go?” Bethany asked.

“I don’t know. I don’t know. The guy said he’d bring her right back, but we waited and—uh—”

“Did they go to get meth?”

“I don’t know.”

“Don’t lie to me, you little shit,” Bethany said. “She doesn’t have any money for drugs. Do you know what that means?”

He stood there frozen.

“I could have you arrested for possession,” she said.

“Take it easy,” Brad said. He faced Justin. “Truth, dude.” There was something threatening in Brad’s tone. Justin didn’t look him in his eyes.

“Yeah, they went to score some meth.”

“Where?” Brad asked. He moved closer to Justin. Brad’s chest seemed to have expanded.

“This dude they call Rocco has a place.”

“Do you know where it is?”

“I can’t—”

“You don’t have to be involved. Just tell us where it is,” Brad said.

“Did my daughter go with her?” I asked.

“She left.”

“Where did she go?”

“When we were at Mrs. Schultz’s house, she asked me if I had any chronic—uh, any marijuana. So I told her I didn’t have any but I knew where we could go get some. And she said not to tell you, that we would be back before you noticed that we were gone. So—”

“Where is she now?”

“After we left Woodie’s, we—uh, went to the park and . . .” He lifted his hands up, let them fall, scanned my face, and looked at Margaret. “I mean . . . I was bringing her back to your house. We were on our way.” He glanced at me. “But we got to the red light and she jumped out of the car. I tried to find her but the light was still red, and by the time it turned green she was gone.”

Gonegonegonegonegonegonegone.

I had my hands on him before I could draw my next breath. “Where did she go?”

“Keri.” This from Brad. It took effort for him to loosen my grip on Justin’s arm.

I let go of Justin, but not before I completely blew his high.

“Where did she go?”

“After the light changed, I drove around looking for her. I saw her get in a car with two dudes. I tried to chase them down, but they took off.”

My knees buckled. I caught hold of Justin’s shirt where it covered his belly. I held on, trying not to feel the net that was coming down over me, the rope growing tighter around my wrists. Angelica had warned me about the slave catchers. What she didn’t know, what I should have realized, was that I’d never left the plantation.