Divisadero (12 page)

Before coming outside he
had been listening to Anna’s breathing in the dark trailer. She’d swept her arm
back during the night and had relaxed into all of the bed. She was leaner than
he was, but was used to American space. Asleep, Anna disappeared into her
world, where even she was a stranger, and Rafael found himself alone once more.
This was his night hour, when he was fully awake, conscious of the life of
those trees that circled the
fi
eld, the faint moon. Yet he was alone. The last time Rafael had laid
eyes on his father was the morning he had seen him walk from Aria
’
s grave. Rafael had needed him in the
months that followed, to coax him back into the world. But there was no communication
or evidence of his father’s whereabouts. There was a maze of small towns, even
cities, he could have been in. Rafael had become parentless. It was as if
neither of his parents could exist without the presence of the other. Rafael
had lost each wing of protection.

Anna came up behind him in
silence and put her hands on his shoulders.
You went away again.
No, I am still here.
Good, I want to talk to you about something.
To do with us...
Not us, she said.
Something about me.
Then suddenly Anna stopped thinking, her hesitation disap- peared. Ahead of
them a hare was peering from the border of darkness. She waited for it to take
a leap into the light. Curiosity, courage, it was what they both wished for
beneath their pounding hearts.

F
or
some years Claire had been living two distinct lives. During the week she had a
job in San Francisco with a lawyer named Vea, a senior deputy in the Of
fi
ce of the Public Defender. The work was
mostly arduous research, and Vea had walked Claire through the craft and
process of it, noting there was something carefully obsessive in this woman who
was able to recognize a mouse of information miles away. Then, on weekends,
Claire disappeared. She would drive out of the city to the farm south of
Petaluma and spend an hour or two of the Friday night with her father.

They sat and ate dinner
across from each other. She noticed how much older he seemed. She was aware of
how his clothes looked loose on him now, although he still appeared a severe
man, precise as a utility in the way he moved and the way he talked at the
kitchen table. He was the one who, in his twenties, had cleared most of the
land, working long days, and fought back coyotes and badgers that were
supposedly as ferocious as wolverines. She and Anna had heard that he’d once
tracked a cougar for several days with a pair of bluetick hounds that
eventually treed the two-hundred-pound animal, and that he had shot it out of
the branches. The girls had yearned for him to dramatize such incidents, turn them
into great adventures from his youth. But he had refused, always laconic and
silent about the landscape of his past. Even now, he and Claire circled the
episode that led to the absence of Anna in their lives, never speaking of it.
It was as if the loss of Anna had consumed him and then exhausted him, until he
had in some way concluded his emotion, the way he had probably done after the
death of his wife, when his daughters were too young to know about it. And even
if the pain and his
fi
erce love of Anna were still somewhere, loose in his skin, he and
this remaining daughter would now be silent about it. The last time Claire had
spoken of Anna, her father had raised his palm into the air with an awful plea
for her to stop. There was no longer
a closeness
between
him and Claire; whatever intimacy had once existed had always been engineered
by Anna.

During these visits Claire
would see him again for a brief moment the next morning, before she rode into
the hills with a rain slicker, water, and food for the next thirty-six hours in
a pannier. She and the horse climbed into hills that some part of her had
always believed were her true home. Here she was uninterpreted by family life,
could be dangerous to herself, feeling the thrill at coming upon a campsite at night
after being surrounded by a ground fog, that divine state of being half lost,
half bewildered, and conscious of a wisp of smoke from some camp
fi
re.

She risked everything out
there, taking narrow trails too fast in moonlight, swimming in turbulent river
currents, cantering over No Hands Bridge with the reins loose and her arms
outstretched. Her associates at work would barely have recognized her. Even her
father might not have, though he had witnessed this love of escape from her
youth. (She’d found him always to be a still man, rarely driving a car or
riding a horse.) Claire assumed some ancestor in her changeling blood had been
a horse person. She rose from her limp into the stirrup and was instantly free
of it. It was in this way that she discovered the greater distances in herself.

The
fi
rst time Claire had entered an endurance
race, she
’
d been thrown by her
horse and went careening down a rockstrewn slope. The animal stood there
patiently, in a cloud of red dust, as she managed to climb back on with a
dislocated shoulder. She continued for two miles before giving up and turning
with
an
un-bloodlike intelligence, something more to
do with reason and survival, to follow the yellow markers back to the camp at
Robinson Flat. The horse had balked as it descended a canyon and she had
already forgiven it. Horses had their sudden demons too. Someone rolled her a
joint, and she smoked that before she telephoned her father.

He got there an hour later
with a horse truck. He came up to her and saw in her eyes the look of a dog
who’d run too far and wild, injuring itself with a lack of knowing how much it
could take on or achieve. She told him it was nothing, but at the farm, when
she climbed out of the truck, she could hardly walk and he carried her into the
house. It was the
fi
rst time he had touched her in a year. He put her down on the long
kitchen table and pressed a hot towel around her shoulder, put his knee onto
her back, and torqued the shoulder up so that she burst into tears. When he did
it again she passed out.

When Claire woke, she was
where he had left her. There was a pillow under her head. She saw him sitting
on the old tartan sofa, watching her, for safety. She tried rolling to the
right and to the left. Then she got into her car and drove the forty minutes to
San Francisco, where she was expected at work the next day.

The Public Defender
’
s Of
fi
ce provided legal defence to those with no money, and Claire had
worked there for
fi
ve years. Aldo Vea, a state lawyer, had two assistants helping him
with research; she was one of them. Vea met Claire and Shaun every morning at a
café on Geary Street, and they ate while Vea discussed pending cases. He was
brilliant at
freewheeling
the possibilities,
conceiving and laying out angles for defence. By ninethirty they’d go off to
their phones, talking to anyone in the defendant’s past—school friends, lovers,
employers. Then they’d investigate the victim. There might be a hint of
violence in the victim’s past that could turn the case. They carried an obvious
notebook and a hidden microphone. They were better than cops, Vea said. And
they were a family. Claire knew everything about Shaun, and about Vea and his
family. When Vea’s wife was ill, Claire picked the kids up after school and
brought them along on stakeouts. When Shaun broke her silence about her growing
attraction to women, Claire and Vea had dinner with her and gave her a game
plan.

Claire would always turn
up on Monday mornings wearing a pastel-coloured dress. The homespun image and
the sense of defencelessness
was
important, Vea said,
but she suspected that he also liked it. She wore a ring she could move from
fi
nger to finger, depending on whom she was
interviewing. To men her dresses suggested gentleness and courtesy; she did not
appear to be in charge. If someone hit on her, the ring on her
fi
nger came into the foreground and she
’
d softly announce that she was pregnant.
(When one dangerous-looking sort quizzically responded,
‘
With child?
’
she lowered her head to hide
her smile. Now she was going to be treated like a Madonna.) She was supposed to
be a creature of empathy, revealing no moral stance, just easiness and
compassion. She knew the best times to get people to talk. Women were better on
the phone, because they could do something else at the same time. During
stakeouts, if curious neighbours knocked on her car window and asked what she
was doing, she’d point vaguely towards a house. ‘My boyfriend’s in there,
drunk,’ she’d say. ‘I had to get out. I’m waiting.’ ‘Can I get you something,
dear?’ they would ask.
‘No, thanks.’
She was dying for
coffee, but then she would have to pee. In stakeouts you lived in a state of
high awareness, and by the end of the day you were exhausted.

Most days Claire was
investigating the provenance of an insurance scam or a molestation case. What
the Public Defender
’
s Of
fi
ce did in their work was essentially
defend any indigent brought up on a criminal charge. Until the landmark case of
Gideon v. Wainright,
only the rich would get a lawyer. The Public
Defender
’
s Of
fi
ce had to respond to the police and the ‘evidence orgy’ that took
place after a crime was committed. The police believed that if they didn’t
solve the crime in three days, they were never going to. They rarely gave a
case more time than that, so they didn’t want complications or subtleties.
Public defenders were allowed to see the evidence only after the third day and
had to quickly
fi
nd witnesses and
fl
aws, to prove either that the client didn
’
t do it or didn
’
t
deserve to die. The latter applied to the penalty phase, and it was the only
time the defence was permitted to try to in
fl
uence the outcome. Claire had once
researched the history of a man who was up for the death penalty, and
discovered an earlier violent assault he had committed in the past, when he was
twenty. She found that he had attacked a man who had been viciously beating his
dog. Bingo. That turned out to be the detail that got him a life sentence, and
saved him from lethal injection. As Vea had said at the time, if it had been
discovered that he’d read all of Herman Melville, it would have had no effect,
but the mutt had returned to save him.

After work, Claire would
sometimes meet up with Vea for a drink at Fog City, watching that little oil
slick on his vodka martini curling dangerously. Aldo Vea was the most
principled man Claire knew, and he had taught her how to survive in this
profession of crime and retribution, how to accept the
fl
awed barrier between cause and effect,
how to see that the present continually altered the past, just as the past was
a strange inheritance that fell upside down into one
’
s
life like an image through a camera obscura. All that was consistent was a
principle. ‘You believe in the principle,’ Vea would say, ‘if you cannot
believe in the man. You meet monsters and you help defend them. You believe in
the principle of full justice. When a murderer
fi
ghts the death penalty,
he
is not
the one asking to be pardoned, he doesn
’
t deserve to
ask,
we
are the ones asking.’ Vea had been in Vietnam between the ages
of seventeen and nineteen, and he had seen the monster. He knew how the monster
could come upon you.

They would have that drink
at Fog City at the end of the day, and she would stop him from having one more.
If he drank more she would leave, and if he didn’t, she would stay and listen
to him. He always needed to wind down, always. He talked Vietnam. He talked out
the cases he was struggling over, but he was really talking Vietnam. One day
she began to tell him about what had happened all those years earlier between
her father and Coop, and how her sister had disappeared at that time. ‘Well,
these are not monsters,’ he said, waving his hand as if dismissing an eyelash.
‘There’s always damage collected in childhood.’ Vea was the only person Claire
talked to about where she came from. ‘Has she ever made contact with you?’
‘No.’ ‘Then there is still sadness in her life. Were you jealous of your
sister?’ ‘No.
Only once.’
If anyone calmed Claire and
defused her past, it was Vea. She wondered whether her father and Coop and Anna
seemed quaint to someone like him.

If she arrived too late at
Fog City and he was already drunk, she would not sit with him. Instead she
would take the car keys out of his pocket and wait until he struggled out of
the narrow booth and paid the bill. They would
fi
nd his car and she would drive him home,
calling his wife to let her know. In his driveway she would put the keys back
into his pocket and walk to the waiting taxi that she had ordered. She would
wave to Vea
’
s wife standing at
their door, who would yell, ‘Love you, Claire,’ as she got into her cab.
Vietnam.