Guardian (12 page)

By the time we get to the main event, he's asleep with his arm across his eyes. The door is right there. But I don't use it.

Chapter 12

We drive through Tallahassee, Mobile, Lafayette, Houston. From hammocks to wetlands to oil derricks. When we cross the Colorado River, I feel something break loose inside me. I think it's my connection to Florida and the past. It feels great to cross a river and forget all those homes and families that didn't want me. I realize I don't even care if Stephanie is alive or dead. The only tie I can't seem to break is with Jessie. I think about her all the time, for some crazy reason.

Just outside Phoenix, we sell the van, motorcycle, and surveillance equipment. He buys a used Malibu for nine hundred dollars and pockets the profits. Now if anyone's looking for Florida plates, we won't have them.

“Are we running out of money?” I shout over the wind. The AC in the Malibu doesn't work so good.

“I have money,” he says. In Lafayette, he cut his hair off and dyed it a sandy brown color. So now he looks a lot more like me. He looks nothing like an angel at this point, in his slept-in shirt and scruffy little beard. When I'm allowed to talk to people, he has me give my name as Salvatore instead of LaSalle, the name they gave me in the orphanage. I think it's a little weird he's disguising himself and using his real name, but I guess if he was good at being a criminal he never would have gone to prison.

“What do you do?” I'm amazed I hadn't thought to ask that before.

“I'm a landscaper,” he says. His hands shift on the wheel, thumbs turning up. His whole body relaxes when he thinks about it. “I had my own company for a year. I'm really good at it. The customers like me, I love the outdoors, and I'm very particular about—what's wrong, Hunter? Why are you crying?”

I'm slumped, head between my knees, heaving out sobs. “Damn you!” I choke out. “You really are my father!”

We sit on huge sandstone boulders in the middle of the desert, eating sandwiches wrapped in waxed paper, drinking the runoff from a bag of ice we bought a few miles back. Cowboy dozes in the sun nearby. I still think about making a run for it, but the feeling is kind of fading. For one thing, I feel like I need to ask some things and I feel like the time is now.

“Tell me about my mother,” I say.

He looks up, guilty and startled. “Huh?”

The desert has put me in a weird mood. I'm so far from home now and Arizona looks like another planet. There's nothing but miles of red dirt and red rocks with little clumps of sagebrush and some kind of menacing mountains off in the distance. The sky above us is like a flat blue ceiling. I feel reckless here, like you do in a dream, when on some level, you know nothing you do really matters.

“Hunter, look. What happened to your mother was an accident. I paid for …”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I say, hefting up the ice bag and sucking water through the hole he punched in it. He has good survival ideas and instincts. “I'm not interested in that,” I lie. “I want to know what my mother was like.”

Something about the angle of the sun has given us long black shadows that cross. He starts slapping his pockets, looking for cigarettes that aren't there. “What do you want to know?”

“What was her name?”

His body actually flinches, like I hit him. “Oh, jeez, Hunter. You don't know her name?”

I hold his eyes. “How would I?”

“Oh, Christ. Courtney. Her name was Courtney. Courtney Driscoll.” He pauses, and looks down. “When I say her full name like that, it takes me back to the trial.”

No, this is MY therapy session
. The wind is blowing in rhythmic gusts, and I tip my head back to let it cool my face. “What was she like?”

“Like?”

“What did she look like? Did she look like me?” The wind gets into my eyes and makes them tear up.

He scans my face. “Her hair was the same color as yours. And she was short, you know, built like you—uh—”

“Scrawny?”

“You're not scrawny! You just don't have a big frame.”

“Was she smart?”

“Smart?”

“Smart! Why are you repeating all the questions like that?”

He takes a big bite of sandwich. “They just seem like weird questions! And they make me feel bad. I loved her at one time and I … hurt her. I don't want to think about it.”

“Do you know everything about
your
father and mother?”

“Well, of course. I grew up with—”

“I grew up with nothing! No name, no family, no mother, no cousins, no family photo album, no Thanksgiving turkey, no—”

“Stop!” He actually puts his hands over his ears. “Jeez!”

I keep hammering. I'm not scared of him at all right now. “You're doing all this because you want to make it up to me. Right? Well, this is where you start. Whatever pieces of my jigsaw puzzle you've got, I want them. Right now.”

He looks at me like I scare him. The wind tosses his hair around. When he speaks again his voice is very low. “I met Courtney in high school.”

“Which one?”

“Piper. I was a junior and she was a freshman. She wore glasses. She sang in the chorus. Frankly, she was one of those girls you'd never notice. You know what I mean? Neat, clean, quiet. Boring. Ran with a pack of losers—a fat girl, a girl who was legally blind, you know what I'm saying.”

“She was a nerd. Was she smart?”

“Very. Got all A's and stuff. Honors this and honors that. Always holding a book up to her chest like a shield.”

“And you? What kind of a kid were you?”

“Would-be biker. I already had my first bike, a little Harley 883—”

“When you were just a junior in high school? How'd you afford that?”

“I don't know.” His eyes shift away. “Anyway, I thought I was hot stuff. Wore leather, slouched in doorways, gave everyone attitude. I probably looked like a big jerk. I hardly came to school, drank beer, smoked pot, broke hearts—that kind of thing.”

We laugh together. “So how did someone like you hook up with someone like her? You needed her for your heartbreaking quota? You had a bet with your friends?”

“Who said I had friends? No, here's the weird thing, Hunter. She came after me. One day I was just hanging around my locker and she gave me a plate of brownies she'd made in home ec.”

My heart aches for Courtney Driscoll, bringing her brownies to the school bad boy. I think about Carolina, how crazy I was about her for a while there. “So you took advantage of her, right?”

“No! Not right away! I guess I thought she was out of her mind. I hardly even thought of Courtney as a girl. My idea of a girl was something with blond hair, black roots, and busting out of a tube top. But Courtney was on a mission to make me notice her. A couple days later she asked me for a ride on the bike.”

“And?” Even though this makes me uncomfortable, I pretend it doesn't so I'll hear everything.

“She didn't hold me by the waist. She put her hands down on my legs. Well, I'm slow, but I'm not that slow.”

“So
then
you took advantage of her?”

“Sure. I'm a human being, after all. The next day in school, her shield was dropped and she had on a sweater instead of the stiff shirts she'd been wearing. She had—a good figure. I started thinking she was really pretty.”

“Don't go into a bunch of details about the sex.”

“I wasn't going to.” He laughs. “Anyway, we had a couple of dates and both our parents went crazy. Her father thought I was a hood.”

“A what?”

“A bad guy. A ne'er-do-well. Like a gangbanger now.”

“Oh, okay.”

“But that, like, sealed the deal for both of us. We had a good thing going, which you don't want to hear about, and we were making our parents mad at the same time. Teenager heaven.”

“Why would your parents object to her?”

“Huh?” The eyes slide away again.

“She was a nice girl, a good student. Why would they object to her?”

“Uh, I don't know. It's getting hot. Let's talk some more while we drive. We should be getting—”

“I want to know!”

“I don't know, Hunter. Maybe because she was Protestant and they were Catholic. I really don't know.”

“Yes, you do. What was wrong with her? What are you keeping from me?”

“Nothing! You know how parents are. They thought she was after … I really don't know.”

I think back to the last detail that didn't make sense. Him having a motorcycle as soon as he was old enough. “Your parents had money!” I shout like an accusation.

“No!” he says, like it is one. “I mean they weren't exactly poor.…”

“You were some kind of little rich kid acting tough with your leather and your bike! Weren't you? My mom was just middle class and your parents had a fit.”

Busted, he leans back on his elbows and considers the big blue sky. “Jeez, Hunter, it's like you were there.”

We sit for a while, in the rhythmic wind. I'm not done, but I want to let him rest. He reaches over and scratches Cowboy behind the ears. Cowboy shakes his head violently and resumes his nap.

“And then she got pregnant,” I say after a while.

“Hunter, I'm hot. Let's at least drive and talk.”

“No, I'm afraid you'll stop. This stuff is very important to me.”

He sighs like a child. “Then she got pregnant.”

I can hardly breathe. This is like I'm standing in the doorway of the bank vault and no alarm is ringing. I can take what I want.

“I was seventeen, Hunter. I didn't want to marry your mother. But—abortion, forget it. I couldn't stand that idea. Even then—you were my child. I couldn't give away my child. I don't know how other people do it. I thought my parents would help me raise you.”

I miss some of this because I want to figure his age. He's only thirty. “Your family? What about her family?”

“They wanted Courtney to put you up for adoption.” His eyes have gotten shifty and careful again. The wind picks up suddenly and blows hard and steady.

“What did Courtney want?” I lean forward to make him look me in the eye.

“She wanted to do that too. Put you up for adoption. I was the only one who—”

“But I ended up with her, right? I was with her the night you came into my room. Right before she did adopt me out. But for my first four years I was with her.”

“It was all a big legal mess, Hunter. I don't understand half of it. After you were born, at the hospital, there were papers about giving you up for adoption. I said I wouldn't do it. Everybody thought I'd cave but I didn't. So I had the right, somehow, to block Courtney, but that didn't mean I could be the custodial parent because of some other stuff I had.”

“What stuff?”

“I'd been arrested a couple of times. Bad boy, remember?”

“So you had the power to force her to keep me? Is that what you're saying?”

“That's how it worked out. I still don't totally understand. I was the one who wanted you—but then her parents jumped in and said they'd take you before they'd let my parents take you—the court ruled and you went to them. I had to take a blood test and go to another court just to visit you, which they still made it really hard to do. But I paid child support and everything. I was trying to keep my rights. And I figured if I worked hard and didn't have any more arrests—”

“What were you arrested for?”

“Just baby junk. Shoplifting. Possession. I don't know.”

Nothing like later, when it was murder
. “And you were trying to get the custody eventually.”

“But I couldn't and then somehow when you were four, she tried to live on her own and she screwed up and then they told her she should give you up. Nobody would help me, my parents, her parents. I wanted you, but nobody would help me.”

I give him a minute. He needs a minute. He collects all our lunch trash and folds it up, creasing the waxed paper. He pours the rest of the melted ice on the ground. I've noticed in our travels, he never litters.

“Will you tell me the rest?” I ask in a low voice. “Will you tell me how she died?”

He looks at me a long time, making his decision. I know he'll decide to trust me. What I don't expect is the way his eyes now fill up with tears, like when you dig a hole in the beach and water seeps in from underneath. He brushes them off but more come back. “I decided the thing to do was marry her. I thought she would do it and then I knew I'd have some real legal control. And maybe as a couple we'd have a stronger position legally. That's when I went to see you. I told you I was going to marry your mother and that I'd be able to watch over you all your life.”

Now my eyes fill up because that's the phrase I remember. “And that's where you said ‘guardian' to me and I got the whole angel idea.”

“Right.”

“And later you exploited that.” I need to say this even though he's crying.

“I did.”

“So what happened with my mother?”

“She wasn't buying what I was selling. I begged her, if she wouldn't marry me to just give you to me … anything so you wouldn't get …”

“Lost.”

“Yes!”

“And?”

“She had changed, Hunter. She was so angry at me. I cost her everything. College, her future. All because of what I did in the hospital. She hated me. She said the best way to get revenge was to make sure I never got my hands on you again and that she was damn well going to dump you into the system. She was, like, laughing at my feelings for you. Like it was something stupid. Like …” He coughs.

“Right.”

The cough turns into a sob. I keep waiting, because I want to hear the end. I have a right to hear the end. “I lost control. I was so mad. She was, like, taunting me and I lost control.…”