Owen's Daughter (3 page)

After that she started drinking six-packs with Francisco, the barn manager. One day she passed clean out and woke up in an empty stall. Whether or not Francisco took advantage was a fuzzy area she tried not to think about. Instead she took two of Mama’s Vicodin and drank a half bottle of sparkling wine, fell asleep in the bathtub, and woke up in cold water, the room dark, nobody home. It was never just aspirin for a headache; she’d send in the bazookas.

At the rodeo where she was elected queen, Rocky showed up, blond and tall and dressed in chaps studded with Swarovski crystals. He was a champion bull rider who everyone said had ridden Dillinger to get his Professional Bull Riders ring of honor. People said he could ride a Maytag washing machine on the spin cycle. He was an Oklahoma boy, passing through Denver on his way to the next rodeo.

Sara was stunned by his flash and charmed by his sweet talk. Between two trailers, she threw herself at him.

“How old are you?” he asked between kisses.

“Seventeen,” she said, lying by a couple of months.

He pushed her away. “Y’all’re too young for me right now,” he said, “but you won’t be in a year,” and winked. “You wait for me, and I’ll see you then,” he said, and tipped his hat.

That gave her enough material for a year’s worth of dreams.

Stepdad Klaus Krieger had left Mama a wealthy widow. She drank hard for a couple of years and went on spending sprees. Skye lost track of how many times she dragged her boozy, weeping mother to bed. “Pour me another tequila, Sheila,” replaced “Mother.”

Then Mama married husband number three, Howard Young, that real estate baron. He bought Sara a canopy bed she was too old for and insisted on adopting her. They went to court and everything, declaring her father had abandoned her. Mama insisted she’d tried to find him, but Skye had always wondered if she’d tried her hardest. Four years later, after making a record number of bad real estate loans, old Howie hightailed it to Texas to lie low for a while. On a plane to Arizona, Mama read an article in the
Delta Skymiles
magazine on this plastic surgeon voted number one in the entire Southwest. First came the lipo. Then the face lift. Then the fat suctioned out of her knees and injected into the backs of her hands, a sign that her mother had truly gone off the deep end. When Sara told her that she’d been accepted to Stanford early admittance, her reply was, “Oh, honey, no. California sun is the worst! You’ll end up with more spots on your face than a Toll House cookie.”

It turned out Sara wouldn’t need the sun block. She graduated high school at the top of her class, with a baby bump under her graduation robe courtesy of Rocky Elliot, the pro rodeo bull rider from Weatherford, Oklahoma, who remembered her on his next pass through Denver. He was a tall, blond farm boy equipped with nothing but muscle in his cranium. One minute Sara was in love with a star, drinking cinnamon schnapps, dancing the two-step in whatever town the rodeo was in that month. The next she was on her knees puking her guts up into the toilet in a motel so cheap, she saw daylight through the floorboards.

Stanford was out the window. A
child
was growing inside her! She saw what she wanted to see—that Disney fairy tale of marrying an all-American, bona fide cowboy. Rocky promised her the kind of life she’d always dreamed of—a family all her own where the parents
stayed
married.

They did the deed in Vegas, a western-themed affair that cost six hundred and fifty dollars. Rocky talked her into pawning the diamond tennis bracelet poor old dead Klaus had given her for her thirteenth birthday. At the chapel, they were given the choice of a cowboy minister or a crazy miner minister. They opted for the crazy miner. Rocky’s mom, Rita, chain-smoked the entire time, jingling her plastic cup full of quarters, eager to get back to the slots. Sara’s mom was on her honeymoon with the plastic surgeon, husband number four.

When Sara gave birth to a daughter, she was determined her little girl would in no way end up like her. Gracie would go to the best preschool, attend church every Sunday wearing a straw hat with a yellow ribbon and, on her feet, white patent-leather shoes. She’d play only with high-class kids, and she’d take ballet lessons and learn to ride English. Skye still wanted that for her. But not long after Gracie was born, Rocky started disappearing for weeks at a time. When he was home, he’d drink sunup to sundown, take pills, or worse. After their marriage was over and Sara had the car accident, she’d called her mother and left a message: “Mama, I’m in trouble here, and I could use a hand. Rocky might get custody, but we both know he can’t manage it. If you take Gracie, I could do inpatient rehab. It’s either that or jail. Please, Mama. I’ll never ask you for anything again, I promise.”

Mama didn’t reply.

Getting sober meant she had to leave Gracie with someone. But nobody else would step up. Which meant anytime there was a rodeo, Rocky would leave Gracie with his mother, Rita, a compulsively gambling, boxed-wine-drinking, cafeteria Christian who could spend twelve hours straight in the casinos and smoked two packs a day. Her views on child raising? Kool-Aid built bones as well as cow’s milk. It was acceptable to feed Gracie Trix cereal three times a day because she liked it. And television, that great mother’s little helper, never hurt a flea, let alone a nearly-four-year-old taken from her mother.

So much could happen in nine months.

“Little Gee,” as Skye called her, was tomboy tough, talked early, and nothing held her back except for asthma. Rita promised she’d remember to refill Gracie’s inhaler prescription, and Rocky said he’d get home every weekend so she wouldn’t forget him.

So she left her little blond pumpkin there in Albuquerque at the Trailer Ranch. Grace Eleanor Elliot, who smiled like an angel and dressed up her plastic horses, brushing their tails until the hair fell out.

Any second now Rocky would pull up in his Ford 350 dually. Built Ford Tough rodeo sponsors gave him a new ride every couple of years. Even if he was wearing those cigarette leg Wranglers, another shiny belt buckle, and his Old Gringo Rockrazz boots, Skye was determined she wouldn’t sleep with him again. If she did, the divorce would take even longer. Plus, she’d be back to drinking and using within twenty-four hours.

You are not that person anymore, she told herself.

After a week at Cottonwoods, all this starting over gave her an idea, and she changed her name from Sara to Skye. Sara Kay sounded like the name of a twelve-year-old who pitched fits in order to get whatever she wanted. Skye was wide open. The new name marked her rebirth. Even Duncan approved.

That first week, she wondered how a woman of twenty-two could feel so worn out. One lesson she learned at Cottonwoods is that the truth is a trailer you drag behind you wherever you go. In every meeting they made you tell your story, out loud and over and over:
Hello, my name is Skye, and I am an alcoholic and an addict. I am someone not even a three-year-old can count on to fix her Cheerios every morning.
Shame was a powerful motivator. Gracie deserved better. Skye wanted her back permanently, and the only way was to get and stay sober.

Nights were the hardest time at Cottonwoods, and not just because there was no Ambien allowed. As she lay there sober, in the dark, lights out, all her mistakes reared up to haunt her. If it hadn’t been for “Tesuque,” the Hollywood director who paid for rehab, Gracie could have ended up standing at a gravestone reading the short version of her mother’s life:

Sara
Kay
Elliot

died
age
twenty-two

former
rodeo
queen,
alcoholic,

popper
of
pills

But that wasn’t the worst of it. This was: A mother who chose getting high over her child.

The day Tesuque had his chauffeur drop her off, she’d been high for days, partly because of losing Gracie. The other part was, why not go out loaded? She knew what it cost to go to rehab, to stay long enough for it to work. It was more than she could possibly earn in two years if she didn’t spend a dime, whereas drinking was cheaper. “Tesuque” was a regular at her restaurant, the Guadalupe BBQ. He always made sure to sit in her area, and he always ordered a black and brown—bourbon and blackberry syrup—that he left untouched. After a while, she started drinking it for him. Why let all that alcohol go to waste? What with customers buying her shots, some nights she’d have five or six drinks at work. One night, when her shift ended, Tesuque was waiting for her. He stood out on Guadalupe Street and told her, “You’re too smart to be working as a waitress, and you’re ruining your good looks with alcohol. Go to rehab.”

“Even if I did have a problem, which I don’t,” she said, “I can’t afford it.”

To which he said, “What if I can? Would you go then?”

“Look. You could buy me a solid gold grand freaking piano and I still wouldn’t sleep with you,” she said, and turned to walk away.

But he caught her arm. “I’ve seen this disease chew up folks and spit them out unrecognizable. I lost my career and two wives before I stopped.”

“Then why do you order a black and brown every night?”

“To prove to myself I can let it sit there. But I’ve noticed you can’t.”

She wanted to laugh it off, walk away, a dozen different things. But she stood there and listened.

“It’s too late for me to make repairs, but not for you. With my income, I can afford to be generous. And I think you’re worth the investment.”

“There’s no way I can pay you back without winning the lottery.”

“What if I said I don’t want to be paid back?”

Skye laughed. “When a man says something like that, he either wants sex or he’s a control freak who wants you to wear a dog collar.”

“I’m betting your life has been filled with men who let you down.”

“So what if it has?”

“So I’ve seen you with your little girl. You don’t want to lose her, do you?”

“I happen to be a great mother.”

“I’m sure you are,” he said. “I’m a great father. I love my kids with all my heart. But drinking took them away from me, and eventually, I guarantee, that will happen to you. It’s already started, hasn’t it?”

How did he know she was scheduled for court in a couple of days? Everybody else in New Mexico could rack up the DWIs, but the judge she was assigned was reportedly hard-core.

“Listen to me, Sara. Not all of us men are bad guys. You have to learn to trust one sometime so you can recognize the others of our species. I’m harmless. So you might as well start with me, or I guarantee you’ll end up with nothing.”

The truth was, she couldn’t see Rocky springing for a grave marker. She’d spent three months in rehab before she understood that Rocky, in addition to his addiction, was probably brain-damaged from falling off bulls. He always was kind of ADHD. He couldn’t do anything that took longer than a minute. While that was good for riding rodeo bulls, it was hell on birth control. The whole nine months of pregnancy, Skye lived in a state of equal parts terror and nausea. There was no drinking because she couldn’t keep anything down. Once Gracie arrived, it was hard to imagine life without those pink cheeks and big eyes, but somehow the using sneaked back in.

And then Tesuque offered her a way out.

It’s high noon. The temperature is a solid, airless 80 degrees. And it will get hotter. Here comes Nola, her psycho roommate, with a bologna sandwich and a cup of vanilla pudding. Skye hated Nola the second they met. She wasn’t there for alcohol or drug addiction—no, her weakness was laxative pills and her larger issue was eating, or the lack of it. Her simpering vegetarian diet was about twenty-five calories daily—couldn’t she just start eating normally? She could throw the laxatives in the same trash can as Skye’s OxyContin pills and avoid the mirror. But Nola had been hospitalized twice since Skye had been at Cottonwoods, while Skye had only her one slip with the vanilla Jack Daniel’s.

Everything inside her wanted to say
No, thanks
to the sandwich, but her belly knew that breakfast was a long time ago. “Thanks,” she said, and after Nola left, she ate the bologna and threw the sandwich bread to a brown rez dog that was always hanging around. The pudding, she wolfed down. The sugar rush helped for about fifteen minutes but turned into a king-size headache.

Cottonwoods’ menu is carb-heavy, which is why her street clothes are so tight. The tank top that once hung on her now shows back fat. Her skinny jeans cut painfully at the crotch. She ties her sweatshirt around her hips so she can leave the top button of her jeans undone. When a person stops drinking and dropping Oxy like Pez, what’s left? Sex and carbohydrates. The Cottonwoods program made everyone sign a paper promising you wouldn’t have sex with the therapists, your fellow inmates, or the adorable chef no matter how often he winked and gave you extra fries. It’s simple math: Subtract drugs, booze, and sex. What’s left? Cookies. Peanut butter right off the spoon. Mashed potatoes. Her world did a complete 180. She could be thrown out on the street for an orgasm, but not for scarfing down a twelve-ounce bag of chocolate chips she stole from the kitchen.

Now it’s one
p.m
. The temperature is 86, 88, 90. The sun is blinding. All those formerly pretty rocks look like needles stabbing the sky. Rocky should have been here by now. He’d promised he’d pick her up before noon. Did she get the day wrong? Did he have a car accident? Is he in a different time zone? The plan was for them to drive to his mother’s trailer park in Albuquerque, where she’d pick up Gracie, then to the body shop in Santa Fe to pick up the Mercedes her mother had given her years ago, which had endured moves from Denver to Santa Fe without any problems. Her twin mechanics—Lobo and Lalo—had been kind enough to store the car until she got out. She would drive Gracie to Santa Fe to Mama’s vacation home on Canyon Road.
You can stay there on a temporary basis, but don’t you dare mess up my
pied-à-terre
, she’d text-messaged Skye. Pied-à-terre, Skye thinks, seriously? From there on, the plan is admittedly vague, but how hard can it be to find employment with tourist season just around the corner? Who knows, maybe her community service hours will lead to a decent job.