Bebe Moore Campbell (30 page)

27

I CALLED HOSPITALS FIRST, PSYCH WARDS. MARGARET KNEW the names of three, and then I had Justin go in his house and bring back a Yellow Pages. There were about sixteen hospitals in the area. None of them had Trina.

“I’ll have to call the police,” I said, leaning against the car.

“What are you going to say?” Brad asked.

“That my mentally ill child is missing. I am not going to mention the program.”

I knew, of course, that there would be a waiting period. Twenty-four hours? Forty-eight hours? No. The magic seventy-two. Nothing would happen until time had passed. Time always had to pass.

I called anyway, and after they put me on hold the officer told me it was too soon for them to do anything.

Justin wanted to give us an address and some directions, and go back into his house to see if he could recapture the last vestiges of his high. Brad persuaded him that it might be better to show us the way. He was not a happy guide, nor, as it turned out, a good one. We drove north on the freeway for at least twenty minutes before he realized that we were going the wrong way; then we drove for forty-five minutes in the opposite direction. The exit we took led to an area that was rural and poor. The houses were spread out. There were no real streets. We passed several trailer parks before turning down a long unpaved road that led to a dilapidated small ranch sitting on several acres of land.

“That’s it,” Justin said. He looked as though he wanted to flee.

There were cars parked in front of the house on what would have been a lawn. An odd odor hung in the air, sharp and pungent. Something was cooking.

Brad parked about fifty yards away; then he got out and strode to the house. Even through the rolled-up windows, I could hear voices and laughter. Everyone got silent when Brad knocked. Two or three guys came to the door. I could hear Brad talking, explaining things in a forceful tone of voice. They closed the door in his face. A few minutes later, it opened.

We heard Angelica before we saw her. Her curses rent the still air surrounding us. When Brad came out of the house, he had his arm around her waist and was trying to hold her against his side. The guys stood at the door watching, not saying anything. Angelica’s arms were flailing, and she attempted to kick him as he dragged her to the car. She was wearing jeans and a white shirt with most of the buttons undone. Bethany got out and ran toward them. Brad told her to go back, but she kept running toward them, yelling and screaming incoherently. She rushed past Brad and Angelica and raced up to the three men, who were watching. “What did you do to her?” she screamed over and over, until the men, who never answered, went inside.

When Bethany joined Brad and Angelica, she tried to grab her daughter by the shoulders, but Angelica shook her off. Then she tried to hit her. Brad had to hold Angelica with one hand and keep Bethany away with the other. Margaret and I tore out of the car and pulled her away. She tried to fight us too, but then she got very still and just stood where she was until she stopped weeping.

By the time Brad got Angelica seated in the back between Margaret and me, sweat was dripping off his forehead. Angelica was wild, more agitated than I’d ever seen her. She was muttering furiously to herself and didn’t pay attention to any of us, except Bethany. She vented the last of her rage on her mother, who appeared to have slipped into catatonia, her face was so devoid of emotion. Angelica’s curses and threats were wasted on her.

Brad went right to his glove compartment, retrieved his hypodermic, and gave her a shot of Haldol. After a while her curses became slurred and softer.

“Do you know where Trina went?” I asked.

I expected some version of speaking in tongues. Angelica hadn’t said one coherent thing since she’d gotten into the car, but now she turned and spoke clearly. “She doesn’t want you.”

Margaret’s house was quiet when we returned, but not for long. When Brad tried to get Angelica to take her regular medication, she spit it out and filled the small bedroom with a stream of curses that echoed throughout the house. Bethany trailed into and out of the room, pleading with her daughter to take the pills. Meth-enhanced psychosis was a powerful adversary.

Margaret began cooking, clattering pans and clanging utensils, which didn’t completely shut out the din from Angelica’s room. Bethany was smoking on the back patio. When I went out there, several butts were on the ground near her feet, and she was lighting another.

“They should be shot, those guys.”

“Yeah.”

“And they’re supposed to be the fucking normal ones.”

“Right.”

“Like they couldn’t tell that she had a problem. Fucking assholes.” She took another drag from her cigarette and began muttering under her breath. “I guess I’ll have to get her tested.”

I didn’t answer that one. I had no comfort to give Bethany, so I went back into the kitchen. Jean wandered in, took a look at me, and hovered. Margaret put a cup of tea in front of me. Maybe she thought it would make me feel better. I stood up.

“I need to make some calls,” I said. Jean disappeared immediately and returned with Brad.

“I’d like to speak with you, Keri,” he said.

“Okay.”

“Regardless of what’s happened, the confidentiality of the program must be upheld. The situation will be resolved. We’ll find Trina. So, I don’t want you to—”

“I have to call her father and tell him our child is missing.”

“I just want to impress on you—”

“You don’t need to impress a goddamn thing on me. You find my child.”

“Keri, you—”

“Brad,” Margaret said. He looked at her and then at me.

“The program is everything to him,” Margaret said, as soon as he and Jean had left and it was just Margaret and me sitting at the table. “His wife left him less than a year ago. That was his second.” She sighed and looked at me. “We’ll find her. My son used to run away. . . .” Margaret knew I wasn’t listening, but she kept talking anyway.

I left in the middle of her monologue. In the bedroom, I tried to collect myself, to practice saying,
Clyde, Trina is missing, and it’s my fault.
The phone at Clyde’s office rang seven times before his answering machine took the message, which I repeated for his home phone. His cell just rang and rang. My arms began to ache.
I can’t lose both of them.

Orlando answered his phone on the second ring. He said, “Hey, baby, you feeling better?” And he listened when I told him no, no, not better, and explained what had happened, not everything, not the part about the program, just the part where I admitted that Trina was missing.

“Don’t panic, baby. You have your cell phone. Maybe she’ll call you.”

Maybe she’ll call me. I thought, She’s riding in a car with two strange men. And then I told him everything. While I was talking I could hear him saying
Listen to me, listen to me, listen, listen . . .
But I couldn’t listen. I hadn’t called to listen to him. I just wanted to hear my thoughts pitched against his voice. I just wanted to know he was there.

“Where are you? How long would it take me to get there?”

“Isn’t opening night soon?”

“Tomorrow,” he said. “I have an understudy.”

“I don’t even know where I am, Orlando. Somewhere outside of Sacramento. I don’t know the address. I’ll call you back as soon as we find Trina.”

“No,” he said. “Get the address and give it to me. I’ll hold on. Go get the address.”

I went inside the kitchen carrying the phone in one hand; with the other I looked in a pile that appeared to be mail but turned out to be school papers. In the family room, there was a stack of magazines on the coffee table. I began going through the pile.
Vogue.
Mrs. Margaret Schultz, 13899 Villalobos Road, Corinth, California.

“I’ll be there in the morning,” Orlando told me.

“All right,” I said. “Thank you.” I could feel myself breathing again and noticed a pinching sensation in my shoulders as they came down a little.

But I wanted Clyde.

After I hung up I thought about the night Ma Missy put my mother out, how she sat on the sofa in front of the picture window in the living room, smoked Salem cigarettes, one after another, and wailed as though something had been cut from her body. The next morning, she woke me up, took me to school, and went to work. We didn’t see my mother for nearly a year. And except for that first night, I never heard her crying again.

I cried a lot. I got bad grades that year. I picked fights with my best friends, and mostly I lost. At night I dreamed of my mother, and during the day I cursed her name in little-girl language. A piece of the woman who had groaned me out into the world was better than an empty space at the table. I pushed people far away, to a place where they could never come back and hurt me. I told myself I would show her; she’d be sorry; I didn’t need her at all. One night I slipped out of my grandmother’s house and wandered through the streets in the dark. I was trying to find her, but I ended up losing myself. I fell asleep in a stranger’s backyard; the police brought me home at three in the morning. One look at Ma Missy’s shocked face, and I felt like a failure. No wonder, I told myself. No wonder she left me.

And now I knew that that had been the easy part of my life.

“She missed her eight o’clock,” I said aloud to no one. The medication hour had come and gone. Trina wouldn’t notice the time. She was high, she had missed her medication, and she was with strange men. Are you praying for me now, Mattie?

I put my phone away and went back into the kitchen, where Jean and Margaret were sitting. Angelica was still cursing and yelling from the room where Brad was watching her. I heard her say something about the FBI having her under surveillance.

“Oh, goodness. How come it’s always the FBI and the CIA?” Margaret asked. She was opening what looked like an industrial-size can of ravioli and dumping it into a pot. “How about the SEC or the USDA?”

Jean glanced at her, a slight smile forming. “The NBA, the NFL.”

We all began to giggle.

“Don King Productions is following me.”

We went on and on, laughing hysterically as we listed more and more ridiculous names. And then we stopped and the kitchen was quiet again, and Angelica was the only one howling.

“I have to do something. I just can’t sit here,” I said.

“I know it doesn’t make you feel any better, but it’s all part of the illness,” Margaret said. “They drug, they drink, they run and bang their heads against a wall. You just have to step back, not go under with them.”

“I am under,” I said.

I was ready to renew the search, to sally out again into the strange town on my mission, but Margaret persuaded me to stay put. It was nearly eleven o’clock, she pointed out. All the stores were closed. If she was at someone’s house, it would be futile to go looking for her. She might be on her way back here. There was a chance that Trina had seen the address on the front door, noticed the street. If she came back, wouldn’t I want to be there?

“Want something to help you sleep?” Brad asked me around 2 a.m.—or, in mental illness time, six hours past meds. Angelica was finally quiet. I was sitting on Margaret’s kitchen chair. The only light was from a low-wattage bulb above the stove. Brad held out a pill in one hand, a glass of water in the other. He looked tired under that light. I figured I looked worse.

“No,” I said.

“You need some sleep, Keri.”

Whatever he gave me cushioned the world in a hurry. So this was how it worked, I thought. It was like taking a big, big shot of double-acting liquor. Everything was soft and grainy, slightly out of focus. I would have cried, but I was too calm. Brad helped me out of the chair, put his arm around my waist, led me to the bedroom, and placed me on the bed. I barely heard the door close.

IN THE MORNING, JEAN BROUGHT ME ORANGE JUICE, COFfee, and a plate of eggs and sausages. A slight wooziness had settled into my brain. A Haldol hangover, something to be worked off during the day. Jean sat on the bed, watching me. I didn’t eat the food. After a while, she took the tray back to the kitchen. It was still too early to call the police. I heard someone at the door, and when I looked up Brad was standing there.

“I went back out after you fell asleep, and this morning too. Want you to know how sorry I am about all this. Truly sorry,” he said.

What did he expect me to say, That’s okay, don’t worry about it?

Brad sighed.

“The thing is”—and here his voice swelled a bit, just enough so his emotions had room to maneuver and settle down—“we have saved so many lives. At least seventy-five since we started. Seventy-five young people who are alive and productive because of the work I do—the work we do.”

“I just want my kid back. That’s all I want.”

“We want her back too. You once asked me how I got involved with this work. My mother had schizophrenia, and she wouldn’t accept any treatment. I grew up with a woman who wore way too much makeup, didn’t bathe, and had conversations with people who weren’t there. Kids at school laughed. The neighbors whispered. For the longest time, I thought I’d done something wrong.

“My mother used to beat my brother and me with anything she could hold in her hands. She’d always say that the Lord told her there was evil in us; she had to beat it out. My brother wound up in the emergency room with a broken arm. My dad lied and said he fell, because he didn’t want us to be taken away.

“I can’t tell you how many times my father called the police or took her to the hospital, only to be turned away and sent home. The few times she was actually admitted, she wasn’t there long enough to do any good. She’d come home and stop taking the medication. Then we’d be right back where we started. We weren’t rich. My dad couldn’t afford a fancy residential treatment program. It was such a waste of a life—and my father’s too. When she died, we were just relieved that the ordeal was over.”

He paused. He was trembling. “We have contacts in this city, Keri. Our people are looking for Trina as we speak.”

“My mother used to say that Satan sent us to her. I wanted to do good in this world.” I thought he was going to cry, and I didn’t want to witness that. Maybe he would have, but Margaret appeared, holding my purse. Inside it my cell phone was ringing.