Fly Away (39 page)

I spun around.
Don’t you even
look
at my daughter
.

He smiled.
I’ll do what I want. Don’t you know that by now?

I screamed in rage and pushed him away from me. His eyes widened as he lost his balance.
He reached out for me and I backed away, watching him tumble down the hardwood stairs—rolling,
thumping, cracking, banisters breaking. When he was still, I went down to stand beside
him. Blood seeped out from the back of his head.

I felt a pale gray coldness descend around me; it cut me off, separated me. I dropped
to my knees in the blood beside him. “I hate you,” I said, hoping these were the last
words he’d ever hear. When I heard my mother’s voice, I looked up.

What have you done?
my mother screamed. She had you in her arms; you were sleeping. Even her cries didn’t
waken you.

He’s dead,
I said.

Oh, my Lord. Winston!
My mother ran back into the room and I could hear her calling the police.

I ran up after her, caught her as she was hanging up.

She turned.
I’ll get you help,
she said.

Help.

I knew what that meant. Electroshock and ice baths and barred windows and medications
that made me forget everything and everyone.

Give her to me,
I pleaded.

She’s not safe with you.
My mother’s arms tightened around you. I saw how she was fighting for you and it
hurt me so much I couldn’t breathe.

Why didn’t you fight him for me?

How?

You know how. You know what he did to me.

She shook her head, saying something I couldn’t hear. Then, very quietly:
I’ll protect her
.

You didn’t protect me.

No,
she said.

I heard the sirens coming.
Give her to me,
I begged again, but I knew it was too late.

Please
.

My mother shook her head.

If they found me here, they’d arrest me. I was a murderer now. My own mother had called
the police, and God knew she wouldn’t protect me.

I’ll be back for her,
I promised, crying now.
I’ll find Rafe and we’ll be back
.

*   *   *

I ran out of my parents’ house and crouched behind a giant rhododendron in their yard.
I was still there when the police and the ambulance showed up, and the neighbors.

I wanted to hate who I’d become—a murderer—but I couldn’t feel anything but happy
about his death. I had saved you from him, at least. I wanted to save you from my
mother, too, but really, how could I care for you alone? I was nothing. I had no job,
no money, no high school diploma.

We needed Rafe to make us a family.

Rafe
. His name became everything—my religion, my mantra, my destination.

I walked down to First Avenue and stuck out my thumb. When a VW bus covered in flower
decals pulled over, the driver asked me where I was going.

Salinas,
I said. It was all I could think of. The last place I’d seen him.

Get in.

I did. I climbed aboard and stared out the window and listened to the music coming
from his scratchy radio: “Blowin’ in the Wind.”

You get high?
he asked me, and I thought:
Why not?

*   *   *

They say pot isn’t addictive. It was for me. Once I smoked my first joint, I couldn’t
stop. I needed the calm it gave me. That was when I started to live like a vampire,
up all night, high all the time. I slept with men I can’t remember on dirty mattresses.
But everywhere I went, I asked about Rafe. In every town in California, I hitchhiked
out to the local farms and asked for him in my broken Spanish, showing the only photograph
I had to workers who eyed me warily.

I drifted that way for months, until I made it to Los Angeles. Alone, I hitchhiked
out to Rancho Flamingo and saw the house I’d grown up in. Then I made my way to Rafe’s
old house. I’d never been there before, so it took me a long time to find it. I didn’t
expect to find him there, and I wasn’t wrong. Still, someone answered the door.

His uncle. I knew the moment I saw him. He had Rafe’s dark eyes—your eyes, Tully—and
the same wavy hair. He looked incredibly old to me, lined and wrinkled and faded by
a lifetime of hard work under a hot sun.

I’m Dorothy Hart,
I said, wiping my sweaty brow.

He pushed the battered straw cowboy hat back on his head.
I know who you are. You got him put in jail.
He said it like:
Ju got heem
.

What could I say to that?
Would you tell me where he is?

He looked at me for so long I started to feel sick. Then he made a little follow-me
motion with his gnarled hand.

I let hope bloom just a little and lurched forward, up the uneven porch steps. I followed
him into the clean, shadow-filled house, which smelled of lemons and something else,
cigars, maybe, and roasting meat.

At a small, soot-stained fireplace, the old man stopped. His shoulders sagged and
he turned to me.
He loved you
.

I saw Rafe in that man’s black, sad eyes, and love tightened like a clamp around my
heart. How could I tell this man my shame—that I’d been chained like an animal for
years? That I would have cut off my arm to get free?
I love him, too. I do. I know he thinks I ran away, but—

Then it sank in.

Loved you.
Loved.

I shook my head. I didn’t want to hear what he would say next.

He looked for you. Very long
.

I blinked back tears.

Vietnam,
he said at last.

That’s when I noticed the flag folded into a small triangle and framed in wood sitting
on the mantel.

We couldn’t even bury him in land that he loved. There wasn’t enough of him left.

Vietnam.
I couldn’t imagine him going there, my Rafe, with his long hair and flashing smile
and tender hands.

He knew you would come looking for him, he tell me give you this.

The old man reached behind the flag and pulled out a piece of ordinary notebook paper—the
kind you use in high school. It had been folded into a small square. Time and dust
had turned it the color of tobacco.

My hands were shaking as I opened it.

Querida,
he’d written, and my heart stopped at that. I swore I heard his voice and smelled
the scent of oranges.
I love you and will always love you. When I come back, I will find you and Tallulah
and we will begin again. Wait for me, querida, as I wait for you.

I looked at the old man and saw my pain reflected in his eyes. I clutched the note—it
felt like ash in my hands, impossibly fragile. I stumbled out of his house and walked
until it got dark, and even then I kept walking.

The next day, when I went to the protest rally that had brought me to Los Angeles,
I was still crying. My tears mixed with the dust and the dirt and turned into a war
paint of loss. I stood in the middle of that huge crowd—mostly kids like me, there
had to be a thousand of us—and I heard their chanting and protesting about the war,
and it hit me. People were
dying
over there. And the anger that was always inside of me found a place to go.

That day was the first time I was arrested.

*   *   *

That was the start of me losing time again. Days, weeks, even a month one time. Now
I know it was because I was doing so many drugs. Pot and quaaludes and LSD. Everything
seemed safe back then, and I was desperate to turn on and tune out.

You haunted me, Tully; you and your daddy. I began to see you both in the hot air
rising up from the desert floor at the Mojave commune where I lived. I heard you crying
when I washed dishes or got water from the cistern. Sometimes I felt your little hand
touch mine and I would scream out in fear and jump. My friends just laughed and warned
me about bad trips and thought LSD would help.

When I looked back—finally, when I got sober—I thought,
Of course
. It was the sixties, I was barely an adult; I’d been molested and abused and I thought
it was my fault. No wonder I lost myself so completely to drugs. I became like a piece
of string on some cold-water river, just bobbing along. High all the time.

Then one night, when it was so hot I couldn’t get comfortable in my sleeping bag,
I dreamed about my father. In my nightmare he was alive and coming for you. Once the
nightmare descended into my life, nothing could get rid of it. No drugs or sex or
meditation. Finally I couldn’t stand it anymore. I told this guy—Pooh Bear, we called
him—that I would blow him all the way to Seattle if he’d take me home. I gave him
the address. The next thing I knew, there were five of us in an old VW bus, banging
our way north, singing along to the Doors in a cloud of smoke. We camped out along
the way, made pot brownies in a cast-iron skillet over an open fire, and dropped acid.

My nightmares turned uglier and more intense. I started seeing Rafe in the daylight,
too, started thinking his ghost was following me. I heard his voice calling me a tramp
and a terrible mother. I cried in my sleep all the time.

And then one day I woke up, still high, and found that we were parked in front of
my mother’s house. The bus was half on the street and half on the sidewalk. I don’t
think any of us remember parking. I climbed over the carpeted floor and jumped out
of the van and onto the street. I knew I looked bad and smelled bad, but what could
I do?

I stumbled across the street and went into the house.

You were right there at the kitchen table, playing with a spoon, when I opened the
screen door and went inside. Somewhere upstairs, a bell tinkled.

That’s Grandpa,
you said, and I felt rage explode inside of me. How could he be alive? And what had
he done to you?

I went up the stairs, banging into the walls, screaming for my mother. She was in
her bedroom, with my father, who looked like a cadaver in a twin bed. His face was
slack, gray; drool slid down his chin.

He’s alive?
I screamed.

Paralyzed,
she said, getting to her feet.

I wanted to tell my mother I was taking you; I wanted to see the pain in her eyes.
But I was so crazy, I couldn’t think straight. I ran downstairs and I scooped you
into my arms.

My mother ran down behind me.
He’s paralyzed, Dorothy Jean. I told the police he had a stroke. I swear. You’re safe.
No one knows you pushed him. You can stay.

Can your grandpa move?
I asked you.

You shook your head and popped your thumb in your mouth.

Still. I had you in my arms and I couldn’t let you go. I imagined redemption for myself,
a new beginning for us. I imagined a life with picket fences and bikes with training
wheels and Campfire Girl meetings.

So I took you.

And nearly killed you by letting you eat a brownie filled with marijuana.

It wasn’t even my idea to take you to the hospital when you started flipping out.
It was Pooh Bear’s.

I don’t know, Dot. That’s, like, way too much weed for a kid. She looks … green.

I carried you into the emergency room and said you’d gotten into the neighbor’s stash.
No one believed me.

It wasn’t until later, when you were asleep, that I sneaked back in and pinned your
name on your shirt with my mother’s phone number. It was all I could think of to do.
I got it finally: I didn’t deserve you.

I kissed you before I left.

I bet you don’t remember any of this. I hope you don’t.

*   *   *

After that, I fell. Time became as elastic as rubber for me. Pot and ’ludes dulled
my mind and stripped me of my ability to care about anything. I spent the next six
years in communes and on painted-up school buses and hitchhiking by the side of the
road. Mostly I was too high to even know where I was. I made it to San Francisco.
The epicenter. Sex. Drugs. Rock ’n’ roll. Jimi at the Fillmore. Joan and Bob at the
Avalon. I don’t remember anything much … until one day in 1970, when I looked out
the van’s dirty window on the way to a peace rally and saw the Space Needle.

I didn’t even know we’d left California. I yelled out,
Wait! My kid lives near here
.

When we parked in front of my mother’s house, I knew I shouldn’t get out of the car.
You were better off without me, but I was too high to care.

I stumbled out of the van and pot smoke tumbled out with me, circling me, protecting
me. I went up to the front door and knocked hard. Then I tried to stand still. The
effort was such a failure that I couldn’t help laughing. I was so stoned, I—

September 3, 2010
6:15
P.M.

Beeeeep …

The noise sliced through Dorothy’s memories, brought her back to the present. She’d
been so deep in her story that it took her a moment to clear her head. An alarm was
sounding.

She lurched to her feet.

“Help!” she screamed. “Someone get in here! Please. I think her heart is stopping.
Please! Now! Someone save my daughter!”

*   *   *

The brightness around me is gorgeous; like lying inside of a star. Beside me, I hear
Katie breathing. Lavender scents the night air. “She’s there … here,” I say, awed,
by the very idea that my mother would come to see me.

I am listening to her voice, trying to make sense of her words. There’s something
about a picture, and a word—
querida
—that doesn’t make sense. None of it makes sense, actually. It’s sounds and pauses
jumbled together. A voice that is both forgotten and etched into my very soul.

Then I hear something else. A noise that doesn’t belong in this beautiful place. A
beep.