Set Me Free (20 page)

“A while,” he said. “I remember you trying to play with me a couple of times after that, but that’s it. That’s all I can remember:
the baby and then not being allowed to play”

“There was something tied in the air over the baby. A piece of white cloth or something, remember?”

“Yeah,” he said, “it’s something ranchers do. It’s called flagging. See, when a cow has a calf that’s too young to walk, ranchers
tie white tags on the shrubs around that area to keep the coyotes away.”

She was surprised he knew this and she didn’t. He was the one who’d been living in Chicago all this time. “Why would that
keep coyotes away?”

“Because of the movement. Coyotes see the cloth fluttering and it scares them off.” Victor was dead serious. He was looking
at her. There were no clouds between them. “All I remember about this place is you.”

It had been said. Amelia felt a shiver swoop up her, from the bottoms of her feet to the top of her head. She didn’t know
what to say. He hadn’t looked away yet.

“I’m going to find that baby,” Victor said.

“Oh.”

“I’m going to find out what happened.”

“It’s not a baby anymore.”

“I know that,” he said. “We can’t tell anyone. I don’t want anyone else to know. You have to promise, if you’re going to help
me. We have to find out what happened together.”

That’s how Amelia Barrow and Victor Littlefoot became friends for the second time in their lives.

Once upon a time, a boy was sent to live with his father. This father was a man the boy did not know well. I would say the
boy did not know him at all, but that is hyperbolic even for this kind of story. The boy knew who his father was because another
boy had told him. Since then the boy and the father had spoken to each other a few times at a few community occasions. But
the father did not live where the boy lived
—
he lived in a city over the mountain, with children he called his own. Besides, the father was not the kind of man to take
the boy on his lap and praise him. The father was not one for praising, generally, or for children, unless his wife had given
birth to them.

Circumstances changed when the boy’s grandmother died. Up until this point, though the boy knew who his father was, and knew
what being a father meant, and though the boy knew that all around him, there were all sorts of distant relatives he could
call his own, he had always somehow suspected that his grandmother was the one person in the world with whom he shared any
kind of blood. He believed that meant that only she could claim him, and that when she died, he would be like a man himself
: free to do as he pleased, to live where he wanted. He was wrong.

The father showed up at the grandmother’s funeral and simultaneously confused and clarified the boy’s world. The boy knew
his mother was the one who had left him in his grandmother’s care before leaving, never to return. He could not remember this
mother, nor the things she had said into his ear the night she ran off into the moonlight. Still, when the father showed up
at the grandmother’s funeral, the boy knew something about what kind of man the father was. By which I mean: something the
mother
said into that infant’s ear must have stayed with him, even though the boy did not know it until that moment. Something about
how this man who was his father was good at making promises, expert at cajoling, skillful at temptation. The boy saw that
he was going to want the father even though he did not want to want him. The boy’s first thought was to flee, but by the time
the father’s clean black car pulled up beside the church, it was already too late, although nothing had yet begun.

The boy could not flee. There was a funeral going on, and the boy was trapped in the front row, with all eyes on him. All
eyes shifted when the father’s form darkened the church’s doorway. All eyes popped out of all heads at the social afterward,
when the father placed his hand on the boy’s bony shoulder and told him it was time to gather his things. “This is what she
wanted,” the father said, so the boy was bound to obey. His grandmother knew best.

Twelve years had passed since the boy was born, and it seemed to him all that time that no one but his grandmother wanted
him. He did not think this in a self-pitying way. He thought himself quite lucky. His grandmother was the kind of woman who
made discussion of love irrelevant. But suddenly, here was a man saying, “I am your father. I have come to take you to your
new home. My wife is ready to be your mother.” The boy knew the father was also saying, “Don’t be fooled: it’s not as if we
had a choice. “The boy knew this meant the grandmother had somehow cajoled the father into taking the boy in. And even though
the boy was scared, he thought, “This is what she wanted.” He would do it just for her.

The father drove the boy up to the grandmother’s falling-down house, and for the first time in his life, the boy felt embarrassed.
He saw that the house might be ugly. He thought, for the first time in his life, that only poor people would live in that
house. The boy realized that perhaps this was what his grandmother had wanted for him: to see a life beyond the falling-down
house. This was why she had sent for the father.

The boy did not want to let the father in to help him gather his things. He did not want the father to see how his life really
looked. But there was no choice. The father pushed open the front door and decided what the boy did and did not need. When
it came down to it, all the boy took with him
was a suitcase with two books hidden inside. Everything else, as the father said, was useless.

“You’ll come back here in the summers,” the father said. “It’s important for you to maintain your ties to your heritage. “

When the boy met the father’s real children, the children who were all the father’s own, the boy wondered why
they
spent no summers being tied to
their
heritage. Instead, the real children attended space camps and Model United Nations conferences and Johns Hopkins science programs.

But the boy hadn’t met those children yet. All that was to happen had not yet happened. Wlxat happened was this.

As the father drove the boy from the land that was in the boy’s blood, the boy caught a glimpse of the old bull he’d been
warned about hundreds of times by old ladies like his grandmother. This bull lived in a field with a falling-down fence around
him. For the most part, the bull was a quiet creature, just something wild and distant, a foreboding possibility on the fringe
of childhood games. There were always threats of the bull going crazy, on a rampage, leaving bloody children in his wake,
but nothing like that ever happened.

Suddenly, the boy turned to the father. “I gotta go,” he said.

The father opened his mouth to respond, then understood. “Number one or number two?”

“I gotta piss. “

“We’ll talk about that word at home. For now…” The father pulled the car to the side of the gravel road, beside the field
where the bull stood idly by.

The boy opened the door and smelled the sour mash of weathered straw. A breeze cut through the thin jacket a cousin had lent
him for the funeral. The sun was warm on his back as he made his way to the fence. He unzipped his pants and waited for the
piss to come. But this was silly, because he hadn’t had to piss in the first place. He didn’t know why he’d asked the father
to stop the car. It wasn’t as if he didn’t want to go with him. He
did
want to go. It seemed as if he’d been waiting to go for years but hadn’t known it all this time.

The bull raised his head and looked at the boy. The boy’s chest started hammering. He felt himself piss a little bit. He looked
right in the bull’s
eyes. He wondered what it would take to get the hull to gore him. He wanted to say something to get the bull riled up, wave
his arms in the air, anything, but the father leaned out the passenger side and said, “Son, we gotta get. “

And the boy thought, “I’m someone’s son.”

[OR]

Do You Love Me?

W
ILLA

Day Three
Mitchell, Illinois, to Salina, Kansas
Friday, May 9, 1997

D
ay three began with crossing the Mississippi. Naturally, Willa was old enough to have studied geography and to know, rationally,
that what lay on the other side of that national divide was much the same as what lay before it: people, houses, roads. But
in all her seventeen years, she had never actually crossed the big river, so there was something mystical about this accomplishment.
She’d never been allowed on the other side. She’d begged her father the night before to do this crossing in the daylight.
Here, now, was her first glimpse of the waterway: it shimmered and shone like hammered metal. It was much wider than the Hudson,
and much wilder. Full of boats the likes of which she’d never seen, and they were all heading someplace southern, someplace
with swampy bayous and zydeco music. The Mississippi seemed cut from the cloth of a country far different than the one she’d
always known, a landscape much messier and more unpredictable. The Wild West.

On the other side of the river, Willa made her father find a bluff from which she could take pictures. She loaded her camera
in the relative darkness of the car, shadowing the film with her body. When she started to shoot, she wished she could be
as nimble a
photographer as she wanted. She wanted to capture the feelings she had while she was making the pictures and somehow project
those feelings into the photographs themselves. But she already knew, from her limited experience, that that was much harder
than it seemed. Miss Finlay had told her the best practice was to use the film as a tool, and without hesitation. Willa worked
silently and diligently, as Ariel wound around her legs, purring, and Nat perched on the hood of the car, watching his daughter
work.

Nat considered the possibility of making this the moment. It was a beautiful morning, and they were alone, and there was sun
in the sky and spring on the air and a breeze that tossed their hair gingerly. But he didn’t want to take her work from her.
She was happy shooting so he let her be. Afterward, she clambered up beside him onto the warm hood of the car.

“I should have shot from the other side,” she said. “I just wasted two rolls shooting into the sun.”

“We can go back,” Nat said instinctively. “I don’t mind.”

“Aren’t we in a big fat rush? To get to that Elliot guy before he dies?”

“Yes—”

“Thought so. So no, we can’t go back. Anyway, we can just stop again on our way east.” The wind carried Willa’s voice away.
She leaned against her father’s warm arm. “What’s with that Elliot guy, anyway? Why are you supposed to find him? Why did
she make you promise?”

So the time had come. Just like that, without his instigation. Nat put his arm around Willa and squeezed. He began slowly.
“After Caroline and I moved to Connecticut, we started to have some problems. I guess the honeymoon phase wore off. We should
have been a little smarter about how we did things. We were babies. We were only eighteen, and we decided to move across the
country alone, to a place where we didn’t know anyone and had never been before, and start a new life together.” He listed
all these things on his free hand and shook his head. “We weren’t ready for how hard
it was going to be. I thought all I needed was a steady job, just to show her I could be a man in her life who provided for
her, made her safe, all that, and then she’d be happy. You know? But it didn’t work out that way.”

Willa nodded against him, looking out across the water, and he continued. “One day I came home from work, and she was just…
sobbing. She’d have these… episodes when I knew her in California. But I guess I had no idea how deep she got. That first
day in Connecticut was just the tip of the iceberg. Over the next few months, she got really hard to talk to, really distant.
Angry. She’d say all sorts of awful things, about what a terrible state the world was in, how children were dying everywhere
of all sorts of horrible diseases, how we weren’t doing anything to help. I didn’t know what to do. When she got like that,
it was like she wasn’t the same person. I didn’t know how to talk to her. And she said the most horrible things about me,
about how all I wanted was to own her, to keep her locked up, to…” He swallowed and tried to keep his voice measured.

“It’s okay,” Willa said, putting her arm around his waist but not looking at him. “We don’t have to talk about this.”

“Oh, but Willa, we do,” he said, and it was the wistfulness in his voice that kept them still and silent for a moment before
he began again.

“I thought some change would do her good. I bought us train tickets down to New York City, and we spent a weekend in a cheap
motel in Times Square. The city was really gritty then, nothing close to what it’s like today, and our hotel room was disgusting.
But even then that city was the fanciest place we’d ever been. I’d always promised her I was going to take her to Europe.
New York was the closest I got. But oh my God”—here he smiled—“you should have seen her in the sculpture wing at the Met.
She was so happy. I hadn’t seen her like that in… well, since we’d moved. She earned her hummingbird nickname all over again
just in that one day. And when we went back up to Connecticut, she didn’t seem
so sad anymore. So for her birthday, I saved up and bought her ten round-trips. I meant for them to be five for her and five
for me. I thought we could make it a monthly thing together. A tradition. But one day I got home from work, and she was the
happiest I’d seen her in months. She was making this delicious meal for us—meatballs, garlic bread, broccoli—and she told
me she’d spent the day in New York. Walked to the train station, hopped on a train all by herself. Wandered around Central
Park. She was just… glowing. She said she loved the city. And even though I felt a little… well, jealous, I was also glad
to see her feeling well again. I told her she needed to be careful, keep her purse close to her body, not ride the subway
alone, that kind of thing, and she laughed the way she had in high school when she knew I was right but she was going to do
things her way anyway. I decided to drop the subject. I thought if visiting New York made her happy, then so be it.”