Daughter's Keeper (41 page)

Olivia shook her head.

“It's a word in Yiddish. My grandmother used to tell me when I was a kid that every person had a
b'shert
, like a soul mate. And she said that just before you're born, an angel takes you around, shows you this person, and then smacks you hard, right here right under your nose, where this little thing is.” He reached out and tapped her philtrum. She jumped. “And that makes you forget what the angel told you. So then you get born, and you grow up, and you spend the rest of your life searching for that person you once saw that you don't quite remember.” Olivia stared at her hands. She couldn't bear to look at him. “Here's the thing, Olivia. What if you're my
b'shert
? What if I'm yours? Are we really just going to let that slip through our fingers because of something as stupid as
timing?
”

Olivia wanted desperately to accede to Izaya's gentle, tantalizing persuasion. She could tell he was absolutely serious, that he was, or thought he was, in love with her. To disappear into the horror of prison with Izaya's photograph in her pocket, with the security of his love, real or imagined, in her heart—wouldn't that make it all easier? Or would it? She had spent her entire life going from one boy or man to another, looking for someone who would take care of her, would provide her with the sensation of ease and security that she imagined other girls, daughters of actual, present fathers, took for granted. Here was a man willing, eager to give her that refuge.

And yet, even though she thought she might be in love with him, it was suddenly clear to her that there was no way she could be with him. While it might seem like the easiest thing to allow him to save her, or at least to make her feel like being saved was even the remotest of possibilities, she could not do it. The fantasy of a relationship that might or might not outlast her incarceration would not provide her with the specific goal she knew she needed to survive the next years. More importantly, it would distract her. She knew herself well enough to understand that she could not fix both Izaya and Luna in her scopes at the same time.

Olivia looked down at her sleeping baby. Luna was on her side, her legs curled up and her arms flung wide.

“I don't know if I'm your
b'shert
, Izaya. I know I like you a whole lot. I admire you. I might even love you. But I have Luna now. I have to spend every moment with her. I have to fill my eyes, and my mind, and my heart only with her. There isn't room for anyone else, not now. There can't be.” As Olivia spoke the words, she ­realized that they were the absolute truth. The only person she wanted was Luna; the only focus for her attention, her love, her devotion, was her baby. By bringing Luna into the world, Olivia had abdicated the right to retreat to the security of yet another man's arms and attention. Her own anxiety, her own loneliness, could no longer be the motivating force behind her behavior. It was Luna's security that had to be her primary—her only—concern. What Olivia had lacked as a daughter was no longer important—it was what she had to provide as a mother that mattered now.

Izaya opened his mouth, but something about her expression must have made him realize there was no point in arguing, that she had made up her mind.

He nodded. They sat in silence for awhile, and then Izaya said, “Well, what about later?” he asked.

“Later?”

“You know, when you get out.”

Olivia imagined a scene some three and a half years hence. Izaya waiting for her at the gates to the prison, Luna in his arms. “I don't know. It's a long time away. Why don't we just wait and see,” she said.

***

Olivia held her coffee in one hand, away from her body and the arm where the baby rested. She sipped carefully and set the cup down far from Luna's grasping fingers.

“Are you ready?” Elaine asked.

Olivia nodded. She had packed the contents of her apartment into a storage container and had the container picked up and taken away, having prepaid three and a half years of storage fees. She had boxed up Jorge's belongings and mailed them down to his parents in Mexico. She had packed Luna's tiny jumpers and T-shirts, her toys, pacifiers, and bottles, into an oversized duffel bag.

“I was wondering,” her mother said. “Would you like to do something special today? Since it's your last day.”

Olivia squeezed Luna a little tighter. “Like what?”

“Maybe Point Reyes? We'll drive out and take a hike along the beach, eat some barbecued oysters?”

When Olivia was ten years old, she and Elaine had spent one Sunday driving along the Pacific Coast Highway in West Marin. At one point, they had strayed off the main road and stitched their way along the quilted seam of road between the rolling hills and dairy farms. They had stumbled upon a gas station with a picnic table set up on the grass behind the pumps. A charcoal fire was burning in half of an oil drum propped up on sawhorses, and rows of oysters on the half-shell bubbled on top of the makeshift grill. A hand-lettered sign leaning against the table read BBQ Oyster 50 Cent. Olivia and Elaine had pulled over and spent an hour shoveling the oysters into their mouths, slurping up the briny liquid and wiping up tomato sauce with slices of Wonder Bread.

For a couple of years afterward, they had taken Sunday drives up to Point Reyes in search of the gas station with the perfect barbecued oysters. But they hadn't paid attention to the name of the road, and they disagreed about whether it had been north or south of Inverness. They'd stopped at countless oyster shacks and eaten hundreds of barbecued bivalves, but nothing had ever come close to that first perfect mouthful of vinegar, tomato, and sea. In a lifetime of misremembered accidents, affronts, and hurt feelings, each held a joyful memory of that day that was both precise and identical to the other's. The last time they'd gone in search of their legendary feast had been the year Olivia started high school.

“Point Reyes! That'd be great! We can take our bikes and do the entire spit,” Arthur said as he came walking through the kitchen on his way to the laundry room, a pile of fetid bike shorts and Lycra T-shirts in his arms.

Elaine looked up at him, startled. “Oh, but what about the baby? I mean, what would Olivia do?”

“She and Luna could take a little hike while you and I bike,” he said.

Elaine's voice was soft and almost wheedling. “That's a wonderful idea, but why don't I keep Olivia company.
You
bike and we'll walk.”

Arthur looked at Elaine for a moment, his brow slightly wrinkled, as if he were trying to figure out what it meant that she was choosing to spend the day in her daughter's company rather than his. Elaine smiled blandly back.

“Sure,” he said, after a moment. He adjusted the load of dirty laundry in his arms and walked back to the laundry room.

The road to the Point Reyes National Seashore ribboned over and through the lolling West Marin hills. To Olivia, sitting in the backseat next to Luna, the hills looked like a woman's not-quite-spread legs and thighs, with patches of black oak nestled in the valleys like mats of mossy pubic hair. Fields dotted with the black and white spots of grazing dairy cows and draped in a gentle gray mist rolled by her window. She inhaled deeply, smelling the ocean's sharp tang. The hills gave way to trees and then again to smooth brown mounds of waving grasses, and finally the road dead-ended in a little parking lot at the Tomales Bay trailhead.

Arthur leapt out of the car and wrestled his bike off the rack attached to the trunk. He clamped his bullet-shaped helmet onto his head and shrugged a neon green windbreaker over his taxicab-yellow top. He clomped in his bike shoes over to Elaine.

“Okay, I'll bike back. We'll meet in two hours in Point Reyes in front of that gourmet market.”

“Perfect.” Elaine gave him a kiss on his cheek. He mounted his bike and rode away.

Olivia strapped the Baby Björn to her chest, lifted Luna out of her car seat, and slipped her into the carrier. She adjusted the straps, and Luna kicked, delighted to be facing outward, looking at the world and, at the same time, snuggled tightly against her mother's breasts and belly.

Elaine led the way through the gate and they began walking down the hill. The path wound through a valley with gentle slopes rising on either side. The ground was soft and sandy, and their shoes left sharp-edged prints in the dirt.

Olivia hiked carefully, placing each foot squarely so that she would not stumble and crush her tiny burden. She bent her head and pressed her lips against the top of Luna's head, feeling the feathers of the baby's soft hair and the delicate skin underneath. Olivia closed her eyes and willed herself to remember everything about the moment. The feel of Luna's feet resting in either one of her palms. The heavy heat of the baby's back pressed against her chest. The brush of her hair against Olivia's mouth. And her soft velvet smell, with just the barest hint of sour musk, like apricots that had begun to rot on the tree, or sweet, thick cream at the moment before it turned.

“Coming?” Elaine called from farther down the path. Olivia inhaled once more, then began walking again, catching up to her mother. They strolled in silence for a while, watching the gulls drift by overhead, and stepping cautiously to avoid the snails creeping slowly across the path.

They came upon a sign and stopped. Elaine read it aloud.

“Beware of sharks and sneaker waves.”

There were two pictures—icons, simplified to their essence. One, the shark, was all fang and jaw. The other was really two images in one. The first showed a man and a woman enjoying a picnic on the beach under an umbrella. In the next frame, a wave had reached out and snatched at them, upending the umbrella, and sending the woman tumbling off into the surf. The man reached out for her, helplessly.

They stared at the sign for a moment, and then, without speaking, continued along the path.

In another fifty yards, the valley opened up to the sea. The path ended at the beach. It was suddenly cooler, and Olivia hugged Luna to her body. She zipped her jacket around the two of them, and walked closer to the water's edge, heedless of both sneaker waves and great whites. The water lapped at the toes of her boots, and Olivia stared at the ocean. She could see only a few hundred yards ahead of her. Beyond that, the sea wore a veil of mist and fog. Although she knew the Pacific went on and on for thousands of miles, she saw nothing but the nearest little edge of water. She contemplated walking into the ocean. She had not, since her trial and sentencing, been plagued by fantasies of escape—neither in the form of flight nor in that of suicide. It had never really occurred to her that she had a choice other than to go to prison. At the edge of the sea, for a brief moment, Olivia imagined taking Luna, sliding into the cold water, drifting off to a secret place hidden in the blanket of mist, and disappearing without a trace.

Elaine came up beside her and gently touched her. They stood there for a few minutes, Elaine's hand warm on Olivia's back. Then they headed up the path toward the car.

About halfway to the parking lot, Elaine suddenly stopped and motioned to Olivia. Olivia followed her mother's pointed finger and gazed up the side of the hill banking the path, directly into the eyes of an elk. The elk stood impossibly still and stared at the human interlopers. Her fawn, its tiny white bottom snuggled tight against its mother, looked at the them curiously. Olivia and the elk stared at each other for a long while and then, with a flick of her ears, the elk led her baby up the slope and away.

Olivia turned to smile at Elaine and found her crying, tears streaming down her cheeks. Olivia opened her arms and embraced her mother. Luna wriggled, trapped happily between them, laughing at the game.

***

Prison was where Jorge was finally learning English. It was not particularly necessary; the guards at the Federal Corrections Center at Lompoc spoke enough Spanish to make their orders and insults understood, and the only inmates with whom Jorge associated were Mexicans, like himself. Nonetheless, he was slowly beginning to pick up bits and pieces of the language that had always eluded him when his only motivation for learning had been to make Olivia happy.

Life was by no means good or easy in the prison, but the pervasive misery was somehow more manageable than it had been when he had been in county jail. The uncertainty of his future had, then, been an excruciating element of his fear. Now he knew exactly how long he would be incarcerated—thirty-five months, less good-behavior credit if all went well and he could keep himself out of trouble. He knew, too, what would happen to him upon his release. His lawyer had explained that he would be transferred to INS custody and deported. The prospect of deportation, of leaving behind the country that had treated him, he believed, with a cruelty he could not have imagined before he had crossed the Rio Grande, filled him with nothing but relief.

Jorge had received one letter from home, written by his father. Juan Carlos had contained his anger, inquiring about his son's well-being without once writing the true disappointment and fury Jorge knew he felt. Only when he wrote about the baby and their agreement to care for it in Olivia's absence did something of his chilly disgust for his son come through on the page. Juan Carlos had always been a man who took full responsibility for his children, and he instructed Jorge that this behavior was the least of what would be expected from him as well. Upon his release, Jorge would be expected to work with his father to support his child, and even once it was returned to Olivia, Juan Carlos would require that Jorge continue to send money and maintain contact, both for the child's sake and for his entire family's, who were sure to come to love it in the meantime.

Jorge had written a letter replete with apologies and assurances, filling four pages with the words he knew he should have written to Olivia, not to his father. He knew, however, that he never would write to Olivia what he was afraid she deserved to hear. He satisfied himself with making his regrets known to his parents. Jorge then put from his mind all thoughts of the baby whom he could not bring himself to expect with anything other than guilt and despair. Having failed its mother so completely, he imagined it would be only a matter of time before he did the same to the child.