Daughter's Keeper (8 page)

“Put your seat belt on,” she said.

He leaned back in his seat, still tapping nervously. “Don't worry about it.”

“Jorge, you have to wear a seat belt. Do you want some cop stopping us while we're on our way to do your drug deal?”

He reached back for the seat belt.

She pulled out of the parking lot and followed his directions to a small house in South Oakland.

“Wait for me here. Don't turn off the engine,” he said.

Olivia sat in the car, listening to the idle. The street was empty and quiet. The houses were small bungalows, most with wrought iron gates on the windows and doors. The house into which Jorge had disappeared was painted a pale color; she couldn't make it out in the dark. Its front lawn had been ­covered over in cement that was probably painted grass-green. There was a tricycle lying on its side in the driveway, missing one of its rear wheels. Along the side of the house, a clothesline drooped under the weight of sheets snapping in the night breeze.

Olivia turned on the radio. She punched the buttons, stopping finally on a station playing
bolero
music. Jorge would hate it, preferring as he did
Norteno
bands likes Los Tigres del Norte. But Olivia loved old scratchy records with the quavering voices of
boleristas
like Amparo Montes and Toña La Negra, singing about
desesperación del amor
and
almas solas.

She jumped as Jorge jerked open the car door. He was holding a small cardboard container, about the size of two shoeboxes. He laid it gently in the well of the passenger seat and got in the car. Then, with an almost childish grimace, he buckled his seat belt.

Olivia's stomach lurched with dread. “What's that?” she whispered.

“You know what it is.”

“I thought your job was just to introduce people! I thought you weren't even going to be touching the stuff!” Her fingers gripped the steering wheel so tightly she could see her knuckles glow white in the dark of the car. She kept her eyes on Jorge's face, afraid even to look at the box under his feet.

“I'm the one everybody trusts,” Jorge said. “Oreste knows me, Gabriel knows me. It only makes sense for me to do the delivery. I just drop this off and pick up the money. That's it.”

The back of Olivia's neck prickled, and she whipped her head around, terrified someone was watching her.

“Oh, God,” she whispered.

Jorge hit his knees with his hands, obviously impatient with her anxiety. He seemed to feel none of it himself. On the ­contrary, he looked excited, almost happy. “Let's just drop this off, okay? Then I'll take you home. I'll deliver the money myself.”

Once again she followed Jorge's directions to another house. She was so frightened she didn't even notice the route they took. The numbers on the digital clock on the dashboard seemed to be frozen, refusing to move while she waited alone in the car. She tried to listen to the radio, but the sound of her heart beating in her chest drowned out the music.

Suddenly, in her rearview mirror, Olivia saw the bright lights of a car driving up the block. She began to whimper, and by the time it had passed her and continued on its way, she was crying. It felt like hours before Jorge returned, and she almost left without him. When he finally opened the car door and leapt in beside her, she slammed the gear shift into drive and spun away, blindly driving down street after street until she reached a landmark she recognized. She kept her eyes glued to the road in front of her, refusing to look at Jorge or at the brown paper bag he held in his lap. She slowed down only when she was within a block or two of home. She pulled up in front of their apartment building and wrenched her house key off the ring. She grabbed her bag, jumped out of the car, and ran down the alley to their apartment.

Olivia gagged as she ran by the garbage bins and made it only as far as the kitchen sink, where she vomited again and again until her chest heaved dryly and nothing more came up.

She leaned her forehead against the cool metal of the sink and breathed deeply, willing her stomach to cease its anguished roiling. Finally, when she was able, she stood up and walked into the ­bathroom. She stripped off her clothes and stood under the hot shower until her breasts and belly were seared bright red.

She crawled into bed, pulled the thick comforter over her head, and buried her face in the soft pillow. Within moments she fell deeply asleep. She didn't hear Jorge come in hours later and didn't even shift in the bed when he lay down next to her. The next morning he was gone again. She took another message for him, writing out the details Gabriel gave her. Where. When. She did her best to put out of her mind what it was that her boyfriend was doing—how he was earning the money he imagined he needed to support her.

Olivia wished she had somewhere to go, something to do, but it was her day off. She cleaned the apartment, more because she needed to keep busy than because it was dirty. She was down on her knees, scrubbing at brown rust stains under the lip of the ­toilet, when she heard a faint moaning. Her bathroom window faced the alley leading toward the street, or she never would have heard the noise. Olivia opened the smoked glass window, jerked at the warped sash. She stuck her head out of the window and saw an elderly woman backed up against the rear of the apartment building. Her arms were spread wide and her fingers were scrabbling at the clapboard. A small black dog stood on its hind legs, its front paws leaving muddy prints on the woman's faded housedress.

“Don't be afraid! I'll be right there!” Olivia shouted.

She ran through her apartment and out the front door. By the time Olivia reached her, the woman had begun to slide down the side of the building, her breath coming in shallow gasps and her eyes wild with fear. It was the rottweiler puppy. Olivia scooped up the dog just as it began licking at the old woman's face. She held the dog in one arm and gripped the woman around the waist with her other. She tried to lift her to her feet, but quickly realized that she wasn't strong enough to do that one-handed. Instead, she lowered her gently to the ground until the woman sat propped up against the wall, her legs stuck out straight ahead of her like the ribs of a broken umbrella.

“Are you okay?” Olivia asked.

The woman didn't answer. The dog gave a sudden wriggle, and Olivia looked down at it. He barked happily, and she scratched his ears. Then she stormed across the alley and pounded on the door of the apartment where his owner lived. When no one answered, she knocked even harder. The door finally opened, and the young man who she had seen walking the dog peered out, his hair standing up on his head in wiry spikes.

“Wassup?” he said, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes.

“Your dog nearly killed someone, that's ‘wassup'!” Olivia shoved the puppy into the man's arms.

“He just a puppy, he can't kill no one.”

“Yeah? Well he nearly scared that woman to death.” Olivia waved in the direction of the old woman. The man's defensive grimace disappeared, and his face sagged.

“She all right?” He began to walk toward the woman but stopped at Olivia's warning hand.

“Leave her alone. I'll take care of it. You just keep your dog inside where he belongs.” She spun on her heel and ran back to the woman who had, by now, begun to breath more normally. “Are you all right? Do you need me to take you to the doctor? Should I call an ambulance for you?” Olivia helped her to her feet. Gnarled blue veins buckled the ashy white skin of the woman's twig-like legs, and her hand was a dry claw in Olivia's.

“Should I call 9-1-1?” Olivia asked.

“No, no,” the woman muttered in a vaguely European accent. “I'm fine. Fine. I am only afraid of dogs. Nothing ­happened. Only I am so stupid. Afraid of a little dog.” She wiped ineffectually at the paw prints mixing curiously with the faded pattern of teapots and cups on her dress. “Can you only help me to my house? Please?” She pointed to the rear door of the building.

“Of course! Of course.” Olivia helped her inside and up the short flight of stairs to her apartment. “Are you sure you don't need a doctor? Is there someone I can call for you?”

The woman shook her head. “My daughter, she'll be here soon. She comes for lunch. She'll be here soon. It's all right.” She unlocked the door to her apartment using the key hanging around her neck and opened it only enough to slip inside. The door slammed behind her, and Olivia was alone in the hall.

When Jorge came home later in the day, Olivia began to tell him what had happened, about the woman's terror when confronted with the overly friendly puppy, and about how furious Olivia had been at the dog's owner. But Jorge cut her off.

“Did Gabriel call?” he asked.

She glared at him, and then wordlessly handed him the slip of paper on which she'd written the message from Gabriel. He took it, crammed it into his pocket, and tried to kiss her. She turned her head away.

“Come on, baby,” he said in English, grabbing her up in his arms.

This was the first time Jorge had ever said anything like this to her. He only rarely used English phrases and words, and then with a kind of hesitant self-consciousness that had always charmed her. This sudden ease with an endearment never before part of their repertoire made her inexplicably angry. She twisted out from under his arms.

“
Mi amor
,” he said, softly, and reached out again. She began to shrug his hand away, but he rested it so gently, so tentatively, that she could not bear to refuse him. In a low, earnest voice, he promised her that as soon as he got the second half of his money, he would wash his hands of Gabriel.

She gave in. He steered her to their bed, all the while whispering how much he loved her, how beautiful she was. She lay back on the pillowy down comforter, its striped duvet cover worn slick and feather-soft, and closed her eyes. She opened them to find him waving in front of her the wad of cash he'd brought home the night before and stuffed under the mattress of their bed. It was as if he thought the money were Spanish Fly or rhino horn—that the mere sight of it would make her voracious with desire. She looked at it for a moment, despite herself, because she'd never seen so many bills in one place. Then she rolled on her stomach and buried her head in her hands. Jorge kissed her unresponsive neck for a while and then gave up. He stretched out next to her, and the two of them lay there, silently.

After a while she turned to him. “I'm going out. Do you need the car?”

He shook his head. “Oreste is picking me up this time. I told him I didn't want to use your car again.”

As if that made it all right. As if it were the use of her car to which she objected.

***

When Olivia was fourteen years old, in her first days in high school, her position on the rungs of the ladder of teenage popularity, always somewhat tenuous, had plummeted to the depths of her worst fears. Before then—before the advent of lockers and ­homerooms, of training bras and boy-craziness, Olivia had been surrounded by a group of girls whose loyal friendship she had always found somewhat surprising. None of these children whom she had known since their first days together in kindergarten was her best friend—she had never had one of those. Still, those girls, even while paired off in their own impenetrable couples, included her in their afterschool activities, sleepover parties, and birthday trips to the Oakland Zoo, the Discovery Museum, the teddy bear factory.

All that changed abruptly when they abandoned the ivy-covered haven and familiar worn blacktop of middle school for the squat brick buildings and bald playing fields of the high school. It was as if on the first day of school each child had been handed a list of names, a strict inventory of students ranked from most to least popular. While invisible, these rosters were absolutely immutable and utterly clear. For whatever reason—because of her lack of a father, of the familiarity of her mother to many of the children who had bought or even stolen candy from the pharmacy, of the precise tidiness of the clothing Elaine purchased for her at the beginning of every school year, or, most likely of all, because of her nearly palpable insecurity—Olivia found herself ranked some notches lower than the girls whom she'd always thought of as her friends.

One day in algebra class, Deirdre Black had punted a small football of a note onto Olivia's desk. Olivia had unfolded the paper to find a message written by the other girl on behalf of their entire small circle of friends. The note informed Olivia that the girls had had a meeting about her. They had decided that she was “ruining their reputation,” that they could no longer
afford
to be her friends, and that she was not to sit with them in the lunchroom ever again “as long as we all shall live.” The note was illustrated with Deirdre's signature doodle—a kitten's bewhiskered face. The girl had added a single fat tear under one of the cat's heavily lashed eyes.

Olivia stared at the paper, her face flushed, and her eyes burning with the acid sting of humiliated, and humiliating, tears. When she finally mustered the courage to look at Deirdre, she found the other girl smiling faintly and studiously copying the equation from the blackboard. Without really expecting to, Olivia lurched to her feet, scooped up her books, and ran from the classroom, ignoring the teacher's cry of protest. She burst through the doors of the school and out onto the street, not even bothering to be relieved that there was no hall monitor to object to her escape. She ran all the way up to College Avenue, the stitch in her side forcing her to limp the last few yards.

The pharmacy was quiet when Olivia lurched through the doors. She found Elaine alone behind the counter and ducked underneath it, flinging herself at her mother's body. She wrapped her arms around Elaine's slender waist and howled.

Elaine's own cry was more muted, but she was still, quite obviously, terrified. “What? What happened? Olivia? Olivia?”