The Year Everything Changed (32 page)

“You won’t. You can see her whenever you want.”

“Be reasonable, Carmen. Mexico City is hundreds of miles from here.”

She opened a cupboard, took out a pan, and slammed the door. “You don’t see her now. You and Mario are always off doing some business thing.”

“You know the problems we’ve had lately.”

“No, I don’t know. You never tell me anything.” She held up her hand to stop my reply. “I don’t want to know. Not now. It’s too late.” Her expression softened. “It’s always something with you, Jessie. I’m tired of living like this. I’m not going to do it anymore.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything.

She put a hand on my arm. “I know you never loved me. And you know I never loved you. You were being kind when you asked me to marry you, and I was so grateful I thought it would be enough. But it’s not. I want more. I’m still young. I have a lifetime ahead of me. I don’t want to spend it in a loveless marriage.”

Again, there was nothing I could say. She and Christina left the following week. The strawberry business folded that summer. Mario and I salvaged enough for him to start another business and for me to get back and forth to see Christina while I looked around for something else to do. I’d never learned to read Spanish and yet didn’t bother hiring a lawyer to look through the divorce papers when they arrived, foolishly trusting Carmen and not knowing I was dealing with her father. It never occurred to me that I was relinquishing parental rights to Christina when I signed.

To be fair, neither did Carmen. Domination was the toll extracted by her father for being allowed into the family circle again. She’d paid without realizing the consequences. When my visits were cut off I used what money I had left to hire my own lawyer, but it was useless. Carmen sneaked Christina out of the house to see me when she could, but our time together was strained and awkward and never long enough.

One day a man came with them to the park, Enrique Alvarado. Carmen said he was a friend, but I could see he was much more. She adored him, as did Christina. He was in his midthirties, well spoken, and wore his custom-made suit as if it were an entitlement. In comparison, in my shorts and flowered shirt, I looked like an aging surfer who’d had too many mai tais and too many years in the sun.

Carmen took my arm. “Can we talk? Alone? There are some things I need to tell you.” Before, she’d spoken English with only a trace of an accent, never teaching Christina a word of Spanish. Now, suddenly, English seemed like a second language to her.

I knew I wasn’t going to like what was coming. “Now?”

“Enrique will watch Christina.”

I followed her to a bench while Christina stayed behind and Enrique watched her climb the slide. Hearing Christina’s laughter and excited calls to Enrique, I was consumed with jealousy. The torment became almost unbearable as Carmen laid out the reasons she wanted me to stop seeing my daughter.

“You can see how Enrique is with her, and how she feels about him,” she said. “We’re going to be married next month.”

“Congratulations.”

“She already calls him Papa,” she added gently, not responding to my sarcasm.

I watched Christina a long time without saying anything. She was the one bright spot in a life without direction or reason. For the past year my existence had centered on the efforts it took to see her.

But what was I to her? I knew she loved me. I could see it in her eyes when she first caught sight of me waiting beside the palm tree at the park. Was it enough? Was dividing her love and loyalty between me and Enrique too high a price to ask a four-year-old child to pay?

“Give me some time with her,” I finally said.

“You can have the rest of the day. I’ll meet you back here at five.”

I don’t like zoos, even the best seem like animal prisons, but I didn’t know where else to take her, so that’s where we went. I didn’t try to explain how her life was about to change, I figured Carmen could take care of that. Instead, I spent my last day with my beautiful raven-haired daughter with her riding on my shoulders and seeing the world through her eyes.

I wouldn’t have made the same decision today as I did then. I would have stayed and fought and bought and bribed whoever stood in the way. Christina wasn’t better off not knowing me. Wisdom gained in hindsight exacts a cruel toll.

With that same bitter hindsight, I know now I should never have let Elizabeth refuse to see me either. I should have parked myself on her doorstep until she had me arrested and gone back when I got out on bail. We could have worked it out. I’m sure of it now. Eventually, she would have forgiven me for Frank. She might even have helped me forgive myself.

I was right to let Ginger go. So was Barbara. Life taught me love doesn’t always come wrapped with a pretty bow. As often as not it hurts one or the other of the people giving and taking, sometimes both. I think that’s what happened to Rachel. Anna should have let her go the way Barbara let Ginger go, but she held on because she loved her daughter more than she loved herself.

Elizabeth looked at Christina. “Do you ever wonder what your life would have been like if he’d found a way to keep you?”

She shook her head. “I don’t have to wonder, I know.” She gave Elizabeth a smile and a wink through her tears. “It is what it is,” she said softly. “For both of us.”

Chapter Fifty-one
Christina

Christina leaned back in her chair and rubbed her eyes. Seven nonstop hours at the editing desk and she was only halfway through the training film River City Studio was doing for the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department. She was hungry, she had a headache, and she had shooting pains racing from her shoulders to her neck. She rocked her head back and forth, trying to work out the kink, and spotted Dexter trying to sneak past the door.

Digging her heels into the floor, she shot her chair across the room and swung through the doorway and into the hall. “Dexter—how much notice do you want before I quit?”

He tucked the folder he was carrying under his arm and looked at her over the top of his half-glasses. “All right—you can have a break.”

“I don’t want a break, I want to quit. One more month and I’m on my way to L.A.”

“Shit.” He came down the hall, grabbed the back of her chair, and hauled her into his office. “Let’s talk about this.”

She scooted closer to his desk and put her feet up. “There’s nothing to talk about.”

“What if I were to make you an offer?”

“This better be clean.” They’d been working together six months, and Dexter had never come on to her. Not that she would have minded. He was kinda cute with his shaved head and dark red beard, but he wasn’t her type. Way too nice. The guys who usually caught her eye had a bit of a bastard in them. Like Randy.

“You’re not my type, Christina.”

She laughed. “Amazing—you popped the thought right out of my head. So, what’s the offer?”

“What would you say if I told you Ian Grayson has signed on for
After the Lightning
?”

“Signed on?” she said skeptically. After last year’s Oscar-winning performance in
The Forest
, Ian Grayson had moved to the top of the A list in Hollywood. He was the movies’ latest bad boy wanted by everyone from Spielberg to Howard. “Or you talked his agent into sending him the script?”

“I sent him the script myself. He’s my cousin.”

She put her feet back on the floor and sat up straight. He had her attention. “So what’s the offer?”

“I don’t want to go to any of the usual sources for money. With a star like Ian, I’m not big enough to keep control of the project if a problem develops. Which means we do everything on the cheap.”

“And I’m cheap.”

“More important, you’re good.”

She’d found the script on Dexter’s desk a couple of months ago and asked if she could read it. The story was gripping, but chancy. For the first three-quarters of the movie Ian would play a seemingly unredeemable antihero. It would take a hell of a director to make the transformation believable. “So, how do I get paid?”

“Scale, plus producer credit, plus front-end cut.”

“And for this I do . . . what?”

“Everything I can’t.”

She could go to L.A., meet all the right people, hook up with the perfect script, do everything right, and never get the chance to work with an actor like Ian. She smiled. “I want everything spelled out in a contract.”

“You pay for the lawyer and it’s yours.”

Bemused, she shook her head. “I’m never going to get to L.A.”

He spun her chair around and scooted her back into the hallway. “Yes, you will—unless you want me to pick up your Oscar for you. Now go back to work.”

“I haven’t said yes.”

He gave her a knowing grin. “But you didn’t say no.”

“If you’re going to strong-arm me you could at least do it over dinner.”

“You’re on. Eva’s Roost tonight.”

“That better not be some hamburger joint.”

“Would I do that? Never mind, don’t answer.” He put his hand to his heart. “Eva’s Roost isn’t the biggest restaurant in this area, but it’s the best. I’ll give you another five percent if you don’t think so, too.”

She liked the odds. “You’re on.”

Christina didn’t get home until two-thirty the next morning. She was an hour into her second wind and unable to sleep, so got up and went into the kitchen for a snack. As usual, Rhona had the refrigerator fully stocked, everything from pudding cups to lunch meat. She settled on strawberry yogurt.

She shuffled down the hallway to Jessie’s study, her ragged stuffed bear tucked under her arm. Standing at the door eating her yogurt, she looked inside. A full moon and the neighbor’s outdoor lighting cast the room in off-white ghostly light and deep shadows. With just a little imagination she could picture her father sitting at the antique desk, looking back at her.

“I loved you, Daddy,” she said softly. “How could you convince yourself I would be better off without you?” She understood now that no one had told her he’d died. It was something she’d made up when he left and never came back. He had to be dead—otherwise he would have come for her.

“Was it really just easier to walk away than to fight for me?” Christina snaked her hand around the corner and flipped the light switch. Decorator lighting recessed in the ceiling and tucked over and in the bookshelves lit the room in a soft glow.

Christina put her half-finished yogurt on the table next to a wingback chair and went around the desk. She’d been in this room a dozen times, looked at the books, at Frank’s Purple Heart, at the things on Jessie’s desk, at the pen propped in a mounted block of gold quartz. She’d never felt free to do more than look at the arrowheads or spent bullets or to take down one of the books or open a drawer or look inside the battered, leather-covered box on the corner of the desk. To do so felt like an invasion of privacy.

Now, driven by a need to better understand the man who had willingly abandoned her, Christina propped her bear against the lamp, sat in his chair, and reached for the box. She lifted the top, looked inside, and pulled out a woman’s watch, the face narrow, the band delicate. Next she found a man’s pocket watch, a pair of screw-back earrings with a matching necklace, and a pair of old wire-rim eyeglasses. There were yellowed letters, a page from a family Bible listing births, deaths, and marriages of relatives dating back to 1820, and old black-and-white photographs curling at the corners.

Christina set the letters aside and studied the photographs. Even as a young boy, Jessie was easy to identify. Standing with his arms stiff at his sides, posed in front of an unpainted farmhouse, he had the same hungry, faraway look in his eyes that she remembered as a child. The others she named by elimination. The thin girl with braids over her shoulders and a toothless grin would be her aunt, the boy in overalls and a cap pulled low on his forehead, her uncle. Her grandparents had been captured in the kitchen, her grandmother standing near the stove, a spoon in her hand, a calico apron covering her dress. Her grandfather leaned against the counter, a smile of mischief and joy directed toward the woman he clearly loved.

Christina stared at the picture. She could almost feel their happiness. Her grandmother must have been an extraordinary woman to survive what awaited her. “How did you do it, Grandma?” she said softly. “How did you have your heart broken so many times and still go on?”

There were other pictures, including a baby picture with Jessie’s name on the back. He was bare-skinned on a bearskin rug and plainly unhappy to be there. Most of the photographs had been taken on the farm, but there were a couple of mountain scenes where whoever took the picture stood back so far, she would need a magnifying glass to tell who the people were.

She couldn’t see herself in these people, but then she’d never been able to see herself in any of her family. She looked pale compared to her half-brother and -sister in Mexico and dark compared to her sisters here. She’d never said so out loud, but there were times when she felt as if she didn’t belong anywhere or to anyone.

She picked up a picture of Jessie standing on a pillared porch, his face in profile, staring at a cloud of dust on the horizon. He looked isolated and solitary, a boy not yet a man, a child unaware that sorrow would shadow his footsteps throughout his entire life.

Was she his surrender, his acknowledgment that he had won battles but lost the war for personal happiness? Was it possible that he really had believed he was doing her a favor by walking away?

She held the photograph closer, and when her vision clouded with tears she held her father’s image against her chest. “I love you, Daddy,” she said again. “I always have. I always will. I wish you had given me the chance to tell you.”

Moments later she reached for her bear and automatically tucked it under her arm, the perch it had ridden for over twenty years since the day it came home with her from the zoo. As she moved to leave, the empty shelf where Frank’s medal had been kept caught her eye. On impulse, she crossed the room and put her bear on the shelf, adjusting his legs, centering him, then tilting his head just so. “Looks as if you have a new home,” she said, smiling through her tears. “Looks as if we both do.”