Molly and Dawan and Lester. I wonder if any of them knew each other. I can’t remember now how close in time they were. Molly shared her food with the feral cats that lived in the small courtyards off a few of the offices, and Lester kept his guitar stashed in an unlocked delivery box meant for pharmaceutical samples, which worked for quite a while, but then one day it was gone, and Lester never knew how or where. And Dawan. Well, Dawan is one of the kids I try not to think too much about.
I met him first in the wash, where Marty and I used to walk the dogs on weekend mornings. I don’t usually meet kids on my own. I’m assigned a case as a CASA volunteer, or I take on a custody matter pro bono, or maybe I get involved with someone through the Las Vegas Homeless Youth project. But Dawan I met without any of these buffers; Dawan I met because I noted the tramped-down area in front of the salt cedar bush he had turned into his home, because Rebel whined and sniffed and would not leave the area, and because I spotted the handle of a red metal cup deep within the brush.
“Hello,” I called.
Marty stopped, already well ahead of me, and looked back quizzically.
“Hello, is someone there?”
Silence.
Of course, it could have been anyone. Any tramp. An adult passing through. I had no way to know it was a fourteen-year-old boy. But I had just gone to a seminar on homeless youth, and one of the speakers had talked about the wash, about how dangerous it would become for any teens living there as soon as a summer monsoon hit. Of course, floods in Las Vegas are always dangerous. When I was in middle school, someone’s aunt washed away in her car. The water had come right over the road, and she had driven into it, not knowing there was a dip just there, not knowing that what looked like a slick of water across the surface was a powerful four-foot-deep rush. Those kinds of accidents aren’t as common anymore, now that the county has spent twenty years building channels and walls and retention basins that sluice the water right through town. But all that effort has made the washes more dangerous: the water runs faster, and we are less accustomed to its power, so storm after storm, we lose a child who has the delightful inspiration to try to float in the sudden stream, or an unsuspecting nature lover, who perhaps hears nothing before he is swooshed away with the uprooted trees and the abandoned sofas.
That must have been what was in my mind when I called hello again, when I shook the branches near the tramped-down entrance, when I said that I had something to give him. I didn’t have anything, of course, except a bottle of water and a rolled-up twenty in my pant cuff, but I wanted to see who was there, if someone was there.
It took a while. Marty gave up, whistled Rebel to his side, and said he’d meet me up top, near the train tracks, when I was ready. So I didn’t have Marty or the dogs when the salt cedar started to shake, which was the first time it occurred to me that I should have asked Marty to stay, I should have kept Rebel with me. But when Dawan crawled out, slithering beneath what I had somehow thought was going to open like a door—a skinny, scratched, sunburned adolescent—my heart nearly stopped. His lips were dry and cracked, his eyes bloodshot. I could see a long, dirty cut high on his shoulder, near his neck.
“I got a knife,” he said.
I should have been scared, but mostly I was shocked. He needed water, he needed a doctor. I couldn’t believe how close I had come to walking past that bush.
I handed him the bottle of water, and his hands shook as he tried to pull the plastic off the lid. I motioned for him to give the bottle back to me so that I could help him, and the look in his eyes, just for an instant, when he thought I was going to take back the water, when something in him would have surrendered it, the politeness of a child to an adult, that look comes back to me at night, in the middle of night, in the middle of certain dreams.
“I’ll open it for you. I’ve got more. I’ve got food.”
He tensed up then, afraid, but he needed the water. He wasn’t about to leave that water bottle.
As fast as I could, slower than I’ve ever known I could be, I opened the bottle, and he drank the water down. When it was gone, he looked at me, looked around me, looking for what I had promised: more water, food.
“My husband’s got our pack. He’s just up top. I’ll call him.”
He wanted to resist, I know he did, but he was too weak. I’ve thought about that since. The only time anyone was going to catch Dawan Jessup, the only chance anyone ever had to get him into some kind of system, was the day I found him, invisible but for the handle of a red cup in a salt cedar bush.
Marty didn’t hear me calling, but Dawan waited there. I’ll never know why, now that I know how hard he was to find, how impossible it was ever going to be to keep him. I raced to the top, to the tracks, and found Marty. The dogs beat us there, barking and leaping, happy to be sent back into the wash, and by the time Marty and I arrived, Dawan was standing, knife in hand, staring a startled Rebel down.
I whistled to Rebel, to Tank. They ran behind me, bumping into my legs, confused and frightened by Dawan.
“It’s okay, son,” said Marty. “We’re not going to hurt you. The dogs won’t hurt you.”
Dawan did not relax. He stood, a scrawny savage, willing himself a foot taller than he was.
“Do you want a sandwich? I’ve got two here.”
Marty handed Dawan the food, and the boy looked back, unsure whether to eat it right there or to take it into his now-discovered hideout.
“I’m Roberta. And this is Marty. What’s your name?”
He looked at me.
Then he sat down on a large rock, washed there in some summer storm, and opened the sandwich Marty had given him.
We waited.
“Dawan.”
And that was how it started. The four years of Dawan, the four years of trying and fighting and defending and hoping. Somehow Marty and I got him to an emergency room that day, and from there he went to Child Haven, and from there to a foster home, and then another, and then another. Somewhere in there he left, and I didn’t hear from him for a while, but then one morning, Dawan was the teen dancing down the oleander bush, snatching up the McMuffin, calling out Hi Robbie in a too-loud voice.
I’ll never forget the thrill of seeing Dawan that morning. Of finding out he was alive, of thinking that I had another chance.
I’ll never forget that thrill, nor the call, three months later, from Child Protective Services: Roberta, we thought you’d want to know.
Some things, you don’t want to know.
Some things, you always knew.
8
* * *
Avis
MY FIRST THOUGHT WAS that Jim and I should meet in some neutral place, that I didn’t want him in our home. I was almost used to being there alone, and I didn’t want him to come in, take a look at what was in the fridge, or see how many messages were blinking on the machine. But I kept playing out the possibilities in my mind, exactly why he thought “we should get together, make some decisions,” and I realized that I did not want to be in a restaurant if certain things were going to be said. I had lived my entire life in Las Vegas. There was nowhere we could go without the risk of running into someone one of us knew.
“Jim, I think it might be better just to meet here. Maybe you could pick up something for us to eat.”
I didn’t want to serve him food.
“Okay. Sure. However you want to do it.”
He sounds distracted. The hotel would be getting busier. Fall was busy, the holidays were busy. Even this year.
It’s as if he is confirming a business appointment. I wonder if there will come a day when he leaves my calls to get picked up by Elizabeth.
“Yes, that’s how I want to do it. Seven thirty.”
My voice is abrupt, because I don’t want him to hear how crushing his eight words were. I can’t help myself. I am looking forward to seeing him. I miss my hus
band. I have lived with him my entire adult life, and if I just close my eyes and pretend I never heard what he said about Darcy, I miss him.
Cheryl says I had better stop closing my eyes. And I damn well better not forget about Darcy.
JIM AND I WENT TO
Oregon once, for the wedding of Jim’s college roommate. I felt uncomfortable around all those friends of Jim’s, friends from a different life, who couldn’t imagine how obscure their references were to someone like me.
Emily was a baby, not quite one, and she was fussy all weekend. Wouldn’t let anyone hold her, didn’t want to take a nap, screamed when the bride tried to take her photo.
After the wedding—it was in a beautiful park, with a red Japanese bridge arched over a sliver of water—Emily would not let me set her down. She kept clinging to my leg, literally trying to crawl up it, and her hand tugged the band of my skirt down obscenely. So I scooped her up, and held her, hoping she would not suddenly pull at my shirt and expose more of my flesh, and then suddenly, she was bent half over, reaching, trying to get back down. I resisted for a moment, frustrated with her, and then gave in and set her down.
Immediately, she dropped to her knees and lightning crawled toward a patch of rock and dirt surrounding a bamboo shrub.
“Look. You’ve got a desert baby. She likes rocks.”
I stiffened, not sure if the woman, a girlfriend of another college friend, was being critical.
But it was true.
The patch of dirt was what Emily had wanted. She sat there, her pale pink dress smudged with brown, eyes bright, a rock in each hand, a telltale trail of dirt and pebbles disappearing between her lips. She gurgled happily.
“Wok. Dada. Wok.”
I couldn’t love Emily any more than I already did, but I remember the rush of warmth, knowing that she too felt out of her element, ill at ease in this wet, green world. And I remember looking at Jim, at his utterly unguarded face, as his daughter cooed dada below him.
Could anyone have imagined that I would have a life so sweet? A husband who loved me, a daughter we adored?
JIM ARRIVES RIGHT ON TIME,
carrying food from the Japanese restaurant at the hotel. I pour some beer into frosty glasses I keep in the freezer, but when I start to set the table in the nook, I suddenly remember that this is where Emily took her first steps. It was tiled then, but she had gone from this edge of the nook wall to that cabinet, this exact place, with her wobbly, lurching, leaning steps.
We were so proud of her. We had her do it again and again. Walk between us. Lift her up. Laugh. Jim holding her in the air. And then, again. Walk between us. Walk to Mommy. Walk to Daddy. Look at our girl. Look at our big girl. A walker!
She lay in her crib crying the next morning, feet in the air, pink fingers holding her thighs. A little walking girl with muscles that ached. Poor thing. We didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when we saw her.
It’s too much to sit in that spot with Jim tonight, so I set the table in the dining room. I knew these kinds of thoughts would come up. I’ve steeled myself for them. I spent part of the day forcing myself to think about some of Sharlene’s more memorable breakups. I figure if anybody has the core knowledge of what not to do at the end of a relationship, it should be me.
Jim takes the food out of the white boxes, and places it in six or seven different ceramic bowls. When he is done, it looks like we are about to have guests for dinner. I know that he is trying to be nice, just like I am trying not to think about whether he is still staying in a suite at the hotel, and whether or not Darcy stays there with him. Both efforts are worth something.
Still, he gets to the point quickly.
“I want to buy a house. These are the lowest prices we’ve seen in twenty years. And I want to sell this house. It needs work, and I think it would be better for you to have something newer, smaller. I’m willing to buy that for you.”
I’ve been preparing for him to say something definitive all day, but still I am stunned. He’s moved so much farther ahead of me—not I won’t be coming back or I want a divorce, but I want to buy a house, and I want to sell this house, and I will buy you something else.
The divorce, the word I thought I was going to hear today, is already hindsight to him. So evident that he seems to have forgotten that we haven’t actually discussed it.
My whole body reverberates with the shock.
FOR WEEKS NOW, I’VE BEEN
dwelling on these questions that I somehow missed when everyone else was asking them. Maybe because I never went to college. I was never in a dorm room. You know: the meaning-of-life questions, the why-be-moral questions, the questions about scale.
Our eighty years is a fraction of a second in geologic time, and our planet less than an atom against the universe, and our individual lives puny against the seven billion people living right at the same moment we are. How could any of us think that our lives have meaning? And if they have no meaning, then why aren’t I doing whatever I want? Why do I expect anyone to act in any certain way? What difference does it make if there is anarchy and mayhem and murder? Who does it hurt? And what does that matter?
I tried this argument out on Cheryl last week.
“Well, your human life might be trivial, Avis, but my fraction of a mite of an atom of an electron is fucking great. Do you think maybe you just need a drink?”
JIM LOOKS DOWN AT THE
bowls of expensive Japanese food. He is realizing that he has handled this badly. That he should have gone slower.
Actually, he should have realized that it is none of his business if I stay in this house or not. Who the hell does he think he is? Planning my half of this new life?
I shiver with anger and hold on to the beautiful strength of this clean emotion.
“I’ll make my own decisions about where I live, Jim.”
“Of course. I didn’t mean that, Avis. I mean, you could stay in this house. It’s just . . . it needs a new roof. It’s not well insulated. The power bills are too high. It would be a really expensive house to maintain . . .”
I am trying to stay angry. I am angry. But I know Jim so well. He is trying to plan this next phase for me. He has leapt way ahead, to a future in which I can’t pay the power bill on this house, and I know already—because Jim is good at this kind of thing, because Jim would have thought out all the options—that he is probably right, that I am not only going to lose my husband, but I am going to lose my house too.
I TRIED TO MAKE CHERYL
understand what I meant.
So what if three toddlers were drowned by their mother? So what if a sick old man rapes little boys? Even, so what if Emily died? I mean these are terrible things. We can all agree. And yet, to think they are terrible, aren’t we elevating ourselves beyond what is rationally possible to support?
Is it terrible if an ant steps on the leg of the ant in front of it?
Is it terrible if a mussel dries out because a high tide cast it too far ashore?
Is it terrible if a cat burying its own dung scratches up a few blades of grass?
And in the length of time measured by infinity, and in the size of a world measured by countless universes, is it possible to believe that our lives are anything more than a few blades of grass?
“Cheryl, I don’t just need a drink. I mean it. Why am I so mad at Jim? Why shouldn’t he do whatever he wants?”
“Why are you so mad at Jim? Why aren’t you madder at Jim? Jim is an ass, and what he did is wrong, and whether or not his life is meaningful has nothing to do with it. You shouldn’t hurt the people you love, or the people you used to love, and it isn’t any more complicated than that.”
“Then to hell with Jim.”
“To hell with Jim!”
And we laugh. Because we always end up laughing. Because if I could just keep laughing, I could get through this.
I HEAR THE CHIME
S OF
an ice-cream truck coming down the street. Jim hears it too, and we look at each other over the top of the uneaten Japanese food. I think of Emily’s first ice cream, and then I think of Nate, a little boy, barreling full speed out the door. He always wanted to be first to get to the truck. First to get an ice cream. It’s a crazy idea. Putting ice cream on a truck in the street. How many kids have hurled themselves in front of a car in a race to get to the ice-cream truck? You can hear the music for a mile. Kids are running into streets when the ice-cream truck is blocks away. My heart used to stop every time I heard that sound, imagining Nate running into traffic, knowing that he could, and that if he did, he would be going full speed and never know what had hit him.
“Do you remember how Nate used to go crashing out the door?”
He smiles.
“Yes. He wouldn’t even stop so I could hand him a dollar. He’d yell, ‘Dad, Dad, come quick! The ice-cream truck is here!’”
We look at each other for a moment. I try to keep it out of my eyes, everything I remember, everything I feel. I don’t know how he does it. I don’t know how he remembers Nate at seven; how he suggests I leave our house, knowing that the same sound has brought the same darting child into both our minds.
We Are Called to Rise Page 6
