Clover Blue

by Eldonna Edwards

  Annie walks in carrying a handful of brushes, her oversized white shirt covered in so much paint it’s a work of art by itself. I wink at Heidi and put my finger to my lips. She giggles.

  Annie raises her eyebrows. “What are you two up to now?”

  Heidi holds up the form. “Working on my college applications.”

  “Honey, you already know more about animals and farming than most of the instructors. Why spend all that time in school when you could be outdoors, doing what you love?”

  “Because I want to become a veterinarian.”

  Annie turns on the kitchen faucet. I sneak up behind her and circle my arms around her waist, trying to nibble her earlobe. She wheels around and dabs a glob of yellow paint on my nose. I wrestle a paintbrush from her hand and whisk streaks on either side of her mouth like cat whiskers.

  Heidi laughs from the table, shaking her head. “You guys are crazy.”

  In the other room, three-year-old Henry wakes from his nap singing, just like always. Heidi leaps from the table. “I’ll get him!” She races out of the room and within minutes I hear them laughing and singing together. The back door slams as they head to the wooden play yard Dad and I built, before he started forgetting the difference between a nail and a screw.

  Standing at the kitchen window, Annie and I watch Heidi push Henry on the swing. He tilts his head back, gripping the chains, his curls glowing in the summer light. Our son is the same age I was when Willow and Wave took me from a church picnic at Atascadero Lake, changing the direction of my life forever. The thought of anyone taking Henry terrifies me.

  Annie wipes her hands on her jeans and leans back on the counter. At thirty-two, she looks more like Gaia than ever, deep-set eyes, wild wavy hair, and still that impish smile.

  I’ve been waiting for the right time to tell her my plans. We’ve promised never to keep secrets. I remove the private investigator’s letter from my jeans pocket and hand it to her.

  “What’s this now?”

  “I found him.”

  Annie unfolds the letter and scans the page. She looks up, wide-eyed. “You know they won’t extradite him; there’s no reciprocity between the U.S. and India, and besides, the statute of limitations has expired.”

  “I don’t want him arrested.”

  “Then why bother looking for him?”

  “I just want to talk to him.”

  “Why? Why let that man poison our lives with his toxic bullshit or poor excuses? Her death was his fault. Not growing up with your family was his fault. If not for him . . .”

  “I would never have met you.”

  She takes both of my hands in hers. “Don’t torture yourself like this. We have a good life, a beautiful son, and Heidi is getting ready for college. Please. Just let it go.”

  When I don’t answer, her eyes fill with tears. She drops my hands and walks back to her studio without another word.

  She’s right. I should let it go.

  But I can’t.

  * * *

  It didn’t take long to find him. The private investigator called back within three weeks to say he’d tracked David Kagen to the northern part of India where he’s teaching English to Tibetan refugees in a small village north of Dharamsala. I immediately booked a flight to New Delhi. I wasn’t worried about the twenty-hour trip or confronting the man who kept me from my family for eleven years. I worried about how to tell Annie, who had long ago forbidden even speaking Goji’s name in her presence.

  Forgiveness doesn’t come easily for Annie, who remains steadfast in her sense of right and wrong. But for some reason she was able to forgive the rest of our SFC family, even joining me for prison visits with Willow and Wave. They were both released on parole after serving half of their eight-year sentences. Doobie and Jade pled guilty to harboring a minor and spent just six months in jail. Coyote and Sirona were found innocent, thanks to Gaia’s testimony that neither of them knew I was abducted. It was during their trial that Annie finally accepted the olive branch from Gaia.

  Annie doesn’t view herself as a victim, far from it. She’s a survivor. She survived her mother’s abandonment and drug abuse, nine years without running water or electricity, no formal schooling, and more cards stacked against her than any kid should endure. Not to mention taking in Heidi after my mom died from breast cancer, and helping with Dad after he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.

  I pour a cup of coffee and carry it toward Annie’s art studio, her refuge, where she spends most of her days. I watch from the doorway as she works on a painting of a teenaged Rain for Heidi’s graduation gift. Heidi is almost the same age as her mother was when she died after giving birth to her.

  I take a deep breath and move behind my wife. She sighs in a way that usually precedes gearing up to win an argument. But then her shoulders soften and she turns to look at me.

  “I promise never to bring him up again,” I say. “I don’t know if I’ll find the answers I’m looking for, but I have to go. And I want your blessing. I need it.”

  “Okay,” she says finally. “Okay, Blue.”

  * * *

  After more than twenty hours on the plane to New Delhi it’s another eight hours by train to the foot of the Himalayas. I spend the night on the floor of the train station in Dharamsala along with a multitude of other travelers before finally boarding a bus to McLeod Ganj. The narrow roads are rutted and rocky, nearly throwing passengers into each other’s laps as we chug up the rugged switchbacks. Other than me, there’s only one other person on the bus who isn’t either Indian or Tibetan, a young French woman who speaks heavily accented English but appears to be fluent in Hindi and Tibetan.

  I lean back in the seat and try to relax as we bump along the mountain road. I retrieve a Polaroid of Goji from my shirt pocket. In the picture, he stands with his arm around Rain, one hand on her protruding belly as he smiles into Jade’s camera. It was taken just a few days before she went into labor, before the world I’d known for most of my life came crashing down, before we drove three hundred miles with baby Heidi in a beat-up Vega.

  We stayed up most of that first night answering my parents’ many questions, and them, mine. Mostly they wanted to know if anyone had hurt me or Bethany. “Not physically,” I’d said. Mom vacillated between grieving the news of her daughter’s death and the shock of my return, eleven years after I’d disappeared. “We never gave up hope,” she kept saying as she ran her hands through my choppy hair, weeping. “Never.”

  By the time the police arrived the next morning, Mom was busy boiling baby bottles and Dad was dozing in the recliner with the new baby asleep on his chest, rising and falling with each of their breaths. The police took our statements. Harmony swiped the Polaroid photo before handing Rain’s diary to the cops. She threw a fit when they brought a woman from social services to take her to a foster home. My parents convinced the woman to let her stay with us. Gaia showed up three months later, clean and sober, and rented an apartment nearby for her and Annie.

  * * *

  The bus lurches around a sharp bend, pitching everyone forward. I drop the photo of Rain and Goji. A monk sitting across the aisle picks it up. When he starts to hand it to me I point to Goji. “Have you seen this man?”

  He stares at the yellowed photograph without recognition, then shows it to the elderly woman next to him. I study the deep lines carved into her round face as she traces the figures in the picture with gnarled fingers. She shakes her head and passes it the French woman.

  “I’ve seen this, this necklace.” The French woman taps on the yin-yang pendant around Goji’s neck. A flicker of hope rises before I realize that there are probably millions of similar pendants in this part of the world. “Not him,” she says. “A much older man.”

  “He’d be fifty-two now.”

  She studies the photo again. “Maybe it’s him. He took the robes for a while but ended up leaving the monastery.”

  My heart sinks. “He left?”

  “No. He’s still here. H
e married a Tibetan woman. They have a small farm outside the village. He also teaches English.”

  “Can you take me there?”

  She points to a much younger monk sitting three seats over. “Tashi can.”

  I glance at the dark-eyed child swathed in a maroon robe. He looks no more than ten years old. His head is shaved and his round face punctuated by two prominent dimples.

  “His student?” I ask.

  She smiles. “His son.”

  * * *

  Tashi runs ahead of me in dirty tennis shoes, his robe billowing like a cape. I do my best to keep up with him. We follow a well-traveled path under trees strung with hundreds of colorful flags, flapping their prayers as we pass. My shirt is drenched with sweat by the time we round the last corner before coming to an opening. Below us, a plump woman stands in profile in front of a cement block house with a metal roof.

  Tashi runs toward the woman, who kisses the top of his head. He points to me and she shields her eyes, squinting.

  The boy waves toward me, shouting, “De sho! Come!”

  I walk slowly down the hill. As I do, three more children appear, and it’s then that I see the woman is not plump, she’s pregnant.

  The boy says something to his mother. She points to a field. A man wearing a pointed straw hat stands and rubs his low back. When he sees me, he sets down his basket and walks toward us. His hair is graying and his skin is darker than I remember, browned by the sun.

  “Welcome,” he says, extending his hand. “My name is—”

  “Goji,” I say.

  His arm freezes in midair, his eyes widening with fear. He glances behind me, then speaks to his family in Tibetan. They scurry into the small house.

  We stare into each other’s face in silence. All the words I brought with me, the whys and the why-nots, suddenly vaporize in my throat.

  “Blue?” he says finally.

  I nod.

  He looks behind me again. “Did you bring her?”

  “Who?”

  “My daughter.”

  I shake my head.

  “The feds?”

  “No.”

  His shoulders relax just a bit. “Then why?”

  “I thought, I believed . . .

  “Yes?”

  “I wanted to tell you how much I hate you for destroying my life. How angry I am. But now . . .” I glance toward the doorway, where his wife and children are huddled together.

  Goji takes both my hands in his. “Say what you need to say.”

  I try to pull my hands away but this only makes him grip them tighter. He’s stronger than I remember, his dark eyes kinder. I search my mind for the unhealed wounds that propelled me halfway across the world. I think of how he kept Rain from me, kept me from my family, kept Harmony from her mother.

  “I need to tell you . . .”

  He nods, his dark eyes burrowing into mine as he braces for my words. “Say it.”

  “I . . . I forgive you.”

  Goji’s eyes brim with tears. “That’s what you came all this way to tell me?”

  “No.”

  A stifled cry escapes my mouth, choking me. I pull my fists in toward my chest. He wraps his arms around me and we both crumble to our knees, sobbing.

  * * *

  In the morning, Tashi sets a cup of butter tea on the table in front of me. Goji and his wife, Pema, are already in the field. Their three other children watch me drink, giggling and whispering to each other. When I’ve finished the tea, Tashi hands me my pack. “I can walk you back to the bus station.”

  Outside their small house, I scan for Goji but I don’t see him. Pema stands at the edge of a row of buckwheat, dwarfed by the huge mountains in the distance. She waves at us, or maybe she’s just waving to Tashi; I can’t be sure. We both wave back.

  As we approach the village, I retrieve Heidi’s senior picture from my wallet and hand it to Tashi. He turns it over and reads the inscription—Heidi Rainbow, age 17—then hands it back to me, confused.

  “Your sister,” I say.

  “Sister?”

  “Give it to your father.”

  Tashi looks at the picture again, then me, his eyes nearly disappearing when he smiles. He tucks it into the sash tied around his waist. “Okay,” he says, then runs toward a group of boys in matching garnet robes. The boys surround him, their joyful faces bursting into laughter as they playfully knock into each other. An older monk arrives and they grow suddenly quiet. I watch as the Youngers line up, hands in prayer mudra, chanting, as they follow their teacher up the road.

  A READING GROUP GUIDE

  Clover Blue

  ABOUT THIS GUIDE

  The suggested questions are included to enhance your group’s reading of Eldonna Edwards’s Clover Blue.

  DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

  1. Clover Blue opens with a birth. What significance do you think this has to the story?

  2. Goji claims he’s not a guru, but SFC members appear to revere his wisdom and seek his guidance. Do you think Goji’s intentions are generally honorable?

  3. Who was your favorite character and why? Your least favorite?

  4. Did Gaia do her daughter, Harmony, a favor by leaving her at SFC?

  5. How would the book have been different if it were set in present time? In the future?

  6. SFC exists without plumbing and electricity. What conveniences would you be willing to give up in order to live a utopian life in nature?

  7. The children are all home-schooled. Do you think they received a better education than their peers?

  8. How might Blue’s life have been better if he’d grown up with his family of origin? How might it have been worse?

  9. Do any of the characters in the book remind you of people you know or have known in real life?

  10. Nudity is commonplace at SFC but sex is considered sacred. Are these two tenets contradictory?

  11. Early in the book Goji claims that Clover Blue was seeking Saffron Freedom Community and that it was his destiny to end up there. Toward the end of the book Blue tells Harmony that if not for growing up at SFC he’d never have met her. Do you believe in destiny? Do ends justify the means?

  12. Goji never apologizes to Blue. Why do you think this is?

  13. Blue ultimately forgives his abductors. Would you be able to do the same in this situation?

  14. hat is the difference between family and tribe?

  15. What message do you think the author is trying to convey in Clover Blue?