The Good Daughter

by Alexandra Burt

  “In case I’m not coming in, I need you to know how to work this. If it ever goes down, and trust me, those IT people take days to show, you can use the program offline and assign a room. It actually happens frequently, but not to worry. There are procedures. You just give out handwritten receipts instead of printouts,” he says and points at a drawer. “There’s a stack in there. Later on you go in and update the system, is all.”

  Jane Doe stayed here before she ended up in the woods. I wonder if she had coffee and donuts. I want to ask him which room she stayed in, I want to find her missing receipt. But I’m not supposed to know any of this and so I don’t ask.

  I pull the receipts from the drawer and study them. Room number, dates of stay, and charge per night, pretty straightforward. It’s my first double shift and my mind drifts and I yawn even though I’ve had four cups of coffee.

  “These hours are getting to you?” Bordeaux folds the local paper and drops it on the counter.

  “I just need more coffee, is all,” I say and fill a paper cup from the pump pot on the table by the window.

  “You know, you can take a quick nap as long as the sheets and towels are washed and all the rooms are ready. Take room 101, it’s closest.”

  Take a nap. 101. I turn. There’s something in the way he looks at me but before I can judge the comment, he blows powdered sugar off the keyboard.

  I have the shakes from too much caffeine and not eating. My head pounds and I dump the coffee in the garbage and look outside. The bottom part of the window is covered in handprints from unruly children, jelly smears and some sort of smudged wall art. I rest my hands against the cool pane and my mind drifts to my mother’s story about the bloodstain. I gaze outside, imagine the kitchen window at the farm, and when I squint my eyes just right, I can almost see Quinn and Tain standing by the cypress, mourning the stillbirth.

  I jerk when Bordeaux slams a drawer shut behind me. He picks up the local paper again. I turn back and above the smudges on the windowpane, the Filling Station comes into focus. Bobby, as always, parked. Waiting.

  “Cops don’t seem to have much to do around here,” I say as I try to remember how to look up a room status on the computer. I’m completely blank.

  “Officer de la Vega, you mean?” Bordeaux says over the paper.

  “I just see a patrol car parked over at the gas station all the time. I don’t know whose it is,” I lie.

  Bordeaux lowers the newspaper. “Bobby?” Then he refolds the paper into a square. “I forgot you two were an item way back when.”

  “We’ve known each other since we were kids,” I say. “But we’ve never been an item. Maybe it’s just where he goes and eats.”

  “Officer de la Vega always parks over there. If one day he doesn’t show up, I’ll know there’s something seriously wrong.”

  “Is he watching someone? Some cute cashier at the gas station?” The thought stings a bit.

  “He’s chasing ghosts,” Bordeaux says, then points toward the glass door. “Looks like we’re about to get busy.”

  Before I can ask him what kinds of ghosts Bobby is chasing, six people step out of a van; three more follow.

  “They sell magazines, always pass through here.” Bordeaux wiggles the mouse and the computer comes to life. Nine people pile into the lobby. All but one crowd around the coffeemaker and the donut box from this morning. “Only two per room, guys, you know the drill,” Bordeaux calls out. “Discount for group occupancy. Grab a donut and let me see some IDs.” Bordeaux grabs the first five keys off the rack, 102 through 106, and slams them on the counter.

  Bobby is chasing ghosts. I wonder what Bordeaux meant by that.

  “Dahlia, take this to lost and found,” Bordeaux says after everyone is checked in. He drops a book on the counter, some sort of cheap paperback horror novel judging by the blood drops and gaudy font on the cover.

  I make my way down the walkway and across the street the silhouette of a man comes into view. Seconds later I realize it’s Bobby as he exits the cruiser, slamming the car door as if he wants the world to know he’s there.

  The suite where Bordeaux keeps the lost and found items is dank and dusty and I don’t enter the room. From the threshold, I toss the book in the general direction of the bins. I hear a thud and it plops on the floor. I don’t bother to go in and pick it up, just pull the door shut and lock it.

  —

  When my shift is over, I leave the Lark Inn and pull up next to the cruiser. The driver’s seat is vacant. I enter the gas station and Bobby stands in front of the cooled beverage dispenser with one hand on the handle, scanning the drinks. I sneak up on him and tap him on the shoulder. He turns and smiles. For a second I want to tell him about the ghosts Bordeaux spoke about, but then I think otherwise. It can wait.

  “I need a favor,” I say.

  He pulls two Arizona iced teas from the shelf. “You’re turning out to be quite the needy girl, let me tell you,” he jokes and hands me one can. “What do you need?” He pays for the iced tea and we sit in the cruiser.

  “You are always here. Any reason?” I ask.

  “We’ve had this discussion before,” he says and pushes the tab until it pops. “It’s a small town and I have to park somewhere. How’s the job going?”

  “It’s only been a few days but it’s okay.” We make small talk about my mother and the farm and whomever we used to hang out with in high school. He tells me of people whose names seem familiar, but most I can’t place, and we laugh at each other’s jokes. It feels like old times.

  “So what’s the favor you need?”

  “It might seem like a strange question.”

  “Shoot.”

  “How long does DNA last? Like bloodstains?”

  “Depends if someone cleans it or not. If it’s well preserved, years, if the conditions are ideal,” he says and crunches the empty can between his hands. “Why do you ask?”

  I hesitate to mention the woman who gave birth at the farm; it seems like it’s too tall a tale to tell. “Just something at the farm. It looks like blood and I can’t clean it up if I don’t know what it is. You know, once you put the wrong chemical on it, it stays forever.”

  “So what do you need from me?”

  “Can I test for blood? Is there a solution I can use so I know what it is before I make the stain worse?” I’m lying. All I want to know is if it’s really blood, I don’t care about cleaning it, that old woolen rug hides it well.

  “Sure, there are ways to test for blood. Crime scene uses chemicals for that. I don’t know anything about cleaning it up but I can check into it. There are companies we use to clean up crime scenes—you know, biohazards and things like that.”

  “Bordeaux said something today.”

  “Yeah, what’s that?”

  “He said you’re always here because you are chasing ghosts.”

  “Chasing ghosts?”

  “Those were his words.”

  “What if I told you it would be better if you found yourself another job?”

  “I’d take that into consideration but there’re not too many jobs around here.” I pause and reach for the door. “What did he mean by that? Does it have something to do with Jane Doe?”

  “That’s just talk. Pay him no mind. I’ll come out later to the farm to see if you need anything.”

  If the first few months since I’ve been back we acted like strangers, we seem to have found what we lost so many years ago.

  But then, a town like this doesn’t lose anything. Not even ghosts.

  BAKERSFIELD, CALIFORNIA, 1993, COUNTY FAIR

  The line is long and it’s hot. The muggy heat presses down on me and coats my neck in sweat. By all accounts the weather is perfect for a fair; the clouds look like cotton candy and there’s no rain in the forecast for days to come. The line moves forward ever so slowly, and we a
re serenaded by faint music drifting from beyond the fence, occasionally interrupted by a happy scream piercing the air.

  I take it all in: the structures of the roller coaster and the Ferris wheel towering high above, the troves of people strolling past Roll-a-Ball Derby, Balloon Bust, Grab A Bag, and Break a Bottle. There are also a Wiggle Worm, a Merry-Go-Round, a Rio Grande Train, a Dizzy Dragon, and a Jumping Bean Bounce. Children balance wobbly cones, ice cream running down their small fingers.

  Mingling with the animal feces from the Live Pony Ride are the scents of hot dogs, nachos, and deep-fried-anything. The aroma of popcorn wafts by and I behold the food choices behind the glass of the trailer: Cotton Candy, Popcorn, Caramel & Candy Apples, Funnel Cakes, Sno-Cones, and Soft Drinks.

  I glance over at my mother, who stands off to the side. She has changed from the Vegas Marilyn look-alike to a somewhat bohemian woman with sandy-brown curls in sundresses. And she has a boyfriend; his name is Henry Cobb. He’s slightly pudgy around the waist, and his hands look as if he gets regular manicures. It is Saturday, and his shop, Cobb Auto Repair, is closed. “I own and run the shop,” he told me. “I don’t know the first thing about cars.”

  He doesn’t have children of his own, neither at the present nor wanted, and he seems rather dull.

  Henry Cobb stands behind me in line, pretending to flip through his wallet. He bumps into me, making my purse over my shoulder slide down to the crook of my arm.

  “Sorry,” Cobb says, pretending to apologize in a small and shaky voice, almost like a cartoon animal.

  He isn’t sorry at all. Not only is he not sorry, but he’s become weird in a creepy way. I can barely stand him but I make nice for the sake of my mother, who seems to like him a great deal.

  Mom and I live in a trailer surrounded by native grasses but in the summer there are mostly bare patches of cracked dirt. An upturned Little Tikes car lies discarded by the wooden front steps leading into our trailer. They sway every time we step foot on them, like a moving floor in a carnival fun house.

  By this time my mother has managed to buy a new car and she works at the Wild West Casino off Highway 58. The casino is open twenty-four hours a day and she works as many shifts as she can, so she isn’t around much. She hides wads of dollar bills, tips I assume, in various places in the trailer; an empty cookie jar here, a lidded bowl there, in the freezer, even. She doesn’t hide the money from me—she actually makes me count and keep track of it, sometimes even uses the moment to teach me to solve math problems—and one day I ask her why she doesn’t just put the money in the bank. I’m really embarrassed about the fact she’s making me count out the individual one- and five-dollar bills at the market and I’d prefer to write checks or swipe a credit card like everybody else.

  “Open a bank account,” I say.

  “It’s not that easy,” she says.

  “Why not?”

  Before she can say anything, I know the answer: paperwork. This conversation took place months before Cobb entered the picture, and she told me that sometimes we have to leave quickly and there’d be no time for accounts and banks and when you have cash you’ve got what you’ve got and you take it with you when you leave.

  At the fairgrounds, the line collectively takes another step forward and I manage to get behind Cobb because I prefer to keep an eye on him. Cobb preaches about the fallen and I have no idea what he’s talking about until I come to understand that the fallen are children, usually girls, who end up in dire straits. That’s what Cobb calls it. He doesn’t talk like that around my mother. When she’s around, he’s enamored with her and hardly pays me any mind.

  “Girls need a father,” Cobb says, “or they get arrested for fighting over some no-good hick boy in a parking lot at a bar surrounded by cacti in large Mexican pottery with cigarette buds sticking out of the dry soil.”

  He gets flowery like that with his language and for a while it was funny. Mom just rolls her eyes behind his back and changes the subject but now it’s no longer funny. At least not to me. He says much weirder things when I’m alone with him; most of them I don’t understand. He’s particular about how I sit and how I cross my legs. He offered to give me clothes that are too small for his niece to wear. I’ve never met the niece but the clothes turned out to be underwear. I never told Mom about it, I just try not to be alone with him.

  While we wait in line, I stare at people passing by and imagine their lives. I fill in the blanks, connect the dots, because people usually don’t tell the truth. One must read between the lines if one wants to get to the truth. Stories present themselves willingly and just about everywhere, as I watch through the window of some motel room, or walk-up above a gas station, or one of the trailers we’ve lived in. But stories are just stories, they are just make-believe, and I wonder how and where I’m going to get the paperwork to do anything real. Like go to school.

  Everything has gotten more complicated and now there are so many unspoken rules that I wouldn’t know where to start if I had to explain them. My mother lies a lot but it’s not the kind of lies that get you in trouble, it’s more little things, like where you are from and where do you live and where have you worked before. She keeps track of dates and names and I’ve seen pages of her neat and skinny handwriting going beyond the gray sidelines, as if she feels a need to keep track of a life she wouldn’t otherwise remember.

  I look down at the dollar bills in my hand Cobb gave me. I can feel him staring at me. He always stares at me when my mother isn’t watching, stares at my skinny arms, my hairless armpits. He also stares at my legs, and given the fact that they are covered in healed scratches that are a shade lighter than my skin, and mosquito scabs, it’s just weird. He has a habit of wiping his mouth with old-fashioned cotton handkerchiefs that have his initials embroidered, HC, in ornate fancy letters; he folds them in half and wipes the corners of his mouth repeatedly.

  I wear a white tank top made from stretchy and tight material with a built-in bra even though I don’t need to wear a bra just yet. It’s a Salvation Army find. My shoulders and arms are covered in bug bites, some healed, and others scabbed over. There is a smear of blood on the strap of my white cami.

  Somehow I don’t pay attention and Cobb ends up behind me again. He stares at my neck, making me uncomfortable. I turn my back toward him but I can feel his eyes hovering where the shorts frayed an inch below the fold of my butt. I wonder what would happen if all those people around me—parents, kids, grandparents, teenagers, the carnies themselves—were able to hear his thoughts, if they were made public with a megaphone, exposing him. I don’t know how to tell my mother—don’t know how to tell her that she should never leave me alone with him. It’s creepy as it is with my mother just a short distance away from us.

  For the first time ever I want to pack up and leave in the middle of the night just to get away from him. I don’t like him but I’d never tell my mother because she seems happy when he’s around. I’m afraid. But I don’t tell my mother that either. I fear she’ll trust him completely and he’ll come by while my mother is at work and no one will think it odd because he comes around a lot, even with my mother gone. But the day will come. That I know. That’s why I’m afraid. And it’s just a matter of time.

  I have no idea why I know this to be true. Sometimes I go days and I don’t even so much as think about Cobb and then suddenly, like a public service announcement on TV, a buzzer sounds and he shows up with bags of my favorite cookies and snacks and books, reminding me that he feels some sort of way about me. He told me when we were alone that once I reach puberty, I must scrub and wash and sponge and rinse, to get rid of the foul stench of my body.

  The line moves forward and he’s now closer than ever.

  “Your mother is so beautiful,” he says and smiles at me. We take another step forward; we are next in line. “I might ask her to marry me and then I’d be your daddy.”

  Suddenly the musi
c slows, switching into a lower key, sad and nostalgic, as if it is being played on some old and rusty instrument. Then it stops for a second, switching back to a childish and cheerful melody. “I don’t think she’s looking for a husband,” I say.

  “I’m going fishing tomorrow. Would you like to come?”

  “I want to get on the Dizzy Dragon ride,” I say and add, “and I don’t like fishing.”

  “I think you’d enjoy it . . .” Cobb furrows his brow. “Your mother might let you go with me if you ask?”

  “I don’t like fishing, I already told you that,” I say with a light sharpness in my voice.

  I jerk when I feel Cobb’s hand on my neck, nudging me forward. He has never touched me before. I want to jerk away but I don’t want to make a scene. Mom told me not to make scenes.

  His hand lingers and I can feel every single finger hot on my skin as if his flesh is glowing. I bend down to adjust a sandal strap that doesn’t need adjusting and then I turn and see my mother sitting on a bench, waiting for us. Watching. Our eyes meet, her face remains stoic, and I wonder why she doesn’t wave at me. Cobb and I take the last step forward and we stand by the counter where he orders three of everything.

  “She doesn’t like fishing she told me, so that’s that. Just as well,” Cobb says after we join my mother at a wooden bench. “Let’s go check out the Dizzy Dragon after we eat.”

  Mom watches me like a hawk. When Cobb slides on the bench next to me, she pulls my food over the uneven picnic table. “Sit next to me,” she says and points at the bench beside her. “I don’t see you nearly enough.”

  There’s a word for what he is and I looked it up. Pervert; a person whose behavior deviates from what is acceptable, especially in sexual behavior.

  We eat silently and after the Dizzy Dragon and a shooting game during which Cobb can’t hit the target even once, he drives us home.

  “Go inside and turn on the TV. I’ll be right in,” my mother says and I climb out of the backseat and my plan is, instead of watching TV, to stand by the window, watching them. As I fiddle with the door keys, they drop and fall through the uneven wooden slats of the rudimentary steps and land with a cling in the dirt. I jump off and climb under the stairs. I see a couple of coins and reach for them. Through the steps I watch Cobb getting out of the car and I’m expecting him to open the car door for my mother as he always does but my mother exits the car before he has barely reached her side. They stand and talk. My mother’s back is straight, like a rod. Cobb’s face turns crimson and his eyes pop. He’s spitting out words as his neck strains. I can’t hear what he’s saying but the words are spat out with the ferocity and rapidity of machine-gun fire.