Solomon's Oak

by Jo-Ann Mapson

  “A likely excuse.” Then she asked me, “Juniper, want a cupcake?”

  I took three. Joseph said, “Chica! That means I only get two cupcakes. Glory makes you cupcakes all the time. Have mercy on the cupcake-deprived.”

  “If you’re such a good cook, you can make your own,” I said, eating one, and saving the other two for later.

  Mrs. Solomon said, “Yeah, chef. I’m sure you have a superior recipe. Here’s the keys to my kitchen. Show us your stuff.”

  In a story, that’s called double entendre, when a thing can have two meanings at the same time.

  The hours went by so fast.

  On the beach to the right of the elephant seals, the dogs ran up and down the sand, barking. I threw the tennis ball for Dodge while Mrs. Solomon and Joseph sat on a blanket pretending they weren’t dying to kiss. I wondered what it felt like, falling in love. Cadillac herded Edsel for a while, then the little dog turned on him and chased him all the way back to the car. I laughed so hard my stomach cramped.

  Joseph said, “That dog needs a new name.”

  “What’s wrong with Edsel?” Mrs. Solomon said.

  “Look at him,” Joseph said. “Since I started taking him outside, he’s varonil, manly. It’s insulting to call him chatarra.”

  “What’s that mean?” she asked, and he said, “A car that’s scrap iron, a beater,” and then they both started laughing so I walked to the water to watch Cadillac and Dodge rush at the crashing waves, barking as if they thought that would make the waves stop.

  I stayed there long enough that Mrs. Solomon and Joseph could kiss.

  Later, he had the mammal book and began pelting us with facts. “An elephant seal can outrun a human, though they don’t run, they more or less ‘locomote’ along with their flippers.”

  “Locomote?” Mrs. Solomon said. “Like a train?”

  “I don’t know. They have thirty spiky teeth and four sharp canines. They eat small sharks and octopus and skates, hundreds of pounds of fish a day. In the late 1890s, they were hunted to near extinction, but today, they’re doing fine and occupying some prime real estate, aren’t they?”

  One of the bulls flopped across the sand up to the fence, flung his proboscis upward, and brayed. Not only did it sound horrible, but the smell made me gag. Joseph said, “He’s protecting his harem. They dive over five thousand feet deep and can hold their breath underwater for two hours. They depend on their whiskers the way cats do—”

  “Enough facts,” Glory said, pulling the book out of Joseph’s hands and running down the sand with it, him limping after her. “You’re under arrest for grand theft library!” he said.

  I got a chill that made me shudder.

  Pretty soon, Joseph would be hundreds of miles away forever. Mrs. Solomon would be back on the ranch, training a new dog. Cadillac would go back to sleeping in his kennel instead of by my bed. At that moment I realized that I loved Joseph like a dad, and at the same time I realized that now he belonged to Mrs. Solomon in a way I never would.

  No matter how well you rub a dog down with a towel, plenty of water is still left in his fur to shake all over you. When you drive home in a car stinking of damp dog, even with your face windburned, and when you’re so hungry you could eat two whole hamburgers without bothering to take off the pickles, when the best teacher you ever had starts singing along in Spanish with the radio even though he has a terrible singing voice, all those things together is the moment you know you have a family.

  Every moment after is realizing it will be taken away.

  Chapter 12

  THE MEETING IS all set,” Ms. Proctor said when she called on Monday.

  “But what if I want to live here?”

  “I know you do, kiddo.”

  The whole thing was so unfair I wanted to break every one of those rose-patterned plates in the cupboard. I took a cereal bowl and threw it across the room, but it ricocheted off the couch and only chipped on the edge. I’d have to take a hammer to it like I did with the first one and I didn’t have the energy.

  “He left me behind like clothes for the thrift store.”

  “I know.”

  “He locked me out of our apartment. I embarrassed myself in front of the apartment manager saying my key didn’t work. I had nowhere to go to. I stayed up all night in the freaking park.”

  I expected Ms. Proctor to zero in on that since one of her life goals was to make me talk about what had happened between the day my dad left and the day I got busted for shoplifting, but she let it slide. Probably now that my dad was here, Ms. Proctor thought she could forget about it because pretty soon I wouldn’t be her problem anymore.

  “Believe me, the family court judge will take all that into consideration,” she said. “Meet with him, Juniper. Things will go better if you agree to this. The judge will see that you’re cooperating like a mature adult and take your wishes into account.”

  “As if. Where and when?”

  “Tuesday afternoon at three P.M. Lois’s office. I’ll be there. We’ll meet him together.”

  “What about Mrs. Solomon? Can I bring her with me? Can I bring Mr. Vigil, too? If I have to do this, I want them with me.”

  “Sweetie, you can’t bring them into the meeting.”

  “Why not? They take good care of me! Why I can’t bring along the two people who have treated me like a real person and show my dad what parents are supposed to be like?”

  “Because he’s your biological father, Juniper.”

  “Sperm donor.”

  “Don’t talk like that. He raised you for almost fourteen years. He’s sorry. He wants to get to know you again. According to the law, he’s responsible for you for the next four years.”

  “The law sucks. He should be in jail.”

  “Honey … ”

  Every argument I could think of died in my mouth. The law was like some Kevlar shield that not even the truth could penetrate. Family court, appointed lawyers, guardian ad litem or however you pronounced the word, they added up to more power than anything I had to say. I ground my molars together until they hurt. “Are you going to talk to him before Tuesday?”

  “I can,” Ms. Proctor said. “Is there a message you want me to pass along?”

  “Yeah. Tell him he stopped being my father the day he moved out. Tell him that I came home from school ready to do my homework and make his dinner. Oh, and be sure to tell him that I begged food behind the chowder shack on Fisherman’s Wharf and that I shoplifted Tampax from grocery stores.”

  “Juniper, let me talk to Glory.”

  “Can’t. She went to see Joseph. They’re ——.” I used the F-word out loud, only the second time in my life I’d said it. I hadn’t used it the night Casey didn’t come home, or the afternoon my mom would not wake up from her nap, or when the landlord of the apartment looked at me like I was most pathetic person on earth. The only other time I said it was while I was getting my tattoo, because it hurt that much. “I have to go now,” I told Ms. Proctor. “I have chores.”

  That wasn’t a total lie because later in the day I did have things to do, just not right at this moment. This moment was not governed by the court or owned by my dad, it was mine. First I went into Mrs. Solomon’s closet, stuffed newspaper in the toes of Mr. Solomon’s boots, then hid them in my room. I gave Edsel a cookie, but watching him wag his tail so happily made me cry, so I ran outdoors and up the hillside to the top of the ridge so I could look down on the farm that had been my home from Thanksgiving Day until now. I spent the day memorizing every inch of it, from the red chicken coop to the leather bridles and western saddles on the saddletrees in the barn to the damn oak tree that should have done something other than sit there. And the butterflies. I had to go into the greenhouse to see them one last time because pretty soon butterflies will be extinct, I think, what with air pollution and chemicals in the water and all that. Cadillac followed, nudging my ankles. I turned and yelled at him, “Stop it! Go away!”

  But he kept on follo
wing me. “Go home!” I screamed, but he only lay down about five feet away while I cried like a baby and pounded the ground with my fists. “I hate you! You stupid, asshole dog! You couldn’t even take care of my sister! Get out of here! Go!”

  I threw a rock, then another, and that did it. Cadillac slunk back toward the farm and finally I was alone until the court made me pack up my clothes and go live with a dad who wasn’t all that great to begin with.

  That night, when I heard Glory go to bed, I held a glass to the wall and tried to listen in on her conversation with Joseph. They talked every night, mostly about me. But tonight Mrs. Solomon was whispering, and what I caught was “missing you” and “can’t wait until tomorrow,” and I don’t know, it made me sad and angry, more of a loser than ever.

  They stopped talking after only ten minutes. I waited a half hour, then got up from bed and put on Mr. Solomon’s boots. I took his Man from Snowy River raincoat, the two leftover cupcakes, a gallon of water in a plastic bottle, a windup, solar-powered flashlight, and earlier today, because I’d picked the lock on Mr. Solomon’s workshop and found the six Percocet still in the bottle inside his tackle box, I took them, too, and just like that they became part of my plan. I left behind all the money I’d saved for the bank account I wanted to open. Where would I spend it? I left the last book Joseph gave me to read, Ishi in Two Worlds, because Ishi was dead so what use was he? I went out the front door so I didn’t have to see the horses or the baby goats or the dogs or the oak tree and I started walking. I could hear Cadillac barking from his kennel. I put my fingers in my ears.

  I knew where I was going. The minute we drove by it on the way to the elephant seals, I made up my mind. The house-size boulder marked my sister’s last known whereabouts. What kind of word was whereabouts anyway? Joseph wasn’t there to make me look it up. A few feet from the highway was a clearing where a car could pull over if it was careful, but after that it was a steep incline of dirt and scrub, a drop of a hundred feet to the rocky streambed that ran dry most of the year.

  The first Christmas after Casey disappeared, my mom and I drove there to leave a wreath we’d made of pine branches and dried berries and apples. We sat on the side of the road and I said, The animals will appreciate the food, and my mom said, It will be gone before the week ends, and that day was the first one I remember thinking I bet she took too many of her relaxing pills, because she drove so slow and kept veering across the road, and I wished like anything I had a driver’s license so I could have driven us safely home, but I was eleven not sixteen.

  The trees rustle at night like they’re secretly talking, too, and don’t want anyone to hear. Branches above me crunched and I thought of the animals Mrs. Solomon says come out after dark. Bears, bobcats, javelina, mountain lions. Any one of them could kill you. I wished I could call them out, just get this over and done with. Be with my mom and Casey. Casey is dead. Over fourteen hundred days now. Four years of the California sun beating down, four years of pounding rain. Either way she is a skeleton.

  The moon is exiting its crescent phase. If you want good luck, you’re supposed to look at the moon over your right shoulder, but not your left, Joseph’s grandmother told him. Ishi lived by the moon. Before electricity or running water or clocks or compasses. The moon controls tides. If you act crazy, people call you a lun-a-tic. White Arabian horses are “moon-colored.” The pre-Columbians used the moon for telling time, planting crops, everything. Those clever pre-Columbians invented the sundial, so I guess they deserve a place in the history book.

  “Everything I love gets taken away,” my mother told a People magazine reporter a month after Casey disappeared.

  I stood in the doorway while the camera crew spread black cables as thick as snakes throughout our house. I tripped over them trying to get from the bedroom to the kitchen. They used our bathroom. I’d go to take my shower and strangers had wiped their hands on my towels. They set up two cameras for interviews, one film, and the other still. Mom cried and made pleas to whoever had taken Casey to please bring her home alive and my dad stopped going to work and sat there on the couch not saying anything. After the People article ran, lots of crazy people called the 800 number and my dad got really mad. The second month Casey was gone, Mom stopped begging and told reporters, We know Casey is with her Maker, though in real life we didn’t go to church. She said, Please let someone know where her body is. No questions asked. We just want to bury our baby.

  If anyone asked, I could have told them about Casey’s secret boyfriends. How she sometimes sneaked out of the house at night to meet them. To go riding in their cars, “to get a Coke,” she said. Casey was so pretty that high school seniors asked her out on dates, and because she wasn’t allowed to date yet, they took her cruising.

  That afternoon, it was my fault we got grounded and sent to the room we shared, all because of a powder blue cashmere with silver buttons down the front, each one decorated with a bird flying. Casey wore it once a week. Her blond hair and the pale blue cashmere made her look sixteen at least. I took it out of the dirty-clothes hamper and put it on. If I rolled the cuffs up, it fit. I buttoned my coat up over it and wore it to school. Spilled purple tempera paint on it in art class. Washed it out immediately but there was a stain. At home, I washed it in hot water and added bleach because the television commercials said it unleashed stain eaters, which was what I needed. I put it in the dryer after. Tried to stretch it out when it shrank. The white splotch was right on the front. I couldn’t hide it. The bleach took the silver birds off the buttons. I put it in Casey’s drawer and waited for her to find it.

  “You idiot!” she screamed at me. “You’re useless and you’re ugly and I wish I was an only child!”

  That brought Mom out of the kitchen into our room and she said we were grounded. “But I have to go to the library,” Casey said. Casey with all her A grades.

  “Too bad,” Mom said. “You’ll both sit here until you apologize to each other.”

  At first we did homework. Every time I sneaked a look at Casey, she stuck her tongue out. At four P.M., Casey called, “Mom!”

  She stood in the doorway, drying her hands with a dish towel. “Now what?”

  “I need to take the dog for his walk. The lady made me promise I’d walk him every day.”

  The phone rang, and on her way to answer it, Mom said, “You be back in thirty minutes or you’re grounded all weekend.”

  Casey gave me the finger, fetched the dog, and they walked out the front door. I watched from the window until she turned the corner and was out of sight.

  One day this psychic knocked on the door and Mom wanted to talk to her but Dad said, You should be ashamed of yourself, preying on heartbroken people, and told her to leave. I grabbed my allowance and climbed out my window and ran to catch up with her. She had a bicycle, not a car. Please, I said, this is all the money I have. Tell me what you know. She took it and said, Casey is close by. Look for the color blue and you’ll find her.

  I am an idiot because at first I believed her. I ran into the street when I saw a blue metallic balloon someone let go of so I could follow it and I almost got hit by a car. Then I spotted the blue BEST BUY sign from the school bus window and got off at the next stop so I could go inside because maybe she would be there, and then I couldn’t find my way home. A bruise on the arm I gave this kid at school. A jaybird. Blueberries on cereal. Some old lady’s dress. The sky didn’t have a right to be that blue if it couldn’t tell me anything. The kid I hit said, Did you know that inside your veins your blood is blue until it hits the air? Yeah, someone cuts your vein, it turns red and leaks out and then you die just like your sister.

  I held my breath and looked in the mirror until everything went black at the edges, but I never found my sister.

  The free food stopped coming and all the time my mom forgot to make dinner. Pretty soon no one called the toll-free phone number to report leads. When my dad called the police, they put him on hold. Mom went to the doctor and got pills
to take for her nerves and pills to get some sleep because night was the hardest time, and sometimes she and my dad argued until the sun came up and they didn’t even care if I went to school or not.

  Because I am a sister, I saved two of everything: the missing-person flyers, school pictures, friendship bracelets, the People magazine article I don’t appear in, and the newspaper articles from Jolon to Portland, Oregon, and the letter from John Walsh with his signature in bright blue fountain-pen ink. Blue. At night I spread the papers across my sister’s bed and it was almost like she was there.

  I should have told my parents about the high school boys, but they were always arguing. I didn’t know their names but I could have described some of their cars. After a while it seemed like if I told them about the cars, they would hate me as much as they hated each other. I thought they’d give me up for adoption.

  What a dope I was.

  When two hours passed, I ate the first cupcake and took the first pill. When it stayed down, I took another one. Then the next cupcake and the next pill, the one after that, and pretty soon the bottle was empty so I threw it on the side of the road because how could I get in trouble for littering way out here and so what if I did because pretty soon I wouldn’t be around to punish. By the time I got to the jumping-off place behind the boulder and stood there on the cliff’s edge, looking down, I couldn’t believe how easy it was to take that step off into nothing. Why hadn’t I thought of it sooner?

  Here I come, Case, I said, and that first step felt so good, it felt like I was a silver bird, flying.

  Chapter 13

  GLORY

  Glory assumed Juniper was sleeping late, skipping chores, and who could blame her? Today she had to face the father who left her, relive all the loss that defined her family, and soon she’d have to go with him, wherever he wanted. Glory poured a mug of coffee, took it outside, and began tending to the animals. That Caddy was in his kennel seemed odd, but maybe Juniper wanted to be alone. She let him out and he ran into the house before she’d filled his bowl with kibble. She really hoped Juniper’s father would let her take the dog.