They’ve started her on antibiotics and she was found to be clinically malnourished. She’s jittery with withdrawal, but is cooperative, which makes me nervous.
“That’s her MO,” I warn Loren, the owner of the holding facility. “If she’s behaving well, she’s thinking of running.”
They assure me she’s being watched constantly, even at night. She’s leaving in the morning. Thank God it’s over. I sing to myself as I get ready for bed, my voice resonating with joy and relief. It’s the first time I’ve sung since the night I sang her lullabies over the phone. The night before she vanished.
It’s become my frame of reference, that night. It is my Before and After.
The night watch person just shined his light over the beds. When he leaves, I look over at Hollie and nod. We pull off our pajamas and stuff them under the blanket, along with some other clothes. He shines the light around so quickly that as long as it looks like a body, we’re fine. But there’s a motion sensor that’s going to be tricky.
We pull socks over our flip-flops to make running easier and quieter. Then we slide of four beds and crawl on our bellies VERY slowly, to the bathroom.
The bathroom window opens soundlessly. Hollie goes up with a boost from me and I follow, hoisting myself up and over before jumping outside. We take off running as fast as we can in sock-covered flip-flops. Suddenly, Hollie stops short. There’s an enormous, cactus-filled ditch. We climb down, plow through the brush, climb up the other side of the ditch, and see three more ravines just like this one. Shit! Just that one cost us an extra ten minutes! An hour later, we finally spot the road.
Out here, all roads lead to Hurricane, a town the size of a tumbleweed and equally exciting, I’m sure. By the time we reach town the sky’s changed from black to gray. My socks look like Hellraiser—thorns and bristles stick out from every angle and my legs are a bloody mess.
While Hollie calls her boyfriend in Salt Lake from a pay phone, I notice a small house across the street with a For Rent sign. Enough slats are missing from the pulled blinds for me to guess that it’s vacant. Two narrow rectangular windows by the ground around back will be easiest to break. I motion for Hollie to come over, pick up a rock, shatter the window, and crawl in.
By the time she climbs down, any fear about someone living here is gone. An inch of dust covers everything and cobwebs are everywhere. If I hadn’t just walked five hours in thorn-covered flip-flops, I’d probably be weirded out. But right now, all I can focus on is a sofa at the end of the room. The last thing I remember hearing is that her boyfriend is sending two of his friends to come get us.
“Ms. Fontaine, there’s been a staff error.”
It’s the supervisor, Monty. He’s spent extra time with Mia and called many times to reassure me.
“Staff error, what, on her application, do you need me to send something?” It doesn’t occur to me that it’s too early for anyone to be doing any paperwork there. Paul’s sound asleep, so is Karin.
“No, Ms. Fontaine. Mia has fled the facility.”
Karin will tell me later that I kept screaming. All I will remember of this moment is the color red. Karin will tell me later that she had been trying to grab hold of me and she had on red pajamas.
“How long has she been gone?” I yell into the phone.
“Seven hours, we didn’t know they were gone till wake-up.”
“Seven hours?! Who’s they?!”
“She ran with another girl named Hollie who has a boyfriend in Salt Lake; we think they’ve contacted him. We have people checking it out. It’s our fault, I can’t apologize enough. It was a new employee on night duty. We’re all out searching, people in town, the sheriff.”
Karin grabs the phone. “The FBI’s looking, too. I’ve told them the girls are underage and we’re worried about prostitution. You’ll be hearing from them.”
She’d called the FBI, thinking it would put extra pressure on them. It did. Loren, the owner, calls back angry. Tough shit, Karin tells him, you should take better care of your charges. He argues with her, saying that he’s annoyed with our daughter, what a bad girl. As if he’s running a Girl Scout camp.
I put the Larkin police on alert. We contact all the trucking companies who travel Utah, who put out bulletins to all their drivers. We fax missing person flyers to the Salt Lake Greyhound station, then throw together a suitcase and head to the airport.
Before we leave the house, Jack Tyson calls. Turns out Hollie is Jack’s niece; he’d just escorted her two days ago. It also turns out Karin wasn’t far off about prostitution. Hollie is a crack addict whose pimp/boyfriend forces her to prostitute. Jack’s found out that Hollie’s boyfriend paid a couple of guys to get the two girls and sneak them over state lines into Kentucky or Tennessee, where it’s easier to prostitute them. He’s already done time for transporting minor girls over state lines.
My God, what else? How much lower, how much worse, can she possibly end up? Turning redneck tricks in some shack at the end of a dirt road. Mia, what have you done to yourself now?
Sunrise wakes me up. I get up and look around while Hollie sleeps. We’re in a basement with a kitchen. On a wild hope, I check the cabinets. There are some cans of beans and a box of cereal—cornflakes with a picture of a groovy black kid sporting a huge Afro. I look at the expiration date. 1979. I’m not that hungry.
The morning crawls by. We take out some knives from a drawer and make a game of throwing them at the big orange flowers on the wallpaper. Whoever hits the center first wins.
“When Aidan finds out where I’ve been he’s gonna be so pissed,” Hollie says, grinning. “He would have killed them. No joke. He’s the most amazing person I’ve ever met.”
Something about her smile, I don’t think she’s joking about the killing part. Whatever, it’s just a ride out of here and then I can go my own way.
Every flight to Salt Lake is full. We blubber out our plight to a Southwest supervisor, whose eyes tear up. His fingers fly over the keyboard and he makes calls till he all but orders passengers to be bumped for us. We’re over the Mojave in an hour.
Within another two hours we’re speeding down I-15 south of Salt Lake City to meet Jack and his wife Rebecca. We’re going to stake out the boyfriend’s house and the apartment of the guys who have the girls. Paul will go undercover as a cowboy in the bus station at sunrise before the first bus leaves. This feels like a really bad cop drama, the episode where “angry parents take the law into their own hands.”
The cell phone rings and my heart jumps—maybe they’ve found her!
“Bubbie?”
“Vivian told me what happened. Listen to me, Mia’s got no money, no food, and right now no brains. She’s either going to steal something or do something else stupid and she’ll get caught. Girls that age think they’re smart but they’re not, they’re full of shit. I had four of you, I know. So, don’t worry, you’ll find her because sooner or later she’s going to get herself arrested. And I’m not your bubbie.”
Oookay, I’m flying down a freeway in Utah listening to my mother reassure me and scold me at the same time with her Boris-and-Natasha accent. She’s normally about as demonstrative as Clint Eastwood, so coming from her this is not only incredibly supportive, it’s positively mushy and it does comfort me.
We’re being pulled over for SPEEDING. I look over at the idiot driving.
“Hey man, I’m high!” he tries. Two friends of her boyfriend picked us up about an hour ago. It was probably dumb to get high but I was already getting the shakes and have been irritable enough to kill someone.
We smile real big at the cop, all four of us in this two-seater. It doesn’t work. Besides going 100 mph, there are cigarettes on the dashboard. And in Mormonville, you have to be nineteen to buy smokes. The oldest of us is eighteen, which means the cop is now searching the car for other “contraband.” I remember these guys saying they had to make a drop-off on the way and suddenly I get that you-know-you’re-fucked-beyond-belief feeling.
Somebody please tell me I’m not standing on the side of a freeway, handcuffed and leg-shackled, watching this fat fuck of a pig laugh as he adds scales to a stack of drugs the size of a small child.
It was odd enough finding myself happy that Mia was only smoking pot. Now, I’m turning cartwheels because she’s been arrested.
Paul and I stagger into a Provo convenience store, pick out some frozen burritos, and stand in front of the microwave studying the buttons like two complete morons. We’ve never used one. I have just mobilized truckers, bus employees, and police in two states within a matter of hours. But, right now, that the only thing between me and a dead faint is a metal box with a few buttons is suddenly a catastrophe of such proportion that I burst into tears.
A group of teenagers immediately comes over to help. They are all so rosy-cheeked, sober, and friendly they seem like another species.
“Here, ma’am, I’ll do it for you,” says a boy Mia’s age. They help us microwave, they help us get drinks, they point out the direction of a hotel, and two boys offer to drive us there and walk back.
I notice most of them have on bracelets or rings with CTR engraved on them. What’s that stand for, I ask. Choose The Right, ma’am. Choose the right what, I ask.
“Always choose the right thing to do, take the higher ground.”
I want one of them for a child!
An hour later, I’m sitting on the edge of the hotel bathtub, murmuring, “Please forgive me for saying that, God. I’m so mean and—”
Hey, wait a minute—I never said the words, I just thought them. So what, Claire, you think God doesn’t know what people think? This is a Disturbing Realization.
My mind’s a chaotic, overcrowded station with a thousand trains going every direction, some of them going very dark places, some on tracks bloody from running over people I don’t like. All I need is the Almighty Omnipotent One setting up surveillance cameras. Isn’t there some kind of off button, an ecumenical lead shield?
Aha, my 3 a.m. wide-awake brain says, that’s it, that’s why all this happened! Four decades of wicked thoughts. But, I know people who are a lot worse than me, I’m related to some of them, and they’ve never had this kind of trouble—why me?
Claire, Claire, comes a little voice, don’t you see? Can’t you stop your fizzy brain for one second and see? Mia is safe, she’s been found. You’ve been blessed beyond imagining. Ingrate.
I get one phone call. A woman answers breathlessly, “Hello?”
A woman who is not my mom.
“Um, is Claire Fontaine there?”
“No, she’s in Utah, can I ask who’s—
“She’s WHAT?”
“Mia?”
“Sara?”
“I can’t believe you’d do this again, Mia! You should be glad your mom and Paul are already in Provo, you have no idea who you were with!”
What is she, ex-CIA? The woman is fucking everywhere! Melanie and Brian were always paranoid about seeing cop cars. I was on the lookout for a rental car with my mother in it!
We have to be at juvenile hall in an hour and Paul needs his morning caffeine fix. We walk into a café full of the happiest people we’ve ever seen. There are children everywhere and all the parents are tall, young, and beautiful, with pale, luminous complexions. I want to ask what their skin care regimen is when I notice a CTR ring on our waitress.
Are you kids here all in some youth group, I ask her politely. Oh, no, it’s a Mormon thing. Paul and I have no idea what about being Mormon makes everyone so happy but he wishes it came in a cup with cream and sugar. Because there’s no coffee here and his head’s pounding.
“Juvie” is a big, modern building outside of town. Paul and I pass through pat-down to see a red-eyed bitch in a brown jumpsuit that I wish like hell wasn’t my daughter. She’s so foul that Paul finally yanks me out of the chair and pulls me out the door.
“You’re not going to talk to your mother that way, you little brat.”
He’s so disgusted and angry he leaves to find coffee somewhere. Nevada’s not far.
I meet with Mia’s probation officer, a sympathetic middle-aged woman who informs me that, “Scales mean intent to distribute in the state of Utah, which is a felony.”
For a second, I almost burst out laughing at the complete, total weirdness of Mia/Pimp/Prostitute/Handcuffs/Probation Officer/Felony. At the tragic absurdity that’s become my life.
Luckily, Mia has no prior record. The judge releases her to my custody on the condition she go straight to Morava. But she has to graduate or I can ask him to reinstitute charges and hold her till she’s twenty-one.
I’m happy because I finally have some authority to help Mia but upset because it took a judge in another state to give me any. Jack has shown up to deal with Hollie. He tells me he had a feeling the judge would release Mia to us. How did you know—oh, wait, you’re Mormon, aren’t you? I bet that judge is Mormon, too, isn’t he? Jack smiles, amused.
The whole state’s jumping with Mormons anxious to help us and I ask God to bless each and every one of them.
From the time we get back, I know running isn’t an option. My mom and Monty are by my side every second. When I go to the bathroom, she’s in the stall with me.
It’s hard to keep from crying. They moved my bed out to the middle of the main room. My mother’s made them handcuff one of my wrists to the bed frame and sleep in my bra and underwear. There are wooden beams across the ceiling and a leopard is perched on the beam directly above my bed. He’s crouched, with his fangs bared, and you can tell from his look that he knows he’s cornered. I know exactly how he feels.
I sit beside Mia to say good night. She’s drained, sad. Maybe she’s just as tired of it all as I am, maybe inside she really wants help but is embarrassed to say so. She asks softly, Mommy, what if I become the fastest bunny ever? It’s a paraphrase from one of her favorite bedtime books, The Runaway Bunny. I smile back and paraphrase the Mother Bunny’s response: Then I will become the biggest fucking brick wall you have ever seen, my little bunny. Have a carrot.
part three
11.
JUNE 30
Mia’s draped across me asleep on the flight to Vienna. I study her face like a specimen, a mutated species of daughter. I would give anything for a glimpse of my beautiful girl behind this ruined mask of leathery skin and sunken eyes. I inhale, eager even for a smell that’s familiar, but that’s gone, too. A user smells like drugs; her pores exude a wet copper stink.
Who is the girl in my arms I’m so desperately afraid of losing? This Mia who’s twitching from withdrawal while she sleeps could have grown up in the rural shacks with the rest of her Indiana pals, with their puke-stained, prison-visit, cow-tipping lives. I’m afraid Mia isn’t buried, but gone altogether.
I feel gone altogether myself. I hardly remember myself before all this began. They say our children raise us and it’s true; my circuitry’s been entirely rewired. Now, for example, when I see criminals on the news, I don’t think first of their poor victims, as I used to, I think of their mothers.
I also used to think that nothing, short of death, could be worse than my little girl molested, and that only angels worked miracles. Oh, what I have learned. Listen: a man takes a child in his hands and does things, rams their little life like a freight train. He casts a spell. But the devil’s miracles are both wondrous and sly, because he lies low, he bides his time. Far in her future, this child will defy physics, will herself become freight train, conductor, tracks, and target. She will lay her head on the tracks, keep one foot on the pedal and head straight for herself, laughing, calling it freedom. No mother can break that spell. Nothing but to lay my head down beside
her, to be there when the end comes as I was there in the beginning and for every little sufferance in between.
After a few hours, Mia wakes up, takes my makeup bag, and heads for the bathroom. She returns made up like a whore. I glance through the makeup bag to be sure she hasn’t kept the tweezers.
“Afraid I kept the tweezers as a weapon?” she snorts, reading my mind. “I’m not stupid, I know they’re gonna confiscate sharps.”
“Sharps? Two days in the slammer and you’ve got the lingo down.”
She chuckles, yawns, and conks out again. Fury-laughter-sleep, in less than thirty seconds. “Mood highly labile.”
Still, one thing hasn’t changed, and it’s the only mercy granted me in this long night. She seeks me out in her sleep, finds her mommy’s lap. I should sleep, too, but I have so little time left with her. I stay up to let my eyes trace along her slender fingers, the tip of her nose, let my hands circle her tiny, bird wrists, feel her still-childish puff-breaths.
I’m memorizing her before I leave her.
The first thing I see coming off the plane are five soldiers with the biggest guns I’ve ever seen. Either Vienna gives everyone this warm a welcome or she’s hired them. She glances at me for a reaction, but I won’t give her the satisfaction. The whole United States is available and she picks the Czech Re-fucking-public.
She keeps looking around like she’s expecting the Messiah and holding my arm so tight I’m sure I’ll have permanent nail imprints to remember her by. When I feel her muscles relax I look up to see a tiny grinning lady with a live Ken doll beside her, dumb smile included. I stifle a laugh. My mom sent me all the way here to be disciplined by them?
Come Back With a Bonus Excerpt: A Mother and Daughter's Journey Through Hell and Back Page 11
