A Family Daughter

by Maile Meloy

  The Marine Corps sent him to Corpus Christi for training, and there he came down with a terrible fever. He was in the infirmary when he received his orders to go to California, and he called Yvette. Half delirious, he put the question to her, and she said yes. He tried not to cry. Nineteen years old and barely out of Catholic school, she took the train by herself out to Santa Barbara to meet him, against her father’s wishes. It took his breath away that she had done it, his beautiful, brave girl.

  And California was worthy of her—he would never go back to the long winters and dirty snow of Detroit. Here were palm trees, and blue sea and clean sand, and it was always summer. And it was for everyone; you didn’t have to be rich. The military put them in hotels on the beach, and there were tea dances and buffet dinners right there next to the waves. He knew he couldn’t go home after the war and drive through the gray slush to work for the auto plants. He felt a physical revulsion at the thought of more Sunday visits to the uncles: his back being slapped, and sweet Gabrielle fatly pregnant with twins. When he finally went to sea, he had long hours to think on the carrier in the Pacific, to be sure in his mind that he would stay.

  He was telling Clarissa’s camera about sitting on that carrier, waiting and thinking, when Yvette came into the house from working in the garden.

  “His mother was so worried about him,” Yvette said, and Clarissa turned the camera on her.

  Teddy felt robbed, for a second, of his daughter’s attention, but then he sat back to watch Yvette talk. It was a perfectly natural thing to her, to perform: there was no flustered transition from pulling weeds.

  “His brothers were all in the service,” Yvette said, taking off her gardening gloves, “and his mother just worried herself sick. She called me a Pollyanna because I didn’t worry. But I was just sure he would come back.” She looked at Teddy. “And he did.”

  “Were you worried, Dad?” Clarissa asked, turning the camera back on him.

  “Sometimes,” he said.

  “Like when?”

  “Well, there was a moment,” he said, trying to think of a good example. “We were laying mines across a harbor in the Solomon Islands. To keep the Japanese ships inside, you see. We dropped the mines on parachutes, and we had to fly very low and slow to do it.” He showed with his hand how slow. “On the first night of the mission, the lights came on from below as we were flying over. Antiaircraft fire hit the plane in front of me, and it went down. We lost a plane every night we flew that mission.”

  “How many men in a plane?” Clarissa asked.

  “Three,” he said. “A pilot, a gunner, and a radioman.”

  “Could they have survived?”

  He shook his head. “They went down too fast. And the plane was usually on fire. Thirty-six men went out on each mission, in twelve planes, and every night thirty-three came back.”

  “Oh, Dad, I’m so sorry,” Clarissa said. She looked at her camera. “I think that’s the end of the tape.”

  “Are you staying?” Yvette asked her. “Are you two hungry?”

  The girls went with Yvette to the kitchen, talking, and Teddy stayed in the living room, thinking about the pilots they had lost, men he played cards with in the wardroom lounge, who the next night were suddenly gone.

  He had thought about Hecht sometimes, the man who had guided him into his life. When Margot and Clarissa were children, both in school, Teddy had thought about writing a letter—not to thank the old man, exactly, but to let him know how things had turned out. But when he wrote to the university for an address, they wrote back that Professor Hecht had died of a stroke the year before. Teddy had felt cut loose, then, as if his own father had died; the author of his life was gone.

  59

  JAMIE CAME BACK from putting T.J. to bed and sat down at the kitchen table, where Katya was drinking coffee and playing solitaire. She played all the time now, to keep (he assumed) from smoking, talking, drinking, thinking, practicing English, bonding with T.J., or getting a job. She was fast: she knew instantly whether she could use a new card and never looked for possibilities that didn’t exist.

  He didn’t mention the Kit Kat wrapper he had found in the laundry, or the defensive way T.J. had said, “It appeared in my pocket.” He sat down at the table and said awkwardly, “Katya, I know you’re unhappy. I wondered if you might want to see someone.”

  “See who?”

  “A therapist, maybe. Like the marriage counselor, but alone.”

  “I did not like that woman.” She went back to the cards.

  “You could see someone else. Or they have support groups.” He wasn’t sure what the support group would be for. Retired Hungarian prostitutes? Mothers who had recovered their adopted foreignraised children? He knew she took some kind of European tranquilizer and had run out of it, so maybe Narcotics Anonymous. He allowed himself to think that her problem was just withdrawal. She hadn’t asked for a new prescription. He wondered if she had tried to get the pills on the street.

  “I cannot explain myself in English,” she said. “It is so frustrated.”

  “Maybe we could find a Hungarian therapist,” he said. “I worry about T.J., that’s why I bring it up.”

  Katya said nothing.

  “Have you thought about why you might be crying lately?” he asked.

  Katya rolled her eyes. “You want to do this analysis?” she asked. “How do you know lately ? Do you know how I cry before?”

  “No,” he admitted. “Did you cry a lot before?”

  “Never,” she said vehemently.

  Jamie felt like she was walking circles around him with a rope, winding it tight around his chest. “Okay,” he said. “So why now? Is it the pills?”

  “ Whatpills?” she said.

  “Is it me?”

  She glared at him, foxlike. “Do not give yourself this importance.”

  Jamie sat back in the kitchen chair. He suddenly wanted a cigarette, though it had been years since he had smoked. It wasn’t like he was so happy, either. He would never do anything with his life, and they were ruining T.J.’s, and Katya cried at night and wouldn’t touch him. He guessed that when she had discovered, with a mixture of scorn and relief, that she could refuse him, he was doomed. Why should she give herself to such an unforceful man? But he couldn’t bring himself to force her, so he was stuck.

  “Do you know how T.J. ended up with a Kit Kat wrapper?” he asked.

  Katya paused and then said, “I buy this for him at the store.”

  “He told me it appeared in his pocket.”

  Katya placed a card and moved a stack. “Yes,” she said. “I give it as a present.”

  “Okay,” Jamie said. “But maybe he shouldn’t have candy between meals.”

  “He is a little boy, he likes the chocolate, so what does this matter?”

  Jamie gave up and went down the hallway toward their bedroom. He stopped outside T.J.’s room and opened the door slowly, without making any noise, and saw T.J.’s big eyes above the blanket.

  “You awake, buddy?”

  “Yes,” T.J. said.

  “What’s up?”

  “I’m thinking.”

  Jamie went in and sat on the bed. “About what?”

  T.J. said nothing.

  “About the candy?”

  T.J. nodded.

  “How did you get it again?”

  “It appeared in my pocket.”

  “Did someone put it in your pocket?”

  T.J. shook his head.

  “Did you find it somewhere?”

  T.J. nodded.

  “Where did you find it?”

  T.J. whispered, “At Safeway.”

  “Did anyone pay for it?”

  T.J. shook his head.

  “So did you steal the candy from Safeway?”

  T.J. was silent.

  “I’m not mad at you,” Jamie said. “I just want to know what happened.”

  “What you said,”T.J. whispered.

  “Which thing that I said?”


  “About Safeway.”

  “That you took it from Safeway and didn’t pay for it?”

  T.J. nodded.

  “Was it your idea?”

  T.J. shook his head.

  Jamie sighed. Katya had been the mastermind; that was clear.

  But he didn’t want to make the kid snitch on her. He thought of his own delinquent youth, of the many things he had done that were worse than stealing a candy bar: getting stoned on the beach on stolen lawn chairs, getting kicked out of school, driving a hot-wired car into the ocean. But he felt an immense burden of responsibility about this boy. He wanted T.J. to get through life more smoothly than he had.

  “Okay, Teej,” he said. “That’s called stealing. And all those people at Safeway, they work really hard, so if we steal, we aren’t just taking things from the store, we’re taking things from them . And they have to feed their families.” He was laying it on a little thick, he knew.

  T.J.’s eyes were huge. “I’m sorry,” he whispered.

  “I know,” Jamie said. “Here’s what we do. We go down to Safeway, and we tell the manager and apologize, and pay for the candy, and then it will all be behind us. Okay?”

  T.J. looked mortified. “Okay.”

  Jamie checked his watch. It was eight-thirty. “We can go tonight, or we can go in the morning.”

  “Tonight!” The poor kid didn’t want to sleep on the guilt Jamie had laid on.

  So Jamie helped T.J. change back into his clothes, and they took his piggy bank. Katya was out on the balcony with the sliding door closed, and Jamie decided not to say anything to her. They went down to the car and headed for Safeway.

  “What will the manager say?” T.J. asked.

  “I don’t know,” Jamie said, honestly. “We’ll just tell him and see.”

  “Him?”T.J. asked, horrified. “It’s not a lady?”

  “It might be a man, I don’t know.”

  T.J. fell silent.

  At Safeway they had to wait by the customer service desk, and T.J. squeezed Jamie’s hand in a vise grip. Finally the manager showed up. He was just a kid, handsome and olive-skinned and clean-shaven, and he had dark tattoos on his arms, under the thin white cotton of his shirt, and a silver stud in his right eyebrow. He wore a red tie and a name badge that said “Samvat.”

  “Hi,” Jamie said, feeling ridiculous. “We live in the neighborhood, and T.J. has something to tell you.”

  The tattooed manager looked down at T.J., who squeezed Jamie’s hand harder.

  “You tell him!” T.J. said.

  “No, you have to.”

  Samvat was waiting, pierced eyebrows raised, so finally Jamie crouched down to whisper the cues: “When I was in the store with my mom…”

  “When I was in the store with my mom…,” T.J. recited.

  “I took some candy without paying for it…”

  “I took some candy without paying for it…”

  “And I’m really sorry.”

  “And I’m really sorry.”

  At this point T.J. produced the crumpled Kit Kat wrapper from his pocket and held it up as evidence of his crime.

  The tattooed kid looked at Jamie like he was a freak. People stole things constantly, his look said, and Jamie was the first parent who had ever dragged his son in on a guilt trip like this. Jamie smiled back hopefully, counting on him to play his part.

  “Okay!” Samvat said, in a hearty voice, and he clapped his hands together, looking like he needed whispered cues, too. “Um, stealing is really bad,” he said. “It could get you in a lot of trouble. But it’s real great that you apologized and everything. So I’ll tell you what, you just keep that candy.”

  “Actually, we’ve brought the piggy bank,” Jamie said, “and we’d like to pay.”

  Again Samvat looked at him like he’d lost his mind. “Okay…,” he said slowly. “Let’s see, that’s sixty cents, plus tax, so, what…I guess sixty-five cents.”

  Jamie helped T.J. count it out—his small hands were hot and damp—and the boy handed the money over. Dark flame tattoos licked out of Samvat’s shirt cuff as he reached to take it.

  “I’ll ring that up at the front,” Samvat said, pocketing the money. “Thank you for being so honest, T.J. We need more people like you.”

  “Thank you,” T.J. said breathlessly.

  Samvat gave Jamie a questioning look to see if that was what he had wanted, and Jamie shook his hand and thanked him, too.

  When they got outside the store, the boy was dancing with relief. His whole body moved like he was shaking the thing off, and he was making happy little noises of having survived something horrible. He seemed so elated that Jamie worried he would be addicted now: the stealing felt bad, but the relief on confessing felt so good.

  In the car, T.J. got reflective and said, “Do we have to tell about this?”

  “No,” Jamie said.

  “Not even to Katya?”

  “Not if you don’t want to. I’ll leave it up to you. You can tell who you want.”

  “Let’s not tell anyone,” T.J. said, as they turned up their street.

  “Okay,” Jamie said. “It’s a deal.”

  60

  MARGOT CALLED THE law firm in Santa Barbara from her kitchen in Baton Rouge, with her heart pounding, just to hear his name. The secretary answered brightly, “Cassidy and Herrera.”

  “What about Jay?” Margot asked. As soon as she said it, she had a sharp fear that something had happened to him.

  There was a pause. “He left,” the secretary said.

  “Oh,” Margot said. “Is he working somewhere else?”

  “I think so,” the secretary said. “I can give you his new information. Or what I have, anyway. I think he’s still there.”

  Margot wrote down the new number and the address in Santa Barbara but didn’t call.

  She decided she would go visit her parents in Hermosa Beach. It was nothing more than that. She was a good daughter, and Teddy and Yvette weren’t getting any younger, and Los Angeles happened to be close to Santa Barbara. That was all—she wasn’t thinking any further ahead. She flew standby and rented a car at the airport, feeling a kind of dreamy ease because she wasn’t really making a decision.

  At home, she admired her mother’s garden, and talked to her father about his improved vision, and was glad she had come. But by the second day, she got restless. Wandering around her parents’ house while they were both out, she left a note by the phone:

  Mom and Dad—

  Such a beautiful day. Going to drive up the coast. Don’t plan on me for dinner. Will call.

  xxoo

  Margot

  She put the pen down and thought that if she were really a good daughter she would have gone with her parents on their errands, and then she wouldn’t be doing this thing. She packed an overnight bag and went out to the rental car her mother had insisted she wouldn’t need.

  Santa Ana winds had blown all the smog out to sea, and the air was clear, the waves laced with silver. The mountains were sharp against the sky and dark green. Margot took the long coastal route north through Malibu and Oxnard, because that was what she had said she would do, but she was longing to be inland on the freeway, moving fast in a straight line. She didn’t know what she would do once she got to Santa Barbara, but whatever happened would stop this agonizing, restless feeling in her stomach. She wished it would happen soon.

  Finally she was in Montecito, then Santa Barbara, and then she was parked outside the address the secretary had given her. She sat and looked up at the white Spanish building, not knowing what to do. She got out of the car.

  She surveyed herself mentally: she was wearing Capri pants and a fine-gauge silk cardigan, and she had kept her figure. She’d had her hair trimmed before leaving Baton Rouge, and the gray didn’t really show up against the blond. Men still looked at her—not like they used to, but she wasn’t invisible yet. She closed the car door, feeling exposed and on display, as if she were naked.


  Then, because there wasn’t anything else to do, she climbed the stairs to the front door of the law firm and went in.

  61

  JAMIE WAS VACUUMING the apartment the morning after the Kit Kat incident. Katya was out somewhere, smoking or plotting against him. T.J. was playing in his room with the door closed against the vacuum noise.

  There were long hairs shed by Katya on her side of the bed, gold in the window light on the carpet, and he moved the little cabinet that was her nightstand to be able to vacuum straight through. The base of the cabinet dragged a pile of hidden twenty-dollar bills across the floor. Jamie stood with the vacuum cleaner running and considered the money. Then he turned the machine off. He sat on the bed and counted the bills: three hundred and sixty dollars. There weren’t a lot of reasons he could think of that Katya would be hiding cash. He had heard a prostitute on a radio call-in show say she got eight hundred dollars an hour, even if it took ten minutes, but he didn’t think Katya was getting that. He guessed he held multiple payments in his hands. He wondered if she had ever brought anyone to the apartment, while he was at work, but he couldn’t think about that for long.

  He left the twenties on the bed and checked the nightstand drawer, her clothes drawers, and a black purse he found in the closet. No money. He checked the freezer—he’d seen it as a hiding place in a movie—and found no cash but a pack of Marlboros behind the ice trays. He was checking the back of the silverware drawer when Katya came in. He watched her hang her jacket on a chair and go down the hall. She made no sign that she had seen him in the kitchen, but she had. Say what you would about Katya, she didn’t miss much. He heard the toilet flush, and then he guessed she was headed for the bedroom. A few seconds later, she stormed back into the kitchen.

  “Why do you sneak in my things?” she demanded.

  “I was vacuuming. Where’d you get the money?”

  “I can have money! I am adult in America!”

  “Sure,” he said, feeling weirdly calm. “But I’m asking where you got it.”