Family

 
Cliché but true: I met him on the Internet.
        I was 16, all right?
        I guess I’m offering up my age here as some kind of excuse, a decoy, but you know as well as I do that we weren’t stupid at 16. We knew things at 16 we’d never know clearly again. We just, well. What was it? A certain lack of experience?
        I for one believed in love.
        Maybe that was my mistake.
        I loved him.
        If I trusted you right here and in this moment I’d tell you something shameful: that some part of me still loves him. How twisted is that?
        All the bad things they said in court and in the newspapers were true. But he wasn’t a monster. He wasn’t born a monster, anyway.
        He’d been a boy like any other boy. Proud the first day he swam without his little blue floaties in the local public pool.
        He became a man. Had his own name tattooed on his bicep before he realized that was so uncool. The cover-up was a ship and anchor.
        I always liked that ship and anchor. Made me feel free and grounded at the same time, even though I was neither.
        It’s just that somewhere between those two snapshots—the boy with his blue floaties and the man with the anchor—somebody hurt him. He never told me about it, but that’s what I’ve gotta believe.
        Maybe that’s cliché, too?
        But people aren’t just born evil, are they? They get hurt. Like me. Like you. Like everyone.

 
My name is Sarah July. I say that a lot, actually. “My name is Sarah July.” As if the saying of it will make it even more true.
        It’s the name I gave myself the second time I ran away.
        The first time was from my mother’s house.
        The second time from his.
        Sarah July. My self-imposed witness protection program.
        But it wasn’t me who testified against him. That was Tamara. She’d always been kind of a daredevil. He picked her up in Seattle when I was 19—getting old. She was 16 then. That’s the age he liked us. I figured he knew that any younger and he’d be tempting too much trouble. Missing girls at 13, 14, even 15—those girls get their pictures on the nightly news. They get candlelight vigils, search teams with dogs. At 16, you’re just a runaway. Your friends’ parents don’t activate phone trees and get together to make posters. They figure good riddance. You were probably a bad influence, anyway. Maybe there’s an exception for skinny college girls with straight A’s, but I sure as hell never saw my face on a milk carton.
        Sometimes I wonder if my mother even reported me missing. I mean, it’s true I left of my own volition. Even left a note. Gone north for love, or some such nonsense. Hearts and flowers.
        My mother was probably drunk on wine coolers when she read it. Had been since I started middle school. Or maybe that’s just when I started noticing.
        North to Portland.
        For love.
        The Pacific Northwest. Pine trees against a pewter sky.
        There was a certain romance to it all.

 
But I was telling you about Tamara, right? She was crazy from the start. Always tearing off, climbing out the second-story window of the house, screaming onto buses, begging Johns to take her back to Seattle.
        He got her back every time, of course. He wasn’t stupid. And he knew people.
        Anyway, so she finally gets arrested out on 82nd, stepping out of some John’s car. And of course she doesn’t protect the house like any normal person would. She rats him out to the cops. Rats us all out, just like that. Next thing you know she’s sitting there on a witness stand, testifying to a federal grand jury, her poor mother right there in the courtroom listening to it all. Her mother. Rumor had it she’d sold a kidney for a private investigator.
        I just sat there at home shaking my head.
        And of course he was out on bail in five minutes.
        It was just a few weeks later when I saw the little story in the newspaper. Hardly even a story, really. Just a note. Prostitution witness vanishes.

 
My heart goes out to her, it does, but I wasn’t the only one to warn her. You pull shit like that and you’re a dead bitch.
        That’s just the way it is.
        That’s what he always promised us. He’d get so stressed out and the anger would take over and he was a different person. Pulled hair and his gun to your head. “You’re a dead bitch.”
        A few months later the indictment was dismissed. Without their star witness, what was the prosecution gonna do?
        But here’s the warped irony: He actually got busted again—six months later in a sting. Nothing to do with Tamara or me or the other girls in our house. He got busted for a 14-year-old. Unbelievable. And of course. Here I’d always thought he was smarter than that.
        It was raining hard that night, the roads like rivers. There were three of us girls left at the house. We just walked away in all the confusion. If Tamara could just have waited. Stayed quiet like the rest of us. Alert for the right moment when a road opens; a river.
        You just float away.

 
I’m pretty sure the other two girls left town. But I figured, hell. All I had to do was change my hair, change my name. He’d recognize me, but he was in jail. Twenty-five years to life. Tamara would recognize me, too, and the other girls, but I knew they’d keep their cool. The only people I had to worry about were the men. And they weren’t the kind of men who looked at you.
        So, now I’m a brunette named Sarah July.
        I work at the library.
        Very occasionally I see someone from my old life, checking out Kafka or Ten Ways to Save Your Marriage, but it’s like I figured. They never recognize me. Not even for a pause.

 
It’s been a long time since all that—the old house off 82nd, Tamara disappearing, him getting sentenced. Six years? And it’s been going pretty well, for the most part.
        I get the twinge of guilt when I think about Tamara, sure, about the way us older girls should have schooled her better. Could have helped her, maybe.
        Other than that, pretty well. Just the usual ups and downs. Stupid notions about love and the sucker-punches of heartbreak.
        Sometimes I wake in a bitter sweat, by myself or next to someone, and it strikes me how fundamentally alone we all are in the world. And the vastness of it. And the distance of the stars. The panic doesn’t last long. I go back to sleep, wake again to the alarm clock and to the morning. I bike to work when it isn’t raining.
        Pretty well, like that, until about a month ago.
        That’s when I got the phone call.
        I didn’t recognize the number, but something in me said “Pick it up.”
        The low whiskey voice on the other end called me by my old name, which scared me, so I didn’t say anything but “Hmm?” And then he hits me with it: “Um, I guess there’s no polite way to say it. Your mother died.”
        I inhaled the gale of the moment.
        Three questions:
                1) “Who are you?”
                2) “How did you find me?”
                3) “What happened?”
        The low whiskey voice answered me in half-sentences.
                1) “I am. I was. Your mother’s husband.”
                2) “It took. Almost a week. To find you.”
                3) “Your mother drowned at Baker Beach on Saturday.”
        I had another question, but I swallowed it, let the voice continue. A memorial planned for Sunday. Some business. Would I come?
        Yes. All right. What day was it now? Thursday. Six hundred miles, give or take. I could call in sick for Friday.
        The voice gave me an address in Oakland. Maybe a mile from where I grew up if I remembered the streets right.
        “Thanks,” I said. “And. My name is Sarah July. If you don’t mind.” I replaced the receiver. Stood there for a long time as the realization of my miscalculation seeped in. “Crap.”
        What had I been doing before the phone rang? I opened the refrigerator, closed it, opened it again. Light on. Light off. Light on again.

 
Maybe this sounds naïve, but I don’t think it had actually occurred to me that she would die. Not yet, anyway. I don’t think it had occurred to me, either, how dangerously small our family was. Grandparents long since dead. And my father. I’d known him, apparently, for the first two years of my life, but I carried no animated memories of the man. Dead now, too.
        Or maybe it hadn’t seemed to matter. Coastal blood, living predecessors. At least the possibility of reconciliation. Drowned. And now it was down to me. The only child of an only child I hadn’t spoken to in—what was it?—three years? Four?
        I’d called her after I ran away from his house. Just told her it hadn’t worked out. We’d broken up. A sliver of the truth. We talked about this and that, the weather in Oregon, the zucchini she was planting in California. I meant to visit. But it was just. Why hadn’t she come looking for me? And how could I admit how stupid I’d been? All the things that had happened. You get a new life, you get therapy for a while. You retell your story to yourself over and over until you sound like the hero, like some gorgeous phoenix rising from the ash of it all. But some of part of you always feels like a stupid whore. I didn’t expect her to sell a kidney over it or anything. But I got tricked. And nobody ever came looking to find out how bad. I’d left every hint. A perfect breadcrumb trail. And she didn’t follow it.
        She’d called me once or twice since I’d made that first call. Drunkenly invited me to Thanksgiving one year. Certainly never mentioned a husband.

 
I took a can of Guinness from the fridge, sat down at the wooden table next to the window. Thoughts floated through my mind like sea kelp: rough surf. Thunder below water. Did she surrender to it or fight? A lizard darting across a stone path. Tamara’s face the last time I saw her. I took a Sharpie from the jar on my table and wrote on the wall, Life is temporary.
        I’d been waiting so patiently for some message from the cosmos—or from a fortune cookie for that matter—some signal that would tell me beyond a doubt that the time had come, to blink first, to pick up the phone, to call information, to get her number again. To go. It was a day’s drive, maybe two.
        And I would have, but think about it. She should have come to me. I’m just saying. I waited. Months packaged themselves into years. I made linoleum block calendars, sold them at local bookstores and on the Internet.
        Maybe stubbornness runs in families.
        But surely a road would open, a river.

 
I sipped my beer, listened to the rain. A faraway crashing sound.
        All I wanted to do right then was pick up the phone and dial, say, “Hey, Mom—” and “I made a mistake.” Say, “I’m not pissed off anymore,” and “Can I come and visit?”
        All these years waiting for a sign. How could that sign be the low whiskey voice telling me it was already too late? Her husband. Since when did she have a husband?
        I wanted to call the voice back, say, “Surely you are shitting me,” and “No one swims at Baker Beach in January.”
        Instead, I stared at the black tip of my boot under the table, finished my beer, closed my eyes. Raindrops pelted against the metal awning over the back balcony. When I opened my eyes again, the kitchen seemed filthy: boot marks on the tiled floor. Damp dust in every corner. Grease on the wall behind the stove. Two days’ worth of dishes in the sink. Faint cobwebs connecting the windowsill to the ceiling. A rotting pear in the fruit bowl. How long had I been living like this?
        I stood up too fast, gathered the garbage and recycling, carried it downstairs to the dumpster. A scrawny guy at the bus stop on the corner belted out a drunken soprano rendition of “Piece of My Heart.” Must have gotten kicked out of the karaoke bar up the street.
        Back in my little kitchen, I started at the top, sweeping spider webs from the ceiling, worked my way down. Being bound by blood to no one in this world and having a dirty kitchen seemed an unbearable combination.
        I scrubbed handprints off yellow walls, wiped coffee marks from cabinet doors. I washed and rinsed blue plates and copper pans, dried them with a cloth instead of letting them drip in the dish rack. I washed the burner plates from the stove, then the garbage can with bleach and hot water. I swept vegetable drippings from the floor, then crouched on my hands and knees to scrub the tiles with orange-scented spray. The heating vent was so intricately coated with grime, I had to sacrifice my toothbrush to clean it properly. It’s amazing, if you think about it, how much grease and muck can accumulate in one woman’s kitchen.
        When finally the room smelled only of orange and bleach, I put on my red raincoat and walked the three blocks to the convenience store to buy a new toothbrush and a white candle.
        “Cold night,” the cashier mumbled as he rang me up.
        I nodded absently. Could be colder.
        In the warmth of my bedroom, I lit the candle, not sure if I meant it to illuminate my mother’s way or my own. As the flame cast weird shadows on white walls, I had the strange urge to go and visit him, tell him what had happened. I shook my head. Pitiful, Sarah. Like he was my family?

 
The shortest distance between two points is Highway 5, but I headed for the coast, Joni Mitchell on the tape player. I made my way past the Dairy Queens and the strip malls, through towns full of churches and double-wide mobile homes, past miles of brilliant green pastures, through forests, half clear-cut and desperate.
        As the road opened onto Highway One, it occurred to me just to keep on driving west—toward the beach, over the cliff. I imagined careening through the air in slow-mo, splashing elegantly into the Pacific. I blinked the image out of mind, turned south, stopped at a forgettable motel near the state line, woke early, and just past noon on Saturday I pulled up in front of the bedraggled duplex in north Oakland.
        The man who answered the door had a gray clipped beard, eyes that smiled even though his mouth refused to follow. Maybe 60 years old. He wore a black T-shirt and loose jeans. He made a complicated gesture with his arm, first sticking out as if for a handshake, then pulling it back to wave me inside. “I’m Hector,” he said.
        I stepped inside. Multicolored shag carpet, but otherwise the apartment seemed nice enough. Butter yellow walls. A dozen climbing houseplants. A fireplace with a mantle. A picture of my mother sitting on the beach with an Asian girl. A picture of a man I didn’t know. A picture of me at 11 or 12.
        The girl from the beach photo sat on the floor in front of a coffee table, playing solitaire.
        Hector motioned in her direction. “Sarah, Devon. Devon, Sarah.”
        “Hi–”
        The girl didn’t answer me. She just watched as I followed Hector into the dining area, then trained her gaze back on her card game.
        “Can I get you something?” Hector waved his hand awkwardly above his head. “Coffee? A drink?”
        “Coffee sounds good.”
        In the blue tiled kitchen, he set a pot of water to boil.
        A school picture of Devon stared from the refrigerator door. “Is that your kid?” I asked, half curious, half trying to make conversation.
        “Not really. No.”
        “How long you been married to my mom?” I tried.
        He shook his head, dumped some coffee beans into a grinder and pressed down, the mechanical whirling sound offering his first answer. He cleared his throat. “Actually, we’ve been separated for about four years. I live over in Santa Cruz. We just. Well, your mom and I lived together for about a year. We didn’t get a divorce. It just, you know?”
        I nodded. “Sure.”
        “And Devon. Well, Devon is her daughter, actually. I mean, you know? Her other daughter.”
        “Whose daughter?” I tried to remember another her in the conversation, but my mind felt spongy.
        “Your mother’s. Daughter.”
        I swallowed hard. A strange tall man she’d married and broken up with. A kid. A life. I shook my head. “She doesn’t look like her.”
        “I know. Right. She’s adopted. From China.”
        “How old is she?” I wanted to argue the point.
        “Nine,” Hector said, pouring hot water through the coffee filter.
        “No. I talked to my mom a couple of years ago.”
        Hector nodded, didn’t look up. “She adopted her. I don’t know when. She was maybe a year or two old when she adopted her. I—I don’t know why she didn’t tell you.”
        I felt like a sinkhole had opened under me and as I fell, a whole world suddenly made sense. My mother hadn’t come looking for me because she’d ordered a fucking replacement from China.
        It occurred to me that maybe my mother wasn’t really dead. That these two were a couple of con artists, completely unrelated to us. They’d lured me down here for—what? Could he have put them up to it? From prison?
        I surveyed the apartment again. My mother’s mythology books on the shelves. My mother’s butcher block table in the kitchen. The pictures. This was my mother’s home. I sipped my coffee.
        The child abandoned her card game and joined me at the dining room table, didn’t say anything.
        Hector tossed the obituary section of a newspaper between us. Just a short, boxed notice. No picture. And they’d left me out of it, mercifully. She is survived by a daughter, Devon Morgan of Oakland, California.
        Hector kind of sighed then. “Listen,” he said. “I have to go to the post office.” And just like that he walked out the door, left me and the child sitting there at the table like two travelers stranded at the same roadside café.