She
hadn’t asked if I wanted to see her bedroom but I got off the couch and followed
her anyway. The booze had me temporarily getting my hopes up. Anna opened a
door to a small bedroom at the side and front of the studio that was
partitioned off along with storage rooms. It was big enough for a single bed
and dresser with a nice little balcony facing the back outside of French doors.
Next to the bed was a simple altar with a dancing Shiva figurine, incense
burner, and candles. She pecked me on the cheek, lightly turned me away, and
closed the door on my libido. It didn’t matter, I felt like sleeping off the
morning’s excesses too. I made my bed on
the couch thinking of what Anna revealed… wondering what she meant by saying
there was a reason Doc wouldn’t rehire me and why was it so goddamned hard for
her to tell me about it?
I
awoke a couple hours later. A calligraphy pen was next to a pad on the counter.
I read the perfect penmanship, “There’s plenty in the cupboards and fridge.
Help yourself, self-helper.” Happy Face. Happy Face. Happy Face.
Her
penmanship reminded me of the daughter I feared I’d never see again, of my baby
carefully drawing out each letter evenly across the page. It flashed a
phosphorus light… a flaming arrow zipping through my consciousness. It always
started like this… a seemingly minor incident, an image, the sound of a Huey,
odor of decay, or a prostitute’s perfume… any of these could send it spiraling
downward… sometimes these emotions were worse flash-backs than the dramatic ones
that stewed from combat in Nam… I can handle them but not Adair’s last embrace…
of hanging on with all her might to a world, her world, our world, slipping
away… visits that got increasingly difficult, her mother’s contempt, the
step-dad’s cowardice… of taking her out of my reach to the East Coast. The
court, the lies, the judge, the lawyers… you can damned near get by with
kidnapping if you’re well connected. I would miss her first day at school, her
first date, her graduations, and walking her to the altar someday. I couldn’t
shake it. Yep, Anna’s perfect penmanship brought it up-front and in my face.
Only
a slug of Jack could calm me. It sat like a centerpiece on the teak table
begging to be emptied. I caught site of four or five gridded notebooks in a
bookshelf like the one she’d tossed on the floor of my cab. I needed a
distraction. Old habits, investigative
training, don’t go away. If there was a diary, a log, or a journal lying about,
I had to check it out. I opened one to an entry of some time ago. She started
each entry with the date, the pagan names of the weekday, and military hour.
Pages were filled, beautiful, rich, mature, sketches drawn in ink next to a
poetic line or musings, projects, shopping lists for paints, turpentine,
canvass, and often military style OD, Orders of the Day. Then, almost shocking,
in the older ones the pages might have been any teenage girl’s diary:
fantasies, well drawn, of fairies and unicorns. I thought, shit a woman that
can paint like she does and then this… I almost forgot that she was still a
child. Journals only a few years back… she would even be an adolescent. I flipped
back and forth through them when I noticed she’d made stars in red ink on important
dates. I came to April where there was only one line of a pithy quote; 04/30/86 “Wherever you are, mystery man,
there you are.” Happy Birthday to me! I think I’m seventeen now!
That
was last year. Two years before that… the divorce. The past. Memory… that date…
not that date but eleven years before. I tried everything I could to blot it
out. I did all I could to stay in the moment because, when my mind went back in
time, it took me with it. Once the ball started rolling I never knew how far
back it would go and it always stuck in one of these two places or years… time
and space... two embraces… even though she was bringing back some of the more
recent past, there was a chance I’d end up in Adair’s last embrace or the
embrace of the child at the Embassy gates in Saigon. Either one was to be
avoided if I could… if only I could.
The
stairway led to a lush tropical garden where an ornate gate provided shelter that
separated it and a small pond and fountain from the noise of the street. It
made for a sweet place to sit on a bench surrounded by Birds of Paradise
eternally blooming. I listened to the rippling splashes of the fountain and
occasional splish of a fin from one of the koi. I hadn’t done that … just sat
since getting fired. It’s what I liked about the graveyard shift in the cab
after the bars close. This was so much better. The garden was beautiful, the
fountain was beautiful, the koi were beautiful, the studio was beautiful… all
of it was beautiful. I took a deep breath and tried to return my focus to the
koi pond and I tried to see past it all to Anna. And, like my daughter, Adair,
she was beautiful too. All of it fine but that date and all this beauty opened
up a living breathing nightmare.
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