You know you wish you were me

by Marolyn Krasner

SMASHWORDS EDITION

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PUBLISHED BY:

Marolyn Krasner on Smashwords

You know you wish you were me

Copyright © 2011 by Marolyn Krasner

ONE

The second line is faint, but Hana knows it’s positive.

A positive test, not something people like to get these days, but here it is.

“I’m pregnant.”

As soon as she hears the words, a little bit of fear locks in on the edge of her heart.

What if I lose it, she thinks as she puts the test back into the little plastic bag it came from and drops it into the trash basket under the bathroom sink. She tries to remember Evee’s little baby clothes and cradling a newborn against her body. She can’t wait to feel the movement of its breath on her neck and kiss the little fingers and toes.

She could call Olivia at the hotel. Olivia always says the right thing and she’s been looking forward to this day as well. No, it’s too early. It’s not a good idea to distract her from work, Hana thinks as she crosses her fingers dreaming of Olivia’s inevitable pay rise.

Hana goes to the bedroom and stands sideways in front of the full-length mirror. She never does this. Olivia bought the mirror last year after spending $6000 on business suits. Hana was disgusted and proud at the same time. Disgusted that Olivia is so fully immersed, soaking in fact, in corporate America and proud that they could afford to spend that much without taking out a loan.

“The mirror is a necessity,” Olivia had said. “I need to know what I look like from every angle. Often, while admiring herself, she says “I love this mirror.”

“I love you,” Hana will say in reply.

If she has the time, Hana likes to sit on the bed and watch Olivia get ready. She loves the suits more than she will admit. There is something elite about Olivia in her suits. She’s gorgeous all of the time and Hana tells her as much as possible, but when Hana sees her in the morning ready to walk out the door with her black shoes and her dark brown bob with the sharp pieces framing her face so elegantly, she imagines she is having an affair with the Governor or a CIA agent.

Olivia laughs at Hana’s nicknames for her, Agent Hot, Ms. Black. Black because that is the predominate color of the suits, except for the little bit of flair she adds with bright collared shirts, red neckties or ornate broaches that Hana finds in dusty counter cabinets at thrift stores. Olivia is partial to bird motifs and says she can get away with a little bit of rebellion because the advertising agency she works for is liberal. Hana has never been convinced because the owner is a blatant Republican who makes them work on Christmas Eve.

“Don’t complain too much, he likes me and you like the money I’m making,” Olivia argues. Olivia has crossed to the dark side quite quickly in Hana’s opinion.

It wasn’t so many years ago that Hana wore ripped jeans and punched at as many people she could in mosh pits at punk shows in the name of individuality and anger. Now, in her domestic bliss with no recent bruises, she can buy whatever she wants without having to look at the price or have an internal debate about which bill she won’t pay to allow herself the luxury of a new CD or a trip out of town.

Sometimes Hana misses the Olivia she met in the late 80s, the girl who would purposely rip her second hand clothes and mend the holes with the most incongruous of fabrics. She was into burlap when they first met. Hana can remember a hot pink skirt with rough, uneven burlap fringe on the edges and a matching jacket. It was itchy when they hugged. Some of Olivia’s creations were impressive, others Hana avoided commenting on because she couldn’t think of anything nice to say.

In the mornings when Olivia is getting ready, Hana hangs around in her oversized t-shirts and sweatpants while Olivia buttons and zips herself into the fine tailoring of her suits. Hana has contemplated changing her look, but her short haircut, baggy tops and jeans are who she is and has been for as long as she can remember. She is comfortable and she doesn’t stand out in crowds.

Olivia’s got this sophistication now that Hana feels she can’t match. There’s nothing glamorous about the dishes or the grocery shopping. Olivia has never said anything to make Hana feel self conscious, she just does. Olivia is constantly thanking Hana for making the house comfortable and for doing most of the cooking and cleaning while Olivia is at work.

Some of their queer friends, who aren’t as settled as they are, make comments about how traditional their roles are. Olivia is the breadwinner while Hana takes care of the domestic duties. The comments have hurt Hana’s feelings at times, but then she thinks of what her life would be like without her roles and responsibilities. What she has now is much better than a lonely alternative.

She and Olivia still make love, not as often as they used to and a little more mechanically, but it is better than nothing. They still hold hands watching TV on the couch. And sometimes while talking in bed. They laugh a lot and they have planned this second baby, so things must be pretty good.

Hana’s life is quite simple. Everyday she sends Evee and Olivia out of the house with lunches and kisses and spends most days inside, cleaning and getting ready for when the two to return home.

Olivia loves her job and Hana enjoys listening to her stories of meeting fancy people and eating at expensive restaurants. Places Hana will probably never go. Advertising is a good fit for Olivia, Hana thinks. She has a natural ability to convince people to take risks. She loves risks and is able to entice others to go along for the ride, even if they’ve never contemplated anything close to what she is suggesting. Hana can’t imagine selling anything to anyone. To her the idea of convincing someone to spend their money is awful.

Olivia’s pitch today is in Seattle and she is trying to convince her bosses that they need to promote her to vice president in charge of internet advertising. Olivia is convinced the internet is going to transform and the advertising industry and the world. She has been preparing the pitch for months, spending way too much time on her computer.

Hana has never used the internet. She has only ever baked for a living, mostly alone and in the dark hours while everyone else is sleeping. She’s never been good at small talk and has avoided working in cafes or bakeries where the kitchen can be seen by the customers. Her ideal job is at a cafe where she finishes before the place opens so she doesn’t run the risk of interacting with customers. Now that they have more money, she only works a few nights a month for fun and is able to be a housewife the rest of the time.

When Evee was born, the situation was totally different and Hana doesn’t want to go back to that. She rubs her eyes at the memory of the exhaustion of baking five nights a week then spending the better part of her days doing housework and taking care of Evee while Olivia worked as a secretary at the ad agency.

When she feels negative about Olivia’s job, she tries to invoke the frustration and the fights of those days and reassures herself there are worse jobs Olivia could be doing.

“I’m pregnant,” she says again, examining herself in the mirror. She pulls her long t-shirt down over her chubby belly and pushes her stomach out to create the roundest faux baby bump she can manage. It looks good, she thinks.

When Evee was born, they were the only gay couple they knew who had made a baby themselves. Hana took a lot of flack for joining the status quo and moving to the suburbs. In fact, not one of her friends from the old days has called or visited. There was one guy who came by when Evee was first born because he needed a place to crash after his car broke down. Hana still tells the story of how he looked particularly shocked when Olivia started breastfeeding Evee at the table during breakfast. His tough, anti-establishment exterior just melted away and he left as soon as he could.

These days it seems like every other lesbian they meet is having a baby or trying to. They are seen as role models and that freaks them out.

Hana messes her short hair and looks at her baggy sweatpants. She won’t be the least feminine pregnant lesbian around. One woman they met had a mohawk, tattoos up her arms and a huge belly. She was having twin girls. Her girlfriend, who looked like Wonder Woman, with the red lipstick and the big hair, said she had never wanted to give birth. Hana could relate. She hadn’t either, until recently.

Even after raising Evee for seven years, Hana felt no desire to have a human growing inside of her. But over the past few months she’s been drawn to the pregnancy articles in the women’s magazines in the supermarket and on more than one occasion recently she has caught herself staring longingly at babies.

A feeling of excitement rushes from her stomach to her throat now and she let’s out little noise of happiness at the thought of the baby, her baby, in the house. Hana pulls her t-shirt tight over her distended belly and jiggles the fat. She can’t imagine her stomach big and hard. Where will everything go?

Olivia’s belly was like a balloon filled with that cornstarch mixture kids make in elementary school. Hana would push into her belly very slowly, for no reason except that she wanted to. Her finger didn’t sink in like with the cornstarch, instead Olivia’s belly was firm and she would push Hana away after a couple seconds.

“Just go get some cornstarch and leave me alone,” Olivia would yell.

Hana looks around their cluttered bedroom. Where is a baby going to go? There is the tall wardrobe, for the suits, a set of dresser drawers, the mirror and their king-sized massive spaceship of a bed that they could not live without.

When they first moved in Hana bought the biggest bed she could find. She had read that pregnant women get hot and need space. Also they had no other furniture, so Hana could not escape to the couch because there was no couch. On the massive bed, Hana could be far away from Olivia’s sensitive body and still have enough room to stretch.

Maybe the house is too small.

Hana is worried. The house is cluttered, mostly with toys and old furniture that she has rescued from a slow rotting death at the dump with every intention to restore or reupholster.

“Instead this crap will spend its twilight years taking up space and rotting in our house. Why can’t you feed the homeless or something?” Olivia has said many times that she is not convinced furniture restoration is Hana’s calling.

What if I’m not a good mother?

The negative thoughts are coming fast.

What if it has problems?

Hana paces around the house, picking things up, clothes, toys and setting them down somewhere else in the room. She wants Evee to be here so they can talk about all of the fun stuff they have planned for later in the day.

Unfortunately Evee won’t be home for hours and Hana has a list of things she wants to get done. She’s been lazy the past couple of days and taken advantage of her freedom by not cleaning or doing any of the errands she had promised herself she would do.

“Sweetie, just relax. Give yourself a break. I didn’t organize this little time out for you just so you could fill it up with work,” Olivia had said on the way to the airport.

Hana was trying to listen, but she was thinking about vacuuming the car.

“Promise you’ll relax,” Olivia was leaning over towards Hana’s cheek which made Hana uncomfortable because she needed to change lanes.

She got up early today in an attempt to finish all of her tasks and, if she were honest with herself, an unachievable to-do list. The item she chose first, even though it was not at the top of the list, was to take the pregnancy test and now that she has taken it and now that she is pregnant, nothing else seems very important.

She wants to call Templeton, but she doesn’t pick up the phone. It wouldn’t be right to tell him before she tells Olivia. Even though this was a team effort and he did say he wanted to hear as soon as they knew anything, Olivia should be the first person she tells.

It is Olivia’s fault she is feeling so anxious now. Why had she forced Hana to be alone? Hana had said it was a good idea, but now that she’s been alone for two days, she is ready for her family to come back. She is ready to be caught up in a wave of things that need to be done that comes with a house full of people.

She looks around the house again, all of its surfaces and curves. She belongs in this house, she knows this, but sometimes, in this family, she feels like the odd one out. Who is she kidding, she is the odd one out. Evee, Olivia, Carol and Templeton, they’re all blood. At times she has felt that she could just be the housekeeper.

She tightens her fists and makes a hissing noise to stop herself from letting these thoughts go further.

When she first told Olivia that she had these feelings, Evee was about two. Olivia knows now that Hana’s sensitivities are serious, but back then she would laugh when Hana said she felt outside of this family.

“That doesn’t matter, Hana, you are part of this family because we love you,” Olivia has said again and again.

At first Hana thought that part of the reason she wanted to get pregnant was because having a baby of her own with Templeton as the father, would connect her to this family. She will share blood with her baby, who will share blood with Evee, who shares blood with everyone else and that would be that.

Hana hoped a baby would make her feel more secure and dissolve her deep fears. Like the one about coming home to the house and finding it empty because everyone took off to New Mexico to be with Templeton, or the one where everyone dies and she is banned from going to the funerals or seeing the bodies one last time because she is not seen as part of this family.

“Stop that,” she says loudly.

Now she is pregnant. She is connected to this family. She is not by herself, someone else is with her. She puts her hands on her lower belly and lets out a yell, annoyed that she’s not able to tell anyone this big news right now. She looks over to the phone again. Olivia wouldn’t mind.

No, she thinks. It’s not a good idea and it wouldn’t be satisfying. Olivia will be distracted, she is so focused on work. Hana wants it to be a big thing. She wants it to be about her. She wants calm, hugs and kisses. Then a party, even if it’s just the two of them.

She walks into the kitchen and looks at the pile of dishes in the sink. She has no desire to clean them. She turns around goes to the big window in the living room and opens the curtains.

The sun is coming up and sending silver and pink laser beams through the clouds. On the windowsill, some of their collected things catch the light. Hana picks up a dried out, dusty shell she and Evee brought home from one off their beach trips. She wipes the dust of onto her t-shirt, then puts the round surface against her bottom lip. It is cold and smooth.

The back of their first Mother’s Day card is fading on the windowsill. The red of the construction paper has turned pale and lifeless from two years in the sun, but the inside is unchanged. Hana adjusts the fold, opening it wider so she can see the inside from anywhere in the room. There is a large yellow sun, a house and three stick people. Two tall and one short, all with outstretched stick arms and little circle hands joined together. They are floating at the top of the card, next to the sun and all three have big red sliver moon smiles.

The teacher’s aide hadn’t understood that Evee had two moms and made sure the letters the little five-year-old wrote on the card spelled out “Happy Mother’s Day Mommy” instead of “Happy Mother’s Day Mommies,” which is what Evee had repeated to her over and over. The awkward and well constructed “ies” was added later when Evee’s teacher informed the aid of Evee’s family structure. A little note accompanied the card apologizing to them for the mistake.

“What is the world coming to?” Olivia had laughed after Evee had gone to bed that night. “I thought we were contributing to the downfall of society and she’s apologizing to us?”

Hana has been spoiled for the past eight years, she knows this. There are so many people around who love her now, good people. Before they came along she was always alone. At the time, she thought she preferred things that way. No complications, no dramas. But when she experienced life with people, happy people, she admitted that she had hated being so alone, she had just been used to it. It’s the way it had always been for her. People tended to piss her off and, more often than not, needed things without giving anything back. Until Olivia, she hadn’t ever really liked another person.

She puts the shell down and spins on the hardwood floor in her socks. She spins toward the kitchen, then toward the bedroom and back to the window. She looks outside. The plants in the front yard are wet from the morning’s mist. There are no cars driving past. It’s too early to be so awake. She spins again toward the bedroom. She’s going back to bed. She can make some lists. She loves making lists because they provide so many possibilities and promises. Everything looks good in clean rows on paper. Now that there is baby the need for lists has become very immediate. Babies require preparation and there are so many things to consider like names, necessities and a timeline charting the months and plot points between now and the birth.

She looks at herself in the big mirror again, and moves her face very close to the glass. Hana has often thought that woman are the most magnificent living creatures on earth. She has thought this for a while, and even though she has never studied any species in depth, her years of observation have convinced her that she is right. She likes to think Olivia has been her main research project.

When they met, Olivia was a young woman, very comfortable in her sexuality and confident that she wanted to be a mother, no matter how impossible it seemed at the time. Then she had Evee and her next goal was to be successful. Now, she is up for vice president at the ad agency.

There is so much evidence to support her theory. Women attract power and scorn. Women can make life and give nourishment. Women, two particular women, rule her world.

She is not a man hater. She loved her father, inept as he was. She loves Templeton in so many ways that it worries her sometimes. And there was Manny, he’s not a very good example because his weakness won out in the end.

If her baby turns out to be a boy, she would be happy. She will just be happy to have a baby, to give Evee a brother or sister.

She likes these feelings she is having. She is dreaming. Dreaming about the future. She used to do this a lot when she lived on her own. She didn’t dream of a careers or vacations. Love was her dream. To be in love. Love was a commodity that parents are meant to trade easily from each other to their children, a resource so rich, there is no danger of it depleting. This was her dream, her goal and career of choice – to be in love.

She kisses her reflection and launches herself onto the bed, covers herself in the blankets and spreads her body out, taking up as much space as she can.

******

TWO

“Thank you for holding,” a young male voice rescues her from the static of a badly tuned radio.

Hana talks quickly. She wants to get the campsite reservation settled before Evee comes home. Evee has been asking to go camping for weeks. She will be going into the second grade this year and it’s been too long since the three of them have gone away together. Hana can’t wait to see Evee’s face when she finds out about the dolphins. This campground guarantees dolphin sightings all summer. Hana tries to decide the best way to tell Evee, make her guess or give it to her as a reward.

She listens to the guy on the phone as he lists the campsite options.

As it turned out, there were only two things she absolutely had to do on her list today, the pregnancy test and this.

As she gives the guy on the phone her credit card details, she hears a car door shut.

Hana tries to facilitate good experiences for her daughter as much as possible. Hana’s memories of school are not her favorite, so she tries to arm her daughter with as many good experiences as possible, in the hope that Evee’s life will be a little easier. They’ve done a pretty good job so far, it seems. Evee has a lot of sweet friends and her school reports are always positive. Evee is a leader among her peers. Evee is a joy to have in class. That stuff must come from Olivia, because Hana’s teachers never gave such glowing reports. Hers were always, Hana is quiet and seems to spend a lot of time by herself. Does not work well in groups.

She hears the boots.

The credit card didn’t go through, the guy on the phone says.

Hana is afraid Evee will come in now and the surprise will be ruined.

“Evee, I’m on the phone I’ll be out in a minute,” she yells out into the hallway then shuts the door to the office and gives the guy the number again. It goes through.

She hangs up the phone and slips her credit card back in her wallet and puts the wallet in her backpack. She looks around the little dark room they use as an office. It is at the end of the hallway, in between the bathroom and their bedroom. It is always cool, a good place to have long phone conversations or hide from the chaos of a house full of women.

There are papers all over the desk. She picks up the one of the top of the pile, it’s a parking ticket.

“Shit,” she says as she looks at the due date, it’s two weeks overdue. She picks up the phone and grabs her wallet from her backpack.

The city employee on the other end of the phone is tired and Hana is annoyed. She is afraid there will be an additional fine, not that they can’t afford it, it’s the principle. The city has changed all of the parking rules and increased the fines at the same time. She is ready to tell the person that she does not agree with all of the strict changes and she is very frustrated, but there is no late fee after all so she holds her comments and wishes the tired and, most likely, underpaid woman a nice evening.

She really has no reason to be upset about little things like parking regulations at the moment. Her life is pretty amazing.

Hana smiles and takes a deep breath. Then she remembers Evee and tries to guess what she is doing, where she is in the house.

Hana walks down the hallway to the living room. The sun is sending bright streaks of light through the room and dust is dancing in the glow. The house is silent except for the creak of the screen door’s hinges as it moves back and forth in the breeze. Hana goes to the front door and looks outside onto the porch.

She hears music coming from down the street and the screech of tires somewhere in the distance.

“Evee,” she says loudly.

She walks to the kitchen and looks out the window above the kitchen sink. She can see the whole backyard from here. Evee is not in the yard, unless she is hiding underneath the window. Hana opens the back door and stands on the landing of the back steps. There is no sign of her. No backpack or boots.

She goes back to the living room, stands behind the big maroon couch and looks out the front window. She can see the front yard, the driveway and the street. She leans her body onto the back of the couch and puts the palm of her right hand on the front of her neck.

“Weird,” she says. The babysitter is very reliable. She is a mother herself and always does what she says she is going to do. There must be traffic or something.

Hana decides to make use of the extra time and do the dishes. She doesn’t enjoy doing the dishes, but she likes the preparation.

First she makes herself a cup of tea, which she sets on the windowsill overlooking the backyard. She stacks all of the dirty dishes next to the washing sink. She sips the tea in between scrubbing and rinsing the washing and the rinsing sinks. Then she scrubs the counter next to the rinsing sink with soap and water, wipes it down and sets the dish drying rack on top.

Olivia gets impatient with Hana’s method. Olivia does the dishes in what Hana feels is chaos. Not clearing anything beforehand and leaving the water running the whole time. She puts clean dishes next to dirty ones and lets everything air dry. The kitchen usually looks exactly the same after she is finished as it did before she started, except that there is water everywhere.

These dishes are pretty gross. It’s a little like punishment, she thinks.

Hana picks up the mixing bowl with the dried pancake batter and submerges it in the steaming water.

The phone rings. She is startled and drops the bowl into the full sink. She runs through the house to the office and picks the phone up.

“Hello,” she is a little breathless.

Water runs down her arm from the rubber glove. It tickles. She presses the phone against her ear with her shoulder and tries to take the sticky gloves off. There is a loud buzz as her ear presses on one of the numbers on the phone.

“Hello? Hello?” it’s a voice Hana doesn’t recognize.

“Sorry,” Hana grabs the phone. “Hello?”

“Good afternoon, may I speak with Mr. or Mrs. Sims?” the woman says. Hana can tell from the robotic voice that she doesn’t want to talk to this person.

“Uh, what is this regarding?”

“Are you Mrs. Sims?”

“No, there is no Mrs. Sims or Mr. Sims. This isn’t a good time. Sorry,” Hana hangs up the phone. She looks at the clock above the desk, it is twenty past three now.

She calls the babysitter, but gets the machine. She doesn’t leave a message. She goes back to the kitchen, looks at the dishes and throws the gloves on the drying rack. They can wait.

She goes out to the front porch and sits on the rocking chair. It is warm outside. She has been inside all day with front door open and the screen door closed. That’s what she does in the summer. Hana gets up and goes to the back of the house to call the babysitter again. No answer.

She goes back to the living room and looks out the front window. Maybe the babysitter was supposed to drop Evee off at three thirty and they are on their way now. She sits on the couch and picks up a magazine. As she flips the pages, she looks out the front window. The street is quiet. Any second she will see the babysitter’s car.

Here leg is bouncing up and down. Her stomach is tight and she feels like she wants to shake her hands. Stretch. Relax. She gets up and goes to the phone again.

“Hello,” the babysitter says.

“Oh, great, you haven’t left yet.” Hana is so relieved, she is smiling. She wipes sweat from her forehead.

“Hana?”

“Yeah, can I talk to Evee?”

“What?”

“Can you put Evee on the phone, please?”

“She’s there, I dropped her off.”

“When?”

Hana feels like the room has shifted, just a little, but quickly.

“Um, about three,” the tone of the babysitter’s voice is higher than before.

“She’s not here.”

Don’t panic. Don’t panic. Don’t panic.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure.” Hana drops the phone and runs to the living room then turns back down the hallway. She looks into the bathroom, but knows Evee is not there, she would have seen her go in. She would have seen Evee if she went in to either of the two bedrooms as well, they are all off the hallway, which is visible from the office.

Don’t panic. Don’t panic. Don’t panic.

Hana looks into the rooms just in case. They are empty. She stands in the doorway of the living room again and scans the small room. She looks at the front door, which is on her left. It is open. Has it has been open all day? She is sure the screen door has been closed all day because she hates the fat flies that come into the house during summer, so she always leaves is closed.

“Evee, you here?” Hana checks all of Evee’s hiding places. Closets, the bathtub, in between the couch and the loveseat and she is steeling herself in case Evee jumps out and screams, as she likes to do when they least expect it.

On her hands and knees now, crawling like she did when they used to play horsey before Evee shot up three inches in the months before her seventh birthday. Hana is close to the dust and fuzz of their hard wood floors and part of her wants to go get the broom and dustpan, but she stands up and moves from room to room again. Bathroom, the office, bedroom and Evee’s chaotic room. Her face is getting hot and her heart is beating quickly.

She goes out to the backyard, hoping to see Evee’s striped pants in the green grass or her head poking out of the bushes in the back by the fence. But as she reaches the edge of the yard and runs along the tall fence that divides the back of their property from the neighbor’s, she sees nothing.

She runs toward the house and takes the steps up to the back door two at a time. In the small kitchen facing the backyard, she is dizzy and she can’t see well after being outside in the bright sun. She reaches out with both hands for the counter and closes her eyes for a few seconds.

She sits down on one of the chairs around the old wooden dining room table. She looks at the piles of folded and unfolded laundry that require attention. She turns her body and looks out through the living room and the front window of the house.

“Evee, come out now.”

If she were hiding in the house, Evee would know to come. She would know that Hana’s tone means she is in trouble. Hana runs through the living room out to the front porch and down the steps that lead to the driveway, turns right and walks along the side of the house to the garage.

“Evee.”

Back to the front of the house. Nothing. She stands on the sidewalk not wanting to cross the threshold between the street and the border of their property. Not wanting to believe her daughter could be outside their safety zone.

The street is eerily quiet. The sun shines bright white light on the empty driveways. There are no trees for Evee to hide behind. The city cut them all down after a postal worker broke her neck from a fall in a neighborhood miles away. The tree roots had ripped the sidewalk apart in protest against their confinement in this suburban street. Hana could relate. Years of growth broke the cement apart and created mountain ranges good for kids to ride bikes on, but bad for someone who wasn’t watching where they were going. Hana had not realized growth was an act of defiance punishable by death.

Why isn’t anyone helping me? Can’t they see something’s wrong?

She has the feeling that people are around, watching her panic from behind closed blinds. It’s like that Twilight Zone and she is the last person on earth.

She heads to the house next door on the right. The Franks. She feels uncomfortable standing on her neighbor’s property without an invitation, but she continues halfway down the driveway then turns around.

“Evee.”

Don’t panic. Don’t panic. Don’t panic. There is a logical reason, she’s seven, she’s impulsive.

She crosses the street and goes to the Stevens’ backyard. They have a pool. Evee swims there sometimes. Maybe they invited her in. She knocks on the front door and puts her ear to the wood. The house is quiet. She goes down the driveway and looks through the gate into the backyard. The pool cover is on.

She can hear her own breathing, it’s a rough sound coming from deep in her throat. She feels lightheaded. She looks at her house from across the street. The screen door is still open.

She looks towards the alley a couple of houses down. It runs perpendicular to their street and provides a thoroughfare for delivery trucks to go to the businesses on the main street near their house. High walls separate the alley from the houses at the end of the street. Sometimes teenagers drive their souped up cars very fast down the alleys, so Evee knows not to ride there, but she has taken her bike down there without permission several times lately. Hana is running there now, hoping to find Evee on her little bike with the tassels on the handlebars. She likes thrills, especially wheelies and speeding down hills, the faster the better. Hana hates how scared she gets when Evee does her stunts.

When she gets to the alley she looks to the left. All she sees are potholes and gravel road and vines growing over the wall of someone’s yard.

She looks to her right and sees much of the same, except there is a fast food place down the block, with the parking lot that they sometimes take shortcuts through when they walk to the beach.

On the ground about 20 yards down the alley she sees something she recognizes. Something red. She is afraid, but she is moving towards it as fast as she can, one of Evee’s red boots. That’s what she heard running up the driveway.

She is frozen and doesn’t know what to do. The boot lying on the ground means her daughter was in the alley. From the house to here, somehow that happened and she can’t make sense of it. Evee loves those boots. Why would she just leave one?

Hana picks it up and walks into the parking lot of the fast food place, up to the drive through the window and knocks.

“My daughter, have you seen her? This is her boot. I found it in that alley. Have you seen a little girl with brown hair?” The guy behind the window stares at her and shakes his head. She sees her reflection in the glass. She can see sweat, shiny on her forehead. Her mouth is open and she looks panicked. She feels panicked.

A car in the drive through honks at her and she is startled. She turns away from the window and goes to the front of the restaurant. She stands outside of the door and looks out at the busy street. They have told Evee so many times not to go on the street alone. She scans up and down the street, but sees nothing unusual, just the blur of car after car and no sign of Evee.

Maybe she is overreacting, allowing herself to panic and jump to conclusions. But she is sure she heard Evee’s boots on the driveway. She knows because she’s heard the sound so many times before. And the screen door, it had been shut.

She opens the door to the restaurant and stands in the doorway.

“Has anyone seen a little girl, she’s got long hair, brown.” She takes a step halfway in and looks around the dining area. There are five maybe six people sitting down and a few more behind the counter. Some look at her and shake their heads, others don’t seem to notice her. “She was wearing boots like this. I found it in the alley? Please, I can’t find her.”

No one says anything to her. She turns around suddenly angry and pushes the door hard, but it doesn’t slam like she wanted. It closes quietly.

She walks quickly towards her house with the boot tucked closely to her chest. She sees a police car turn down her street. She runs back through the alley. The police car stops in front of her house. Two young policemen get out.

Hana runs towards them yelling. “I need your help. My daughter, this is her boot. I found it in the alley over there.” She hugs the boot and breathes loudly.

“Do you live at this address, maam?” the dark haired officer says motioning to their house. She nods and looks at the second officer whose ear is pressed to his shoulder. He is turned away from them.

“We received a call,” the officer says, then pauses. He turns his head down the street toward the alley. “Someone has reported seeing what they think was a young girl being carried away from this address.”

Everything slows down except Hana’s heartbeat. It is loud and she feels it everywhere in her body. There are more voices, little sounds coming from the other cop’s shoulder, the car.

Hana looks down the street where a second police car has parked in front of the alley. The lights are on, but there are no sirens. The car backs up and parks in the middle of the street, blocking oncoming traffic. There is a third car at the other end of the street in the same position.

She looks back at the officer. He is looking at her.

“Does a young girl live with you at this address?”

“Yes.”

“Your daughter?”

“Yes, my daughter.”

Hana’s body is hot and she can feel the weight of the boot in her arms, but she can’t feel it against her skin.

“Did you say someone called you?”

“One of your neighbors…”

“One of my neighbors? Who?” Hana is looking at the houses on her street. Nobody said anything to her. Why didn’t anyone come out and say anything?

“Have you been out?”

“What?”

“Have you been out or were you at home? Where were you coming from?”

“The alley, I was looking for Evee,” Hana’s words are quick.

“Is that your daughter’s name, Evee?”

“I heard her… You don’t understand, you’re wrong I heard her running up the driveway. I was on the phone.” Hana’s mind is fuzzy. How can she be in this situation, talking to a police officer in front of the house? Their house where nothing bad has ever happened. She has had anxiety attacks that felt like this. Fear and panic mixed into a paralyzing tonic that leave her shaken for hours, sometimes a whole sleepless night.

Hana looks up and sees a different police officer talking to the neighbor across the street. The neighbor is pointing at and motioning from their house toward the alley.

Hana feels the worry now. It’s made its way through the confusion of this. Now that she sees the police and the neighbor, she knows that something has happened. Something big. Evee is not here, the police are here.

“I’ve been waiting for her all day.” Hana feels a soft breeze over her face. It is cool against her wet face.

“What is your daughter’s full name,” the officer’s words are quiet, but Hana watches his face. He is straining. He looks angry. Instantly she doesn’t trust him.

“What?”

“Your daughter’s name,” his words are clear and loud now.

“Evee, Evee Morris-Sims,” Hana’s voice is shaking. Everything is shaking. She drops the boot, but the officer is quicker and picks it up.

“Hey,” he yells to the other cop standing in the middle of the street and then he throws the boot to him. “It’s the girl’s.”

Hana’s chest feels cold now without the comfort of Evee’s precious red leather boot. “What are you doing? You can’t do that?” Hana makes a move toward the other officer, toward the boot.

The officer puts his hand out in front of her. “Listen, I know this is a terrible shock, but we will need full access to everything here, we will need you to let us do whatever we need to do. If your daughter has been taken…” he stops and looks past her.

She turns around expecting to see something, but there is nothing. Just their driveway as it has always been. The front of the house, the garage.

“What?” Hana is sure he was going to say something very bad or very good, either way she needs him to finish. “What were you gong to say?”

“We don’t have much time to find her,” he says as he walks past her toward the house.

“Where are you going? What are you saying?” Hana says as she follows him up the driveway.

“You said you heard your daughter?”

“I’m sure I did,” Hana tries to put herself back in the office, on the phone. Tries to quiet her fear enough to remember. It was less than an hour ago, but she’s heard those boots so many times. Maybe she didn’t, maybe she did, she can’t be a hundred percent sure.

“Where is her father?” the officer says as he looks at the ground on the driveway.

“He doesn’t live with us?”

“Where is he?”

“New Mexico.”

“Who lives in this house?”

Hana thinks of Olivia then for the first time. She has no idea any of this is happening. Whatever it is that is happening, she needs to know, needs to be here. Hana runs toward the house.

“Maam stop. Stop right now,” a loud voice booms behind her.

Hana turns around to see who they are talking to. There are two officers running towards her. Where did they come from?

Their grip on her arms as she loses control of her legs is reassuring because suddenly she is finding it hard to breath. The cop is standing looking at her. She doesn’t think he understands that she can’t breath, or he doesn’t care.

“Are you all right?” She doesn’t know who said that.

Hana looks at the police and the neighbor across the street. She should be with them listening to what and who the neighbor saw, but she can’t move. She just watches as if it is happening on TV. It’s one of those crime shows that she has no involvement in because it’s not real.

“Maam – I’m gonna have to ask you not to go into the house. We’re going to need to have a good look around there.”

Hana doesn’t move. The officer stands looking at her.

“Maam?”

Hana looks at him and can’t keep the screaming thoughts in her head.

“Why are you so worried about me in my house? My daughter is not here. You’re telling me she’s been taken, but you are all standing around,” she is screaming at him.

The sky is bright blue and the sun is hot as Hana kneels on their concrete porch, trying to take a deep breath. Her lungs are half the size they were twenty minutes ago. She is crying loudly now, as loud as she ever has. She wants to explode, die right here, anything to get rid of this fear that has taken over her whole body.

“She’s somewhere, please. She’s just playing.”

She is being picked up now off the porch. She is limp like a protestor being pulled to a paddy wagon. Her feet are dragging on the ground and she hears a low wailing sound and realizes it is coming out of her. She has always been embarrassed crying in front of anyone else, but now she can’t stop.

The tears are falling and noises she has not made for years, since the dark days when she wailed into pillows, are coming out of her uncontrollably.

They let her go and she is in the back yard on her stomach on the grass.

The young cop’s questions come fast. When did you last see your daughter? What is the name of the babysitter? What do you mean Evee’s mother? Are you not Evee’s mother?

“Yes, she’s my daughter, but Olivia is her mother?”

The cop has gone icy cold. He looks at her and she feels a distaste she has encountered before.

“Maam, where is the child’s mother?”

“Seattle, she’s working,”

“We’re going to need her contact details,” his pen is ready and he is looking around the backyard.

“I want to call her,” she whines. Hana hates herself for using a pathetic begging voice and for the hot tickling tears welling up in her eyes. Of course she can call her. She pushes herself up and turns toward the back door of the house, but the cop steps in her path to the door.

“I think it’s best if you just stay here and let us handle this with the family.”

Then he motions to the lawn chair sitting in the middle of the yard.

“What are you saying?”

“Maam, please.” His arm is still outstretched towards the chair and he touches her lightly on her shoulder with his other hand.

“I am fucking family,” her fists are clenched and her face is hot. She steps forward towards the back door and the cop. Her face is close to his. She can smell aftershave. She thrusts forward. Her chest bumps hard against him. He is knocked back but starts towards her with an angry look on his face.

There is noise around them, like the hut hut of a group of soldiers. Then she is held again by hard arms, holding her tighter than before and without any sympathy this time. She is scared.

“I advise you to calm down, before you get yourself into serious trouble,” the cop says through tight lips.

“What do you mean? If my daughter is missing, I am already in serious trouble. Don’t tell me what to do, you’re just standing there not doing anything.”

The officer turns away from her and walks into the kitchen through the back door as she is pulled back into the lawn chair and a different cop stands in front of her, watching her with his hand on his belt, not his gun, but not far from it.

Hana pulls blades of grass out of the ground one by one as police move around her house. She hears drawers opening and shutting and thinks she can hear someone laughing. Their personal life is on display. She trembles as she hears the cop’s words again in her head. They don’t see her as part of this family and no matter what her insecurities about her place in this family are, right now she is integral. She is Evee’s mother.

There are things Hana feels that she doesn’t bother to talk about anymore. Stuff she feels she should have left behind a long time ago, in her early twenties. The worst thing about the dark days was the violence and how she was never able to stop herself from going one step too far. She has been clean and without incident for so long that she is sure that this suburban existence is her life now. The juice boxes and sleepovers have turned into enough, and now this baby, it’s all proof she is a grown up.

So when the dark feelings come up it is usually at times that remind her of when she was young. Times when she feels a lack of control of her situation. Times like this, although nothing has ever been this bad before.

She stands up and the cop guarding her flinches. He reaches for his gun, but then puts both arms out to stop her. She starts towards the back door, he can’t hold her still and calls for help.

She makes it a few steps forward and then two more police surround her. Her arms are moving around her. She sees them swinging at strained faces. Then they are gone, and she is pulled down to the ground. Her face is on the cement at the bottom of the back steps. The coarse ground scratches her wet cheeks.

She stares at the cracks in the back steps. There are ants scurrying quickly in chaos. They are afraid, too.

She feels a sharp weight in her back and on her legs, then her hands are pulled behind her back and she hears metal, then she is stuck, bound in hand cuffs. She wails as loud as she ever has. Her throat is sore and she feels helpless.

“She’s my baby. I’m her mommy. Please, I’m sorry I did that. I’m sorry. Somebody listen to me. I’m scared. Please.”

She sees a pair of dark, hard shoes close to her face. If this were another decade she would be beaten, maybe killed for living with another woman. This thought and the boots, shiny, hard and close to her face, quiet her.

She thinks of her mother. A young girl surrounded by American military for years. Who knows what the soldiers would have done to her back then if they found her here in this family, making babies with another woman.

Her thoughts are hectic. She has the feeling that everything’s gone wrong and there is nothing she can do to make it right. Like with Manny. He was down on the ground like this. Probably scared, just like this and she just left him there. Most of the time Hana tries not to think about him. But right now she can’t stop the guilt and the fear. Everything bad she has ever experienced is with her now, on the ground where her tears are making a dark circle in the cement under her face.

******

THREE

Carol’s high-pitched yells pour out of the house. Hana’s heart pounds with anxiety in time with the sound of several pairs of feet running through the house toward the kitchen.

“What’s happened? Where is everybody?” Carol’s voice is different. Hana can hear fear. She turns her head from the wet concrete toward the back door. A jolt of shame runs through her as she sees Carol’s face through the window of the back door.

Carol looks down at Hana and tilts her head to the side as if she doesn’t know her, but thinks she recognizes her. Then the door flies open and crashes against the side of the house and Carol is down the steps and trying to pull Hana up.

“Please Carol, they won’t listen to me,” Hana is on her knees now, looking over her shoulder at Carol.

“I don’t understand,” Carol says, her voice even higher now.

“Evee is missing Carol,” Hana’s eyes are blurry with tears, but she can see Carol’s open mouth. Hana has heard the expression, white as a ghost, but she never knew it could really happen until this moment. Carol’s eyes as the information clicks, have gone from alert to glazed and her face has lost all signs of life.

“Maam, what is your relationship with Evee?”

“How do you know?” Carols says loudly. “This doesn’t make sense.”

“How are you related to Evee?” the officer is standing next to Hana now, competing for Carol’s attention.

“She’s her grandmother, her biological blood relative,” Hana spits the words out at the officer, who doesn’t look at her.

“Could you please come with me, maam?”

“Why is she in handcuffs?” Carol says as she touches the metal bracelets digging in to Hana’s wrists. A little color has returned to her face.

“Because I’m a dyke,” Hana feels ashamed after she says this. Ashamed that her anger is showing and the real problem here is that Evee is missing. “Carol, I don’t think they’re looking for her.”

“Why aren’t you looking for her?” Carol is trying to help Hana to her feet.

“I can assure you we have several officers…”

“Take these off of her right now,” Carol says.

“At this point, maam, Ms. Morris…” the cop clears his throat and straightens his body with his hands folded over each other in front of his crotch. “Ms. Morris is… untrustworthy.”

“You’re untrustworthy as far as I’m concerned. My granddaughter is missing and you’re here abusing her mother. There are legal documents,” Carol lets go of Hana and runs into the house yelling about Hana’s legal rights as Evee’s guardian and that she owns half the house.

Hana stands at the bottom of the steps, her arms aching behind her back as she listens to Carol’s voice travel through the house to the office. The expensive papers are in the top drawer of the desk. Carol paid a lot of money to have them written up by a lawyer, a gay lawyer, of course. It’s her rule to only employ the best gay and lesbian plumbers and lawyers, hair stylists and real estate agents she can find locally. And if there are none, she asks her friends in the community who they would recommend. Hana is not satisfied that the papers mean anything, legally, but at this moment she needs something to go right.

“You get these things off of her. You have no right. You have no right. I know the chief of police and I will see to it that you and you, all of you are punished for what you have done here.”

Someone takes the handcuffs off of Hana’s wrists. The young cop stands at the top of the steps blocking their way into the house.

“I’ve shown you those papers, she has every right inside her own house, now get the hell out of my way.” Hana has always admired Carol’s ability to control men.

Carol continues up the steps, supporting Hana’s body as much as she can. They make it to the living room and Carol gets Hana to the couch where Hana stares out the front window. Usually when she sits in this spot, she watches Evee’s head as she plays on the porch. She likes to take her dolls for a swim in a bucket or draw pictures of the flowers in the front yard. Olivia sometimes joins her on the rocking chair and Hana listens to the sweet sounds of their voices as they laugh and tell each other stories.

Hana remembers the worried conversations and the questions she and Olivia asked before their baby was born.

What if they get teased for having two moms?

We’ll build up their self-confidence so it won’t hurt them.

What if teachers or their friends’ parents discriminate against them?

We’ll sue.

What if they are screwed up from being so different?

Is anybody normal?

Never, did they ask the question What if she gets taken away?

“Carol,” Hana whispers. Carol is distracted and looking around the living room. “I think I know who has taken Evee. I mean maybe, I don’t know.” Hana shivers. She has been able to block everything that happened with Manny out of her mind for so long. She had to get rid of the guilt to make room for a normal life.

“Who?”

Maybe she is wrong. Manny could be dead, if he kept going the way he was when she last saw him, he should be dead. Hana puts her head down.

Carol grabs Hana by the shoulders. “Who?”

“Do you remember I told you about that guy, when I was in LA, my friend,” Hana whispers.

“What’s his name? We have to tell them?”

“Tell them?”

“Hana, for Christ sakes, this is Evee, our little girl. He’s got our little girl,” Carol grabs Hana tight up against her and squeezes.

“Manny Gomez,” Hana says and her stomach aches at the thought of what he would do if he had Evee. Then she thinks of the tiny baby growing inside of her. She wants to tell Carol, but now is not the right time. Carol is running to one of the cops and giving them Manny’s name and probably an inflated list of offences he has committed in his lifetime, only one of which she knows for sure, that he tried to kill Hana in a car wreck. But that was just because he didn’t want to lose her.

Hana bends over on the couch, her arms smashed between her stomach and her thighs. She is exhaling, convulsing, crying without tears or sound. Feeling alone in this, the worst nightmare she has ever experienced.

She looks up and Carol is there with the phone.

“It’s Olivia.”

Hana takes the phone quickly and stands up, feeling dizzy and nauseous. She puts it up to her ear and listens to Olivia crying.

“I don’t know, just give me a minute,” Olivia says. Hana hears someone else’s voice in the background. “I’m not a child Trina, just get out,” there is a loud noise like a door slamming.

“Olivia,” Hana says.

“Oh god, Hana please tell me this isn’t happening. Please, please god.”

Olivia’s crying has always upset Hana. It is loud and like her laugh. When they were first together, Olivia cried a lot. She said Hana was the first person she had been able to cry in front of without feeling self conscious. So her crying was from deep inside and scary for Hana. She would just hold Olivia until the crying stopped. After a while, the big cries eased off. It was as if she had stored all the bad stuff in one place and those cries cleaned some of it out for good. But now, these sounds that Olivia is making remind Hana of that pain she used to hear and it is so hard to listen to because she is feeling the pain as well and she can’t hold Olivia, can’t comfort from hundreds of miles away.

“Did you look everywhere, the alley? You know she likes riding her bike there.”

“I looked there, her bike is in the garage.”

“What about around the corner? God, please Hana, it’s got to be a mistake, she has to be there. My baby has to be at home. Please.”

Hana’s face and neck are soaked with tears. She can’t listen to Olivia anymore.

“Olivia, get Trina back in the room, please. I’m worried about you,” Hana’s voice is stern.

Olivia’s crying quiets. She has left the phone somewhere and has walked away from it.

“Hello, Hana?” Trina says.

“Trina, could you please get her here, please just get her home and don’t leave her alone at all,” Hana says.

“Ok, yes. I’ll take care of it.”

Hana is thankful Trina is there. She used to think maybe Olivia would leave her for someone like an assistant. Such a stereotype. Thankfully Trina has good boundaries and is very into men. As far as assistants go, in Hana’s unprofessional opinion, Trina is wonderful.

“Thank you.”

Hana hangs up the phone and looks around the living room. She kept it together pretty well on the phone with Olivia, but now, her legs are shaking and she feels a little dizzy.

She staggers to the bedroom. The bed is warm from the day’s sun. She lays on her stomach with her arms spread out to her sides, soaking in the bed’s heat. She turns onto her stomach, breathes in then yells into the mattress. She yells as hard as she can and cries until her throat feels rough and raw. This is all her fault. She wasn’t outside to meet Evee, to stop this from happening, to protect her, which is her main job, as a mother. She takes some more shallow breaths and turns herself over on the bed and stares at the light bulb above her head. Stares until her eyes sting. There are a lot of police around and outside of the house now. They are going to want her to talk about Manny.

She closes her eyes, but suddenly feels like she is being enclosed in a dark hole, a well. She is stuck, unable to move. She feels like the walls of the room are moving closer together. Then the space enlarges and she is in a room bigger than a stadium. Her body is buzzing, like there are electric currents running through her and she can’t tell where they start or end. She is finding it hard to take deep breaths again and this adds to the anxiety. She opens her eyes and stands up. She looks at her face in the tall mirror, but sees only a combination of shapes. Eye shapes, a mouth shape, and a nose shape. She has no connection to these shapes. They don’t feel like they are part of her body.

“Carol,” she yells as she continues to stare and has the feeling she is moving further and further away from herself. “Carol.”

Carol runs into the room. Hana’s arms are stretched out towards her.

“I’m scared Carol.”

Carol wraps her arms around Hana. She is a small woman, maybe five foot two, but she expands when she hugs. She can spread her arms out so wide that she can enclose the whole family, all three of them in a perfect hug.

“I’m scared, too,” Carol says. “The police need to talk to you. I told them we will not deal with that man and I’m going to report him, put in an official complaint. I need you to tell me everything he said and I will write it up…” Carol stops. “Sorry, I get so worked up, you know. They want names of friends and phone numbers. I would do that, but I don’t know all of your friends. Do you have those? They want to talk to Templeton. I know his number, so I gave that to them.”

Carol keeps talking and Hana lets her because it is comforting. Carol’s voice is something normal, like a list of groceries they need or plans for a trip. A trip. Hana starts to cry as she thinks about the camping trip. The reservation, being on the phone while something was happening to Evee. Something dark. Shouldn’t she have suspected? Shouldn’t she have felt something? How is it that she had no idea this could happen? If she couldn’t stop this, maybe she shouldn’t have this baby of her own.

She hears the sounds again, the low moans coming from deep inside of her. She is rocking. Carol has her in her arms, with her head on the back of Hana’s neck. She can feel Carol’s tears on her skin.

Carol is the only mother Hana has had. It was a package deal. A girlfriend, a baby and a mother in law. She couldn’t refuse an offer like that and she has never regretted it.

Carol takes her out to the living room where a female cop is sitting on the smaller couch. Olivia likes to curl up on that couch after dinner. Seeing the policewoman sitting there adds to Hana’s discomfort. She wants to ask her to move, sit on the floor, or just leave. She doesn’t want to talk to any of them.

The story of what happened with Manny embarrasses Hana more than anything. The cop says it is crucial to remember the details of him and them, for Evee.

“We worked together for about six months,” Hana says quietly as the cop writes notes in her notebook. Carol rubs Hana’s back.

“I was young and lonely. I was really lonely. That’s the only way I can explain our friendship, we were both unhappy, lonely people. We worked together at a bakery, early mornings. A lot of times we’d finish work before noon and then go to my house and drink and talk, watch TV, sleep and take some stuff and go back to work.”

“What did you take? Drugs?”

“Yes.”

“What kind of drugs?”

“Speed, coke. It was to stay up, so we could work. I only did it for a couple months. I started to feel pretty disgusted with myself,” she pauses. “Do you really need the whole story? I haven’t heard from him in so long. I just had the feeling he could be involved because I can’t think of anyone else who would do this,” Hana starts crying again.

“Ms. Morris, this information is crucial.”

“Can you give us a minute please?” Carol asks. The officer nods with a sigh and walks away.

“I’m sorry, I just don’t know why I have to talk about that, you know. They already don’t trust me. The way she just writes down everything I say. It makes me feel like this is my fault,” Hana squeezes her hands together tightly.

“Nobody thinks it’s your fault,” Carol says.

Hana looks at Carol and has the feeling that she is lying.

“But, you have to tell her everything,” Carol sounds angry.

Hana takes a shuddering deep breath. This is all her fault.

******

FOUR

Before Olivia, Hana hadn’t been with many women. She had been in love, unrequited love, several times. The last time was with a skinny pink-haired girl who worked at the bakery with her and Manny. She served customers. She sang in a punk band.

Hana would walk to work in the dark hours of the morning, thinking about the back of her head, which she stared at each day as she slid loaves of French bread into paper bags. And as she worked, staring at the back of the girl’s head she would think about putting her lips on the exposed part of the girl’s neck. She dreamed of how soft it would be. They would hold each other tight for hours.

The girl gave Hana gifts, strange things customers had left behind – erasers that go on the top of pencils and little toys. Hana would take the gifts home and put them on a windowsill in her apartment, dreaming one day that the girl would come over and see how special they were to her.

The girl didn’t show up to work one day, then two days, then a week. Hana finally asked one of the other counter workers what happened to her and she said that the girl had moved to San Francisco with her boyfriend.

Hana realized that the girl hadn’t cared about her at all. She probably felt sorry for her. Maybe she thought she was a little slow. All Hana ever did was stare at her and make silly jokes. Hana felt humiliated. When she got home, she threw all of the toys away and cleaned the windowsill with bleach.

Despite the painful loss of her one infatuation, she liked the job. It was one of the best job she’d ever had. It wasn’t easy. She worked five days a week, waking up early every morning. She walked down the hill from her apartment building to the bakery. She loved the silence of walking in the dead of the morning. The city was sleeping and she could hear the wind in the trees. Her walk home from work was never as relaxing. Cars were lined up along the road and everyone looked stressed out.

At the bakery, she was in charge of bread. Manny started at midnight. He made the fancy items, the danishes, brioche and croissants. So many croissants, she could hardly believe it when she first saw the case out front one day. It was packed full of hundreds of greasy croissants that he just piled on top of one another. Flour, butter, chocolate, bacon and eggs, fruit, ham and cheese smashed against the glass of the cabinet.

Hana had liked Manny right away. He had tattoos up his arms depicting his life story. All she had to do was stand behind him at her table and look at his history. The old green ones with women’s names, Cheryl, Claudia, Maria and Rose, with the thorns that he had added a long time after he got the original tattoo done. Rose was the big one. The one that made him decide that being up early and baking fancy pastries was a good use of his time.

After Hana had been there a couple months, Manny offered her some cocaine. She had never done it before, but she was curious.

“Best thing is no one’s ever gonna know, all this flour around,” Manny laughed as he cut the white stuff up on one of the tables that they worked on.

She took a deep breath in through her nose with the little rolled up dollar bill Manny had given her. Her brain burned, but she liked the way it felt. She also like the way it made Manny feel. He started talking.

“I got this stuff from a guy I used to live next door to. That’s when I lived with Rose. This one,” he pointed to his forearm with the little rolled up dollar bill, which he had just snorted through. “Yeah, I go there sometimes and we talk shit, but he always gives me some nice stuff cuz he knows I still hurt.”

“What happened?” Hana asked.

“Oh, sometimes love is shit. It’s like a really nice car going way too fast toward nothing. Then bam,” he clapped his hands hard. “It’s history now,” he said, then he turned back to his table and started folding the croissant dough.

“You never done blow before?” he said with his back to her.

“Uh,” she managed. Her head was buzzing. She felt good. She wanted to jump up and down.

“I didn’t think so. You just keep away from the knives and we’ll be fine.”

From that day Manny shared a lot of drugs and even more personal information with her. Hana liked the way Manny looked at her sideways from time to time and asked if she’d met any hot ladies, even though he knew she hadn’t.

“Ever since pinky out front has been gone, you’ve seemed a little lonely,” he laughed one day. “You need to get laid girl.” Even though he had been burned so many times, as he said “There’s still nothing better than a warm soft lady next to you.”

Manny started giving her rides home from work. Then he started hanging out a couple times a week.

She liked Manny because she thought he was uncomplicated. He didn’t seem to want much from her and that was good because she didn’t have much of anything to give him, except her time. She did have time and what she had, he got.

After a couple weeks of hanging out at her house, they started going grocery shopping together. He would buy the beer and whiskey and she would buy the meat and potatoes.

If she would have stepped back from the situation, maybe she would have seen what was happening. She would have protected herself more, but at the time, it was nice to have someone to go to the grocery store with. Someone to make dinner for. Someone who wanted to spend time with her, no matter the reason.

He talked a lot. He had so many opinions. The government was a bunch of crooks, that wasn’t new, she had heard that from her father growing up. The police were crooked. His mother was a saint, his father a bastard.

The days blended into one another. Manny’s voice mixed with the alcohol and the drugs mixed with the mechanical movements at work. Kneading, snorting, drinking, listening, sleeping.

One morning she woke up with no shirt or bra on. She was lying next to Manny on the floor of her apartment in just her underwear. He was snoring and he had his shirt off. His pants were done up and he had a belt on, buckled closed.

She felt hot. She smelled like him. She smelled her arms and her hands. She smelled dirty. She got up as quietly as she could and hurried to the bathroom, locked the door and got into the shower.

Her head was heavy and she tried to remember, but the only pictures she saw were beer cans and laughing. They had watched The Blues Brothers. Car crashes and good music.

She washed her whole body. She washed three times. Maybe nothing happened, she hoped. Then she remembered the feeling of his course cheek against hers and she smelled him through the soap and steam of the shower, she could smell his face and his mouth. He took her shirt off.

Maybe he won’t remember anything. He’s a drunk, I drink. We’ll remember different things, she assured herself.

It was her day off and she wanted him out. She wanted to be alone. She told him she wasn’t feeling well and he left, sleepy and smelly.

That was the day she met Olivia.

Olivia says she planned their life from the first day she met Hana. It was the day Templeton moved into the apartment above Hana’s in a run down building downtown. Templeton invited Hana to have a drink with them on the roof of the building to celebrate.

Olivia was, and still is, striking, with high cheek bones and dark hair cut in a severe bob. Hana had been up for two days baking and taking meth with Manny and needed sleep more than a party, but she was able to keep her eyes open by looking at Olivia as much as she could get away with.

She was mesmerized by Olivia, no matter what she did. Even when she covered carrot sticks in creamy onion dip and, as the dip fell all over her beautiful fingers, she had licked it off as if it was the most delicious thing she had ever tasted, Hana was not disgusted. She was enamored and enthralled by Olivia’s fluid movements and her long arms with at least two dozen rubber bracelets some covered in dip as well.

Every other sentence contained fuck or shit. Hana loved the way the words came out of Olivia, so often and with the perfect amount of emphasis, expected yet still a little dirty. When she spilled the red wine on her sweater, Olivia’s swearing sounded like a melody. Then she took her sweater off and Hana was quietly overjoyed. Her arms were toned and soft with a hint of a tan. She was wearing an old black t-shirt with the sleeves cut off, but she had sewn red lace onto the frayed edges.

She’s perfect, Hana thought as she studied Olivia and collected images to replay to herself later.

“Olivia’s an artist,” Templeton said.

“Cool,” Hana nodded, pretending not to be impressed even though she was ecstatic.

“I am not,” Olivia said, throwing a carrot stick at Templeton. “I take pictures of people at the mall.”

The two friends looked at each other and laughed dramatically like teenagers showing off. Hana didn’t get what was so funny, but she enjoyed watching Olivia laugh. Her whole body shook and strange grunts came from somewhere in the back of her throat.

Hours later, the three of them had eaten most of the food and finished the box of wine. Hana was lying on her back and watching the clouds turn from white to orange as the sun set. She heard Templeton tell Olivia he had to go and did she want to leave. Hana held her breath as she waited for Olivia’s answer. She heard nothing for a moment, then the sound of feet coming towards her. Templeton’s face appeared above hers and she noticed, for the first time how much his ears stuck out from his balding head.

“I’m going now, I’m completely fucked up to my satisfaction.”

“Oh, thank you both for inviting me,” Hana said as she looked at Olivia.

“I’m not going anywhere,” she said, staring into Hana’s eyes.

Hana smiled widely and immediately felt stupid. Don’t give it all away.

“Be careful Hana, she may try to take your photo,” Templeton said before blowing Olivia a kiss and leaving the roof. Hana let out a little laugh, not sure what he was talking about.

Olivia walked over to the edge of the roof. Hana watched her walk towards the bright orange horizon. Her legs were long and strong and her shoulders glowed hot light. She felt something easy about this woman and she was sure it wasn’t the alcohol.

The undeniable fact was that Olivia had decided to stay with her on the roof and not leave with Templeton. Easy, unbelievable. Happening right now, she thought as she tried to gather enough courage to do something with the opportunity.

She stood up slowly, her head and body were heavy and she realized that she was quite drunk. She looked at her full glass on the ground and decided she had had her last for the night. If anything happened she wanted to remember it. Who knows when I will have another opportunity like this? She walked over to the edge congratulating herself on the steadiness of her steps.

“Templeton’s a cool guy,” Hana said as she approaches Olivia.

“Yeah, the best.”

“How long have you known him?”

“Since high school,” Olivia said.

“But he’s a lot older?”

“Yeah, he was my art teacher. He took me to my first gay bar.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, then helped me through Tina.”

“Tina?”

“My first.”

Hana noted a feeling of hatred.

“Yeah, Patty Smith with bleach blond hair and biceps, you know, guns.”

“Wow.”

“And a girl, well let’s be honest, a girl in every bar in every city where there were waves breaking.”

“This was in high school still?”

“Yeah, I was 16.”

Hana listened to Olivia’s stories of bad nights ending with calls to Templeton at three in the morning and hours of waiting at bus stops or coffee shops. He always rescued her no matter where she was stranded – wasted on bourbon and heartache.

Hana couldn’t connect the trashed teenager to the strong woman who was standing next to her. Part of her hoped she would have the chance to rescue Olivia some day. She wanted to have an affect on her, wanted to be wanted, kind, mean, whatever.

But then doubt crept in and Hana took Olivia’s gave over the tops of nearby buildings as a sign she wasn’t at all interested.

To try and distract herself she watched two homeless people in the parking lot across from the street from her building. Their cardboard shelters were tattered and they were standing next to them as if they were neighbors in the suburbs, chatting over the fence after mowing their lawns. She thought about an alternate reality. She would be an artist. If she was an artist she would create something inspired by the homeless people who stay in her neighborhood.

She could interview them and tell everyone their stories, humanize them so that no one could never just walk past a homeless person again without empathizing. Then she thought of Ronald Regan and how he didn’t care about people. He didn’t care about domestic policy. She kicked the wall.

She was so tired. She thought about telling Olivia about the fight she had been in a few weeks before. She was alone at a punk show. She had punched a skinhead kid for calling her a name she won’t repeat. He couldn’t have been more than 17, but she punched him so hard that his eyes rolled back in his head and then she ran.

The feeling of Olivia’s hand on hers brought her out of the memory. It was not something about herself that she was ready to bring to the moment anyway. She looked down to make sure it was Olivia’s hand and followed it up her beautifully contoured arms to her long neck and finally her gorgeous, smiling face. Olivia moved her hand up Hana’s forearm and caressed it.

“It’s beautiful up here,” Olivia said, looking sleepily into Hana’s eyes. For a moment Hana was heartbroken at the thought that maybe the whole experience, everything that was happening at that moment could be excused by too much wine. She was stiff, waiting for Olivia’s next move. “How long have you lived here?”

“Four years. Four and a half years,” Hana stammered and was embarrassed.

Olivia leaned in to Hana and rested her head on her chest.

“I can hear your heart,” Olivia said.

Hana was frozen, except for her heart, which was beating so fast she was afraid it would betray her by revealing her desperation. She managed to put her arms around Olivia awkwardly, in an attempt to appear relaxed. She took a deep breathe and the scent of Olivia reminded Hana of girls in the locker room in high school – hair spray and lacy bras. She smiled.

Then she remembered Manny’s arms. Thick and sweaty. Had she gone into them or had he put them around her?

Olivia sighed and released herself from the hug. Hana wanted to ask her what she was thinking. What did that hug mean? Was she sad? Did she like her? She hoped it meant she liked her.

“We should clean up” Hana said instead.

Olivia looked over at the chairs and wine glasses and nodded. “Can I hang out at your place till Templeton comes home?”

They had lounged in Hana’s apartment and talked until late. She told Olivia about her mom how Hana had moved to LA to find her roots, which made her laugh, because they only thing she had discovered was that she loved Japanese food.

Hana knew she was sinking into deep infatuation. She was talking about herself without feeling stupid and without having to pay the person who was listening.

Olivia was clean, intelligent, funny and big, metaphorically. Hana was the bigger woman in size, something she never forgets to note, but it was Olivia’s confidence and her voice, everything about her made her expand and fill space no matter where she was.

When Templeton got home, the two women parted with a quick hug. Hana tried to say something meaningful and funny, but when she opened her mouth nothing came out, so she just gave a little awkward wave with her fingers as she shut the door.

She was wired, but felt like bed was the best place for her. So she lay down and tried to relax. But leftover drugs and a strong current of lust were running through her body. Also the desire to see Olivia again as soon as possible had her scheming reasons to visit Templeton’s apartment. Maybe she could wait in front of the building in the morning and act surprised when Olivia appeared.

She closed her eyes and tried to relax, replaying images of Olivia in that beautiful orange light. Her elegant neck as she laughed. Templeton’s comment about the photograph. Maybe that was code.

The last thing Hana thought about before she fell asleep was Olivia’s stories of the surfer girl. Maybe Olivia had been showing off. It was almost like a challenge to Hana. See if you can top this. Or maybe Olivia was just being honest. Maybe she had decided she liked Hana and she was telling her the dirtiest stories first to test her, to see if she would stick around to find out the real stuff, which Hana thought she would.

Hana awoke to knocking. She wanted to ignore it, but the persistence was alarming as was the volume to her sore head. It was eight in the morning and she had not had enough sleep. She flopped back down, then a woman’s voice seeped through the wall, calling her name. It was Olivia.

Hana shuffled herself out of bed as fast as she could. She put on a sweatshirt and looked at her face in the mirror. She had sleep creases down the left side of her face and bloodshot eyes. Fuck it, she thought as she reached to open the door.

“I need a favor,” Olivia said. Her face was tense and her eyes were opened very wide. She looked like she had had four cups of coffee already.

She rushed past Hana, sat on the couch and emptied her bag out onto the coffee table. Hana looked at the pile of stuff then watched as Olivia pulled a small jar out of her shirt.

“OK, this is sperm and I would like you to help me,” she said very fast as she cupped the little container.

“What do you mean?”

“Put it in me,” she was moving the container back and forth toward her crotch.

“Put it in you?”

“Yeah,” she looked around the room. “After I, um, have an orgasm.”

“Are you kidding?” Hana laughed in disbelief.

“Templeton and I want to have a baby. No, I mean I want to have a baby and Templeton is helping.”

“Then why are you asking me?”

“It was an idea,” Olivia shrugged her shoulders.

“But, it’s his. Why don’t you get him to do it?”

“No way! No.”

“Ok, can we stop?” Hana stood up. “Do you want a coffee or something?”

“No, this stuff has a time limit. I already spent about five minutes outside your door working up the courage to knock and then another minute knocking and now it’s been over a minute since I’ve been in here. What is that, like ten minutes? I have to do it as soon as I can,” Olivia stood up quickly, still holding the jar in one hand.

“Never mind, this is too fucking weird. I’m sorry,” she said as she tried to put latex gloves, a plastic syringe, keys, change and random papers from the pile back into her bag with her free hand.

“No, wait, just give me a second to think,” Hana’s instinct was to tell Olivia to get out because she was ruining an infatuation that had been perfect to that point. But she was attracted to her and wanted to spend time with her and doing this would be some good leverage toward making that happen.

She watched Olivia wait for her answer, biting her bottom lip. Hana liked seeing her vulnerable and this made her want to help her, to make her happy. Even if fulfilling her request was against her better judgment.

“OK, I’ll do it.”

Hana hastily made the bed while Olivia sucked the gluey stuff out of the container with the syringe and handed it to Hana. The smell made her want to gag. She had never seen or been close to the stuff before and she held it as far away from her face as possible.

Olivia walked to the side of the bed and took her jeans and underwear off naturally, as if she’d been undressing in front of Hana for years. She rolled the clothes up. “I have to have my ass elevated,” she said as she placed the roll on the bed then she got onto the bed and positioned herself on top of the roll.

Hana breathed in quickly at the sight of Olivia’s most intimate places. She felt a familiar tingling and laughed quietly. Just ten minutes before, she was sound asleep where Olivia was laying, half naked.

“What?” Olivia looked embarrassed for the first time.

“I’m sorry,” Hana took a deep breath. “Let’s go.” Hana followed Olivia’s instructions carefully, inserting the syringe as Olivia touched herself.

Hana had to look away from Olivia’s body. She was confused by this surreal situation. They weren’t having sex, but something sexual was happening. She was simulating intercourse with this woman. She was penetrating her and she was getting excited, but it wasn’t a sexual excitement. It was clinical, almost like she was either going to pass or fail this thing.

“Ok, I’m almost there,” Olivia said, a little breathless.

Hana looked at Olivia’s face as she got closer. Her eyes were closed and she moved her lips as if she were speaking silently. Then Hana felt the syringe move with the contractions of Olivia’s orgasm.

“OK, now. Not too fast,” she said lifting her head to watch, analyzing Hana’s technique. Hana noticed her hand shaking a little as she pushed the syringe down and released the stuff as slowly as she could. When the plastic couldn’t go in any further, she let go and stood up, trying to relax as she watched Olivia take out the empty syringe, twist her body around, lift her legs and placed her feet flat on the wall.

“This is supposed to help those little fuckers get to my egg faster. Are you going somewhere?”

“To wash my hands,” Hana said.

“Sexy.” Olivia laughed softly.

“Can I get you anything?”

“A cigarette,” Olivia laughed her animal laugh again and Hana laughed as well.

Two days after the insemination Hana was back at work with Manny. She wanted badly for him to ask her if she had met anyone, but he was quiet, except for whistling along to songs on the radio and swearing when he spilled some jam. Hana had tried to help him clean it up, but he motioned her away.

She waited another fifteen minutes for him to forget about the jam before she raised the subject herself.

“You want to hear something crazy?”

He turned his head quickly towards her, so she could see his left eye and his nose. He raised his eyebrows and she took it as a signal to start her story.

When she got to the part with the syringe, Manny turned his whole body toward her and folded his arms.

“So I did it.”

“You fell for that?” Manny let out a little hiss and shook his head.

“What?”

“That chick wants something from you?” Manny raised his arms and shoved toward the sky with both hands.

“Like what?”

“Shit, who knows,” he said looking away from her. He took a deep breath.

Hana thought about Manny’s daughters and how he said he wanted to see them, but their mother wouldn’t let him. She wondered what exactly happened. He had told her it was messed up, but he hadn’t said what exactly it was.

She couldn’t imagine being protected from a parent who wanted to see her. For her, it was the opposite, it was like her mother was being protected from her.

“You’re an idiot, you know. This chick, you think she likes you? She’s just using you.”

“Shut up,” Hana rolls dough over on the table a little harder. She is hurt. Why would he say that? Maybe he does remember what happened between them, whatever it was.

“But, shit, if you like her, go for it,” Manny smiled then and Hana felt like he might be happy for her.

“I don’t know – what if there’s a baby, too?”

Olivia, Olivia, Olivia. Baby, baby, baby. It was all Hana had thought about since that morning. Baby. Diapers. Throw up. Shit.

She knew nothing about kids. How was she going to date a woman with a baby?

Who was she kidding? Manny was right. She couldn’t even feed herself properly anymore. She couldn’t really cook. She didn’t understand what a child needed.

“A baby, man, that’s just one more thing to love,” he said and turned around back to his dainty pastries and Hana watched his marked arms move in graceful patterns back and forth and wished it was easy with him all of the time.

“Do you think I should call her?”

“I’m not the right person to ask,” he said as he waved flour onto the wide wooden bench.

Hana opened her mouth to disagree. To make him feel better. As if she could make him feel anything. She doesn’t want him to think she is childish, like a schoolgirl gossiping with her friends. He liked silence at work. Hana liked his silence. It’s why they both liked their job. They kept their hands moving through the dough, tired but strong together in the early morning hours.

She hoped, maybe one day if he trusted her he would tell her more about Rose. Hana tried to picture her. She had a little to go on from the weathered tattoo on his right forearm. Big dark hair, sad eyes. All Hana really knew was that she was dead. Something the manager slipped into conversation when she had been there a couple of weeks.

“Has Manny told you about his dead wife yet? That’s a doozy?”

Hana knew immediately where she stood with that guy, quietly at her bread station, not telling him anything about her personal life. If he was so loose with painful details of the lives of her coworkers how would he handle the information that she may have just gotten a complete stranger pregnant?

No, she liked their morning routine. Silence, the radio playing oldies, like the ones her father listened to in the garage when she was growing up. She enjoyed those times too. It was the only time they spent together, and they would sing the old songs and she watched him mend copper pipes or fill up the tires of her bike. They both knew she could do it herself, but her dad seemed to like helping her out and she never liked to get in the way of him and something he liked doing.

“But you let me know what happens with this crazy chick, she may be the one,” with this he let out a laugh that sounded like sandpaper on metal. “Man I have heard some crazy shit before…”

Hana let herself laugh, glad that she didn’t feel hurt when he made fun of her and excited as she remembered Olivia’s feet flat against the wall of her bedroom.

She watched as the sunlight danced in clouds of flour between her and Manny. Her back was straight and she was smiling. She imagined herself on the edge of a cliff looking out over a huge ocean. It was comforting because she knew she was safe. If she jumped, the water was not far below and it was warm. She knew she was supposed to jump and swim and feel the pleasure of the water soak deep into her body and hold her in its warmth. Turning around and going back the way she came was not an option.

Days later, Hana was outside her front door digging for her keys in her backpack when Templeton whistled from his front door, one story above her head. He was in a silver satin robe and plaid pajama bottoms.

“Can I bring some coffee down?”

“Sure, can you give me a minute?” Hana said as she put the key into the bolt of her front door. She looked around the apartment. She was nervous, something she had not had the chance to be with Olivia days before. Her well worn A Woman’s Body book was still on the coffee table. She brought it out after Olivia had left, awkwardly after lying in Hana’s bed for a couple of hours. They had talked, mostly about all of the research Olivia had done into getting pregnant. Fertility signs to watch for, which sperms make a boy and which ones make a girl. She asked Hana if she had ever thought about having a baby. Hana hadn’t. She was lying on her bed, looking at her ceiling, which she did most days. She had never thought about having a baby.

“Well, you’re still young,” Olivia had said.

Olivia left Hana with what she had probably intended to be a kiss on the cheek, but turned out to be more of a soft graze. Her hair tickling Hana’s lips and making her heart beat quickly. Hana closed the door behind Olivia and did that thing she’s seen in romantic comedy films, where the infatuated character shuts the door and turns around with both hands still touching the wood, slides down the door, sits on the floor, looks up to the sky and sighs. It was a genuine feeling. She was glad to have gotten rid of Olivia so she could have the moment. It felt good. She was tempted to go to the bathroom and practice asking Olivia out in the mirror, but laughed out loud at the thought.

She put the book away in her bedroom, picked up some bits and pieces off the floor and put out the little she had in the way of snacks, on the coffee table.

Templeton knocked on her door minutes later. He had changed out of the pajama bottoms and into cut off jeans, but the robe remained. Hana liked it and thought he probably had more glamour than she ever would.

“Hey, I like your place. Mine is so rectangular, yours is flat and square, like a house. Mine feels like and elevator shaft.”

“Really, I didn’t realize they were so different.”

“Oh yeah, you’re lucky, you have doors and rooms. I have a studio. What do you pay? Never mind, don’t answer that. I’m rude sometimes.”

Hana took the french press Templeton was holding and put it on the coffee table where she had laid out some french bread and cheese as well as individual creamers.

“Oh my god, chez manifique,” Templeton said as he sat down on the couch and picked up one of the creamers and lipped the words I love these.

“Me too,” she smiled.

“Where do you buy them?” he said as he tore the top off of one and sniffed it as if it were a glass of wine.

“I don’t. I work at the French Bakery. They give us the cheese when it’s old, and the rest, well, I bake the french sticks. I have a big bag and I work in back, so, you know,” Hana folded her arms. She wasn’t sure why she was telling this guy that she stole from work. Was it to impress him? After all he was the best friend of the woman she’d squirted his semen into the day before and in a weird detached way, that meant they had been intimate.

“It’s my perk,” she justified.

“And mine,” Templeton said as he motioned toward the bread, a request for permission to start.

“Oh yeah, help yourself. The cheese is ok, it’s just the manager doesn’t sell it if it’s past the use by date.”

“Happens to the best of us, sweetheart,” he cooed to the cheese.

Hana laughed and sat on the floor next to the table and poured the coffee.

“Don’t expect that to be anything like the France bakery, I buy the plain wrap grounds and just dress it up in that fancy thing.”

“I’m sure it will be nice,” Hana said, handing him a mug.

“Who was that guy here earlier?”

Hana doesn’t answer right away. Had Templeton been watching her apartment all day? What was she going to say anyway? That’s Manny, we hang out a lot and I take drugs with him because I’m a loser.

“I like the tattoos,” he raised his eyebrows and took another sip of coffee.

“He works at the bakery.”

“You guys friends?”

“Yeah,” Hana said, then took a bite of bread. Maybe he knew stuff about her. Things that he would tell Olivia. Things that might make Olivia think she was not stable. The truth was that she was not very stable. Sometimes she looked for fights with strangers and took drugs with a guy who had a dead wife.

She chewed her bread and kept her mouth shut. Maybe he sensed that it was a no-go conversation area because he launched into the topic that bound them together and he seemed nervous all of a sudden.

“Thanks for helping Olivia. To be totally honest, she was really worried she’d have to do this all by herself. Wouldn’t be easy. Kind of sad to have to do that all alone, don’t you think?”

Hana nodded as he fidgeted and little bits of bread flew around him.

“She’s young but she’s a good person. Full of life. You can tell that can’t you? I think she and I were brother and sister, in a past life, or sisters. It’s so funny, I’ve always gotten along so well with younger people. I mean I never thought I’d meet such a good friend, maybe the mother of my child, teaching high school, but she’s got this thing. You can feel it, I’m sure. She draws you to her. She knows what she wants and she usually gets it,” he paused as he placed another wedge of cheese onto a piece of bread and took a bite. “I am a pig.”

Hana smiled and held her breath willing him to get to the point.

“Sometimes she is childish but I don’t think she is a hundred percent aware of her behavior. She’s young. Whatever. Maybe I’m wrong. I don’t know. What I mean is sometimes she gets this tunnel vision and everyone and everything can just get the hell out of the way. I’m not criticizing, you understand, she’s my favorite person in the world, my best friend. But sometimes I need to take a break from her. She knows this. I’ve told her. Better you hear this from me.”

“Why?” was all Hana could say.

“Why? Well, she likes you dummy. You might be what she wants now, along with this baby of course.”

“You think she likes me?” Hana looked at Templeton and then down at her coffee. Her head was spinning.

“Oh my God, I know she does.”

Hana had always liked gay men, at least the ones she had spent time with. There was something reassuring about their ability to see sex and relationships as a normal part of life. Even in those high-risk years, sex was everywhere she looked, but nowhere she stood.

For her, sex and relationships were all consuming and as precious as breath. Templeton’s light and airy tone when he said Olivia liked her showed how little he knew her world of involuntary celibacy and about how much she liked Olivia.

If she had been given the chance to script this scene in her life, Hana would have had Templeton sit her down and tell her this news with as much seriousness and pain as he would if he were telling her that Olivia had died a slow and torturous death in a dark and lonely room. This is how she imagined falling in love would be for her. Heavy, hard and quick. In love, lose love. Stay in pain.

This reality that was happening felt nice. It was not intrusive, ugly or painful. It gave her faith as well that she hadn’t been as transparent as she thought the past couple of days and, maybe she hadn’t been acting like a total idiot in Olivia’s presence.

“Do you have any sugar?”

Hana nodded and went to the kitchen. She tried to imagine what kind of baby Templeton and Olivia would create together. He had a small pointy head and, even though he seemed young, mid-thirties at the most, he was losing his hair. His ears were big, but nothing else was very striking. He wasn’t particularly handsome. More Keith Haring than Rock Hudson, but not ugly at all.

He seemed to be partial to tank tops, which weren’t the most attractive choice of clothing for a man with skinny arms and a mass of hair on his back and his chest. It was summer and Olivia didn’t seem to care how he dressed or what he looked like. She loved him. Hana was happy to spend time alone with him, getting to know him, and getting some more background on Olivia, as it turned out.

“Has she had many other girlfriends?” Hana asked quickly as she put the sugar on the table.

“Girlfriends? No. Flings? Oh yeah. And you could see why. She’s gorgeous, flirty, funny, smart. When we go out she is always very popular, especially with the older butches. They think she’s pretty feisty – which she is.”

“Oh.”

“Don’t worry, she’s totally available and I think, no I know, you are someone she could get serious with if you are interested.” He said the last word in a sing song voice and elongated it in such a way that made Hana nervous and excited at the same time.

“She doesn’t know me.” Hana said.

“Sometimes you just know these things Hana. Plus, a lot of relationships start with one night stands.”

“We haven’t had sex,” Hana was surprised at her prude voice.

“I know” he said.

“Well, why did you say that about one night stands?”

“Because it’s true.”

Hana smiled and shook her head. She understood why Olivia and Templeton were such good friends. Strange jokes and riddles were part of how they communicated. This worried her slightly but then she thought about all the other stuff he had said. All the stuff about Olivia being interested in having a serious relationship with her.

Templeton brought his face close to Hana’s. She could smell coffee and banana. She felt a little uncomfortable. Was he going to kiss her? He put both hands on her shoulders.

“I know you two will be good together and when there are three of you, nothing will get in the way of your happiness.”

“Are you stoned?”

“I’m serious. I’m not the dad type. You seem to be, so that’s why I think you should show her, you know, you’re interested.”

“Ok, Ok. Thank you, I will think about it.”

Templeton pulled her into a satiny, BO hug.

“I can see the future, Hana. It’s all rosy.”

If Hana’s head hadn’t been wedged in between Templeton’s head and bony shoulder, she would have shook it in disbelief. It was 1987 and everyone thought they could see the future.

After Templeton left, Hana took a long shower and then climbed into bed. She hadn’t slept a full night’s sleep for several days and she had to be up early for work. She was trying hard to relax, wrapping herself in her blankets, bringing her knees to her chest and breathing deeply, but her body would not let go. Templeton’s words, his assurance that she and Olivia should be together, made her uncomfortable. Is that how these things happen? Doesn’t it take away some of the magic to go into something as special as a love affair, with the help of a third party?

After three weeks, Hana couldn’t take it anymore and as she stood outside of Templeton’s apartment door staring at its old dark wood, all she could think was that she was going to make a big mistake. Either way, this was a mistake.

She imagined a lawyer standing behind her.

Is it not true that you have planned this, to knock when you hear Olivia’s voice? Hear it through the door, on which you have placed your ear, almost every time you have walked past since meeting her?

“I just found myself here, thinking, wow, wouldn’t it be nice to see those two again. What a surprise.”

Hana looked around making sure there was no one to hear her internal cross examination. Through the door she heard Olivia’s voice, zig zagging at a rapid pace. Then the laugh, snorting and climbing higher. She knocked hoping they wouldn’t hear over their jubilation.

No luck. Templeton answered the door in that way Hana has always imagined people with rich social lives do. His left hand was holding the doorknob, but his body and face were still focused on Olivia. He was so engrossed in their witty banter that he hadn’t had the time or inclination to turn his head to face whoever it was at the door. Hana – who checked her mailbox at least two times a day, even after the mail had been delivered, just in case a secret admirer left something for her – could only imagine a life where the person on the couch is more interesting than the surprise at the door.

“Hana,” the friends screamed at the same time. Hana was immediately self conscious with the two of them staring at her and fixed her eyes on the ground in front of her toes and said hi to her chest. Then she was enveloped in a hug by Templeton and then pounced on by Olivia. She could smell the stale scent of smoked weed.

The two pulled away from Hana and stared at her. They were really stoned. With grins so wide that the insides of their cheeks were showing.

“You guys are having a good time.”

“Come in come in,” Templeton sung. “Make yourself at home.”

Hana looked around the room. There were pieces of brown wrapping paper hanging from every vertical space in the studio, with sketches of flowers and naked men holding a variety of gardening tools. There was a kitchen counter covered with dirty dishes stacked neatly and a hot plate. Hana saw the bottom of a garbage can poking out from under a floral tablecloth. On top there was a massive fruit bowl filled with red apples, oranges, grapes and a pine cone. The windows were high and dirty and supplied the only light in the room. The view was mostly of the brick building next door. There was a creaking noise and Hana turned and watched Templeton climb up a wooden ladder to a loft enclosed with red velvet curtains.

“I’m going to have a little nap. OK,” he said in a low, mischievous voice.

“Nighty night,” Olivia whispered back.

“I’m so glad you’re here,” Olivia said as she guided Hana to the couch. “I’ve been meaning to get in touch, but you know, busy busy busy busy busy...”

“Have you found out, I mean are you…?”

“Pregnant? Nope, got my period the next day, actually. So my timing was really off,” she said.

“Oh, sorry.”

“I am really glad you’re here, because we’re trying again.” Olivia gritted her teeth and opened her mouth in a mock smile and shook her head from side to side like jack in the box on a spring.

“What are you doing?” Hana asked after a few awkward seconds of watching Olivia’s veins grow. “Olivia, do you want me to help you again?”

“Yes.” Olivia pushed through her teeth. “It’s weird, fucking weird, but I don’t trust anyone else.”

“Why do you trust me?”

Olivia stopped the shaking. “I don’t know. You seem trust worthy, worthy of my trust anyway. Don’t care much about what everyone else says about you.”

Hana’s stomach dropped. “What?”

“You know, everyone I’ve talked to about you…” Olivia couldn’t keep a straight face and started laughing.

“You are really stoned.”

“You’re gullible. You looked so scared. Do you have skeletons in your freezer?”

“I don’t have a freezer.”

Olivia softened. “Oh, shit. Maybe humor at the expense of you isn’t so funny.”

Olivia she put her hand on top of Hana’s hand.

Hana liked the feeling. Olivia’s hand was warm and soft. She had been dreaming of another moment like this for weeks, albeit without the guy up in the loft and the glassy eyes. The sound of her heart beating was getting louder. She turned her head to find something safe to look at, the window, the Adonis with the pitchfork.

“Hana, I like you.”

Hana smiled and laughed softly. Olivia squeezed hard.

“Ow,” Hana pulled her hand away.

“You like me, too.”

Hana hissed, imitating Manny’s response. “I don’t know why,” she said smiling. Olivia wrapped her arms around Hana’s shoulders tightly. Olivia’s hair tickled at Hana’s nose, she jerked her head from side to side trying to push the hair away from her face. Her arms were pinned to her side.

“You’re holding me too tight.”

“We like each other, fuck, can’t you just accept that this is nice?”

“If I was comfortable, maybe.”

Olivia let go, sat back away from Hana and put her arms out to her sides. “OK, you show me how you want to hug.”

Hana heard Templeton moving around in the loft and looked up, but despite her fear, Templeton was not watching, unless he had some secret hole he was looking through. Hana wouldn’t put it past these two. Luring her in here, embarrassing her with jokes and emotional humiliation.

Hana took a deep breath and scooted herself closer to Olivia. She looked at the curve of Olivia’s waist. She wanted to wrap her arms around her waist and rest her head on Olivia’s chest, but she decided that was not a good first hug. She would try that one later. She stared at Olivia’s arms and her chest. She didn’t know where she should put her arms. Should she go high and hug her shoulders, or low and wrap herself around Olivia’s chest? She had never thought about a hug in so much detail before. They just happen. Like at the front door. Suddenly Templeton had put his arms around her and she wanted to reciprocate, but got as far as tapping him on the back lightly before Olivia joined in.

That was not the kind of hug she was interested in giving Olivia then. She wanted to give Olivia the most amazing hug. A hug so meaningful that Olivia would never need to be hugged by anyone else. A hug that they will talk about for years to come. A hug so magnificent that when Olivia tells anyone about it, they look at her with awe and envy. A hug that people will talk about at parties. A hug that will make Hana a sought after partner. Women would line up at the front of her apartment building for the chance of a hug. Her hugs would be addictive.

Hana wanted Olivia to tingle from her hug. She wanted to warm Olivia on the inside out and make her crave hugs when they were apart.

“Hug me dammit, my arms hurt,” Olivia said with a big smile and a wink.

Hana stopped thinking about the hug, about Templeton in the loft and the hygiene issues raised by the proximity of the bowl of fruit to the garbage can. She placed her hands on the sides of Olivia’s waist. It was a nice fit. Slowly and smoothly she moved them to the small of Olivia’s back as she leaned in and made contact with the warmth of her body. Now chest to chest, her hands made their way up Olivia’s ribs on either side of her spine and stopped at her shoulder blades. Then she squeezed, lightly and took a deep breath with her head resting lightly on Olivia’s shoulder. They both relaxed and hugged and breathed.

“Ok, I’ll help you,” Hana said quietly.

“Yay,” Olivia whispered.

“Would you like to maybe have dinner first?”

“Like a date?” Olivia pulled away and smiled at Hana, still holding her arms.

“Just like a date – except with sperm.”

Months later, Olivia and Hana were officially together, officially pregnant and sitting at their kitchen table, in their very own home. The fog was thick outside and they were drinking strong black tea.

“I think you should be called okesan,” Olivia said, out of the blue.

“What’s that?” Hana had said, not sure she had understood.

“Oak asan. Okasan, it means mother in Japanese. I’m not sure I’m saying it right,” Olivia was smiling.

“Oh,” Hana said and took another sip of tea. Hana knew the word, but hadn’t heard it in a long time. She used to say it over and over again to herself. She was in high school and at night she would listen to Japanese language tapes in bed. Okaasan. Okaaaasan. The middle part of the word is like the sound her doctor told her to make when he was holding her tongue down with one of those extra large popsicle sticks. Hana hadn’t thought of the child calling her okaasan. She would have been happy with Hana.

“Or not, I mean it was just an idea,” Olivia said.

“Where did you find that word?”

“I went to the library and looked it up.”

“You did?” Hana smiled.

“Yes, I’m very resourceful,”

Hana was touched that Olivia went to the library just to find the word. She also felt the sad thoughts surfacing. The irritating ones that come up whenever something remotely Japanese confronts her. So she held her hand out and wove her fingers in with Olivia’s and looked into her eyes.

“That’s very cool that you looked that word up,” Hana said and she meant it. No one in her life has ever paid much attention to the fact that she was Japanese. She had tried to learn the language, but it hadn’t been easy on her own. She had done a lot of reading about the internment and Japanese history in the US, but it made her angry. She wanted people to tell her these things. She wanted her family to teach her about herself.

“I’ll think about it,” Hana said and kissed Olivia softly. Then put her hand on Olivia’s growing belly.

Hana has tried hard not to resent Olivia for having a mostly normal childhood, and for not understanding the pain that Hana carries reluctantly, each day.

Carol made sure Olivia was taken care of. She was a mother and stepped into the role of father when Olivia’s decided he liked making children so much that he went off and did it again with a couple of other women. Olivia never had the urge to run away from her mother. They were a team and Olivia has fond memories of her younger years. Unlike Hana, she has parents and siblings. She has no dark days to linger in.

Hana dark days started early, from about 13. She had already stopped believing in anything magical. Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and true love were all myths. She was certain that she was destined to live a celibate life. She contemplated becoming a nun, not because of her love of Christ, but because of her infatuation with women. She had heard a lot of lesbians were or a lot of nuns had become lesbians. She was hoping to find one who sat somewhere on that continuum so they could live happily ever after in the dark corners of some convent.

Growing up she lived with her father in a small, cold, two-bedroom house. He owned his own plumbing business and was a workaholic and a control freak who insisted on hanging over the shoulder of every employee he had. He experienced an incredibly high turnover rate. He was good and thorough, he was in high demand so work kept him away from home most days and evenings.

For her 12th birthday he gave her a book about the female body. On the inside of the cover he had written: This is a good manual for your body. I can’t answer all of your questions. Try here first, and if you can’t find it, maybe ask your aunt Trish. If she doesn’t know, try Dr. Stine. Pop

Hana later understood why work kept him away from her so much. She has decided his neglect was a result of Joy taking off and leaving their child with him. Hana is convinced her father would have preferred it if Joy had stayed with him in the happily ever and that she had never been born.

Everything Hana knew about her mom could be said in one breath. Her name was Joy Yamagata, she lived somewhere in Southern California, she had been interned with her family during WWII.

Since she moved to the house with Olivia and Evee, flashes of her childhood had become more consistent and clear. She thought it might be the house’s layout as well as the routines she had reestablished in her life.

When she was on her own at her father’s home, she was strict with herself. She heard on TV once that children need structure, need dinner at the same time everyday, need to go to bed before nine each night, play time, homework time and bath time. She made dinner, which was mostly macaroni and cheese and watched only an hour of TV each night, she did her homework and she played, sometimes with the cat and sometimes with a neighbor.

One night she found her father home, unexpectedly and crying on the phone saying Hana’s mother’s name over and over while the dinner he had had been making became charcoal in the oven. He was in his chair with his head in his hand. He was sniffing and tears were falling from his eyes. Hana felt sorry for him. She remembers tears coming to her eyes and sadness in her stomach that made her feel sick.

Hana thought Joy had died, but the conversation went on and she remembered that this had happened before. On that day she realized her mother could be reached by phone. She hadn’t thought of that possibility before. Sometimes she thinks she was a very naïve child. Other times she is easier on herself, at least she tries to be. Olivia says she has done well despite the being burdened with so much responsibility and emotionally neglected. Although, Hana knows Olivia is trying to be supportive, it just makes her feel like she was a stray animal. A stray, naïve animal.

Over the years, each time she has thought of calling her mom, it was like a new idea. Something she had not tried yet, a new possibility. And every time she called her Joy, she hoped it would be different. But as she dialed the numbers, her stomach would tense up as if waiting to be punched.

“Hello,” Joy would say and Hana would be surprised at the rough sound of her voice, not mean, just coarse, like sidewalk.

“Hello, it’s Hana.”

Then Joy would sigh, just the exhale, as if she had been holding her breath until that point.

Hana rubbed her free hand on the carpet quickly until it burned a little. There was so much she needed to say at this point, but a very strong dam was blocking the words from coming out of her.

“How are you?” Hana said.

“I’m fine. Listen, this is a bad time,” Joy said.

“Oh, sorry,” Hana paused and squeezed her eyes shut. “Can I come visit you sometime? I don’t have to stay with you, I mean, I have some money and Dad said he would lend me some. I think I have a friend who moved down there, I could stay with her. I thought maybe around Halloween. Do you like Halloween? Kind of stupid, I know. What do you think?”

“Yes. Well, if you come down to visit your friend, maybe give me a call, otherwise I am busy most of the time. I have to go.”

As Hana got older, Halloween was replaced by a report on how she was doing in school, or when she was angry once, she called Joy to tell her that she was a dyke and wanted to know how that made her feel. Joy responded the same way each time, with an affirmation and then a closer, someone was at the door, or the kettle was boiling or it was late, which sometimes it was. There was one year, the year Hana moved out of her dad’s house, that she called Joy more than six times.

Often, when she gets the urge to call, Hana has to go to a lot of trouble to find Joy’s phone number. Either she ritualistically burns the piece of paper after calls or her mother has changed her number.

After she moved in with Olivia, she felt so safe, that she called her mom one last time. She got the answering machine.

Hana told her mother’s answering machine that she was happy for the first time in her life. She said all of the things she’d wanted to say in a real conversation with her mother. How she didn’t think it was fair that she had to grow up without knowing anything about who and where she came from. How she wanted to know her family. That it had been humiliating looking Japanese without being Japanese.

She told her that she couldn’t understand why her mother didn’t want to know here, that she thought they could have a nice time together. She assured her mother’s answering machine that she wasn’t going to be angry anymore and in that moment she believed what she was saying.

She was so secure in her new life, that she even left her phone number. After a month or so when she hadn’t heard anything from Joy, she felt angry again. And she started having bad thoughts again. Luckily, she allowed herself to get distracted by tasks and sometimes she could feel that the thoughts had less strength. Because she was part of a growing family, something big, thinking about all of the bad stuff made it softer in a way. It could dissolve into her body instead of hovering outside, threatening to interfere and ruin her life.

Now something stronger and much more threatening than thought has interfered in their lives. There are police around and neighbors have started to linger outside of the yellow tape that has been put up in front of the house.

“Olivia is on her way home. I spoke to her boss. He was very kind, very kind.” Carol had said as she paced in the living room earlier. Hana was on the couch with a cold cloth on her forehead.

“I can’t just sit around,” Carol was angry again. She had oscillated from a teary heap to the height of anger all afternoon.

She screamed “Bullshit, bullshit” when the police told them there was nothing either of them could do except wait. “Nothing? How can we do nothing? This is our family, this is our baby.”

Then she left. She grabbed her purse and ran out the front door. Hana wanted to stop her, but then shut her mouth. She knew better than to try and talk Carol out of anything she wants to do and the same goes for Olivia. Once they decide something is going to go a certain way, nobody can change either of their minds. That’s how they got this house, Carol gave it to them.

Olivia and Hana had been together less than three months and Olivia was newly pregnant. Neither had ever owned anything worth more than a thousand dollars, and instantly, with two signatures, they were the owners of a two and a half bedroom suburban home with a backyard and a garage.

Hana cried when Carol handed her the key to the front door. Even though Hana had visited the house, which Carol and Olivia had lived in for years, she felt then that is was hers, theirs. A home.

Hana doesn’t want to be left alone right now. The house is so empty and has been for days. It’s like the house had been preparing for this to happen. First Evee went to the babysitters they Olivia went on her work trip. The house felt dried out. But what about Hana? How come she hadn’t left as well? She had just been left.

She feels selfish, feeling sorry for herself now and it would have been selfish if she had asked Carol not to go out searching. In fact, she should be out there as well. She should be looking, doing everything she can to find Evee, but she can’t. She tried earlier, but the size of out there is so big, it’s overwhelming her. The house is safe. It is her safe place, no matter how empty it is right now.

Two hours have passed since she heard Evee’s boots on the driveway.

She is close. She is safe. Hana has been repeating these words over and over silently, afraid that if she says them out loud, like a birthday wish, they will not be true.

She stares at a photo on the wall. She just picked it up from the mall a few days ago. It is encased in a cheap wooden frame that Olivia wanted. Hana had argued that it was a special picture and deserved a nicer frame, but finally let Olivia have her way.

The guy taking the photos must have been family, or maybe he had a gay sibling or best friend. Usually they get quizzical looks, the three of them. Hana, who is asked at least once a month, “Where are you from?” is used to ignorance.

They make a lot of assumptions. People think they are cousins or best friends, but never sisters, because how could an Asian woman and a white woman be sisters? And Evee, well she could belong to either of the two women or neither.

This guy knew right away that the three of them were a family and helped them celebrate by taking wonderful photos. They were so elated after the experience that Olivia got him a bag of warm cookies from the cookie shop in the food court and bought the frame hoping he’d get extra commission.

In the photo Evee is wearing her red cowgirl hat, the one she bought to match her boots. Her big smile dominates the picture. That is good, Hana thinks. She wants her daughter to stand out, especially in their family. She always knew the little girl would have a big presence. When she was a baby, Evee was quite content sitting up on the couch watching her parents move around the house. She would follow them with her eyes and often throw up her arms and speak loudly, gurgling something that Hana interpreted as I’m here mamas, let’s take care of each other.

Wherever Evee is at the moment, Hana has to believe she is all right.

She is close. She is safe.

When Olivia, Evee, Carol and Hana are here together there is always someone laughing and someone smiling. They are a good family. Hana is frozen with fear of losing Evee, and then everybody else.

Hana remembers the vodka from the freezer. Just one shot. It is cold and sharp and it works just enough to get her to the porch. Then she remembers the baby and runs back to the kitchen and quickly drinks glass after glass of water. How could she be so stupid?

She was stupid with Manny. Stupid to have gone with him that day. Nothing happens in isolation. She hurt him and now, he has hurt her.

Hana puts her hands over her eyes and presses to stop the tears. She has a baby growing inside of her. Will he take that away from her as well? Maybe not by force, but through this experience.

Hana’s best memories are in this house. She became an adult here. Before here, her life was meaningless. She had no one counting on her. She took no risks. When she met Olivia it was like a door opening into a new world that was all ready for her to move into. It was all risk, all of the time and an opportunity much healthier than what she had with Manny. He knew it. Knew it was a great thing that Olivia was offering Hana. Even though he said it was bullshit, and that she was moving to the “fuckin whitewashed suburbs to join the fucking PTA.”

Of course this was happening. In a way she has been expecting this perfect life to end one day and this, obviously, is the day. She has nowhere to go if she cannot live in this house, in this family.

Her eyes ache.

She can’t shake all of these bad feeling. She has lied to herself by selecting a suite of easy and nice memories to play over in her mind. Her life is not as easy as making lunches and watching Olivia get ready for work. Her life has been hard. Her years in this house have been nice and sweet.

Memories from before are tinged with dark shadows. Shadows that slow her down. When she lets them play, these memories get stuck on repeat and she feels unable to move under their weight.

Maybe she has never deserved nice and sweet. Safe. Happy.

This house and the people who move through it, sleep in it and love here are perfect. She is not.

******

FIVE

At one in the morning, Olivia jumps out of a police car and runs up to the front door.

Hana is standing at the front window and can see Olivia’s fear clearly as she steps into the house. Hana walks towards her and grabs her in a tight hug. Olivia holds Hana tightly as well.

“I’m so glad you’re home,” Hana says.

“Where is she? Please tell me you know where she is.”

Hana squeezes Olivia tighter. She tries hard not to cry. Olivia pulls away from Hana and runs out of the living room. Hana can hear her in Evee’s room, sobbing loudly.

Hana goes to the room and stands in the doorway. Olivia is sitting on the floor with Evee’s comforter bunched up in her arms.

“I can’t stop crying. I want to, but I can’t. I’m so scared,” Olivia is holding the comforter tight to her chest. Her hair is messy and she looks like she has been awake for a week. Hana sits next to her on the floor.

“You don’t have to stop crying,” Hana says.

“But I do. If I want to think straight, I do,” Olivia says through sobs.

Hana watches her cry and this almost makes her smile, because she knows this situation better now. Olivia is home and upset. This has context. She is no longer alone with all of this herself. Olivia is here and Hana can get busy making sure she is OK. She pulls Olivia into her arms and Olivia leans into her chest.

“Why do you think Manny would do this?” Olivia said as she detaches from Hana’s arms and stares at her.

“He just popped into my head.”

“But why? It’s been so long since you’ve seen him,” Olivia has stopped crying and her face is becoming cold.

“But the last time I saw him was pretty bad. I thought of him because I abandoned him. He said what we were doing wasn’t right and that nobody would accept us. Maybe he just got around to it. I don’t know. Please, I feel so guilty,” Hana tries not to give into her need for Olivia to care for her.

“Don’t feel guilty, that does nothing,” Olivia’s voice is flat.

“I wasn’t out there waiting for her. I heard her, Olivia, but I just stayed on the phone for a fucking parking ticket,” Hana says.

Olivia leaves the room without saying anything.

Hana feels a cold breeze as Olivia leaves her side. She knows Olivia is right, but she has no idea of what to do. The house has started to feel like a prison and the only place she wants to be. If she goes outside, she has no control of anything. In this space she has, at least, a little power. She can turn on the faucet, make a phone call, slam doors.

She hears a thud and runs into the hallway. It came from the bathroom. She sees Olivia’s legs on the floor.

“Are you OK?”

Olivia says nothing. Hana goes into the bathroom and sits on the bathroom floor across from Olivia.

Evee’s brown hairs are scattered around the unswept floor. Shiny and curly. She has been growing her hair long since she was six. She said she wanted braids and pigtails like a girl in her class. Olivia brushes Evee’s hair every night and braids it perfectly. It had surprised Hana that Olivia could braid hair so well.

“Do you know how many girls asked me to braid their hair? It was a great way to get close to them. I got to rub their heads and touch their gorgeous hair and straddle them. What more could a teenage dyke want?”

The towels, too many for a three person family, are stacked hanging from the rails. The orange one is Hana’s least favorite. She needs to get rid of it. She stands up and opens the drawer under the sink and tries to find the good scissors, but all she can find are the small nail scissors. She grabs at the towel and starts poking at it, wanting to cut big chunks out, but the scissors only poke unsatisfyingly at the bright, orange terrycloth. Small pieces fall to the floor around Olivia as the short scissor blades bend under the firm fabric.

“Stop that,” Olivia says as she smacks at the orange fuzz that has collected on her legs, her dark pantyhose.

“I hate this thing, I always have” Hana says as she continues to cut.

“Stop that right now!”

“No, we’ll never throw it away.”

Olivia tries to stand up but her foot slips on the fuzzy floor. Hana hears a whimper and looks down to see Olivia with her head in her hands. Hana puts the towel pieces and scissors down. She kneels on the hard floor and puts her hands on Olivia’s shoulders. She leans closer to hug her, but Olivia is stiff and unresponsive. Hana puts her arms around Olivia’s square shoulders anyway and watches part of a spider web dance behind Olivia’s head.

Oh to be a spider web right now. An inanimate object with a temporary existence. No responsibilities, no pressure to achieve anything except holding ground for a short time for a predator and its prey. But then that’s what happened here, she thinks of the house, that man, Evee.

“I’m gonna be sick,” Olivia shudders.

Hana moves out of the way. Olivia bolts forward towards the toilet. Nothing comes out except more crying. Hana rubs her back, softly at first then harder, to the point where Olivia jerks away.

“She never did anything to anyone. She is perfect. My perfect baby,” Olivia lets go and her body falls to the ground before Hana can catch her. Her right cheek is slack on the floor, her mouth is open and her eyes are wide and wet. Hana has never seen anyone look like Olivia does now, pale and without will. It scares her. It all scares her.

“Why?”

“I don’t know baby.” Hana kneels down and sits next to Olivia, facing her, rubbing her back, but Olivia jerks away from Hana again.

“I want her back so bad, I want my baby back so bad.”

“I know you do.”

Olivia sobs into the floor. Hana gets some tissues and wipes the tears from Olivia’s cheeks. Olivia takes the tissue and sits up. She straightens her back and looks at Hana.

“Today was going so well. The pitch, I wish you could have seen them Hana, they loved it. They loved me and I did really really well. Everything is going so well right now,” Olivia says, trying to not to cry.

Hana nods, thinking she could say something about the baby now.

“I was talking to this woman on the plane on the way up. She was our age and I don’t know, I was chatty, hyped up a little thinking about my presentation.”

Olivia slumps her shoulders and speaks slowly. Her dress shirt is open at the neck revealing her collarbone and a little bit of her black bra. Hana wants to reach in and caress her neck, but doesn’t.

“We started talking about ourselves, you know, small talk and I mentioned Evee and you and I told her about Templeton, the whole situation. I went on a little bit, I guess. When I looked up at her, she had this look on her face like I had punched her. I almost laughed. I was surprised, you know. I guess I don’t talk about us to total strangers very often and I forget how different they think we are. I know we’re not a nuclear family. To some people, we’re like nuclear fall out, toxic waste. So I was looking at this woman, and thinking about how moments before she was telling me that she was single, and hadn’t found the right man and wanted a family, blah blah blah,” Olivia’s speech has quickened. “She looked so ugly to me all of a sudden. Where before I felt sorry for her, right then I just wanted to yell at her and say ‘you know you wish you were me lady. You know you wish you had what I have because it’s the best. What I have is wonderful.’”

Hana smiles and watches Olivia stand up and brush the dust and fuzz off of her black skirt.

“I have to call Templeton. Where’s the phone?” She says as she rushes out of the bathroom and into the living room. Hana follows her and watches as she picks up the phone and dials. She makes a mistake and hangs up, picks the phone back up and dials again. Hana can see her fingers are shaking. She makes another mistake and shakes the phone.

“This is ridiculous,” she laughs.

“Olivia, I can do that.”

“Shhhh,” Olivia shakes her hand at Hana. Hana can tell she’s managed to dial the whole number this time.

“Evee’s gone,” are the only words Olivia can manage before she starts sobbing into the phone and hands the phone to Hana.

“Hi,” Hana says.

“Hana, are you OK?” Templeton asks quickly.

“I should have called you sooner. Evee’s been missing since yesterday.”

“I know, the police were here for a while. I think they thought I could have… I don’t know, I guess they have to check everything out.”

“They are useless.”

“Don’t say that Hana,” Olivia yells as she paces behind the couch, ripping up a tissue. The angry look on Olivia’s face bothers Hana, she turns and looks out the window onto the street and the neighbors’ houses.

Templeton talks about the police at his house, asking questions about where he was, what he was doing how he feels about his daughter being raised by two women.

“They are pretty useless, Hana, but don’t tell Olivia I said so,” he says.

“They’re all we’ve got though,” Hana says as she looks out onto their street from the front window.

It is dark outside, after midnight. She looks at all of the dark windows in the other houses. Families keep so many secrets behind dark windows. It’s the only way to keep going forward, she thinks. It’s the only way to get anywhere in life. Family secrets aren’t for public consumption. People would laugh at whatever is exposed because, no doubt, they’ve got something far worse behind their dark windows.

“Oh my god. This is a nightmare. I haven’t called because the police told me not to. I’ve been so worried. Do you want me to come there?” Templeton says.

Hana wants him to come, so badly. Hana hears a sharp intake of breath and knows if he isn’t smoking one already, Templeton is reaching for a cigarette.

“Wait, Hana, the pregnancy test. Have you taken it?”

Olivia grabs the phone away from Hana.

“Templeton I don’t understand.”

Hana goes into the office and sits in the dark, cool space listening to Olivia’s voice. She shuts the door. She can’t see anything. She is glad to be alone in the small room.

She was so sure she would feel better when Olivia got home. Sure Olivia would take charge and say the right things, as usual. She hasn’t though, she’s just as helpless. Hana feels better and worse at the same time and she can’t understand why. She can’t understand how it is possible to feel any relief in this situation. Her daughter is out of her reach. Hidden away and she hasn’t been able to do anything to help her and part of her is glad Olivia is just as helpless, glad she hasn’t failed again and her partner, the other mother is searching for answers as well.

The door to the office opens and light pour in from the rest of the house. Hana is sitting in her sweatpants, bare feet and a sweatshirt staring at Olivia.

She can see Olivia clearly for the first time since she came home tonight. Her hair is a mess. Usually parted down the side and sharply angled to the left side of her face, is it messy now from Olivia’s hands constantly pulling it back. Despite her efforts to wipe it off, there is still a lot of orange fuzz on her $500 skirt. She has undone most of the buttons on her untucked silk top and she has no makeup on. She looks like she’s woken up drunk on the floor of someone else’s house. Hana would laugh right now if everything wasn’t so fragile. She would laugh because this look of Olivia’s would be a good costume for a party.

“What are you doing?” Olivia says quietly.

“Did you have a good talk to Templeton?”

“We can’t just keep talking and talking. We have to do something, Hana,” Olivia shakes her head. “What are we going to do?”

“Can your boss help us?” The words flew out before Hana could stop them. Olivia’s eyes widen then she turns around and runs back to the living room. Hana had thought of asking Olivia’s boss for help earlier, but didn’t want to do anything until Olivia came home. Then she forgot the idea until just now.

“Oh thank you thank you thank you. OK, we’ll be ready,” Hana heard Olivia say from the living room.

******

SIX

Olivia had warned Hana that a lot of people would show up. For some reason, Hana limited had her imagination and pictured 15 maybe 20 people standing quietly outside of the yellow tape.

Not much different than what it had been like since the neighbors found out what happened. They had been meeting outside off and on, standing in groups and staring into their house.

They’ve looked so frightened, gathered out there with their arms folded. One parent watches their house, and the other stays inside with the kids. There have been people she has never met and others she knows quite well. They have assembled and dispersed, shoulders hunched, hands in front of their mouths as they talked to each other and shook their heads. Hana hasn’t spoken to any of them. What would she say? I’m sorry. I apologize for the inconvenience, we are doing everything we can to resolve the situation. No, this isn’t anything she can explain. This isn’t a busted water main or a power outage. This is a crime in their front yard. A devastating crime and it happened on their perfect street in her perfect home to her perfect family.

Sleep did not happen last night. The house was busy. At about 3am a tall and stern marketing genius from Olivia’s company came by and the three of them wrote a press release. Hana felt like the two women, the experts, dismissed her suggestions, even her descriptions of Evee. Mostly she made coffee and nodded a lot.

She felt more and more that she was melting into the background of the house and hardly distinguishable from an old chair or a closet door.

At 5am the publicity twins showed up. Olivia had showered and was in her best suit, the black one with the embroidery on the collar.

“You can’t wear that,” the shorter guy said as the taller one shook his head. “You don’t have any money, this is not about money, remember. This is about pain. Wear something less nice.”

“Oh, of course, you’re right.” Olivia nodded and ran back into the bedroom. The boys started talking about the script.

“She shouldn’t cry…”

“Are you crazy, this is all about crying.”

Olivia rushed back into the room. She had totally transformed from executive to suburban mom. She was wearing the cream cardigan Carol had bought her a couple of years ago with a light purple cotton top underneath and jeans.

Great, much better the boys said.

“What about Hana?” Olivia asked.

The twins looked at each other. Their mouths were open. The shorter one put his right hand out like he was holding a platter on which his words were placed with a nice sweet piece of chocolate to soften the sting.

“I’m not sure you two should appear on camera together?”

“What? Are you serious?”

“We are trying to gain sympathy, or empathy or whatever. We might lose some of that if people see two women up there when they expect a normal, I mean you know mommy daddy situation. I’m sorry, I’m just trying to get this perfect for you guys.”

“Hana, are you OK with this?” Olivia voice was using the same voice Evee’s does when she really wants something. Greed and sorrow all wrapped into one whiny tone.

“Anything, anything.” Hana nodded even though she felt hurt and excluded, she did not fight. Anything that would help get Evee back was OK. She just wants everything to fit back into place before the house and her life falls apart. “I’m the cook or something.”

“A family friend,” the taller one said. Hana wanted to punch him.

Now, in the shower, her body tenses when she thinks about the cop from the other day.

We’ll handle this with the family.

Even though she won’t be appearing on camera, she wants to look like she is together. So she changes into her best jeans and the black V-neck sweater Olivia bought her last year. It’s the nicest thing she has.

The press release worked because there are five news vans on the street outside of the house and about 40 people in the front yard.

Olivia’s eyes are dark with exhaustion. She drank two strong cocktails around four in the morning. Hana had tried to mix them herself. The police asked them not to drink at all, to remain coherent for Evee. Hana wouldn’t have made them with as much alcohol as Olivia had.

Olivia is in her makeup smock getting ready for the bright lights as if it was just another rushed morning.

Muted colors the twins had told her, nothing to make you glamorous, we don’t want anyone saying, her daughter’s been kidnapped and she had time to put on makeup.

“Good luck babe,” she says, placing her hand on the small of Olivia’s back and kissing an exposed part of her neck. Olivia turns around with her eye shadow and lipstick in her hands and hugs Hana.

“You know I love you very much,” Olivia says quietly in her ear.

Olivia squeezes Hana tightly.

“You are Evee’s mother just as much as me. This doesn’t change that.”

Hana lets go of Olivia. “It just hides it,” she says.

******

SEVEN

Hana makes Olivia some oatmeal. Olivia tries to eat, but begins to sob and can’t swallow. Olivia cries like a child. Carol holds her close.

Hana sees the two women in front of her, but feels like she is watching a movie. She is sitting on the edge of the bed. She has no energy to move. No desire to comfort. Hana doesn’t want to be alone, but looking at Olivia and Carol curled up in bed isn’t helping her feel any better.

It is dark again.

The day is a blur. First, the TV cameras and questions, the crying. Then the helicopter search Olivia’s boss organized. Hana hates heights, but she had to go. She had to participate in something.

As the press conference ended, a reporter approached Hana and asked her point blank if she was Olivia’s partner. Hana couldn’t lie. She nodded. The woman said she wouldn’t write anything because she felt it would hurt them more than help.

“Maybe after, I mean later I could come back and talk to you both,” she was smiling and Hana disliked her immediately.

“What do you mean?” Hana asked.

“I write for a gay magazine sometimes. It’s an interesting angle,” the woman said, still smiling.

“No,” Hana said and turned around, dizzy with anger. There were still reporters and lights and people all over the yard. She went into the house, to the dark office and shut the door.

Now, again it is just them in the dark house that has felt so cold since Evee went missing.

Nothing has changed. Olivia was so sure the media coverage would help. So sure Evee would be home by now. They still know nothing.

Nothing is the worst thing right now.

“I’m going to take a walk,” Hana says to Olivia and Carol as she leaves the room and shuts the door.

As she puts on her jacket, the cop on the front porch tells his partner is just leaving to do another search and that she could go with him. She does.

The idea of Evee being taken somewhere dark and cold makes her hurry to the police car, but the thought also makes her want to go to sleep and wake up in a different reality.

The cop doesn’t talk, which she is happy about. She sits in the front seat. The car is not marked, just another sedan driving around the worst places in the city.

They drive around and shine their flashlights in alleys behind isolated shops and abandoned buildings. She doesn’t want to see these places, but she needs to.

The first time she came to this place, Olivia’s hometown, she didn’t like it. She thought the houses looked too alike and it reminded her of where she had grown up, which was disappointing because she had spent all those years waiting to get out.

It hadn’t been a bad place to live until now. Nothing bad had ever happened to them here. Despite her fears of living in suburbia, most people they met had been friendly and normal.

Carol had already offered them the house if they decided they wanted to move some place “slower, quieter, closer”. Hana added “whiter”, and as they drove into the street where they now live, she sighed quietly and gripped the steering wheel for strength to survive whatever may lie ahead.

Before they had unpacked the car, Carol had started her sales pitch. She spoke at length about the new café run by a gay couple and that there were several lesbian couples within walking distance from the house. She listed off names and a detailed history of what seemed like every encounter she had had with a homosexual within a two mile radius. Her dentist, the father of paper delivery girl, the cute boy at the grocery store who she lets help her out of the store every time because she knows he likes talking to her.

“Poor thing’s mother came to a PFLAG meeting and couldn’t even finish a cookie. Her face was red and she said some pretty nasty things to us. I was so upset. Usually when something like that happens, I’m the first one to follow them out into the hallway and tell them a thing or two about parenting. Oh but this time I was so livid that I looked right over at Joyce, you remember her don’t you Olivia baby? Nice woman. Her son had the AIDS scare last year. Everything’s fine. Fine. Joyce was gone for a good ten minutes before she came back in shaking her head. That mother would not budge. All fire and brimstone. But, you know what Hana darling, I say if you rattle someone up that bad, maybe it’ll shake loose some of those beliefs they’ve been clinging to for so long and let some air in that stinky old place they call a heart.”

Hana let Carol look at her and compliment her on her good manners and her dark hair. She smiled as Carol giggled with excitement while talking about her grandchild and how she thought it was the most exciting thing that the two of them were going to have this baby together.

Hana’s apprehension softened a bit as she realized she wasn’t going to be challenged by this woman. There were no games being played.

After lunch Hana watched Carol and Olivia through the kitchen window as she sat at the table in the backyard of Carol’s house.

The two women’s hands moved as if they were communicating in some primitive sign language. Hana laughed as she took another sip of Carol’s lemonade. Things were good, she thought.

Carol and Olivia were gesturing toward her. Hana wondered why they would be discussing the grocery list so vigorously. It was just dinner.

Then Olivia came out and sat next to Hana. She looked tired. Hana got up to help her, but there was nothing she could help her with. Olivia started tapping her fingernails on the weathered wooden table.

“Mom’s got an appointment she forgot to tell us about and her knee is still pretty sore from the fall,” Olivia caught her head in her left hand and rubbed her scalp. “I’m tired.”

“Well, I’ll go to the market with her, and the appointment.” Hana didn’t want to leave the comfort of the warm backyard, but thought it was her duty to help.

“Really?” Olivia looked relieved.

“Yeah, you rest. We’ll make something easy for dinner.”

“You are wonderful,” Olivia said as she leaned over and kissed Hana.

Hana enjoyed hanging out with Carol. She talked a lot. A lot. She repeated herself constantly, so Hana found she could zone out once in a while, and when she tuned back in, could still follow the path of whatever story Carol was telling.

Carol introduced Hana around at the veggie market. My new daughter in law. The mother of my grandchild. Olivia’s true love. Hana hung back after a while, weary of the attention she was getting from the strangers, which wasn’t all positive.

She carried the fruit and vegetables and felt good doing family stuff. She was helping her “mother in law” as Carol told her to call her.

On the way to the appointment, Carol was walking so quickly, Hana had to pick up her pace to keep up.

“I’m late, Hana, sorry. We have to hurry.” Carol, was wobbly, but despite her bad knee, she was walking faster than anyone around her.

Hana caught up with Carol at a granite staircase, where Carol was catching her breath. Hana heard music from the closed doors at the top of the stairs. The building was a church. She hoisted the bags up over her shoulder and started walking.

“Hana?” Carol called after her.

Hana turned around and saw Carol half way up the steps of the church.

“What are you doing?” Hana asked in a stern voice that she was immediately ashamed of. She did not really know this woman and she was a very important stepping stone in having a happy future. She had to stay on her good side.

Carol kept climbing the steps toward the door.

“Carol!” Hana yelled in a whisper then rushed up the steps. “Carol, what are you doing?”

“I have an appointment.”

“But there’s church happening in there.”

“Yes, I have an appointment to speak here today. I'm in the program.”

“To speak? About what?”

“Olivia and you. I thought she told you.”

“No, she didn't. I thought you had an appointment for your knee.”

“No, I’m speaking here, at the church.”

“A Baptist church? I wouldn't have come with you if I knew this is what you were doing.”

“Olivia knew.”

And she's not here. Hana thought, looking at Carol’s hand on the door of the church, wishing she could will the handle to suddenly become hot and scare Carol out of this stupid idea.

Carol opened the door to the church and Hana felt a little nauseous.

She’s not in the closet. Everyone knows she is gay. But she’s no activist.

Hana stood on the steps feeling suddenly burdened under the weight of the bags of fruit and vegetables. She was not going in the church, no matter what. Carol hadn’t asked her in anyway. She sat down and set the bags around her feet. She found an apple and started eating.

The music had stopped and she could hear the faint sound of Carol’s voice coming from the church. What could she be saying to those people that they would listen to? She moved the bags closer to the doors of the church and, still seated, opened the door a crack. Carol was up on the stage with a microphone in her hand. Hana wondered if she brought her own microphone. Maybe she carried it around for occasions like this one. Hana looked around the room. The pews were about three quarters full. Men and women in their church clothes were sitting facing Carol. They appeared to be alert. No one was aiming guns or tomatoes at her. They seemed to be listening.

“My daughter was very young when she told me she didn’t want to marry a man. She was 11. That is very young for any girl to be thinking about marriage, don’t you think? Anyway, it wasn’t something I took very seriously at the time. But later, when she was a little older and her friends started dating boys, I asked her if she was interested in anyone, you know, to date. She told me she was in love with a classmate. But she was dating a stupid boy, those were her words, not mine. And that was it. There was nothing weird about it. I saw in her face the affection she had for the young woman and I respected that affection and my daughter’s emotions. Not everyone is going to be like each other and that is what makes the world a good place, I think. I like big strong men and my daughter likes big strong women.”

Hana laughed.

“At the moment my daughter is expecting her first child. I am so excited, as many of you, I’m sure were when your children were expecting and you were looking forward to being a grandparent. It’s a magical time.”

Hana felt sadness rising in her chest. She looked up at the sky, trying to make the tears stop. But they came quickly and soon her breathing grew into sobs and she had to spit apple out and throw it to the side of the steps. She pressed her eyes into the sleeve of her jacket and tried to stop crying. Stop asking all of the questions she has repeated over the years. She was so disappointed that the loneliness had reached her here, among people who seemed to really like her, love her.

She was angry at herself for being sad on such a cool day. On a day where someone referred to her with pride as daughter.

Quiet clapping was coming from inside the church. She wiped her eyes and took a deep, shuddering breath. She heard the door open and didn’t turn her face or body, hoping wasn’t Carol. Hoping she had a couple more minutes to pull herself together.

But it was Carol and soon she was crying again and Carol was hugging her. Before she can stop them, some of her secrets spill onto the steps. Just a few, but the big ones. The drugs, her mom. It was all one big incomprehensible mess and she was afraid Carol would be repelled by her history.

“Oh Hana, you’re a good person. I can tell. Nobody has the right to treat anyone like that. It’s not your fault. It’s not.”

What if the stress of this situation convinces the little baby inside of her that the world isn’t a nice place to be and it changes its mind.

The first time Olivia got pregnant, that’s what happened and it was devastating.

Olivia and Hana had become very close very fast. It was like they were lab partners making a mysterious liquid fizz and bubble. This experiment, Hana believed, Olivia was not truly acknowledging. But she went along for the ride, because Olivia was such a captivating force to follow. If Olivia had said out of the blue, let’s move to Egypt, Hana would have gone.

Instead they mixed elements together and made a baby and fell in love.

Hana was intimidated by Olivia in the early years of their relationship. Olivia was so sure of herself, or she appeared to be. So sure of her desire to have a baby – more sure than Hana had ever been in her life. Hana had never felt strong desire. When she younger she wanted good grades because she didn’t want bad grades. She wanted to be a star athlete, a successful artist. She felt like if she wanted, actually wanted to be successful at any of those things she might not be able to be because she had never felt desire, passion for anything – except women.

But then she met Olivia and helped her make a baby. It was the first time she was ever close to such drive. Olivia was a strong powerful force – committed to making a baby. Hana was pulled in by the current of desire that Olivia had. Pulled in to the crazy act of artificially inseminating a complete stranger when had come to the conclusion that she would probably never actually see a naked woman in real life.

Olivia would lie in Hana’s bed and talk about why she wanted a baby. How her mom thought she was too you and made her go to counseling.

“When she found out I was gay, she practically threw a party, but when I told her I wanted to have a baby, she flipped out. ‘Shit Mom,’ I said ‘you had me when you were eighteen, I’m twenty-one,’ I told her. ‘I can do this.’ The counseling helped me realize that I want this. I want it so much. I mean I can say now that I’ve met you there is more that I want. I was ready to make this baby on my own. Do everything, Mom would help with stuff, you know, but look at you Hana, you’re perfect.”

“Why?” Hana asked

“Why? Why not? Your hair. Your sweet sweetness. Your pureness. You’ve never done anything unkind in your life have you.”

“I don’t know,” Hana thought about the fights and the urges she got sometimes, the ones she has learned to stop before they make her do something bad.

“I don’t mean being rude or bitchy you know. Like you weren’t a bully at school. You didn’t take pleasure in hurting others. I bet you don’t even like to gossip.”

“I like to listen.”

Olivia laughed softly at first. Then it got louder and she hugged Hana.

“What’s so funny?” Hana was laughing too.

“The best thing about someone who isn’t bad at all is when they are, just a little bit. You are so beautiful. We are going to make the perfect family. Can’t you see it? You me and baby. Fuck the right wing.”

“Fuck the right wing.” Hana said and she kissed Olivia for a long time. Breathed in her hot air. Held her tight and felt what she thought might be want, desire, passion. For Olivia, the perfect woman. Her perfect woman.

“I love you,” Hana said it with her eyes closed. When she opened them Olivia was smiling.

That morning Olivia felt the cramps of the loss of the first baby. There had been 10 weeks of excitement, giddy plans and expectations. Then it was gone and with it a little bit of their hope that their experiment was a good idea. Hana was glad to be something good in Olivia’s life. At least, that’s what Olivia had said she was.

“If I didn’t have you here I would be a lot worse.”

But as the days passed, Hana watched Olivia crawl into her sadness. Hana tried to reach her. Tried to get through to her with jokes, fruit, all of the things she had learned that made this new love happy. Pizza with pineapple dried up next to the bed and crosswords were never attempted.

If Olivia wasn’t staring into space, she was crying. When she cried Hana felt a little relieved. She felt like they were communicating. She could hug her and hand her tissues. When she stared, there was no access. The room felt cold and Olivia’s body was stiff, hostile.

After a couple of days Templeton took Hana aside.

“Are you ok?” he said, staring as he does into her face, making her wish she had a mask or a paper bag to cover her head.

“She seems a little better today,” she tried to sound upbeat.

“Maybe you need to take a break”

“No, I’m fine.”

“You need to take care of yourself.”

“But she can’t be alone.”

“She won’t be. Carol, me. Do you have someone you can call, go to the movies with?”

Hana wanted to deny that she needed to get away from the stuffy sadness, but she couldn’t. She needed a break. For two months her life had been chaotic. She had moved in with Olivia to a house far away from anyone she knew and every moment since had been dominated by Olivia and the baby.

She called Manny. She hadn’t spoken to him since her last day of work when he had just turned around and said bye to her, that’s it, bye.

On the phone he said he wanted to pick her up and see the house. She told him it wasn’t a good time. He persisted and asked for the address and made Hana uncomfortable. Olivia had never met Manny and Hana didn’t really want her to, especially not when she was so vulnerable.

She arranged to meet him at the gas station a couple blocks from the house. The next day he pulled up in his wreck of a car with the same dirty sheet covering the front seat, leaned over and opened the door from the inside.

Hana looked at his face. He didn’t look happy to see her. She thought about telling him to forget about it, just let him drive off and never see him again, then go to a movie, something funny to get her mind off things. But ditching him would just cause her more guilt and it was only going to be a couple hours at the most. She owed him that.

Carol says that even when you’re feeling like shit, putting a smile on your face will make you feel better, for a short time anyway. She stood up straight, so she was looking over the roof of the car where he couldn’t see her face and she opened her mouth into a big smile.

She got into the car and said hi in a chirpy voice. He said hey back and pulled out of the gas station. Her smile flattened as they faced forward, watching the road. Acting happy wasn’t going to rub off on him.

The smell of the car and of him reminded her of what she had left behind not so long before. Baking, drinking, listening to his miserable and boring stories. How desperate she was, she thought.

He said he wanted to drive by the house and have a look and, again, she said it wasn’t a good time. He didn’t say anything for a while. She gave him directions to the beach and pointed out the few landmarks she had learned so far. Olivia’s favorite bagel shop. Carol’s apartment building. The driveway where a gang and then the police beat a teenage boy to death. The fairgrounds where the county fair was in full swing.

She looked at the ferris wheel, bland and lifeless in the daylight. She and Olivia had planned to go, but then plans changed.

She pretended to look out the windshield, but she was looking at Manny’s arms on the steering wheel. It had only been a couple of months since she’d seen him, but his arms looked different. They were thinner and his skin looked like it was grey underneath.

They drove down to the beach and parked. It was the middle of the day and there was nobody around. She knew what was coming next. Sure enough, he brought out the coke in a little plastic baggie. There would be no conversation without that stuff.

She took some when he offered it. It wasn’t what a responsible person would do, but she had been through a lot lately, she thought.

“The new bread guy they got is a prick. He’s not going to last long,” Manny said, looking out at the ocean in front of them.

Hana’s mind moved quickly. She decided that if she talked less at home and did the housework twice as fast, she’d have more time to spend with Olivia and things would be OK very soon. They would try for another baby and everything would be OK. If she didn’t spend so much time worrying about everything, because there wasn’t really anything to worry about… Olivia would get pregnant again and then she would be happy again and life would be good again...

“Hey, you high or something?” Manny was staring at her. His face was close. He was almost smiling. She flinched away from him.

She could see all of the pores, and the thick dark hairs growing out of his face. She wanted to touch his cheek. Feel the roughness of him. Make sure she hadn’t imagined that she had felt it before.

She thought they should get out of the car. Breath fresh air. Take a walk. She turned away from him and reached for the door. Manny’s big hand grabbed her arm and turned her body around to face front again. She shook her arm to get out of his grip. He grabbed her other arm and pinned her to the seat.

His face was even closer to hers then and his breath was hot on her eyes. She wanted to close them, but knew she shouldn’t. She watched as his face went from hard to soft. Then he smiled and laughed as he released his grip on her and returned to his side of the front seat.

“Scared you,” he laughed harder.

“I was one second away from smashing your balls, motherfucker,” Hana’s voice shook.

“Whoa, tough chick. Motherfucker,” he mimicked.

Hana rolled down the window and put her right arm outside of the car. Her skin burned where he held her. His grip had been tight. She was angry. In all the time they had spent together, he’d never done anything like this. He had seemed desperate many times, but never violent.

She had believed him all those times he said violence was a part of his past.

“You like this place?” he asked casually as if he hadn’t just hurt her.

She was silent. Her face was hot, but she tried to calm down. If she remained angry at him she would have no one.

“I don’t know,” she said finally, trying to maintain an even tone to her voice.

They sat there for a long time without saying anything. The sound of the waves grew louder. In Hana’s head she was hating him. Over and over she thought about how she had wanted to poke his eyes out. How she didn’t trust him and resented him because she didn’t have anyone else and maybe he knew that. Then she tried again to let it go. She thought of Olivia. She thought she should buy her a gift, but she had no idea what to get her. What could someone whose lifelong dream has just died, want?

“I thought you wanted me to come get you,” Manny said. His voice was quiet and Hana almost asked him to say it again, but then she realized she had heard what he said.

She looked at him. He was facing straight ahead, maybe at the water or maybe just not at her. She looked ahead as well. The waves were big and they broke hard onto the shore. There were no surfers, no people anywhere.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“I thought you had come to your fuckin senses and realized this isn’t real,” Manny said looking at her this time.

Hana almost laughed, but stopped herself. She nodded her head “This is real.”

“How do you know? You don’t know. Why did you call me?”

“I haven’t heard from you. She lost the baby, I needed to get out of the house.”

“I come all the way up here so you can get out of the house? Why the fuck would I do that?”

“Because we’re friends, I thought. Aren’t we?”

“I don’t have any friends.”

“What is your problem?”

“I don’t have a problem. You have a problem. You’re the one living in a dream world. You think you’ll be happy here? You think you’re just going to magically fit it? You won’t because you’re not like these people,” he yelled. She had never heard him yell before. Color was returning to his skin.

“You’re talking about yourself. You are always talking about yourself.”

“Bullshit,” he said more quietly.

“It’s true. You don’t know shit about me and I know every sad story about you. All the bitches who done you wrong. How your life has been so unfair. All those days you talked and talked, when all I wanted to do was sleep. You didn’t even notice, you just kept talking. You’re oblivious to other people and the only reason you’re here is because you don’t have anyone else…” Hana stopped there. She had said more than she should have. She didn’t want to hurt him.

“Fuck you,” he said, still staring ahead.

“You’re just pissed off because I have a life now, a good life,” Hana said.

“You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. You don’t have a life. Look what happens when there is no baby, you get kicked out.”

“She didn’t kick me out…”

“You ever think the baby died because it’s not right. What you’re doing? You called me because you want out don’t you? This is where you want to be. With me.” His hand was on his chest and he looked afraid.

Hana stared at him. He was on edge and she wasn’t sure which way he would tip. She looked away, to her right, out the window and reached for the door handle.

“I’m sorry Manny,” she said as she turned the handle. As she opened the door, he turned the car on and quickly put it in reverse. She was thrown back into the seat as the car accelerated.

******

EIGHT

Hana watches the houses from the front window. It is quiet on their street now.

There had been another fight with the police because they wanted things from Evee’s room. Her blanket and some clothes. They needed hair and photographs. Hana had yelled again.

Olivia helped mediate this time, suddenly calm, telling Hana that the police were there to help. Their job is to find Evee and they have to do everything they ask.

Olivia kept them out of the room as she and Hana gathered some of Evee’s things. Then she watched as Olivia dropped them into a plastic bag and the officer twirled it around like Hana does with the garbage bags. Twirled it then tied the top into a knot.

I could have done something. I could have.

She lets go of the curtains and they fall together and she can no longer see the street. She walks around the living room for what must be the 100th time since Evee was taken almost forty-eight hours before.

Evee was taken.

She drags her feet as she walks from the big window to the back of the couch. From the back of the couch to the front door.

The police had hooked some device to a special telephone in case someone calls so they can trace it. Olivia had listened intently, nodding the whole time another policeman, the millionth they’d dealt with so far, had explained how the phone worked.

“No one is going to call,” Hana had said.

Hana regretted the words as soon as they came out. She was behaving like a child, fighting everything the police had done and said. Olivia hadn’t respond when Hana said this, but Hana knew Olivia thought she was behaving like an idiot. She hadn’t said anything, but Hana’s knew Olivia wished she wasn’t there. And then there was Carol. Hana thought Carol has always had doubts about Hana’s abilities as a parent. She must finally feel vindicated because this experience has proven to her that Hana is not fit to care for her granddaughter.

They had gone out to search more dark parks, beaches, apartment blocks, parking lots.

Hana is ready for Carol and Olivia to gang up on her when they get back. She has been waiting for that to happen for years. It’s inevitable. She’s just a loose addition to the family after all. A stray that they have just put up with.

Hana has to get out of the house now. She finds her flip flops by the front door. She only wears them when she waters the lawn. She hates walking in them. As she walks toward the back door, the foam of the flip flops hit her heals, making a pat pat sound that she hates. She tries to walk on her tip toes, but the hard rubber digs in between her toes. She stops in the kitchen, holding the door knob to the back door. She looks around. She looks at the sink, full of water and the bowl of pancake mix she had started to clean the day before or the day before that – the day Evee was taken. It seems so long ago.

The last meal they had together was pancakes. Evee’s face was coated with pancake syrup and Hana was getting annoyed because Evee was eating with her hands. Evee had been pushing Hana’s button all morning because she had woken up with the idea that she was going to turn on the VCR and watch a movie, but there wasn’t enough time. So she was grabbing large pieces of pancake and wiping them on her plate in a deep puddle of syrup before shoving them in her mouth.

As Hana got increasingly irritated at Evee, Olivia seemed oblivious.

“Evee stop that right now,” Hana said sternly. Evee stuck her tongue out, but then covered it with a piece of pancake. Hana looked at Olivia who had her eyes on her own pancakes as she cut them into small pieces. She could hear Olivia’s reasoning in her head. Just ignore her.

“I’m going to take that away from you and later you’re going to be very hungry because you played with your food instead of eating it,” Hana’s voice is strained. She watched Evee dip her nose into the plate full of syrup and lift her head and laugh. Hana grabbed Evee’s plate, but Evee grabbed it as well. Evee screamed.

“Don’t worry about it,” Olivia says.

“She’s being obnoxious,” Hana whined as she turned to Olivia for help.

“So are you,” Olivia said, coolly then she popped another piece of pancake in her mouth. “And you’re making a mess.”

Hana looked down at the plate she and Evee were fighting over. It was titled and syrup was dripping onto the table.

Evee laughed. Hana set the plate down and licked syrup off of her arm. Then she grabbed some of Evee’s pancake and shoved it into her mouth.

Evee laughed even harder and grabbed pancake and shoved it into her mouth as well.

Hana picked up another piece and moved toward Olivia, who was giggling.

“No no no, watch the suit.”

The kitchen is a mess. Hana hasn’t cleaned at all since Olivia and Evee have been gone. The big bowl is filled with water and pancake mix residue, which is now a foamy mess in the sink. The plates and forks, syrupy and sticky, are stacked on the counter.

Is this normal? Could the police will use this against her? Dirty dishes stacked in the kitchen for who knows how long, does that count as neglect?

She unlocks the back door quickly to get away from the mess. This is what they do sometimes, this family. They leave the house in order to avoid the mess.

A sink full of dishes, well, off to the beach then. Messy rooms, let’s go shopping and buy more clothes to fill them with. They joke about it. But right now, Hana has no one to share any of their jokes with. She is alone and the way things are looking, this may be it for her. This may be her future, leaving this house as quick as she can to get away from any reality that lives inside.

She hurries down the back steps straight out onto the grass of the backyard. It is wet with the dew from the late evening fog. Her feet are wet. It would be easier to walk around if she took of her shoes, but she leaves them on. She walks towards the back fence. It is dark as she leaves the reach of the streetlights in front of the house. The back of the yard is overgrown. She takes a deep breath and smells grass under her feet, and cat shit. Cats love their yard. They hide in the tall grass waiting for mice and birds, sometimes sharing the glory of their catch by leaving carcasses on the back steps. Hana hates cats.

Hana walks the length of their back fence. Deliberately stepping on the overgrown grass, her flip flops slipping from the base of her feet and twisting in between her toes. She runs her hand along the panels of the tall fence.

The events earlier in the day return. She looks at the cement near the back steps. She feels a pain in her right wrist where one of the hand cuffs dug into skin, near the bone. She feels ashamed when she thinks about all of those police staring at her and the noises the neighbors must have heard.

Towards the corner of the fence, she feels the boards wiggle. These are the pieces she has been meaning to fix. They come off easily. She slips through the hole and she is in the neighbor’s back yard. She tosses her shoes off now and picks them up. She runs through the neatly mowed grass of the family next door.

Of course their yard is tidy, she thinks as she runs past the playhouse and the swing set. They’re religious, she doesn’t know what kind. They have three kids, maybe more. She has only spoken to them a few times. Mainly to promise she would fix the fence soon. She is quickly on the cement of their driveway. She slides past their station wagon.

On the sidewalk she feels exposed. She turns right and starts to run toward the end of the street. She hasn’t run in a long time. It doesn’t feel good. Her feet hit the hard ground at strange angles and she is aware of her big body bouncing and skin being pulled. She stops after passing a few houses. She drops her flip flops on the ground and slips them on.

She walks to the end of the street. Across the way is high school. She looks both ways. The street is empty. No cars or people. The Twilight Zone again. She is scared because she remembers being young and walking home on nights like this. She would have been a little older than Evee. She was so scared on those streets alone. The mist was thick and she would get wet and it was cold. There were always noises following her. If she sped up, so would they. Once she got to her house, the noises would stop. She would unlock the door and call out to her father. “I’m home, dad,” even if he wasn’t there to hear her. It was one of the things that kept the noises outside.

What protection does Evee have? None. They have sheltered her so much. They didn’t know.

She crosses the street and walks along the chain linked fence to an opening she has seen others use. Part of her hopes others have used it tonight and she might not have to do anything. Maybe someone else will hurt her. That’s what she is looking for out here. Someone to hurt her, make her feel this emotional pain somewhere else on her body. Right now it’s all inside, in her brain. She wants it on her body. She wants bruises and cuts.

She walks toward the other end of the field. No one is here. It’s a Friday night in the summer and nobody is around. Se was so sure she wouldn’t be the only person out on a night like this. The only thing she sees is one of those football training things, the one the guys push ram with their bodies.

Something cracks as she hits the ram hard. Something around her shoulder. Her collarbone? She straightens up and her bones crunch. She can go again. She walks backwards several yards and stares again at the worn vinyl. It looks hard and she runs toward it again, this time her sandals slip out from under her feet on the wet grass. She falls hard on her right knee. The pain shoots up her leg and into her lower back.

She lies on her back. The wet ground crawls into her clothes. She straightens out her body. Her knee is throbbing and she is looking at the stars. Maybe she’s the only person out here because everyone else has somewhere to be. Somewhere they belong.

She looks up at the stars.

Hana has taken off once, years before when Evee wasn’t even two yet. She hadn’t planned it at all. One night, after Olivia and Evee had fallen asleep, she packed a backpack and instead of going to work she drove for hours.

At first she was excited. It was the middle of the night and the lights were pushing her along the road and the warm air blowing through the open windows filled her with a sense of freedom that she had always wanted to experience. She felt like she could drive anywhere and start again. She could go to Vegas or Canada. She had always wanted to see Niagara Falls.

The euphoria didn’t last long because as soon as her eyes grew heavy, she thought of their nice bog bed and Olivia’s dark hair on her little pillow and the smell of the misty morning as Evee wobbled around the house watching their every move as if they were the most wonderful things she had ever seen.

She pulled over and called Olivia just outside of Bakersfield. As the phone rang, she watched the dust blow across the highway and felt like she was in a David Lynch film and at any point a curtain would fall and she would be living her life backwards, married to a man with orthopedic braces who recited Rolling Stones lyrics with marbles in his mouth.

Olivia finally answered the phone a little out of breath. Hana could have hung up than and driven home. Olivia wouldn’t have known anything, but she couldn’t be dishonest.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hana, are you OK?”

“Yeah.”

“Are you crying?”

“Yeah,” Hana was trying to catch her breath.

“Why? What’s wrong baby?”

“I’m, I don’t know. I’m scared.”

“Can you come home, just leave early. It’s OK. Come back to bed.”

“I can’t.”

“Why not, sweety. Come on.”

“I’m at a truckstop.”

There was a pause and when Olivia spoke again, her voice was not as comforting. “A truckstop, where are you?”

“On the grapevine,” Hana said. “I tried to leave, but I can’t, but now I’m so far away and I’m tired.”

“Are you coming home?”

“Do you want me to?”

“Do I want you to? Why would you ask me that?”

“Sometimes I'm not sure, I mean do you want me? Or do you need me?”

“I love you, Hana. I want you here, I need you here with us.”

“Sometimes I want to escape.”

“Me too,” Olivia laughed a little.

“I’m not kidding. I just want to, I don’t know, dissolve or something.”

“Sweety, you’re scaring me a little. Do you want me to come get you? I could call mom…”

“No, don’t’ call her. Please, I feel so stupid.”

“You’re not stupid Hana.”

“Sometimes I just want to drive. I sit in that house and look at the dishes and the laundry and I don’t feel like I belong there. I want to get away, but then I got out here and there’s nothing for me out here.”

Evee has been taken.

The words, no matter how many times she repeats them in her head, can not be true. Even though the neighbor saw something. Even though there are police throughout her house and out in the front yard, bending over and marking spaces on the ground. She can’t let herself truly believe she may never see her daughter again.

She is thinking about war and those mothers in Columbia with the signs. Displaying their missing to the world together.

I don’t want to go to some group for this. I don’t want to sit there with grieving parents. I don’t want that to be us. She thinks of a colorless room with the chairs set up in a circle. Men and women sit in the chairs, shoulders slack, mouths open. Is that what she is going to be like if the worst happens?

The president who said that famous line about “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” never had anything like this happen to him? He couldn’t have, otherwise he wouldn’t have said such a stupid thing. Fear hasn’t taken Evee away, a person has. Maybe fear had some part in all of this, but it wasn’t something she was overly concerned with at this moment. She doesn’t want a psychological analysis of the person detailing the reasons why they would do something so disgusting as take a child away from her home.

In fact, if Evee were to be returned home safely, she wouldn’t even press charges. She would want the hole thing erased from their memories. Someone else can sit in court and look at the solemn face of the idiot who came close to their house and took Evee.

“Please please please please bring her back. Please find her. We can handle whatever happened. We are strong. Please give her back. Please.”

All of her air has floated out of her body and she is trying to take more in, but she is crying again.

All she wanted to do was go camping with her family.

Her family. That’s what she is now. Olivia, Evee. That is her life. That’s all she has. It’s the most she’s ever had.

She gets herself up with this thought. She needs to be home. She is being selfish out here as if she is going through this alone.

The air is cold and damp as she walks home now. She takes the flip flops off and feels the course ground underneath her feet. It feels real. She feels real now. It must have been Manny. No one else would want to hurt her.

She remembers gripping the door tightly when Manny accelerated the car. The door was open when he reversed. The door got heavy and she felt like she was being pulled out of the car. She wanted badly to be out of the car, but not like that. She wanted badly to be away from Manny and whatever it was he was going to do. But she pulled hard to shut the door and stay in the car.

“Stop Manny, stop,” she screamed.

He did not look at her. He didn’t wince when she yelled at him again.

Then the car lurched forward, speeding even faster toward a dead end. A small barrier set up at the end of the road to keep cars out of the fairgrounds.

She screamed. She thought about jumping out, but she couldn’t.

The small barrier was sturdy. They would have put it in with a crane, maybe a forklift.

“Please Manny, don’t. Don’t do this,” she was crying. Then she looked at the steering wheel and realized she could do something. She was bigger than him. Her body lunged forward before she could talk herself out of it. Her hands were turning the big wheel like she was steering a boat out of the path of a tsunami. The car turned so sharply she was thrown against her door and she heard her body smashing against car. She heard her hands hit the roof.

She heard Manny’s voice, he was talking loudly, he was crying then the car hit something. The back of the car hit the barrier. She was thrown again, this time against the dashboard. She was able to get her hands in front of her head. She floated then smashed hard into the old car. Then everything stopped.

She didn’t look back at him as she opened the car door. She wanted to get as far away from him as she could. If he wasn’t hurt, he would come after her. If he was hurt, she didn’t want to see it. She didn’t want to risk feeling sorry for him. Engaging with him.

So she got away as fast as her aching body would let her. Just beyond the barrier there was a path along the back of the fairgrounds. She started walking and everything that had just happened repeated in her mind. What was he saying while he was driving? She was worried about the wall approaching so quickly.

She heard sirens coming from the road leading to his car. She stopped. She could hear yelling. It was Manny. She couldn’t understand what he was saying, but he wasn’t shutting up.

She stood there a moment trying to hear then she looked behind her. There was a chain linked fence. She went over to it and if she grabbed onto it and stood on her tippy toes, she could see over a wall to the front of the car. There were police there. The car was at an angle, with the back smashed against the cement barrier.

Three policemen were looking at the ground and moving around the side of the car. One had his gun pointed at the ground. She couldn’t see, but she knew Manny was there in the path of that gun.

He wants to die, she thought.

She didn’t want him to die. She didn’t want that. She turned around and ran. She ran along the path that was at the back of the fairgrounds away from the scariest thing that had ever happened to her.

“I’m lonely. I can’t believe you left me. Everybody fucking leaves me,” that’s some of what he said as he was speeding towards the little wall.

Hana remembered more and more about the accident over the years. But she’s never tried to find out what happened to him. Nobody ever came by the house to ask her about it either. That’s why she doesn’t trust the police tonight. They have no idea she was with him that day.

As she walks up the steps to their front door, a police car pulls into the driveway and lights up the front of the house with its headlights. One of the officers walks toward the house in the glow of the bright headlights.

In this moment she feels again like she is in a movie. One of those scenes where the mother, in her apron and pinned up hair, gets the news she’s feared most, her child has died in a battle far away.

Hana is prepared to fall to her knees in misery or joy. She is prepared to live her life with the verdict that this man is bringing as long as it ends all of the unknowns.

Hana is sitting on the couch with Carol and Olivia. They are all holding hands. They are staring at the officer.

“We’ve located Mr. Gomez,” he says.

Hana feels Olivia’s squeeze tighten.

“And your daughter is not with him. We’ve determined that he had nothing to do with her abduction. He’s got several witnesses who vouch for him. They’re all Buddhists. He’s living in a monastery, actually,” he stops talking and stands there awkwardly smoothing his hair back with his hand.

No one says anything for a minute and in that short time Hana feels all of her hope drain from her body. It is a heavy feeling, like standing upright quickly after floating on your back in water. Your body’s weight feels like a burden. Her loss of hope feels the same way. She is carrying more now. The unknowns have multiplied and she feels like she is being pulled down under the weight of them.

“What now? Don’t you have anything else to tell us? Where is my daughter?” Olivia’s voice is loud and strong. She is standing up. Carol is still holding her hand, trying to get her back to the couch. A human chain trying to keep her attached to civil behavior.

“I’m sorry Ms. Sims, that’s all the information I have,” then the officer leaves them alone in the house and as he walks back to the police car, his shadows dance on the walls.

******

NINE

The curtains shut all the light out. Vivian hates the late sun on summer nights. It’s no good to have too much daylight. It used to be when she could sit out on the back patio and drink a Seven and Sevens with Dale.

Anyway it’s all shit now.

Her hand slides over the golf ball, glued to the round wooden base.

“Hole in one.” She whistles a long whistle.

Then she taps the top of the whisky bottle. One for the wedding, two for the day they bought the house.

Over to the clock, which she straightens.

“Always time for you, she says.

Then to the photo in the tarnished gold frame. Him in his emerald green tux at the Rotary Christmas Ball, 1981. She kisses his head four times and holds the frame tight to her chest feeling the sharp edges on her breast as she takes a deep breath.

She knows this ritual won’t bring him back, but something inside can’t let her stop, for one night. It’s a way of never forgetting.

She is wearing her maroon night gown. It is made of fake velour and is too big for her. It ties at her neck with a pink ribbon. She wears it all year round, even now in the hot months.

The walls of her house are faux wood paneling. Dale wanted a ranch-style house and that came with faux wood, exposed wooden beams in the ceiling that Vivian has never dusted. Prints of the prairies, orange sunsets, horse silhouettes and cactus. Vivian has added her own pieces of embroidery, pink and maroon, mostly. Home sweet home. God Bless this Mess.

He kissed her on the check and pounded the nails in the spots in between his prairie prints for her to hang her creations,

He was so kind.

She weaves her fingers together and places her hands over her chest. It’s something she does when she thinks about him. Hugging herself isn’t as satisfying and this way her heart is safe and won’t burst out of her chest. She knows time heals all wounds, or she knows they say it does. But the thing is whoever said that first, never had a wound as bad as her losing Dale.

The door from the garage opens and then slams shut. Then the door to the bathroom, just across the hall slams shut.

He must have to go real bad.

She turns out the lights and passes that bathroom on her way down the hallway to her bedroom.

“Fuckin… pathetic… idiot,” Jay says from inside the bathroom.

She hears pounding.

“Jay.”

The noise stops.

“Jay,” she says again stern this time.

He hasn’t been around for two days, which means the lawns haven’t been mowed and the kitchen sink is still clogged. She isn’t putting up with his laziness another minute.

“Open this door.”

“No.”

“Don’t you no me…”

The door opens and he flashes past her and back into the garage. His body odor is strong. He’s been smoking.

“Come back here.”

The door to the garage door slams, but doesn’t shut. It bounces back open, something else he has yet to fix. The light in the garage, which is also his bedroom, is bright. The fluorescent bulbs flicker and click, so bright she has to squint at first, but then she sees Jay running towards her. Then beyond him, in his bed, she sees a small shape under a white sheet.

“Grandma, grandma, please, grandma.”

She is running towards the bed. He tries to grab her, but just gets her nightgown. He pulls hard, but she is moving forward, grabbing at the sheet. Underneath is a girl, small, with long curly brown hair. She has duct tape over her mouth, and around her ankles. She is screaming under the tape. A high muffled sound. So big coming from such a little girl. Vivian looks at Jay, he is frozen, staring at the girl.

Vivian grabs him under the armpit hard like she did when he was younger. She pushes him away from the bed.

“What’s going on?” she hisses and pushes him to the corner of the room, near the door to the inside of the house. “Where did she come from?”

He can’t talk, he can’t catch his breath.

“Talk to me you stupid boy,” Vivian says yanking at him a bit to get him back. “You sick or something? Who wraps a child up in tape?”

“Ann. I wanted to…” he tries to catch his breath.

“Ann, is that her name?”

“No, not her. Ann from the campground. She’s special.”

“What kind of special wants little girls?”

Vivian gives him a shove and he hits the wall. She knows he’s not going to run on her. He can’t even do the laundry by himself.

“Has she eaten? You go put some of the chicken soup in the
microwave. Now.”

Jay goes to the kitchen.

Vivian turns around to look at the girl. She relaxes her hands and smiles as naturally as she can manage. She is afraid to approach the girl.

The girl looks Vivian in the eyes.

Vivian moves closer and puts her arms under the girl’s body. She lifts her up and carries her into the house. To the couch. She starts taking the tape off of her ankles. She looks up at the girl’s face. Here eyes are red and her face is dirty so are her clothes. Her shirt is ripped on the left sleeve.

“Did he do anything?” Vivian whispers and feels nauseous thinking of what’s going on, what has happened since whenever the hell he took this little girl from wherever she belongs. “Did he hurt you at all… Touch you?”

The girl just stares at Vivian.

“Not talking to strangers? Good girl. Don’t worry, OK you’ll see you mom and dad real soon.” Vivian tries to take some of the tape off of the girl’s face, careful not to touch her too much.

Jay brings the soup out. He’s put it on a platter, with two pieces of toast and a big glass of water. Vivian notices that he’s taken the crusts off and cut the buttered bread into triangles and layered them on a little plate. He sets the platter on a TV tray in the corner and brings it over to Vivian.

“She don’t got a dad.”

“Shush. You go sit down there,” she tells him, pointing at a chair facing the wall at the dining room table, far from where the girl is. She sets the tray in front of her.

The girl does not waste time and eats a piece of toast and drinks big gulps of water. Vivian, confident the girl is more interested in the food than trying to run, joins Jay at the table.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

“You sure better be boy. How did you get this girl?”

“I took her.”

“From where?”

“Doesn’t matter,” Jay drops his head.

“Listen, you’ve made a bad mistake. We can make this better. You gotta tell me how this happened.”

“I don’t know why it was so easy,” he says. Vivian watches as he rubs his hands on his thighs. He is anxious, she wants to thump him, but she will let him keep talking.

“I was gonna go there street and see what it was like, and then maybe later, like in a couple of days or a month I was gonna do it, get her. But then, you know, I was there and saw that nobody was really around, so I just felt like why not? Why not do it right now. I went to the side of the house and couldn’t see anybody around. It was like they knew I was coming and just left me alone,” he stops talking and puts his head down and is quiet for a moment.

Vivian’s throat is filling with acid, it’s feeling she is used to with this boy, the only way to get rid of it is to get away from him, but she can’t right now. Look at him, she thinks. He’s shaking. She reaches her arm out and steadily touches his thigh. She is trying so hard not to squeeze, pinch or hit him, the acid has almost reached her mouth. If he only knew how kind she is being to him right now.

“Keep going,” she whispers. He looks up at her. He’s pathetic, she thinks, but curls her lips into a smile.

“I had this idea that if anybody came out I would have said I was a garden worker, and that I wanted to do some work. I felt really smart, thinking of that. But nobody came except her,” he says nodding his head towards the girl on the couch.

“I was in this really good spot, close to the porch. I waited till she was up the steps. Then I don’t remember thinking or anything, it was like my body filled with some chemical or powers I had never felt before. I hopped up the steps and she was opening the screen door, like to the front of the house, but she heard me and turned around because I made a loud noise. She let go of the door and opened her mouth like she was going to let out a big yell and I tensed up, but nothing came out of her. So I grabbed her and put my hand over her mouth.”

Whatever pride he had been feeling drains quickly and he pounds his fist on his thigh a couple of times.

“I never do anything the right way. Fuck, I was only supposed to check the place out. I parked in this alley thing close, so I just started running back to my car. I shouldn’t have taken her with me, you know, I could’ve just left her on the porch. But, like I wasn’t thinking, you know. My body was moving without me doing anything. It was so out in the open. I was really nervous because so many people could see me. I opened the trunk and I guess I know something might happen because I had a blanket and duct tape already. I put a couple layers over her mouth, no, first there was this car, this old lady driving this big car, so I had to shut the trunk and the she was kicking inside the trunk and screaming. It seemed like fuckin forever that this old lady was driving by. She was all crumpled up in the front seat in her big boat of a car. She didn’t look at me at all, she just kept her eyes on the road and rolled past me slowly. It was like she knew what I was doing and she didn’t want to bother me. In my head, she was telling me it was OK,” his speech speeds up again. “Then it was like magic, it was like my hands worked all by themselves, like robots. I taped her mouth up, then her arms and legs. Then wrapped her tight in the blanket and taped it up until the tape was gone. She was crying when I shut the trunk.”

Vivian watches his face. His forehead, mouth and eyes, they’re all soft. Her face feels like it’s so tight that it’s going to split from her head. She watches him for another moment and realizes he has finished his story. She has to grab the seat of her chair to keep from pouncing on him, beating him to the floor. If that girl wasn’t sitting there watching them, she would hurt him right now.

“Why did you take her Jay? Why her?”

“For Ann, I told you.”

“Oh, right, Ann. Tell me again,” Vivian has no idea what he is talking about.

“She’s a counselor at the Crusaders Camp, they rented the campground out last June. I like her and I think she likes me. That’s why I took her,” Jay nods at the girl and looks at Vivian. “She was asking me all these questions.”

“Who?”

“Ann,” his voice is angry.

“Don’t talk to me like that. You are not in a position to talk to me like that right now, are you?” She is tired of being fake nice to him.

Jay shakes his head.

“Finish your story then.”

“Ann was telling me all these things she wanted to do. Like she was telling me about kids whose parents are fags and stuff and she wanted to help those kids cuz they need a normal life. She told me she wanted me to do something… important. Something big,” he said and Vivian could tell he really thought he was doing a good thing. She asked me if I wanted to work in the campground forever and I said I didn’t know and everything she asked me I didn’t know the answer. So she made me feel like I wanted to do something good, something big, for her.”

“Big?”

“Ann told me about her. She said there’s this little girl who lives on her grandma’s street. She don’t have no dad cuz her mom’s a dyke and… She said she wanted to save her from that.”

“Save her? Did she tell you to take this girl?””

“No. But I thought it would be something really big I could do. I wanted to help her.”

“Who?”

“Ann.”

“But what about her,” Vivian’s voice was a whisper as she turned toward the girl on the couch again. “She’s got a mother of her own and you took her?”

“Ann said she was in danger, that there is no God in their house and that she could give her a better life,” Jay’s face is strained.

Vivian can see that he is unsure of himself as he told her the rest of the story.

He said he drove to Ann’s house, he felt triumphant, like he had done something big because it was for her and he couldn’t wait to share it with her. She was the one who told him about this girl and now he had her and he was going to see Ann. His stomach got that bubbly feeling as he thought about Ann’s reaction. It’s what she wanted and he thought she would love him so much for this.

He found her street and her house and pulled into the driveway. He turned the car off and listened for any noise from the back. He heard nothing. He went up to the door and knocked, but there was no answer.

He knocked again, but nobody was home. He got very tense then and felt his face get really hot. He started pounding on the door with the side of his fist. Three times. Nothing. Three times. Nothing.

He walked to the side of the house, but there was this tall fence with barbed wire at the top. He wished then that he would have called Ann in advance. That maybe it wasn’t good that everything was a surprise.

He went back to his car and sat there for a long time trying to quiet the screaming thoughts in his head. Stupid fucking idiot. What are you gonna do now? No plan fucking stupid.

Vivian watches as he hits his head with his hands, but she doesn’t try to stop him.

He said he thought about taking the girl to some random place and dropping her off. But she would tell them about the car and describe his face. He wouldn’t have time to get away. The cops would follow him here.

He could have ditched the car and run for it. He’s got $1,200 in the bank. He could have taken off to Mexico. He could have left the girl in the trunk and called Ann from the road and told her she was in the trunk.

“That’s so pussy. I’m such a fucking fuck up.”

So he drove back to the main road, found a pay phone and dialed Ann’s number. But nobody answered except the answering machine.

“Ann, this is Jay. Um, I’m in town, near your house. I got something big… Want to hang out? I’ll call back,” he slammed the phone down.

He said he felt hopeless and even cried a little, which he hadn’t done in a long long time. He got back in his car and turned down the first street he came to. But it looked like it went for miles, with nothing but houses. So he turned the wheel hard and made a U-turn and didn’t stop driving till it was pretty dark. Then he stopped in a really dark spot and took the girl out of the trunk and put her in the back seat, because he was lonely and a little afraid that she was dead.

“Jay what did you think was going to happen when you gave this girl to Ann? Did you really think she was going to be happy?” Vivian asks.

“Yes, it’s her dream Grandma,” Jay says, looking at Vivian with sad heavy eyes.

“You are stupid, boy. You took her just to get into some Jesus freak’s pants.” Vivian reaches over to Jay’s head. “You’ve never even been to church.”

He flinches, but she grabs his ears and stretches them out. Opening them up. She’s often wanted to do this because he behaves as if they’ve been closed up for a long time and that’s why he does the things he does.

“Owww,” he tries to shake his head from her grip, but she is holding tight.

“Listen to me,” she says slowly. “What you’ve done is very very wrong Jay.”

“Let go,” he whimpers.

“No, I don’t think you understand. This kind of thing can hurt this little girl for the rest of her life. She smells like piss Jay, you made her pee on herself. What else did you do?”

“Nothing.”

“Did you touch her?”

“No grandma, I told you it’s not like that. I wanted to help. I wanted Ann to help her. I’m a fuckin stupid idiot, I get that. Don’t you think I get that?”

“I don’t know why you had to do this,” Vivian lets go of his ears and turns, again, to check that the girl is still on the couch. She is.

“Because I love Ann, and I just thought…” he takes a wobbly and deep breath and stares at her.

He is still a sad little boy, she thinks and tries hard not to feel sorry for him. She turns to watch the little girl on the couch. She looks like a zombie. Her shoulders are hunched over and her legs are hanging loosely to the ground. Twenty four hours before, she was safe and her parents were probably not worried that anything like this would happen. But now it has and her grandson is responsible. She does not feel sorry for him at all. She just wants to see the back of him.

“OK, this is what’s going to happen, you’re outta here. You’re on your own. I’m gonna take care of this, but you gotta leave. Tonight. I mean it”

“I don’t got nowhere to go.”

“Well, you were smart enough to get her here, you can get yourself
somewhere else.” Vivian looks over at the girl then back at Jay. “You go get your shit together. If you’re not out of here in one hour, I’m calling the police.”

“You’re not gonna call them now?”

“Go get ready.”

Vivian sits in the lazy boy next to the couch and watches the girl. She has finished eating.

“Why don’t you lie down and have a rest,” Vivian says in the sweetest voice she can manage.

The girl pulls her legs onto the couch and stares up to the ceiling. Vivian hopes she is not afraid of spider webs.

Jay is back in the room with in five minutes. He’s put a sweatshirt on and his eyes are wet. Vivian stands up and walks him over to the door to the garage. She wipes tears from his cheeks.

“I don’t want to see you for a while. I don’t want a reason to tell anyone about this you hear me?” Jay nods, drops his head down and sobs quietly. “You look at your grandma. I’m giving you a gift right now. You say thank you.”

“Thank you.”

“Don’t do anything stupid. Don’t hurt me anymore, you understand.”

“Yes.”

Jay wraps his arms around Vivian. She tries very hard not to cry as well, she breathes his scent in deeply and lets go of him. He turns to the door and shuts it behind him, softly and firmly. Vivian stands by the closed door and listens to his car drive away.

Vivian goes to the couch and looks at the little girl sleeping, mouth open, breathing loudly. Her hair is a nice chocolate brown, with big curls, her face sweet like a kid’s should be. She feels sorry for whoever is missing her. She shakes her awake gently.

Vivian takes the girl by the hand and walks to the garage. She feels the resistance of the unwilling child. She doesn’t look back at her face, she just keeps walking. She needs to secure the house. The police do it all of the time on the shows she watches. She never ever thought she would have the opportunity to secure anything. But here she is, bolting the big garage door with the lock Jay put on.

She turns off the lights in the garage and bolts the door from the garage to the house. Then the front door. This would constitute as the grand tour for the girl. Vivian stops for a second and worries that maybe the girl could be making a plan to escape based on everything she sees as they secure the parameter. So she looks at the girl, who is crying, silently.

She’s too upset to do anything, Vivian decides.

She continues. Their hands are sweaty and Vivian’s is sore from gripping the girl’s so firmly. She fumbles for the right key to each lock. They all look the same now that she has to use them in quick succession. She hasn’t really used all of the house locks in a while, and she remembers it was because of the keys being so difficult when all she wanted to do was go to sleep.

The three bolts and the handle lock on the front door are secured, she moves through the living room to the sliding glass door. The curtains are closed and she has to put her arm under the edge of the curtain by the handle lock. She doesn’t want to risk a neighbor seeing anything. She never knows if someone has got their binoculars fixed on her back patio at any given time.

She hears a couple whimpers from the girl. It’s bedtime.

This is going to be tricky. She thinks of drugging them both. Sleeping pills for the girls and uppers for her. She doesn’t need them, she won’t sleep anyway. There is always the possibility this little girl could hit her over the head with something if she dozed off. No, drugs are a great idea.

The girl stands at the kitchen sink, with her hands in front of her while Vivian grinds a sleeping pill into a mortar. She had considered just half, but this girl would be fighting sleep and the longer she is dozy, the better. She dishes out some ice cream and dusts the pill on top, then pours chocolate sauce over the dust.

She’s uses this recipe herself on sleepless nights.

She grabs the girl’s hand and takes her back to the couch. The girl takes the bowl of ice cream silently.

Vivian watches as the girl eats each bite, slowly. Too slow as far as she s concerned. She thinks about telling her to hurry up, but this is a fragile situation and she knows it. She cannot risk upsetting her and her staying up all night. She needs her to finish the ice cream and pass out.

She is proud of herself for exercising such restraint. In the old days she wouldn’t even think about the consequences of interrupting a child’s eating, TV watching or their sleep. If she was ready for them to be finished, she forced them do what she wanted. But now, and granted the situation is totally different, this child is a stranger and her own family was familiar to her, now she understands the need to sit back and wait. It will make this whole situation go much more smoothly and that’s what she wants, no dramas. No surprises.

When her daughter was 15 Vivian got the surprise of her life – a grandson.

Vivian knew where her daughter had been staying, knew the address and the reputation of the house and knew she shouldn’t go there, but she had anyway.

The place was filthy. She had brought homemade muffins and a casserole. Her daughter was happy to see her. Happy under a thick haze of whatever it was she had taken a short time before.

The house was worse than Vivian had expected. They went into her daughter’s bedroom where Vivian brushed the young girl’s hair. They talked about Dale and his job and the daughter said she thought he worked too much and that she worried about him. Vivian took this chance to compliment her on her sensitivity and said they were worried about her as well.

This changed the whole situation and the daughter flew into a rage that Vivian had experienced once before, the day her daughter left the family home. That was the day she ripped her bedroom apart and cut Vivian’s arm with a broken picture frame. Vivian believes it was an accident and holds no hard feelings and told no one the truth, not even Dale. The stitches came out fine and the scar is easy enough to cover up.

“You don’t know me, you have never known me. This is my life. My life,” they were the same words again. Vivian left the house and the food she had made. Left not knowing how long it would be until she saw the girl again. She realized on the drive home that she did not know how long it had been since she related to her daughter. And maybe this was all her fault.

Vivian thought about calling the police and reporting the place, but Dale, cool-headed, patient Dale, said “Stay quiet for a while, honey. She’s our daughter and we didn’t raise her to live like that. She’ll come home when she needs a good meal and a hug.”

One day her little girl showed up on their doorstep without warning holding the little boy. And just like Dale had said, she had a meal, a shower, a cuddle in front of the TV with her dad while Vivian dug baby clothes out of the back closet of the spare room.

As she rummaged through the musty closet, she did the math in her head and realized her daughter must have been at least three months pregnant the last she saw her.

Until that point she had only ever thought of her as a young child. She decided she must have lacked some fundamental aspect of parenthood. Doomed by unknowing. Maybe that is why she wasn’t able to have more than one child. She wanted so badly to have more than one, but it just hadn’t happened. Part of her was also jealous that her daughter had had a child.

They tried for years, but she didn’t get pregnant. Now she is thankful because she knows what it is like to lose a child, she knows she has the power to drive someone out of their house into a dirty place where there is no love at all. She is thankful they only had one. Anymore would have killed her.

In the morning, their daughter was gone again, but she left the baby.

“What are we gonna do Dale?” Vivian said loudly as she bounced the crying baby in her arms. He was heavy and wriggly and even though she had given him a good bath the night before, he smelled. Not a normal baby smell, it was a mix of cigarettes and car exhaust.

“Poor boy, you poor poor boy,” she said as she brought him close to her chest. He calmed down a little.

She sent Dale to the grocery store for bottles, formula and diapers. She wasn’t sure how long Jay was staying, but she was darned well going to be prepared.

After she heard his car drive off down the street, she started to cry. She had been holding it in ever since their daughter presented this little man to them. But it wasn’t a happy cry. They were the tears of a woman whose worst fears of failure had been set out before her. They had been set out and now they had woken up and were doing a little dance of celebration because they had won. She was an awful mother. The proof: a drug addict teen-parent daughter, willing to abandon her child.

When did things go so wrong? They never hit her, she was not abused in any way. She always got what she wanted. She didn’t have to share, there were no siblings. Dale had a good job, they went on vacations, took her to Disneyworld, Las Vegas. She got nice clothes for school.

Vivian had never had an explanation as to why their daughter chose to live such a disgusting and harmful life. Maybe there was no explanation. Maybe, as her psychologist said, she is an addict and there is very little anyone can do for an addict until that person wants to do for themselves.

But as her mother, Vivian believed she could help her daughter. Believed that she was the answer to her troubles.

So she cried as she looked at Jay because she didn’t know for sure how to do things differently for him.

Vivian is startled by a loud knock on the floor.

The girl has dropped the ice cream bowl. She has fallen asleep and there is melted ice cream on the leg of her pants. Vivian picks up the bowl and goes to the kitchen to get a washcloth. She wets it and rushes back to the couch. She grabs the quilt from the edge of the couch, the one she uses every night when she watches TV and she puts it over the little girl’s body.

She looks at the little girl sleeping, mouth open, breathing loudly. Her hair is a nice chocolate brown, with big curls, her face sweet like a kid’s should be. She looks nothing like her own daughter or Jay and that is a good thing. This is a fresh start and chance to do things right for once.

She goes through her drawers. She is not a big woman, but she doesn’t have much that would fit such a small girl. She finds a wrap skirt and a cardigan.

“Stupid boy.”

******

TEN

There is no reason to scare the girl, Vivian decides in order to gain the child’s trust, she has to be nice. She has to be a good guy.

Vivian is laying on the floor of her bedroom. She has been there most of the night.

“It is going to be a good day,” she whispers.

She is excited and happy to have something to do. Today is going to be so different than her usual routine of watching the news and maybe a golf tournament before going to the grocery store to buy the food for the week.

For the last 15 years, Saturday has been about Schroeder’s Market. She starts with the fruits and vegetables, moves on to bread and, ever since she found our about her lactose intolerance, she has had to walk swiftly past the dairy section. It’s been two years, and although she feels much better, she’d still like to stop in front of the yogurt and cheese and throw handfuls into her cart.

Once in a while she allows herself a small tub of ice cream, which she eats in her car in the parking lot of the store using a plastic spoon from the deli section. She only eats a couple of bites then throws the rest away.

There’s the obligatory chat with the meat guy. Then it’s over to the soda aisle where she grudgingly loads up the cart with Jay’s Mountain Dew – a 12-pack of cans for work and three two-liter bottles for his fridge in the garage. Everyone has their vices. Hers are the news and Malibu with ginger ale.

She didn’t really sleep at all. How could she?

It is all a little hard to believe, actually. Like something in a crime show. She loved crime shows. She preferred the ones on TV. Movies were over so quickly. She liked series. She liked characters she could follow week after week. She related to a lot of the stuff she saw on those shows. The drugs and the death. She had lived a little bit of everything.

And now this. Having this missing child in her care. Last night she listened to the radio every hour. On the news there was no mention of a missing child.

She thought there could be several reasons why it hadn’t been on the news.

First, maybe the parents were bad people, or druggies, maybe they didn’t care. If so, this would be a good place for her to be. Vivian does care and she is going to take very good care of this little girl.

She felt that was unlikely though. The girls manners and nice clothes made her think that someone takes good care of her.

Second, maybe the police were following other clues and they didn’t want the media involved. Didn’t want to spook whoever it was that has taken the girl. She laughed when she thought of this because she is that person. Well, Jay was, but if they came here now, they would think she was that person.

Third, they could have Jay right now. This thought stressed her out. He wouldn’t be able to keep a secret. Anyway if they found him and the girl’s hair and other evidence all over his car then they’d be here soon. They could show up any time now.

Jay probably slept in his car last night. She hopes he has some money. She can’t remember the last time they had a conversation. It’s either her telling him what to do or him slamming doors in her face or her slamming the door on him because he’s lazy and watching TV in the garage, surrounded by garbage and drinking that goddamned Mountain Dew.

She shakes the sleeping child lightly by the shoulder. When she sees Vivian, the girl is startled and starts to cry. Vivian shushes her and rubs her head. She quiets and Vivian suspects it is fear rather than ease that makes her behave.

Her stomach aches at the thought of being the person scaring this little girl.

“You take a shower. There are towels in there for you. When you’re done, you wrap that robe around you. I’ve got some nice clothes for you to wear. Then we’ll have breakfast,” Vivian chooses her words carefully. If things get bad, she doesn’t want anyone to think she had intentions of hurting this child.

The girl goes into the bathroom. Vivian sits outside of the door, waiting. When the girl is done, she comes out in the robe, most of which surrounds her on the floor. Vivian goes into the bathroom and collects the girl’s clothes. She starts to fold her little shirt and sees a name written on the tag in black permanent marker.

“Evee,” she says excited.

The girl turns quickly, with an angry look on her face.

Vivian is ashamed for a second then puts herself back in charge.

“That’s a nice name. You hungry?”

Evee nods.

“OK, let’s get you dressed then we’ll pig out.” Vivian pushes out an unconvincing laugh. The girl has no response. Vivian feels a mix of excitement and sadness at the sight of the little girl, Evee. In any other situation, she would be happy to have her here for a visit. They could play dolls and brush each others hair like she used to do with Jay’s mother when she was young. Vivian finds it hard to believe her daughter had ever been young, she got old so fast. She pushes away the bad feelings in her chest and tries to focus on the here and now.

She hands Evee back her underwear and tells her to change into the clothes on the bed and leaves the door to the bedroom open just a little to give her some privacy. Then Vivian tightens the odd fitting skirt with safety pins and buttons the cardigan to the top even though the weather report said it is going to be a hot day.

Vivian feeds her toasted waffles with maple syrup and orange juice. Evee sits still and doesn’t look at Vivian much. Vivian feels on edge. Things were better when Evee was sleeping. Now she feels like the bad guy and she is the good guy.

Evee, I just want you to understand that I’m not going to hurt you, Vivian says in her head. In her sincere voice. The one she only uses in her head. All of her other voices are dishonest. All of her other voices try to cover up her real feeling.

Evee chews and stares at her plate.

“What grade are you in?”

Evee stops chewing.

“I asked you a question, honey.”

“It’s summer,” Evee says, after a what seems to Vivian like a big swallow of food.

“Oh, right. Well what grade are you going to be in, then?”

“Secant,” Evee says. Her voice is soft and Vivian stops herself from correcting the girls’ pronunciation.

“Wow, second grade, that makes you, what, six?”

“I’m seven,” Evee’s shoulders are almost touching the edge of the table and her hair is hanging, still a little wet, all around her face.

Vivian feels some food caught in her throat and her stomach shifts. I am doing the right thing, she thinks. She has to think this.

“Oh, right. Sorry. Seven’s a good age. Lucky number, you know, seven.” Vivian hears a chirpy laugh escape from her chest. “Um, what do you want to be when you grow up, then?”

“I don’t know.”

“Really, you don’t know?”

“Rock n roll singer?”

“Oh my, that’s exciting,” Vivian hates that she sounds like such an old lady, desperate for this child’s approval, respect, who knows.

What had Jay wanted to be when he was Evee’s age? A garbage man. That was it. She wasn’t very happy when he made that announcement. Dale, as usual, was more encouraging. She just remembers saying something like “garbage men are dirty and smelly and I won’t allow anyone who is dirty and smelly to live in this house.”

She remembers the look on Jay’s face the night before as she yelled at him. He hasn’t changed at all since he was a little boy. She feels sad now, and guilty. She wishes, as she has often recently, that she could do things over again. She wishes she was a better person and didn’t fuck everything and everyone around her up as much as she had.

Look at the situation you’re in now, she screamed in her head. Totally fucked up.

Vivian stares past the girl toward the closed curtains. She is amazed that this could be true, that Jay could have pulled something like this off without getting caught. There has to be some sort of reason for thinks to have ended up this way. There must be some sort of point to it all.

There is a knock at the door. Evee jumps in her seat. Vivian’s heart pounds loudly as she sits very still. Another knock. The sound reverberates through the hallway and bounces off all of the walls around them. Vivian feels dizzy, but grabs the side of the table with her left hand and raises her right and pushes her finger against her lips.

“Shhhh.”

There is a loud thump. Evee kicked the bottom of the table.

“Shhhh,” Vivian says louder as she stares hard at the girl.

Another thud as the table bounces.

Vivian is up and over Evee in a second. She lifts the chair and pulls it far away from the table. She can hear Evee’s breaths. They are short and shallow. She puts her hand over Evee’s mouth. Evee stiffens under her grip and shakes her head. Vivian tightens her grip and put her mouth close to Evee’s ear.

“You have to do everything I tell you to do. Everything.”

She keeps her grip tight until she is sure there won’t be another knock.

“Don’t move. Don’t move.”

Vivian backs away from Evee, who is looking at her. There are red marks on the girl’s cheeks where her hands were.

I’ve already gone too far. Vivian thinks. But it was necessary.

Vivian walks backwards to the front door and looks out the peephole. A small group of people are at the end of her path, talking. Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Evee is still staring at her when she turns around.

“Just some people selling stuff.”

She rings her hands together as she walks back to the table. She kneels down so her face is level with Evee’s.

“Why did you do that?”

“I don’t know,” Evee’s voice is quiet. Vivian watches as the girl’s shoulders quiver.

“I told you to be quiet.”

“I want to go home.” Evee’s face is red in an instant and tears are racing down her round cheeks. Her high pitch whines hit Vivian’s ears with sharp jabs that make her flinch.

“I want to go home.”

Vivian asks if she wants any ice cream, but Evee continues crying loudly. Vivian takes her hand and leads the girl’s resistant body to the kitchen. She places Evee’s hands over the kitchen sink and repeats the ice cream recipe from the night before. She isn’t sure how much is too much to give a child, but right now she just can’t handle having her awake all day. She crumbles half of her normal dose over the vanilla scoops and pours on chocolate sauce. She’s had enough stress already today and so has the girl. It is time for some peace and quiet.

After a half and hour, Evee is asleep on the couch. Vivian nudges her to make sure she is out. Then she goes to the garage and gather’s Evee’s warm clothes from the dryer. She holds them close to her chest.

It is about noon, she can tell by the temperature in the house. It is hot and smells dry. She can tell it is a sunny day outside because of the bright light seeping onto the floor from the bottom of the closed curtains. She can hear children playing in the neighbor’s pool.

She sits in the lazy boy next to the couch and shakes Evee’s small colorfully striped pants out in front of her. They are well-made. Not cheap, she thinks.

If only all of this was about money.

When had Jay become so ideological? He had never been to church, had never talked about this Ann girl or gay people for that matter. But then, she never asked.

They haven’t spent much time together lately. She avoids him most days. She always has. Dale was the only parent Jay had ever had.

Since he died, she hadn’t had much time for Jay. She signed him up for sports and she went to some of his games. He liked baseball the most, he said. She sat in the stands, avoiding the young and enthusiastic parents. Sometimes she would watch the game. Jay wasn’t very good at hitting or catching the ball and his reflexes were slow. If he made mistakes, which he often did, Vivian found it hard not bringing them up on the way home or at home later, over dinner.

She knew she was mean to him. She never really connected with him. She just saw her daughter in him and she was waiting for him to screw up and now he has.

Her psychologist has said that Jay may remind Vivian of herself. This made her very angry. When the psychologist tried to go deeper and explore why she was so angry at the observation, Vivian said she didn’t want to talk about it.

Of course she doesn’t want to talk about that. To talk about all the reasons why she is angry would be like ripping herself apart right there in the doctor’s office, in the middle of town, in the middle of a Wednesday, with the rest of the week to get through. She isn’t ready to talk about her anger because it is all she has holding her together. Everything she has loved is gone and all that is left is anger. Her anger at Jay has somehow been able to get her through each day and she doesn’t want to think about it too much. She doesn’t want it to go away because if the anger went away, there would be nothing. Being angry at Jay somehow distracts her from the sadness that she is afraid could kill her if she let it take hold.

She picks up the remote control and turns on the television. She watches the news every day. She only buys a newspaper once a week on Tuesdays for the television listings. She gets all of her information from TV news. She likes the six o’clock news the best. Even though most days she has seen each of the stories several times by the time the six o’clock news comes on, it has the best theme music and anchors. The real professionals.

The screen blinks on and there she is, finally. Evee’s face is dead center in the middle of her TV screen above large red letters spelling out MISSING – Evee Morris Sims.

The excitement of the moment surprises her. She is actually involved in this situation. A policeman is speaking in front of several hovering microphones. Indirectly he is talking about her because the girl he is talking about is with her.

“We believe she has been taken out of the area. We are urging anyone who has any information at all to please contact the police.”

On the screen now there is an image of a house with people everywhere. There is police tape. Then an image of a red boot and some people hugging each other. Vivian tries to see if she can recognize Evee’s mother, but she can’t see anyone who she thinks could be her. A reporter’s voiceover lists the activities since the afternoon the day before.

“A thorough house by house search…

Helicopter…

Evee’s friends and classmates…

A community united to find this special little girl…

Back to you Mike and Colleen.”

What would Mike say if she called him and gave him an exclusive on this story? Would he get here before the police? He likes the dramatic stories. He’s always on the side of the freeway reporting the details of major car crashes.

A photo of Evee is up on the screen next to Mike’s face. Evee is on TV and laying next to her at the same time. It is unbelievable. The photo of Evee has been cropped. There are hands resting on Evee’s shoulders. She can see fingertips from under Evee’s curly hair, but the arms are cut off. Vivian can’t tell how many people are putting their hands on Evee, but she can tell that there are people standing behind the girl. She can’t tell if the hands belong to women or not. The smile on Evee’s face is so soft and relaxed. There is no sign of the scared little girl she knows in the photo. Her eyes

She looks over at Evee and knows this child is loved. There is no doubt about it. She is loved very much by whoever is in that photo and all of those people in the news story. She loves them back, this girl. She is capable of great love.

Vivian is sure now about what she needs to do to resolve this situation.

******

ELEVAN

Templeton says he hopes they don’t mind that he has brought Jackson along for moral support.

“Well, it’s not going to be a fucking vacation that’s for sure. It’s fierce and ferocious here right now, look at those people staring at us. We all need any support we can get. Nice to meet you Jackson. You’re very tan,” Olivia says, her voice rough from three sleepless nights and hours of crying and yelling.

She has insisted on answering the telephone whenever it rings, screaming at the journalists who have been calling since the press conference.

Some choice excerpts include: “When this is all said and done, your job is mine; I know your boss, I fucked your boss;” (Hana grabbed the phone away from her during that one.) But mostly she starts crying so hard that she can’t form words, so she screams into the phone until someone takes it away from her.

Before Templeton arrived, Olivia got someone to go and buy several bottles of alcohol in preparation for his arrival.

A neighbor couple came by with food and Olivia came out of the bedroom with nothing on under her flimsy sexy robe, the one Hana thought no third party would ever see. She grabbed the bottles of vodka and gin and walked to the kitchen exposing more of herself than she would under normal circumstances.

“Anybody want a drink?” she sung from the kitchen.

Hana was not sure what to do at first. She could have pushed Olivia back into the bedroom and get her dressed and pretended nothing was wrong in their perfect house or she could have asked the neighbors to leave.

The neighbors were a straight couple they didn’t know very well anyway. They had a son that Evee played with after school. Hana always got the impression that they didn’t really like their son playing with Evee. Maybe it was because she liked to have bike races with him and she usually won. Or maybe, probably, it was because they are lesbians. Anyway, they had never come by before and there they were on the couch, staring at her with tense lips and lasagna. What were they looking for? What did they think she would do, chat and offer them cucumber sandwiches?

So with a shaky voice and hot face she said: “I’m not trying to be rude, but this is a very hard time for us. We appreciate your concern, but we can’t really handle anymore visits and could you please tell the other neighbors to respect our privacy.”

Their faces dropped in unison and they hurried out of the house, leaving the food and wishing all the best. Hana felt guilty, of course, watching them walk down the path to the sidewalk, but as they met with other neighbors and stared back at her from the street, she realized that these people weren’t her friends.

Jackson is a new boyfriend. Fred left Templeton to return to the city. He said he was wrong, he was not the type to live the rural dream. He said he wanted to be around men in leather, not just one or two, but a room full. He wanted to be a slut again. Templeton let him go. He had fallen in love with New Mexico and he was making art that people were buying. He was living as a working artist for the first time in his life.

Templeton had been the hesitant one when Fred first suggested that they escape out of an epicenter of the epidemic. He hated the spaces between the houses and the dust when they first moved, but when his phone calls went from once a week to once a month, Olivia told Hana she thought he had decided to stay.

When Hana visited a couple weeks before, she asked him if he missed Fred. Templeton answered in the same way he has since Fred kissed him goodbye.

“I’m doing fine.” When he says fine, his voice gets higher and he shakes his head quickly. Sweeping the grief under a mental carpet.

Templeton has photos of Evee and drawings she has made for him hanging around his studio. He says when he is having a hard time or gets stuck, he looks at Evee and knows he is capable of creating something truly beautiful.

Now he is at their house. Olivia hugs him and Hana tries to say something to Jackson, something welcoming and host like, but her lips are shaking and all she can do is look at the floor as her tears splash on her feet.

“I’ll make some lunch,” Jackson says and excuses himself to the kitchen.

Templeton walks to their bedroom and Olivia and Hana follow. They all climb into the bed and lay on their backs. Templeton is in the middle and spreads his arms out. Hana and Olivia cuddle up to him and he wraps his arms around them. They lie there and breath together.

Even though Hana loves bed time with Templeton and Olivia, she is feeling claustrophobic and uncomfortable. She is holding her breath and trying to think of something to say. Something appropriate, but then she is angry again. Why should they be comforting each other when Evee is out there? Out there away from them.

“I like him,” Olivia says.

“I told him we’re going to need some space,” Templeton says. “But when I need him, I’m really going to need him.”

Olivia reaches over and holds Hana’s arm.

“I never saw this coming,” Templeton says.

“I can’t lay here very long. I can’t do this without her. It’s not right,” Hana sits up and looks at Olivia and Templeton. Olivia’s face is pale. She’s got dark lines under her eyes and Templeton looks tired. They both look back at her.

“I don’t know what to do? I can’t sit still, I can’t go looking for her because I am afraid I will miss something here or while my head is turned left, I will miss seeing her on my right. I can’t sleep. I’m so scared.”

Arms wrap around her and Olivia and Templeton hold her as she relaxes her body little by little enough to let their warmth sink in.

“I’m pregnant,” Hana says and squeezes her eyes shut.

There is silence. It lasts too long for Hana. She doesn’t know what to say next.

“I know it’s bad timing.”

“Are you kidding me Hana? Are you kidding?” Olivia sounds angry.

Maybe she shouldn’t have said anything. Maybe she should have an abortion. If this all goes wrong, if Evee never comes home, Olivia might not want to be with her anymore. She shouldn’t have said anything at all. She should have kept this to herself. Kept this selfish dream, this young and irrational hope of belonging, a secret.

“I’m sorry Olivia,” Hana says.

Olivia turns her head and looks at Hana. Her eyes are clear. For the first time since Evee was taken, her eyes are connecting to Hana.

“Don’t be sorry. Hana, this is good. This is the best thing I’ve heard in days.”

“I’m sorry,” Hana says again, but she hadn’t meant to. She wanted to say I love you more than anything Olivia. But sorry is all she feels. Everything she is feeling is saturated with sorrow for Evee. Olivia equals Evee, equals them and she is so sorry for them right now.

Templeton kisses her on the cheek. Her face is wet with his tears.

“She’s on her way home, I know she is,” Templeton says.

Hana remembers the day he told her their future was rosy and that has been true, with the exception of the past few days. Maybe he could be right again.

******

TWELVE

On her way out of town Vivian stops for gas. A news report about Evee is blasting out of the overhead speakers of the bright gas station. It is so loud and there is no chance of tuning it out.

…Missing for two days. Police are treating it as a kidnapping… No suspects… Call the hotline…

Vivian has never made the news or been associated with the news in her life. She watches the news everyday. She also watches crime shows, court shows and newsmagazine programs. She enjoys the stories people tell on these programs. She watches with interest as people’s lives change. Her life has been the same for so long. Just her and Jay in the garage. Just her and jigsaw puzzles and volunteering at the hospice. Watching the people die. TV is better.

This, what is happening right now in her life, could be on TV one day. That would be the worst thing because then she’d be on TV and that would change her life. People would see her story. What would she do? She couldn’t go back to how things were before, not after having been exposed to the whole country.

Her hand shakes as she inserts her bank card into slot on the gas pump. She punches the numbers into the keypad and thinks about the information traveling from this machine to some computer that will bring up a code which represents her purchases and patterns. If she was suspected at all at this moment, she could be tracked down very easily and followed. Definitely followed.

She hits cancel several times before the transaction goes through. The machine beeps and a long receipt comes out, she rips it up into small pieces. She opens the driver door to her car and leans in to get some cash out of her purse, she looks in the back to check that Evee is still asleep. She walks toward the gas station store looking at the underside of the yellow awning for security cameras, when she sees them she imagines herself in black and white.

She opens the door to the shop and sets the buzzer off as she steps inside. Two teenage boys at her right are looking at a magazine and giggling. They don’t look up as she walks by, why should they? She’s just an old lady. She looks down the candy aisle and tries to decide what Evee would like. She chooses some wrapped fruit candies and licorice. She has learned that kids prefer the red more than the black stuff. She walks toward the attendant, who is standing with both hands on the counter as if he has been waiting for her all day.

As she pulls onto the highway heading east, she grips the steering wheel tight. She knows it’s wrong, but she is excited by the whole situation. Of course the thought of this girl’s family being scared out of their heads doesn’t make her feel good, so she tries not to think about them. Instead she thinks about how she is doing something covert right now, something illegal, but she is the good guy and the bad guy at the same time.

She has never done anything very illegal before. She has run red lights and driven after a few too many drinks and there was a time when she experimented with marijuana with Dale and his sister who was visiting from up north. It would have been rude to refuse her, she grew the marijuana and Vivian decided that if she had had another job, like an Avon lady, she would try her product, and this was basically the same thing. She has manners.

This is very illegal, but she is no criminal.

She watches her speed, this stretch of the highway is popular with police looking to make their quota. If she were to be stopped, the cop would notice Evee and if he had been paying attention at the briefing at the beginning of his shift, he would recognize the little girl form the photos they showed him. If he was attentive he would notice that Vivian is acting odd, anxious. He would tell her he would be right back and she would watch him in her rear view mirror as he walked confidently back to his squad car to radio headquarters about the missing girl. She can see all of this because she has seen it on TV so many times. Strong confident police officers have good instincts and the one who stops her would have doubts about his job. Just before he stops her, he will be bored. He will be dreading the rest of the day, a long shift of stopping speeders who would rather spit in his face than hand over their drivers licenses.

Finding the girl would give him satisfaction. The same satisfaction it has given her to take care of Evee. She hasn’t hurt her. She wants only to take care of her.

She would watch the cop walk back toward her car and just as he is close to her window she would speed away. There are malls around here that she could drive to. She would leave the girl in the car, in the parking lot, no doubt about it. Nothing is worth getting caught. She would be OK. She could find her way home.

Vivian is going seventy when she looks back at the speedometer. She releases her foot from the accelerator. Her heart speeds up as she looks in the rear view mirror and out the windows for police cars. There aren’t any around.

If she had been able to choose the type of TV drama her life would turn into, this wouldn’t be the one. She would have liked a love story. Her love story, the one she had with Dale. She would have liked it to continue. She would sit through a thousand commercials if she could have Dale back.

At least she won’t be in front of the TV tonight. She won’t fall asleep upright with the remote in her lap and an ache in her neck.

This is how her life has been for years. No friends coming by to have lunch. No messages on the answering machine. The only phone calls she gets are from telemarketers.

Usually she hangs up, but there was one girl last week. She sounded so much like her daughter. She is embarrassed now as she thinks about how much she needed to talk to her.

“Hello is Vivian Chase there?”

“Yes, this is Vivian.”

“Hello, how are you this evening? Is it all right if I refer to you as Vivian, Mrs. Chase? I’m calling you today from Atlantic Star Cable. Have you heard of Atlantic Star Cable, Vivian?”

Each time the woman spoke, Vivian could hear the voices of what sounded like dozens of other people having similar conversations. When the woman finished her sentences the line went quiet.

“Where are you calling from?”

“Uh, I’m calling on behalf of Atlantic Star Cable.”

“No, I mean where are you?”

“I’m calling you this evening regarding your current cable service. May I ask, do you currently have cable service, Vivian?”

“Sorry, I’m not sure I’ve heard of the company.”

The line is quiet and Vivian imagined the woman trying to find the right script. “Atlantic Star Cable is America’s…” Vivian listened to the other voices on the line as the girl spoke. She imagined the heads of the people in the room nodding and tilting. Dozens of people talking to dozens of other people at that very moment. Fingers pushing buttons, making their way down lists of names and phone numbers. Styrofoam coffee cups with lipstick stains and teeth marks.

She thought about the woman at the hospice and how they have tea breaks twice a day. She is always invited, but doesn’t join in. She did, twice, but each time they talked about their families and their adorable grandchildren. She didn’t say anything and they didn’t ask. What would she have said anyway? Everything in her life has turned to shit and now her only form of companionship is her fucked-up grandson and the television. The place is already depressing enough, she doesn’t need to share.

“Which company currently provides your cable service, Vivian?”

“Uh, Fortune Cable.”

“OK, thank you.” The woman’s ‘you’ trailed off slowly.

“How many people are in that room with you?” Vivian asked and a strong sense of sadness overcame her at the thought of people together in a room, laughing, talking.

“Excuse me?”

“Do you like your job?”

“Um, I’m not really supposed to talk about myself?”

“That’s funny. That’s usually why people call other people, to talk about themselves.” She heard a small laugh over a burst of chatter. She had the urge to tell this woman about her life, to tell her the story of how she became so lonely and sad. About Dale dying without any warning and her failure as a mother and now grandmother. Instead she hung the phone up and poured herself a drink.

She looks in the rear view mirror now and is startled to see Evee staring back at her. Vivian scrunches her nose in what she would like to think of as a peace offering. She tries to read the child’s expression, but she just looks tired.

“You hungry?”

Evee nods slowly, turning her head back to the outside world.

“You like McDonald’s?” She looks quickly back at Vivian in the mirror and nods a little faster. Vivian is grateful for the little success. “Good. What would you like to eat?”

“Happy meal.”

“Perfect.” She drives another ten minutes before she sees a McDonald’s, pulls into the drive through.

“How about a chocolate sundae?”

Another quick nod from the back seat. This is the way it’s going to be, she thinks. Just fine. She places her order into the electronic sign and turns her body to face Evee. Her hands are sweating now as she realizes the person at the drive through will be able to see inside the car. What if there is a newspaper in the staff room of the McDonald’s, opened to the page with Evee’s photo on it.

“Can you do me a favor and put that hat back on, please?” Evee puts the cap on. Vivian is thankful that the girl’s hair is messy and blocking part of her face. She drives up to the window to pay. Her breathing is shallow and quick, but the guy doesn’t even look into the backseat. She pulls away and hands Evee the food.

“You should eat the ice cream first. Don’t let it melt.”

“First,” She says excitedly as she searches through her bag of food. “I got the Apple Man Fruit Fella.”

“Wow, you’re lucky.”

“Molly has all the Fruit Fellas except Apple Man. I never get McDonald’s.”

“Well, then it’s extra special.” Vivian makes a U-turn and heads back to the highway.

“Where are we going?”

“Where do you want to go?”

“To see my mom and okaasan.”

Vivian is not sure what she said after mom. “OK, then that’s where we’ll go.”

“Really?”

“Yep. Eat your food.”

She watches her in the mirror, relieved that the food is preoccupying Evee.

“Taste good?” She gets a nod.

Food was always her secret weapon with Jay as well. McDonald’s, Twinkies, M&M’s. Something about the chemicals they use must numb children’s brains in some way. For the short term anyway. Anything that works is preferable to a child that won’t shut up or behave. That’s what those child rearing books don’t tell new parents. It’s what every struggling mother learns. Anything that works is OK.

Once, when Jay was 10 and bouncing off the walls, she gave him a couple shots of Malibu mixed in some warm milk. It was not long after Dale passed away and she couldn’t handle Jay’s incessant jumping and flailing around the house – a regular bedtime activity. She sent him to his bedroom and told him if he was in bed in his jammies she’d bring him a treat. She made herself a Malibu and ginger ale, put a couple Oreos on a plate and made Jay’s concoction, which did the trick. But that was just once. Three years later he discovered the Mountain Dew and Vivian decided it was worth the money to get the garage sound proofed and she moved him out there.

She hears crying, looks in the rear view mirror to see Evee sobbing. Her mouth is open and there is chocolate sauce on her cheeks.

“What’s wrong?”

“I want okaasan”

“You’ll be home soon.”

“That man was scary.”

“Yes, yes he was. But he’s not a bad man, he just made a bad mistake.”

******

THIRTEEN

Olivia hasn’t smoked since she was in high school. From what she’s told Hana, she used to sit on the old picnic table in her mom’s backyard and stare that the tops of the trees next door. She said it helped her think. At the time she was considering telling her mom she was gay and planning her escape if it turned out Carol was not as liberal as she seemed to be.

She was also thinking about having a baby. The two things didn’t go together so well, but she was young and anything was possible. Hana has never understood how Olivia could want a baby at sixteen or how Olivia wanted to be a mother since she was a young child herself. When Hana was 16 she couldn’t wait to be on her own, if Olivia hadn’t come along, she would still be on her own. She is so glad Olivia came along and that Olivia didn’t have a baby without her.

Hana watches her from the kitchen window now. She is so beautiful. Hana watches her bring the cigarette to her lips and inhale. She could be smoking for an ad, if there were still ads for smoking. Maybe a movie. She looks like the sexy academic who no one would suspect of being a smoker, but she is and she loves it.

Maybe she is planning her escape again, Hana thinks. It’s the same backyard, the same view. The situation is vastly different, but she is still Olivia.

Jackson gave Olivia that whole pack when she asked if she could have one. It’s his way, Templeton says. He’s a pleaser that’s why he likes him. Templeton has become accustomed to a life of leisure.

“Hana, where’s Olivia?” Templeton runs in from the living room and sees Olivia outside. “Olivia, the police want to talk to you guys.”

Olivia’s smoky scent leads the three of them to the living room, ready again for news, any news. Another cop is standing in front of them now. Hana hasn’t spoken to this one yet. She grabs Olivia’s hand, it is cold and she can’t tell if she is shaking, or if it is Olivia.

“We have taken a young man into custody,” the cop says.

“Did you find Evee?” Hana says quickly, squeezing Olivia’s hand.

“No, we haven’t. We have found hair and a red boot matching your daughter’s in the trunk of this man’s car.”

“Have you asked him where she is? What did he do with her?” Olivia is screaming as much as she can with her weak voice. Templeton holds her tight.

Hana realizes that this is it. The look on the cop’s face. The factoids she read in the pamphlet about missing children that offered nothing close to reassurance. After three hours, it said, it is unlikely that an abducted child will be found alive.

It’s been three days.

Olivia’s cries are coming from behind Hana now. She is running out the back door. Templeton follows her and Hana realizes she is screaming because Evee is probably dead. That hadn’t been true a minute ago, but now it is. A young man, traces of Evee, but nothing else.

“Have you found anything, have you asked him what he did with her?” Jackson asks. Hana hadn’t realized he was standing next to her.

“No, we haven’t. He is in custody, so we are hoping to get something out of him soon. We will let you know if we find anything.”

Hana sits on the couch. Jackson follows the police officer out the front door. Hana watches as they talk in her driveway. She would like to turn herself off right now.

******

FOURTEEN

The first time Vivian and Dale visited Las Vegas, they had only been married 22 hours. She was ready for fun and so was Dale. Vegas had the reputation as a place where you could stay up all night and never get bored. You could drink as much as you wanted and no one would look at you funny. It was the place you went if you were looking for the opposite of a wholesome family vacation.

The night they arrived, they went dancing and Dale twirled Vivian around like he’d wanted to do at their wedding, but they weren’t allowed to boogie in the courthouse. Vivian’s remembers her dress floating around her thighs, she felt like Miss America.

“She’s my wife,” Dale yelled to the other people on the dance floor. Vivian heard cheers and whistles. She buried her head in his neck, inhaling his smoky scent. She never wanted to leave.

The second time Vivian and Dale visited Las Vegas, Jay’s mom was seven and the only thing that could get her out of the swimming pool was playing roulette with her dad. They won $1000 together that weekend.

The last time Vivian and Dale visited Las Vegas, Jay’s mom was 15, and pregnant as they later found out living in the drug house. She hadn’t returned Vivian’s calls and she never thanked her for the money she sent each month. Dale thought the trip would be good for them and it was. They drove the same roads Vivian is driving today and as a rule they didn’t talk about anything that made them sad.

If Vivian was quiet for too long, Dale would either start a word association list that would eventually have them laughing so hard Vivian was afraid they’d crash or he’d pull the car over to the side of the road and do his best to seduce her. Although usually a six-hour drive, that day it took them ten hours to get Vegas.

As Vivian drives now, with the sun high, transporting this little misplaced girl, she has moved beyond sad, so she tries her own list. Flower, cracks, dollar, chain, sick. Fuck. She misses Dale.

The road sign tell her there is only sixty five miles to go. An hour and a half and then this will all be over . She can drive away, back to her life, her house and her own problems. She speeds up, no longer excited, no longer lying to herself, thinking that she is doing something good. If this doesn’t catch up with her soon, it will later. Evee’s family will look for her, and Jay. They aren’t just going to be satisfied with having her back, they are going to come after her. Revenge is real.

******

FIFTEEN

This is the first time she has driven to Vegas by herself. It has grown. She can’t believe how ugly it is, but beautiful at the same time. In the daylight it loses a lot of its luster. The streets go on forever flanked by drab buildings and parked cars. The massive billboards, which light up the sky in the dark, look flat and intrusive during the day. As she approaches Freemont Street, she is shocked to see that it has been closed to traffic. It’s the only way she’s ever gone. She panics a little and pulls over.

She looks in the rear-view mirror to check on Evee, who is looking out the window.

“Neat, huh?” she says, trying for enthusiasm.

“My mom’s here?”

“She will be soon.

She gets her map out of her purse. And plans a new route. Only a few minutes to go then she will turn around and drive home. Then who knows what. Sell the house. Go on vacation. Wake up tomorrow and watch the happy ending on the news. She looks at Evee, who is playing with the toy.

“Can I have that cap?” Vivian snaps and points her fingers towards the baseball cap on the floor next to Evee’s bare feet. Vivian puts it on.

“Do you know the phone number at your mom’s house?”

Evee does not respond

“Do you know your phone number?” she says, sternly.

Evee nods.

“Listen, I’m gonna drop you off soon. Your mom’s gonna come get you, OK. Now, I want you to remember two very important things, OK? Number one, you tell whoever asks that this has all been a big mistake. The man who took you… he made a big mistake. People make mistakes. You understand? And don’t forget to tell them that nobody hurt you.”

Vivian takes a breath and points at Evee whose face seems to be sagging under the weight of her situation. No child should look that sad. Vivian can’t wait to get rid of her.

“Number two. OK, you give someone your phone number. You tell them your name and make them call your mom. She’s waiting for your call. She wants to talk to you,” Vivian is caught there and can’t get anymore words out. She turns her body back to the steering wheel and the road, and puts the car in drive and pulls out of the gas station.

When Vivian and Dale visited Vegas, they always stayed at the Golden Nugget. It had been lucky for them.

She drives slowly past the entrance now.

“You see that building? I’m gonna stop right up here and I want you to run back and go inside as fast as you can, OK. I want you to go in there and remember those two things I told you? What were they?”

“It’s all a mistake and my mom’s phone number.”

“And nobody hurt you. Don’t forget that part.”

“Where are you going?”

“I’m going… Never mind. You just do what I told you.”

Vivian stops the car beyond the entrance of the Golden Nugget.

“Now get out,” Evee doesn’t move. “Get out,” she yells.

Evee starts crying as she struggles to get her seatbelt undone. Vivian is crying now as well as she reaches in the back to help. She sees the fear on Evee’s face as she reaches. Evee unclips the latch before Vivian can get to it and cringes away from her and out the rear door on the driver’s side. Vivian watches her. She is running fast. She disappears, swallowed up through the double doors.

Vivian puts the car in drive and lets it crawl forward on its own without pushing on the gas pedal. She is exhausted. She looks at the long, straight road ahead of her and wonders what it would be like to have nothing to feel sad about.

******

SIXTEEN

Evee runs out of the car as fast as she can, her feet moving over the shiny cool tiles. She sees the set of double doors in front of her. She doesn’t look back. Her heart is beating very fast and the clothes that woman put on her are hanging loosely over her body.

She reaches up and pulls open one of the heavy doors and an avalanche of noise rolls over her. Bells and cling clang sounds get louder as she steps inside the room. Even though there are lights everywhere, it is really dark. She feels like she has walked inside her Light Bright toy after putting in all the little plastic pegs. Or like when she put her face up real close to the TV. She waited till her mama and okaasan were out of the room and then she pressed her face up to the glass and saw bright reds, blues and greens flashing blurry just like in this place.

She breathes in a thick smell of smoke and puts her hand over her mouth like her mama always does before she tells the person “do you mind, my daughter is allergic.” She knows she’s not allergic, but she doesn’t like the smell anyway.

Someone opens the door behind her and she is almost run over by a group of people dressed in fancy shiny clothes and big hats. One of them has a small dog on a leash dressed in a tuxedo with a top hat. She wants to follow them to see if they are going somewhere crazy, but she doesn’t, she has to call her house.

She looks to her left. There is a long yellow carpeted walkway and all she can see are rows of machines with people, old people sitting in front of them pulling down a metal bar and pushing buttons over and over. To her right it’s the same thing. Straight ahead there are round tables with people in uniforms giving regular people cards. One man is sitting with his head down on the table and another man is patting him on the back.

Behind those tables far on the back wall she sees a phone. She starts running straight ahead for it, taking her hand off her mouth – she feels brave. She is running fast. If that man, Jay is here, he’s not going to catch her again because there is a clear path between her and the phone.

“Hey, no running!” She hears a voice call out like at the pool and she slows a little, speed walking.

She makes it to the phone and reaches as high as she can to get the receiver. She has to jump just a little to get it off the holder. She puts it up to her ear and hears the dial tone. She can’t reach the numbers to dial. She jumps several times, but can only hit random digits. She feels like it is very unfair that she can’t reach the numbers when it is so important to call her house.

“That’s not a toy,” a deep voice says from behind her. She turns around to see a man standing over her. He is very tall and fatter than okaasan and he has dark skin and is wearing a bright yellow jacket with the words Golden Nugget on it. He squats down to her level. “You got an important phone call to make?” he laughs and she sees his white teeth.

“I wanna call my house.”

“That phone takes money, you got any of that? No, well then, you’re out of luck.”

“No! I want to call my house. I want my mommy,” Evee starts crying loudly. She wants this man to go away and tries to tell him, but he just looks around like he doesn’t understand what she is saying.

“Shush sweetie. Are you lost?”

Evee just wants it all to be over. Wants her moms there right now.

“OK, OK.” He takes hold of her hand as he stands up, but she hits his hand as hard as she can and screams. “Ouch, it’s OK, it’s OK.”

Evee can see that she did hurt him and she is glad. But he isn’t angry, not like the lady.

“We can go call your mom over there at that desk, you see that desk over there?”

The man is pointing to a round place in the wall with a sign in glittery letters that says INFORMATION. There is a counter and a woman standing behind it. Evee’s breath is heavy and her throat hurts from screaming. She has decided she is not going to talk to the woman at the desk. She doesn’t want to talk to anybody except people at her house. She might talk to this man if he smiles at her before they get to the desk.

The man is on one knee and his face is very big in front of hers.

“Hey, are you listening?” the man laughs and Evee sees his teeth again. She shakes her head because she hadn’t heard anything he said. She didn’t even see him put his knee on the floor.

“Are you staying in this hotel?”

She shakes her head again. He smiles. He can hold her hand this time. But he doesn’t try. The walk together. She leans into his leg a little when she sees a lot of the old people staring at her from the rows as she walks past.

When they get to the desk, the man leans over the counter and says something to the woman that Evee can’t hear. The woman looks at Evee and opens a door hidden in the wall to let them in and then she gets out.

“You watch the desk for me, Lenny.”

“Glenda, I’m on duty.”

“I need a cigarette. I’ll just be over here. Pretty please.”

Evee watches the woman blow the man a kiss. He looks down at her and shakes his head, laughing a little.

“She’s dangerous.” He motions for Evee to sit in a chair in the back of the alcove. “My name is Lenny, what’s yours?” He holds his hand out to her and she puts her hand into his.

“Evee,” she says as she lets him wrap his big hand around hers and shake.

He lets go and picks up the phone. “Hiya, this is Lenny in security, I need to make a call.” He puts his hand over the receiver “What’s the number?”

She tells him her home phone number, the one she is only supposed to give out in emergencies, like this one. As they wait, he makes a funny face. She wants to laugh, but she doesn’t. It won’t come out.

“That didn’t go through. He puts the phone down. Where do you live?”

“Ventura.”

“Ventura? California, right? That’s pretty far away. Who are you here with?”

“The lady dropped me off outside.”

“What lady?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t like her.”

Lenny scratches his head and picks up the phone again. “Hi, Lenny here again, can you try a number in Ventura, California, I don’t know the area code.”

Evee watches Lenny’s face. He is not being funny this time.

“Hello. Hi, I’m calling from the Golden Nugget in Vegas, Las Vegas. I’m looking for Evee’s mom?” he pauses. “Yes, she’s here with me now. Ok, OK just a second,” Lenny hands the phone to her. “Your mom.”

“Evee, Evee! Are you OK baby?”

Evee starts to cry as she talks and has a hard time getting the words out.

“I want to come home.”

“You’re going to be home real soon. We’ll come get you.”

Then all Evee can here is yelling and her mom crying.

“Evee, honey, are you OK?” It’s okaasan.

“Yes,” Evee wants to cry and laugh and she has to go pee so bad now. Her stomach hurts too and there is so much noise in this place and on the phone and from Lenny’s walkie talkie.

“I wanna come home. Please come get me.”

“Evee the police are going to come see you, OK. Don’t be scared baby. You are OK now. You are safe.”

Okaasan said she would never lie to Evee. She said that when Evee asked her if the tooth fairy was real or fake. She wanted to know the truth. Okaasan said, I don’t ever want to lie to you and if you want to believe in the tooth fairy, you can believe.

“No, is it real or not real?”

“Not real, but maybe we shouldn’t tell your mom because she really likes it when she gets to leave money under your pillow.”

Two more men in yellow jackets come over to the desk in the wall. Lenny is talking to them. Evee believes she is safe now. Now that she is surrounded by tall people in yellow that work in this place and her moms are going to come get her.

Glenda comes back to the counter, and leans on it from the outside. Lenny says something to her and she looks at Evee with raised eyebrows.

She is holding Lenny’s hand very tight now and walking on the yellow carpet past noisy machines and pasty white old people legs and ladies with black tights on and no pants with drinks and money everywhere. Money is on their trays and the sound of coins dropping into buckets and machines counting money. It is exciting. She thinks the lady was not so mean for taking her here. Nothing bad can happen here, she thinks.

Evee knows what this place reminds her of, the fair and the tent with the paintings of the bearded lady and the tattooed man and other strange looking people on the outside. Okaasan said they couldn’t go in because she didn’t want to pay money to objify people. Mama, laughed and said she wasn’t interested either, but Evee had been, but then her and mama went on the ferris wheel and then got cotton candy, so the bearded lady wasn’t so important anymore.

When they all get onto the elevator, the tallest yellow jacket man tells all the other people in the elevator to get out and they do. She squeezes Lenny’s hand and moves closer to his leg and looks at the floor. She is scared again. It’s like at the beach when a wave she didn’t see, hits the side of her head and pushes her under. That’s what this feels like. The elevator is so small and the trunk was hot and she still needs to pee so bad.

******

SEVENTEEN

Vivian drives for three and a half hours deep into the desert. Wishing she was in the south of France, or even Bakersfield, anywhere that would get her out of this car with Evee’s fingerprints and hair all over it.

She drives the many back roads through the desert. She talks to no one. She doesn’t take toilet breaks, holding it instead. It’s her penance. She holds it for miles and miles. Lifting herself off the seat when she passes over a bump or pothole. Visualizing the sides of her bladder splitting under the strain of filtered coffee and sugar. The pain is nothing compared to what the parents – whoever they are, must be going through. She knows.

The pain of losing your daughter to drugs. And your husband in the middle of the night on a dark road with badly marked lanes and steep embankments. Nothing could be as bad as that, and she continues to hold it. But she did the right thing in this situation. What else could she have done? What kind of person turns in their own family. He was just so stupid.

She decides she won’t go home. Too risky. She will drive to Arizona. Her sister’s house. Just a couple of days. She’ll call the hospice from a payphone. There’s nobody else expecting her. Nothing she is scheduled to do. Nobody to wait for her anywhere. It’s almost like she doesn’t exist.

“What a track record,” she says as she thinks about Jay and his mother. One kidnapper and one drug addict. She sure knows how to fuck them up.

She opens the glove compartment looking for the white tape. The car swerves as she reaches for it. She goes off the road a little. She puts the tape in. Turns the volume up and screams along to the song.

We had a love, a love, a love you don’t find everyday

She thinks about the movie someone could make about this whole thing. It would be a great story. She decides Kathleen Turner would play her and someone tall and handsome could play Dale. She would want him in every scene with her. Standing over her. Encouraging her. Loving her like he did when he was alive. He never blamed her for what happened to their daughter. Never took any of it out on her. All he did was die. And that’s something she will always be angry at him for.

“God dammit Dale, I told you I didn’t need ice cream. Always trying so hard with me. You always tried so hard. I love you. No matter what I love you.”

I love you Viv.

Vivian pulls to the side of the road. The gravel under the car kicking up clouds of glowing dust.

It has been years since Dale has spoken back to her. And she swears she has just heard him.

“Dale?”

Yes love.

“Dale, where have you been? I’ve missed you so much. I’m in a mess here.”

Oh Viv, you’ve done the right thing. There’s no harm done.

“But I should have gone to the police, right? Maybe it would have been the right thing to do.”

Well there’s right and there’s right, Viv. You did what you thought best, for everyone involved.

“I’ve missed you so much. I can’t say how much, it hurts so bad still.”

Why don’t you go to the bathroom Viv. Ease yourself on dear.

Vivian opens her door and feels the heat coming out from under the car and a soft breeze tickles the hair on her arms. It sends a tingle through her that she attributes to Dale. She looks at the passenger seat. It is empty. Suddenly she is hit with anxiety as she realizes the extreme silence she is in. She sets her feet on the gravel and stands. Her bladder sore. Her legs stiff. She turns her body towards the car and spreads her legs. She pulls her pants down and grips the seat she has been sitting in all day.

She cries with the relief. A loud cry with more noise than tears.

The crying reminds her of the day she had to identify Dale’s body. The police told her it would be a good idea to bring someone with her. She didn’t because the only person she would have wanted support from was Dale. How inconsiderate that they would expect anyone else to take his place of importance in her life. How inconsiderate of them to force her to look at his broken body.

Later she was grateful to have been able to see him. To spend time alone with him before the funeral. She didn’t take anyone with her.

Dale had shown up that morning anyway. He had encouraged her to eat some cereal before she left the house. Told her she needed to take care of herself, for him. Over the past several years he has shown up to remind her that he is still expecting a lot from her so she better look after herself, and she has to some extent.

Vivian squats a while after she has finished. Drying. Noticing the heat of the car and desert on her bare skin. Imagining, for a second, sunbathing in a bright swimsuit suitable for a woman her age. A big hat and a drink, with ice cracking in a tall glass.

She stands and pulls up her pants. She stretches her arms above her head and leans slowly to her left, then her right. She twists her torso and looks up and down the dark road. No cars have passed the whole time she has been stopped. She is in the middle of nowhere.

“Dale, you still here?” Then she whistles, out of habit. It’s what they used to do when they had been separated at swap meets or shopping malls. It was their sign that is was time to leave, or at least reunite, grab hands and walk together.

She hears a whistle.

“I don’t know what to do next. I’m in a mess, Dale. I don’t feel good about this.”

What if you went home? Home’s safe.

“It is home. And I can go back to normal, like nothing happened. If I went right now I could be back before any of the neighbors wake up.”

Vivian feels refreshed and excited. She gets back into her car and turns on the ignition. She hasn’t done anything wrong. Dale is with her and she is going home. He thinks it is a good idea and so it is. She turns the steering wheel hard and pushes the accelerator. The wheels spin out on the gravel and she lets out a holler at the sound and the dust glowing red and yellow on all sides of the car. The car lurches forward and she sees the dark desert swirl in front of her. She is back on the smooth road again heading in the direction she had come. A lighter load in all respects.

From this moment forward, she decides, her life is going to mean something.

She whoops again.

“From this moment forward, my life’s going to mean something,” she yells as loud as she can. Her throat feels raw, but she likes it.

Her hands grip the steering wheel tight and she puts her foot down hard on the gas. The car speeds to 100mph. She sees nothing but the road in front of her and that’s all she needs.

******

EIGHTEEN

Evee can see forever out the window. There is a blue pyramid building and hundreds of other buildings. She sees a city underneath her and wonders how many little kids are playing on the streets right now.

She feels a little nervous as she presses her head against the cool window. Below she sees the white tops of roofs and cars moving around like little ants. Lenny stands next to her and the police sit in chairs.

Everyone is being nice to her even when she cried a lot because they made her look at a picture of the man who put her in the trunk. Lenny told her that she could squeeze his hand really hard and it would make her feel less scared. It worked a little, but her hand got tired quickly. He told her she was very brave.

She wants to be friends with Lenny forever. She thinks mama and okaasan will really like him, too. Templeton can draw his picture and she could take him to school. With all those people around all the time, she will be safe for the rest of her life.

Lenny sits next to her as she eats the grilled cheese and French fries that the hotel gave her. The food is so warm and her stomach is not feeling so sick anymore and it feels good to eat. She likes the feeling of the cold water filling her belly. It’s like the ocean in the middle of summer when the air outside is so warm that the water cools her down so she can play for longer. In and out of the water all day as mom and okaasan watch her from the shore and run in together laughing.

Then the door opens so quickly it hits the wall hard and scares Evee until she sees mama and okaasan running towards her. She sits there frozen. She is picked up and squeezed tight. She is smashed into bodies and someone is rubbing her head and kissing her face. She hears crying. It’s her own crying and her moms’.

Mama always says it is fine to cry whenever you need to. Evee really needs to now because even though she cried in the trunk and at the lady’s house and with Lenny, she didn’t really get to cry because all those people, except Lenny were so scary. She didn’t want them to get mad and get meaner. But now she gets to cry enough to make herself feel better.

She squeezes the bodies as hard as she can. Then she opens her eyes and the room is so bright. They put her down but it’s cold and she is scared again. She feels like the wave is smashing over her head again so she reaches up and cries for okaasan to pick her back up.

Okaasan sits on the couch and squeezes. Evee rests her head on her favorite place on okaasan, her big soft chest.

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