Juno's Daughters (29 page)

How could that be? Jenny asked herself again. Why hadn't she called?

The officer looked at her for a moment, considering. She wondered what his wife was like. Did they have children? Probably not yet, she thought. The ring on his finger looked new.

He said, “Well, one fifth of runaways return within twenty-four hours. The younger ones, in particular, don't usually go far.” He dropped his eyes to the pad in his hands. “The thing is, runaways are not usually running
to
something. They're usually running
away
.” He met her eyes. “Can you think of anything that your daughter, Frankie, right, that Frankie might have wanted to get away from? A boyfriend, maybe? Something else?”

Jenny shook her head. He would naturally expect Frankie to have been abused and unhappy, she realized. Most of the children he encountered probably were. He did not know Frankie. He had not seen her nestled under a pile of coats on Peg's couch or reclining on the prow of a fishing boat. He could not imagine how cherished she was.

“You can call me if you think of anything. One last thing, there are no other friends or relatives in the area?”

Monroe
, thought Jenny. Monroe, Monroe, Monroe. The word entered her mind and then lingered there like a hiccup.

“No,” she said. “There's no one.”

“Will you be staying nearby?”

“As soon as I get a room I'll call and let you know where I am.”

“There's a La Quinta hotel right around the corner. You might try there.” He stood and offered his hand.

She had trouble pulling herself out of the chair. It was as if her legs suddenly would not hold her. The young man bent slightly and with a hand under her elbow, he helped her to rise.

Jenny waited until she was sitting in her truck again in the parking lot to dial Lilly's cell phone. She could see the Space Needle in the not-too-far distance, but the area immediately around the station was full of dilapidated warehouses and empty parking meters.

Lilly answered the phone immediately. “Did you find her?”

“No.” Jenny rubbed her face with the palm of her free hand. It was going to be a hot day. She had only been in the city for a few hours, but already she felt greasy. “Listen to me. Did you ever tell Frankie where your father lived?”

“When did you . . . How?”

“It doesn't matter now, Lil. What matters is
did Frankie know
?”

“I might have mentioned it,” said Lilly. She added quickly, “Though I seriously doubt she would go there. She didn't remember one thing about him. And besides, I told her what he was like.”

What was he like
? Jenny wanted to ask. What was he like to
you
? Instead, she said, “Give me the address.”

“I don't remember the exact number. But I can describe where it is.” Lilly paused.

Jenny wished she could see her daughter's face. She wanted to scan it for information about her meeting with Monroe. About what it had meant to Lilly to finally see her father after all those years.

“Mom? Hold on, Aunt Sue wants to talk to you.”

A car door slammed near her and Jenny jumped in her seat. A few spaces away an elderly Asian woman climbed out from behind the wheel of a rusted Buick and began a slow and deliberate march toward the glass double doors at the entrance to the police station.

“Jenny?” Sue's voice was high and panicked-sounding. “I phoned Mom and Dad. They're waiting by the phone in case Frankie calls.”

Jenny could picture her parents in the small front room of their house in Sacramento. Her mother would be perched on the edge of a chair, pale and full of frightened speculation. Her father would wear a hole in the carpet with his pacing. They would not understand why Jenny had not called them first.

She took a deep breath. “Thank you.”

Sue cleared her throat. “Look, Jen. Lilly wants to fly up to Seattle this evening. I know she wants to help, but I don't think it's a good idea to . . .”

“Good,” she said, “I'll send you the money for the ticket.” Where the money would come from she had no idea, but she felt a rush of relief anyway. They would look together, she and Lilly. They would find her.

Sue hesitated. “It's not that. I just think . . .”

“Please put Lilly on the phone again.”

“Lilly?” Sue called and then, quickly into the phone she added, “I'm praying for Frankie.”

“What?”

Jenny had barely gotten the word out and Lilly was back on the line.

“Mom?”

Jenny heard more shuffling and suspected that Lilly was carrying the phone into another room. Her suspicion was confirmed when she said, “Aunt Sue did not just say what I think she said, did she? That she was praying for Frankie?”

“Let it go, Lil.” She took a deep breath. “Now where did you see your father?”

“Here's the thing.” Lilly cleared her throat. “I won't tell you where Monroe lives unless you promise,
promise
, not to go see him until I get there.”

“Excuse me?”

“I've got a seat on a plane from SFO to SeaTac. It gets there at six p.m. tonight. We can go after that.”

Jenny fished a pen out of her bag. “Okay. Give me the directions.”

“Okay that I'm coming or okay that you won't go without me?”

Jenny wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. She wondered if Lilly, somewhere deep inside her, carried the memory of how she had once had set a stuffed dog, cheaply made with appliquéd eyes, on a sobbing Jenny's lap. How she had sung a song about a peanut getting squished on the railroad tracks.
Whoops, peanut butter
.

“Okay to both,” lied Jenny.

H
er first ever words to Monroe had been so banal, she still cringed when she tried to recall what they were. Something about the beer in the cooler being colder than the bottles in the fridge.

She remembered exactly what his reply to her had been, though. He had said, “I'm having a panic attack.”

Jenny was balancing a paper plate full of salad on her lap. She set it down on the deck in alarm. “What should I do? Do you want me to call someone?”

He shook his head. “Tell me a story.”

That was the moment she should have walked away. Jenny turned on her side on the Motel 6 bed and watched through the open door as a bedraggled family unloaded shopping bags and a cooler and beat-up suitcases from their trunk. He needed help, he was
panicking
, for God's sake, and what happened was that he told her what to do. Not
I want you to tell me a story
, or
It would help if you told me a story
, or even
Please tell me a story
. He looked at her with those blue eyes, Lilly's eyes, and a rigid jaw and said,
Tell me
. And she did. She
liked
the way he told her what to do. He said it in a way that let her know what she was
going
to do and there was, at that crazy unsettled time in her life, some relief in that. So she told him about how one year when she was about ten and Sue was twelve, their parents took them on a car trip to Wyoming and they stopped at some hot springs. Their dog, a border collie named Rascal and the only dog she had ever loved, hopped out of the car, bolted toward the springs, dove in, and
never came up
.

Monroe laughed.

Jenny stared at him. She had told this story before a number of times. Usually it was greeted with expressions of sympathy or gasps of horror. Never laughter. At the time it happened she thought she would die of grief.

“We stood there for a long time,” she continued. “At least twenty minutes. Me and my sister were crying and my dad was poking at the water with a stick.”

Jenny laughed then, too. She offered it all up to him without a second thought: her imperfect family, her sister's and her own sadness, her younger self. And this being Monroe, he took it. She left with him that night, and less than a year later they were married.

And that was what Jenny remembered. Not his face. Not the name of the friend who had brought her to the party or the names of the people whose party it was. What she carried with her even to this day was the way it felt when he touched her. As if her life, her
real
life, was just then about to start.

Jenny pulled herself up off the bed to hunt for a phone book. She looked in the
A
s but could find no Monroe Alexander. She would just have to look for him, using Lilly's memories as her guide. But first she dialed Mary Ann's number. When there was no answer there, she dialed her own.

“Jenny, any word?” Mary Ann sounded as exhausted as she felt.

“No. Lilly's arriving tonight to help me look.”

“Oh, good. I'm really glad to hear that. Dale and Peg were by earlier. Phinneas has called at least ten times. Chad brought the halibut by for Frankie, and then when he found out what happened he didn't leave for an hour. He's ready to come back at a moment's notice. Everybody is, Jen. Anything you need, you just say.”

Jenny rubbed her thumb against a burn spot on the rickety bedside table. It had been left by a cigarette, no doubt. She remembered the pack of Camels in her coat pocket but had no taste for them anymore. Just thinking about smoking made her gag. The hotel room door had been open long enough so that the air had lost some of its musty smell, but the extra light did nothing for the atmosphere. Looking at that room, she felt lonelier than she had in a very long time and she couldn't help thinking that what had happened to her that summer had something to do with it. If she hadn't felt Andre's arms around her before, would she be missing them now?

She said, “I need you to sell my loom.”

“What?”

“Anna Birnbaum on Shaw once said she'd give me $700 for it. Tell her that if she'll give me $850 I'll include three boat shuttles, two leash sticks, eight bobbins and, let's see, eight extra heddles.”

“Jenny, why?”

“This room costs $70 a night. Lilly and I will have to eat, and I have no idea how long we'll have to stay here. I saw a place downtown where you can wire me the money.”

“For goodness sake, don't sell your loom. You saved forever for that. I'll send you the money. How much do you need? $850? $900?”

“No, Mary Ann. Thank you, but this is what I want to do.”

“It's no trouble, really. I have three times that in . . .”

“No.” Jenny pressed the phone tightly against her ear. It was either that or throw it with all her might against the terrible reproduction of a watercolor of Pike Place Market that hung on the wall. “I love you, Mary Ann, but you either call Anna Birnbaum or I don't want you to be in my home when I return.”

If she allowed herself to, she could picture the older woman's eyes filling with tears. The way her jaw, already lightly padded, softened when she was wounded. She pushed the image out of her mind. The stalls in the watercolor were purplish blue. The water was gray blue behind. The pavement stones, slick with rain, were tinged aqua. It was all blue, blue, blue. All of it.

“Okay, Jenny,” whispered Mary Ann. “I'll call Anna Birnbaum. Good luck.”

“I need it.”

The building in which Lilly had found Monroe was in North Seattle, near Aurora Avenue. Jenny found a parking spot in front of Family Pawn, and when she noticed a couple of young guys standing in a doorway noticing
her
, she rolled up the truck windows. The truck wasn't worth much, but she needed it to get around. She reached over to lock the passenger door before getting out onto the curb. She didn't usually lock the truck and so had to remind herself to hold the grip down while she shut her own door, too.