Turtle Baby (7 page)

"Infanticide," Bo thought, had something to do with European kings. Or with Greek folklore. Oedipus Rex, maybe. Not with Indian babies from cities with dirt streets.

Estrella's reaction to the word was less cerebral. "Oh, sheet!" she began crying, her fists knotted on Acito's case file Bo had tossed on her desk. "I can't. I just can't do it!"

"Can't do what?" Bo asked, puzzled. "I'll run the petition over to court for you, if you'll just fill out the forms. No problem."

Estrella's face seemed composed of fragments, like a mosaic. The friend Bo had known for years was visibly going to pieces.

"I had decided," Estrella began in a whisper, "that I wasn't going to have this baby. I thought about it all day, sitting at home. No matter what Henry and my family and everybody would think, I decided. But I can't do it." She was sobbing. "I just can't have an abortion."

Bo opened her mouth and then closed it when she realized that everything she could think to say was either inappropriate or idiotic. Instead she sat on her friend's desk and draped an arm over the heaving shoulders.

"Walls for the wind," she crooned the first Irish blessing that came to mind into Estrella's upswept coif, and distractedly looked out the window. "And a roof for the rain." A black and white bird dropped from the bright, glassy air and paced in the shade of a peeling eucalyptus. "And tea beside the fire ..." Bo trailed off. The bird couldn't be a magpie, could it? Were there magpies in Southern California? Bridget Mairead O'Reilly had taught her granddaughters well the things the presence of magpies could mean.

"Do you know," Estrella straightened her back and sobbed at the wall, "that my father's parents raised six kids in a truck, picking crops all over the West? And my mother is deaf in one ear because there was no money for a doctor when she was a child, and her eardrum burst from an infection?"

"I didn't know," Bo murmured, watching the bird.

"Do you know that I'm the first person in my entire family to go to college, to have a job like this? I like my job, Bo. It's important; it helps people sometimes. I like helping." Tears were leaving dark splotches on Estrella's wine-red silk blouse. "I don't want to have to quit working."

The black and white bird cocked its smooth head at the sky.

"One for sorrow," Bo whispered the first line of the magpie rhyme her grandmother had recited at every piebald bird summering at Cape Cod with Bo's family.

"Can you believe I really don't want an excuse to quit this underpaid job?" Estrella giggled into a Kleenex, her eyes wild.

A second magpie locked tiny feet over a low-hanging branch of the eucalyptus. "Two is for mirth."

"And Henry will make the best father a kid could want ..."

"Three is for marriage." Bo smiled as a third bird joined the first on the ground and began preening its feathers. If a fourth magpie showed up, this whole conversation would be moot.

"I just wish ..." Estrella snuffled, toying with Acito's case file, "it wasn't so damned complicated."

"And four for a birth!" Bo grinned to herself as one more black and white form rustled the menthol-scented leaves. "I know you're gonna work it out," she said to Estrella while shaking a congratulatory fist toward the window. "You're one smart woman; you can cope!"

Pleased, Estrella opened the case file and pulled a handful of legal forms from her desk drawer. "Why are you waving at the yard?" she asked as though the behavior were perfectly ordinary.

"Magpies." Bo blushed. "I think they're leaving."

"There are no magpies in San Diego, Bo."

"Not usually," Bo agreed.

An hour later Bo slipped Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D into her dashboard stereo and turned it up. Her new case had been one of the hundreds of crack babies born to mothers who abused the powerfully addictive drug. She'd been to the small, south-county hospital, interviewed the mother, seen the baby. Crack baby cases were all alike. And all sad. A petition filed in juvenile court would remove the child from its mother while she entered a drug treatment program, but nothing could repair the damage already done.

Crack babies were growing up to demonstrate impaired intellectual functioning even as toddlers and preschoolers. Bo would file the petition tomorrow, but her mind was on Acito and her own behavior in Tijuana.

"My best friend is a Latina, and yet Mexico feels like a house of horrors to me," she remarked to the vinyl sun visor shielding her eyes from the late afternoon glare. "Nonetheless I manage to burst into tears over a tune by some bar singer who may have tried to poison her own baby only this morning. Is it safe to say that my response to this situation leaves something to be desired?"

On the passenger's seat Mildred, Bo's aging fox terrier, chewed on a slab of rawhide cut to resemble a gingerbread man, and said nothing. Bo had gone home to pick up the dog before heading by the hospital and then out eastbound 94 toward the little high-desert community called Jamul. "Hah-mool," she sang the Spanish syllables over blasting organ chords, and wondered what the word meant. Maybe Dr. Broussard would know. The transplanted French-Canadian psychiatrist had settled into San Diego's melting-pot culture with a verve, and at sixty was learning both Spanish and rock-carving while continuing her research with a community of people who believed in extraterrestrial landings.

Compared to Eva Broussard's life, Bo mused, her own was an encyclopedia of boredom. On the other hand, for a manic-depressive, boredom was probably okay. Sort of.

Only twenty-five miles from downtown San Diego, Jamul rose dramatically from the spaghetti-tangle of freeways below, a sparsely populated backcountry of hilly dirt roads and bleached boulders not one of which was smaller than a single-engine Cessna. Bo could understand why Eva and her group had chosen to buy a hundred and sixty acres of mountaintop privacy up here. The views were spectacular, the air cool and clean.

Turning off 94 to begin the climb toward the shrink's airy compound, Bo slowed to admire the late afternoon sun gilding a thousand white boulders in a color like lemonade. Beside the road leaves of scrub oak and chamise reflected the light in flashes, while on the hillsides yuccas stretched creamy blooms skyward. Nothing moved but a red-tailed hawk circling on the horizon.

Bo sighed and replaced the Bach tape with Vivaldi's Concerto for Two Flutes, Strings and Basso in C Major. The music, ecstatic in its major key, spoke of landscapes in which no rheumy-eyed children begged, no raven-haired babies lay poisoned and lonely in hospital cribs.

"It isn't right!" Bo remarked to Mildred, surprised at her own outburst. "Everything about this case, and everything that goes on at this border isn't right. I don't understand it, but it's out of balance. It's wrong."

Mildred looked up in concern and nudged the rawhide gingerbread man toward Bo with her nose. One leathery arm had been reduced to slick white pulp.

"Ycchh," Bo said. "Thanks anyway."

On a dirt road named Mother Grundy by nineteenth-century settlers who couldn't pronounce "Madre Grande," Bo engaged the four-wheel drive and revved the little vehicle uphill with abandon. A gate halfway to the first ridge stood open to a rocky jeep trail leading further upward through boulders and chaparral.

Bo turned the flute duet even louder and imagined the delicate notes rising like liquid crystal over lemon-colored hills. The jeep trail would lead to a half-Iroquois psychiatrist whom many would write off as eccentric, Bo smiled, but whom she trusted more than anyone since her first doctor, the long-dead Lois Bittner.

"Happiness for some of us," she told Mildred, "involves finding a decent shrink."

The dog merely nodded.

"I heard you coming," Eva Blindhawk Broussard called from the porch of a crumbling adobe hacienda. "So did everyone for twenty miles. What lovely music!"

In moccasins and jeans the older woman looked as lithe as a greyhound despite the halo of stiff white hair framing her copper-colored face. She might have been thirty instead of sixty. Bo made a mental vow to get to the gym more often than twice a year.

"The place is shaping up!" Bo noted after a long hug from a woman she regarded more as a sister than a doctor. "The floor looks terrific."

"Mexican quarry tile," Eva Broussard explained. "It's quite inexpensive over the border in Tecate, and I enjoy driving down there. What's truly amazing, though, is that I have a steady supply of craftsmen walking through the property every day."

The hills, Bo knew, were laced with pathways created by thousands of undocumented laborers walking to destinations that might be hundreds of miles away.

"A group of Guatemalan refugees did most of this tile work," Eva went on. "But I know you didn't come to talk about tile. You said on the phone that you're having some concern about the new medication?"

"I saw a woman from Guatemala today," Bo said, interested. "A Maya Indian. She sings in a club in Tijuana. Her baby's been poisoned, and LaMarche is convinced that the poisoning was deliberate, but I don't know ..."

To the west, nested layers of hillside were mantled in early shadow. Beiges and grays with fleeting fringes of purple. Eva sat beside Bo on the porch's tiled floor and sighed at the view.

"The Maya," she pronounced in deep, Canadian-French-accented syllables that invited close attention, "are a most fascinating people. Very different from northern native peoples, like my own tribe. Very special. And being brutalized to near-extinction as a culture even as we speak. Tell me, what is this baby's name?"

"Acito," Bo answered. "And the mother calls herself Chac. Does his name mean anything? She said hers was a god."

" 'Ac' is the Maya word for turtle. And the suffix 'ito' is the Spanish diminutive. 'Acito' would mean 'Little Turtle.' Have you met him?"

"At St. Mary's today," Bo answered.

"And is he a Little Turtle?"

Bo remembered small hands clutching her hair, a soft, coal-black cowlick. "Absolutely," she said. That was Acito, all right. Hard-shelled enough to survive. Looking for something in that loopy way a turtle looks. Looking for his mother.

"The Maya understand that a person may have a nagual, an animal co-spirit," Eva went on, squinting as the sun dropped lower, bathing the porch in sudden gold. "Acito's mother, this Chac, knows and respects her son's heart, to have named him so well."

"Chac is one of the prime suspects in Acito's poisoning," Bo whispered, running both hands through her windblown red-silver curls.

Eva shook her head and stood. "No," she said. "That's not possible. We cannot harm another whose true name we know. Not without doing identical harm to ourselves. Chac did not harm Acito."

"I knew that," Bo said. "I just didn't know how I knew it."

"Why do you constantly question your intuition?" Eva asked, throwing a stick for Mildred.

"Because I'm crazy," Bo answered softly, using the pejorative term she would allow no one else to use. "I never quite know, even with the medication, what's absolutely true and what my mind is exaggerating all out of proportion. I was spooked down there, just being in Tijuana, and then Chac sang a song about Acito that brought me to tears. It was embarrassing, and I just left."

"Nothing is absolutely true," Eva said, pulling Bo to her feet with both large hands. "And just because your perception is more extreme than others doesn't mean that what you're perceiving isn't really there. It is."

Everything was coated in sparkling gilt fifteen minutes later as Bo drove Eva, holding Mildred, back down the main road and a red-painted plywood restaurant named El Coyote.

"The chile verde is exceptional," Eva mentioned while herding both Bo and Mildred to the restaurant's candlelit back patio of white chairs and green tablecloths. "And they use a low-alcohol tequila in the margaritas. Now, what's this about your medication? Are you unable to sleep, irritable, grandiose, paranoid? I can prescribe something to go with the Depakote."

"No symptoms, really," Bo said, relaxing as a faint moon materialized in the summer sky. "But I just can't seem to react to things like everybody else. Estrella's pregnant and upset. LaMarche keeps acting like something out of a Fred Astaire movie. And a song I can't understand makes me cry. Nothing seems, well, normal."

"Perhaps you need simply to accept your own reactions, Bo. 'Normal' is such a relative term. You know the symptoms to watch out for. If they're not there, then what is?"

Bo lit a cigarette and pondered the question, grinning. "Just me," she answered. "Whoever that is." It occurred to her that a bronze-skinned baby with an animal's name might just help her figure that out.

From the restaurant's radio a familiar song drifted across the patio and out over the mountains. A woman's voice, trained and powerful, accompanied by a wooden flute.

"Mi Acito," the voice whispered. "My Little Turtle."

Hell had broken out in patches when Bo arrived at the office on Thursday. She hadn't even pried the squeaking plastic lid off the lukewarm fluid called "coffee" by the Department of Social Services cafeteria, before Madge was at the door doing a sort of jitterbug while juggling case files. Bo slumped in her chair and tried to focus on the scene. It was hopeless before coffee.

"A distressing incident at the hospital last night ..." Madge said. "In the department's judgment it will be better if Estrella doesn't handle it, so ..."

The muted thudding of Bo's phone interrupted the supervisor's narrative. It was for just such moments as this, Bo smiled sleepily, that she'd covered the little bell inside her desk phone with a layer of adhesive tape. The clanging of an unmuted bell before noon was intolerable. "Child Protective Services, Bo Bradley speaking," she yawned.

"Dr. LaMarche says you don't think the mother poisoned the kid," Detective Dar Reinert boomed amicably and without preamble. "Had a real nasty mess with her last night at the hospital. Wound up letting her go, but my bet is, we'll never see her on this side of the border again. Whaddaya think?"

Dar Reinert was the San Diego Police Department child abuse detective who'd found Bo the car of her dreams. A fact that did nothing whatever to make what he was saying any more comprehensible.