The Good Daughter Read online

  “You’re right, I look awful,” I say. My reflection in the glass doors that lead into the emergency room speaks for itself.

  “How are you supposed to look after falling into a creek and busting your nose?”

  “I need to call my mother,” I say. It’s been hours since I took off running; she must be frantic by now.

  “They sent an officer over. She was a bit . . . well, a bit feisty about the police coming to the house. Took a lot of convincing to get her to open the door. What’s that all about?”

  I ignore his question. I imagine the doorbell ringing, a suspicious Who are you looking for? through the closed door, an insistent Are you Memphis Waller?, her silence on the other side, the officer attempting to convince her to open up. Did This is about your daughter prompt her to let her guard down? Did the entire conversation happen through a bolted door, or did she reluctantly allow the officer inside, just to regret her lack of vigilance?

  “Do you know who the woman is?” I ask.

  “She’s still unconscious. We can’t interview her,” Bobby says. “We haven’t IDed her yet either.” Bobby hesitates ever so slightly and leans forward in the chair. “Did you see anyone?” Every muscle in his face communicates tension.

  “I was running the trails. My leg started hurting and I needed to stretch. I went into the woods. It was just one of those things, I guess. I just happened to be there.”

  “So you don’t remember anyone? Other joggers? Trucks? Hikers? Even just cars passing by? Anything?” His voice sounds breathless, but then he seems to compose himself. “What are the odds, huh?” He checks his wristwatch. “You’ll have to give an official statement once you feel better. So . . . someone will check you out before you leave. I’ll come back and give you a ride home. They’ll let me know when you’re ready to go, okay?”

  I nod. My head pounds and I have lead in my veins, my limbs heavy and saturated with exhaustion. I watch Bobby push the square stainless steel elevator button and the large doors swallow him as if he is a ghost of times past.

  After the doctor looks me over and concludes that I’m just a bit beat up and bruised, a nurse helps me take off my wet clothes and change into a pair of gray scrubs. In the waiting room, with my wet clothes in a plastic bag on my lap, I sit and wait for Bobby.

  The TV is still tuned to the local news. First, the reporter focuses on the closing of the road, detours, and forensics being done out in the woods. Then, with one hand tight around the microphone, a piece of paper in the other: “According to an anonymous hospital source, the woman was in the woods for a very short time before she was discovered.” An anonymous source? It sounds clandestine, but someone probably knows a nurse who’s overheard a comment or read a file. In small towns like Aurora it’s really as simple as that.

  The reporter smiles and promises to keep the viewers updated. KDPN has told me nothing more than I already know.

  I feel an odd sense of kinship with the woman I found in the woods and figure there is no public plea for her identity because law enforcement expects her to wake up and tell them her name at any moment.

  Suddenly the screen switches to a black-and-white sketch of a woman. I catch a few words here and there—similar case . . . mystery woman . . . almost thirty years ago . . . sketch artist . . . cold case. The woman was reported missing by a man who had no photo of her, hence the sketch. It is an image drawn with pencil on paper, facial features created by a forensic artist to identify unknown victims or suspects at large. Old-fashioned wanted posters far from present-day digital images created by computer programs. The reporting then turns to high school football scores.

  A nurse appears and informs me Officer de la Vega is waiting for me at the ER entrance. When I stand up, the world around me spins, then stills.

  Instead of departing through the two large sliding glass doors, I take the stairway. Holding on to the railing, I walk up two stories. I have one more place to go before I leave the hospital.

  —

  The third floor lies abandoned but for a security guard whose silhouette I see strolling down the hallway. He then disappears around the corner. A board on the first door on the right says Jane Doe, scribbled with a dry erase marker. My Jane, I say quietly to myself, as if the fact that I found her gives me the right to claim her.

  I enter the room. I shut the door behind me, and as I part the curtain, the plastic gliders gently purr in their tracks.

  I approach Jane in a very pragmatic way, partly to calm my nerves, partly not to miss anything. First, I take in the visuals; her weight, height, and skin color: five seven, one hundred and forty pounds, plus or minus five pounds, pale complexion with a gray undertone. Her hair is ashy blond, medium brown maybe, slicked back, hard to tell.

  The monitor above her bed is busy; Jane’s heartbeat is rushing along in one neon green jagged line, unsteady like the jittery crayon stroke of a child. There are two other lines, one red and one yellow. Measuring blood pressure and oxygen saturation, I assume, but I can’t be sure. But it seems that’s what those machines ought to track. A body needs circulation, oxygen, a heartbeat.

  There are three tubes in all. One in her left arm, one leading from under the blanket to a urine collection bag. The third is a breathing tube. With a rhythmic hissing sound that raises and lowers as the machine cycles, a ventilator blows air into her lungs. Jane’s chest is rising and falling in a steady wave. The side rails of the bed are pulled up as if there is a conceivable chance she might spontaneously get up and make an attempt to get away.

  I’m taken aback by the measures required to keep her alive. I feel the desperate energy her body radiates in its lulled state of unconsciousness, compensatory for some unknown act of violence inflicted upon her. I spot Jane’s likeness in the reflection of the large window, her ethereal body an apparition, and beyond that lies the town of Aurora, a faraway carpet of glitter, like an otherworldly background of sorts.

  I step closer and I allow my hand to hover over Jane’s hands. They are now scrubbed clean, but some dirt remains under her nails. They are jagged, as if she tried to claw her way out of the grave someone had put her in. I lower my hand and feel her skin; it’s warm to the touch, alive, prickly almost.

  An odd scent fills the air. I tilt my head back and sniff at it like a dog. Is that cinnamon? My mind slips like feet losing ground on a slick floor, then the pressure behind my eyes becomes unbearable. I can’t quite interpret what message is coming from her, but I know she’s trying to communicate with me. That’s it—how else can I explain the tremor in my hand that slowly works itself up to my shoulder? It then rushes through my body and a metallic taste develops in my mouth. I plunge into what feels like madness in the making; images of trees, branches clawing at me. Someone has turned a switch, making reality hard to identify; it’s blending with visions of Jane in the woods, digging a hole with her own bare hands. I can smell dank creek water, feel it seep into my nostrils. Is that what my Jane went through or am I reliving falling into the creek and losing consciousness? Suddenly we are one and I am inside Jane’s body, I am the one in the woods, not her.

  I’m not sure when I fall, but I hit the floor, knees first, then my body folds in on itself. Cold linoleum seeping through the thin scrubs snaps me back into reality. There’s a voice coming from above, almost as if I’m at the bottom of a well and someone is talking down to me. A pinpoint-sized speck of light seems to appear out of nowhere. The speck turns into a beam, then the beam turns into something brighter than the sun, so bright that it sears my eyes, hot and sharp like a blade.

  “Are you okay?”

  I know the voice. Dahlia. Dahlia. Dahlia. Over and over. I want to answer but I can’t. The pungent cinnamon scent is trapped in my nostrils, bitter and sharp. There’s pressure under my arms and then around my waist. I’m nothing but dead weight, yet Bobby manages to place my body onto something rather soft and comfortable.

&nbs
p; All that is left of what’s happened is a pounding headache and aching joints. I’m beyond hungry. Famished.

  “What happened? No one is allowed in here. Did you pass out?”

  I find my voice: “I think she just tried to communicate with me.”

  Bobby cocks his head to the left; his eyes go soft. “Look at her,” he says. “Does she look like someone trying to communicate?”

  I have taken a long hard look at her. I know it sounds nuts.

  “You smell that?” I ask.

  “Smell what?”

  “Cinnamon,” I say.

  “I don’t smell anything. Let’s go,” Bobby says.

  How can he not smell that? It’s all over the room, pungent, sharp, biting its way up my nostrils.

  “Wait. You really don’t smell that?” I ask and resist when he tries to push toward the door. “Just breathe in.”

  “I don’t smell any cinnamon, Dahlia. But we’re about to be in a shitload of trouble if they find us in here. I’m taking you home. Now.”

  The scent remains with me as we depart through the sliding glass doors and even when I fasten the seat belt in Bobby’s police cruiser. I stare straight ahead, my head against the headrest. Something feels different, as if a part of me went AWOL in Jane’s room. What that missing part has been replaced with I can’t tell.

  The police radio squelches and splats until Bobby turns the volume down, the communication now white background noise.

  “It’ll be okay. Just try to relax,” he says and rests his hand on top of mine, which are shaking in my lap.

  His hands are familiar, sinewy, with short fingers and large palms. I roll down the window, close my eyes, and allow my hair to blow in the breeze. The silence between us is natural, soothing. We used to be that way, comfort for each other. I feel myself calm down, almost as if hardly any time has passed between us at all.

  —

  Fifteen minutes later my mother’s house appears on Linden Street, a road ironically lined with Mulberry trees. The scent remains, yet watered down, the pungent part now in need of detection, no longer presenting itself without any effort. The sweetness, now replaced by an earthy, nutty scent, reminding me of something pure and uncontaminated, not the syrupy and artificial kind drifting through the mall when you pass the Cinnabon counter in the food court.

  “She’s in a coma?” I ask Bobby one more time as I reach for the car door. “You know that for a fact?”

  Bobby nods. “It’s all over the news.”

  I try to tell myself I just went through a lot—finding Jane, hitting my head, falling in a creek, seeing her comatose and hooked up to machines—and that I have the right to feel out of sorts and that it’s really no surprise that I’m beside myself.

  I nod and as we shuffle along the driveway, I see the front door is ajar, my mother kneeling on the porch. She sees us, stands, and goes inside, slamming the door shut.

  “It’ll be okay,” Bobby says. I’m not sure if he’s talking about me or my mother. “Get some rest and call me when you wake up, okay?”

  I trust Bobby. Trust him with my life. And so I just come out and say it again. “She tried to tell me something.” Just like that. I don’t know of any other way to communicate what just happened to me in that room.

  He doesn’t acknowledge the comment, but doesn’t tear at it either.

  “Don’t come inside,” I say. “She’s in a mood.” There is no such thing as rest in my mother’s house, there is no resting from my mother’s moods. She is unpredictable at best.

  Bobby looks at me as if he is going to argue, but then his shoulders drop. My eyes follow his cruiser lights as he drives off. He taps the horn three times and I smile. It’s something he used to do a lifetime ago.

  I catch another whiff of the cinnamon scent. I turn my head, expecting to see its origin, but I know better. What if this is it? This is how it starts. Soon there will be crickets in my world too. Have I been a sitting duck, a sure victim of my mother’s faulty and mentally deranged DNA?

  At the threshold I sidestep a cricket that looks like a miniature black raven on its back. But there are others I can’t avoid, and as the tip of my shoe crushes the carcasses to dust, I hear my mother’s voice.

  “Where’ve you been?” She appears calm but her voice is higher pitched than usual. She wears makeup and a dress; her hair is a couple of shades lighter than it was this morning. She is barefoot as if somehow she forgot to complete the illusion of having it together.

  “You’ve heard what happened?” I ask.

  She turns the kitchen faucet on full blast. The microwave stops running, then beeps. The scents of burnt popcorn and cigarette smoke sting my nostrils. The cigarette between her fingers is short enough to burn her. She leans forward and crushes it out in an already overflowing ashtray.

  “Have you heard what happened?” I repeat, my voice louder than I want it to be.

  “You had some sort of an accident. They wouldn’t tell me anything else,” she says.

  “I found a body in the woods. A woman. She’s alive but in a coma.” I shudder at the mental image of my Jane covered in forest debris.

  My mother shifts in place as if she is trying to find a way to perfectly position herself, like she is expecting a blow. “You should’ve stayed home and taken care of those crickets. You never listen to me.”

  I stand next to her, pass the dish soap, and watch her swirl her hands around in the water.

  “I was running but my leg hurt and I went into the woods and—”

  “Where did you find her?”

  “Let me tell you the story from the beginning.” My mind is still attempting to make sense of everything and recalling the moment. Allowing me to relive what happened might help me do just that, might help me separate truth from imagination. But as always, my mother won’t have any of it.

  “What woman and where?” She scoops up dirty silverware and immerses the pile into the sudsy water.

  “Will you just be patient,” I say and then lower my voice. “If you’ll allow me to tell the story without—”

  She stomps her foot on the linoleum, and it strikes me how silly the gesture is. I watch the sudsy water turn into a pink lather. It takes me a few seconds to realize what has happened.

  “Mom,” I say gently, “you cut yourself.” I grab her by the forearms and allow the water to rinse off the blood. There’s a large gash in the tip of her middle finger; a line of blood continuously forms.

  “I don’t understand,” she says, and I realize she’s begun to sob.

  I hug her but she remains stiff, her arms rigid beside her body. She has never been one for physical affection, almost as if hugs suffocate her. I rub her shoulders like she’s a little kid in need of comfort after waking from a bad dream. There, there. You’ll be okay.

  I speak in short sentences; maybe brevity is what she needs. “I found a woman. She’s okay. I’m fine. Everything’s okay,” I say as I wrap a clean kitchen towel around her fingers.

  “The police came to my house.” She pulls away from me, dropping the bloody towel on the floor. “I don’t like police in my house. You know that.”

  “I’m not sure you understand. A woman almost died. I found her while I was running and they took her to the hospital. If I hadn’t—”

  “You’ve been here long enough,” she says and starts banging random dishes in the sink, mascara running down her cheeks. “You came for a visit and you’re still here.”

  “Mom.” She doesn’t mean to be cruel—she’s just in a mood, I tell myself. She needs me. I don’t know what’s going on with her but I can’t even think straight and all I want is to go to bed and sleep. “Please don’t get upset.”

  “Can’t you just . . . lay low?”

  The tinge of affection I just felt for her passes. I recall the time I didn’t lay low, years ago, rig
ht after I started school in Aurora. It was the end of summer, the question of enrollment no longer up in the air. I wondered how she had managed to enroll me in school, how she had all of a sudden produced the paperwork. “But remember,” she said, “stay away from the neighbors. I don’t want anyone in my house.” The girl—I no longer remember her name but I do recall she had freckles and her two front teeth overlapped—had chestnut trees in her backyard. One day, I suggested we climb the tree. When I reached for the spiky sheath that surrounded the nut, it cut into the palm of my hand and I jerked. I fell off the tree and I couldn’t move my arm. I went home without telling anyone my arm hurt. The next day a teacher sent me to the school nurse. They called my mother—I still wasn’t caving, still telling no one what had happened, still pretending my swollen arm was nothing but some sort of virus that had gotten ahold of me overnight—and an hour later my secretive behavior prompted them to question my mother regarding my injury. When I finally came clean, her eyes were cold and unmoving.

  Laying low is still important to her. “What did you want me to do?” I ask with a sneer. “She’d be dead if it wasn’t for me.”

  Even though she hardly looks at me, I can tell her eyes are icy. Her head cocks sideways as if she is considering an appropriate response. Her responses are usually quick, without the slightest delay in their delivery, yet this one is deliberate.

  “I don’t need any trouble with the police,” she says.

  “That’s what this is about? The police? What did you want me to do? Just leave her in the woods because my mother doesn’t want to be bothered? You can’t be serious.”

  “I’m very serious, Dahlia. Very serious.”

  “I have to go to bed. I’m exhausted. Can we talk later?”

  “I’ve said all I had to say.”