When She Flew (12 page)

“So,” the policewoman said, “let’s do this. Your full name?”

“Melinda Faith Wiggs.” My voice was quiet. I wanted to hear what they were asking Pater, but I couldn’t.

“Date of birth?”

“August eighteenth.”

“Well, happy belated birthday,” she said. “What year were you born?”

“Nineteen ninety-six.”

She looked surprised. “You’re thirteen?”

“But I do high school math and reading.”

She squinted at me like I was a jigsaw puzzle she was trying to find the right piece for.

“Okay, Melinda. Lindy. What are you doing up here? Are you being held against your will?”

I rolled my lips together and shifted on my stump. I looked at the other police officers and that big, mean dog, everyone kicking up dirt, ruining my sweeping. There would be dust all over our books and our pots and pans. Everything would be dirty now. Everything would have to be cleaned.

The policewoman sighed and said, “Let’s start with something else, then. Like . . .” She glanced around. “How about the bird that lives in your, uh, your tree fort, is it? Is it a pet? Whatever it is, it sure scared us a while ago.” She smiled.

I shrugged and tried not to cry. Everything was ruined. I’d ruined everything. She flipped the page in her notebook, and handed it to me with her pen. “Maybe you’d feel more comfortable if you wrote it down.”

I didn’t know if she was trying to trick me, but I wrote:

 

 

 

 

She waited for me to write more.

 

 

 

Just like we could hear you
, I thought, but didn’t write. I handed the notebook back to her
.

She pointed the flashlight at what I’d written, read it, and laughed. “You keep the notebook. You have a way with words. I’ll just keep my pages.” She flipped back and tore out a few pages of notes and maps and diagrams, a bunch of blank ones for her to write on, then handed the notebook back to me. “Consider it a gift,” she said, her head tilted. She looked at me in a way that felt like she knew what I was thinking, how I was feeling. I had to turn away.

“I’m sorry, Lindy. We just need to know more about you so we can determine if you’re safe here. I have a daughter, too, and if she were in trouble, I’d want people like me to help her. We’re just here to help you, okay?”

We both waited for something. I looked at Pater in the dimming light, his shiny blond hair held back in a rubber band. His beard needed trimming. I had been planning to do it after dinner. He was talking to the black police officer now, but he was watching me. He’d already forgiven me. I turned back to the policewoman. She had dark eyes like my mother. Like Sweetie-pie.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Officer Villareal,” she said, a name more beautiful than I could imagine or remember how to pronounce. “But you can call me Jess, if you want.”

“Please don’t let them hurt him. Promise me. Cross your heart. Promise?”

She looked at me that way again, but I didn’t turn away this time. “We won’t hurt him if he doesn’t do anything that makes us have to,” she said. “Has he, Lindy? Has he done anything to you that he shouldn’t have? Anything inappropriate or sexual?”

“No!” I practically shouted.

Pater half rose from his seat across the way, and the short police officer jumped up.

It’s okay, I mouthed to him, then looked back at the woman and whispered, “Why would you even say that?”

“Only to make sure you’re safe,” she said. “He can’t hear us over here, Lindy. You can write it in the notebook. He’ll never know what you’ve told me. Is this man really your father? Has he harmed you in any way?”

“Of course he’s my father,” I said, tears on the sides of my face. My nose was all runny. “He would never hurt me.”

“His full name?”

I couldn’t. I shook my head.

“How about your mother? Where is she?”

I’d probably already revealed enough for her to find out everything about me. Pater says our identities are not our own unless we keep them to ourselves. Was he telling them his name? About Crystal? About our lives? I looked over again. He was talking and the black officer was writing in his own notebook.

I turned back to the policewoman.

“If I tell you, do you promise to leave us alone?”

“I can’t do that.” She gave me a sad kind of smile. “But I can promise to make you safe.”

“I am safe. We were safe, right here. We were fine.”

“Then tell me about that, Lindy. Tell me about your life here, how you got here. Tell me why you think you’re safe here.”

We talked for a long time, just as Pater and the other officer did over in the cook tent. He kept looking over at me, like he was saying it was all right.

The telling wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be, and after so much of the truth was out, I started to believe it might help Pater and me stay here in our forest, or I never would have told it.

“Okay, Lindy,” Officer Villareal finally said, “I have to ask you one more important question.”

I was glad it was nearly over. I just wanted to climb up into my bed and go to sleep for a long time, and wake up in the morning to find that this had just been an awful dream.

She paused, like she was trying to find the right words. “So, what is that over there, carved into the dirt?”

I thought everyone knew what it was. I told her as much.

She looked perturbed with me for the first time. “But, what does it mean to you, exactly?”

“It’s our good-luck charm. It protects us.”

I started to cry again. No matter what all those ancient people believed, the svastika had failed us.

13

A
s the dark grew denser, things that had become familiar to Jess—jutting tree limbs, rustling leaves, sticky webs—were startling once more. With only a fingernail clipping of moon and no clouds, not even Columbia’s pink sodium city light could penetrate the treetops. The police officers’ flashlights veered and dove like giant fireflies as they finished questioning the man and girl, wrote their notes, wandered into the woods to relieve themselves, and in Jess’s case, to quickly retrieve her lost shotgun while the girl used the latrine.

Jenkins turned the man, one Raymond Wiggs, over to Takei for safekeeping, then went to join the other officers assembling out of earshot. They hadn’t cuffed Wiggs, but Takei kept his automatic rifle at his side rather than on his back. The two stood silently in the cook tent under an old Coleman lantern, the cool glow lighting a ten-foot-diameter circle of dirt. The sergeant had yet to determine how to proceed.

Technically, they should charge Wiggs with recklessly endangering and/or failing to supervise a child. They were squatters. The girl had inadequate shelter and was truant. The law didn’t take into account whether a parent had the means to provide what the state thought of as proper shelter; that was where social services came in, as lousy as that system could sometimes be.

What the letter of the law lacked was human consideration, Jess thought, the weighing of consequences. Compassion. That was why it was good that cops were real people, with families and lives and hardships of their own. They could interpret the law and try to apply it in a way that was best for the people involved, whether that was getting a drug dealer out of a neighborhood or releasing a drunken teenager to a parent who promised to get the kid help. If Jess hadn’t believed in that her entire career, she would have gone into nursing or, god forbid, social work. The aim was to help, not to hurt.

She was glad Wiggs had decided to settle down and cooperate. Even though he apparently disdained society and anything that smelled of authority, he seemed to be holding it together for his daughter. Jess wondered what the consequences would be if they separated the two, placing the girl in foster care. Would that help her, or would it just rip apart an already struggling family?

Jess walked the girl over to her father. “We’re going to have a meeting to decide what to do next, so you and your dad need to hang out here with Officer Takei, all right?” The girl had dark smudges under her eyes now. It was 22:30, probably past her bedtime.

“Don’t worry,” Jess said. “It shouldn’t take too long. Are you hungry? Do you need some food?” The girl shook her head. Jess realized she herself was starving.

Lindy walked into her father’s embrace. He leaned down and laid his cheek against the top of her dark head, face lingering there. “Put your coat on,” he said, then looked up at Jess. “I should make a fire. She’s cold.”

The temperature had dropped with the dark. Jess looked at Takei. He shrugged. He had the situation under control. “Sure,” she said.

Somehow this man had maintained his dignity in front of his daughter through all of this. He’d been screamed at, held at gunpoint, threatened, searched, interrogated—things that might make another man feel powerless or broken.

Lindy still clutched the notebook, along with Jess’s favorite pen. The man nodded at Jess—a silent thanks, she guessed. His eyes no longer looked distant or crazy. He was just a dad, glad to have his daughter safe beside him.

Jess nodded back, then turned away. If the sergeant decided to take Lindy into protective services, she and her father would be separated for days, maybe weeks. Maybe forever, if they determined he wasn’t a fit parent. Lindy looked young, but she was obviously wiser than her years. She might have been lacking in the ways of teens raised in more conventional settings, but Jess didn’t think that was such a bad thing.

The girl was intelligent and articulate, and she had a compassion for nature and living things that left Jess feeling both awed and guilty. Had she exposed Nina to enough of the world, to nature that didn’t exist in a zoo or a Disney animated film? Had she expected enough of her, or had she let her skate the easy suburban route through life, watching too much TV, never developing interests in anything except for the gender-specific fluff society presented her with, clothes and gossip and boys? Was that where she’d let Nina go wrong?

There’d been a time when Jess thought she’d be the kind of parent who took her child to museums and libraries, on hikes and vacations to national parks. In fact, she’d promised Nina a trip to Disney World for years. They’d gotten as far as the Oregon coast on a small handful of occasions, up into the mountains once or twice.
Why didn’t I just make it happen?
she wondered. Why hadn’t she done a lot of things?

Jess stood in the dark forest, as far removed as she could be from the day Nina left three years earlier. The old grief still haunted her, still gripped her chest like a claw, and made her ask the big question:
Why didn’t I do more to make her stay?

She shook her head, drew a breath. She had to focus; she had to get on with the job at hand. The shushing of tree boughs eddied around her, midway between the man and girl and the group of officers assembled at the other side of the camp.

Jess forced herself to repeat her mantra:
I am not the worst parent in the world.
She’d seen far worse, of course, and Nina had turned out okay. She hadn’t ended up a druggie or an alcoholic or even a smoker; thank god she had never cut herself or had other self-destructive tendencies. She’d graduated from high school only one semester late and found an administrative job she liked with an insurance agency in Tacoma. And now she’d saved enough money so that she and Teo could live in their own apartment. She was a computer-savvy young woman, attuned to American culture, to society, and she knew how to survive in the world she was inheriting. That world would probably make hamburger of Lindy, if she were forced back into it. Jess drew a deep breath and held it, then went to join the other officers.

They’d convened on the log steps she, Jenkins, and Takei had first walked up. She took a seat next to Z and the dog on the top step. Greiner and Jenkins stood behind them and Everett stood facing the group at the bottom. They each shone their flashlights at a central spot between them, their own campfire of sorts.

She and Jenkins had compared notes earlier, and now shared the man’s and the girl’s stories with the group. The parity of their statements made even Everett shake his head and whistle. Their histories of moving from Colorado to Oregon after the father came home from Iraq, the mother’s apparent drug use and negligence, the anxiety they both felt over her trying to find them, their daily routines—the seemingly normal routines of a father doing an admirable job raising a daughter with no help, no money, and no home.

It didn’t happen this way, that two stories matched so exactly, not when those being questioned hadn’t had time to put their heads together, and not when one of them was a juvenile.