When She Flew Page 2

  She pulled her phone from her purse and hit speed dial.

  “You’ve reached Nina Villareal.” Voice mail. It always shocked Jess that her nineteen-year-old daughter could sound so businesslike.

  After the beep, Jess said, “Hi, honey. Listen, sorry to bother you at work, but I can’t remember. Which Transformer is it that Teo likes? The one that turns into the truck, or is it the Hummer? I’m at the store right now, so if you get a sec, call me. I’m not on duty until three. Thanks!” She tried to sound bright.

  Within seconds her phone rang.

  “Neither,” Nina said when Jess answered, not “Hello,” not “Hi, Mom. How are you?”

  “It’s Bumblebee,” Nina said. “He only talks about it all the time.”

  “Bumblebee, Bumblebee.” Jess ruffled through the shirts and ignored the dig. “What does it turn into?”

  Something across the aisle—a sudden shadow, an unspecific darkening—caught Jess’s attention. A thin, middle-aged white man, a little too clean-looking, fingered the girls’ clearance tank tops with a wary expression, eyes scanning, scanning. It was midmorning on a Wednesday. The lights were bright, the store busy with beleaguered moms, sugared-up kids, and prancing teens back-to-school shopping, and there he was, peering around like a spooked but hungry cat.

  “Goddamn it,” Jess whispered. It didn’t matter where she was. She saw it everywhere, like some kind of cop curse—the city’s dark side, the bottom of a rock turned over, teeming with peculiar life-forms creeping and crawling through dirt and rot. The dirt dwellers she dealt with were like subterranean worms and bugs: drug dealers and pimps, abusive parents, gangsters and thieves. She had tried for years not to notice them when off duty, but she couldn’t help it. This guy didn’t match the description of the suspect in recent sex-assault cases across western Oregon, but Jess wanted to get a better look. He was definitely up to something.

  “Did you hear me?” Nina sounded annoyed. “I said it turns into a yellow car. Mom?”

  “Mm-hmm,” Jess said, maneuvering past the table to the other side of the aisle. “Okay, then, thanks. I, uh . . . I gotta go, okay? Bye now.” She clicked the phone off and shoved it into her purse. She knew better than to say anything to Nina about what she was doing. It was exactly the kind of thing she’d always gotten in trouble for: paying too much attention to the bad guys and not enough to Nina. Now her daughter would say Jess was doing the same thing to her grandson: instead of focusing on his birthday present, all she could see was this almost-certain sexual predator. It was what made Jess a good police officer, but she sometimes wondered if Nina was right, if it had kept her from being a good mother. Wherever she went she noticed these things and acted on them. And not just at work.

  When Nina was growing up, Jess had checked out every sleepover she had with friends. Was there an older brother, an uncle, a stepfather? All soccer and volleyball coaches were suspect until Jess got to know them. She’d had no problem letting teachers, neighbors, and sons of neighbors know that she wouldn’t have a problem arresting anyone’s sorry ass whoever tried to hurt a kid, and not just hers.

  Early in Nina’s life, they’d stopped going to church, and with all the revelations about priests in recent years, Jess felt more vindicated than ever about that one. Jess’s mother didn’t believe the stories about the priests, and insisted that her beloved Virgin of Guadalupe kept a special eye on young girls of Mexican descent. Jess had wondered as a child with an Anglo dad if that meant she only got special protection sometimes. At least Nina had a Latino father to up her chances.

  Leaving her cart behind, Jess traversed the shiny floors through bright fluorescence to the girls’ clearance racks, where she feigned interest in a crocheted cardigan stretched out of shape by countless hopeful girls trying it on. She pulled it off the rack and held it up to inspect it. The man moved into the juniors’ section, where two young girls, no more than thirteen, ogled flimsy dresses far too sexy for their age. Jess sighed, picturing Nina back in seventh grade, emerging from a dressing room in just such a dress and looking like a thirteen-year-old streetwalker. Jess had put the kibosh on all slutty wardrobe choices, but she suspected that her daughter wore whatever she wanted to as soon as she was out of the house.

  Reaching into her purse for her badge, Jess slipped across the wide aisle to stand on the other side of the dresses. Through the gaps between them, Jess saw the tops of the girls’ heads, hair shiny and probably smelling of strawberry or watermelon shampoo. They chirruped like little birds, giggles punctuating every other breathy sentence. Jess swallowed against an old ache. She missed that sound, along with the pop-diva music through the bedroom door, even the arguing. Just the daily-ness of having a daughter, of having someone at home to cook and care for, and worry about, although Jess still did plenty of that.

  “Excuse me.” The man’s voice, hesitant, halting. “Could you, uh, young ladies help me? I’m, I’m trying to pick out a dress for my daughter, and she’s about, well . . . she’s about your size, I think. Are you going to try those on? Could you try this one, too?”

  Jess froze, waiting.

  “Um, we gotta go,” the taller girl said, and the two hurried across the store to the exit, then stood and clapped their hands dramatically over their mouths before laughing and loping off, escaping into the wilds of the mall.

  Jess watched with a mixture of relief and disappointment. They were safe, but now she couldn’t charge him with anything. He definitely was not the six-foot, two-hundred-pound suspect the sexual-assault victims had described, but she could still put the fear of god into him. She stepped around the rack and flashed her badge, shaking her head at the bulge in his dark trousers.

  “Officer Villareal, Columbia Police. There are cameras everywhere, asshole,” she said. “It’s not like you won’t get caught.”

  “I didn’t do anything,” he said, mildly defiant, but he shrank inside himself when Jess dropped her eyes to his crotch. “I was just shopping for my—”

  “ID, please.”

  “But I—”

  “Now.”

  The man’s gummy face turned white. He fumbled in his back pocket, pulled out a wallet, and extracted his driver’s license. Jess took it and studied it.

  “Well, Mr. Leander, shall I call in for priors? Do you have a record?”

  “No, I swear, this isn’t what you think. I’m just shopping for”—he fumbled again in the wallet, pulled out a school photo of an adolescent girl with a forced smile—“my daughter.”

  “That so does not make me feel better.” She pulled out her cell phone and hit speed dial for the station house, then relayed his information.

  After thirty or so seconds, during which the man looked as guilty as anyone ever had in Jess’s presence, the officer at the other end of the line replied, “He’s clean.”

  “Great.” She snapped the phone shut. “Okay, Mr. Leander. I’m letting you go, but I will remember your name and this, uh, incident.”

  “But—”

  “What I meant to say was, get the fuck out of here before I change my mind and arrest you.” The obscenities, the threats—they were just part of the job.

  The blood rushed back into his face all at once, the sudden red ugly, like something festering, and he squeezed his way through racks of clothes and out into the stream of people who flooded the mall to escape the late August heat. Jess felt sick knowing he’d try again, maybe even today, in another store, another mall, another neighborhood.

  She returned the badge and phone to her purse and walked back to retrieve her cart. There’d be hell to pay with Nina the next time she talked to her on the phone, but there usually was. Jess found a size three Bumblebee T-shirt and decided to find a toy to match.

  Teo’s third birthday was a bittersweet occasion, both a celebration and a reminder of how long her daughter had been gone and how little Jess had been in the boy’s life. Nina still insisted that she’d had no choice but to go live with her dad when she got pregnant at sixteen. It was so much more complicated than that, but it had left a cold white scar between them where they’d ripped apart—an ache Jess still felt deep in her abdomen, especially when she heard teenage girls chattering, or saw moms and daughters shopping together, talking and laughing.

  It wasn’t that Nina was heartless. She wanted her son to have a grandmother. She brought Teo from Tacoma for twice-annual visits and allowed weekly phone calls, but phone conversations were not the ideal way to maintain a relationship with a small boy. The problem was more that Nina had no desire to have a relationship with Jess, and no recollection of the good things—of the love between them—before it all had gone bad.

  On a whim, Jess headed toward the jewelry department. Her daughter loved big swingy earrings that shone against her dark hair, bubble bath, sweet-scented lotion—all things she couldn’t afford to buy for herself. Jess could send them along with Mateo’s present. Maybe she would wrap Nina’s gifts, too, even though her birthday wasn’t until December.

  Jess stopped, then turned back toward the toys. Her daughter would see it only as manipulation, and perhaps it was. She couldn’t imagine her daughter didn’t still love her at some level, even if she wasn’t willing to acknowledge it. At least now Nina had found a way to move into her own apartment, away from Jess’s ex-husband, who drank more than Jess had ever felt comfortable with, especially for one charged with taking care of a young daughter and grandson. Without his constant influence, Jess thought, there might be a chance for her to be the kind of mom and grandmother she longed to be. She had to believe that.

  If Nina would just listen to her, Jess would tell her daughter how proud she was of her for raising her son on her own—Jess had made the mistake of staying with Rick for ten long years, mostly for economic reasons. But if she said it, her daughter would think it was a dig at her father. “You always make him out to be the bad guy,” Nina would say, so Jess had stopped talking about almost everything she would have liked to with her daughter.

  Earlier in the summer, Nina and Teo’s visit had gone the way they often did—somewhere between frustrating and nuclear winter. Nina had wanted to take Mateo to Wonderland Park to ride the carousel and feed the pygmy goats, and to the U-Pick-It strawberry fields, and to South Columbia Public Pool. She had an agenda in mind that meant Jess got no real time with either of them, baking cookies as she’d planned, or taking a walk along the greenbelt that ran behind her house to look for bird nests, which Teo dearly loved, or to pick a bouquet of dandelions. All of the simple, normal things she yearned to do with Teo, and Nina wanted to cart him all over the city.

  “He’s only two,” Jess had said, sipping tepid coffee at the breakfast table. “He’ll never even remember picking strawberries. Kids this young don’t remember stuff like that. Wait till he’s five. Can’t we just have a nice day together here?”

  Teo banged a spoon on the table while cramming Cheerios into his mouth. Jess put her hand over his to stop the racket, then took the spoon and placed it in her lap so he’d forget about it and concentrate on breakfast.

  “I remember things from when I was two,” Nina said, sliding her own spoon over to the boy.

  Jess tightened her jaw, determined not to react.

  “Fank oo,” Teo said, grinning, half-eaten Cheerios falling from his mouth. He resumed banging the table. Nina smiled at him, the kind of smile Jess had given Nina when she was so small and happy and charming.

  Her smile faded as she turned back to Jess. “I remember when I was two and Dad took me to ride the ponies at that place with the big totem pole and the fake fishing pond.”

  “You were three and a half. And I was there, too, Nina. Whose idea do you think that was? Your father would have rather been . . . I don’t know.”She’d been about to say he would have rather been having brewskies with his buddies.

  “But he was the one with me. He walked with me the whole time I was on the pony, because I was scared it was going to bite me.”

  “Yes, he did. All the way around that little circle.” Jess shook her head and stood to clear the breakfast dishes.

  “Do you have to do that?” Nina’s voice wobbled, and Jess turned to look at her, surprised.

  “What’s the matter? I was just saying you never remem—”

  “Do you have to ruin every happy memory I have?” Nina stood and held her arms out to Teo. “Come on, baby,” she said. “Let’s get ready for the day.”

  Jess felt guilty, of course, and followed her to her room. Once again, she’d done the wrong thing.

  “Nina, come on,” Jess said from the open doorway. “I didn’t mean it like that.”

  Nina kept her eyes averted as she pulled off the boy’s pajamas, saying, “Just forget it,” and Jess wished more than anything that they could forget everything that had ever come between them, but Nina never would.

  Later in the day, Jess stood outside the fence enclosing the old carousel, watching Nina hold Teo on top of a gilded horse. They laughed like drunken chimps as they circled around. They were both petite, with soft honey gold skin, and Nina’s dark hair drifted behind her. Jess’s heart filled at their beauty.

  All the activities Nina had proposed for the day were things Jess had loved doing with her when she was small, but it was as though her daughter had wiped Jess from every happy childhood memory. Jess turned her back on the rickety wooden fence, even though an excited Teo called, “Grammy! Grammy! Look at me!” each time she came into his view.

  She reached into her purse for a tissue, blew her nose, wiped her eyes, and turned around to wave.

  “Hi, hi, hi!” she called. “Hi, sweet boy! Hold on tight!”

  2

  The great blue heron stands three to four and a half feet tall and has a wingspan of up to eighty inches wide, wider than I am tall by eighteen inches. I would like to lie in the wings of a great blue heron, in its downy under feathers, and listen to its heartbeat.

  It has been my dream to see one up close, ever since I first read about them in the Sibley Field Guide to Birds of Western North America at the library. I like to draw herons and other birds, and write poems and stories about them. Birds are such happy things, and so free to flit and glide wherever they want, yet they always return to their nests. Maybe that’s what makes them happy. Great blue herons hardly seem in the category of birds, though. To me they seem more like enchanted creatures waiting for someone to break the spell so they can change back into the princes and princesses they once were.

  Great blue herons inhabit much of North America, but they live in wetlands, not forests, staying near lakes and streams so they can fish. They have been known to eat voles, which is really just a fancy word for mice, but probably only when they can’t eat fish. There are no wetlands in the Joseph Woods, but back when we had our car and we still thought Pater would have a job, we took a drive out to the river one Sunday and roasted hot dogs for lunch. We saw three great blue herons fly over us that day, like magic, like a sign that we were meant to be in Oregon.

  Last year a baby orca and its mother wandered too far upriver from the ocean; we saw the story in The Oregonian. They didn’t know how to get back home. Pater said all the fuss from people and boaters and news helicopters was probably confusing them more. He didn’t say he thought they’d never find their way back, but I know that was what he was thinking. In my mind, I like to think they submerged so no one could see them under all that deep blue, popping up again when they were safely out to sea.

  Last year, for my twelfth birthday, Pater found a book at the Joseph Woods Wildlife Sanctuary about our forest and its flora and fauna. He doesn’t usually buy books, because we can borrow them for free from the library, and we sometimes find good ones in the free box at Goodwill. But he said I was getting older and needed some books of my own, so he bought me The Wilds of Joseph Woods State Park, by Carol Frischmann. I can’t believe someone would write about where we live, and I would like to find Miss Frischmann one day and thank her, because in her book she says that the great blue heron has been sighted here, in my forest, on very rare occasions. That gave me hope.

  I often walked along our creek looking for morels, stopping every once in a while to sketch a kestrel posing on a limb, or a clump of Johnny-jump-ups. The day everything changed, I was thinking about herons, so I almost wasn’t surprised when I saw the tall swoop of gray-blue farther down the creek. I knew it could be a trick of my eyes, but my heart began to beat as rapidly as a hummingbird’s. Could it really be a heron? Or was it just me wanting it that made it look like one? It could have been a piece of newspaper caught in a tree, a scrap of a hiker’s coat or a camper’s tarp. They leave behind the oddest things, like one shoe, or a camera bag. Things you’d think they would need and be more careful about. If I lost one shoe, or my coat, I’d hate even to tell Pater. He says the VA’s four hundred dollars a month doesn’t go very far, even without rent and paying for the energy that Nature makes for free. You still have to eat some store-bought food (even though we grow most of our own vegetables, and forage berries, herbs, and mushrooms). You still need basic necessities (his polite way of saying menstrual supplies and toilet paper, as I just can’t make myself use leaves like he does). You still have to have presentable clothes for church, he says, and to save for the future.

  The tall gray shape moved, and I crept slowly toward it, dropping the paper and pencil on top of the mushrooms in my pocket. I worried I would startle whatever it was because I wore my sparkly silver foraging dress over my jeans and T-shirt. The dress was Crystal’s. I took it from her closet the night we left to remember her by. I wear it to collect mushrooms because it has a big pocket on the right side so I don’t need to carry a bag. I took soft, quiet steps in the underbrush, slipping behind a hemlock when I was as close as I dared go. I leaned my head to the left of the tree, ignoring the tiny ants marching up a woody ridge, and slowly, slowly, I could see the creek, then in the middle of it, a bird: a big, beautiful blue heron. My breath came as fast as if I’d been running, and it was almost like I could cry. I was so overwhelmed by what I’d been allowed by Nature to see.