Blonde Faith

23

The diner could have been designed by the same company that built the bank. Glass and chrome and red linoleum and vinyl were all it had to show. There was a counter with fourteen high stools and six booths along the glass wall. I sat in the corner stall farthest from the door. A red-eyed, red-faced, red-haired waitress of thirty and then some came up to me and said, “Sorry, honey, but the booths are for two or more.”

Her name tag read RILLA.

“My friend is coming over from the bank in just a minute,” I said. “She wants strawberry shortcake and coffee. I’ll have the same without the strawberry shortcake.”

This made the hard-living waitress smile. She showed me her stubby yellow teeth and said, “I had a boyfriend like you down in San Diego one time. The things he did with words kept me laughin’ so much that even when he stole my money and my car I still thought he was almost worth it.”

“You never saw it comin’,” I said, “and he don’t know what he left behind.”

Her grin widened, and she shook her head as a sort of agreement.

I looked at Rilla, thinking about the thousands of species of trees that proliferated under the Southern California sun. You couldn’t count them because new ones were coming in every day. There were more kinds of people than there were types of trees in LA. Rilla in her blue-and-white checkered uniform and I in my charcoal suit were kindred seeds blown in from far away. Just thinking that lightened my spirit.

The waitress would have stayed awhile to see what other gems I might put down, but Faith Morel came in then. I looked up and Rilla turned.

“Right here, miss,” the red-on-red-on-red woman said. “He’s a laugh a minute.”

Faith tried to smile but only managed an aspect of wan nausea. Rilla looked at her and shook her head again.

“You take care of her now, Groucho,” the waitress told me.

It seemed to me like an annunciation, a pronouncement from the deity I imagined who only appeared now and then to advise us and then watch us fail.

Rilla left, and Faith moved in across from me.

She was devastated. This wasn’t a state of mind that had just come upon her; I could see its history in the lines around her eyes and the slump of her shoulders.

“What happened?” I asked.

She tried to speak but could not bring out the words. I admired her ability to work so amiably while carrying this weight.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I know it must be bad news that brought you here. I mean, to get Christmas to let go of Easter Dawn is pretty serious all by itself.”

There was something ethereal about Morel. Her mind seemed to be pressing into mine as she stared at me, wondering if I could even understand her pain. I was drawn to her like a beast that smells water and is dimly reminded of its distant infancy, romping with snuffling brother and sister pups many seasons gone.

That diner was a defining moment for me. . . . Maybe not that, not a seminal event but a time when I got to see what I had become. While Faith examined me for strength and fealty, I watched her, thinking about Bonnie Shay. Faith had that aura about her, the same as Bonnie did. Sitting there feeling what had been gone from my life for so long, I understood that I could not live without Bonnie. It did not matter that she’d been with another man; it did not matter about my masculinity or my rage. Either I was going to be back with her or, one way or another, I was going to die.

“Here you go,” Rilla said, putting two coffees and an obscenely large portion of strawberry shortcake on the table.

“I didn’t order this,” Faith said.

“Funny man here did,” Rilla informed her.

Faith turned to me as Rilla went away. A barrier was removed from the bank officer’s blue eyes and she smiled. Something about me ordering her something sweet to make her feel better. It’s funny the way we make up the truth about people.

“Have you ever heard of the Sisters of Salvation?” she asked me.

“No sisters, just the army.”

“We were . . . we are a group of lapsed nuns of different denominations and religions that got together to help women all over the world. We have a mission in Vietnam. I worked there for three and a half years. I ran an orphanage on the outskirts of Saigon.”

“That’s more than a job,” I said.

“Christmas brought Easter to me after he’d massacred seventeen civilians near the DMZ. He came to visit her every chance he got and he confessed to me what he had become, what the military had turned him into.

“He was in pain, trying to figure out if he should join forces with Ho Chi Minh or kill himself to pay for his crimes. After a few months I convinced him to adopt Easter Dawn. I told him that they could save each other, and I guess they have . . . at least so far.”

Most beauty fades upon closer examination. Coarse features, unnoticed awkwardness, false teeth, scars, alcoholism, or just plain dumb; there is an abundance of possible flaws that we might miss on first sight. These blemishes are what we come to love in time. We are drawn to the illusion and stay for the reality that makes up the woman. But Faith did not suffer under the light of earnest scrutiny. Her skin and eyes, the way she moved even under the weight of her fears, were just so . . . flawless.

“But Christmas isn’t the problem now, is he?”

“No,” she said.

I waited for more, but it was not forthcoming.

“I see that you were wearing a wedding band not too long ago,” I said.

She covered the light spot on her ring finger with her right hand as the coffee cooled and the ice cream melted.

“Craig,” she said. “He was a navy-trained pharmacist. He worked on an aircraft carrier preparing medicines. I met him and . . . convinced him to donate some pills and drugs for the children I cared for.”

“Where is Craig now?”

There was something wrong with time itself as we sat there. There was something wrong with me. I was that beast smelling a far-off lake. Rilla and I were the pups that once played together heedless of the dangers that we were to face. And Faith was the being that had looked over us. I was hungry for her. I leaned a few inches across the table. The minutes were not passing by but pooling around, waiting for a sign to continue on their mindless way.

“I was offered the chance to bring all of my children back to the States to look for parents to adopt them. Craig had asked me to marry him.” Faith locked her eyes with mine. “He was a weak man, Mr. Rawlins. He wanted everybody to like him and to respect him. He boasted and blustered, but he wasn’t a bad man.”

Wasn’t.

“So you came back to America and brought your orphans,” I said, “and your new husband. Was his name Morel?”

“No. My married name is Laneer. Morel was my mother’s maiden name,” she said, and then continued with the story she was telling. “We found homes for my kids, and then, and then Craig bought us a big house in Bel-Air.”

“Whoa,” I said. “Weak but rich.”

“He and some other men had made a deal with a warlord in Cambodia. They were smuggling heroin out of Vietnam into Los Angeles and other cities. When I realized that he was selling drugs, I told Craig that I wouldn’t have it. I told him that he had to stop. When he said that he needed time to work it out, I left him.”

She was looking into my face but seeing the images of her husband and her choice.

“I went to stay with a friend in Culver City. I told Craig where I’d be. The next morning I was reading the newspaper and saw a picture of him on page three. It said that he had been tortured and murdered and that I couldn’t be found. I stood up from the table, and the dining-room window shattered. Someone had tried to shoot me.

“I ran out of there and kept on going for two days. I was out of my mind. . . .”

“Did you call the police?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“The article made it seem as if I was to blame. Our neighbors talked about us arguing and, and I was worried because the men who killed him were in the army. I thought I’d be arrested and killed. You know that happened all the time in Saigon.”

I took her hand then. It just seemed like the right thing to do.

“I stayed in a motel for three days,” she continued, “until I thought of Christmas. I had his number in my mind because I called him every other week to say hello and find out how Easter was coming along. She’s such a special child. He came and got me. After that he set me up in an apartment in Venice.”

“I want to believe this,” I said, “but I don’t get the thing about Easter. She saw you in the car with Chris, but she didn’t recognize you.”

“She was a baby when he took her. She doesn’t remember me, and because of the circumstances of her parents’ death we decided not to tell her too much. She wouldn’t have remembered me before I went out to their house in Riverside.”

“Do you know who it was that tried to kill you?” I asked.

“Not exactly. I knew some of the men that Craig was involved with, though. There was a marine lieutenant named Drake Bishop and a guy they called Lodai. And then there was that grinning idiot, Sammy Sansoam.”

“Black guy?” I asked. “About five ten?”

“Yes. Craig told me that they made hundreds of thousands of dollars. I guess they tried to shoot me because I’m the only one who knows anything about them. They killed Craig because I tried to make him quit.”

The guilt in her was so powerful that I felt it. For a while there, her feeling superseded my broken heart.

“It’s them that’s the killers, not you,” I said, taking both of her hands now.

“I know,” she said.

She was gripping my fingers hard enough to cause pain. I was happy to give her the outlet.

“You guys want anything else?” Rilla asked. Neither one of us had seen her coming.

“No,” I said, realizing that my voice was heavy with emotion. “That’s all, Rilla. Thank you.”

Rilla, my long-lost pup sister, looked at me with real empathy. She put the flimsy yellow check on the red tabletop, saying, “You can just leave it here.”

When the waitress had gone, I asked Faith, “Do you know how I can get in touch with Christmas?”

“No.”

“Can I do anything for you?”

“You could give me a ride to my apartment.”

“Aren’t you going back to work?”

“I told the manager that I was going to meet you, and he told me that I had to stay at my desk. So I quit. I would have done it soon anyway. It’s just too hard trying to pretend that everything’s fine.”

FAITH HAD a beachside courtyard apartment down in Venice. I walked her to the secluded entrance. She turned to me. It seemed that the easiest thing in the world at that moment would have been to throw that door open wide, carry her across the threshold, and make love until the sun set and then rose again. These thoughts seemed to be in both our minds as we stood there.

“Christmas didn’t tell you anything to do in case of emergency?” I asked.

“He gave me a number to call,” she said, and then she recited it.

“That’s my phone,” I said.

“Easy,” she said in mild surprise. “Short for Ezekiel.”

Damn.

“Will you call me?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Will you come visit?”

“Definitely.”