The Narrows

CHAPTER 5

On the phone that night from Las Vegas my daughter asked me to tell her a story. Just five years old, she was always wanting me to sing to her or tell her stories. I had more stories than songs in me. She had a scruffy black cat she called No Name and Maddie liked me to make up stories involving great peril and bravery that ended with No Name winning the day by solving the mystery or finding the lost pet or the lost child or teaching a bad man a lesson.

I told her a quick story about No Name finding a lost cat named Cielo Azul. She liked it and asked me for another but I said it was late and I had to go. Then, out of the blue, she asked me if the Burger King and the Dairy Queen were married. I smiled and marveled at how her mind worked. I told her they were married and she asked me if they were happy.

You can become unhinged and cut loose from the world. You can believe you are a permanent outsider. But the innocence of a child will bring you back and give you the shield of joy with which to protect yourself. I have learned this late in life but not too late. It's never too late. It hurt me to think about the things she would learn about the world. All I knew was that I didn't want to teach her anything. I felt tainted by the paths I had taken in my life and the things I knew. I had nothing from it I wanted her to have. I just wanted her to teach me.

So I told her, yes, the Burger King and the Dairy Queen were happy and that they had a wonderful life together. I wanted her to have her stories and her fairy tales while she could still believe them. For soon enough, I knew, they would be taken away.

Saying good night to my daughter on the phone felt lonely and out of place. I had just come off of a two-week trip out there and Maddie had gotten used to seeing me and I had gotten used to seeing her. I picked her up at school, I watched her swim, I made dinner for her a few times in the small efficiency apartment I had rented near the airport. At night when her mother played poker •in the casinos I took her home and put her to bed, leaving her under the watch of the live-in nanny.

I was a new thing in her life. For her first four years she had never heard of me and I had never heard of her. That was the beauty and difficulty of the relationship. I was struck with sudden fatherhood and reveled in it and did my best. Maddie suddenly had another protector who floated in and out of her life. An extra hug and kiss on the top of the head. But she also knew that this man who had suddenly entered her world was causing her mother a lot of pain and tears. Eleanor and I had tried to keep our discussions and sometimes harsh words away from our daughter but sometimes the walls are thin and kids, I was learning, are the best detectives. They are masterful interpreters of the human vibe.

Eleanor Wish had withheld the ultimate secret from me. A daughter. On the day she finally presented Maddie to me, I thought that everything was right in the world. My world, at least. I saw my salvation in my daughter's dark eyes, my own eyes. But what I didn't see that day were the fissures. The cracks below the surface. And they were deep. The happiest day of my life would lead to some of the ugliest days. Days in which I could not get past the secret and what had been kept from me for so many years. Whereas in one moment I thought I had everything I could possibly want from life, I soon learned I was too weak a man to hold it, to carry the betrayal hidden in it in exchange for what I had been given.

Other, better men could do it. I could not. I left the home of Eleanor and Maddie. My Las Vegas home is a one-room efficiency across the parking lot from the place where millionaire and billionaire gamblers park their private jets and head by whispery limos to the casinos. I have one foot in Las Vegas and one remains here in Los Angeles, a place I know I can never leave permanently, not without dying.

After saying good night my daughter handed the phone to her mother, who was on a rare night at home. Our relationship was more strained than it had ever been. We were at odds over our daughter. I didn't want her to grow up with a mother who worked nights in the casinos. I didn't want her eating at Burger King for dinner. And I didn't want her to learn about life in a city that wore its sins on its sleeve. But I was in no position to change things. I know that I run the risk of seeming ridiculous because I live in a place where the randomness of crime and chaos is always near and poison literally hangs in the air, but I don't like the idea of my daughter growing up where she is. I see it as the subtle difference between hope and desire. Los Angeles is a place that operates on hope and there is still something pure about that. It helps one see through the dirty air. Vegas is different. To me it operates on desire and on that road is ultimate heartbreak. I don't want that for my daughter. I don't even want it for her mother. I am willing to wait, but not that long. As I spend time with my daughter and know her better and love her more, my willingness frays at the middle like a rope bridge crossing a deep chasm.

When Maddie handed the phone back to her mother neither of us had much to say, so we didn't. I just said I would check in with Maddie the next time I could and we hung up. I put the phone down, feeling an ache inside I was not used to. It wasn't the ache of loneliness or emptiness. I knew those pains and had learned how to live with them. It was the pain that came with a fear for what the future holds for someone so precious, someone you would lay your own life down for without hesitation.