She flopped back in her chair and shook her head, her eyes magnified by the glasses. “I didn’t see anything about that, Anna. I’m so sorry. The system failed you both. But I’m onto this now and I won’t let go until I have some answers.”
I was so choked, I couldn’t think of anything to say except, “I want to see Dennis. Give me his contact info.”
She nodded and slid a piece of paper towards me. “Be cautious. Start with a phone call. It’s been a long while since you talked to him and you can’t be sure what to expect. People change but not always in a good way. You may have built up unreasonable expectations of him.”
“Dennis was… I mean is a good man and was a good father.”
“You might remember him that way. Children of abusive parents sometimes paint a glowing fantasy picture in their memories that has no relation to reality. The truth can be a massive shock to the psyche. But I do believe you’re mature enough to handle this now. My question is why it was ever withheld from you.”
I left that office clutching the address in my hand. I wasn’t ready to act on the information but three weeks later, when I called the office again to ask Martha more questions, I was alarmed to discover she was no longer there. Reassigned was the official word, but after checking through all the social work departments I found no trace of her again. Like I said before, people around me tended to disappear. Maybe she knew too much for them to keep her around.
I kept the piece of paper in my wallet, waiting for the right moment to call, to think of the right thing to say. What could I say to my father after fourteen years? We’d both failed Birdie and I dreaded telling him she was gone.
A year later, one frigid night in December, in my first year of teaching at the alternative school, I rolled out of a cab so drunk Sabrina had to drag me to my front door.
“I hate to leave you alone on Christmas Eve,” she said, blowing on her hands. “But I have a plane to catch in a few hours and I haven’t even packed.”
I fumbled around for my key, dropping it into the snow then crawling around on hands and knees to dig it out. I was stone cold sober by the time I got inside the house. And frozen to the core. The frigid wind had whipped the ends of my hair into icicles and I could barely feel the tips of my fingers. When the door slammed shut, I looked around at the bare room with its floor cushion and TV. Loneliness was a weight crushing down on me with such force I felt like I’d disappear. Every cell of me pressed into the floor. Gone without anyone knowing or caring. I needed a friendly voice to tell me that life was still worth living, so I ripped Dennis’s number from my purse and dialed before I could change my mind.
I imagined his phone ringing somewhere. Far away. Echoing down the years until it reached the man I remembered as Dennis. Dad. The man with the long hair and broad shoulders. The man who read me stories.
A sudden click and I held my breath.
“Hello. Hello?” The voice was scratchy. “Who’s this?”
“Dennis?” I said in a small voice. The long silence was punctuated only by the sounds of our breathing. The voice waited, maybe for further proof. “It’s me, Anna.”
And then the sound came over the wires and cables. In waves that ebbed and flowed. The sound of an old man crying. Soon I was sobbing along with him. Pouring out all the hurt and pain.
“I reckon we both needed that,” he said, when we paused for breath.
I held the phone as if it was made of gold. “I feel better.”
He coughed. Blew his nose. I tried to match the man from my memory with this older, more vulnerable man. “I’ve never stopped crying since I let you two girls go. I thought it would just be for a while, till I could get my feet on the ground. Then they wouldn’t let me see you. Said it was best for the both of you that you went to a good, solid family.”
If he only knew.
“Where’s Birdie?”
The question I’d been dreading was finally out. The question I’d been asking myself for so long now.
“Gone.” The word echoed. Took on a life of its own.
“Gone where?”
I tried to explain but how could I capture years of pain in a few minutes over the phone?
“Promise me you’ll find her,” he said after I was done. No comment on the drugs or the abuse or the pimps. Just find her. “Find her and let her know where I am. I want to see both of you. Make up for everything. If I can do that, I’ll be able to rest easy at night.”
I made that promise to him though I hadn’t a clue where to start. First, I scoured the net for Las Vegas bunny ranches. Pages and pages of curvy young girls in frilled bikinis and thigh high boots posing outside wooden ranch style nightclubs or gathered around bloated, bald guys in red silk shirts and cowboy hats. Starlight Bunny Ranch, Moonlight Pussy Palace, Hot Love Junction, all lit up in pink neon, shining down onto the pumped-up boobs and bulging buttocks of a thousand nameless young girls.
I didn’t find her there. Earl Rafferty was probably too cheap to put out the bus fare to Nevada.
So one frigid March weekend I took the bus up to Duluth.
41
Lake Superior was still partly iced over. Rivers of free-flowing water ate their way through rough sheets of slate colored ice, shattering them into a rubble of dirty chunks that piled up against the shoreline. I stood on the harbor front clutching Birdie’s picture and watching a thick bank
