Randy White - The Mangrove Coast

“He called you Mandy. A nickname.”

“I guess. I don’t know. I don’t remember anything about him. I used to pretend I did; made stuff up, but it’s because I wanted to believe I’d known him at least for a little bit. Daddy.”

“It’s been nearly two decades,” I said.

“That’s why it’s so weird.”

“Because he mentions it in the letter-that time won’t make any difference to me? Or because you’re in some kind of trouble?”

Amanda thought for a moment, not looking at me before she said, “All of the above.”

“The problem is, I think something’s happened to my mother. She took off with a guy and now she’s disappeared.”

I said, “What?”

“Gail, the woman in my father’s letters, my mom. She’s been gone for nearly three months.”

“Do you mean that she went away on a trip and you haven’t heard from her? Or do you mean she’s vanished?”

“I’m not sure. That’s why I came looking for you. Maybe both.”

“Then you should be talking to police, not me. Or the FBI.”

“I already have.”

“Then you are serious.”

“Of course I’m serious. Why would I say such a thing? I haven’t seen her or spoken with her since early February. And it’s been more than a month since I got a postcard from her. My mom would never do that. She wouldn’t drop out of sight like that unless something was really wrong. When I explain it you’ll understand. Coming to you is about the only thing I haven’t tried. I mean, who else am I going to ask?”

After I’d listened for a while, I thought: Who else, indeed?

Amanda had trouble telling a story sequentially-most people do-so I interrupted occasionally to keep her on track or nudge her off lengthy asides. Mostly, though, I just listened. You have to let people tell stories in their own way. Take all the pieces apart, rearrange them neatly, and here’s what happened: After Bobby’s death, Gail Richardson was so devastated by grief that she sought professional counseling. “This was in Lauderdale,” Amanda explained, “and Mom had to find a counselor that was approved by the VA. They’ll only pay for certain ones and Mom ended up with Frank Calloway. I was so young at the time I really don’t know for sure what happened, but what they told me later was that Frank treated her for the next year or so… nearly two years, I think, and he gradually fell in love with her. When he realized his interest in Mom wasn’t just professional, he sat her down to explain why, ethically, he could no longer be her psychologist, but ended up asking her to marry him instead.”

Gail, widow and the mother of a very young daughter, did not accept right away. But Frank persisted and, slightly more than two years after the death of her husband, Gail became Mrs. Frank Calloway. Within months after that, Amanda was legally adopted.

“I don’t think that Mom was ever in love with Frank. Not like she’d been in love with my real father, anyway. Read the letters and you’ll see the kind of passion they had for each other. That’s pretty rare.” Amanda allowed a reflective, cynical beat before adding, “These days, in fact, it’s almost nonexistent. But I think my mom’s a realist. She knew how tough it’d be raising me on her own, and I think she came to feel real affection for Frank. She certainly came to be dependent on him. She looked to Frank for everything. Financial security, emotional approval, the whole works. With some men, I think they’d rather have that than love.”

“It sounds like you’re not a big fan of your stepfather.”

“He’s not my stepfather anymore. He’s my mother’s ex-husband.” “You don’t like him.”

“I respect Frank. At times I even find him likable and entertaining. But he never pretended to be my real father. No, with Frank and me, it was… it was more like a business arrangement. I think we both knew we had to accept each other or risk hurting my mother. Even when I was very little I can remember thinking that. It was the only way to keep my mom happy, and we both loved my mother very much.” She paused for a moment, remembering how it was, before she added, “You said my dad, my real dad, had a picture of me. Did he ever show you a picture of my mom?”

I nodded. He had. Yes, he certainly had.

Bobby had carried a couple of photos of Gail. One, I couldn’t remember much about… a busty teenage Latina girl in shorts and a T-shirt? Yeah… posed in front of some kind of fast car. A GTO, maybe or a 442. One of the popular muscle cars of the day. Essence of the American male from that period: dream car, dream girl, a bank loan and marital obligations implied.

But the picture of Gail I remembered best was a glamour shot apparently taken by a professional photographer: haunting eyes, high cheekbones that created their own shadows in tricky lighting, long black hair with auburn overtones brushed as bright and smooth as a candle’s flame. It was the face of a starlet; one of the classic beauties from the forties. Imagine Rita Hayworth, but with Veronica Lake’s sleepy, secretive eyes, and you’d come pretty close to Gail Richardson.

Bobby had called it his “‘Twelfth of Never’ photograph.” Which made no sense until one night, as I boiled coffee over a can of Sterno, tropic rain drumming down, he explained: “It’s because of the way she looks. Her face, her hair, the way her eyes look right into mine. It reminds me of the song ‘The Twelfth of Never.’ It’s our song, Gail’s and mine.”

I said, “Huh?”

“What‘a’ya mean, ‘huh?’”

“I mean ‘The Twelfth of Never.’ I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

At first, he thought I was kidding. Then he realized that I wasn’t. “Doc, you’re telling me you’ve never heard it? Not even on the radio? The Johnny Mathis song, for Christ’s sake!”

“Nope. But it’s been a couple of years since I’ve been back to the States. Nearly four years, actually.”

His expression was pained. “You’d have to live on the frigging moon not to have heard that song.”

I was boiling the coffee, listening to the rain, looking at the blue flame of my miniature chemical fire: Sterno in the jungle. “The moon,” I said. “For the last few years, yeah. The moon, that pretty nearly describes the places I’ve been.”

He said, “You’re serious. You’re really serious. Okay… you want to know what the song’s like? Look at my wife. The way her face is, that’s exactly what the song sounds like. Too beautiful even to describe. A thousand years ago, she coulda been an Aztec princess or she could be Miss Latin America today. You know what you can’t tell from that photograph? Her eyes; Gail’s got the most unusual eyes you’ve ever seen. Her right eye’s bright blue. Powder blue like those stones the Navaho Indians wear. Those stones… turquoise, that’s what they call it. But her left eye is green. Really deep green, jungle green. I look at her eyes and I know that there’ll never be anyone else for me but Gail. Like until the twelfth of never, get it? I mean forever.”

Later, much later, when I finally heard the song, Bobby had been dead for, what, six months? Maybe a year. But listening to it, I’d thought about how right the man was. In his life, there had been only one true love. Gail. One blue eye, one green eye. And probably his toddler daughter, as well. Another girl with unusual eyes.

Back then, I’d thought of them as Bobby’s girls.

The only loves he would ever have. Just like he’d said: forever.

To Amanda, I now said, “I never met your mother, but I remember the photos. She was a very beautiful woman.”

“She still is. She’s in her forties, but the men-when she walks into a room? — men still stop what they’re doing and stare. She has that