Carol O’Connell: Find Me

When she had returned to the convertible, Charles started up the engine, feeling the imperative to get her away from this place. “We’ll finish it for him, all right? We’ll go to the end of the road.”

There was no protest on her part, but he knew better than to take this for consent. She simply did not care-about anything. Portrait of a woman on the unwind.

But one thing was a certainty on this road where paradox was the everyday thing: this sad news was reason for rejoicing: her father had died before she was born, and Mallory had not committed patricide on a dark road in Arizona.

They rolled on in silence and finally reached the official end of Route 66. Turning left on Ocean Boulevard, he drove on to the famous pier mentioned in every guidebook. It looked rather like a circus in progress. Electing something more tranquil, he chose the beachfront parking lot, then led her across the wide expanse of sand to the water’s edge. “Later,” he said, “after you were born, Cassandra never tried to contact your father?”

Mallory shook her head. “My mother waited a long time. She was eight months pregnant with me before she gave up on him and went home to Louisiana, where I was born. And after a while, my father just forgot about her-and me.”

Oh, wait! Back up!

“After a while ? You mean after you were born? Peyton didn’t die in the crash?”

An hour had passed before Mallory would speak to him again, and then he learned that Peyton Hale had been badly mangled. One leg had been smashed into twenty-six pieces, and his skull had also been broken, yet he had survived.

A much calmer Charles Butler was revived by the salt-sea air, and he was experiencing his first corndog on the boardwalk of the Santa Monica Pier. He sat on a bench, listening to the music of a carousel and the rest of the story.

“Savannah told me he went through years of physical therapy.” Mallory discarded her own corndog in a trashcan. “She was still obsessed with him. She tried to visit him in the hospital, but he wouldn’t see her, and every letter she wrote to him came back unopened.”

“Understandable,” said Charles. “If Peyton believed that Cassandra was dead, he might not want any confrontation with reminders of her.” And for all these years, Savannah had remained in love with Peyton Hale. Else she would not have kept the stolen letters. “And now,” he said, “if you don’t mind-could we go back to the part where your father just forgot about your mother? Did Savannah tell you that?”

This time, Mallory’s selective deafness was not a problem. He could answer his own question. She would never believe this from a liar, a monster like her mother’s best friend. “Mallory, you tracked him down, didn’t you? You’ve met Peyton Hale.”

“We never spoke.”

And what did that mean? How should he put this so as not to sound too harsh, not too anxious to pressure her? He yelled, “You never spoke ! What the hell does that mean?”

He sat beside her in the shade of the car, watching the ocean. She told him a tale that jibed with Louis Markowitz’s version of a child’s lost weekend. This was the episode that had driven Louis mad with worry over his foster daughter.

“I was only fourteen years old,” said Mallory. “The Markowitzes thought I was at computer camp for those three days. It was a school award for good grades.”

Charles recalled Louis’s rendition: “Helen was so happy when she signed the school’s permission slip. Finally, Kathy wanted a normal childhood experience. I was less trusting. I put the kid on the bus and stayed until it pulled out of the schoolyard.”

Mallory’s side of the story filled in a few gaps that Louis had not mentioned, or never knew: In her after-school hours, she had used a police department computer and traced Peyton Hale to a remote town in northern California. She had used the same computer to purchase her airplane tickets, charging them to the NYPD. However, arranging for a limousine to meet her upon arrival had proven too problematic. And so the child had hitchhiked north from the San Francisco airport. Young Kathy had slept on the beach that first night, not expecting to meet her father there, for his home was miles from town. The next morning, she had been surprised to see him coming toward her. “I knew who he was the minute I saw him. His eyes- my eyes.” He was so close to her, almost within touching distance. In passing, he had turned to her with a curt nod, a greeting to a stranger, and then he had passed her by. “He didn’t know me.”

“That’s it ? You never spoke to him? You just walked away?”

“What was the point? He didn’t know me.” She splayed her hands to ask why she must repeat herself. And now she laid it all out for him-again, though it annoyed her to do it. “I look just like my mother. I have her face, his green eyes, and he had no idea who I was. He just forgot about her… and me.”

“He thought you were both dead.”

Evidently this was not an acceptable excuse in Mallory’s ruthless accounting of what was owed to her. “But I didn’t know that,” she said, as if this might point out a defect in Charles’s logic. When she spoke again, her tone of voice warned him not to side with Peyton Hale. “It was like my mother and I never existed.”

More accurately, in Charles’s opinion, it was like her father had punched her in the gut-and she would have had no defenses at that young age- only pain. And so Charles thought to change the subject before she could shut down again and lock him out with another prolonged silence. “Did you talk to Louis about this-when you got back home?”

“He didn’t wait that long. He knew I was missing when he called the computer camp the next day-just to see if I was playing nicely with the other kids-that was his story. Then the old man tracked me down to the San Francisco airport. He was waiting at the gate when I showed up with my return ticket. We flew home together.”

“I suppose he was very upset.” In Louis’s version, the man had been badly frightened in every passing minute until he had found his lost child.

“No. The old man just asked if I was okay. He never mentioned it again, and he didn’t rat me out to Helen. He said Helen liked the computer-camp story, so we’d let her go on believing in that one. After a while it was like somebody else took that trip to California, not me. And I didn’t c are about my father anymore.”

Charles very much doubted that, but knew better than to accuse her of human frailty. At least, Mallory had found the best part of her father, the young man who would always be in love with Cassandra, the Peyton Hale she had rediscovered on Route 66.

And what now-what next?

She had no plan beyond this moment. She could not see one day into the future, and this worried Charles. Those who could not see a day ahead might not have another day to live.

He picked up the canvas bag of maps and pulled out the one for California. As he plotted a therapeutic drive up the coast, she was staring at him. No-she was staring at the map with its arcs, circles and little crosses.

“Why would Riker give you a bag full of evidence?”

“Personal effects,” said Charles, correcting her. Oh, that was a mistake. She never took criticism well. And now his attention was diverted to other items at the bottom of the bag, things he had overlooked before. He pulled out a pair of dark glasses, distinctive for their great expense and style- Mallory’s sunglasses? Yes, for next he found her gold pen, a gift he had given her years ago. He stared at these items for the longest time. “Some of your things,” he said, holding them out to her. “They got mixed up with Horace’s effects.”