Chapter 7
Seven
The headlights of the yellow Cadillac sedan cleaved the night. To the west, a rippled track of light cast by the descending moon revealed an ocean that was otherwise a vast and daunting darkness.
Loretta and I had waited in the car while Franklin checked out of Hotel del Coronado and a bellhop put their luggage in the trunk.
I must have been a curious sight, robed and hooded in the back seat, and one thirty in the morning was an uncommon checkout time.
The del Coronado staff were too discreet to raise an eyebrow.
My rescuers rode up front and I behind them on the way to Los Angeles.
I was weary but not sleepy. I seldom went to bed earlier than two in the morning.
Besides, I was too excited and too nervous about the new life ahead of me to lie down on the seat and go to sleep.
Loretta had mentioned a household staff that included a cook, three maids, and a majordomo.
I’d read many novels of nineteenth-century England in which grand houses on sprawling estates provided the main setting, but I couldn’t imagine what residence would require such a retinue here in California, where the history of the place went back mere decades instead of centuries.
We motored north in silence, which might mean that we were emotionally exhausted, but which might also mean that we were all brooding over what this new arrangement entailed and having second thoughts.
I felt that I should speak up, assure them that they could take me back to Captain.
Really, I should say, he’s not as bad as he seemed tonight, he steals books for me, brings me the foods I like most, he never beats me, and in his care I’m safe from people worse than him, a world full of people worse than him, there’s much to be said for being safe.
However, I didn’t have the courage to say any of that.
I was too selfish to give them the option of undoing what had been done.
If the future to which we had committed proved to be an ordeal for them, I could slip out of their house one night and make my way in the world as best I could, go where they couldn’t find me if they were compelled to search.
Maybe I would find my way to the sea one night and swim out along the rippled track of light cast by the moon until the water drew me down and closed around me.
The world is beautiful and enchanting, but there are many ways out of it if life becomes unendurable.
Northbound toward the city, I stared out the starboard window at the shapes of barren hills that defined the eastern horizon and rose to a universe of stars.
From time to time, along the roadside, a series of eight or ten Burma-Shave signs offered an amusing rhyme, but I was too far behind the headlights to read the message that the placards conveyed.