I Met Someone by Bruce Wagner

Author:Bruce Wagner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2016-02-03T10:48:37+00:00

She hadn’t left her favorite suite at the Gansevoort in three days.

She came to New York alone, a sort of getaway, half for the birthday party Meryl and Bill Irwin were throwing for Edward Albee’s eighty-eighth, half to see Todd Haynes about a film project.

She had planned on staying a week but things changed.

When Ginevra heard from her—a disjointed rush of torn, hyperventilated syntax—she asked her to come to the office straightaway. Dusty balked and the therapist went over to the hotel instead. She answered the door in big movie-star sunglasses but the disguise nobly failed. Like a victim in a cerebral European horror flick, the skinscape and very bones of her face had already begun to metamorphose into something unknown and misbegotten. She returned to the couch where she’d been living.

“There’s tea,” she said, nodding at a pillaged room-service table.

“Have you spoken to her?”

“No.”

“Is your friend still here?”

“No.” A long pause, then: “They both left.”

Two days before, on a bright, freezing Sunday, Livia had called. (As it happened, she was in Brooklyn visiting a just-born grandchild; she’d learned through Allegra that Dusty was in New York.) She needed to see the actress—a “personal matter,” which seemed to rule out any news about the search—and would rather it didn’t wait until they were back in L.A. An hour later, her old ally arrived at the hotel with Snoop Raskin. The news came quick, like a rogue wave.

“I was able to locate the babysitter,” he said. “Claudia Zabert.”

“Okay,” said Dusty with a generic smile, too disoriented by the incongruity of their sudden presence to even know she was afraid.

“And—this is going to be difficult.”

His entire face blistered and lurched like a satellite photo of a surgical strike, before returning to a blank composure of unbombed grids.

“Your daughter is Allegra.”

“What?”

Livia tensed and moved closer, self-deputized into suicide watch.

“It’s—Allegra. She’s Aurora. The one you’ve been looking for. They’re the same.”

Dusty tried to say what again but slurred “Grallegwa?” as if in the midst of a stroke. Sinatra’s boy soldiered on.

“It’s my understanding that your mother—Reina—gave Ms. Zabert five thousand dollars for ‘expenses,’ and after leaving Tustin, she and the girl—whom she renamed Allegra—spent time in Northern California. San Bruno, San Francisco, San Rafael. They lived in campsites and motels and with various acquaintances of Ms. Zabert’s. There are at least five recorded arrests for panhandling, vagrancy, and prostitution—it’s actually somewhat remarkable Ms. Zabert was able to maintain her physical ‘custodianship’ of the girl, such as it was. There may have been an involvement in a cult known as the Children of God or ‘the Family,’ but I believe that would have been something she dabbled in on an expedient basis in order to procure food, clothing, and shelter, and have other needs met. Ultimately, they settled in a commune near the Salmon River—this would have been 1981 or thereabouts, when the girl was age three. The commune was located in the Siskiyou Mountains and fairly remote; Ms. Zabert may have been seeking to avoid or escape certain legal pressures and predicaments.

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