Years ago, when he and Katherine couldn’t get enough of each other and decided to marry, some wealthy friends of Katherine’s threw a party for them in St Helena in the Napa Valley. Maria was in a dress with a big blue bow in the front and her hair pulled to one side and with flowers there that she kept touching delicately on the drive up. She had shiny red leather shoes and was very excited about the party, and then in the summer heat and with the adults drinking wine and eating, and the older girl she had been told she’d be playing with being unfriendly to her, she had gotten flustered and overwhelmed.
An acquaintance of Katherine’s, a noted winemaker with an odd pale narrow face, watched this and then tried to get Maria to sit on his lap. She pulled away from him and he scooped her up from behind and lifted her high in the air as if imitating some amusement park ride. He made sounds like she was on a ride as he whooshed her along and smiled widely at the people nearby as he set her down. When she burst into tears, he said, ‘You must not be old enough for a big party like this.’
Maria ran to their car parked on the crushed gravel beneath an arbor. Katherine followed. The car was unlocked and by the time she reached her Maria had climbed into the backseat. Her face was streaked with tears, the flowers that had been in her hair lying where she had torn them out and thrown them on the gravel. Marquez could see Maria and Katherine in the car and near him the winemaker joked with a small circle that kids hated him and that no matter what he did they cried.
Katherine talked Maria out of the car but she broke free and ran back and an exasperated Katherine said, ‘I don’t want her in the car out here alone. The car is way too hot anyway. I don’t know what she’s so upset about. I guess the party is just too much excitement for her.’
‘I’ll talk to her.’
And that was probably where he first connected with Maria. He got in the car and asked, ‘Can I sit with you?’
She didn’t answer. She’d had enough of adults and was feeling sorry for herself and very disappointed after all the expectation of what the party would be. She kept her head pressed against the window. Her left hand gripped the hem of her dress and tears still ran down her cheeks, though she didn’t make a sound.
He lowered the other windows to cool the car off and kept talking to her. He talked her into getting into the front seat where he knew she was used to sitting with her mom and hadn’t been since the three of them started riding together. Her world had been disrupted. The mom she’d had to herself, she didn’t have in the same way anymore.
‘Let’s get out of here for a few minutes,’ he said. ‘Let’s go for a drive.’
Heads turned as he backed out. The hostess looked over reprovingly at this unnecessary indulgence of a little girl who just needed a nap, and this Marquez, this game warden, leaving in the middle of a party that was a nicer event than he’d probably ever been to. With Maria he stopped and got an ice cream. They drove slowly back and looked at vineyards and she told him about starting first grade and the friend she met, and now she was going to be going to a new school and wouldn’t know anybody at all.
They weren’t gone forty minutes. It didn’t affect the party. It didn’t affect anyone at it except the hostess, but it was the first real connection with his stepdaughter and the start of a conversation that was still going on today. He knew something of how she thought. He knew she had said she was going to Yosemite to get away and clear from her head the tag of being labeled the former girlfriend of an ecoterrorist. Maria was stubborn, independent, and smart. She went somewhere last night with her friends where no one would find them. Still, his heart pounded and his voice was a croak as he swerved off the road and answered the phone. And his body suffused with an almost chemical relief when he learned from Desault that the victim in Rayman’s Hummer was not Maria.