billing and bookkeeping. When Naomi was little, she went along with us. When it was time for her to go to school and we needed to be gone for a couple of weeks at a time, she stayed with Helen and Gabe.”
“Jasmine’s father?” I asked.
Alan nodded. “Gabe Gibbons was the world’s best grandpa, and Naomi loved him to pieces.”
When it came to gold-star grandpas, it seemed to me as though I was currently in the presence of one of those, but I didn’t try voicing that opinion to Alan. He wasn’t in a place where he’d be able to hear a compliment, much less accept one.
“You said, ‘was,’ ” I interjected. “What happened to him?”
“Grandpa Gabe died in a car wreck when Naomi was thirteen, and she took it real hard. It was as though the bottom had fallen out of her world. She lost interest in everything. Her grades dropped. By the time she got into high school, she was a mess. She started hanging around with a bad crowd, got herself into some serious trouble, and ended up being expelled. Once she got kicked out of school, she never went back. I’m sure you know the drill.”
The truth is, I knew that drill all too well. When my daughter, Kelly, dropped out of school and ran off with a wannabe actor/musician, I was sure she was a goner, too, but I was wrong. It turns out she wasn’t then and still isn’t a goner. Eventually Kelly got her GED and enrolled in college, where she ended up earning not only a bachelor’s degree but a master’s degree as well. She runs a chain of early-childhood-development centers in southern Oregon. As for that supposedly worthless wannabe actor/musician? Jeremy, my son-in-law, is now a well-respected band director and drama teacher at the high school in their southern Oregon town.
“So Naomi ran away from home?” I asked.
Alan nodded. “Jasmine could see where Naomi was headed better than I could, because she’d already been down that road. Naomi left home and dropped out of our lives completely. For a while she stayed in touch with her grandmother, with Helen, but the last time she stopped by to visit, she stole money out of Helen’s purse. That was the last straw as far as Grandma Gibbons was concerned. It was also the last time we heard anything about her or from her until that phone call from Harborview Medical Center.”
“She didn’t come home to visit when her mother was sick and dying?” I asked.
“No,” Alan said, somberly looking off into the far distance, “and she didn’t come home for the funeral either.”
“So when did she leave?” I asked, picking up the iPad and getting ready to drill down for details.
“When did she leave Jasper or when did she leave now?”
“Now.”
“January twenty-fourth,” Alan answered, “a couple of hours after Athena was born. She stayed around long enough to fill out the birth certificate and name the baby—Athena Marie Dale. She’s listed as the mother. The father is listed as ‘unknown.’ ”
“So whoever the father is, she probably didn’t marry him or take his name.”
“I guess,” Alan replied.
“What about an address? Did she give one of those?”
“On the form it’s listed as NKA. They told me at the hospital that translates to ‘no known address.’ ”
“So she was homeless, then?”
“Evidently.”
I looked over at Athena, wrapped snugly in blankets and sleeping peacefully in her carrier with what looked like a smile on her tiny lips. She had no idea how lucky she was, but I did. In the Pacific Northwest, it’s not nearly as frigid in early March as it is in January or February, but it’s still wet and plenty cold. Six weeks earlier at the end of January would have been a terrible time to take a newborn baby—especially a frail premature one—from a hospital nursery to a tent in some homeless encampment with no heat, plumbing, or sanitation. If that had been Naomi’s only post-hospital option, maybe leaving Athena in the nursery was the best possible decision she could have made for either one of them, but that wasn’t an opinion I could voice aloud to Alan Dale—certainly not right then.
“Did Naomi have any known associates?” I asked.
Alan shook his head. “When she ran away from home originally, she took off with a boyfriend named Brad Walters. I tried looking him up when Jasmine was so sick. Turns out he was already dead—he died of an overdose. After that the trail went cold.”