Scare Crow

by Julie Hockley

  But I had still heard nothing of how he was going to manufacture and distribute the promised goods. He either had no plan or he wasn’t sharing this information. This was worrisome. And his obnoxious personality was wearing me down. I just wanted to put a bullet through his fashionable brain and be done with it. I couldn’t. Not yet. But when the cartel came for revenge, I promised myself to do his children a service and be the one to end his miserable life.

  The more I watched his interaction with his children, the more I understood his reasoning for having them there at the same time as us. Julièn liked to flaunt his power, whether it was over an entire country or over his three young children. And perhaps he hoped that I wouldn’t blow his brains out and paint his walls with them while his wife and boys were there. I was tempted, more than once.

  Manny had observed as much of Julièn’s behavior as I had, but she had a different perspective.

  “My father never wanted a daughter,” she told me one evening. “He wanted an heir. Not a girl.” We were hunched over a blueprint of the Munoz compound. Julièn had just made his eldest son spend two hours standing in front of us with a whole steak sitting in his mouth after he had refused to eat it at dinner. Julièn had left us to go after his wife, after Mariella had grabbed her son and walked out of the room.

  “My mother had four pregnancies before me. All girls, based on the ultrasounds. My father would make her get abortions as soon as he’d find out. When she got pregnant with me, she hid it from him. Until she had me. She had to get all the wives of the underlings involved so that he wouldn’t kill me. When the men threatened defection, he promised to keep me, but he left my mother and kept me away from her. She killed herself when I was five. My father married the nanny after she gave him his first son.”

  I went to bed that night with no doubt in my mind that Manny had killed her father. And that one of Julièn’s sons would do the same to him someday if I didn’t get to him first. People like us shouldn’t have children. This was clear.

  ****

  I had kept the air-conditioning off in my room because I couldn’t hear anything over the hum. I needed to be able to listen for anything out of the ordinary. An ambush in the night.

  It was like sleeping in a BBQ.

  I went to open the window a little wider, as though this would make a difference, and saw something, a shadow, moving in the grass.

  It was there. I could see it. The figure of the woman in a flowing dress, red hair that seemed to glow in the darkness like its own October moon and flew behind her. I wasn’t imagining it, and I obviously wasn’t sleeping.

  I ran out of the house and headed in the direction I had seen the woman go. I looped around the staff kitchen and toward the garbage bins, where I could see smoke rising over one of the spotlights.

  I did find a lady. But her hair was darker than the night.

  Mariella was sitting in a lawn chair, sucking on a cigarette and staring at me. She still had her evening dress on and a bottle of wine next to her.

  I was in my boxer briefs.

  I nodded hello. She took a puff of her smoke and glanced away. She saw me as one of her husband’s confrères. If only she knew how badly I wanted to spoon his eyeballs out.

  I headed back where I had come from, feeling sickly and disoriented.

  Manny was walking down the staircase in a black silk baby-doll. “Cameron? Are you okay?”

  I went to find her in the darkness. “Fine. Can’t sleep?”

  “I hate this place,” she told me in a whisper. “I hate the smell. I hate the heat. I hate how quiet it is. I feel like I’m going crazy here.”

  The shimmer of the pond water was reflecting over her face. Her hair was up in a messy ponytail, and she had a pendant that fell into her cleavage.

  I let the back of my hand come to her neck and make its way down to the silver pendant, pulling its weight between my fingers. It looked like three leaves intertwined over a circle.

  “It’s a triquetra,” she explained. “My grandfather gave it to my grandmother as a wedding present.”

  I didn’t want to ask if she’d had to yank it from her grandmother’s cold dead hands.

  While I held on to the pendant, Manny pressed my hand on her chest.

  Manny’s gaze went from eye to eye. Large, dark pupils stared back at me.

  “Stay with me,” she pleaded, pulling at my hand.

  “Good night,” I told Manny in a low voice.

  The vulnerable softness of her face disappeared and was replaced by her stern self. She turned on her heels and went back upstairs.

  On my way back to my suite, I let myself glance outside. It was as black as the inside of a coffin. There was no way I would have ever seen anything outside, let alone at the back of the estate.

  Haunted. That’s what I was. And it was destroying me. I needed to refocus.

  I tried something that night when I closed my eyes in bed. I forgot where I was. I took a deep breath and imagined I was somewhere else. That place I would never forget, that was forged in my brain, that was part of my DNA. It was the only time I had truly slept.

  I was at ease. With Emmy. I could forget; I could let things go. Even for just a few moments in her arms, I was liberated from myself.

  I could breathe again and remember.

  She was alone most of the time. Surrounded, but alone. Alone, but not lonely. Alone by choice. We had this in common. This need to be self-sustained. And this was what had drawn me to her initially. I had seen myself in her. She was me, the other, better version of me—the one that could have existed in another dimension.

  Then she matured. She became a beauty—the kind of beauty that one can’t help but stare at, as though it were absolutely not possible, and yet it was. I watched her, from afar. I got to know Emily Sheppard … the way she moved, the sound of her laugh, her habits, the people who surrounded her. This, I had thought, must be love.

  How can someone who has never been loved be able to love?

  Jesus, I had no idea what love was.

  The person I was watching was a fictional character. Someone I had made up in my mind. I had given her a personality, feelings, thoughts that were not her own, because I didn’t actually know her.

  I could have spent my lifetime being in love with this beautiful girl I thought I knew. If that day in the cemetery had never come and if Emmy and I had never met, that would have been just fine with me. I wouldn’t have known any better. She would have lived her beautiful life, and I would have watched her do it.

  She would have been ignorant of me (I had reproached Emmy for this), but I would have also been ignorant of her. I would have loved her. But not really her.

  Emmy, it turned out, was real. She was hotheaded and emotional and overdramatic. And she was kind. She could make your heart start beating again. She could bring life to the darkest place, to the darkest man. With one tear, she could make you feel like the shittiest asshole in the world. But with one smile, you were invincible.

  That thing that was tearing me apart—the visions of the lady in the garden, barefoot, red hair flowing behind her in a nonexistent wind—was the knowledge of what I was missing.

  Being alone but not lonely together. Being each other’s counterparts, each other’s best part.

  There would never be another. For her or for me.

  After having had a taste, I knew what I was missing, and I couldn’t continue life if she weren’t next to me. I had been sending myself to an early grave because I couldn’t be Cameron without her.

  I knew this.

  So what the hell was I supposed to do now?

  ****

  In the morning, after a good night’s sleep next to the spirit of Emmy, I met Julièn and Manny at the breakfast table.

  “The Coalition will not be single sourcing to you,” I announced as I took a seat.

  Manny choked on her orange juice.

  Julièn readjusted the napkin on his lap. “We had a deal. Measures have been taken based
on our agreement.”

  By measures, he meant that he had already made promises, taken bribes, and spent the money he would have made after the deal went through.

  “I would be doing the Coalition a disservice if I didn’t test the proposal before fully investing all of our efforts.” I looked Julièn in the eye. “I am not satisfied that you will be able to deliver on your promises.”

  Manny sat erect. “Cameron, it’s all going down in a couple of days. We’ve already spent so much time planning—”

  “The Coalition is committed to building a business relationship with you,” I continued, cutting Manny off. “As a show of our loyalty, we will offer you exclusivity over all marijuana being distributed throughout the United States. This will be at a considerable peril for the Coalition. We will be severing relations with all of our current growers, who have proved themselves efficient and trustworthy for many years.” I needed to keep the peace with the cartel for as long as possible, until I could bring Emmy back to me.

  Julièn leaned back in his chair and crossed one leg over the other, showing off his leather shoes. “I suppose this could be temporarily achieved—”

  “I will, of course, need detailed and complete intelligence on your current grow-ops. As an equal show of good faith,” I added.

  He kept his gaze locked on me. “Of course.”

  Most of our growers were partners of the Coalition. While there would be some rumblings of the decision to single source all marijuana through Mexico, the captains would find ways to make amends and keep the peace.

  But there was also one independent grower. And he would not be happy to know—following an anonymous tip—that his license to grow had just been revoked.

  CHAPTER 15: EMILY

  TRIGGER

  The bright side of hitting rock bottom, of having exhausted all options, was that my eyes had been opened to new possibilities. It was like getting lost in the desert carrying an empty jug of orange juice, collapsing with dehydration, and on my last breath being handed a jug of apple juice and a map sending me in a totally new direction.

  It was March already. I was sitting cross-legged on the floor in some seedy gym in south Callister, my homework splayed in front of me. But I was focusing on Griff, who was punching out a balloon bag in the corner. He had been training hard to get back into fighting shape and had already won a few bouts, held in shady backroom fighting rings. Everyone we encountered was excited to see him back in fighting shape. Griff wasn’t just a good fighter. He was gifted. And with every day that passed, I noticed his confidence growing. While he wouldn’t admit it to me, I could tell that he was happy to be back in the ring. He was home.

  I envied him. I knew how it felt—to do what you were always meant to do. I had caught a glimpse of this when I was with Pops. The glimpse had croaked the second Pops had turned me down.

  At least the dreams and the nightmares had stopped so that Griff could get some shut-eye.

  I hadn’t forgotten that there was a whole world of bad people who wanted me and who would want my child. But for now, I had pushed this aside—because I had no other choice.

  A few days after Griff and I had come back from our fruitless meeting with Pops, a large cardboard box was delivered to our door. It was the kind of box that my roommates usually got from their moms. Boxes with clean Spider-Man sheets and Kraft dinners. Except that this box was for me. It had a bunch of clothes of a bigger size to accommodate my growing self. XL shirts and stretchy pants. A brown and red woven poncho. And a large terrycloth bathrobe that, quite magically, had a thousand dollars stuffed in one of its pockets.

  As soon as possible after Christmas, my loving, doting mother had my medical benefits canceled so that I now had to pay cash for my nausea medicine. I guess this was her way of rejecting me and rejecting my child again (in case it wasn’t clear to me that she had already done so on Christmas Eve). So the care box obviously wasn’t from my mother, but from two people who were as close to a mom as I would ever get: Maria and Darlene. I knew that a thousand dollars was a lot of money for them. And I knew that if I tried to send it back, they would be really hurt.

  Since Griff wouldn’t let me out of his sight, I’d had to stop working because my schedule was getting in the way of Griff’s training. And honestly, I was too exhausted to work. I could barely manage going to class and keeping up with my homework. Some days I felt as though my neck were holding up a bowling ball. But I kept this from Griff.

  Griff’s fights were quite small (compared to what he had once been used to) and paid little, so the money that Darlene and Maria had sent me came in handy, keeping us fed. And the box of clothes helped me continue to conceal my pregnancy. As far as I knew, no one knew that I was pregnant. Griff and I planned to keep it that way.

  Griff and I, we wedged together as though we had always been meant to. Before I knew it, spring was trying to claw its way out of the irrepressible snow.

  Griff had finished training for the day, and I was taking yet another trip to the washroom while he went to get the car. I had learned to be speedy. The last time I had (apparently) spent too much time in the women’s washroom, he had a handgun placed in my purse the next day, and I got a two-hour refresher course on self-defense from one of his assistant trainers.

  When I pulled my pants down in the stall, my insides twisted when I found that I was bleeding again. This had been happening on and off for weeks. The nausea, the fatigue, the bleeding, the fear for the baby’s health, the fear of what was going to happen next—it was all weighing on me like a metal jumpsuit. But with my mother having pulled my medical insurance and having no alone time to stalk the student doctor, I had to take comfort in the fact the baby was still kicking my insides to a pulp.

  I rushed outside to find Griff parked with a wheel on the sidewalk, the passenger-side door open for me and Griff on his phone. He hung up as soon as he saw me.

  “Everything okay?”

  “Sure,” I said. I had been hiding my health issues from Griff because he didn’t need the added anxiety. Some days he was so wound up from the stress of fighting, of money, of watching out for me that I thought he might actually unstitch. “Who was on the phone?”

  “My promoter.”

  He drove out of the parking lot, nearly colliding with an oncoming vehicle. Something was up.

  “And?” I wondered when we were safely stopped at a red light.

  “There’s a fight in two weeks. At the Bolster Coliseum.”

  There were posters all over Callister, and his gym mates had been yakking about it for weeks. The first time Callister City hosted a mixed martial arts fight in its largest arena was big news, but it was no longer new news.

  “And?” I asked again.

  “One of the fighters just got injured in training.” He turned to me before I could repeat the same question. “They want me to fight his fight.”

  This was big and new news. “That’s good, isn’t it? It’s what you’ve been hoping for, training for.”

  But Griff didn’t seem as excited as I thought he should have been. “This is a title fight, Em. It’s the main event. I’m not ready for that.”

  “Then you will be ready. Two weeks is enough time to get ready for it. Right?”

  “If I train twenty-four hours a day for the next two weeks.”

  “So do it.”

  “It’s not that simple.”

  “What’s not so simple? You train hard. You win. Done. If anyone can do it, you can.”

  He chuckled. “I want you there. You’re my lucky charm.”

  “Of course I’ll be there.” I had been to every one of his fights, watching from the back, where no one could see me. Staying out of sight as much as possible was the best way to keep the baby and me safe.

  “No,” he said. “I want you there. In the stands. I need to be able to see you when I’m in the ring.”

  “Griff—” I started.

  “Please, Em. You’re the reason I’ve been winning all this time.
I can’t do it without you.”

  I laughed. I found that hard to believe. He had been winning all those years before he even met me. “This event will be televised, and I’m as big as a whale. How exactly am I supposed to keep this pregnancy secret with millions of people watching?”

  “Emmy, you’re barely showing. If I didn’t know you were pregnant, I would have sworn you just had a really big dinner.” His eyebrows jumped up and down, and he grinned. “Besides, they won’t be watching you. They’ll be watching Griff the Grappler Connan.”

  He had a point. When Griff entered a room, nobody could take their eyes off him, including most of my roommates.

  ****

  Two weeks later, it was mid-March and the day of Griff’s fight. My belly was still quite small for being eight months pregnant, but finding something nice—nice enough to wear—was a major challenge. I was combing through my bins, trying to figure out what to wear to the arena when I got accosted in the hall by Hunter and Cassie. I had noticed them spending a lot of time together lately. Cassie had kept her hair blonde, though the rest of her still screamed bloodsucker. Vampire girl and frat boy was a weird combination, but they both had something in common: their love of seeing someone pummeled by all means necessary in an escape-proof ring.

  Griff had gotten everyone tickets to the fight so that I wouldn’t be sitting by myself … so that Griff could take his eyes off of me long enough to beat up the guy they put in front of him. He was the hero. I was the hero’s sidekick.

  Griff came up behind them and stood snickering as they handed me a plastic bag.

  I narrowed my eyes at Griff while I opened the package. There was a lot of deep purple in there. I unfolded the material to find that it was a cotton sweatshirt with a life-size picture of Griff, when he was a kid. He looked to be about ten years old, smiling proudly, with one of his front teeth missing.