City of Angels

by Kristi Belcamino

  Meanwhile, backup officers arrived at the Star Center and burst in searching for Taj and me, not realizing we’d been in Amir’s trunk. It took a while for everyone to sort out what had happened.

  After backup arrived at the Star Center, Craig raced over to the beach house to help Ernie, unsure what he would find. On the way, he’d received a garbled radio message for help from Ernie. Worried, Craig called for backup. A few houses away from Kozlak’s place, Taj stepped into the middle of Highway 1 to flag him down. They sped to the beach house together with an army of police cars and ambulances only moments behind them.

  “Did you see Rain?” I asked them. I couldn’t forget her dazed look and demeanor. I was still worried that they had taken her away in an ambulance.

  “They just want to check her out. She probably was drugged for the last few months,” Taj said.

  “She was pretty out of it,” Craig agreed. “But she looks like a fighter. They’ll make sure she’s okay at the hospital.”

  “Let’s go there. Right now.” I leaned forward toward Craig.

  “I already asked about that,” Craig said. “They won’t let you see her right now. Only family. But they said you could go by during visiting hours tomorrow morning.”

  I sat up. “But we are her family. We’re all she has.”

  “Let me try one more thing.” Craig got on the radio and made some calls. The dispatchers told him that the supervisor on duty at the children’s hospital was a no-nonsense, everything-by-the-book nurse, and that we had no chance of seeing Rain tonight.

  “Head there first thing in the morning,” Craig said. “You don’t have to talk to detectives until tomorrow afternoon. I told them I knew you—I figure I sort of do after everything Ernie told me—so they released you into my custody.”

  “And they agreed?”

  “Not really,” he said, chuckling. “But I’m the only one who knows your names or where you live. When they figure out you’re gone, it will be too late. I sent a message to the detective bureau saying you’d be there tomorrow at three. I figure you could use a good night’s sleep first.”

  When he pulled up in front of the American Hotel, Craig said he’d pick us up tomorrow at a quarter to three and take us downtown for our interviews. Upstairs, Taj led me to his room and tucked me into his bed like I was a child, pulling the covers tight up to my chin, kissing me on the forehead. I didn’t protest.

  But I sat up in bed when the realization struck me. Rain was now in the system. That meant they would put her into the foster care system. The last place she wanted to be.

  “She has nobody,” I told Taj, who was sitting at his desk writing. “They’re going to make her some anonymous face in the system and stick her in some home with other kids and nobody to love her. We can’t let them do that. She belongs here with us. We’re her family.”

  Taj turned with a serious look.

  “I know. I’ve been sitting here racking my brain over it. Trying to figure out a way to stop that from happening. I just don’t know.”

  I sat up, pulling the covers around me.

  “Taj, I have to tell you something. Something I did tonight. It’s about Amir.”

  He was at my side in a second, holding me, his lips pressing down on my head, kissing me and stroking my back. “I know.”

  “See, the thing is, it’s not just him. It’s also the surfer boys…” I paused and swallowed hard, my mouth dry, “…and my mother. I’ve got a lot of blood on my hands.” The words came out wobbly. “The last time I saw my mom she told me I had killed her and she wished I was never born.”

  When my sister, Adele, was stillborn, my mother sunk into a deep depression. She didn’t come out of her room for two months. At the time, I didn’t know it was another chapter in my mother’s lifelong struggle with depression and addiction.

  When she finally got out of bed, we were so relieved we didn’t notice that she’d become addicted to the painkillers prescribed to her. When these ran out, she went looking for something stronger. My dad and I didn’t know. She hid it well. That is, until she got hooked on crank.

  After she ran out of pills, my mother, desperate, contacted a distant druggie cousin for help. The bastard hooked her up with a local drug dealer who introduced her to crystal meth. Within a year, she had left us and fled the suburbs to inner city Chicago with her new drug dealer “boyfriend.”

  I was fifteen.

  My dad fell apart. He began traveling for work, leaving me home alone for weeks on end. When he was home, he was drunk. He hired a housekeeper to cook and clean. I rarely saw him.

  Once when he was gone, I watched a TV show about a girl who found her mom after filing a missing person’s report. I went to the police station. The cop told me it was hopeless. “Sorry, kid. I’m sorry to be the one to break the bad news, but you better just accept it now. You ain’t ever gonna see her again.”

  But he was wrong.

  One day, my friend Rob told me my mom was back in town. He’d seen her walk into that old abandoned house on Johnson Street on the edge of town—the place where homeless people squatted. He took me aside and whispered it to me in the hall at school, and although I was grateful for that, it really didn’t matter if anyone else heard. At that point, nothing could humiliate me anymore. The entire school knew my mother had become a drug addict and left her mansion in the suburbs, her new Mercedes, and her family.

  After school, instead of going home, I took a city bus over to Johnson Street. The wind had picked up and blown in dark gray clouds that swirled above me, making me pull my hands up into the sleeves of my jacket. Fast food wrappers and cigarette butts littered the curb. The houses had peeling paint and lawns were bare or brown, piled with cars. Besides the wail of a baby and the angry screaming of a woman in response, the only other sound was the howling of the wind and the creak of an unlocked screen door rattling back and forth.

  I paused outside the house Rob had told me about. It was a two-story Tudor that had fallen to ruin. Tiles were missing from the roof and cardboard was taped over all the downstairs windows. I made my way up onto the porch, which was littered with trash—an old black shoe, soda cans, a stack of cigarette butts. The doorknob felt cold under my fingers, but turned easily. The interior of the house was darker than the gray outside. I closed the door behind me and paused, waiting for my eyes to adjust, hoping I wouldn’t find a bunch of people staring at me when they did. But the first floor was empty, just strewn with trash like the porch. A big staircase lay before me.

  Slowly, I made my way up the stairs, apprehension flooding over me. At the top, more light seeped in from an upper window. Three open doors lay before me. The first one contained some blankets and trash. The room smelled so badly of piss and sweat and filth that I gagged. A homeless man wrapped in tattered rags sat in the corner raving to himself about something. I tried the next door.

  That was where I found my mother.

  At first I didn’t notice her. She looked like a wadded up blanket on the floor in a dark corner. I was about to close the door when she moved. I crept closer and saw a pale face that didn’t look like my mother anymore. The woman before me was so emaciated that her face looked like a skull. Her skin was drawn back tightly on her cheeks and her eyes sunk into dark hollows.

  “Is that you, Veronica?”

  Her voice was raspy, weak. Her blond hair dark with grease.

  “Yes, Mama. It’s me.” I knelt beside her. She grabbed my hand. It felt like I was holding a claw.

  “Oh, my baby is here. Please help me. You’ve got to help me.”

  “I will, Mama. That’s why I’m here. I came to get you and help you.”

  “Thank you. That’s my girl.”

  “Mama, can you walk?” She seemed so weak. “Will you be okay for a minute? I’ll go call Daddy.”

  “No!” The screech sent a chill through my body. Her eyes were wild as she struggled to sit up, managing to pull herself up onto her elbows. “Is he here with you?”

&n
bsp; “No, Mama.”

  She sunk back onto the blanket. “Good. I need you to go find Darwen. I need you to help get me some stuff, some important stuff I need to make me feel better.”

  She acted like I was still a child who believed her when she told me her drugs were her special “adult candy.”

  “Mama, I can’t. I’ll do anything but that. Mama, please let me take you home. Let me take you home where we can help you. Daddy will know what to do. Please.”

  “He won’t help me.” Her voice grew louder. She was growing increasingly angry and was clutching my hand so tightly her claws were digging into my palm.

  “Mama, you’re hurting me.”

  The door below slammed and footsteps pounded up the stairs.

  “Hey, kitty cat, who you got here?” The man’s eyes were bloodshot and bulging. His beard was tangled and his clothes rags. I could smell his sour, unwashed stench from across the room. Another man stayed behind him in the shadows.

  My mom’s eyes lit up with excitement. “Is that you, Darwen? You got something for me? Did you bring something for me?

  “Oh, I got something, but what you gonna give me?”

  “You know I’m good for it, Darwen. I just need some time.”

  “I gave you time. You said your old man would give you some money if we came back here.”

  I looked at my mother in surprise. She came back to town to get money from my dad?

  My mom slumped back in defeat. “That didn’t work.”

  “You saw Daddy?” And he didn’t tell me.

  She leaned toward me and in a hoarse stage whisper asked, “Listen, baby. Do you have any money?”

  I shook my head sadly. She grabbed my arm, twisting it. “How about jewelry? You got any jewelry you can give him, honey? How ’bout a necklace?” She clawed at my neck, her fingers trolling around, feeling around for my necklace, which she then yanked off, ripping the worn fabric of my shirt as she did so.

  “Mama, please don’t. Please, please come with me.”

  She eyed the necklace, saw it was cheap costume jewelry, and tossed it onto the ground.

  Her eyes raked over me, taking in my torn blouse. She turned to face the guy across the room. “Darwen, this is my girl. My baby. Isn’t she pretty? She’s twelve.”

  “I’m almost sixteen, Mama,” I said, trying to ignore the men across the room.

  My mom ran her jagged fingernails down my cheek and she smoothed down my hair. “Veronica, why don’t you go over and introduce yourself proper like to Darwen. He’s my new old man.”

  “No, Mama. We’re leaving. You’re coming with me.” I could feel the men staring at me and dread coursed through me, making the back of my neck tingle. Turning, watching the two men with my peripheral vision, I grabbed my mother under the arms and lifted her. It felt like I was grasping a small load of dirty laundry, she barely weighed anything. I had my arms around her back and her head on my shoulder but she was not even attempting to support her own weight, just lay in my arms like a floppy doll. I tried not to hold my breath, but her stench made me gag. I almost had her to her feet when she whispered in my ear.

  “There’s one thing you have that I know they want.”

  I paused, trying to think of what I had that they wanted. I didn’t even have a purse with me.

  “You know what it is. I saw the way they looked at you when your shirt ripped. You got one thing they want. Can you please give it to them for your mama? Pretty please, baby. Be a good girl and give them what they want. Otherwise, your mama is gonna die. If I don’t get what they have, I’m gonna die.”

  My vision started to close in. I let go of her and she slid back to the floor. I stood frozen, staring at the skeletal body at my feet, paralyzed as bony arms reached toward me and long, thin fingers wrapped around my ankles.

  “You give them what they want.” My mother’s voice was an unrecognizable wheezing shout.

  Blinded by the tears in my eyes, I jerked my foot away from her and started running for the stairs. As I pounded down them, I kept expecting to feel a man’s strong grip on my shoulder, jerking me back. There were no footsteps following me. Only the echo of my mother’s wails as I left the room.

  “You leave me here, I’m gonna die. You just killed your mama. Please come back. Don’t leave me here.”

  I paused at the bottom of the stairs, frozen, sobbing with guilt at the terror and pleading I heard in my mother’s voice.

  “Veronica? Veronica? You little bitch. I wish you were never born. I wish you were dead.”

  I lifted my head and walked out that door. I never looked back.

  That night at dinner, I didn’t speak. My dad asked me what was wrong, but I just glared at him. I left my food on my plate and locked myself in my bedroom.

  Two days later, a police officer knocked on our front door. He held his hat in his hands. I already knew what he was going to tell me.

  My mother was dead. It was my sixteenth birthday.

  By the time I was done telling Taj this story, my face was sopping wet from my tears and snot dripping down my face and into my hair.

  “You’re the first person I ever told this story to,” I said with half a laugh, half sob. “So, it’s not just Amir. It’s my mom, it’s that homeless guy, it’s those to surfer boys, and then it’s Amir. That’s five! I’ve got five dead bodies on my conscience.”

  Taj was silent. That was when I knew. Of course he hated me. What kind of monster would let her own mother die? He must really be disgusted to not say anything. But then I felt him scoot up against me. He wrapped his arms around me and kissed my eyes. Very gently.

  He exhaled loudly. “Is this what you’ve been living with?”

  I sobbed, uncertain how to answer that question. I had nothing left to hide.

  “You can’t blame yourself. She was the mother. She was the one who was supposed to take care of you. Your job was to be the kid. Your job wasn’t taking care of her. I don’t care if that’s how your dad made it seem. You were the kid. Hell, you still technically are a kid. You couldn’t save your mother. I don’t care what you think you could have done to save her, I’m telling you this and it is the utter truth—there is nothing, nothing in the world you could have done to save your mother. Got it?”

  “But I didn’t tell my dad. If I had, she’d still be alive.”

  “That’s not true. Your dad knew she was there, remember? He didn’t go get her. He could’ve gone and gotten her, but he didn’t because he knew he couldn’t save her either.”

  I didn’t answer. The echo of Taj’s words in my mind made me cry even harder. “She was the one who was supposed to take care of you.”

  He was right. She was supposed to take care of me. And she didn’t. And I thought, deep down inside, that was what hurt the most. That was why I had made sure that I always took care of myself without anyone else’s help. And I tried to be the adult with Rain. But I wasn’t an adult. Not yet.

  Taj continued holding me close, breathing warmly into my hair, occasionally kissing it. I turned and buried my face in his chest, feeling weak and emotionally exhausted from the relief of telling someone else my deep dark secret.

  “Listen, your dad probably knew that there was nothing he could do to help your mom. Giving her money for drugs was only going to prolong the inevitable. If she didn’t want to be in treatment, there was not a damn thing you or your dad could do about it. That’s the truth. When you are a drug addict, nothing is more important than your drugs. Nothing was more important than drugs to your mom. No her own life. Not your dad. Not you. Nobody. Nothing.

  “And those other people—none of them were your fault. Even Amir. You would be dead right now if you hadn’t done that. You told me it wasn’t my fault Angelina died. How do you expect me to believe that when you won’t believe your mother’s death wasn’t your fault? You’re the one who is supposed to help me believe that.”

  We both had been carrying around entire truckloads of guilt for a very, very long time.


  “Yeah,” I said with a rueful laugh. “I guess we’re both pretty messed up.”

  But maybe, just maybe, Taj was right. Just like I knew in my heart he couldn’t have saved his sister, maybe I couldn’t have saved my mother. Amir had said almost the same thing—“You can’t save someone from themselves.”

  We lay still and he stroked my hair. “Shhh. Just close your eyes now.”

  Finally, the exhaustion I’d been fighting overcame me. And despite everything I fell asleep. I slept ten hours and woke to bright sunshine and Taj’s arms around me.

  John and Eve came creeping in after I yawned loudly the next morning. Eve crouched down and hugged me tightly. “Oh thank God you’re okay.”

  Taj sat up, running his fingers through his hair, making it stick straight up, just the way I liked it. “Can’t a guy have his girl over without it becoming a slumber party for crying out loud?”

  His girl? I didn’t have time to think about that because John thrust the LA Times in front of us. Although the newspaper was almost entirely filled with stories about the riots, Rex Walker’s death also made the front page. I had to flip to the inside section to see a mention of Ernie’s death. All it said was an unidentified police officer had been killed in a shootout with a suspect. The story basically said that Walker had been found dead at Kozlak’s house under suspicious circumstances and that Big Shot Director had been arrested for conspiracy to murder and child pornography. Apparently, they nabbed Kozlak and Chad hiding in a safe room at his Malibu house. Had the maid had given him up?

  They also found that girl from the video’s body. Stuffed in a barrel of acid in Kozlak’s basement.

  I knew Chad and Kozlak would never see the blue sky above them again. But I hoped they would suffer much more than that. I wanted them to rot in prison and have unspeakably horrific things done to them while they were locked up.

  Then I read something that made me whoop and jump to my feet with joy. The police said they were going to ask the Department of Justice to open an investigation into The Church of the Evermore Enlightened practices and how they covered up illegal activities of their members.