by Wendy Heard
She answers quickly. Maybe she saw me coming. She doesn’t open the steel-and-mesh screen but stands behind it, one hand on the doorjamb.
“I need to talk to you,” I say.
“What about?” Her thin hair is tied back into a low ponytail, her chest gaunt under a baggy pink T-shirt.
“About Joaquin. What do you think? Why the fuck is his window boarded up? Why does his school say he doesn’t go there anymore?”
She sighs, opens the screen and comes out onto the porch with me. She’s wearing her usual eighties jeans and dirty white sneakers. She gestures that we should sit on the stoop, and I sink down onto the concrete step beside her.
She looks me in the eyes. Hers are faded gray and lined at the corners. “I know you care about him. No one doubts that. But I am his mother. Not you.”
Those words are the hardest pill for me to swallow, and I’ll never, ever get used to them, no matter how many years go by.
My voice is rough. “Since you’re such a mother, do you want to do the doctor’s appointments? Deal with the insurance? Check his dosages? Because you’ve spent the last ten years pretending his diabetes doesn’t exist.”
“He hasn’t had any symptoms in years, Jasmine.”
“Because he’s been on meds!”
“You have this need to be involved, to control him. You need to let go. He isn’t sick. It’s you.”
The urge to do violence swells huge inside me, but I have to stay calm. I take a deep breath and force my fists to unclench. “Every holiday, it’s this bullshit again. You trying to give him candy he can’t eat, trying to prove he’s fine. He isn’t fine, Carol. He could die. Is that what you want?”
“Doctors can only fix the symptoms. God is the only one who can heal.”
“Diabetic ketoacidosis. It takes two days to set in with no insulin and would kill him in a week. Do you think this is a fucking game? Do you not remember what happened?” I’m on my feet now; I can’t help it. My heart is being raked from my body, my naked soul slick with fury.
Three years ago, before Joaquin got good at taking care of himself, one horrible Christmas found me kneeling over him in his bed, trying frantically to shake him awake. A urine stain spread out around him on the sheets, and his pulse was thready and irregular. I’d slung him over my shoulder and run out to my truck. That drive to the ER was the longest car ride of my life.
Unwelcome images flash through my mind—Joaquin limp and covered in piss, flopping around under the seat belt while I tried to see the road through tears that fogged my vision almost to obscurity—
“‘And the Lord will take away from you all sickness,’” Carol continues. “He needs to grow his faith, and he can’t do that while being fed lies at school, lies by you. He needs to be surrounded by the Word.”
“Is that what they told you at church? After they collected a tenth of your benefits check? Don’t you remember what the doctors told you last time? Or do you think it’s God’s will that Joaquin should die in a diabetic coma before he can go to high school?”
She stands up and brushes her hands on her jeans. “Romans 1:26.”
“Stop.”
“‘And God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones.’”
I push that aside to deal with another time. “This is not about me. You can think whatever you want about me, but—”
“I’m exhausted by you, Jasmine.” She lets herself back in the house and shuts the door behind her.
I bang my fist on the steel screen. “Do you want him to die? Is that what you want?”
I stumble backward down the steps, pull my keys out of my pocket and grip them so tight they cut into my palm. I’m in my truck without knowing how I got there. I thrust the key into the ignition and crank the manual gearshift into first gear. The truck peels away from the curb too fast. At Cesar Chavez Avenue, I slam the brakes, grip the steering wheel and scream at the top of my lungs.
4
JAZZ
THE CEILING ABOVE the crowd sparkles with strings of golden lights. They twinkle just bright enough to illuminate the faces. I adjust a microscopic issue with my toms and run my fingers through my bangs, straightening them over my eyes. The guys are tuning up, creating a clatter of discordant notes in the monitors. When they’re done, they approach my kit for our usual last-minute debate about the set list. Dao humps his bass in his ready-to-play dance, black hair swishing around his shoulders. “Dude, stop,” Matt groans and readjusts the cable that connects his Telecaster to his pedal board.
“Your mom loves my dancing,” Dao says.
“You dance like Napoleon Dynamite,” Matt retorts.
“Your mom dances like Napoleon Dynamite.”
Andre raises his hands. “Y’all both dance like Napoleon Dynamite, and so do both your moms, so let’s just—”
I wave a stick at them. “Guys. Focus. The sound guy is watching. We’re three minutes behind.” I have no patience for this shit tonight. This all feels extra and stupid. I should be doing something to help Joaquin. His dwindling supply of insulin sits at the front of my brain like a ticking clock.
The guys get into their spots, the distance between them set by muscle memory. Andre leans forward into the mic and drawls, “Arright DTLA, lez get a little dirty in here.” His New Orleans accent trickles off his tongue like honey.
The room inhales, anticipates, a sphere of silence.
“Two three four,” I yell. I clack my sticks together and we let loose, four on the floor and loud as hell. I’m hitting hard tonight. It feels great. I need to hit things. My heart beats in tempo. My arms fly through the air, the impact of the drums sharp in my joints, in my muscles, the kick drum a pulse keeping the audience alive. This is what I love about drumming, this forcing of myself into the crowd, making their hearts pound in time to my beat.
Dao fucks up the bridge of “Down With Me” and Andre gives him some vicious side-eye. The crowd is pressed tight up against the stage. A pair of hipsters in cowboy hats grabs a corresponding pair of girls and starts dancing with them. I cast Dao an eye-rolling look referring to the cowboy hats and he wiggles his eyebrows at me. I stomp my kick drum harder, pretending it’s Carol’s face.
The crowd surges back. Arms fly. A guy in the front staggers, falls. A pair of hands grips the stage, and a girl tries to pull herself up onto it.
Matt and Dao stop playing. The music screeches to a halt.
“What’s going on?” I yell.
“Something in the pit,” Dao calls back.
Andre drops his mic and hops down into the crowd. Dao and Matt cast their instruments aside and close the distance to the edge of the stage. I get up and join them. Together, we look down into the pit.
A clearing has formed around a brown-haired guy lying on the floor. Andre and the bouncer squat by him as he squirms and thrashes, his arms and legs a tangle of movement. Andre’s got his phone pressed to his ear and is talking into it urgently. The bouncer is trying to hold the flailing man still, but the man’s body is rigid, shuddering out of the bouncer’s grip. He flops onto his back, and I get a good look at his face.
Oh, shit, I know this guy. He’s a regular at our shows. He whines and pants, muffled words gargling from his throat. Some of the bystanders have their phones out and are recording this. Assholes.
The man shrieks like a bird of prey. The crowd sucks its whispers back into itself, and the air hangs heavy and hushed under the ceiling twinkle lights.
Andre is still talking into his phone. The bouncer lifts helpless hands over the seizing man, obviously not sure what to do.
I should see if Andre wants help. I hop down off the stage and push through the crowd. “Excuse me. Can you let me through? Can you stop recording this and let me through?”
I’m suddenly face-to-face with a man who is trying to get out
of the crowd as hard as I’m trying to get into it. His face is red and sweaty, his eyes wild. “Move,” he orders me.
Dick. “You fucking move.”
“Bitch, move.” He slams me with his shoulder, knocking me into a pair of girls who cry out in protest. I spin, full of rage, and reverse direction to follow him.
“Hey, fucker,” I scream. He casts a glance over his shoulder. “Yeah, you! Get the fuck back here!”
He escalates his mission to get out of the crowd, elbowing people out of his way twice as fast. I’m smaller and faster, and I slip through the opening he leaves in his wake. Just before he makes it to the side exit, I grab his flannel shirt and give him a hard yank backward. “Get the fuck back here!” I’m loose, all the rage and pain from earlier channeling into my hatred for this entitled, pompous asshole.
I know I should rein it in, but he spins to face me and says, “What is your problem, bitch?” And that’s it. I haul back and punch him full in the jaw.
He stumbles, trips over someone’s foot and lands on his ass on the cement floor. His phone goes clattering out of his hand, skidding to a stop by someone’s foot. “The hell!”
“Oh, shit,” cries a nearby guy in a delighted voice.
“Fucking bitch,” the guy says, and this is the last time he’s calling me a bitch. I go down on top of him, a knee in his chest. I swing wild, hit him in the jaw, the forehead, the neck. He throws an elbow; it catches me in the boob and I flop back off him with a grunt of pain. He sits up, a hand on his face, and opens his mouth to say something, but I launch myself off the ground again, half-conscious of a chorus of whoops and howls around us. I throw a solid punch. His nose cracks. Satisfaction. I almost smile. Blood streams down his face.
“That’s what you get,” I pant. He crab-shuffles back, pushes off the ground and sprints for the exit. I let him go.
My chest is heaving, and I have the guy’s blood on my hand, which is already starting to ache and swell. I wipe my knuckles on my jeans.
His phone lights up and starts buzzing on the floor. I pick it up and turn it over in my hand. It’s an old flip phone, the kind I haven’t seen in years. The bright green display says Blocked.
Back in the pit, the man having a seizure shrieks again, and then his screams gurgle to a stop. I put the phone in my pocket and push through the onlookers. I watch as his back convulses like he’s going to throw up, and then he goes limp. A thin river of blood snakes out of his open mouth and trails along the cement floor.
The room echoes with silence where the screams had been. A trio of girls stands motionless, eyes huge, hands pressed to mouths.
The flip phone in my pocket buzzes. I pull it out, snap it open and press it to my ear. “Hello?”
A pause.
“Hello?” I repeat.
A click. The line goes dead.
A set of paramedics slams the stage door open, stretcher between them. “Coming through!” They kneel down and start prodding at the man curled up on the concrete. His head flops back. His eyes are stretched wide and unseeing, focused on some point far beyond the twinkling ceiling lights.
Next to him on the concrete lies something... What is it? It’s rectangular and has red and—
It’s a playing card.
5
RICKY
“HURRY UP,” RICKY WHISPERS. Andrew is busy jimmying the locks open.
“Keep a lookout,” Andrew murmurs back.
Ricky obeys, eyes flitting left and right along the deserted outdoor hallway. The neighboring apartment building’s parking lot flickers under a dying security light, casting the walkway into uneven shadow. The night is bright, all the city light reflected by the smoky sky. It smells like fire, but not in a good way, not like barbecue or a campfire. It smells nasty, like when they burn furniture at the Dockweiler beach pits on the Fourth of July.
A low rumble builds from the east. Both Andrew and Ricky freeze, eyes on the sky. A helicopter swoops over the roof and roars west, a spotlight trained down on the ground below. Far away, sirens echo through the night.
“It’s not for us. They’re looking for someone,” Ricky says.
Andrew returns to his work on the dead bolt. “This lock is a motherfucker. It’s reinforced or something.”
“Maybe we should just go.”
“Don’t be a pussy.” With a grunt of triumph, Andrew turns the door handle and pushes it inward. The apartment is dark and releases a cloud of hot, stale air into their faces.
Ricky follows Andrew in and they close the door behind them. Andrew’s eyes glint in the light filtering in through the cracks in the blinds. He’s tall and thin, his head shaved like Ricky’s. They look alike—you can tell they’re brothers—but Andrew has always been the better-looking one.
Ricky says, “I know they got a TV and computer in the bedroom. I saw through the blinds.”
“Let’s get to it.” Andrew sounds excited.
He follows Andrew through the living room into the bedroom. The apartment looks clean, like no one lives here, which Ricky is pretty sure they don’t. He’s been living three doors down with his mom for ten years—when you get your Section 8 housing, you stay put—and during the last six months since this new person moved in, he has only seen them one time, when he was coming home from a party at three in the morning. Even then, he only saw a dark shadow hurrying down the stairs.
The bedroom is hotter than the living room. It smells like moldy carpet, which probably hasn’t been changed since that old lady died in here a few years ago. It was sad; they found her all starved to death and shit.
The bedroom has a bed, a desk, and that’s it. The desk is empty.
“What the fuck?” demands Andrew.
“It was here!”
Andrew yanks the desk drawer handle, but it’s locked. He inserts his pick into the lock, jiggles it, and the drawer comes open with a click. “Oh, shit.” Andrew’s grin is white in the semidarkness.
“Is it there?”
Andrew pulls a sleek black laptop out of the drawer and sets it on the desk. He reaches in and pulls out another object, a small black box, and frowns at it. “What’s this thing?”
“It’s some kind of router, or maybe a hot spot?”
“Nice.” Andrew sets it aside. “This laptop looks new. That’s good!”
Ricky could swear there was a TV in here. He crosses the room to the closet and slides the doors open. The rod is completely empty; no clothes hang inside here at all. He sees the TV up on the top shelf. “I found the TV!”
His eyes focus on something stuck to the back wall of the closet. He gets his phone out of his pocket and hits the flashlight button. It illuminates a web of lines, words and photographs.
He steps forward.
Thirty or forty index cards are pasted to the wall in a six-by-six-foot circle. On each index card are two photographs and some information written next to the pictures. He reads one that says Norma Peterson. Age 66. Retired Teacher. Beside her photo is that of an older man. Christiano Peterson. Age 68. Retired Bus Driver. The index cards are taped to the wall, and lines are drawn between them with blue painter’s tape.
With his finger, Ricky traces the painter’s tape that leads from Norma and Christiano’s card to another card with a man and a woman on it. This man and woman are younger. From this card runs a strip of painter’s tape to another card, this one with two women on it, and from them to a middle-aged man and woman. From one card to another, from one pair of people to another.
His eyes drift down to the floor of the closet, where a cardboard box sits with its flaps open. He turns his phone on the contents. It shines across a collection of identical clear plastic... What are they? He kneels down to get a closer look. They’re needles, the kind the doctor uses to give you a shot.
“What are you doing?”
The words make Ricky jump to his
feet. He presses a hand to his chest. “Fuck, you scared me.”
“Pussy.”
“Look. This is some serial killer shit right here.”
Andrew leans forward to examine the web of pictures. “Huh. Whatever.” He grabs the flat-screen TV off the top shelf.
A click. From the living room.
They stare at each other, breath held.
“Did you close the door behind us?” Andrew whispers.
“I thought so!”
“You’re a fuckup. You know that?”
Andrew shoves the TV at Ricky and pulls his gun out of the waistband of his pants. “C’mon, son.”
“Wait, man—chill. Maybe it’s not even—”
“Shh.” Andrew points the gun at the ceiling like CSI and tiptoes toward the door. “Grab the laptop,” he whispers.
Ricky stacks the laptop on top of the TV and grips them tight to his chest. He can barely see anything, just Andrew’s white tank top in the darkened room. They tiptoe past the dark, silent bathroom into the living room.
Light filters in through the blinds, spilling stripes onto the carpet. The room is empty.
Andrew releases a sigh of relief. “All right, maybe I’m the one who needs to chill.”
Ricky laughs. “You got spooked!”
Andrew heads back toward the bedroom. “Imma grab that router thing.”
Ricky shifts the TV and laptop in his arms. He feels proud. Maybe now Andrew will stop—
The bathroom door creaks.
Something cold and wet covers his nose and mouth.
He lets go of the TV and laptop. They crash down onto his foot. Pain flashes hot and bright in his toe, and he sucks in a breath. A cold chemical fog rushes into his lungs. His head spins, and he crumples to the floor.
Andrew is running. Andrew’s right above him. “Ricky? What’re you—”
Something white snakes around Andrew’s face, covers his mouth. Andrew’s gun flashes, but a hand whips out and knocks it to the ground. Andrew squirms, thrashes, crumples down on top of Ricky.