by Wendy Heard
“I’m sorry,” she says.
“It’s fine.”
“What am I doing?” she asks, and her voice breaks into tears again.
A plainclothes detective enters the waiting room and approaches me. She’s the same detective I spoke to when I arrived here, the one I gave my statement to in the ER as they were stitching me up. I forget her name. She’s a fair-skinned, freckle-faced woman with a blond ponytail and hairsprayed bangs.
I get up off the floor. “Any news?” I ask her.
“No, not yet. I’m actually...” She scans the room and her eyes land on the woman at our feet. “Did she just arrive?”
“A few minutes ago. Do you know her?”
She squats down next to the woman, whose head is buried in her knees again. She touches the woman’s shoulder. “Mrs. Russo? I’m Detective Gonzalez. We spoke on the phone.”
Russo?
The woman snaps her face up. “Do you have news?”
“No, ma’am. I just wanted to check on you. May I help you up?” Gonzalez offers her hands.
“You’re Sofia’s mother,” I say. Oh my God.
She looks at me as though for the first time. “You know my daughter?”
“I was with her,” I manage in a pathetic squeak that doesn’t sound like me at all.
Her eyes are so hungry, so filled with the need to grab at me and devour everything inside my brain, that I have to look away.
Gonzalez helps her onto a chair. I sit beside her, and Gonzalez squats down in front of us. “They’ve been keeping you both updated?”
I nod. “They’re still in surgery.”
“Still in surgery,” Mrs. Russo echoes weakly.
Gonzalez says more words to us. We stare at her blankly. We have no words to give back. She retreats to have a quiet conversation with the officer by the door. The other people in the waiting room stare at us out of the corners of their eyes.
After a few minutes, Mrs. Russo says, “Did you see what happened?”
“No. I just...found her after.”
A choked sob escapes from her mouth. “Did you do it to her? Just tell me. Did you shoot her?”
“Me? No. Of course not. My son is in there with her.”
She grabs my hand. “I’m sorry. That was ridiculous. If you did it, you wouldn’t be here in the waiting room. They’d have you in jail. Right? Is that how it works?”
“I guess.”
She nods.
A moment passes.
“How old is your son?” she whispers.
“Thirteen.”
She spits out a curse word and covers her face with her other hand.
“He’s her student,” I say uselessly.
She opens her mouth to ask something else, but the swinging doors open.
My heart explodes.
A doctor walks out. He’s got female nurses on either side of him and a lady in a skirt suit behind him with a clipboard.
It’s going to be bad news. I know it. Why else would there be so many people with him?
Everyone in the waiting room stares at these new people. I can feel the collective holding of breaths.
I’ve been wishing so hard for them to call me, but now I pray they’re calling anyone else. Let that lady with the toddler get the bad news. The old man. Anyone else. Not me. Not Joaquin.
“Mrs. Russo?” the doctor calls.
She waves her left hand weakly. It shakes so hard I can see it. She grips my hand hard with her right.
The group approaches us. The doctor clears his throat. “You’re Sofia Russo’s mother?”
She nods. Her face is dead white.
“We’re sorry,” he says.
More words follow, but they’re drowned out by the awful, howling wail that erupts from Sofia’s mother’s chest. My own grief for Sofia stops in its tracks, overpowered by the raw agony of the woman who clutches my hand almost hard enough to break it.
And horribly, unforgivably, disgustingly, underneath the pain that racks my body is a cold, bloodless relief.
There’s still a chance for Joaquin.
48
ALICIA
ALICIA GONZALEZ WATCHES the blonde woman receive the news.
Alicia knows the feeling. It never gets better, either. You just get colder on the inside. You detach from the starry-eyed person you were before your child was dead. Welcome to the rest of your life.
She glances sideways at Officer Washington. His eyes are red, and he passes a hand under his nose. “You need a minute?” she asks roughly.
He squares his shoulders. “No, ma’am. I’m fine.”
They wait in silence. The doctor takes Mrs. Russo by the arm, and the clipboard-bearing woman accompanies them along a hallway to the left. That’s the grief counselor’s office, Alicia remembers from other visits to St. Joseph. This is a nice hospital, a hell of a lot nicer than Kaiser.
Another doctor pushes through the swinging doors, a small Asian woman with tired eyes. “Miss Benavides?” she calls into the waiting room.
Jasmine stares at the woman. It looks like she’s too shaken up to answer. Alicia steps forward and waves down the doctor. “Right here.” She sits in the chair next to Jasmine, whose entire body seems to be quivering.
The doctor says, “I’m Dr. Lee, and we just finished working on your...son?” She casts a questioning look at Alicia. Jasmine is clearly too young to have a teenage son, but Alicia nods.
“And?” Jasmine says.
“He suffered damage to his right lung, a fractured rib. He’s got a fracture to his left—”
“Is he going to live or not?” Jasmine barks.
“Oh, he’s going to live. You might be looking at long-term PT, and we’ll have to continuously reevaluate that lung for a while to make sure it doesn’t collapse. It’s made more complicated by his diabetes, so we’ll need to keep him in hospital for at least—”
Jasmine isn’t listening. Alicia watches as she presses her hands to her face and folds forward onto her knees.
The doctor gives Alicia a frustrated look. “I’m needed on another floor. I’m going to pass this along to Dr. Stein, who arrives in thirty minutes. In the meantime, Joaquin is being moved to Room 1502, and the nurses will let you know when he’s up for a visit.”
As the doctor walks away, Alicia remembers her own ER waiting room horror last year. Her ex-husband hit her infant daughter in a rage during one of his visitations, sending her into a coma from which she never woke. Isabella. That was her daughter’s name. It’s tattooed on her shoulder. Isabella.
She should be happy Joaquin will live. She can’t muster it up, though, because Joaquin living means Belinda Patel is dead. Belinda was her only friend, the only one who understood her buried grief. And now Belinda is gone.
Jasmine sits up. She wipes her face. “Sofia is dead,” she says. “Dead. Dead and gone.” Her teeth chatter, extending the last word into a sigh.
This is your own fault. If you had followed instructions, everything would be fine. Belinda and Sofia would be alive, and thirty more people would be getting the justice they deserve.
She can’t bear the thought of the project going unfinished. It’s horrible to think of all those people waiting by their phones for a call that will never come. Belinda would never have wanted that.
EIGHT WEEKS LATER
49
JAZZ
JOAQUIN REACHES FOR the doorbell because I’m too nervous.
I stop his hand. “Don’t.”
He’s paler than usual from all the time indoors, but he looks good. His hair flops over his eye as he raises an eyebrow at me. “Jazz. We can’t stand out here all day.”
I pull him into a hug and squeeze him tight, almost tight enough to hurt him. I feel his ribs and the muscles of his back and the wonderful warmth of the blood
inside him. I nuzzle my face into his shoulder and inhale the clean scent of his shirt that smells like mine because I washed them together. I had a serious moment at the Laundromat, pulling his clothes out of the canvas laundry bag. I held his shirt clutched tight, tears welling up in my eyes.
I release Joaquin. “I should have changed my clothes.”
“Why?”
“I should have dressed more proper.” I gesture around me at the expansive front yard, the Spanish-tiled roof.
“You’re fine,” he says.
“I’m sorry,” I blurt out.
“Sorry for what?”
“I’m sorry I lied to you for all those years about being your sister. I wish I had told you the truth from the beginning.”
He takes a deep breath. We’ve talked about this, but it was overshadowed by our relief to be alive and my grief about Sofia. He blinks a few times, fast, and turns his pretty, long-lashed eyes on me. “I wish you would have told me, too.”
“I thought you’d be ashamed to have me as a mother.” That’s the cold hard truth, and I spit it out, but it tastes awful and I have to look away from him when I say it.
“Why would I be ashamed? That doesn’t make sense.”
“Because I’m so young. And so stupid. And so...” I shrug. “It doesn’t matter. I was wrong. You should have always known the truth about your own life story.”
“You’re right. I should have.”
He gets this from me, this bluntness, and I love him for it.
“Can you forgive me?” I ask.
He rings the doorbell. “I guess.”
A set of footsteps approaches, and the door swings open to reveal the exact kind of hallway I’d expected from the way the house looks from the outside: dark wood floors, a chandelier hanging from the high ceiling and fresh flowers on the entry table.
Mrs. Russo—Rachel—presses her lips together into an attempted smile. “Hi,” she says, the syllable flat and sharp. She’s thinner, her cheeks sunken, eyes blazing blue from rings of darkness.
I try to smile back. “Hey.”
“Is this your son?”
“Yes. Joaquin.”
“Nice to meet you,” he says. He holds out a hand to shake. It makes me proud, the straightness of his back and shoulders.
She takes the hand but holds it gently instead of shaking it. “You look well. Are you better?”
“I still have to go to physical therapy. But I feel good.”
Her chest rises and falls, and I recognize the gesture as something Sofia did, a brief yoga breath meant to calm herself.
I can’t be here. I have to run.
“Come on in,” she says. Joaquin pulls me forward. Rachel leads us past a dining room with a fancy table and a kitchen with granite countertops. She brings us to a living room. Joaquin stays on her heels and enters the room, but I stop in the doorway.
On the floor, surrounded by toys, sits a beautiful toddler. She looks up at Joaquin, then me. Her hair falls like streaky caramel around her shoulders, and her deep brown eyes peer up at us with curiosity.
I stumble back a step. I turn the corner and press my back to the wall. I try to breathe.
A framed picture of Sofia in a blue cap and gown smiles brightly at me.
She’s so pretty.
Was.
Was so pretty.
Through the din inside my skull, I hear voices. “I’ll go,” says a woman’s voice, and then Rachel is leaning on the wall next to me.
I can’t take my eyes off Sofia’s face. Her smile.
At last, Rachel whispers, “This was taken when she got her bachelor’s degree.”
My face is hot. “She looks happy,” I manage.
“She was so funny. She wouldn’t let me throw her a graduation party.”
“Why not?”
“She wasn’t done with college yet. She wanted to finish her master’s before we celebrated. She didn’t want to get cocky.”
I try to smile, but I can’t. I didn’t have time to get to know everything about Sofia. I wish I’d had time to know these pieces of her.
“Olive looks so much like her,” I say, which breaks my voice and my heart.
“She does.” After a pause, she says, “I’m so angry. I wish that detective was alive so they could send her to prison and give her the death penalty so I could watch her die myself. I can’t believe the way the media has been behaving. It makes me sick.”
I’m pretty sure there’s no execution any state would dole out that would be more painful than the poisoning death I know Patel suffered, but I don’t say anything. I know what Rachel means. She wants to see the murderer of her daughter suffer with her own eyes. She wishes she could kill her daughter’s killer with her own hands. I understand.
I peek around the doorjamb. Joaquin and Olive are silently collaborating on a complex structure made of Legos and crayons.
She’s watching over my shoulder. “I’m happy he’s all right.”
“You are?”
“Yes.”
“I thought you might...” I trail off.
“I know. I did. But not anymore. Sofia wanted him to be all right. That’s how she was. That’s how I want to be.” She takes a deep, audible breath. “You said you wanted to meet Olive. So let’s do it.”
I push off the wall and step toward the kids. I drop to the floor, cross-legged, and force myself to take a good look at Olive.
She’s beautiful. Joaquin hands her a green crayon, and she sets it atop a tower of Legos in a very exacting way.
“She only places them horizontally,” he murmurs out of the side of his mouth. “It’s smart. It makes for more solid construction with the way the Lego holes are angled.”
I shoot him a look that is supposed to make fun of him for being a dork, but instead it gets filled up with mush. “Oh yeah? Is that so?”
Rachel settles onto the carpet across from me and rests a hand on Olive’s back.
I say to her, “I want to help.”
She frowns. “What do you mean?”
“She’s going to be a handful. Lots of energy. When you need a day off, I want to...” I fumble for the words. “I could take her to the park, the zoo. Or I could go to the store for you, or drive her to lessons...anything you want. I want to be someone you can call for help. I would have been that for Sofia, and I...I still want to be that for her.” I can’t talk anymore. This is too hard. But it’s harder for Sofia’s mom, so I need to suck it the hell up.
She says nothing.
I grip my hands together in my lap. Baby elephant.
Joaquin reaches out and takes one.
Olive reaches for me, too. She touches the skull and crossbones, the roses around my wrist, the letters scripted into the sides of my fingers. “Paintings!” she says in a small, adorable voice.
I laugh, the sound tearful. “Yeah, honey. I painted myself.”
“I paint myself,” she mimics, returning to her Legos. She places a crayon carefully between the holes in the Legos, just like Joaquin had said.
“All right,” Rachel says to me. “I’ll call you.”
50
ALICIA
THE BROWN-HAIRED woman waves at her.
Alicia looks up from the purple flowers and waves back with a gloved hand. She has to pretend she belongs here.
The woman hurries to her car, yoga mat rolled under her arm, as Alicia returns to her plants.
She adjusts her gray wig and brushes dirt off her muumuu. She’s seen that woman a few times. She wonders who the woman thinks she is. It’s hilarious, actually, that you can plant flowers in any apartment’s planter you like. The tenants will think you’re another resident or someone related to the landlord. The landlord will think you’re someone related to a tenant. And no one is ever bothered by a beautiful scattering of flowe
rs in their planter.
Satisfied that her babies are doing well, and careful not to let them touch her skin, she leaves and walks down La Cienega to her next guerrilla garden, which is what she calls the patches of the purple-flowered plants she’s tucked into planters all over the city. When she sees the next flower bed on her route, she lets out a frustrated sigh. This apartment’s automatic irrigation system is on the fritz, and it looks like she’s going to lose this batch.
It’s all right. She has forty-seven other guerrilla gardens planted from Santa Monica to Pasadena, and all her other plants are doing well.
While she’s out here, she always thinks about Belinda. Since Belinda had no family, there was no one to claim her ashes. Alicia had taken them, offering to scatter them overseas, to the coroner’s relief. Instead, she added them to the soil in these guerrilla gardens. It’s perfect, poetic, and exactly what Belinda would have wanted.
Belinda was a great woman. Alicia made sure she got all the credit for the Blackbird Killings. She helped the higher-ups find Belinda’s keys to the apartment and storage unit she used, which contained all the flip phones and the syringes.
The police are still looking for Belinda’s list of participants, but they’ll never find it, because Alicia took it. The Blackbirds will remain anonymous, which is as it should be.
Alicia made sure to paint an accurate picture of Belinda for the media: a powerful woman driven to extremes in her desire to protect the types of innocents she was never able to save as a soldier or a police officer. Every true crime podcast has done a piece on Belinda. Netflix is developing an eight-part documentary series around her life and her activities as the Blackbird Killer. People don’t hate Belinda. They love her. They admire her. Just the other day, Alicia read an opinion piece in the Guardian about how Belinda should be regarded as a vigilante hero. She’s a martyr, a voice for the voiceless. Her legacy will live on for decades.
Satisfied with her work, Alicia takes the gardening gloves off, revealing latex gloves underneath. She pulls these off as well and wads them into a ball, careful not to touch the surface of either pair of gloves with her bare hands.