Lola

by Melissa Scrivner Love

  Lucy nods.

  “What about your grandparents?”

  Lucy shakes her head.

  “You don’t want to live with them?”

  Lucy shakes her head again. Lola wants to ask why, but they are standing in the middle of a ghetto street, in the crosshairs of a couple of bespoke-suited cartel henchmen.

  “Are you hungry?”

  A nod from Lucy.

  She tosses a glance to the cartel soldiers in the SUV and says, too loud, “Let’s go inside and call your mother.”

  Five minutes later, Lola places a chipped blue plate of scrambled eggs and pico de gallo in front of the girl. She has heated tortillas, which she places next to the eggs, but Lucy stares at the food, gulping and gaping. She is hungry and overwhelmed. Lola feels her longing, her desire to set upon the food like a starving wolf, to devour it with sharp bites, feeling the metallic tinge of other blood on her gums.

  “Eat,” Lola says. Then, realizing she gives the same okay to Valentine before she allows the dog to approach her bowl, she continues, “It’s for you. All of it.”

  Lucy bows her head, quick, little fingers folded into little fists clasped together. Lola realizes she is praying, and, on instinct, she, too, bows her head, clasps her fists, brown hands rippling with veins, blood, life. Lola is strong. But by the time Lola has figured out what to say to God, Lucy has finished her own prayer and is tucking into the food, her hand gripping her fork, determined to shovel as many eggs as possible into her mouth at once.

  Lola finds Lucy’s dedication to getting fed admirable. She does not know what to make of her own determination to feed the girl. She has never wanted children because to her, they would be extensions of herself she must let roam around a dangerous world where someone, anyone, could extinguish them to get at her. She does not need any more Achilles’ heels. And she does not want to have to teach a child what it takes to survive in this particular world.

  Hector, she thinks now, Hector in the hospital. Not her child, but she raised him, and look what happened.

  “I’m still hungry,” Lucy says when she’s scraped the blue plate clean and folded the last tortilla into her tiny o-shaped mouth. A second later, Lucy seems to realize she’s spoken words she might not have dared utter in front of her own mother, words that might seem like a complaint and therefore earn her a backhand or three hours in a tight closet with no light or water. Lola does not have to be inside this girl’s head to read her mind.

  “I’ll make you more,” Lola says, and she rises to return to her skillet, cracks more eggs into a bowl, whisks them with whole milk, salt and pepper. She scrambles them in heated butter, not letting them get brown and scabbed. The food Hector’s getting in the hospital must be horrible. “You want bacon?”

  Lucy nods, eyes wide with hope and hunger.

  Over the second helping, Lola nods to the Donald Duck backpack, abandoned on the floor, the zipper opened wide enough for her to see several changes of underwear, a toothbrush, and some pajamas. “You trying to get to your grandparents?” She knows the answer from the street but wants another stab at the truth.

  Lucy shakes her head. “I’m not supposed to bother them.”

  Lola doesn’t ask where that edict came from—Rosie or the Amaros themselves. She commends herself on her decision to display Mila’s body at Mamacita’s. Fuck them for not taking care of what’s theirs. She does it for her own fucking mother, because she understands the rules of the world. Still, she’s relieved Lucy hasn’t been near her grandparents today. If she had, the little girl would have seen one more dead body than she needed to.

  “Bet they’re worried about you.”

  “They don’t know.”

  “Know what?”

  Lucy takes a pause, chewing her bacon. Lola fried it crisp so Lucy could take quick, easy bites. She knows Lucy is buying time.

  “Is it your mother?” Lola asks. “You don’t have to say. Just nod your head.”

  Lucy nods her head.

  “She gone?”

  “No,” Lucy says, and Lola thinks the saddest thing she’s ever seen is a five-year-old girl sighing. Of course, it’s not the saddest thing Lola has ever seen. Maybe she is just wishing it were.

  “She home?”

  Lucy nods. “With her new boyfriend. He likes me.” With those words, Lola knows everything. How is it such a common story that anyone, ghetto or not, could fill in the blanks and determine Lucy’s reasons for running away?

  “I’ll call your grandparents.” Lola will make them see their obligations to this girl.

  “Don’t.” Lucy stops Lola, who’s scrolling through her cell, searching for Mamacita’s number in her contacts.

  “They’ll take care of you, Lucy,” Lola says, hoping it’s true. They know their daughter is an addict disaster and an abusive mother. They’ll have to make sure Lucy has a roof over her head, clean clothes, food. They’ll even hug her a couple times a week, especially if Lola sends Garcia down there threatening to burn down their lifeblood.

  “They know him,” Lucy says.

  Shit. Lola doesn’t want to tell Lucy her grandparents will believe her. She’s not that stupid, to take people’s inherent goodness as a given just because they run a successful business and feed her soldiers some damn good bulk tacos on occasion. Lucy has her reasons for thinking they won’t listen, and if Lola just sits very still, Lucy will tell her what they are.

  “He’s their landlord’s son,” Lucy says. From the way she sounds out the word landlord, Lola can’t be sure she understands its meaning, but Lucy does seem to have grasped that her grandparents need this man, her mother’s new boyfriend’s father, to keep their business up and running.

  Lola hates when children have to be so smart.

  “I see,” Lola says. Her mind spins—the Amaros’ landlord’s son is a pedophile. Could her two birds, one stone theory work here? She could burn down his property, ruin their business, clean up her community, one pervert at a time. Lola might have only forty-five hours to live. Destroying a pedophile seems like a worthy item to add to her bucket list.

  “Can I stay here?” Lucy asks, stealth, trying to dart in under Lola’s logical to-do list so she’ll get an answer from the heart, that unguarded vessel somewhere at Lola’s center.

  Would keeping Lucy here, in a stucco shambles of a house that serves as a gang’s headquarters, be worse than letting her return to her mother and her new man? No, Lola decides. Guns and drugs are not the worst things in the world for a child to see. They should be, but they are not.

  In response, Lola rises and removes the toothbrush, pajamas, and underwear from Lucy’s Donald Duck backpack. She puts the dirty clothes into a small pile for the washer, but she leaves behind one pair of underwear—pale pink, except for blood where there never should be for a girl this young. Lucy will never have to see them again.

  A wrought-iron fence, six feet high to Lola’s eye, borders L.A. County Hospital. The building itself is imposing—tiered and stacked at varying heights. She enters expecting courtrooms and jail cells.

  Instead, she finds a bustling emergency room—one waiting patron bent over a trash can, a janitor poised with a mop nearby; another—alone, female, wedding ring, sunglasses—holding her broken arm. Domestic, Lola thinks with some satisfaction. At the reception desk, she finds a bright nurse, no more than Lola’s age, her red hair scraped back into a ponytail, her green eyes shining with an energy Lola suspects must come from knowing you’re doing good in the world, asking her if there’s a problem with the child and saying, if so, they can see her right away.

  Lola has forgotten about Lucy, that the little girl hadn’t said outright she wouldn’t stay in the house alone with Garcia, but Lola had known better than to put that decision on a child. Now, she finds she is gripping Lucy’s hand so tight it must hurt. Still, she can’t bring herself to ease the pressure, and Lucy doesn’t seem bothered. The little girl is staring up at the nurse in what Lola decides is awe, and she knows the pang she e
xperiences from the realization is jealousy.

  “Hector Vasquez,” Lola says, her tone brusque, like she’s got more important shit to do. She is behaving the way she expected the nurse to. She had braced herself for a Calm down, ma’am, you’ll have to wait, or a You’ll need to fill out the forms correctly, in block letters, black or blue ink, before the doctor can see you.

  “Oh,” the nurse says, and Lola forgets the jealousy, forgets her expectations, and thinks only that in sparing her brother, maybe she’s killed him anyway.

  “Can we see him? I’m his sister.”

  “You’re Lola?” the nurse asks. Hearing her name come from this white bright happy woman’s mouth throws Lola.

  “Yes.”

  “He’s been asking for you.” The nurse doesn’t even have to look at her computer. “Mr. Vasquez has been moved to the third floor.”

  “What’s on the third floor?”

  “A room to keep him comfortable.”

  “Comfortable?” The word here, where misery and bustle combine, seems out of place.

  “He’s septic.”

  “What?” Lola’s hand grips Lucy’s even tighter now.

  “The wound he sustained from the meat slicer was infected.”

  So that’s the story Hector invented. A meat slicer. She guesses you could call a butcher knife a meat slicer. She likes Hector for telling some skewed version of the truth.

  “You can go on up. Elevator’s just down the hall on your left.”

  Lola moves at a repressed run toward the dinging elevator. She wants whoever’s there to hold the door, now that she knows her brother wants her. He’s not expecting her; she wasn’t even thinking she would come here until she was in her car with Lucy in the backseat, the safest place, Lola figured, despite her lack of car seat. She drove with the speed of traffic, knowing that was safer than driving slow, her eye remembering to glance in the rearview to see if the cartel SUV was following her. It wasn’t. She had to console herself then, remind her ego that the cartel thought Garcia was in charge. They are watching him, not her. Then she was pulling into the hospital parking lot, seeking the lone empty spot and thinking that she put her baby brother here.

  Now, running for the elevator, she remembers she meant to bring muffins or migas or something for Hector, and she’s forgotten. Shit.

  “Hold the door,” she says, too loud, and she catches a glimpse of a stocky man in a shitty suit spotted with sweat pressing what must be the Door Close button, because the doors do just that, leaving Lola and Lucy stranded.

  “Motherfucker,” she says, then sees Lucy pursing her lips not in judgment, but fear. She can’t have a temper around this little girl. “I’m sorry,” Lola says. “I didn’t mean that.”

  “He should have held the door for us,” Lucy says.

  “Yeah,” Lola agrees, glad the girl seems to have some sense of right and wrong despite her junkie mother and her worthless grandparents.

  The third floor is quieter, the people in the waiting room in less pain. The television there plays a game show on mute. On the floor in front of a middle-aged man, a child plays with toy cars, making them crash into each other head-on before losing interest and starting to rip pages from gossip magazines that have felt the touch of a thousand thumbs.

  Lola spots Marcos outside a door toward the end of a low, white corridor. He drove Hector here yesterday morning with orders to stay until Lola’s baby brother was released. Now, Marcos has his hands in his pockets and is rising up and down on his tiptoes. Lola wonders if this is an exercise he learned in prison, something to help pass the time without freezing the muscles, but when she gets to the end of the corridor, she sees another man around the corner, this one in his fifties, wearing hard-soled loafers and a cotton sweater that only partially disguises his burgeoning gut. Like Marcos, this man has his hands in his pockets, and he’s rising up and down on his tiptoes, waiting outside a door that holds someone sick.

  Marcos is copying this man, pretending to be a person.

  The thought breaks Lola’s heart a little, her soldier faking humanity in a hospital. Then she remembers there are no rules of etiquette to follow in the face of death and sickness, and Marcos didn’t fucking call her to tell her her brother was septic.

  “The fuck?” she starts in, then remembers Lucy and mutters “Sorry” to the little girl.

  “Just words,” Lucy says in a singsong Lola hasn’t heard her use before.

  “I was gonna call you…” Marcos says. He’s trailed off without Lola holding up a hand for him to stop. “But I didn’t know if you’d want that. After you sliced him like that.”

  Now Lucy looks up at Lola in alarm, and Lola hisses at Marcos. “I have a kid with me.”

  Marcos notices Lucy for the first time. “Why you got a kid with you?”

  Lucy and Marcos are both looking at Lola for an answer now, but Lola doesn’t have one.

  “It was an accident,” Lola says to Lucy now. “The slicing thing.”

  The little girl nods and looks away, and Lola sees, in the girl’s motion, Lucy’s deciding to accept the truth Lola has conjured for her.

  It pisses Lola off, having to lie to Lucy like this. She takes two steps toward Marcos and speaks in a hushed tone so the little girl can’t hear. “They said he was asking for me. You sure you didn’t just want to let Hector die without saying good-bye to his sister?”

  “Shit, Lola, he ain’t dyin’,” Marcos says.

  “He fucked up.”

  “No shit.”

  “Were you punishing him?”

  “Nah, man, that’s your job.”

  Lola could take this as insubordination, that Lola hasn’t done her job, but she can see in the way Marcos is looking up and down the corridor, making sure no one is listening, that no one is watching her, that he doesn’t mean it that way. Marcos doesn’t speak in subtext. He doesn’t know how. The lines of logic and decency that divide humans from the animals don’t exist for him. This close, he smells of raw flesh, as if his mother didn’t cook him long enough in her belly and now he’s poison to anyone who tastes him.

  Three years ago, Marcos didn’t bow down to her over Carlos’s warm dead body. She had alibied Jorge, and she knew Garcia wanted to fuck her despite Kim and her endless folding of washed onesies for their unborn child. Marcos was different. Marcos was created by the stepfather who beat him. Lola knew Marcos had been looking for the man since he got out of prison a few months back. It seemed the evil stepfather had jumped ship, leaving Marcos’s mother as soon as he knew Marcos was getting out. The man knew to run scared. He had disappeared, poof, and Lola knew Marcos must have been asking why he couldn’t have done everyone a favor and vanished fifteen years prior.

  Lola also knew Marcos didn’t understand how to find someone. He only understood how to kill them once they were found.

  The day she drove him out to the desert, past bakery restaurants meant for retirees and dollar stores advertising discounted junk on their marquees, Marcos had sat up straight in his seat. He hadn’t wanted to come with her, but Jorge had told him to. Marcos was like that, scary to one person, obedient to his true friends. Lola already loved him for it.

  She had pulled up in front of a small, Spanish-style house with a clean pickup parked outside. She said, “Open the glove box.”

  The gun Marcos took out was unregistered, the serial numbers filed off.

  Marcos looked at her, unsure what to do. He didn’t know that he was waiting for her orders, but Lola did. She knew she had won him before she even gave him his prize.

  “Your stepfather lives here.”

  She didn’t have to tell him not to let anyone see him. She let him out without another word and said she would be at the dollar store two blocks away when he was ready.

  Fifteen minutes later, he found her in the aisle that held cleaning supplies, stocking up on generic toxic shit for her mother’s apartment.

  “I’m ready,” he had said. And he was.

  Now, outsi
de Hector’s hospital room, Lola nods toward Lucy. “Take her to get something to eat,” she says to Marcos.

  Lucy looks to Lola as the rancid, raw man approaches her.

  “He’s going to take you to get some food,” Lola says. “He’s all right. He won’t take you anywhere there aren’t other people.”

  Marcos knows to walk beside Lucy, his hands in his pockets, playing at casual to frighten her less. Lola wonders if he learned these things, how to show surrender, from being a child in a house where he must have wanted to disappear. Has he learned what not to do from his early abuse? Has she?

  Hector’s closed hospital door beckons, and while she wants to stay out here contemplating the cycles of abuse and whether or not they can be broken, she must go in. She was anxious to do it only five minutes before. Now, she has to force herself to turn the door handle and push, too hard, as if she’s expecting resistance on the other side.

  There is none. There is only Hector, propped up in a hospital bed, watching the same game show the waiting room patrons are ignoring. His hand is bandaged, and Lola can see a digit there, wrapped in gauze. They must have been able to reattach the finger. He’s sipping what looks like lemonade from a straw and calling out, “Sixteen fifty! Sixteen fifty!”

  He looks content.

  Lola doesn’t want to interrupt, wants to give him this serenity, but he sees her where he was expecting someone else, a nurse, maybe, and he turns down the television volume and puts down his drink. It saddens her, Hector’s need to sit up straighter when she enters a room. Was he like this before? Or was he just her brother then?

  “Hey,” she says.

  He bows his head in response, and Lola thinks of Marcos with his acknowledgment in words.

  “I meant to bring you food.”

  “It’s actually not so bad here,” Hector says. “They got cheesecake.”

  “Oh. That’s good.”

  “Would you like to sit?” Hector casts his eyes around for a chair.

  “Sure,” Lola says, and she takes a seat on the very edge of the bed.

  Hector shifts so she can have more room.