Lola

by Melissa Scrivner Love

  “Nothing,” Blondie says.

  The word drains Lola. She is nothing. She ran after Blondie, sure, but she didn’t catch her.

  Blondie’s about to disappear into the interview room when Lola hears it, soft. It’s Bubba’s voice, like gravel, as he says one beckoning word. “Sadie.” Blondie’s name.

  Lola yanks open the passenger door and slips into Garcia’s Honda Civic. “I have a name,” she tells him in a whisper, because Lucy might still be sleeping in the back, as she was when Lola was able to slip out of the car and leave her alone with Garcia.

  “The girl?”

  “Sadie.” Lola tries it out and finds saying the name sends her salivating and licking her lips.

  “Just a first name?” Garcia asks, trying to mask the disappointment in his voice. Does he not want to hurt Lola’s feelings, or does he not want to piss her off? It only strikes her now that Garcia saw her slice off her baby brother’s trigger finger—the only part of his body that would make him money in gangland. Garcia must be questioning her loyalties. If she can turn on blood, she can turn on him, he must think. Is Garcia protecting her feelings now because he loves her or because he fears her?

  Lola stops these destructive questions. It’s like an older man asking if his plastic wife loves him for his money, or a trophy wife wondering if her rich husband loves her for her fake boobs. Yes and yes, but so what? Whatever the reason, you’re together, digging, building, and fighting.

  “Don’t need a last name,” Lola says. “She’s in rehab.”

  “Which one?”

  “Easy to find out.” Lola pulls out her cell, ready to call Hector. The hospital discharged him several hours after her visit, when a bus crash flooded the emergency room with bleeding bodies. They needed his bed, but they gave him pain pills in exchange.

  Lola knows Hector will welcome the tedious task of calling every rehab center in L.A. County until he finds a meth head named Sadie. It’s a task that no one else wants, and he can start to prove himself again.

  As Lola is about to dial, she remembers Lucy, the sleeping girl in the backseat; or she’s assumed Lucy is sleeping, because everything back there is still. And the dog—Valentine—should be snoring, but there is only silence where the pit’s gentle whir should be.

  Lola turns to the backseat she suddenly knows will be empty.

  “What the fuck?” This is Lola, losing her shit, and she’s standing outside her body, watching her sinewy limbs scramble from front seat to backseat, as if she can tear up the upholstery and find Lucy there.

  “I’m sorry.” She hears Garcia trying to reach her. “I must have drifted off.”

  Garcia can sleep anywhere—the bed, the sofa, a kitchen chair, where Lola’s seen him face-plant into steaming enchiladas and keep snoring. This quirk of his was funny only an hour ago. She wonders if that’s what having kids does—takes qualities that were funny in your partner and molds them into liabilities.

  “Cartel assholes,” Lola says.

  “They didn’t follow us. Weren’t even outside when we left.”

  “You don’t know for sure.” Lola thinks how it’s scarier not having the Mexican men in their tailored suits outside her door. When she sees them watching, she knows where they are.

  Now they might have taken Lucy. The thought blurs her vision, springs sweat from her pores, mixes up her brain like eggs before they go in a skillet. She sees red.

  She has to save Lucy.

  The blur of upholstery and bodies, hers and Garcia’s, comes into focus as Lola’s thoughts fall into one coherent piece. “She’s too young to be out alone,” she says, and Garcia looks more afraid now that her voice is steady than when she couldn’t speak.

  “She’s not alone. She has a pit bull,” Garcia points out, but Lola doesn’t want his calm. She wants him to feel the weight of fault on his strong shoulders. He should be out of the fucking car now, panicked. Where is his guilt? She must make him feel it.

  “Valentine could’ve run into traffic. Dragged Lucy with her,” Lola tries.

  Lola knows this scenario would never happen, because Valentine adjusts her behavior to match her particular master. With Garcia, she pulls at the leash and chases squirrels. She knows he can handle it. With Lola, she plods along, dutiful, the leash lax, and if she perks up at a random South Central rodent, she lets it go with a heavy heart and a pitiful look back at Lola. With Lucy, Lola knows, Valentine will be vigilant, head up, eyes open and meeting anyone who dares to cross a five-foot radius.

  “Valentine wouldn’t pull that shit,” Garcia says, and Lola sees blood when she looks at him. She can’t pierce his pragmatic armor—is it because he’s a man? Then she remembers—Lucy is not his child. Lucy is not her child. If she can remember that, she has a better chance of getting Lucy back.

  “We’ll split up,” Lola says, and Garcia nods, his movements quick and efficient, but not urgent. They break apart to search their respective halves of the police station’s parking lot.

  As Lola weaves through the cars, she calms herself by trying to tell cop vehicles from criminal ones: unmarked Crown Vic, cop; tricked-out Impala with custom window tint, criminal. After about ten cars, she gives up. The game is too easy, and the realization unsettles her, the old saying about judging a book by its cover ringing in her ears. Yes, she thinks, judge. That is called instinct, and whatever nagging feeling about a person grabs you and won’t let you go is probably right. How shitty.

  “Lola!” She hears the little girl’s voice then sees her five spaces away, standing on the curb facing the busy main street, Valentine by her side.

  Lola feels a drowning rush of relief. Then she sees they’re not alone. A tall man, middle-aged with a slight paunch, bends over to pet Valentine. He wears a Hawaiian shirt and khaki pants, casual loafers with no strings.

  Lola thinks of Maria and her childhood and the white men like this who would only venture into the ghetto to fuck a poor brown child. She breaks into a run, unable to cover the short distance as fast as she’d like.

  “Hey!” she shouts. Valentine looks up, caught, because that is what Lola says when she wants Valentine to stop doing something—chewing furniture, eating tree bark, eyeing a Chihuahua like so much lunch.

  “Hey,” the man responds with a casual wave that matches his casual clothes, clothes Lola’s instinct tells her he spent hours picking out this morning to appear nonthreatening.

  She fingers the switchblade she shouldn’t have been able to sneak into an LAPD precinct but could and did. Her pocket is large, and it swallows her hand like a favorite blanket. The knife’s aluminum handle cools her fiery palm.

  “Nice day, huh?” the man continues. “Sunshine, just the right amount of breeze.”

  Lola shouts something to Lucy in Spanish, she doesn’t know what. Something about stepping away from the man, getting down. It is not meant to make sense. It is meant to scare the white man, because he has a minority bearing down on him, and can’t he see her hand in her pocket? Doesn’t he, shouldn’t he, expect her to pull a weapon? Shouldn’t he back the fuck down? Isn’t that what running, shouting, hand-in-pocket brown-skinned woman means?

  No, Lola thinks, and it’s the woman part that sticks, that deflates her status from terror red to something like light lavender.

  “I found your daughter,” the man says as Lola reaches them. She makes it a point not to breathe hard, despite her screaming lungs and red cheeks. She keeps her mouth sealed in a single straight line of plump lips.

  “She’s not—” Lucy starts, then catches Lola’s eye. Lucy must see some sadness there that Lola didn’t know she had, because Lucy doesn’t say that Lola isn’t her mother. Instead, she says, “Thank you.” Then she, too, seals her mouth in the single straight line, and Lola finds the imitation charming. And smart. An unreadable face will help Lucy once she’s out in the world. Although maybe Lola’s face is not as unreadable as she thought, if a five-year-old can decipher a fleeting dash of pain there.

  “What’s
your name?” Lola turns to the middle-aged man.

  “Harry.”

  “Your real name.”

  The man chuckles. “Why would I lie?”

  “It’s what criminals do,” she says.

  In a single swift motion, Lola whips the knife from her pocket, flipping the blade out. The metal is two inches wide, glinting in the bright sunshine they’re having from the nice weather the casual man pointed out. The blade looks as thin as a single sheet of paper. It is surgical, precise, clean. Its tip comes to a sharp point, which Lola holds toward the man’s paunch. He steps back, hands up.

  “We’re outside a police station,” he reminds her.

  “And you’re lucky I don’t turn you in.”

  “Your word against mine,” he says, and Lola realizes she was wrong—he did see how it was before, when she was running at him. He knew to judge her by skin color, but he wasn’t judging the physical harm she could do to him. He was judging what a cop would believe from her versus him, and he won every scenario. “I’m betting you or whoever you’re picking up here wasn’t on the right side of the bars.”

  “The fuck you know about it…” Lola mutters.

  “Hunch,” he says as he holds up a badge. “Harry Rauch. Vice.”

  Lola feels the knife handle in her sweaty palm, where she’s still holding it, frozen in pouncing position even though she knows she’s misjudged this man. “You gonna arrest me?”

  “Nah. You’re one of the few actually takes care of your daughter.”

  His surprise mercy forces Lola’s knife hand to her side. She takes Valentine’s leash and Lucy’s hand. As they walk past Crown Vics and lowriders, Lola remembers her game—cop or criminal. Maybe it’s not that easy.

  They find Garcia back at the car, his cell phone out, dialing. “I called ten times. Everything okay?” he asks, even though he must be able to tell from Lola’s sagging shoulders that it is not.

  “Yeah,” she lies.

  Valentine leaps into the backseat with Lucy, collapsing against the little girl’s tiny thighs with a contented sigh. Lola would like to think Valentine would have come to Lucy’s aid if some dangerous man were to make a move, but maybe Valentine has forgotten that people can do her harm. Unfortunately, it’s all Lola can remember, a fact that could have gotten her in big fucking trouble ten minutes ago. Assault with a deadly weapon. On a police officer. Sentence would have to be life. Or death. Fuck. When did she start seeing every stranger as a fatal struggle?

  “Want to go to the beach?” Garcia asks, his voice too high, his suggestion absurd. They have never been to the beach together. They have no towels or flip-flops or bathing suits. Garcia is grasping, trying to find something to restore balance. But Lola doesn’t think she can look at a wave crashing against sand without feeling a fierce isolation from the other beachgoers, dressed appropriately in bikinis and sarongs. She will not look right in her cargo pants and wife-beater. Garcia will take off his shirt, revealing tattoos snaking across sweating brown skin. The white people will look twice at them, then they will scoot away, foot by foot, until they have crossed some invisible line where they feel safe. Lola, Lucy, and Garcia do not belong here.

  “Lola,” Garcia says, and she hears a panicked edge in his voice. Her heart floods with love for him, worried about her, and she sinks into the Honda’s upholstery, where she belongs, with him, her sleeping pile of would-be daughters next to her.

  “Let’s go home,” she says.

  Three hours later, Lola wakes to sunlight fading on the other side of her bedroom curtains. An insistent ring drowns out the dull drone of Garcia’s snores. The landline. Only three people have the number.

  “Yeah?” she says. They don’t have caller ID for the cheap plastic phone with big buttons and an answering machine that runs on tape. Lola expects her mother’s fading chirp on the other end, telling Lola not to worry, but her pipes have burst or her hot water’s not working, and does Lola know the best plumber to call? Maria Vasquez assumes her daughter worries about her. She never calls on her son for any of her “emergencies,” because it is Lola’s job, not Hector’s, to take care of her. The work of nurture falls on female shoulders. It is the same across classes, races, and religions. Fucking bullshit, Lola thinks.

  “Lola?” It is Hector, his voice an octave higher than normal, the octave reserved for uncertainty and questioning, as if he’s thinking someone besides Lola might answer the phone. But there is only Garcia, a sliver of restful drool wetting the pillow beneath him, and Lucy, asleep in the next room, cuddled up with Valentine and a Spanish-English dictionary, the sole book Lola could find in the house. But Lucy is bilingual, and Lola sighs now, thinking how useless she must seem to the girl.

  “Yeah,” Lola says, not a question this time.

  “It’s Hector.” His voice jangles with nerves.

  “I know, honey,” Lola says in the voice of a mother. She needs him to tell her what’s got him scared. That won’t happen if he’s scared of her, too.

  “It’s…something’s happened. Can you come over here?”

  “Where?” Lola asks, wondering if the cartel has decided to skip her and go for Hector instead. She’s got one more sleep by her count, though, and she had planned to call Hector to get started on the search for Sadie as soon as she woke. The drugs and cash are either with that wisp of an addict or her cop protector, and Lola doesn’t consider either of them a match for her.

  “Mom’s,” Hector says, and Lola knows this particular drug problem has jack shit to do with the Los Liones cartel.

  Twenty minutes later, she’s standing in her mother’s bare living room, taking stock of the stripped space. Television, stereo, furniture, all gone.

  Lola moves at a stroll into the bedroom, where the faded floral duvet cover, differing from Lola and Garcia’s only in color, is folded neatly under the two feather pillows. But when Lola opens the dresser, her mother’s jewelry box is empty.

  “I called earlier, to see if Mom needed anything,” Hector says. He clasps his hands together, and Lola notes with some satisfaction that he is able to intertwine his fingers, including the bandaged one, in a pose fit for a nervous prayer. “I was at the store. Needed coffee. Thought you were probably busy.”

  Lola hears judgment where Hector meant none—You were probably too busy to take care of your own mother. She knows he meant to help her, to start taking over some of Maria’s care. After all, Lola will probably die tomorrow because of his fuckup.

  “Uh-huh,” she manages. She wants him to see her stroll, her slender finger reaching out, slow, to take in the emptiness. She wants him to see that their mother’s disappearance does not alarm her. Of course, if it were just their mother missing, Lola might not know what the hell happened. Lucky for them, Maria Vasquez took all the shit fit to pawn with her, so Lola knows the score of the game she has watched play out countless times before.

  Their mother is back on smack, and she needed cash to get her next fix, and maybe her next, and maybe even her next after that.

  Lola imagines Maria pacing in an alley identical to the one where Lola stood waiting to talk to Mila. Maria will be waiting for the protection of darkness, when the dealers emerge from the shadows like so many rats.

  Drugs are Lola’s business, too, though. Does that mean she can’t judge these alley sloths, preying on street addicts? Who does she think she’s getting drugs for? White-collar hedge-fund managers or movie producers? Who is she to say her mother doesn’t deserve a fix?

  “Lola?” It’s Hector again, in that questioning voice that rakes at her heart. “What do you think…where do you think…” He trails off, because he already knows the answers to his unfinished questions.

  Lola throws an arm around his neck, pulling him down to her level so she can kiss the top of his head. His hair smells like freshness, and it’s still damp from the shower. She wonders what he had planned tonight, before their mother went and fucked up their lives a little bit more.

  “Shouldn’t be surpr
ised,” Hector says, Lola’s lips still lingering on his hair.

  “She was doing better,” Lola lies, because she doesn’t believe any addict is ever doing better. They’re just at the top or bottom of their respective lifelong roller-coaster ride, waiting to drop, or waiting to climb up from rock bottom.

  “Yeah,” Hector says, and Lola can tell he doesn’t believe it either. Does the realization mean he’s growing up?

  “You had dinner?” Lola asks, because she wants out of here. She’ll keep paying the rent, maybe drop by every couple of weeks to check mail and wipe down the dust until her mother decides this time she’s getting clean for real. Then the cycle will begin again, with Lola making enchiladas and mopping floors every week, both of them pretending Lola’s helping and Maria’s recovering.

  “No,” Hector says, and they’re almost to the front door, Lola about to tell him to lock it behind him, when he asks, “Why do you think…this time? Some bad news shit or something?”

  Lola remembers her last conversation with Maria. Her parting words. Hector’s in the hospital. The realization smacks her, shaking her body from the top of her head to the ends of her toes, pinched in her cargo boots. She had taken such care to make her parting words to her mother sting. Your son. In the hospital.

  And now, instead of buying some fucking flowers and candy and going to hold her son’s hand like a decent mother, Maria Vasquez has pawned all her shit for heroin.

  Lola has fucked up. In her hurry to deliver alarming news to her mother, Lola forgot about Hector, her younger brother, who somewhere deep down in his young bones thought this recovery would be their mother’s last, that Maria would kick her habit and start worrying after her children—were they getting enough to eat, would Hector ever think about settling down, why hasn’t Lola had a baby yet?

  But all these questions have always been too much for Maria. Their mother lives in the moment in a way Lola never could. She has a focus and determination to achieve a single goal—scoring her next fix.