Lola

by Melissa Scrivner Love

  She must have passed out after the call, because she doesn’t remember anything until she was sitting in Garcia’s passenger seat, a cold compress on one side of her face, a heating pad on her shoulder, Gatorade in her hand. Lola remembers thinking Garcia must have thought she caught a cold instead of a beating. He should have known better how to care for a person in the aftermath of violence—surface stab wounds, minor gunshots—outside of a hospital, because for people in their business, secret medical treatment is a necessity. Then Lola heard Garcia saying her name, over and over, a question, asking her to respond, to let him know she was alive, and she realized then he must have been too scared to gather proper supplies. She forgave him in her pain, but she made a note that she should have all her boys sign up for EMT courses. She remembers being glad he did not ask why her car was still in the driveway of their home, but she knew his lack of suspicion must mean she was fucked up bad.

  The next thing she remembers is waking up here, with Lucy by her stomach, and Garcia’s place in bed cold.

  She hears murmurs from the kitchen instead of the popping of bacon fat in a pan. Lola recognizes the singsong lilt of her mother’s best friend even though she can’t make out Veronica’s words. Every few seconds, she hears Garcia’s response—a low growl that means he’s listening. Lola taught him that, to acknowledge her when she spoke. She’s glad her mind seems sound.

  Lola throws back the covers and crawls out from under Lucy’s sighing sleeping head. She can hear Veronica’s words now, a string of statements disguised as questions.

  “Why would she be out alone at that time of night?” Translation: Lola brought this on herself. “Doesn’t that seem strange to you?” Lola’s not acting like herself. “And you’re sure she doesn’t need to go to the hospital?” We need to get her to a hospital.

  Lola hasn’t looked at herself in the mirror, but she figures she can make a grand, energized entrance, demanding bacon and coffee. Her appetite for pork fat and caffeine should tip Veronica off that everything’s fucking fine.

  A knock at the front door interrupts her plan. It can’t be much past seven in the morning. This news, whatever it is, can’t be good. Lola’s mind flashes to Maria, and she finds herself hoping for a cop on her doorstep, delivering the news that her mother is dead. She imagines the LAPD would send a rookie to get his feet wet with a poverty-stricken addict’s family before they let him loose on some Westsider’s pretty blond dead daughter.

  Lola practices her face on the way to the door. She must give the expected reaction to an addict’s death—tired and sad, but not surprised. Then she remembers her puffy eye, her pounding temples, the blood she fingered on pavement last night that must have been hers. She can’t answer the door to a cop.

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Garcia says, and Lola feels his strong hand on the small of her back. “You should be in bed.”

  “I’m fine,” Lola says.

  “You need to go to the hospital,” Veronica says, appearing behind Garcia with a mug of coffee. Lola can tell Veronica wants to be more hysterical, but her mother’s friend will have to finish her second cup of caffeine before she can muster the waterworks and wringing hands she figures will get Lola to an emergency room.

  “I’m fine,” Lola repeats. “Someone’s at the door.” Garcia checks the peephole as Lola, impatient with the pounding and Veronica’s muted worry, asks, “Is it the cops?”

  “Cops?” Veronica pipes up, having just thrown back half her mug with the expert toss of an alcoholic over a shot of scotch. “Do you know who did this to you, honey?”

  “Yes. No,” Lola says, her brain foggy. She takes a moment before she faces Veronica. “Mom’s gone.” Veronica will give her less shit for not telling her about Maria’s disappearance if Lola acknowledges Maria as her mother.

  “What?” Veronica’s eyes widen over the rim of her coffee mug, and Lola can’t tell, could never tell, over decades of maternal disappearances, if Veronica’s shock was genuine or feigned for the sake of Maria’s children. Either way, it makes Lola hate Maria even more, because either way, her mother would always have a friend in Veronica—to cover for her, to be on her side even when she didn’t deserve that second, third, or thirtieth chance. Addicts are lucky like that.

  “She’s using again,” Lola says.

  “That can’t be,” Veronica says.

  “It is,” Lola says over Veronica’s feigned shock or her naïveté. Whichever it is, Lola can’t give a shit right now.

  “It’s not the cops,” Garcia says. “It’s Rosie Amaro.” Lucy’s mother.

  “How’s she look?” Lola asks. She wants to know what she’s dealing with. If it’s sober sad Rosie, Lola will brew a fresh pot of coffee. If it’s Rosie on PCP, Lola will grab the baseball bat she keeps in their coffin of a front hall closet. She bought it on sale specifically for unexpected visitors she doesn’t have an excuse to shoot.

  “Pissed,” Garcia answers.

  “Go hide Lucy.”

  “Lucy Amaro is here?” Veronica asks, her voice pitched up to shrill.

  “Veronica. Go pour yourself another cup of coffee.”

  “You’re awfully bossy this morning, missy,” Veronica says, but she disappears into the kitchen as Garcia heads out to stash Lucy in the spot only Lola and Garcia know.

  Lola takes her first moment alone to look through the peephole at Rosie Amaro. The woman is sick thin, with ripped tights and a second-skin short skirt. Black curls spring from her scalp in tense tight coils so that now, with her back to Lola, Rosie gives the impression of a ghetto Medusa.

  Lola remembers Rosie from high school. She was quiet, head always bent over a book, a target for girl bullies with their labels: skank, fat skank, skinny skank, stinky skank. Lola wonders if these poor excuses for insults gnawed at the hole in Rosie, letting in enough sadness so that heroin became the answer. No, Lola thinks, calling someone a skank every day for a few years should not make an addict. But maybe Rosie isn’t as strong as Lola.

  Lola herself had gotten the skank label a couple of times in high school, from a girl bully jealous of her and her book smarts and her curving pear hips. Lola hadn’t gotten sad. Instead, she had channeled all her anger into fucking the bully’s boyfriend so good he would never go back to the abusive bitch. But she was younger then, fourteen, and the boyfriend she fucked was Carlos, and she has to wonder now if that skank label set her on a path she could never reverse.

  Lola sucks in some air before she swings open the front door. Rosie stops pacing and spins on her heel, toes tapping, arms crossed over her flat chest.

  “Where’s Lucy?” Rosie asks.

  “What?” Lola squints in the sunshine. Her right eye is swollen shut, but she can tell it’s another banner day in Los Angeles—seventy-five, sunny, not a single cloud in the sky. Even here in Huntington Park, where drive-bys leave little bodies bleeding out on cracked sidewalks, the sky smiles down like it doesn’t have a fucking care in the world.

  “Lucy. My daughter. Where the fuck is she?” Rosie darts toward Lola, who straightens up. She’s sick of playing tired dumb even two seconds in.

  “You don’t want to do that,” Lola warns.

  “Oh, yeah?” But Rosie stops, because she’s taken notice of Lola’s appearance. “The fuck happened to you?”

  “Rough night,” Lola says. With Rosie this close, Lola can tell she’s not high, but she is coming down off something. Rosie can’t even hold one-eyed Lola’s stare for a single second. It is in this state between highs, when the need for another fix grows like a malignant tumor, that Lola has found addicts to be at their most dangerous.

  “I want to talk to Lucy,” Rosie says.

  “She’s not here,” Lola says, even though she hasn’t discussed Lucy’s wishes with her. Is there some deep want in the little girl to go back to her mother, to give Rosie her hundredth or even thousandth one more chance to give a shit? Lola wonders what it would take for Rosie to win Lucy back—some cinnamon toast and a tuck into bed with a ted
dy bear instead of Rosie’s boyfriend?

  “My parents tellin’ me you have her.”

  “No, they’re not,” Lola says, because she hasn’t called the Amaros to let them know Lucy’s here. They’re pretending not to know Rosie’s letting their landlord’s son grope their granddaughter, so in Lola’s book, they can go fuck themselves.

  “Well.” Rosie deflates, bluff called. “They said Lucy likes you.”

  The outside acknowledgment of Lucy’s feelings for her makes Lola’s chest swell until she’s almost beaming at this skinny skeleton of a mother. She has to cover, fast.

  “She’d like you, too, if you’d stop pimping her out to your boyfriend.” Direct, but it throws Rosie off whatever game she thinks she’s playing with Lola. Lola wants to assure Rosie they are not in the same league.

  “The fuck?” Rosie says, with a too-loud laugh that confirms what Lola knew was true from the moment she found that wadded-up pair of panties in Lucy’s backpack.

  “You heard me. Skank,” Lola throws in, just because it’s sunny out, and she got the shit beat out of her last night. She’s feeling a little high school.

  “You…you,” Rosie sputters, and Lola finds herself wanting to help Rosie craft a return insult. Ho, whore, bitch, cunt. Come on, Rosie. You’re a terrible person. You can fucking hurl a couple insults my way. But Rosie doesn’t. Instead, she forces herself to breathe, to stand still, to be calm. Must be a trick she’s learned in some rehab somewhere over the past decade. “You have until tonight to give her back.”

  Lola sighs. A cartel boss can give her deadlines, but not this sad sack addict wanting to play at motherhood for a night, probably because her boyfriend’s coming over. Lola no longer has time for Rosie and her sick shenanigans.

  She opens the door a little wider, palming the bat where Rosie can see as she says, “Get the fuck off my porch.”

  Rosie stares at the bat, eyes widening. “Lola…my God…”

  Lola raises the bat, hoping for all the world that Rosie will make a scene. Lola wants Rosie to give her an excuse to crack this bat across her cheek.

  But Rosie runs. Lola squints through her puffy eye and sees high heels sinking into dewy morning grass, atrophied calf muscles in torn tights trying to put distance between their owner and Lola.

  Oh, well. Lola didn’t need another complication. She’s got shit to do.

  She finds Garcia in the bedroom, sitting in a metal folding chair that wasn’t there when Lola woke.

  “She gone?” he asks.

  Lola nods, and Garcia stands, placing the folding chair to one side as together they pry up the floorboards to a wide-eyed Lucy, squatting on a makeshift chair made of cash. Lucy is sitting on the dirty drug money Lola and Garcia have made but can’t use. They can clean about ten percent of what they make through cash purchases—gas, groceries, liquor, manicures that include fancy tips and glitter. They hand over big bills for clean change. The rest makes Lucy’s seat now.

  The little girl’s tiny fingers reach up to rub the sleep from her eyes. When Lucy sees Lola’s beaten face above her, she asks, “Was that my mom?”

  Lola nods.

  “Did she want me back?” The hope in Lucy’s voice breaks Lola’s heart.

  Lola nods again. “But I sent her away.”

  Lucy sinks back down onto the cash and says, “Oh.” Her expression of disappointment hurts more than the beating Lola took last night.

  “Could you tell us in your own words what happened that night, Sarah?”

  It is the afternoon of the day Rosie Amaro came calling for her daughter. The courtroom where Lola sits reeks of industrial lemon cleaning supplies and the salty meat smell of postcafeteria cold-cut body odor. There aren’t many bodies here—jurors of all colors, shapes, and sizes; a thin male judge with white hair who reclines in his large black chair, comfortable being the one in charge; a defendant, white male, thirty, who’s looking right at the witness; Sarah, thirty, white, beat-to-shit bruises fading on her face. Lola doesn’t have to look at the jury to know the defendant is fucked.

  “He promised me it wouldn’t happen again. That he would never hit me, that it was just that once. But he lied.”

  “And just to be clear, you’re referring to the defendant?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what is your relation to him?”

  “He’s my husband.”

  “Your husband did this to you.” The prosecutor times her words so she stops in front of the jury, letting the horror of domestic violence hit them.

  “Aw, shit,” Hector murmurs, enthralled with Andrea, the prosecutor Lola saw at Pacific Division. Today, the diminutive woman wears a tailored green suit and silk blouse, jacket off, with heels Lola recognizes as a designer brand from the fresh bloodred soles.

  Lola bets no one on the jury—from a smattering of doughy white men to a no-bullshit middle-aged African American woman to a sobbing white coed who didn’t realize until today that, for most people, the world sucks—will hold Andrea’s designer garb against her. Maybe Lola has read it wrong—maybe the judge isn’t the one in charge here. Maybe that’s why he’s reclining, like a security guard on a coffee break. Maybe he has turned his courtroom over to this fiery little storm in green, who closes her eyes now, as if praying for both this woman’s safety and the defendant’s dark soul. Lola sees Andrea steel herself as she opens her eyes and holds up a hand, a gesture that says she just can’t go on. She has to clear her throat before she says, small, “No further questions, Your Honor.”

  Andrea walks, too slow, back to her chair at the prosecutor’s table, which throws off the defense attorney. A clean-cut white man in pinstripes he can’t quite pull off, he leaps from his chair, working his squeaky loafers and large, inappropriate smile to bring the jury out of their postlunch pity comas. But Lola can see the twelve are not ready for this shift in energy.

  Andrea must sense it, too, because she busies herself with her case binder, a large black object that Andrea’s small hands can’t quite contain. She takes a sheet of plain white copy paper from her briefcase, so slow, moving with the easy grace of someone who knows eyes are on her. Even seated and silent, she has the jury’s attention.

  “Mrs. Rollins,” the defense attorney begins, and half the jury jumps in their seats, because he is too loud. He is losing his case already.

  “Sarah,” the woman says, but her voice is too quiet for the defense attorney to hear as he charges on with all the energy of a cavalry horse at war. Too bad Andrea has just created a somber air that belongs more to a battle’s aftermath, when people want stillness to grieve.

  “Did you cheat on your husband?”

  “Yes.”

  Lola glances at the jury to see if they recognize this asshole’s victim-blaming, but not a single member of the twelve-person jury is looking at the defense attorney. Instead, their eyes linger on Andrea, taping that single piece of white copy paper to her case binder as if she doesn’t have a damn thing better to do. What’s so important about that piece of paper, Lola wonders, that now is the time to tape it to the front of her binder?

  Lola cranes her neck, and she can make out the words State of California v. Rollins. The case name. A simple administrative task Andrea’s secretary should have taken care of weeks ago, but here Andrea sits, in court, tearing another piece of tape from her roll and centering it over the white sheet before sealing it to the binder.

  “Objection, Your Honor. Relevance.” Andrea doesn’t look up as she tears off another piece of tape.

  “Sustained.”

  Lola doesn’t have to listen to any more of the defense attorney’s questions to know he has lost his case. Of course, she didn’t come here this afternoon to watch a jury convict a wife beater, although she considers that a bonus. She came here to find Andrea, the woman who had taken such an interest in speaking to Sadie the other day. A simple Internet search turned up the prosecutor’s full name—Andrea Dennison Whitely. With three names like that, Lola figures Andrea’s eith
er rich or a serial killer.

  Maybe both, Lola thinks. The woman seems like a multitasker, prosecuting a piece of shit domestic violator while building a case against the Westside’s most notorious new drug trafficker—Eldridge Waterston. It’s the only reason Lola could think of for Andrea to make the drive to Pacific Division for one lousy meth head. She must want the head of the snake, and, in this instance, her wants coincide with Lola’s.

  Lola has one week to infiltrate Eldridge Waterston’s organization, but she has to find him first. Sadie has no idea where her boss lives, and the only other person who might know is sitting in front of Lola in this courtroom, taping paper to a binder and winning her fucking case.

  The judge calls for a break as soon as the defense attorney realizes his cross strategy—which so far consists of insinuating that a battered woman is a slut—has failed.

  Lola and Hector trail out of the courtroom with the other spectators.

  “What do we do now?” Hector asks.

  They’re in Van Nuys, walking down a long corridor walled in windows. Potential jurors line the hall, jackets and bags clutched to them, ready to make their exit as soon as some voice of authority booms the words, “You’re excused.”

  Lola answered a jury summons once. The defendant was a quivering white college dude caught on a possession charge. When the judge had asked if anyone had a reason they couldn’t serve on this particular kind of case that they needed to tell him in private, Lola had raised her hand. She had summed up her entire childhood for the judge in his private quarters with no tears. “My mom pimped me out to older men for drug money.” The judge had listened with kind eyes, then said, in a firm, genuine tone, “I’m sorry. You’re excused.” Talking to that judge for ten seconds, Lola had known for the first time what it must be like to have a father. She had found herself wanting to take back the words, to spend a week or two with this man who ruled with kindness and quiet strength. When she went home that night, she had searched for him on the Internet and found a quick bio: UCLA undergrad, Harvard Law, admitted to the bar, charities, married, two daughters. The judge’s biography reminded Lola that she did not belong in any part of his world, except maybe the charities, and she never wanted to be helped. She wanted to be the helper, or maybe that was the wrong word for it. She wanted to be the one in charge of telling other people what was best for them and making them do it. It was then Lola had realized she didn’t need a father figure; she was the father figure.