by Steph Cha
Aunt Sheila showed up crying and shouting about God and prison. It was enough of a scene that they switched corner stores after that, and Shawn learned forever that stealing meant wrath from God, life in prison, and a volcanic eruption of grief from Aunt Sheila.
“Suit yourself.” Duncan nodded at Ray and Ava. “But you know these hoods getting theirs. Show him what you got.”
“Shut up, Duncan,” said Ray. “None of this is happening, okay, Shawn? It’s all a dream.” He waved his fingers in front of Shawn’s face, as if that could make this all any more dreamlike, this night like no other he’d ever lived.
Ava rolled her eyes, but then she produced a cassette tape from her back pocket. “I know it’s kind of old, but I saw it and thought you might want it,” she said. “You can borrow my Walkman. Just don’t tell Aunt Sheila.”
Shawn took it, not knowing what to say. Michael Jackson looked up at him, unsmiling in tight black pants and a black leather jacket. The word “BAD” splashed over his head, spelled out in red letters. He ran his thumb across the cover, bunching up the plastic wrap.
“Thanks,” he said. Ava mussed his hair.
Duncan clapped his hands over the boom box. “Alright, smooth criminals. Let’s move.”
He marched ahead of them, and Shawn noticed he was wearing a new jacket, his old windbreaker tied around his waist, his pockets bulging with God knew what stolen junk.
“He looks like the Grinch who stole Westwood,” said Shawn.
Ray and Ava burst out laughing.
The village was spattered with glass and trash, as if all the storefronts had retched out their guts. The air smelled like smoke and piss, and in every direction, people ran like wild children, hollering and thrashing.
But Shawn wasn’t scared anymore.
A metal clothing rack stood in the middle of the street, most of its hangers bare, like bones picked clean on a slab of ribs. Shawn stuck his foot out as they passed, sent it rolling until it wobbled and fell over with a rattling crash.
“Shawn!” Ava shouted. But there was delight in her voice.
The night and the mob and the violent roar—he knew, with instinctive clarity, that these things wouldn’t hurt them. If this was fire, they were flame. They were part of it, safe within the blaze.
One
Saturday, June 15, 2019
It took Grace twenty minutes to find parking. She passed a seven-dollar lot, thinking there must be cheaper options, and wound up driving farther and farther away, gaping at the prices, before turning around and deciding the first lot would do just fine. Downtown was a maze of one-way streets, and they seemed to guide her away from where she was going. Two wrong turns and she was in a sketchy area, both sides of the street lined with tents. She glanced at her door, made sure it was locked.
By the time she parked—in a nine-dollar lot a good deal farther than she wanted—she was flustered and slightly sweaty, with the bad feeling that always clung to her when she was running late. It would take another ten minutes for her to walk to the courthouse, where she’d have to find Miriam and Blake in the crowd. She texted her sister.
Sorry, just parked. Where are you?
She was almost there, preparing her apology, when Miriam responded.
We’re on our way! Ubering.
It was 6:13, almost fifteen minutes after when Miriam had told Grace to show up. Grace was relieved, but she felt like a sucker for even trying to come on time. She should’ve known better—Miriam ran on what she called “Korean time,” though she was the only one in their family who wasn’t fastidiously punctual. But this was a memorial for Alfonso Curiel, someone Miriam claimed to care about; Grace would’ve thought she’d make an exception, maybe start getting ready before it was time to leave the house.
She reminded herself that she hadn’t seen Miriam in over three weeks. It wouldn’t do any good to start the night mad at her, even if she had managed to turn their hangout into a whole stupid thing at the last minute, with Grace third-wheeling when all she’d wanted was to get some Thai food with her sister. Tonight was supposed to be Park girls only, but then this memorial had popped up, and Miriam got Grace to agree to go with her before dinner.
It was the kind of thing Miriam was always inviting her to on Facebook; Grace never went, and once in a while Miriam would scold her for her inattention, her indifference, her laziness, like it didn’t matter that Grace actually worked a full-time job, or that her job was in Northridge. This time, Grace had no excuse not to go. She had the day off from the pharmacy, and she was already planning to see Miriam in L.A. When Blake invited himself along, she couldn’t even argue—it wasn’t like she could stop him from attending a public gathering. She wished he’d had the sense to make his own dinner plans, but he made a reservation for three instead, at some new downtown spot Miriam wanted to check out. His treat, of course. Grace was low-key dreading the next several hours, and Miriam had already left her hanging.
The memorial was in front of the federal courthouse, a huge shining cube of a building that looked like an evil Apple Store. There was a crowd gathered, maybe a hundred people, listening in silence to a large black man in the middle of what seemed like an impassioned speech. Grace stood back, wondering where she was supposed to wait for her sister.
She lingered on the sidewalk until she noticed another group a few yards away. There were about ten of them loitering, white men in their twenties and thirties, all of them in red hats and black polo shirts, like an aged-out frat or marching band. One held a sign that said COME GET SOME OF THIS, ANTIFA. She couldn’t remember who Antifa was, but she wanted to get away from this crew. They gave her the same creepy feeling as the white dudes who took Korean in college, just to stare silently at the girls.
She joined the back row of the crowd and faced the way everyone else was facing, hoping to blend in. She was here; she might as well pay attention.
It wasn’t like she didn’t care. She understood that there was a lot of tragedy in the world, and it bothered her, for sure, that people were racist and horrible, and that black people kept dying.
And this was a terrible story, even as these things went. Alfonso Curiel was just a kid, a high school student who lived with his parents in Bakersfield. Two nights ago, a police officer shot him dead in his own backyard. One of his friends posted on Facebook, saying he’d been with Alfonso at a movie just an hour earlier. He said the boy was always forgetting his keys and that he was probably trying to get in through the back, and some neighbor had called the police on him.
He was totally innocent, from the sounds of it. It was an awful shame.
The man up front spoke loudly, though the noise of downtown swallowed some of his volume. He stood tall in a black suit with a black shirt and a black tie—he had to be a pastor. Grace recognized the stance of holy authority, the rich boom of his words, before she even started listening.
She heard the name of the dead boy, and she leaned forward, bowing her head, to hear what the pastor was saying.
“He was just trying to get into his home,” he said. “His own house, where he lived with his mommy and daddy. See, it don’t matter what you do if you’re black in America. You can stay in your neighborhood, on your street, and still, some cop can find you in your own backyard. You can be an unarmed black boy, and someone can just come in and kill you with the full blessing of the law. And that goes for our women and girls, too. Remember our sisters. Remember Sandra Bland, remember Rekia Boyd.”
He turned to an elderly woman standing next to him and placed a large hand on her shoulder before speaking again.
“Remember Ava Matthews, right here in L.A.”
Grace listened to the pastor, yielding to the power of his voice. There was a murmur and a snapping of fingers—she’d never seen that before, but she recognized it as an amen.
“Alfonso Curiel’s mother gave an interview last night. Said he was a good kid, never any trouble. Got good grades. Wanted to be a doctor. That’s the kind of kid he was—a
kid who did everything right. He’s in heaven now, no doubt about it. But here, he didn’t get a chance to live his dreams. Here, we lost another one. Only thing we can get for him here is justice.”
Grace looked at the woman at the pastor’s side, holding a homemade sign, a piece of poster board taped to what looked like a yardstick. She wiped tears from her eyes with her free hand, and for a second, Grace thought she must be the mother. But no, she was too old. In her sixties at least, with a crown of tight gray curls and deep grooves running under soft, round cheeks. The grandmother, maybe. She stood with such sadness even the sign listed forward, limp with grief. JUSTICE FOR ALFONSO CURIEL, it said, and under the words, a black-and-white picture. A handsome, round-faced boy, serious but bright-eyed in a collared shirt. A school portrait. He was supposed to go to college. He was supposed to be a doctor.
Grace felt dizzy and closed her eyes. When she opened them again, she was tearing up, too.
Miriam was right. It was wrong of Grace, selfish of her, to look away when there was so much injustice in the world. It had been too easy for her to feel nothing for Alfonso Curiel, to do nothing to honor his death. She had let herself luxuriate in apathy, her world separate from the real world.
Her heart swelled with wretched humility and righteous, motivated passion. It was a familiar feeling, one she knew from her church days, the feeling of Christian revival. She was full of love, abundant and pure and impersonal, enough to reach every fallen soul, to take part in the sorrow of all.
She was paying such close attention that she didn’t notice her sister until she was by her side, Blake looming behind her. “You came,” Miriam whispered in her ear, her voice breaking Grace’s concentration. She gave Grace a quick hug, then drew back and looked her over. “You dressed up. Nice.”
Grace felt herself flush. She’d put on makeup and real clothes tonight, something she didn’t do often, as she spent most of her life in a lab coat and orthopedic shoes, seeing old Korean patients. She was wearing a black cap-sleeved dress, a little high on the thigh, that she’d worn over opaque tights for a recent church halmoni’s funeral. It seemed like a smart choice when she was riffling through her closet that afternoon—somber enough for a service, sufficiently cute for dinner—but looking around now, she felt both frumpy and overdressed. There were others in black, but they wore T-shirts, blazoned with phrases like I CAN’T BREATHE and BLACK GIRL MAGIC. She just wanted to blend in and be respectful, and she’d managed to show up looking like Wednesday Addams.
Miriam, for her part, was dressed for a music festival, wearing some kind of sexy kimono thing, all loose floral silk and breezy sleeves over a cropped top and torn-up denim shorts. It was a ridiculous outfit, even discounting where they were, but because this was Miriam, she looked fantastic. Grace had always been envious of her sister’s sense of style, which she had never been able to imitate with any success, even when Miriam loaned her clothes or took her shopping. It didn’t help that Miriam had always been an inch taller and ten pounds thinner than Grace, the gap as constant as their difference in age. There was nothing to stop Grace from stealing this exact outfit and wearing it tomorrow, except that she knew she’d look like a hair washer at a second-rate Korean salon.
“The fucking Nazi goon squad is here,” said Blake, nodding at the group of milky frat boys Grace had noticed earlier.
“Ignore them,” said Miriam. “They’re dying for someone to start shit.”
Blake made a face like he’d been put on time-out. “What kind of lowlifes protest a memorial?” he said, loud enough to carry. A few people turned to look at him. He had a point, though of course no one else was trying to agitate while the pastor was speaking.
Blake and Miriam had been together for almost two years now, and Grace still didn’t really get what her sister saw in him, unless it was just that he paid the bills while she bummed around on Twitter and chipped away at a screenplay or her long-suffering novel. He could maybe pass for handsome—he was tall with blue eyes; that did most of the work—but he was fifteen years older than Miriam, with receding blond hair and a tendency to wear statement blazers with glossy sneakers. He was successful at least—a screenwriter who’d created a popular television show about Appalachian drug addicts. Grace found it interesting that Miriam railed against the white maleness of Hollywood when she was in love with the whitest male Hollywood had ever known. Even Grace noticed the stark whiteness of his show, and, as Miriam liked to point out, Grace hardly ever noticed stuff like that.
He compensated in the most annoying ways, like telling everyone he was a feminist and practically a communist and asking people on Facebook to recommend books by women of color, as if Miriam and Google couldn’t do that for him. One time, Grace peeked at his Twitter and saw that he’d posted something like “Listen up, fellas, oral sex is a two-way street.” Miriam had liked the tweet, and Grace would’ve paid good money to burn it out of her memory.
A wave of applause caught Grace off guard—the pastor had finished his speech, but she’d stopped listening to him minutes ago.
“Now we’re gonna hear from our sister Sheila Holloway,” he said, putting his hand back on the older woman’s shoulder.
Miriam watched, her eyes intense and misty. She was all attention, now that she was finally here. Grace listened long enough to satisfy her curiosity—the speaker wasn’t the grandmother, just a community member or something—but the woman was quieter than the pastor. It took an effort to make sense of her words over the noise of the crowd, and after a minute, Grace stopped trying. She couldn’t find her way back to her rapture; she was already starting to forget the feeling. It was like trying to fall back asleep to dream the rest of a promising dream.
The restaurant wasn’t even a restaurant. It was a bar with food in Little Tokyo, and everything they ordered was cute and tiny, like toy food in a Japanese gift shop. Grace got tipsy without meaning to, taking small but steady sips from her screwdriver. She wasn’t much of a drinker, and the vodka hit her fast, her blood warming around it.
She was still working on the screwdriver—the second half more tolerable than the first—when Blake made a trip to the bar and returned with three tumblers of brown liquid. “They have a lot of great Japanese whiskeys here,” he said. “I got us some Yamazaki Single Malt.”
Grace eyed the three glasses while Blake offered one to Miriam. She could tell from Blake’s insufferable connoisseur tone that the whiskey was probably expensive. Miriam took a sip and made a noise of appreciation. Blake looked pleased, and Grace returned to her screwdriver while he held forth on Japanese whiskey.
“You should try it,” he said, pushing the third tumbler toward her. “It tastes like honey. Honest to God.”
Grace sniffed it and almost gagged; she didn’t like the taste of alcohol, and brown liquor was the worst.
“I don’t think this is for me,” she said, setting it down.
“Oh, come on. If you can drink that shit, you can drink anything.” He gestured at her screwdriver—it was the second time he’d commented on it, the same condescending smile on his face. “This is the good stuff.”
Grace blinked, waiting for her sister to tell him to leave her be.
“Just take a tiny sip,” Miriam said instead. “If you don’t like it, I’ll drink the rest.”
Grace picked the glass back up and stared at it, mentally preparing. “Well, I guess if it’s the good stuff,” she said.
She stopped breathing through her nose and threw back the whiskey in one shot. Her throat burned. She coughed and chased with the remainder of her screwdriver.
“Not quite like honey,” she said, blinking hard and showing her tongue.
Blake looked at her like he’d caught her strangling a baby, but Miriam burst out laughing.
“That was a twenty-five-dollar shot,” said Blake.
It was even more than Grace had guessed. “Oh, wow, I didn’t know,” she said innocently. Her chest felt aglow.
“Go get her another screwdri
ver, honey,” said Miriam, still laughing. “She earned it.”
Blake started to object, but Miriam met him with a patient smile, one that promised to turn sour if he refused her. Grace didn’t even want another drink, but it was nice to see him storm off to the bar, knowing Miriam was on her side.
“Two is probably enough for me,” said Grace. “I have to drive back to Granada.”
Miriam rolled her eyes. “Can you please move out of the Valley? It’s impossible to see you, and even when you come out you have to leave at like six o’clock.”
“It’s almost nine now.”
Miriam lived in Silver Lake, a hipster yuppie neighborhood, and ever since she moved there, she’d developed a biting scorn for the Valley—Granada Hills in particular. She refused to believe Grace liked her living situation, that she had, in fact, chosen it with full knowledge that there were other options available and didn’t need Miriam reminding her that she could rent an apartment with roommates if she wanted. She’d lived with roommates—in college, in pharm school—but why should she throw away money on rent when her job was ten minutes from home, when her parents wanted her around, her mother, Yvonne, genuinely excited—Grace would swear on the Holy Bible—to cook her meals and do her laundry? Miriam should have understood. She’d lived at home after college and again for a few months after she quit consulting to follow her dreams. Instead she talked about the Valley like Grace had heard some people talk about tiny rural hometowns in Alabama and Ohio—as a place she’d escaped on her way to her true life, some shameful primitive village, when it was really a cluster of suburbs within Los Angeles city limits, maybe a half-hour drive from where she lived now.