by Неизвестный
“Why did she make me kill her, Laura?”
But there are some questions so basic that no answer will be enough.
And then, for a moment, she came back from the brink.
Near the front door, an Arizona Cardinals baseball jacket hung on a single wooden peg. Meg focused on the jacket with a singular purpose, like a deepsea diver watching a depth gauge and knowing there were only seconds of oxygen left to surface.
“Laura. Take this. Put it on.”
She dressed me, like a mother with a sleepy child, carefully fitting my hands through the cuffs, pulling the sleeves tight, locking the bottom of the zipper, and oh so slowly and lovingly sliding the zipper to the very top.
“Now,” she said. “Now we can leave this horrible place.”
I got the keys to the Caprice, and we drove away from the butcher shop.
“Your daughter's alive,” I told her. “I'm alive. You're alive.”
“I need help, Laura.”
Yeah. Don't we all.
EPILOG
When I checked into the Roosevelt Hotel on Hollywood Boulevard, I almost ran into Dolly Parton. Then I saw Liz Taylor, except it was Liz at forty. After John Wayne and three Elvises walked by, I finally asked what was happening.
“Impersonators annual banquet and performance night,” the desk clerk said.
“Female impersonators?”
“No, no, nothing like that. You see a Barbra or a Liza, it's a woman. Staying just the two nights, Miss Winslow?”
“Maybe longer. Can't say.”
“Mr. Villaneuva is in a connecting room. Have fun. Next?”
“You sure about this?” Rey asked.
Waiting for a taxi, we crossed Hollywood Boulevard to Mann's Chinese Theatre, and Rey knelt on Rita Hayworth's square, tracing her signature in the cement. Standing, uneasy, uncertain of what we were doing together, he fidgeted with his Hawaiian shirt, tucking it neatly into his jeans and in the next moment pulling it out.
“I wanted to knock on your door last night,” he said. “I wanted. . . ”
“Rey.” I laid a palm on his cheek for a moment. “You're here with me. Right now, that's as much as I can deal with.”
He jumped over Charles Laughton to Doris Day and knelt again to place his palms into the impressions left by Joan Crawford.
“It's enough,” he said. “To be here. With you.”
It clearly wasn't enough for him, but I had a long way to go to sort out what kind of relationship I wanted. When I'd told him I was going to look for my daughter, he refused to let me disappear again from his life. I'm not sure what drew us closer over the past week, but Meg's breakdown was clearly a monsoon that swept our lives off course into uncharted territory.
We were on the edge of something, but I refused to step over to the other side.
One thing was clear.
I am so tired of reinventing myself. After years of many identities, I wanted to be my own person, my own self, my own soul. I arranged a set of ID papers in the name of Laura Winslow.
For two depressing days I was jailed in Tucson on a charge of murdering Michael Dance. But crime scene investigators cleared me once they'd dug through all of Taá's files. Her obsession with keeping meticulous data had led her to storing computer records of all her financial transactions, her deals with the Zamora smuggling cartel, her agreement to share profits with Jake Nasso, and, most damaging, her total contempt for Michael Dance. She'd also kept a diary of every single hour she'd spent with Meg, ending with her bitterness that Meg had no real interest in a long-time relationship. Taá drew unrealistic and obsessive details of Meg moving into the house. Meals they would plan, sheets and linen and furniture they would buy, movies to see and trips to enjoy.
Several of Meg's friends joined myself, Rey, and Amada for an intervention, finally convincing Meg to enter a drug clinic so that she could reestablish a chemical balance to offset her depression.
Many things never were resolved. Alex Emerine and Don Ralph vanished. All the LUNA chat messages vanished from AOL. New smuggling cartels were already formed, taking over Zamora's business. Jonathan Begay left Sonora, and months later I saw his face in a newspaper photograph amidst a crowd of protesters organized by the Zapatistas marching on Mexico City to demand better rights for Indians.
I didn't care.
The taxi took us along Lexington, slowing to find number 4255. It was a small two-story adobe bungalow.
“Wait for me,” I said to the driver.
“You want to give me twenty now?”
Rattled, eyeing the bungalow's front door, I handed her a fifty-dollar bill. Rey followed behind me. A dog barked from the next yard when I went inside the chainlink gate. I stood so long, not wanting to ring the bell, that I didn't notice the man who came up the driveway alongside the house.
“Can I help you?”
“Ah,” I said. “Ah. . . do you live here?”
“Yes. I own the house. Live upstairs.”
“How long have you owned the house?”
“That's an odd question, lady, for somebody who just walked into my yard. If you're a realtor, just leave.”
“I'm looking for somebody who used to live here. Maybe a tenant of yours.”
“Who?”
“Ashley? Or, maybe, Kimberly?”
“I've had one of each,” he said warily. “What's the last name?”
“Begay.”
“Are you related to her?”
“She lives here?”
“Are you related?”
“I'm her mother.”
“Ashley Begay lived here for five months until I threw her out. By that time she'd conned me for almost four thousand dollars. Are you going to pay me for that?”
“I haven't seen her since she was two.”
“Oh. Oh. I'm. . . well, I'm sorry. But she stiffed me for a lot of money.”
“I'll pay you,” I said, taking out a checkbook and writing him a check.
“Is this check good?”
“Yes. I can wait, if you want to call the bank.”
“Hard to figure you as Ashley's mother. She's a grifter. A con artist supremo.”
“Do you know where she went?”
“Pasadena.”
In West Pasadena, the taxi driver took a wrong turn and we went by the Rose Bowl. It was Sunday morning, and more than a hundred people thronged on the grass and along the parking lots of the stadium. Families already had picnic baskets out, and many walkers and joggers moved on the streets, which were barricaded against traffic.
Spider had moved three times in Pasadena, and we finally found her last known address on Prospect Avenue in a very rich section of old houses. Number 449 lay hidden behind thick, high walls overflowing with purple bougainvillea. The taxi driver waited, not asking for more money.
Inside the gate, I went up a long bricked driveway and rang the doorbell. A woman with a very young baby on her left hip came to the door, leaving it locked as she studied me through the glass.
“I'm looking for Ashley Begay,” I said loudly.
The woman stared at me for a long time.
“You mean Spider?”
“Yes. Is she here?”
“Try New York City. And if you ever find her, just tell her there's a warrant waiting here for her arrest. Tell her never to come back to California.”
“Where now?” the taxi driver asked.
I walked into the middle of the street, looked one way, looked the other, totally undecided, lost, on the edge of wanting to find my Spider but not wanting to find her.
“Laura?” Rey said. “You want me to come with you?”
“I don't know where I'm going.”
“Get in the taxi.”
He led me to the car, a gentle but firm hand on my elbow. He settled me into the backseat, sat beside me, held my hand. Sobbing, I rested my head on his shoulder.
“Decide for me,” I said. “I just don't know what to do.”
He fumbled with an airline sche
dule, folding and refolding the pages, finally drawing a fingernail across an entry of available flights from LAX to Kennedy.
“The airport,” he said to the driver.
Somewhere over Kansas, looking down through thin tendrils of horsetail clouds, I thought of Xochitl and her new life.
If I'd learned anything from all the events of the past days, it was that you can start again if you have the will to do so. There is no way to escape your memories, your history, your life up to now. If you ever doubt the influence of the past on the future, just look over your shoulder at the ghosts of those who survived and those who didn't. If you keep your gaze fixed on history, you are condemned forever to running from the hounds of past identities.
If you look ahead, at the edge between past and future, you can change.
I'm not sure I really believe that.
But this time, I was going somewhere, instead of running to escape my past. I turned to look at Rey, found him staring at me with concern and hope, and I took his hands in mine and smiled and grinned and leaned over to kiss him for the first time.
AUTHOR'S NOTE
Sadly, the problem of illegal trafficking in women is not fictional. It has long been a global issue, but until very recently it has not been a serious issue for justice and law enforcement agencies in the United States. The President's Interagency Council on Women has basically defined trafficking as the recruitment, abduction, transport, harboring, transfer, sale or receipt of persons; within national or across international borders. . . to place persons in situations of slavery or slavery-like conditions, forced labor or services, such as prostitution or sexual services, domestic servitude, bonded sweatshop labor or other debt bondage.
Simply put, trafficking is the buying and selling of women as slaves, a horrible experience made easier by the unequal status of females in the source and transit countries. China has only recently (and reluctantly) admitted that girls are kidnapped and sold within its borders. In the year 2001, trafficking from Mexico into the United States increased exponentially to the point where smuggling people can be more profitable than smuggling drugs. Traffickers operate in small gangs, rather than more easily tracked large cartels. Traffickers use technology in highly innovative ways to establish organizational structures which hide transfers of money. (The Internet is a major vehicle for these operations.) Because trafficking in women is a relatively new criminal business and is not controlled by traditionally organized crime cartels, the United States justice and law enforcement systems are ill-equipped to deal with the problem.
For more information, use the Google Internet search engine to find articles on “illegal trafficking in women.” Start with Amy O'Neill Richard's monograph (April 2000) titled “International Trafficking in Women to the United States: A Contemporary Manifestation of Slavery and Organized Crime.”