“She couldn’t make it easy,” he says, grinding the toe of his sneaker into the mud rug.
Back in the car, we idle by the curb, without another direction to head in. Lucas stares at his phone. Winding himself up to call their father, I guess.
“Why do you think she does it?” I ask. “All of it?”
“I have some ideas. But you have to ask her.”
If we find her before she flies away, that’s the first thing I’ll do.
“My sister can be amazing. She’s funny and smart and strong. She was one of the best center backs in the region when she played. Short, you know, but totally fearless on the field. That’s why I left Boston and came home with her. She’s not just the worst things she does,” he says pleadingly.
Diana thinks we’re not just our bodies, and I don’t even believe what she believes. But I hope she’s right, and Lucas, too.
I hope we’re not only our mistakes, our diseases, our disasters.
We both jump as Lucas’s phone chimes. He fumbles to pry it out of his sweatshirt pocket and read the text. Bathed in the blue-white glow of the screen, his face changes—fear to relief, his jaw loosening, dark eyebrows unstitching. “Fucking Leigh,” he says as he exhales, and it’s the sound of a heart restarting.
Instead of the Turquoise Trail, we take I-25 North because it’s faster, and get off onto the quiet streets of Santa Fe. Just about everything shuts down by eight, and it’s almost midnight now. Lucas directs me toward 285 North toward Chimayo, which we take for a half an hour. He cradles his phone and fiddles obsessively with the volume, even though Leigh’s battery was on its last gasp forty miles back, so it’s super unlikely she’ll text again.
We rise into the foothills of the mountains. Somewhere up there is Santa Cruz Lake, and I remember that night, Leigh’s body in the cold water, how she made me feel. I want us to be there again, but we don’t need to go that far before we see the van on the side of the road, listing toward the flattened front left tire. The cabin light is on, but the driver’s seat’s empty.
“Keep going,” Lucas says, anxiously juggling his useless phone between his hands.
Within a mile, we’re winding through a narrow gap in the hills and into the town that none of us can name, the small houses looming above and below us, a dog trotting aimlessly through the narrow street, summer bugs under the porch lights. Around a tight corner, the bone house looms. That’s where we find Leigh: sitting on the narrowest possible strip of earth just outside the fence. Our high beams illuminate the cow skulls skewered on the fence posts. They light up Leigh’s skin too, because it must be in the fifties this high up and after dark, but Leigh’s in shorts and a tank top. I’m already cold as soon as I leave the car, half a step behind Lucas.
Her head drifts up as we approach, eyes flickering over me and settling on Lucas. “I didn’t mean to,” she says, her voice low, kind of compressed, like her mouth isn’t working quite right. A little like the way Dad sometimes speaks.
I stop, but Lucas stands over her. “You were drinking?” he asks. “Or are you on something?”
She looks down at her ratty Vans, pulls on a loose thread. “Are you gonna tell Dad?”
“Of course, Leigh-Bee.” He kneels in the street, strips off his hoodie, and wrestles it onto his little sister, who almost disappears inside its folds. “We love you, you asshole. Don’t you get that?” He laughs low and thick.
This is what I want: to rush forward and elbow Lucas out of the way, wrap myself around Leigh and bury myself in her at the same time. To take her back to the hideous room and tell her how much I miss her. That I’m sorry about everything I said to her. That I forgive her. That I feel so much better and bigger and braver with her than without her. That I need her, and I want to be with her, the way things were on the Fourth. That I want to fix her, and for her to fix me, and if it’s not possible then I want us to just keep hiding away together.
I want, I want, I want . . .
But because what I want isn’t what’s important right now, I walk back to the Malibu. By the time I slide behind the wheel, Leigh has her face smashed into her brother’s shoulder and he’s murmuring things it’s not my business to hear. I close the car door. Flicking on the turn signal so I’m visible on the wildly unlikely chance that anybody else is driving through the hills this late at night, I click off the headlights and let Leigh be with the person she loves the most in the world and who knows her the best, for however long she needs.
TWENTY
Three things worth mentioning happen on Sunday, September 3.
Okay, not three things in the world. According to KOAT Action 7 News, the standard sound track to our breakfast cereal, there are notable happenings outside of La Trampa. A congressman is arrested for embezzlement and insider trading. This past August is confirmed as the warmest on record in New York City. A giant flock of turkey vultures drops dead in the Florida Keys. Reporters uncover an actress’s on-set affair with her married costar—she plays a high-powered chef who spends her nights alone with tubs of frozen yogurt, wine bottles, and Netflix; he plays an underachieving club rat who has meaningless sex with nameless hotties until a chance encounter with the chef rearranges his priorities . . . and his heart—and it’s established that the actress has “ruined” the actor, at least until the film comes out and breaks the box office.
But within my little ten-mile orbit, it’s just the three.
Happening #1: Finally, the heat breaks. It’ll linger in the eighties till late September and could spike back up before then. But when I step outside at noon, my lungs feel like lungs instead of twin magma chambers seething within a volcano, and that’s not nothing.
Happening #2: Having returned home from Monterey late the night before, Chris Zepeda comes to reclaim his spare key and stays for lunch. While he and Dad watch TV—the Buccaneers and the Rams are busy trying to break each other’s bones on a bright green field—Mom and I churn out ham and cheese sandwiches in the kitchen. I grab the mustard out of the fridge, and she presses a kiss into my shower-damp hair. “No sé que haría sin ti,” she says. I don’t know what I would do without you.
I slap mustard onto slices of bread, blushing. Because what I’m actually doing is courageously hiding out from Chris.
By now he’s had a chance to inspect his house, and if he peeked into the hideous room, he might have noticed the dust gone from the floorboards where I swept and scrubbed them, the reduced pile of his sister’s things on the little table, maybe a stray starburst of eye glitter I somehow missed. Besides which, I’m feeling super guilty about using the house Chris entrusted to me as a hookup pad. I guess it was more than that—a “reevaluating my sexuality and falling in love, or so I thought at the time, and maybe I still think so” pad—but I’m not sure if that’s any better.
We gather around the table during halftime, and while Chris casually slides Dad’s chair up and then settles into his own, I search his face. If he suspects anything, he’s totally stoic behind the wild shrubbery of his beard. “This looks great, Melanie.” He smiles broadly at Mom, tucking his paper napkin into the collar of his faded Allman Brothers Band T-shirt as if he weren’t facing down bland sandwiches, but a plate of costillas adobadas con mole poblano; the messy pork spareribs Dad smothered in sauce made from Mexican chocolate, four kinds of chili peppers, Kahlúa, and unidentified magic. I don’t know if anybody misses my father’s cooking quite like Chris.
He devours half a sandwich in two bites and washes it down with instant coffee, pausing long enough to grunt, “Sophia says hello,” before leaning in for the finishing bite.
Mom slides a second-round sandwich onto his plate without being asked. “¿Cómo está tu hermana?”
“Está bien. She’s finally, how do you say it, when you’re getting the baby to bed on a kind of schedule?”
“Sleep training,” Dad says, rocking himself toward the table.
Mom blinks, but Chris doesn’t skip a beat. “Yea
h, right, sleep training. So now she’s not so pooped during the day. She can go out, get a haircut, go to the park. They’re in a great place for kids. The whole area, it’s nice. You’d like it, Vanni. Nick—that’s Fee’s husband—he does something fancy in software.” He nudges Dad. “You picture my sister marrying a tech nerd?”
After a few seconds’ silence, through which Chris waits patiently, Dad tips his head. “Sure can’t.”
Chris reaches for a third sandwich, and Mom meets him with the platter halfway. “Nick has a good job, so they have a nice little place in this condo park called Ocean Forest. Couple of miles from the beach, actually. You even get a peek at the water from their balcony. Now that Dad’s up and around and back in his senior apartment where he’s happy, they’ve got a spare bedroom.”
I resist the urge to panic.
“I’m sure Fee’d love to meet you,” he continues, catching my eyes over the condiments, “if you get out that way. In the future, you know?”
“What a nice offer!” Mom says. Then they’re off and talking about Chris’s whole summer, the weather out west, his jet lag, and Mom’s secret recipe for her wonderful ham and cheese sandwiches (spoiler alert: it’s ham + cheese + a guest with low standards in a very generous mood).
After lunch I head to my room to get dressed for the evening. I spend a good fifteen minutes staring into my drawers before I pull on a pair of bone-white denim shorts and a soft button-up with blue and red checks. A Fourth-ish ensemble for a special occasion. I braid back my hair, then do my makeup in my spotted bedroom mirror, bending over and bracing my elbow on the desk so my hand won’t shake while eyebrow-filling and lip-lining. This, I’m sure, is not flawed genetics but the strain of no-makeup makeup that takes half an hour to apply.
I’m pretty sure.
After the finishing touches, I track down Mom to say good-bye. She’s at the screen door in the kitchen, looking out to where Dad and Chris sit on the lawn chairs permanently stationed in our backyard. There’s not much to see out back but a small, grassless, rocky plot like most yards around here. It’s hemmed in by a coyote fence made from spindly wooden poles, set in concrete and bundled together with galvanized wire. Dad and Chris built it themselves, with the brand of help from seven-year-old me that some would consider unhelpful. But they got it done, and for eleven years they’ve been sitting out back in various lawn chairs exactly like these, nursing a beer each, staring at that fence like it’s an ocean view at sunset. Mom watches them as if her view’s the same.
She turns at the slap of my flip-flops across the kitchen tiles. “¿Te vas, mija?”
I nod. “I’ll be back after dinner.”
Mom nods back, and then says carefully, “It was nice of Chris to make that offer.”
“Monterey? Yeah, I guess. It’s not like I’m going, though.”
“If you wanted to . . .” she starts, pushing away the loose hair that flutters against her cheeks in the breeze through the screen. “I didn’t mean what I said before, you know, in the kitchen. I know it’d be tough for you, but your father and I would be okay.”
“I know.” I scuff at the tiles. “Maybe you and Dad should go to California. On a vacation or something.”
“Maybe,” she says in the same sweet, high voice she uses to assure Mrs. Reyes she’ll try to stop by the prayer circle organized on Dad’s behalf. “Long before your father was sick, he was happiest at home.”
“You think Dad’s happy?” I ask, more drily than I meant to.
She turns back to the screen, staring out. “I don’t know, mija. Why don’t you ask him?”
Feeling as brittle as a husked peanut shell, I head into the backyard.
“¡Que linda!” Chris exclaims when he sees me.
“Yeah, yeah.”
“Going out? Hold on, I’m parked behind you in the drive.” He pats my dad on the shoulder and levers himself out of the lawn chair with a groan, as if he’s been there so long he’s grown roots. “I’ll move it to the street. Got to hit the head anyway. Back in a few, Gabe.”
Dad toasts him with a bottle of beer he’s only half emptied in the past hour.
Inspecting the plastic seat for dust, I swat away a light cloud of gnats and plop down beside my dad in Chris’s empty chair. “I start that new job tomorrow morning,” I say to fill the quiet.
His own chair creaks gently as one leg bounces up and down without his doing, one elbow jerking out of time. Chorea, it’s called—it means something like dance in Greek. “The park?”
I toe at a weed sprouting from the dust with my tennis shoe. “No, I quit that place. Remember? Too many hours.”
“I meant . . . what really happened at the park, corazón?”
I slouch down and tip my head back and squint into the blinding blue wash of the sky above us. I’m not shocked that Dad suspects. Maybe Mom doesn’t, but I’m pretty sure she still believes I’ve stayed home the past few months for all of the reasons I claim: to save money, to help in the restaurant just a little longer, to spend just a little more time with Dad. If those were my motives for kicking around town, then I might actually go off and start my life someday soon. Mom’s hoping hard for that. But Dad . . . I think he knows the truth.
I think we just don’t talk about it.
“I got fired,” I sigh. When he doesn’t speak, I’m not sure if he’s processing or waiting for more, so I keep going. “I did something stupid. Leigh was there, but it wasn’t her fault. I wanted to do it.”
Another pause. “Are you sorry?”
Now it’s my turn to process. “I’m sorry about what happened after.”
“Do you—” His left elbow slips off the plastic arm, threatening to tip his bottle. He swears under his breath and tucks it back in, and I stiffen in my seat, but he lets out a wobbly breath. “You want to talk about it?”
I don’t, and I do.
Because if he’s not exactly the dad I remember growing up with, and he’s destined to become less so very soon, he’s still my dad. We’re not just the worst things we do or the worst things that are done to us, right? Just because he and I can’t go hiking, or ride ATVs with Chris Zepeda . . . just because we can’t be in the kitchen together, him cooking and me happily watching, not learning but marveling at my dad . . . just because we’ve never needed to talk before much, and I’m scared that it is and always will be too late for us to learn how. . . .
So tell him something, I command myself. Something true. Tell him I broke up with Jake a couple days ago by the Dumpster behind Silvia’s, and it was hideously awkward and I felt truly awful about it, but now he’ll be an even worse peak-hours waiter because he’ll spend half of his shift vengefully trying to hook up with half the customers; an admirable goal, but Jake lacks my time management skills. Tell him about Diana, and how we’ve been texting for the first time in over a year and a half; nothing deeper than Buzzfeed lists that remind us of each other, but you have to start somewhere, somehow. Tell him about the Fourth of July. Tell him about Leigh. Tell him what Mom said about wanting things only for yourself being the way that children love, and I didn’t get it then, but I might be starting to.
Just say something.
“What would you have done, if you knew you would get sick?”
We don’t talk about this. We rarely talk about his sickness, let alone the possibility of me being sick. We’re supposed to—we had a few family counseling sessions after Dad was diagnosed—except that Dad is Dad, and Mom’s so busy being optimistic, and I’m busy being, you know, busy.
But that isn’t working for me anymore.
Dad takes a long time to think, and when he speaks it’s a little bit slurred, but slow and mostly clear. “Run the restaurant. Married your mother. Had you.”
I scrub at a patch of grime on the plastic with my thumb. “No, but what would you have done different? If you knew, when you were my age, when you could go anywhere you wanted?”
“I would’ve—” His head
jerks forward and back. “Run the restaurant. Married your mother. Had you.”
“Okay,” I say, my voice watery.
“Don’t regret . . . that would be the worst thing. I don’t want that for you.”
“Okay.”
The slap of the screen door against its frame announces Chris’s return. I kiss my dad’s rough cheek, swallowing raggedly, my throat too tight to say good-bye. For once, we’ve probably said enough.
TWENTY-ONE
Happening #3: At 3:45 p.m., Leigh Clemente turns eighteen years old.
Leigh’s not a birthday-party type, but if she were, I still don’t think Mr. Clemente would be renting out the Rockin’ Rollers skating rink. These days, Leigh is solidly homebound except for school, which she’s driven to and picked up from, and for the therapist her dad found and made her go to pretty much immediately. (Leigh had her first appointment last Friday, but all she said when I asked about it was a single texted emoji: )
On the drive to Los Cerrillos, I’m bouncing with nerves. I have this slick, hard knot in my stomach, like the pit inside a peach. At each stoplight I check and recheck my makeup, sliding a finger along my lips and below my eyelashes to smudge away any imperfections. I haven’t seen Leigh since Sunday night, and I’m allowed over today solely thanks to Lucas. After he and Leigh wobbled down the mountain on a spare tire and a prayer, me following behind them all the way to be safe, he put her to bed with water and aspirin and a trash can on standby, then woke their dad to tell him the whole story. The only editing he did was on my behalf. According to him, I’d had no inkling that she might go missing, that she had ever planned to go missing once she turned eighteen. When he went to my house that night to find Leigh, I selflessly leapt out of bed and drove him back and forth across the county searching for her.
He claims he kept it simple because I’m a good influence on his sister—maybe the only time I’ve been called that in years—and he understands why I kept her secret, so why complicate things in his dad’s eyes? Leigh’s theory is that her brother is shipping us, and doesn’t want to mess up those Clemente-Espinoza Christmas dinners I so brazenly risked.
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