by Lee Thompson
There was only life and death.
There were only laughter and tears; an occasional embrace and more frequent repulsion.
There was only opening and closing your heart, over and over, until the light you woke to every morning, the light you let into your heart and the light you gave, just wasn’t there anymore.
She told herself to stop thinking and appraised what she hoped would be a temporary stronghold against whatever forces pursued her. But she doubted what she saw so far would stop Sebastian. He could simply walk in and check each dorm room until he found her, and then he could raise his pistol, aim it at her face, and pull the trigger.
She thought, At least then I won’t have to watch them bury Mom and Rick…
“What did you say?” Patricia said as she led her into one of the ground floor rooms on the west side of the building. It wasn’t much bigger than Nina’s bedroom—which she wanted to return to but hadn’t seen since before Sebastian had trashed it—and she noticed a desk against the far wall, centered below a window, the shade drawn, and bunk beds were to her left, a chest near the foot of them, and the opposite wall overflowed with dirty laundry, shoes, belts, and purses.
She thought about Jacob, figuring he and Victor were back in New York by now, and she wondered what they would think of the situation she found herself in. Would they protect her the way her own father wouldn’t and the police would be unable to?
She pulled the desk chair out. Patricia moved closer, leaned forward, and she hoped her sister would embrace her, and she wanted that more than anything, but Patricia said, “Scoot over.” She pushed her aside so she could reach the cordless phone.
Nina said, “Can’t you wait to call him until tomorrow?”
“Are you talking about Dad?”
“You know I am.”
“No I don’t, that’s why I asked. And no again, I can’t wait until tomorrow, and neither can you, or the police. He needs to know what happened and he needs to be here.”
“I don’t want to see him. He left us. I don’t know how you can still talk to him.”
Patricia scowled. “Chill out, okay? You’re making him out to be worse than he is.”
“You’re only saying that because you’re his princess and you can’t do any wrong.”
Patricia threw the phone on the bottom bunk and it bounced once and then began ringing. Nina eyed it suspiciously until Patricia retrieved it and answered. Then she watched her sister suspiciously as she nodded, and said, “Uh huh… I understand… Okay…” When she hung up a moment later she sat on the mattress and Nina took the chair. Patricia set the cordless next to her thigh and said, “The detective will be heading over here soon to ask you some questions.”
Nina sighed, relieved. She said, “I thought it was Dad calling.”
Patricia shrugged. “He hardly ever calls me if you want to know the truth. Three times last year. But forget about him for a minute, will you? The detective said he’s coming over, so think about Mom and Rick and focus on everything you can remember even though it sucks to remember sometimes.”
“It didn’t use to.”
“Well, get used to it,” Patricia said. “Seriously.”
“Do you have anything to drink?”
Patricia nodded. “Come on. There’s a community kitchen we keep stocked with soda.”
A while later, with both of them carrying Dr. Peppers, they sat in the game room. Normally it would have interested Nina, but all she wanted to do was answer the detective’s questions once he arrived and hope that something she said would lead to Sebastian’s capture. Not that she counted on things falling into place so easily. She considered the possibility of her having a nervous breakdown. She didn’t know if it was impossible or not for someone so young to have one, but she assumed she might be the first.
She sipped her soda and glanced from the dartboard to a Ping-Pong table, to an old arcade version of Mrs. Pac-Man. She thought about the tightness in her chest, happy for a moment that she wasn’t crying, or feeling as if she might in the next few seconds, and it crossed her mind again that she might have a breakdown of some sort. Apparently she’d had one last night when Richard Stark showed up. She figured it didn’t matter either way, if she had a breakdown or not, since Sebastian was out there somewhere—and she did suspect he was close by, possibly even watching her from another building, or from a truck in the parking lot.
She was still thinking about him, and what she considered inevitable, twenty minutes later when Patricia led a tall black man who stank of cigarette smoke into the game room. He introduced himself as Detective Reeves but said she could call him Charles, and he shook her hand and Nina noticed that the fingernails on his index and middle finger were yellowed from nicotine. When they parted he looked at his fingernails, smiled sheepishly and said, “It’s a nasty habit, I hope you never start.”
“I might try it to see if I like it,” she said. “Actually I could use one right now, probably.”
The detective chuckled. “Well, don’t let me catch you smoking.”
“Why? Will you lock me up for trying to ease the stress? Isn’t that what everybody does?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Nothing,” Nina said. “I’m just in a bad mood.”
He nodded. “You have every right to be. You want to have a seat over at the card table with me?”
“If we’re playing poker I’ll steal all your money.”
“Ignore her,” Patricia said. “She’s a smartass when she’s stressing. Usually she’s a dream.”
He smiled. “I’m sure. Nina?” He gestured at the table and she joined him. Once they were both sitting, he said, “I’m very sorry for your loss.”
“Did you know them?”
“No.”
“Then why are you sorry? You didn’t do it.”
“I’m sorry it happened to them.” He held her gaze, leaning forward a bit, as if that might drive his point and intention home so that her young mind might grasp it.
She said, “I knew what you meant. I’m not stupid.”
He leaned back. “You don’t like authority figures, do you?”
“Right now I don’t like much of anybody,” Nina said and she felt the tears gathering in her eyes and she wanted to hold them back but she wasn’t able to and they were hot against her cheeks. She didn’t wipe them away. Neither the detective nor her sister tried to comfort her.
Patricia said, “Well, I’ll leave you guys to it. You remember where my room is, Nina?”
“Sure.” And then her sister was gone and she was alone with a man she’d never met until now. And she used to like meeting people, but things had changed somewhere in the past few days, and his proximity made her uneasy.
He rested one hand on the table and pointed at her, and said, “I hope you’re not blaming yourself for what happened to your family.”
“Are you a cop or a psychologist?”
“Point taken,” he said. “Can you tell me what happened last night?”
“I can.”
“Start whenever you’re ready.”
“Start where?”
“Wherever you’re comfortable.”
“Nothing about any of this is comfortable for me. You want to know what I’m thinking about right now?”
“Shoot.”
She chewed on her lip for a moment and thought about what she was about to say and the consequences it might have for both her and her sister. But she couldn’t contain how she felt or what she feared, so she said, “I’m thinking that you might be him…”
She watched his eyes, nearly expecting their color to change, and she waited for that stench that had followed Sebastian like a cloud to suddenly fill the small room. She didn’t think shape-shifting was beyond him.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “You think I might be who?”
“Sebastian.” She leaned forward. “If it is you, just kill me, you prick. But know this: you’re a coward to prey on little girls. You hear me? You’re a god
damn coward!”
Reeves held up his hands. “Easy now. I’m not anybody but who I appear to be.”
But she was thrumming with so much pain, so suddenly, she couldn’t contain it and it gushed out of her…
“How can you do it?” she cried. “How? Why? I don’t understand how anyone can draw so much joy out of destroying someone else! Tell me! Explain it! What are you? You’re not a human being. You’re nothing. You’re weak. You should try to fight someone like Victor, and not abduct little kids, and you shouldn’t have shot my mom! You shouldn’t have! She meant the world to me and she didn’t know how much, goddamn you. What do you want from me? What did I or anyone else do to you?”
By the time she was done, she could barely lift her hands, so she lay back in the chair, exhausted and shaking.
Detective Reeves said, “I think I better call your father.”
“For what?”
“You’re very distressed.”
“Of course I am, but him being here will only make it worse.” She placed her elbows on her knees and wiped her cheeks dry and sighed. “I don’t understand.”
“There’s a lot I don’t understand either.”
“Really?” Nina said, looking up.
“Certainly.”
“Like what?”
“All that stuff you just exploded about. I see it every day, and it’s always someone’s mom or dad or brother or sister, and I think to myself: That could have been my mom or dad or brother or sister. I don’t understand the motive behind crimes like that, but usually there isn’t anything complicated about it. Men kill each other for a pair of shoes. Men in war will kill other men for something to eat or to take their woman or just because they’re ordered to. It’s madness, I know that, but I’m like you, I don’t get it.”
“Maybe it’s better not to get it,” she said, straightening up. “Maybe if we got it we’d go insane.”
Reeves nodded. His fingers tapped his breast pocket and the outline of the cigarette pack inside it. Nina said, “If you want to smoke, go for it.”
“You sure?”
“It’s your lungs,” she said, trying to smile a little.
He smiled back. “Come outside with me. I don’t want to stink this place up.”
She followed him to the double French doors that led out to a garden off the back of the game room. He said, “Who is this guy?”
Nina told him about how she’d met Sebastian and how she had walked home as her and the detective stood inside the double doors. Then she said, “Will you give me a smoke?”
He didn’t answer, only smiled at her as he opened the door.
The air had cooled considerably in the late afternoon and she thought a thunderstorm might be moving into the area. She sat at a cast iron table on the flagstone courtyard in the center of the garden with Detective Reeves as he chain-smoked. He hadn’t said much in the last five minutes, probably, Nina figured, thinking about her outburst, for which she was a little embarrassed.
“So you can’t really tell me anything about this man Sebastian?”
She shook her head. “No, just what I told you. He’s white and scrawny, short for a guy, at least when he’s sitting down he doesn’t seem much taller than me, and he stank like some kind of chemicals.”
Reeves nodded. “Maybe a meth addict. Or somebody who rotted their brain on moonshine. But he didn’t threaten you overtly?”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“Did he say he was going to hurt you or your family?”
“No.”
“Did he imply that he would?”
“He was there and then he was following me home and somehow got ahead of me.”
Reeves knocked the cherry off his cigarette and stepped on it and then pinched the end and put the half back in the box. He set his hands on the tables and said, “Can you think of anyone else that might have a beef with you and your family?”
“Enough to kill them and tear my room apart? No.”
But she was thinking of Anthony threatening her, and she was thinking about how mad Clint had seemed lately and how his own father had said he’d disappeared, which wasn’t like him, and it wasn’t, not as far as Nina knew.
She told Reeves about Anthony and his threat and then how Clint was mad at her for talking to a homeless guy. Reeves made a note of their names and said, “I’ll speak with both of those boys.”
“I’m not sure what good it will do,” she said, “they’re just boys, not killers.”
Reeves studied her for a minute and then nodded. He tapped his fingers on the table as he stood and said, “That should about do it, so I won’t keep you any longer.” He offered her his hand, which Nina shook, and Reeves said, “Are you going to be staying with your sister?”
“Not for long. She’s going to call my dad.”
“I’ve left him several messages, but he hasn’t called back yet. I’m sure he will soon.”
“Don’t count on it. He doesn’t really care about anyone but himself.”
He ignored her comment and waved and then walked around the building slowly and Nina watched him go. She felt as if she were deflating when she stood and carried her weary bones back inside. Patricia wasn’t around so Nina tried her hand at a few of the games to distract herself, but nothing held her interest or proved to be the distraction she wanted it to be.
6
Jacob sat in Victor’s Lincoln on a newly asphalted parking lot of an upscale restaurant/bar named O’Tooles. Victor came back outside, walked between the stucco pillars supporting the awning, and then between two cars, a smile carved deep into his wide face, a piece of paper flapping in his hand. As he neared the Lincoln, Jacob wiped his palms on his jeans and realized he was sweating horribly.
He had thought a lot about the trophies and ribbons in Santana’s bedroom, and on the drive to O’Tooles he’d attempted to coax the truth of what had happened to her just a year or two before her mother had died and Victor had brought her north and set her up in an apartment close to his own. Victor hadn’t shared with Jacob whatever accident Santana had suffered, simply saying that they had something else to take care of first and then they’d have a few shots and he would tell him the story.
It was difficult to wait. And Jacob was angry with Santana for keeping a part of herself hidden from him, for her facing some tragedy and then never speaking of it. But he remembered how, sometimes, when they watched certain movies and a young girl was dealt a deadly hand, Santana would wipe her eyes, rise from his side, and excuse herself to the bathroom. He’d hear the exhaust fan, and he knew now that she had turned it on to cover the sound of her crying as she relived her own peril in stunning clarity.
And he’d never known she had needed him, like a fool he had always just asked if she wanted him to pause the movie until she returned, and Santana had always shook her head, her back to him and face hidden as she walked away.
Victor opened the driver’s door and slid his mass effortlessly behind the steering wheel. It jerked Jacob back to the present. Victor handed him a piece of torn notebook paper. On it was an address. Jacob said, “What’s this?”
“That girl Nina said she saw her shitbag little boyfriend put a kid in his car, right?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s where the kid lives. Her boyfriend, not the girl her boyfriend took.”
Jacob stared at the address, then at his fingers, which were beginning to tremble. He said, “Maybe we should just tell the cops what she saw.”
“The cops are looking for me.”
He folded the paper in half and slid it into the pocket of his hoodie next to the Ziploc bag. He said, “Before we go shake this kid down I want to know what happened to my wife. And I want to know if she knew that you’d bought the house she’d grown up in. Is that why she wanted to come back here so badly?”
“What does it matter if she knew I own the house or not?”
“It bothers me,” he said. “I thought the two of you were the most honest
people I know. But of course you’re secretive, it goes with your line of work.”
“You told her not to come down here.”
“I know,” Jacob said, “and I told you why.”
“Ever tell her?”
“Tell her what?”
“Your fear, that you were afraid she’d come here to visit and want to stay, or how you thought she might want to bring you with her and raise your family here.”
“My roots are in New York.”
“Santana’s were here.”
“What the hell are you trying to say?”
Victor blew air through his teeth. “Think about it.”
“About what? Just tell me.”
“I don’t know.” He raised his hands in surrender. “Speculation isn’t going to change anything. Let’s drop it and go in and have a couple of shots and then we’ll go back to the house and you can shower, because you really need it. After that I’ll fill you in on the stuff you didn’t know about my sister.”
“I don’t understand why she didn’t fill me in.”
“You just don’t get it, man. Drop it. She’s not here to defend herself. And I never told you because if she didn’t want to, she sure as hell didn’t want me to. Besides,” Victor said, “I like you and I didn’t want to hurt your feelings.”
“Spare me. If you have an intelligent observation about me, or the relationship I had with her, spit it out. I want to hear it. No, actually I need to hear it. Enlighten me.”
“You got your wires crossed over nothing. I’m not judging you. I don’t judge anybody.” Victor stared out over the parking lot, the dimming sky, and Jacob watched him for a minute, feeling childish as he grew angrier because he thought the big ox had always disliked something about him, as if he had a serious character flaw, and Victor had always kept it to himself.
Jacob said, “Fine, let’s go get drunk. That’ll fix everything.”
“No it won’t.”
“It was sarcasm. I’ve tried obliterating myself. I know it doesn’t work.”
He opened the passenger door and had one foot still in the car, one foot on the ground, when he noticed Sebastian standing near the entrance of O’Toole’s, leaning against one of the pillars Victor had just passed between a couple of minutes ago. Jacob wanted to hold his gaze, challenge him even, especially since Victor was there to back him up, but the man just stood there and made no effort to approach him.