Red Road

by Wiltz, Jenni

  Kobilinski poked his head inside and the lights automatically came on. “Huh,” he said, running his long fingers over the control panel, populated with clouded domes instead of switches. “That’s new.”

  Emma sat at the far side of the rectangular table. Kobilinski closed the door and sat across from her. She wiped her palms on her jeans before clearing her throat. “Is my family all right?”

  “I think so,” he said, grey eyes gleaming as if he were a hungry wolf and she a fat squirrel. “Why do you ask?”

  “No one gets called to the office unless it’s something bad.”

  “I just want to talk for a minute, that’s all.” He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out his badge. Emma leaned forward to examine it. It wasn’t a seven-pointed star, like the badge the two officers who came to the house had had. This one was shaped like a shield, pointy at the bottom with the city seal in the center—a green field with the sun rising behind it. “Do my parents know you’re here?”

  The detective nodded. “Your mom said it would be okay.”

  “This is about what happened to my dad, right?”

  “We’re still looking for the people who hurt him.”

  “People?”

  “Or person. We don’t know, really.”

  Emma hated the thought of multiple men following and then attacking her father. She hated that the detective didn’t know whether to use the singular or the plural. It meant no witnesses had come forward. It meant they had nothing. “Where’s my dad’s truck?”

  “We haven’t found it.”

  “Have you looked?”

  “Why don’t you let me ask the questions here?”

  “Because you’re doing a bad job.”

  Kobilinski reached into his pocket and retrieved a piece of paper torn from a spiral-bound notebook. Paper caterpillars curled over the edge of the page. “Do you know a kid named Alejandro Espinoza?”

  If she consulted her yearbook, she could probably find a dozen kids named Alejandro Espinoza. If he were any good at his job, the detective would know that already. “No. Should I?”

  Kobilinski shrugged. “It was a long shot.”

  “What year is he?”

  “He’s a junior, like you.”

  “I don’t know him.”

  “Why don’t you think about it for a minute? Let it really sink in. Is he in any of your classes?”

  “I know who’s in my classes.”

  “Have you ever heard that name before?”

  “Not that I remember.” She folded her left hand inside her right and put them in her lap so he wouldn’t see her nails digging into the skin. “Did he have something to do with what happened to my dad?”

  “We don’t know.”

  “You have to know something or you wouldn’t have even asked me about him.”

  “You wanna work for the police now?”

  “I want you to find out who hurt my dad and stole his truck.”

  “We’re doing that, Miss West.”

  “And then I want you to punish them.”

  Kobilinski looked up. His hungry eyes flickered over her face as if he hadn’t bothered to see her until now. The skin under his eyes was a darker, shinier pink than the rest of his skin. “If we find out who did it, they’ll go before a judge and a jury. You don’t have a say in it.”

  Emma remembered the address she heard the policemen in her parents’ room repeat back to her father. All they did was look up who lived there and send a detective to ask her about it. Couldn’t they find a picture of Alejandro or his father or brother or whoever else lived there and show it to her father, to see if he recognized them?

  “Why did you need to talk to me?” she asked. “I’m not a witness.”

  “We figured it couldn’t hurt. Cover all the angles.”

  “Starting with obtuse.”

  He turned his head. “What was that?”

  “It’s from geometry class. Are you going to talk to my mom and my sister, too?”

  “I don’t know. Should I?”

  “I don’t even know why you’re talking to me. Go find Alejandro Espinoza and talk to him.”

  “We don’t know that he has anything to do with this.”

  “Then why did you bring him up?”

  Kobilinski leaned back, balancing his chair on two legs. Part of his cheek moved, as if he were sucking it in. “You’re a tough customer, kiddo.”

  Emma slapped her palm onto the table. “This is my father. Have you seen what they did to him? He couldn’t stand. He couldn’t see. Now he doesn’t have a job, and we don’t have any money. Is that tough enough for you?”

  Kobilinski patted his pocket like he was looking for something. “I know this isn’t easy, but a lot of bad stuff happens in this town. If your dad is still alive, he’s one of the lucky ones.”

  “That doesn’t make me feel better.”

  “Making you feel better isn’t my job.”

  “No, your job is to keep people safe.” She stared at him as hard as she could.

  Kobilinski pushed his chair back. “I think we’re done here.” He reached into his back pocket and took out a business card. “Be a good kid and stay out of trouble. If you remember anything, give me a call.” On his way out the door, he stopped at the lighting control panel, trying to push the cloudy domes.

  “It’s a motion detector,” she said. “It turns off when no one’s in the room.”

  “Huh.” He looked from the lighting panel back to her. “You learn something new every day.”

  • • •

  The secretary gave her a pass so she wouldn’t get detention for being in the halls between classes. She went to her locker to exchange books, but they were jammed so close together she broke a fingernail trying to pull her chemistry book out from between French and pre-calc. When she looked at the convex curve of her nail, scooped out like ice cream, she realized what had just happened.

  They thought she might be to blame. They thought someone might have attacked her dad over something that had to do with her.

  All the swear words she knew flashed through her head, none of them enough to encompass or properly condemn the stupidity of the MVPD. Her dad had already been threatened by the people in East Malo Verde for looking like a cop. What more of a motive did they need?

  Emma slammed her locker and trudged through the hall. Two weeks ago, she would have been angry about the grime on the floor, the flickering hallway lights, or the million other things wrong with the school that her parents’ tax dollars should have fixed. Now, she stared at the floor and wondered how well the pockmarked linoleum absorbed blood. Was it better or worse than the cement walkway beside their front door?

  Alejandro Espinosa.

  She didn’t know which of her five thousand fellow students bore the name, and of those, who might have been on El Camino Rojo that night. Was it even possible to find out? She sank to the floor outside her English classroom to wait, folding her thighs against her chest.

  Down the hall, a lanky figure turned the corner near the locker bay. She recognized the turned-out limbs and bow-legged walk. Thunder rolled across her heart and she realized she needed him. He was the only way she could remember that not everything was bad.

  She watched as he came toward her, dressed in his usual olive shorts, white T-shirt, and black flip-flops. His curly hair was flat on top, as if he’d worn a hat all day. “What are you doing here?” he asked, squatting beside her.

  “I got pulled out of class to talk to a detective.”

  “How’d that go?”

  “They think I have something to do with it.”

  He frowned. “Are you serious? Did they say that?”

  “They said a name and asked if I recognized it. I think they expected me to say that we’d hated each other since the fourth gr
ade or something.”

  “I thought that only happened in movies.”

  She shook her head. “The detective didn’t even know how to work motion detector lights. I couldn’t make this stuff up.”

  “Speaking of making stuff up, I have a present for you.” He opened the drawstring of his backpack and pulled out a burgundy notebook, with a gold pencil tied to the spiral.

  “Those are USC colors.”

  He smiled. “I thought with all the crazy stuff happening to you, you could write it down. When you’re in class with Percival Everett, you’ll have all your material ready and waiting.”

  Emma didn’t think it was possible for her to forget the past two weeks—or that she’d want to relive it by writing about them. But then again, she hadn’t been through many life-altering traumas. Maybe he had. Most of their conversations had been about her, and she realized how little she knew about him. I’m an asshole, she thought. Again.

  “Thank you,” she whispered.

  “It’s nothing. I just saw it and thought of you.”

  “That’s not nothing.”

  Up close, his eyes were more olive than emerald, fringed with a blanket of lashes thicker than hers. His right hand moved to her face, fingertips resting against her cheek. “Then I guess it’s something.”

  She leaned into his hand and the warmth of his skin made her want to melt. They were only connected by four small patches of skin, but the warmth of the entire world was concentrated inside of them. Four fingertips, four compass points, four seasons. The whole world was made of fours and now they were, too. She brought her hand up to cover his, pressing it to her face. “Thank you,” she whispered again.

  He leaned forward, the warmth of his breath bringing color to her cheeks. “You’re—”

  The bell shrieked its disapproval. The door of the classroom in front of them swung open.

  “—welcome.” He let his hand fall away as students poured into the hall. “Another time?”

  “Another time,” she said, wondering if he could see the pulse of her heart in her neck.

  He grinned and headed for the locker bay. Emma watched him go, resting her cheek on her hand. Her heart felt sore, like a muscle stretched and contracted too violently during a workout. It opened to surround Dan and everything he brought her, then clenched shut when she thought about what had happened to her dad.

  When the classroom emptied, she tucked Dan’s gift into her backpack and zipped it closed. Via was only speaking to her because they hadn’t talked about anything except her dad. If she rocked the boat, she’d have a war on two fronts to fight again. Much like the German High Command, she didn’t have the resources for it.

  “There you are,” Via said, black hair haloing her face as she hurried into the classroom. “Why’d they call you to the office?”

  Rachel followed, backpack slung over one shoulder. “Was it about your dad?”

  Emma nodded. “A detective wanted to talk to me.”

  “A police detective?” asked Via.

  “No, a pet detective,” Rachel said.

  “But why would they talk to you?”

  “The detective asked me if I recognized a name. I didn’t.”

  “Does that mean they know who did it?”

  Emma shook her head. “I don’t think they’re going to help us at all.”

  Rachel snorted. “They pulled you out of history for that?”

  “You missed the Underground Railroad,” Via said. “The Civil War starts tomorrow.”

  Ryoki Sumitomo and Savannah Banks came into class practicing Spanish together. “Dónde está la biblioteca?” Ryoki asked.

  “En la piscina,” answered Jen.

  “How’s your dad?” Rachel asked. “Is he getting any better?”

  “He can sit up and eat. Mostly he’s sleeping or reading old magazines.” She didn’t tell them that his left eye was still swollen shut, he had no glasses, and he hadn’t been to a doctor.

  “Is he handling it okay?”

  Emma didn’t know what “okay” would be. He was alive and he smiled at them. What went on inside him at night while he tried to sleep was something different. “I don’t know,” she said.

  Mrs. Evans strode to the front of the class with a stack of papers in hand. “Take your seats, class. I’ll return your Gatsby papers shortly.”

  Via and Rachel drifted into their seats as they awaited their fate. “I don’t want mine back,” Via said. “It was such a crock of shit.”

  Emma couldn’t remember what she wrote and didn’t care. When Mrs. Evans dropped her paper onto her desk, she shoved it in her binder without looking. On a fresh sheet of paper, instead of writing the day’s date, she wrote “Alejandro Espinosa.”

  It didn’t look threatening, not the way she wanted it to. She wrote it again, imitating her father’s blocky scrawl, drawing the “j” as a long, solid line with a dot on top.

  Better, she thought.

  She tried again on a third line. This time, she used her right hand instead of her left. The “e” and “o” came out slanted, like they were drunk. Like she was drunk. Now it was back to being harmless.

  She scribbled through the childish, malformed letters. This boy’s name had to look like what he was, so everyone would know who was to blame.

  She thought about Gatsby, dying in his swimming pool. About Myrtle, bleeding to death on the side of the road. About Lennie, crushing his puppy. About Curley’s wife, dying because she was lonely. About George, shooting his best friend to save him. About Gus, who got killed by Indians because he couldn’t settle down. About Donald Martin and Romeo and Juliet and Mercutio and Dimmesdale and Oedipus and Antigone and Hamlet and Ophelia. None of these characters died of cancer or leprosy or the plague. They were whole and healthy until they interacted with each other, until they killed each other, and kids were being taught that these were the greatest stories of all time.

  • • •

  Outside the locker room, Elvira reached up and pulled on her ponytail, tightening the bright pink elastic. It matched the wet-looking gloss on her lips. “Are you okay, chica? You were pretty upset last week.”

  “I’m doing better,” Emma lied.

  “Your lip is mostly healed. A little gloss and no one would even notice.”

  She’d forgotten all about the spaceship-shaped patch of raw skin on her bottom lip. No one else had mentioned it at all—Dan because he probably didn’t want to embarrass her, and Via and Rachel because they probably didn’t care. “Best to let it heal, I think.”

  The day’s roster matched them up against Tina Wooster and Yvonne Matapang. On the court next to them, Rafael and Juan put on their usual show. Every time Rafael jumped to make a shot, Elvira’s eyes wandered to the landscape of his chest, waiting for that moment when his shirt flew up high enough to give her a clear view of his six-pack.

  “Enjoying the view?” she asked.

  “Uh-huh,” Elvira mumbled, drifting past the foul line of their court.

  “Just serve already,” Tina Wooster called.

  Emma tossed the birdie and smacked it as hard as she could. As the strings of her racket bounced the birdie across the net, she thought about the sheet of paper in her binder with the culprit’s name written on it.

  Was a high-school junior really the one who beat up her dad and left him for dead? All she’d heard that night in the closet was the police officer repeating the address. Her dad hadn’t given them any names because he didn’t have any to give. Who else lived at the Espinosa house besides Alejandro? There had to be something she could find, in public records or police reports online. She would start looking tonight, after her mom and Mattie went to bed.

  When Mrs. Patterson dismissed them thirty minutes later, they were on a winning streak, with five unanswered points in a row. “Nice job, partner,” Elvira said, raising h
er hand for a high-five. Emma tagged her palm and smiled back.

  They dropped off their equipment in the bin by the gymnasium door, and headed back to the locker room. Before they got there, another girl hurried up to Elvira and grabbed her arm. She was taller than Elvira, with thinner eyebrows and more earrings, all the way from her lobe to the cartilage at the top of her ear. The girl ignored Emma. “Carnala, did you hear? There was a cop on campus this morning, asking questions.”

  Elvira shook her head. “What about?”

  “Who’s been in fights recently. Sergio told me last period, and I thought of Monica. Is she in trouble? Did that chota talk to her?”

  Emma felt her heart stop in her chest. What was Kobilinski doing? Had he started asking more questions after he left the counselors’ office? Did he summon Alejandro Espinosa, too?

  “I don’t know,” Elvira said. “I haven’t heard anything.”

  The other girl shrugged. “Sergio got the gabacho’s picture on his phone if Monica needs it.”

  Elvira looked from side to side. “Okay.”

  “Tell Monica not to worry. Hector will know what to do.”

  “I know. I’ll tell her.”

  The other girl dashed off.

  Emma put her hands in her sweatshirt pocket so Elvira wouldn’t see them shake. “W—what was that about?”

  “Letizia knows my cousin.”

  “Why would she need a picture of the cop?”

  Elvira shrugged. “Don’t ask me that, chica. You probably already know, anyway.”

  “They can’t go beat up a cop to keep your cousin from getting in trouble.”

  “Chica, they thought your dad was a cop.”

  “Then where does it stop?”

  “It doesn’t. Blood in, blood out.”

  “Somewhere it has to stop.”

  “Would you stop? If it was your family?”

  She remembered what Elvira told her when she’d said a real family doesn’t ask you to get beat up: a real family doesn’t have to ask.

  “It is my family,” she said. Then she turned her back on Elvira and hurried into the locker room.