Red Road

by Wiltz, Jenni

  Chapter Twenty

  Tuesday, April 8

  When the Buick rounded the corner, Emma stepped out to the curb. “Hi,” she said, flinging her backpack onto the floor mat. It was the first thing she’d said to her mom since the aborted dinner last night. Part of her wanted to hold that grudge like a blanket, pressing its silence to her chest until her mom pried it from her fingers. But if she did, she wouldn’t find out what Kobilinski had said to them that morning.

  Pride had to be sacrificed for the expediency of knowledge.

  She sank into the vinyl seat and glanced sideways at her mom, dressed in a black T-shirt and black cardigan with jeans. As a little girl, Emma remembered her wearing reds and pinks and whites and purples, colors that looked so much better against her warm golden skin. She wanted to tell her mom that she looked beautiful in her memories.

  “Did you have a good day?” her mom said.

  “A detective talked to me at school.”

  “He came by the house and asked if he could see you. He promised it wouldn’t take long.”

  “It didn’t.”

  “Oh?” Her mom arched her knuckles over the steering wheel.

  “I didn’t know the person he asked about.”

  Her mom exhaled and loosened her grip. “I told him that’s what would happen. I just wanted him to know we’d cooperate.”

  “Why wouldn’t we?”

  “We would. Of course we would.”

  Something in her voice told Emma the opposite was true. She made a mental note to get her dad’s version of Kobilinski’s visit. He would tell her the truth, especially if they were alone. “What’s for dinner?”

  “Hot dogs. Mattie requested them this morning.”

  “Can I see Dad?”

  “After dinner. He’d just gone to sleep when I left.”

  When they got home, Emma spread her books out in the dining room and gathered quotes to use in her Lonesome Dove paper. Mattie came home later, dropped off by a friend’s mom after a rehearsal for their class staging of Romeo and Juliet. “It’s such a stupid play,” Mattie said. “Who kills themself over someone they just met?”

  “I take it you’re not Juliet?” Emma said.

  “I’m the nurse. Olivia Lee got to be Juliet.”

  “Fewer lines. That’s a good thing, right?”

  “Not when you want to be the star.”

  “Judi Dench won an Oscar for Shakespeare in Love.”

  “So?”

  “She was only in it for, like, five minutes.”

  “Hmm,” Mattie said. “Judi who?”

  At 6:15 p.m., her mom called them for dinner and pointed at the row of hot dog condiments on the kitchen island. Emma picked up the mustard bottle. It was weightless in her hand. If she used it, there wouldn’t be enough for her mom and Mattie.

  She set it back down and reached for the ketchup bottle.

  On TV, the news reported on a shooting and two related stabbings in East Malo Verde. “There’s a power struggle going on,” said Carlos Vasquez, the gang task force agent they always interviewed. “The FBI sting last fall sent four Nuestra Familia lieutenants to prison. They have replacements, but none of them are as strong. That leaves a power vacuum that the Sureños are trying to take advantage of. They send up a few soldiers to try and take over new turf, and the Norteños fight back.”

  Emma thought of Elvira’s cousin, fighting a Sureño instead of going to class. What turf was so important that two girls needed to slug each other instead of learning how to write an essay or solve for x? Everyone in high school was dying to get away from it. It was like fighting for a piece of scorched earth or a dry well.

  She bit into her hot dog. Ketchup oozed over the bun and stung the healing cut on her lip. When they finished eating, she helped her mom with the dishes and put away the condiments. “We’re almost out of mustard,” she said as she closed the refrigerator door.

  “Put it on the grocery list,” her mom replied.

  Emma pulled out the drawer that contained a steno notebook with a mini-golf pencil tucked into the spiral. She wrote “mustard” beneath “pasta” and “bandages.”

  “You can go see your father now.”

  Emma closed the drawer and ran upstairs. She knocked on the closed bedroom door and waited for permission. When she heard his voice, she opened the door and smiled. “Hi, Dad. How do you feel today?”

  “Better.” A stack of old Sports Illustrated magazines lay on the nightstand, along with a bottle of ibuprofen and an empty glass. The bottle lay on its side with no lid. “I was up for a minute earlier.”

  “A whole minute?”

  “One whole minute.” His grey T-shirt matched his growing stubble, almost a short beard by now. She’d never seen him with so much facial hair. It was like he was an actor in costume. Only the deep brown of his eyes told her it was still him.

  “Did you have a good day at school?”

  “We got our Gatsby papers back.”

  “Did you get an A?”

  “Yes,” she said, even though she hadn’t looked yet.

  “I didn’t even need to ask.” He curled the corners of his lips without pulling on the crusted scabs. “I already knew.”

  No one in the world trusted her that much. I don’t deserve it, she thought. She looked at her mom’s dresser, topped with a square mirror framed in raw oak. Her most recent school photo, next to Mattie’s, lay tucked into the frame. The whole room smelled faintly of the perfume her mom kept in the top drawer, something in a squat blue bottle. “I talked to a detective at school today.”

  “What did he want?”

  “He asked if I knew someone named Alejandro Espinosa.”

  “Do you?”

  “No.”

  “Don’t let them bother you at school again.”

  “Mom said the detective came here first. She gave him permission.”

  “She didn’t tell me. I would have said no.”

  “He didn’t even talk to you?”

  “No. And I don’t want you to talk to him, either.”

  “But what if I can help?”

  “You don’t know what the other kids might see.” He reached for her hand. The skin across his knuckles was spotted with scabs, a human relief map of a place with no contiguous land mass. His fingers tightened on hers and she understood that he was trying to tell her something.

  She looked over her shoulder at the open bedroom door. “I don’t think anyone but the secretary saw us. Why does it matter?”

  “They know who we are.”

  “Who? The people who did this?”

  Suddenly, her dad’s breath shot out in a wheeze. He turned his head to cough, but couldn’t get enough air and gasped as another spasm shook him.

  Emma grabbed his glass and ran to the bathroom sink, clanking the rim against the faucet with her shaking hands. She dashed back and held the glass to his lips. His fingers grabbed hers in a first-time driver’s grip. “It’s going to be okay,” she said.

  He coughed once more and fell back against his pillows, exhausted. The bags under his eyes were thick and grey, two piles of ash from a fire long burnt out.

  Emma set his glass on the nightstand. “We’re all going to be okay.”

  “The truck,” he whispered. “It had my registration in it. They took my badge, too. They know where we live, Em.”

  A blanket of lead descended onto her shoulders. “Did they say they’d come back?”

  Her father tried to roll onto his side.

  “Dad?”

  He ignored her, pressing his face into the pillow. She wondered if those men were really coming back. Wouldn’t her mom or Kobilinski have warned her? Maybe her dad had misunderstood.

  Or maybe something else was going on.

  Once, in history class, the fire alarm had
gone off unexpectedly. She’d been staring at Mr. Parker’s glasses, wondering how different a prescription he had from her dad. She saw the exact moment the fear took hold of him, when his brain registered the noise. His eyes went blank and the blood drained from his face. There was nothing left on it but a strange glow, a sick translucence only present to indicate an absence. Then Pedro Alvarez dropped his book and broke the spell. Mr. Parker shepherded them out to the practice field, where they lined up for a headcount like they were supposed to.

  Mr. Parker had survived more than one ambush in Iraq. What it left behind inside him was more than she understood.

  Emma looked down at the bedspread. “The police are doing everything they can. We’ll be fine, I know it.”

  Her dad lifted his face from the pillow.

  “We’re going to be okay,” she lied.

  “T—tell me about school.”

  “I don’t know, Dad.”

  “Tell me.”

  She’d already lied to him twice. She couldn’t bear the thought of doing it again. “Do you really want to know?”

  “I do.”

  “I don’t know what I’m doing anymore. With school or college or any of it. Something happens every day that pushes it further away.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  She turned her head to look at him. He was fifty-one now, with sinewy limbs and a head of hair that seemed grey before his time. How would he have answered that question at her age? No one grew up wanting to work in a seed-coating plant. “What did you want to do when you were my age?”

  The corners of his lips curled. “I asked you first.”

  “I think I want to write.”

  “You need school for that, don’t you?”

  Emma nodded. “But the things they make us read . . . Of Mice and Men and The Great Gatsby and Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet. What do they have in common?”

  “All made into movies?”

  “Dad.” She rolled her eyes. “People die in the end.”

  “They’re just stories, Em. It isn’t real.”

  “Then why can’t the greatest writers in the history of Western civilization think of another ending?”

  “I know one that has a different ending.”

  “Which one?”

  “Field of Dreams.”

  “That’s not a book, Dad.”

  “It is. Different title, though.”

  “The only reason no one dies in the end is because they’re already dead.”

  “It counts.”

  She knew why he loved that story. His dad had played minor league baseball in the 1940s and dreamed of being called up to the majors, but that call never came. The best picture she’d ever seen of her grandpa was at his funeral, in a tarnished silver frame next to the punch bowl. He held a baseball. His skin was heartbreakingly smooth, his hair gelled into a pompadour. When she looked at his face, frozen in water-stained sepia, she realized it belonged to a person she didn’t know. “All right,” she said. “It counts.”

  “I’ll get you to school, Em.”

  “Dad, stop.”

  “I promised I would.”

  “Dad, I don’t even—”

  “Help me, Em.” He moved his hand and wrapped his long fingers around hers. “You have to have faith.”

  “I don’t know what that is.”

  “It’s believing in someone.” His eyes swam with love and fear, the fear so dark it swallowed his pupils and widened his eyes. “Can you believe in me?”

  She looked at his face. His cheeks had deflated, sagging into visible parentheses on either side of his mouth. I did this, she thought. I took away his only escape. She bent her head and lay down next to him, resting one palm on his shoulder. “I love you, Dad.”

  She watched his chest rise and fall, the way she had when she was younger and they took naps together in the afternoon. She sat in the blue wheelbarrow while he pruned and mowed and edged the front yard. When he was done, he wheeled her into the backyard, pushed her on the swing, then picked her up and carried her inside. He lay on the floor or the couch, but never the bed. She curled up on his chest or against his side and slept, undisturbed by his snores.

  He let her stay for a few minutes before reaching over with his right hand to smooth her hair. “Do you have homework?”

  “Lots.”

  “You better get to it.”

  “I will.” Emma’s heart tightened, shrunken like fresh cotton in the dryer. None of this should have happened. Was it the fault of the men who beat him? Was it her fault, for refusing to consider Tennessee? Was it his fault for trusting her not to put her needs before his own?

  Someone had to be responsible. And if she was the guilty party, she wanted to know just how much damage she’d done.

  • • •

  At 11:15 p.m., Emma heard her mom’s footsteps on the stairs. Her mom went into the master bathroom, brushed her teeth, and crossed a squeaky patch in the floor to the bed. Emma waited for the brass bed to creak, then timed out an excruciating forty minutes.

  At five minutes to midnight, she opened her bedroom door and crept down the hallway to the office. From her pajama pocket, she pulled out a tiny flashlight her dad had gotten for free with a coupon at a hardware store. In the closet, she teased open the top drawer of the filing cabinet. The manila file folders inside bore her mother’s impossibly precise lettering: Taxes 2011, Taxes 2012, Taxes 2013, Bank Statements.

  Emma pulled the out bank statements folder.

  The current balance in her parents’ account as of twelve days ago was $417.72. The current balance in their savings account was $560. She held the flashlight between her teeth and used her other hand to turn to the next page in the statement. There were two credits in the “deposit” section, payments from Christy for $388 each, and a whole page of debits.

  On the final page of the statement, she saw the headline “Your Retirement Accounts.” There were three account numbers listed, two with zero balances and one with less than $1,000 in it.

  She flipped back to the debits and added them up, subtracting them from their total assets. They had less than one month’s worth of money in the bank.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Wednesday, April 9

  “Buffer solutions contain two parts,” Mr. Lopez said. “Equal amounts of a weak acid and a conjugate base.” He turned to write sample pKa and pH values on the board and Emma looked down at her homework. It wasn’t finished, but she didn’t care. Math was the only subject worth studying right now.

  Every time she closed her eyes, she saw the numbers from her parents’ bank statement. What was her mom planning to do . . . let them run out of money and wonder why there was no more bread or milk? If they had another source of money, it wasn’t in that filing cabinet. She’d scanned the contents of a few more folders for anything that involved dollar signs. All she found was a bunch of owner’s manuals for appliances they didn’t even have anymore.

  She looked back at the board and copied the formula Mr. Lopez had written. Beside her, Dan leaned back in a stretch, creaking the plastic seat of his desk. His outstretched hand dropped a folded piece of paper onto her desk. She jolted forward and put her hand over it.

  It took her a moment to read his handwriting—all his e’s, a’s, and o’s looked the same. You. Me. Lunch on the bleachers. Be there or be square.

  She bit the inside of her lip to keep from smiling. No one smiled in AP Chemistry. No one smiled when her dad could barely breathe and thought they were all about to be attacked by a gang. But no person of the opposite sex had ever specifically requested she clear her schedule to be alone with him. Even if a meteor destroyed Earth later that night, at least she would die knowing Dan wanted to eat lunch with her.

  • • •

  After chemistry let out, Emma followed Via to PE. Via moved like
water, slipping through cracks in the press of bodies filling the crowded hall between the courtyard and the entrance to the locker room. The best Emma could do was hunch her shoulders and draft behind her, like a cyclist or a racecar driver.

  “Hey,” Emma said, hurrying to catch up. “Can I ask you something?”

  “Sure.”

  “It’s kind of personal.”

  “I don’t have anything to hide.”

  “How much money do you and your mom have left over after paying the bills?”

  Via stopped in front of the locker room. She turned and held up a hand to shield her eyes from the late morning sun. When she lifted her arm, her cropped flannel hoodie exposed a flat, hard stomach. “Jesus, that’s not what I expected.”

  “What did you expect?”

  “Something about loverboy tossing a note onto your desk in chemistry. Do the world a favor and never become a spy, okay?”

  “I snuck into the office last night and looked at my parents’ bank statement.” Emma shifted her weight to her right leg. “It’s really bad.”

  “And it reminded you of me? I’m flattered.”

  “The mustard was almost gone. I didn’t want to be the one to finish it because I don’t know if there’ll be more.”

  Sandra Silva turned sideways and squeezed between them on her way into the locker room. Her backpack hit Emma in the chest.

  “Don’t go around us or anything,” Via called after her.

  “How much?”

  “I don’t know.” Via shrugged. “Fifty bucks, maybe? Sometimes there’s enough for a movie and fast food.”

  “How much does Rachel make at the Falafel Hut?”

  “Eight bucks an hour.”

  Emma thought of the numbers in the “debit” column on her parents’ bank statement. “That’s not enough.”

  The red bell above the locker room entrance clanged its ear-splitting ring. “Goddamn,” Via said, clapping her hands over her ears.

  Emma followed her into the locker room, passing through a cloud of woodsy perfume. Via opened her locker and raised her arms to pull off her sweater. Emma looked away. She would have given ten IQ points to look more like Via and less like a Pillsbury marketing device.