by Jodi Compton
The first time I saw snow, we’d been based in Illinois. Like this one, that snowfall had come in the night. I had been afraid to touch it until my father did. In that memory, I can’t see the features of his face, just his big bare hands, picking up the snow, showing me how it melted as he rubbed it between his fingers.
Like he’d done, I got my fingertips wet from the snow, then painted that wetness onto my eyelids. My eyes felt dry and bloodshot from poor sleep, and I felt the relief as the water sank in and stung my eyes, then ran down onto my cheeks like the tears.
Since I’d first heard her name, Nidia to me had been a series of imperfect motivations. I’d driven her to Mexico for some cash and maybe drugs, plus for a break from my daily life in San Francisco. Then I’d tried to find out whether she was alive or dead, because I’d needed to understand what happened in the tunnel and why. Finally, I’d taken on the job of rescuing and guarding her to prove to myself that, given the chance, I could have been a good officer.
Nothing I’d done had been because I’d known who Nidia was or cared about her, and now it was too late to try. Somewhere inside that religious, distant person had been a real girl who’d loved a real man, and later had a sexual indiscretion with another one, a man with whom she’d known there was no future. I’d never known that Nidia. Serena and I had both held her at arm’s length for fear that her victimhood was some kind of catching illness.
Should that matter to a soldier? Wouldn’t such personal feelings simply be an encumbrance? If so, why did I feel guilty for not having them?
I straightened up and went back into the hospital. We had things to think about, Serena and I.
But when I got to the neonatal unit, Cheyenne was sitting in the waiting room, her eyes reddened. Payaso was stretched out along several hard plastic chairs like I had been, sleeping with his head pillowed on a rolled-up sweatshirt. Iceman was doing the same, but sitting up with his head tipped to the side.
No Serena.
I turned to Cheyenne. “Where’s Warchild?”
She frowned. “We thought she was with you.”
I walked the corridors, looked into other waiting rooms, checked the women’s restrooms. No luck. But by then I had an idea about where she might have gone.
It wasn’t difficult to find the morgue. No one was around to stop me, to ask to see my ID. There was a sign above the double doors that read AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY, but Warchild wasn’t one to let the rules stop her.
The morgue wasn’t that different from the rest of the hospital. It had the same vaguely synthetic smell of recycled, conditioned air, the same sound-absorbent flooring. Only the sound of the climate-control system was different here, louder. It was here that I found Serena, sitting with Nidia’s body. She was crying.
Serena, Warchild, crying for the little vic she’d claimed to disdain. This was a private moment. I decided to slip out the way I’d come in.
Except then my cell phone rang. Serena looked up. When she saw me, she knew who was calling. I did, too. Costa. Our deadline had arrived.
Serena watched with wet eyes, both of us silent, as the phone rang a second, then a third time. Once more and it would go into voice mail. We couldn’t afford that, no matter how ill-equipped I was to deal with the situation at the moment.
I connected the call. “Hello?”
“Good morning, Miss Cain,” Costa said. “I’ve conferred with my client. We’ve come up with an arrangement for you to bring Miss Hernandez to us.”
He went on about how Nidia had been well cared for physically and medically before, and how that would continue. Then he started to tell me about the meeting place they wanted me to bring her to. I cut him off.
“That’s not going to happen,” I said. “She’s staying with us until the child is born. That’s nonnegotiable. We’ll be in touch afterward about a hand-off.”
“What makes you think any of this is negotiable?”
“You want the baby,” I said. “That’s your only reason for doing any of this.”
“For someone in your bargaining position, you strike me as almost arrogant,” he said.
“My position’s pretty good. I’ve got what you want and you’re the one calling me to get it.”
“You know, when I said yesterday that no one understood what was motivating you, that wasn’t entirely true,” he said. “I think I understand the root of your reckless behavior. Miss Cain, I know the reason why you had to leave West Point.”
I hung up on him.
forty-eight
“Did you hang up?” Serena said.
“We were getting nowhere.”
“What did he say to you, at the end?”
“Nothing.”
“He said something.”
“He was just messing with me. He thinks he’s smart.” I put the cell phone away and walked to Serena’s side. The sheet covering Nidia was pulled back to reveal her face and shoulders. Her eyes were closed, but she didn’t look asleep. She looked diminished, lifeless.
Serena said, “You stalled him.”
“That was the plan.”
“I know, but things have changed,” she said. “You could’ve told him what happened. You could’ve arranged to hand off the kid and get yourself off the hook.”
“I know.”
“So you’re still doing this?” Serena said. This meaning the war with Skouras, protecting Nidia’s baby even without Nidia alive to know about it.
She had prayed for me, Nidia, even though she’d believed me to be dead. As far as I knew, no one had ever prayed for me alive. I owed her something.
“I am,” I said. “Are you in?”
Serena nodded. “I’m in.” She slid off the stool. “Come on. We’ve got some planning to do.”
“Go on without me,” I said. “I’ll be there in a minute.”
Her footsteps receded, the door closing with a faint gust of air. I stood a moment longer, looking down at Nidia.
“Pray for us, kid,” I said.
forty-nine
Three days later, we were at a rest stop off Highway 101: Serena and I, Payaso, and the baby I’d come to call Henry. I sat on a picnic table, holding him. He was freshly diapered and had had as much formula as I could get him to take. Now, content, he regarded me with milky eyes that hadn’t decided on a color yet.
Indecision marked all our lives today. We had no idea what we were going to do about Henry Hernandez. Serena and Payaso were looking to me to make that decision, as they had with most of our choices thus far. Most, but not all. They’d made a crucial one late yesterday that had changed the game.
Serena came out of the restroom, shielding her eyes against the sun, finding us. She walked over. “It’s on the radio,” she said.
“We knew it would be,” I said. “Infant son of adolescent Mexican single mother, taken at gunpoint from a maternity ward by a cholo and his girl… Yeah, Skouras’s gonna know whose baby that was.”
Serena said, “I was doing what I thought was right.” It wasn’t the first time she’d said it.
“I know,” I said.
Yesterday, Serena and Payaso had, in essence, kidnapped Henry from the hospital nursery. I had been back up at Julianne’s trailer, getting some badly needed sleep after the restless night in the hospital. They hadn’t called to consult me. They’d made an executive decision.
There would have been some difficulty in getting Henry out otherwise. None of us were legally related to him, and the county foster-care service had been about to step in. Serena and Payaso, with their deep-seated distrust of the system, weren’t about to let that happen.
“For Skouras’s men to take him out of a foster home, that’d be child’s play,” Serena had told me afterward. “You think some skinny white do-gooders are going to be able to protect him? He needs to be with us.”
She and Payaso had recounted it for me. Cheyenne had been the third party, the getaway driver. They’d taken Payaso’s GTO to the hospital, Cheyenne waiting in Iceman’s Taurus
two blocks away. Serena had gone up to the maternity ward and signed in as Encarnación Hernandez, aka Teaser, Nidia’s now-deceased cousin. It was an ID that would only lead back to Nidia Hernandez and family, not to any of us. Serena had gotten permission to hold the baby and strolled with him as close as possible to the exit. Covertly, she’d texted a single character to Payaso, an exclamation point.
That had been the signal for him to fire two gunshots in the stairwell before running out a ground-floor exit to the GTO. With the hospital’s security officers headed toward the sound of the shots, Serena had escaped with Henry. She’d jumped into Payaso’s car, and they’d driven two blocks to where Cheyenne was waiting in the Taurus. Serena had lain down out of view in the backseat holding the baby, while Payaso had gone the other way in the GTO, both cars slow and careful.
When I’d stopped yelling at Serena for taking such a big step without me-this after making such a big deal of setting me up as the leader of this whole endeavor-I’d realized that she and Payaso had been right about Henry not being safe in the foster-care system. And their plan, however audacious, had worked. The news reports had only the color and model of Payaso’s car, not the specific make, and no license number. And nothing at all about the Taurus. I had to admire both the nerve and the planning.
But what they’d done had meant that we’d have to leave Truckee. As soon as the news went out, Skouras’s men would come. Truckee was not a big place, and our East L.A. crew didn’t quite blend in, and Julianne’s place, while set back from the road, wasn’t a cabin in the middle of no-man’s-land. It wasn’t safe anymore.
I’d gone into town to buy a car seat and other things the baby would need, and then I’d simply driven us both out of town in the Taurus. White woman, white-looking baby in a car seat, unassuming domestic car: Sometimes plain sight is your best option. On the streets of Truckee, I’d passed several police cars, but if the whole town was in an uproar over a baby’s kidnapping, it had been taking place behind closed doors. No one made any attempt to detain me on my cool, law-abiding way out of town.
“They can’t stop every car with a baby in it,” I’d told Serena and Payaso. “What kind of proof could they demand from me that Henry is mine, anyhow?”
They’d gotten away shortly thereafter, taking fire roads outlined on my area map. It was only now, about two hours north of L.A. on the 101, that we’d finally felt safe hooking up again.
“Have you heard anything from Iceman and Cheyenne?” I asked.
Serena shook her head. “They’ll be all right,” she said. “Don’t worry.”
They had stayed behind an hour, in order to clean the trailer-well, maybe not Iceman, but Cheyenne probably had. I’d insisted on that. When Julianne came home, I didn’t want it to be to cigarette butts in the ashtrays and hairs in the shower drain.
I said to Serena, “Pretty soon we’ve got to call Lara Cortez, so she can get in touch with Nidia’s family. I don’t want her in a morgue cooler indefinitely.”
Serena nodded. “I’ll get a phone number from Lara and call them myself,” she said. “It’s a death notification. Believe me, in la vida, I’ve seen this news dumped on mamis and papis in really screwed-up ways. I want to handle it myself.”
“Sure,” I said.
“Can I hold the baby?” Serena asked.
There was nobody nearby who looked remotely official, so I judged it safe for Serena to be holding the baby. The nearest people to us were a young Latino family who piled out of a green minivan. The kids jumped out, racing for the water fountain. The parents, a man in a straw cowboy hat and a woman in jeans and a warm-up jacket, got out at a more leisurely pace.
I handed Henry over into Serena’s arms, and she held him adeptly, supporting his downy little head. “Hey, Enrique,” she cooed. “Que pasa, lil’ homey?”
She seemed quite at ease, and it was worth considering that if Henry lived at Casa Serena, he’d have a dozen or more experienced babysitters. Most of the sucias had grown up diapering and coddling little brothers and sisters, and many of her former homegirls had babies of their own. But I also thought of Herlinda Lopez’s death and my own shooting down in Mexico. Adrian Skouras’s baby was four days old and innocent as rain, but he had an unwanted gift for bringing terrible trouble into the lives of people around him.
Who the hell could I have given him to? Who would I wish that on?
One answer would have been for me to become his guardian myself, keeping the lightning always potentially poised over my own head. Noble, but not practical. I was inextricably linked in Skouras’s mind with his grandson. Like Nidia, I would serve to identify him wherever we went.
The woman next to me called her children, and they ran to the table, where she’d laid out a lunch of sandwiches and boxed juice, a Tupperware container of apple and orange chunks, and vanilla cookies. The kind of lunch I remembered from my childhood: inexpensive, balanced, charmless.
The best thing would be for Henry to disappear into the anonymous hands of strangers like this, into the heart of mundane working-class or middle-class life. Of course, this family was Mexican, and while I tended to think of Henry as Mexican, he was only half. Henry might grow up to be easily taken for white.
There were infertile couples everywhere who would, in theory, leap at the chance to adopt a healthy, appealing infant like Henry, only four days old. But in practice, most of those couples would ultimately shy away from a dark-alley, extralegal adoption, if I even knew how to set one up. Which I didn’t. It was too bad, really. So many childless couples, wanting-
Wait.
An audacious idea had come to me.
No way. Put it out of your head, Cain.
“What are you thinking?” Serena asked.
“Nothing,” I said. “Come on, let’s go. It’s probably not smart for you to be standing around holding him like that. We should keep moving.”
Serena handed the baby back to me. “See you soon,” she said.
I walked back to the Taurus and strapped Henry into his car seat, backed carefully out of my space, and drove toward the freeway.
But on the road, I couldn’t stop thinking about the idea that had come to me at the rest stop, and by the time I was back in L.A., I knew what I was going to do.
fifty
At Casa Serena, an informal vote overwhelmingly suggested that baby “Enrique” live with the sucias, like a mascot, a baby boy with no mother but a dozen loving, devoted older sisters. The girls passed him around among themselves so much that Serena finally had to intervene.
“He’s fine,” Heartbreaker pleaded as Serena carried him away. “Babies need stimulation.”
“Not that much,” Serena said. “He’s four days’ old, for God’s sake.”
Deprived of the baby they’d quickly come to consider a living toy, the girls turned to the night’s second form of unexpected entertainment, the cable news channels and the latest on the baby-napping. To the sucias, this was the latest exploit of la leyenda Warchild, and they devoured the media reports with a mix of pride and derision. They jeered when Payaso’s GTO was reported as “possibly a Chevy Nova” and laughed outright at the police sketch of Serena.
“That could be fucking anybody!” Teardrop exulted.
Escaping into the privacy of Serena’s room, where she’d made a makeshift cradle from a dresser drawer and blankets, I gave Henry a bottle. Serena followed me in, holding a pair of cold, wet Corona bottles by their necks, then expertly cracked them open using the edge of the dresser and her hand.
When Henry rejected the rest of the formula, I set it aside and turned him upright, jouncing him gently. In a moment, he burped, a loud and healthy sound. Serena giggled, and I did, too.
This was the moment where most girls our age would have asked one another, Do you think you’ll ever want a baby of your own? Serena and I didn’t. We’d already implicitly asked and answered that question. We already knew.
She handed me a beer and said, “Have you thought any more about
what to do with him?”
I had-more than that, I’d decided-but couldn’t say so. “Tomorrow we’ll brainstorm.”
She nodded. “Sounds good.” She set her bottle down. “Can I hold him again?”
I handed him over. Serena took him in her hands and bounced him gently. “Don’t you worry,” she said to him. “Your Auntie Warchild and Auntie Insula aren’t going to let anything happen to their littlest homeboy.” She kissed the top of his head. I snickered.
“What?” she said.
“‘Auntie Warchild and Auntie Insula,’” I said. “We’ve gone crazy.”
“A long time ago,” she agreed.
We put Henry in his makeshift bassinet to sleep. I lay back on Serena’s bed, my head at its foot, and took my first sip of the Corona, felt it trace a cold path down deep through my chest. “Ahhh,” I said, eyes half closed.
“No shit,” Serena agreed.
I opened my eyes again and looked up at her print of Halong Bay. It was an image so clean and pure I imagined Serena willing herself to touch it and suddenly be there.
“Warchild?”
“Eh?”
“Have you ever thought about going to Vietnam?”
She gave me a quizzical look. “To do what?” She rolled the neck of her beer bottle in her palms.
“To see it. It’s a tourist destination. The war’s been over a long time,” I said.
“Are you saying you believe me now, about my dreams? You never did before.”
“What I believe doesn’t matter,” I said. “You’re interested in Vietnam; you ought to go someday.”
“You mean, like, on vacation?”
“Yeah. Not a big fact-finding mission. Just walk around, see the people, eat the food.”
“Homegirls don’t do that shit,” she said. “I mean, Jesus, it’s on the other side of the planet.”
I rolled over onto my stomach. “For God’s sake, think of the things you do every day. You’re a shot caller in a gang, for crying out loud. You’re telling me you couldn’t make a reservation, get on a plane?”