John Ridley_Those Who Walk in Darkness 02

by What Fire Cannot Burn

  Things would start badly, Soledad figured, when her mother saw her on crutches. Bring on the worry. Then the “Why are you doing this, why don’t you get a regular job” talk would start free-flowing. After Soledad macheted through that tangle of nonsense, things would really get going southward with all the questions her mom would send at her fusillade-style about the love life Soledad didn’t have, the friends she didn’t own. Question after prying question about bullshit, bullshit, bullshit . . .

  Driving up La Cienega for Sunset Plaza. Soledad gripping the wheel of her car. Choking it.

  God, how she hated this—

  Tenser, tenser with each block traveled.

  —having a sit-down with family. Having to open up and share because somebody wanted access to her life even though that somebody had given birth to her. Not that Soledad wasn’t . . . appreciative; was that an expressive enough word? Not that Soledad wasn’t appreciative of that. Her existence. Thank you very much, Mom, now here’s a card for Mother’s Day and a bunch of flowers. But why did coming from her mom’s gene pool entitle her mother to more than Soledad wanted to give?

  Jesus . . .

  Her mother had to come to LA, had to come unannounced? Soledad said to herself—and it was hyperbole, sure, but there was a kernel of truth to her emotion—she’d rather go at the worst of the freaks—a telepath—than have lunch solo with her mother.

  Sunset Plaza.

  Soledad parked in the lot looking south over the city. Clear day. Warm weather. Decent view. LA wasn’t all bad.

  Soledad limped up the hill from the lot to Sunset, crutched it over to Le Petite. Her mother, Virginia—Gin—already there. Looking good. Soledad thought her mother always looked good. Wasn’t just a daughter’s assessment. Gin was handsome the way Maya Angelou was handsome. The way, the way early pre-glam-makeover Oprah was handsome. Strong black women whose greatest strength was primarily their intelligence.

  The future as Soledad had predicted did not materialize. Her mother greeted her warmly. Said how good it was to see Soledad, made a comment on the quality of the day. She did point out an actor sitting three tables over who’d had a hit TV show six years prior and hadn’t much worked since outside of commercials for some kind of snack chip that wasn’t made out of potatoes.

  Gin said nothing about Soledad’s crutches other than to ask: “Hurt yourself?”

  “Twisted it running,” Soledad lied. What she figured to be the first of many she’d be spinning over lunch as she prepped herself for the continuing cover-up of her leg injury.

  But Gin had nothing more to ask concerning her daughter’s leg, was more inquisitive with the waiter regarding the specials.

  Soledad absentmindedly ordered the Santa Fe salad. She’d had it once years ago. It was decent. She figured it couldn’t’ve changed all that much, and if it had, probably not for the worse.

  A thank-you to both ladies from the waiter. He went to place their order.

  No assessment as point of entry into a wider conversation about Soledad’s love life from Gin to Soledad re: the waiter’s looks and what Soledad thought of them. If Soledad found him attractive. If she’d consider dating him. If she wouldn’t, was it because she was already seeing someone?

  Unusual. Highly unusual, the lack of question asking.

  In the time between the food order was placed and its arrival, Gin took charge of the conversation, apologized for coming to the city without forewarning but it just seemed the two of them kept . . . missing each other.

  Signifying. Saying without saying she was on to Soledad’s long-running scam.

  But Gin abandoned her grievances there. Barely started, she let them go no further. All that came from her were pleasantries. About her flight, about the city. To her daughter, and about life in general.

  Lilac.

  She thought she smelled it when she sat down. Now Soledad was sure. There was lilac in the air.

  Soledad didn’t know of any growing on Sunset. The smell had to be drifting down from up the Hollywood Hills. Near the intersection of Sunset and Holloway—six blocks away—in a car that was made in Korea a cover version of a song by Fleetwood Mac played on the radio. Somewhere on the Blvd. a woman cried, but they were tears of joy. For a brief moment a near portion of the entire world was received with exceptional clarity by Soledad.

  It wasn’t right. The situation was incorrect. A background as a cop wasn’t needed for Soledad to know her mother suddenly showing up in LA by herself was messed up. As her mother talked, Soledad half listened, half tried to figure the most natural, the least abrasive way to ask what she needed to know. Except if Soledad was ever nonabrasive, she’d long ago forgotten how to be. Probably about the same time she’d forgotten how to be patient.

  So Soledad blurted: “What are you doing here?”

  “I came to see you,” Gin said.

  That didn’t come right away. There was a pause ahead of it. Brief, but it was there. The hesitation her mother had taken, the thought she’d put into a simple answer: Gin was lying.

  Having spoken enough of them, Soledad knew a lie when she heard one.

  “For no reason? You just get on a plane, fly a couple thousand miles—”

  “To see you, talk with you. Not over the phone and not in, in vagaries.”

  “You and Dad splitting up?”

  A laugh from Gin. A bitter one.

  “If you are, you can, I guess, stay with me if you want.”

  “I never should have let you be an only child. You needed more family than your father and I could give you.”

  Soledad didn’t know what to say to that, didn’t know where it came from.

  The waiter stopped by with the Santa Fe salad, the sea bass Gin had ordered, asked the ladies if they needed anything further.

  A couple of curt noes.

  Soledad fumbled with her silverware. Gin cut her food with a knife, forked a piece and ate. Ate another bite. Then she set the fork at the edge of her plate.

  She said: “I have cancer. Ovarian cancer.”

  The handle of the knife she held, dull as it was, hurt Soledad with the force which her fingers gripped it. Drove it into her palm. Her throat went dry. And her eyes as well. Someone else hearing that, hearing their mother was potentially terminal, most likely their eyes would go slick. Soledad’s did the opposite.

  Her voice, Soledad’s voice was steady. “You should be in the hospital.”

  “I will be. I’m scheduled to go in Monday.”

  “You’re going to wait until—”

  “I wanted to see you. I wanted to tell you.”

  Soledad started to say: You could have called.

  Except . . .

  Her mother had called. She’d called and called, and Soledad had ducked and dodged.

  Soledad felt a slow and steady drip of guilt water-

  torturing her. She knew she’d feel it for years.

  Fucking cancer.

  Gin: “I came to tell you . . . well, I came to say how much I loved you. How proud I was of you . . .”

  Was.

  Was?

  “This is . . . you’re, you’re sick, and you come all the way out to tell me—”

  “. . . but it sounded so odd, vapid to tell someone you loved them. Under the circumstances.” Gin had to fight with that word some. Circumstances. “When you say it like you’re making a final declaration. If they don’t know it; if the person you’re saying that to doesn’t already know that you . . . and it sounded, and it sounded cliché. I’m dying, and therefore I have to . . . well, probably I’m dying, so I have to tell you that I . . . but I wanted to tell you.”

  “Stop it!” Soledad barked loud enough people four tables over looked in her direction. The has-been actor among them. “Stop talking in the past tense. It’s like talking to a ghost.”

  Amazing even to herself; her mother had cancer, the bet was it was killing her, she’d picked flying to LA over going in for immediate surgery or treatment or whatever science was up t
o that was—in terms of fighting cancer—little better than a good leeching, and the only emotion Soledad could show was anger.

  Unbelievable.

  The waiter returned, asked the two ladies if everything was to their liking.

  Soledad’s head shook.

  The waiter thought one of the meals was lacking and started to go into a WeHo hissy fit.

  Gin set the guy right, sent him off. She ate. She put an effort into eating, going to the trouble not hardly out of hunger as much as to give Soledad a minute to collect herself. Food was poor distraction. Gin didn’t have an appetite, hadn’t since her doctor had sat her down, looked her in the eye and told her with all the compassion of a guy who’s told a hundred patients some HMOified version of the same spiel: You’ve got an illness which could very much end things for you, and it’s pretty much beyond us.

  Gin pushed her plate away. She looked to her daughter. “What I want to say, I wanted to say face-to-face. I’m going to be selfish, Soledad. I don’t want you coming home.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t want you dealing with my sickness.” In that sentence Gin put the emphasis on “my.” “I don’t want you watching me waste away.”

  “You’re not going to die.”

  “You talk as if it were a matter of choice. If I choose to live, I will. That’s hardly the way things are.”

  Except, in Soledad’s world it was. In Soledad’s world she had to believe it was.

  Soledad: “Please quit the bullshit acceptance of the—”

  “It’s not . . . bull.” Knocking on Death’s door, Gin wouldn’t sully herself with foul language. “I’m fifty-eight years old. My time is coming. Today. Tomorrow. It is. I can cry, or I can . . . I can get what I’m able to out of the time I have left. If that means taking a few days, flying to see my daughter . . . My fear, Soledad, my living fear was that something would happen to you while I was still alive. I didn’t want that. I didn’t want that as badly as possible. There is something so horribly out of sync about a parent burying their child. And I take comfort in knowing the manner I will end. It won’t be by a bullet from a, a thug or some such. Or getting run down by some drunk. This way when it happens it will be just like, like slipping under water.”

  Soledad was realizing there was so much more to her mother than she knew. Was it some kind of law of nature you had to be close to losing something to appreciate it?

  “How’s Dad taking it?”

  “Well. He’s well in my presence. I think he cries alone, wishes that he could do something. I haven’t . . . There are some things you avoid talking about, but I know it must be horrible for him. When you marry, you take a vow to love, to protect. Then there comes a time when the vow is useless.”

  “It’s not useless. He still loves you.”

  Gin appreciated her daughter’s insistence. But she was in a place of frankness. “Not useless, then. Hollow. How much does it hurt to love someone, to say you’ll always protect them . . . I know he’d give his life for me. But he can’t. He can’t, and that’s a hurt beyond imagination. I’ve felt it about you. There have been so many times where I’ve felt—”

  “Do people know? Have you told people?”

  “No.” A slight smile. Even at this juncture Soledad steamrolled her mother, kept the personal conversation from becoming too intimate. “I told . . . do you remember Mrs. Schoendorf? Her daughter was in your class.”

  Soledad remembered the girl, her mother. She indicated so to Gin.

  “Right after,” Gin continued, “I got out of the doctor’s office, in a store I ran into her. Don’t even know why I’d gone shopping except so that I could pretend everything was normal. Pretend the doctor hadn’t told me what he told me. So there I was. Mrs. Schoendorf, she was talking, going on about . . . whatever. About nothing, really. I don’t know. Maybe it was important. Maybe it was the most important thing in the world to her. But once you know you have, you have this thing, you have this thing that’s actively trying to end your life inside you . . . once you know your self is trying to kill you, that’s the only thing that’s important. And I said that to her. I said: ‘I can’t talk now, I have cancer.’”

  “. . . How did she, what did she—”

  “Well, I think I shocked her. I did. I know I did. You say something like that . . . but not so badly that . . . I saw her again. A day later. She shunned me. She actually shunned me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She . . .” As if it were a cat lying on the table, as if it could feel and respond to her movements, Gin’s hand, the tips of her fingers, moved up and down over the fork that rested near her discarded plate. “I don’t know how else to describe what she did. She did not wish to encounter me, and did everything she could to keep from doing so. Because I was sick. Just because I was sick, she treated me like I was some kind of—”

  “I want to come home. I want to go home with you.” Soledad was forceful with that. Put the same energy into her words she would if she were kicking in a door, executing a warrant.

  Her mother, not as forceful, was equally indisputable. “No.”

  “This isn’t . . . we’re not taking a vote.”

  “Soledad, I love you. There it is. The cliché I didn’t want to . . . I love you, you’re all the daughter I could have ever wanted.”

  A lie. It hurt Soledad that at such a moment her mother was so mindful of her feelings she felt compelled to engage in emotional subterfuge. That Soledad, despite, in spite of her faults—her baggage that she portered poorly. The distance at which she kept people—could be as a daughter anything close to all Gin could have hoped for was beyond Soledad’s comprehension. Both her self-perception and her perception of her mother were that badly adjusted. When she looked in the mirror, all Soledad saw was a cop who did work. That she was a cop who was honest and true and selfless was as lost on her as it was precious to Gin.

  And that it was lost on Soledad made her all the more beloved to her mother. Tears free-flowing from her. The cloth napkin not nearly enough to contain them. Giving effort to rejoin her own thoughts: “But since the day you left home you’ve been your own woman. I haven’t agreed, I haven’t even liked every choice you’ve made. But I’ve let you live your life the way you wanted to.” She was pointed with that. “All I’m asking, if I’m done, let me end my life the way I see fit.”

  Soledad tried to think of a time—after Reese had a pit burned in her chest by that fire freak. After the tag team of a metal morpher and a telepath had cut through half her element. Even when a weather manipulator, for a minute, looked unstoppable to the point Soledad thought for sure she was staring death in the eye—she did not want to face a day of work.

  Couldn’t come up with one.

  Her work gave her purpose. Even being benched from MTac, maybe especially because she was benched, her work gave Soledad a sense of purpose.

  She wouldn’t, could not consider not working, even though the stats said her work would eventually catch up to her. Kill her.

  There were, yeah, times alone when Soledad found herself with the shakes. The night after going against that telepath she’d gone home and vomited. Spilled from her gut contents she didn’t even know it had. That reaction was human. It was a reminder she hadn’t actually “seen it all.” Like Vin had said: the kind of nerves that keep you on your toes.

  What Soledad was feeling now . . . competing needs: the need to come up with a reason to pry loose her grip on her Prelude’s steering wheel, get out of the car, cross the parking lot and go into the DMI offices. Into work.

  Vs.

  Come up with an excuse not to do all that. Flip the ignition. Go home.

  Her mother’s dying of cancer. A reason. No excuse needed.

  But telling people, telling Abernathy about her mother meant opening a door a little. Letting people view a sliver of herself.

  Wasn’t going to happen.

  So there had to be something else; another reason to go in or drive off.
Stay or leave. Do work or—

  Metal tapped the glass right next to Soledad’s head. Unexpected, but it didn’t startle her. Not that she was startleproof. She was in another space where sound took its time traversing, and when it had, it was garbled among thirty-three other sensations coming to her on a lag. Even turning her head was a process where thought and action were filtered by delay.

  At the window of her car: Raddatz rapping his wedding band against the glass. He said something. Through the door it was just a fog of wordless sounds.

  Soledad dropped the window.

  “You good, O’Roark?”

  “Yes,” she said. Quick, but without conviction.

  “Sitting in your car alone? You sure you’re good?”

  Soledad’s eyes drifted over Raddatz. Over his body. She wondered: What did he look like naked? What kind of damage did his clothes hide? Massive scars? Burns? Twisted flesh that would never be a well-tailored suit again? She wondered: Was it better to have your wounds on display—a missing arm, a leg gone—was it better to look damaged than to walk around normal on the outside only to, end of the day, have to strip down to the truth of yourself?

  “O’Roark . . .” Raddatz tossed out her name trying to catch her focus.

  “I’m not okay,” Soledad said.

  Raddatz squatted, came down to Soledad’s level. “Got issues you want to talk about?”

  Soledad took what seemed the appropriate amount of time she figured it should take to work through the pre-articulation of a difficult thought.

  She said: “Talked to my physical therapist this morning. My knee’s only going to get so much better.”

  “How much?”

  “Not enough to go back to MTac.”

  “What are you going to do with yourself?”

  “That’s what I’m sitting here thinking about.”

  “What would you like to do with yourself?”

  “I guess . . . what I’ve been doing with myself for the last month. Working DMI.”