“I’m going to take this down to the car.” Soledad’s dad, Richard, hefted a box, brushed passed Eddi without a word, left the apartment.
A chill lingered.
In her mind Eddi damned her blather.
“My husband doesn’t think Soledad died for her convictions. That she died for any good reason, really.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t come here to upset anybody.”
“The thing about losing someone, I’m learning,” a little laugh, “is dealing with other people’s sympathy. Everyone wants to tell me that things are all right or that Soledad’s gone to a better place. Things are not all right. I’ve lost my child. She is not in a better place. She’s dead. And all the well-wishes just remind you of what’s gone.”
Eddi didn’t know what to say, didn’t want to say she was sorry. Again. She did not want to be where she was. She was not touchy-feely. She wasn’t a people person. It was as if she’d inserted herself into the heart of a painful situation for pain’s sake, the hurt inflicted as a substitute for the ache she couldn’t otherwise feel for herself. Trying to make peace with Soledad’s mother for Soledad was a losing proposition.
“You come to give me your sympathies, and I reject them. It’s not very polite. I think my own guilt is working on me.”
“Guilt?”
“I’ve been ill. I told my daughter . . . I told Soledad I’d rather her not be around while I was recovering. But it wasn’t . . . I didn’t know if I would recover. I didn’t want her to watch me die.” Gin could read the look on Eddi’s face, answered the question there. “The surgery went well. The doctors think I have a good chance of surviving.”
“You wanted to save her some hurt. You shouldn’t feel guilty for that.”
A shake of her head. “That’s not why I feel guilty. If I’d let her come home, let her be there for me—”
“She’d still be dead.” That was harsh and sharp, maybe more than Eddi had meant it to be. Definitely more. If she’d thought about it, she would have planed the edge off the statement. But maybe in her self-pity Gin could use a reality slap. “Soledad was going to fight this fight long as she could, and long as she could would be right up to her end. I know that doesn’t make losing her any easier. I work the same job, and having a like mind doesn’t make . . . God, Soledad was a tough one . . .” One tear from Eddi. Just one. But it was one that up till that moment wouldn’t come to her at all. “It doesn’t make her not being around any easier for me.”
“A parent shouldn’t outlive their child. It should not be this way.” The depth of the observation was matched by a dispassionate delivery. The summary of a grad-level thesis. A truth that could not be equivocated.
And the quiet returned.
Fat, uncomfortable quiet.
Gin asked: “Would you like something, something to remember her by?”
“I couldn’t.”
“I don’t know how to do this.” Just heavy with a certain “Jesus, end this” defeat. “I don’t know how to close out a life. All of this,” nodding to the boxes in various stages of being packed, “we’ll just take all this home, put it in a room and never touch it again.”
Eddi understood that.
“You were her . . . ,” lightly, “friend. It would be a nice way to help keep her memory alive.” Gin started for the door. “I’ll give you some privacy. And thank you.”
She left.
It was like, it was like being in a museum exhibit. A room set up to approximate the real world, but empty of actual life. And this, ladies and gentlemen, is where Officer O’Roark would have sat and watched television. Right here is where she is believed to have lain on the floor and read a book or a magazine. Over there, the supposed location she partook breakfast. And to our best estimation, this very location is where she developed her modified O’Dwyer VLe that was one of the most effective weapons in the fight against the hegemony of the muties. Right up until it misfired and cost Officer O’Roark her life. Soledad’s ghost was all over the place. Warm and vibrant. Quite present. It felt to Eddi she could, with patience, wait out this dark, sick joke Soledad was playing—’cause that’s all it was—and catch her sneaking from a hiding place in a closet into the kitchen for a sandwich.
Just a feeling.
Soledad was dead.
And how to keep her alive? What thing was there that would remind and inspire and comfort and not depress too severely? A photo? A book? Soledad’s favorite book? How the hell was Eddi supposed to know what Soledad’s favorite book was? Yeah, there were books around, but did Soledad particularly read any of them? Like Eddi, did she just buy books because it made her feel not so bad about wasting nights watching reality TV? Maybe something Soledad had made herself, some craft or something.
Weren’t any around. Probably, Soledad wasn’t a craftsperson. Except for her gun. With her gun she’d been real crafty.
On a table was a book, but not one that had been published. Eddi reached for it, opened it. Not a book. Soledad’s journal. Eddi read for a few pages. Stopped. Held the book, clutched it. Clutched it tight in her hands, then to her breast.
This.
If Gin was gracious enough to share her daughter, this—Soledad in her own words—is what Eddi would take.
The end of fear.
Sounds good. That’s the problem with catchphrases and manicured sound bites: They sound good, but they don’t add up to anything. They sound good because they’re honed and shined by politicians and zealots with badges, but with sophistry like that, all you end up with is shine.
I’m getting shined. Getting shined three-sixty.
Raddatz is perpetrating with his “end of fear.” Don’t know what or exactly how or why, but I can feel in my gut it’s below the boards, not above. Problem is, that’s the shine I came into things being told to expect.
The shine I can’t divine: Tashjian. Maybe it’s a false reading that I could, I should pass off to our history. My natural distrust and paranoia. But the feeeling I have is that there’s no way Tashjian’s being straight with me. Yeah, freaks are getting killed and somehow Raddatz, the cadre, they’re part of it. But that I should so conveniently find myself in the middle of it, that so quick I was able to hook up with the guy Tashjian needed to put in his sights . . . there’s something else, something more going on and I don’t know how the hell I’m supposed to figure what. And I’m thinking, maybe, maybe that’s the point. Why put an MTac cop and not an IA investigator into the mix, and I’m not going for Tashjian’s “they’d smell ’em coming” line. Why is because the MTac cop can’t—at least she isn’t supposed to—figure things. Or maybe it’s ’cause she’s got a way of being a lightning rod, and it’s time for lightning to strike.
That’s cute.
Lightning rod.
How about target? How about dupe?
Whatever. People are trying to fuck with me, not the first time I’ve been fucked with. I’ve been had at plenty by freaks and normals the same. With freaks, I got technology for them. With normals, well, the rearview mirror of my life is littered with people who made the mistake of getting on my bad side.
That was it. That was the last of Soledad O’Roark. Eddi read her journal again. Not, as with the first time, in a sitting. The second time there was a good deal more flinching involved. The second time Eddi had to read until she was full up with, with all she could take. Toss the journal aside. Then allow herself over a period of time to gravitate closer, closer to it, almost throwing off a front of indifference—I can handle this, I can handle it—before picking up the journal, reading to her level of tolerance and going through the process again. Reading to completion a second time.
And when she had, Eddi said: “Fuck.”
Eddi wanted to meet outside somewhere. It’d been nice to walk on the beach, along the Santa Monica promenade. It just would’ve been nice—not nice, but more tolerable—to deal with bleakness under some daylight.
Vin wouldn’t have it.
Yeah, he wanted to
see Eddi. Would love to hang with her. But go out of doors? Han, he didn’t much feel like going out.
Why don’t you come on over? he invited. C’mon, we’ll sit. We’ll talk.
Eddi had come to know Vin liked to sit and talk. Sit and watch TV. Sit and veg, and especially to an increasing degree sit and booze. She’d got that reading Soledad’s diary. Journal. No way Soledad would’ve ever called it a diary. Eddi’d gotten Soledad’s take on Vin’s descent and wanted to avoid the opportunity to support his further degeneration by being audience to the cheap theatrics of his one-man drunk show.
Wasn’t gonna happen.
So Eddi came around to Vin’s.
Vin hobbled from the door after opening it. One leg. Too lazy, too drunk to put on his prosthetic. A technological wonder purchased through the generosity of others, and it did nothing more spectacular than prop itself against a wall.
A look around the apartment upon entering. You gotta, Eddi thought, be kidding. A scattering of newspapers that worked as something of a floor guard, as a layer of receptacle for whatever rubbish Vin seemed to feel had to be discarded right there. And Vin seemed to feel there was a lot of rubbish that needed to be discarded right there. Fast-food wrappers. A gang of empties. A bad stink was all around. All of that was noticed after Eddi got past, finally got past how bloated Vin had gotten. A repository of bad eats, fermented drink, with nothing like ambition to burn any of it off.
Once Eddi found a spot to settle, Vin got into some dry crying remembering Soledad: Can’t believe she’s gone. Iron woman. She was like some kind of . . . Christ, never thought she . . . I can’t imagine life without . . .
And Eddi just sat where she was, sat and gave a couple of “C’mon, don’t do that’s.” She was patient with Vin’s drunken exudation of woe. Patience was a chore. At the core Eddi got his hurt, had once shared it, but she had already put it on display with Soledad’s mother. Wasted it on Soledad’s father. Eddi couldn’t go back to that well a third time. Now her needs were more practical than cathartic. What she needed, she needed information. Vin probably had some, and she didn’t feel like slogging along miles and miles of self-pity to get at it.
Swatting aside all of Vin’s blubbering: “What was Soledad doing over at DMI?”
“. . . Wha . . .”
“At DMI. You know what she was doing, what she was working on?”
Vin sat a moment. He was waiting for a translation. From English to . . . whatever it was he was capable of comprehending in his state.
“She was . . . it was DMI stuff. I guess it was. If she was at DMI, what else is she going to—”
“But what? What kind of an assignment? Did she talk to you about it at all?”
“No.”
Brushing fingers across her lips, taking a minute to think. “What about . . . you ever hear her say anything about the end of fear?”
“. . . I don’t . . .”
“C’mon, Vin. A phrase like that? You’d remember if you heard it.”
“I can’t—”
“You’re a cop. Think. Remember.”
Mopping a hand over his sweaty face.
“Vin, remember!”
Nothing from Vin.
Eddi was up, moving around the room. Newspaper crunching under her feet. Riding wild frustration. Working at keeping from kicking down a wall.
Vin knew he was the eye of her ire. Like a kid that’d done wrong, he tried to explain away his delictum.
“It’s a bad time for me,” Vin said. “You come in here demanding shit. And I’m, I’m going through—”
“What are you going through that nobody else is except a dry-out?”
“I lost my wife.” The words left a trail of saliva that flopped around on his lower lip, dripped to the floor.
“She wasn’t your wife.”
“She was gonna be!”
“You know why?” Moving right at Vin, rolling right up on him. “She felt sorry for you. She felt so fucking sorry for you and your one-legged booziness she would waste her freedom on marrying you. Not even marrying you—”
Vin tried to get up, move away. One leg. He wasn’t going anywhere. Eddi, hot, grabbing him, throwing him back in the chair that was his domicile. No, he wasn’t going anywhere at all.
“She wasn’t marrying you, she was throwing you a lifeline. And what do you do with her memory? Nothing. Not a goddamn thing.”
“Don’t fucking say that!” Vin squirmed around in the cushions same as if he was trying to dodge Eddi’s words. “She loved me. She did. I lost her, lost, lost my body,” rubbing at his stump, “lost everything. You stand there, shit, you stand, and you tell me how I gotta feel? You don’t know how much she meant to me. You didn’t lose what I lost.”
She moved. A step back. One more. Eddi slipped off her jacket. Without hesitation, preparation, pulled up her shirt. Reached behind and unhooked her bra.
Vin didn’t look, couldn’t look. Scared of Eddi, naked but standing unashamed.
She said: “Look at me.”
Vin could not.
“Vin, look at me.”
His head came up, a tangle of his hair was foreground in his vision. The wet in his eyes made Eddi look so slick she glistened. A warrior princess with a Hollywood shine.
Eddi cupped her hands over her nipples. Her left breast was pulled back slightly. Along the curve, tattooed in simple letters: WE DON’T NEED ANOTHER HERO.
From Reese to Soledad.
Soledad to Eddi.
“Told her she should’ve checked you more carefully,” Vin said. “She would’ve hated that. She hated hero worship.”
“I don’t worship her.”
“Just woke up one morning with that on your tit?”
Eddi slipped back on her bra. She put back on her shirt. “I know what you’ve lost, Vin. I’ve lost as much. But I’m not going to be careful with your hurt, hand you any soft, feel-good bullshit about her. I’ve read her dia . . . journal. Whatever. And the shit that’s in there . . . Soledad was, she was empty. She was an empty human being. It’s like emotion was beyond her. Only thing that filled her was guilt for being lucky enough to live when half of San Francisco died. Can you imagine that, Vin, hating yourself because you’re not dead? And it was killing her. Guilt was killing her. Before that freak snapped her neck, guilt took her life way back.”
A very lonely thought. Lovely in its pathos.
“I admire what she stood for. But don’t tell me I worshipped that.” Eddi asked again: “Tell me everything you can about Soledad and DMI.”
“Soledad . . .” Vin pulled back his hair. Tangled. Dirty. Uncombed. It just flopped over his eyes again. “I don’t know any more than you. They were doing surveillance on a freak. The cops got caught out. The freak killed three of them. And Soledad.”
“You know a cop named Tashjian?”
Vin shook his head.
“He’s IA.”
There was a thick booze haze Vin’s memory was nearly useless against. He hacked at it, hacked at it . . .
What came to him: “He was . . . he investigated her. It was before you were MTac.”
“She was cleared. The investigation was over. Why was Tashjian back in her life?”
Vin didn’t know.
“The end of fear: You never heard that?”
“You asked me already.”
“I’m asking again. Did you ever hear that from her?”
“I don’t . . .” Vin realized: “She didn’t talk to me. Not really. She’d spend all day sitting around with me, but she never . . .” And he knew: “She didn’t love me.”
“No, she didn’t.” Moving straight on from that: “Soledad wasn’t working DMI just to work DMI. She was there for a reason.”
“Why would you, why would you say—”
“Because it’s the truth.” Eddi refused to care about Vin’s feelings, only wanted to know: “What was the reason Soledad was working DMI?”
“’Cause her leg . . . I was . . . her leg was messed up
. That’s why.”
“Yeah, getting hit by the car was an accident. Her being at DMI; Tashjian was taking advantage of the situation. She didn’t trust him.”
“What, what situation?”
“If I knew, I wouldn’t be here. Christ, dry up and help out.”
“Help what? Help you be bitter?”
“I’m trying to find out what happened to Soledad.”
“She died. She got herself killed!” Vin’s delivery dived in and out of rage and extreme sorrow. “And you can’t deal with that. You can’t deal that your goddess was dark and cold and a brute. You can’t handle she let a freak get the best of her. So you’ve gotta start dressing things up different than they are. Gotta, gotta get it in your head the same guys who took out the Kennedys and King got Soledad. Otherwise she was nothing but normal, and all the time you spent jerking to her was wasted.” Vin was taking a spiral right for sloppy, starting to process the truth about Soledad: Her affection for him was just more of her own guilt. “Well, here’s the deal, Eddi: Soledad was just like the rest of us, life-sized and not an inch bigger. She was a cold bitch and she fucked up and now she’s dead. That’s all there is.”
Fighting Vin’s belligerence with evidence: “It was in her journal.”
“‘There’s a big fat conspiracy going on, and I’m in the middle of it.’ That what she wrote?”
“She wrote . . . she’d written—”
“I’ll tell you . . .” Vin curled up in the chair, tired from the effort of dealing with Eddi. It was a reminder of all the effort that had gone into dealing with Soledad. “There is no way Soledad’d ever have anything to do with Tashjian.”
“You barely remembered his name.”
“I remember her. I’m sitting here crying over her. That’s more than you’re fucking doing.”
Kinda lit or not, Eddi could’ve gone across the room, put a fist to Vin’s head. Done it again. Then one more time.
Vin was oblivious to Eddi’s passions. The only thing tangible to him was the need to freshen his melancholy. “Let’s remember her, Eddi. Sit down, have a drink. Let’s recall the girl.”
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