Katie interrupted us. “Del and Talon were involved in some kind of drug thing, and they brought her little brother Sid into it. Do you remember this kid, Tom?” Katie asked. “He was younger than us, and he lived down the block from you. We used to see him around. He had brain damage, I think—totally uncoordinated. And he had a killer crush on Del.”
“Of course I remember him.” I pictured the skinny, wobbly boy with arms turned out and legs turned in. “He was sweet. He used to help my mom bring in groceries. What about him?”
“He’s dead,” Katie said, without a hint of sentiment. Her eyes were like cobalt stones. She sat back, leaned into the couch, and crossed her arms. Then she recounted the facts. “Tom’s mother used to drop him off at Bayside Plaza to watch movies. Genius Talon decided to use Tom as a runner at that mall because of course the police would never suspect him. He got Del to ask because he knew Tom would do anything for her.
“The next thing we knew, Tom was found dead in an alley behind the mall covered in blood and soaked in piss.” Katie twisted around and stretched her legs out on the couch. “Some guys who were there said that it was Sid who beat Tom. They said Sid just went crazy, started hitting Tom out of nowhere. Sid swore that he was not even at the mall when this thing went down. He told the police he was with Del at her house. Del denied it. After Del denied that Sid was with her, Sid took a plea.”
Katie looked squarely at me. “Del let Sid go to prison for life, Jenna. She helped Talon frame her little brother for murder.”
“That’s not all,” Gail said. “Ida works at a massage parlor. Rumor is she’s a prostitute. And Nicole has been in and out of prison and psych wards over the past several years. She had her first break about five years ago.” Gail thought for a moment. “All we’re saying, Jen Jen, is they’re not the same people they were when you knew them.”
Del was dead, Sid was disappeared, Ida and Nicole likely faced similar fates. What upset me most was that Katie and Gail had described exactly what I would have expected to come of these lives, had I allowed myself to think about it. I had known all along, in fact, as I kept my distance and demonstrated to myself—with a steady stream of accomplishments, affiliations, and acquisitions—that those things were not happening to me.
I say this not to belittle the friendships my present life is buoyed by, nor to trivialize the successes that, unlike many people, I will never have to doubt I have earned, nor to call into question the sincerity of my love for Madison, with whom, almost always for better rather than worse, I have been smitten since the day we met. No one takes a step without crushing bone. I am merely avowing the remains that have afforded me the traction without which one cannot dwell upon the earth.
“I’m going to see Pascale,” I said flatly.
Chapter Seven
We were expecting a crowd, but there was none. It was five thirty when we approached, the house quiet—uninhabited, I would have thought, based on its state of disrepair. An old, gray Dodge with all four tires removed rested on cinder blocks implanted into the pebble driveway. Rust, like acid, seeped through the driver’s side door and beyond. Black Sabbath screamed murder from the house next door, causing its walls to shake and the ground to vibrate.
Del’s body was at the medical examiner’s office. Pascale had let it be known that the family would hold an open house that night for people to stop by. When I decided to make the trip I had imagined a big funeral—an event at which I could have gone unnoticed, a church somewhere with a lot of people milling around. I envisioned myself with time to get a feel for things, to see Pascale, Ida, Nicole, Sid, maybe even Del’s father, Andre, before they saw me, and to make contact only if it seemed right or even possible. Now I was walking straight for the front door of the tiny, near-vacant living room and felt conspicuous already.
Gail, about to knock, asked, “Are we the only ones here?” She looked at me. “It’s not too late, we can still…”
The door opened.
A tall woman with short reddish-brown hair and square-framed glasses large for her face peered out at us. A smile formed as she acknowledged first Gail and then Katie. Reaching me, her eyes lingered with confusion, and then an almost imperceptible lift in her forehead suggested something else. Suspicion? I stood quietly and watched Pascale as she grew increasingly certain she recognized me. She should have recognized me. I was a little taller, maybe a little thinner, and definitely paler. But my hair was the same—light brown, shoulder length, curly. I had the same green eyes and round face, the same smile.
And I had been close to her once, found my place within these thin walls, tiny rooms, and one bathroom for six—including me, seven—people. I had nestled my way inside this home, in which the crowdedness, the deprivation, the chaos, even the violence converged into a thick mélange of fraught but passionate attachments and fierce loyalties. Pascale had considered me one of her own, insisted I call her Mom. She had come to rely on my cooperative spirit, good grades, and supposed moral certitude as examples to the others. She expected me in the afternoons, cooked the dinners she knew I liked, enjoyed having me around there. I had felt more loved in this house than I did in my own—more seen and appreciated.
Now she crossed her arms, shook her head from side to side, and said, “How do you like that? Look what death dragged in.” Her accent was as heavy as it had ever been.
Gail was eyeing the car. She backed up a few steps to secure herself an unobstructed escape route.
“We mean you no disrespect,” Katie started to say. “Jenna has come all the way from California…”
But I remembered her, knew her comment to me was an invitation, that she was actually glad to see me. “Hello, Pascale,” I said matter-of-factly.
“So you’re a lawyer, I hear.” I nodded. She continued, “Del’s little girl, my grandbaby, belongs with us.”
At first, I didn’t understand the comment. Then I realized the reason Pascale was glad to see me was because she had a plan and she needed me to help make it happen: she wanted custody of Khila. My confusion became awe as I began to wonder if I was there because Pascale wanted me to be. Had she orchestrated this reunion? It had struck me as odd when Gail was among the first people Nicole notified after Del died. But it made sense if Pascale had told Nicole to call Gail, because Gail was her most direct link to me. This family did not ask for help easily, but they needed it now. And the only way Pascale could let me be involved was if she thought I thought it was my idea.
“The law is on her father’s side, but I can try.” Accepting the challenge and hearing it as the invitation back into the fold I’d given up on a long time ago, I boldly stepped past Pascale into the tiny living room and left Gail and Katie, mouths agape, in the doorway. Now inside a space small and cluttered, the immediacy of the walls and the drop of the ceiling left me jarred and disoriented. The room was shrinking around me. No, I’d remembered this house as much larger than it was.
Pascale came as close to pleading as I imagine she ever could. “I was raising her, Jenna. When Khila wasn’t with Del, she was with me. He can’t just take her away.”
Nicole appeared from the hallway. Blondish-brown hair lightly brushed her shoulders, and slight features and light eyes gave her an appearance of innocence and serenity that contrasted with the message the rest of her sent. Multiple silver studs outlined the rim of her right ear, a silver chain choked her lean neck, and she wore blue jeans and a tight-fitting zip-down black leather vest with nothing underneath. A leather purse hung at her hip from a thin strap across her chest.
Focused as I was on her attire, I didn’t see Nicole’s fist until it struck the bone under my right eye. My head lunged backward, and pain ricocheted through my ears and eyes and down my neck. My hands were fists, even before I felt overtaken with rage. White noise buzzed in my ears; I saw double as I forced myself to my senses quickly enough to protect myself from an anticipated second blow.
But as she came into focus, I saw Nicole standing calmly, arms folded nea
tly, waiting for me to join her. Then I noticed her fingers twitching and her mouth tightening and releasing. She twisted her neck slightly, jutted her chin, then dropped it to her chest. Neurological symptoms. I recalled what Gail had said earlier about Nicole having been in and out of psych wards, and I recognized the movements as side effects of antipsychotics, telltale signs of her life since I’d last seen her. My rage dissipated as quickly as it had flashed, replaced by a sadness so heavy it made a canyon of my heart.
“Where the hell have you been?” she demanded.
Calmer now, I knew the slug was Nicole’s way of saying how desperately she had needed me these past years and how much I had let her down by disappearing.
“I missed you, too,” I said, feeling the side of my face, slowly sliding my jaw from side to side. “Still the wild child, I see.”
Katie, barely in the door, looked stunned. She ran her fingers through her fine white hair, blew out a breath. Gail, by the dining room table, glared at me, conveying an “I told you so.”
Shaking her head with disgust, Pascale said, “I told you not to do that, Nicole.” Then, while looking at me, she added, “How can we ask Jen to help us now? I told you, I can’t afford a fucking lawyer.” She turned the bottle of beer she was holding upside down and sucked from it. Her comment was not exactly comforting, but it did confirm my suspicion that I had been summoned.
Nicole ignored Pascale. She tightened her lips, squinted and shook her head. “Talon is not gonna get away with this. He killed her. I know he did. He did it for some fucking insurance money.”
Katie walked over and nervously offered me a cigarette, which I considered and then declined. She put one in her own mouth and lit it with a shaky hand. “Okay,” she stammered, “let’s just everyone calm down.”
Still cloudy from the punch, I wasn’t sure I’d heard Nicole right. “What are you talking about?”
“He killed her. And now he’s taking her kid to butt-fuck Texas.”
Nicole’s fists clenched, then released, and she shuffled from foot to foot, irritably. Her head jerked and her eyes rolled up in her head, then back. Muscle spasms and facial tics marked the ways she’d aged more than time did.
Gail’s disbelieving expression said these were the rantings of a lunatic. Gail had rested her hand on the dining room table. Now her face was bent with disgust, and she was frantically trying to remove from that hand some substance it had come into contact with. It looked to me like chicken shit, but I didn’t dare say.
“Well”—wiping her hand against her shorts—“is there insurance money?” She checked, wiped, checked, wiped. With Gail’s germ phobia, I was just glad the chickens were outside, or we’d have been dealing with a catastrophic health crisis for the next week. Katie sat down on the forest-green couch, the cigarette tilted between her fingers. She too was watching Gail and trying not to laugh.
“Two hundred thousand dollars,” Nicole blurted out.
“How do you know?” I asked.
“Del told Ida about it.”
Pascale nodded along emphatically from where she was perched on the arm of the couch near Katie. Her body framed by the large picture window behind her, she gestured unenthusiastically toward an open envelope sitting on the table. “Says she had a heart attack and drowned.” Pascale muttered on about how impossible it was for Del to have died the way the medical examiner said she did. Her anger exaggerating her accent. “They don’t know what they’re doing. I told those kike doctors I don’t understand half of what is written there. No one will explain anything.” She got more and more worked up until she was yelling and hurling insults in different languages at no one in particular.
I removed the document from the envelope and studied it.
“This is a preliminary autopsy report.”
Pascale nodded.
“Already?”
Gail stepped in closer and read over my shoulder. “I’ve heard that drowning deaths in Miami get some kind of priority. It has something to do with encouraging tourism—or maybe not discouraging tourism. Something about tourism.”
I laughed. “Reassurance Miami style—guaranteed a quick autopsy if you or a loved one drowns?”
Now Gail was staring at me.
“What?”
Smugly, she said, “Your cheek’s a little swollen.”
I could feel the tenderness in my cheekbone. I glared at Nicole as I left Pascale with her escalating and increasingly nonsensical ranting to go to the bathroom to see the damage for myself. On the way, I noticed the door to what had once been Del’s bedroom was ajar. I pushed it open, half expecting to find Del there. When I didn’t, it was crushing, like abruptly awakening from a dream in which I’m holding her, only to realize I’m hugging air.
I entered and looked around. The furniture was different. The room smelled of cigarette smoke and stale beer. It was smaller even than I’d remembered it, crowded further by an unmade double bed with stained sheets. The tired antique-white paint was peeling; the faded linoleum floor was torn in places and curling upward around the edges. Curtains yellowed from humidity, dust, and sun covered the jalousie windows from which one or two slats were missing. An insect screen provided a false impression of security. A small dresser held a framed photograph of Del from more recent years. She was holding a little girl—the near likeness of her—securely on her lap, smiling, her eyes looking to something beyond the camera.
From the window behind me, I heard Spanish music and kids talking and laughing. I looked out to the lawn across the street where a group of adolescent boys and girls faced each other in two lines, boys in one, girls in the other. A woman was instructing them in a dance routine. The kids were silly but mostly paying attention, some of the girls much taller than the boys. I heard someone say the word cumpleaños, so I assumed this was a rehearsal for a quinceañera. Del had been planning hers when I met her, but by the time she did turn fifteen, her parents’ marriage had deteriorated and Pascale’s drinking had become a daily event. Del’s father Andre gave Del a silver-link necklace for her birthday, and Pascale did bake a cake on the day itself, which we had with dinner. But it was Norma, at that time still immensely fond of Del, who decided to throw her a party.
*
We celebrated Del’s fifteenth birthday at the Sand Dollar Motel. Norma and Mel provided all the food and drinks and a big cake, and we invited a bunch of friends to a night party on the pool deck. It was January 1983, and Thriller was hitting the top of the charts. Michael Jackson’s voice amplified from a bulky portable cassette player while a bunch of people did the moonwalk off the diving board into the heated pool. Katie was off on the beach with Jason Schwartz, a football player she was dating. Andrew Torie and John Mason sat on opposite sides of Del vying for her attention. I watched Del flirting in two directions at once. Upset and jealous, I left to take a walk on the beach with Gail and our other soccer friends, Edie and Susan. We put rum in our Cokes and drank as we walked.
“Brent was hilarious.” Susan was laughing and talking at the same time. “Did you see him on his hands on the diving board?”
“I saw you seeing him,” Edie teased.
They had been best friends since kindergarten.
“Yeah, and? Maybe I think he’s cute,” Susan said.
“You’re being quiet, Jen Jen.” Gail tilted her cup to her mouth and took a swig.
Mostly, I didn’t like getting high or drunk, because even back then I worried about feeling out of control, but I was quiet about all that. I’d developed strategies for looking the part—holding a drink in my hand, passing a joint nonchalantly without ever really having hit on it. As was typical, I had taken a sip of the drink I was holding and then surreptitiously tossed the rest some distance back. Now, with images of Del squeezed between John and Andrew making my gut twist, I regretted it.
“Pour me some of yours.”
“You finished that whole cup?” Gail shook her head and poured. “Be careful or your parents’ll catch you.”
&nb
sp; The air was cold, but mild. The sand was soft and almost white, reflecting the moonlight. I noticed couples we knew disappearing into or emerging out of the sea grape caves that outlined the beach—shirts being rebuttoned, zippers being zipped. Katie and Jason were one such couple, and I watched them giggle and cling as they made their way into the dense, leafy caverns. It would never be like that for Del and me, I thought. We would never be that public or that unself-conscious about our feelings for each other. We would never be admired and envied for how cute we were together. We made out, fondled each other in her room at night, but it didn’t seem to register as anything. Del, I was convinced, would cut me off physically the minute a guy got her attention. In fact, Del hadn’t been on a date since our first kiss that past November. She hadn’t had a boyfriend since the summer when we started spending all our time together. Recently she had told me she didn’t want to date anyone, she felt better about herself now than she ever had. In that moment, with Del on the pool deck flanked by Andrew and John, these details seemed purely coincidental to how close she and I had become.
On our way back to the motel, we ran into Del walking with John on the beach. She had his jacket on for warmth. He had his hand on the lower part of her back, and she was leaning into him and laughing at something he had said. When I heard her laughter, I shrank inwardly, felt myself fragment into tiny pieces. The conversation started in my head. I began preparing to let her go, began telling myself it was bound to happen. A moment later I was angry that she would do this to me—just trash us like that.
When she saw us, Del stiffened and pulled away from John. “Hey,” she said, mostly looking at me.
I jutted my chin at her, uttered an effortful hey. Bombs were exploding all around us, but no one else could hear them.
“We’re just going for a walk,” Del said. To me, “Do you wanna come?”
I continued past her, just her eyes following me. “We just got back.” Someone announced from the pool deck that Norma wanted to cut the cake.
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