No Witness But the Moon

by Suzanne Chazin

  When Vega’s session with Lorenzo and Waring was over, Sergeant Lasky came in with the paperwork that officially put Vega on paid administrative leave until further notice along with a referral to counseling. Vega didn’t like the sound of either of those.

  “How long before I can return to full duty?” The last thing Vega wanted right now was to have nothing to do but sit and brood.

  “Typically, the administrative leave lasts for a week or two while your department and the district attorney’s office sort through the evidence,” said Jenkins. “After that, it’s up to the department whether you go back to full duty or modified desk duty.”

  “In other words, punishment detail.”

  “That’s an administrative matter, Vega. I have no control over that. The faster this is resolved in your favor, the better your chances of putting it behind you.”

  “Will my name be in the papers?”

  “The department won’t put it in any official releases for twenty-four hours. But it will be in the public record,” Jenkins explained. “If the press wants to get ahold of it, they can. It just depends on how newsworthy they consider it to be.” She thrust out a hand. “I’ll be in touch if there are any developments.”

  They parted in the hallway. Vega began heading toward the back of the building to sneak out to his truck. Teddy Dolan caught up with him and began steering him to a conference room.

  “I got you a personal escort.”

  “I don’t need an escort.”

  “You’ll want this one. Trust me.” Dolan opened the door and there was Adele, sitting by herself at a long table. Her bob of silky black hair looked ruffled and static-charged from some hat she’d just removed. Her lipstick had long ago faded. Her mascara had gone soft like a water-color around her eyes. She was still the most beautiful thing Vega had ever seen.

  “You came.” His voice was hoarse and throaty. He tried hard to control the pitch.

  Adele’s full lips parted slightly. Her deep brown eyes searched his. She reached up a delicate hand and tucked a wad of hair behind one ear. It was such a simple gesture, one she did so often. But it brought an instant lump to Vega’s throat. It made him want to bury himself in her arms and cry right there. But he knew he couldn’t. And so he stood frozen in the doorway, afraid to touch her with his darkness, afraid to contaminate her world with the poison that was now his own.

  “He needs to decompress,” Dolan told Adele. “Take him out the back way.” Then he flicked a gaze at Vega. “Take care, Jimmy. See you around, okay?”

  The way Dolan said it made Vega wonder whether he ever would.

  Vega hugged Adele as soon as Dolan left the room. He leaned over and whispered a husky thank-you into her hair. She smelled of vanilla and limes and something entirely her own. He wanted to take her to bed with him, huddle under the blankets, and never come out.

  “My car’s out back,” she told him. “Leave your truck here tonight. You can fetch it in the morning. You’re in no condition to drive home.”

  “But Sophia—” Vega knew Adele didn’t like him sleeping over when Sophia was in the house.

  “Peter agreed to keep her for the night.”

  “You didn’t tell him, I hope.”

  “No.”

  Vega heard something sad and spent in her voice. And he understood what he hadn’t wanted to before: he couldn’t keep this a secret. Even if Peter didn’t know tonight, he would know. Everyone would know before the week was over. Friends. Family. The cops in his band. His ex-wife’s neighbors. Classmates Vega hadn’t seen in twenty years. He was sticking his head in the sand if he thought he could keep this a secret.

  They snuck out the back entrance. Everything felt shameful now. Vega laced his fingers into Adele’s. He was hungry for her touch but it felt as tentative as her voice. When she smiled, there was something forced around the edges. He didn’t press. They walked past Vega’s Ford pickup, the black paint gelatinous under the cold wattage of floodlights. Adele’s pale green Prius was in the visitor’s parking lot, farther up the hill. She powered open the doors and Vega strapped himself into the front passenger’s seat. The silence between them felt like a third person. Adele fumbled to undo the buttons on her coat. She had trouble steadying her hands. Vega gave her arm a gentle squeeze.

  “It’s okay, nena. It’s going to be okay.” He couldn’t believe he was the one consoling her. But in an odd way, it made him feel better. By soothing her, he was soothing himself. It gave him an outlet for his pain.

  They sat in the car for a moment, their breath clouding white. Adele didn’t look at him. She stared out the windshield. “You didn’t tell me he was unarmed.”

  Vega stiffened. He was going to tell her. Of course he was. But not like this. Not when everything was so fresh he could barely sort through it.

  “Dispatch told me he was armed. I didn’t know until—” He turned to her. “How did you find out?”

  “I overheard some of the cops talking while I was waiting for you.” Adele fiddled with a cross on a chain around her neck, sliding it back and forth. She seldom wore it. She was only nominally religious. “I drove over here picturing a gunfight. A struggle—”

  “Would you rather I have been in intensive care?”

  “Of course not!”

  Vega picked at the skin around his cuticles until they bled. He didn’t know what to say.

  “People from La Casa are already calling me,” Adele told him. “They’re saying they heard that the police shot a Central American dishwasher in Wickford.”

  “You didn’t tell them I’m involved, did you?”

  “No. But it’s bound to come out. I feel like I’m in the middle. My clients assume I know things I don’t and I don’t know things I do.”

  Silence.

  “Jimmy, I need to know what’s going on.”

  “There’s nothing I can tell you. I’m not allowed to talk about the shooting. You know that.”

  “But you can tell me the man’s name.”

  “I don’t know it—not for certain, anyway. And even if I did, I couldn’t give it to you until my department makes it public, and that won’t be until after his next of kin are notified.”

  “Was he part of that gang? The one that raped that girl in Quaker Hills?”

  “In all likelihood? No.”

  “He had a criminal record I assume.”

  “I have no idea.” Did she think he ran background checks on suspects while he was racing to a crime in progress?

  “Then how could you . . .” Her voice died away. They both knew what she was asking.

  Vega ran a hand through his hair. It was sweat-dried and coated in grease. He needed a shower. “I know you want me to open up about everything right now. I want that, too. Believe me. Nothing would feel better than to unburden myself to you. But I have to do the right thing here. And the right thing is not to discuss the shooting. Not with you. Not with anybody. For your sake as well as mine.”

  “But people will assume that you did something wrong.”

  “I know.”

  “How am I supposed to defend what I don’t know?”

  “I’m not asking you to defend me, Adele. Just maybe not to—”

  “Not to what?”

  “Not to judge.” Vega swallowed hard and kept his gaze on his hands. He was already failing Isadora Jenkins’s shame rule. “People are going to say a lot of stuff about me in the coming weeks—bad stuff, in all likelihood.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m a cop who shot an unarmed suspect. Turn on the nightly news and ask yourself who the media is going to believe.”

  Adele’s cell phone dinged with a text message. She fished it out of her bag. “I just want to make sure it’s not Sophia.” She frowned as she read the text.

  “Is Sophia okay?”

  “The text isn’t from Sophia. It’s from Dave Lindsey.” The chairman of the board of La Casa, Adele’s Latino community center. “Dave says one of our clients heard from his cousin th
at the dishwasher who was shot worked at Chez Martine, that French restaurant in Wickford.”

  Vega looked out at the highway that ran alongside the building. Headlights flashed and faded like shooting stars across his field of vision.

  “Jimmy? Is that true?”

  He didn’t answer. He felt like he’d flicked his finger at a domino this evening and the trail of tiles kept continuing to fall.

  “Oh God, please say it’s not true.”

  “Don’t tell me you know this guy?”

  “I’ve never met him before in my life,” said Adele. “But if he’s the dishwasher from Chez Martine, I know his daughter. She’s Sophia’s babysitter, Marcela.”

  Chapter 4

  Marcela Salinez followed the sound of Spanish chatter and unfolding metal chairs. Her knees buzzed with the sweet reprieve of being able to sit for an hour. Today, she’d cleaned three large houses. Twelve bedrooms in all. Eleven bathrooms. A dozen mirrors. Walls and walls of glass. Then she rushed home, put a plate of tamales into the oven for her family, grabbed a quick shower, and headed out the door to La Casa, Lake Holly’s Latino community center.

  This was her Friday night routine. These women were the only people who understood her, truly understood her. Not her husband, Byron. Not even her other friends, the ones who could tuck their children into bed at night. For the hour Marcela was with these women each week, their children became more than just stilted voices over a long-distance phone line or grainy fishbowl images on an ancient computer screen. Here, in the safety of La Casa, they could laugh and cry as they shared stories of holidays and celebrations they would never know except through the time-lapse photos that papered their tiny apartments and au pair suites.

  The women called themselves Las Madres Perdidas—The Lost Mothers.

  Their children lived in locks of hair and lost baby teeth that sat in boxes on the women’s dressers, as if they could be mailed piecemeal over a border that would never let them reunite any other way.

  This was the last time Marcela would ever attend one of their meetings.

  She wasn’t a lost mother anymore.

  “Okay, everyone! Time to take a seat,” said Rosa Or-doñez, the founder of the group, as she finished setting out cake and coffee beneath posters exhorting people in English and Spanish to Dream Big! and Learn Something New Every Day!

  The women gathered in a semicircle in front of a dusty chalkboard and balanced cups of lukewarm coffee and store-bought cake on their knees. They chatted to one another about nanny and housekeeping jobs that never seemed to pay enough and rents that only went up. They compared currency exchange rates and the best places to wire money back home. Finally, the talk died down as Rosa took a seat.

  “We have something to celebrate tonight,” said Rosa. “As some of you already know, a ‘special gift’ has arrived.” That was the euphemism they all used—regalo especial. They all knew what “special gift” meant. It was the only gift any of them wanted.

  “Marcela,” said Rosa. “Please share with everyone your good news.”

  Marcela took a sip of coffee and smiled shyly over the rim of her cup. She was thirty years old. There was a time not long ago when her dimpled smile and long dark eyelashes used to turn men’s heads as they’d once turned Byron’s. Fatigue had worn her down of late, made her eat more and sleep less. She compensated with home-color kits that turned her hair every shade of dark red and bright lipsticks that made her feel at least a little more attractive when she contemplated another day of scrubbing toilet bowls and ironing shirts.

  She felt older than her thirty years even though she was one of the younger women in the group. There were mothers in this room ten and fifteen years her senior, women who had left their countries when their children were babies and now worked to support two generations of offspring they could never see. Marcela wondered if her good fortune would only fill them with more sadness and frustration.

  “My thirteen-year-old daughter, Yovanna, has arrived from Honduras,” said Marcela softly.

  A flurry of questions flew out of the women’s mouths about the girl’s journey.

  How much did you pay?

  How dangerous was the crossing?

  How long did it take?

  Did immigration stop her at the border?

  Did she spend time in a detention center? “Ice boxes,” the women called them. Hieleras in Spanish. The detention centers at the border were known for keeping detainees—even small children—in freezing cold quarters without blankets to punish them for crossing.

  Outside this room, no one could speak of such things. Not to employers, some of whom didn’t even know the women had children. Not to friends whose own children were here. Not even to the staff at La Casa. The staff knew that such things existed. But they could not partake—or even appear to partake—in anything illegal. This room on Friday evenings was the only place these women could share the photos and stories that kept them from being ghosts on the landscape of their children’s lives.

  Marcela tried to answer all their questions. The basic facts were easy enough to explain. The trip had cost ten thousand dollars—an unbelievable, princely sum. Even after years of saving, Marcela had had to borrow most of it from family. The journey had taken more than five weeks—a period in which Marcela could barely eat or sleep for fear of what would happen to her daughter. Would she be raped? Beaten? Jailed at the border? Held for ransom with dozens of other desperate migrants in some brutal Texas safe house?

  Yovanna hadn’t been jailed at the border or held for ransom. Those two things Marcela knew. She’d prayed every day to Saint Toribio Romo, the patron saint of immigrants, for Yovanna’s safe crossing. And her prayers had been answered. Sort of. No one had warned her about the nightmares. Or the anger. Or the fact that Yovanna would be so far behind in school that even in a special class for non-English speakers, she would be frustrated. No one had warned Marcela that she would leave behind a tenderhearted little girl and get back a sullen teenager who blamed her for everything. I left for YOU, Marcela kept shouting. But Yovanna only ever seemed to hear three of those four words: I left YOU.

  “You are so lucky,” said Guadalupe Carrillo wistfully, tucking her graying hair into a bun at the back of her head. Guadalupe was a live-in nanny who took care of three American children while her own three children grew up in Guatemala. Guadalupe had tried twice to get her oldest son here but he’d never made it farther than southern Mexico before getting caught and turned back. Since his last attempt, he’d suffered a broken jaw and the loss of his two front teeth after several gang members beat him up. He was only fifteen.

  Ana, a Honduran who worked at a nail salon, couldn’t hide her envy. Her nine-year-old son had lived apart from her practically his whole life. She narrowed her gaze at Marcela now.

  “And how is your husband adjusting to having a stepdaughter live with him?”

  Marcela played with her empty coffee cup. She had a sense that Ana knew even before she asked the question what the answer would be. It was the same for all of them who had new relationships here. But even so, she felt defensive. She chose her words carefully.

  “He is—hopeful—that Yovanna will be a good big sister to our three-year-old son, Damon.” Marcela tried not to think about Byron’s real words to her when she told him Yovanna was coming: We have a child already. Why must you bring your daughter here? Where will she sleep? How will you support her when we can barely support our son?

  Byron needed time, Marcela told herself. He was a good man. He was just very—practical. He carried his practicality with him everywhere, like the soles of his feet. They had a tiny three-room apartment. Marcela, Byron, and Damon already slept in the only bedroom. Yovanna was stuck with a borrowed cot in the living room. It was a cramped life.

  My nineteen-year-old’s in Honduras, too, he’d pointed out during that terrible argument. You don’t see me moving her in with us! Marcela didn’t remind Byron that his daughter was grown with a child of her own and a
mother nearby. Nor did she point out that her sorrow was different from his. A mother’s wholeness lives outside her body. It beats in the breast of another. How could he expect her to live the rest of her life with a divided heart? To inflict on Yovanna the same fate that had been inflicted on her as a child?

  She had to go back to her early youth to recall a time when her heart hadn’t felt divided. If she closed her eyes, she could still smell the perfume sweetness of ripe sapote fruit dangling from the tree in their dusty courtyard where her older brothers kicked around a bundle of wrapped tape and pretended it was a soccer ball. She could still feel the pearls of sweat on her father’s neck as he hoisted her up on his shoulders to watch the priests in glittery robes carry a giant statue of Jesus through the narrow streets of San Pedro Sula. Later, in her teenage years, she could still see the boy with hooded eyes, big dreams, and fast hands who used to woo her in the back of a rickety delivery truck, despite her mother’s warnings that neither the boy nor his dreams would stick around.

  The women in this room understood. Here in this semicircle of cold metal folding chairs, they were first and foremost mothers even if, in the rough economics of their world, loving their children meant leaving them.

  The talk soon turned to the usual worries, the sense of impotence that distance and closed borders bring. Elena feared her daughters in El Salvador were being beaten by her in-laws. Elena called them all the time but the girls could never speak freely because the grandparents listened in on the phone. Ana’s ex-husband had stolen their son from Ana’s mother’s house and dumped him at his own parents’ farm where they worked him to death and refused to send him to school. Guadalupe’s seven-year-old daughter was complaining of stomach pains regularly but Guadalupe’s mother was too timid and old-fashioned to take the child to a hospital. So much was out of their control. They came here to earn money to provide a better life for their children. They lost their children in the process.