by Jenna Rae
“I’ve called you every day.”
“I know.”
“You never answer me. You never call me back.”
Del rolled her eyes. “Do you need my help or not?”
Lola hesitated, shook her head. “Thanks for coming by.”
“I did it for Marco. He was worried.”
“Will you talk to me, please?”
Del turned around so suddenly that Lola took a step backward. “About what? How you snuck out on me like a coward? How you up and left me without a word?”
Lola shook her head. “I didn’t—that’s not what happened.”
Del’s face was a mask of rage. “The hell it’s not!”
“That’s not fair. Did you even read my letter?”
Del whipped the envelope out of her back pocket and shoved it in Lola’s face, nearly hitting her in the eye with a frayed edge. “I read it.”
“I told you, Del, don’t you understand? I love you! I want to be with you. I just want—”
“I don’t give a shit what you want. You gave up the right to tell me what you want when you left me.”
“That’s not—”
“You. Left. What you tell yourself to make it okay has nothing to do with me. I loved you. I would never have left you like that. But you did, so, okay, I guess we’re different. Fine, there’s nothing left to talk about.” And she was gone, slamming the door shut behind her.
“I didn’t leave you. I moved back into my own house. So we could start over and do things the right way. Because I love you. But it doesn’t really matter, does it? You still love Janet, and you and I were over the minute she showed up on your doorstep.”
She stood staring at the door, as though it would open and admit Del, who would somehow have heard what she’d said and understood it and want to work things out.
“She’s not coming back,” hissed Orrin.
Lola focused on breathing. Why was it so hard to breathe?
“I said, she’s not—”
“I heard you,” Lola snapped. “She’s not coming back. She doesn’t love me. No one loves me. I get it.”
Orrin was silent.
“Moving out of her house was the right thing,” Lola asserted. “She may have hurt feelings over the way I moved out, but it didn’t matter. She stopped loving me weeks ago. If she ever really loved me at all.”
She was tired, all of a sudden. Her gaze wandered up to the ceiling, and she tried to imagine a way to make things right and couldn’t.
“I do everything wrong,” she whispered. The kitchen phone rang, and Lola went to tell the woman on the other end that no, she didn’t want to win a trip to Lake Tahoe or receive valuable information about an exciting investment opportunity available only to a select few. She put the phone down.
“It was Janet. She just showed up and played Del like a harp.”
Orrin snorted. “How do you know they weren’t together before that? For all you know, your godless man hater was whoring around with that Oriental slut the entire time you were living in sin with her.”
“Ignore him. He’s a racist, sexist, homophobic monster. Everything’s fine,” Lola told herself. “Fine.”
She looked around the kitchen, and it was somehow filled with the smell of Christopher James. There was no home here. It was only the wreckage of her home. It was all tainted with that day, and his hands and his mouth and his knife and his gun, his pants, his skin, his blood. Lola leaned over the sink to vomit, but there was only retching and noisy, useless emptiness.
Had Sterling smelled it on her—the fact that Lola was spoiled and rotten inside? Was that why she’d been so strange? Maybe that was why Del turned to Janet for something clean and unspoiled. Maybe she was too wrecked to ever be anything but a lightning rod for violence. Maybe that was why Orrin turned into a monster. Maybe that was why they all turned into monsters. Maybe it had always been Lola, all along, since the day she was born. Maybe that’s why her parents gave her up. They could smell the rotten inside her.
“It’s all my fault. It was always my fault. I was always the problem.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Sitting in the stone castle the old man has built to please me, I try to convince myself I am worthy of my mission. How can I be? But maybe the unworthiest vessel is made worthy by her mission. This is what I tell myself when my doubts and despair overcome me.
I am more than what I have experienced, after all. Still, I am drawn back into the scenes of my life against my will and surrender to the wallowing with guilt. I remember my life in a series of snapshots, like still photos from a movie I saw a long time ago, drunk or high or whatever.
Scene: a malnourished, silent, hollow-eyed toddler, huddled in a closet, covered in urine and feces and bruises, shrinks against the rat-infested back wall of the closet when the door is yanked open.
Scene: a kindergartener with a black eye and a broken arm—in that spot halfway between elbow and shoulder where abused kids always seem to sport a broken bone—pretends not to know how to read. Being smart draws adult attention, and if there is one thing this kid understands it is that adult attention is a bad thing.
Scene: a gaunt, blank-eyed twelve-year-old, pregnant with her father’s child, closes her eyes while the cash-only, no-insurance doctor with a suspended license performs the first abortion to the sounds of pop music. The girl will forever hate Madonna, Sinead O’Connor, Mariah Carey and especially Vanilla Ice.
The scenes get blurrier after that. No more furtive reading, a thing she had forgotten doing. No more daydreaming of a better future once she is able to get away from her father. No more hope. The girl, thirteen, is drunk and letting her youth pastor pull down her panties, mostly because he reminds her all the time of how smart she is and how pretty and how nice. At least he is willing to talk sweetly to her, and he even gives her a little money and a beer and some Xanax. The girl, fifteen, is on her knees in front of her father, smiling up at him through the haze left behind by the fat marijuana cigarette they have shared, ready to earn her keep the way she always has, first on her knees and then on her back, because Daddy is greedy and wants it all. The girl, sixteen now, is living in her boyfriend’s car, kicked out by her father when she turns up pregnant for the fourth time and he doesn’t want to pay for an abortion for a kid who could be anybody’s. She feels the baby kick and squirm inside her and smiles, wishing she didn’t have to get an abortion this time. Maybe her boyfriend will help her. Maybe they can raise the baby together and give her a good home. The baby’s a girl, the kid’s sister-daughter, and she’s healthy, according to the nurse practitioner at the clinic. There’s a squeal as the boyfriend yanks open the car door and pulls the girl out of the car. He’s drunk, angry, and starts hitting her. Everything goes dark.
She next remembers earning money on her knees in the manager’s office of a bar she has sneaked into. The girl, finally almost eighteen and unaware of it because she’s hooked on the little pills her new boyfriend—she refuses to think of him as her pimp—has used to keep her docile and needy and working the street. She gets beaten by a particularly brutal john and nearly dies. In the hospital, they abort yet another baby, and she realizes she cannot keep track of how many babies she has had sucked out of her. The next day is the first time she tries to kill herself.
Then it is a blur of social workers and doctors and nurses and orderlies and telling people what they want to hear and blowing some and letting some fuck her and lying and stealing and pretending to listen to people who are less intelligent than she. She is bipolar, she is schizophrenic, she is narcissistic, she has borderline personality disorder, she has post-traumatic stress disorder, she is faking mental illness as part of her drug-seeking behavior. She is anti-social, has religious mania, is unipolar with depressive features and schizoaffective presentation with dissociative features and a bunch of crap she doesn’t even remember anymore. She is whatever she needs to be in order to get out of whatever legal hold they place her under, and she has a dozen
different diagnoses. It doesn’t matter. They put her in the hospital, they let her out. They take away her drugs, they give her other drugs. They fuck her mind and they fuck her body. None of it matters.
Then she starts reading again, mostly because she is clean and sober for a few days and not yet doped up from the new meds cocktail and is bored in the game room of whatever hospital she’s in for another ten-day hold. And the reading saves her. She starts to feel things again, which is scary, but she holds on long enough to get herself let out and to find a library and a menial job and a studio apartment to sleep in.
There’s a slow blur as she flounders through the next decade or so, trying to build something like a normal life. She tries on jobs and colleges and churches and men. She tries on different personalities, never quite feeling authentic in any of them. After several wearying years she is ready to give up on authenticity and focuses on being able to pretend well enough to get people to buy the act. She learns to talk the right way and dress the right way and read the right books and listen to the right music, and people start to treat her the way she always wanted them to. One day a nice old man comes along and wants to take care of her, and she marries him. It’s strange, kind of hating him and kind of liking the way he loves her. When she’s well, she can do what she wants as long as she comes home to him. When she’s sick, he makes sure there’s someone to take her to the hospital. He never makes her feel anything but safe and free, and she figures maybe this is the closest to love she can feel. But then she meets her friend, and her friend helps her find her mission, and she knows there is real love, and it is the love she feels for her lost girls.
I blink and the movie ends and I am here. I have my mission, whether it comes from God, as I sometimes think, or from some other unknowable source inside or around me, as I often believe. It will redeem me. I have murdered my own children and my own soul, and I am perhaps beyond all hope. But I don’t really believe this, not inside of me. I can save the souls of other girls, the ones who cannot save themselves, and this’ll have to be enough penance, because it’s all I can do. I have come to believe that one of these girls is my savior, as I have been—with the help of my dear friend—the savior of so many others. All I can do is save the lost girls one at a time and hope one of them will save me.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Del glanced at the clock with surprise. How had half the day slipped by? She headed for physical therapy with a sense of relief. It would, she thought, be nice to focus on something not related to Janet. The therapist, a young woman with dark blue hair and what looked like several dozen tattoos, made it easy to forget about Janet. Nicole was calm, encouraging and the toughest taskmaster Del had ever encountered.
“A Marine, huh?” Del pointed at the bulldog on Nicole’s well-toned arm.
Nicole’s dark eyes twinkled. “If you’re surprised, I’m not working you hard enough.”
Del let go a shaky laugh, too tired to respond further.
“I know it sucks, but this is the only way to rehab that arm and shoulder.”
Del nodded, not wanting to waste breath on words. By the time Nicole released her, Del was barely able to stand, and she slumped in a plastic chair in the reception area and took a breather. Ignoring the glare of an older woman across the waiting room, Del pulled out her cell and called Phan.
“What’s up?”
“You ever find out about Wilson? She need a psych intervention, or what?”
“Oh, no, she’s not paranoid, Mason. She’s just more insightful than the rest of us. Remember?”
“Ha-ha. We need to close the open question of who the mother is, Phan. If we don’t they’ll round file the missing daughter, you know that, and I’m not able to sign it off now.”
“Why’s that, partner?” Phan let the silence develop for a moment. “Oh, yeah, because you were too goddamn stubborn to take care of business with your injury. Yes, now I remember.”
“I’m sorry, Phan, I really am. I just—no excuses, okay? I should have taken care of it, and I didn’t. I fucked up, and that means extra work for you. I’m sorry.”
“Just take care of it now.”
“I am. I just had PT, which, by the way, sucks balls.”
Phan chuckled. “Serves you right. What have you gotten done on the missing women? On Hahn?”
“Nada. I spent the first half of the day trying to get somewhere, and there was nothing, nothing I could see. Oh, shit, I gotta get a car. I’m not supposed to ride the bike for a while, ’cause of my shoulder.”
“Renting or buying?”
“Buying.”
“Sucks.”
“It’s about time, I guess. The Boulevard’s bigger than the Rebel, but it’s still not exactly a passenger vehicle. Lola—anyway, I’ll call you after.”
Two hours later, she was several thousand dollars lighter and piloting a battered white Ford Ranger. It was nearly twenty years old, but the engine seemed sound enough. The tires were pretty new, and the brakes were good. She’d settled for an automatic transmission, and it was strange, steering with her right hand after twenty years as a cop had trained her to steer with her left. But her left arm and shoulder, burning after her first round of physical therapy, needed the rest.
Del tried to tell herself buying the truck had nothing to do with getting prepared to dodge a possible tail but gave up the pretense after trading in her cell phone for a newer one. The Droid was, according to the saleswoman, a computer and a GPS and an address book and God only knew what else. It didn’t matter, really. She used the new phone to call her partner, after looking up his number in her notebook.
“Come over for dinner. I want to see your truck. Plus, Kaylee can program your phone for you.”
Del was touched. She hadn’t told Phan that she was lonely and freaked, but he’d obviously figured it out. Then she smirked. Maybe he just wanted a buffer between him and Kaylee. “Want me to bring a pizza or something?”
“I got it. Bring whatever you want to drink. Come by at seven, yeah?”
“See you then.”
By nine, the extra large pepperoni was demolished, Phan had nearly given up trying to prove his truck’s superiority to Del’s and Kaylee had programmed Del’s phone and typed up a set of instructions on how to use it. The tween, still baby-faced and in her school uniform, grabbed the sheet from the printer and handed it to Del.
“Thanks,” Del said, flashing Kaylee a smile.
“No sweat.” Kaylee picked at her fingernails and shrugged. She’d been quiet the whole evening, and Del had the feeling that she wanted a break from her dad.
“Hey, take her for a spin.” Del tossed her keys at Phan as he came out of the kitchen. “Drive my baby and tell me she doesn’t kick your ugly little toy in the teeth.”
Phan was quick, she had to give him that. He dropped a nod and a wry smile.
“Back in a minute.” He gave a wicked grin. “Unless your piece of crap dies on me.”
Once he’d left, Kaylee’s tension visibly lessened.
“Good riddance.”
Del raised an eyebrow.
“Sorry.” Kaylee peered at her from under her lashes. “He kind of irritates me, you know?”
Del considered. “Sometimes he irritates me too.” She blew out a breath and shrugged. “Not as much as most people.”
Kaylee rolled her eyes. “He just wants to control everything I do, and—why am I even telling you this? Whatever.”
Del made a face. “At least your dad gives a shit. My dad was a drunken asshole.”
Kaylee’s eyes widened at Del’s deliberately inserted profanity. She looked so much like her dad! Del fought a smile.
“Seriously?”
“Big-time. Didn’t much care what I did, long as I stayed out of his way.”
“Doesn’t sound so bad.”
“Wasn’t, mostly, but I knew if I needed anything I was on my own.”
Kaylee narrowed her eyes again. “Everybody’s always on their own.”
&nb
sp; Del waggled her head. “I guess, at the end of the day. But if I needed something, your dad would help me. Has helped me. He’d do the same for you—and a lot more.”
Kaylee shrugged and turned away. “Whatever.”
“Maybe it’s just part of becoming an adult,” Del offered. “Being annoyed by your parents. Otherwise, maybe you’d never leave home. Stay with them until you’re my age.”
Kaylee smirked. “God, that’s pathetic. What about college?”
Del laughed. “Not everybody goes to college.”
“Only if they suck at school.”
Del shrugged this away. “What college are you going to?”
“I don’t know. Maybe Caltech, if I can get in. Or Cal. I’m not sure.”
“Cal, I know. That’s UC Berkeley, right? Tell me about Caltech. Where’s that? What do you like about it?”
Del listened as Kaylee detailed the various attributes of the apparently amazing southern California college, hiding her astonishment that a supposedly apathetic middle schooler was so highly focused and goal oriented. She didn’t sound like a kid who’d lost her way but a kid who knew exactly what she wanted and how to get it. Del refrained from saying this, sensing adult approval would only annoy the girl. Delight overcame Del as she heard Kaylee’s exhaustive rundown of the various merits of Caltech, and she wondered at the source of the feeling. Whatever discontent and unhappiness the girl was experiencing, she had the hopefulness and confidence of the safe and well loved. Thinking back on her own childhood and adolescence, recalling the hundreds of children and teens she’d seen on the job, Del could only wish everyone had lived Kaylee’s life. Imagine what the world would be, Del thought, if every kid had this girl’s upbringing!
Phan’s footsteps pounded up the stairs and Kaylee interrupted herself and drifted away. “Call me if you need help with your phone, Del. I programmed my number for you.”