by Ashley Love
I throw my hands up. “I just…Sam, I love him.” I don’t feel I owe her any other explanation. In truth, I don’t know if I even have one.
“And that’s fine, but what about you? Where do you fit in to all of this? This bullshit doesn’t sound like it’s going away anytime soon.”
I sigh, grabbing for the stack of papers again, feeling my tolerance for her lecturing start to wear down. “You just don’t get it. We’ve been through a lot…”
“You’ve been through too much. This boy has put you through hell and back. It’s time for him to get his life together. If anything you could do or say was going to fix him it would’ve happened already.” She waits for me to look up and I don’t, my lips pursed to keep them from trembling with anger, to keep from shouting. She finally mutters low enough that I can hear her, “I can’t believe you’re still doing this to yourself.”
Before the last word is out of her mouth I stand up suddenly, my chair almost flipping backward from the force of my legs pushing back. I start to gather my things calmly and deliberately. “I’m not. I’m not doing this to myself. Any of this.” I laugh, unamused. “I’m not doing this.”
“Leala…Leala, hold on.” By the time Sam grabs her things I have one foot out the door, but she catches me just as I step out of the building. “Leala—”
“Maybe I’m scared if I give up he won’t do it, okay? What about that?” I ask, angrily whipping around to her. She stands and says nothing as the door shuts behind her. When it closes and we’re both outside, she takes a deep breath.
“And say you stay, and he does do it...the day’s gonna come where he tells you it was all for you, and not him. He’ll resent you, Leala. How’s that gonna feel?”
I turn away when she snaps at me, but don’t move far as her tone changes back from one of judgment to one that’s seemingly filled with pity and I feel pathetic and I want her to shut up.
“At least if you leave him to his own problems…if he doesn’t make it out of that mess, it won’t be on you. But in the meantime you’re getting nothing accomplished for yourself. Sure, you’re looking for schools and jobs but you’re playing it safe—”
I narrow my eyes at her. “To be fair, I don’t know that I’m in a position to be a risk taker.” I start toward the parking lot and she’s quick to follow.
“Point made, but still, you won’t look for jobs or schools more than fifty miles outside of L.A. Don’t tell me you’re staying here to be close to your family, 'cause I won’t buy it.”
I want to argue with her, but she’s got me on that one. I wait for her to continue, and inevitably, she does.
“You’ve always been a free spirit. You never gave a shit about what anyone wanted you to do, you knew what you wanted.”
“And look where it got me,” I say over my shoulder, laughing loudly. She sighs.
“Okay, so you channeled it a little obscurely, but that was a culmination of your mother’s iron claw on your life, and being eighteen, and a boy with a cute smirk and absolutely no responsibility or debt to society looking for a sidekick.”
When we reach my car I slap my folder of paperwork onto the hood, turning to her with an exhausted look.
“You made your mistake,” she assures me.
“And now it’s time to get up?”
“Yes. Yes, grasshopper.” She does her best Chinese bow and I laugh, damn her.
I sigh, groaning aloud as I run my hands over my face and then through my hair, messing it at the roots and I want to be angry at her for not understanding but she’s so damn logical and has my best interest at heart.
My shoulders finally slump in defeat and all I can ask is, “You realize you called him cute, right?”
The smile slides right off her face. “You’re not helping your case right now.”
19
Aimee calls as I’m dropping Sam off at her and Michael’s condo. She needs a favor, of course, and when I ask what, she tells me that she needs to return the coat hanger that Aunt Shelly gave her as a wedding present. I know precisely which coat hanger she’s talking about, and if I were her, returning it wouldn’t exactly be the first idea I had for staging its disappearance. But she’s the nice one, or so everyone says.
“Why can’t you just take it back?” I ask, explaining that I’m tired and nowhere near her side of town.
“Just help me out for once,” is her huffy request, as if I always do the exact opposite. Then she tells me Kevin has her car for the night and I narrow it down to the fact that she can’t drive his stick-shift Jeep. So I’m stuck with Aunt Shelly’s iron coat hanger.
“It’ll fit in the trunk, don’t worry,” she assures me of this as I agree to her request and start toward the other side of town.
I pull into the driveway and honk the horn, in no mood to stay and chat because I know it will end with me more pissed off than I already am about losing sleep and this damn coat hanger with…gargoyles, I remember now as she comes down the walkway toward my car and it’s even more hideous than I recall.
“Are those…?”
“Yes. Take it back,” she says as I eye it suspiciously. I get out of the car and she hands the monstrosity to me and it’s heavy and smells like pine, the metal fixtures fastened to a carved board made to hang on the wall, but not in any of our homes. The gargoyles all frown at me moodily.
“Why would someone buy you a—”
“I don’t know. Take it back.” She runs a hand over her dark hair, sighing as if it kept her up all night like a real life annoyance, like a baby or a migraine, not the ugly iron and pine that it actually is.
“Alright. Done.” I shrug, and she thanks me, asking if I want to come in for a bit and I say thanks but no thanks, still holding the ugly iron heads, feeling them heavy and pressing into my ribs on their outward curved handles. I want this thing out of my sight.
Aimee says goodnight and disappears inside and I reach inside the car to open the trunk, but when I get around to the back, something stops me dead cold, almost making me drop the pine board onto my feet.
A duffel bag.
It’s worn gray canvas with blue stitched seams and handles, two zippers pulled together to the middle and secured with a luggage lock. Squared corners of the inner contents poke out against the shape of the bag, distorting it. From the contours I could guess bricks were inside, or blocks of some kind.
I slide the coat hanger into the backseat long enough to jerk the handles of the bag up and it’s so heavy I can barely lift it, smudged with dirt I can now see since its presense has registered as reality. I half expected to see it gone when I came back from tucking away the gargoyles on the plank. I tug at the zippers but can’t get enough light from the streetlamp nearby to take a guess at the contents.
“Can I ask why in the hell you’re doing this?”
A paper tag flutters off of one of the handles.
“This bullshit doesn’t sound like it’s going away any time soon.”
With my name on it.
Call Kyle.
In Lex’s handwriting.
“Guess it takes a special kinda dumbass to let everything else get in the way, huh?”
With shaking hands I slam closed the trunk of the car and decide that the gargoyles are plenty safe in the back seat, closing the door immediately after. I slide into the passenger’s seat and put the key into the ignition but my hands are shaking so hard I can’t drive anywhere until I at least have some idea of what in the hell is happening.
So I take out my cellphone and I follow Lex's instructions. And when Kyle answers the phone there’s only one thing I really want to know.
“Why the fuck is there a duffel bag in my trunk?”
* * *
“So, let me get this straight…”
I try to give him a broken recount of the events he’s spent the last hour putting in order for me. Computer passwords, numbers transfers, pawning electronics, product purge, it all runs together
and ends with every cent of Lex's savings and the value of all his possessions in a duffel bag hidden in the trunk of my car and his house completely cleaned out and void of all drug evidence, of all evidence period. Couches, flatscreens, tables, everything of monetary value—gone.
The plan had set into motion the night Lex called Kyle from county jail, and had been set up almost a month prior. This way the police would find nothing more to bring against him in court had rehab not been an option.
“You were the safest hiding place,” Kyle finally concludes, and my head is still spinning.
I rub my temples with the pads of my fingers. “God, what is this, capture the fucking flag?”
“Well, to be fair, you’re the one who didn’t open the trunk of your car for a month,” he mutters petulantly, slouching further into the seat, staring at the dash.
I cut a look at him sideways. “You know there’s plenty of places in this city to dump a body, right? If I killed you right now?” He swallows and blinks, not acknowledging my empty threat. I sigh, impatient. “When did he hide it?”
“We both did. While he was staying at your place.”
“The night you took him out. When he brought back those drugs…” I grow quiet, stare at the stitching of the leather steering wheel, watch the thread weave in and out thinking about that night.
“Look, I’m sorry about that. I knew he shouldn’t do it, I just—”
“Couldn’t tell him no,” I supply, before he can summon up some excuse. I look over at him. “Just like everyone else.”
“Don’t use this to punish him for all that shit. He’s doing his time, okay?”
“No, he’s not,” I say, irritably. “He’s sitting up there talking about his fucking feelings, with people who actually wanna help him.” And then it dawns on me. “He talked you into this shit, didn’t he? Said you’re his boy, that he needs you?” The thought makes me sick to my stomach.
“He made me a promise a long time ago that he would look out for me. So I gotta look out for him, too,” he answers defensively. “You love him, I know you do. You want to get him out of this mess.”
“Don’t bring love into this, you manipulative little shit,” I snap, then shake my head, realizing this entire conversation is getting more and more pointless. This poor kid won’t listen anymore, no more than Lex would. “God, you sound just like him, it’s disgusting.”
I rest my head in the center of the steering wheel, careful not to set off the horn, though I’m sure the sound would be welcome in the silence. All these years I’ve been involved with this shit, I always thought Kyle was the only one of these motherfuckers with his head on straight. I cannot for the life of me understand why he would get me in the middle of something like this. How did none of us see this coming before?
After a minute, he finally says, “Listen…what’s done is done. Now it’s something else.”
“Naturally...”
“We need to get the money into bank accounts.”
“And why, exactly, can’t you do that?”
“I started to, and I remembered that my name is on that old police report from Felix’s arrest. They can link me to Lex and all that shit if they try and trace the accounts. So I called Lex up and we figured it out.”
I sit back against the seat, laughing unhumorously. “You just…figured it out, huh?” I give him an exaggerated shrug and a look that says I’m not pleased nor buying any of this.
“You’re a clean slate.”
“Yeah, no shit, and I’m trying to keep it that way.”
“Listen, he’ll protect us. You know that.” He raises his voice, but I shout over him, at the end of my patience and willingness to go along with this shit silently anymore.
“How? How is he supposed to protect us when he can’t even look out for himself right now?” I slam the heel of my hand into the steering wheel, wrapping my fingers around it tightly to prevent from pounding it over and over and over. I grit my teeth, pressing my forehead to the back of my hand then and try to even my breathing. “God, he’s still doing this shit,” I sigh dismally. I don’t know if I can’t believe him anymore as much as I can’t believe I’ve gone along with dumb shit like this for all of these years, expecting a different outcome than this, still, than what he’s doing to me five years later. “How do I know there isn’t something else down the fucking road? This is all his idea, right?” I look over at Kyle, starting to get worked up again. “How do you even fucking know what you’re getting yourself into, what you’ve gotten me into now?”
“Hey, don’t spin your headtrip shit on me, alright?” he comes back, angrily, shutting me up. “This is Lex we’re talking about. He’s been my boy long as we both can fucking remember and you know that.”
I say, matter-of-factly, “Yeah, yeah, he’s your boy, I get it. But that means you more than anyone should fucking know how he is.”
“I trust him.”
It’s all he offers. There’s something sick about it, something sad, a blind need to belong so badly, just as badly as when he was sixteen and wore every sneaker and jersey and jacket just the same as Lex, two sizes smaller. He walked like him; he talked like him. I think about what Lex said just the day before. About how he didn’t give a shit about any of them. About how he lied to get ahead.
“What, you don’t trust him anymore?”
It’s exactly what Lex would ask.
“Kyle…” There’s an ache in the pit of my stomach, a pain that I can’t stand at the thought that this…all of this, it’s been a game all along.
“Do you?”
I’m not sure what I’m even supposed to trust him with anymore. Everything I’ve given him he’s broken, destroyed. He’s smoked it all away, sold it, wasted it, played with it so unconcernedly. I can’t even give Kyle a straight answer, for fear it would be a lie. Or finally the truth.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” he asks, when he realizes I’m not going to supply the response he wants, or any at all. “He’s just tying up loose ends. Once this is done, everything will be over. It’ll be over, Leala,” he says again. “So are you gonna fucking help out or not?”
20
I call the center early the next morning. Anxious, shaken from no sleep and wondering how all of this will play out. They don’t want to let me talk to him, try to tell me he’s in group, having a session, try to pretend they’re fixing him. I tell them it’s important, listen to elevator music until the line clears again.
“Why the fuck would you do this to me?” It spits from my lips before he can get as much as a hello out of his mouth. “I stay up half the fucking night, worrying about this shit, can’t sleep—”
“Leala, listen to me.” He doesn’t even question me, and his tone suggests he knew this call was coming. Maybe Kyle got to him first.
I ask again before he can talk his way out of anything, “Why the fuck would you do this to me, Lex?”
“I tried to tell you, the other day, when you were here, I tried—”
“You tried? You tried?” I laugh in disbelief. “No. You didn’t try, you didn’t say a fucking word except you didn’t wanna lie to me anymore!” I could outright jump through the phone and strangle him.
“I wanted to tell you!”
“Well that did neither of us any good, did it?” I spit nastily.
“I didn’t know what else to do! I had to get out of that shit!”
“You know, it’s not even that, it’s the behind my back part that I can’t swallow. Why didn’t you tell me from the beginning? Kyle made it sound like you’d had this shit all planned and waiting for a while. You couldn’t find a moment in the last three weeks to tell me about this shit?”
“And what?” he asks over me. “Have you say no and me be out of options? I didn’t think it would take this long! This was all supposed to be over by now!”
“Oh, that’s the understatement of the fucking year,” I deadpan, and it’s quiet for a moment
, both of us letting it sink in.
“Just…just help me out, alright?” he asks, frustrated, and I’m not sure if it’s because he’s caught in his lies or because he has to beg with me a little for once. “For fucks sake, I’m just trying to get all this shit off my back.”
“And on to mine?”
“This isn’t about you,” he pleads.
“Exactly. It’s about you, its all fucking about you, as always. You didn’t even think about the repercussions of this for me, did you? Did you?” I ask. Then, “Answer me dammit!” when he doesn’t respond.
“I wasn’t trying to hurt you.” He’s quiet, and I soften a little.
“Well you did. Now I’m knee deep in shit and you’re still over there trying.” It’s petulant. It’s petulant and pouty, under my breath, and it angers him, my ability to so effortlessly be a constant reminder that he’s still fucking up. As if he doesn’t know enough himself.
“Tell me what else I was supposed to do,” he says heatedly, flustered. “Tell me! 'Cause if you can think of a better plan, then please, by all fucking means…”
“You were just supposed to be honest with me.”
It’s hard, even for me, to believe that the solution is that simple.
“Well I fucked up, okay? How’s that for honest?”
“It’s a start,” is what I resign to quietly after a moment. He sighs.
“Look, if you don’t want to…then fine, I understand. I’ll just…figure something out.”
I roll my eyes. “Oh yeah, nice fucking guilt trip.”
“Well, what do you want me to say?”
“I don’t even know,” I snap, pressing my forehead into the palm of my hand. “Just…just don’t talk right now.” I squeeze my eyes shut, still holding the phone to my ear. I listen to him breathe on the other end.
“You know why I’m doing this,” he finally says, quietly. “You know the cops are watching me. They see any mass sum transfers, any activity that looks like trafficking…I’ll get jerked out of here so fast…”