This Little Light

by Lori Lansens

  “And what about my father?” I asked. “Has my father been detained?”

  Javier shook his head. “Police say Mr. Sherman is helping with the investigation.”

  Helping with the investigation? I’ve barely seen my father since the beginning of eighth grade. Sushi dinner every few months and only because my mother bribes me with Sephora. I cannot look at him, my mother’s soul mate—he used to say that all the time—without seeing the biggest hypocrite on the planet. I hate hypocrites more than anything. And he’s the worst. A straight-up liar who lies. My father knows nothing about me now. How in the fuck could he be helping with the investigation?

  “Please don’t call my father,” I said.

  I had no doubt that Javier knew what had happened between my parents. People knew. After they split, Sherman married someone semi-famous, so his wedding was semi-news.

  Javier nodded. “I won’t call your papá.”

  “We can stay?”

  He pointed outside. “You can stay in the shed tonight. Tonight only. If someone comes—if they find you—nunca he visto.”

  “Gracias,” I said. “Javier, I’m sorry to…but I have to…Is your wife awake?”

  He looked at me strangely. “My wife? No esta. She is deported.”

  Fuck. That was sad to hear. Plus, this made my next question super-awkward, because I couldn’t figure out a way to describe to this savior of ours my urgent need for a sanitary napkin and my hope that his deported wife might have left some in the bathroom.

  I looked at Fee, dead pale and clutching her gut, but somehow she had my back. Or my vadge in this case. We tried to string together the Spanish words—not in this order—woman—rag—pad—blood.

  Javier took a hard look at Fee beside me and said, “You don’t speak Spanish?”

  Fee shook her head tragically. “No hablo español.”

  I explained to him in Spanish, but I’ll write it here in English. “Her mother is a housekeeper and Feliza was raised with an English family since she was a baby. She grew up with us in Hidden Oaks. She doesn’t speak much Spanish.”

  But Fee somehow remembered the Spanish word for bandage. “El vendaje,” she offered, pointing at me.

  I remembered a word too. “Putacachuca.”

  Years ago, my parents had a client who shot her husband in the foot for calling her a dirty putacachuca. My mother, hearing the word but not the definition, thought it’d be a cute name for a cat. Mommy.

  Javier made me repeat—twice—”El vendaje para la putacachuca?”—just to make sure he was hearing right. Rough translation? A bandage for my whore’s vagina. Then he checked the sky, black and empty but for the moon and stars, opened the screen door, motioned to the shed and said, “Go now.”

  We ran.

  He could have been a rich man right now if he’d shot us, or tied us up and called the authorities, instead of giving us shelter, even if it’s just this dirty toolshed. Plus, he waited out a search copter arcing over the mountain toward the beach, and then he ran out to the shed with two old blankets, and a sleeve of Saltines, and two bottles of water and a paper towel roll with, like, five one-ply sheets left. His wife had left no stash of la venda para putacachuca.

  Before he closed the door, Javier warned us in no uncertain terms not to leave the shed. Then, pointing to the silver Airstream trailer next door, he warned, “Don’t let him see you.”

  Fee and I both drank the water Javier’d brought us in one long gulp. Fee’s came right back up. All of it, in a foamy mess on the ground beside us.

  I was seriously about to cry, for the first time all night, because hiding in a shed and menstruation and my mother’s detained and Fee’s puking, but the shed door creaked open, scaring the shit out of me. It was Javier again. He pulled the pink laptop I’m typing on now from under his arm, saying, “The signal reaches out here. Puede ver todas las noticias. It’s better to know. Don’t try to contact anyone. No use sus medios sociales. They’ll track you here if you do.”

  I figured the laptop must belong to one of his kids, because pink, and then I flipped it over and saw there was a Miller Law sticker with the password written in Sharpie. America321. A gift from Sherm and Shell. Serendipity.

  * * *

  —

  Fee just lifted her head and asked me to stop typing because the noise is hurting her ears. “I’m so thirsty, Ror.”

  “I know.”

  “What is even happening?”

  How can I answer? I do not know. “It’s okay, Fee. Try to sleep. You’ll feel better in the morning. And we’re gonna figure it all out. Don’t I always have your back?”

  Fee nodded and closed her eyes, but before she passed out again, she whispered, “Malibu Sunset.”

  I laughed, then felt queasy, as I always do, at the mention of our most secret secret. Back in sixth grade, Fee pocketed a red lipstick at the mall drugstore. It was just the two of us running an errand for her mother, while she was running errands for Tom Sharpe. I didn’t know what Fee’d done until the bald security guard grabbed us both by the arm and yanked us into this tiny, windowless room at the back of the store. He told Fee to empty her pockets and she set the gold tube on his desk. The old dude picked up the lipstick, turned it over, and read “Malibu Sunset” from the sticker on the bottom. Then he shook his head tragically, saying he had no choice but to call the police, and our parents. Store policy. He sat behind his desk, and must have hit some unseen button, because the door suddenly locked behind us.

  We waited, trembling, as the guy sat there watching us squirm. Finally he goes, “I don’t want you girlies to get in trouble for one little lipstick. I wonder if there’s something we could do?” I dug into my pocket and found the fifty-dollar bill I’d grabbed from my jewel box on the way out the door. I was eleven yet understood extortion.

  The old dude took the bill and slipped it into his shirt pocket, and told us he’d keep the police out of it but he still had to call our parents. “Or,” he said. “Maybe there’s something else you two girlies could give me.” Fee and I shared a look. We didn’t need to discuss. We turned back to the old perv, lifted our shirts and gave him a three-count flash of our tender buds in their little cotton bralets. When we pulled our shirts back down, he hit the button on his desk. The door unlocked behind us, and we bolted. We ran through the drugstore and into the mall, then out to the parking lot to Morena’s empty car, and sat scream-laughing in the backseat, imitating the slurry way he’d said, “Malibu Sunset.” The ickies, as Fee called the feelings, would come later. I cried in my bed that night for betraying my boobs.

  We didn’t tell our parents about the drugstore perv. We would’ve had to say why we’d ended up in that windowless room. We didn’t tell the other girls because they’d have judged Fee for stealing. I never asked Fee why she lifted the lipstick when I had money in my pocket and would’ve bought it for her. “Malibu Sunset” became our code for when shit was getting all too real.

  This laptop is my savior. To be able to write about what is happening right now? While I’m living it? Not to mention the access to information. Knowledge really is power. I cannot even imagine, as bad as this is, what it would be like to be sitting here in the dark, in the dark.

  * * *

  —

  Sherman Miller. My fucking father is helping with the investigation. I’m kinda tripping on that right now.

  I’ve looked online, but Sherman’s not out there shouting that I’m innocent, or calling on people to put down their guns. Like, how would Sherman be helping? By throwing my mother under the bus like he did when they split up? He did that. Threw her under, ran her over, then backed up and rolled over her again, and again, until she was flattened, like in cartoons.

  I was beginning eighth grade when my father slipped away. He was suddenly gone a lot, and when he was home, he was cold and distracted. He’d go out to the patio at night to smoke cigars and talk on his phone, and I’d crack open my window and listen as he confided to my parents’ friends,
and associates and clients, and family members, “Shelley has lost her mind. She’s gone off the deep end. She’s accusing me of having an affair! How crazy is that? I think it’s the menopause. She isn’t sleeping. Hardly eating. I’m so worried about her, and about how all of this is affecting Rory.” The game my father was playing was fucked, and fascinating.

  Because my father was having an affair. And in between sharing his deep concern for my mother and her menopause, he was whispering baby talk to his lover. I heard it all, every repulsive, disgusting thing, but I never told a soul. Not my mother. Not even Fee. I didn’t wanna break the spell. I didn’t want Sherman to stop talking beneath my window, even though it sickened me, and I basically stopped eating. I wanted the truth—craved it like a drug.

  My mother knew. Or at least she was suspicious enough to search through Sherman’s desk drawers, and coat pockets, and phone and computer while he slept. She discovered the texts and pics and hotel receipts and perfumed notes signed by “Sugar Tits.” I’m still not over that gross nickname. I heard my mom tell her sister, Lilly, on the phone, “My whole life feels like a lie.” When I heard those words, something shifted at my core. If her life was a lie, then mine was too.

  One Sunday morning, while the neighborhood was at church, Shelley confronted Sherman, as I eavesdropped from the landing on the stairs. My father’s rage was so hot I thought it’d set the curtains on fire. Even with the evidence spread out over the glass coffee table in front of them, he called my mother crazy. Crazy. That word. Over and over. Shelley was insane and Sherman the indisputable victim of unfair persecution. It went on like that for weeks, as I listened to Shelley’s firm prosecution and Sherman’s flimsy contradictions through the AC vent in my bedroom, which connected to the one in theirs. And night after night, hiding behind the curtains at my window, I held my breath against the smoke from his Cubans and the stench of his lies. Hysterical/dramatic/volatile/bitter. He used all the woman words. “And she’s gotten so hostile. I’m afraid she’s headed for a complete psychotic break.”

  Sherman left less than two months after Shelley discovered his non-affair because, as he told everyone and his mother, he couldn’t handle another day of his soul mate’s crazy accusations. He told my mother that her emotional fragility was bad for business and asked her to stop coming to the office. She actually did. Instead of lawyering—doing the thing she loved—she fused with the sofa, day-drinking vodka from a coffee cup, inhaling reruns of Dr. Phil and crying for all the other cheated-on wives. She stopped socializing with the neighbors when she realized she’d been the last to know—another fucking cliché—and saw it in all of their faces. Not to mention that the dads stayed bros with Sherm. He still skulks back onto the cul-de-sac the first Saturday of each month for poker night at Big Mike Leon’s house. I heard my mother asking Aunt Lilly on the phone why one of her friends didn’t tell her. “They are my friends, Lilly. They are.”

  My mother didn’t have a psychotic break. She brushed her hair and put on clean clothes most days. She made meals neither of us could eat, asked me about school, and about the Hive, took me shopping, did car pool and groceries. But much of the time I had the urge to snap my fingers to remind her I was there. Or that she was there. She was flustered by everything, and clumsy. She missed steps, missed beats, like her operating system had a bug. She looked like my mother, but when Aunt Lilly came to visit from Vancouver, she noticed it too: the Shelley Miller we knew had been all but extinguished, her light barely a flicker.

  A couple of weeks after he left us, Sherman moved in with Sugar Tits—that toothy actress who sucks hairy-ass in those UpTV movies. Soon after that, he shuttered Miller Law and went to work with the actress’s father in a Christian-owned entertainment corporation on Wilshire, one of those companies that make God-themed inspirational movies. My father also, hilariously, converted to Christianity. Atheist Sherman Miller even got baptized at a box church in the OC. They got married in Montecito before the ink was dry on the divorce. When I refused to go to the wedding, Sherman blamed my mother for turning me against him.

  Poor Shelley. Her confusion over it all broke my heart. To be honest, it also plucked my fucking nerves, because she couldn’t seem to make sense of the most obvious and basic shit. At the beginning of this semester in Psych One we learned the term cognitive dissonance—the confusion that arises in a person when what they believe and understand about life doesn’t line up with what’s happening in front of their face. My father’s affair. American Holy War. Cognitive dissonance. I get it.

  My aunt Lilly, my mother’s little sister, has been her adviser, and therapist, because she had been cheated on too. Lilly understands what they call the Shattering. Apparently there’s a shorthand for survivors of betrayal. Hope I never need to learn it. Just wanna say that I do not believe, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, that every guy out there is a cheating dick. I think there are actual human males in the world who wouldn’t betray their partners. Just, I might have to move to a different zip code.

  I’m glad my mother has Aunt Lilly. Especially in those early days, I was so relieved when she came to visit us, because I couldn’t stand when Shelley would stop in the middle of dinner and say things like, “Remember, Ror, how Daddy would hold my face and say, ‘You are mine, Shelley Miller.’ He did that. Didn’t he do that?” It was like she’d lost confidence in actual reality. What could I say? Yup. I remember, Shell. I mean, Sherman did things like that all the time. I’d loved that cheesy, cornball crap between them. I believed in it.

  Shelley cried so much that first year. Out of nowhere, she’d just start bawling uncontrollably. I heard her describe it to Aunt Lilly as a crygasm—full-body waves of intense, gut-wrenching pain. But really? Soul mate. Soul mate? What a laughable and tragically naive idea. Are you fucking kidding me? You are mine. I am yours. Words. My father wanted to have his cake and eat it too, and in the end he decided he preferred the young actress slice over the aging soul mate slice.

  Aunt Lilly, whose husband left her on their fifth anniversary for a girl he met online, says people like Sherman and her ex—not just men but all people who cheat—commit love fraud. She thinks there should be jail for that. Like, why does a guy who lies and cheats in business have to compensate for the losses but cheaters in a marriage get off scot-free? I see Lilly’s point, but ethics jail is a scary idea.

  When I think about it, though? Sherman did commit murder. He killed something fundamental in my mother. And definitely arson. He torched my family. Grand theft? He stole my innocence, which has nothing to do with my virginity.

  I turned to God when Sherman left us. I was still a believer back then, just like the rest of my hive. I went to the chapel every day for weeks, praying for my daddy to come home. Praying for my mommy’s heart to heal. And for the fiery death of Sugar Tits. When prayer after prayer went unanswered, I got kinda pissed. I should’ve just made voodoo dolls and put my faith in those badass Santería gods. Anyway, I never caught up with Christian God. He was no doubt slammed, as usual, with major American sporting events.

  After a while my mother and I didn’t talk about my father except when she asked me to please see him for dinner in hopes he’d put an overdue alimony check in my hands when he dropped me off from Sushi Planet. He’s a bit of a deadbeat. Forgets to send money. Thank God Shell got the house in the divorce. Thank God she didn’t sell it, even though I know she wanted to move. Aunt Lilly couldn’t understand why we stayed in Hidden Oaks. She wanted us to come home. By home, she meant Canada.

  “Too much. Too soon,” Shell had said. She knew I’d die if I lost everything at once—my dad, my house, my best friends. She put me first. Like always.

  Over the past couple of months my mother’s started working from home, sitting at her computer for hours on end. At least, I think she’s working. She says she’s helping a colleague from the old days with immigration consultations. She almost never talks on the phone, except to Aunt Lilly. I admit I’ve been avoiding my mother lately,
because sadness. Just. So. Done.

  * * *

  —

  It’s been a while since I last looked online.

  The Internet keeps slurping Jinny Hutsall and Jagger Jonze through a fat fucking straw. Does no one sleep?

  People Online just called them the Sexiest Christians Alive. With the hair and the lips and the cheekbones, and that voice, Reverend Jagger Jonze could convince the world he’s the Second Coming.

  Is that his plan? “Thank God for American Girls” is holding at number one. People gotta be hate-listening that shit. And Jinny Hutsall? All those pose-y shots of her in the stunning off-white Monique Lhuillier with the bloodstains? “Ethereal beauty.” “Lit from within.” “Modern-day Joan of Arc.” The media’s calling the two of them the Divine Duo. “Touched by God.” “Sexy Saviors.”

  Jinny Hutsall? This whole fucking nightmare started when she blew into Oakwood Circle with the Santa Anas, also known as the devil winds, the second Sunday of September.

  We’d been expecting her—the new girl who’d be joining our class. Trucks had been coming for weeks, bringing boxes and trunks and furniture protected by plastic and crates. Jinny Hutsall had no social accounts for us to creep, which we wondered about, but lots of parents won’t allow their kids on social these days, and kids have to make fake-name accounts. We didn’t think that much of it.

  All we really knew was that the Hutsalls were relocating from Chicago. Our parents, even my mom, had been curious about the new neighbors, especially after they googled Warren Hutsall’s net worth. Super-rich. Super-connected. Import/export king, but also kinda private and mysterious. My mother said he sounded more triple-gater than double-gater, and wondered why he’d be slumming. Good instincts, my mom.

  We girls were hanging in my room that random Sunday when Delaney looked out my front window and goes, “Oh my God. The new neighbors.”