This Little Light

by Lori Lansens

  “So you know who we are?”

  “I see you come in the dark.”

  “You saw us with Javier?”

  “Yes. I watch the TV. I see the bomb. I see you come in the night.”

  “We didn’t plant that bomb.”

  “Everyone are looking for you.”

  “You know about the bounty? I mean, you obviously know.”

  “Yes.”

  “So why didn’t you…?”

  Fee interrupted. “Why didn’t you let him call the police? Why didn’t you call the police? It’s two million dollars.”

  “I don’t believe.”

  “You don’t believe we’re guilty?” She shook her head. “I don’t believe.”

  “Why?”

  “My mother…she tells me Reverend Jagger is a bad man.”

  “Your mother? How does your mother know about Jagger Jonze?”

  “Her cousin work for him in the Beverly Hills. She clean his house. She know.”

  “Wow. Wow. Okay.” We looked down at the curtained-off room. “Where is she? Your mother?”

  “My mother has the cancer. She with God.”

  Poor kid. Poor bald, bruised, red-white-and-blue Patriot Girl. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” I tell her. “Sure your father won’t wake up?” I ask. He looks like he might never wake up.

  She nods. “Not for long time. Is not my father. Is my father father. Mi abuelo.”

  “What’s your name?” I ask.

  The little girl lights up, like it’s the best question she’s ever been asked, and she takes a big breath before she says, “Paula. My name is Paula.”

  “Paula. That’s a beautiful name,” Fee said.

  “Yes. A good name.”

  “I’m Feliza, but everybody calls me Fee. And this is Rory.”

  “Yes.”

  “You know you saved our lives?” I said.

  Fee goes, “You are so brave.”

  “I am just Paula.”

  “Are you sick too?”

  “I don’t have the cancer.”

  “But your head…”

  “I have the lice. Mi abuelo shave me.”

  I feel relieved to hear this. Fee does too.

  All of a sudden I remember. “Wait. Your dog? Where’s your dog?”

  “Dog?”

  “Perro? The black pit bull?” I say. “He is dead. Abuelo kick him very hard.”

  “Fuck. I mean, sorry. That’s awful. That’s so awful.”

  “It’s better. His life is bad. I bury him in the woods where we play.”

  “You buried him already?”

  “I bury him in the summer. When he die.” She looks at us, confused.

  “The summer? But last night? We heard your abuelo beat the shit out of him.”

  “No.”

  “But we heard him calling for Perro, and then there was all the crashing around.”

  “My dog is called Blackie.” She drops her eyes.

  So she is Perro. Her grandfather beats her and calls her Dog. That’s her life. Choose happy. Right.

  “So, do you, like, drug your abuelo a lot?”

  “Yes. I give to him the pills mucho times.”

  “Sleeping pills?”

  “In his whiskey.” She counted off on her little fingers. “Vicodin. Percocet. Tramadol.”

  Fee looks appalled. I’m frankly impressed. Paula’s an angel, but her halo’s pretty warped.

  “So many pills left from my mother. I give to him the pills so I can play with my dolls. And for when he is too drunk and too mad.”

  “Right. You like the Patriot Girls,” I say. “But why do you have to drug him to play with your dolls?”

  She doesn’t answer. Instead, she runs back into the curtained-off part of the trailer and returns with a big black backpack. She presses it into my hands and says, “I put clothes. His clothes. They small. Is better for you to go in the shed now. Sometimes his friend comes here.”

  I realize I’m still holding the peanut butter knife and put it back down on the counter. We take the backpack, gratefully, and head for the door.

  Fee stops. “Come with us. Come to the shed with us.”

  “Paula come?” It’s like we’re inviting her to Disneyland, she gets that excited.

  I go, “It’s not really safe, Fee. I mean, Paula, you understand people are hunting us?”

  Paula’s abuelo let out a long, low fart. Safe? It’s all relative? Right?

  Paula goes first, acting casual, trying not to be blown away by the winds that’ve kicked up pretty hard during the time we’ve been in the trailer. The chopper has flown off, because of the wind, or because he thought the area was clear. I’m afraid he will come back around for another look.

  When we’re sure the sky’s clear, and no humans are lurking in the bushes, we run, the three of us, back to the relative safety of the metal shed. Paula heads straight for the corner, and digs into one of the white plastic garbage bags I was so afraid to open, and unearths a Patriot Girls doll and a matching outfit from the dry leaves and lawn clippings.

  Paula goes, “Yesterday I be Maggie Martin. Today I be Hannah Good!”

  “Cool,” I say. “We used to love Patriot Girls too, right, Fee?”

  “Yeah, but Paula, why do you keep your dolls here?”

  “It’s Nina’s dolls. She is dead. Hurt in her head. I never know her. Mr. Javier give to me the dolls and tell me hide them here.”

  “I still don’t get it. Why do you have to hide your dolls in the shed?”

  Paula shakes her head. “Abuelo.”

  “Nina had Patriot Girls dolls? They cost a fortune,” I say.

  “The people give to Nina when they daughters don’t want to play no more.”

  Oh. My. God. Shelley packed up my Patriot Girls dolls years ago, along with the matching outfits that I’d outgrown too, and told me she was gonna give them to her clients’ kids. That’s actually my doll. I know it. My fucking Hannah Good doll.

  “Your abuelo’s gonna wake up eventually,” Fee says.

  “Yes.”

  “He beats you. A lot?”

  “Yes.”

  “Fucking asshole. Sorry. But.”

  “I know those words. I have the cable. And the Twitter.”

  “What are you, like, seven?”

  “I am ten. I am small.”

  “So, fourth grade? Fifth?”

  “No school. I am illegal.”

  “Oh, Jesus. Paula…like, my mother’s an immigration lawyer and she’s gonna help you. We’ll figure something out. I promise.”

  “Okay.”

  Paula digs into her backpack and takes out two half-frozen gas station burritos. “The microwave don’t work. I don’t have no more soda. No water. Abuelo don’t have the filter.”

  “Thanks, Paula. It’s okay—Javier’s said he’d come back with help. When does he usually get home?”

  “When the sun go down, Mr. Javier is coming home.”

  Paula digs deeper into the backpack and starts pulling out the old work pants and sweatshirts, baseball caps and T-shirts she stole from her grandfather.

  I couldn’t wait to get out of my cursed fucking Mishka. Fee couldn’t wait to ditch her Prada. We start peeling off the gowns—thousands and thousands of dollars shredded and puked on and bled over. I’m so grateful for the dingy T-shirt and the brown work pants and even the ball cap that keeps my dirty hair off my face. I fold up one of the other shirts to use as a makeshift pad. Feels like a diaper, but better than free bleeding.

  Paula changes into the Hannah Good Patriot Girls dress over by the window, her back to us, keeping a lookout for hunters and drones. I don’t mean to look—I wasn’t being my usual creepy voyeur self—but both Fee and I turn when the little girl knocks over one of the suitcases. And that’s when we notice that Paula is wearing little boys’ undies, and inside those undies is a little boy’s penis.

  Paula doesn’t see us see her penis. Fee and I just looked at each other. Everything is illuminated
. Why the old man hates the kid, and won’t tolerate her playing with dolls and wearing her Patriot Girls dresses. That old man beats this little kid because she is an aberration to him. A dog. Perro. He calls her freaking Perro. When she told us her name was Paula, maybe it was the first time she ever said the name she’s given herself. Her real name. Javier knows about her, though. He must know. Javier’s protected her. Well, as best he could.

  Paula took her grandfather’s phone from the side pocket of the backpack and showed us. “Abuelo have the VIV tracker app.”

  “VIV tracker app?”

  “For you.”

  “There’s a freaking app?”

  “Yes. There is a freaking app. Also, Abuelo have the app for the police. He is procit. Don’t have a driver card. Too much DWI.”

  “Makes sense.”

  “I get blue alert if police are nearby.”

  “Oh my God. That’s amazing.”

  “I can stay here with you?”

  “Yes, Paula. Stay with us,” Fee says.

  “And I come after?”

  “Come after?”

  “To where Mr. Javier take you? Rory? I come?”

  Fee and I look at each other like, um…

  “We don’t know where he’s taking us or how soon we’ll be, like, safe…”

  “Me too.” The way she says it, like, yeah, every day she’s in danger, so leaving with us doesn’t exactly feel risky.

  Fee hugs Paula. “You can come with us, Paula. Wherever we go.”

  Paula reaches into the black backpack and pulls out this old electronic game—merch from The Dancing Dina Show. That’s probably mine from when I was little too. Paula goes, “You play Dancing Dina with me, Fee?”

  Fee laughs and nods. Life is bizarre. An hour ago I thought we were dead; now Paula and Fee are curled up with each other, passing the game back and forth, giggling like kindies, and this, I think, is what joy looks like. It’s not happiness. It’s a moment of connection.

  I think we have at least a couple of hours before Paula’s abuelo wakes up from his tramadol dreams. Javier should be home by then. I still can’t believe that Paula is here. And that she brought us burritos, which are still half-frozen, and which I’m ridiculously excited to eat.

  The last time I felt joy was orientation night. Which is ironic. We were driving to the school, me and my hive, in my Prius. The dads were meeting us there. Jinny wasn’t with us because she was riding with her father and Jagger Jonze. It was like old times, me and my girls, music cranked, singing at the top of our lungs, and there it was…joy. Seems like a thousand years, but it was just a little over a month ago.

  Orientation night. We were pretty fueled for that. Even me. In spite of what I knew about Jinny’s Jesus-freakishness, and in spite of the shifting vibe of the Hive, I was pretty eager to get dressed up and go fangirl over the preacher man. I figured Sherman’d be hanging with the dads, so I wouldn’t have to deal with that, and meeting Jonze—like I said—I thought it was gonna be oh so cool to take selfies with him. How many likes and fresh follows would we get from that, right? A lot. Plus, because he was a personal friend of Jinny’s dad, he was gonna hang out with us at Hutsalls’ after the official thing at the school. When the other girls heard about that, we were the object of some powerful envy.

  I think, for the good Reverend, orientation night was all about the promo pieces he makes—the commercials like the ones they’ve been showing of us on cable news. Plus, we paid—well, our fathers paid—a premium for having Jonze host the whole shitty fucking thing, and that night we got to hear his personal story—not like we didn’t know most of it because Internet, but still.

  Tables and chairs had been set up in the ballroom on the far side of our massive school campus, but the rehearsal was pretty casual. No flowers or fairy lights. No candles. Chick-fil-A for dinner, though the AVB charged a grand a head for the orientation part. Quite a markup.

  The night was one disappointment after another. We’d already picked out cute dresses and shoes and then we get this AVB bulletin telling us we gotta wear our school uniforms. Seriously? We all felt ugly in our tartans.

  But when I laid eyes on Jonze from across the room, in his tight white Armani T-shirt under a blue cashmere blazer and Cavalli jeans that totally showcased his package? As hot as he was, my vadge clenched and my nips inversed and my whole body just went, No.

  When Jinny dragged him over to meet us, I was already holding back. A “specimen” is what Brook called him. And he was. But you could see, or I could see, something feral about him. He didn’t even look at us as Jinny introduced Feliza, and Brook, and Zara, and Delaney, because his eyes were darting around the room, like he was scanning for prey. He only turned his attention to our little group when Jinny said, “And this is Rory Miller.”

  I knew by the way he looked at me that he’d been told I was a Jew. Or a heathen. Or both. I could smell his distaste.

  “Shalom,” he said, making prayer hands at me.

  What the actual fuck?

  “I told the Reverend about all my new friends,” Jinny explained, staring up at him with reverence—and what I realized later was actual lust.

  The other girls stood knock-kneed and watched as he put a hand on my shoulder. “All are welcome,” he said with his mouth, but not his eyes. Definitely not with his eyes.

  Nothing about orientation night went the way I thought it would. I’d been looking forward to taking some celebrity selfies, but after meeting him there was no chance I was gonna promote that anti-Semitic miscreant. When Zara asked to take a pic and he sternly reminded us that phones had to be checked at the door, I didn’t even care.

  Before he moved on, the Reverend told us he was really looking forward to getting to know us later at the Hutsalls’, where he promised we’d have a great rap sesh—that’s what he called it—about the pledge and all. He also said we should go get in line for our filmed AVB interviews. I nodded enthusiastically, along with my friends, afraid he’d hear my thoughts. When Jonze walked away, the girls circled me, crying no-fair that I’d gotten special attention. Oh my God.

  After we did the brief on-camera interviews, the dads segregated themselves at tables on one side of the room and we girls sat in our cliques on the other as the Reverend took the stage. First he sent the younger girls, eighth grade and below, out of the room to watch a movie with Mrs. Piggott. Then he said, into the microphone, “Dads. Papas. Fathers. Daddies. And young ladies. This is my story. It’s real. It’s uncensored. It’s the story of what brought me to Jesus and how I came to stand before you today. It’s a cautionary tale, and an important one for you and your daughters to hear. May the Lord Our God be our guide tonight.”

  I bet half the dads there were going, Wait? What?

  “Amen,” we all said.

  We knew his story. I mean, everyone knows his redemption story—reprobate from the streets of Chicago finds Jesus blah blah—but hearing it from him was still pretty powerful. He could sell anything to anyone with that million-dollar mouth.

  “My mother was a homeless teen drug addict who left me in a bar called Jonze’s Joint in Cabrini Green when I was barely a week old.” A pretty good opener.

  “The only thing anyone could ever tell me about her was that she looked to be about fifteen years old and was wearing a Rolling Stones T-shirt when she said she needed to use the bathroom, passed me over to a waitress and disappeared forever.”

  I couldn’t help but tear up. Mother loss is my worst fear.

  “I grew up in an orphanage, then foster homes, angry, violent, without love, without human contact—at least none that I wanted. I changed the name they gave me—John Jonze—to Jagger Jonze when I was ten years old. It was a way to feel close to my mother, and a way to never forget where I came from. I had a hard heart. A lot of hatred. I had love for my mother, though. I forgave my mother for abandoning me. I respected my mother for not murdering me in her womb. This was back in the days when women had easy access to abortion, but she ma
de a choice not to kill me. I saw what she did as an act of love. Can I get an Amen?”

  The rest of the crowd gave him his Amen. I couldn’t.

  He went on. “Trust me here, dads. I’m telling you the truth. I never had God in my life. Never went to a church. Never heard a sermon, or sang a song of praise. I didn’t know God from the drug dealer down the street. I didn’t understand the wages of sin. You beautiful girls here today are already blessed to have the Lord Jesus God in your life and in your heart. But I was hollow. An empty vessel. My only friend was an old guitar I found in the trash. I learned to play the Rolling Stones, by ear. ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’ was my anthem.”

  As he spoke, Fee noticed his tattoos peering out from beneath his collar and cuffs and elbowed me to look. The Hive is hot for ink.

  “By the time I got to middle school, I was doing drugs. By the time I got to the middle of freshman year, I was kicked out of my foster home for selling drugs. I was on the street when I was fifteen. There were ways to get money fast. It was easier if you were wasted. I used my body to make money to buy drugs so that I could endure the shame I felt because I used my body to make money to buy drugs…vicious cycle. Horrible godless life. Men. Women. Young. Old. I went with anybody who’d pay me for it.” He hung his head here.

  The dads were uncomfortable. Lot of throat clearing. I don’t think they were primed for this degree of confession.

  “I woke one morning naked in a stranger’s bed. It wasn’t the first time. I had no idea when I looked at the body draped in the sheet beside me if it was a man or a woman.”

  Zee’s dad, only Zee’s dad, shouted, “Amen.” Um.

  “I lifted the sheet, pretty relieved to find the most striking woman, the smallest and most delicately beautiful woman I’d ever seen. Her hair was the color of sunshine and fell over her face and shoulders as she slept. She was so still I couldn’t tell if she was dead or alive. I was afraid to touch her, so I leaned in close to see if I could feel her breath. She opened her eyes. That startled me. And then she opened her pretty mouth and said, ‘Did you rape me last night?’ ”

  Rape? There was no mention of rape in his online story. The dads were looking around at each other, but no one said a word.