Hunting Lila

by Sarah Alderson

  ‘What does it mean?’ I asked, to distract him.

  Jack’s jaw untensed. ‘It’s the Marine Corps motto. Always Faithful. The crossed swords are the Unit’s emblem. It’s something we all got done when we finished recon and special ops training.’

  His unit – he’d spoken only sparingly on the phone to me about his unit. I didn’t know much about it at all; it had taken me months even to figure out that recon meant reconnaissance. Though I still hadn’t figured out what exactly they were reconnaissancing. What I did know was that the training had been two long years, for much of which he hadn’t been contactable. That had been difficult.

  A thought occurred to me. ‘Does Alex have one too?’

  ‘Yep, of course.’

  Of course. I could have guessed. I stopped myself from asking him, If Alex drank poison, would you do it too? It was what my mum used to say all the time but I didn’t think the reminder would go down too well.

  ‘He’ll be over later by the way. He can’t wait to see you.’

  My heart lurched. I was sure it punched out of my chest like you see in cartoons. I looked over at my brother, biting the inside of my cheek to rein in my unstoppable grin. I didn’t want him to see how ecstatic that bit of news had just made me.

  Half an hour later we were still cocooned in the air-conditioned cool of the car. I was staring out at the blue ocean to my right, wrapped up in imaginings involving Alex in uniform, when Jack interrupted my reverie with a nod to his left. We were passing a turn-off. A large sign announced the entrance to the Marine Corps Base at Camp Pendleton. Several army trucks were turning in ahead of us.

  I squinted up the road as we passed it by. ‘So that’s where you work?’

  ‘It is indeed.’

  ‘Is it big? It looks big.’

  ‘Two hundred square miles. We’ve been driving alongside it for the last thirty minutes.’

  I thought about that for a bit. ‘Don’t you live on base?’

  ‘No, our unit doesn’t. We need to be near to San Diego and the border.’

  The border? With Mexico, I assumed, not Orange County. I wondered why that was important. The only thing I could think of was drugs, or maybe illegal immigrants, but I didn’t ask as I knew Jack wouldn’t give me a straight answer. He always changed the subject when I asked what his unit actually did. I knew they hadn’t been deployed overseas, thank God, but it seemed a little weird that they’d gone through all that training just to sit around in sunny California, kicking back in civilian clothes and driving fast cars. And, anyway, didn’t the police or border control deal with drugs and immigration?

  A few miles further down the road and we came to Oceanside. It was a small, sun-bleached town facing the Pacific, the kind of place you see in the movies, with palm trees swaying languorously in the breeze. We drove through some back streets, away from the ocean, and pulled up outside a small two-storeyed detached house. It had a square of front yard, with scrappy grass and a wooden veranda running along the front. The house was painted grey. There was an integral garage which we drove up to, Jack hitting a button in the car that made the garage door swing open for us.

  When we entered the house through the internal door, I stopped short. I had imagined something semi-squalid, like his bedroom used to be, and instead I was confronted with a photo shoot from Ideal Home. I caught my breath in the hallway when I saw the little wooden letter table by the door. It looked strange sitting there. The last time I’d seen it had been five years ago, back in our house in Washington. I looked around the house more carefully, spotting one or two other items from our childhood. A whitewashed bookcase in the living room, a framed print of a Klee painting in the hall, an antique coat rack by the front door. No wonder it had appeared so homey on first glance. It was like putting on a familiar old coat in the winter. Even though she’d never stepped foot inside this house, my mum’s touch was all over it.

  The kitchen, which Jack led me into now, was slightly old-fashioned, with a big ceramic sink, crackly lino floor and a flimsy veneer table and chairs. I glanced around for anything familiar in here. The only thing I recognised was a postcard of Big Ben tacked to the fridge door, one I’d sent Jack a year or two back. I wondered what I’d written on the back, probably some barefaced lie about how happy I was.

  I wandered over to it. It was posted amongst a litter of other scraps of paper and one or two photos. I flinched when I saw one was of me, taken the last time I was over in Washington, three years ago. I felt sorry for my fourteen-year-old self when I looked at it. I had a stricken expression, like I was hiding a terrible secret. The irony was, back then I hadn’t even known what terrible secrets were – I’d just been a scared fourteen-year-old, confused by the rift opening up between her dad and her brother, and not sure whether she’d see her brother or his best friend ever again. I resisted the urge to tear the photo off the fridge and rip it up.

  I almost didn’t want to look at the other photo, which I’d clocked out of the corner of my eye. To do so was like tearing off an itching scab: a momentary thrill of satisfaction, followed rapidly by pain and clotting. It was a dog-eared picture of a stunning blonde woman, caught mid-laugh, one of her arms wrapped tightly around a boy who was looking up at her, his head shadowed beneath her chin, blue sky behind them. The boy was Jack and the woman was my mother. The top of another, blonder, head appeared in the bottom left of the picture, but it was impossible to tell that it was me. I turned away, wanting to shield Jack from the picture, then remembered that he had put it there and was confronted by it every time he went to fetch the milk. I guessed that was progress.

  ‘It’s a nice place, Jack. Really nice.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he nodded, ‘it’s good to come home to.’

  I agreed silently, then, experimenting with my indifferent voice, asked, ‘So where does Alex live? I’m surprised you two aren’t room-mates.’ My indifferent voice needed work.

  Jack laughed. ‘Contrary to popular opinion, sis, Alex and I are not joined at the hip. Alex lives five minutes away. He has a very cool bachelor pad on the oceanfront.’

  My heart rebounded back into my chest. Bachelor pad? Of course. It was absurd that Alex wouldn’t be dating girls. He was beautiful, and yes, I was blinded by bias, but it was still an indisputable fact. By anyone. Together, he and Jack had cornered the market in good looks and charisma. When I was about ten I’d had to watch in silent agony as Alex dated a few girls – all older than me, all able to fill a bra – and it had almost killed me to watch. But in the fantasy world I’d created in my mind since leaving, Alex lived in a woman-free vacuum. It was the only way I’d kept myself sane. Now the words ‘bachelor’ and ‘pad’ were being bandied around and my mind was erasing that carefully crafted fantasy and redrawing it with images of hot tubs and women in bikinis.

  Breathe, I reminded myself. This is Alex. Not Jack. Alex, who always played the cool, collected one to Jack’s extrovert. He’d never been one to chase the girls, he was the one who always apologised to them when Jack forgot their names. He would hang back, watching silently with one blond eyebrow raised whenever Jack went in for the kill. And even if he did have a bachelor pad, it didn’t mean he was entertaining streams of women every night, or even any night.

  Yeah, keep clutching at those straws, Lila.

  ‘You hungry? Thirsty?’ Jack asked.

  I certainly wasn’t hungry now. My stomach was in knots. I shook my head.

  Jack led me through into the hallway, where he stopped in front of a small white box on the wall by the front door.

  ‘This is the alarm,’ he said, flicking open the box. Inside was a space-age-looking row of blinking lights and a touchpad with both letters and numbers on it.

  ‘The code is 121205,’ he said. ‘You need to set the alarm when you’re in the house, not just when you go out. If something sets it off when you’re inside, the whole place will lock down. You won’t be able to get out. Just hang tight and wait for me or the police.’

  I
stared at him in silence for a few seconds. I hadn’t taken in the instructions, just the code. It was the date of my mother’s death. Jack ignored my expression and snapped the box shut. I understood the paranoia. Dad had installed an alarm on the house in London too. But having an alarm hadn’t helped Mum.

  Jack picked up my bag which he’d dumped at the bottom of the stairs and waved me forwards, up them. I went first, pausing on the landing, not sure which door to take.

  Jack edged past me to the door at the end of the short corridor. He opened it and let me go first into what was going to be my bedroom for the next however many days he let me stay. It was nice and simple. A single bed, a dresser with a spiky cactus in a red pot on top and a blue comfy chair wedged in the corner – another relic from our previous lives. The window looked out over the back garden. I could definitely make this room my home forever.

  ‘It’s great. Thanks,’ I said, turning towards him. It was kind of awkward, him not knowing why I was there. Me not telling, him not asking.

  He put my bag on the chair and said, ‘Do you want to have a sleep? You could probably use it. I’ve got a few things to do this afternoon. You sleep. When you wake up, we’ll have dinner and talk.’

  Yeah, there, he’d said it, Talk. Guess I knew it was coming. I had a few more hours to think up something to tell him. I glanced at the clock on the bedside table. It was coming up for 3.30 p.m. Sleep was seeming like a very good idea indeed, especially when I looked again at the bed.

  ‘OK, sounds like a plan,’ I agreed.

  I looked at him then walked over to where he was standing by the door. I stopped a few inches away from him and let my head fall against his chest. He brought his arms around me as I mumbled into his T-shirt, ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Hey, no problem,’ he said softly. I felt his lips press against the top of my head and then he left.

  I sat down on the edge of the bed and kicked off my shoes, then fell backwards onto the cool sheets. It felt so inviting but my skin was tacky and glazed from travel and I needed a shower more than I needed to sleep. I groaned and sat back up, glancing around for my bag. It hovered off the chair, unzipped itself and moved towards me. With a shock I realised what I was doing and let it fall to the floor with a thud.

  ‘Lila? You OK?’ Jack yelled from downstairs.

  ‘Er, yeah, fine, just dropped my bag,’ I called back.

  I knelt on the floor, breathing loudly. I had to get this under control. No more using my ability, for anything. That was the rule. I absolutely had to stick to it if I wanted to avoid any more eyeball incidents. Or worse. I had to concentrate. I’d pretty much managed it at school and when I was around people. It was just being tired that made it harder to control. Tiredness and having a knife held to my throat.

  I reached into my bag, feeling for my wash things and a clean T-shirt. It felt weird. I was using muscles I hadn’t used in a while. I was going to have to get used to that.

  3

  I sat on the edge of the bed, feeling dazed from jet lag but buzzing like a high voltage power line had been connected to me while I was asleep. I had been woken up by voices from downstairs; one was Jack – I could hear him laughing and joking around. The other was softer, deeper, and I would recognise it anywhere, even in my sleep. It had broken through my dreams and nudged me into consciousness. Alex.

  The room was gloomy, it was dusk outside. I twisted around to look at the clock. It was 7.30 p.m. but it felt like I’d only been asleep for ten minutes. The jet lag was messing with my body, but not half as much as that voice downstairs was. My heart was racing, I could feel my cheeks starting to burn. I glanced at the light switch and narrowed my eyes – the light flickered on, then straightaway off. I got up, frowning at myself, and flicked the switch by hand.

  A part of me, a big part of me, wanted to bound out of the room and down the stairs right that second. The need to see him was suddenly overwhelming. It felt like I’d been stuck at the bottom of the ocean for the last three years, surviving on one mouthful of air, and now I could see the surface, or an oxygen tank, only a few feet away. But bed hair and a wrinkled T-shirt was not a good look and vanity got the better of me. A few more minutes wouldn’t kill, whereas Alex looking at me and thinking I looked like the inside of a used sick bag would.

  What to wear, though? I’d not been thinking all that straight when I’d packed and consequently discovered a random assortment of clothing in the drawers. I seemed to have covered all bases though, I noted, apart from skiing. I pulled out an electric blue silk dress. I wasn’t sure what scenario would arise where I was going to need that but hey, you never knew. There was also a school shirt, which I scrunched up and fired at the bin. I didn’t need any reminders of where I should be right now. In the end I pulled on some jeans and replaced the T-shirt I’d worn in bed with a purple vest.

  I turned to look in the mirror above the dresser. My hair was all over the place, I’d gone to bed with it wet and was now doing a good impression of a blonde Alice Cooper. I smoothed it flat, hacking a brush through the ends to get the tangles out. I leaned closer to the mirror. I didn’t normally bother with make-up, but tonight I really needed to make an impression. A little bit of mascara, maybe some lip balm. I didn’t need any blusher, that was for sure. I cast my eyes around the dresser, searching for my make-up bag. It was nowhere in sight. I let out a groan. Great. Just great. On the one day I needed to look amazing, to look older, my make-up bag was five thousand miles away.

  I reappraised my reflection in something of a panic. Yesterday I’d looked like a dead thing, now I looked very, very alive. Almost too alive – like I was on something. Which, I supposed, I sort of was. There was nothing I could do about that, unfortunately. I brushed my hair behind my ears and bit my lips to make them redder, hoping to take the focus away from my burning cheeks.

  I took a deep breath, then another. I could do this.

  I made it to the top of the stairs and gripped the banister with all my might. How was it I could make inanimate objects do my bidding but couldn’t get my own legs to obey? I took the first step and the voices in the kitchen cut off in mid-sentence. I felt like an actor about to walk out on stage in front of the world, without knowing the words or even having read the script. I could hear the sound of chairs scraping back so I picked up my pace, wanting to make it to the bottom before they could. I took the next steps two at a time. I caught sight of the top of Alex’s head and inhaled fast, my heart rate skyrocketing. I missed my footing on the next step and went tumbling forwards. In the split second before I hit the wall all I could think was that this wasn’t exactly the reunion I’d fantasised about in my head every hour of every day for the last three years.

  My eyes closed involuntarily to avoid the collision and I braced myself. I hit something good and hard but it wasn’t a wall. I opened one eye slowly, peeking to see. Alex was holding me by the top of my arms where he’d caught me. I’d crashed right into his chest. My hands were splayed against him. He rocked back on his heels, not letting go of me. I was thinking I had to move my hands but, much like my legs earlier, they wouldn’t obey. Here he was, literally at my fingertips; I had dreamed about that – though there had been fewer clothes in my dream – for a long time now. I could feel the muscles of his chest and, yep, they lived up to the fantasy. My head barely came up to the height of his shoulders. I just wanted to rest it there and not move but Jack was getting into my peripheral vision and I didn’t want him to see the look of dazed delight that was surely on my face. I straightened up, pulling away abruptly. Alex let go of me. I drew in a breath. He was even more beautiful than I had remembered. His tanned face and ice-blue eyes made my stomach lurch violently I grabbed the banister with one hand to stop myself from falling again. That would be bad.

  ‘Lila. It’s good to see you.’ Alex chuckled.

  I smiled back ruefully.

  ‘Hey, you too,’ I garbled, as the power of coherent speech momentarily deserted me.

  ‘Do I get a prop
er hug?’ he said, and he opened his arms wide.

  I stepped into them. It felt familiar, warm and, truth be told, unexpectedly painful too. Not physically, but his closeness, the headrush of familiar scent and touch, brought back so many memories from before, it was like someone had turned a television right by my head from silent to full volume.

  ‘Been a long time – you’re looking well,’ Alex said, as we walked through into the kitchen.

  He pulled out a chair for me and I sat while he rested, long and lean, against the kitchen counter. Jack turned back to the stove where something was cooking.

  ‘So, what’s the deal then?’ Alex said. ‘Why the escape to southern California? London not rocking enough for a teenage girl, so you’ve got to check out the entertainment factor of a military town?’

  Maybe Jack had put him up to it. I doubted it though. Alex never did anything he didn’t want to.

  ‘Kind of, something like that,’ I muttered. I didn’t want to answer any questions right now. I just wanted to enjoy the moment. To which end I shrugged off the teenage comment. I was back with the two people in the world who I loved most. I felt complete. And happier than I’d been in a good long time.

  ‘So, when’s Sara getting here?’ Alex said to Jack.

  Well, that didn’t last long. I felt the smile melt off my face, my ribcage start to crack. Who was Sara?

  ‘She’s working. She said she’d see us tomorrow,’ Jack answered over his shoulder.

  ‘That’s a shame. She’s looking forward to meeting you, Lila. You’re going to love her,’ Alex said in my direction.