These Women

by Ivy Pochoda

  The houses that remain unsettle Dorian, reminding her of how fast the city can turn its back.

  Dorian’s not a neighborhood booster. She understands why people don’t want to live in West Adams, why they can’t envision a life for themselves between Boost Mobile, Cricket Mobile, and Yang’s Donuts. Why they don’t want to live next to a once beautiful home chopped up into a boardinghouse with too many occupants in a warren of rooms. She knows why folks pass up the opportunity to own a pristine bungalow or a rambling six-bedroom mansion on the wrong side of the 10.

  Still, every year there’s more and more chatter about the neighborhood coming up, about how it’s the last great value in Los Angeles, the last place to buy a substantial house and be part of an actual community. But tell that to the guy who got murdered in front of Moon Pie Pizza on Western and Adams, or the bartender who got shot at Lupillo’s on Western by Pico, or the dozens of stray cats flattened by boys drag racing their steroidal Nissans up and down the residential blocks.

  Dorian’s breathing heavy by the time she reaches the 10. She stops before crossing over the freeway. In the triangular strip between the eastbound on-ramp and the street where the girls have a regular beat someone has opened a nursery. Dorian peers through the chicken wire at the plants in their pots, some woven on three-by-three-foot square trellises and lashed to the fence and choking on freeway exhaust. There are pencil plants and other succulents, a few cacti, some shrubs, roses, as well as California natives—wild geraniums, sages, and asters that will attract birds. Soon, she imagines, finches, hummingbirds, and even orioles will swarm this grim plot next to the 10.

  There’s a rustle in the air and she braces for a gust of wind. But when she looks up she sees a flock of green parrots tearing through the sky, their wild birdsong cutting through the traffic noise in an unfettered, melodic mania. Dorian cranes her neck, watching the birds swoop low, then rise as one—a multicolored storm funnel in the last light. Ever since she first spotted the swarm of parrots in her neighborhood she’s been hoping to lure them to the fish shack or to her house. But the parrots follow no discernible pattern—appearing for days, stirring up the sky and trees, shaking the palm fronds, chattering wildly, then taking their excitement elsewhere.

  You’d think it’s either random or a panicked response. One goes, so go the others. But there’s a method to the flocking—to the great mass of twisting, soaring, wheeling creatures taking to the sky together. It’s not the action of a mindless herd but a precise communication, each bird interacting with at least seven neighbors, adjusting, coordinating velocity and individual movements, copying angles and vectors and directions so the whole flock moves in graceful lockstep.

  Dorian watches the flock disappear to the south, where they will roost in one of the palms and then vanish again. After the parrots, the crows always follow, bringing a different sort of energy—a stormy menace. Dorian doesn’t stick around for their arrival.

  It’s rush hour and the freeway is eight lanes of traffic going nowhere. The wind is roaring overhead, outpacing the stalled cars. To the east the scattershot skyscrapers of downtown are a gray and purple smudge in the hazy sun that’s fading in the other direction. A few merchant posters—bold black letters on fluorescent paper—are attached to the fence that guards the overpass. “We Buy Houses Cash.” “We Buy Houses Quick.” Two promote concerts for Ivy Queen and Arcángel. Then there is the smog-stained memorial—a dirty cross made out of plastic flowers, a faded laminated photograph, and a filthy teddy bear—to a young woman who died on the overpass or below on the freeway.

  No denying that this strip of Western is grim. Strip malls with hybrid Chinese food/donut shops, budget lingerie boutiques, busted ATMs, chop shops, tire shops, pet stores with sickly animals. She passes Washington, then Venice. At Cambridge she glances east. She can see the house, her legacy from Ricky and his parents—a mustard-colored five-bedroom Craftsman on the corner of Oxford one block down. A family house, able to accommodate the older generation as well as Dorian, Ricky, and Lecia.

  Dorian lives there alone.

  She pauses before continuing up Western. She wants to hold back the inevitable loneliness of the dusty rooms, the bric-a-brac she can’t part with. The skeletons of objects broken in her rage, the faded reminders of everyone who left or was taken.

  There’s a bar two blocks north. Lupillo’s. A neighborhood dive—sticky floor, cheap drinks, broken locks on the bathrooms. Same place the bartender was killed a year back. Shot from the doorway by her ex-boyfriend. Now there is a beefy security guy on duty.

  Dorian’s heard the owner’s planning to rebrand the place Harvard Yard, a nod to the surrounding Harvard Heights neighborhood. A smartass joke that doesn’t fit the community.

  Dorian’s usually the odd person out, neither a heavy-drinking Latino nor a young interloper on her way to a concert or a night out in K-town. The other patrons leave her alone.

  She takes a seat on one of the shaky barstools. The bartender’s wearing a T-shirt she’s cropped and tied over her flat stomach. Dorian orders a Seven and Seven that comes in a flimsy plastic cup. Latin hip-hop blasts from the sound system. The place smells like beer and taco grease from the restaurant that serves the bar through a cutout in the wall.

  Dorian sips the cocktail through a straw to ease her way into the sweetness before putting her lips to the cup. The bar is nearly empty. Two middle-aged guys are playing pool. Several young women are huddled by the jukebox. The women are easy with one another, their hips bumping, their hair whipping back and forth.

  The door opens and Dorian can see a woman standing on the threshold. Her breath catches on the idea that it’s Julianna even though she knows Julianna burns brighter, flies higher than the drop panel ceiling and dirty linoleum of Lupillo’s. Still, her mind tricks her into thinking there’s a chance for her to catch Julianna, stop her from running off, prevent whatever fate awaits her.

  When she enters, Dorian sees that the woman couldn’t look less like Julianna. The games her mind can play. She’s seen them all.

  The woman crosses to the bar, bringing a smell of cigarettes old and new. She sits down in front of a half-empty glass of something brown, which she polishes in one go.

  She rattles her empty, then glances over and fixes on Dorian.

  Dorian gives her a quick look, wondering if she’s one of the women who turns up behind the fish shack for a feed before returning to the stroll.

  “Who the fuck are you?”

  Dorian turns away. No use tangling with strangers.

  “I said, who the fuck are you?” The woman is wearing a low-cut blouse that shows a large scar—a raised purplish-black welt—across the bottom of her throat. “What are you looking at?”

  “Nothing,” Dorian says.

  “Damn right, nothing.” The bartender slides the woman a fresh drink. She sips it, keeping an eye on Dorian. “How’d you know I’m here? You follow me? You been following me? You think I don’t see you?” Her hair is cropped close to her head and slicked down with oil.

  “I don’t know,” Dorian says. “I don’t know you.”

  The intensity of the woman’s glare is unsettling. She’s convinced of something, that much is clear.

  Dorian has a new drink but she’s not sure she’s going to enjoy it.

  “’Scuse me? What are you staring at?”

  Dorian takes her Seven and Seven down in two gulps and pulls out cash. She’s out the door.

  She hurries south. The wind is in pursuit, sending cans and paper plates after her. The palms on Western bend at impossible angles.

  “You running away now? You spend all this time following me and you run away.”

  Dorian picks up the pace.

  “I’m going to find out where you live.”

  Dorian pauses at the corner of Cambridge, checking over her shoulder to see how far back the woman is. She spots her down Fifteenth, a block away. For good measure Dorian overshoots her own block, takes a left on Venice, then doubles
back on Hobart.

  There’s no one out on her street, which isn’t unusual. Somewhere a car is racing down a side street, screeching and skidding. The wind twisting in the telephone lines sounds like someone’s sawing metal.

  She opens her gate. The porch light comes on, revealing the messy bougainvillea and the vines that have invaded it. She fumbles in her purse. Her heart is racing. Her last drink hits her hard. She drops her keys. She squats to retrieve them. And there on her front porch by a potted pencil plant are three dead hummingbirds.

  4.

  IT’S LECIA WHO WAKES DORIAN THE MORNING AFTER SHE fled Lupillo’s. She’s there, sitting at the foot of the king-size bed, dressed in jeans and a white T-shirt, the clothes she’d worn the last night Dorian saw her. The jeans were a little tight but Dorian hadn’t complained. Because look at what some of the other girls had started wearing back then—midriff shirts that looked like men’s underwear, and pants that barely rose to hip height, anything to show belly and butt and a glimpse of pubic bone without being arrested for indecency.

  And here she is, still wearing those clothes, one leg crossed over the other, leaning back on her hands, her face angled toward Dorian at the head of the bed. Dorian tosses a pillow to shoo her away. She doesn’t need this ghostly version coming around. She rubs her eyes, hoping the vision will go. But Lecia is as stubborn in death as she was in life. Fifteen years and the same dance, the same standoff.

  “Go away,” Dorian says. That’s the most she’ll say. She refuses this ghost. But it’s insistent. And Dorian has to be vigilant or she’ll lose her grip. She works hard to keep the past in the rearview.

  She peeks through her fingers. Lecia’s braiding her hair, twisting her wild orange curls into a thick plait just like Dorian used to when she was little.

  To talk to Lecia is to be satisfied with spirits and memories. To acknowledge her is to start a dangerous slide, an irreversible descent.

  Dorian rolls over and presses her face into the pillow on Ricky’s side of the bed. She counts to twenty. Then she counts again, this time to a hundred. When she looks up Lecia is gone.

  She sits up and turns on the light. The first thing she sees is the three birds on the bureau.

  It’s still dark out. The Santa Anas are shaking the windows. Just like back East, the winter sun hides until nearly seven though the sky doesn’t have the same frigid menace. She finds a shoebox in the closet, fills it with old socks, and tucks the birds inside.

  In the kitchen, she heats yesterday’s coffee, then scatters stale biscuits in the backyard for the birds and checks her planters to make sure cats and possums haven’t been tearing up her vegetables. She overfills the bird feeder, which doesn’t need more seed.

  Her feeders attract a strange crowd—not just the birds she wants, the orioles, the warblers, and the finches, but also pigeons too lazy or too refined for the sort of junk they find on the street and even a few seagulls thrown off course on their way to the ocean.

  She checks the sky for a sign of the parrots. They usually come around in winter, mostly in late afternoon or early evening. But sometimes in the morning. They’ve never landed in her yard, only flown overhead and settled in the towering palms one street over.

  There’s birdsong somewhere in the murky sky. Not parrots but the repetitive chee-chee of violet-green swallows singing in the early dawn. Dorian closes her eyes and listens, knowing that the song will die out at first light. This time the song doesn’t last even that long. There’s a rumble overhead, the sonic groan of an airplane flying too low. With a wild rustle the birds take flight, rising into the sky where they are lost in the dark, leaving Dorian with only the morning sounds of the slow-moving city and the whip-whip of the wind.

  She catches the silhouette of a cat slinking along the fence. She watches as it stops and considers the feeder. The airplane drove the birds away so the hunting’s no good. But the cat lingers. Dorian follows its gaze. It’s not looking at the feeder but at something under a desert sage bush.

  Dorian waits. The cat waits.

  She listens for a rustle, a shift, a flutter or twitter, some indication of what the cat is hunting.

  Then it pounces. In one swift move, it’s off the fence and beneath the bush. In a split second it emerges, something in its jaws. Dorian leaps with a shriek that will probably bring her neighbors to their windows. The cat drops its prey and is absorbed into the early dawn gray as if it hadn’t been there at all.

  Dorian squats to pick up the cat’s quarry. It’s a scrub jay—long dead, rigor already set. It’s possible to feel the substance of its life in her hands. Cradling the bird in her palm, Dorian glances beneath the bush. There’s another jay on its side—tipped like an empty bottle.

  The dead jays bring Dorian to her knees, a sob trapped in her throat. Unlike other birds, unlike other animals, jays can travel into the past of their own minds. Like humans, scrub jays have memories. She brings the jays inside and places them in the shoebox along with the hummingbirds and puts the box in a shopping bag.

  Dear Idira, Once you figure out that no one’s going to hear you, you’ll still have to listen to the echoes in your head, a funhouse of memories that get distorted with time. That place will spook you. I could go on about the things that will remind you of your kid, the things that will never let you sleep. A dead bird for instance. But these things should be a caution to you, a warning about the senselessness of rage. Because in the end it’s just you. It will always be you. So it’s a waste of energy sending all that venom and anger out into the world because the return is nothing. It’s a one-way ticket. You give and give your anger and get nothing in return except more anger, leaving nothing behind.

  THE SKY IS SOFTENING. It’s Saturday so traffic is light on Western. Still the girls are out, pulling their coats tight against the strong gusts—some working hard to snag a last customer before the hour gets too polite, others being collected by their pimps.

  It’s a twenty-minute walk to the fish shack to grab the two boxes of birds stashed in the kitchen, then another twenty-five to Southwest Station. About a decade ago Dorian was a regular at the precinct, so well known that she was used to the detectives busying themselves with inconsequential tasks when she arrived.

  She got used to being ignored. But she spoke anyway, her voice angry and insistent. Her fury unnerved even herself. It was as if her voice belonged to someone else. She hated saying Lecia’s name in the stale precinct. She hated summoning her daughter’s memory under the cold fluorescent lights between the static of radio calls and the clatter of ringing phones.

  It’s pretty much what you would expect in the station early on a Saturday—the aftermath of the previous night, the angry, the drunk, the lost, the violent, the wronged, the insane. Dorian checks in at the desk. She wants to file a report: someone has been poisoning birds behind her business and now her house.

  The sergeant gives her the once-over, sniffing for a whiff of crazy. Then he pages someone in the back.

  Dorian drums her fingers on the shoeboxes as she waits. It takes twenty minutes but eventually the door behind the desk opens. “You’re in luck,” the sergeant says to the person stepping out from the back. “Caught a poisoning case.”

  Dorian looks up to see a short female detective. She’s clearly Latina but she’s dyed her dark hair blond, giving her skin a pasty pallor. “Not my beat,” the detective says. “Vice, remember?”

  “You want it or not?”

  The detective doesn’t reply. She just holds the door open for Dorian to follow her.

  “But don’t get too excited,” the sergeant adds. “It’s only birds.”

  Dorian pretends she doesn’t know every inch of the station’s ground floor—every desk, every interrogation room. She’s been in all of them. She’s been listened to, taken seriously, consoled, indulged, told to leave, escorted out.

  Let the professionals do their job.

  I hope you’re not suggesting we are doing a third-rate investigation. />
  How well did you really know your daughter?

  Spend enough time on my side of the desk and you’ll learn all about the things children keep from their parents.

  I asked you, how well did you really know your daughter?

  The short detective leads her to a far corner of the floor unfamiliar to Dorian—to a desk crammed between two filing cabinets. Away from the action.

  Dorian sits with the shoeboxes in her lap. The detective hasn’t said a word. The dregs of last night’s makeup are visible on her face, the faded paint of a day at the office. Dorian can see that her dye job needs a touch-up. There’s a furrow of half-inch roots framing her face. This sort of maintenance is the reason Dorian let her own hair go gray.

  But this detective, she’s a different story. It’s as if she’s trying to be someone else with hair and makeup suited to a person with a different complexion. And yet she’s a cop. In Dorian’s experience cops don’t try to be other people. They just try to be cops.

  Dorian glances over the desk to a nameplate: Det. E. Perry.

  The woman sitting in front of her sure doesn’t look like a Perry.

  “What does the E stand for, Detective?”

  The woman looks up as if she’s only noticed Dorian for the first time. “Esmerelda. You?”

  It takes a moment before Dorian realizes what she’s asking. “Dorian Parkhurst.”

  Detective Perry takes a piece of gum from its wrapper and pops it in her mouth. She doesn’t take her eyes off the workhorse computer monitor. “So, birds,” she says after a moment. She’s typing furiously, her gaze never meeting Dorian’s.

  Dorian places the boxes on the desk. “Thirty-one hummingbirds and now two Western scrub jays,” she says.