These Women

by Ivy Pochoda

  “Nothing,” Dorian says.

  The woman takes a step back, then gives Dorian a look. “Nothing? Bad enough my daughter was murdered. I don’t need you and that caretaker snooping on my business.”

  “My daughter was murdered too.”

  “You want a prize or something?”

  “It doesn’t get better.”

  “Do I look like I expect it to? Do I look like I expect the Lord or anyone to take this off my shoulders? I might pray to ease the pain, but I’m no fool. This is a violent world, and to expect it won’t touch you is madness.” She puts away her can of spray paint. “I did my best with her. You want them to be part of you but they’re not.”

  There’s a noise from above, a chaotic rustling. Together they glance up and see the green parrots swooping through the air, bringing their hectic song. It’s a quick flyover—no stopping or roosting. After the birds are gone, Dorian’s still craning her neck, trying to follow.

  “Crazy birds,” Jazmin’s mother says. “They can go anywhere in the world and they stay here. My choice, I’d go to Hawaii or Mexico.”

  “Maybe they like it,” Dorian says.

  “Maybe they just don’t have any sense in their heads. Maybe they expect the world is going to change for them. That this place is going to get better. Or maybe they just don’t care.” She shakes her head at the insanity of it all. She takes a cigarette out of her purse.

  Dorian kneads her hands together. She feels the same tightening in her chest that she does whenever Idira Holloway comes on the radio—the strangulating proximity of another mother’s grief. Because this can’t be happening again—another reminder, another hand creeping from the past to reach around her throat.

  “You good?” the woman asks.

  Dorian doesn’t reply. Because she’s not good. And never will be.

  The woman kneels down and presses her lips to her freshly painted daughter’s name. “Bless you, baby,” she says.

  Headlights are coming up the hill. The custodian is on his way in his golf cart. Before he pulls into view, Jazmin’s mother hurries off in the opposite direction. Dorian watches her go, slipping away into the night.

  She exhales, shakes her limbs, breaking free of the claustrophobia of another’s sorrow. But this time, she doesn’t let memory disappear. She turns around, taking in all the graves, the dead, the reminders of violence and tragedy that surround her. It was she who’d been the fool, burying her head in the sand whenever the past tapped her on the shoulder, thinking that because she’d tried and failed to make things right for Lecia it was over and done.

  But it continues. Always. For her and for the rest of the mothers who’ve lost their children. To expect a reprieve, to expect to be released—that’s the true insanity. Because it’s everywhere, this violence. It reaches forward and back.

  Dear Idira, I need you to do something for me. I need you to keep shouting as loud as you can because there is tragedy everywhere. I need you to raise your voice against this endless night. You need to illuminate it. You need to root it out and expose it. Because it’s there. It’s everywhere. There’s violence all around us.

  Dorian heads home. West on Washington to Western, then south across the 10 into Jefferson Park. If the winds die out, she thinks the parrots might return tomorrow, filling her trees with their antic song, allowing her to watch the fireworks of electric green rise into the sky. The wind is fierce but at least it’s at her back, pushing her home, hurrying her down the hill.

  She passes the first bungalows of Jefferson Park, planning to stick to Western until she comes to the fish shack, where she’ll grab some leftovers and check her inventory before heading home. Just before Twenty-Seventh Place she notices a commotion on the east side of the street—a couple of police cruisers and an ambulance with lights on, sirens silent. She recognizes the riveted stance of the silhouetted onlookers and crosses the street.

  Crime scene tape.

  Something—someone—on the ground, twisted, motionless.

  She steps up to the tape that blocks the entrance to an empty lot. There’s a body on the dirt bathed in red lights that circle—circle and circle and go nowhere.

  Dorian doesn’t want to look, but she does, she has to. She sees a woman tossed, her throat slit, a plastic bag over her face. She looks exactly as Lecia had. Exactly.

  Then Dorian screams. She screams herself hoarse. Screams until someone leads her away, until her heart settles, her mind stops raging, until she finds the words she needs.

  Feelia 1999

  YOU’RE NOT GONNA COME GET THE DOOR? YOU’RE NOT GONNA open the motherfucking door? You’re not—Well, thank you. No, I don’t have luggage. You think I packed a bag before some motherfucker tried to straight up murder me? You think I was, like, hold on, I need to get my nightgown in case that knife doesn’t do its job? You think I packed my toiletries and some shit?

  Yeah, I got money. You think I’d call a cab I can’t pay for?

  Calm down? Do I not seem calm to you? I got my throat slit, motherfucker. How’ve you been?

  Ten days. That’s how long. You’d think it would be longer. But they tell me I’m good to go, get out the door. Didn’t even wheel me down in one of them chairs. Just handed me my bloody clothes in this plastic bag here.

  Take the 105 to the 110. I don’t care you don’t have a FasTrak. I don’t feel like herky-jerking through all of South L.A.

  You wanna roll down this window? Don’t mind if I smoke, right?

  That’s the one thing my daughter, Aurora, did right. Came and dropped off a few packs of Newports. Girl’s not all bad. Lazy. Head so far up her own ass, she forgets about her mom in the hospital. But at least she brought me enough smokes. Probably show up at my place tonight like nothing at all. Hello and how the fuck are you type shit and can I get some cash or mind if I crash here.

  Least she has a job. So she says.

  Only other visitors I had were the police.

  Two detectives. Cheap suits and all. Ma’am, can you tell us what happened?

  What’s it look like happened?

  Ma’am, can you take a look at these photos, see if you can identify anyone in them?

  Hand me a sheet of pictures of black dudes.

  One thing I can tell you for sure, the man wasn’t black. The detectives give me a look, like I lost my mind along with all that blood came pouring out my neck.

  You sure? Take another look.

  Am I sure? Am I motherfucking sure? Did he slit you ear to ear, assholes?

  Are you a sex worker, Mrs. Jefferies?

  That one made me laugh. How many hookers you know go by Mrs. anything?

  A sex worker, I say, in my best white-lady voice. What exactly are you asking?

  Cops give each other another look, then give me one as well. One of them clears his throat like he’s a first-timer asking for a full ride. Mrs. Jefferies, are you a prostitute?

  There he goes with the Mrs. Jefferies shit again. If I hadn’t been so goddamn worn, if it didn’t hurt to move every muscle, I would have slapped him. Mrs. Jefferies isn’t any prostitute. Ask me about Pookie. She’s a different story.

  But I don’t say that. Instead what I tell him is: What the fuck does it matter? As far as I can see all that matters is that I’m lying in this bed nearly slit ear to ear. I could be an accountant. I could be the president of Mexico. I could be the queen of the motherfucking Nile for all that what I do matters.

  It matters is what they tell me.

  I don’t have to ask why.

  Hey, watch yourself. You got to hit every bump in this goddamn road? It’s like I’m getting stabbed all over again. It’s like the damn 110 is running right through these stitches in my neck.

  Now that’s gonna leave one hell of a scar—one ugly motherfucking necklace.

  Hold up? What are you asking? Did I ash on your seat? No, I did not ash on your motherfucking seat. Shit isn’t even leather. And don’t you slow down right in the middle of the goddamn freeway.
<
br />   You don’t listen to the news? You don’t have your ear glued to the radio? You don’t listen to the traffic? You want to be one of those incidents on the news—cab rear-ended on the 110 because a woman ashed her cigarette on the seat?

  Where are we now? Manchester? Take the next exit. Head to Western. It’s to the west. You know that? Well, don’t mind me.

  Want to know where to go on Western? Can I tell you that at least? Corner of Sixty-Second.

  Fucking cops. Fuc-king cops. Not like they offered me protection or anything. They didn’t even offer me a ride home. Shit—that motherfucker could be waiting for me for all I know. Could be sitting outside my house. Ready to finish the job.

  Hold up. I said hold up. That means slow the hell down. Take a right. Take a goddamned right. I know I said it was straight up Western. But I need you to take a right. Now. I don’t care it’s one way.

  Shit.

  What’s wrong? You want to know what’s wrong? Lemme tell you.

  That’s where it happened. Right there. That convenience store. That’s where—I told you to turn, didn’t I?

  How long’s this light got to be? You want me to relive this shit?

  His car was pulled up just there at the edge of the parking lot. Just behind the thing for the free papers. That’s where I like to smoke and mind my own.

  Might as well keep going straight now. I’ve already seen it. Still. The fuck was I thinking? The fuck—Nothing in this world worth trusting. That’s the truth. Nothing. That’s the heartbreak of it all.

  I’m only three blocks up. White apartment on the right. Just behind the hedge or whatever you call it. It’s not bad. Could be worse. Home is home, you know. You make it what you make it.

  Right here. Just over by that white delivery van.

  You know what? You want to keep going a little more.

  Don’t give me that look. I’m good for the fare.

  Maybe just a bit farther up Western. Or maybe don’t take Western at all. Just anywhere. Just not here. Not right now.

  1.

  CLICK.

  There’s Kathy sitting on a dirty leather couch with the stuffing popping through. There she is, leaning back, arms thrust out like she’s beckoning the world, turning that couch into her throne. There she is, five years younger, skin good, hair sleek, skirt so short you can quick-glimpse her red thong. There she is—cigarette in one hand, glass of something, maybe Hennessy, in the other. There she is, wildcat eyes, snake mouth. There she is frozen in time, preserved perfect, in five megapixels.

  It was Kathy the Ragin’ Cajun who first took Julianna downtown and showed her the bars and illegal clubs just off Olympic, who introduced her to the man who said Julianna was pretty enough to model, the man who promised he’d turn her into South L.A.’s Cindy Crawford. (He didn’t know, and Julianna didn’t tell him, she liked the other side of the camera.) It was Kathy who helped Julianna get her first job—waiting tables at Sam’s Hofbräu, which turned out not to be a beer hall but a strip club. It was Kathy who encouraged Julianna to try out dancing, encouraged her to get onstage. Kathy who turned Julianna into Jujubee.

  Jujubee is a nice name when you’re high. Nice to say quickly. Nice to call out across a club. Nice to let buzz around inside your head. Nice to tell the guy who wants more than a lap dance. It’s a nice name that allows you to escape who you really are—a name that allows you to do things that a Julianna wouldn’t do.

  A few years after Julianna started dancing at Sam’s, Kathy took a turn into a rougher line of work. Tried her luck on the streets instead of the bars. She said she needed more cash for her habit, her kids, her brother locked up somewhere, and his kids. And she and Julianna went their separate ways.

  It’s been twenty-four hours since the news rolled down Western that Kathy was dead up in an empty lot on Twenty-Seventh Place. Julianna had been getting ready for work at the Fast Rabbit when she got a call from Coco who’d heard from Reyna who’d heard from Marisol who’d heard from Sandra whose mom worked at Moon Pie Pizza a block from Twenty-Seventh, so it had to be true. Kathy had her throat slit, was suffocated and tossed. The news was like a punch in the stomach—so hard and fast it knocked Julianna to the couch. More than a day later she still hasn’t left the apartment.

  She hasn’t slept and it’s coming up on evening again. It started as an informal wake for Kathy—a gathering of Coco and the rest of the girls who’d been taken down to the Seventy-Seventh the night Julianna wound up at Southwest and was surrendered to Dorian. (And how the fuck Dorian had turned up at that particular moment is a mystery Julianna can’t quite puzzle. The woman has a knack—she’ll grant her that.) The girls swarmed the apartment where several of them crashed from time to time. They’d told Julianna since she’d escaped being locked up, the llelo was on her. And in no time Rackelle was there with the goods. Then it was two A.M., then four A.M. Then most of the girls had gone home or gone to bed. Only Julianna stayed awake.

  The sun came up a lifetime ago and now it’s already sliding away. A whole day has unfurled on the TV. The winds started a fire up on Mulholland that is sweeping down the hills near the Cahuenga Pass. People had to drive through a tunnel of fire on the 405 to get to work—the sky black with smoke, the hills lava red. The pictures on TV looked like something from Mars—an alien invasion. Julianna thought she’d been tripping.

  At noon Coco emerged from her room—her bleached hair wild around her heart-shaped face, making her look like a mama lion. When she saw Julianna sitting on the couch, tearing up the last baggie, she made a tsk tsk sound like a teacher at the Catholic school Julianna hadn’t much cared for. “Chica, you’re taking it hard. When was the last time you even talked to Kathy?”

  It had been a year at least. Maybe more. But Julianna didn’t tell Coco that. And she didn’t tell her the real reason she was unwilling to lay off the shit and take something that would make passing out inevitable.

  She might not have actually seen Kathy’s body, trash strewn and contorted, bloated and blue, but she couldn’t shake the image. It would be there if she slept. It would be there no matter how long she stared at that tunnel of fire on the 405. But instead of coming clean about what was bugging her, she’d just asked Coco how much cash she had because she wanted to call Rackelle to come back with more shit to get her through the night.

  Coco found some grubby twenties and told Julianna to tell Rackelle to bring some Molly as well because if she was going to work the back room at the Fast Rabbit, she sure as shit was going to get high so it didn’t half matter whose hands were where and what her mouth and the rest of her was doing all night.

  It’s been a few hours since Rackelle made the delivery and all Julianna wants is to get up, get clean, go anywhere else. But by early evening she still can’t move, pinned to the couch by Kathy’s death.

  She yanks her purse open and digs out her cell phone again—the latest model, an indulgence way beyond the indulgences of the other girls. Each time a new phone comes out Julianna finds the money. It’s the camera that drives her—more pixels, more saturation, a more perfect eye on her imperfect world.

  She scrolls through her pictures, her long pink nail tap, tap, tapping against the glass.

  How many selfies you gotta take, the girls tease her. You think you’re becoming an Instagram star? Think someone’s gonna buy your low-rent Maybelline? Julianna doesn’t correct them. A while back she figured out how to fake them and everyone else out—pretend she was taking a picture of herself, but really turning the lens around. Using the camera how it was meant to be—looking out not in.

  It started as a slim rectangle to hide behind. But soon she began looking at the pictures she was taking. Each night she examined the who, where, and why of the previous day. She used it to see behind the fronts the girls put up for one another—the rough talk, the layers of makeup.

  She’s scrolling back the years. Rewinding time. Erasing the lines and wrinkles. Doing away with almost a decade of late nights. Removing all the m
en who have left their marks. And she finds another one.

  “Fucking Kathy.”

  Because there she is again, this time sitting at one of the bright plastic tables at Chabelita Tacos, the twenty-four-hour joint up over the 10 on Western. She’s wearing a black cropped halter with three silver buttons. Her hair is bobbed and bleached and looking a little fried. Her head is tipped back so her mouth is in focus and her nose and eyes are slipping away. A gasp of smoke has just escaped her lips and hovers above her like a spirit. There’s a man visible just over her left shoulder. He’s looked up from his food, drawn by Kathy’s laughter.

  Julianna swipes the screen again. There’s another. This time Kathy’s mostly turned away from the camera so that only the edge of the right side of her face is visible. She’s either teasing the man or telling him off—Julianna can’t remember. In fact, she can barely remember the night, what they were doing at Chabelita and what happened next.

  “Fucking Kathy,” she says again. “The Ragin’ Cajun.”

  Coco looks up from what she’s doing and when she does Julianna can see she’s crushing a bag of Molly into a fine powder that she’s rolling in wads of rolling paper for later. “Girl wasn’t Cajun. She was straight-up Texas. I’ve been to her mother-in-law’s place down somewhere in Inglewood and there must have been five generations eating that sweet-ass barbecue. Cajuns eat that blackened spice shit, not B-B-Q.” She shakes the small balls of paper in her palm, then dumps them into an empty tin of breath mints. “You’re working, right?” Coco asks, tucking the breath mint tin into the secret compartment in her purse where she hides drugs and extra cash. “Because you miss another shift, you’ll be slipped out of the rotation.”

  This would be the second time Julianna skipped out on work this week. The first time was the night after she’d left Dorian at Jack’s Family Kitchen to grab a ride with the first guy who passed, pretending that she was working, but then bait-and-switching him, letting him know that all she wanted was to drive around until she outran the memory of Lecia that Dorian always conjured. If that meant she had to give him a taste, she would. As luck would have it she didn’t. She’d crashed at his apartment in Vermont Harbor and slept through work.