These Women

by Ivy Pochoda

  The women return or are returned to the common room. The evening activity is animal bingo. It’s meant to keep the women’s brains active. Anneke imagines the game is actually boring them to death, lulling them into submission with the same repetitive call of: rooster, chicken, pig, hen.

  Rooster. Chicken. Cow. Cow. Duck.

  Bingo, someone croaks.

  And they go again.

  Many of the women can’t play and others simply don’t. They either cluster in front of the windows, gaping into the darkness, or they circle around the television absorbing the nightly digest of local news and cheap game shows.

  Another nurse has the remote and has tuned in to KTLA. And there in the middle of the screen is Roger.

  It’s a photo from several years ago, taken when Anneke and Roger went to visit Marella in San Diego. It’s possible to see the faux grandeur of the Hotel Coronado in the background.

  The photo was on a table in her bedroom. Seeing Roger’s face on the news doesn’t infuriate Anneke. The photo does. Who gave it to the press? Who had the right? Did they take it from the house? Did they take it out of the frame? Did they leave her a receipt?

  What else did they take? What else is missing, disturbed? How many fingerprints? Footprints? How long before her house feels like hers again? Before it is a home instead of a crime scene?

  How had this happened?

  How had the outside come in?

  She had preserved order.

  She had done her part.

  But life will go on. It must go on. She knows that people think she will stop living, that Roger has brought an end to her life as well.

  The photo on the news changes. There’s a shot of her house, almost unrecognizable with the cop cars and strangers at the gate and clustered on the porch.

  Then the screen flashes to a grid of photos—all women, mostly Latino and black. Four are highlighted with red marker, indicating they are Roger’s more recent victims.

  There are seventeen in all. Seventeen women. In the brief moment the image rests on the screen Anneke recognizes Lecia, Julianna, and a woman who might have been Julianna’s friend many years ago. Close, but not quite a bingo.

  Her stomach rises. She rushes for the bathroom. A woman in a wheelchair grabs her hand as she passes.

  “I could feel this coming.”

  Anneke keeps her hand over her mouth.

  “Evil comes in cycles. But it can’t touch you in here,” the woman says. “Here we are safe.”

  The TV is now showing the steps of Southwest Station a few blocks off Western. There’s a press conference under way with officials in suits and in uniform. In the background Anneke can hear voices rising over that of the blond woman who’s speaking into the microphone. The camera pans across MLK to a group of protesters holding candles and poster board signs—some with slogans, some with images of the murdered women.

  The mothers. The mothers are chanting. The mothers are heckling the police. The mothers are calling for justice. The mothers are holding photos of their daughters.

  One mother steps forward. Dorian.

  A reporter jams a microphone in her face.

  “This is not about solving crimes that have reached over decades. This is about correcting an injustice.”

  Her voice is loud, furious, and confident. It unsettles Anneke.

  “This is about finding out why our daughters’ killer was at large for so many years, about why the police did nothing about our daughters’ deaths. About why they didn’t care. About why they looked away. This is about why the police think our daughters don’t matter.” Dorian holds up a poster with Lecia’s face on it. “This is why,” she says, pointing at Lecia’s cheek. “This is why,” she shouts. “Her skin.”

  Behind her the other mothers have raised their voices. Our daughters matter!

  Anneke feels a hand tighten around her wrist. She looks down to see the woman in the wheelchair still clutching her. “She sounds like the other one.”

  “Who?” Anneke asks.

  “She sounds like the woman in New York. The one who climbed to the top of the Brooklyn Bridge.”

  “Imagine that at sixty,” another woman says. “Imagine doing that.”

  “The Holloway mother,” the woman holding Anneke’s wrist says. “She reminds me of the Holloway mother. You can bet this one is going to make a lot of noise.”

  As if on cue, Dorian steps closer to the camera. “We are not going away. We are not going to be quiet.” She points to the wall of the building behind her. “See that? That’s where we are going to have our memorial. A mural to all our daughters right there. Something the police will have to look at every day. Every day they will be reminded of how they failed our daughters. Every day they will be reminded of how they failed us. We will never let them forget.”

  The mothers pick up this chant. “Never let them forget.”

  The broadcast cuts back to the newsroom.

  Anneke breaks free of the woman’s grip and rushes to the bathroom.

  She keeps the light off. She presses her hands into the cold porcelain sink. She runs water, splashes it into her eyes to make the grid of women disappear. It was easier before she’d seen them all. Easier before she’d seen the mothers.

  Seventeen women who’d stirred something passionate and violent in Roger. Seventeen women who made him feel something so extreme he couldn’t contain it.

  But really there are more. There must be. The one in El Salvador and others like her, surely.

  Anneke presses her knuckles into her eyes.

  You can hope and pretend. You can imagine that the world is violent and that it has nothing to do with you—that the women who die nearby are a symptom of an abstract evil, a distant one. Because to do otherwise would be overwhelming, it would undo you from the inside out, rip you apart just as badly as if you were one of the victims yourself. In fact, to do so would be unimaginable because being in the presence of that sort of violence, confronting it at the breakfast table, reaching over it to turn out the bedside light—that, well, that is impossible.

  But now that she’s seen those women’s faces, Anneke feels something rending her apart. She wants to slap them off the TV, break the screen.

  Instead she keeps washing her face, more cold water until her eyes sting.

  She can’t linger here. She can’t leave the women to themselves for more than a few minutes.

  Keep your house tidy, your person too.

  When she returns to the common room, a fireman is standing in the doorway arguing with the other nurse on duty. “He wants us to evacuate,” the nurse tells Anneke.

  She looks at the women absorbed in their activities, stuck in their wheelchairs.

  “We can take them down in fire trucks and ambulances.”

  “Take them where?” Anneke says.

  The fireman’s walkie-talkie crackles.

  “We’re not going.”

  Anneke turns. The woman who’d grabbed her hand on the way to the bathroom has wheeled up behind her.

  “We’re not going,” the woman repeats.

  Anneke puts a hand on her shoulder. “She’s right. We’re staying put.”

  There’s another burst of noise from the fireman’s walkie-talkie. “You understand you might be stranded or worse.”

  “You don’t need to tell me about worse,” Anneke says.

  5.

  “DAMN, YOU’RE A HARD WOMAN TO FIND.”

  Anneke opens her eyes. She’d dozed off in a recliner in the common room. The first glint of sun has lit up the scorched hillside, bringing up the burnt bracken and charred earth. The intercom is on the table next to her. It had been a quiet night—no pages, no emergencies. And she’d slept.

  “I said, you’re a hard woman to find. The fuck you doing up in these burned-ass hills?”

  It’s a voice that Anneke has only heard at a distance but one she knows perfectly.

  Anneke glances at the clock. Six A.M. “Working,” Anneke says, sitting up.
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  “Looks like you’re sleeping is what.”

  Anneke pushes the recliner’s footrest away. She spins around in the chair and sees Orphelia Jefferies standing in the entrance to the common room.

  “What are you doing here?”

  Orphelia throws back her head and laughs. Even from across the room and even in the low light Anneke can see the jagged scar. “What am I doing here? What the fuck am I doing here. That’s motherfucking good. Going on fifteen years you’ve been popping up wherever the fuck in my life and now you ask me why I’m here. I’m here because I want to be.”

  Anneke stands. She wants to close the distance between them, get Orphelia to lower her voice, turn down that raspy cackle before it wakes the entire house.

  “And what’s more,” Orphelia says, “I’m here because I want to see you. I’m a woman with questions.” She glances around. “You got coffee up here?”

  “I do.”

  Anneke goes to the table in the common room and pops a pod in the machine. “How did you find me?”

  “You’re not the only detective in this game. Saw your house on the news. You know what’s some funny shit? Two weeks ago, nobody would talk to me. It was all crazy black lady’s back with her crazy shit. Now everyone is all loose lipped. Everybody wants part of this mess. She works at some old folks place in the mountains in Malibu. Didn’t take a genius after that. A phone call. That’s about it. Hard part was getting here. My daughter, Aurora, drives one of those internet car things overnight. Ride-sharers. Had her drop me off. You know those motherfucking roads are closed. It’s like you’re a bunch of, what-do-you-call-them, pioneers up on the hill. Last people on earth.” She clears her throat. “So let that be a lesson in how bad I wanted to talk to you. Walked all that way uphill in the dark.”

  The coffee finishes sputtering into a cup. Anneke adds nondairy creamer and hands Orphelia the cup.

  “The powdered shit?”

  “So why’d you come all this way?” Anneke asks.

  “Because if I were you I’d split town tomorrow. Never be seen again. That’s what I’d do. So I wanted to talk to you first.” Orphelia glances over Anneke’s shoulder into the common room. “You going to invite me to sit?”

  “No,” Anneke says.

  Orphelia cocks her head. “Have it your way.” She sips her coffee and winces. “Tastes like shit,” she says but drinks it anyway. “So funny you asking me how I found you when the real story is about how you found me.”

  “How I—” Anneke says.

  “Let’s see, about fifteen years ago, you started popping up outside my house. Just every so often. Then the liquor store, the grocery. Then at my motherfucking job. So let me ask you clearly one more time, how did you find me?”

  “He had your wallet.”

  “Shit, no. I had my own damn wallet at the hospital.”

  Anneke has no interest in explaining things to this woman. “I returned your wallet to your house. Someone must have brought it to you.”

  “So how come you kept coming back? How come you’ve been loitering around my shit for years?”

  Anneke takes a deep breath and puts her hand to her eye. The tremor’s going to come. There’s no stopping it. She clenches her jaw and speaks through pursed lips. “I thought he was having an affair.”

  “You what?”

  “You heard me.”

  “You thought your husband was having an affair.” Orphelia laughs so hard she spills her coffee. “So when you found out the truth, you what—you kept watching me in case I could ID your husband? That’s some motherfucking commitment.”

  “You assume I knew the truth.”

  Orphelia’s hand flies to her scar. “Or maybe it was more fucked up. Maybe you thought you could make reparations. Maybe you were thinking to watch over me like a too-late guardian angel. Maybe you were trying to protect me?”

  “Protect you?” Anneke lets out a sharp laugh. “I had no interest in protecting you.”

  Orphelia brushes a droplet of coffee off her arm. “So?”

  Anneke folds her arms over her chest and fixes the other woman with a disdainful stare. “I was jealous.”

  “Wha—?” Orphelia’s eyebrows lift, her mouth forms a wide O.

  “You heard me.” Anneke feels as if someone has knocked the wind out of her. The admission nearly leaves her breathless, overwhelmed by shame and weakness.

  “I’ve heard some fucked-up shit in my time, but this is the take-the-cake winner. Jealous? Motherfucking jealous.” Orphelia cracks a dirty smile. “Let me take a look at you. Let me see. Are you green? Are you green like a bag of spinach? Green like the grass?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I’m just wanting to know if you’re so green with envy that you watched me for fifteen years? Because that’s got to be the greenest green in history.”

  She has no idea, Orphelia Jefferies. None. What Anneke felt for her wasn’t pity or sadness. It even stopped being jealousy—it transcended jealousy. “You don’t understand,” she says. “It’s more than jealousy. It’s hatred.”

  “I’m all motherfucking ears. Explain to me how you can be jealous of someone your husband tried to murder?”

  “You think it’s crazy to hate the woman who brought out a passion in him so intense he couldn’t control himself? It’s a betrayal you’ll never understand.”

  “Lady, killing a whole bunch of people is worse than anything he did to you.”

  Anneke laughs. She doesn’t care how many people hear, how many of the old ladies she shakes from their sleep. “Oh,” she says, “there’s your first mistake. You think Roger picked you up just to kill you?” She shakes her head at Orphelia’s stupidity. “He was attracted to the depravity of you and others like you and he hated himself for it. And I hate you too.”

  “So you just let him do his thing—kill women because you hated them.”

  I keep my house neat.

  I keep my family close.

  I keep my world in order.

  I keep the chaos out so that order is reflected through me.

  Somewhere someone is stirring in West Seas. Anneke needs to clear Orphelia out before one of the women emerges from her room or before she must attend the morning’s first emergency.

  “Listen,” Anneke says, “I did what I could.”

  “And what did you do?”

  She steps closer to Orphelia. “I called the police. I reported him. But no one followed up and that was all the proof I needed.”

  “Proof of what?”

  “Let me ask you something. Did you ever go to the police about me?”

  “I did. I sure as shit did.”

  “And what did they do?”

  “Jack shit.”

  “And did you think you were crazy, that you were making the whole thing up?”

  “Time to time, but you kept showing back up,” Orphelia says.

  “It’s easier not to imagine the unimaginable. It’s what you have to do to survive. Now if you’re done, I have to work.”

  Orphelia puffs out her lips and shakes her head side to side. “I’m not done. I’m not motherfucking done. I’ll never be done with you. You fucking knew. You can lie to yourself all you want. You can lie to the goddamn news. But I know the truth. And I’m going to remind you every fucking day as long as you live. You knew and you killed them.”

  There’s a sound from the hall that leads down to the bedrooms. Both women turn and see that two of the residents have appeared, one on foot, the other in an electric wheelchair.

  “Now where did you come from?” the one who is standing says, looking at Orphelia.

  “Did you fly up the hill?” the one in the wheelchair asks.

  Orphelia throws them a dismissive glance, filled with streetwise hate for their old-women curiosity. Then she gives Anneke a look once more. “I’m telling you and don’t contradict me: you knew. That’s what I came all this fucking way to tell you. You knew.”

  Before Anneke can say a word, Orphelia
is gone.

  “All this way through the mud for bad language,” one of the women says.

  “Knew what, dear?” the other asks.

  6.

  SHE HATED THEM, THAT’S THE TRUTH. SHE HATES THEM. A jealousy that has crystallized into hatred. Every woman Roger had killed, he’d also killed a piece of Anneke, too.

  “Knew what, dear?” the woman in the wheelchair asks. She’s tugging on Anneke’s sleeve. “What did you know?”

  These women—give them a bone and they’ll gnaw all day. West Seas is a world of petty fixations: how many letters your roommate received, who was overlooked for her niece’s baby shower, whose paperback was stolen, whose son visits the most.

  Today will be all about the woman who visited Anneke—what she wanted, what Anneke knew.

  They will whisper about it. They will gossip. They will transform the story to get them through the day.

  But they won’t understand. They never will. And when they find out who Anneke is, it will be worse. She knew? What did she know?

  She needs to find Orphelia and get her back, explain to her and to everyone that she didn’t know, she couldn’t have known because knowing would have been the end of it for her. She couldn’t have known because then she couldn’t have continued to exist. And she couldn’t have known, because if she did the police would have followed up on her phone call.

  “I’ll be right back,” Anneke says. And without checking to see if either woman needs something from her, she heads for the door.

  She crosses the drive and opens the gate.

  West Seas is on a steep street near the top of a hill. Anneke can make out Orphelia beginning her descent to the south.

  “Wait.”

  She doesn’t have her car keys so she follows on foot. The street is filled with gravel and rock loosened by the recent rains. The air still smells of wet char.

  “Wait,” Anneke calls again.

  Orphelia skids on the uneven terrain. “You chasing me? You following me?”

  “I said wait.”

  “And I’m supposed to do what you say?” Orphelia calls, but she stays in place.