Two Girls Down

by Louisa Luna

  “Put your hands behind your back. Again,” she said.

  The girl moaned and cried in a pile next to them.

  “He’s got a boy in there, bitch,” she said to Vega.

  Vega cuffed Quincy-Ray.

  “The fuck you talking about, Choppers?” Vega said, standing.

  “He’s got a boy in the bathroom,” she said, holding a newspaper to her lips, the split in the middle gushing blood.

  “Fuck you,” said Quincy-Ray. “He ain’t mine. He belongs to the guy who owns the house.”

  “They’re all into some sick shit,” said the girl.

  “I didn’t do nothing to that boy,” said Quincy-Ray, arching his back, trying to flip over.

  Vega went to the front door and unlocked the locks, opened it up. She heard some birds and smelled the air.

  “You,” she said to the girl. “Get the fuck out of here.”

  “I’m telling you the truth, bitch,” she said, her lips and cheek starting to blow up.

  “Get the fuck out of here or I will break your fucking fingers in this fucking door!” Vega shouted, gripping the doorknob.

  The girl jumped, grabbed a backpack, stepped over Quincy-Ray like he was a puddle, and left, dripping blood on the carpet as she went.

  Vega slammed the door.

  “I’m serious, girl,” said Quincy-Ray. “I had nothing to do with that boy in there. I’s just staying here a couple weeks.”

  Vega left him and drew the Springfield again. She walked softly the way she’d come, moved through the kitchen except took a left, passed a room she guessed was a bedroom though there wasn’t a bed in it, only stuffed black garbage bags.

  Then a narrow door that she opened slowly into a dark room that smelled rotten, the only light in the room coming from a small gray window on the other side of a filmy shower curtain.

  She kept the gun in front of her and let her eyes adjust, held her breath. It was then that she realized there was someone else in the room, breathing shallowly, much lower to the ground than she was.

  She kept both hands tight on the Springfield, felt around with her elbow for the light switch and flipped it.

  There was a lot to see, all at once. A bathroom that wasn’t unusual. Toilet, bathtub, sink. Except under the sink, across the floor, was a tank, like a big iguana tank, open on the top. Later she would learn it was thirty by thirty by eighteen and made of acrylic.

  There was not an iguana inside. There was a boy.

  He was younger than a teenager but not little; he was naked, in a fetal position, covered in shit and blood. His head had been shaved, and his eyes were closed, but he was breathing, shivering. Hands cuffed with cheap restraints around the pipe under the sink, his arms stretched unnaturally above him, fingers blue.

  Vega felt dizzy and remembered to breathe. She squatted and put her gun in her holster, rubbed her hands over her mouth. She looked at his face and recognized the crinkle of his bottom lip, the attached earlobes. She had seen him on TV, missing from Modesto, thirty miles south. She sifted through the trash in her mind for his name.

  “Ethan?” she said. “Ethan Moreno.”

  He stirred but didn’t wake up.

  “Ethan, can you hear me?”

  His lids fluttered, just a small beating of wings, his eyes not staying on her.

  Later she couldn’t remember exactly what had happened or how she felt. She told the cops; she told CNN. It was like she’d climbed into the backseat and let someone else drive, but she was still giving directions. First the kitchen, under the sink, looking for a wrench or a hammer but found a small fire extinguisher instead. Then back to the bathroom, where she slammed it against the pipe, over and over, for ten, twenty minutes until it busted and water sprayed them both, and she untangled his hands and reached inside the tank and put her arms under and around him, feeling his cold, wet skin, the bones of his hips and back, and she lifted him out, his eyes still fluttering.

  Then she ran out the back door the way she had come, to her car, curling his head toward her chest.

  “Ethan, can you hear me?”

  He spoke into her shirt, his breath a hot burst.

  “Can you hear me?” he repeated.

  She smiled without meaning to, said, “Yes, I can.”

  Then: “Can you tell me your name?”

  Then he was gone, and so was that street and that day, and so was Vega for that matter; she couldn’t see a thing except the flashlight in her eyes, and all she kept hearing was that doctor asking if she could hear him and if she could tell him her name. She started to speak, but the words turned to salt in her mouth, and her eyes sealed shut as she tried to get back to the boy in the tank.

  —

  Cap had never seen media like this.

  Twenty or thirty vans and trucks with every three-letter and double-digit combination on their doors were parked outside the emergency room entrance. Men with cameras, correspondents in sportswear, antenna masts spinning. Cap watched them through the spotted beige blinds of a hospital administrator’s office in Frackville, a town that made Denville look downright cosmopolitan, where the sole local ambulance and one sheriff’s car had brought Dena, McKie, Bailey, and Vega to be treated.

  “You can’t contain these things anymore,” said the Fed, standing a foot or so behind Cap. “When I started, twenty-five years ago? It was easy to stay five steps ahead of them. You could get someone in and out of the hospital or the courthouse. Jail. You could go through a back door and throw a coat over their head. Now one person takes a picture with a phone and you get this shit.”

  Cap scrolled through the flipbook of potential responses in his head: “You got that right, what a bunch of dicks,” or “Hey, they’re just trying to make a living like everyone else,” or “This could help us—the more attention, the better,” or “This could hurt us—the more distractions, the harder it will be to find Kylie.”

  He said none of them, instead whispered, “Watch the language, okay?”

  The Fed nodded, remembering.

  Then they both glanced to the corner of the room where Bailey sat on a chair, drinking Pedialyte from a straw. She didn’t seem to hear them, staring at the ground, still in the dirty dress, legs kicking the air like a lazy swim stroke.

  —

  Vega sat straight up in bed, hips and torso shuddering with a single jolt. She looked around quickly for clues. Green plaid curtains, green plaid chair, television mounted to the wall. It could have passed for the world’s most uncomfortable motel room until she looked down at the stiff white sheets, flimsy gray blanket, adjustable side rails, remote with worn arrow buttons. Another goddamn hospital.

  She saw the IV needle stuck in the top of her left hand. With her right she touched her chest, looked down the gown in the front. Bra and underwear still on. She pressed her lips against her teeth, then rubbed them together, realized she was taking too long to do these things and enjoying things too much—they must have given her painkillers. She touched her lips, smelled her fingers, saw the residue sprinkle on the tips and the imprint from the handle of the Springfield like little tire tracks on her palms.

  Then she remembered Dena Macht on the ground, Bailey Brandt with her arms hooked around Caplan’s waist, the snapping of a wooden plank over McKie’s back, and then she lifted her hand and touched the bandage above her eye. The pain was dulled by the drugs but pulsed from the pressure, a drop rippling through a puddle.

  Vega heard noise outside the window—voices, vehicles. The first thing she thought of was a stock car race, the time her mother took her and Tommy to see NASCAR racing at the Sonoma tracks, the swell and grind of the engines, the hiss and howl of the crowd. But this was not a sprint.

  Vega pushed the twisted sheet off of her and swung her legs to the floor. Slowly she stood, one hand on the rail, the other on the IV stand. The bottoms of her feet felt spongy, the muscles in her legs weak, but she knew it was just the drugs; she hadn’t been in a coma, for Christ’s sake. She walked to the wind
ow, tugging the IV stand behind her, and pulled back the curtain.

  She saw Jamie Brandt, Gail and Arlen White on either side of her, holding her arms, and Maggie behind them, in the middle of a herd of vans. A pack of newspeople waving mikes and cameras. Gail shoved one of their arms away as they ran toward the emergency room doors, leaving Maggie Shambley’s lawyer in her unwrinkled suit behind to talk to the press.

  Vega went back to the bed to sit, pushing the IV stand in front of her. She examined the needle in her hand and thought. She’d seen enough nurses do this with her mother. Only one or two of them were good, the rest were always stabbing and re-stabbing her hands, muttering, “Small veins,” with disdain like it was her mother’s fault. But by the end she was so high most of the time it didn’t matter. She didn’t notice the blood drops on the mattress or the bruised skin below her knuckles.

  Those were actually sweet memories for Vega, when her mother was stoned on morphine, because she seemed to enjoy things and she wasn’t debilitated by anxiety as she’d been before the cancer. Her mother had stopped driving a couple of years previously because she was afraid she’d crash, so she’d made Vega and Tommy and her second husband, TJ, drive her everywhere. Then she stopped riding in cars altogether because she said they felt too small.

  But on the morphine, she laughed and swore, leaned back on the pillow and gazed at Vega as if she were a gently waving daffodil. Vega thought her mother looked pretty then, with her little scraps of hair and thinned eyebrows, clear white skin and deep-end eyes, like an old elf queen.

  Vega stared at the bag and the slow drip of liquid into the tubing. She reached up and rolled her thumb on the little wheel to pinch off the tube inside, shutting down the flow. Then she looked around, grabbed a tissue from the tray table next to the bed and folded it into a tiny square. She unpeeled the tape from the needle, pressed the tissue square over the entry point into her skin, and pulled the needle out, slow and careful, then strapped the tape over the tissue.

  I could have done that for her, she thought briefly, sadly. She slapped her palms against her thighs, rubbed them through the gown. For a moment she felt very old and very scared. Then she stood and walked on her rubbery legs to the door and pushed it closed. Her shirt and jacket hung on a hook on the back, pants folded neatly over a hanger, black boots against the wall. She gave them a tight little smile and pulled the gown off over her head.

  —

  Bailey didn’t seem to hear the noise coming from outside. She had finished the Pedialyte, and had asked for more, which Cap didn’t have access to in the administrator’s office, so he’d given her a small cup of water. He knew he couldn’t give her too much, that she was at least mildly dehydrated and would need more electrolytes, salt, and sugar. Cap squatted in front of her while the Fed looked at his phone.

  “She’s here,” he said to Cap.

  Cap smiled at Bailey, examined the slender curvature of her cheeks and chin. She really did look like the Shrinky Dinks version of Jamie, not just younger, but everything in miniature, down to the expressive almond eyes.

  The child was calm and seemed to trust him. He didn’t flatter himself that he had a way with kids; he knew to her right now he was merely the agent of change, taking her from somewhere terrifying to another place, and considering the instability of Dena’s and McKie’s state of mind, another place was better no matter where it was. Because there were a ton of worse things you could do to an eight-year-old girl besides kill her.

  But she had held on to him after Vega passed out, listened to him when he asked her to wait in the car while he went inside the house of the old man with the truck to use the phone, stood next to him and pressed her head into his side and under his arm when the sheriff and the ambulance showed up.

  “Your mom’s here,” said Cap to her.

  “Is she sick?” asked Bailey.

  Cap breathed out an airy laugh and tried not to burst into tears like a maniac. Having had what would probably prove to be the singular most traumatic experience of her life, here was Bailey Brandt worried about her mother.

  Before he could say yes, there was the ding of the elevator and then a rush of noise in the hallway, chatter and footsteps and Jamie Brandt’s burnt voice above them all, yelling, “Bailey!”

  Bailey jumped in her chair and stood. She looked once more at Cap, and he smiled at her and nodded. She appeared unsure of everything, but not afraid. She peered toward the doorway.

  Then Jamie was there, nearly hyperventilating, her jean jacket and purse falling off her, like she had climbed a rope ladder to get there. She was thin and pale and weak but still she ran and stumbled to Bailey, hitting the floor on all fours and crawling the last step to her. Bailey said, “Mama,” and slung her arms around Jamie’s neck, and Jamie grabbed her and moaned, her mouth open, cupping Bailey’s head and sweeping her hands over Bailey’s hair.

  Then everyone was in the administrator’s small office: Traynor, Junior, Gail and Arlen, Maggie, two doctors and two nurses. Gail went to Jamie and Bailey and started hugging them too and thanking God, and Cap started to back out and make his way to the door.

  Then Arlen was in front of him, pumping his hand, saying thank you and asking how can we thank you and remarking on what a blessed day this was. And Cap thought the day was blessed until it turned on you, and if they couldn’t find Kylie it would turn quick, sweet cream into bad milk.

  A blessed day. Well, whatever you say.

  Then a dark blot clouded the corner of his eye, and he turned and saw that it was Vega, standing against the wall at the end of the hallway. Dressed in her black uniform, the pants and sleeves coated with dust and dirt from the Macht cabin. Her face was scabbed and scraped on one side, a bandage over her eye where McKie had hit her with something hard and sharp.

  Gail White called for her husband, her voice strongly reminiscent of a bow saw on plywood, and Arlen immediately stopped thanking Cap and God and hustled into the office.

  Cap turned back to Vega and took some steps, and then she took some steps until they were close, and he could really see the scratches on her cheek like an animal skin pattern and the gloss of the bacitracin, the gray-blue bruise rising around the puncture wound, swelling her eyebrow.

  “I didn’t think they’d let you out so soon,” said Cap. “They said you were dehydrated.”

  “I’m okay,” she said, pressing her lips together. “They got me on some kinda painkiller.”

  She squinted one eye at him and looked a little tipsy.

  “You’re not supposed to be up, are you?” he said.

  She shrugged, nodded to the office.

  “They all in there?”

  Cap nodded.

  “Bailey tell you anything?” Vega said.

  “Not really. We were holding questioning until Jamie could get here.”

  “Where’s Dena?”

  “In ICU. Which in this hospital is a room with a sign on the door that says ICU. She’s conscious but not at all lucid.”

  “What about McKie?”

  “He’s in a bed. Local sheriff’s watching him.”

  “Awake though?”

  “Yeah. Concussed,” Cap said, then smiled at her. “What’d you do to him anyway?”

  “Hit him with a plank-a-wood,” she said, words running together. Then she pointed to the bandage. “Same one he got me with.”

  Cap looked at the bandage, imagined a plank of wood hitting him in the forehead, a jagged edge or a nail punching a hole in his skull. He took in the parts of Vega’s face, including the puffy eyebrow and scrapes, and did not think he would look as good in such a situation. The kiss in the woods came back to him fast, his embarrassment and desire taking the form of a stomach cramp. He pulled at his belt.

  “You okay?” Vega said. “What’s wrong with your pants?”

  “Stomach thing,” he said.

  She ignored him, because she was either high or disinterested, and he was grateful. Then he wondered if she remembered it at all, the kis
s, if it had been wiped away by the trauma or if she’d slipped it into the inside pocket where she kept all things vulnerable and emotive.

  Then a crowd came out of the office: Traynor and Junior and the Fed, the doctors and the nurse, the hospital administrator, and Maggie Shambley. The administrator shut the door.

  “Family needs a few minutes,” said Traynor in Cap’s direction.

  “Miss Vega,” said Maggie, rushing up, then to Cap, “Thank you both. I knew you could do it,” she said to Vega, taking one hand in both of hers. “I read about how you found that boy in Modesto, and I just knew it.”

  She whispered the last few words, overcome. Vega gave a mandatory smile, and her eyes were lazy from the drugs, also sad because she was Vega—it was Friday and they were still one girl down.

  —

  After everyone had thanked everyone two or three times, and Traynor and the Fed had laid out the schedule, they’d all decided that it made sense to do the interviews right there in the hospital to (a) get the freshest statements; (b) play keep-away from the media; (c) get McKie and possibly Dena to talk before they figured out they wanted lawyers.

  They were gathered in the hospital staff room, just marginally larger than the administrator’s office. The Brandt-White family lawyer was named Sam, tall and horsey with blond highlighted hair and a blouse with a silky ascot attached. Gail White had whispered to Vega in the hallway, “She’s from Philly,” to explain the sophistication, foreign and apparent. As Sam spoke she held out one hand and cut across it with the other, like she was chopping onions.

  “Jamie’s ready, and Bailey’s ready,” she said. “You’ve got to wait for the social worker from CPS or you’re going to get heat from your DA.”

  “We’re fine with that,” said Traynor. “We know most of them. Do we know if Dena Macht’s awake?”

  “In and out,” said Cap, rocking slightly on the balls of his feet. “McKie’s awake.”

  “Anyone coming for either of them?” said Traynor.