by Wendy Heard
She grabs the phone and runs for the door. She sprints down the hallway just as the woman comes back onto the line. “Ma’am, I’m connecting you with LAPD. Officer Ramos.”
She yanks open the stairwell door and hurries down the steps. “You need to hurry. I hear gunshots. Do you have someone on the way?”
“Ma’am, I need you to calm down. I can’t understand you—it sounds like you’re running. I thought you were inside your apartment.”
Sofia leaps down the last two stairs and almost runs into the exterior door. She turns the handle and pulls it open.
A woman steps through the door. In the harsh fluorescent light, her blond wig gleams white.
45
JAZZ
I STEP AWAY from the front gate, back toward the sidewalk. This seems wrong, the quiet. Patel must be just outside, waiting.
I take another step, clinging to the gate, hiding behind bushes.
Nothing happens. The silence creeps into my gut like poison.
I keep low and hide behind the same wall Joaquin used for shelter. I make my way along the building and raise my head when I’m nearer to the side street.
The car is quiet and dark. The street is empty. Unless she’s hiding behind one of the parked cars or palm tree trunks, she’s not here.
I feel like I’m walking into a trap, but I don’t know what to do except continue forward. I don’t want to do my usual thing, where I barrel into situations without thinking. I want to be smart and clearheaded. Joaquin’s life might depend on it.
I strain my ears for sirens. Nothing. Where are the police?
I don’t like this. I need to check on Joaquin.
I run the direction Joaquin went, toward the side gate. I climb the six-foot fence awkwardly with the handcuffs and drop onto the other side. I throw myself into the planter and hunch over, keeping in the bushes down the deserted, narrow walkway until I make it to a fork. To the right, the sidewalk leads to a door that takes you up into the stairwell; straight ahead lies a side entrance to the parking garage. I take the right path and pause outside the stairwell door.
All is quiet.
My heart pounds, thuds, a maniacal drum line inside my chest. I push at the stairwell door, but it’s blocked.
I stoop down, lower than she’d probably shoot, and peek around the door.
At first, I just register a body, and then it comes into focus, and my stomach plummets into the floor beneath my feet.
It’s Sofia. Blood. Soaking through her shirt. Just under her collarbone.
This moment has no thought. My breath and my brain and all of myself are wrapped up in the horrifying images before me.
Her eyes, staring at the ceiling. Blinking. Lips trying weakly to form words.
Chest, catching visibly with each breath.
The moment sucks back into my chest, and my brain whirs to life. My eyes fly around the empty stairwell. Patel is nowhere to be seen.
I drop down by Sofia’s side. She’s on her back, legs tucked under her in an unnatural position. I’m whispering, a broken stream of “no no no no no.” I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. Put pressure on the wound? But won’t that push the bullet farther inside her?
“Sofia, do you have your phone on you, honey?” I search her body with my cuffed, shaky hands, but there’s nowhere on her leggings or tank top to conceal a phone or anything else. Her face is slack, eyes closed now like she’s dreaming.
The wound is far away from her heart, all the way at the top of her chest. There’s not that much blood. She’ll be okay. I pat her cheek. “Hey. Come on. Wake up. Let’s get you to a safe place. We need to find a phone.”
Dead silence. No sirens in the night.
I don’t think she called the cops. They’d have been here by now.
I can feel the danger to Joaquin pulling me away from her. Panicked gasps escape my lips. I want to scream, beg anyone to help me, but this is a closed, soundproof stairwell. Screaming isn’t going to do shit.
Sofia coughs, the sound wet and thick. Blood splatters onto my chest and beards her chin in red.
“Oh, holy shit,” I hear myself say. “Sofia, honey, I gotta get to a phone and call 911.” I roll her onto her side so she can cough without choking on the blood. I don’t think she knows I’m here, but then one of her hands seizes mine, shockingly tight. She coughs again, spewing blood into the carpet.
I squeeze her hand and press my lips to her forehead. I’m not helping her by staying here. I need to go. I need to move. “I gotta get a phone. Sweetie. I have to—” I’m losing it. I need to pull it together. I need to be a soldier.
So now I do the unthinkable. I do the inhuman, the inhumane. I pull my hand out of her grip.
She clings on tight, and I hear myself sobbing as I wrench my hand away from hers. I put her hands together, baby elephant style, to give her something to hold on to.
I stand up. I almost can’t. I double over in pain like I’ve been punched.
I want to throw up. I swallow it down. I try to breathe. I turn toward the stairs.
I put my feet on the stairs. I push down with my muscles, force my feet to move. Sofia’s presence, like a psychic tether, weakens as I get farther away from her.
On the second-floor landing, I straighten up and square my shoulders. The door is in front of me. I have to walk through it.
I know this place. This is the place past fear, past pain, where you’ve been beaten bloody and lost everything you ever had to lose. This is the place where blood runs cold and real decisions are made.
I reach for the handle, turn it and pull the door open. The silent hall stretches ahead of me, the front doors decorated cheerfully. Don’t forget to breathe.
I’m done playing Patel’s game. I’m tired of her baiting me like an animal. If she wants me, she can come and fucking get me.
I grab the vase off a table and hurl it at the door across the hall. It explodes in a crash. “Get the fuck out here,” I yell. My voice is muffled by the low hallway ceiling and the hotel-style carpeting. I seize the small table and bash it on the door it belongs to, bang it over and over, making a huge racket, until the leg comes off in my hand. I brandish the table leg like a baseball bat and stride to the next door. I ring the doorbell, bang on the door with the stick. “Hello! Come on out, everybody. Let’s call the fucking cops.” I run down the hallway. I turn the corner that leads to Sofia’s apartment. “Come out, bitch,” I scream. I bang on another door, ring the doorbell.
Sofia’s door cracks open. I flatten myself against the wall just as the barrel of the gun sneaks around the edge of the door frame and spits at me. The bullet whizzes past my face—I can feel it slice the air like water. I bend down, run forward in a squat and leap around the corner, swinging the stick like the bat Carol uses on me. I hit something—a grunt—I fling myself into Sofia’s apartment, stick swinging blindly.
Patel is down, the gun on the tile at her side. It looks like I struck her in the hand; she’s scooting backward on her butt and wringing it out. I kick the gun away, swing the stick as she tries to retrieve it and connect with her ribs, knocking her down. The blond wig loosens, revealing a slice of shiny black hair underneath.
“Where is he?” I roar, an animal, ready to rip her limb from limb. I pull off her wig, toss it aside and grab her hair in fists, pull her head back, hands tearing hair from roots. “Where is he?”
From the hallway at the back of the living room, Joaquin steps through the door. “I’m here. I’m fine,” he says. I open my mouth to tell him to go find a phone.
Patel pulls a small gun from the waistband of her slacks. I draw in my breath to yell, but her hand lashes sideways and cracks off a silencer-muffled shot that hits Joaquin in the thigh and spins him sideways to the ground. He screams, his puberty-cracked voice shrill.
A knock on the half-open front door. “Hello? E
verything okay in there?” A middle-aged woman with a bathrobe drawn around pajamas steps through the doorway.
Quick as a snake, Patel snaps her arm left and fires a shot at the woman. The woman goes down hard, a hand clamped to her chest.
I grab for Patel’s gun hand. The woman by the door is making gurgling, screeching, wailing sounds, and Patel whips the gun toward her and snaps off two more shots in quick succession. The woman goes quiet.
I tackle Patel from behind. My hands are cuffed; I can’t easily pin down the gun hand while keeping her immobilized. She bucks and thrashes. I hear my own voice, like a child’s, hissing curse words that sound like prayers. I’m fighting to keep her down, and then the gun swings up and reality sucks in to the black hole in the barrel.
It snaps. A crack of fire spits into my shoulder. I topple back and she climbs on top of me, gun pointed at my face. Her hair is messy, a disheveled bun sticking up from the side of her head. Her chest heaves. She’s ugly with fury, and she parts her lips, pressing the gun to my chest.
She swallows, catches her breath. My shoulder flares into pain like it’s been set on fire.
I wait for the shot.
“Joaquin,” I hear myself whimper. I can’t do this to him. I can’t die and leave him here.
She digs the gun into my breastbone. I try to struggle, try to thrash aside, but she’s got my wrists pinned with her knees.
God, please, let Joaquin be okay. Let him be okay. Let him be okay.
“I tried,” she says. “I tried to make you one of my blackbirds.” Her tone fills with rage. “And you messed everything up. Like you screw up everything you touch, right, Jasmine? Everything you touch, you turn to shit.”
Tears fill my eyes and blind me. I wait for her to pull the trigger.
Movement behind her. A shape, shadowy and limping.
Joaquin.
His face is white with pain. He lifts his hand. He’s clutching an object that glints translucent yellow in the light from the open front door.
The syringe.
Patel turns her head to see what I’m looking at. I take the opportunity, grab her gun hand and pull it up so it points over my shoulder at the floor. She fires reflexively. Joaquin darts his hand into the space between her neck and shoulder.
The silver needle pokes into her neck. He pushes his thumb down on the depressor, and the yellow liquid vanishes.
She stiffens, freezes.
He’s fast. He has practice.
Joaquin pulls his hand back and drops the syringe to the floor. He clamps his hands to his bleeding thigh. Patel goes rigid on top of me. I buck her off, sending her tumbling onto the floor. I shake the gun out of her hand and throw it far away, out past the dead woman into the hallway.
She curls into the fetal position. She turns her face to me. Her eyes are wide, like she sees more light than exists in this darkened apartment. On the floor next to me, the syringe lies discarded and empty.
“You did good,” I tell Joaquin. “Let’s get you out of here. We need an ambulance.”
“Don’t leave,” she whispers.
“Fuck you.”
I push myself into a sitting position. I forgot about my shoulder, and now it flares to life with pain. It’s dripping blood warm and sticky down my arm and onto my hand. I can’t tell if the bullet is still lodged in there, buried in my deltoid, or if it passed through; it feels like I’m being stabbed with every heartbeat. Joaquin’s looking sleepy, slumped sideways onto the carpet.
“Come on come on,” I tell him. I push myself up and close the distance between us.
Patel groans, a low, guttural sound of pure misery. Her body stretches suddenly, feet flexed. She clutches at her stomach, and then she heaves, spewing a small stream of blood onto the carpet beneath her.
I kneel by Joaquin, who has his leg clutched in his hands. His face is twisted into a childlike expression of pain. Through my own agony, I say, “Sweetie, can you hop? Let’s get out of here. Let’s find a phone. Sofia’s been shot, too. We gotta get an ambulance.”
He lifts his hands for me to help him up, just like I used to when he was a kid. I take his hand and pull him to his feet. He moans, and I say, “You’re going to hop. Don’t put any weight on that leg.”
We’re almost out the door, and I’m trying to figure out how to get Joaquin around the dead woman who lies prostrate across the doorway with terrible, wide-lidded eyes that stare straight into my soul. “Don’t look,” I tell Joaquin. He hops around her. Now that Joaquin is safe and Patel is taken care of, my need to check on Sofia burns worse than my shoulder, worse than my worry about Joaquin’s leg. I pray she’s okay. I pray with everything inside me.
From behind us comes a rustling sound. I turn. Patel has rolled onto her back and is fumbling with her ankle, under the leg of her jeans. She lifts something—another gun. A small one.
I cry out and shove Joaquin toward the door. He stumbles and turns to face me in protest.
She raises the little gun in a two-handed cop grip and fires.
The bullet hits Joaquin in the chest and launches him back into the hallway.
She aims at me. I brace myself.
When she opens her mouth to speak, a trickle of blood leaks out.
“It’s worse to let you live,” she whispers. She drops the gun and collapses.
46
JAZZ
WHEN JOAQUIN WAS BORN, I was allowed to hold him in my arms for a day and a night. In the hospital, with another new mother in the neighboring bed, I pressed him to my bare chest and squeezed my love into him through sheer force of will. His skin was my skin. His blood was my blood.
He loved me, from the first time I held him, fresh with the warmth of me, my insides laid out and cradled in my arms. Is it weird to say I could feel his love when he looked at me? He was just a tiny baby, but he loved me.
I loved him more. That first day, and every day after.
I chose the name Joaquin. It means uplifted by God. Carol approved of the Biblical connotations, but she didn’t know I held that name in my heart for a decade. When my biological mother was pregnant with the little brother I never got a chance to know, I begged her to name him Joaquin. I thought it was the most beautiful name. I clutched it like a talisman. Joaquin. Lifted up by God. Favored. Joaquin. Safe. Special. Eternal.
I had expected to feel shame when holding my baby. I expected to find him pitiful, this pathetic victim of my own stupidity, destined to continue the cycle of poverty and abuse—
But it didn’t feel like that at all.
I felt hope. I saw the future in him—pure, untapped potential. I saw it in his bright little eyes, in the swoop of his thick dark hair. I saw it in the softness of his tiny bicep, in the grip of his itty-bitty fingers around mine.
He wasn’t here to perpetuate the cycle. He was here to break it. He was here to redeem me, to make the best of me. He would never bring me shame. He would be my forever pride and joy, from that moment until—
Until—
I had always thought it would be until my last breath.
My last breath.
Mine.
47
JAZZ
THE LIGHT IS too bright in here. The swinging doors stay shut no matter how hard I stare at them. Every time they do open, a nurse walks through and I rise, but the nurse turns left or right, and it’s never my turn.
A police officer stands on duty by a painting of a woman doing ballet. Next to the chair I occupy with the very edges of my butt cheeks, a stack of magazines blares rudely. Keep Your Waist Tight for Summer, suggests Fit Woman.
What a thing to look at while I wait on death.
I lean forward to rest my elbows on my knees, but my shoulder screams in protest. I have a bandage there to match the one on my forehead. “You’re going to have a scar,” the nurse had said disapprovingly when she l
earned the stitches had been ripped out three times. I wanted to swear at her. But I didn’t. It didn’t matter. Nothing matters, nothing except what’s happening behind the swinging doors.
The hallway door the cop is guarding opens and a blonde woman hurries through, her face red with tears. She runs to the nurses’ station and gasps out incoherent words I can’t quite hear. The nurses approach her with matching expressions of careful concern.
I watch the woman with half interest. She’s in her late fifties or early sixties and wears yoga pants and a sweatshirt. It’s the middle of the night. Maybe she was roused from sleep.
She turns toward me, the motion robotic, and approaches the seating area. Her face is melted into an expression of blank, cold horror.
She stares at a chair, like she’s deciding if she should sit down. She spins slowly, as though she’s forgotten how to do it. She lowers her ass, but halfway down her legs give out and she slips. Her butt hits the floor. I jump to catch her, but I’m too late, and I end up with a handful of her sweatshirt as she sprawls sloppily on the tile.
The cop rushes forward. “You all right, ma’am?” He’s younger than me, a handsome man with beautiful clear brown eyes.
She shakes his hands off her and shrieks unintelligibly. I tell him, “Back off. She wants space.”
The woman draws her knees up to her chest and presses her face into them. Her hair is messy, like a child’s.
I sit on the floor beside her and rest my back on the chair legs. I wonder if she has a relative behind the swinging doors, too.
An old man enters the waiting area. He checks in with the nurses and sits in a nearby chair. Another person enters behind him, a woman with a small child in tow. They take a pair of seats by the cop, who has returned to his post by the door. They shoot the woman and me a strange look. They can suck it. We can sit wherever we want.
The woman pulls her face out of her knees and wipes her hands across her cheeks, which are dripping with tears. In doing so, she jostles my shoulder, and I hiss with pain.
