Writing on the Wall

by Jenna Rae

  Del didn’t have to look up to know that Lola was watching her from the window. “Yeah,” she whispered back. “What am I missing here?”

  ***

  Lola was quiet as they packed up and moved. Her eyes followed the black weapons duffel when Del took it out of the closet and out to the car before coming back for Lola and the rest of the stuff. She didn’t ask any questions, though, so Del didn’t have to lie. She also didn’t ask where they were going, but she did shove her credit card at the desk clerk of the next hotel. Del grabbed it and slid it back at her.

  “Not yours.”

  Lola frowned, about to protest, and Del explained, “What if he’s tracking you by them?”

  Lola put away the card without a word.

  Del checked the rooms before gesturing Lola into the one further from the stairwell and heading into her own. If Lola had any comment about the change to adjoining rooms, she didn’t share it. Del dropped her stuff on the chair, used the bathroom and opened the door between them to find Lola curled up on the bed. She left the door open and lay down for a moment on the rough bedspread on her own king-sized lumpy mattress. I’ll rest until Phan gets here, just for a minute. She closed her eyes and was gone.

  In her dream, she saw her daddy’s face. He had been handsome once, tall and blond and dimpled. He was, her momma said, an even better version of Robert Redford. Women always looked at him with hunger in their eyes, especially Momma, and he had a slow, knowing smile that made just about every woman swoon.

  Little Del followed him around, copying his swagger and his smile and his rich, warm laugh. She adored him, wanted to hear him laugh and feel his giant hand rough up her curls. When he looked at her with pride, she was fit to bust with happiness. When he called her his best pal, she felt she must be the happiest kid in the world.

  She would perch happily in his lap, see the sun shining through the golden hairs on his strong arms, feel his legs, solid beneath her. She would feel the rumble in his chest as he spoke and laughed. She could smell his cologne, his sweat, the beer on his breath. Not a sour smell, not like later, but a warm, robust smell. Back then, he was her superhero, golden and shining and powerful and good—the most important person in her world.

  Things changed somewhere around the time Del turned seven. Her daddy lost his job for reasons Del never knew. He sat around brooding, and he was easily irritated by her, by Momma, by everything. She didn’t know what she was doing wrong and tried harder and harder to get his attention. One day he casually backhanded her for walking in front of the television, and she felt a shift inside of her. This was not her daddy, this sullen man who smoked and drank endlessly and never smiled or said anything that wasn’t a grunt or a holler. That daddy was gone, and this man who looked like him was a stranger. She hated this man for taking her daddy away. She watched him for signs that he’d turn back into his old self, but they didn’t show.

  The sheriff beat on the door one morning, and that made Daddy really mad. They moved into a trailer park, where he started drinking even more. He became grimy and bearded and bloated and sour. Her momma, who had always seemed little more than a dim shadow attached to Daddy, grew even more brittle and thin and worn. She took to wearing bright makeup and tight clothes and high heels. She got a job in a bar and was gone most of the time.

  Daddy had by that time stopped even pretending to look for work and would sit on a lawn chair in the gravel center of the trailer park with a rowdy group of men Del watched with wary eyes. None of them worked. None of them took care of the packs of kids who ran around in the dirt. The men never seemed to move unless it was to cuff one of the kids or kick at a dog or grab at a woman. They started the days bleary and sullen and grew loud and raucous as afternoons yielded to evenings.

  Del sometimes hunkered down under the rotting wooden steps of what her momma jeeringly called the veranda—a thin strip of tacked-together plywood scraps that hung off the side of the trailer. She hid and watched and listened as the men her momma called “the peanut gallery” shared rude comments about the girls and women in the park. What had happened to her daddy? What had she done to make him into such a hateful thing? She grieved for him, though she didn’t know the word. She ached for things she could not name—affection, kindness, approval? She ached for the hero she’d once worshipped.

  Late one night, she watched from under the veranda when Momma came home from work and tried to get Daddy to come inside. He waved her off, and she shook her head and asked when he was “gonna start being a man again and get a job.”

  Del gasped in shock. What was she doing?

  Del’s momma continued, her bony, scarlet-taloned finger drooping in his face. “You can’t even get it up, you fat pig! Show me you’re a man. Show me!”

  Momma’s sharp words sounded like a mosquito’s buzzing, and Del shook her head, covered her ears. Her daddy smiled his old, easy smile. Del’s eyes lit up, and a small spark of hope flared in her chest. Was he back? Was he coming back, finally? Her breathing was too loud, and she moved her hands to cover her mouth and quiet it.

  Slowly, casually, Daddy rose, turned to face his pals, and muttered something she couldn’t hear. There were a few quiet chuckles, and Daddy hitched up his pants, which immediately sagged again under the weight of his protuberant gut. He smiled before he slapped Momma twice, quick, almost careless slaps. The men burst into jeering laughter, and Daddy waited for Momma to lift her head. He again muttered something over his shoulder that made his friends cackle, and then Daddy swung around to face Momma again.

  This time he backhanded her hard enough to make a loud cracking sound and send her to the ground in a boneless heap. For a moment, Del thought Momma had disappeared, leaving behind only her clothes and shoes. There was a moment of silence. Del held her breath and saw movement in the heap and let the breath out with a sigh. Daddy’s gaze drifted over, and Del realized that Daddy knew she was there all along and didn’t care. She let out a sob, and Daddy just hitched his pants up again. He stood for a moment before easing back into his chair with an ugly laugh that was echoed and amplified by the jeers and howls of his cronies. Del curled her hands over her face, unable to face Daddy and unable to look away.

  Del watched her momma struggle to her feet. Momma lit a cigarette, blew blood-sprayed smoke into the air, and turned to stagger over to their trailer. Del ducked her head as her mother passed over her, listening to her stiletto heels dig into the spongy wood of the steps and the veranda. A drop of blood fell between the boards and splattered onto Del’s knee. She waited until Momma had wrangled the door open and gone inside to grab a handful of gray dirt and rub it on the blood.

  She’d seen Daddy and Momma fight before, but this was different. They weren’t a couple of drunken lovers wrangling in that wrestling-match-lovemaking-fighting-flirting way she’d become used to. They hated each other, something she’d never realized before. Why? How had that happened? She was sure that it was her fault, though she couldn’t have said why. She felt guilty and scared and in the way. If she’d never been born, they maybe would still love each other. If she were a good girl, instead of a “mouthy little brat” as Momma sometimes called her, maybe they wouldn’t hate each other so much.

  Del held her breath and waited until the men had turned their attention to one of the scantily clad teenagers sauntering by. It felt like there was a rock in her chest, and she wiped her face dry before she snuck out from under the steps and crept into the trailer. Daddy would never see her cry; she swore it to herself in that moment, and it was a vow she never broke. Not when Daddy broke her arm, not when Momma threw a bottle at her and it cut her head open. Not ever. She was cold inside and still, and she knew suddenly that someday she would be big enough to leave this ugly place and these ugly people, and when she did, she would never look back.

  It was dark inside, and she crept on cat’s paws past the living room and the strange shadows in there to the hallway, dancing her fingertips lightly, soundlessly along the smooth, notched pane
ling on the wall. She hesitated before entering her parents’ room. It was a sacred place, somehow. A place where she didn’t belong. She smelled smoke and heard a tiny squeal of mattress springs. Don’t be a chicken, she scolded herself. She’s hurt, so see if she needs anything. A good person takes care of somebody who’s hurt.

  It was the first rule she recited to herself, but not the last. Over the next few years, she would develop a list of things a good person does, a code of ethics that would define her as an adult, but she didn’t know that then. All she knew then was that the rule felt right, sounded right in her head. She squared her shoulders and pushed open the accordion style door with a steady hand.

  “Ma’am?”

  Silence. The room smelled like smoke and perfume and sweat and beer. Momma seemed broken, hunched over on the mattress that sagged almost to the floor under Momma’s bony hips. With her black boots and black stockings, she seemed to float in the dark like a wraith. She was a thing that existed only within the cloud of smoke that encircled her bowed head. A swirl of teased blond curls made a denser cloud inside the smoke, and it almost looked, there in the darkened room, like there was no solid part of Momma, just smoke and then hair and then some unknowable, untouchable, denser cloud of anger and blood and vodka.

  “Y’all right?”

  Silence.

  “Ma’am?”

  “Whadda you want, huh?” Her mother finally tipped her head up and blew a stream of smoke her way, but Del had long since learned how to duck away from that. “Wanna rub it in? Maybe y’all wanna take a picture?”

  “No, ma’am.” Del wanted to make things better, but she didn’t know how.

  “Listen, here, girl.” Her momma’s watery gray eyes skittered around Del’s face. “Ain’t no man on this earth better’n your daddy, you hear?”

  An hour earlier, this statement would have made Del swell with gladness. Now it was just a bunch of words that meant nothing. She nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Yeah. Damn straight.”

  Del waited for more, thinking her momma must have some kind of answer for how things had gotten broken. Maybe, some small part of her dared to hope, it hadn’t been Del’s fault, after all. Then she thought, a good person doesn’t think about herself when somebody else is hurt—this became one of the rules too.

  “And one more thang.” Momma’s voice was slurred—when she drank, she sounded like Nana, who’d lived with them in Texas until her death. “That’s my man. He’s mine.”

  Del frowned, nodded.

  Momma fixed her gaze, steadying her voice and narrowing her eyes. “Y’all remember that, Adele Savannah Mason, you hear me?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “You better, girl. I’ll whup your ass—you got that? Huh? I’ll whup yo’ narrow ass, you don’t watch it.”

  Del backed away. Momma’s face was twisted with rage and wildness and smeared with blood and makeup. Del felt and tried to hide a wave of revulsion, but she must have hidden it badly, because Momma popped up quick and grabbed Del’s shoulders and shook her hard and pushed her. Del hit the wall with the back of her head and fell onto her bottom with a thump. Momma snorted and again sat and hung her head, her straggly hair covering her bloody face.

  Del scrambled up and backed away quicker now. Sometimes, she told herself, a victim isn’t a good person. So you don’t turn your back on the victim, either. But you don’t treat them bad. Another rule.

  By the time she was ten, there were over fifty rules. She wrote them down in her tight, neat block letters in a little notebook given her by a teacher she didn’t remember. She had memorized them by then, of course, and it was only a few months later that she threw the notebook away. She’d added a final rule: the rules are a part of a good person and can never be forgotten or ignored.

  At fourteen, she was looking for a way out and met a woman who let Del stay with her until Del tried, unsuccessfully, to seduce her. After a few months on the Fresno streets, she got hauled in by a police officer who caught her sleeping in a park late one night. He shook her awake, arrested her without trying to mess with her, and tossed her in the back of the patrol car. On the ride to the station, he advised her, not unkindly, to get her shit together.

  He seems like a good person, she thought. She studied the back of his freckled, balding head. He turned to the right just a bit, and she saw in a narrow alley the flash of movement that had caught his eye. He muttered into his little radio in secret police code, and she felt a flip in her stomach. She didn’t want to be in the back of a police car. She wanted to be in the front. She wanted to talk the secret code into the little radio and drive through the dark streets with a swiveling head and eyes that took in every detail of the ghettoscape. She wanted to see the little movement and know what it meant and how to keep things safe for the good guys. She never knew the cop’s name, but she never forgot him, either. When she put on her uniform for the first time after the academy, she felt the same flip in her stomach and knew that she was one of the good guys, finally.

  Her dream circled back to that night at the trailer park, again and again, and her daddy’s laugh was still sounding in her ears when a knock at the door startled her awake. She paused to grab her weapon before she heaved off the bed and loped to the door.

  “Crap, it’s dark out?”

  Phan’s face, distorted through the peephole, was a welcome sight.

  ***

  Lola debated whether or not to go into Del’s room and finally decided to duck her head in. The two detectives were hunched over the small table tucked into the corner of the room, and Tom Phan smiled at her to enter. He was handsome, tall and tanned and sporting an engaging smile. His warm brown eyes smiled at her and searched her at the same time—maybe it was a cop thing.

  “Detective, it’s nice to see you,” she heard her own voice saying. “Thank you so much for helping me like this.”

  “Inspector Mason and I were just going over the physical evidence from your house, Ms. Bannon—what there is of it. Would you like to have a seat?”

  Lola smiled and nodded. “Please, call me Lola.” Inspector?

  She perched on the edge of the bed. Del’s bed, she thought, picturing Del asleep, her tanned skin golden against the white sheet. She looked away from the bed and gazed at the two detectives. Inspectors, she corrected herself.

  “All right, Lola,” he said easily. “But only if you promise to call me Tom.”

  She nodded.

  “How are you, Lola? I understand you got hurt the other night.”

  “It’s nothing. A few stitches, that’s all.”

  Del finally looked at her and said, “There’s not much here. I wish we could tell you he left fingerprints or a neighbor saw him or something, but no.”

  Lola nodded. “Okay.”

  So, she thought, all business. She forced her eyes away from the tempting sight of Del’s long, muscular limbs, her solid torso, her angular face. She kept pushing her curls back in impatience as she talked with Tom. She must need a haircut. Lola wanted desperately to see Del after that haircut, with her long neck stretching above her broad shoulders and her long arms and her mysteriously undefined breasts.

  What did she look like underneath the jeans and polo? Somehow, the way she kept her body under wraps made it even more enticing. Lola would like to be the one person who knew what Del looked like without the men’s jeans and a big, square shirt. Her pulse was racing, and Lola forced herself to look at Tom and try to concentrate. He was watching her, and Lola hoped he didn’t know what she’d been thinking.

  “So, Lola, do you mind if I ask you some questions?”

  She shook her head and tried to keep her mind off Del for the next two hours. He asked her about each incident, taking her slowly through every detail, following up on her every impression.

  He asked her about Orrin and his brother, his partner, his girlfriend, and his money. He asked about friends and lovers, pressing when she insisted there’d been no one in her life for the pas
t twenty years but Orrin and his family, and before them, only foster homes and social workers and teachers.

  Somehow, he managed to pry into every facet of her life without seeming to intrude. Lola listened carefully to Phan and answered his questions with thoughtful care. Phan developed a rhythm, and Lola found herself responding to it. She imagined that cops did that all the time with witnesses and suspects. The rhythm lulled people, calmed them, helped them feel safe, allowed them to remember and reveal more. It was smart.

  Finally, Phan closed his notebook and thanked Lola for her help. She smiled, visibly relaxing, and thanked him back.

  “Well,” Del said wearily. “I can’t think of anything else, can you?”

  He shook his head. “But we’re still working in the dark.”

  Del frowned in agreement. “So, how do we fix that?”

  Lola saw her tiredness and wanted to say or do something to help. She’d been toying with an idea, one she knew Del would hate, and she decided to share it anyway.

  “Um,” she began, avoiding Del’s gaze and focusing on Tom, “I was thinking. I mean, you guys are obviously the experts, of course, and I don’t know what the best way is, and you do.”

  Tom just looked at her.

  “So, anyway, what I was thinking was, you know, he wants to get to me, right?” No answer, but Lola saw Del sit back in her chair and narrow her eyes. Tom flicked a glance at Del but nodded at Lola.

  She rushed, “Why not use that? Why not throw him off balance, draw him out?”

  Del’s head was shaking, but Lola continued, “Tom, the department will tolerate a certain amount of time, right? I mean, if we keep running around from one hotel to another, he won’t be able to find me, maybe, but eventually, I’m going to have to go home. Del’s going to have to go back to her job, her real job, and you’ll get a more urgent case. If he doesn’t kill me in the next week or so, the department will figure he’s moved on. Your boss will say he’s lost interest, and he’ll cut the funding. Then Del will get in trouble, because she’ll argue with her boss, and he’ll just wait a little while and then kill me. Or he’ll really move on, and then some other woman will be dead.”