Land of Careful Shadows

by Suzanne Chazin

  He started on one side of the street, at a stucco house with six mailboxes and, armed with a copy of the dead woman’s picture, talked to every man or woman who opened the door. He spoke in his most respectful Spanish. He stressed that he was only here to find out if they could identify the woman in the photograph or knew the whereabouts of José or Vilma Ortiz. He didn’t show his badge unless they asked for ID to keep the encounters as low-key as possible.

  Some residents tried hard to help, staring at the photo, calling on other household members to see if they knew her or the Ortiz family. Others—probably the most recent arrivals—opened their doors only a crack and shook their heads without giving the photo more than a passing glance. After two streets, Vega couldn’t say for sure whether no one knew his subjects or whether people were too scared to get involved.

  It was past eight p.m. by the time Vega limped down Maple Road. His ankles hurt. His head throbbed like there was a mariachi band inside. He was about to call it quits for the night when a silver Mercedes SUV with tinted windows turned the far corner and slowly cruised down the street, then double-parked about twenty feet in front of him. This wasn’t a street where silver Mercedes normally traveled.

  The driver flicked on an interior light. Vega saw two figures inside, a male and a female. Vega watched the male in the front passenger seat power down the window and thrust out a lanky brown arm. He was wearing a green-and-beige checked shirt that Vega recognized as the uniform of a cashier at the local supermarket. He had the build of a teenager, but there was no slouch to his posture, none of the nervous energy so common in puberty. He seemed to have an adult air about him, a wariness of overstretching his boundaries. And in that moment, Vega recognized his daughter’s boyfriend, Kenny Cardenas. He recognized the SUV, too. His ex-wife had one just like it. Which meant he had no doubt who was in the driver’s seat.

  She was sitting very still, head bowed like a child caught doing something she shouldn’t have. Her long, black hair fell across her face. She made no attempt to tuck it behind her ears. Kenny had his head turned toward the window. Vega suspected they were in the throes of an argument, though it lacked the passion and drama he’d expect from two teenagers. Maybe they were breaking up.

  If so, Vega could hardly say he was disappointed. Not that Kenny Cardenas was a bad kid. He was a straight-A student like Joy and, from what Vega could surmise, a popular and likable boy at Lake Holly High. But it was an open secret that Kenny and his family were undocumented. His father, Cesar, mowed lawns for a living. His mother, Hilda, cleaned houses. Kenny and his three younger sisters crossed the border from Mexico when they were in elementary school. And sure, things were getting better for young people in Kenny’s situation. If his father could marshal the time and resources, he might be able to apply for temporary legal status for Kenny that would allow him to get a driver’s license like all his friends and to apply for jobs without resorting to fake ID. But that didn’t change the fact that nothing in the boy’s future was guaranteed. Not a college degree or a job with benefits or a chance to put down real roots in this country. Vega wanted better for his daughter. Maybe she couldn’t understand that now, but she would someday.

  He told himself to back away. Pretend he was never here. That was the right thing to do, to respect their privacy. But he couldn’t leave until he was certain she was all right. He squinted through the windshield. The two teenagers were talking now. Joy was shaking her head vigorously back and forth. Kenny had his hands raised in a gesture of frustration. Vega watched her duck her head for a moment—to open the car door? To retrieve something from her purse? He wasn’t sure. But there was no mistake in his mind about what happened next. As Joy lifted her head, Kenny reached across her seat and brought his fist down. His daughter’s head bobbed and jerked in response.

  In seconds, Vega had the passenger door open and Kenny Cardenas splayed across the hood. A stream of Spanish invectives flew from his lips. Joy wouldn’t understand them. She only knew the stilted Spanish she got from textbooks at school. But Kenny would.

  “You think you can hit my daughter, pendejo? You think that makes you a big man? Hitting a girl half your size? ” Vega wished he could have gotten his hands on José Ortiz after he punched his wife. Maybe this town wouldn’t be in the mess it was now.

  “Dad!” cried Joy. “What are you doing?”

  Vega didn’t answer. He kicked the boy’s legs apart and shoved him hard against the SUV. Kenny went to protest. Vega yanked the boy by the back of his shirt. “How does it feel when someone threatens you? Huh, cabrón?”

  “Dad! Stop it!” Joy tugged on her father’s jacket. “He didn’t hit me.”

  Vega kept a tight hold on Kenny’s shirt as he turned and looked at his daughter. Her eyes were slightly swollen, her black mascara smeared enough to resemble one of those pouty ingénues on MTV. But that could have been from crying. She wasn’t bruised or bleeding. There were no markings on her face.

  “I saw him,” Vega insisted. “Through the car window. I saw him bring his fist down.”

  “I was trying to recline my seat. It wouldn’t budge so he had to bang on the headrest.”

  “It’s true, Mr. Vega,” Kenny gasped. “I didn’t hit her.” Vega released Kenny’s shirt and stepped back. His heart was pounding at the thought of what he might have done to the boy. He felt no better than that rookie Fitzgerald. He braced for Kenny’s anger but saw something shrunken and defeated instead. Whatever Vega had interrupted this evening, it had already been going badly before he’d finished it off.

  Joy paced the sidewalk, her black high-heel boots clicking on the pavement, her silver bangles jangling as she pushed her bangs out of her face. She’d always been one for drama.

  “What are you doing here, embarrassing me like this?” she demanded. “I’m not five years old anymore. You can’t spy on me like this.”

  “I wasn’t spying. I’m working a case with the Lake Holly PD. I was interviewing people in the neighborhood. I didn’t know you’d be here.”

  “It’s okay, Mr. Vega.” Kenny looked pretty shaken up but he muscled the quiver out of his voice and tucked his shirt back into his jeans. “No harm done.”

  “No harm?” asked Joy. “He could have killed you.”

  “Joy”—Kenny patted the air and gave her a reproving look—“It’s okay.”

  She folded her arms across her chest and bit down hard on her lip. She was still a child with her emotions, Vega noticed, trying them on like a flashy pair of shoes whether they fit the occasion or not. Kenny, he suspected, had no such luxury. There were some emotions—anger, jealousy, regret—that he simply couldn’t afford.

  “I have to go now,” said the boy. “I have to finish my homework.” He nodded over his shoulder to a wood-frame colonial. The front porch sagged. Paint peeled in ribbons from the siding. The house had originally been a one-family. Judging from the number of mailboxes by the front door, Kenny, his parents, and three sisters now shared it with three other families.

  Kenny shot a quick glance at Joy. Vega caught something pained in the gaze. “See you,” the boy said softly. Then he hustled up the front porch steps.

  “Call me,” Joy shouted after him. Vega heard the desperation in her voice. He felt the hurt as if it were his own. Kenny didn’t answer as he opened the front door and disappeared inside.

  Joy stood next to her mother’s Mercedes, bobbing up and down in her black boots. The temperature had dropped and the skimpy Pepto-Bismol pink jacket she was wearing wasn’t nearly enough. Vega sloughed off his navy blue police Windbreaker and draped it over her shoulders. The shoulders of the Windbreaker sloped down her tiny frame and the sleeves dipped below her fingers. Vega zipped it up for her like she was still in preschool.

  “I can do that myself,” she said with a trace of embarrassment.

  “I know. Sorry.” He stuffed his hands in his pants pockets. He could feel the cold bite right through his shirt.

  “Now you don’t have a jacket.”


  “I’m okay. Maybe you could drive me down to the police station? My car’s in their parking lot.”

  “Sure.”

  Vega eased himself into the passenger side of Wendy’s silver Mercedes. He wished Joy was driving him all the way north to his house tonight instead of six blocks to his borrowed county car. The seats had those automatic warmers in them. The car’s engine purred like a contented tiger. He could have closed his eyes and stayed in that Mercedes all night.

  Joy checked her rearview mirrors and pulled back onto the street.

  “Are you still sore at me?” asked Vega.

  “You never told Kenny you were sorry.”

  “It was an accident.”

  “You still could have said you were sorry.”

  “I’m sorry, all right? I made a mistake. You make mistakes too, you know.”

  He was referring to his Acura that she’d totaled. She looked ready to dissolve into tears.

  “Hey,” he said softly. “That was a stupid thing for me to say. I’m just tired and cranky. You forgive me?”

  “Sure.” Silence. She was like a complicated machine that he’d lost the instructions to. He could watch the gears turning but he had no idea what was going on inside. Which reminded him.

  “I was talking to a man today who plays tennis with Dr. Feldman.” He waited for a reaction. It was his cop training. He always let the other person fill in the blanks. But Joy said nothing so he was forced to continue.

  “He said Dr. Feldman hasn’t seen you in a month.”

  Still no response.

  “I thought you liked working at the hospital.”

  “I’ve just—been busy.”

  “With what?”

  She chewed on a fingernail. All her nails were bitten, he noticed. She never used to bite her nails. Even the skin around the cuticles looked red and inflamed.

  “He’s not worth this kind of heartache, Joy. You’re better off without him.”

  “You don’t know the first thing about Kenny.”

  “I know you’ve got big opportunities coming up and he doesn’t.”

  “For your information, Kenny was accepted to Binghamton University for the fall. Pre-med, just like me. La Casa just awarded him a scholarship.”

  “I hope for his sake, things work out. But even so, the kid’s got a tough road ahead of him. I don’t want his limitations to hold you back.”

  Joy made a face.

  “What?”

  “Didn’t Grandma and Grandpa say the same about you?” Not in his presence. In his presence, Dr. Kaplan and his wife were unfailingly polite. Stilted, but polite. They were Democrats, after all. They marched for civil rights. They gave generously to PBS and the Anti-Defamation League. But in private, Vega knew, they breathed a sigh of relief when Wendy left him for her nice Jewish investment-banker second husband, Alan, and a house in The Farms. Upward mobility, Vega supposed. Wendy moved upward. He got the mobility.

  “That was prejudice, Joy. This is different.”

  “Why? Because you’re on the other side now?”

  “I’m not on anyone’s side.”

  “Oh come on, Dad. As soon as you got the chance, you got as far away from your Puerto Rican roots as possible. You never spoke Spanish to me—”

  “—Because I didn’t want to embarrass you. Do you have any idea what it felt like to be the only kid in Lake Holly whose mother had an accent?”

  “I liked Abuelita’s accent. I would’ve liked to have known that side of my culture better. Now she’s dead, I never will.”

  Something parched and painful settled in the back of Vega’s throat. Regret. He’d never expected it to have such physical weight. God, he missed his mother. Every minute of every day. And where was he when it all could have been different? Going through the divorce, he supposed. Moving to cheaper digs farther upstate. Taking on more overtime to pay for child support.

  Never once did his mother berate his choices, even if some of his visits were hurried between work shifts, even if he rarely brought Joy because Wendy considered the Bronx too dangerous, too dirty—too Spanish. His mother cooked things like alcapurrias and piñon—fried meat fritters and beef-and-plantain casserole that Vega loved but sometimes upset his daughter’s stomach. The neighborhood wasn’t safe for an innocent like Joy to wander in so they stayed in his mother’s stuffy apartment where his daughter sat, pale and mute on the slipcovered couch, the blue of the television drifting across her face until Vega took her home. He wanted their worlds to mesh. He wanted the two people he loved most to get to know each other better. But it required the conviction that his world—his life—was worth getting to know and Vega, always trying to fit in elsewhere, never had that sort of confidence. And now, as Joy said, it was too late. The concrete had set. It would never be other than what it was.

  “Dad? Are you okay?”

  “I should’ve tried harder,” he said softly. “I guess I didn’t want to force a world on you that you weren’t interested in.”

  “But I am interested.”

  “You say that now, Joy. Now, when it’s cool, or whatever, to be ethnic or different. When you were a kid, it was the last thing you would have wanted. You remember how you used to complain that Abuelita’s apartment was always too hot—even in winter? And you were never comfortable sitting on her furniture because of those plastic slipcovers. Remember?”

  Joy giggled. “My legs used to stick to them. Every time I moved, they made like, farting noises. How did you deal with that growing up?”

  “I never sat on the living-room furniture. It was always for company.”

  She got a sudden dreamy-eyed look on her face. “You know what I did like? That little doll she crocheted on the back of the toilet. The one whose pink skirt hid the extra roll of toilet paper. What happened to that doll, Dad?”

  Vega closed his eyes and leaned back on the headrest. He tried to blot out the image that stuck in his head. The crocheted doll lying on the black-and-white ceramic floor tiles of his mother’s bathroom, one eye open, one closed, her cotton-candy pink yarn skirt soaked red with his mother’s blood.

  “I don’t know what happened to it,” he said finally.

  They both were silent after that, listening to the soft hum of warm air percolating through the vents.

  “I’m sorry, Dad. I didn’t mean to bring up Abuelita. I know you’re still hurting a lot.”

  “I’m glad you brought her up. She’d be glad too. As a matter of fact, there’s something I’ve been meaning to give you.”

  “What?”

  “I came across her favorite pearl earrings a couple of weeks ago. I took them out of her apartment after . . .” Vega’s voice dropped off. To say it was to imagine it and he was still wrestling with that. “Anyway, I know she’d want you to have them.”

  “I’d like that.”

  They were at the police station now. Vega gestured to the parking lot. “If you can turn in here, my car’s right there in the lot.” He pointed to the black Escalade.

  “Wow Dad, nice car.”

  “It’s not mine. It belongs to the county.”

  “They let cops tool around in Escalades?”

  “It was impounded from a heroin dealer. Last night I needed to look the part. I won’t get it again, trust me.”

  “I thought you weren’t working undercover anymore.”

  “I’m not. I just had to help another cop make a few connections.”

  “In Lake Holly?”

  “Nah. South of here. I’m in Lake Holly to help the local guys track down the identity of a dead woman.”

  “Dead? As in murdered?” Vega forgot that violent death wasn’t an everyday occurrence for most people. Plus, Joy had always been impressionable. When she was little, movies had to be prescreened, nightlights left on throughout the house. Before bed, Vega used to have to make an elaborate show of rendering her room monster-free by dabbing witch hazel on the doorknobs. So he lied.

  “She drowned. That’s all.
These things happen.” Vega undid his seatbelt and put his arm around her. It felt good to feel her loose and willing for once in his embrace. “This Kenny stuff—you’ll see—it’s not going to matter once you’re up at Amherst.”

  He caught a shadow of something cross her face and wondered what secret fear or insecurity he’d blindly trampled now. Her moods changed like quicksilver these days. She could seem so brash and independent one moment, so childlike the next.

  “I’m sorry, Daddy,” she said thickly.

  “About what?”

  “About totaling your car.”

  “I don’t care about the car, Chispita. You’re the only thing that matters.”

  Chispita: “Little Spark.” He used to call her that after the plucky young heroine in a Mexican telenovela his mother used to watch when he was a kid. The last time he called her Chispita, she cringed. This time she seemed almost grateful that someone could still see the little girl inside the skimpy pink jacket and black leather boots.

  She shrugged off his jacket and handed it back to him. Vega kissed her cheek, feeling the dampness from her earlier tears with Kenny, the way they made her skin smell all yeasty like she was a little girl again, riding on his shoulders, burying her face in his chest when something frightened her or turned her shy. He would have to get comfortable with saying good-bye to her in a couple of months. It felt too soon.

  He stepped out of the car. “Drive safely, Mija.” It’s what he always said. His stand-in for “I love you,” when I love you was too hard to say. He slapped the window of the passenger’s side and stood shivering in the cold as he watched her red taillights fade down the street, braking at a traffic light before turning into the darkness beyond.

  Chapter 7

  “Our Juanita Doe didn’t go into that lake under the influence, that’s for sure. The average five-year-old in this country’s got more pharmaceuticals in him than she had.”

  At least Greco wasn’t calling her a “chick” anymore. Vega supposed he had to be thankful for small favors. Like the bad coffee Greco was handing him now as he walked into the detectives’ bullpen on Monday morning. Neither of them had gotten much sleep the night before.