Land of Careful Shadows

by Suzanne Chazin

  “There’s nothing to talk about.”

  “There’s everything to talk about.”

  “I e-mailed you a letter, Dad. It’s all there. My confession. Everything.”

  “I didn’t get the e-mail.”

  “I just sent it.”

  Vega fumbled with his phone. His hands were shaking. The new e-mail came up on his screen. He gambled instead on a lie. “I didn’t get it, Joy. Let me come up. Maybe I’ll get it in a few minutes.” Now was his only chance. Now, while she was undecided. To reach her, he would have to circle the edge of the lake and climb up to the point. He would have to lose visual contact with her. Anything could happen. He needed a distraction.

  “I want you to do me a favor, Joy, okay? One favor?” he called out, willing his voice to sound firm and confident. He’d had only the most rudimentary training as a hostage negotiator. But he knew one basic: keep a person talking. If you can keep communication going, you’ve got a chance.

  “You always sang that Pink song really well—you know the one? ‘Perfect’?” he asked. “Can you sing it to me now?” She had a lovely voice, a breathy alto just like Pink’s.

  “I can’t.”

  “Yes, you can. Come on. Curse words and everything. I don’t care.” He began the song himself: “Took a wrong turn, once or twice—” He was a good singer normally, but his throat had constricted from panic and adrenaline. He sounded like a saw cutting wood.

  And then he heard her, those raw, earthy notes that formed little more than a tiny vibrato in her chest. But it was the most beautiful thing he’d ever heard. She was singing. She was alive—and she would stay that way as long as the notes kept pushing out of her.

  He doubled his step, picking his way over tree limbs and pushing past branches that snapped like broken bones in his wake. He climbed toward her voice. It’s what kept his legs moving when he thought they’d give out, when the rocks got too slippery or cut up his hands until the knuckles began to bleed.

  The light was fading. He hadn’t climbed Bud Point since he was seventeen, a lifetime ago. He’d forgotten how steep it was, how dense the vegetation was, even now in early spring. He felt hemmed in and claustrophobic, surrounded by thick, remorseless timber that walled him off and left him directionless, like a small child in a sea of legs. He could barely hear Joy’s voice for the hard pulls of breath he was taking.

  And then the singing stopped.

  “Joy?” He was just below the summit. He could hear nothing but the distant backwash of cars speeding along Lake Holly Road and the vague yawn of a jet engine coursing through the sky. He hoisted himself up the final rock and pushed past a thicket of barberry bushes, thorns digging into his bloody hands. That’s when he saw her, shivering in that ridiculously gaudy pink jacket like some hip-hop diva.

  She was standing on an overhang of granite no wider than a picnic bench, kicking at small pebbles. He hoped to God she wasn’t fantasizing that one of them was her. He couldn’t believe he’d ever gone over that ledge. He felt like Alice in Wonderland. Every dimension seemed different to him on the other side of that looking glass.

  She seemed to register his presence as if waking up from a very deep sleep. She turned to face him. Her lips were blue. He longed to wrap his Windbreaker around her but he sensed any sudden move might spook her, so he stood very still.

  “Come to me, Chispita.”

  “I’m scared.”

  “I know you’re scared,” he panted, trying to catch his breath. “But I’m here now. Come.”

  She tucked her fingers under her armpits to keep them warm but she didn’t move. “It’s my fault, Daddy. All of it. I talked Kenny into doing it—”

  “—He was driving, Joy. It wasn’t all your fault.” Vega unzipped his jacket and shrugged it off. His shirt was damp with sweat. He fought off a shiver. “Here.” He held it out to her. “Take this.” He hoped the promise of warmth would coax her from the ledge. She didn’t move. A shadow crossed her features.

  “They’ll deport him, Dad. You know they will. That’s why we did what we did.”

  “Were you drunk?”

  “We were at a party. I’d had two rum and Cokes—I’m sorry. I know it was wrong but everybody was doing it. Kenny had just gotten off work so I gave him the keys. You always told me never to drink and drive. I thought it was the safest choice.”

  “Are you saying . . .” Vega let the arm holding his jacket fall to his side. He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “Kenny was sober?”

  “He only had a Sprite. Honest.”

  Vega closed his eyes and cursed softly. He felt weak with the realization: this didn’t have to happen. None of this had to happen.

  “I don’t see what difference that would have made,” said Joy. “Kenny’s an unlicensed driver. He’s in this country illegally and he killed somebody. Look what happened to that other immigrant in February, Dad! The cops would have torn Kenny to pieces. The whole town would have turned against him.”

  “Not if he was sober!” Vega slapped a hand to his forehead. He couldn’t hold back his frustration any longer—at Joy, at Kenny, at a schizophrenic system of justice that turned two scared teenagers into felons. “He’s an honors student with a clean record. He’s lived in this town since he was ten years old. You could have called me. I’d have gotten him a lawyer. Or Adele Figueroa would’ve. We’d have made sure it never left town court, that the whole case got adjudicated before ICE ever got their claws into him. And you?” He blew out a long stream of breath and tried to keep his emotions under control. “You were in the clear.”

  “Can’t you do that now?” She brushed her dark bangs out of her face and suddenly, all the worldliness seemed to disappear the way it did when she drifted off to sleep. There was hope in her dark eyes. For the first time in weeks, there was hope.

  Vega wanted to rail against her immaturity, her naïveté. There was no way he could turn back the clock and undo what had happened. And yet he couldn’t tell her this. Hope was her lifeline back from the edge of that cliff. He couldn’t sever it, no matter how childish or unrealistic it was. He couldn’t lie to her either. So he simply held out his jacket again.

  “Please come here and put this on, Joy. I will do anything you want me to do. Just please stop this foolishness.”

  She took a step toward him. Then another. Then she ran into his arms like she was five again. He hugged her so tightly she let out a whimper.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’ve made a mess of everything.”

  “You’re okay. That’s all that matters.” He slipped the jacket on her and zipped it up. This time, she didn’t protest. Then he wrapped his arms around her, feeling the warmth of her breath on his chest, drinking in the smell of her, something halfway between vanilla and bubble gum.

  They stood like that a long time watching the sun dip below the gray hillsides of trees. The lake, so welcoming earlier, had a blackness to it now, a cold and unforgiving depth. Streamers of clouds threaded the sky. Vega laced his fingers in Joy’s and wordlessly guided her down the bluff and back toward the parking lot. It would have been so easy just to drive her home without mentioning any of this again. But Jimmy Vega was a cop through and through, just as Louie Greco had said. He couldn’t go against what he knew was right. He wished he were still enough of a Catholic to believe in salvation from such things. Even so, he had to try.

  In the truck, he pulled out his phone and brought her e-mail up on the screen. Then he pushed “delete” without reading it.

  “I want the truth from your lips, Chispita. Not this.”

  “But you already know.”

  “I need to hear it from you.”

  Joy stared out the side window. She tugged on her fingers inside his oversized jacket, a habit she’d had since she was little when she was nervous.

  “Kenny didn’t mean to kill her. It was dark and the road was narrow—”

  “—Was he texting?”

  “No.” Her breath fogged up the side w
indow. She traced a finger across the condensation. “Maybe he was changing stations on the radio,” she admitted. “But we tried to save her, Dad. We performed CPR and everything. She was already dead. And then it just snowballed, I guess. Kenny got hysterical. He said the immigration authorities would send him back to Mexico, maybe send his whole family, on account of how angry people already were about what happened to that woman and her little girl.”

  Vega didn’t have the heart to tell Joy that no police agency could have summarily deported the entire Cardenas family for an infraction only Kenny had committed. He didn’t want to compound her misery.

  “I just thought if we could make her—you know—sort of—disappear,” said Joy. “Maybe all the problems would too.”

  In halting words that trailed off and sometimes died in her chest, Joy spilled out the story of how she and Kenny dragged Maria’s body into the bushes to hide it, then drove to Kenny’s house and picked up some of his father’s landscaping rope, then drove back to the lake, tied rope around Maria’s limbs, and weighted each rope with a stone.

  Joy didn’t know that her father had already seen the muddy, blood-spattered T-shirt, jeans, and rope in Adele’s garage. Vega wanted her to choose to come forward, not to feel trapped into doing so. And besides, the clothing and ropes would convict Kenny but the letter would convict Joy. Even before she admitted to writing it, Vega had the sense that she was the one doing all the planning, the one clever enough and calm enough to realize that if the police ever found the body, they might trace it back to a collision—unless they found that hate note in her discarded handbag. And it was Joy who understood that they needed to put Vega’s car on the tracks so that the damage from the train would obscure any damage from the hit and run. By the time they’d accomplished all of this, a couple of hours had gone by and Joy was sober enough to pass the Breathalyzer when the police showed up. Also, her nervous demeanor would have made perfect sense considering the condition of Vega’s car.

  Vega tried to ask the questions he would ask in any police interrogation. He tried to divorce himself from the fact that this was his daughter. But he couldn’t escape a taste of something bitter and metallic at the back of his throat. This couldn’t be the girl who used to beg him to check for monsters under her bed. When did she stop believing in monsters? When did she become one?

  “Joy—do you understand how serious this crime is? Kenny killed a woman and that’s terrible enough. But then you treated her death like she was some sort of broken cookie jar you could sweep under a rug.”

  Joy buried her face in her hands. “I didn’t want this to ruin his life.”

  “So you sacrificed yours?”

  A quiet came over both of them after that. It was the quiet after an explosion when everything that could have happened has happened already. Vega rested his hand on top of hers and gave it a squeeze.

  “That’s why you and Kenny need to turn yourselves in.”

  “Can’t you just—not tell what you know?”

  Vega shook his head. “I’m a police officer, Joy. I can’t turn my back on the law, on everything I believe in. And neither can you. It’s what’s eating you alive. And it will keep eating you alive until you and Kenny own up to it.”

  “What will happen to us?”

  Vega let out a long breath of air. There was despair in the exhale, and frustration too. Things didn’t have to be this way. “I don’t know. I don’t want to give you false promises because it’s not up to me. It’s up to a judge and the DA’s office. But it’s always better if you turn yourself in rather than let the police come after you.”

  “But this time, you’re saying, they might deport Kenny.”

  “Again, I don’t know. I can’t say.” He could not bring himself to tell her that Kenny’s chances of getting deported were infinitely higher for not having come forward after the accident.

  “Then I’ll tell the police I was driving. It’s what I wrote in my e-mail. No one can prove otherwise.”

  “Do you understand what you’re suggesting? You’re talking about lying to the police in a criminal investigation. And for what? For a boy who is here illegally? A boy who could get deported no matter what you do?”

  “But I love him.”

  “Does he love you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then he’d never ask you to lie for him. Or throw yourself off a cliff for him or any of those things you seem to think are love. You are seventeen years old, Chispita. You still have your whole life ahead of you. Don’t throw it away like this.”

  On the drive back, Joy cried silently in the truck. When Vega reached for her, she shrank from his touch. She unzipped his jacket and flung it at him. “I don’t want this anymore.” The pull on the zipper grazed his cheek. He welcomed the sting. At least it allowed him to feel something besides this unbearable numbness.

  The lights blazed inside the white-columned house when Vega pulled into the driveway. Wendy was home. “Do you want me to come in and speak to your mother?”

  “No. I’ll tell her.”

  Vega had a sudden panicked thought. “She doesn’t know, does she?”

  “No,” said Joy. “Why? Do you want to arrest her, too?”

  “I don’t want to arrest anybody. I just want to know what you’re going to tell her.”

  “That you’re going to arrest me if I don’t turn myself in. And Kenny, too.”

  “I’m not going to arrest you. I’m going to resign from the investigation and help you through this.”

  She opened the door of the truck and stepped out. The bright lights on the driveway framed a halo around her raven hair. She was so young. So beautiful. It hurt to look at her, hurt to know he was scraping the shiny silver plating off her life, asking her to summon whatever steel she had beneath. Then again, judging from what she’d confessed tonight, she had a fair amount of steel in her already—more than he would have guessed.

  Vega leaned over. “Joy, listen to me. Your life went into the water along with Maria’s that night in March. You can keep pretending that that’s not true. Or you can face what you’ve done, try to make amends, and get back to living. I can’t do that for you. You have to do it for yourself. But you don’t have to do it alone. I’ll help you through whatever’s in store.”

  “And what about Kenny?”

  Vega had no answer.

  “I thought not.” She slammed the car door and walked across the driveway. Vega waited for her to look back, but she didn’t. He heard the side door shut. There was a finality to it, an echo that he wondered if he would identify as regret one day, years from now, when he thought back on this moment, when he asked himself whether he’d done the right thing and heard only that echo in reply.

  Chapter 32

  Four days later, Jimmy Vega stood in an airless courtroom and watched Joy and Kenny, both pale and shaky, stand before a judge and admit in tiny voices the totality of their crimes. Cesar Cardenas wailed when Kenny pleaded guilty to driving the car that killed Maria Elena Santos and concealing the accident. Vega had never heard a noise so anguished—like the bark of a sea lion. He himself had managed only a little better at the sound of Joy’s own guilty pleas, biting hard on the inside of his cheek to keep from losing it completely as the counts against both teenagers were read.

  Both the lawyers and the families agreed that the relationship between Joy and Kenny had to end for each to be adequately represented. Kenny’s family yanked him out of Lake Holly High and enrolled him in the county vocational school for his final few months before the June court date; Wendy got Joy into a small private girls’ school in Connecticut. Vega supposed he had known all along that this would happen. But he had never spelled it out to Joy. And for this reason, she felt angry and deceived. She blamed her father for the breakup and punished him by refusing all contact. He had saved her, perhaps. But to do it, he’d had to lose her. He sent her her grandmother’s pearl earrings that he’d promised her, hoping that this small gift might heal the divide. She
never responded.

  At night, he woke up in a cold sweat, trembling at the thought that Joy might go to prison. That was certainly more possible than college at this point. Amherst had withdrawn its offer of admission to Joy as Binghamton had to Kenny. Their lives were on hold until June.

  Vega resigned from the investigation and, with Captain Waring’s blessing, buried himself in paperwork following up leads on other detectives’ cases. He didn’t return phone calls. Not from friends. Not from Greco. Not even from Adele. After Joy and Kenny turned themselves in, Vega had had to confess to Greco about the box of Kenny’s bloody clothes and ropes in Adele’s garage. If Adele hadn’t hated him enough for destroying Kenny before this, she surely did after the police got a search warrant and tore apart her garage.

  Greco tried to stay in touch. He cornered Vega on the phone to give him updates on Porter’s trial as well as those of Rowland’s pals, Delaney and Giordano. He filled him in on Linda’s condition; she was walking again, albeit on crutches. Olivia, all healed up, was back at school. But that didn’t change the fact that he and Greco were playing for opposing teams now—Greco working to prosecute Joy, Vega trying to defend her and neither of them allowed to discuss it. So he listened politely and offered the requisite yeses and nos until Greco got off the phone. He was relieved when the calls stopped after a couple of weeks.

  Then one day at work, about four weeks after Joy’s arraignment, a county detective dropped a large manila envelope on Vega’s desk.

  “A woman just left this with the desk sergeant for you.”

  Vega opened the envelope and tipped out a black cotton shirt—the guayabera he’d worn to Gabby Martinez’s quinceañera—along with a note:

  La Casa is moving. I’m cleaning things out.

  Thought perhaps you might want this. Toss it

  if you don’t—Adele.

  Vega wasn’t surprised at the cold tone of the note. He’d never apologized for what happened to her garage. He should have. He’d been so caught up in his own pain; he’d never considered anyone else’s.