And when they’d grown up some more and Olivia had gone into the next system, the criminal justice system, he’d kept her kid for her. He’d kept her kid safe.
“Kinship caregiver,” they’d called Joshua when Olivia became incarcerated. Quick fingerprints and a background scan had granted him temporary custody of Jayden, but he’d made sure to jump through every hoop to keep his nephew stable in his home, the two of them moving from the dorms to an apartment across campus. Soon he’d earn his bachelor’s in human services and could become a youth counselor. He’d make it permanent then, make it official. For now, they relied on the foster care checks each month along with his scholarships and grants.
Like he said, they did all right by each other.
Crossing the boardwalk, they dodged bikers and joggers with dogs, heading toward the grassy steps where dreadlocked and tie-dyed musicians beat steel drums. The rhythm got Jayden pounding at the air with his palms and doing his imitation of beatboxing, spitting as he played. “Dada, I be jammin’,” he said in his best Bob Marley.
“Ya, mon,” Joshua said, arranging the picnic spread for Bianca. He asked Jayden if the girls would like it, but Jayden only said, “Can I have a juice?”
“Sure, grab one from the chest.”
A few seconds later, Joshua felt ice chunks at the back of his neck. “Hey, you little turd, good shot, but quit wasting ice. I’m trying to make a good impression here.”
“What’s a ’preshun?” Jayden fiddled with the plastic straw in his juice box.
“Im-pression. It’s like, we want Bianca and her daughter to like us. To think we have good manners and behave ourselves.”
“But it’s a lie! We’re wild.” He roared.
Joshua laughed. “We are wild. But let’s pretend to be civilized—for the ladies.”
Jayden sipped through his yellow straw. “Fine.”
They’d gone to the stationery store the night before and picked a suede journal with gold-lined pages and embroidered flowers on the cover. On the inside flap, Joshua had written, To Dreams. Write yours, Bianca. Would she think he was a weirdo, or worse? Most girls assumed he was gay cause he was a “nice guy,” as they put it. He didn’t hit on them or make lewd comments or jokes. He hated sports. Instead, he watched cooking shows and reruns of old sitcoms. He and his foster mother Patti used to watch I Love Lucy. His favorite episode was when Lucy dressed up like Superman so her kid wouldn’t be disappointed at his birthday party, but then the real guy showed up all buff and Lucy got stuck on the balcony in a bizarre getup and an old-school football helmet with pigeons landing all over her until Ricky found her and of course she had some ’splaining to do. Oh man, that was funny.
At the pier entrance, Bianca pushed that pink stroller down the ramp. The steel drums on the boardwalk beat in Joshua’s ears. Her hair was tied in curls on top of her head and pinned with a bright fuchsia hibiscus. She had on this long, Aphrodite-type dress that reached down to the pavement with straps that circled her neck, shoulders and collarbone. Her cleavage showed, but barely, and when she stepped, the dress pressed into her thighs, and Joshua noticed the curve of her thick hips. She reminded him of a fetish from their Mexican Art class. She wore dangling bead earrings and bangles on her wrists, and her lips were shiny with gloss. God, he prayed, you better not be messing with me sending this gorgeous woman sauntering toward me.
He called her name, waving. She peered across the amphitheater, her face lighting up. A good sign. “Hey,” she called back, heading toward him and Jayden. “Look at this spread,” she said when she got to the picnic blanket.
He stood and hugged her. “You made it.”
She hugged him back, warmly, like Patti used to. “This is fantastic. I’m lucky if I remember sunglasses and chanclas.” She parked the stroller, locked the wheels, adjusted the sun visor, and sat. “She fell asleep in the car,” she whispered, plopping her chanclas in the grass and tucking her bare feet beneath her.
Jayden watched Bianca intently, and when she’d finished arranging herself on the blanket, he jumped and shouted, “Ribbit, ribbit,” leaping into her lap. “I’m a frog. Kiss me.”
“Ay, hey there, mijo!”
“Kiss me.” He puckered his lips.
She shot Joshua a bemused glance; he shrugged. “Well, since you’re a frog, kissing you is the right thing to do.” She planted her cheek to his lips and made a loud smooching sound.
“There, dada. I made a good ’preshun like you told me.”
“A good ’preshun?” Bianca said. “That is important.” She grinned.
He wanted to reach across the blanket and press his face to her neck. He couldn’t remember feeling this strongly about anyone, hadn’t wanted to connect with anyone this badly. Not since a few shaky friendships at the group home after Patti’s anyway. He averted his gaze from her cleavage, focused on the picnic. Busied his hands so he wouldn’t turn into one of those frat-guy boors he loathed. But goddammit, she had beautiful breasts. He opened large plastic bowls of potato salad, macaroni and cheese, and fruit cocktail, and smaller containers of apple sauce, yogurt, pudding, and a bag of chocolate chip cookies he’d baked the night before. “Dig in,” he said. “Oh, and I have something else for you.” He pulled out the paper satchel from the stationary shop, handed her the gift.
She raised her eyebrows warily. Instead of reaching for the gift bag, she asked, “What’s this?”
Jayden broke the tension, hopping and yelling, “It’s for your birthday. Happy birthday!”
Bianca’s eyes widened.
“Sorry, Jayden just loves birthdays,” Joshua said.
Her confusion gave way to laughter, and she reached out and tickled Jayden’s belly. “Tontito, you little silly boy.” To Joshua, “I was afraid you’d take the present back if I told you it’s not my birthday.” She turned her attention to the bag, peeling back the tissue paper carefully, then pulled out the journal, running her fingers along the edges, opened the cover and made a strange little chipmunk noise, like she couldn’t tell if she wanted to laugh or cry. “This is too much . . . thank you . . .” She looked at Joshua as if studying a painting again. “I love it.”
He thought she would.
They ate ham-and-cheese sandwiches, pickles, potato salad, and cookies; Jayden mostly ate pudding and cookies, but Joshua let him be.
“I can’t believe you did all this, really,” she said between bites.
“It’s just sandwiches.”
She looked at him as if to say it’s not just the sandwiches and you know it.
Jayden stood between them, his face close to Bianca’s, and shrugged up his shoulders, cocked his elbows into wings, widened his eyes, and pulled his head low, turning it quickly side to side. Bianca watched, dumbfounded but amused, until he began screeching, “Who, who!”
“Oh, I know! You’re an owl!”
He jumped up and clapped. “How’d you know?”
“You’re a perfect owl, that’s why. And I’ll bet you’re wise too.”
He nodded solemnly.
Joshua said, “It’s our spirit animal. Like Hedwig.”
“I love Harry Potter,” she said. “Will you read them to me sometime, mijo?”
Jayden hooted again, then turned sharply around, waved his hands in front of Joshua’s face, and said loudly, “Can I go play now?”
Joshua prodded him from in between him and Bee. “Go on then, kid. But stay where we can see you.”
Jayden stuffed more cookies in his mouth, then grabbed his bucket and ran down the hill to the sand.
“He’s spectacular, Josh. Such a funny little boy.”
“He keeps me on my toes.”
“If you don’t mind my asking . . .” She paused, bit her lip. “What’s the story with his mom?”
Joshua had wondered when she’d ask. “It’s not like you think,” he said. “She’s
my sister, Olivia. And I don’t know where she is.”
“Your sister? Oh, you mean, Jayden’s not your . . .”
“Son? Technically, no. He’s my nephew. I’m his legal guardian, but it’s more than that. We’ve been together since he was born.”
Bianca leaned in closer. “He’s lucky to have you.”
“He’s my only family, besides Olivia. It’s us two guys against the world. My sidekick. We fight crime together.” He did a ninja karate-chop. Bianca didn’t roll her eyes. Instead, she laughed. And it didn’t seem like the uncomfortable laugh other people did but a genuine I-actually-like-you laugh.
Down at the sandpit, Jayden dumped piles of sand on the boardwalk. “Hey, man! Cut that out,” Joshua said. Jayden halted middump, throwing the bucket on the sand dune. “That kid,” he said, shaking his head. “Well, I mean, you understand.” He motioned toward the stroller.
She smiled, but it almost seemed forced. “I’d better check on Jubilee,” she said, pulling back the sunshade.
“Jubilee. That’s a beautiful name.”
Now Bianca’s face relaxed into an easy smile. “It means celebration. I grew up Catholic, and we memorized all the verses. In the Bible, Jubilee is the time of release and universal pardon. Slaves set free. Land returned. Debts forgotten. All kicked off with a trumpet blast.”
“Trumpet blasts. An Emancipation Proclamation?”
“My dream, undeferred.”
Joshua craned upright but couldn’t see her. “I want to meet this little celebration.”
“Of course. Just a sec, I need to grab her bottle.” She reached into her purse and pulled out a small hard-plastic bottle with a pink plastic nipple. Joshua did a double take, unsure what he was seeing. It was a toy, a play bottle with pretend milk that disappeared when tipped over.
When Jayden was little, he used to suck on baby spoons for teething. “Does she play with that after she’s done eating?”
Bianca turned around. “What do you mean?”
Then he saw Jubilee.
He knew it had to be Jubilee because Bianca held her like a baby, lifting the toy bottle to her mouth. Only her mouth didn’t open. Man, what the hell? What was going on?
She wore a pink sundress made of terry cloth. Peeking from underneath were pink-and-white bloomers. Her short, tawny hair was parted to one side and fastened with a plastic butterfly barrette. Her eyes, wide open and clear, were gray, the color of a storm. Her lips and cheeks, puckered pink. A dimple indented one caramel cheek. On her wrist, a tiny charm bracelet with “Jubilee” inscribed. She was nonresponsive. Like a dead baby. He almost thought she was a dead baby. But no. A doll. The most lifelike doll he’d ever seen. A stone in Bianca’s arms. A heavy rock in his gut. It clenched like the potato salad was turning bad inside him. He felt the urge to vomit. Not because Bianca wasn’t gorgeous and mysterious. She was. But he was scared. Damn, this was scary. Was this a joke? Was he supposed to play along? He didn’t get it. He shook his head.
“Bianca? What’s going on?”
She stared at the doll as she pretended to feed it. His skin got all prickly like he was watching a horror movie. What would make this woman who seemed so smart and with it and pulled together act so . . . insane? There was no other way to say it, man. She was acting insane. His stomach dropped again.
She’d seemed so normal. She was normal. Right? I mean, everything else. But the doll? He looked at her carefully, quietly. Come on, she had to be joking. He waited for her to start laughing. She was pulling his leg. She had to be.
He sat up and peered into the stroller hoping the real Jubilee was there, waiting to be lifted up, that her mother the prankster was getting him good.
The stroller was empty. This was more than he’d bargained for. He put his hand to his head, rubbed his eyes. He felt so damn uncomfortable and could not for the life of him figure out what he was supposed to do.
“Um, Bianca?” He had to say something. This was too weird. He couldn’t unpeel his eyes from her as she cradled that doll in her arms. She clucked and tsk’d as she moved, staring into Jubilee’s eyes as she worked, then, in the softest, sweetest voice, began to sing:
“Somewhere over the rainbow, skies are blue, and the dreams that you dare to dream really do come true.”
Her song haunted him. It suspended them in this strange mise-en-scène, as if time had stopped, the spotlight directed on Bianca and her baby doll, and he had no idea if he was part of the play or a spectator in the audience. He exhaled. She wasn’t playing. This was Jubilee.
“Oh shit, Bianca.”
If she was listening, she didn’t acknowledge him. He watched her. Watched as she swept baby-fine strands from Jubilee’s forehead. She held the doll’s body to her chest and sang. It broke his heart.
“If happy little bluebirds fly, why, oh why, can’t I?”
She was messed up, bad. Bianca, who seemed so light, was heavy. It fell over Joshua like grief, had him there hunching. He scrolled the index of his memory, skimming his counseling books, flipping page after page. All the stories he’d read. What branch had broken inside her? What scar had healed thus? Does it crust and sugar over—like a syrupy sweet? Maybe it just sags like a heavy load. “Oh shit,” he said again. And because he didn’t know what else to do, because he couldn’t stay there as sad as she was making him, he stood, mumbling something about needing to check on the kid, then walked toward Jayden, pouring bucketsful of sand onto the boardwalk.
He glanced back. Bianca held the plastic bottle to the doll’s O-shaped mouth.
It was jacked up. Come on. It had to be a joke. She was testing him.
But she’d turned so bright when she pulled that doll from the stroller. Her face reminded him of Olivia’s, the day she handed him Jayden. His chest hurt. He pulled his inhaler from his pocket and puffed it twice. Ocean waves roiled in the distance.
Joshua watched Bianca from the safe distance he’d created between them.
His stomach hurt. He thought of the home for troubled youth where he’d interned. Many of the patients were “prodromal,” not yet fully psychotic but showing early signs of illness. Some of them scared the shit out of him. One boy had been killing small animals and drinking their blood, worried he might start drinking human blood. That was sick. But Bianca wasn’t like that. Right?
Jayden was playing in the sand, oblivious to the potential danger. The boy hadn’t been scared of her. If she were twisted, his boy would’ve sensed it. Kids know that stuff, right? He wouldn’t have sat on her lap, wouldn’t have treated her like a friend. Joshua was grasping at straws. What would Olivia have said about Bianca? She was gorgeous. And intelligent. She laughed at his dumb jokes. She liked the journal. She liked Jayden. She didn’t seem sick. He couldn’t imagine her killing anything. Couldn’t imagine her having those dark thoughts. She didn’t seem like a danger. You should walk away, Joshy man. Call it. Time of death, call it. It was crazy, and he was crazy for even considering walking back toward the grass, toward the woman on the blanket who’d already burrowed her way into his mind. Damn. Into his heart.
But he was curious. Maybe that’s all it was at first. He wanted to find out more. He had to know—why Jubilee? Why did Bianca need that strange little doll, who almost looked like a living, breathing infant?
She called him back without calling him back.
She called him back, and he couldn’t help himself, he needed to find out more. He needed more time with her.
What harm could it do to wait and see?
Two
La Bee
One Year Earlier
Before Jubilee
In Gabe’s kitchen, Bianca and Gabe’s mother, Esme, chopped cucumbers, cilantro, and cubes of Monterey Jack cheese instead of the more expensive abalone. Bianca diced with quick, deliberate strokes, imagining the restaurant she and Gabe planned to open in the Imperial Valley.
They would ask Gabe’s dad, Hector, for help with the down payment—if they didn’t chicken out. Hector was a huge, formidable man who scared Bianca. But Esme she loved. Esme she trusted. It was her house Bianca went back to instead of Mama’s seven months ago when Dad died.
Esme threw the mixture into a deep plastic bowl, then peeled shrimp tails, deveined them, and tossed those in while sharing the latest chisme—which Valley women were cheating and in whose bed and why. But Bianca and Esme still never spoke of what had happened at the Clínicas de Salud Bianca’s freshman year in high school.
A ceramic rooster cookie jar glinted against the faux marble counter. Esme’s kitchen was decorated in red roosters that anywhere else would’ve been chintzy, but here they were comforting.
Outside, the lawn roasted in patches. Wilted yellow flowers spilt from cane cholla and barrel cactus. White flies, iridescent and smaller than grains of rice, orbited the streetlamps. The Rio Vista street sign was pocked with bullet holes where drunk teenagers had ricocheted through the alley with shotguns. Aluminum-foiled windows shimmered from the ranch-style stuccos squatting beneath palo verdes and mulberries, barricades against the 110-degree broil that relented only after midnight.
“If Gabe were my husband, I’d have left him,” said Esme, “but since he’s my son . . . Ay, hija. We’ve made a full-blooded Mexican of you. La Bee.”
Bianca pursed her lips, poured a chilled bottle of Clamato over the mixture while Esme squeezed lemon halves, shook Tapatío out in spurts. Once, while delivering tamales that Nana, Esme, and Bee had made, Esme told her comadre that Bianca was her nuera, daughter-in-law. But she never said it in front of Gabe. He was a mama’s boy, which, in the Valley, wasn’t necessarily bad. A man who treated his mama with respect would treat his own wife with respect, that’s what Esme said.
Jubilee Page 4
