by Wiltz, Jenni
Mattie sniffed. “W—what about 911?”
“No,” her mom said.
Emma flipped to the very first page. To the right of the obscenely large 911, she found a list of numbers labeled Non-Emergency Calls, including the police and county sheriff.
“Read it,” her mom said.
Emma put her finger on the paper to guide her and opened her mouth to speak.
The phone beeped out an alarm, one angry pulse after another.
“Goddamn it.” Her mom pressed the clear plastic button that reset the circuit. “Again.”
Emma chose the number for the police. She didn’t know what the sheriffs did, other than put signs on street corners to beg for re-election. “831-555-8714.”
The phone rang three times before a male voice answered with, “MVPD, how may I direct your call?”
Mattie choked on a sob and ran into the hallway.
“Matt, wait.” Emma gave chase as her sister stumbled toward the living room and knocked over a big ceramic vase sitting on the floor. Emma kicked the shards out of the way and opened her arms. Her sister fell into them, just like in a Polaroid they’d snapped when Emma was six and Mattie three. “It’s going to be okay. Don’t be scared.”
“I am,” Mattie sobbed. “I’m scared, Em.”
“We’ll fix it, whatever went wrong.”
“How? We’re just kids.”
“I’ll figure it out.”
In the kitchen, her mom hung up the phone and then followed them into the hallway. Black mascara trailed from both of her lower lash lines. She stepped over the shattered bits of vase and wrapped both of them in her arms. Emma smelled a faint floral perfume, underscored with sweat. She closed her eyes and imagined her dad there, too, surrounding all of them with his arms, a concentric circle of love that belonged only to them.
• • •
They fell asleep in the living room because it was closest to the door. Mattie and her mom slumped on the couch, while Emma curled into her dad’s recliner, face pressed against the headrest. Her mom clutched the portable phone as she dozed. The desk sergeant had said he’d call the local hospitals and radio all officers on patrol to ask about accidents, incidents, or crashes. That was before ten.
It was after three.
Emma fought the crescent of nausea rising from her belly. If her dad could come home, he would have. Sleep was impossible until she knew why.
In the corner of the room stood a giant faux palm. Its nylon leaves were shrouded in a skin of dust, cemented by months of temperature cycling. Emma imagined the tree gasping for air.
She got up and took one crinkled leaf between her fingers, gouging it with a fingernail the way she would a scratch-off lotto ticket. The part underneath her scratch was still bright, but now it looked diseased next to the uniform grey of the rest of the leaves.
She stumbled back to the recliner and pulled her thighs to her chest. Everything felt wrong, even the color of the light. It was orange, tinted once by the streetlight and once by her mom’s fabric window blinds—but a strange, computerized orange with a hint of blue behind it, as if orange had gone extinct thirty years ago and an artist was trying to render the color from memory. Her nose began to run and she sniffed quietly to keep from waking her mom and Mattie. But when she tilted her head onto the recliner’s headrest, she heard something.
Leaves.
Moving leaves.
But which ones? There were bushes under the living room’s front window, a mandarin tree in the corner of the front yard, and a pot of small pink roses next to the door. There were also lots of animals in the neighborhood: cats, birds, squirrels.
She held her breath.
The crackling sounded again, louder this time. Not a cat, she thought. Not a cat, not a cat, not a cat, not a cat, not a cat. “Mom, wake up.”
Her mom’s eyes flew open, fingers still clenching the phone. They pressed several of the buttons, making them glow a ghostly green. “What is it?”
“Something’s outside.”
Her mom hurled the phone to the floor and jumped up from the couch without a care for Mattie, asleep on her shoulder. Her hands shook as they fumbled with the stiff door lock, the one she kept asking Emma’s dad to grease.
She threw it open hard enough to dent the wall with the doorknob. A mushroom cloud of paint flakes and drywall exploded into the air.
“Roger!” she shrieked, flinging herself toward the bushes.
Emma pitched herself out of the recliner and crawled on hands and knees to the door. Mattie scrambled after her, peering over her shoulder when she stopped dead in the doorway.
Her father lay in the bushes. She didn’t recognize his face because it was hardly a face at all. His glasses were gone, his right eye swollen shut. Dozens of tiny red marks and lines speckled his cheeks. A dark clump of purpled skin and dried blood peaked where his nose should be. Blood trailed out of his mouth on both sides. Red handprints dotted his torn undershirt like a prehistoric cave painting. His button-down was gone.
“Mattie,” her mom ordered. “Get the First Aid kit and bring it upstairs. Run.” Her sister’s feet clapped down the tile entryway. “Emma, get under his right arm.”
Emma squatted beside him and reached for his arm gently. “Faster,” her mom snapped, flinging his left arm over her shoulder. His head lolled onto her shoulder, staining it red instantly. Emma didn’t look at his face; if she did, all the strength would leave her knees. “I love you, Daddy,” she whispered.
They swayed inside just as the neighbor’s porch light came on. Her mom kicked the door shut behind them. With one arm, she reached out and locked the doorknob and the deadbolt.
Her dad’s breathing was shallow and snagged, like a net on a harbor buoy. “Go,” her mom said. “Hurry.”
They lumbered toward the stairs like contestants in a three-legged race. Twined together, they moved one step at a time to the landing, then the hallway, then her parents’ bedroom, where Mattie stood clutching a white box with a red cross. Something wet trailed down Emma’s left arm. The sour smell of sweat and blood made her throat convulse and she clamped her lips shut.
“Go toward the bed,” her mom said. Instantly, Mattie reached to pull back the bedspread. “Leave it. Em, put your arm behind his shoulders. Hold him up.”
For a moment, Emma bore all his weight as her mom reached for his feet. Once she had them, they lifted him onto the bed as gently as they could. His dangling hand painted a poppy-red smear across the spread. Emma picked it up and held it, squeezing it until she felt the beat of his pulse.
“The First Aid kit,” Mattie said.
“Set it next to me.” Her mom lifted one of his feet and untied his shoe. “In the bathroom, Em, get tweezers and my contact lens solution. The saline, not the cleaner.”
Emma blinked. “Mom, the police—”
“Emma, please.”
“They need to see this, don’t they?”
Her mom looked up, the muscles of her jawbone quivering. Her hands gripped her dad’s bare ankles, the vertical lines of his socks still imprinted on his skin. “I asked you to do something.”
“You’re hurting him.”
Her mom’s deep golden eyes never blinked. “So are you.”
Emma let go of his hand. She would get the saline and then call the police and there wasn’t anything her mom could do about it. “Don’t worry,” she whispered in Mattie’s ear as she handed off the saline bottle. “I know what to do.”
• • •
The squad car arrived forty minutes later. Mattie had followed her downstairs, unable to watch their mother tweeze dirt and broken glass out of their father’s face. Emma stood in the doorway, fingers choking the brass handle, as two officers stepped up to the porch.
“It’s my dad,” she said, wiping away a tear and waving them inside. She locked the do
or behind them and laced her cold fingers with Mattie’s. Together, they led the way, squeezing each other’s hands as hard as they dared. The policemen jingled as they walked, the click and clatter of their gear echoing against the tile entryway.
For the first time, Emma noticed the smears and stains of blood on the walls and carpet. It was on her hands, too, in her nails and in the crevices of her fingerprints. “Don’t step in the blood,” she said, blinking as more tears flooded the corners of her eyes. “My mom will get mad.”
The officers didn’t respond.
At the top of the stairs, she pointed at the double doors of her parents’ bedroom. One of the officers crooked a knuckle and rapped. “Mr. and Mrs.—” He paused, reaching into his pocket.
“West,” Emma said. “Our name is West.”
“Mr. and Mrs. West?”
The second policeman leaned over the bannister, following the trail of blood with his eyes. “Jesus,” he said. Silent tears fell from Mattie’s eyes to her bare feet.
Her mom slipped out from behind the double doors. Beneath the skylight, her skin looked dull and dead, smeared with blood and stretched thin over cheekbones and chin. She waved the policemen inside and they obeyed, handcuffs slapping against their hips as they moved. “Girls, to your rooms.”
Emma stepped forward. “Mom, I want to—”
“No.”
“Don’t they need to talk to us?”
“Just do your chores and go to bed.”
“Mom, I can’t.”
“Please.” There were streaks in her hair, dark ones, in the shape of blood-stained fingers. “Emma, please.”
“We have to go, Em,” Mattie said, pulling on her arm.
All the words jumbled up inside her, in the wrong order, wrong tense, wrong case. They wouldn’t form a cyclone, like they normally did, so it was too hard to sort them out. She let Mattie pull her the rest of the way down the hall.
“Thank you,” her mom said softly.
Emma ignored her. She turned into the bathroom and stuck her hands under the faucet, watching her father’s blood swirl down the drain. The water ran for minutes until it was clear. When she finally turned it off, she dried her hands and cracked the bathroom door. As expected, she couldn’t hear much from her parents’ bedroom. Her mom had shut the door, and the muted mutterings she detected were no help at all.
She crept out of the bathroom, lining up her footsteps with the right side of the hall. The squeaky floorboard was smack in the middle. As long as she avoided it, her mom would never hear her. She scuttled sideways past Mattie’s door to the spare bedroom.
Once inside, she grasped the sliding closet door in both hands, easing it half a foot down the center of its track. A whiff of potpourri from inside the closet overwhelmed her, something fruity and warm, like berries on a picnic table. She held her breath and slid the door closed behind her. If she closed her eyes and concentrated, with her ear to the closet’s back wall, she could make out most of what the policemen were saying. Some of it was about the attack, and some of it was about the theft of her dad’s pickup truck.
She forced everything but the words themselves out of her mind—no connotations, only denotations. To cement them in her memory, she pretended to write them out, holding her imaginary pencil in a death grip. The officers talked fast, but so did Mr. Parker. She had a lot of practice using abbreviations to get everything down in time.
When her parents’ door opened, Emma held her breath. Would her mom notice the smell of potpourri . . . what if it had drifted from the office into the hallway? But her mom didn’t seem to notice anything as she walked the officers downstairs. She closed and locked the front door behind them, then sank against it and began to cry. Emma heard one fist strike the door, rattling the locking mechanism in the handle.
She pressed one hand to her mouth and reached out into the darkness with the other, as if she could comfort her mother. She put her head on her knees and bit her lip hard enough to keep her own sobs from becoming audible. Blood dripped from her lip onto her knees, staining her legs with what she’d just washed off her hands. When she heard her mom’s bedroom door close one more time, she padded back to her room and slid into bed, letting her red knees stain the covers.
Chapter Fifteen
Friday, April 4
The knock on her door came after first light. Her mom paused for two beats, then turned the knob. “Em,” she said. “Time to get up.” A breath of heather-colored shadow clung to her mom’s eyelids and black mascara raccooned the skin around her eyes. She looked old and thin and brittle. Emma felt the opposite—thick and spongy, like a limb atrophied without circulation.
She blinked to separate her tear-crusted lashes. The world looked like a watercolor painting, all color dissolving in the flood of liquid pooling over her irises. “Is it Dad?”
Her mom shook her head. “It’s time to go to school.”
School. The word didn’t even register. Only three hours ago, a police car had been parked in their driveway. Men with nightsticks and guns had been inside their house.
“Everything has to stay normal,” her mom said. “I’ll drive you in an hour.”
“I want to stay home today.”
“You can’t fall behind.”
“It’s just one day.”
“We leave in an hour.”
It was impossible. She couldn’t think about the conditionnel or the molecular architecture of liquids. The things she learned in school only mattered as long as nothing else mattered more. Yesterday, nothing had mattered more. Today, nothing mattered less.
Emma tossed back the covers and saw dried streaks of blood on her legs. She raised a hand to her broken lip and touched the scab, long and oval like a spaceship. Someone would ask her about it and she wouldn’t know what to say. In the shower, she tried to think of a convincing lie as she let the hot water pummel her. The pressure made fireworks explode behind her eyelids, bursts of deep red and green that she saw long after she turned off the water.
When Emma left the bathroom, hair wet and skin scalded, she stumbled on something in the hallway. Rubbing her eyes, she bent down to see what it was—a towel spread out on the carpet. She peeled it back and saw a pale red stain spread out like a flower, fragrant with the smell of a chemical floor cleaner.
• • •
When her mom pulled into the school’s cul-de-sac, Emma folded her hands in her lap. If she refused to get out, maybe her mom would just take her home. She’d already mapped out her bargaining chips: cleaning house, scrubbing toilets, changing sheets, doing laundry, buying aspirin, and telling the insurance company someone stole the truck.
A Honda Civic pulled up behind them, with Mexican flags flying from plastic rods attached to the windows. She clutched the straps of her backpack and looked at the Cinco de Mayo murals. I see the Mexican flag more than I see mine, she thought.
“Em,” her mom said.
“I don’t want to go.”
“Please.”
“I want to see him.”
“Not yet.”
“I won’t bother him. I just want to see him.”
A tear splashed onto her mom’s arm, spotting the rolled cuff of her blouse. She folded the cuff one more time to hide it. “It’s just one day. Can you do that for me?”
The Civic zoomed off and a Dodge Charger took its place. Socorro Ramos got out, dressed in her cheerleading uniform. The short, knife-pleated skirt flounced as she shut the door. Her legs were long and thin, straight as a ruler from calf to thigh. She carried one thin spiral-bound notebook in her arms.
Her mom turned her head, signaling the end of the conversation. Emma picked up the left strap of her backpack and got out of the car.
• • •
The combination lock’s ridges grated her fingers as she turned it. Every inch of skin on her body hurt. It had gone f
rom a shield to a sieve, full of holes that let everything through. The metal of the locker felt colder, the corner sharper, the books inside it heavier.
As she put back her French book, she realized she had no lunch and no money. Could she survive the day with no food so she wouldn’t have to ask for help?
Asking for help meant giving a reason. Giving a reason meant telling the truth or telling a lie. She didn’t want to do either. She could explain everything, but not until she’d seen her dad smile again. Not until she closed her eyes and didn’t smell his blood.
Emma slammed her locker shut and shuffled down the hall, counting black streaks on the linoleum as she walked. One, shaped like the tail of a comet. Two, brushed thin like a smear of ink from a leaky pen. Three, shorter than her pinky finger. Four, five, and six, all thick and straight like the tip of a highlighter. She let out her breath after six and slipped into her seat in the far row of Mr. Parker’s classroom.
Via arrived a few minutes before the bell, turning her back to Emma as she scooted sideways through the aisle. Emma’s gut wrung itself like a wet sweater. How could anyone give a shit about the prom or the weather or whatever else Via was mad about when there were people who would beat a gentle man and leave him for dead? The prom was a stupid dance in a stupid room for a few stupid hours.
Rachel arrived fifteen seconds before the bell, smiling without showing her teeth. Emma pulled the scab on her lips between her teeth and bit it as hard as she could.
After the tardy bell, Mr. Parker hitched up his jeans and wrote the title of the lecture on the board: Manifest Destiny, Part Deux. “Today we’re going to talk about Texas, which shows us the flip side of any expansionist policy. Any guesses on where this is going?”
While he waited for an answer, he rested his thumbs on his silver belt buckle. Emma looked at his glasses, rimmed with silver wire. She wondered how much he could see without them. Her dad was nearly blind without his. Tears seared her corneas as she thought of him stumbling for miles across town, crawling if he had to, squinting at blurry street signs without his glasses to find his way back to them. She curled her right hand into a fist, nails digging into the lifeline of her palm.
