by Wiltz, Jenni
To Emma, for doing well in the third grade.
I am very proud of you.
Love, DAD
She knew kids whose fathers gave them a cookie or let them stay up late to watch a movie when they brought home a good report card. Her father soared over them. And because he did, so did she. “Dad, thanks for always buying me books.”
He covered her hand with his. She laced their fingers together and squeezed. Despite the blood-red white of his eye, the warmth was still there: the softness, the gentleness, the goodness. It was still him.
She felt a wave of sadness for Via and Rachel. This moment would never exist for them. Some parents never understood how much their children needed to believe in them.
“School,” he said. “What else?”
“We’re reading Of Mice and Men in English class.”
He made a brief grunt, signifying approval.
“Did you ever read that one?”
He tried to shake his head.
“Do you want to?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll read it to you.” She dashed down the hall to dig the book out of her backpack. When she brought it back, she got through all of three paragraphs before he fell asleep. She read to him for at least an hour more, hoping the sound of her voice would keep him soothed and asleep, where he could heal and live in dreams that had nothing to do with the present.
• • •
Emma waited until her mom had gone to bed to turn on her computer. It groaned and wheezed, but did as she asked. She opened three browser tabs, one for each of the local news stations: Fox, CBS, and NBC. In the search box for each, she typed “El Camino Rojo, Malo Verde.”
She found multiple reports for the incident earlier in the week, the one at the house her dad recognized. Police arrested the suspect, Jesus Javier Reyes, and charged him with stabbing Simon Castillo eleven times. At the bottom of the page, someone had updated the story yesterday, two days after the stabbing: The suspect was released after the weapon in question disappeared from police custody.
She clicked a few other stories, all about shootings or drive-bys in East Malo Verde. Each mentioned the escalating tension between Sureños and Norteños. An MVPD sting carried out earlier in the year had sent several high-ranking Norteños to Pelican Bay and San Quentin. The Sureños jumped at the chance to fill the void in the power structure, leading to a per capita homicide rate on the east side equal to that of Detroit. The articles all ended the same way: “Police have no suspects and have made no arrests.”
Elvira was right.
Emma closed the browser and shut down her computer. If crimes in East Malo Verde didn’t produce arrests, who filled the cells in the county jail a mile down the road? Why wasn’t there a class in school that explained these things? Instead, they taught her how to calculate the volume of a sphere and what a red “A” on someone’s dress meant.
If she’d stayed home today, she could have helped her mom paint over their blood-smeared walls or spray carpet cleaner over the stains in the hallway. But her mom believed the things she’d learn in school were more important. Were they? If she committed a crime and got locked up, she could earn her degree for free. If she obeyed the law, it would be called college instead and she’d emerge with thirty to sixty grand of student debt.
The world was a fucked-up place.
Chapter Seventeen
Saturday, April 5
Sunlight streamed through the top of her window. Emma felt the heat on her face and tossed back the comforter. It seemed just a second ago she’d gone to sleep, but when she opened her eyes, the clock on her nightstand read 12:30 p.m.
Dan’s water polo match would be over by now.
She pushed her pillow out of the way and brought her hand to her eyes. The faded blue digits he’d written on it were still there. Yesterday was a blur of blood and tears, but she remembered the look in his eyes when she said she couldn’t come to his match. She jotted his number on a piece of paper before stumbling to the shower.
When the water was as hot as it could get, she tilted her face and let the water hit her cheeks and eyelids. The word made her cringe. The water wasn’t hitting her at all. It didn’t inflict any pain. It didn’t break any bones or blood vessels or even leave a mark. She promised herself that when she wrote a story, she’d never use the word “hit” to describe one gentle thing falling against another.
• • •
Downstairs, she found her mom and Mattie in the family room. Mattie slumped in a wicker chair, arms crossed on her chest. Her blonde hair looked greasy at the roots and she still wore last night’s pajamas, fleece pants with hearts on them and a baggy pink T-shirt. On TV, a woman in a low-cut dress drizzled olive oil into a skillet.
“How’s Dad?” Emma asked.
Her mom tried to smile. Even that faint movement accentuated the parentheses around her mouth. The lines beside her eyes seemed deeper and darker, too, like some part of that that terrible night had crept beneath her skin. “He’s resting.”
“Is he feeling better?”
“He liked you reading to him last night.”
“I want to read something to Dad, too,” Mattie said, “but we’re still on Romeo and Juliet.”
“There’s cereal.” Her mom pointed to the kitchen island, where a plate and bowl lay untouched. “Or raisin bread for toast in the freezer.”
“I hate raisins.”
Something else had occurred to her in the shower, after evaluating the real-life consequences of the word “hit.” She looked out the kitchen window, to the roses along the back fence. The full sun caused some of them to droop, the top of their stems arched like a cane. “We should take Dad to a doctor.”
Her mom got up and headed for the kitchen. “Toast?”
“I don’t want any.”
“One slice or two?” She pulled out the loaf of raisin bread and slid two slices into the toaster oven.
“What if he has internal bleeding or brain swelling?”
Her mom reached into the fridge for the yellow tub of store-brand margarine. The label shouted at them: Heart healthy! Zero grams trans fat! New look! Better value! “He doesn’t.”
“How do you know?”
The toaster button popped and her mom skidded both slices onto a plate with her fingernail. “He can’t go to the hospital,” she said, spreading margarine on the toast with a knife. “We don’t have any insurance.”
“But I have a card in my backpack.”
Her mom scraped the knife against the margarine container. “We tried to pay, at first. But they wanted $1,800 a month to insure all of us. And then $1,950. And then $2,200. We could insure all of us, or we could eat.”
Her mom handed her the plate and she watched the margarine melt into glistening puddles. She thought sodas from the school’s vending machine were expensive. She couldn’t imagine spending $1,800 a month on an insurance bill. What if they didn’t have insurance for her dad’s stolen truck, either?
Emma blinked. There was so much more to be afraid of than she’d ever known. “Mom, who let things get like this?”
“Like what?”
“So bad they can’t be fixed.”
Her mom looked at the basket beneath the phone, full of unopened bills. “I don’t know.”
Emma took a bite of the toast. A raisin caught in her throat and she coughed to dislodge it.
The woman on TV crushed garlic and spread it over a baguette. “Mmm,” she said. “This is going to taste great.”
• • •
At 5:30 p.m., her mom asked her to help get dinner ready. Normally, this was one of her least favorite chores, second only to taking out the trash. Today, she was happy to have an excuse to put down Of Mice and Men. It wasn’t helping her mood, what with Carlson wanting to kill Candy’s dog and Curley beating the shit out of Lennie. Plus
, there was only one woman in the whole book, and she was an empty plot device, a literary blow-up doll. What was she supposed to learn from that?
“What about Dad?” she asked.
“We’ll go upstairs to eat with him.”
Mattie turned from the TV. “Really?”
“He won’t eat much, but we can still have a normal dinner together. Something easy.”
“Soup and sandwiches,” Emma said. She dove into the kitchen and scanned the pantry’s offerings: chicken noodle, cream of chicken, and tomato soup, all store brand. She reached for the tomato, dumped it in a saucepan, and held the can under the faucet.
“Wait.” Her mom put a hand on her wrist, the circular stone in her wedding ring flashing in the window’s light. “Use milk.”
Emma smiled. Her mom never let them do that; milk ran out too quickly in their household. She poured a can of two-percent milk and turned on the burner while Mattie and her mom sliced up cold cuts left over from Christy’s. They arranged the sandwiches on a silver platter, an old wedding present, and Emma poured the soup into mugs. A mug seemed easier since it wouldn’t require her dad to use a utensil.
She and Mattie brought everything upstairs in two trips. Her dad was awake and smiling, sitting up further than yesterday. He wore a clean white shirt and although the swelling around his left eye hadn’t changed, his right eye seemed a little less bloodshot. “Ready for dinner, Dad?” she asked, setting a glass of water on the nightstand for him.
“I’m always ready.” His voice sounded like rocks in a blender and she tried not to look at the bruises on his throat.
“Emma chose the soup,” her mom said, spreading a napkin over his lap.
“It smells good.”
“It’s tomato,” Mattie said. “With milk.”
“Milk.” There were three visible cuts where his lip had split, each with a brick of a scab on top. “What’s the occasion?”
Mattie smiled. “You are.”
Emma reached for one of the sandwiches, a salami on white. “Wait,” her dad said, as she lifted the sandwich to her lips. “Say grace.”
She put the sandwich on a napkin and folded her hands. It was her responsibility to start since she was the one who’d forgotten. “Come, Lord Jesus, be our guest,” she began.
Her mom and Mattie chimed in and her dad mumbled along a half-second behind. “Let these gifts to us be blessed. Amen.”
“Amen,” he said.
“I made sure the soup’s not too hot, Dad. You don’t have to blow on it.”
“Thank you, Em.” He tilted the rim toward his lips. Emma heard a slurp, and then he grimaced. Some of the soup dribbled down his chin onto the white shirt.
Her mom sighed, tossed her sandwich down, and ran into the bathroom. She came back with a handful of toilet paper and blotted the stain. “There’s tomato paste in that. It needs soap or it’ll stain.” She scrunched the toilet paper into her hand and left the room.
“Dad, it’s my fault,” Emma said. “Maybe I made it too hot.”
His right eye drooped as he looked at the blotchy orange specks on his shirt. “Not your fault.”
“Do you want a spoon? Would that help?”
“I don’t know, Em.”
“We can try. I’ll be right back.” She put down her sandwich and ran downstairs. Her mom stood at the sink, pumping dish soap onto a sponge. “I need to get a spoon for Dad,” she said, reaching into the silverware drawer.
Her mom squeezed the sponge until it bled suds. “Tomato, Emma? Really?”
Emma narrowed her eyes. “You saw me open the can of soup. Why didn’t you say anything if you didn’t want me to make tomato?”
“What were you thinking?”
“It’s not Dad’s fault.”
“Then whose fault is it?”
“The person who did this.”
Her mom stared out the window above the sink. “I should have picked up more clients. You could have gotten a job, too. What about the place Rachel works?”
“Mom, can we just finish dinner?”
“I’m already finished,” her mom said softly.
Emma clutched her dad’s spoon in her hand. “I’m going back upstairs. Soup is gross when it’s cold.”
• • •
Half an hour later, Emma brought the dirty dishes back downstairs. Her mom stood in the same place, except now it was dark and Emma knew she couldn’t see anything except the neighbor’s back porch light. “Mom, I brought the dishes.”
Her mother turned, tear tracks glowing crystalline on her pale cheeks. “Put them in the sink.”
“Mom, sit down. I’ll do the dishes.”
“Things are going to change, Em. You know that, right?”
“You mean money?”
“I mean lots of things.”
Emma stood next to her mom and put the dishes in the sink. The mesh grate over the drain had a piece of tomato skin caught in it. She grabbed at it with her fingernail and it shredded over the wire mesh.
“Just leave it, Em, please.”
Emma stared at the lacerated fruit skin. “Being a grown-up is like bleeding to death one drop at a time, isn’t it?”
“Sometimes more than one,” her mom whispered.
Emma heard Mattie’s footsteps on the stairs behind her and lowered her voice. “I don’t have to go to college, Mom. I can’t pay for it. Neither can you.”
Mattie jumped the last step to the floor, her bare feet padding back to the blanket she’d spread out earlier. She sat cross-legged and reached for a year-old magazine. “I’m the one who doesn’t need to go to college,” she said calmly. “You can give Em my portion.”
Her mom gripped the edge of the sink and lowered her head. “Goddamn it, you’re both going to college and that’s the end of it.”
“Mom, it’s not like I’m—”
Her mother reached into the sink for one of the dirty soup mugs and threw it onto the floor. “Don’t ever let me hear you say that again! If you two don’t go to college—” A heavy sigh rattled her chest. “Why else would we be doing all this?”
“Mom,” Mattie said, picking ceramic shards out of the folds of her blanket. “Violence is not the answer. You don’t need to go to college to learn that.”
• • •
Calling Dan was out of the question. She’d have to leave her room to get the portable phone and there was no way she’d emerge from her cocoon of sanity until she had to. She’d escaped upstairs after helping Mattie clean up the broken mug, mumbling an excuse about extra reading.
It wasn’t far from the truth. She was within striking distance of finishing Lonesome Dove. But instead of reaching for her book, she turned on her computer instead. She’d never seen her mom or Mattie do anything like that before. There were only two people in the world who might understand, and it wasn’t likely either one of them would want to talk to her. Still, she had to try.
When she signed into chat, she saw one familiar name.
BookGirl14: Hey, are you there?
Redhead_Rachel: Yeah. What’s going on? How’s your dad?
BookGirl14: I’m not sure. Things are all weird right now.
Redhead_Rachel: Weird how?
BookGirl14: My mom freaked out. Mattie’s acting weird.
Redhead_Rachel: My mom freaked out after she left my dad. She got mad at me for talking about him.
BookGirl14: Why?
Redhead_Rachel: She thinks I don’t need him just because she doesn’t. She’d kill me if she knew I still see him sometimes.
BookGirl14: I saw him. That night I came to youth group.
Redhead_Rachel: He wasn’t there that night.
BookGirl14: He was waiting for you in his car.
Redhead_Rachel: You must have seen the wrong car. His letter worked, did I tell you? He
threatened to sue the school, so the principal said Tim and I can go to prom.
BookGirl14: I’m glad you got what you wanted.
Redhead_Rachel: Don’t worry, it’ll be your turn soon.
BookGirl14: That won’t help my dad.
Redhead_Rachel: You won’t skip any more class, will you? Via and I are worried.
BookGirl14: She called you for the homework, didn’t she?
Redhead_Rachel: Come to youth group tomorrow night. It’ll help.
BookGirl14: I just want to be with my dad.
Redhead_Rachel: You could pray for him.
BookGirl14: I’d do that here if I thought it would work.
She didn’t understand how Rachel could have so much faith in something no one could prove. Especially after freshman-year geometry and all they’d gone through to learn how to prove that the angle between a chord and the tangent at an intersection point equals half the central angle subtended by the chord. Maybe, she thought, school had a few important lessons after all. They just weren’t the ones in the books.
Chapter Eighteen
Monday, April 7
Mrs. Evans leaned against the podium, brandishing the blue legal-sized bulletin issued by the office every morning. Most teachers pinned the bulletin to a corkboard, but Mrs. Evans believed it of vital importance they know which holidays were coming up and whether the varsity tennis team won against Hollister.
“Good morning, class,” she said, eyes on the bulletin. “Today is April 7. If you are in MEChA, you have a meeting at lunch in room 1512. The girls’ varsity tennis team won its match against Live Oak on Saturday, but the boys’ varsity and both JV teams lost. The water polo team lost to Carmel in straight sets on Saturday, too.”
Emma kicked the seat in front of her. She wondered if Dan was also the type to slam locker doors or kick things to vent his anger. Since he never wore real shoes, she doubted it. Maybe he was like her, and kept it all on the inside.
