Red Road

by Wiltz, Jenni

  “Look,” Via said, folding her sweater into neat quarters. “My dad left. Rachel’s dad left. Yours isn’t going anywhere. If the worst thing that happens to you is that you have to get a job, it’s not that bad.”

  Emma tossed her backpack to the floor. “The police pulled me out of class. My dad can barely breathe, and we don’t have enough money to take him to the doctor to find out if he’s got a broken rib or internal bleeding. What part isn’t that bad?”

  Via unbuttoned her jeans and slid them off, swapping them for sweat pants. “The part where you get to go home and tell him how much you love him.”

  “Wherever your dad is, he’s still alive. You could find him.”

  Via snorted. “I could also buy meth from Mark Haworth and smoke it in front of the principal’s office.”

  “Does it make you feel better to hate him?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s too much work not to. Look, the universe will always devolve into entropy. It’s the fucking law of nature and trying to stop that will only kill you. I have better things to do than die for someone who doesn’t give a shit about me.” Via slammed her locker shut. “Whatever you think ‘hard’ is, something worse has already happened to someone else. Try to keep that in mind, okay?”

  Emma bent her head as Via brushed past her. Not so long ago, her biggest problem was the jealousy she felt when she saw the “XS” label peeking out from Via’s sweatshirt.

  She peeled off her jeans and stared at the worm-like brands on the sides of her thighs, pinched and reddened where the seams dug into her flesh. Maybe Via was right. Maybe her family’s problems were someone else’s forgotten worries, dwarfed by the enormity of their own circumstances. If that were true, no one but the families of the dead and dying had anything to complain about. And Dad’s not dying, she told herself. So shut up and go to class.

  Elvira was already waiting at the locker room entrance. “How on earth do you do that?” Emma asked.

  “Do what?”

  “Get into the locker room, change, and get back out here without me seeing you.”

  “Magic.” Elvira smiled and snapped her fingers. The pink polish had been replaced by purple with lime green polka dots.

  “I could use some of that.”

  Elvira pushed up the sleeves of her sweatshirt, shaking a stack of gold bangles on her right arm. “When I was little, I thought anything with glitter in it was magic. Then my sister put glitter nail polish on my doll’s hands. She told me that if I did anything bad, the doll would come to life and kill me, like Chucky.”

  Emma smiled. “That’s genius.”

  “Yeah, until you’re the one who spills strawberry soda on the carpet. I thought I was gonna die.” Elvira looked up at her from beneath mascara-coated lashes. “You were kind of mad yesterday. Are we cool?”

  “That stuff with the cop and your cousin freaked me out.”

  “Letizia and Monica are tight. They look out for each other.”

  “Can I ask you something about that?”

  “Sure. You ready to go?”

  Emma kept pace as Elvira headed for the gym. “Do you know a guy named Alejandro Espinosa?”

  “Yeah.” Elvira held her voice steady, like a pool cue she’d aimed at a tricky shot. “Why?”

  A sequence of lies built itself in her mind, clicking together like a DNA double helix. “I heard some people talking about him in the hall.”

  “What’d they say?”

  “He’s in trouble with the police. Maybe that’s what the cop on campus wanted yesterday.”

  “Wouldn’t surprise me.”

  “Why not?”

  Elvira stopped just outside the gymnasium door. Usually, it was propped open with the tarnished brass doorstop, but today, it was closed. Elvira looked over her shoulder before speaking. “His brother Hector is some big guero with the NF.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “He’s a shot caller.”

  Emma shivered. “I don’t know what that means, either.”

  “The shot caller gets the orders and then it’s his job to make sure those orders get done.”

  “Who gives the orders?”

  Elvira shrugged. “For a while, it was some guys up in Pelican Bay. Then it was some guy here in Malo Verde. It doesn’t matter.”

  “Who does Hector give the orders to?”

  “Everyone,” Elvira said softly.

  Emma shook her head. “So all the Norteños . . . they have to do what Hector says?”

  “They’re supposed to.”

  “Then why are the cops asking about Alejandro?”

  “Hector has two strikes. He sends Alejandro to do a lot of his dirty work since the cops don’t have anything on him.” Elvira looked over her shoulder again and reached for the door handle. “But who cares about that pinche cholo? You ready to kick some ass?” Elvira flung open the door and stepped through, her bangs standing straight in the sudden rush of air.

  So, Emma thought. Alejandro Espinosa was a legionnaire for his brother, Hector. Hector was a lieutenant answering to some sort of Praetorian Guard. The more she thought about it, the more sense it made. All the gang members she’d seen had one physical attribute in common. The Romans tattooed their soldiers, too.

  • • •

  The wind pushed cotton-ball clouds across a pale sky and Emma shivered. A group of black-clad stoner kids huddled at the opposite end of the bleacher, their backs turned to hide their conversation and the cigarette they passed around.

  Emma reached into her backpack and pulled out her sack lunch. Two minutes later, she saw Dan’s lanky frame emerge from the north end of the courtyard, carrying a cardboard box from the cafeteria. He hopped up the steps of the bleachers, holding the box in one hand. Emma smiled. “You have good balance.”

  He sat beside her and put the box on the bleacher in front of him. It held a juice box, grease-soaked chicken nuggets with dipping sauce, corn, and a brownie. Emma smelled the tang of salt and her mouth watered.

  “So,” he said, peeling the top off the container of ranch. “How’s your day been?”

  “Elvira and I won in badminton.” She looked at his arms, bare to the wind, and waited to see if they got goosebumps. They didn’t. “How do you stay warm?”

  “Blood pressure.”

  “I don’t have that.”

  “Do some pushups.”

  She looked at her peanut butter sandwich. “I’m eating.”

  “Can you even do one?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He chomped on a chicken nugget. “Let’s find out. Show me what you got.”

  “I haven’t done a push-up since middle school.”

  “It’s easy. I’ll show you.” He hopped down the bleachers to the dry grass below.

  “What are you doing?”

  Dan wiped his fingers on his shorts and stretched out his arms in front of him. Then he rotated his arms all the way around, like a swimmer before a race, and started jogging in place. “Pace yourself. Fatigue is no laughing matter.”

  A couple of the stoner kids from the other end of the bleacher turned around. One of them exhaled in her direction and she breathed it in, wondering how much she needed for a contact high. “Are you serious right now?”

  “As a heart attack.” He whipped his hair back and dropped into position. “Okay, hands on the ground, like so. Back straight, like so. Then, using extreme care to keep that back straight, you go like this.” He executed one perfect push-up. Once complete, he pulled his knees to his chest and hopped up. “We have to do thirty before we can get in the pool for practice. Now you try.”

  “No way. My hands will get dirty.”

  He held out both hands to her. “Come on.”

  “I don’t—”

 
“You got this,” he said, guiding her down the bleacher. “You can even do it girl-style, if you want.”

  “No way.” She got down on all fours, feeling the soft blades of grass collapse under the weight of her palms. A black ant twirled its antennae, sensing the disturbance in its environment.

  “Legs up,” he said.

  She lifted her knees and formed a plank.

  “Back straight.”

  She dropped her knees a little, lowering her rear end.

  “Now go.”

  On the exhale of her next breath, she unlocked her elbows. Instantly, her forearms started to shake. Her wrists felt brittle, like they’d buckle under the enormous pressure of her entire body weight. The ant crawled over the last blade of grass before her knuckle. It touched her with an antenna before climbing on, its legs tickling her as it crossed the thin strip of raised bone connecting wrist to knuckle.

  Emma felt the blood rush to her face as she strained to push her wrists straight again. Somewhere in her temples, veins throbbed with the force of effort it took to make her body do what she wanted it to. She powered through the rest of the exercise, then fell to her knees, panting.

  “That’s my girl,” Dan said, leaning down to give her a hand. She took it and he pulled her up easily. “That wasn’t so hard, was it?”

  The blood drained from her face, flowing through her body with a speed it rarely attained. For the first time in weeks, she felt alive. “No, it wasn’t.”

  Dan kept his grip on her hand, pulling her closer and holding her against his chest. His right hand came up to touch her cheek and she leaned into it, just like she had in the hallway the other day. Just as then, his hand was warm, warm enough to erase the chill of the afternoon wind.

  His eyes met hers, wide and warm and deep. “Hi.”

  “Hi,” she whispered. The pulse in her throat knocked against every layer of her skin.

  Tipped with silver, his thick lashes brushed his cheekbone every time he blinked. Until the time he didn’t blink, because his mouth tilted toward hers. A buzzing cloud of blackness blanketed her as his lips pressed against hers. Or had she just closed her eyes, too?

  Gently, like water from a slow stream, he kissed her. She felt his fingers on her back, splayed across her spine. All the places they were connected glowed, and she didn’t even need to open her eyes to see it.

  When he pulled away, she felt cold. She closed her mouth and pressed her lips inward, wondering if he tasted heat and salt, too. “Hi,” he said.

  She opened her eyes. “Hi.”

  His right eye was still half closed, as tilted as his smile.

  I just kissed a boy, she thought. A tickle on her right knuckle made her twitch, and she looked down at the black ant circling the back of her hand. She held it up for him to see.

  He smiled. “Did you know ants can fall from almost any distance and survive?”

  “No.”

  “Make a wish, Em.” He bent down and blew the ant off her hand, back to solid ground.

  • • •

  “Dinner’s ready,” her mom called. Her voice carried up the stairs and down the hallway. Emma heard it through the clack of her typing, halfway through the first page of her Lonesome Dove paper. She saved her work and scooted her chair out from under her desk.

  Downstairs, her dad lay on the couch in the family room, watching TV with the remote clutched in his right hand. Without his glasses, Emma knew he couldn’t see more than a few colorful blobs on the screen.

  “Hi, Dad.”

  He turned to face her, gasping as he twisted his torso.

  “Don’t move! I’ll come to you.” She moved in front of the screen, comfortably within his line of sight.

  He still hadn’t shaved. Foggy white hair covered his cheeks and chin. “How was school?” he asked, panting on the exhale.

  Earlier, she’d wondered how she was going to keep from smiling when she thought of Dan. Now she knew. “It was good,” she said softly.

  “What did you do?”

  “Nothing special. How are you feeling?”

  “I came downstairs.”

  “Mom helped you?”

  He nodded.

  “It looked like you were in pain a minute ago.”

  “I’m getting better.” He held up the remote to change the channel. “See?”

  “I do.” Her heart clenched in her chest. “I’m going to see if Mom needs help with dinner.”

  “Good girl.”

  She turned and stepped into the kitchen. Her mom put the wok on the island and chopped up some veggies for stir fry on a plastic cutting board: a green pepper, which Emma hated, and some water chestnuts.

  Her mom took a hunk of iceberg lettuce from the fridge and dug her nails into it, tearing out chunks several layers deep. The gold bands of her rings glinted as separated the leaves.

  “Mom,” Emma said.

  “What?”

  “Dad needs help.”

  “Emma, I’m making dinner.”

  When her mom finished the lettuce, she reached into the pantry for a can of garbanzo beans from the dollar store. She drained it and sprinkled a handful of the beans over the lettuce. She poured the rest into a storage container and tossed it back into the fridge.

  “He needs help,” Emma said again, a little louder to be heard over the whirring of the fridge. “Do you even care?”

  Her mom pulled out three mostly empty salad dressing bottles and set them on a plastic plate. She carted it over to the empty place at the table and set it down. “Scoop your own salad. It’s time to eat.”

  “What about Dad?”

  “He’ll eat on the couch.”

  “He’ll spill and you’ll get mad.”

  “Emma, for the love of God, just take some salad.” She turned off the heat beneath the wok and leaned around the corner into the living room to call Mattie to the table.

  Emma slipped her fingers through the red plastic serving tongs and scooped two clutches of iceberg lettuce and garbanzo beans onto her plate. On TV, the baseball game her dad was watching came back from commercial. The A’s were losing to the Rangers by four runs in the bottom of the sixth inning.

  Mattie wandered into the kitchen and leaned onto the island. “Are those green peppers?” she asked, hovering over the salad bowl. “I don’t like those.”

  “Then pick them out.” Her mom took a plate of salad to her father and came back to the table. “Sit down and let’s say grace.”

  Emma put down her fork and folded her hands in her lap. Her mom started first. “Come, Lord Jesus, be our guest. Let these gifts to us be blessed. Amen.”

  “Amen.” Emma picked up her fork and teased slices of green pepper away from the salad and noodles. Across the table, Mattie did the same.

  Her mom glanced at their matching piles. “Someday you’ll learn to like them.”

  “I don’t think so,” Emma said, just as Mattie said, “Maybe.”

  “You can’t eat hamburgers and hot dogs every day.”

  “Lots of people do,” Emma said, meeting her mother’s gaze.

  “And you think those people are happy or healthy?”

  “More than we are.”

  Her mom threw a narrow-eyed glance at them, the same one they got as children when they begged for popsicles at the grocery store, or grabbed a department store rack to see who could hang the longest. If they protested, their mom dragged one or both of them out by the wrist, with a clearly enunciated monologue reminding them that “children who don’t behave don’t get to be in stores.” Not once had it been an idle threat.

  When kids are small, Emma thought, all they want is to be beside their parents forever.

  She looked at her dad and felt the magma of hot tears rise behind her eyes. When other families fought, they used words, with meaning that wasn�
��t buried so deep you needed an archaeologist to excavate it. She always thought her family would be different if the situation called for it, but they weren’t. They were exactly the same as they’d always been, fossilized in sediment of their own making. She thought about Via and Rachel, and what they would do in her place. Via would fill a swear jar in ten seconds flat, and Rachel would wear down her opponent until she got what she wanted. It was time to decide what she would do.

  She blinked and took a deep breath. “Dad needs help.”

  “Emma, what do you want me to do about it?”

  “Take him to the doctor. He’s in pain.”

  Her mom speared a bell pepper slice and a water chestnut. “They’ll prescribe pain medication and send him home with a bill we can’t pay.”

  “Or maybe they’ll diagnose a broken rib or internal bleeding and save his life.”

  Mattie set down her fork and folded her hands in her lap, as if they were going to say grace all over again.

  “Don’t be dramatic,” her mom said. “You’ll scare your sister.”

  “She should be scared.” Emma dropped her fork onto her plate. “You won’t get him new glasses, so he can’t see a thing. He can barely breathe, but you’d rather pretend everything’s normal so making dinner is the worst thing you have to deal with.”

  “Stop it,” Mattie said, blue eyes shining with unshed tears. “He can hear you.”

  Her mom’s eyes darted to her father, but he didn’t even turn his head. He watched the next batter, one of the A’s, strike out on a fastball. That’s his third strikeout tonight, the announcer said. It’s like his swing is off—he’s just not reading the pitches the way he used to.

  Her dad leaned back against the sofa and sighed. The breath caught in his throat and he coughed. Then he gulped in a mouthful of air and coughed again. Emma heard his lungs straining to fill themselves, to get ahead of the cough. His face wrinkled into a grimace and he held his left side.

  “Dad.”

  He couldn’t answer her.

  “Dad!” She jumped out of her chair and raced toward him.

  He bent over and vomited blood onto the hardwood floor.

  “Goddamn it.” Her mom jumped up and grabbed the entire roll of paper towels from the counter, tossing it at Emma.