Red Road

by Wiltz, Jenni

  He shrugged. “They don’t look very hard before locking the door at night.”

  “Where are you going to sleep now?”

  He patted the torn vinyl of his dashboard. “I know a place.”

  “If you go back, tell them you claim sanctuary.”

  He drew his brows together. “Does that work?”

  “It used to. Thanks for the ride.” She pulled the door handle and a cold breath of air whooshed into the car.

  “Emma.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Nothing’s so bad you can’t fix it.”

  Her lips pressed into a toothless smile, the only kind she felt she could give. She closed the door behind her and stepped up to the porch. According to her watch, it was only nine. She was safe.

  The motion detector turned on the porch light as she approached. Owen waited until he saw it to back out of the driveway. Emma closed the front door behind her as fast as she could to block the noise as he roared away.

  Somewhere down the block, a dog barked.

  “Who was that?”

  Emma jumped. She saw her mom standing alone in the shadows of the dining room. “Mom! You scared me. What are you doing?”

  “That wasn’t Rachel. Who was that?”

  “A friend of Rachel’s.”

  “Em, how could you?”

  “Mom, what’s wrong? I’m home on time.”

  “I heard that car pull into our driveway.” Her mom stepped from the shadows, her hand wrapped around the phone with a grip so tight her knuckles shone. “I heard it from the family room. I grabbed the phone and ran to the window, hoping I’d recognize the car.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “My fingers were on the buttons, Emma. 9, 1, 1. What was I supposed to think? You knew what your father said about those men coming back.”

  The blood in her veins turned to lead once she realized what her mom was talking about. Then the words tumbled out of her mouth, as if speed could make up for ignorance. “I’m sorry. I didn’t think. Rachel’s dad was there, and he was yelling at her, and I had to find another way home, and—”

  “I’m done, Em. You may not care what happens to this family, but I do and I will not have it disrupted. You are not to leave this house except for school.”

  The words hit her like clods of dirt, tossed onto a casket in the ground. “Mom, this family is all I care about.”

  “Everyone else is doing their part.” Her mom’s eyes drifted toward her empty right ring finger. “Why do you want to make things harder?”

  “I’m only trying to help.”

  Her mother shook her head. The skin under her eyes glimmered with unabsorbed facial cream, the kind that smelled like milk and honey. “What’s happened to you, Em? You’re not the same anymore.”

  “I’m still me. Why can’t anyone see that?” She looked down at her feet, bathed in moonlight from the far window. That window was shaped with a rectangle on the bottom and a half-circle on top: two basic shapes used to create a new one. She thought that maybe their lives could be like that. The shape of before was the rectangle, no different from any other window. The half-circle was after, a cautious shape, smaller and bent inward.

  They both let in light.

  And they could both be broken by the same rock.

  “Go upstairs,” her mom said. “Tomorrow I’ll decide whether to tell your father.”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Thursday, April 17

  Malo Verde’s seasons didn’t pay attention to the calendar, and spring was no exception. The car’s chilled vinyl seat was no match for Emma’s thin denim. She shivered as she latched her seat belt. In the driver’s seat, her mom gripped the steering wheel and said nothing during the entire trip to school.

  Emma waited for a word, or even a look, to tell her things could still be normal. It didn’t come. She cleared her throat each time they hit a red light on Carver Boulevard, trying to work up the courage to say the word “mom.” Each time, something stopped her. If she said the wrong thing and made it worse, her mom might break her silence and tell her dad everything. The worst thing Emma could imagine would be to have her dad misunderstand her the way her mom had. How could they think, after sixteen years of being a good daughter, she would suddenly become the opposite of what they needed?

  When her mom pulled up to the curb, Emma got out quickly, without a wave or a goodbye. She trudged through the front gate, looking at the black galaxies of bubble gum on the cement. She wondered what it would take to disappear inside one. Every part of this day would be hell. Rachel and Via were in three of her morning classes, with Elvira in the fourth. All morning, she’d be reminded of how badly she failed the people around her. Dan was the only person she hadn’t failed yet, and that was just because he was new. Give her time, and she’d find a way to screw that up, too.

  She kept her head down in the halls. Even the people who didn’t know about her fight with Claudia Morales stared at the scratches on her cheek. All those extra stares had weight—she felt them like extra books in her backpack. When she stopped at her locker, she tilted her shoulder and let her backpack fall to the filthy floor.

  Her fingers gripped the combination lock’s ridged edges. Twirl, stop, twirl, stop, twirl, stop, lift. When she bent down to unzip her backpack, she saw a familiar pair of black flip-flops. The first smile of the day bubbled up inside her like a geyser, pushing through the layers of salt and tears. “I’m so glad it’s you,” she said.

  But the face she saw wasn’t the one she was so used to seeing. The ease around the lips and the warmth in his eyes were gone. He looked colder and harder, like a replica made of wax or stone. “What’s wrong? Did something happen?”

  “I was coming to ask you the same thing.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  He reached into his pocket and held up a folded piece of paper. “I found this in my locker this morning.”

  Emma took the note and unfolded it with clumsy fingers. Her stomach churned as she recognized the handwriting. This was a whole new level of sabotage, something she never would have done. “I would have kept her secret forever,” she whispered. “I was never going to tell.”

  “What secret?” Dan snatched back the note. “What’s going on, Em? Is it true?”

  She grasped the side of her locker door and let the rough metal bite into the sides of her fingers. The note, written in Rachel’s childish balloon letters, told Dan that Emma had left church last night with a boy she barely knew. They were holding hands, the note said, and she left with him, alone, even though I was the one who drove her there. Just thought you should know.

  “It didn’t happen that way,” she said.

  “So you didn’t hold hands with some guy and leave with him in his car?”

  “It wasn’t holding hands.” She bent her head against the locker door, needing its coolness on her forehead now, too. Think, she told herself. You have to say this right or he’ll walk away and he might never walk back.

  “Emma, who is he? I thought you wanted to be with me.”

  “I do,” she said, looking into his eyes. “You know I do. I don’t even know Owen. He’s someone Rachel knows from her youth group.”

  “Did he touch you? Why did Rachel think you were holding hands with someone you don’t even know?”

  “Fuck,” she said, slamming her locker. Every part of that question was a trap. It ended with her as the villain, any way she played it. Either she revealed Rachel’s secret, which was a shitty thing for a friend to do, or she kept it, which was a shitty thing for a prom date to do.

  “Just answer the question.”

  “I was leaving a note for Rachel. Owen pulled me away because there was something going on Rachel didn’t want me to see.”

  “Did he pull you straight into his car?”

  “Well, s
omeone had to give me a ride home.”

  He tilted his head back. “Em, that doesn’t add up. Either you know him better than you say you do, or you did something really dangerous.”

  “That’s the least dangerous thing I’ve done lately,” she snapped. “My mom grounded me for it, she might tell my dad, Via hates me, Rachel’s mad, I can’t look Elvira in the eye, and you’re all that’s left to keep me going.”

  Dan nodded and made a grunting noise deep in his throat. “All that’s left, huh?”

  “I didn’t mean it like that.”

  “You have some serious shit going on, and I get that. I’ve told you over and over that I can help you. I want to help you. But when you start getting in strange guys’ cars . . . that’s not just ignoring my words. That’s ignoring me. Maybe I should take a hint.”

  Anger flushed her cheeks, spreading from the black hole in her heart. “Everyone wants me to be someone else, but you know what? Just because you want something doesn’t mean you get it.”

  “I can see that,” he said, pushing himself off the locker bay and walking down the hall.

  • • •

  After history class, she walked straight through the main building, across the courtyard, and out the hallway that led to the locker room. She’d wanted to run the minute Dan walked away from her, but she knew what Mr. Parker would think if he saw her empty chair. He’d think she wasn’t so tough, that maybe she didn’t deserve that A.

  I deserve it, she thought. And I’m going to prove it.

  She ducked behind the row of math portables she and Elvira hid behind after Monica’s fight. No one would find her here, if only because no one would be looking. The grass was cold and wet, so she set her backpack on the ground and used it as a cushion.

  There had to be a way to fix this. If she could solve an equation for the superpositions of left- and right-moving waves during the quantum mechanics unit in chemistry, she could find a way to repair the domino damage that had buried her in the past week. The worst parts of that damage had happened at home. How could she show her dad that it was okay to leave the house? What would it take to make him feel safe?

  The people who hurt him, who threatened to come back and do it again, had to go away. The only ones who could make that happen were the cops, but they had no evidence and no witnesses.

  Then she would get them evidence and witnesses.

  She stood up and pulled the maroon notebook out of her backpack. She let her fingers slide down its cover slowly, as if Dan would feel her touch on his face. What would he do if he knew she’d stolen a gun? Probably never talk to her again, just like Rachel and Via.

  She took a deep breath to keep the tears back, wiped her nose with her hand, and flipped open the notebook. In the beginning, she’d written about her mom’s Miss Havisham decorations. Then she’d drawn maps of East Malo Verde, noted the cross streets of El Camino Rojo, copied what little she’d been able to find on the Espinosas from news sites, sketched gang signs, and noted the names of known Norteño lieutenants.

  It was all there, just like writing a paper: Read the source material, gather quotes, make a thesis, and plug the quotes into supporting points. It was the only thing she’d ever been good at, and the only chance she had to stop the dominoes from falling.

  The first bell rang and she uncapped her pen. The second bell rang and she started writing.

  • • •

  The cul-de-sac’s curb hadn’t been the color of cement in years. Blackened by its brushes with tires, it was now the color of a cheerleader’s smoky eye makeup. The Buick was there right on time, its tires never having contributed to the cloudy coloration.

  Emma got in and clutched her backpack in her lap. The two feet between them felt like the twenty thousand leagues separating surface from sea floor. She stared straight ahead, afraid to look at her mom or even turn her head. At school, she at least had the option of flight.

  Maybe in a day or two, if she behaved, she could convince her mom not to ground her. She hadn’t even told her about Dan or the prom. Maybe that was for the better, since it didn’t look like Dan wanted to be around her any more, either.

  She was toxic, like asbestos and lead paint.

  Emma breathed a sigh of relief when her mom pressed the garage door opener and turned into their driveway. She decided to go straight upstairs and stay there as long as she could. Her mom would send Mattie with a tray, and maybe a night without her would remind them that they missed her. She slung her backpack over her shoulder and went straight up to her room.

  Smoky grey light fell through the skylight over the stairs. She walked straight through it, wishing it could paint her invisible. The hallway smelled like lemon cleaner, all bleach and citrus, and she wondered if her dad had thrown up blood again.

  At the end of the hall, her door was closed.

  She never closed her door, not even with the gun in her room, because she never had before and doing so now would tell them all she had something to hide.

  She reached for the brass doorknob, newly caked with fingerprints. Her next breath seared her lungs. If Kobilinski or the other cops were waiting for her behind it, she’d tell them she only ever wanted to help.

  The knob turned and she opened the door.

  It wasn’t the police. It was worse.

  It was her dad.

  He sat on her bed, his spine curved like a boomerang. The blue robe was gone, replaced by an afghan her mom had crocheted a couple years ago. His eye was still ringed with glossy purple skin, although the swelling had gone down. The snowy beard had grown another inch.

  Emma looked at him and felt the same way she did when she saw the pictures of her grandfather at his funeral. “Dad,” she said, partly to convince herself it was really him, this sad, bowed creature with hair whiter than sifted flour.

  In the SeedCorp days, he’d done a lot of the plant’s hiring and firing. He knew all the tricks for getting workers to confess they’d clocked in high or lied about that sick day yesterday. It took her a moment to realize he was using them on her. Don’t speak, he’d said. That’s rule number one. Make them think you know everything.

  She sat in her desk chair, facing him. It took all her willpower not to look at her closet door and see if it was closed all the way. Behind him, on the bed, her row of stuffed animals looked at her with bleak button eyes. “How are you feeling?”

  “Not so good.” His voice was rough and tight, like muscles that hadn’t been stretched before a run.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I think you know.”

  “Mom sends me upstairs all the time now. I don’t know anything.”

  “She told me what you did, Em. All of it.”

  “The fight,” she said slowly, turning her cheek so he could see the scratches.

  He shivered and pulled the blanket around his shoulders. “Why did you do it?”

  “To show them they didn’t win.”

  “That’s not what you did.”

  “It feels like that’s exactly what I did.”

  “You lost the chance to show them you’re better than that.”

  “What happened to telling me to fight? It’s what you wanted when I was a baby.”

  He blinked his one good eye, still pink around the iris. “That means something different now.”

  “It means exactly the same thing,” she snapped.

  “For me, maybe.” He breathed deeply and touched his ribs with his right hand. “I always wanted to live on a farm, with fruit trees and irrigation ditches and wide blue skies. But the job was here, so we stayed. The only thing that made it better was knowing you were smart enough to get out.”

  “School isn’t any good for the real world, Dad. It doesn’t mean anything.”

  “It means something to me.”

  Emma turned her head. “Why does everyone w
ant me to be something I’m not?”

  “You can’t stop, Em. You’ve come this far.”

  “Dad, why didn’t you go to Tennessee?”

  He sighed. “I know it’s not easy for you to make friends, Em. I watched you struggle with it all these years. You found people you like here, who like you. I’d never take that away from you.”

  “I wish you had,” she said softly. She wished he’d told her to shut up and pack, like Via’s dad or Rachel’s dad might have done. I ruined everything, she thought. And I did it by being me.

  “Things should have been different,” she said.

  He shook his head. “I wouldn’t trade one day with this family for anything. You make me happy, Em, you and your sister. That’s all I need. I need you to know that.”

  She slid out of her chair and sat next to him on the bed. He put his arms around her, so gently she could barely feel them. She rested her cheek on his shoulder, feeling the hard, calcified rope of his collarbone beneath her skin.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Friday, April 18

  After a few minutes, the gun felt normal in her hand. It was like holding a hairdryer. You just had to get your arm used to supporting the weight. She held it in her hand and moved her arm around, up, down, in circles, from hanging at her side to pointing out in front of her.

  When her arm started tingling, she set it down and took a break. When the blood had run back into her fingers, she picked it up and ran through the same set of drills. She consulted her notebook diagrams and practiced flicking the safety on and off. The diagrams also told her how to disengage the magazine and check to make sure there were bullets.

  There were.

  Monica had been ready.

  Detective Kobilinski had said they needed evidence to charge the Espinosas with attacking her father. If he couldn’t get it on his own, she would give it to him. Everything bad that had happened stemmed from that night. If she could repair that damage, she could start working on everything else, too, like running a film reel backward. Nothing would be all right unless she could make sure her dad never had to fear the people who hurt him. If her family could heal itself, she would work on Via, Rachel, and Dan.