Hailey's War

by Jodi Compton

  “Jesus Christ,” she said.

  I pulled the shirt back on. “I know this is hard to take, but I was never ‘playing’ soldier, not back east and not now,” I said. “When I do something, I’m serious about it. Nidia is my responsibility because I’ve made her my responsibility. And it’s also my responsibility to protect you. Take the money and go to your sister’s.”

  She was still staring at me. I wondered if my father had ever talked to her that way.

  Then she took the money from my hand. “Is it too much to ask,” she said, “for you to ask your friends to go into town for an hour until I’m packed and out?”

  forty

  Julienne’s trailer was pretty nice: double-wide, two bedrooms, a little porch in back. There wasn’t much food in the refrigerator; my mother apparently shopped day by day. Naturally, there was a whole carton of cigarettes in the cupboard above the refrigerator. I could imagine Payaso’s happiness at seeing them, but they’d probably be going with her.

  I’d sent Serena and the rest into town, as Julianne had asked, and since they left, I’d been avoiding her. Now I went into her bedroom. Nothing I was going to say was likely to help, but I couldn’t help myself; I needed to smooth things over.

  The bedroom decor was clearly picked out by Julianne’s ex, still the nominative owner of the whole place, because it was dominated by masculine hues: hunter-green and rust red, with inexpensive pine furniture.

  Julianne was in the little bathroom. I watched through the open door as she threw things into a makeup kit: eyelash curler, tweezers, nail clippers, lipstick. She glanced at me in the mirror.

  I sat down on the bed. “I’m sorry about this.”

  “No, you’re not. If you’re going to be a bitch, Hailey, don’t be a half-assed bitch. It undermines the whole point.” She fished a deep-red lipstick back out of her makeup kit and rolled it gently onto her lower lip, then her upper.

  She came to stand in the bathroom doorway, studying me. “There’s something you don’t know, Hailey. When you were fourteen and I’d gotten back on my feet after your father’s death, I wanted to move to Santa Barbara or Ojai right away, someplace nearer the ocean, with more culture and more people.” She paused. “But you told me you wanted to go to West Point, and I stayed because of that. A metro area would have had a larger student body, more standout athletes and kids with 4.0’s. You would have been a smaller fish in a bigger pond. I never told you, never made a big deal of it, but I stayed in Lompoc for four years so you’d have your best shot at getting in.”

  I looked away, repressing an irritated comment, which would have been this: If she’d tried to stir up any interest in my potential Army career, she’d have known that such a sacrifice wasn’t necessary-as the child of a dead serviceman, I’d already had a significant edge on the other candidates. Sons and daughters of personnel who died while in active duty are given special consideration.

  But there was no point in embarrassing her. I played along.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t realize.”

  “Lot of good it did, in the end,” she said.

  Ah, there it was, the sharpened-dagger point to that little story.

  She walked out of the bathroom and placed the makeup tote into her packed suitcase, zipped it up, and looked at me. “Why do you even think Porter and Angeline are going to open their house to me on such short notice?” she asked.

  “Because they’re Mooneys,” I said.

  She gave me a sharp look, but this time there was more than pique in it. If there was one legitimate grievance Julianne had with me, it was that in my younger years, I’d made no secret of how much I’d envied CJ and his siblings their settled home life, a jealousy that had clearly implied that Angeline had been a better mother than her sister.

  “Oh, of course,” Julianne said. “You’ve never forgiven me for making you move out of the paradise of your aunt and uncle’s house. If you’d had your way, you’d have been there until the day you left for West Point.” She paused then, chambering her next thought like a shooter chambers a round. “Probably in bed with your cousin Cletus, too.”

  It was unfortunate that Julianne had such contempt for the Army. She would have excelled at planning missions: She always knew where the weak point lay.

  “That’s a sick thing to say,” I told her tiredly.

  forty-one

  The next few weeks were uneventful. That was almost a problem in itself. Serena and Payaso did not take well to mountain life, finding the blackness and the silence at night unnerving, and the days boring. Julianne’s little home would have been spacious for two, but not for four. There always seemed to be someone in the single bathroom. The TV got only a small selection of channels, and there was no sound system to speak of, just a clock radio that would also play a CD.

  Relief came in the form of Bravo and Deacon, who drove up from L.A. to put in some bodyguarding time. A grateful Serena and Payaso jumped in the GTO and headed south for a fix of tacos mariscos and city light, as well as to check in with their respective lieutenants, Trippy and Iceman.

  They came back in five days like a supply dogsled from Nome, laden with DVDs, magazines, a deck of playing cards, a box of Krispy Kreme doughnuts, groceries from a Mexican tienda, and several ounces of marijuana. I had to put my foot down about that.

  “We’re guarding Nidia, and everyone who’s here needs to be clearheaded, which means no drinking and no drugs,” I reminded them. “I know it seems like Skouras’s men have no idea where she is, and they’re never coming for her, but that’s what the two guys in Gualala thought, right before Payaso and I walked through their front door and took Nidia away from them.”

  That didn’t have the desired effect. “Motherfucking Trece style!” exulted Trippy, who’d come with them, throwing Trece’s sign. Deacon and Bravo threw it back, all of them focusing on the last part of what I’d said and ignoring the first.

  It turned out that nearly everyone wanted to come up and do guard duty. While I’d have liked to believe it was esprit de corps, there was an ulterior motive, and not one I’d ever have thought of.

  “Snow,” Serena told me. “Most of them have never seen it. They all want to be here when the first fall comes.”

  Soon there was a regular rotation. Not only did Payaso’s homeboys come up to be security, but the sucias came, too, providing company both for their guys and for Nidia. Despite the glaring surface differences between the sucias and Nidia, Serena’s girls were natural and easy with her, playing cards and chatting, brushing and braiding her red hair. The guys, meanwhile, followed Payaso’s example, showing Nidia an excess of courtesy, cleaning up their language when she was around, holding doors for her.

  Of all of us, I was the only one to stay with Nidia day in, day out. I dealt with mountain life by reaching back and tapping a little of my old West Point discipline, deciding to get my body back into its pre-coma shape. I got up early and ran for miles on the fire roads, coming back to do push-ups and Russian twists on Julianne’s little porch. In the evenings, I played more kinds of poker with Serena and the guys than I’d known existed. One afternoon, Serena and I took our guns out into the hills and shot at soda cans, sharpening our skills. Nidia and I went into town to get cold-weather clothing. Everyone else had a chance to get things from home, but I’d come to Truckee with only the clothes on my back, as had Nidia. Skouras’s guys had bought her a few things in Gualala, but in her haste to get out of there, naturally, she hadn’t thought to grab anything before leaving.

  The snow came in mid-November, turning everyone into giddy children except two of us. Me because it reminded me, soberingly, of the pristine fields and quads of West Point, and Nidia because she was Nidia, with the weight of the future in her belly. So she watched from the steps as her friends pelted one another with handfuls of snow, put it down collars, and tasted it cautiously. Meanwhile, I put snow chains on our cars, laboriously, with reddening fingers and a little cursing.

  December came
, and Truckee put on its Christmas finery, white lights glittering along every storefront in the town’s Old West-style retail district. Skiers and snowboarders overran the town, the streets full of muddy SUVs with loaded roof racks. Had she wanted, Serena could have had her pick of the college boys who appraised her from the windows of their Tahoes and Denalis. Winter clothing suited her, the gunmetal-colored trench coat and boots and the long hand-knit scarf I’d bought for her at a downtown boutique.

  After the initial adjustment period, Nidia’s confinement proved an oddly peaceful, settled time for all of us.

  One day, though, I overheard Payaso and Deacon in a discussion of whether an icicle would make a good impromptu weapon in a fight.

  Innocence never lasts.

  forty-two

  One chilly night I found Serena outside, looking up at the night sky.

  “What a trip,” she said, breath clouding in the air. “Look at all those stars. That’s too many, man. That’s just wrong.”

  I looked, too, seeing the dusty backbone of small stars that formed the Milky Way. I said, “You know, when the Northridge Quake hit and the lights were out all over Los Angeles, people called the media, saying that they could see a river of dust kicked up by the quake. They said the dust was hanging in the sky, glowing white from city lights elsewhere. What they were seeing was the Milky Way, for the first time in their lives.”

  “I bet they were scared.”

  “Scared?” I said. “Why? It’s beautiful.”

  “You really like it out here?” she said.

  “Sure. It’s not so different from where we used to live. It used to get pretty dark and quiet out there.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “And you grew up and hauled ass for the city, L.A. and then San Francisco. But you get up into the mountains and you go all white on me: ‘Isn’t nature beautiful?’”

  “That’s not a white thing,” I said.

  “Maybe not, but-” She shrugged. “I keep thinking of this girl I knew, she was from Lennox but she never got ganged-up. She stayed in school, became an inner-city schoolteacher, that whole trip. So she takes these girls from the hood to the ocean. Some of them have literally never seen it, even though they’ve grown up just about ten miles inland. She thinks this is going to be a beautiful life-changing thing for them. But they get out on the beach, and they start freaking. It’s windy, their hair’s getting messed up, they’re afraid the gulls are going to shit on them, they think the kelp smells funny. They want to go back into town, go to Taco Bell.” Serena grinned. “She gave up and took them.”

  “Thanks for telling me that,” I said. “It was so uplifting.”

  “I’m just saying, maybe your parents were white, but somewhere along the way a homegirl breast-fed you. You don’t like it up here any more than us.”

  “It’ll be over soon,” I said.

  “No, it won’t.”

  “Sure it will,” I said, confused. “Nidia will give birth, and then at least she’ll be safe. Once Nidia and her child are two separate units, Skouras’s men won’t have any reason to chase her.”

  “Insula,” Serena said, “have you really talked to Nidia about that? Giving up her baby?”

  I said, “The baby’s going to have to be hidden somewhere, under a whole new identity. It can’t be living with Nidia. As long as they can find her, they can find her child.”

  “That doesn’t answer my question. Point blank, have you told her that?”

  I was silent.

  “That’s what I thought.”

  I looked out into the black shapes of the woods. “Why is it so hard to talk to her?” I asked.

  “This is a difficult subject,” she said.

  “No, I mean about anything,” I said. “Since we got her back from Gualala, you and me, we’ve both avoided being alone with her. Your girls like to kick it with her, but you and me, we avoid being one-on-one.”

  Serena lifted a shoulder. “I just don’t think I have anything in common with her,” she said.

  “None of us do,” I said.

  When we’d rescued Nidia in Gualala, when I’d opened the bedroom door, I’d said, You’re safe, but beyond that I’d said and done nothing to reassure her. I’d tried to get her to kick the bound Skouras soldier in the ribs. Later, after we’d narrowly gotten away from the Highway Patrol officer, I’d spoken only briefly with her about her ordeal in Mexico and then Mendocino County, when Serena and I had reassured ourselves that she hadn’t been sexually mistreated or roughly handled, that she was basically okay. At least that’s what we told ourselves.

  The truth was that what had happened to Nidia was difficult to think about, no matter how she’d been treated in Gualala. The extent to which Nidia had lost control of her own life, living with only Skouras’s guards for company-if I let myself think about it too long, it’d sicken me. I couldn’t stand to ask her how she felt, how she’d gotten through it. Because some part of my own psyche feared that I could still, despite all my training and toughening, be like her. It was as if victimhood were a catching illness and I couldn’t afford to get too close to it.

  I didn’t have to ask Serena if she felt the same way. I knew she did. It had been Serena, before she’d even met Nidia, who’d called her a “vic,” or victim. I didn’t think either of us was proud of the way we felt about Nidia, but we were in a unique position. The guys felt comfortable around her because they’d always been guys; they’d simply never had to think about being hurt in such a deep psychological way. And the sucias, well, to them this whole thing wasn’t real. It was a movie: Serena and Payaso and I had walked into enemigo territory and taken Nidia back, motherfucking Trece style!, and then we’d made a fucking cop wet his fucking pants, applause, roll credits.

  Nidia probably needed to talk to someone about what had happened to her, someone other than Serena’s homegirls, but apparently it wasn’t going to be Serena, and it wasn’t going to be me, either. I’d nearly gotten killed for her, and I’d gotten her back from Skouras, and since then the extent of my commitment had been to assure her that we’d keep her safe.

  Somewhere along the way, I’d come to understand that there was no way that Nidia and her baby could live together, not for many years, at least. The baby was going to have to disappear into safe, anonymous hands. Skouras’s men were never going to be able to find the baby, not if they’d never laid eyes on it. Nidia was different. Her they would recognize. As long as they could find her, her baby wasn’t going to be safe in her care, and the opposite was also true: As long as she had her baby, she would be a target.

  And now, as Serena pointed out, I had to make that clear to her.

  “All right,” I said, “let’s go talk to Nidia.”

  “Right now?”

  “It’s not going to get any easier. I might as well get this over with.” I got to my feet. “Come on.”

  “Me?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Please, even if it’s just for moral support, do this with me.”

  One of Serena’s girls, Cheyenne, was in Julianne’s bedroom with Nidia. Serena said to her, “Insula and I need to talk to Nidia for a while.” She always referred to me by my street name in front of her sucias. She added, “In private.”

  Cheyenne switched off the CD player and got up. Serena and I stepped into the room to let her pass.

  Nidia looked from Serena to me and said, “Todo esta bien?” Is everything okay?

  Serena sat on the bed. “Por ahora,” she said. For now. “It’s really Hailey who needs to talk to you.”

  Nidia looked to me. Stalling, I moved over to the low pine dresser and lifted my hips to sit on its upper edge, putting my legs out and my feet on the edge of the bed.

  “We really haven’t talked about what’s going to happen in the future,” I began.

  “The future?” she said.

  The easiest way to do this, I decided, was to make her do the reasoning. “What exactly do you see happening after you have the baby?”

  Her green
eyes were uncertain. “I don’t understand.”

  “With Skouras, I mean.”

  She didn’t exactly wince, but I saw his name prick her, like a dart. She said, “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?” I was playing amateur therapist, making her do the emotional and logical heavy lifting. “I’m not trying to be unkind here, but you have to think about it. Your baby is due in about a month. Then what? Skouras’s not going to stop looking for the two of you.”

  She said, haltingly, “I-I have to hide, with the baby.”

  “Where?” I said. “They know about your mother’s village. That’s off the table.”

  She looked down at the deep-green bedspread. I waited.

  “Hailey,” Serena interrupted. This isn’t working, her gaze said.

  “Okay, look,” I said. “Nidia, I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and I just don’t think your baby is going to be safe from Mr. Skouras unless you’re in separate places, and even you don’t know where the baby is.”

  “Como?” she said, her eyes wide and shocked.

  Quickly, I explained to her the reasoning that I’d shared with Serena. Nidia listened, but I could see she wasn’t accepting it.

  I finished by saying, “We’ll find your baby a good foster home. The best, I swear. And it’s not forever. Mr. Skouras’s an old guy. He’s already had one heart attack. He doesn’t have close family that’ll pursue this after he’s dead. After that, the two of you can be together, I swear.”

  But Nidia said, “No.” She laid a hand on her stomach. “This baby is my responsibility. No one else’s.”

  “I understand,” I said, “but making sure your baby is safe is the biggest part of that responsibility. I know it seems backward, but living separate from your child is the best thing you can do for it, until Skouras is dead.”

  Falling silent, I waited for her to respond, but she didn’t, looking down, not meeting my eyes.

  I was about to speak again, to push harder before she could think of another argument for keeping her baby. But Serena beat me to it. She leaned forward and said simply, “Hailey got shot.”