by Hester Young
“I just wanted to get out of the city!” Teresa’s on the verge of tears. “I just wanted to be alone. To see the sunset. Watch the stars come out.”
Pam shakes her head. “If Micky isn’t in that car, then you killed her. And if that little girl is dead, Teresa—if that little girl who was the center of Donna’s world is really dead, then so help me God, you will experience the kind of pain you never thought possible. I will rip you into goddamned pieces and feed them back to you. Now I will ask you one more time. Where the hell is Micky?”
Teresa waves her hand around vaguely and begins to weep.
“Is she in the car?” Pam asks.
“In the car,” Teresa repeats, and I imagine a torture victim parroting back whatever they’re supposed to say.
“Pam,” I implore. “This is not justice. This is not going to bring Donna back.”
“I’m not looking for Donna,” she says coldly. “I’m looking for Micky. Go check the passenger seat.”
“No,” I say. “I can’t let you do this. I know you want to believe Teresa is the bad guy here, but maybe it’s time to look at facts. Maybe Donna isn’t who you thought she was.”
“Go check the front seat,” Pam says, ignoring me.
“You don’t know what Donna was involved in,” I persist. “You can’t know. Maybe she knew about the babies. Maybe she was part of this whole adoption scam. Maybe . . . maybe she killed Lety.”
“If you won’t do it, then get out of the way.” Pam breezes past me and stops at the front passenger-side door of the Range Rover. She grasps the door handle with her left hand, still pointing her gun toward Teresa with her right.
The door of the SUV starts to swing open, and as it does, I hear shots.
I whip my head back to Teresa, sure that she’s been hit, that Pam has lost her temper and her mind once and for all, but Teresa remains on her knees, arms extended before her as if praying to some higher power. She’s not injured.
For a split second, I think that Pam must’ve missed, that everything’s okay, that there’s still a chance of talking her down.
Then I realize Teresa has not been praying. She’s been aiming.
Her hands grasp the kind of small handgun that Noah once derisively referred to as a “pocket pistol.” Shoot someone with a twenty-two and all you do is make ’em mad, he said at the gun range, but when I look at Pam, see the dark flower spreading across her side in one single, deadly bloom, I know that Noah was wrong.
Pam turns around looking more aggravated than frightened by the bullets she’s just taken until she sees her own right hand. Whether through luck or skill, Teresa has hit her trigger hand. Her fingers slick with blood and no longer able to grip the weapon, Pam drops to her knees and tries to take cover behind the Ranger Rover’s open door. She’s fast, but not fast enough.
Teresa shoots her again. I can’t see where the bullet lands, but Pam’s body flinches at the impact. She topples sideways. Drags herself toward the rear of the car and tries to handle her gun left-handed, cradling the bloody fingers of her right hand between her legs.
“Charlie!” Pam’s voice is strained. “Micky’s in the car.”
I run to the Range Rover while Teresa moves to deal with Pam. On the car floor, at the base of the passenger seat, I discover a large pile of white blankets. And from the folds of the blanket, black against the pale cotton, hair. Long, dark strands of hair.
“Oh God,” I whisper. “Oh God. What did you do, Teresa?” I gather the blanketed mass into my arms, try in vain to peel away fabric from Micky’s face, but Teresa’s voice hits me like another bullet from behind.
“You aren’t going anywhere. Don’t move.”
I look over my shoulder, still holding the child in my arms. Teresa has me in her sights, though she doesn’t look particularly happy about it.
A few feet away, Pam writhes on the ground, half babbling, half weeping. “I’m gonna kill you, Teresa. I’m gonna take you down, I swear.”
I can’t see where her gun has fallen. Teresa must’ve picked it up or else kicked it away. Pam lies there impotent and wounded, probably bleeding out.
Do I run? Try to get help?
I unwrap a piece of blanket, find Micky’s small hand clenched in a fist. “Is she dead?” I whisper. “Is Micky dead?”
“I gave her a pill.” Teresa sounds strangely apologetic. “To make her comfortable. I didn’t want her to be frightened.”
So Pam was right about the Rohypnol. Pam was right about everything. If I had just stayed out of Pam’s way, if I had trusted her instincts instead of falling prey to Teresa’s pleas for help—we could’ve gotten out of this. We could’ve won.
Teresa takes a few steps closer to Pam. Even in the dimming light, I can see that she’s uncharacteristically rumpled, her suit jacket disheveled on one side, her arm partly out of the sleeve. On her right side, a strap hugs tight against her body.
A shoulder holster. The bitch had a shoulder holster.
“You were never good for Donna,” Teresa says, bending over Pam, “but this brings me no pleasure. None at all.”
I wonder how long Pam can live without medical help, if there’s something I can do to stanch the bleeding. Teresa sees me looking and frowns.
“Leave her there,” she orders. “You hold Micky.”
I remove the blanket from Micky’s body, drawing her in tight. Run a hand through her straight, thick hair. I would’ve brushed it for her at night. Slow strokes, careful not to pull, the way I imagine mothers do it.
My eyes well up with tears. Thank God she’s unconscious.
Over in the dirt, Pam barely moves. Shock must be setting in. Her mouth forms a small O, begins to open and close like a fish’s. She’s flat on her back now, chest heaving, her gaze fixed on some distant point in the sky. The first stars have appeared, and I wonder if Pam sees them, if she’s swimming in her mind’s eye, gulping down stars, inhaling their ancient light.
All that blood, I think. She has to be losing so much blood.
How did this situation turn so quickly? The three of us—Pam, Micky, and I—we were all so alive this morning.
It didn’t have to go like this. I could’ve prevented it. If I hadn’t told Andrea Rincón about Micky’s memories. If I hadn’t interfered with Pam’s plan. If I hadn’t come to Arizona at all. Without my poor choices, all three of us would be safe. I touch my belly. All four of us. I can imagine my aunt Suzie’s unemotional assessment of events. A real shame Charlotte took her own kid down with her. Just like her mother.
“I don’t understand.” I’m rocking Micky back and forth, more for me than her. “You could’ve helped people, Teresa.”
“I do help people,” she retorts. “Women, children, families. I help them.”
“You sell babies. That isn’t helping, it’s exploiting.”
She brushes off her dirty knees. Disregards the groaning sounds that Pam is making. “I never did it for the money, don’t you understand? I did it for the women. Women who were pregnant but couldn’t raise a child. Women who needed a chance. I saved those babies from the kind of childhood that I had.”
“You broke the law.”
It’s too dark to see much of Teresa’s face now, but I can hear her indignation, her fury. “Those mothers were looking for abortions!” she exclaims. “In case you didn’t know, that’s illegal, too, in almost every province of Mexico. Our women could’ve ended up dead from some dangerous procedure. They could’ve been arrested. Instead, their babies were born and given to families that wanted them. They received excellent maternal care. Donna and I, we did the right thing, and don’t you ever try to tell me otherwise!”
Pam’s quiet moans are getting to me. If only there were something I could do, something to stop her hurting. “Marilena gave you three different babies, and she made a pretty penny doing it,” I tell Teresa. “Are you
really trying to pretend every one of these pregnancies was an accident?”
“Things . . . have changed,” she acknowledges reluctantly. “In the beginning, Charlotte, they really needed us. We were the only option. But later . . . they just wanted the money, those mothers.”
“Then why did you continue? You weren’t helping children, Teresa. Those babies were brought into the world to turn a profit.”
“It still helped the women,” Teresa insists, and her need to justify herself speaks volumes, I think, about her own guilt. “Two thousand dollars is not much in the United States, but it’ll buy you a house in Nogales. There was still so much good to do. And the families, these adoptive parents, they’d waited so long. It was a win-win.”
“Not for Lety,” I say.
“No.” Her voice turns quiet. “Not for Lety.”
My chest and arms are damp with sweat from holding Micky to me. I realize that I can’t hear Pam anymore; she must’ve passed out.
“What happened to Lety wasn’t my fault,” Teresa says. “I wasn’t a part of that decision.”
“How did Lety even get involved in all this?”
“She lived in Tirabichi once. She knew Marilena. She left to work at one of those nasty clubs for a while, and of course, she got pregnant. She came to Marilena, wanting to give up the child.”
“And?” I keep an eye on Teresa’s .22, hoping she’ll get distracted by her story and leave me with an opening.
“We said okay. My husband found a couple who had been fighting infertility for nearly a decade. They were so excited, so ready. They had the money. But then Lety backed out. Seven months pregnant, and she backed out.”
“Why?”
“How would I know? She was Donna’s little pet. I never even met her. From what Donna said . . . I guess Lety had some crazy idea about coming to the United States. ‘Why should I give my baby to Americans? I want to be an American.’ That sort of thing. She had some whole scheme cooked up, thought she could find a way across the border.”
“So you killed her?”
“I told you, I never laid eyes on her,” Teresa says testily. “That was your mother’s domain, not mine. Lety is dead because she got . . . pushy. She wanted to keep her baby and she wanted the money. So she started threatening Donna. Saying that she’d go to the government, expose us, all that. After everything we’d done for her during the pregnancy. Food, shelter, medical care—she turned on us.”
Poor Lety, I think. You were too young, too stupid to know what a dangerous game you were playing.
She was just a kid. Fifteen years old with big dreams for herself and for her child. And for the sister she never stopped looking out for. I know what Lety saw in that shower, the moment all her hopes for the future ended, and something terrible occurs to me now.
“Was my mother . . . was Donna the one who shot her?”
Teresa laughs at the idea. “God, no. Your mother wanted to pay Lety and be done with it. To make it go away. Marilena and I, we tried to tell her. You let one girl railroad you, then they’ll all do it. It was obvious Donna had no backbone, so I told Marilena to handle it.” She pauses. “I didn’t know . . . I didn’t know that Marilena would take such drastic measures.”
“Were you upset?”
“At Marilena? Yes, of course. But she was only protecting her family. Her livelihood. She knew we had a good thing, didn’t want some silly teenage girl ruining it. I didn’t agree with her methods, Charlotte. I wish she’d never done it. But she wasn’t acting out of evil, just . . . survival.”
It’s probably how Teresa sees herself: acting out of survival, not evil.
“What did Donna think of all this?” I ask.
Teresa sighs. “When she found out what had happened, Donna just about lost her mind. She blamed herself. Wanted to run off to the police and tell them everything. As if that would’ve done any good.” She sounds tired. “We had a lot of fights about it.” It’s not an admission she wants to dwell on. “Listen. Donna was my best friend. I knew her better than anyone. Better than Pam did, obviously, and a whole lot better than Jasmine. Donna and I . . . up until the end, we had no secrets. We were true friends.”
“True friends?” I can’t contain myself here, can’t play into this level of self-delusion. “She’s dead because of you, Teresa.”
“She was going to throw it all away! Not just her own life but mine. My husband’s. All the women in Nogales who needed us, the families waiting for their babies. She was going to hurt every one of us just to ease her own little conscience. I couldn’t let her do that, Charlotte! It wasn’t her choice to make, don’t you understand?”
“I understand.” And somehow I do. I don’t believe she’s right, but I understand.
“I wanted to be gentle,” Teresa says. “Painless, so she’d never know. Rohypnol would’ve made it easy . . . she could’ve walked out with me, gone to sleep . . . never felt a thing.”
“Except Jasmine was there.”
She nods. “Jasmine was there. But I couldn’t back out. Donna was planning to contact Nogales law enforcement. I had to do it.” I wonder if it’s the so-called good girl in her that feels compelled to confess all now. I wonder if, in her strange way, Teresa seeks forgiveness. “I tried to slip her some pills, but Donna wouldn’t take anything, wouldn’t eat or drink. She was still on her crusade about Lety, ‘doing the right thing.’ She was so naïve. We had . . . a disagreement. And then Jasmine threatened to call her boyfriend. I had to act.”
“You killed Donna first. Why?”
“Because I loved her! I didn’t want her to have to see her child hurt. Whatever you might think of me, I’m not a cruel person.”
Teresa’s sense of compassion in the face of cold-blooded murder baffles me.
“I should’ve taken care of Micky that night, I know that now. I knew there was a possibility that she’d heard something, and I should’ve done it then. Instead of putting her through all this. That poor baby.” She reaches out toward the bundle in my arms, runs an awkward hand across the back of Micky’s head. Even unconscious, Micky flinches slightly at her touch.
Teresa’s winding down, the need to explain herself to me now satisfied. I have to do something, do it now. Delay her plans. If I ran now maybe I could escape. Maybe. But I’d be leaving Micky, drugged and defenseless, to this woman. I can’t do that. Micky is my responsibility, just as much as the baby girl I’m carrying inside me.
“I think you’re overreacting, Teresa,” I find myself saying in a strangely steady voice. “This isn’t life or death here. Micky had a few bad dreams, that’s all. There’s nothing that can tie you to Donna and Jasmine. You can let the kid go.”
Teresa laughs, a soft, regretful laugh. “Oh, Charlotte. You have such a fighting spirit. Your mother would’ve admired that.”
“Pam pulled a gun on you,” I press. “I saw it myself. She was ready to put a bullet in your head. Shooting her was self-defense, and that’s what I’ll tell the cops.”
Teresa doesn’t seem to hear me. “Donna always wanted to meet you, you know,” she says. “But she said you’d be ashamed of her. You with your glamorous life in New York, working at your fancy magazine.” Her hair grazes my arm, giving me chills. “It’s strange, isn’t it? You were just a name on a masthead to her, a face on the Internet. But I know you now. Better than your own mother.”
Teresa’s getting to me, finding my tender spots. Is she lying, just to rile me? Did Donna really keep tabs on me? Follow my career? I have a hundred questions, but before I can voice them, a pair of headlights comes around a bend in the road.
Hope surges up in me. Maybe it’s a park ranger. Pam said they keep an eye on the land out here. Or maybe it’s Noah, although how he’d have tracked us down, I can’t imagine. But why would someone come down here if they weren’t looking for us? The loop doesn’t go anywhere.
I
lift Micky’s body, trying to get a sense of its weight, trying to guess how fast and how far I might be able to run while carrying her. She’s a sturdy kid, and I’m not exactly built for speed these days. We’d have two chances—fat and slim.
The headlights continue in our direction, bumping down the unpaved road at a leisurely pace.
“Get down,” Teresa hisses at me, tapping the gun in my direction. “Down behind the car.”
I comply, mind racing as I work out what to do. Teresa is small. If I launch myself at her, I might be able to wrestle her gun away, but not before she takes a few shots. How can I fight her and still protect my baby? Still protect Micky?
I run a hand over Micky’s clenched fist, smooth her fingers with my thumb. It’s then, her hand against my palm, the headlights sweeping toward us, that Micky uncurls her fist, reveals the secret she’s been keeping all this while. A white circular pill.
The Rohypnol. She didn’t take the Rohypnol Teresa gave her.
I study Micky’s face and, to my shock, one dark eye peeps warily open. We stare at each other for just a second before her eye blinks shut. Holy hell. The kid’s awake. More than awake. She’s been playing possum this entire time.
How could a six-year-old be so much smarter than I am? She didn’t trust Teresa. Not for a minute.
The headlights, meanwhile, have moved past us, following the loop back to the main road. The driver must have been lost. Once again, we’re out of luck.
I give Micky’s hand a quick squeeze, not sure if her consciousness is a good thing or a dangerous one.
“It’s dark now.” Teresa stands up. “I think we should go for a walk.” She’s lost all interest in conversation. There’s a briskness to her voice now, an efficiency as she steels herself for the unpleasant task before her, and I wonder if this is what she’s been waiting for all along: the cover of darkness.
“Are you just going to leave Pam lying here?” I ask, stalling for time. “We’re not that far off the road. Someone will see her, see her car. As soon as the sun comes up, someone will find her. The police can probably tie her to you, Teresa. You’ll need an explanation.”
