by Samuel Park
“I think there’s something fishy about you.” He looked at me directly with those steely eyes, almost appealing to me to agree with him.
My mother feigned offense. It was better than to show how she actually felt. “Me? You’re wrong.”
“Say I agree to go with you. Then when I arrive, it’s some kind of trap. A rain of bullets waiting for me. Whatever this place is you’re trying to lead me to, it better be teeming with unsuspecting terrorists.”
My mother swallowed nervously. The Chief got up. He was done with my mother. He’d given her her five minutes and he’d fulfilled his patriotic duty to the common people. I felt a nervous vibration run along her arm as she said to his retreating back, “I’m trying to help you. I’m here because I want the same as you.”
Within twenty-four hours, her prediction came true. There was an explosion—a car bomb that went off a block from President Wilson Avenue, where the American consulate was. It killed one person and wounded five others. And with that, in Lima’s eyes, my mother went from a crazy person off the street to a potential spy for the antiterrorism police force.
La Bardot came by herself, bearing gifts. She pulled the cheap polyester pants from the plastic bag, and my mother shook her head. More janitor’s clothes.
“You shouldn’t wear the same outfit again,” said La Bardot. She came in character, in her platinum blond wig and giant red hoop earrings. She wore a spaghetti-strapped shirt that left her shoulders and arms mostly bare, and a pair of shorts that showed off her strong, athletic legs.
My mother wouldn’t budge. They stood in the living room, too restless to sit down. I slumped in a chair next to the TV, pretending to watch a cartoon. The two of them paid no mind to me. My mother had wanted me to stay at Janete’s, but I refused to be abandoned again.
“I want to be comfortable and wear my own clothes,” my mother said. “I don’t need Octopus directing me.”
La Bardot did not want to argue—she stuffed the clothes back in her bag and asked with a sigh, “Do you still have the map he gave you, with the directions to Barra?”
“Yes. So the plan is the same?”
La Bardot nodded. “Except this time it has to work,” she said, reproachfully.
“It will,” said my mother, flashing a glance at La Bardot, and then returning to her small compact mirror as she put on her lipstick. “Have you ever met Chief Lima?”
La Bardot shook her head and frowned disgustedly, expressing her opinion of him.
“I’ve now only seen him twice, briefly, but we’re establishing a rapport, a connection,” said my mother, smacking on her lips. “He is an important man, and important people, for some reason, are really drawn to me.”
“He is a torturer,” said La Bardot, enunciating precisely.
My mother began applying her mascara.
“Judgment serves no use when it comes to acting. It’s better to think about objectives,” she said, opening her eyes wide, her eyelashes growing darker. “I have mine, he has his.”
“Lima is not a person. He’s a monster,” said La Bardot, reaching into her bag for a cigarette.
“Acting is more about observation and noticing how people actually behave,” my mother replied. “What people are really like, instead of the assumption in your head.”
“Then I’d be a terrible actress because I would play everyone as bored and disenchanted, because I think that’s what everyone really is,” said La Bardot.
“Including yourself?” my mother asked, with a smirk.
La Bardot shrugged. “Maybe.” She paused for a second, then said, “I have a confession to make. When I turned down the role, it’s not just because I had such little faith in my acting.” La Bardot exhaled smoke slowly. “I was afraid to be in a room with Lima.”
My mother put the mascara away. “He’d probably recognize you.”
“No, he wouldn’t. But the mere thought of sitting face-to-face with him, I couldn’t do it.” La Bardot looked away, embarrassed. “The way you’re going about this. You’re not the least bit afraid?”
“I am, but I’m really trying to just think of it as an acting job.” My mother paused, absentmindedly tapping a makeup brush on her hand. “Can I ask you a question?” she said, taking advantage of this newfound honesty. “Have you ever been . . . intimate with Octopus?”
La Bardot laughed. “Why? You want to know what he’s like?”
“No,” said my mother, a bit taken aback. She glanced my way. Then she added, “I just feel like he’s been studying me, figuring out who I am, and that can go both ways, you know?”
“Octopus likes to say that in order to belong to everyone in the group, he can’t belong to any one person, so no, he keeps his hands off the women.”
“Interesting,” said my mother, nodding.
“You’ll have to be very careful today.” La Bardot took another drag, straightening up abruptly. “Are you almost ready?”
My mother walked toward me and kneeled on the wood floor. She put her arms around my head and I could smell her sweet perfume. I wanted her to hold me and let me spend the rest of the day nestled in her warmth.
“Don’t go,” I said. I reached for her, and wrapped my arms around her waist.
“I have to go,” she replied.
I was mad that she would disobey me. She tried to pry herself away, looking at me as though my warnings of danger were a mere irritation, but she didn’t listen to me, as though Fate wasn’t a thing to avert, but rather a thing to hurry along.
La Bardot, watching us, moved toward the door, foolishly believing that she had the power to commandeer my mother. She said, “We don’t usually work with people who have kids. One of Octopus’s rules that he is breaking for you.” To me, she added, “Don’t worry, sweetie, your mother will be safe.”
I didn’t believe her. “Stay with me, please!” She’d been spared disaster once, but she wouldn’t be spared twice.
My mother pulled my arms away from her, being careful not to hurt me. I began to sob and hiccup. I stretched her shirt to the point that I almost tore it. When she got me off her waist, I reached for her legs, and when she got me off her legs, I reached for her ankles.
I cried loudly, helplessly. I kept repeating, “No, no,” as my mother got farther away from me. Though her progress was slow, she was getting closer and closer to the door.
At one point Janete must’ve heard me through the wall. She came into our apartment, took one look at La Bardot and my mother trying to escape, and instead of preventing them from doing so, immediately and absurdly began to abet them. Grown-ups colluded, their minds poisoned by the same fallacies.
La Bardot didn’t seem to mind Janete’s imposing presence. Janete grabbed me from behind and held my arms back, so that I lost my hold over my mother and was left with just the air to punch. I frantically tried to free myself from her, but Janete used her weight against me. My crying became as loud as screams, interrupted only by my throat gulping for air.
I was in such a state I could no longer form thoughts or sentences, and just kept crying out, “Mom! Mom!”
I no longer had any physical pull over my mother, but still she remained on the same spot. Maybe she hoped that I would stop crying. Or maybe my cries had punctured some of her conviction. I could see the hesitation on her face, and La Bardot could see it, too, because she reached for my mother’s elbow, prompting her. But still she lingered—a child’s cry belongs to her mother and her mother alone.
“Go,” said Janete, who didn’t understand how anything worked. “I’ve got her.”
I could barely see my mother through the blur of tears. But I could make out her image following La Bardot out. Even after she closed the door and left my sight, I kept crying and screaming for her. As she walked down the stairs, as she reached the main door, as she exchanged the claustrophobia of our apartment with the openness of the sidewalk, she could still hear me crying and fighting for her until I had not an ounce of energy left in my body.
/> chapter six
OF ALL THE THINGS MY mother taught me over the years, and there were many nuggets of wisdom that she dispensed, one was to think of older women as potential mothers. Second mothers. Proxy mothers. Mothers for a moment, for a minute. This meant I had to respect and love my teachers. If I got lost, and needed bus fare to get home, I shouldn’t hesitate to present my lost self to an older woman. If I went out alone to buy milk, I was to stay close to a woman with children. Because even when a mother is not your mother, she is a mother, and therefore can be trusted.
This didn’t apply to men. But even still: When I saw the postman, I hugged him for no reason other than he was old enough to be a dad. Same with the pharmacist, who patted me on the head and gave me free packets of Pop Rocks popping candy. I suppose their uniforms made them seem paternal. Men were bad and mean and nasty, my mother said, which is why I was surprised when she still smiled at them in conversation and didn’t hiss at their backs. They wouldn’t necessarily think of a girl like me as a daughter, she said, but as a toy, and they’d break me so badly, I’d never be able to be put back together again. I pictured one of my legs where my arm should be, or my feet facing backward, forever doomed to walk away from what I really wanted.
Which brought me to Janete, who was both masculine and feminine. When she was dressed like a man, like she was now, she was gentle and sweet and quiet. When she was dressed as a woman, she was loud and silly and energetic. For a while, she’d kept her arms of steel around me, making herself into a cage that held me until I could fight no more. I lay with my head against her chest, wetting her shirt with my tears and drool. She never pushed me away, and kept patting the back of my head with her soft hand. I could always tell who loved me and who didn’t.
Though my body was drained, the urgency never left. In fact, with each minute that passed, it only increased.
“We have to help my mom. We’re the only ones who can,” I said, my voice tremulous, my mouth trying to remember what it was like to make words instead of sobs.
Janete squinted her eyes, serious. “Your mother will be back any minute now.”
Shaking my head, I said, “She should’ve been home by now. It’s been hours.”
Janete reached for me and moved a strand of hair out of my wet face.
“La Bardot said something about the Barra neighborhood,” I considered.
“La Bardot? What a pretentious name,” scoffed Janete. “I’m a dead ringer for Donna Summer, but I don’t go around calling myself that.”
“Can we go to the 13-DP?”
“The police station? Why would your mother go to that awful place?” asked Janete. With our bodies no longer entangled, I could feel a shift in the room. Janete was no longer a jailer but rather my accomplice.
“That’s where La Bardot took her. Her new friends are not good people. They’re using her. She’s going to get hurt.”
“You don’t know that, Mara.”
“Please, please? Can we go? See if she’s there?”
I could see her thawing. She cared about my mother and wouldn’t forgive herself if she failed to rescue her. I could tell she would help me, and without waiting another second, I flew out of the room, fast, fast, like a kite released to a breeze. “Mara!” Janete called out after me, and I turned back briefly to see her hand on her hip, a look of resigned frustration on her face. She was pretending she was against it, but I could tell her goal wasn’t to stop me, but to slow me down. Because though my feet were tiny, maybe half the size of hers, they donned magic sandals that made me glide through concrete. I didn’t look back again, just assumed Janete was behind me, as I ran, ran, ran toward my mother.
I had to save her. Who else would?
We ran most of the way, Janete trying to catch me, until we both tired and walked the remaining distance hand in hand. I imagined all sorts of scenarios over the twenty blocks we ran, with flashing lights and guns drawn. Instead, arriving across the street from the police station, we saw La Bardot pacing nervously back and forth. The man who was with her sat on a stoop, his hands squeezing his temples. I didn’t think I’d seen him before. His shirt had a giant collar and was unbuttoned enough to reveal half his chest. He had a red scarf around his neck. He kept his eyes lowered, so no one could see his face. As I approached, I could see La Bardot was wearing oversized aviator sunglasses and a yellow rubber belt with a giant round metal buckle. Her blond wig looked uneven, too clearly fake. If I could tell La Bardot was a fraud, wouldn’t the Police Chief see through the entire plan?
“What’re you doing here? You have to go home immediately,” La Bardot hissed, swatting the air in front of me as though it would push me back the way we’d came. I noticed a trail of cigarette butts at her feet.
“Have you seen my mother?” I asked, without preamble.
La Bardot pointed to the police station. “She’s still in there,” she said tersely.
I looked over in that direction. A bus had stopped nearby, and a group of passengers came out of it and dispersed.
“She hasn’t come out?” I asked.
La Bardot shook her head. She glanced at Janete, who stood behind me with her hands on my shoulders. To Janete, she said, “Take her back to her apartment. Now.”
But I wasn’t going to leave. “No. I want my mom.”
La Bardot looked at me with a hint of fear on her face, as though she’d never been on the receiving end of a child’s anger, and didn’t know how upsetting it could be.
“She’s fine,” said La Bardot, tightening her shoulders. She turned to her accomplice, lowering her voice. “I don’t know what’s taking her so long. She was supposed to just leave if she wasn’t able to convince him, and we’d regroup and come up with a new plan.” She turned to the station. “They must be keeping her waiting or she’s trying harder than she should, I don’t know.”
Janete sighed, and held me closer to her. She looked more worried than ever. But there was nothing we could do except wait.
Half an hour later, when it felt like the four of us could no longer contain ourselves, I saw Chief Lima finally emerge from the station, followed by my mother. This was momentous. Mom looked grim-faced, nothing less than devastated, her head down, her shoulders curved inward.
I immediately called out, “Mom!” but there were four lanes of traffic between us, my voice the buzz of an insect flying by. I watched as Lima opened the door of a police sedan and my mother got inside obediently. He got in after her, and another police officer got in from the other side, so that my mother was flanked by them in the back passenger seats. I couldn’t see her very well, only the side of her face, the back of her head, and neither told me much. I wanted to see the expression in her eyes.
They drove, flickering away as fast as a mirage. I hoped they were on their way to Barra, that the plan had worked. But I felt no relief, and wouldn’t until my mother came back, until I felt the soft creases of her palm in mine. But this was what she wanted, wasn’t it? My mother who knew what she was doing. I just prayed that Lima wouldn’t do anything rash once they arrived at their destination and he saw there were no rebels to catch. I thought about how large a man he was, and cringed at the idea of his explosive temper.
La Bardot watched their departure with as much nervousness and anticipation as myself. Without saying a word, she strode to the nearby pay phone.
She dialed. I didn’t hear her say “Hello,” only the words: “He’s gone. It’s all clear.”
She strode back to us with an unconvincing grin and I felt Janete’s grip on my shoulder tighten.
Moments later, a van turned the corner and noisily, its tires screeching, double-parked a couple of yards to the left of the police station. It was the van from the country safe house, but they had finished painting it, and it actually did look like a real police van, down to the smallest specifications, even “13th Precinct” stenciled on the side. Pacifier came out of the driver’s side, wearing a brown, double-pocketed police uniform. I recognized his gait,
the blunt way he slammed the door shut. Octopus came out on the other side. He had shaved his beard and cut off his hair, and looked almost unrecognizable in the police cap, uniform, and boots. Pacifier opened the back of the van and two more familiar men came out. They left the back doors open and, after exchanging a final set of looks, charged confidently into the station, Octopus leading them inside.
Then, something really strange happened. Lima’s sedan reappeared.
He should’ve been heading toward the highway. But it looked like he had just circled the block. The police sedan double-parked a few meters behind the fake police van. I glanced at Janete, confused, but then saw La Bardot—ashen, her chin dropping.
“Foda,” she muttered again and again.
No one came out of the police sedan. I could make out Lima’s head through the window. My mother was blocked by the driver’s body, and I wanted to call out for her again, but I knew she couldn’t hear me.
Suddenly, traffic broke and La Bardot charged toward the station. Her legs cut like scissors through paper, and the soles of her shoes slapped the asphalt with impunity. I watched her go, then turned my attention to Lima and my mother still in the car, both not making a move. What were they doing there? Why were they back so soon?
La Bardot disappeared into the station. My heart raced, Janete pulling me closer. La Bardot’s partner discreetly began to walk toward the van. I kept waiting for the police sedan to drive away, go where it was supposed to go, but it remained parked, with no one getting in and no one getting out.
Then, in a matter of seconds, I saw Octopus and his men emerge from the station, not in the confident manner they’d gone in, but rather, scattered, a hurriedness in their gait.
Bullets began to rain down on them.
Lima’s massive arm stuck out of his passenger window, holding a gun. The same was true on the driver’s side, as Lima’s men fired shot after shot, far louder noises than I’d thought possible, hitting metal, concrete, flesh, and bone. I moved behind Janete, clutching her leg.
