Wanted

by Heidi Ayarbe

  “We’ve gotta go. Call for help. Like now.” I take out my phone.

  “Not from that. They’ll trace you. A pay phone.”

  We run through the house holding our shoes in our hands, slipping back through the laundry window, out onto the street. Rain pelts my skin as if it were trying to burrow into me, keeping me in a state of forever cold. We splash through puddles, bare feet striking the gravel outside. A thick piece of broken glass cuts into the sole of my foot.

  We drive to the Old Washoe Station to call 911. Rain drizzles down in a misty sheet now, the thick drops replaced by thousands of tiny spatters, like walking through a cloud.

  “Please, please. Please get to her as soon as you can. She’s bleeding. A lot.” I think I’m screaming. I lean my head against the thick glass of the booth.

  “Can you repeat that, ma’am?”

  “She’s hurt. Really bad, okay?” I give her the address again.

  “May I ask who’s calling?” the operator asks.

  “Babylonia,” I whisper, and hang up the phone, tears spilling down my cheeks.

  Josh buys towels at Walmart. We huddle, shivering in his car, the heat cranked up to ten thousand degrees Fahrenheit. He wraps my foot in gauze. “What have we done?” he asks. “What have we done?”

  How do you fix the unfixable?

  Chapter 43

  JOSH LEAVES ME AT HOME

  just before midnight. Lillian has fallen asleep on the recliner. I put the afghan on her and watch her sleep for a while. Her head leans to the side, jaw slack.

  She actually waited up for me.

  Then I limp to my room and spend the night praying for a call, a text, a smoke signal, carrier pigeon, Morse code tap on the window—anything from Josh.

  Sunday passes.

  No call.

  We lose.

  We lose. I watch the game on mute, not able to handle the squeaky basketball shoes, whistles, and pound of the ball. U-Dub wins. By three points. Total: 179.

  We lose the over-under and the spread. We lose.

  Vaporized hope.

  Five thousand dollars.

  Gone.

  And Josh hasn’t called. Leonard has. Three times.

  Monday is Senior Ditch Day. So I get up to go to school. I don’t know where else to go. I’m not the only lame senior here. Seth is here along with a handful of others. Mrs. Brooks brings us doughnuts, coffee, juice, and fruit.

  There are only ten of us in class. No Josh. So I kind of have to participate. Even Moch is here. “What are you doing here?” I ask.

  “Mike.” Moch smiles. “I can ditch any day.”

  Mrs. B laughs. “Yeah. And one more ditch, Mr. Mendez, and you won’t be graduating. Understood?”

  Moch nods. “Understood.”

  I feel like Mrs. B and Moch have some kind of student-teacher mentor thing going on. Maybe she’s his lifeline.

  Mine is Babylonia.

  Was.

  Mrs. B asks the class about the dance.

  “It was fun,” I say, trying to pass my nonenthusiasm off on being exhausted, not the fact that I’m probably going to prison for the rest of my life.

  “You looked really pretty,” Seth says. “You’ve been looking different lately. I guess. I dunno.”

  It’s called the Home Invasion Diet. Steal from people and watch the pounds slip away.

  “Thanks,” I say, feeling my cheeks get hot. “So did Jeanne. She’s nice.”

  “Yeah. When she gets away from the dragon lair for more than an hour at a time. I kept expecting her to turn into a pumpkin.”

  We all laugh.

  We talk about the dance as if it were important—some kind of indispensable rite of passage watching the most popular kids in our class wear shiny, plastic crowns.

  I almost killed a woman on Saturday, so this conversation feels pretty empty.

  “Read the news?” Mrs. Brooks hands us the Nevada Appeal front page story.

  Babylonia Leaves Local Philanthropist in Coma

  “Maybe she’s like the others,” Javier says. “What do they say? Twenty-first-century slave owners?”

  “Maybe,” Mrs. B says. “But who will know if she dies? She’ll never get a chance to tell her side. You want to risk someone’s life for a maybe.”

  Mrs. B’s words are like razors, slicing across my abdomen, my chest; every part of my body stings with the truth.

  We could be wrong. A sick feeling floods me. A bad feeling. We were wrong. I think we were wrong.

  Moch passes the paper back. Mrs. B has brought in a few for all of us to look at. I stare at the headline, skimming the article. The words blur, then come into sharp focus again. Maybe, maybe if I can change the words, it won’t have happened.

  Maybe.

  “PB & J didn’t get that scoop.” Seth shows the front page with Tarzan and Jane caricatures, the headline:

  Hawaii According to CHS

  The class laughs.

  Mrs. B says that Police Chief Dominguez got the name of every kid at the dance, probably to narrow down the suspect pool.

  “Great,” Moch says. “I’m officially a suspect because I choose to abstain from school gatherings where people dress up like retired old people in Florida. Mierda.”

  “Language, Mocho.”

  “Sorry.”

  “I’m with you then, Mocho,” Catalina says. “I wasn’t there, either. Should we just turn ourselves in now?”

  Moch smiles at Catalina. “Nah. Let’s let them sweat it out for a bit. Make them work to find us.”

  “Deal.”

  The class talks, eats, does what normal classes do. Mrs. B tells about the time she was in the Peace Corps. She talks about teaching English all over the world until she settled back into Carson City.

  I stare at the headline. The hollowed-out-pit feeling in my stomach fills with fire.

  Was the dance just an alibi? Maybe I’m just an alibi. For Josh. Nothing more.

  At lunch, Josh is waiting for me in the hallway outside of the library. “Roast beef.” He holds a Schat’s Bakery bag up. “Coke. Homemade pecan cinnamon roll.”

  I swallow down the huge knot that’s worked its way from my stomach up my esophagus, filling my mouth with anger and sadness and confusion and disappointment, wondering if every horrible human feeling known to man has to be experienced in some twisted rite of passage and all at the same time. I’m an emotional time bomb.

  The welt on Josh’s head has gone down and is now a bluish-green color. “Please,” Josh says. “I could use some company.”

  I sit next to him. His eyes are red, dark circles underneath. The smell of the food makes me feel nauseous, so I just sip on the Coke. We can give the food to some poor kid who’s been exposed to the cafeteria food all year.

  “I stayed at the hospital all night and yesterday,” Josh says.

  I nod.

  “Just outside. It’s not like I could do anything, go inside or anything. But I just needed to be there.”

  “You didn’t mean—” I start to say. “It was an accident.”

  “She could die, Mike. And I’d be the one who killed her.”

  “She’s not gonna die.”

  “So when she wakes up—”

  “We’ll figure it out when she wakes up. Okay? She’s. Not. Going. To. Die.” This has to be a fact now. No odds or probabilities or looking back. She. Will. Live.

  We have placed our bets.

  “I need the money,” I say.

  Josh peers over the rim of his Coke can. “I left it in an envelope, in their mailbox. I didn’t know what else to do. I just don’t know how to make things right.”

  Open heart, insert knife. A white-hot feeling of pain seizes me.

  “But you can’t just do that. You have to tell me about that kind of stuff. Call me. Text me. Send me an email. It’s as simple as saying, ‘Hey, Mike, by the way, I’m giving five thousand two hundred and twenty-three dollars away.’” It feels like somebody’s wrapped his fingers around my trachea,
closing in on it tight.

  “Would you lower your voice?” Josh says. “Plus what else were we going to do with it?” Josh asks.

  “We lost,” I say, lowering my voice. “We lost the bets.”

  “How much?”

  “Five thousand.”

  “Five thousand? What the—are you out of your mind?” Josh paces back and forth.

  “Out of my mind? Out of my mind? I’m not the one throwing money at a family to get over my Daddy Warbucks guilt. Guess what? Mrs. Mendez will never come back. And your family—”

  “My family what?” Josh’s scar is white-hot. His eyes narrow. “What?”

  Every word that comes to mind is poison. I clench my jaw.

  Josh seethes, speaking in a forced whisper. “You just do it so you can be seen.” He holds his hands up, doing obnoxious quotation marks when he says seen. “You work so hard to make sure everybody knows you’re above everybody else, but at the end of the day, you just want to fit in. Guess what, Mike.” Hearing Mike rattles me. “You can’t buy yourself friends or respect. Your three-hundred-dollar boots don’t make a difference to anybody out there. Anybody.”

  The ugly words bounce off the walls, hitting me over and over again. It feels like I’ve been punched so hard I can’t breathe.

  I pull my knees to my chest and cradle my head against them. I take off my glasses and press on my lids, seeing the crackle of light behind them.

  “Okay, Trust Fund. I don’t suppose you have five grand lying around?” I’m really hoping Josh is doing this for the game of it and actually can access thousands of dollars from some secret bank account set aside for his yacht when he turns eighteen.

  He glares at me and shakes his head.

  “I’ll take care of it.” I stand up, throwing my backpack over my shoulder, trying to keep the nettles out of my heart. Josh watches me in silence. I feel like I’ve been pricked by a pin and deflated, become a two-dimensional paper doll, creased and folded, ready to be thrown in the trash.

  The bell rings.

  He doesn’t move.

  I turn my back and walk away.

  On my own. Better this way.

  Chapter 44

  LEONARD HAS LEFT FOUR

  messages. I call him. “I’ll get the money for you. By tonight. Late.” And hang up before he has a chance to go into some kind of Sopranos speech. I’ve checked my accounts. I have to pay out nearly five hundred dollars this week to my winners. Five hundred I would’ve had, had I not bet it all.

  One basket. One basket and we’d be fine. We wouldn’t be fighting. We’d be collecting almost four thousand dollars from Leonard and would shrug off the botched over-under bet. ONE SHOT. Two points. Luis’s family would have money. Moch’s family would have money. Brain Food, Planned Parenthood, the Boys and Girls Club . . .

  Five thousand five hundred dollars.

  Damn damn damn stupidstupidstupidstupid.

  Lillian’s at the clinic. Outside, it’s a regular spring afternoon. Kids are playing with a flat soccer ball that thuds when it gets kicked and wobbles just a few feet. The neighbors are cleaning out their yards, getting ready for spring planting. Five thousand five hundred dollars.

  I stand outside Lillian’s bedroom, leaning my head against the door. Maybe she’s got something. I’ll pay her back.

  “I’m so sorry,” I say, walking in the bedroom. I start with the dresser drawers, making my way through her room like I would a house on our list. I look under the mattress, behind the headboard, in the not-so-secret panel in the back. I run my fingers along the base of her bed frame. I look behind the mirror on her dresser and run my hand along the base of the dresser, too. Nothing.

  Her closet is impeccable. Three pairs of shoes from Payless—brown, black, and blue—all in a row. Practical. Inexpensive. I think about my shoe collection, Josh’s words, and cringe. Focus. In the back of her closet, there’s a shoe box, tucked behind some ancient Christmas ornaments. I pull it down and open it up. I flip through her Mexican passport, staring at the picture of the girl in the black-and-white photo. She looks so young. She looks like me. There are some letters—in Spanish—Mom’s birth certificate, a medallion of a saint. I hold it up and look close, squinting to see which saint. Saint Jude. I’ll have to look it up, so I pocket it. I can use all the help I can get.

  I’m about to put the shoe box back up when I notice there’s a funny bump on the lid. I pull away at the loose cardboard and find a savings account book. I do a double take. It has my name on it. I flip through the book. Every month, since I was born, she’s deposited between twenty-five and fifty dollars. I now have nearly eight thousand dollars. Money Lillian’s saved for me for college. Money she’s not spent on herself to buy shoes.

  A knot of sorrow fills my throat. I placed my bets without having all the information. “I will pay you back,” I whisper. I hold the savings book in my hands—its pages worn and fuzzy at the sides. Seventeen years of saving for me, my future. “I’m so sorry,” I say.

  My phone beeps again. Leonard. I listen to the message. “Tonight, Mike. Or things are gonna get ugly.”

  I’m the last to slip through the door before the bank locks up. When I withdraw the money, the teller doesn’t even blink. She just says, “Do you want to close the account?”

  “No. Can I leave ten dollars in it? For now?”

  “Sure. Buying a car?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “A car.”

  She smiles and hands me the money. “Drive safe.”

  I drive up to Reno, tapping the money, Lillian’s money, against my thigh. I rub Saint Jude between my thumb and forefinger, wondering where I’ll get the money to pay Lillian back, thinking about the games this week. I just have to bet smarter.

  Two points. One shot. One. Stinking. Shot.

  After I leave Leonard’s place, I stand outside. A nearby parking lot is filled with men hanging out, looking for a day’s work. I look at my watch. Way too late. And I don’t have anything to give them.

  Lying. Hiding. Falling. Nowhere to land.

  3D living overrated. Too late now.

  Chapter 45

  AT SCHOOL, IT’S LIKE JOSH

  and I don’t know each other—don’t even live on the same planet. How can he not wonder about Leonard? How can he not be worried that I’m in deep shit and he’s just sitting pretty, going to tuxedo fittings after school for another tea or whatever?

  After school, I end up at Moch’s house.

  Moch is standing outside on a crooked ladder, fixing the screen. He’s wearing jeans and a T-shirt. His hair isn’t slicked back; he’s not wearing sunglasses. He almost looks normal—like a regular high school senior stuck fixing his parents’ window on a Thursday afternoon.

  I can’t sit still. I can’t think.

  Mr. Mendez gives me a giant hug and hands me two Cokes; I pass one up to Moch. He wipes his head with his forearm, cracks open the can of Coke, and takes deep gulps, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down. “Pa takes the bus up to Reno in the mornings. Right now it’s like every business, contractor, and industry in Nevada has gone licit.”

  “Licit. Good word.”

  “Not always,” Moch says.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “What for?”

  Everything.

  That should be my six-word memoir: I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.

  He climbs down the ladder and sits on the bottom rung, finishing off the last of his Coke. “It’s hot. Too hot for March. Gonna be a dry summer. Lots of fires, I’m guessing.”

  I shrug and shiver. I don’t feel the warmth, just a piece of ice. I sit next to him in his lawn chair, sipping on my Coke. Cold sweat prickles the back of my neck.

  “Where’ve you been?” Moch asks. “You don’t come by much.”

  “Just busy, I guess.”

  “Ellison? You two together or something?”

  “No.” It sounds so final and my voice catches.

  Moch nods. I can’t tell if he looks relieved or di
sappointed or is slipping back into monosyllabic Moch.

  “Staying for dinner?” Moch asks.

  I look at the trailer house. It’s a was home. Its past smells and tastes and sounds lost under a blanket of death and sadness. “I dunno,” I say. Moch goes into the house and comes back out with two more Cokes.

  The Coke fizzles; perspiration beads on the can. The sun lowers in the sky. The air cools. We sit together, listening to neighbors fight, TVs on full blast, the boom of somebody’s bass, the sound of a baby crying. Barefoot kids run up and down the street chasing lizards and beating them with sticks. A lizard scurries across the lawn, and Moch whispers, “You’d better hide, little dude.”

  Boredom kills. Literally.

  I inhale. The neighborhood smells deep-fried, dusty. It’s a tumbleweed haven.

  Moch takes a big drink and hiccups when he comes up for air. “I went to that doctor’s house. I had a gun.”

  It takes a second to digest what he’s said. I rub my arms. I try to read Moch’s expression in the shadows. He pauses, tapping his fingers on the can, drumming an aluminum rhythm. I listen.

  “He was alone, sitting outside reading. I saw him there alive and reading. Like he had no right to be there at all. I walked up to him, gun in my pocket. He saw me. He didn’t run or cry or anything. He asked me to sit down. I did. You know, I was so ready to kill him. He knew I was going to kill him, too. It was like he had been sitting there, reading in that stupid fucking porch swing, waiting for me to come.

  “I asked, ‘What are you reading?’ You know what he showed me?”

  I shake my head.

  “The Gambler. ¡Joder! So I couldn’t kill him because he was reading your book. How’s that? So I got up to go. He said, ‘Why didn’t you do it?’

  “I say, ‘Once more I looked around me like a conqueror—once more I feared nothing.’ Yeah. I quote from The Gambler. And he’s like, ‘You’ve read it?’ But he doesn’t say it in a surprised way like some pendejo. He says it like he wants to talk about it. ‘Yeah,’ I say, ‘it’s this book my friend always quotes from, so I picked it up.’ It’s like we’re in some kind of book club. I couldn’t believe it. I have this gun. Ready to kill him. And now I’m about ready to sit down for tea and scones and a book talk, and it hits me. The whole thing hits me and I’m just blown away because I don’t know what to hope for outside of these tattoos and all the other shit I’m caught up in. I don’t know what I’m fighting for. I don’t even know who I’m fighting.