She flops back into the seat, scrunching her nose at me. “Don’t think you’re forgiven. Just because you’re bringing me on some crazy Thelma-and-Louise adventure. I was really worried about you, Mollie. I even called the hospitals, thinking you’d had an accident. Or maybe hurt yourself. I know we said we’d never, but . . .”
I squeeze her shoulder, remembering the promise we’d made over tears and margaritas on our first Taco Tuesday. No matter how bad it gets, we stick it out. We don’t let them win. Them being Mateo, of course. Mateo and Shadow Man. Though somehow, I’d pictured Cole’s face, then my father’s, when I’d said it. “I’m sorry I let you down. That I gave you a reason not to trust me. You’re my closest friend, and I screwed up.”
“¿Grande?”
“Yes. Grande. I screwed up big.”
“So . . . am I Thelma or Louise?” she asks.
I can’t hide my grin. Because this is why I’d asked Luciana along. Why I’m grateful she’d agreed. I need her to distract me from the hysterical chatter in my head. The chatter that only quiets beneath screaming men with guitars, a pint of vodka, or Sawyer’s rough lips.
“Who do you want to be?”
Luciana shrugs. “My mom never let me see that movie. She said it would turn me into a crazy gringa. But one of them gets lucky with Brad Pitt, right? That’s me. Obviamente.”
I tap my blinker and ease toward the 505 exit, nothing but scorched earth in either direction. Tall grass, long-withered under the summer sun. Even now, in the fall twilight, it’s just waiting to catch fire. I’m not sure if it’s Boyd or Wendall or my own paranoia. But inside I feel like a struck match. “Of course. Brad’s all yours.”
“Mi amor, Bradley,” she says, exaggerating her accent and clasping her hands to her heart. “Speaking of amor, how did it go with Sawyer on Monday night? He said he’d make sure you—”
“Didn’t stalk Boyd home?”
I wish I had. It probably would’ve ended better. For me anyway. Or maybe not. Last time I’d pulled a stunt like that I’d been served with a restraining order. Mollie Roark is not permitted to contact Tyler Lowry or his parents or go within fifty feet of Napa Preparatory Academy, where Mr. Lowry is a student. No matter, because by then I’d all but ruled out Tyler anyway. Not that he wasn’t capable of murder—everybody is—but he’d always struck me as way too cocky and way too stupid to get away with it for long. The kind of Neanderthal who’d texted my daughter, come on baby i like u sooo much pls send me sexy pics so i can dream about u. The kind of guy who’d off somebody and brag about it to his minions the next day.
“No,” Luciana says, coyly. “Got home safely. Which is guy code for . . .” She bats her eyelashes at me. “. . . you know.”
“Luci, how many times can I say it? We are just friends.”
“Right. Friends who suck face.”
I sigh at the haughty little purse of her lips and for a singular moment—an awful moment—I almost chide her. I almost call her Dakota. “You sound like a fifteen-year-old girl,” I say, blinking back tears.
“Estoy en lo cierto. And you know it. I’m so right.”
“Sawyer and I may suck face, as you put it, from time to time. But we are both undeniably and irrevocably broken. Do you know what happens when two broken people get together?”
“They make passionate love that heals all their broken pieces.” With a grand sweep of her arms, her voice swells. I know she’s baiting me. But also, deep down, I think she believes it. I don’t say it out loud, but it’s that kind of sentimental BS that made her a perfect mark for a creep like Mateo in the first place.
“Someone’s been watching too many telenovelas. Two broken people are depressing as hell. All they can manage to do is break everything around them.” It’s not Sawyer I’m thinking of, though. It’s me and Cole. How we’d brought this on ourselves. How the hairline fracture between us had splintered and widened and swallowed Dakota whole. Come to think of it, I’d been something of a perfect mark myself. “I’m not sure I’ll ever put my own pieces back together, much less somebody else’s.”
“Alright then. Just friends, it is. But don’t think you can change your mind and go after Brad. He’s off limits.”
I roll my eyes at her, and a curtain of silence falls between us. Both expectant and conclusive, like the end of a Broadway show. I’m not sure whether I’m the starlet waiting to bow to the audience or the stagehand watching with good-natured envy.
Luciana flips through her phone, reading softly to herself. “¡Ay, Dios mío!” she says, her face stricken. So stagehand then. “What kind of place are you taking me to?”
“What do you mean?” I ask. “We’re going to Allendale. I told you.”
The Jeep rumbles through the final turn and onto the gravel road as she shows me the screen. The Wikipedia page for the great metropolis of Allendale. “You didn’t tell me it was in a story about the end of the world. May the goddess protect us.”
“Luci, you can’t be serious.”
But she is apparently, handpicking the worst phrases, her panic gathering strength. “A story by Ray Bradbury. Post-apocalyptic. Incinerated by a nuclear weapon . . .”
All I can hear is my father’s voice at the side of my bunk, rumbling like distant thunder, as he’d read the story to me from a yellowed issue of The Martian Chronicles by the light of a lantern casting disfigured shapes on the wall. I’d felt a secret thrill, a little zip of horror, when he’d recited, “Today is August 4, 2026 . . . in the city of Allendale, California.”
Luciana draws a deep breath as she makes the sign of the cross. “The family incinerated . . . and the dog is the only living creature!”
I don’t tell her I’d been to cursed Allendale just last week. I don’t mention the squirrels hung like war flags on my father’s fence posts or the gaping punji pit where I’d nearly been speared. I sure as hell don’t tell her Bradbury’s bit about the dog was what I’d liked best, because the dog had lived, at least for a while. That was when we still had Roscoe, the old basset with bad hips. My dad had found him dumped on the side of the road just beyond the junkyard. A lot of dogs turned up that way—Sambo and Rex and Waggles—and my father carted them home and let me name them and dress them up and push them around in an old baby stroller. Until Roscoe. He’d been the last.
I reach for the radio dial. Something fierce and pounding to stamp the memory down, send it back into the boneyard where it belongs.
But just then, I see it. Straight from the pages of my childhood, the part at the end when the story turns dark. When Hansel and Gretel roast in the witch’s oven, and Red Riding Hood discovers a wolf in grandma’s bed.
I point up ahead. “That’s it. Whitetails and Whoppers. The place from the jumping card.”
Luciana screams.
I brake hard, the back wheels of the Jeep sliding like a snake across the gravel. In the headlights’ glow, a winged creature swoops into the ditch and out again, ensnaring something small and furry in its talons.
Luciana’s got my arm in the same sort of death grip. “It’s just an owl,” I say, surprised at my own voice. How shaky it sounds. Like those cracks in the ice are deeper than I thought and spreading. “It’s caught something.”
Probably a ground squirrel by the size of it. Dad didn’t like them either, the way they’d popped in and out of their burrows before he could get a clean shot. Assholes in foxholes, he’d mutter under his breath as he plugged their dens with concrete.
“El búho. An owl,” she repeats, releasing me. “Are you serious?”
I nod, feeling uneasy as I listen to the sound of her breathing. She buries her head in her hands.
“Are you okay, Luci?”
“Don’t you know anything about mysticism? Symbols in nature? Chica, you really are clueless. You’re such a doctor. All science, science, science.”
She makes it sound
like a bad thing. And look like it too, the way she shakes her head at me.
“My abuela, Cinta, saw an owl the day before she was set to travel to Mexico City. Do you know what happened there the next day? El terremoto. The big one. The whole city was destroyed. But she was safe at home. She always told me, ‘Luci, los búhos pueden ver en la oscuridad.’ Owls can see in the dark. They see things coming, and if we’re blessed, they warn us. She always thought that owl was my grandfather’s spirit sent to protect her.”
Saying nothing, I park the car and shut the engine. My pulse pounds with a rhythm so frenetic I wonder if Luciana can hear it, can see it throbbing in my neck. I crack the door and peer into the trees that line the storefront, searching for the owl. I need to see it. I don’t know why.
“There,” Luciana says, softly. “In the tree.”
Dangling down from a slim branch and firmly in the owl’s clutches, the legs of the ground squirrel scrabble for life. In the twilight, two gleaming eyes meet mine. The owl’s head swivels once to its right. Then, it opens its wings, like an archangel, and takes to the sky.
****
Luciana trails behind me as we approach the storefront. At every soft snap of a twig in the underbrush, I hear her suck in a breath. I can’t stop thinking about that helpless ground squirrel, doomed but thrashing against its fate. I feel that way sometimes. Like the universe has me by the scruff.
A set of rickety stairs deposits us at the entrance, just beneath the sign. It’s the way I remember but different too. Distorted like Mol’s had been by the dull lens of adulthood. Smaller and shabbier and less alive. Up close, the store’s cheerful green paint peels back from the boards, revealing a second skin, a darker green below. The color of camouflage. A homemade sign taped in the front window proclaims half-off ammo and deer bait now that the season is over. The severed head of a buck, who didn’t get so lucky, welcomes us with a glassy stare from just beyond the screen door. How could I have ever belonged here? In this world. Where killing is sport.
Dad had told me: Steady. Steady now. Look ’em in the eyes before you pull that trigger. But I’d squeezed mine shut instead, sending my first shot into the belly of a sycamore and the six-pointer in my rifle’s sights bounding into the thicket, vanished before I’d opened them.
I push the door open, hear the familiar jingle—the set of ancient brass bells—and I’m gone thirty-something years into the past. When that sound had moved me, as enchanted as a dream, and I’d tapped them with my finger until my father snatched my hand away and buried it in his.
“Wow,” Luciana whispers. “Miedo.” And I’m not sure whether she’s referring to the creepy Hall of Horns—the long, dark corridor at the back of the store lined ceiling to floor with antlers of all sizes—or the bear of a man at the counter, his beard thick and wiry as a Brillo Pad.
“Hello?” If my voice sprouted legs, it would be on tiptoe, light-footed and ready to run.
Grizzly Man glances up at me from his tattered copy of Outdoor Life and grunts. Since I don’t speak bear, I wave meekly in return. The store is cold and empty, not the bustling landmark I remember. The place where men like my father gathered to tell their tall tales to their own kind.
Luciana runs a hand along the shelf nearest the counter where the brightly colored fishing lures hang like ornaments on a Christmas tree. She selects an unnaturally green minnow and turns to me, holding the hook to her ear. “I thought it was an earring,” she says.
Grizzly Man clears his throat. Which is probably bear speak for step away from the merchandise. My heart somersaults in my chest when he speaks.
“What can I do ya for, ladies? Ya don’t look like the huntin’-and-fishin’ type.”
“I’ve got a pair of horns hanging on that wall, believe it or not.”
“Do ya now?” He nods at me, but his eyes seem unconvinced. “Ya here for the sale then? We got the decoys and deer calls on clearance.”
Luciana snorts, disguising her derision with a loud cough. When I give her a look, she slinks away down the clothing aisle, taking up a position between the camo jackets and fishing vests.
“We’re not here for the sale. I was hoping you could take a peek at a picture for me.”
Grizzly sits up, rolling the magazine tightly between his paws, and swipes the air. “Goddamn. Are you a cop? I don’t want no trouble. I just got off parole.”
Keeping my face therapist neutral, I slide Dakota’s yearbook photo across the counter. She’d been frantic that morning when she’d discovered the tiniest of pimples on her chin. You can’t even see it, I’d told her as she caked on my concealer in the mirror.
Are you kidding, Mom? School pictures, remember? This zit is going to be immortal. When I’m forty it’ll still be there, staring back at me, reminding me how freakin’ ugly I was. Do you think they can photoshop it out?
Her yearbook picture. But that’s not the way I think of it. Not anymore. It’s the photo I gave the detectives the day she never came home. The photo they showed on the news every night for over a month. The one plastered on that godforsaken billboard and shared online. Propped on an easel in front of her coffin. It’s ruined forever, a manifestation of my pain. And now it’s the photo I tap with my finger, drawing Grizzly’s eyes.
“I’m not a cop. This is my daughter, Dakota. Do you recognize her?”
He studies the picture more carefully than I’d expected. My body tenses in the silence under the weight of what he might say. What he might know. “This is that girl that got—that got kidnapped a few years back, right?”
I nod, though it still seems surreal. My girl. Kidnapped. And murdered. The word he didn’t say. A fresh surge of devastation crashes against my chest—a bone-crushing tidal wave—and it’s unbearable. “She had a business card for this place. I only just found it. I was thinking she might’ve come in here.”
Luciana appears next to me, holding a camo T-shirt across her chest.
“Isn’t this cute?” she asks.
Grizzly perks up, like he’s been kicked in the flank. The slight upturn of his ursine mouth disgusts me. He licks his lips, barely visible beneath his brown scruff.
“It’s on sale too,” he says. “You can try it on if you like.”
Luciana seems not to hear him. She nudges me. “Did you tell him about her hair? That it was pink? Not like the picture.”
“Pink hair,” Grizzly repeats, and I nod again as he tears his gaze away from Luciana’s breasts and back to the photograph.
“She’d dyed it,” I explain. And that too comes with a surge. Of regret this time, bitter and twisting and relentless. I hate myself. “The color of bubblegum.”
He shakes his head and pushes the photo back to me. I leave it there, not wanting to claim it. The last yearbook photo. Dakota had been right. That picture was a vampire, immortal and life-sucking. “Never seen her. Sorry.”
“Are you sure?” Luciana asks. “Mira. Look again.”
Grizzly smirks. “Español, eh? Just like my old lady, Fernanda. Ex-old lady. She was a spicy little Latina too. Always runnin’ her mouth. Anyway, I’m sure I ain’t seen this girl. I only been workin’ here ’bout a year. Before that, that puta, Fernanda, got me a two-year stint down at Folsom Prison.”
Luciana’s a warrior like me. Her war paint, a lukewarm, lipstick smile—tight and polite and placid. But behind her eyes, I see it. I’m no stranger to fear. Terror either. That icicle dagger that falls in a blink from nowhere, piercing all the soft parts it finds and turning them cold.
“It’s okay,” I tell him. “Maybe I can leave this here. You can ask around.”
The photo sits, untouched, as he frowns at it. Like he’s thinking bear thoughts. Instinctual and predatory. I feel it too. The sting of ice at my neck. But it means nothing to me now. I shrug it off, shoo it away. Since I lost Dakota, fear is as inconsequential as a fly.
“You
with that other guy?” he asks.
“What other guy?”
“Tall, skinny fella. Had the same picture. Came in here a while back askin’ the same kind of questions.”
“Did he leave a name?” I try to sound the opposite of how I feel. Desperate. Maniacal. Ready to throttle him if necessary. He has no fucking idea who I am. What I’m capable of. I’m not sure I know.
“Nah. He was real jittery. I knew he wasn’t no cop. Wouldn’t have the stomach for it. But I do remember somethin’ about him.”
“Well?”
Grizzly leans back, hands on his ample stomach. “What’s it worth to ya?”
“Ladrón,” Luciana mutters, tossing the camo T-shirt at him. “Taking advantage of a mother who’s lost her child. You want that on your conscience?”
“Your money’s good too, chilosa. Unless you have somethin’ else in mind.”
I stalk toward the Hall of Horns, rage and fear bubbling up in my blood. What a strange, powerful concoction. There’s no way to know if it’s still here, affixed to the wall near the horns of the whitetail buck whose life I’d ended with a perfectly placed bullet to the heart. But, if it is, I figure it belongs to me. To my family. And now seems as good a time as any to claim it.
“Do you know my father?” My own voice frightens me. The sharp edge of it, so much like my dad’s.
Grizzly’s eyes—two dull marbles—open wide in a way that satisfies something clawed and hungry inside me. “They used to call him Crazy Krandel.”
At the end of the corridor, in front of the back exit, a small portion of the wall is marked WAR MEMORABILIA.
I spot the bayonet right away. The M7 my father had carted back from Vietnam and donated to Whitetails and Whoppers at his shrink’s suggestion. Those were the days when he still listened to his doctors.
I smack the display case, popping the cheap lock, and open it, wrapping my fingers around the black plastic handle, strangling it in my grip. “I hated that nickname. Because it was the truth. He’s stark raving mad.” And I’m a chip off the old cuckoo block. But that seems obvious, with the way the words force themselves from my mouth. Plunging like paratroopers into battle, they leave bits of spittle in the corners.
Shadows Among Us Page 9
