This Little Light

by Lori Lansens

  “Mr. Javier will come soon,” Paula promised, whispering so as not to wake Fee.

  Paula and I checked the Villains in Versace app on her abuelo’s phone a few times, but nothing so far. We checked the police alert app too. A little worrying because there are, like, a hundred emergency vehicles heading out to the fire up the coast to control traffic and force evacuations. But Paula said the tracker won’t sound off unless they’re within three miles of us.

  I look at Fee. Differently. Her tummy, usually flat, is a little poochy. But then again, so is mine. I prolly noticed and thought nothing of it because Fee does drive-thru Del Taco a fair bit when she’s stressed. She failed that math test a couple of weeks ago and she was worried Mr. Tom’d be mad. A quesarito or two always helps. Jesus. Her baby can’t be bigger than a pea at this point, though. Fuck. I’m sorry. I can’t even go there. And I can’t even think about Jagger Jonze without feeling like I might spontaneously combust.

  * * *

  —

  Oh. My. God. My mother has escaped!!! En route to the Valley State Prison, Shelley Miller eluded the guards—they think someone was working on the inside to help her—and has vanished. Shelley freaking Miller.

  How is it possible that the weepy, tired, unmoored mommy I’ve lived with for three years was able to escape cuffs and shackles and evade armed guards? Holy. Shit. What a freaking warrior. I can just imagine her going ninja on the motherfuckers. It’s like when I was little, in the parking lot at ballet, and that big Escalade starting backing up and nearly hit me. Shelley was the Flash, shoving me out of harm’s way and holding up her hand to stop the car with the force of her motherly love. At least, that’s how it felt at the time.

  Aunt Lill had to have helped Shelley escape—of this I feel fairly sure. They showed footage of my mother in the cuffs and shackles as she was being led from the courthouse to the prison van. Aunt Lill was in the deep background. I spotted the pink T-shirt in the crowd as reporters circled, asking for a comment, snapping Shelley’s pic and filming her stumble into the back of the van. Before the doors were shut on her, my mother looked right down the lens of the CNN camera and said, “My daughter and her friend are innocent. Many people believe in them. Keep fighting, Ror.”

  I woke Fee to tell her about my mother escaping and sending the message to keep fighting. And that people believe in us.

  Fee perked up a little with the news. “Shelley escaped?”

  “Shelley escaped.”

  Paula misunderstands. “Your mamá is coming now?”

  “Not exactly. I don’t know, Paula. I just know she’ll figure something out. And Javier will be able to reach her. Won’t he? He’ll hear about it and he’ll be able to call her. Maybe he already has. Maybe he helped break her out?”

  “Or maybe he had nothing to do with her escape and he’s waiting out another increase in the bounty,” Fee said.

  Does pregnancy make women cynical?

  Paula turns back to the window. She’s our lookout and happy for the job, scanning the road for Javier’s truck, keeping watch on the Airstream door. She tells us there’s some air traffic headed our way.

  “You know Javier, Paula,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “I mean, he wouldn’t be keeping us here, waiting for the bounty to go up. He’s a good man, right?”

  “Yes,” Paula said. “But also, a poor man.”

  Fee stood up and joined Paula at the window. She glanced at me. “What should we do?”

  “I don’t know.” I really don’t. “If Javier’s a good guy, and I think he is, he’ll get in touch with my mother.”

  “But if he’s a human thinking about how two million dollars could change his life, then he might be on his way here right now with a van and some armed friends. Or he could just call the hotline and keep his hands clean,” Fee said.

  I didn’t respond. I don’t wanna think about that.

  “We can go to my abuelo’s trailer?” Paula said. “I can give to him more pills?”

  Fee and I said together, “Nooo.”

  So many fucking betrayals already. “I don’t know who to trust. My father? Our friends? Chase Mason? I just don’t think I wanna live if Javier fucks us over too.”

  “Who is Chase Mason?” Paula asked.

  “No one,” I said. “But when this is all over, I’m gonna write a blog calling him out.”

  Fee goes, “For what?”

  I didn’t know, until I said, “For breaking my heart.”

  Fee looked at me funny. “You’re not his girlfriend.”

  “What?”

  “I’m just saying Chase Mason isn’t your bf, so I don’t get why you feel so hurt, plus he didn’t really say anything that bad?”

  Cold. That’s cold. I got a lump in my throat. Fee might as well have smacked me.

  Paula looked sad for me. “You want Chase Mason to be your boyfriend?”

  I cleared my throat. “He’s been my crush for a really long time.”

  “No more?”

  “No more.”

  “He have another girl?”

  “He has lots of other girls.” I pictured Chase Mason at the library. “He did this interview with the press, Paula, and he totally lied about stuff that happened at the library and basically said I did things that he did.”

  “What things he did?”

  “He always had girls coming to the library to see him, and he took them into the media room to hook up, but he said I was the one who took girls in the media room, which never happened. He made it look like I was using the library as a place to meet girls who wanted to have abortions. To, like, pass them notes and deal birth control and morning-after pills and whatever.”

  It hit me like a brick.

  “It’s Chase. Oh my God, Fee. It’s Chase.”

  “What?”

  “Chase. Chase Mason. He’s the one. It’s him.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying Chase Mason is not a traitor. He’s a fucking…I don’t know what to call him…an operative? A sympathizer. He’s on our side.”

  “You’re not making sense.”

  “All those girls I told you about always coming into the library? The card he gave me—telling me I should get in touch with him if I ever got in trouble? He changed his band name to Larkspur. He changed the name of his band overnight and announced it to the media because he’s been trying to send a message to me. And Aunt Lill? The shirt she was wearing with the Bible verse? They’re working together to help us.”

  “What?”

  I knew I was on to something and did a quick Google search.

  “Oh my fucking God, Fee. Paula. You guys. 14:34 on the Bible verse shirt Aunt Lill’s been wearing? It’s an address. On Larkspur Road. Larkspur. That’s why he changed the band name. The message. 1434 Larkspur is owned by Blake Mason—Chase’s uncle. It’s a fucking address in Malibu, a few miles away. We need to go there. Oh. My. God.”

  Fee comes to look at the screen.

  Paula turned away from the window, clapping and squealing. “He’s coming now. To take us to the Larkspur! It’s Mr. Javier truck. He is coming. He is coming now!”

  Oh FUCK. The VIV tracker is blowing up Paula’s abuelo’s phone and the police alert just went off.

  Fee screamed. “Police cars are coming! Police! It’s the police!”

  It’s over.

  We’re dead.

  Um. It’s not over.

  We’re not dead.

  The news is reporting that four people are, though. Four people who, if not for us, would be alive right now, watching politics on cable news. I feel totally sick about that.

  We three, well, four are safe at Chase’s uncle’s beach house on Larkspur Road. We’ve been here for nearly an hour.

  Where did I leave off?

  I think I wrote about how the sun had set, and Javier’s truck speeding up to the cabin with Paula yelling about the cop cars and the apps going off? When we looked out the little window and there w
ere six police vehicles rounding the bend on the dirt road right behind Javier’s truck. That’s when Paula ripped the pink laptop out of my hands and stuffed it in the backpack along with her Hannah Good doll and said, “Come. Now.”

  Fee seized up like a broken machine. Paralyzed by fear. You don’t think that can happen, but I witnessed it. She froze at the window, and wouldn’t, couldn’t, take a step. She didn’t scream. Or cry. She just stood there, rooted to the shed floor. I had to drag her. Paula tried to help.

  We finally busted out of the shed, and that’s when we heard a voice from the sky over what sounded like an old-school megaphone. “Stop. Right. There.”

  We look up, and thirty feet overhead there’s a guy in one of those GarBirds, with duct tape in a couple of spots and a big hand-painted American flag decal on the length of the tail. The guy flying the Bird was huge, with a big furry beard. He had one hand on the controls and was aiming an assault rifle at us with the other, screaming into his headset, “I got ‘em! I got ‘em.”

  Javier tore into the yard and jammed on his brakes, sending up a cloud of gravel, and his face, behind the veil of dust, was…it was horror that I saw there, because he knew, in that moment, that one of two things was gonna happen: either the guy in the Bird was gonna gun us down in front of his eyes or the police were gonna surround us, and take us away to God knows where.

  Then the guy in the sky stops paying attention to his controls, or to the airspace around him, because he sees the cops coming up the road and he’s realizing that the two million dollars he’s got in his crosshairs is gonna get snagged by the authorities before he has a chance to claim the bounty. He brings his machine down a little, and just then a MiniCop—a legal one, a two-seater with a girl and a guy at the controls—comes chopping over the hill, and the girl, who looks about our age, has a rifle too, and she aims it at us and we can hear her yelling, “Should I kill ‘em? Now? Now?”

  We put our hands in the air like you see on TV, and I was pretty sure we were gonna die right there in the needle grass in the hills overlooking Malibu. My life didn’t flash before my eyes—maybe because I’d already written half of it down. I thought about my mother. And then, honestly, I just thought, So this is how I die.

  The bearded guy is pissed to see another copter there, encroaching on his prize, and the approaching cops are yelling over their speakers for the guy to withdraw, but instead he’s getting ready to shoot. Fee and Paula and I grab each other’s hands as the wind starts gusting hard, and we look up and see the tail of the MiniCop get twisted around by an updraft then hit the whirring blades of the GarBird, which shred it like paper. Slices of it fly at the couple at the controls, and they start screaming, and the guy with the rifle starts screaming as his GarBird starts to spin and falls out of the sky, directly on the silver Airstream, crushing it like a soda can, along with Paula’s abuelo passed out inside. The contraption instantly explodes into a fireball. A large piece of burning debris hits the shed behind us, which also bursts into flames. We can hear the bearded man screaming from somewhere inside the chaos.

  The other copter crashes on the road, right in the path of the cop cars, exploding too, and lighting up the dry brush all around. The flames rose so high so fast. The smoke was glowing red, pulsing with the lights on the police cars.

  Paula screamed, “Run!”

  We ran.

  I glanced back to see if Javier was still in his truck, and if he was okay, but I couldn’t see anything through the smoke. We ran for our motherfucking lives. Brook couldn’t have caught us, even Fee, shaken out of her fog by the explosion, and shot up with adrenaline.

  Paula knew the brush and the hills and where to hide. She’s been doing it her whole life in one way or another. She didn’t complain—not even when we tumbled down into the crevasse a mile or so from the shed, where the sagebrush disguised a drop. Stoic. That’s the word.

  Paula actually said it was a good thing we fell—“a blessing.” And she was right. A few minutes later we saw the silhouette of two men with rifles appear at the top of the ridge, but they couldn’t see us where we’d landed, in a thicket of scrub oak under a rocky ledge.

  When, later, some nearby coyotes started yelping and yipping the way they do, Paula said it was okay, because they’d just killed an animal, a deer or a raccoon or whatever, and so they wouldn’t be hungry for us. And when we climbed to the top of a hill and saw the only way down was to slip and slide in the dark, Paula said the people looking for us would never think we’d be brave or strong enough to attempt that descent. She just kept moving forward, leading us through the thickets and over the ridges and up and down the rock walls.

  I keep thinking about that scene at the clearing. I didn’t want anyone to die. Not even the people who wanted to kill us. Not Paula’s abuelo. The bearded guy? Javier? They haven’t released the names online yet. The cops were focused on the action in the sky and I don’t know if they got a good look at us before we disappeared into the brush. There’ve been no reports that we have a little girl with us. Or that we’ve changed out of our “Versace” gowns.

  After we made it down the hill, the three of us walked a couple of miles on the side of the Pacific Coast Highway with our heads down, disguised in our gray gardeners’ clothes, hair under ball caps, backpack on my shoulders. I held Paula’s little hand. A thousand cars whizzed by. Fire engines, cop cars, bounty hunters, Crusaders. No one seemed to notice. Just a couple of smallish Mexican housekeepers with their little Patriot Girl on the way home from a long day cleaning someone’s mansion.

  We have flash burns on our faces and some nicks and cuts from the debris. Paula has some small shrapnel wounds on her neck. Our hands are torn from all the thorny sagebrush and dry mesquite we had to rip away so we could get up the hill after we fell. We’re exhausted, bruised and battered, but okay.

  Here. The safe place. 1434 Larkspur Road. Chase’s uncle’s stunning beach house in Malibu, on the far edge of this neighborhood near Paradise Cove.

  The door on the iron gate was unlocked. We cringed when it groaned open and again when it rattled shut behind us. The moon lit the grassy yard and tall hedges on either side of the driveway. All was quiet, then we heard a branch crack in a big dying oak and we looked up to see this fat raccoon, who immediately started hissing at us. Fee screamed. Paula put her hands over her mouth. Jesus, Fee.

  Within seconds we heard a sliding glass door open, and footsteps shuffling through crisp leaves in the yard next door. We held our breath as an old lady’s voice floated up and over the hedges. “Who’s there?”

  We looked at each other but didn’t speak, didn’t move a muscle, waiting for the old lady to shuffle back to her sliding door.

  She called out again. “Who’s there?”

  The raccoon shifted attention and hissed in her direction.

  “Shoo!” she called out, as Paula and Fee and I stood frozen.

  “Monty?” the old lady called. “Monty? Come out here! Bring the broom!”

  We heard the door slide open again, and more shuffling through the leaves, and after a moment watched the white handle of a broom poke up over the tall hedge to rap at the oak tree, which the raccoon was not gonna leave without a fight. The flailing broom got nowhere near the thing, but it did piss him off, and he hissed again, and that made Monty mad. “Bastard,” the old man growled.

  Feet crunched back through the leaves, and we knew it was Monty because the old lady was still on the other side of the hedge going, “Shoo!” Then we heard the clatter of a ladder, and we realized the old guy was gonna climb up to get closer to the raccoon, and he would be able to see us over the hedge.

  He fussed with the ladder, as his wife called out over and over again, “Shoo,” because that’s working? I mean, Jesus. And I was thinking, why shoo the poor thing anyway? He’s a raccoon in a tree.

  The ladder got settled into place, and we heard old Monty stepping on the rungs, and as he did, the raccoon climbed higher. Monty was ready to give up. Then his wi
fe said, “That’s fine, Monty. Leave him there. And when he gets into that trash again, you can damn well clean it up.”

  Monty said, “I’ll get the hose.”

  The old lady goes, “The hose has a tear, remember? You were going to Home Depot for a new one then didn’t. Go over to the Masons’ and borrow theirs. They always leave that front gate open.”

  Fee and Paula and I looked at each other like, actually? Is this happening? After everything we’ve been through, we’re gonna be foiled by a fucking raccoon and some old dude named Monty?

  But before I could make up a believable story about why we three were in Blake Mason’s yard, a motorcade of screaming cop cars came from nowhere—flashing lights and blaring sirens tearing down the PCH on the other side of the gates.

  The raccoon, maybe flustered by the noise, leapt down from a high branch to a low one, and then onto the top of the privet hedge, and then he was gone. Along with the cop cars, who headed north up the coast.

  Monty and the old woman shuffled back through the leaves. The sliding doors opened, and shut. We made a beeline to the porch of the beach house.

  The door was open. We basically walked right in, like, Honey, I’m home. The house was silent except for the humming air units and the crashing waves outside.

  We could see the black ocean from the foyer, the stretch of moonlit beach in front of it, a coast guard boat out there skimming the surf, throwing searchlights over the sand. The beach front of the property had a tall Plexiglas security screen for unobstructed ocean vistas, and smooth ten-foot concrete walls for privacy from the neighbors on either side. A winding concrete path bisected the yard, with a rectangle of turf, which I realized was a putting green, on one side and, on the other, a collection of citrus trees, bare with the exception of the grapefruit tree, where a few fat fruits still clung to high branches. We stood there for I don’t know how long, just breathing, and looking out at the sea.