It gave Linda hope they could learn to please each other again. Her heart full, she pushed David’s hair back from his forehead and kissed him. He smiled groggily and reached up to pull her closer to him for an embrace. They could talk later, Linda decided, folding into her husband’s arms, her pinga already responding to his touch.
Once they had disentangled from each other’s limbs, Linda went to the kitchen to make a nice warm chocolate to start their slow morning. While David took a shower, Linda lovingly set the table with wide-mouthed cups of thick chocolate and churros and strawberries for dipping. She frowned at the vase of flowers. They were browning.
Dumping the water into the sink, she stepped out onto the back patio, looking around self-consciously to make sure none of her neighbors were up and about. Seeing no one, she padded over to the compost boxes and dropped the flowers in. Then she pulled her garden shears from the little tool bin her daughters had bought her last Mother’s Day and walked to cut a few blossoms for their breakfast table.
Bending to cut the flowers, Linda realized she was becoming accustomed to her new body. She was no longer startled by the sight of her own hands when she performed small tasks, no longer knocking things over or breaking fragile things by misjudging her strength and size. And after her weekend with David, she knew that he, too, was making his peace with her changes.
Her penis stirred a little against her new bathrobe as she remembered the pleasures of the night and the morning. He could still be hers, and she could still be his. They were the same people, even if she was housed differently now.
David was sitting at the table when she came back in, his hair still curling and damp after his shower. She brushed his shoulder as she walked by, and he grabbed her fingers and kissed them just as he always used to do. She noticed the hand-shaped bruise on David’s shoulder and flexed her fingers guiltily. She’d have to be more careful with her strength.
“Viviana called while you were in the yard,” David said quietly, like it was no big deal.
But Linda knew how hard it was on him that their youngest daughter refused to accept Linda was still her mother.
Linda sighed. “I don’t know what to tell her.”
David dipped a churro and nibbled at it thoughtfully. “Mi amor, we have already told her the truth. I guess she just needs more time to accept it. I’m going to try to get her to come to dinner with the rest of us this Sunday.”
Linda leaned across and kissed her husband on the top of his head. “If anyone can get her to listen, it is you.” She said a silent prayer that their daughter would indeed listen to her father. David loved all his daughters. He wouldn’t be truly happy until they were all together again.
Changing the topic, Linda said, “I would like to visit Jessica today.”
“Señora Roark? Por qué?”
“I’m worried about her. She hasn’t responded to any of my calls.”
“Maybe she’s embarrassed. Maybe she doesn’t want to see you.”
“It’s just a feeling, corazón. Something isn’t right.”
After lunch, Linda drove to Jessica’s house and knocked on the door. A small woman with a perfect ash-blonde coif answered the door. She had to be Jessica’s mother. Linda could see her new friend’s delicate features echoed in the older woman’s face. She smiled in the formal way women smile when they don’t mean it. “Yes?”
Linda twisted her husband’s baseball cap in her hands and asked if Jessica was there. The woman’s face remained guarded, and Linda remembered she was now a large man. She rushed to reassure the woman she meant no harm. “My name is Leonel. I helped to install the new chandelier a couple of days ago?”
“Oh, Leonel! Yes, she told me about you. How is your, um, partner?” The woman relaxed a little, changing her hold on the door so she was no longer poised to slam it shut.
“David is well, thank you. May I speak with Jessica?” Linda felt oddly like a child asking if a friend could come out to play.
“She’s not in right now.” The woman’s voice was tense and quavered a bit. There was definitely something wrong.
Linda considered. She rubbed the back of her neck and shuffled her feet uncomfortably. This part would have been so much easier as a woman. She could only hope Jessica had said something to her mother that would let the woman trust her enough to tell her what was going on. When they’d last talked, Jessica had said she had not yet told her mother what was going on with her. Her children had seen it, but they were very young. No one believed them. “Jessica was supposed to meet me yesterday to discuss some remodeling, but she did not come. She has not answered her phone, either, and I am worried about her. Is everything okay?”
The woman still looked hesitant, but she also looked like she wanted to say something. Linda asked gently, “Do you know where she is?” Linda tried to look small and nonthreatening. “I just really want to help. Is there anything I can do?”
The woman looked back over her shoulder, like she thought someone might be listening. Suddenly, she seemed to come to a decision. She stepped out onto the stoop, pulling the door closed behind her and taking Linda’s arm. Linda let the petite woman lead her back to the truck.
“She went out yesterday afternoon and hasn’t come home yet. She sent a text and said everything is fine, but she’s not responding to my calls and messages. This is just not like her. I’m worried. She hadn’t even made arrangements for the boys. I had to come over so Nathan could go to work.” There was a strange emphasis on the word “work” that told Linda Nathan was not the son-in-law of the year.
Linda nodded thoughtfully. “Do you know where she went when she went out? That would be a good place to start, I think.”
“She said she was going to see a family friend, Cindy Liu. But Cindy says that she never heard from her.”
Linda wrinkled her forehead. “Have you called the police?”
Jessica’s mother nodded. “They say they can’t do anything. She hasn’t been gone for forty-eight hours yet, and there’s no sign of violence. They act like my baby would just walk away from her family.” She lifted her hand to her mouth, covering it like she could keep the words from spilling out.
Linda patted her shoulder, reassuringly. “She would never do that. Of course, she wouldn’t.” She leaned against the truck. There had to be something she could do to help. Cindy Liu’s name kept coming up. Much too frequently to be mere coincidence. Maybe Ms. Liu didn’t know anything, but Linda was going to check.
She pulled a business card out of a little holder affixed to the dashboard of the truck and pulled a pen out of her pocket. She circled her husband’s phone number and wrote “Leonel” and her cell phone number on the back of the card. “This is my partner’s card. But you can reach me at the same number or at the cell phone number on the back. If you hear from Jessica, or if you need anything, please call me.”
The woman looked down at the card. “Thank you, Mr. Alvarez. I’m Eva. Eva Roark.” She turned to walk back to the house, clutching the small card with both hands, like it was vital to keep it flat. She stopped halfway up the walk and turned back. “She’ll be all right, won’t she, Mr. Alvarez?”
Linda nodded and did her best to look confident. “I’m sure she will be.”
Linda took the short drive back to her neighborhood and parked the truck in her driveway. She pocketed the keys but didn’t bother to go inside. David wasn’t home. Their other car was missing. He’d probably gone to the office to talk with el jefe about the chandelier job at Jessica’s house. She paused for a moment, realizing that, as a woman, she would have left a note saying where she was going, “just in case.” As a man, she didn’t feel the need. She could look out for herself. It was freeing.
Linda walked three houses down to the Liu house. She remembered when old Mrs. Liu had lived there. She was the kind of person who kept you standing on the stoop for an hour talking if you stopped by to share your extra cookies. Linda had liked her and had been saddened by her death.
She’d only met the younger Ms. Liu a few times, buying her products at the farmer’s market. “Younger” was a kindness. Cindy Liu was at least twenty years Linda’s senior. She didn’t have her mother’s friendly air, though she had come a long way from the surly young woman who had frightened the girls when they were children. And she did make lovely skin products. Linda had tried to be welcoming when Cindy had moved into her mother’s old home.
Linda approached the house. The garden had become quite overgrown. It was pretty in a way, wild and untamed, but also, somehow, a little threatening. The elder Mrs. Liu had always kept the garden so well. Linda had enjoyed sitting in it with her on warm evenings and listening as her neighbor poked fun at the younger people in the neighborhood. In a way, it had been like sitting with her own mother, had she lived to old age.
The house didn’t appear to have changed much in spite of the constant stream of workmen she had seen at the place. The changes must have been all inside. The same rattan furniture sat on the porch, the cushions now torn and water-soaked. The birdhouse still sat on its pole in the middle of the garden. Even through the shoulder high plants, Linda could see no one was putting bird seed in the tray any longer. If this was how Ms. Liu was keeping the yard, it would go to seed in another year or two. Linda clucked her tongue at the waste.
Looking toward the house, Linda noticed that the basement windows were soaped over, like they did at factories. It gave the house an abandoned look. Linda knew Cindy Liu still lived there. She and the other neighborhood ladies had often whispered together about the strange deliveries at odd hours and the crazy way that woman drove. Her car wasn’t in the driveway. Maybe she wasn’t home.
Pausing on the front porch, Linda listened, trying to decide if she should knock or not. At first, she didn’t hear anything. Then she thought she heard sobbing. She knocked. “Ms. Liu? Are you there? It’s me-Lin, uh, Leonel, your neighbor?”
She listened again. The sobbing stopped. She thought she heard a voice, but it sounded far away, and she couldn’t understand what it was saying. “Ms. Liu?” Linda bumped the door open, wincing at the cracking wood sound that meant she had probably broken something. She leaned her head inside. “Ms. Liu? Are you all right? Can I come in?”
No one answered. Linda stepped inside. It was very dim in the living room. The blinds were pulled and blackout curtains had replaced the white lace that had once covered the windows. Waiting for her eyes to adjust, she stopped just inside the door and stood very still, listening. Nothing. Then a distant yell, “Hello!” The location was hard to guess. The voice echoed strangely, like a bad phone connection.
She called back, “Hello? Ms. Liu?”
“Basement!” The voice called.
Linda guessed that was an invitation. The hairs on the back of her neck were standing up, and she felt suddenly very awake, very aware. She didn’t know yet what was wrong, but she had a bad feeling about this. She walked forward, anyway, unconsciously flexing her muscles.
She remembered where the basement was. She used to help the elder Mrs. Liu haul her laundry up and down the stairs when it got too difficult for her to manage alone. She strode through the living room and opened the door that led down to the cellar.
The stairwell was unchanged, though Linda now had to duck to avoid bumping her head on the dangling bare light bulb as she worked her way down. She called out again, not wanting to frighten anyone, “Hello! It’s me, your neighbor, Leonel! Is everything okay?” Linda realized that Ms. Liu had not yet met her as Leonel, but explaining who she really was could wait for another time. Given that Ms. Liu had not attempted to include herself in the neighborhood, that probably wouldn’t make any difference.
When she rounded the corner at the foot of the stairs, she stopped in her tracks. There was a huge metal door, like the kind you see on giant walk-in freezers in restaurants. That was definitely new. Not sure what to do, she knocked on the door. The rapping of her knuckles, though gentle, reverberated eerily. She heard it again: the voice. “Leonel!” This time she understood why the voice sounded so strange. She was hearing it through the ventilation system. The silver boxes ran above her head in the close ceiling.
“Yes, it’s Leonel. Can I come in?” Even though Ms. Liu had never met Linda’s alter ego, the voice sounded welcoming, happy that it was her. That raised the hairs on the back of Linda’s neck again.
The voice was muffled, but she caught a few words. Linda tilted her head toward the vents above her. She heard three words. Locked. Trapped. Help.
Help? That was good enough for her. She grabbed the handle of the door. It resisted. Locked. So, she pushed harder. The entire mechanism pulled off. She dropped it and pushed the door open.
She burst into the room, trying to look everywhere at the same time. Her eyes glanced over the racks of beakers and test tubes, the animal cages, the table with a mortar and pestle and some mysterious-looking roots. What she didn’t see was a person needing her help. Had she imagined the voice?
She heard knocking and turned to look at the wall behind her. There was Jessica, banging with all her might on the walls of some kind of metal and glass tube. Linda could see that she was screaming, but only the smallest of sounds was escaping.
Linda looked over the capsule, trying to figure out how it opened. There was a keypad on the front and a small dial. She turned the knob a few times, but it quickly became obvious you had to know the code to open the capsule this way.
She stood in front of the window and yelled, “Cover your face!” Just in case the soundproofing worked both ways, she used her arms to demonstrate. Jessica nodded and turned away from the door. Linda took off her outer shirt and wrapped her right elbow in the cloth and then thrust her arm through the glass side panel, shattering it. There was a whooshing sound, and the tube shuddered.
Linda gently knocked the small shards still attached away with her fingers. The opening was small, but so was Jessica. Linda leaned her head in. Jessica was pulling an IV out of her arm. Her hair was wild around her head, but her eyes were clear. “Can you fit through here?”
“Yes, I think I can!” Jessica crouched and maneuvered through the opening carefully.
Linda supported her as she stepped over the pile of broken glass, protecting her bare feet. Free, she threw herself into Linda’s arms and began to sob. “Thank God you found me!”
Linda lifted Jessica as easily as a child. “Let’s get you out of here.”
“Wait!” Jessica slipped back down to the floor and bent down, examining the glass. She picked up a small object and grasped it in her hand. She pointed at the orange bag on the small desk. “That’s my bag.”
Linda grabbed the orange purse and flung it over a shoulder. She bent to gather Jessica back into her arms and took the stairs three at a time. She didn’t understand what was happening here, but she knew it wasn’t good. She didn’t know what Cindy Liu had to do with it but didn’t think she’d stick around to hear her side of the story. She’d get Jessica to safety and then figure out what to do from there.
They had just made it to the porch when Linda halted mid-stride, stopped by a strange figure dressed in a black hooded cape. The figure spoke. “Who are you? Where’s Cindy?” The voice had a strange quality, like sandpaper or maybe the scrape of a match being lit. The person advanced toward them.
Linda couldn’t tell if the person was male or female, but the person was tall and hiding his or her face. Linda felt instinctively that the person could be dangerous. She turned, shifting Jessica’s weight to her left side so she could free her right arm in case she had to fight their way free.
“Is she back?” Jessica twisted in Linda’s arms, panic clear on her face and in her voice. “Don’t let her hurt me!” Jessica’s body grew light in Linda’s arms, and she knew her friend was losing her hold on gravity. Jessica grasped fiercely at Linda’s shirt, and Linda heard the cotton tear slightly.
Linda shifted to hold her more securely and whispered assurances in her calmest vo
ice. “I won’t let you go, Jessica. It’s going to be all right.” She guessed Jessica believed her, because she loosened her death grip on Linda’s shirt sleeve. She looked at the person standing in their way with narrowed eyes. Linda didn’t know how much use Jessica would be in a fight, but the will to use whatever strength she had was definitely there in the set of her jaw. It was impressive, even if her pink tracksuit and tousled ponytail didn’t make her look very imposing.
The hooded figure retreated the couple of steps it had taken toward the pair. One hand snaked out of a sleeve and scratched at the other wrist. The fingers were claw-like, and Linda was sure she saw scales on the exposed forearm. The figure spoke again. “She hurt you? Why would she hurt you?”
“Listen, I don’t know who you are, or what you want, but I need to get my friend to safety, and we’d rather not be here when Ms. Liu returns. So, if you’ll just move aside, friend, we’ll be on our way.” Linda pulled herself to her full height and tried to bring a little threat into the word friend, like she had heard her brothers do when they wanted someone to back down. She felt more worried than intimidating but tried not to let it show.
It must have worked, because the figure took another step back. Linda pushed past the person and walked down the porch steps. She felt eyes on her back, but she didn’t turn around. She just kept striding straight for the safety of her own kitchen three doors down.
Once inside, she gently sat Jessica in a chair. She watched as Jessica dug through the orange bag, put on her weights, and then handed her the phone. “Call your mother, Jessica. She’s frantic over you.”
Jessica nodded and obeyed, big, fat, silent tears running down her cheeks. Linda put a box of tissues on the table next to her friend.
Trying not to eavesdrop, Linda busied herself at the stove, brewing a nice cup of tea and preparing a little tray of milk, sugar, lemon, and a few cookies. She was filled with a strange restless energy, a mix of emotions hard to define. She was relieved to have found Jessica, but it didn’t feel like it was over. Not by a long shot. She had this powerful urge to hit something. It wasn’t like her, this violence. But she was angry. It vibrated through her like the energy of a train when you stand too close to the tracks. The surprising thing was how the anger felt good, felt right.
Going Through the Change Page 14
