Land of Careful Shadows (29 page)

A
utumn was a tease in New York. Sun-baked and vine-ripened. Tented in a canopy of red and gold. All summer, the land had been a chorus of green. Now suddenly each tree and bush wanted a solo and every note could be heard.

In Lake Holly, nearly every doorstep groaned with the weight of a pumpkin. The shop windows were decorated with witches and ghosts and skeins of fake spider webs. There were baskets of mums and purplish cabbage plants by the train station. Not that Jimmy Vega spent much time strolling Lake Holly these days. When he wasn't working in the southern part of the county or at his own house, he was at Adele's. Helping her, he believed. Hiding, some might say. In the summer, he replaced the rotting floorboards on her front porch. In September, he rehung a couple of her doors. He was only good these days with things he could hold in his hands: a hammer, a saw, his guitar, at night, her forgiving flesh. He made love to her with an urgency he hadn't felt in years, as if only by feeling the heat and sweat of her body could he prove he was still alive. There were things Adele didn't understand about him. But this one she seemed to: he needed to escape what he could not control.

The court date, originally set for June, ended up being pushed back until July. During a record heat wave, Vega sat in the back of the courtroom, sweating through his suit jacket the same way he had before a judge all those years ago. So steeled was he to accept the bad news, that he almost missed the good. Joy's lawyer had been able to bargain the charges against her down to a misdemeanor. She was given a one-year suspended sentence, six months community service, and three years probation.

He had expected her to forgive him when it was over. Even if Amherst was out, she could still enroll in the local two-year college, complete her community service, and figure out what her future held from there. But for Joy, it was never about what happened to her. It was about Kenny and for Kenny, the U.S. legal system was an entirely different animal.

Adele found the boy a good attorney who took the case pro bono and managed to convince the judge to give Kenny a three-year suspended sentence—lenient by all accounts. The problem—always the problem—was his immigration status. Jail or not, Kenny Cardenas had still been convicted of a felony, which automatically triggered an ICE hold. As soon as the case was over, he was remanded into federal custody and deported back to Mexico. The last Vega had heard from Adele, Kenny had moved in with his grandparents in a rural mountain village in Guerrero where he knew almost no one and couldn't find work beyond the level of a field hand.

Joy blamed her father, and Vega, unable to bear even one more shred of guilt, retreated. He stopped calling, stopped even trying to make contact with her. Instead, he kept his hands busy, kept his mind blank, and accepted the seasons as they rolled into one another, hoping to find comfort in the passage of time.

One Friday afternoon in early October, Vega went to the hardware store on the highway to buy a few new roofing shingles to replace some missing ones on Adele's garage. He could have bought them down at Bobby Rowland's store but Vega couldn't bring himself to face his old friend since Matt's death. He did a lot of avoiding these days.

By the time he returned, Adele was already home from work. Her Prius was parked in the driveway and another car was parked behind it, a fat-ass white Buick that looked like a roll of toilet paper on wheels. It took up Vega's space on the driveway and forced him to park across the street and walk back over with his package of roofing shingles. The white Buick wasn't the sort of car anyone he knew would drive. But he knew whom it belonged to the moment the driver's door opened and he heard Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons crooning, “Oh, What a Night.” He knew only one person who would listen to a bunch of over-the-hill Italians singing about the one time they got lucky over half a century ago.

Louie Greco hitched up his pants as he stepped out of his white Buick. He fetched a red licorice stick out of a bag in his pocket, shoved it into the side of his mouth, and walked up to Vega. He eyed the package of roofing shingles in Vega's hands.

“I think she'll let you stick around whether or not you fix her roof, you know.”

“Keeps me busy.”

Greco offered up a knowing smile. “I'll just bet she does.” Vega hadn't spoken to the man since those few awkward calls soon after he resigned from the investigation. He had to admit he was glad to see him. They hadn't started out as friends, but somewhere along the line Greco had grown on Vega, like an old jacket you don't care about until you discover it's missing.

Vega put the package of shingles down on the edge of the driveway and shook Greco's hand. His hair was thinner, his waist thicker. Vega wondered if the case had taken a toll on him as well. “How are you doing?”

“Just passed my thirtieth anniversary with the department.”

“Congratulations.”

Greco made a sound like an engine on low throttle. “Way I see it, if I'd killed the bastards instead of working for them, I'd be out on parole by now, a free man. Free health coverage all those years, too.”

“Yeah, but look at all the fun you'd have missed.”

“Thrill a minute. Which reminds me . . .” Greco pulled a sealed plastic bag out of his pants pocket and held it out to Vega. “Here. Got a present for you. From your people at the county crime lab. They released this evidence a couple of days ago to the Lake Holly PD to return to its rightful owner. I thought perhaps you could do a good deed with it, earn your Eagle Scout badge or something.”

Vega took the bag from Greco's hands. He recognized the silver cross with the tarnished bird-wing
milagros
dangling from each side. He frowned. “Why are you giving Maria's cross to me? She's already buried in Guatemala and I'm not in touch with her mother anymore.”

“I know,” said Greco. “But the old lady's in Lake Holly for a couple of weeks with that grandson you spoke to.”

“They are?”

Greco nodded. “They're staying with Linda Porter. She got a special visa for them to meet Olivia. It can't make up for nine and a half years. But hey, it's a start.”

If Vega had thought he'd had it tough these past six months, it was nothing compared to Linda. Scott was in prison, disbarred and sentenced to twenty-two months for obstruction of justice. He'd never be able to work as a lawyer or with the immigrant community again. And then there was the accident, which had left Linda with a permanent limp. Yet the few times Vega had seen her around town, she'd seemed surprisingly upbeat. The whole tragedy had opened up a part of her daughter's past that had been hidden until now. Instead of fearing this connection, Linda seemed to embrace it. Vega wondered how very different things would have been had Porter simply told his wife the truth when Maria first came to see him. Perhaps they could have found common ground. It was too late now to ever know.

“Why don't you give the cross to Maria's mother yourself?” asked Vega.

Greco took a bite of his licorice and chewed slowly. “Thought it would be better if it came from you and Kenny and Joy.”

“Hey, news flash, Grec: Kenny's in Mexico and Joy and I aren't speaking.”

“News flash, yourself: Kenny's in Lake Holly. Got back about a week ago.”

“
What?
Legally?”

“He wasn't legal the first time. Now he's a felon with a three-year suspended sentence hanging over his head. What? You think he hopped the red-eye to JFK?”

No, and the realization filled Vega with guilt. He slumped against the side of Greco's Buick. Kenny Cardenas, barely eighteen years of age, had made a nightmare journey through the blistering desert. He'd crammed his body inside some coffinlike compartment in a sweltering trailer. He'd run and hidden from men with guns and flak vests who saw him as little more than dung to be scraped off the soles of their boots. Kenny's journey couldn't have been all that different from the ones Rodrigo Morales, Maria Elena Santos, and countless others before them had made. The boy might have started out as an innocent when he first turned himself in to the Lake Holly police. But if detention and deportation hadn't stripped away that thin veneer of boyhood, crossing the border surely did.

“You're not going to arrest him, are you?”

“Nobody officially
told
the PD he's in Lake Holly. So—kid keeps his nose clean, who's to say we know he's here?”

Vega gave him a surprised look. Greco touched his chest. “I'm not the hard-ass you think I am. Our guys have better things to do than to hassle the kid. But ultimately, Lake Holly's too small for him to stick around in and not get noticed. He's here until his family can scrape together enough money to ship him off to some other part of the country where he can make a fresh start. Not college or a green card or anything like that, of course. He's probably fucked up forever any chance of being legal. But maybe—I don't know—he can build some sort of life for himself.”

“Not the life he'd had in mind.”

“Hey, how many of us
ever
get the life we'd had in mind?” Greco clapped a meaty paw on Vega's shoulder. “You didn't do this to him, man. That's what I kept trying to tell you back in April but you didn't want to hear it. We'd have caught up with him and your daughter sooner or later.”

“Just like you caught up with Brendan Delaney and Eddie Giordano?”

Greco gave Vega a pained look. “You heard about that, huh?” In August, a clerical error at the county jail caused the charges against Luis Guzman to be dropped. ICE deported Guzman back to Guatemala before Lake Holly could hold him as a witness. Without Guzman to testify, the DA's office was forced to drop the case. Delaney and Giordano walked on all charges.

Greco sighed. “If it's any consolation, Maria was higher profile. And Porter wasn't good for it. We'd have kept searching until something clicked.”

Vega looked down at the cross in the plastic bag, still encrusted with dirt just the way he'd found it that afternoon by the side of Lake Holly Road. “I don't know what you think I'm supposed to do here. My daughter's not going to listen to anything I have to say. She hates me.”

“Huh. Shows what you know.” Greco trudged up Adele's front porch steps, and banged on her door. The figure that opened it made Vega's breath stop in his chest. She peeked around the side of Greco and blinked the way she used to as a toddler when she'd just woken up from a long nap.

“Dad?”

She looked different somehow. Less girlish. Her cheekbones were more defined. Her bangs had grown out and she'd started wearing her hair in a loose side ponytail that trailed like blackstrap molasses down her shoulder.

Vega walked to the bottom of the porch stairs and stopped.

“Hey.” His voice caught. He could feel the uncertainty in his pitch. He was still clutching the plastic bag with the crucifix. He held it the way he used to hold carnival bags filled with goldfish that he won for Joy. He was holding something fragile and precious, something he knew he had to keep alive between them.

She walked across the porch and down the front steps until they were face to face. She was dressed in one of his old police sweatshirts that rode halfway down her thighs. He'd had so many conversations in his head with her these past six months that now that she was in front of him, he couldn't think of a single thing to say.

He swallowed hard. “I've missed you.”

He opened his arms and she fell into them with the force of gravity. Something warm and carbonated burbled in his chest, a sensation he recognized as hope. He hadn't lost her. Whatever else, he hadn't lost her.

“I've missed you, too,” she whispered in a voice that brought to mind the girl he used to dab witch hazel on doorknobs for. “I want to try to make things better. With you. With Maria's family tonight.”

“Are you sure you're ready for that?”

“No. But I don't think I'll ever be ready for such a thing.”

Greco lumbered down the porch steps. “If it's all set, I'm outta here.” He patted Vega on the arm. “You want some advice?”

“I think I'm gonna get it anyway.”

“We don't get a lot of chances in our line of work to put the pieces back together. You got one now. With your daughter. With these people. Take it.”

Greco opened his car door and regarded Vega over the hood. “Don't be a stranger. At least, not any stranger than you already are.” He got back in his car and pulled out of the driveway, trailing doo-wop and exhaust.

Vega watched him go, his arms around his daughter. Then he brushed back a loose strand of her hair and noticed for the first time the delicate pearl earrings she was wearing.

“Are those Abuelita's?”

“Yes,” said Joy. “I wear them all the time. It makes me feel like she's with me.”

“She is,
Chispita.
” He laced a hand in hers and led her up the stairs. “She's with us both.”

 

Rodrigo Morales bought a dozen pink roses from the Asian grocery store across from the train station in Lake Holly. Tiny buds with some sort of feathery green ferns around the stems. They cost him twelve dollars plus tax and the owner of the store never smiled at him once while he was counting out his money. They were both immigrants to this country. Sometimes he wondered why immigrants didn't treat each other better.

Still, he liked the soft, velvety feel of the rose petals between his fingers, the way they reminded him of the touch of Maria's skin, of those nights at the lake when they reached out for something comforting and familiar in the darkness and found each other. He had thought it was lust that had driven him into her arms. But he recognized the sensation as closer to longing. He was here and he wanted to be in Esperanza. He wanted to hear Triza's whippoorwill voice drifting from an open window. He wanted Stephany on his shoulders and Juliza and Lorenzo walking beside him, talking his ears off. He wanted to taste the dust in the square, the ripe mangoes in the marketplace, the salty sweat on his wife's skin after they made love.