Lemon Reef (11 page)

Del laughed. “She didn't tell me.
Abuela
did.” She was referring to her grandmother on her father's side. Del seemed relieved to be looking at me, as if she'd missed me. Her tone was soft and intimate and comfortable. “My dad said it's true. Crazy Horse went into Canada for a while, and he met up with the Cree tribe. My aunt told my dad their great-grandmother had this affair with him when she was sixteen years old and got pregnant with their grandmother. So my mother and her siblings are his great-grandchildren.” Del paused, reconsidered the generational math, laughed a little at how confusing it was. “Things changed for them when my grandmother married this man who turned out to be really brutal with her and with his kids. He broke my grandmother's spirit and, you know, then she couldn't protect her kids.”

Del was talking about Pascale's history of having been beaten when she was a girl, several of her bones broken, some of which had never healed properly. Del thought Pascale couldn't help herself when she got so out of control, she needed the release. Getting moral about it, Del said, didn't help. In her mind, they were all doing the best they could to stay together as a family.

The anger was gone. Del's attention was adoringly honed on me. Her gold eyes shimmied, then fixed on my face. She swallowed as if working toward a courageous next step and admitted, “I didn't really want you to leave before. I never want to be away from you. I need you, Jen.” She had never been so candid or so clear in expressing feelings for me before. Del raised her finger to her lip and felt the place where I could see a wide crack that was crusting with dried blood. The skin under her eye was bluish and swelling. Some skin on her nose and her forehead had been scraped, leaving deep gouges that were pink and raw. She went on. “I didn't know what it meant to be close to someone until now.” Del watched for my reaction, her words now flowing easily and confidently. “Please don't be mad at me, Jenna. I can't handle the feeling that I let you down.” Del smiled sadly, leaned her forehead against mine. She touched my hair, wrapped her finger in a ringlet, kissed me, forgetting and then sharply remembering her cut lip. I tasted blood.

I'd like to say that I matched Del in dignity and depth, that I met her where she deserved to be received in that moment. I wish I had apologized for abandoning her earlier that evening when she looked for me. I wish I had held her, stroked her hair, told her I needed her, too. I didn't do any of those things. All I could think about as she spoke, her heart obviously broken, was the scant T-shirt and panties between her skin and mine. By that time in December, we'd made out, touched each other, mostly over our panties. I wanted more but felt too shy to do anything about it.

It was with Del in this wounded and vulnerable state that I rolled on top of her, stripped her T-shirt up and off, bit at her nipples until she winced and withdrew. I yanked her panties down, felt her insides for the first time, pushed my fingers into her without concern for her comfort, her privacy, or her pride. Del neither participated nor resisted but made of herself a line to be crossed. I began pushing her legs apart and bringing my mouth to her. I guess that was the line.

Del sat upright and yell-whispered, “I don't want you to do that.”

I was staring at her clit, my tongue in reach. “Why not?”

“Just don't! Get off me.” She closed her legs and slid out from under me. Her anger surprised me, and I sat up to find her eyes. She was out of bed and pulling her clothes on, still favoring her side where she had been kicked. “I think I've hit my exposure limit for one day.”

My hand smelled strong, and I noticed her shit under my fingernail. I felt momentarily confused, and then I realized how it had gotten there. I started to sob. I was deeply ashamed. “Del, I'm sorry,” was all I could say.

“You're
sorry
?” Del was more perplexed by that, it seemed, than anything else that had just happened. “I just want to forget about it.” She left to take a shower.

I cried and at some point fell asleep. When I woke up the next morning, Del was spooning me. I heard her breathing in my ear, could feel her pressed against my back, her arm and leg wrapped around me, holding me protectively. I was relieved then, told myself I was good again, stole her forgiveness, and ran.

*

I said, “It was not my fault things went so wrong for her.”

Gail sighed loudly. “I can't believe we're still trying to understand why Adeline Soto did the things she did, or whose fault it was. Who cares why, anyway? It wasn't easy for any of us, and we're not taking our fucked-up childhoods out on the rest of the world.”

“In the same ways,” I said.

Gail responded sharply, “Yeah, well, that matters.”

Does it?
I thought of Mr. Baxter and Ms. Flint and Angie and how my decision had turned their lives upside down. For the better? I would never know.

Katie chimed in. “It's not what you think, Jenna. You've been gone for a long time. You don't know what all's gone down with that family. They're out of control.”

I laughed. “They've always been out of control.”

“No, not like this,” Katie said. “Not like they are now.”

I took a deep breath. “Look, you don't have to protect me. I'm gonna need to know what Del was involved in if I'm gonna try to do something about Khila going off to Texas with her father. That's gonna happen unless you can come up with a damn good reason why it shouldn't.” I looked at Gail and said, “You called me.”

“Oh, right,” she scoffed. “As if you ever would have forgiven me if I hadn't.”

I could hear the blood coursing through my ears and feel heat starting at my center and emanating to my limbs. So typical, I thought. She entreats me to leave on the next plane, offers her home, tells me that I'm Khila's only hope, and then she experiences my being here as a burden and as evidence that I'm still stuck and miserable.

To Gail, “Why didn't you tell me you were back in touch with Del?”

“You really want to know? Because she was unhappy. She was leaving her husband, and I didn't want you anywhere near that.”

“But
that
I could have helped her with. I don't know that we can do anything for Khila now, or even that Khila would want us to. For all we know, she's a daddy's girl, glad to have him all to herself.”

“Del asked us not to talk to you about her.”

“Do you have any idea why?”

“I assume because she didn't want to be back in touch with you.”

“So why should I help, then?”

“Because no matter what, she would not have wanted Khila to go to Texas with this man.”

Katie interrupted us. “Del and Talon were involved in some kind of drug thing, and they brought her little brother Sid into it. Do you remember this kid, Tom?” Katie asked. “He was younger than us, and he lived down the block from you. We used to see him around. He had brain damage, I think—totally uncoordinated. And he had a killer crush on Del.”

“Of course I remember him.” I pictured the skinny, wobbly boy with arms turned out and legs turned in. “He was sweet. He used to help my mom bring in groceries. What about him?”

“He's dead,” Katie said, without a hint of sentiment. Her eyes were like cobalt stones. She sat back, leaned into the couch, and crossed her arms. Then she recounted the facts. “Tom's mother used to drop him off at Bayside Plaza to watch movies. Genius Talon decided to use Tom as a runner at that mall because of course the police would never suspect him. He got Del to ask because he knew Tom would do anything for her.

“The next thing we knew, Tom was found dead in an alley behind the mall covered in blood and soaked in piss.” Katie twisted around and stretched her legs out on the couch. “Some guys who were there said that it was Sid who beat Tom. They said Sid just went crazy, started hitting Tom out of nowhere. Sid swore that he was not even at the mall when this thing went down. He told the police he was with Del at her house. Del denied it. After Del denied that Sid was with her, Sid took a plea.”

Katie looked squarely at me. “Del let Sid go to prison for life, Jenna. She
helped
Talon frame her little brother for murder.”

“That's not all,” Gail said. “Ida works at a massage parlor. Rumor is she's a prostitute. And Nicole has been in and out of prison and psych wards over the past several years. She had her first break about five years ago.” Gail thought for a moment. “All we're saying, Jen Jen, is they're not the same people they were when you knew them.”

Del was dead, Sid was disappeared, Ida and Nicole likely faced similar fates. What upset me most was that Katie and Gail had described exactly what I would have expected to come of these lives, had I allowed myself to think about it. I
had
known all along, in fact, as I kept my distance and demonstrated to myself—with a steady stream of accomplishments, affiliations, and acquisitions—that those things were not happening to me.

I say this not to belittle the friendships my present life is buoyed by, nor to trivialize the successes that, unlike many people, I will never have to doubt I have earned, nor to call into question the sincerity of my love for Madison, with whom, almost always for better rather than worse, I have been smitten since the day we met. No one takes a step without crushing bone. I am merely avowing the remains that have afforded me the traction without which one cannot dwell upon the earth.

“I'm going to see Pascale,” I said flatly.

We were expecting a crowd, but there was none. It was five thirty when we approached, the house quiet—uninhabited, I would have thought, based on its state of disrepair. An old, gray Dodge with all four tires removed rested on cinder blocks implanted into the pebble driveway. Rust, like acid, seeped through the driver's side door and beyond. Black Sabbath screamed murder from the house next door, causing its walls to shake and the ground to vibrate.

Del's body was at the medical examiner's office. Pascale had let it be known that the family would hold an open house that night for people to stop by. When I decided to make the trip I had imagined a big funeral—an event at which I could have gone unnoticed, a church somewhere with a lot of people milling around. I envisioned myself with time to get a feel for things, to see Pascale, Ida, Nicole, Sid, maybe even Del's father, Andre, before they saw me, and to make contact only if it seemed right or even possible. Now I was walking straight for the front door of the tiny, near-vacant living room and felt conspicuous already.

Gail, about to knock, asked, “Are we the only ones here?” She looked at me. “It's not too late, we can still…”

The door opened.

A tall woman with short reddish-brown hair and square-framed glasses large for her face peered out at us. A smile formed as she acknowledged first Gail and then Katie. Reaching me, her eyes lingered with confusion, and then an almost imperceptible lift in her forehead suggested something else. Suspicion? I stood quietly and watched Pascale as she grew increasingly certain she recognized me. She should have recognized me. I was a little taller, maybe a little thinner, and definitely paler. But my hair was the same—light brown, shoulder length, curly. I had the same green eyes and round face, the same smile.

And I had been close to her once, found my place within these thin walls, tiny rooms, and one bathroom for six—including me, seven—people. I had nestled my way inside this home, in which the crowdedness, the deprivation, the chaos, even the violence converged into a thick mélange of fraught but passionate attachments and fierce loyalties. Pascale had considered me one of her own, insisted I call her Mom. She had come to rely on my cooperative spirit, good grades, and supposed moral certitude as examples to the others. She expected me in the afternoons, cooked the dinners she knew I liked, enjoyed having me around there. I had felt more loved in this house than I did in my own—more seen and appreciated.

Now she crossed her arms, shook her head from side to side, and said, “How do you like that? Look what death dragged in.” Her accent was as heavy as it had ever been.

Gail was eyeing the car. She backed up a few steps to secure herself an unobstructed escape route.

“We mean you no disrespect,” Katie started to say. “Jenna has come all the way from California…”

But I remembered her, knew her comment to me was an invitation, that she was actually glad to see me. “Hello, Pascale,” I said matter-of-factly.

“So you're a lawyer, I hear.” I nodded. She continued, “Del's little girl, my grandbaby, belongs with us.”

At first, I didn't understand the comment. Then I realized the reason Pascale was glad to see me was because she had a plan and she needed me to help make it happen: she wanted custody of Khila. My confusion became awe as I began to wonder if I was there because Pascale wanted me to be. Had she orchestrated this reunion? It had struck me as odd when Gail was among the first people Nicole notified after Del died. But it made sense if Pascale had told Nicole to call Gail, because Gail was her most direct link to me. This family did not ask for help easily, but they needed it now. And the only way Pascale could let me be involved was if she thought I thought it was my idea.

“The law is on her father's side, but I can try.” Accepting the challenge and hearing it as the invitation back into the fold I'd given up on a long time ago, I boldly stepped past Pascale into the tiny living room and left Gail and Katie, mouths agape, in the doorway. Now inside a space small and cluttered, the immediacy of the walls and the drop of the ceiling left me jarred and disoriented. The room was shrinking around me. No, I'd remembered this house as much larger than it was.

Pascale came as close to pleading as I imagine she ever could. “I was raising her, Jenna. When Khila wasn't with Del, she was with me. He can't just take her away.”