South by Southeast (6 page)

“Did you ever even find my mother, or was that just another cover story?”

My tongue froze. I don't think any question has ever hurt me so much. I had crossed new moral lines to find Chela's birth mother—information about Patrice Sheryl McLawhorn had been the bait to lure me into a job I hadn't wanted. My ethical sacrifice felt empty.

“You think I'd lie about something like that?” I said.

“Guess I don't know what you would do,” Chela said. “You tell me.”

I could barely keep my voice steady. “She's living in Toronto.” I gave Chela both the home and work addresses, which I had memorized. “I've got no reason in the world to lie about one of the worst disappointments of my life. And if you're gonna go that deep with
it, what are your plans with Maria tonight? A cup of coffee? Catch a movie?”

Chela's eyes fell away. She'd never learned how to back down with grace. “No,” she said quietly. “She's helping me get a fake ID. We're going dancing at a club called Phoenixx. Sorry if you don't approve, but it's the truth. I'll be fine.”

The truth was Chela's peace offering. At least I knew where she was going; half the cast lived at Phoenixx after hours, and I'd turned down invitations to hang out in the VIP room. I probably wouldn't even go to spy on her. Probably.

“If you even think you have a reason, call me,” I said. “And have the bartender open the bottle in front of you. Don't even
think
about drinking anything that's been out of your sight. Drinks get drugged.” I knew that from experience. A couple of years back, a drugged drink had nearly gotten me killed in a Florida swamp.

“Thanks . . . 
Dad,
” she said, lighter on the sarcasm than usual.

I wanted to tell her that her mother couldn't stand in our way unless we let her. And that I knew how much it had hurt when Chela had gotten her hopes up, only to let the mother who split and left Chela to be her grandmother's nursemaid close enough to damage her again. And that I understood why she couldn't flush Maria away, and maybe it was wrong to ask her to.

But I didn't say any of those things.

My heart was still ringing from the word
Dad
. Any man who has answered to that name knows why a nest of wasps was stinging my stomach as Chela walked straight toward trouble.

While Marcela and Chela rifled through her suitcase in Marcela's room, I told Dad everything, even the part about the fake ID. Then I waited for his lecture.

“Nothin' you can do,” he said.

“Like hell. And she's living under my roof?” I sounded like Dad, circa 1980. We had switched scripts. “I'll go in there and tell her she's staying home tonight. Period.”

“Better lock the doors and windows to keep her in,” Dad said, and flipped from the news to
Judge Joe Brown
.

Chela had run away from every home she'd ever known, even Mother's, so we were still surprised she had stayed with us so long. You lose the moral high ground when you spend years dodging the system, harboring a juvenile fugitive living under an alias. Chela was only a street name; none of us had gotten in the habit of calling her Lauren, the name her mother had given her. I suddenly wished we had. Instead, we'd kept her street name alive and well.

The wasps stung my stomach again.

Through the closed door, I heard Chela's cell phone ring with the screech of metallic rock. “She's already here!” Chela yelled from the bedroom, panicked. “She's downstairs.”

“Tell her to come on up and wait,” I said.

Much to my surprise, I heard Chela pass the message on.

“She said thanks anyway, but she'll wait outside.”

Of course. I went back to the balcony and peered down until I saw Maria in the neon glow. She was smoking a cigarette beside a parking meter in a low-cut gold dress that looked spray-painted on. Her barely harnessed cleavage made men stare as they walked past her. If Maria had been anywhere except Ocean Drive, she might as well have been wearing a sign for the cops. Would she be working at Phoenixx?

“Oh, hell no,” I muttered when I came back in.

Within a minute or two, Marcela and Chela emerged. Marcela's lips were tight with concern, but she fussed over Chela at the front door as if it was prom night. Compared with her club date, Chela looked like a prep-school student in leather pants, heels, and a conservative black blouse that could be office attire. Marcela buttoned the blouse nearly to her chin and helped her adorn it with a
string of faux black pearls. Not an inch of Chela's skin showed, but that wasn't much comfort. With dark mascara and blown-out hair, Chela didn't need a fake ID to look twenty-one and luscious as a sugar-frosted Fudgsicle. The girl needed a bodyguard.

“I'm gonna go down and introduce myself,” I said, and Chela gave me a look that said,
Don't you dare
. I sighed and pulled out a couple of bills and pressed them into Chela's palm. “Cab money. Don't get drunk, and don't get in anybody's car, hear?”

My wild imagination veered from date rape to international sex-slavery rings. I could barely keep a tally of everything I thought could go wrong.

Watching my worry, Chela's face melted into a soft smile. “Thanks, Ten. I'll be fine,” she said, and kissed my cheek before she slipped out the door.

I'll have the rest of my life to wish I'd found a way to keep her at home.

THIS CHICK LOOKS
nothing like me,” Chela said, examining the ID she'd rented from a guy working out of his minivan below Fifth Street. She'd left fifty dollars and her own license behind as collateral. The woman in the photo was about twenty-five, with a narrow face and curly blond hair. “Isn't this a white girl? Five foot four? Come on.”

Maria was undulating snakelike to the throb of the bass that seeped through Phoenixx's brick façade, leading Chela to the front of the line. Leggy women dressed in Cleopatra costumes strolled up and down the lines with drink shots on golden trays. Chela wondered how much waitresses at Phoenixx made a night in tips.

“Relax,” Maria said. “That's a Florida driver's license with a hologram. That's all they care about. He'll barely glance at your face. You're hot, so you're in.”

Chela was pleasantly stoned from the joint she and Maria had shared walking on the beach toward Fifth Street, and she remembered what she'd always liked about weed. Everything slowed down. Lights and colors were brighter. Music was crisper. The only drawback was the paranoia that made her keep staring at the photo, more and more convinced that she was about to get arrested. Signs outside
the club warned about prosecution for using a fake ID. Her heart raced as they got closer to the velvet rope.

“Are you sure?” Chela said.

“
Dios
, who
are
you?” Maria said. “You were never such a baby.”

Lillian Holly Jasper. Lillian Holly Jasper. Lillian Holly Jasper. The name printed on Chela's ID tumbled through her memory. D.O.B. January 5, 1987. The signature was a mess. What if she had to give a writing sample?

Chela wanted to tell Maria to forget it. She'd been bold in the old days, but Maria was right, easy living had dulled her edge. What kind of shit had Maria given her, anyway? A couple of hits, and she was losing it. Any door host would see how nervous she was.

Maria suddenly held her hand. “It's okay,
chica,
” she said. “I got you.”

Chela's head stopped spinning just as they reached the head of the line, where waiting customers glared at their brazenness.

The door host was a pro in black slacks and a black sports jacket and white shirt, as if he was in the Secret Service. He had an earpiece like in the L.A. clubs. His pen flashlight made Chela's heart sink. If he thought she was cute, nothing showed in his stern, bearded face.

“Back of the line, ladies,” he said.

“Can you call Hector?” Maria said.

Chela tugged back, still holding Maria's hand. “Why can't we just wait?” she whispered. Why was Maria drawing attention to them and her lame fake ID?

The door host sighed and peered back over his shoulder. He tapped at the window behind him, where a beefy Latino man was on a phone. The man's face lit up when he saw Maria. He grinned and gestured to the door host:
Let her in.

The door host unhooked the velvet rope, the path to freedom, and Chela thought she might be spared the humiliation of arrest
after all. But before either of them could pass, the host held out his palm. “IDs,” he said.

Maria went first. She was only twenty, so she had a fake ID, too, but the woman on her ID was her cousin. Maria breezed by.

Chela tried to summon her acting skills from drama class, but her hand still trembled when she handed over her license. The door host spent much longer on hers, studying it closely with his light, holding it near his face. Turning it over. Feeling for imperfections. Chela tried to keep a smile on her face, but maybe she was only gritting her teeth as if she was in pain. She wanted to hide herself when he turned his flashlight on her face.
I'm so busted
.

“My hair's dyed in that picture,” she said. The lie itched in her dry throat. “Obviously.”

He stared at her with steel-blue eyes. Laser eyes. “You look way better as a brunette,” he said, and waved her in.

Something happened then. The tension uncoiled, and Chela suddenly felt as loose as the Kid again,
catch me if you can
. She winked at the poor moron. “I'll remember that advice, gorgeous,” she said, and followed Maria with the Kid's walk, swinging her hips, riding her high heels. Someone from the line whistled.

“Save some for me, baby!” a man called out.

When Chela turned around to blow him a kiss, three or four guys cheered.

Maria's eyes danced. “That's more like it!” she said. “Where you been, girl?”

Chela wasn't sure where she'd been, but she was glad to be back.

The club's foyer was a dark tunnel painted in Day-Glo streaks, lit up like Picasso's untamed dreams in the bluish glow of a black light. Overhead, nearly microscopic bulbs blinked secrets in Morse code. The driving bass beat shivered the floor. A steady breeze of chilled, purified air from the heart of the club greeted her with scents of life and motion.

Chela's heart and spirit galloped. She'd asked Bernard to take her clubbing at one of L.A.'s under-twenty-one clubs, but it was hard to explain a dance club to someone who had never been to one. Besides, no lame teen club could recreate the sound.

“It's so alive in here!” Chela blurted, too close to Maria's ear. “I've missed you!” She hadn't known that she had missed anything or anyone from her old life, but the realization dizzied her. She and Maria were survivors on an epic scale.

Maria hugged her with one arm, and they walked like Siamese twins. “I've missed you, too, Chela! There's so much to tell you . . .”

The music swallowed their words. Maria opened her thin purse and pulled out a laminated photograph from the L.A. County Fair. A brown-haired princess, about two years old, stared back at Chela with big dark eyes. It might be Maria's baby picture, except for the photo's stamp from that same year.

“That's Esperanza!” Maria said.

“Wait . . . she's yours?”

Maria nodded, face beaming. “My life! She's with my aunt for now, but I'm gonna get a nice place soon, make her a home. Isn't she amazing?”

The dizzy feeling intensified. Maria had a daughter? The idea brought back the image of the shell of a Chevy Impala with dark windows and a stained old quilt draped over the backseat, stinking of pine-scented air freshener. Maria had hosted her parade of thirty-dollar johns in the Impala before it got towed from behind the little pastry shop off Sunset, which had the best powdered doughnut holes Chela had ever tasted. After Chela's first time alone with a man in the Impala—ten minutes with her eyes closed—she'd gone straight to the Sugar Shack and washed away the taste of him with crullers and coffee with too much sugar. That became her ritual. “See how easy that was?” Maria had said. Chela thought about the old-fashioned sugar server her grandmother kept on the kitchen
table, the one with patterns of linked strawberries, where Gramma treated herself to one teaspoon in her tea every morning—only one, because of her diabetes. Chela remembered the table for two she and her grandmother had shared, waiting for her mother to come home as she kept promising. Chela had waited for her mother until her grandmother died. And a few long, lonely, terrifying days after that.