South by Southeast (8 page)

Maria followed Chela as she walked away. Maria gently took her arm. “Wait, baby, don't trip. Don't be mad at me.”

“I'm not mad,” Chela managed to whimper.

“I thought you were down with everything. Everybody knows this is the place to hook up with rich guys. I don't want you to leave by yourself, but I'm not ready to go yet. Now I gotta stay and kiss Raphael's ass, make an excuse for you.”

“I'll be okay,” Chela said. “I'll take a cab.”

“Don't forget to go get your real ID from Julio.”

Damn, she
had
almost forgotten. That would add more money to the cab ride. She hoped she wouldn't get to Julio's designated corner and find he'd left with her license. A hassle with the DMV would be poetic justice. She hated filling out forms and having her picture taken, a remnant from her time in the system.

“I won't forget.”

“You sure you're okay?” She sounded like the old Maria again, a big sister.

Chela nodded but couldn't speak. Her sob was buried in the shallowest space in her throat, stinging to be free.

Maria grinned, and her face lit up. “Maybe Raffi's friend will get over you and give me a chance, right? But did you see the nose on that guy?”

Chela let out a small laugh, and Maria hugged her until they were laughing together. Maria had once given her the advice to pretend ugly guys were Brad Pitt, but the latest Brad had just looked like another old guy she would never be interested in. In those days, she hadn't had anybody in her head she wanted to have sex with. Before her grandmother died and she ran away from home, she'd never kissed a boy, or even thought about it. When her friends had been out having a life, she'd been helping Gramma manage her bedpan and refilling her meds.

Laughing brought real tears to Chela's eyes. The club was too hot, too crowded. If she didn't get outside, she would scream. But it
was hard to let go of Maria, who was twirling her around to the endless beat, trying to cheer her up and make up for letting her claws out. It was hard to walk away from the
boom-boom
on the speakers that mirrored her heartbeat, the sheen of Maria's sweet-smelling dark hair, and the knowledge that Raphael thought she was beautiful. Chela had not felt powerful in years. Beauty was the only power that mattered here.

Phoenixx was a trap, and Chela had been fortunate to escape. This time.

I DIDN'T HAVE
a good reason to be worried only a few minutes after midnight—still early by club standards—but I was worried plenty. I'd hoped Chela would take one look at Club Phoenixx, size up her friend's world, and realize she had made a mistake. I thought I heard the doorknob rattling a dozen times, expecting to see Chela's sheepish face, and I was always wrong. I'm not the nervous type, but her absence wore on me as if part of me knew our future.

Why hadn't I tried to bribe her with hard cash? That had worked in the past. Although I was already tired, I found myself pulling on a rumpled black T-shirt and my snakeskin boots. Underdressed, maybe, but I'd have no trouble getting into the club. The name Tennyson Hardwick mattered in shallow circles, even if it was for all the wrong reasons.

When I opened the door, Chela was standing in the hall, searching her purse for her key.

We were equally surprised to see each other, but she recovered first. “Going for a walk?” Chela said. “Oh, wait—swimming, right?”

“Busted,” I said. “I was about to go to Phoenixx and get all Double-O-Seven on you.”

Instead of complaining, Chela gave me one of the shocks of my life: she hugged me right there in the hall. A tight, needy hug. I pulled away to give Chela a closer look. Her clothes weren't disheveled, but Chela's eyes were red-rimmed behind her mascara's mask.
I hope I don't have to go out there and hurt somebody
, I thought.

“Nothing,” Chela said, before I could open my mouth to ask what had happened. “It's just . . .” She wiped the side of her eye. “Have you ever wished you were somebody else?”

I'd been hoping for this kind of frank conversation with Chela since the day we'd met. Somehow, my wish for her evening had come true, but it carried pain I wouldn't have wished on an enemy. I guided her into the empty living room, and we sat on the sofa. Dad and Marcela had been in bed since Chela left, so we wouldn't have to censor our words.

“Have I wished I could change my past?” I said. “Hell yeah. But I don't dwell there, Chela. Yesterday is gone. Instead, I live my life new every day.”

“Usually, it doesn't seem real,” Chela confessed in a whisper. “Those days.”

“But it got real tonight?”

Chela nodded. She crumpled, resting her head on my shoulder. “How can I ever tell B, Ten?” she said. “
Not
telling feels like lying, but . . .” A sob raked its way from her throat. “I'm so disgusting. No matter what, it's always there. I ruined my whole life . . .”

“That's not true. Don't believe that for a minute.”

“Every new guy I meet, I'll be afraid he'll find out.”

“April knows about me,” I said. “She knows about Mother. All of it.”

Chela's sobs went silent as she gazed up at me, her nose red. “Really?”

“From day one,” I said. “A cop source told her. Trying to scare her off. It didn't work.”

As soon as I said it, I realized April wasn't a good example of hope.

“Is that why she dumped you?” Chela said.

My throat tightened as I shook my head.
Yes,
a voice whispered. “No,” I said. “She was ready to be married, and I wasn't. She wasn't rejecting who I was—it's who I
am
.”

“Maybe we're always the same person,” Chela said. “Deep down. Like you said.”

“That's not exactly it,” I said, wishing I'd chosen my words more carefully on the balcony. “The more we can look at where we've been . . . it's easier to stay on the path to where we're going.”

I was talking to myself as much as Chela. Hell, I needed to write that down.

“I want what you had,” Chela said. “Somebody I can tell. Should I tell B?”

I sighed, stroking the tangles out of Chela's hair. Bernard Faison, Chess Genius, didn't seem a likely candidate for a cold dose of History 101.

“It's beautiful that you want to tell him,” I said. “And maybe you will, one day. But B's just a kid, Chela. Two parents. Million-dollar house in the Valley. There's no way he could see where you came from. I'll be the one you can say anything to. Deal?”

In Chela's silence, she didn't seem satisfied. I could almost hear April's voice warning me not to try to be a substitute for a man in Chela's life, even if I was only trying to protect her. April never forgot that Chela had tried to climb into bed with me the first time I brought her to my house. That was all she'd known. Instinct made me stop stroking Chela's hair.

“If it's right to tell Bernard, you'll know,” I said. “Only you. I can't tell you when.”

“I will,” she said, her voice brightening. “I want to. As soon as I get back.”

Good luck with that, kid
, I thought. Disaster might be on
Chela's horizon, but how could I blame her for wanting someone who could accept her blemishes? The truth is powerful enough to change everything, and nothing is harder than change.

I just hoped Chela would be ready.

I woke up in a cold sweat that night, but it had nothing to do with Chela.

The dream was so vivid that I checked my face and skin for wounds. I'd been fighting for my life. I could almost smell Spider's cigarette smoke and adrenalized sweat in my room.

My nightmare gallery has a colorful cast of characters. Sometimes it was the corrupt LAPD cops who nearly killed Chela and tried to end my life in the desert. Or the bear of a man I wrestled in the Florida swamp. More and more, Dad showed up in my dreams: a husk confined to a hospital bed in the nursing home he had been lucky to escape.

In Miami, my dreams were about Spider. I only met Spider a couple of times, but I might have known him better than anyone. He was a South African drummer extraordinaire, and the fiercest knife fighter I'd ever seen. We weren't on good terms the last time we met, which is a kind of tragedy; under different circumstances, I would have liked to share a beer with Spider. Sweated together with him in a dojo. Instead, I'd had to kill him.

Maybe the dreams of Spider came back to ask me if the right man had been left standing. He was the better fighter; I was just nastier. I had justice on my side, but I'm the last person who could define that word.

I wasn't due on the set until noon, so I'd planned to sleep in like Chela; but my dream woke me before daylight. I'd lost interest in sleeping, so I threw on some sweatpants and went to the kitchenette to fix the morning's first coffee.

Dad had beaten me there, with the pot already brewing and the news playing low on the living-room TV. CNN was Dad's true religion. Dad had always been an early riser, but five thirty was pushing it even for him. He was in the hotel's terry cloth robe he wore most of the day when he wasn't going out. He grunted a greeting, and I grunted back. While he pulled out a coffee mug for me, I checked the mini-fridge to see if we had any eggs left. Dad and I might not talk much, but we liked to cook together. We hadn't had many chances since Marcela moved in.

As I studied Dad's profile, I noticed that his cheeks had hollowed in the past year. Even while he'd taught himself to walk and speak again, time was a thief. I knew exactly how he would look in his casket.

“What?” Dad said.

I shrugged. “Life,” I said, although I was thinking about just the opposite.

Dad nodded. “I . . . thank the Lord every time I open my eyes.”

I dumped three sugars into my coffee and so much milk that it turned cold. I wondered what it felt like to know, really
know
, that the next five years, or two years, aren't promised to you. I'd had that realization when I fought Spider and expected to die at his hands. But if I lived long enough, what kind of old man would I be?

“Never told you . . .” Dad began. “Saw Shapiro before I left.”

Dr. Joel Shapiro was Dad's cardiologist, an office I'd visited often. Shapiro's name made my heart skip. Dad would have reported good news right away.

Dad's pause was endless, so I prodded. “And?”

He shrugged and did something rare: he looked me dead in the eye. “And whatchu think? Bad heart's a bad heart. He says . . . I need surgery.”

The kitchen's fluorescent light seemed to dim. Suddenly, I wanted to go back to bed. The last time Dad was in a hospital was because he'd suffered chest pains after helping me investigate a
case, and we'd both breathed a sigh of relief when the doctors sent him home.

“What kind of surgery?”

“Don't matter, Ten. Won't do it. Chances are fifty-fifty for . . . complications. We don't think it's worth it.”

“Marcela knows? Since when?”

“She was there.”

I wanted to escape back to my dream with Spider. Marcela had accepted Dad's proposal at the party even knowing about his bad prognosis? Marcela was an RN, so a cardiologist probably couldn't tell her anything she hadn't guessed. Why had he waited so long to tell me?

“What does it mean if you don't get the surgery?” I said.

Instead of answering, he looked at me as if I were a toddler. Dumb question.

“Well . . . what do we do?” I said.

Dad shook his head. “What do we do? Eat. Sleep. Wake up. What we always do.”

I didn't feel anything, just as I hadn't when I'd felt Spider's neck break. The past year had flown by, as would the next. And the next, and the one after that, until one day a doctor with sad eyes would say to me what one had said to Dad.

My coffee tasted like milky chalk, so I put the mug down. “Shit.”