Authors: Luanne Rice
Malibu, for all its natural beauty and insular celebrity, loved to fight. No one ever agreed about anything, and the local papers were full of angry letters to the editor and scathing editorials on everything from these fancy stores to whether the high school football field should have lights. Lion was strongly in the no-light camp: he believed that light pollution was ruining America and that young people were better served by stargazing than Friday night football.
The hostess at Tra di Noi had his regular table ready—on the patio under an umbrella. Lion angled his chair to get into the full sun. He wore chinos and a faded red lisle shirt, a bit frayed around the collar. He’d bought it in Ravello on a long-ago visit to Gore Vidal’s Villa La Rondinaia—Swallow’s Nest. He’d been starring in a film with Sophia Loren, shot in Positano, and Gore had invited the cast to visit for the weekend. Now Gore was dead. Lion’s friends were dropping like flies.
“Campari and soda,” he ordered, and Julia did, too.
“The three woman just behind you are staring and pointing,” Julia said.
“What can one expect?” he asked.
He loved coming here. People recognized him. Even if they didn’t remember his name, they knew they’d seen him in “something.” He was one of the Los Angeles film-world fixtures who gave visitors that little thrill they so loved, when they had a “sighting” and were able to return home and say they’d seen stars.
The waitress brought their Camparis and took their order: they would share a sliced-artichoke-and-parmesan salad and each have the
tonnarelli al filetto di pomodoro
—basically spaghetti marinara with the freshest tomatoes in California.
“You know, when I come here with Graciela, it’s like magic,” he said. “We’re just a couple of old-timers, but people light up to see her. Or to see us together—they remember the film and . . .”
“Why do you keep doing it?” Julia asked.
“Doing what?”
“Chasing after her.”
“That’s not what I do! We’re old friends. I admire her, of course, but . . .”
“You’re in love with her,” Julia said. “You’ve never been able to hide it.”
“I don’t even try.”
“Lion,” she said gently, “she’s married to John, and she’s not leaving him.”
Lion took a large slug of his drink. It was most unbecoming to be lectured this way by Julia.
“Do you think I don’t know that?” he asked. “It’s quite obvious.”
“I just keep thinking about what you said the other day. John dedicating his books to her. He has another one in the works.”
“Lovely. And all I can give her is memories of film shoots and my old horses. How she used to love them. And me.” He stared at Julia as if daring her. “She did, you know. And neither one of us thought it wrong.”
“John might have disagreed.”
“Oh, come on. He knew. He was buried in his research, married to the most passionate woman on earth. Did he really think we were just horseback riding? To quote Irene in that wonderful remake of
The Forsyte Saga
, ‘I believe that misconduct can happen only where there’s no love.’”
“You remember the line.”
“I live by the line,” he said. “So, speaking of love, how is yours? And what made you disappear?”
“My love?”
“Roberto. Let’s not argue about it. Tell me about the trip—what were you up to?”
“He lost his daughter when he crossed the border. Five years ago, just like Jenny. I was trying to find out about her. But oh, Lion . . . there was nothing good.”
“Good Lord,” Lion said.
Lion sipped his Campari, filled with mixed feelings. Compassion for Roberto, of course; but was Julia serious about him? Lion had been thinking this was a fling—romance at the Casa. Julia had always been so caring, but did she know what she was getting into? Lion gazed at her with the affection of a man who’d adored her since her childhood. She had been through hell these last years.
“Not long ago you told me you were happy,” he said. “Are you still?”
“I think I am,” she said.
He laughed. The waitress delivered their salad and split it between two plates. “You’re not sure?”
“I’m not used to it,” she said. “Not like this.”
“You like him?”
She nodded, picking at her salad. One of the three ladies at the next table approached and asked if Lion would mind having his picture taken with her. Lion obliged, and that made Julia smile. Then the friends wanted photos. It took a few minutes, and by the time he sat down the pasta had arrived.
“Is Roberto the reason you want to move to Malibu?”
“No!” she said too quickly.
“Part of the reason?”
“I just liked that little house, that’s all.”
“Hm,” Lion said. But he could see it in her face. Her spirit had been resurrected since she’d arrived at the Casa, and her eyes looked alive again. She had something to look forward to, and how could he begrudge her that? The fact that Graciela was in Ireland, leaving no opportunity for a chance or planned meeting, weighed heavy on his heart. She’d sent him two postcards and had promised a love letter. But when he came right down to it, he had to admit the truth: she was with John. And that was her choice.
“I’ve always hated coming in second,” he said. “I’m a terrible loser. When friends of mine were nominated for Academy Awards, I loathed them. I’d pretend to be happy, send them telegrams and air-kiss them all over the place, but deep inside my chest was a wizened-up tar ball of resentment.”
“But you won!”
“Only once.”
She laughed. “You’re saying you feel that way about John?” she asked.
“How could I?” Lion asked, sighing. “He’s practically my dearest friend and one of the best men on earth. So, what did his letter say?”
“He offered me a chance to help him on his book about our ancestor.”
“The Irishman who fell in love with Mexico.”
“Yes.”
“Clearly you relate,” Lion said.
“Clearly,” she said softly.
They turned their attention to their meals. Julia pretended to be absorbed in swirling the strands of spaghetti. But Lion saw the worry lines in her forehead and knew, with all of his actor’s instinct, that she was thinking about Roberto and his little girl and whatever she had learned on her trip that had taken away hope.
Jack
He went out to Louella’s grave as he did every Wednesday morning, to clean off her headstone and her parents’, and to tend the flowers he’d planted there. One thing this part of the country had was dust. The slightest wind would stir it up. He used a rag to wipe down her name and dates and the words the stone carver had chiseled:
Most beloved wife on earth and in heaven
. He’d written that himself because it was true.
Sometimes he brought Sugar along, but not today. He watered the flowers with a gallon jug and stayed crouched there, as if he could talk straight through the granite slab to Louella. He felt haunted by his visit with Julia Hughes. She was searching for a little girl she didn’t even know.
He understood how loss, more terrible than you could believe possible, could come over you like a fever, turn you into a person you barely recognized. The day he learned Louella’s lymphoma had come back and spread, he’d wanted to die himself. During the last week of her life, he had felt like a desert animal full of desperation and thirst, and one night he’d howled into his pillow like no coyote he’d ever heard.
Louella would have known what to say to Julia. The best Jack had been able to do was call in Lathan Nez, and a big help he’d been. Sure, he’d had a few more details to add, but nothing conclusive that would tell Julia what she wanted to know. Julia wanted to tell the father whether he could bury his daughter or not. People needed that. Even if there wasn’t a grave to visit, they had to find a place in their minds to say goodbye.
That was the hell of the desert. So much uncertainty. When the border fence was built around the urban areas of California and Arizona, politicians thought it would stop illegal immigration by funneling migrants into “inhospitable”—deadly—terrain. Hell no, it didn’t stop them—and if the muckety-mucks had spent any time on the border before building the wall, they’d have known. They’d have realized that the migrants who make this trip feel they have no choice. They know it is their last trip—either they’re going to make it or die trying. They come to the States to provide for their families because their kids are starving.
Louella had always understood that. Married to a border agent, she’d volunteered with a group called Salvation who helped the migrants by placing water stations in the desert. They marked them with blue flags on tall masts so they could be seen from far away. It wasn’t a church group, but she had been a religious woman, and she’d put her faith to work.
“Don’t tell me about it,” Jack used to say to her. “You’re undermining what we’re doing. You’re encouraging them.”
“We’re keeping a few of them alive,” she said. “Sweetheart, the fence, the wall, is inhumane. People are dying.”
“That’s their choice,” he actually said. “They come here illegally, that’s the chance they take.”
“When did you get so hard?” she asked, holding his face between her hands. “They’re human beings like us, looking for a better life for their families. You understand that, don’t you? You did it for us.”
And it was true—at the start of their marriage, jobs were scarce and Jack didn’t have a college degree—just two years at Northeastern that didn’t count for much. He’d wanted to join the FBI, like his grandfather Brendan Leary, but they wouldn’t take him because of his lack of education. He’d given up his dream of working for the federal government, got a job selling copy machines.
God, had he hated that. It was the most soulless work imaginable, going into hermetically sealed office buildings and trying to sell pieces of crap designed to break down just so the businesses would be forced to buy the service contract as well. That job kept him and Louella afloat for a whole year, until he saw the posting for the Border Patrol position.
He could have called one of his granddad’s old protégés at the Bureau, but he hadn’t done that when he applied to the FBI and he wouldn’t do it now. If he couldn’t stand on his own feet, he didn’t deserve the job.
But he got it. And he was good at it. At first he carried with him his grandfather’s mission of public service, but right around the time the fence was built he changed. Seeing so much suffering, and chasing people through the desert just to keep them from dying and to deport them back to where they came from, dragged him down. And that’s when he got hard.
Louella loved him anyway, even when he came home in a mean mood. She told him it was because he was losing his humanity.
“It’s a humanitarian crisis,” she said. “And you’re part of the problem. That’s why you can’t sleep at night.”
He hadn’t even told her about the beatings his guys gave the migrants they caught, sometimes pushing their faces into cacti. They were supposed to carry water in their vehicles, and half the time they didn’t, and the people they picked up would be delirious with dehydration, and they’d drop them off at the processing center, take away their medication—some of them diabetic, going into insulin shock. More than once Jack had himself used his blackjack to hit migrants trying to escape.
Louella dressed in white to go to her volunteer job. Long pants, a long-sleeved shirt, a white scarf around her neck, and a wide-brimmed white hat. Jack knew it was because white reflected the heat, and where she had to walk carrying water to refill the
agua
stations—sometimes a mile or so into the desert—it was hotter than blazes. He often thought of what the migrants must have thought, seeing her appear like an apparition, calling out in Spanish, “Hola, mis amigos! Tenemos agua, comida, y medicina para todos
.
”
He plucked some dead blossoms off the flowers he had planted at her grave. She had been moved by the Rosa Rodriguez story. Of course he had told her, and by then she had helped him start meditating, relaxing, seeing his work as a way to help, not hurt others. She was his savior.
He remembered one of the last cases before he retired—Fernanda Cruz Castillo. Her group of thirty had been walking at night when they tripped a sensor. ICE sent helicopters to hover over the migrants, very specifically to churn up the desert sand and create a dust storm. It disoriented everyone, temporarily blinding some, made them disperse. Agents with night-vision goggles picked up most of them, but several evaded arrest. Fernanda was one—not because she was adept at hiding, but because she’d gotten blisters and could barely walk and had fallen behind.
Her husband, Diego, had been among those picked up. He kept telling people at the processing center about his wife, but they didn’t respond. It was seventy-two hours later, when he was on the deportation line, that he caught Jack’s attention. He told him about Fernanda. Louella had just died, and he swore her angel was sitting on his shoulder. She told him what to do. Jack pulled Diego out of the line, took him in his Explorer to the spot where he’d last seen Fernanda.
Diego had been sitting with her, trying to encourage her to keep going, just before the helicopters came. They had three children at home in Oaxaca, staying with her parents, so Diego and Fernanda could try to get seasonal work in the States, make enough money to feed the family for the year. “Do it for the
hijos
!” Diego had begged her. “One more step, another step . . .” But her feet were raw and bleeding, and she couldn’t walk. She sat there crying, knowing she was letting everyone in the family down.
When the border agents came to capture the group, Diego ran to tell them about Fernanda. They shoved him into a prickly pear, the long spines going into his arms, hands, and face. They kept saying, “Show us your papers, your passport.” And he just kept telling them about Fernanda.
Driving him back to the spot, Jack saw that he had not received medical treatment. The cactus spines were still embedded in his skin, crusted with blood and pus.
“She has beautiful long brown hair, and she’s wearing an orange shirt,” he said. “Jeans and a pair of Nike sneakers.”