Work Text:
enter again the sweet forest,
enter the hot dream, come with us—
everything is broken up, and dances.
THE DOORS – “GHOST SONG”
They took Jesse away in broad daylight. All down the block, doors were hanging open; a single shot could have been a cap gun or a car backfiring, but nothing else could have been mistaken for the sound of that spray. At first they’d shouted and dove behind cars and ducked under windowsills and behind couches, but the departing roar of the bikes had made it clear what had transpired, and then their curiosity had gotten the best of them and they’d crept down the street to stare. For the rest of Mia’s life, she would remember looking up and seeing a little boy sitting on his father’s shoulders—both of them watching, wide-eyed, while Jesse lay in her lap dying, and Jesse did not open his eyes and they did not look away. Because the boy had been blonde and because Mia had known Jesse when he’d been five years old, over time there would be a kind of convergence in her memory, until in her mind, when she’d raised her head, she had met Jesse’s bright eyes, and watched the slow understanding dawn that he’d been going to die.That it had been his own scrawny nineteen-year-old body lying prone on the sidewalk, bleeding out between Mia’s fingers and into the creases of her bent knees and onto her jeans. And he'd bled dry and it had stained the dusty asphalt. Then the sirens.
Then the ambulance. Then the paramedics. The stretch after that would always be a bright hazy blur. When everything that could have been tried in a driveway had failed, there was some hesitation, some brief dispute about how to lift him. In the end one man slid his hands under Jesse’s neck, and cradled his head.
Mia watched them carry him away and knew in that moment that she would remember him as a body, as dead weight, his head tipped back and his slack left arm hanging from the stretcher. They had overlapped for one year in high school and one year in elementary school. She’d seen him sprout up and she had known him as a fidgety, weedy first-grader. For three years he’d been in and out of the house and the D-T and the bodeguita, and he’d scuffed the soles of his boots against the floor in the kitchen and she’d snapped at him, and after long Sunday lunches she had sent him to gather up plates for her. But now when she pictured him she would picture him like this, his body still limp because rigor mortis had not had time to set in, so his fingers were spread when they folded his hands across his chest, not curled into fists, and she could see the chipped black paint on his fingernails.
Later she remembered that Dom had seen their father’s body pulled from the charred chassis, and felt a new kind of sympathy for him, although not enough to forgive him for anything. When she’d been sixteen she’d been able to get a copy of the autopsy report. She had read it lying on her stomach in her bed, spreading loose pages out across the comforter. The pictures that should have been attached had been curiously absent, but for years she had carried certain phrases and findings with her. His back had fused to the leather seat. His chest had fused to the harness. His arms and legs had been contorted in heat-induced contracture. His skin had sloughed off and exposed the joints in his knees and elbows, and there had been charring on the articulating surfaces of the bones there.
The phrase that had stayed lodged in Mia’s head for the longest time, that had looped as she’d lain awake at night and as she’d sleepwalked through her last two years of high school, had been: cherry-red lividity of the soft tissues and blood.
-
By 2004 Mia was working as a waitress again and Letty was coming to see her in the early hours of the morning. At some point they had made a silent pact not to acknowledge this arrangement, and not to talk about the past at all. When the waitstaff were let out an hour after close, she would scan the sidewalk. Sometimes she would find Letty idling at the curb.
Sometimes she would find Letty in the back alley, smoking and shooting the shit with the line cooks. The food was French and finicky but almost all the cooks were Dominican, so they got along with Letty, who remembered enough of the slang.
The restaurant was a French bistro in Silver Lake and was called Caillerie, which acted as a litmus test for people who booked reservations over the phone; anyone who pronounced it with a short a and a hard l to rhyme with tail was base and therefore turned away. All that even though caillerie was not a real French word but a portmanteau; caille from quail and the suffix swiped from gallerie and brasserie. This had been explained to Mia on her first night; she had thought it had been stupid then and she thought it was stupid now. When the waitresses were talking to each other they called it Calories. They were all on the same diet, which was easy to follow because it had two rules. You only ate if you were drunk, and even then only at the crack of dawn.
Mia was the oldest of them all at twenty-four and the only one who was not actively trying to become an actress or a model. There was some distance between them for these reasons, and because Mia also did a little less cocaine, but she shared her cigarettes and gave them ride home sometimes and went clubbing with them after work. The restaurant closed very late to accommodate the young, stylish set, and when they had finished stacking chairs on tables and rolling silverware into black cloth napkins, they left as a pack in their tight black dresses and went to dance in the Art District, or sometimes to warehouse raves in Koreatown.
Letty was working at a twenty-four-hour corner liquor store, and came to meet her three nights a week when her shift ended an hour before Mia’s. Frequently she was drunk when she arrived, which Mia didn’t like but tolerated anyway.
Realistically, there were maybe four jobs Letty could have held down; Mia thought that she was happy that Letty had fallen into this one, because all the others would have ended with Letty in prison for aggravated assault and/or grand theft auto. Happy was not the right word. She was not invested enough in Letty’s life to be happy for her. She was relieved because she had known Letty longer than any other person in Los Angeles, and had also spent more than enough hours in police interrogation rooms.
On this particular day Mia cleaned up on tips but also had her ass groped twice—once as she leaned into the pass, by a man coming out of the bathroom, and once as she turned away from a crowded table. Ordinarily it was not this bad; she was functional scenery rather than a person. She saw men’s attention flit momentarily to her individual attributes, but there was never any question regarding why she was there.
But today they were handsy and it pissed her off, enough that she had to duck into the storage closet and breathe in and out through her nose and force herself to relax her shoulders. She had not committed until that moment to going out with them that night, even though she knew that Letty would be waiting for her. Sometimes she made Letty drive her home, and got wine-drunk on the couch with her, watching mindless television. When she came back out, though, she spotted the first man who had palmed her on the other side of the restaurant, laughing, and his teeth were clear veneers, huge and white, and somehow that pissed her off further. At that point burning off steam started to appeal to her, and she ate the Luxardo cherry out of his date's Manhattan before she brought it to her, and told Chelsea, who worked the hostess stand, to wait for her after.
-
If the club had a name, Mia missed it. It was another windowless warehouse in Koreatown. It was bookended on both sides by other brick-walled warehouses and Mia guessed that these must have also been converted into something, but she could not think of what; maybe other clubs, or art galleries. She was carded. Letty was not. Letty seemed to know the bouncer, who had piercing blue eyes but in every other respect looked like Mia’s brother.
Inside the bass was boosted insanely and the floor felt like plyboard sheeting, maybe cork mats, slanting in places and catching under Mia’s black heels. Her feet ached already, but she hadn't brought shoes to change into. The light was blue and strobing. The rest of the waitstaff dispersed to convert cash into coke and tabs with maquiladora efficiency.
Mia was in the mood tonight, but not enough to handle dealers, so she danced alone until she caught a glimpse of Chelsea, who owed her money. There was no chance that they would be able to hear each other over the music, so with their hands they had a silent argument and then left for the bathroom together. Letty watched this, probably smirking, or tonguing at the inside of her cheek. Mia couldn’t see her and assumed she was leaning against the wall somewhere, obscured by bodies; it was just that she’d known Letty all her life and one of the few things she could still tell with complete certainty was whether Letty’s gaze was on her.
The bathroom was disgusting, barely more than a cubicle, at the end of a winding high-ceilinged passageway lined with industrial tubing. Mia squinted into the scratched mirror and saw that she had smudged liner under her eyes. Chelsea fished the plastic bag out of her bra.
Suddenly Mia’s nose was itching inside and she was longing for the quick numb rush, and she bent over the sink and did a bump, a modest one, using her house key. She was more of a lightweight now than she had been at twenty-one. Outside the music seemed to change as though a different DJ had come on; it was still house but with a blurrier, trance-ier sound, four-on-the-floor being piped up from under deep water.
In a minute she would be either unbearably horny or unbearably angry, which for years she’d thought of as a single emotion. At least two sides of the same thin coin. So she left the bathroom, pushing past another waitress, a new hire named Gabrielle, and went looking for Letty.
It didn’t take very long. Letty knew what she’d been doing and she had a thing for Mia like this, sweaty and irritated. She was waiting at the edge of the floor, and Mia noted that she had spilled something on her shirt. When she hooked a finger into Letty’s belt loop, she could feel that the hem above it was still damp.
“Yeah?” Letty said into her ear, answering her own question before she asked it. The same stickiness was on her breath. “You having fun, girl?”
They slipped out through a fire exit and Letty pressed her up against the brick wall, and hiked Mia’s black dress up over her right hip; on her left was the mouth of the alleyway. When she pressed her fingers into her, mouthing at Mia’s shoulder, Mia was briefly only focused on the buzzing and vibrating of her touch-sense, the way she was feeling only one sharp burst at the beginning of each discrete second. It was like having sex over a staticky connection, and she turned her head to one side to feel, against her lips, the texture of Letty’s hair.
It still amazed her sometimes that she and Letty had kept on doing this, three years out from the thrill of sneaking around behind Dom’s back and five years out from a time when Mia had almost thought she’d loved her. Granted, Letty lived with her, and they split the payment on the second mortgage and the utility bills. When Mia had to search for a reason for anything inevitably it was money; everyone she’d ever known had lived under the shadow of some kind of debt, real or looming. Some had died in debt, like her father. Some had died over a debt. Jesse had died owing Johnny Tran a dented white Volkswagen Jetta.
And then there was the Charger, which belonged to Letty. Mia’s Acura was nearing the ten-year-mark. Sometimes in the afternoons the engine turned over and sputtered, and she went upstairs and dragged Letty out of her bed and Letty drove her to Silver Lake and dropped her off there.
Mia had sold the Charger to Letty for the absurd amount of five thousand dollars, because it had been important to Letty for whatever reason for it to feel like a real transaction, when Mia would have gone to the DMV with her for free or even paid her a week of tips just to get rid of that fucking car. There was blood soaked into the leather. There was blood and sweat sizzling on the hot block of the engine. Mia thought about of all this as Letty fucked her and her back scraped against the brick wall.
Coke gave her an incredible ability to multitask when Letty’s fingers were in her. As she came in the glow of the sodium vapor light, her legs trembling, she was silently making a list of the stupidest things she’d heard Letty say recently, which included her thoughts on why the Vietnamese would never make a good car and that when Mia was tan, she looked “native, like Cherokee.”
-
After this there was no point in staying because they had danced already, and besides they had twenty minutes at most before the club shuttered. Letty had parked way down the street somewhere and went to retrieve the car. Mia went to the curb and stood there, shivering with bare legs in her heels, until she gave up—Letty really was taking her sweet time—and walked to the end of the block. There she found Gabrielle sitting on the curb, knees drawn up to her chest, staring into space vacantly, with the miserable glassy-eyed look of someone coming down hard.
Gabrielle was blonde and nineteen and one of the aspiring models, and was quietly hated by everyone because she was beautiful and they had to run her drinks for her. Also she was not really French, although she'd been hired for her name, but Mia had been hired for her legs and hair, and could not resent her for that, not really. In the moment, Gabrielle looked up at her with wide, watery blue eyes, and it was not a maternal instinct; it was like seeing a cardboard box of kittens abandoned by the median.
Mia scanned the street. Letty was still not there. God. She asked, “Are you waiting for someone?”
Gabrielle digested the question slowly. Mia could see her connecting the individual words together. She moved her head in an ambiguous way; it was neither really up-and-down nor left-to-right.
She’d been roofied or something. She’d taken pills. This was not just the comedown; her shoulders were trembling and her mouth was slack and wet, and Mia looked down at her thighs to see if they were scratched, if her knees were bruised, if her dress was hiked up or torn. She saw no indication that Gabrielle had been raped and dumped on this street corner. That was something; it meant at least that she would not have to speak to a cop.
There were Letty’s lights, finally, sweeping the pavement, and Mia made up her mind and bent down and asked, “Where do you live?”
Again, Gabrielle just stared at her. Thene her eyes slid closed and she nodded forwards, but only for a moment; her chin struck her knees with a hard bone-on-bone crack and she lurched up, blinking.
Mia got her to her feet, just barely, by tugging too hard on her shoulders. Letty had pulled up and was watching them with some interest through the window.
“She’s coming home with us,” Mia told her, opening the door to the back seat. From the way Letty’s mouth curved up, she wondered if Letty thought she meant that they were going to fuck her.
-
Letty bore down, down, down on the gas petal until she was going thirty over, and at the same time started to explain the theory behind it, that when you drove trashed you had to just let the road flow past and try to find zen. Going slow was when you overthought and fucked up and rear-ended someone, or scraped your mirror against a whole long row of parked cars. As she rambled on about this she kept glancing into the rear-view mirror, but Gabrielle was asleep in the back seat and evidently was not listening to her.
Mia was. She admired people who could be confidently wrong. Once she’d been one of them, but she had lost that ability three years earlier. Now she could not even manage to be confidently correct; she found herself stating objective fact in an annoying uptalk-y way, and asking, Are you one hundred percent sure? When at twenty-one, she would have said, That’s fucking bullshit, Vee. Cut the crap.
She knew exactly when she had lost it: when she had not said, Fucking turn around, when she had not said, Why the fuck would you let him see this? Don’t you know he’ll be scarred for life? Don’t you know he’ll see this every night for months as he tries to sleep, don’t you know—
But she’d turned silently back to Jesse and when she’d opened her mouth to sob it had made no sound.
And here was Letty with her blown-black pupils and this idea that could not have been stupider, still talking as they blew through a red and an unbelievable cacophony of horns followed them. Part of them had died on the same morning in 2001, Mia thought idly. It was a realization she’d had hundreds of times over the years. Now she was unsure of her place in everything and even more unsure of how to fix that, and Letty drank too much and sometimes said things that made Mia think she had zero expectation that she would make it to thirty.
And now she was twenty-six. And Mia was twenty-four, with the same expiration date looming as all the aspiring models and actresses, but at least they were working towards something. She had no hope of going anywhere. She couldn’t marry rich because it was becoming apparent to her that she would not be able to marry anyone; with a community-college degree she was never going to make any real money. She wouldn’t be remembered and she would have nothing to show for all these years, not even DVDs or reruns or catalogs to point to, or old magazines in cardboard boxes at the Salvation Army. As it was, only Letty was going to remember her, and Letty had a startling ability to forget almost anything. Occasionally Mia was searching for some detail from their shared childhood, from her teenage years in which Letty had been a fixture at the garage and parked in front of the PlayStation and at the dinner table. “That’s all a blur, man,” Letty said, and laughed, and could never help her.
In the back seat, Gabrielle made a soft retching noise. But when Mia turned, she had not thrown up on herself; she was conscious again, and was staring with heavy-lidded eyes through the window.
“Hey, what are you on, anyway?” Letty turned all the way around to get a good look at her, reaching back between the seats to prod at Gabrielle’s bony knee. “Going down or coming down?” Gabrielle blinked at her blearily, yawned, and said nothing.
Suddenly, she had a lot of sweat beading at her temples. Up and down and all over, Mia thought, and rolled down her window.
“Letty,” she said. “Shut up and look at the road.” Sometimes she surprised herself. Then again, she was not a very good judge of herself. She had never been.
She watched the palm trees pass. What was the plan? What were they even going to do with her? They were in the neighborhood now, with just two turns until Adelaida. There was the master bedroom and Dom’s old room, but Mia had no interest in trying to get her up the stairs. They would have to put her on the couch and find her an afghan and a mixing bowl. There was already a years-old stain on the closest part of the rug from Letty, and underneath it on the hardwood its dark, scuffed mirror image, where her stomach acid had soaked through and actually etched the floor.
Mia was thinking about this as Letty pulled into the driveway. She had to walk around and open the car door for her. Gabrielle stumbled out and made it three steps. Then she was down on her knees, vomiting into the grass. Then she was collapsing and she was flat on her stomach, head lolling, and when Mia cursed and rushed to her and slid her hand under her chest, there was no pulse there.
For the first time in three years something that Mia had learned in a classroom mattered, and the world and the wet lawn and the white house looming slid into another blur. After all this time Mia's hands moved on their own and placed themselves and she began to press, down and in until she was the one moving the still blood inside her. At the same time she heard her voice get shriller and shriller until she was screaming at her, screaming in time with the compressions at Letty to call 911, fucking call 911, and Letty was wild-eyed and searching through all of her pockets, and as Mia bent and sealed her mouth over Gabrielle's, she could hear her on the phone.
-
The ambulance came in Mia’s memory, silently, without its siren. But that couldn’t have been right. She must have missed it with the pulse roaring in her eardrums. She remembered the helicopter’s slow, spiraling descent, the breeze from its blades, the kicked-up dust. She remembered the ambulance that had come for Jesse. That time she had seen it round the corner, and it had slowed; there had been some inexplicable hesitation. Even as Jesse had lain in plain sight on the sidewalk, bleeding, the driver had crept forward, looking for a house number.
This time it just appeared, nose angled into the driveway. She was still pressing, breathing, pressing, Its doors shot open and discharged four paramedics in navy-blue coveralls. They were speaking—shouting—and Mia heard it as radio static. There were hands beside her hands. When Letty pulled her back by her hips, she rose up blindly and went stumbling towards the curb.
Mia had seen a defibrillator used once before and in snatches could remember the yellow plastic the bulky case like a plug-in engine monitor and the fat rubber buttons. They had taken Jesse’s shirt off in one long rip. It had been soaked through by then. And there had been no movement; the electric current had flowed straight through to the ground. And Gabrielle with her black dress wrenched down looked so fragile, so thin-skinned, with the pads dipping in and out of the hollows between her ribs. If her heart had been beating, Mia felt she would have seen it, throbbing red under her skin—but they were delivering the shock. They were pressing hard enough to splinter her ribs. She was spasming, mouth opening.
Letty was still somehow with them, Mia realized; in their frantic motion they hadn’t noticed, but Letty’s hand was under her jaw, fingers curling in and searching. And before she saw Gabrielle’s chest rise, Mia met Letty’s gaze and knew she was alive. She did not believe it, not at all, but it was something else to know.
One paramedic lingered as the rest were loading her onto the stretcher. “Thanks for calling,” he said, and nodded a little at Letty, as though she’d acted on her own, as if Mia had not had her mouth on Gabrielle's mouth, forcing air into her.
For once it didn't matter. As the ambulance doors closed, Mia caught a glimpse of Gabrielle’s blonde hair falling over the steel frame of the stretcher, and knew that she would remember that image for the rest of her life, and would see it in muzzy definition against the ceiling as she tried to fall asleep. Then it was leaving, its red-and-white lights coming back to life, and it was over.
Mia was coming down in every way. She tipped her head back; she could feel her nasal cavity draining into her throat.
“Shit,” Letty said, and Mia realized how solid she was, how physically real, the bulk of Letty’s warm breathing body taking up space beside her. She put her arms around Letty’s waist and closed her eyes. Letty exhaled and swayed her a little.
There was no blood on the sidewalk. No one had come to watch; these days half the houses on the street were vacant. And suddenly it was dawn, and the world held still in a spill of pale champagne-colored light.
-
They stood there in the cool air. “I need a cigarette,” Mia said, but when Letty nodded and reached deep into the pocket of her jeans, she winced, remembering that Letty smoked menthols.
Mia had never liked menthols because she liked a sharp delineation between the smoke and the stick of gum after. With mint on her tongue and tar in her lungs she could pretend it had all been erased cleanly. In the moment, though, a cigarette was a cigarette, and she let Letty light it for her and take one long drag, head bowed so that when she breathed out, the smoke spread out over the sidewalk. Then she took it from Letty’s fingers and brought it to her mouth.
She had the feeling of having delivered a baby—not of having had a baby, but of having wrenched a faceless woman’s legs apart and seen the bloody head crown. Both of them breathing so hard, three heartbeats, her fingers sliding against its soft skull. She remembered that her brother had been born in a parking lot, and she could see it so clearly. He had come free at last, with a suctioned release of the cunt, and someone had brought him up, red and wet and wailing, into the light.
The strangers who'd helped had shown up sporadically at Sunday lunches in Mia's childhood, but now she had not seen a single one of them in ten years. Mia had been born in a fourth-floor hallway of the old Franciscan hospital. Letty had been born, she knew, in San Cristóbal. Under what circumstances, she had no idea. She would have to ask Letty about it later.
She understood now that she had been tethered to this sidewalk by the red stain, and when she dropped the cigarette and ground it out, barely smoked, under her toe, she sensed that it was another thing she wouldn’t need to do anymore. For three years she had been carrying Jesse’s dead weight around with her. Without closing her eyes she’d been able to see how he’d looked at her, sheer relief for an instant before his eyes had rolled back that she'd been there. Then blood had come from his mouth and she had wiped at it, wiped at it, wiped at it with her fingers, and looked up at the boy, the not-Jesse who had become Jesse, and seen him realize that she had not been going to be able to save him.
But it had been the not-Jesse who she'd watched slowly lose his faith in her, she realized. It had been the little boy. Jesse had known nothing; he'd felt his eyes close, still believing he'd wake up. But now Mia looked at the end of the driveway and she remembered Gabrielle, the flutter of her eyelashes, and Letty curving her hand around her jaw and finding the pulse there.
If she’d stayed for any other reason, it had been in service of keeping Letty with her. But she understood now that Letty would have followed her anywhere. Now it was clear to her that Letty would dog her until Mia closed and locked some door and that opportunity ceased to be available to her. Now she saw that in all this time, Letty had had nowhere else to go either.
Mia imagined that she was Gabrielle’s mother, receiving the phone call and rushing to the new blocky complex on Marengo. Gabrielle’s mother, in her mind, had red lips and televangelist hair. In the elevator her fingers would shake and scrabble over the buttons. She would push it once, twice, three times, clutching her cell with white knuckles, or holding it to her chest. So slowly, the doors would close.
And when she arrived, finally, and burst into the room, Gabrielle would be awake, and Gabrielle would tell her. So now Mia was real and she would be remembered and so was Letty, and they had no money but all their lives ahead of them and a place to leave behind. It was all so obvious and still a revelation. The car was Letty’s now.
Letty was lighting up, and Mia watched the spark wheel dent the pad of her thumb. She waited for Letty to tuck the lighter away. She said, “I don’t need to live here anymore.”
Letty looked at her, but she’d always been more used to Mia than she should have been.
“All right,” she said. She followed Mia inside, spat into the kitchen sink, and then followed her up the stairs. The fraying green military-surplus duffel was still under the bed in the master bedroom, and she lay on her stomach on Mia’s bed and watched her pack her clothes and wrestle with the zipper.
-
In Escondido, it occurred to Mia that they were leaving the state, not just Los Angeles, and that actually Letty was taking them down towards the Mexican border. They hadn’t discussed this, except that it had always been Mexico—not any city in Mexico, but the idea of Mexico. The broader point had been that the CHP would have pulled up short in Chula Vista. Some level of cooperation was to be expected, but the cops south of the border were even more crooked than the LAPD. In Los Angeles, you had to keep cash in your glove compartment; in Baja California, the chotas had readers clipped to their belts and would ask you if you wanted to pay debit or credit. There was admittedly a nonzero chance that that was complete bullshit. Mia had heard it from Letty who had heard it from Dom who had heard it from Leon. And that had been five years ago.
They had to stop for gas. Ironically the station was called American, and the pumps were alternately red and star-spangled blue. In case you were worried, maybe, that you had slipped over the border already. Although in the post-9/11 world, Mia had also heard, you could no longer just stroll into Mexicali.
Letty went inside to pay and to use the bathroom. She might have been going to kneel and throw up. For the last two miles she’d been suddenly pale-faced and clammy.
Mia watched her walk away. She thought distantly that she should have been anxious that Letty might have been going to keel over, but she was not. They were too far from LA. The sun glare off the flat side of a parked semi was making her head ache. To feel the warmth against her back, she had gotten out of the car, but now she had to contort herself awkwardly to reach through the cracked-open window and retrieve her sunglasses from the case clipped to the visor. When she slid them onto her nose, it did very little.
Still she was glad to be on the road, to be miles from home, to now only be roped to Letty and the car. She had done the right thing, she thought, by tying them together. She trusted the world to send something her way to split them, and now when Letty left, she could trust her to take the Charger with her.
Mia could have let Dom drive away in it, or take a hammer to it, or take it up to the Valley and leave it in neutral and let it roll into the lake, or in a dry season and fencing permitting, the reservoir. She could have smashed the windshield in herself; she could have let it sit behind her house for another forty years. But she could not have sold that car.
The driver of the semi-truck came ambling back, then, and took a while, foot braced against the fender, to open its door. As he climbed into the cab and Mia watched him settle in the seat, she considered walking over. He was heading south, probably, from the way he’d angled himself, and she guessed that he could take her as far as the border. It was broad daylight, which made it seem less likely that he would rape her.
In her head, she ran briefly through a scenario where he tried to, and she said, No, but I’ll jack you off, and he said, Okay. He was very relaxed, she had to admit, for someone who had just tried to rape her. And she reached over into his lap and stroked him as they flew down the highway, and in the grand scheme of things it was nothing; he made the low, guttural sounds men made when they were trying not to moan, and she inspected the nails on her free hand or kept her gaze fixed on the horizon. He came with a grunt; it dripped down her wrist. He told her to open the glove compartment (did semi-trucks have glove compartments?). Inside she found paper napkins.
Letty was coming out of the mini-mart, holding a Styrofoam cup and a bottle of Snapple, and Mia decided that she did not in fact want to give a handjob to a trucker. Besides, he was pulling out already, jackknifing slowly around a parked Honda. Letty looked much better, like she had thrown up and then drank from the sink and splashed water in her face. Mia could see it dripping from her hairline. She could also see a pack of gum sticking out of Letty’s hip pocket, and she guessed would put it off a little longer.
As Letty crossed the parking lot, Mia waited to see whether her gaze would flick to the semi. It was not as big as the one on the highway to Thermal. The bed sat lower; no car could have slid under it. Letty did not seem to notice it at all.
When she was close enough, Mia took the glass bottle from her, levered her nail under the pop-top, and then changed her mind and handed it so that Letty could crack it open with her teeth. She didn’t have to say anything; Letty understood and did, grinning a little at her.
“Where are we going?”
Good, Mia thought; she had been waiting for her to ask. Otherwise she would not have said a word. At some point she might have reached for the wheel, if Letty had started to steer them into a long line at the crossing.
“I don’t know.” Letty said nothing and just waited patiently. She’d sucked an ice cube into her mouth and was letting it melt in the soft pocket of her cheek, leaning back against the driver’s-side door. “Arizona?”
Mia had seen the Sonoran Desert on TV and in coffee-table books and liked the idea of it—the dry lunar landscape, dust settling over the sidewalks and tinting them evenly the color of brick. Still, she said it mostly because she did not want to cross the border. That was what she had decided, surrounded by the split flag and cars with California plates. There was no reason for it when nothing real was chasing them. Her Spanish was not that great and she did not want to have to work under the table.
Watching Letty start the car, Mia remembered again how Jesse had looked at her in his last moments. Before that moment, she could not have said with certainty that he’d had any faith in her at all. It was extraordinary to be trusted like that, It was a kind of love—she understood suddenly that for all these years Letty had been in love with her, whether or not Letty had known, whether or not Letty knew now. It was extraordinary to be loved like that. It was extraordinary to be loved at all.
So they veered east and went rattling over the border into Yuma, where they rented a one-bedroom casita with iron bars over the windows and lived for three years, until they had an explosive fight over Letty’s drinking and Mia’s expectations and where all their money was going and Letty went peeling out of the driveway, leaving sticky black streaks of burnt rubber behind her. Mia heard through the grapevine later that Letty had come back after four days and circled the house, trying all the windows and doors, but the landlady had changed the locks by then and Mia was gone.