Jodi Compton - Hailey's War

I eased the knife away from her throat. “You really just assumed I was dead, with no body, no news report, nothing? Next time, try to be a little more aspirational , will you?”

“You been expanding your word power, eh?” she said, amused.

“Yeah,” I said, starting to laugh. “I did a sleep-learning program while I was in my coma.”

Her laughter dried up. “You were in a fucking coma?”

“For two months,” I said, unable to stop laughing, like it was the funniest thing I’d ever told anyone. “I fucked up, Serena. That little girl, I let them get her. I didn’t know how serious it was. If someone had told me, maybe I could’ve protected her. God, I fucked everything up.”

I was crying now, my arms crossed on the back of the driver’s seat, my face tipped down, forehead touching my wrists. The knife was still in my hand. Serena got out of the car, opened the back door, and gently took the knife away from me.

“Come in the house,” she said.

“Not like this. I don’t want your girls to see me like this.”

She nodded like she understood, although it didn’t make much sense; I’d never had any standing with the sucias to lose. Serena walked away, plucked an orange from her tree, and peeled it, standing in the late-morning sunshine in her driveway.

I pulled myself together, got out of the car, and walked over to the spigot at the side of her house. I turned on the water and splashed my face clean.

“Weren’t you on your way somewhere?” I asked, straightening up.

“It can wait,” Serena said. “Believe me, prima , you’ve rearranged my day.”

Her house was like I remembered. Same homeboy memorials on the refrigerator , same subtle pulse of music from the sound system. One of her girls, heavyset with brown-red hair crinkly with a perm and then mousse, looked up from the television as we entered.

Serena was rummaging through her kitchen shelves. “What would you like?” she asked. “Chorizo and eggs?”

“Not right now.”

“Coffee?”

“No, thanks.”

“A beer?”

I shook my head.

“Mmm. Some Vicodin?”

“Oh God yes.”

A half hour later I was in Serena’s bathtub, floating in a cloud of strawberry- scented bubbles and Vicodin peace. I was listening to my own voice telling Serena, who was sitting cross-legged on the closed toilet seat, about Mexico, about the tunnel rats, as I’d started to think of the seven armed men, and their leader, whom I thought of as Babyface for his soft features.

“You’re sure it was about her?” Serena said. “They wanted her?”

“That’s what the guy said.”

“So none of this was about a sick abuelita up in the mountains.”

I shook my head. “Nidia made that up.”

“She lied? I thought she was really religious,” Serena said.

“I think she was. Is, I mean,” I said. “But scared. When push comes to shove, people lie.” I paused. “She was so quiet on the drive up, and I thought it was just that the two of us didn’t have anything in common. But now I wonder if she wasn’t feeling guilty. She knew there was heavier shit going on that she wasn’t telling me about.”

“You said she ‘was’ religious, then you changed it to ‘is,’” Serena said. “You think she’s still alive?”

“I don’t know,” I said slowly, “but it seems like if they wanted to kill her, they would have done it and dumped her right next to me. They took her with them, which means they wanted her alive.”

“Just because they needed her alive for the moment doesn’t mean they needed her alive for very long,” Serena pointed out.

I must have looked disturbed, because Serena said, “We’ve got to be realistic about this.”

I didn’t answer, tipping my head back and letting the warm water crawl through my scalp.

Serena said, “Come on, get out before you fall asleep in there.”

When I stepped out of the tub, before I could get the towel around me, I felt her eyes on my body, the healed wounds that couldn’t yet be called simply scars.

“They don’t hurt anymore,” I said, “if that’s what you’re thinking.”

A few minutes later I was wearing one of Serena’s T-shirts and a pair of boxers, pulling back the covers of her bed. She was still standing in the doorway.

“Thanks for letting me crash here,” I said.

“That’s what Casa Serena’s always been about, prima , a place where my homegirls can go to ground. You’re not the first.”

“But how many of the girls you’ve taken in were holding a knife on you just minutes earlier?”

Serena shrugged. “Around here, shit like that happens.” She looked at me thoughtfully. “Out there, if I’d said, ‘Yeah, bitch, I set you up,’ would you have cut my throat?”

Her words gave me a chill, even through the Vicodin calm. I said, “I don’t know. You had a gun. That would have made it very dangerous for me to back down.” But then I shook my head. “I don’t think it would have mattered. I couldn’t have cut you.”

“That would’ve got you killed, then.”

“You mean, if you’d admitted to setting me up, and I let you go, you’d have shot me, anyway?”

“Of course.”

I couldn’t pretend her answer didn’t hurt. She saw it in my face. “Come on, Hailey. If you had a legitimate grudge, what else could I do? That’s the number-one thing that gets people killed in la vida . It’s always retaliation. If you had a grudge against me, if I’d done something to make you my enemiga , and I let you walk away, that’s like”-she searched for a comparison-“like leaving rat poison around in the kitchen. It’s something you just don’t do. It doesn’t matter that I started it.” She saw my disapproval. “It’s the same reason I don’t hold it against you that you braced me with the knife. You had a legit reason. I respect that.”

I shook my head. “Thanks, I guess.”

“De nada.”

“One other thing? That tattoo, my name on your roll call?” I gestured to her leg. “Can you do something about that? It’s going to give me the creeps, seeing it all the time.”

She winked and said coolly, “Might as well keep it. You know?”

I said, “That’s cold, Warchild.”

She turned sober: “Sorry.”

The Trece Sucias, who were almost exclusively Mexican-American, would have surprised an outsider with the diversity of their features and coloring. At first glance, they all conformed to gang style, with cheap tattoos and hard masks of eyeliner and dark lipstick, long nails painted fuchsia or black. Some sharpened those nails to points for an unexpected weapon in a fight.

Up close, though, you saw the differences. Their hair was reddish, golden, black, or brown; skin creamy pale or tawny gold. In Juicy Couture and Skechers, for example, Heartbreaker would have blended in with the UCLA girls on Melrose Avenue. She was five-ten, with a lean, flat volleyball player’s stomach, golden-brown hair, and wide-set greenish eyes. Her cousin and closest friend, Risky, was a small, fine-boned girl who could have been taken for Italian, with straight brown hair, brown eyes, and pale skin. Trippy, Serena’s lieutenant since Teaser died, was tall and strong, with chestnut hair in sharp bangs across her forehead and long down her back. Teardrop had classic Hispanic looks, straight black hair and rich brown skin.

The four of them, who made up less than half the sucias’ number, were in Serena’s living room when I came out a little after ten. I’d slept all day, and I still didn’t feel too hot. The girls were playing with Teardrop’s baby daughter and talking in Spanglish. I fixed myself a bowl of cereal and sat at the table to eat. They ignored me, except when Teardrop said in Spanish, Look, she’s all red , meaning badly sunburned, and the rest giggled. I told myself it wasn’t a slur I needed to answer and pretended I didn’t hear.