Майкл Коннелли - Tampa Bay Noir

I’d seen the picture, of course, and I didn’t feel I ever needed to again, but I nodded. I knew he meant well. He was just trying to connect with me in a way his daughter didn’t feel the need to. I remembered my mom’s tearful gratitude upon coming home and finding the apartment full of things that made it look like a place where real people lived, and the note she had me write for Nicole’s dad in my best English. He’d been kind to me, and it felt easy to be nice to him.

That’s how I found myself at Nicole’s house that evening, standing in the room where her dad kept all his memorabilia. As Jake went through drawers and piles of paper, Nicole plopped down on a reclining chair in front of the TV. Her skin still glistened with the stuff she’d put on at the beach, and her cheeks and the bridge of her round nose had turned pink as cotton candy. She was still wearing sunglasses, even though no natural light entered the room through the black curtains over the window. The walls were covered in posters for what he explained were cult horror movies — movies with titles like Blood and Lace and Brain Damage and Kill, Baby, Kill! There were also posters for movies I did know, like Fight Club and Pulp Fiction , and framed newspaper clippings of bizarre stories of living dolls and people being swallowed by sinkholes. Enormous speakers accompanied the enormous TV, and in a corner stood a small desk strewn with papers and action figures and guitar picks and DVD cases. The word that came to me while standing in the middle of the room as Jake frantically looked for the Pablo photograph was reblujo , which is what my mom called the small room where we used to keep junk back in Medellín. Here, even the carpet served as a resting place for guitars and exercise weights and junk food packages and soda cans.

“Can you hurry the fuck up?” Nicole said. “I want to get this gunk off of me before dinner.”

“I swear I have that photo in here somewhere. Your mom must have hid it.”

“Why would she do that? She doesn’t set foot in this pigsty. You see how clean the rest of the house is, don’t you, Vicky? That’s because Mom cleans it.”

I said nothing, but it was true. The rest of the house was spotless. It was all beige walls and pictures of palm trees and ocean sunsets and shiny glass surfaces and spotless white tile. The living room had a beige sofa, but I could tell it was real leather, and not an ant in sight.

“You know what? Fuck it,” Jake said, throwing papers on the carpet and pointing a slender finger at me. “You stay for dinner. Call your mom. Change into some of Nicole’s clothes. I’ll drive you home later. I’ll look for the photo in the meantime.”

We left him rummaging through the junk in his room, huffing and throwing things on the carpet.

Nicole’s mom found me and her daughter on the beige sofa, going through the family album. It contained picture after picture of a small, chubby Nicole holding kittens and blowing out the candles of her birthday cakes and standing next to Mickey Mouse. My parents had only brought a handful of family photos with them, of my grandparents and uncles and aunts, as well as one picture of their wedding and one of my first communion.

Nicole’s mom, who introduced herself as Carmen, appeared in a few pictures in their album, wearing shoulder pads and hairspray, her lips fuchsia, just like my mom looked when I was a child. Now, as she sat across from us, she wore green scrubs and black chunky shoes, and her dark hair was up in a high, curly bun. Nicole was her spitting image, down to the only dimple that formed on the right side of her face when she smiled. As Carmen examined me, her shoulders slackened and a wide grin filled her cheeks. Nicole had lent me a pair of denim shorts that didn’t quite hug my hips, and a large white T-shirt with the word NASCAR in big block letters.

“You girls having a sleepover?” Carmen asked. Her voice sounded salty to me, like the roar of the waves on the sea.

“Oh no,” I said. “No, just dinner.”

“We ordered pizza,” Nicole said. “Jake’s on one of his rants about a stupid photo. He just really needs her to see it.”

“Oh, it’s okay,” I said.

“I know,” Nicole said.

“We know,” Carmen said. “Don’t worry, honey. We’ll eat dinner, and I’ll drive you straight home. Sorry he’s holding you hostage. Did you call your parents?”

I nodded. I didn’t understand the word hostage , but I memorized the sound of it so I could look it up in my dictionary at home.

Carmen got up slowly and sighed while undoing her hair tie. The curls flopped down in one clump. She dug around in her purse and left a bill on the coffee table.

“I’m going to get changed before dinner,” she said. “You be on the lookout for the pizza.”

What followed was an hour-long screaming match behind the closed door of Jake’s memorabilia room, during which the sausage pizza Nicole had ordered got colder and colder. I couldn’t hear most of what they said after Nicole turned on the TV to a music video channel that people called to request their favorite video. I could hear pointed accusations like, “What is wrong with you?” but most of it was muffled or drowned out by the volume of the television and Nicole calling the number that scrolled at the bottom of the screen to request “You Make Me Sick” by P!nk over and over, using what she proudly announced was her dad’s credit card number. Even though I couldn’t hear most of the row, it reminded me of the last few months at home, when my parents argued over money they didn’t have for bills they couldn’t pay.

When Nicole’s parents came out, Carmen was still wearing the scrubs and her hair was still tangled, but now her cheeks were flushed and her blue eyes glinted with a giddiness I hadn’t seen before. Jake looked as collected as ever and, during our cold-pizza-and-orange-soda dinner, didn’t mention a single word about the Pablo photograph. When he apologized for making me come over, I stopped bracing myself for another fight. Both were now in full couple mode, asking questions about my dad’s health and my mom’s two jobs, and because I didn’t know the word housekeeping yet, I mentioned the things my mom cleaned instead: floors, windows, toilets.

My mom didn’t work her second job on Saturday and Sunday afternoons, so one late-October Saturday we went to see the Virgin on the window. My mom’s boss had written directions on a piece of paper, and I read them to her from the passenger seat of the Cordoba, while my dad’s long legs cramped in the back. My parents wanted to go pay a promise they’d made to the Virgin of Chiquinquirá on behalf of our safe passage and transition to a new country. They still hoped to make it back to Medellín to pay the promise for real, but now that my dad could move around more or less normally again, this would do.

I would never tell my parents this, because their response would have been that God manifests in many forms, but I found the shrine unimpressive. The building where the Virgin had appeared was by the side of a highway, unceremoniously next to a Toyota dealership. The image of the Virgin itself looked like an oil slick that had spread over a couple of large mirrored windowpanes of what we were told used to be an office building. It was an outline of what could be the Virgin but also almost anything else, or nothing at all. In front of the window, someone had installed a life-size wooden crucifixion, in front of which was a church kneeler. Before the statue were countless votive candles and rosaries. People stood around or sat in white plastic chairs and prayed in the choking heat of fall.

A man who introduced himself as Guadalupe told us the image had appeared four years earlier, just before Christmas, and that was why so many people believed it was a miracle. He was short and wore brown slacks and a navy button-up, and he said he came to pray every Saturday. On seeing the slickness of his forehead, which he wiped with a white handkerchief, I wondered if he dressed the same way every time he came to spend a scorching afternoon with the Virgin. He offered my dad a chair close to the Jesus statue after my dad told him the story of his work accident.