Jonathan Nasaw - When She Was Bad

“Did they drug you?” Pender was saying. “Slip you a mickey, something like that? Should I call an ambulance?”

“No!” For some reason, the suggestion alarmed her. “No ambulance.” She rolled over onto her back, swung her legs off the couch, and tried to sit up. The blood rushed from her head; the room swam.

“Take it easy, I’ve got you.” Pender helped her lie back down, positioned a throw pillow under her head. “How about a doctor-is there a doctor I can call?”

“I am a doctor,” said Irene, almost pouting.

“Okay, doctor.” Pender pulled the side chair over to the couch to sit on. “Would you please tell me what the hell happened here?”

Irene sat up again-slowly, this time-and was surprised to find she was still wearing Frank’s pajamas. “They must have slipped something into my orange juice,” she told Pender. Nor would finding that something have been very difficult. They’d only have had to go as far as the medicine cabinet in the upstairs bathroom-in the last six years, Irene had self-prescribed, with varying degrees of success, every sleeping medication known to God, man, and GlaxoSmithKline. “I thought it tasted kind of bitter.”

“When was that? Do you know when they left here?”

“One quesh’n at a time,” said Irene, slurring like a ham actor playing a drunk.

“Sorry. How long ago did they leave?”

“What time is it now?”

“A little after eight.”

Leaning forward, massaging her pounding temples with her fingertips: “A.M. or P.M.?”

“P.M.”

Come back to me, little brain, thought Irene, working at the math. “Eight, ten hours?”

“In your car?”

“If it’s gone.”

“Do you know your license plate number?” asked Pender, taking his cell phone out of his pocket.

“I think so. Who are you calling?”

“The police,” Pender explained gently. “So they can update the BOLO.”

“That won’t be…necessary.” Irene was proud of having come up with the word-for a few seconds there it had been touch and go.

“Why not?”

“Because…” Blank. Blank mind. Because what? What was the question? Oh, right. Yes, of course: “Because there’s only one place they could have gone.”

“Where’s that?” asked Pender-but Irene appeared to have nodded off again. “I’d better go make you some coffee,” he said.

“Good idea,” Irene mumbled. “Make some for me, too.”

Lily dressed hurriedly. On her way out of the cabin she saw Lyssy’s snubnosed revolver lying atop his 501s, at the foot of the bed. She snatched it up almost as an afterthought and stuffed it into the waistband of her Guess?’s, then tiptoed barefoot across the clean-swept boards, opened the door, and closed it ever so quietly behind her.

The pocketapocketapocketa grew louder; Lily waved from the covered porch as the open-sided, open-roofed contraption her grandfather had always referred to as the mule came chugging up the dirt road leading in from the highway. A skeletal vehicle with small rubber tires lined up four on each side, a frame of welded pipes supporting a bench seat up front and a railed wooden flatbed mounted over a noisy, sputtering gasoline engine in back, the mule was one of the few motorized vehicles capable of traversing the steep-sided canyons and narrow, deeply rutted trails of La Guarida.

“Hola, Tio Fano!”

“Mija!” The driver, a small brown man with a bowl haircut, parked the mule a few yards in from the edge of the fan-shaped clearing, next to the beige Infiniti. Wearing a denim shirt, once-white trousers, and open-toed sandals, he hopped down from the cab and approached Lily with both arms outstretched and his leathery features contorted into a mask of tragedy.

She hurried down the steps and across the clearing. The ground was bare save for a sparse, limp growth of thin-bladed grass. She held out her hand; he took it in his weathered, work-callused hands and squeezed gently, as if he were giving her a blessing. “Pobrecita. I’m so sorry-my heart is…” His vocabulary failed him (Spanish was his second language, English his third); he let go her hand and pressed his fist against his sternum.

“Mine, too,” said Lily, her mind racing. Fano, an ageless, undocumented Guatamalan Indian who lived in a shack on the far side of the northern rim of the canyon, had been the caretaker here for as long as Lily could remember. Somehow she had forgotten all about him when she suggested using La Guarida as a temporary refuge.

And now he held her and Lyssy’s future in his hand. Although there was nothing in Fano’s greeting or demeanor to indicate that he knew she was a fugitive, Lily couldn’t discount the possibility entirely. But if he did know, would she have the courage, the wherewithal, to do what Lilith had once done? Could she kill someone in cold blood? Someone who’d never done her a lick of harm-someone she liked ?

The answer was no, of course not. But the fact that she was even able to consider the possibility told Lily how much she had changed since this morning. It wasn’t just that she’d finally made love-no one knew better than Lily DeVries that there was nothing illuminative or magically transformative about the sex act in and of itself; if there had been, she’d have been enlightened by the age of four.

But overcoming such a monumental blockage after a lifetime of suffering flashbacks, panic attacks, and alter switches at the mere thought of sex-now that was empowering, as Dr. Irene might have said. And never mind that she’d only been able to accomplish it by pretending to be Lilith-after all she’d been through, Lily was finally beginning, if not to accept completely, then at least to consider, what Dr. Irene had been telling her for years, and had reiterated only that morning: that the alters were not others. That Sunny Lemontina’s anger was her anger, the unnamed little girl’s flight into autism was her flight, Lilah’s sexual desires were her desires, and most important, that Lilith’s capabilities were her capabilities as well.

“The place is looking pretty good,” she heard herself saying-one of her grandfather’s stock greetings for Fano.

“Gracias. Senor Rollie came down last week, he told me whatever…how you say, acuerdo?”

“Agreement, arrangement.”

“Si, agrangement-whatever agrangement I have with your abuelo, now I got with him.” He started to tell her something else, then caught himself.

Lily thought she had a reasonably good idea what it was. “Did-did my uncle happen to mention anything about me?”

“About you ?”

Lily couldn’t remember ever having felt so present as she did at the moment. She was intently aware of her surroundings: the sunset stillness in the clearing; the pale green, failing light through the towering redwoods, their feathery tops disappearing into the gloaming like so many Jack’s beanstalks; the feel of the dirt beneath her bare feet and the cold metal of the revolver pressing against her bare belly; the sound of the creek off to her right; and the sweet, loamy smell of the surrounding forest.

But even with her senses fully engaged, Lily’s mind was running as clear and cold as the creek, focused in laser sharp on Fano, noting the sideways shift of his eyes, the uneasy shuffle of sandals in the dirt. “Please, Fano, what did he tell you?”

“Just you ran away from home, and if you show up down here, I suppose to call him.”

Okay, could have been worse, thought Lily. “Is that really all he said, Fano? He didn’t mention I’d had a nervous breakdown or anything?”