Sarai Walker - Dietland

“I’m here, aren’t I?”

Julia attempted to tame her wild hair, smoothing it with her hands, but it made no difference; each flattened curl sprang back up. She was serious and fearful. She didn’t even flirt with me. Crushed cakes of purple and blue eye shadow bruised the white floor around her. “Come with me,” she said.

I followed her down the Lips aisle, left at Mascara, right at Concealer, to the end of the Blush corridor. Julia wasn’t wearing her heels, just simple brown flats, and I had never seen her move so quickly. I struggled to keep up.

At the end of the corridor was a pile of boxes sitting in front of a blank space of white wall. Julia pushed the boxes aside, grunting and puffing. Once the boxes were cleared away, I saw a cutout line in the drywall. Julia wrenched it open with a crowbar, revealing a hidden space.

The space was glowing with yellow light coming from two lamps balanced on a steel beam; beyond the lamps it was black. Julia bent over and stepped inside. She motioned for me to follow, but my limbs were heavy. I couldn’t move.

“You wanted the truth,” she said. “It’s in here.”

I entered the space. A figure was sitting atop a sleeping bag in a dim corner to my right. As I moved closer I saw she was wearing a gray tracksuit, her arms and legs pulled tight around her, headphones dangling around her neck. Her dark hair was nearly shaved off. She squinted up at me, a tiny, startled creature.

“Leeta?”

Julia moved one of the lamps so I could see her better. Her face was scrubbed and pale. Without the long hair and eye makeup, without the colorful tights and boots, she was pared down, almost naked.

“It’s Plum.”

“I know who you are, Louise B.” Her voice was raspy, unused. She scooted out from the corner where she was sitting, moving into the light. She wasn’t the looming figure I’d seen on the screen in Times Square, but I was finally beginning to recognize her face, that face that had haunted me for so long.

“It’s really you.”

Behind me, Julia was sweeping up the concrete floor, trying to remove all possible traces of Leeta from the hiding space. “Go on,” she said over the broom handle. “She won’t bite.”

I unbuttoned my jacket and wriggled out of it, leaving the paper bag under my waistband, and maneuvered myself onto the hard floor to face Leeta. “Your hair is so short,” I said.

She turned away, fidgeting, reaching for the locks that were no longer there. “I’m not what you expected. I’m being hunted like an animal, so I’ve become one.” She backed into her corner again, pulling the gray hood up over her head. The face that peeked out at me from beneath the heavy fabric, now darkened by shadow, had been spotted all over the country, all over the world, but Leeta had been hiding beneath fifty-two stories of Stanley Austen’s media empire the whole time. I thought of the barricades outside the building and had to smile. The enemy was inside.

“Did you bring money?” she asked.

I kept staring at her, only semi-aware that she had asked me a question. She asked again. “Money. Did you bring it?”

I reached under my shirt and removed the paper bag, but I didn’t hand it to her. Julia wheeled a large brown crate into the hiding space. “Five minutes,” she said.

Leeta bounced her legs up and down, slipping her hand beneath the hood to reach for her hair again, then moving her hand to her mouth and nibbling one of her fingers. She eyed the crate. “I want to see the sun. Even if they capture me or shoot me, at least I’ll have a taste of freedom one last time. Nothing feels as good as freedom.”

The playful girl from the café was gone. Leeta, stuck in a dark cave for months, hunted by the police with their guns and dogs and helicopters—she was the reality of everything that had been happening. I worried about what they would do if they found her. She seemed so alone down here, as if she’d been abandoned.

“What happened to Soledad?” I felt an almost electric charge saying the name to someone who knew Soledad, the woman whose grief and rage for her daughter burned as brightly as a star.

“All the women have scattered. I don’t know where.”

“How did you meet Soledad?” I knew what I’d heard on the news, but the details had been vague.

Leeta was silent, as if she’d closed up in her dark corner, but then she began to recount the story. In college, she was required to sign up for a community service project. She volunteered at a women’s clinic; Soledad worked there and trained Leeta to become a rape crisis counselor. The clinic offered abortions and birth control in addition to rape counseling. “Working there was intense,” Leeta said. “Bulletproof windows and an armed guard outside. Women had to pass by a guy with a gun just to get rape counseling, which is fucked up. Working there, it was easy to feel that it was us against the world—and the world didn’t care. Sometimes me and Soledad would go for drinks after our shift, to cope with hearing so many awful stories and seeing so many women cry.” Soledad was used to it, but Leeta said she struggled with the job.

Soledad’s house in Santa Mariana was an hour away, but Leeta went there for barbecues and movie nights sometimes, which is when she spent time with Luz. “When I got homesick, Soledad mothered me. How embarrassing to need a mother at my age, right?” Leeta’s eyes, which had been wide and alert, softened. She blinked slowly. “Do you want to know what I did for Luz and Soledad, Louise B.? I think you need to know.”

“Tell her,” Julia said as she continued cleaning. I was still holding the paper bag and set it down on the floor next to me, wiping my palms on my knees, conscious of my colorful tights and boots, wondering if Leeta thought me a fool.

She explained that after Luz’s funeral, Soledad insisted that her relatives return to Texas right away. Alone at home in Santa Mariana, she invited Leeta over and told her that her friend Missy was going to kidnap Wilson and Martinez. They couldn’t get to the other rapists, who were locked up, so the two ringleaders would pay for all their sins. “I asked Soledad why she wanted to kidnap the men—I was stunned at what she was suggesting—but she just said they were going to get what they deserved. This wasn’t the Soledad I knew.” Leeta tried to talk her out of it for Soledad’s own sake, so she wouldn’t risk going to prison, but she’d made up her mind.

Soledad couldn’t be directly involved in the kidnapping because she would have been an obvious suspect, so she asked Leeta to go to the bar where Wilson and Martinez hung out and lure them to a vacant lot, where Missy would be waiting for them. “I would be the bait in a short dress and blond wig,” Leeta said. “I wasn’t in my right mind then. What’d happened to Luz was the worst thing that’d happened to anybody I’d ever known. I just kept thinking of her and all those crying women at the clinic and how this was never going to end. Despite my shock at Soledad’s plan, I began to wonder if she was right. Maybe we needed to go to the source of the problem.”

It wasn’t difficult to lure the men from the bar. They followed Leeta to the car, eager and excited at the thought of sex, and she drove them the ten miles to where Missy was waiting. “Being in the car with them made me sick. Those two scumbags killed Luz, each of them and the other men taking a piece of her, and I wanted to pull the car over and run into a field and scream, but I couldn’t do that, so I drove and screamed in my head. The men were talking to me in the car but all I could hear was my screaming.”

When they arrived at the darkened lot north of town, Missy was waiting with a black van. “They suspected something was wrong. They were scumbags but they weren’t stupid.” Leeta said they were reluctant to get out of the car. When they finally did, Missy Tasered them and tied them up. Leeta helped Missy load them into the back of the van and then Missy told her to drive away and keep going, out of Santa Mariana and as far away as she could get.