“Enough, Rhea.”
He drops the air mattress and it skids at her feet, looking more like it should be floating out on the pool than resting on the bedroom floor.
My mother stays quiet. She is too uncomfortable, too pregnant, to argue about something as trivial as sleeping arrangements. Sleeping through the entire night is her only objective. She props up three pillows where she’ll doze off practically upright. If she lies flat, the baby’s bulk cuts off her air.
A tall glass of ice water sweats on the nightstand. Lately, she can’t drink enough liquids, and sometimes in the middle of the night I hear her getting up to fill her glass at the tap in the bathroom. She’ll stand at the sink and down it in a couple gulps, then refill the glass before returning to bed.
As she stretches a sheet over the mattress, my sister groans loud, exaggerated groans. Where did her fear go? The fear that sent her crying and stuffing clothes in a duffel, insisting she be allowed to stay someplace else. Cooper’s escape was just an excuse to get away from our own house for a while.
“She’s right, Paul,” my mother finally says. “We probably should let the girls sleep in their rooms.”
My father clicks on the safety of his Savage and looks at my mother as if she’s betrayed him somehow. It’s the way he always looks at her when she sides with my sister.
Sometimes it feels like we’re on opposing teams—my father and I left with no other choice but to pick each other. We’ve always been the odd men out, and, as a consequence, he has raised me as both his son and daughter. He has taught me how to throw a baseball, straight and hard, and every summer he buys us season tickets, and together we sit drinking Cokes, cracking peanut shells and cheering on the Angels at Anaheim Stadium.
“Give it a couple more nights, June.” My father says this with the kind of care and caution that makes it clear who he’s really protecting. But he can’t ever keep me safe. I know this now. I know that no amount of locks on the doors, chairs at the glass, or rifles by the bed will change the fact that we’re defenseless in our sleep.
The boy is going to make it, he’s going to survive.
This news told to me again and again does nothing to rid the image I see every night of him left for dead on the floor of his parents’ bedroom—wide-eyed in his struggle to keep the life from leaking out of him between his fingers.
My mother turns out the light, my sister squeaks around on the air mattress, fidgeting to get comfortable.
My father settles on his side, settling in for some raucous snoring.
In the dark, my eyes snap open. This is when he comes, just as he would much later in life, for my father—that malaka in the guise of a black ski mask and gloves. I’m the only one in the family who is still spooked by the bogeyman.
THE FIRST SOUNDS OF FAMILY
I should be suspicious a few weeks later when my sister asks right after dinner if I’d like to go get ice cream. She never asks me to go anywhere, never even comes out of her room. Despite the statewide manhunt for Cooper, our parents have allowed her back in her own bed at night. It’s not like she’s busy on the phone, talking boys with friends. She doesn’t have any. Ever since we moved to Chino, she keeps more and more to herself. She misses too much school because she’s tired. And the few friends she did make have all but given up calling to find out what’s wrong. My parents now pay a shrink in L.A. to figure out what they can’t.
As I reach the car I call shotgun, forgetting in my excitement that I’m to be the only passenger.
We ride in her 280-Z, my father’s old sports car. It was a gift for having aced her driver’s test. The car is intended to be an incentive for her to drive to school, providing her with another kind of license—to show off. Before accepting it, she insisted that the maroon car be painted white like the Z the cool photographer drives in Madonna’s “Borderline” video.
My sister takes me to Baskin Robbins and buys me a double scoop of chocolate chip. For some reason she doesn’t give me time to eat it there. Never before has she let me eat or drink in her beloved car.
I hang behind in the store, convinced this is some sort of trap.
“Are you sure?”
Rhea has the lightest colored eyes in the family. They’re hazel, and they change colors depending upon the light in them. Something dark is in them now, something deliberate and dead set that’s doing more than clouding her judgment.
“C’mon, Paula,” she says. “Let’s just go.”
On the way out, I grab a wad of napkins.
Instead of returning home, she speeds south down Central Avenue, toward the outskirts of the city. We pass Chino Grain and Feed built like a gigantic aluminum shed, where my parents pick up bales of hay and straw for the horses. We pass the grass field and wooden bleachers that is the Chino Fairgrounds. I don’t like where we’re headed. The prison is less than a block away.
“Where are we going?”
“I told you. We’re going on a drive.” She looks over at me in disgust. “It’s dripping.” My sister no longer likes food. She used to be overweight, so overweight that our grandmother, our yia yia, would sew her polyester pants with an elastic waist. In the last six months, she’s dropped more than fifty pounds. Now too thin, her weight still eats at her in other ways, and she subsists on nothing but Diet Coke and Cup o’ Noodles.
Quickly, I lick around the sides of the cone and stare out the window. The prison is surrounded by chain link, which is how it got its nickname “the prison with no walls.” Barbed wire coils across the top, though Cooper didn’t risk climbing over it and cutting up his hands. He didn’t have to. According to my father, he walked right out through a hole in the fence. “Either he cut it himself or somebody else had before him,” my father explained. “Naturally, they’re trying to keep that part out of the papers.”
All of the front towers are unlit, except for one where a man in a dark gray baseball cap is visible. Even at this distance, I can tell he isn’t looking where he should be. He’s focused on something inside the tower, maybe watching a baseball game or a game show on one of those portable TV’s.
I lean toward the dash and point at the guard.
“How come he isn’t on the lookout? He’s watching TV, I can tell. Don’t you see him?”
My sister bats my arm out of her line of sight.
“He’s probably watching the monitors, Paula.”
At the stoplight, she turns right, in the direction of the hills, and there is now no denying where she is taking us. I roll down the window. The night air blows hard and fast in my face, and I can’t catch my breath. Ice cream melts cold down my fingers. I toss out the cone, hoping a cop will see it and cite her a thousand bucks for littering. Anything to make her stop.
The 280-Z doesn’t have power steering and she needs both hands to make this next sharp turn. There are no streetlights so I’m not sure how she knows this is the right road. It’s made of dirt and gravel, and at the sound of the spoiler scraping the ground, I’m convinced she’ll change her mind and back right down. Instead she downshifts into first gear and steps harder on the gas.
Hurriedly, I roll up the window, as if being separated by glass is an actual form of protection.
“Turn around,” I say. “Please, Rhea.”
“You need to confront your fears.” Her tone is polished, adult sounding, possibly like her new L.A. shrink.
The house is just a dark bulky shape and I tell myself my sister might’ve gotten the addresses mixed up. This house could belong to a family that is off