But this is not the case for her. She takes one last breath of the outdoors before closing and locking the window. She pulls her blackout curtains from her suitcase and swiftly threads them through the curtain rod, pulling them across the window as the gauze presses to the other side until completely superceded.
She inhales the blessed darkness of privacy. She can relax enough to unpack her small, curated collection of possessions.
Tomorrow, she’ll start her new job at the coffeehouse. The wages she earns being paid under the table are enough to keep her going. She did get a fairly decent insurance payout when her mother was murdered and converted it to traveler’s checks that she cashes only every now and then. She’s learned how to live with very little, studio apartments usually, with cinder-block walls. No cable, no wifi other than what she can catch through her neighbor’s walls. She shops at thrift stores on their 50-percent-off days. She does her own nails.
She always gets a library card and reads for free, and that is the key to her happiness. Brooke reads voraciously in the true crime genre. She takes strange comfort in these devastating tales, because when the killers come for her, it won’t be that bad. They didn’t torture her mother, and her death must have been fairly quick. It’s unsettling, though, that they taunted Brooke with the dinner plates, and that they now amuse themselves with a cat-and-mouse game. She hates that playfulness, the long stretch of years in which they’ve denied themselves closure. Because if they know where she is, why haven’t they already killed her?
They let her move from town to town, reinventing herself, taking a new name. Each time, she thinks maybe she’s gotten away, but then they eventually give her some sign, some indication that they’ve found her.
She’s learned to live with this slow chase, feeling temporary relief—like now—when she’s in a new city. She reads true crime to understand the motives, the thinking behind the pursuit . . . because maybe when they come for her for real, she’ll know what to say.
So she studies up, has read every Ann Rule book. She knows details of strangers’ murders with an encyclopedic memory, probably better than their own family members, loath to hear about and thus visualize their loved ones’ last moments on Earth.
She had started reading at the group home as a way to distract herself from the pain of her mother’s murder, a death so much less gruesome than those in these horrible pages. Her beautiful mom had been pushed off the road by a car that didn’t linger and which no one caught the plates of. A drunk driver, the police had concluded, but she knew better. Instead of murder, it had been called manslaughter. She hated that word. As a girl who grew up speaking both English and Spanish, she found it very strange. Slaughter was how animals became meat, and her mother was not even close to being a man.
In her mind’s eye, she could see the drivers as they’d looked four years ago, furious brothers who had to tick off the years until the eldest could get a driver’s license and exact revenge.
She worked hard to avoid thinking about her mother during her final moments and instead burrowed into other people’s tragedies: the abductions, tortures, the gut-based screams unheard by potential saviors—and sometimes heard but disregarded.
When she’s done unpacking, she opens her laptop and pulls up her Facebook account. Her profile picture is the default egg, but once inside her page, the cover photo is one of her and her mother, arms slung around each other, standing at the shores of Lake Havasu. Just the two of them, none of the spring break hordes.
Her mother, Magdalena, had been able to afford a week only in the off-season—their rental, though, still reeked of beer, tequila, and the dim but unmistakable scent of vomit. “A good cleaning could get rid of that smell,” her mother had said, and with a smile at Brooke, shrugged. The maid on vacation doesn’t clean.
Brooke’s thirteen years old in the photo, wearing a bikini whose flimsy top pieces meet with a large silver ring. “A keyhole,” the cashier had said when she rang it up. All that summer, Brooke had struggled with whether she invited the mental image of exactly what key might fit that hole. It was a summer that felt like sex still lingered on the beach, discarded by the spring break kids for any teenager to pick up like a sand dollar.
She’d looked critically at her mother’s figure in her own bikini that summer, a sky blue color that made her skin glow. Her Mexican skin was pre-tanned by God, Brooke had thought . . . and therefore so was hers—although one shade lighter. Her mother’s body was slim, muscular, curvy, all at once and in the right places. With perfect posture and a graceful stride, her mother walked the distance from their beach towels to the waves over and over. That summer, Brooke had looked at bodies hungrily, surveyingly, trying to understand her own place in the hierarchy of physiology.
As she looks below the photo, she sees a message waiting on her wall for her. Miguel had typed, “How’s the new place?
Miguel’s profile picture’s a joke, a detail of a large mural painted on a taqueria wall. It shows an Aztec warrior spiriting off a woman, breasts spilling out of her animal-skin dress. Miguel had chosen the warrior’s face to represent his own.
It’s okay, Brooke comments in the thread he’s started. I just kind of wish it had a soul.
You don’t want a place with soul, mija. That’s how you get a hotel like in The Shining.
So he’s online, or at least ready to jump on in response to his phone’s alert.
True. I’ll dial back my expectations.
Wish you didn’t have to keep moving.
I know. She pauses. Miguel understands; she had told him the story all those years ago when the two of them were co-prisoners at the GHAC, the “group home for abandoned children”—their nickname designed to find humor in their own scarred existences.
It’d be cool if someday you end up moving right into my city.
She starts to type something snarky, but her fingers stall on the keyboard. She’s wished this many times, that she was the sort of person who was free to live a normal life, who could renew an acquaintance with an old friend from her troubled teen years. She remembers all those hushed conversations on the back porch of the group home, her fingernails pulling paint shreds off the peeling floorboards and making a little pile of the results as they shared war stories in the battle of growing up. Who isn’t a survivor from the wreckage of childhood?
She types, Someday, I’ll do it.
I’ll put out the red carpet, baby.
No paparazzi, please, she types. You must know all the media attention is painful to me.
You just want to live your life, right?!
She snorts, and writes, Gotta log off now. Need some sleep.
Night, mija.
She closes Facebook and sits thinking. A joke about media attention, but she’s always felt the unwanted attention focused on her, keen and intent.
Furious, even.
When Brooke first met Miguel, she was fourteen, bewildered at the loss of her mother and the apparent dearth of relatives to take her in. She’d known her mom had come from a large family in Mexico, but her physical move to the United States had also been an emotional one. As far back as Brooke could remember, there were no phone calls, no packages, no sign that her mother had family she cared about. Brooke’s father had been a fling, and she hadn’t been permitted to know his name. The birth certificate, she saw when she had first studied it, reported his name as “Dirtbag”; someone had crosshatched it out but she could still discern it.
Brooke became a ward of the state and entered the foster care system, awaiting adoption along with Miguel. Some of