Delta Girls (32 page)

K
AREN HAD NEVER DRIVEN ALONE BEFORE. EITHER HER
mom was teaching her or Nathan was teaching her, or one of them was coming along for the ride. More often than not, she was in the passenger seat—sometimes the back seat, with her mom and Nathan up front. The driver’s seat felt like a throne, the unfamiliar car cavernous as she drove. At first, her heart was pounding so hard, she could barely see where she was going, but once she found the highway, everything turned cool and silent. Every once in a while, she turned a corner and one of the plush polar bears in the back shifted, startling her, but otherwise, a strange calm descended upon her. She was no longer a competitive figure skater, a girl whose boyfriend had just killed someone. She was just a body moving forward through space, stopping only to drain money from her savings account or use the bathroom or get something at a drive-through, the grease a serious shock to her system.

She drove and drove well into the night. She wasn’t sure what state she was in, what state she was heading toward. All she could
see were her headlights scraping the road, bits of snow gleaming softly from the surrounding pine trees. The whole world blanketed by silence.

She fished around in her purse for her cellphone; she had turned off the ringer. There were eleven missed calls. She listened to her messages, deleting most as soon as she heard her mother’s voice. One from Nathan, from jail, said, “You need to turn yourself in, sweetheart. It’s the right thing to do.” A second, logged in a few minutes later, said, “Karen! You can’t do this to me! I love you!” She didn’t know prisoners were allowed more than one call, but there was a third, too, his voice sharper now, harder: “If I’m going down, Karen,” he said, “you’re going down, too.” A fourth said, simply, “Bitch.” Karen swallowed the acid rising in her throat, tears warm on her cheeks. There was one more message, from Isabelle: “You better ditch the car soon.” She sounded frantic. “My mom just noticed it’s gone.”

W
HEN WE GOT BACK TO THE VIEIRAS’, THE LIGHTS WERE
on in the distillery and Mr. Vieira was standing outside, screaming his head off.

I stopped the car and got out.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“That asshole Roberts!” I had never seen Mr. Vieira so upset. “That fucking asshole Roberts!”

“We don’t know it’s him, Dad,” Ben said. Mrs. Vieira paced in tight circles behind him, talking to herself in rapid Portuguese.

“What happened?” Quinn looked terrified.

“Fucking Roberts smashed all our eau-de-vie,” Mr. Vieira said, before shouting something in Portuguese to his wife. She stopped pacing and scurried into the distillery, her large body moving faster than I had ever seen.

All that work we had put into those bottles. All that income they were expecting …

“Not all of it,” said Ben. He couldn’t seem to look at me.

“More than half!” his father shouted. “I’m going to beat the life out of that sonofabitch.”

“We need to let the police deal with it,” said Ben. “No need to take matters into your own hands.”

“He took matters into his hands,” said Mr. Vieira. “Now I’ll take matters into mine.”

K
AREN PULLED INTO A FOREST PRESERVE, STOPPED
the car in front of a small frozen lake. The headlights illuminated the icy surface, bumpy, almost grainy-looking. How could she go back to smooth, slick ice now? There was nothing she could do to make things better. Nothing she could do but disappear.

Hot air blasted from the vents; she turned the heat off so she could feel the coldness of the night against her face. She found a thin gas-station pen in the glove compartment, a page with directions on one side. She turned it over and wrote:

———

CIRCLES OF LIGHT
continued to float in front of Karen’s eyes after she turned off the headlights. She blinked until they faded away, until she saw nothing but the dull glow of the winter night. She got out of the car and took a few steps forward, her boots crunching through the crust of snow, then inching onto ice. She took careful steps farther out onto the frozen lake, until she started to hear the ice creak, feel it crackle and shift beneath her. She was tempted to turn back to the safety of the car, tempted to think about the baby growing inside her, but she forced herself to stay where she was. She forced herself to stand still and let the ice split all around her, filling the air with its broken song.

G
LASS WAS EVERYWHERE. IF IT HADN’T BEEN SO AWFUL
, it would have been beautiful—the shards reflecting the light, sending their shimmer all over the distillery walls. The room smelled amazing, too, all that pear essence released into the air, perfect green fruit lounging all over the floor.

Mr. Vieira had stormed toward the bridge, Ben following him.

Mrs. Vieira grabbed a broom and started to sweep up some of the glass. Most of the alcohol had already evaporated, but the floor was still wet.

“Can we help you?” I asked, and she just shrugged. I went to the main house and found another broom and a mop in the pantry. I tried not to look at the bowl of Bartletts as I walked through the kitchen, the fruit full of dark splotches now, well past its prime.

“Isn’t this typical?” said Abcde as I handed her a broom. “The men go off to fight and the women are left to clean up the mess.”

———

BEN AND MR
. Vieira eventually stumbled back, Mr. Vieira cradling one fist.

“Well, he bloodied Roberts’s nose,” said Ben.

“Fucking asshole said he didn’t know anything about the bottles,” Mr. Vieira grumbled.

“He honestly didn’t seem to know what we were talking about,” said Ben.

“Bullshit!” Mr. Vieira opened and closed his fingers a few times, wincing.

“There was a big crowd here today,” said Abcde. “Maybe someone came back …”

I had a sudden flash of the man I thought I saw across the slough. A shudder ran through me.

“I know it was that sonofabitch,” said Mr. Vieira. “Probably broke the pipe in the icehouse, too.”

Quinn continued to help clean, carefully lifting one pear after another from the ground and putting them in a trash bin, but I could tell she was shaken.

WHEN THE POLICE
finally arrived, I busied myself with the broom, making sure to avoid eye contact.

“Thank God you’re here,” said Mr. Vieira.

Before he could continue, an officer said, “Demetrio Vieira, you have the right to remain silent,” and pulled out his handcuffs. He looked as if he knew Mr. Vieira personally, as if he hated to have to arrest him.

“You have the wrong man!” Mr. Vieira yelled as the officer gently pulled his arms behind his back and cuffed his hands.

“I’ll call your lawyer,” said Ben. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him flash me a look before he followed his father to the police car. Mrs. Vieira trailed behind, wailing as if someone had died.

“We better get back to the boat,” I said, and Quinn nodded, a
serious expression on her face. “We can drop off Abcde on the way.”

EVEN THOUGH I
had closed all the windows, the houseboat was still a little wet inside, the whales’ stunning acrobatics powerful enough to send water through the tiny gaps in the frames. When I went to turn down the thankfully dry bedspread, my nerve endings lit up like a switchboard. There was a perfect, whole Comice sitting on the pillow, still smelling of eau-de-vie, a couple of chips of glass glinting from its sides like dew. Or ice.

“Eema!” Quinn whimpered. I gestured for her to be quiet so I could try to tell if anyone was still inside the houseboat. I grabbed a heavy-duty flashlight as a potential weapon of self-defense, and slid open the closet, the bathroom door, all the cabinets. When those turned up clear, I told Quinn to stay inside and I went onto the deck to check inside the life preserver box. No sign of anyone. Just the whales, whose sudden blowhole puffs almost made me jump out of my skin.

“Eema!” Quinn clung to me when I came back inside. “I don’t want to sleep here.”

“I don’t either,” I said. “Pack your bags.”

WE CONVINCED ABCDE
to come with us to the hotel.

“It’s not quite a horse head in the bed,” said Abcde when we told her about the pear, “but it’s still a bit close for comfort.”

Ben’s truck was pulling into the driveway as we were pulling out. Mrs. Vieira was in the passenger seat; there was no sign of Mr. Vieira.

“They’re keeping him overnight,” Ben said after we both rolled down our windows. He looked more exhausted than I had ever seen him. He still seemed to have trouble looking at me.

“We’re spending the night at Rogelio’s,” Abcde said, leaning
over my lap. “Someone left a pear on Izzy’s pillow. From the eau-de-vie.”

“Maybe I’ll head over there later,” he said. This time he looked into my eyes so directly, my heart knocked against my ribs. “Izzy, we need to talk.”

“OOOH,” ABCDE SAID
as we drove down the dark levee roads. “He wants to ‘talk,’ eh?”

Quinn giggled a bit, although she still looked nervous.

“In a hotel, no less?” Abcde teased.

I just kept driving toward Isleton and tried to remember how to breathe.

THE CHECK-IN DESK
at Rogelio’s was the bar, and it was packed. As cozy as the restaurant had felt, I wondered whether I had brought my child to a safe place for the night. A bunch of heads swiveled toward us—I would guess dreadlocked poets and nine-year-olds were not their typical bar clientele. I was tempted to scoot onto a barstool, ask for whatever was strongest, whatever would knock me out for a few days; instead, I just asked for a room.

“You guys were here earlier, huh?” said the tall blond bartender/innkeeper. She was probably in her mid-forties, but wore a tight shirt and low jeans that exposed a swath of her overly tanned belly.

“For dinner.” I nodded.

“I’ll knock twenty off your rate since you already ate,” she said as she took a key down from its hook.

“Thanks,” I said, grateful for any opportunity to save some money.

“That woman’s a poet,” Quinn whispered loudly to Abcde.

“But she don’t know it.” Abcde winked, then said, “If you consider rhymes poetry, that is. Which I don’t.”

———

WE HAD TO
walk through the dark restaurant and the bustling but friendly poker room to get to the stairway that led up to the hotel area. I was happily surprised by our room, at the end of the long hallway. It was huge, with high ceilings, antique furniture, two queen-size beds.

Quinn threw open the doors of the large wardrobe and found the TV inside. “Can we watch it, Eema?” she asked. She hadn’t watched TV for ages.

“Television rots your brain,” said Abcde and Quinn immediately closed the doors, as if just looking at the blank screen would zap her intelligence. She continued to explore the rest of the room, picking up the miniature bottles of shampoo and lotion, the paper caps covering the water glasses.