The Fates Will Find Their Way (7 page)

All over town, the signs were posted, signs that, unwittingly, were the precursor to Nora Lindell’s “missing” signs. The reward money—$5,000—was instantly infamous; our mothers said it was disgusting. Our mothers said rewards like that were why dogs got stolen in the first place. Trey wondered aloud on more than one occasion whether the Wilsons would still fork over the money if they knew the dog was dead. We thought that was going a little too far, but only said so behind his back.

It was Nora, actually, who was the one to finally tell Trey to give it a rest. A few weeks had passed since Danny had hit the dog. Winter break would be over soon; classes would start just after New Year’s. Trey had thrown an impromptu party after his parents had, last minute, gone out of town. The night was winding down. The majority of us private schoolers still had curfews, which meant the party couldn’t last the way Trey wanted it to.

“Cut it out,” Nora had said, loudly, unexpectedly, and seemingly out of nowhere. It’s not like we hadn’t noticed she was there. Of course we noticed her. Who else but Nora would have been forced to bring her little sister to a party? Who but a widowed father would be naïve enough to let his fifteen-year-old daughter take her middle school sister to a high school party? But we’d forgotten her in the way that you can forget a quiet girl. We’d forgotten her because she’d turned herself inward, willed herself invisible, at least until Trey had started picking on Danny.

The point is, Trey had one of the “missing” signs clutched in his fist and he was waving it in Danny’s face, saying, “Danny or five thousand dollars? Danny or five thousand dollars?” He’d been waving the sign in Danny’s face the last few weeks, since Thanksgiving, really. And, yeah, honestly, the whole thing had gotten boring. But it didn’t seem our place to say. It hadn’t, until Nora spoke up, seemed our place to say anything at all.

“Excuse me?” Trey said. In a movie, this would have been the moment the music screeched to a halt. But it was real life. The music, whatever it was, played on. “Did you say something?”

“I said to give it a break,” said Nora. She was sitting with her back to the giant aquarium. Her cheeks were rosy. Sissy was lying on the carpet next to her, braiding her own hair into lopsided cornrows. The little sister, interesting to note, looked embarrassed, as if she didn’t yet know where to side. “It’s boring already,” said Nora, not looking up. Not looking at anyone, especially not Trey. “No one’s laughing.”

For a minute we thought Danny might cry.

We waited. All of us. Our eyes on Trey. It was his house, after all. It was his right to set the tone. Danny slinked away to the bathroom. Sissy held her breath. Her mere existence, back then, was annoying. Whether she wanted to be or not, she was a chaperone. There was no telling what would remain secret when a middle schooler was among us.

“Whatever,” said Trey finally, which is when the music would have miraculously turned back on. Instead, we all started breathing again, beginning to plot our blasé escapes home in time for curfew without seeming like there was a curfew to abide. Trey, of course, sounded like a jerk and we all felt embarrassed, but if any of us had been paying attention at the time, we would have noticed that the important detail was that he
did
give it a break. That the “missing” sign went not into his back pocket this time, but into the trash can finally, and we should probably have realized then—though we didn’t, how could we? We were children after all—that there must have been something going on between Nora and Trey for a while.

9

EXCERPT FROM COURT RECORDS, CASE FILE AF7845.

DETECTIVE:
Let the court records show that present in the room are Detective Rose Peters, Geraldine Epstein, and Mrs. Linda Epstein.

GERALDINE:
People call me Ginger.

DET: Okay, Ginger. I’m sorry about that. Why don’t we go ahead and get started, then?

GERALDINE: That doesn’t mean I want you to call me Ginger.

MRS. EPSTEIN: Ginger, please. There’s no reason to be rude.

DET: It’s okay, Mrs. Epstein. Completely understandable. Geraldine, what would you like me to call you?

GERALDINE: I don’t care. Call me Ginger.

DET: All right, Ginger. Why don’t you tell me about Trey Stephens.

GERALDINE: I’m here against my will. Can you write that down? This isn’t my idea.

MRS. EPSTEIN: Ginger, we talked about this.

DET: Your dissent will be noted in the court records, Ginger. And, again, we’d like to thank you for being here. We know it isn’t easy or comfortable.

GERALDINE: I knew what I was doing. That’s my point. I started it.

DET: I understand you feel that way. I understand that’s what you think.

GERALDINE: This is what I’m talking about. Mom, this is why I don’t want to be here. Nobody’s listening to me. Nobody’s fucking
listening
to me.

MRS. EPSTEIN: Ginger. Stop it.

GERALDINE:
You
stop it. I hate that you people think I don’t know what I’ve done. It’s not how I
feel.
It’s what I
know
.

MRS. EPSTEIN: Please, Ginger. Just think about it. Think about what he’s done to you.

GINGER: You’re a cow. You’re a fucking cow. You know that?

DET: Mrs. Epstein, maybe you could give your daughter and me some time alone?

MRS. EPSTEIN: I’m not a bad mother. I’m not a bad mother.

DET: Nobody’s saying that.

GINGER:
I
am.

DET: Please, Mrs. Epstein. Outside. Let the court records show that Mrs. Epstein is no longer present.

GINGER: Amen.

DET:
All right, Ginger. Let’s try this again. Why don’t you tell me what you
know
about Trey Stephens?

GINGER: We fucked, right? If my mom hadn’t walked in on us, I wouldn’t be telling you, okay? I’d probably be fucking him right now if I could. But everyone knows and so, okay, we fucked. Good?

DET: Remind me how old you are?

GINGER: So you can tell me I don’t legally know what I want?

DET:
Something like that.

GINGER: I’m not a child. I understand the law.

DET: Then you understand that, according to the law, you are a child?

GINGER: Do you want to know about how I fucked him? Do you want details? Like about his penis? Should I describe it so you know for sure about what I’ve done?

DET: Do you understand that what’s happened between you and Trey Stephens has affected your childhood? Do you know that most children your age don’t know about penises and
fucking
?

GINGER: First of all, I don’t think that line of questioning is appropriate or very policeman-like. Second of all, that’s a joke about most kids my age not knowing about penises. Hate to ruin your feel-good idea about me and my friends’ childhoods, but a joke.

DET: Do you have boyfriends at school?

GINGER: Mr. Stephens is a man. Those creeps at school are boys. It’s embarrassing. Seriously. The way they fiddle with you, like they’re going to cry or pee their pants. It’s embarrassing.

DET: All right. Let me ask you this. Do you think it’s strange that
a
man
, as you call him, wants to touch your body? Can you see the differences in your body and, say, my body? Can you see that there is, perhaps, something unusual in
a
man
wanting to touch something so undeveloped?

GINGER: Are you trying to give me a complex? My boobs are actually pretty big, for my age. I’ve got the fourth largest boobs in my grade. So don’t try to give me some sort of complex, okay? I get that from my mom.

DET: You miss my point, Ginger.

GINGER: Do I?

DET: All right. How about this? How about let’s start with how you met Trey Stephens.

GINGER: I’ve known Mr. Stephens all my life. He comes to parties. We go to parties and he’s there.

DET: Do you think that’s strange?

GINGER: Why would it be strange?

DET: Does Mr. Stephens have children?

GINGER: So, what, he can’t come to my parents’ parties because he doesn’t have children? Whoops. My aunt is fucked. I guess she won’t be coming to any more parties because she can’t have babies.

DET: Again, you miss my point.

GINGER: Again. Do I?

DET: This isn’t going anywhere.

10

I
t was well after midnight and spitting rain when the Mexican left the restaurant. There was a puddle outside the back door. He skipped over it and felt foolish in the process. He was a large man, but not soft. He was barrel-shaped and strong. Far from dainty, and yet that’s exactly the impression—not the word, for surely he thinks in his language and not in ours—he often has about himself.
Remilgado
, he might have said aloud.
Remilgado
. Perhaps he spit to offset the daintiness.

As was often the case, he was aware of his smell. Aware of that mixture of grease and sweat, of fried fat and meat and bleach. The rain worried him. Surely it would compound the smell of the restaurant, spread the stink evenly across his skin. He would need to shower before climbing into bed next to Nora. He dreaded waking her. Dreaded her reaction to the odors he brought home. She would not be rude; she didn’t know how to be rude. She had never once said anything about the smell. But this, in many ways, was the most embarrassing thing of all. The Mexican worried that she didn’t mention the smell because she believed the smell was inherent to him, believed it was a part of him, his heritage, and this was why she said nothing.

What the Mexican couldn’t know was that Nora didn’t simply tolerate the smell, she adored it. Late at night, the babies asleep, the high bedroom windows open, she knew when the Mexican was home first by smell, then by sound. Most nights she stayed in bed, completely still, her back to the bedroom door, and listened as he tried not to make noise. This always made her smile. She listened to the bathroom door open, to the flush of the toilet, to the sound of the shower. He took care with his laundry, never leaving it in the bedroom with the other clothes, but taking it always directly to the washing machine.

She knew he was embarrassed, but she couldn’t say anything. He would misunderstand, this was certain. He would take her protestations as sympathy or guilt. Anyway, something we all know is that Nora wasn’t good at speaking plainly. Maybe with strangers—with the man in the Catalina, with the woman who first hired her in Arizona, with that ridiculous stewardess in our hometown airport—perhaps with these types of people she felt emboldened, she felt free not to be herself but to be different from what she’d been trained to be. Because who, after all, knew definitively who she was? Certainly not Nora Lindell. The last to try to explain her departure from us all would be Nora. Why did she get into that car? Did she even get into it? Why did she leave our town? Why didn’t she have an abortion when she could? These were questions Nora would never dare ask; they were questions, instead, that she left to us.

At any rate, one thing we knew—we know—is that Nora was not one for speaking plainly to the people she cared about. Blame her mother’s death. Blame a loving but taciturn father; blame an entire town full of boys who were too shy to talk and so only stared. Blame anything you like. What we know is that Nora was one of the quiet ones. One of the inward-turned ones. Someone who was better at watching than at interacting, but whose observations served only to confuse, rather than to clarify.

And then there was Trey Stephens. How they came to be, none of us knew for sure. Silence was almost certainly part of the equation. The fish tank in Trey’s basement. That faint blue light. A hand. A knee. A soundless, awkward desperation.

If she’d not been able to talk to Trey, to talk to her father, to talk to Sissy or Sarah Jeffreys or anyone from this life, then how could she have talked to the Mexican? How could she talk to anyone when she couldn’t talk to us?

B
ut when was this, anyway? The Mexican had come home. It was raining, close to one in the morning. This was surely after they’d had sex, long after the twins had been born. But does it matter? We know they were married by this time. But does any of that matter really?

What matters is that she crept to the laundry room while he was in the shower. She crept to the laundry room and, without turning on a light, she pulled his dirty clothes from the washing machine and put them on one by one. She put on his clothes and curled up in a ball at the base of the machine. He found her asleep in his terrible, stinking clothes, and he picked her up and carried her to their bed and they faced each other while the babies slept in the room next door and they promised each other they would never leave. Nora cried and tried hard not to think of Sissy, and the Mexican held her. He said, “Let me take these clothes from you. They are dirty. They do not deserve you.” By which, of course, he meant that Nora did not deserve them. She hit his chest. He let her.

“That’s not what you mean,” Nora said.

“I know,” he said.

“Say what you mean,” she said.

“I do not know how to say what I mean. You are too much,” he said.

“No, no,” she said. She was panicky. “Don’t say that. Don’t say that. I can be less.”

He was silent, sad. “You misunderstand me again.” She hit his chest. He grabbed her fists in one hand. “Listen,” he said. “You are everything. I do not deserve you.”

“But you do,” she said. She tried to hit him, but his hand held hers tightly. “You do,” she said again, still crying, sighing faintly.

“Your face is wet,” he said. She blew her nose into his shirt that she was still wearing. He pulled the cloth away from her face.

“The babies,” she said. “Who will take care of the babies?” And this is when the Mexican laughed, laughed though he was frightened by the tiny woman he held in his arms, the tiny girl he did not understand. “I will take care of the babies. I will take care of you and the babies. My babies. Three babies. All of you mine.”

A breeze came in then through those high bedroom windows, a breeze that rose up from the herb garden, touching the quiet surface of the pool, picking up its faint smell of chlorine. Nora closed her eyes and breathed in heavily, taking in the scent of the eucalyptus plant, envisioning its crippled limbs and its coin-shaped leaves.

“Do you miss your sister?” she said.

The Mexican squeezed her tightly, then turned her body so that she faced away from him, and he held onto her from behind.

“Every day,” he said.

“Me too,” she said. “Every day.”

He balled her hands into fists and grasped them tightly in his own hands. Her arms were crossed. She was locked into the position of a straitjacket. She realized this suddenly and smiled, though the Mexican could not see.

“I’m a crazy person,” she said and laughed.

“Sí
,” he said. “
Chica loca. Mi americana muy demente
. This I am sure I do not misunderstand.”