Evan thought of the gunmetal grays and hard surfaces of his penthouse, such a contrast with Mia’s throw blankets and candles.
He said, “A lot of people do.”
Joey muffled a noise in her throat.
Evan said, “What did you want?”
“I don’t know.” Anger laced her voice. “To help him. More.”
“You can’t help people more than they want to help themselves.”
He looked at her. Her eyes were wet.
She turned back to the window, shook her head.
“Stupid fucking kid,” she said.
He and Joey sat in their parallel twin beds, Joey with her laptop across her knees, Evan sipping vodka poured over cubes from the motel ice maker. The front desk sold miniature bottles of Absolut Kurant, which Evan didn’t buy because he wasn’t a fucking savage. A twenty-four-hour liquor store five blocks away had a bottle of Glass, a silky vodka distilled from chardonnay and sauvignon blanc grapes. It had a tangy finish, unvarnished by added sugars or acids, and if he swirled it around his tongue enough, he could catch a trace of honeysuckle.
It wasn’t Stoli Elit, but at four in the morning in a less-than-tony neighborhood adjacent to St. Louis International, he’d take what he could get.
He flipped through the red notebook he’d recovered from the microwave in the Richmond house. The pages were blank.
Baffling.
Joey looked over at his glass. “Can I have some?”
“No.”
“Oh, I can help steal a shotgun from a cop car, fly on a fake ID, kidnap a kid from a safe house, but God forbid I drink alcohol.”
Evan considered this a moment. He handed her his glass. The room was small enough that he barely had to lean to reach her.
She took a sip.
The taste hit, and she screwed up her face. “This is awful. You actually like this?”
“I tried to warn you.”
She shoved the glass back at him.
“It always reminds me of my foster home,” she said. “The smell of alcohol. And hair spray. Menthol cigarettes.”
Evan set down his glass. He thought about how Jack used to leave silences for Evan to fill, room for him to figure out if he wanted to talk and what he would say if he did. He remembered Mia’s advice: At the end of the day, all they really want to hear? You’re okay. You’re gonna be fine. You’re worth it.
“She always smoked them,” Joey said after a pause. “The ‘foster mom.’” The words came with teeth in them. “We all called her Nemma. I don’t know if that was her real name, but that’s what everyone called her.”
Evan cast his mind back to Papa Z sunk in his armchair, as snug as a hermit crab in a shell, one fist clamped around a Coors, the other commanding a remote with lightsaber efficiency as the boys swirled around him, fighting and shoving and laughing. Van Sciver always reigned supreme, the king of the jungle, while Evan slunk mouselike around the periphery, trying to get by unseen. It was a lifetime ago, and yet he felt as if he were standing in that living room now.
Joey kept her gaze on her laptop screen. “She was a beast of a woman. Housedresses. Caked-on blush. And her favorite phrase.”
Evan said, “Which was?”
“This is gonna hurt you more than it hurts me.” She laughed, but there was no music in it. “God, was she awful. Breath like an ashtray. Big floppy breasts. She had a lot of girls under her roof. She always had boyfriends rotating through. That’s how she kept them.”
She paused, wet her lips, worked the lower one between her teeth.
Evan remained very still.
“I don’t remember much about them,” she said. “Just the faces.” The glow of the screen turned her eyes flat, reflective. “There were a lot of faces.”
For a moment she looked lost in it, her shoulders raised in an instinctive hunch against the memories. Then she came out of it, snapped the laptop shut. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
Evan said, “Okay.”
She wouldn’t look over at him.
He got up with his glass and the bottle with its elegant clear stopper. He dumped his drink in the bathroom sink and poured out the rest, the vodka glug-glugging down the drain. He dropped the empty bottle in the trash can, came back to his bed, and returned to leafing through the red notebook.
He sensed her stare on the side of his face.
“That’s why I’m all fucked up,” she said.
“You’re not any more fucked up than everyone else.”
“I’m angry,” she whispered. “All the time.”
He risked a glance over at her, and she didn’t look away.
“Those are the skills you learned to survive,” he said. “They’re what got you through.”
She didn’t reply. The thin sheets were bunched up beneath her knees, the folds like spread butter.
He said, “But you also have a choice.”
She swallowed. “Which is?”
“To ask yourself, do they still serve you? You can keep them and be angry. Or let them go and have a real life.”
“You can’t,” she said. “Let go and have a real life.”
“Not so far,” he agreed.
“I feel like I’m stuck,” she said. “I hate the Program, and I hate that I wasn’t good enough for it. And then I wonder — is that the only reason I hate it? Because I wasn’t good enough?”
“You were good enough to get out,” he said. “You know how many people have done that and are alive?”
She shook her head.
“For all we know, we’re the only two.”
She blinked a few times.
“You did that,” he said. “On your own.”
“Yeah, well, you never know what kind of strength you have until you have to have it.” She reached over, clicked off her light, and slid down onto her pillow.
“Good night,” Evan said.
He turned his light off as well. The blackout curtains left the room as dark as a crypt. He heard her shifting, burrowing into the sheets. And then a silence so pure that it hummed.
“Good night,” she said.
Evan’s RoamZone vibrated in his pocket. He drew it out and stared at caller ID, which sourced to a mobile with an area code in downtown L.A. He stood and took a few steps away from the final passengers waiting to get on the connecting flight in Phoenix. The flight attendant had just announced the last boarding group, so Evan waved for Joey to go ahead. He’d catch up in a second.
He clicked to answer. “Do you need my help?”
Breath fuzzed the connection.
“Yes,” Xavier Orellana said. “I want out. I want out of the gang.”
Evan said, “I’m coming.”
He hung up and got on the plane.
60
Not Good
“Know any good your-mama jokes?” Peter peered up at Evan and Joey as the elevator doors clanked shut.
His charcoal eyes were dead earnest, as if he were asking for a physician referral.
Evan and Joey had pulled in to Castle Heights right behind Mia in her Acura, returning from picking up Peter at school. Peter had practically run circles around the two of them across the lobby and onto the elevator.
Standing beside his mom, Peter yanked the straps of his oversize backpack. It looked like it was loaded with bricks. How many textbooks could a nine-year-old possibly require?
Joey said, “What are you talking about?”
“Like: Your mama’s so fat she jumped in the Red Sea and said, ‘Take that, Moses.’”
Mia said, “Your public-education tax dollars at work.”
Peter kept on, undeterred. “Your mama’s so ugly she made a blind kid cry.”
Mia said, “I like that one because it’s offensive in two distinct ways.”