Break the Skin (24 page)

But the truth was I was standing in Emma’s house, and I knew I’d have to go down the hallway to that bedroom, and I’d have to wake Pablo and tell him what had happened in Deep Ellum. Everything had gone wrong. I didn’t have the money. Slam Dent had chased after Amos, and I didn’t know what that meant. Did Amos have the money on him, or had he been taking us to where the money was? Maybe he’d gotten away, and Slam Dent was still after the cash, still after Pablo. The only thing I knew for certain was I didn’t have the money I’d gone to Deep Ellum to get.

“Miss Baby?” Emma said, and I knew she was asking what had happened. I thought of her, years back, waiting those nights for her husband to come home from the Carousel Club. She must have wondered how long their luck could last. How many nights could they keep from falling into harm’s way? Did the Mister know anything about what Jack Ruby was up to and whether it was part of a plot to kill the president? I asked her once. Point-blank. “Emma, what do you know?” She looked at me for a long time. She licked her lips, took a breath. I was sure she was about to tell me something she’d carried with her so long she couldn’t help but wish it on someone else. “I know I loved a man,” she finally said. “Loved him a good long while.” She put her hand to her breastbone.
“That’s what I know in here, Miss Baby. What it was to have a life with my Mister.”

I put my hand on the small of Donnie’s back and nudged him forward. “You tell Emma what happened,” I said. Then I went down the hallway to wake Pablo and do the same.

In the bedroom, a small television on the dresser was playing CNN, but Pablo had given up on it. He’d slipped out of his shirt and pants and had fallen asleep on top of the bedspread. He still had on his white briefs, the kind he’d worn since he was a boy. He slept on his back with his hurt arm in its sling across his stomach.

I sat down on the edge of the bed, and still he didn’t wake. I was about to reach out and touch him. My hand was in the air just above his face, still bruised from Slam Dent’s beating. One moment more, and I’d lay my hand to his cheek, feel the heat of his skin against mine, and he’d open his eyes and find me there.

Then I heard it. I heard the name. At first I thought my mind was playing tricks on me. I looked to the television, and there he was. Lester Stipp, my Donnie. His picture was on the screen just to the left of the news anchor’s shoulder, and the anchor was saying why.

Lester Stipp had been missing since September from his home in Mt. Gilead, Illinois. Now he was wanted, a suspect in a murder case. After months of dead ends, finally a break in the investigation—the murder weapon found. Lester Stipp. His picture disappeared and a news video ran behind the anchor: shots of a wood-frame house with a porch on the front; a town population sign that said
NEW HOPE
; the front of a Walmart in Mt. Gilead where a young woman had been arrested. They showed her picture, just a skinny-Minnie of a thing with curly brown hair.

There it was on the television, the world my Donnie had stepped out of, a world darker than any I would have dared imagine. Wanted for murder. Surely there was some sort of mistake. I’d known Donnie nearly three months, and outside the times he got frustrated because he couldn’t remember something, he’d always been sweet and kind. I knew he was
in the living room now telling Emma as gently as he could what had happened in Deep Ellum and what it meant. How could he possibly be the one the police were after?

But he was. I couldn’t wipe that fact away. Not even if I was to turn off the television. What I’d heard and seen wouldn’t leave me. Murder, this girl, my Donnie. And, finally, this: a reward for anyone who had any information about where he might be. Enough money to make things right between Pablo and Slam Dent, and plenty left to boot.

“Betts.” Suddenly Pablo reached out his hand and I took it. “Tell me you got it. Please. Tell me you got the money.”

I thought about what I’d just seen on CNN—my Donnie, this Lester Stipp—wanted for murder. I wanted to tell Pablo yes, I had it, the cash he’d promised Amos would give me when I met him in Deep Ellum. I wanted to throw it on the bed, bills and bills that would cover Pablo with all the money he needed to get him out of trouble with Slam Dent. I didn’t have it, but I knew I could tell Pablo about the news report, tell him that all we needed to do was make a call to the police and say we had the man from Illinois that they were looking for. Surely, I could do that much, couldn’t I? Give up on Donnie, this man I’d sworn came from the Otherworld, this magic man I thought was meant for me. I sat there on the bed, the moonlight washing over me, and I wished I could go to sleep and not have to make this choice.

“Slam,” I said, figuring I’d start there and then see what might happen. I couldn’t stay tongue-tied forever, not with Pablo waiting, and Donnie—I mean, Lester—out in the living room with Emma. He couldn’t know what I’d seen on CNN. He’d be waiting for me to come out and tell him what was going to happen next when it came to Pablo and the fix he was in. Lester Stipp didn’t have any idea that the drama he was in the midst of—Pablo’s trouble—now had everything to do with him.

“That son of a bitch,” Pablo said, catching on to what I was trying to tell him. “He got to Amos.”

“Before we could get the money,” I said.

“Son of a bitch,” said Pablo again, and I know I should have been thinking the same thing about Lester Stipp. If the television was telling the truth, he was a bad man, and maybe he’d come here playing innocent, pretended to love me all because I’d invited him to, and now I wondered whether he’d sucker-punched me, let me believe that he was a man without a memory, when all along he was playing me for a fool, pretending he didn’t know a thing about who he was or where he’d come from, all for the sake of trying to escape arrest. Lordy Magordy.

And yet there was a part of me that couldn’t give in to that story, that wanted there to be another tale instead. Call me a fool and you’d probably be right, but as I watched Pablo jump up from the bed and pace about the room, I couldn’t help but hope that the television was wrong, that this Lester Stipp hadn’t had a thing to do with that murder case, and once we could get to the bottom of the story—once we could sit down with the police and straighten it all out—he’d still be the man I’d taken in and then fallen in love with. It didn’t matter to me what his real name was, only that he’d still be there with me every day of my life.

“I’m a dead man,” Pablo said. He stopped pacing and pointed his finger at me. “You’re looking at a dead man.”

I felt accused, as if somehow what had happened in Deep Ellum had been my fault.

“You could go to the police,” I said. “You could turn yourself in. Wouldn’t that be better than letting Slam Dent get hold of you?”

“I’m not doing time. I’m not, Betts.” He grabbed a bag from the closet and started throwing clothes into it with his good arm. “Trust me, I’d rather end up dead.”

That was what did it, made me decide I couldn’t let my brother take off again. I switched off the TV, and I said his name. “Pablo,” I said.
“Mi hermano.”
Blood runs to blood, my
abuelita
always told me, and here at the moment of decision, it turned out to be true. I chose my brother over whatever cockeyed chance at love there might have still been for me.

When Pablo heard me call him my brother, something about the
Spanish tongue touched him—I could feel it myself, the intimacy in the way those two words came from my mouth—and he stopped what he was doing and straightened up and looked at me, waiting.

It was like we were children again, our
mami
gone away and the two of us left to fend for each other.

“Don’t go,” I said. “I can help you.”

He shook his head. “It’s too late,
mi hermana.
”

“No, Pablo. I don’t think it is.”

What I thought about as I told him the story was this: It’s never too late for the things that matter. Never too late for love, for faith, for family. Never too late to do what’s right. So to save him from Slam Dent, I told him everything about what I’d seen on CNN, told him about Lester Stipp and how there was a reward out there just waiting for us to collect it.

“Betts.” He took both my hands in his, squeezing them with a pressure that made me understand how frightened he was. “You know I need the cash.” I told him yes, I knew. “You have to make the call,” he said. “I can’t be involved. If I am, the police will snag me. You have to get the reward and then get it to Slam Dent.”

I knew all that. In my head, it all made sense. I had to leave Lester Stipp with Emma and go over to my house to make the call. I could see myself doing it, but then I stepped out into the living room, and there he was. He and Emma were sitting on the couch, and she was patting his hand. His head was bowed, but when he heard me come into the room, he looked up, his eyes wide, his mouth open—that gap between his front teeth making my heart go again, the way it did the first time he looked at me like that, looked at me as if he were waiting for me to save him.

“Baby?” he said. “Is everything going to be all right?”

“It’s going to be fine,” I told him. “Just fine.”

But I knew in my heart it wasn’t.

LANEY

I
t was our night off—the first time Lester disappeared—a Saturday at the end of January. We were going to drive to Vincennes, have something to eat, maybe go to a movie. Maybe we’d get a room at the Executive Inn and stay the night, he said. He was shy when he suggested it, but still, there it was, the idea. “How’d that be, Laney?”

I wasn’t sure. We’d gotten pretty hot with the kisses and the hugs, but we hadn’t done the down-and-dirty yet, and though I didn’t know how to break the news to Lester, I didn’t intend to, not anytime soon. I wasn’t even on the Pill; I’d never had a reason. And there was so much I didn’t know. Frankly, the idea of sexing it up with Lester scared me to death. What if I ended up pregnant like Rose?

I didn’t say anything for a long time, and when I finally did, I was very firm. “I’m not like that. I’m not a skank.”

Lester said he was sorry. “Gee, Laney. I didn’t mean … well, gee, Laney … come on, we’ll go, and we’ll have some fun.”

Fun, I could handle. I was all over that. But no funny business, not until I was sure Lester was the one, with a capital “T-H-E.” “You’ll have to be a gentleman,” I said, and he told me of course, absolutely, nothing but.

So when he didn’t pick me up at the appointed time—when it got so late, I knew something was wrong—I thought he’d written me off. A nice girl, that Laney, but not the woman he needed.

“Grow up,” Rose said when I went looking for a shoulder to cry on. “What’d you expect? You didn’t give him what he was after.”

My mind was racing. I drove to Lester’s house, but he wasn’t there. Not a sign of him. No light on inside. No truck parked in the driveway. He didn’t show up for work the next week. He was gone. Days went by and there was no word, and I swore it was my fault. I’d driven him away by being too inexperienced, too afraid.

“No, it’s not like that,” Delilah said. “It’s Rose.”

“What in the world would Rose have to do with it?”

“Laney, what if it’s the next part of the hex? She’s a greedy woman. She can’t stand for anyone else to have love.”

Rose said good riddance when I came crying to her again about Lester. “Honey, he’s nothing to get out of sorts about. You’re better off without him if you ask me.”

At the time, I thought she was just trying to make me feel better, but it didn’t work. In fact, it made me hurt more, and I couldn’t help but hate Rose a little for that. I burst into tears, and she said, “Oh, come on, Laney. Did you really think you’d keep him?”

“What’s that mean? You think no one could ever love me?”

“I’m just saying you’re not the first girl to get her heart broke.”

There we were again, getting our backs up, and as much as it saddened me, I decided that this time I wouldn’t back down. I think back on it now, and I realize it was the start of our final coming apart, even though we’d go on awhile pretending otherwise.

“You should know,” I said. “The way you stole Tweet.”

She shook her head, and her voice went hard. “That woman, that Delilah Dade. I don’t know how you can be friends with her.”

But I
was
friends with her—sisters again. Delilah never told me I was better off without Lester. No, she took me to the Dairy Queen and treated me to a Hot Fudge Brownie Delight. Then we went driving in the country, a Lucinda Williams CD playing, and we sang along with all those heart-sore songs, and by the time we were done, I felt like this was
all something I had to do, and by God, I’d be the better for it, just like Lucinda, a little tired, a little sad, a little pissed off, a little wiser.

“It only hurts so long,” Delilah told me. “Then it just aches when you touch it.”

We put our heads together. We read through my book on spells and magic until we found one that we thought might work to reverse the one Rose had spun to take Lester away. After sunset, I was to write his name on a different piece of paper while standing in the four corners of my house. Then I was to put the four slips of paper under my pillow. I was to repeat the writing of the name every night for eight nights in a row, always sleeping on the slips of paper, and that would bring my love back to me.

“All of them?” I asked. “Or just the four from that particular day?”

Delilah reread the spell. “It doesn’t say.” She thought for a minute. “Better make it all of them,” she finally said. “Why take a chance that the spell won’t be strong enough?”

So that’s what I did. The evening of the tenth day, I came out to Mother’s Corolla to go to work. I got into the car and was about to start it, when a voice from the backseat said, “Hey, Laney,” and I just about jumped out of my skin.

“Lester?” I spun around to have a look.

“No, it’s just me.”

It was Poke, just sitting there in the backseat. I felt my heart sink. “You’re a wicked boy. You scared me half to death. What are you doing?”