Lemon Reef (9 page)

Del moved her abdomen restlessly, made a throaty sound, her breath quickening. She laughed sweetly and said, “I can't believe how good that feels.”

Her sounds and movements caused me to shiver with pleasure and sent my stomach whirling. We kissed. She rolled onto me, cupped my breast, and furtively rubbed against my thigh. I rubbed against her enough for an orgasm to trickle out. I don't know whether or not Del came or noticed that I did. We didn't talk about that part.

It was near morning when we were finally too tired to keep going; we just lay there quietly, the full weight of Del's body on mine, the side of her face pressing against my chest.

“Are you sleeping?”

“A little,” she mumbled.

“Is it okay, what we did just now, is it okay?”

“Yeah,” she said sleepily. “I liked it.”

“You're not gonna avoid me tomorrow?”

“No,” she said. “I might wanna do it again.”

Lazily stroking my cheek with her thumb, her breathing fell constant and smooth.

Trying not to move too much, I used my toes to reach, then my hands to grab a blanket at the foot of the bed. I lifted it over us, held her tighter, and slept, too.

*

“What did you mean,” I asked Katie, “when you said Del wasn't doing well?”

“She just wasn't.”

Katie lowered the air-conditioning, cracked her window, and lit a cigarette. Her white-blond hair hung loose around the soft angles of her face and brushed against her shoulders lightly. I watched her put the cigarette between her lips and draw from it. She still made smoking look so good. I hadn't smoked a cigarette since I was seventeen, but I had to consciously resist the temptation to ask for one now, resist the powerful adolescent fantasy this image of her stirred, that mirroring her would magically transform me into being her.

“Del was weird lately, Jenna.” Considering further, Katie said, “You know how she always looked amazing?”

Her comment took me by surprise. Katie would never have admitted Del looked good when we were in high school. She was too jealous of her. Del and Katie and, to a lesser extent, Gail were part of a world I, the lesbian-to-be, was oblivious to growing up. It was a world of sundry hair products, shiny jewelry, enthralling perfumes, and tight-fitting sundresses. The objective for most of the girls was to get the boys to look at them—something I couldn't pretend to care about. Sometimes I felt left out, but most of the time I felt relieved to be outside the competition and contempt ricocheting from girl to girl like infinite images in the angled mirrors in department-store dressing rooms.

I smiled and nodded. Del did like it when guys were attracted to her, but dressing up meant more to her than that. She came from a poor family, attended a high school full of rich, spoiled kids, yet managed to set the fashion bar the other girls aspired to. It was just what was understood to be true about Del—boys desired her, girls imitated her. She didn't have a lot of money to spend on clothes, but the clothes she wore, she wore well—class drag. Del was thin, blond, and beautiful, and she could make faded jeans and a threadbare T-shirt look like they came out of a Neiman Marcus window display.

“Not lately.” Katie looked at me, her lips drawn tighter. Smoke seeped from the edge of her mouth and disappeared through the crack in the window. “I don't know how to explain it, Jenna. It was really strange. The last few months…I don't know how to explain it.”

“Try,” I said and then felt embarrassed by the force of my interest.

“Like a nun.” Katie couldn't help laughing a little. “I mean”—fighting a creeping smile and offering her bewilderment by a slight upward gesture of an open hand—“Adeline Soto wearing shirts buttoned to her neck.” She paused to let it sink in. “Loafers. Her hair was greasy.” Katie shrugged, pushed smoke out through her nose this time. “Not a stitch of makeup. No perfume, no nail polish, no jewelry—nothing. It was like she had joined a religious cult or something. In fact, that's what everyone was saying. The only person she saw outside of work was Talon…well and her kid, she was allowed to be with her kid.”

“Allowed?”

Katie's attention seemed to shift, and she dropped her hand to her thigh. I looked at it and thought about the amount of time we had spent mocking Katie's spindly fingers, Gail's short neck, my bird's-nest hair, and Del's stubby toes.

“She didn't do anything without Talon's permission.” Katie shook her head slightly, slid her blue eyes in my direction. “There is something seriously wrong with that guy,” she said. “Two weeks ago Del worked a shift, didn't take her sunglasses off.” My stomach tightened, and I lowered my window for air. “These guys, man.” She blew out smoke. “They take what they want.”

I startled, realizing immediately we were no longer talking about Del. I watched Katie for a minute, almost asked her about an incident in high school I knew had changed her life and about which we had never spoken. I decided not to bring it up.

“Was it unusual for her to be bruised like that?”

“Like that, yes. It was getting worse the last few months. They were splitting up—at least that's what Del wanted. She said she was leaving him. She stayed with him through”—Katie stammered as she spoke—“a lot. You know how it is. They have a kid together. I think that was a big part of it for Del, why she stayed as long as she did.”

I nodded. “I'm sure it was the main reason she stayed.”

“That's why it's so sad. Del's dead, and he gets the kid, just like that. It doesn't seem right, Jenna. We've been thinking maybe there's something we can do to stop him from taking her. Since you're a judge, maybe you could talk to the police and explain why he wouldn't be the best person for her to be with.”

“Commissioner,” I said. Then feeling too tired to explain, I added, “I'm not a judge.”

“Norma tells everyone you're a judge.”

“Yeah, well, Norma's not one for grappling with the nuances.”

“We're worried about Khila,” Katie said. “That's her name.”

“I know.”

“She's only ten. If he was capable of beating Del like that, what's to say he won't do the same to Khila?”

I stared out the window, noticed the miles of rooftops. “He's her father. He's allowed to take her.”

I heard myself sounding dispassionate, and wondered when feelings had become so irrelevant for me. I looked at the photo of Del next to me on the seat, and the radio began to play “Fooling Yourself (The Angry Young Man)” by Styx. Of all the songs…

Katie turned it up, saying, “I haven't heard this song in a really long time.”

Katie'd actually given me this song in high school. It was after we hadn't spoken in a while, and I had been feeling so angry at her, and alone. That she had given me this song meant more to me than she could know. I'd never told her this, but it made a difference to me, pushed me to try harder when I really didn't feel like I could. Katie always seemed self-absorbed, perpetually distracted, like she didn't care about anything. Then, out of the blue, she would say something or do something, like leave a copy of this song in my locker, which would make it clear she'd been paying attention all along. I realized now, looking at her, that her mind skittered because she cared too much—she had a low threshold for painful things. If Katie didn't like what she was seeing or hearing or feeling, she just, metaphorically speaking, changed channels until she landed somewhere else, somewhere easier. Avoidance had worked for her when we were younger, but her apology to me in the airport, her cryptic comment about men taking what they want, and her concern about Del and Khila made me wonder if it was still working for her.

She blew smoke and said over the music, “I know for a fact Del would not have wanted Khila to go with Talon.” Then she leaned forward and turned up the volume. “This song has always reminded me of you.”

“I remember.”

The clothing, the bruises, Del's hygiene, the custody threats mixed together in my mind with the lyrics blaring from the speakers. I closed my eyes and leaned my head against the window. If what I was beginning to realize had happened to Del didn't push me over some emotional edge, I thought, the seventies music just might.

“You should call your mother.” She waited for me to respond.

I nodded absently. “I will,” I said, knowing full well I probably wouldn't.

We exited the freeway at Seventy-Ninth Street and headed east through the old neighborhood. I noticed Del's block as we passed it. The old movie theater on the corner was now a Blockbuster Video, and the family-owned convenience store she and I had frequented was a Taco Bell. Small prefab houses with minor variations streamed by, connected like dots by dead lawns, creating the effect of a flip-book. As we continued in the direction of Biscayne Bay, the houses expanded and the distance between them increased. We turned left onto the street I grew up on and drove past sprawling ranch-style homes with long driveways and sculpted landscapes.

For a moment I thought we were going to my parents' house, but before we reached it, we turned again onto a cul-de-sac at the end of which was a small complex of modern town homes with brown wood siding and atypically shaped roofs. The structures reminded me of futuristic gingerbread houses with their sleek architectural design combined with details of cuteness, such as faux window shutters and colorful gates and rain gutters. It was exactly where I would expect Gail to live.

We knocked on Gail's door, waited, knocked again. There was no answer. There were lights on, so I assumed she'd run out for a moment. I called her cell phone. No answer. I called her home phone. No answer. Twenty minutes went by while we speculated as to where Gail might be and continued to try to reach her.

“She knew we were coming?” Katie asked.

“I called her when I landed.” I knocked again. No answer. “Just take me to Pascale's,” I said, finally.

Katie's expression was equal parts surprise, fear, and recognition that of course I would want that. She blew her cheeks out, nodded, and said, “Let's just hang until Gail gets back. I don't want to go without her. I'm sure she's just held up somewhere. Probably doesn't have her cell phone.”

We went back to the car and waited in the speckled shade cast by reaching live oaks. Katie noticed Gail's car in the parking lot, which did confuse her.

“If she's home,” Katie said, “why isn't she answering?”

I shrugged, sick of trying to figure it out and preoccupied with the heat. We were in an outdoor oven, and I swear each hour someone notched it up another degree. The air proved resistant to movement. My jeans stuck to my legs. The armpits on my red cotton T-shirt were dark. Sweat gathered at my hairline and rose between my shoulder blades. I felt a bead of perspiration trickle down my spine and then another and another. My intolerance of the heat and wetness that had once been the norm for me served as another reminder of the distance I had put between my childhood and my current life. At the same time, the heat was undeniably enlivening, and I did have an image of myself, as the sweat dribbled down my back, as literally thawing.

Katie stretched her lean, long body out across the hood of her Celica and closed her eyes. Her dark eyelashes drew a stark contrast to her bronze complexion and white-blond hair. I was struck by how familiar she was, even after all this time. I remembered that she slept the same way that she lay now, with one arm slung over her head and her face tucked into the crook of her bent elbow.

My eyes went to the soccer ball hanging from the rearview mirror. I'd been away a long time, but a lot was the same. Katie's father had left when she was not quite two. Her mother supported Katie and herself by working as a waitress at the same deli at which Katie worked now. Katie had started working there after high school. It was supposed to be a temporary thing while she figured out what came next. Nothing had come next.

*

My phone rang. It was Bea McVee. As I answered, I checked my watch—eleven thirty a.m., which made it eight thirty in California.

Bea said, “So much for being too new to get a complaint. I just walked in to a message machine full of them. Between yesterday and this morning, you managed to piss off the Early Childhood Intervention Program, Women Against Violence, and the Leche lunatics, and then you left town.”

“Baxter and Flint,” I said. “I switched custody, gave the father temporary sole legal and physical of the nine-month-old girl.”

“That explains Early Intervention and WAV.”

“She was nursing.”

“The mother?”

“The
baby
.”

Bea's voice was raspy with impatience. “Those Leches would have me still nursing if they could.”

“I guess Margaret Todd is organizing,” I said. “We go back a long way. I worked with her on the domestic-violence-death autopsy team for as long as I could stand it. And then we really bumped heads on a case last year. It got a little personal.”

I told Bea about the case in which the father had been accused in criminal court of drowning his eight-year-old stepson. “Todd,” I said, “represented the mother, and I represented the father. Todd really believed the father had killed this boy. She felt I used the findings of the criminal court expert in our case in order to win, knowing the method he used to determine where the boy's body had entered the water was sketchy at best. It is a new science”—I conceded the point—“but I wouldn't say it's sketchy, and the expert, Jake Mansfield, is internationally reputed.”

“I see,” Bea said. “Well, she's challenging your finding.”

“I would expect as much. I respect Margaret, Bea. If you think I acted rashly, reverse it.”

“My only concern right now is if you might have been a little intimidated by Alex Sanders.”