Just Get Home, page 16
“You should go,” she said softly, appearing at Dessa’s elbow. She held a flat pillow and a threadbare blanket.
Anger welled within Dessa. A bubble of rage rising from the pit of her stomach.
“Where’s Jasmine?” She looked at Beegie.
“Who’s Jasmine?” The woman was confused, looking from Dessa to her charge.
“Beegie’s little sister. Is she here with you or is she somewhere else?”
The woman laughed. Short and sharp. A bark almost. She sat up. A mean smile spread across her face. “She doesn’t have a sister.”
“Yes, she does. She showed me her picture.”
Beegie looked stricken. Her eyes closed off.
“I don’t care what she said. I told you, she lies. She doesn’t have any sister. She doesn’t have anyone.”
Dessa looked at Beegie and saw that what she had merely thought of as a family resemblance had in fact been an identical one. Shame made Beegie look even younger, but Dessa wondered how she could have missed it before.
“Do you want to be here?” Dessa whispered, canting herself toward the teenager.
Beegie shook her head, ironing her eye with the edge of her palm.
“Let’s go.” Dessa wrapped a hand around hers.
The two of them moved to the door and suddenly the woman’s mouth was agape. Realizing what was happening. She stood, indignant.
“You can’t take her! It’s illegal. She has to stay with me! Do you think that if you take her the state will send you my money? I’ll tell them you kidnapped her. They’ll arrest you. The cops’ll fucking arrest you!”
Dessa looked back at her. “They’ll have to find me first.”
And then she slammed the door.
23
As she chased after Dessa, Beegie kept hearing the words in her mind.
“They’ll have to find me first.”
It looped with the sound of her slamming of the door. Cycling faster and faster until the sounds ran together in her mind.
Have to find me first. BANG. To find me first. BANG. Find me first. BANG.
Beegie had slammed doors before. Heard her own words refracting though her own mind. Angry shouts repeated endlessly until something else entered her brain to knock them away.
But no one had ever been angry for her.
Slammed the door for her.
That’s what the caseworkers assigned to her were supposed to do. To listen when she told them that it wasn’t important why she needed a lock. That everything would be just fine as long as she had it.
They’ll have to find me first. BANG.
Barb had told Dessa about the picture. About the lie she’d told about having a sister. And even then, Dessa’d been angry for the way Barb had talked to Beegie.
It felt good.
Even if it wasn’t real. Even if it didn’t last. Beegie knew better than to think it would. But just to hear someone else’s voice angry for her, not at her.
Dessa was mumbling under her breath as she walked, “At least I have a couch. Jesus. That woman should not be anywhere near children.”
Beegie wanted to explain. Before the anger Dessa felt toward Barb subsided. “Dessa...the picture...”
Dessa’s face softened, “It’s fine.”
“No...it’s not—”
“I don’t care about the picture, Beegie. I’m just glad you don’t have a little sister living with that monster.”
* * *
Beegie didn’t know how to explain. The picture. The lie. The story behind it. Being happy and sad all at once. Going from one home to another. The way her mother had talked about the family like they’d tried to steal Beegie from her when she’d thought all they wanted to do was to love her. About her confusion at feeling warm about them even when Momma said they were bad.
Momma said they had sent her that picture of Beegie, thinking they were doing her a favor. They had told her they were going to call her Jasmine, because she deserved a real name not just the one given to her by the hospital.
And hearing that had made Momma fight harder. Which was good because Beegie loved her mother and was glad they were together.
But it didn’t keep Beegie from staring at the photo when her mother was at work. Or from wondering about the person behind the camera and the other one whose face was out of frame. She had long-ago memories of a house that smelled like soup and a staircase that creaked when you climbed it, of pill bugs and sandboxes, but none of it seemed quite...real.
When she fell asleep at night, Beegie used to think about what her life would have been like if she had been Jasmine. Did a different name mean a different life? Or did people with different lives just get different names?
And when she went back into foster care...well it had been years since that family that had wanted her. Probably they had moved on. Didn’t care anymore. She was too old. Not cute anymore.
It was a strange impulse that had driven her to start showing people the picture and telling them it was her little sister. She’d started it at Tricia’s, her first placement. “Isn’t my little sister cute?” she say, showing the picture to adults when they came by.
“Oh yes. Very,” they’d respond.
“Her name is Jasmine,” Beegie would tell them.
“Pretty,” they’d say.
Beegie didn’t do it for too long. She had stopped doing it by the time she was at Janelle’s. Too many people knew the truth, she could tell. She knew too many people were just playing along.
But when Dessa had said her daughter was almost three, Beegie had the photo in her hands almost instantly. The old lie she used to tell. Fishing for compliments. Maybe it was because she had gotten it back so recently...or maybe it was because of the events that had unspooled in the hours between the earthquake and meeting Dessa. But there she was again...trying to fill some hole in herself with a stranger’s polite praise.
* * *
Beegie stumbled on the words, trying to explain without giving up too much of herself. “I don’t have a lot of people saying nice things about me. But people...if I show them the picture...they tell me my little sister is cute... I know that’s fucked-up.”
Dessa stopped walking. She shook her head. “I don’t think it’s fucked-up...what’s fucked-up is that no one says nice things to you.”
They had moved a few blocks north toward Los Feliz Boulevard. The street was filled with cars. None of them moving. Dessa’s face looked orange in the reflection of the brake lights. A dark hulking shape loomed on the horizon. The upward slope of Griffith Park.
Beegie shuffled. She didn’t want to look into Dessa’s eyes. “I like people to know I wasn’t always like this.”
“Like what, Beegie? You were a cute kid.” She paused. “You still are.”
Men’s voices rang out, reaching toward them. Angry shouts. Thumps. Followed by a chorus of car horns.
Beegie stepped out toward the curb to find the source.
A gas station. At least thirty cars in a snarl under the working lights. People on their way somewhere else, or at least in hope of heading somewhere else.
Two cars were parked pushing in toward the same pump.
A man with a beard, his long hair held up in a bun, held another man over the hood of a BMW. He drove punches downward, into the other man’s face.
The man stopped, suddenly allowing his victim to slide to the ground. Then the attacker pulled the handle from the pump and selected the grade of gas he wanted for his Prius.
The man he had been hitting rolled over. His bloody hands leaving stamps of themselves all along the white paint job. He used the car to support himself, leaning against it as he made his way to the driver’s side door. His hands slipped on the handle, barely lurching it open, before leaning inside.
“Do you think he’s okay?” Dessa said just as the man swung back out of the car.
He had a gun in his hand.
“Fuck you, you hipster douche.” The man with the Prius stared at him, his mouth agape.
Beegie pulled Dessa down into a crouch. She pushed her into the street, running low past the bumpers of the idling cars.
Tires screamed against pavement. Beegie looked up in time to see the Prius pulling away, launching over the sidewalk to get away. The pump handle separated from his tank and dropped. Gasoline fountained outward, a clear arc through the air as it fell to the ground.
“Everyone’s gone crazy,” Dessa was panting next to her, still in a crouch as they reached the opposite side of the street.
And then the ground moved beneath them.
It was a jolt. Hard, sharp shake. Violent spasms.
An aftershock.
A terrier earthquake. Smaller than the last one, but just as mean.
That’s how it felt.
Beegie thought about the Greelys’ dog, Rooster. The way he would wait by the tree in their backyard for hours. Eyes up on the leaves. Just watching. Waiting.
Once Beegie saw him catch a squirrel.
Or actually she didn’t see the catch, she heard it. The squeak squeak scream drew her to the window where she was just in time to see the snap. A small gray body in Rooster’s mouth as the dog shook it and shook it long after the squeaking had stopped.
That was how it felt. She and Dessa fell to the ground, their hands on the cement. She saw them as two limp squirrels, gray and brown, caught in the mouth of an ugly dog. Whipping the fight out of them.
Beegie could swear she could hear growling. Inside the rumbles. Beneath the shaking and the breaking. A thousand million earthquake dogs. Growling through their teeth while they shook, shook, shook the world.
There was a bright flash down the street as an electrical wire was set free from its pole. The gas station and all behind it plummeted into darkness. The wire skittered. A snake spitting blue sparks, it danced on the street.
A small ringing bubbled up through the sound. Beegie watched as Dessa pulled her phone from the plastic sack. Thumbing it to answer.
“Hailey?”
A sound leaked from the phone pressed to her ear. A child crying. Short frightened whines.
“Ollie! Ollie!” Dessa shouted over the growling of the world.
Three fast beeps sounded. Dessa pulled the phone away from her ear, hands shaking. Desperately trying to get her daughter back. She hit the redial button.
“Jesus Christ. Please...”
No good. The beeps sounded again.
Dessa turned into the car. Her head pressed against the door. For a second Beegie thought she was praying. The older woman was whispering to herself.
The shaking had stopped. Beegie thought of Rooster finally walking away from the body of the squirrel. Its broken body, fur dark with the dog’s saliva. The way the dog trotted to Eric when he called. So pleased with himself.
“Just get home,” Dessa whispered.
Yells rose from the darkness where the gas station was. Beegie could see silhouettes of people running, their legs flashing in the headlights.
Pop, pop! Bright flashes sparked the darkness. Gunfire. Followed by a scream.
Beegie dropped next to Dessa again and said, “People are the problem. We need to get the fuck away from people.”
24
The first time Dessa went to the Los Angeles Zoo she got lost in Griffith Park. She had decided that they would go see the animals and packed Ollie into her car seat, still blobbish and sleepy at eight weeks. It was ill-advised. An end run around the guilt and maternal horror she felt as the days of her leave dwindled and she faced the reality of heading back to work.
The park’s roads are a snarl of loops, conjoining lanes and confusing five-way stops. Though there are patches of green, much of its acreage has reverted to Los Angeles’s natural state of desert...velvet hills of brown scrub, dusty green leaves. Even the trees have taken on a sun-bleached hue, like fading photographs they stand in gangs by the roadside. The park is huge, blanketing the mountain between Los Feliz and Burbank. Dessa missed the sign for the zoo and lost her bearings, turning and turning, always to the left it seemed, up and up, but never reaching the top. Ollie woke up and began to cry, new baby squall. Dessa tried to settle her with her voice. It’s okay, sweetie. It’s okay. But as she passed the museums and playgrounds, the carousel and runners’ paths, she began to cry too. She and her daughter were lost in this strange jungle in the city.
She pulled over by the side of the road and climbed into the back. She pulled Ollie out of her car seat and calmed her, bouncing and shushing. Dessa tried to still her thoughts too. She worried her tension and fear would soak through her skin and infect Ollie with her mother’s maladies.
Eventually there had been a knock on the window. A park ranger. The woman had said she wanted to make sure everything was all right, but Dessa sensed that she had planned to say something else before she saw the look on Dessa’s face.
The ranger led Dessa down the turn she had missed. After she had parked, the woman had handed Dessa a fistful of free zoo passes. “Take care of yourself,” she had said, touching the rim of her hat. “And that baby.”
An hour later, pushing the stroller up the zoo’s steep hill, damp with sweat and lonely, Dessa wondered what the whole point of it had been anyway. Ollie’s new eyes could just barely make out her mother leaning over her, much less the dusty zebras and bored emus thirty yards away. She had done it so that she could tell herself that she had done something. A box ticked off for when she dropped Ollie off at day care that first time. A prophylactic against her future guilt.
It was only after she had gone back to work that she realized how pointless that day had been. There is no elixir to cure you of wanting to be with someone you love.
But that day had shaped her life in the most mundane of ways. The fistful of free passes meant that she continued to go to the zoo with Ollie on weekends. Dessa used them regularly, even after they expired, when she learned that no one at the zoo checked the dates on these things.
Since Ollie had become a toddler, Dessa had found herself at the park nearly every weekend. Proximity to both sides of the hill, plus the added bonus of most of its attractions being free or cheap made it an easy way of keeping Ollie busy; Birthday parties at Travel Town, playdates at the Shane’s Inspiration, ice cream by the carousel.
Dessa could not imagine getting lost here now. Even in the dark, walking Crystal Springs Road with Beegie next to her, it seemed a benevolent place. Through the trees to the east she could make out the parking lot of taillights drawing a red line up the I-5 freeway. A river of humanity seeking safety but going nowhere. Distant voices reached them through the dark. Impotence rising to frustration before becoming anger. They were too far to make out the words, but Dessa knew their meaning without the shape of syllables.
The road drew them away from the highway and the voices dissipated. Now trees flanked both sides of the street. Clumps of tall pine stretching against stars that were usually impossible to see.
“It says the park is closed.” Beegie waved the flashlight over a sign that read Park Hours Sunrise to Sunset.
“That’s why we’re going in. No people. No buildings that can fall on us.”
Beegie eyed the trees. Unsure.
“It’ll be just like going on a hike. Or going camping.” Dessa tried to make herself sound reassuring.
“You know only white people camp, right?”
“What?”
“Camping, hiking...all that is a white thing. Black people, Mexicans, Latinos, whatever, we don’t do shit like that.”
Dessa laughed in spite of herself. The glow from the flashlight splashed up on Beegie’s face and she could tell the girl was smiling. “Okay, I’ll bite. How is it a white thing?”
“It’s rich people pretending to be poor. Sleeping outside. Eating on the ground and shit. Only white people are crazy enough to play homeless for fun. All ‘getting in touch with nature.’ Brown people, uh-uh. We don’t pretend. We don’t get in touch with nothing. Our relationship is good the way it is. Out of touch.”
Dessa shook her head, smiling. She opened her mouth to say something, but then couldn’t quite figure out how to say it.
Beegie got there first. “I bet you know a black guy who likes to camp.”
“I do.”
“We’re gonna take his card.” Beegie winked and Dessa snorted.
“Well, this white person hated camping. My dad used to take me. Being dirty and cold and the bugs...ugh. But then I realized that my mom hated it too. And I didn’t want to be anything like her. So I decided to love camping.”
“You don’t like your mom?”
Beegie’s question was light, tentative. And Dessa realized who she had just said that to. A foster kid. Who knew what was in Beegie’s past?
Dessa answered slowly. Careful, “No. I didn’t... She’s dead now, but I think that’s why I can finally say that. I couldn’t admit I didn’t like her until she was gone.”
“But you loved her.”
“Yeah. I did. Sometimes I wish I didn’t though. It would have been easier not to like her if I hadn’t.”
Beegie was quiet for a beat. “Moms are hard,” she said, finally.
“Yeah,” Dessa agreed.
“I gotta pee.”
Beegie stepped off the road, dried leaves crunching under her feet. Dessa watched as she scrambled down the embankment toward the open expanse of the golf course.
She took out her phone. The stuck stutter cry she had heard during the aftershock. Ollie’s open mouth. A vowel sound. Ahh. Before it was taken away. Swept away by the movements of the earth, the vagaries of her cellular network and those three little mind-fucking beeps.
She was alive.
Or she had been.
But she had been screaming. Scared.
