While Griff stuffed his face with cookies, Pops poured the tea. I looked at Hawk. He looked at me. Neither of us had any inkling as to what on earth Pops meant.
“I don’t understand,” I admitted.
“Tea?” the old man asked me.
I didn’t want tea. I wanted an answer I could understand.
Pops sat back down in his chair, holding his saucer with a shaky hand, before enlightening me. “No. This business venture is not right for us.”
While Pops’s words repeated in my head and I tried to determine if he had really just flat-out turned me down, Hawk was about to protest his father’s decision before being shushed with the raise of his father’s wrinkled index finger.
“Is it me or is it the business idea that has you unwilling?” I asked him, anger sharpening my tone.
“You will find your way, young Emily. Of this, I have no doubt. But this path is not your own.”
“I’ll cover the first shipment. You won’t have to risk any of your own money. And I’ll still split the profits.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You’re sorry,” I echoed. “So that’s it then?”
He smiled a pitying smile.
I tried again. “I thought you of all people would understand my plight. You’re the only one who can help me.”
“Not every path is lit by the morning sun,” he repeated in different words, as though it would make more sense, and took a sip of tea, keeping his eyes on the wall behind me.
“Let’s go,” I told Griff, pulling him up before he had time to lick the empty plate of cookies. I stormed out to the driveway, where Meatball was patiently waiting for us in the car.
“There’s an old Cherokee saying,” Pops called out from the doorway of his tiny house. I stood by the car, my hands gripping the edge of the door, my hair catching the winter wind. “‘Don’t let yesterday use up too much of today.’”
I snorted and shook my head in disbelief before getting in the car.
“Now what?” Griff asked me once we were back on the road.
“Now nothing. This was it. Pops was my last hope. I’m about to have a baby, and I have no way of defending us.”
“You’re not alone. We fight together. We’ll find our way, Em. Like Pops said, this wasn’t right for us, but something else will be.”
I sighed. “Griff, I have no money and no way to make money. I’m not going to be able to work at the admissions office much longer, and your money will run out eventually.”
“It already has,” he confessed, keeping his eyes on the road.
I had known that the information on Pops would have cost him. I just hadn’t realized that it had cost him all the money he had left. “I’m sorry, Griff. I bankrupted you for nothing. Getting information on Pops turned out to be completely pointless.”
“It wasn’t just the information on Pops that was expensive. It was all the other stuff too. The debts plus interest, the rent, the plane ticket to England. It all added up in the end. I barely had any money left by the time I went looking for information on Pops.”
Griff gripped the wheel.
“You had to give something else up, didn’t you?” I knew what it was. Something he swore he would never go back to.
He sighed. “The good thing is that I’ll be able to make money. Good money. For us.”
“And give up your freedom.”
“Let’s face it, Em. There isn’t much else a guy like me can do. I’ve been fighting my whole life. It’s all I know.”
I grabbed his arm. “I’ll be right there with you.”
He smiled bravely and let me pull our hands together over the console.
When we got home, Griff pulled the mattress out of Hunter’s and Joseph’s room and dragged it into mine. He jammed half of it under my bed, and the other half came up to the doorway, taking up the rest of the floor space.
He hadn’t asked my permission to do this. Because he didn’t need to. It was how I wanted it as well. I needed him with me.
We slipped under the covers and eventually closed our eyes. Before I knew it, I was standing in the bathroom under a cloud of steam. I brought my hand to the mirror and wiped the steam, standing still as it clawed its way back up the mirror. I wiped it again and started pulling my hair back into a ponytail. Cameron came behind me, pulling my hands down, watching my reflection. He tucked my wet hair behind one ear and then the other. Watching me in the mirror, stroking my ruddy cheek with the back of his hand. He leaned in and kissed my shoulder, holding my reflected eyes. He pushed my hair over and ran his lips down the nape of my neck. His hands came around and pulled my towel off, letting it fall to our naked feet. He watched me in the mirror as his hand slid down my back. I wiggled and tried to keep my composure until I just couldn’t stand it anymore and laughed. He chuckled triumphantly, his face lighting up. I loved when his face lit up like that. His smiles were an endangered species.
As our eyes locked in our reflection, we became serious again. Cameron’s hands looped to my chest, pressing against my breast.
And he watched me.
He always watched me.
He brought his hands to my waist and spun me around to face him. He lifted me up onto the bathroom counter, pressing me against him, pressing his face against mine, pressing his lips to mine. I ran my fingers up his neck and up through his hair, wishing that this moment would last forever. But it ended, as did the dream.
My eyes flickered open to a room that was solely lit by the glow-in-the-dark stars on my ceiling. I turned my head to find Griff sitting against the wall, arms on his knees, head leaning over his solid arms.
“You’re not sleeping,” I murmured. It had come more as a question because I couldn’t be sure. He hadn’t moved.
His head finally looked up, and he stared at me for a minute until he finally spoke. “You were talking in your sleep.” His features were emptied.
My dreams, my memories were draining him.
Something bumped against the inside of my skin, and I nearly fell off the bed.
I brought my hand to my belly, which sent Griff springing off his mattress onto my bed. There were three more knocks from the baby—one against Griff’s hand and the others against mine.
I wished that Cameron had been there to feel his child’s life for the first time. But he wasn’t there.
Griff was.
I may have had doubts as to whether Pops had actually figured out that I was pregnant, but in the end, it didn’t matter. I finally understood what he had meant about letting the past, missed opportunities, take up the good things that lay now and in the future.
“For what it’s worth,” Griff said in a half whisper, keeping his hand on my stomach even though the baby had settled again, “I was proud of you today. The way you spoke about your idea to the old guy. Brilliant. I know you would have been able to pull it all off and make it work. With everything that’s happened, with everything that’s been done to you, you still always find a way to survive. You’re a really amazing woman, Em.”
He slid back and laced his fingers under his head. Together, we watched the fluorescent stars on my ceiling.
****
As soon as the sun was up, I was out the door with Meatball. Griff insisted on keeping watch over us. It was freezing out but we walked quickly, keeping warm with purpose. It didn’t take as long as I had expected to get to the cemetery.
I asked Griff to wait for me as I went to find Bill’s grave and kneeled.
It took me a while to get started. I had to say something. To Cameron. To Bill. To Rocco. To all these men who had come into my life, leaving their mark, and left.
“I just can’t do it anymore,” I whispered to them. “The dreams. The pain. Holding on to all your memories with a pointless hope, as if something will change. As if you were going to come back. It’s not fair to Griff.” I took a breath of cold air into my lungs. “It’s not fair to me.”
I started digging my fingernails into the ground, but it
was frozen solid.
“Meatball, dig,” I ordered him, pointing to a spot on the grass.
Meatball sniffed it and wagged his tail.
Ugh. “Meatball, don’t dig,” I properly ordered.
So he dug. I let him go until the hole was big enough. I took the Rumble Fish book and the Rumble Fish movie and placed them in the hole. I hadn’t had anything of Rocco’s, so I had stolen a dry lasagna noodle from Hunter’s cupboard to memorialize Rocco’s love of food. I placed this on top of the other two other items.
Bill. My parents had forsaken him. Pushed him aside so that he had no choice but to leave.
Rocco. His life cut short before he ever had a chance to really live it.
“Cameron …” I had to gulp down the tears that were working their way up my throat. “You had all of me, and you chose to end it. I gave you everything I had. I wanted to fight for us, even after you were gone. You broke my heart. It hurts so much, sometimes I think the pain will explode me.”
I pushed the loose dirt over the lot. I patted the earth and let my hands rest over the bump for a little while. Nothing I did would ever bring any of them back.
“There will come a time when I will get revenge. I promise you that I will not let your death go unnoticed. I will not let you be forgotten ever again.” This I knew for sure. “But … for now … I have to let go.” I closed my eyes and leaned closer to the earth.
I let them go. I let them rest in peace so that I could live to do the same, so that I could heal, so that I could survive, so that I could learn to love again.
Someday, there would be revenge.
But not right now.
CHAPTER 14: CAMERON
GHOSTS
“Emmy won’t get over you. No matter how hard you try.” Carly’s words were still echoing inside my head.
I was in the back of a bulletproof limousine outside Mexico City in the midst of a motorcade. Manny was crashed out next to me. Her legs were curled under her, and her head bounced against the window with every bump on the road. She didn’t look so evil when she slept.
I rolled up my jacket and stuffed it under her head so that she’d have a softer landing.
We had been up all night, traveling, trying to lose the tail that the Mexican cartel had sent us. For them to get wind that the leader of the Coalition was officially meeting with the Mexican president was a declaration of war. At my insistence, not even the captains knew exactly when we were meeting.
We finally managed to burn our cartel shadow in Arizona.
I had a book in my hands that I had picked up off a bench at a small airport somewhere in California. I had opened it and read it before our plane had even taken off, but would keep it until I found or stole another one. Then I would replace the book I would steal with the book I had already read. It was a habit, though some people might have called it an eccentricity or an oddity. Then again, a normal person wouldn’t have chosen a life of drugs and murder over a scholarship to MIT.
For as long as I could remember, I had a book within arm’s reach. As a kid, I used to sneak into waiting rooms around Callister—dentists, doctors, lawyers—they almost always had some book or magazine left behind. Eventually, receptionists would start recognizing me and shoo me away. Then I was stuck going to the library, though there wasn’t much fun in stealing books that they wanted you to take.
My first vivid memory was of me sitting in someone’s bathroom, waiting for my father to come get me. I must have been maybe five years old. The bathroom had little blue and white tiles on the floor and gold faucets attached to gold double sinks. There was a toilet and a matching bidet that I thought was a water fountain for dogs. Everything was covered with a layer of grime that only comes from abuse and neglect of oneself. Hopelessness. My dad had recently realized that I could read any brick of a book within twenty minutes, and he started to bring me along to these grimy places—his coke parties. I was the entertainment.
“Pick a book, any book,” he would call out to the party hosts. And then the adults would go running around the house, looking for the biggest, most boring books they could find. They would lock me in a bathroom with a stack of books, and I had an hour to read them all.
Then they were supposed to come find me and test me to see if I really was the prodigy my father had made me out to be. But they almost always forgot to come back (or they were too high to care), and I would end up falling asleep in someone’s bathtub. At least I had access to a toilet.
One of the adults once brought the New York State penal law for me to read. It was supposed to be a joke, but it turned out to be the best book I had ever read. It was fraught with inconsistencies, gray areas, incomplete definitions. I was ten years old, and I thought I was going to become a lawyer. This makes me laugh now.
In the end, someone would unlock the bathroom door sometime the next day when he or she came searching for any leftover blow. I would go find a bus stop and make my way home.
My mom may have been a drunk and totally oblivious to me, but at least she didn’t know how to use me when I was a pathetic kid. That would come later, when she went looking for a cigarette in my Transformers backpack and found stacks of cash instead. She bought herself a case of gin and a membership to Costco and brought a new boyfriend home. If I’d had a backyard, I would have buried the money there.
Manny stirred just as we were going through the gates of Julièn’s estate. When she popped her head up, she glanced at my bundled jacket and put it on her lap. She still had the marks of the zipper of my jacket imprinted against her cheek.
We were in the desert, yet there was lushness on Julièn’s land that made it almost hallucinogenic, like a mirage to the gates of hell. There were so many flowers that they seemed to have rained down from the sky. The smell of vivacity was just inharmonious with the death that surrounded it.
We were escorted in by Julièn’s wife. She was dressed in a one-shouldered, almost see-through white blouse and white trousers. She was a tall, slim, statuesque woman—a model turned one-hit-wonder pop star during the nineties—who had gotten ensnared in Julièn’s flashy lifestyle. Her walk reminded me of a white elephant’s: slow, but every step deliberate and resilient.
“My husband is still away,” she told us, her voice monotone. She eyed Manny from head to toe. “Make yourselves at home.”
She left us standing in the middle of the villa.
Manny showed me around, outlining intimate details with every step. She had clearly been there before, and based on the reception we had just received, Julièn’s wife had been absent then—though she clearly knew of Manny.
In the main living quarters, full-grown palm trees grew through holes in the porcelain floor. There was a fishpond that half mooned around the spiral staircase.
“This is the indoor garden,” Manny explained. “The fish in the pond are Mangarahara cichlid. Very rare.”
I glanced over the edge at the captive fish. I had read about these; they were from the Mangarahara River in Madagascar. And they were extinct. Thought to be extinct.
The sunken living room overlooked the infinity pool, where three boys were splashing about as their model mother watched them from the sideline. I knew Julièn had three boys, though I was surprised that he had brought them here. I would not have wanted them anywhere near the likes of us.
From my peripheral vision, I saw something move at the back of the property. Manny slipped her hand into mine as a chill ran down my spine. When I brought my gaze to that place where I had seen that something, it was gone.
I took my hand back from Manny’s grasp, despite the softness of her skin. Despite the hollowness at the pit of my stomach that only fills with a woman’s touch.
We moved through the rest of the house.
Every room had a view of the garden outside. And every time, I went to the window and looked back to that place in the back. There was simply nothing there.
The heat, the lack of sleep, this place of hell were already getting to my
brain.
It wasn’t until the evening that Julièn finally made his appearance. And an appearance was exactly what he made. A convoy of at least fifteen cars. Enough bodyguards to protect the Tower of London. And a truck just for his luggage.
Mariella, Julièn’s wife, came to greet him at the door without the children. He held her at arm’s length and gave her a quick peck on the cheek, before his suit could wrinkle. She disappeared as soon as he released her. His children would be brought to him a little later at his request while we were in the middle of discussions. The children stood erect, as though they were in the principal’s office, as he patted each of them on the head and sent them off.
Trying to talk business with Julièn was like talking to a toddler. He changed the subject if he didn’t like what you were talking about. He threw tantrums at the staff if his meal were too hot, if his wine were too cold, if it rained outside. He had even planned playdates for us.
“I have a few friends I would like to introduce you to,” he said on the second day we were there. We were only supposed to be there two nights, and yet we still hadn’t gotten to the crux of the business. It was going to take a lot longer than two nights.
I wasn’t surprised by this. That morning, I had noticed a dinner table that had been set for at least twenty people. “Cancel,” I ordered Julièn. He listened, begrudgingly, but would never gain any concept of keeping things quiet.
“You know, I came from nothing,” he reminded me every time the subject of money came up, which it always did as often as he could possibly bring it up. He would wave his hands around, pointing at a piece of crappy, overpriced artwork on the wall or some mahogany serving tray he had acquired from wherever. “Some tiny little village,” he would add, as though this would create some kind of kinship between us. As though I were one of his constituents and I didn’t know that he had actually been raised in the States in a middle-class suburb of Phoenix. Hardly outdoor plumbing.
What he did have, however, was intel on the comings and goings of the three cartel families within Mexico. Where they lived; where their wives, children, and mothers lived. Where they shopped for groceries. The Christmas presents they had purchased for their children last year. Julièn was concentrating his efforts on finding and killing the cartel, creating a name for himself across Mexico and the world as a leader who was tough on drugs, while making money hand over fist on his own drug production. He was the Mexican version of Shield.