I shove my hands into my coat pockets as I walk, partly for warmth on top of the gloves, partly to keep my fingers from itching for a better camera than my phone’s. I left my good camera at the house, but Huntington is a little more interesting than I expected it to be.
Passing the closest elementary school reveals a squirrel winter home set up to one side of the playground; it’s basically a high-stilted chicken coop painted bright red. There’s a hole in the bottom so the squirrels can get in and out, and the blinking red light of a camera inside that must let kids in the school keep an eye on the rodents through the winter. Currently, a few are sleeping peacefully on what look to be semi-shredded quilts and sawdust. Yes, I totally peeked. It’s a squirrel home.
A mile or so on, there’s a bare space set back from one corner of an intersection, too small to be a park of any kind, but with a gorgeous wrought-iron gazebo in the middle of it. Sort of a gazebo—it doesn’t have a floor, just the posts digging down into frozen earth, but for all the strength of the metal, the supports are intricately wound together and the almost onion-top looks lacy and delicate. Like an outdoor wedding chapel, but surrounded by fast food joints and a stand-alone optometrist’s office.
Starting a wide loop back home, I have to cross a seven-road intersection, half the roads one way only and all the signs pointing the wrong way. There isn’t a single car in sight on any of the seven roads. True, it’s only half past eleven in the morning, and most everyone is at work or school, but I get the feeling this intersection is braced only by those drivers filled with resignation at the inevitability of certain death and doom.
I take pictures of everything anyway, even though they’ll mostly turn out crap on the phone, because taking pictures is just what I do. The world seems a little less frightening, somehow, if I can keep the camera lens between me and everything else. Mostly, though, I take pictures for Chavi, so she can see the things I see.
Chavi’s been dead almost five years now.
I still take pictures.
Chavi’s death is how I met my FBI agents, and they are mine in an important way, Eddison and Mercedes and Vic. She should have been just another case to them, my big sister just another dead girl in a file, but they kept checking in on me after. Cards and emails and phone calls, and at some point I stopped resenting the reminders of Chavi’s murder, was grateful that as we moved from place to place, I had my strange group of friends in Quantico.
I walk past a library that looks more like a cathedral, complete with stained glass and a bell tower, and a liquor store bookended by law offices specializing in DUIs. A little bit farther on, there’s a plaza anchored by an enormous twenty-four-hour gym on one end and an educational afterschool care facility on the other; between them are seven different types of fast food. Weirdly enough, I kind of like that, the contradiction and messiness, the awareness that our intentions tend to go fuck themselves and our vices are right there waiting.
A much bigger plaza—two stories and with way more elaborate decoration than any outdoor shopping center should have—houses what has to be the nation’s fanciest Kroger. A sign outside advertises a Starbucks inside, but there’s another Starbucks in the plaza and one just across the street, and it’s supposed to be a joke but so, so isn’t.
I should probably get lunch, but I try not to eat out on my own if I can help it. It’s not a health thing; give me takeout with Mum, and I am all for it. It’s the on-my-own bit. After a few years of trying to balance what my body needs against what my emotions insist I need, I’m still not great at it. Sometimes—mostly only on bad days, anymore—I still eat myself sick at the realization that Chavi isn’t here, she’s not here and it just hurts so fucking much in a way that doesn’t make any sense, because anything that hurts this much should be able to bleed out, should be able to be fixed and it can’t be, so eating Oreos until I’m bloated and cramping and vomiting just gives a way for the pain to make sense.
It’s been a few months now since I teetered over that line I drew for myself and collapsed in front of the toilet—and Oreos definitely don’t taste good the second time—but I’m still . . . aware, I guess, that my control isn’t what it should be. Mum has always been significantly less concerned about the weight than about the eating-myself-sick part, but between the two of us—her iron will and my relief at her iron will—we’ve managed to stabilize things so I’m no longer swinging wildly between the worrisome extremes of bony and round.
That my current weight makes me look more like Chavi than ever . . . well. On good days, it’s a shudder and carefully avoiding pictures, or mirrors larger than a compact. On bad days, it’s needles crawling under my skin and my fingers twitching for Oreos. Mum calls me a work in progress.
I head inside the Kroger. I’m pretty sure I can’t feel the tip of my nose, so a hot drink wouldn’t be the worst thing. If I don’t eat until I get home, it’s harder to get myself in trouble.
The barista is a tiny, sparrow-like lady who must be eighty if she’s a day, her lavender-tinted hair poufy in a Gibson Girl bun with bright purple bobby pins. Her back and shoulders are bent and her hands arthritic, but her eyes are sharp and her smile welcoming, and I wonder if she needs this job or if she’s just one of those people who gets a part-time job after retiring because the house or her husband gets too irritating over long periods of time.
“What name, sweetheart?” she asks, Sharpie in hand as she reaches for the cup.
“Jane.”
Because watching people butcher Priya sucks.
A few minutes later, I have my drink. There are tables and chairs packed together here in the corner of the grocery store, and there are speakers in the ceiling pumping out some corporate CD of smooth jazz, but it’s all but buried under the sounds of the rest of the store: squawky calls over the intercom, crashes of carts and cans and boxes, screaming children, the pop rock soundtrack—it’s chaotic and clashy and makes the whole café-in-a-grocery-store thing a bit weirder.
So I head back outside, into the cold and the shred of a breeze that’s picked up, and wander off into the parking lot. I came from the back of the plaza, but the road fronting it will take me straight home, and it’s probably about time I headed back.
Instead, I freeze at the sight of a strange little pavilion. It’s up on a grassy island, one of several splitting the parking lot into sections, the iron covered on three sides by what looks to be heavy white canvas. Space heaters, coils glowing cherry-red, hang from the struts, safely above the heads of a collection of mostly older men in similar ball caps, dark blue or black with yellow embroidery, all of them layered up against the cold that slams in from the rolled-up side of canvas. They’re seated at stone picnic tables, boards and pieces spread between them. It shouldn’t be anything, but it is, because it’s achingly familiar.
Nothing looks quite the same as old men gathering for chess.
Dad and I used to play chess.
He was terrible at it and I pretended to be, something that bothered him a lot more than it did me, but we played every Saturday morning in the park near home, or in the adjacent empty church during the long Boston winters. He sometimes wanted to play during the week, too, but there was something about the Saturday tradition that appealed to me.
Even after Dad, I keep looking for chess gatherings everywhere we move. I lose every game, at least half of them on purpose, but I still want to play. Everything else that was Dad is neatly packed away, but convincing others I suck at chess, that I get to keep alive.