—
IF YOU DROVE east from the beach, if you left behind the surf shacks and bait shops and ice cream parlors, the lean surfers, the rent-a-cops cruising along the harbor, you’d reach the Back Gate. The entry to Camp Pendleton was guarded by armed Marines, but outside its border was a not-bad, not-good neighborhood. Here’s how you could tell: the fences were higher but the houses wore no metal gates over their windows; the Pizza Hut hid behind bulletproof glass but they stayed open late at night; and cops still patrolled, more than they did in good neighborhoods, but more than they did in bad neighborhoods already abandoned to their own chaos. In this not-bad, not-good neighborhood, Aubrey lived with her sister and her sister’s girlfriend in a little white house. The house itself was simple, but Aubrey’s bedroom was surprisingly ornate. The walls were painted a dusty green with silver flowers, and white Christmas lights traced the ceiling. Silver curtains rippled in the windows and swaths of lace draped over the bed like a wedding veil. Her first visit, Nadia had wandered through the room slowly, her arms behind her back, afraid to touch anything, as if she were in a museum.
“I couldn’t sleep when I first moved in,” Aubrey said, pointing to a dream catcher that hung from the ceiling. “Kasey thought this might help.”
Kasey was slender and lean like an alley cat, and she had long, dirty-blonde hair she liked to rumple in the middle of conversations, as if to prove how little she cared about how her hair looked. She was a bartender downtown at the Flying Bridge and she liked telling stories about her regulars. A man who hated touching dry glass. A woman who was deathly afraid of pickles.
“You know, them big ones they give you with your sandwich? Scared shitless. Runs and screams if you bring one near her, even if it’s still in a jar. Wild, huh?”
Kasey had traveled west eight years ago with her big brother, who was stationed at Camp Pendleton. She was lovesick over a straight girl and had fled to California to forget about her. On the long drive from Tennessee, she’d plucked the dream catcher off a shelf at a truck stop, wanting it for no other reason than the fact that she could want it. Now the dream catcher drifted inside a bedroom almost painful in its effort. Aubrey said that her sister helped her decorate the room after she’d moved in.
“Mo thought we needed to do something together,” she said. “We hadn’t seen each other in a few years.”
“Why not?” Nadia said.
“She left for college.”
“And she just never came back?”
Aubrey shifted slowly, one foot to the other. “Well, she didn’t like Paul.”
“What was wrong with him?”
“He hit my mom,” she said.
“Oh.” Nadia paused in front of the bookshelf. “Did he hit you?”
“Sometimes.”
Nadia couldn’t imagine a grown man hitting her. Even when she’d misbehaved as a child, her father had always carried her to her mother, who did the spanking, as if discipline were something to be dealt with between women.
“Well, what’d your mom say?” she said.
“She’s still with him.” Aubrey shrugged, then hopped off the bed. “Come on. Let’s go outside.”
Nadia finally understood, why Aubrey had left and why her mother had let her, why her sister had helped her create a bedroom out of a Disney movie, why Mrs. Sheppard cherished her. In a way, Nadia almost felt lucky. At least her mother had been sick—at least she’d only tried to hurt herself. At least her mother would’ve never let a man hit her child. Her mother was dead, but what could be worse than knowing that your mother was alive somewhere but she wanted a man who hit her more than she wanted you?
On the Fourth of July, Nadia sat on Aubrey’s porch, watching the neighbors set up fireworks in the street. The city was hosting a fireworks show downtown at the pier, but it wasn’t the Fourth of July without illegal fireworks, Kasey had said. She was appalled by the strictness of California fireworks law, so she cheered on the people who smuggled them over from Tijuana to set off in the neighborhood. What was the harm? It wasn’t as if people were setting off bombs. She sipped her beer, wrapping an arm around Monique, who watched the neighbors in the street and shook her head.
“Someone’s gonna blow a hand off,” she said. “I just know it.”
She was not a mother but she had a mother’s gift of rushing to the worst possible outcome. She was a trauma nurse at Scripps Mercy Hospital, so she encountered the worst possible outcome daily. But even if she hadn’t been a nurse, she was the type to worry. When she came home from work, she always asked if they had eaten. She reminded Aubrey to take her vitamins and called after her to grab a jacket, it gets chilly downtown, oh don’t look at me like that, you know you always get cold. A man in the middle of the street squawked as a car swerving around the display nearly hit him. Monique shook her head again.
“You warm enough, babe?” she said.
Aubrey was sitting under a blanket with Nadia. She rolled her eyes a little.
“I’m not a baby, Mo,” she said.
“You’re my baby,” her sister said.
Kasey laughed and Aubrey rolled her eyes again, but she didn’t look upset, not really. It was the fake-annoyed look you give to someone who could never actually bother you. Sometimes Nadia envied Aubrey, even though she felt guilty for considering the thought. Aubrey had lost her mother too, but she was loved by her sister and her sister’s girlfriend and even the first lady, three women who cared for her only because they wanted to. Both girls had been abandoned in the sand. But only Aubrey had been found. Only Aubrey had been chosen.
Monique and Kasey’s love for Aubrey hung in their eyes, and even though it wasn’t meant for Nadia, she inched closer, holding her hands up to the warmth. In the street, the neighbors huddled around, giving directions in Spanglish. Teenage girls herded babies onto the grass, while old men in flannel shirts redirected traffic and boys on skateboards looked out for cops. Reggaeton and rap blasted out windows, rattling through cars parked in driveways. Soon, fireworks would illuminate the pier, but Nadia wanted to be nowhere else but here, in a house where everyone was wanted, with a family where anyone could leave but nobody ever did. A firecracker lit up the sky, and she jumped, delighted and a little surprised, at the first spark.
—
LATRICE SHEPPARD HAD GHOST EYES.
One brown and one blue, which meant, her granddaddy had told her, that she could see heaven and earth at the same time. Her mother had gasped the first time she’d held her—something must be wrong, the blue eye blinded, maybe, already filmy with disease—but the doctor had said it was too soon to tell. “Takes time for a baby’s eyes to adjust to the world,” he’d said. “Just pay attention. If the eyes squint or cloud, there may be cause for concern.” So she’d spent the first years of her life with her mother’s face always inches from hers, studying her eyes. Maybe that was why she’d always felt there was something wrong with them, even though she could see fine. The brown eye seemed ugly next to the blue, the blue next to the brown, and she learned that it was better to just be one thing, to distill yourself into something as simple as you could. She had already begun her unending growth spurt—by the second grade, she was the first to line up in the school picture—and at lunch, she ate alone on the playground while the other girls double-Dutched to a rhyme they’d made up about her:
Latrice, the beast
She’ll make you her feast