“So she was a grad student?” Ella asks, tipping her head toward the plastic room where flashes of Leanne zip here and there like a hummingbird as she works. It’s funny, how the plastic was terrifying and nightmarish when the room was empty, but now, with Leanne in there working, it makes sense.
“She is a grad student. She’s officially taking a semester off. If they find out she yoinked some of their equipment—old shit from the closet nobody wanted—she’ll probably get booted. And if they find out what she’s doing with it, they’ll boot her and send her to jail. But yeah. She read The Hot Zone when she was a kid and fell in love with the idea of solving Ebola. Then she focused on malaria. It still kills half a million people each year, most of them children.” River grins wolfishly. “That’s why she’s down with the Violence. She’s been studying mosquito-borne illness for years. She was born for this.”
“How did you two meet?”
River gets up and paces. It’s not odd, though—Ella figures River is one of those people who never stops moving.
“There’s an underground matching service for people who can make and distribute the vaccine and people with the ability to house them and their machinery and get them around. I’ve been living in this RV for years, traveling around, doing my thing. I used to foster kittens in here and rehome them, but when I got matched up to help Leanne, I adopted out my last babies, had the thing professionally cleaned to get rid of the kitty stink, and helped Leanne move in.” They hold up their phone lock screen to show them holding three super-teeny tabby kittens. “That’s how my YouTube following got so big. People love baby kitties. They love fighters.”
“Fighters?”
River grins. “Every abandoned kitten is a fighter. Even when their eyes are glued closed and they’re on the verge of death, they scream and press their claws. This is just a different kind of fight.” They scroll through some photos, frowning. “I miss the little bastards. But this is more important for now. Not often you get to save lives and give end-stage capitalism the finger all at once.”
Plastic creaks and flaps, and Leanne appears, shedding the last of her PPE. “Just got to let it grow for a while.”
“So what do we do now?” Ella asks.
Leanne picks up a remote control and turns on an old TV Ella hadn’t noticed, set into a niche near the front seats.
“It’s time for my stories,” she says firmly.
“Every day at two,” River moans. “You’d better be glad you’re done storming or she would’ve left us both to fight it out on the ground.”
“Damn right.” Leanne leans back in a recliner that resembles a minivan seat, her feet up. She looks pretty ridiculous with the imprints of goggles, mask, and surgical cap embedded in her face, but her eyes are focused and fiery, and Ella would not touch that remote for anything just now.
Ella watches for a moment before turning to River, incredulous. “General Hospital?”
But River is likewise entranced. “No judgment. I used to watch it with my abuela. Now shut up.”
With nothing else to do, Ella tries to get into the show, but there’s so much backstory that it’s like listening to someone else retell their crazy dreams. Leanne is rapt, and at one point River puts a pile of cookies in her lap and backs away, only to watch Leanne methodically chew the cookies one after the other, eyes locked on the screen as she occasionally murmurs things like, “oh no,” and “not again,” and “that bitch!” Only when a commercial break comes on does Leanne look down at the crumbs in her lap as if she has no idea why the napkin is there at all.
“More cookies,” she says, and River has them ready for her.
But Ella is more interested in the screen. The commercials are louder than the show, and a news lady looks thoroughly scandalized as the words VIOLENCE FIGHTING RING: IS IT LEGAL? flash across the screen in bright red.
“Ugh,” Leanne groans. “I hate these mini-news-breaks for old people!”
But the helmet-haired woman onscreen is unaware that she’s the topic of someone’s disgust.
“This is our News You Can Use feature. Full story to follow tonight at six.” The woman clears her throat and stacks her papers before looking directly into the camera. “Last night, the first event of the newly created Violence Fighting Ring took place in a warehouse just outside of Orlando, watched by subscribers and a small live audience. The first match featured The Raven against Mildred the Magnificent, if you can believe it, in which a young man was beaten by an elderly woman. The second match was shut down when an irate young woman named Destiny berated The Killer Cuban instead of fighting. And the third match, in which Florida Woman trounced Steve the Stockbroker, ended in a case of real-life violence—with a capital V. An audience member became afflicted, and you won’t believe what Florida Woman did next. More, tonight at six.”
Now it’s Ella’s turn to gaze into the TV, unaware of anything else in the world. Her focus is narrowed to the face on the screen, a promo shot of Florida Woman from the Violence Fighting Ring.
“Dude, you okay?” River asks. “You look like you saw a ghost.”
“That’s my mom,” Ella says. “My mom…is Florida Woman.”
River barks a laugh as the show goes back to General Hospital. “You’ve got to be kidding. Your mom is a pro wrestler?”
“I don’t…she isn’t…I mean…that’s…my mom. I haven’t seen her in weeks.”
Leanne turns off the TV right as her show comes back on. River looks at her like she’s been replaced with an alien.
“Sorry, but this is better than a soap opera,” Leanne says, looking just as excited as she did when heading back to the clean room with Ella’s blood. “So how do we help you find her?”
44.
The drive home from urgent care is short, and Patricia is completely exhausted. Most of the time, she manages everything in her life with exquisite care, treats herself like a racehorse—only the best food and medicine, plenty of rest, rejecting anything that might drag down her mood or status. But that fragile web she’s woven is falling apart. Money held it all together. Turns out it’s very easy to eat organic salads and do Pilates and look ten years younger than you are when you have everything you need and quite a bit of excess, but once worries and responsibilities begin to pile up, the safety net dissolves and the wrinkles return with a vengeance.
The sign for what used to be her favorite fast food beckons, and without thinking, she pulls right into the drive-thru. With Patty behind the wheel, her standards are tossed out. A cheap, hot meal that will placate Brooklyn? Worth every penny. She has no idea what particular foods the child enjoys, but at least they still have her old order. She spends more than she’d like to from the spare twenty in her glove box—how the prices have gone up!—but they won’t need to eat again today. She even buys two biscuits off the all-day menu for tomorrow morning. Once the sins start coming, they tend to pile up—that’s what her mother always said. And even if she’s learning that most of what her mother said was a lie or very misguided, she believes this much.
The more that goes wrong, the more that goes wrong.