EPILOGUE
1
Once I was proved innocent, I became the subject of a small media-feeding frenzy. My other life as “Insula” never came out, since only Ford and Joel Kelleher knew that particular detail, and neither of them spoke to the media. Given that, there was nothing to take the luster off my story, which became uncomplicatedly heroic. The Dateline and 20/20 types acted accordingly, immediately revising their take on me to stress my West Point accomplishments (whereas before they stressed my stigmatizing failure to graduate). They drew attention to the “mystery” of my “lost” years, the way I “dropped off the grid” after leaving West Point, then “came virtually out of nowhere” to “run Brittany Mercier literally to the ground on national television.” And then, they said dramatically, I walked out of a sheriff’s substation a free woman “and, once again, simply disappeared.”
Not true, of course. I hadn’t gone very far at all, just back to Crenshaw. I cleaned my apartment in anticipation of leaving it for good, scrubbing the corners of the kitchen linoleum, chasing dust kitties from under the couch. I ran for miles to stay in shape and did push-ups and sit-ups in my living room, but I stayed away from the Slaughterhouse.
Which isn’t to say I didn’t fight at all.
It was an unusually warm evening in Los Angeles, almost humid. The sun had set, but the streetlights weren’t yet on as I guided the Aprilia through waning traffic. Ford didn’t want me to leave the city, but he hadn’t said anything about staying out of Trece territory.
I parked my bike and dismounted in front of a stuccoed-over, one-story Craftsman house with bars on the windows. I didn’t bother with the front door, because there was noise from the backyard, a surf of female voices in mixed Spanish and English. The sucias were gathered.
I reached over the top of the gate, felt for the gravity latch, and pulled it up. The yard was a scene that looked like casual weeknight partying: some beers and cigarettes going, easy chatter. The sharp tang of lighter fluid rode on the breeze, and I saw a gunmetal-colored kettle grill, not yet lit. A picnic-style table with attached benches was pushed to the edge of the yard, and it was there that I saw Diana, not drinking, not smoking, wearing long, baggy shorts and a tight black tank shirt and hard work boots.
“Hey,” I said. Conversation stilled as everyone looked at me.
Diana stood up, and we inventoried each other. It was the first time I’d seen her wear any makeup: black eyeliner that made her gaze hard.
“I’m ready,” she said.
“Come on, then,” I said.
Her booted foot flashed out. I dodged it. Oh, faster than that, I thought.
She planted the foot that had missed and readied to come at me again, but behind her raised hands her eyes were a little less hard and sure than they’d been a second before. I raised my hands, too, and twitched my left as though about to jab but struck with my leg instead, launching my shin into the side of her knee at a forty-five-degree angle. She wasn’t ready—I hadn’t even glanced downward toward her legs—and her knee gave way, and she fell.
For just a second, she looked up at me from the ground as if to say, Why are you doing this to me?
You know why, I thought. She scrambled to her feet.
And we fought.
She had heart, and clearly some experience, but not technique, and, worse, she telegraphed everything by looking first where she intended to strike. I blocked everything she threw at me and bloodied her nose though I didn’t mean to do it. Her eyes were narrowed with determination, but she was breathing hard, and in another minute she’d tire, and her hands would begin to drop, and her blows wouldn’t be convincingly strong to those watching.
Now. I let my left hand waver downward, like I might in a moment of carelessness, and she saw it and capitalized.
I’d been hit harder, but even so, one of those bright neurological camera flashes went off in the periphery of my vision. Good girl.
I came back with a hard flurry, as if angered. Actually, I was backing her up to a slender strip of grass, off the concrete. When I had her there, I closed in, swept her right leg with my foot, grabbed her shoulders and wrenched them to the right. Then her center of gravity was over the place where her leg should have been but wasn’t, and she fell.
When she was pinned, her face turned to the side against the turf, I put my elbow against her jaw and said, loud enough for those watching to hear, “Give it up. Tap out.”
“No,” she said.
I leaned forward to get a little more weight on her. “Give it up.”
“Bullshit.”
I lowered my face and whispered. “Do you think you could really be Warchild’s equal?”
Her eyes were squeezed closed in discomfort. “Not hers, maybe. But yours.”
It was a sign of the defiance she was supposed to demonstrate and, more than that, of family pride. I took my weight off her, got to my feet, and extended a hand. She looked up at it with uncertainty. “It’s okay. You did good,” I said, and she let me pull her up. She fell against me in a rough, bloody hug, whispering. “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you, Hailey.”
I patted her shoulder and then pulled back to speak to the assembled girls. “I’m not going to be around from now on. Neither is Warchild.” I put my hand on Diana’s shoulder. “This is Gladia. She’s in charge. Anyone has a problem with that, say something now. To me. Don’t sneak around talking shit later.”
I let my gaze roam over them, looking for resistance. There were sucias here who were older than Diana, and nearly all had put in more work than she had. But no one said anything.
“Okay, then,” I said.
“Serena wanted this,” I said, into Diana’s ear. “She told me so.”
It was also for Diana’s sake that I’d asked Ford to take Trippy out of commission. With a power vacuum in the sucias—and however strong and smart Diana was, Trippy would consider her leadership a vacuum—she’d come back to take by force what she considered her rightful place, and Diana—who I’d known even before speaking to Serena was the best choice to fill the leadership role—would be directly in her crosshairs.
“She also chose your new name,” I told her. “It’s from the Latin gladius. You should look it up.”
More beers were brought out from an ice chest, and a cold, wet can was thrust into my hands. Diana pressed hers against the back of her neck, a home remedy to stop the last seepage of blood from her injured nose.
Someone lit the charcoal grill, and when the flames died down, one of the other girls laid a slab of ribs marinated in honey-jalapeño barbecue sauce on the grate. It was tradition to party after a jumping-in, even in hard times.
No one asked me why I was leaving. I was nearly twenty-five, an eternity in gang years, an age where those who had escaped a violent death or imprisonment counted their blessings and stopped banging, even if they were, technically, down for life. And I was white. I’d always been an anomaly, someone who shouldn’t have been in their world in the first place.
What the girls of Trece did ask me was what I knew about Serena. I told them as much as I could: that she’d gotten into an unfortunate clash with a guy who was breaking into her storage unit, that she’d shot him and had faced a murder rap, but that it had been dismissed, and now she’d left town. When they asked me where she’d gone, I lied and said I didn’t know.
“You caught that girl. I knew you would, prima.”
“Yeah, I did. How are you, Serena?”
“What’s to say? I finally found out what the limit of my fate is. Chicago. That’s where the Shadow Man is sending me. Can you believe it? Me in Illinois, in the f*cking snow? You know what they call the two big gang nations out there? The People and the Folks. The first time somebody told me that, I was like, are you playing with me?”
“I don’t think the Folks Nation is going to have much room for a homegirl from East L.A. Maybe it’s time to go legit. You dodged a real bullet today.”
“Yeah, a murder rap. That was your doing, right? What’d you give the Shadow Man in trade?”
“Nothing I can’t afford. I’ll be fine.”
I’d known that Serena had served time, but I’d never seen her that way before, in loose county blues, makeup-less, eyes shadowed from lack of sleep. She’d laughed and slipped back into the speech patterns of the adolescent chola she’d once been, something she did when she was nervous or upset.
I understood why. The most frightening thing ahead of her wasn’t the cold weather of Chicago, or loneliness, or going legit. It was the memory of the man she’d shot and killed. No matter how bad a guy he’d been, he’d been a person, and she’d pointed her gun at him and pulled the trigger and taken away his everything. He was going to visit her in her dreams. Trey Marsellus still sometimes visited me, and his death had been solely accidental.
I wanted to ask her if he’d drawn on her first and if the shooting had at least been self-defense. But either it had been or it hadn’t, and Serena already knew. It wouldn’t change anything for me to have that information.
Then I’d asked if there were messages she wanted me to carry back to the people she knew, and she nodded and beckoned me closer to the bars, telling me her succession plan for the sucias, and I’d promised her that I’d fight Diana and make sure the other girls knew that it was Serena’s will that she be the new leader. Then we’d said our good-byes, as Magnus Ford waited, out of earshot, by the gate at the end of the cell block.
2
Back at my apartment building, after Diana’s initiation, I was slowing the Aprilia to park when I saw him across the street: a tall, lanky young man with curling reddish blond hair, leaning against a late-model Porsche, his eyes hidden behind aviator shades despite the fading light. My heart skipped a beat with anticipation.
But as I was pulling off my helmet, I realized that something was off. CJ seemed out of proportion to his car. It was as if he were too short.
Then he took off his sunglasses, and I understood.
“Virgil?” I said.
It was really the midnight blue Porsche that had thrown me off. It was nothing that Virgil Mooney should have been able to afford. Beyond that, CJ and Virgil had always looked very much alike, and if Virgil’s West L.A. style was very like his older brother’s … well, it wasn’t like a lot of the guys under thirty in Southern California weren’t wearing the same thing.
But Virgil, at five-eleven, was well shy of CJ’s height, and beyond that, there was a kind of spark that was missing in him. I’d always felt that the gods had touched CJ in a way they hadn’t his older and younger brothers. But Virgil had a sunny simplicity that made him straightforwardly easy to love, compared to his sometimes maddening older brother.
I loped across the street to him. “Virgil?” I said, as if still not sure of his identity. I hadn’t seen him in years.
“Hi, Cousin Hailey,” he said.
“Hi,” I said. “How did you find me?”
“You mailed your address to CJ,” he said. “I have his house key, so I can check in once in a while, and I saw the postcard.”
He smiled at me, but I didn’t miss the serious cast of his eyes.
“Is everything okay?” I said, meaning, Is CJ okay?
“It’s Dad,” he said, and brushed a stray hank of hair away from his face. “He had a little heart attack, then a bigger one in the hospital, and then they think he’s got blood clots in his carotid. It’s a lot at once. He’s going to have surgery, early tomorrow. They said they could put it off a little while, for his kids to get into town.” He swallowed. “You know what that means.”
I did know. Porter’s doctors wanted him to have a chance to say his good-byes. Just in case.
Virgil went on, “He asked to see you. He considers you one of his kids, he and Mom both.”
How long had it been since I’d spoken to either of them, Porter or Angeline? Virgil was absolutely right: They’d treated me as one of their own children, given me the kind of nonjudgmental guidance and approval my mother had been by nature incapable of and my father had not lived to provide.
“I should’ve kept in touch with them better,” I told Virgil.
And though I would have a hard time explaining it to Virgil, there was going to be a problem in rectifying that now, if it meant going to Nevada, across state lines. Ford had been very clear on that point. He didn’t even want me to leave Los Angeles. He’d also been clear on having powerful friends, from his time in “government work.” I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that my name was on some kind of list: if not the actual Homeland Security no-fly list, then something that would assure that Ford would be contacted as soon as my name turned up on a passenger manifest.
I sighed. “This is hard to explain, but I don’t think I can fly.”
Virgil didn’t do the obvious, which would have been to ask why not. Instead he smiled slyly and held up his car keys. “Oh, we can fly,” he said.
The car, it turned out, was a repair job Virgil was doing. “I called the owner and said there was an emergency in the family and I’d be delayed in getting it back to him,” Virgil told me. “I didn’t promise that the car was going to be locked in my garage that whole time.”
“Is this thing going to break down somewhere in the desert?”
Virgil shook his head. “It’s minor stuff. The heater/AC fan is broken, and the passenger-door gasket is warped so that it leaks in the rain. Nothing that’ll keep us from getting up to Nevada in time.”
So I’d napped in the passenger seat while Virgil, as he’d promised, flew us across black and empty highway, unpatrolled secondary roads where he could drive as fast as he liked, under a blanket of night sky broken by icy stars.
Porter was at the main hospital in Reno, and it was there that I greeted my family, each in turn. Angeline wore her hair shorter now than she had most of her life, but still long enough to wrap in a short knot on her neck, and her face was only gently lined—laugh lines around the eyes and such. Then Moira, with whom I had briefly shared a room during my first days in California. By an accident of genetics, she looked more like my mother than I did, with Julianne McNair’s dark hair and good bones. She was quieter than her brothers, but underneath it kind and nonjudgmental like her parents, and I leaned in for a feminine wishbone hug, shoulders and chest touching but hips separate.
Constantine was nearly as tall as CJ but kept his red-gold hair short, and his nails were clipped but still stained faintly with grease from his mechanic’s job; he thumped me on the back like he might have a guy.
“Is CJ on his way?” I asked when the greetings were finished.
Moira said, “We’ve left him two messages, but we’re not sure exactly where he is right now,” and Angeline added, “I never knew his job required him to travel so much. It didn’t used to. Seemed like he was always in L.A. when his daddy or I needed to talk to him.”
I didn’t see a need to add anything to that, though I could have enlightened them on CJ’s desire not to be in Los Angeles.
Angeline said, “Why don’t you go on in and see your uncle? We’ve all already been, and he was asking specifically if you were coming.”
Porter looked frail and wan, but who didn’t, in pajamas and a hospital bed? His eyes were bright and sharp, though, as I came in. “There’s my youngest daughter,” he said, and a smile creased his work-worn face.
“Hi, Uncle Porter.” I kissed his forehead. “How are you feeling? Didn’t you tell them you’re a Mooney, that there’s never anything wrong with you a Goody’s Headache Powder won’t fix?”
He lifted a hand from the bedsheet and waved it. “I used to think that. It’s all vanity, like the man says. Sit down, kid.”
I did as he said.
“I’d ask if you were keeping out of trouble, like I used to, but … well, I’ve seen the news.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Things got a little crazy for a while.”
“But now they know”—he gestured at the TV, indicating the mass media and the police beyond—“that you didn’t hurt anybody.”
“Yes,” I reassured him. “They do.”
“That’s good,” he said. “We need you, you know.”
“Me?” I gave him a “that’s crazy” look. “You guys don’t need me.”
“I do,” he said. “Listen, this is a good hospital, and I’m getting good care, but … Hailey, promise me you’ll watch out for your cousin.” He didn’t have to specify which one.
“CJ doesn’t need looking after,” I said. “Are you worried that he’ll get addicted to something?”
It was the only thing I could imagine Porter or Angeline lying awake at night about; they’d known about his marijuana use in high school, and they were smart enough to know that anything else he wanted was readily available to him now, in the circles he moved in.
I said, “Trust me, I’ve never seen any sign that he’s using anything to excess. He doesn’t even drink very much.”
“I know,” Porter said. “That’s not what I’m worried about.”
“Then what? CJ’s smart, you know that, and he’s got more money than most of us will earn in five lifetimes. He’s handling success fine.”
“He is right now,” Porter said. “You make sure it stays that way. Don’t let him find a guru and move to an ashram.”
I laughed in spite of myself.
Porter didn’t. “You may not think so, Hailey, but of all my kids, Cletus has the hardest row to hoe as he gets older, and I think you’re the only one tough enough to put a boot up his ass if the day comes that he really needs it. If I’m not around then, you tell him I told you to do it.”
“Yes, sir,” I said, and was surprised to find my vision blurring with tears.
“Don’t do that, kid,” he said gently.
“He’s on his way here,” I said, knowing it’d be true soon enough; CJ never neglected his voice mail very long. “I’ll do what you’re asking, but when he gets here, give him the guru-and-ashram speech yourself. It’ll have more weight coming from you.”
“Are you kidding me?” he said. “That boy adores you.”
Those words almost prickled on my skin, like an unexpected caress. “I love you, Uncle Porter,” I said, standing up, “and I don’t think he’ll need it, but I’ll look out for CJ.”
The afternoon wore on; Moira and I went to the hotel down the street where the rest of the family was staying and found they had no more rooms left, but Moira told me I could stay in her room, which had two beds. I left my overnight bag in the room, and we went out looking for food. When we returned to the hospital with containers of Chinese takeout, Constantine told us that CJ had called.
“He was in Haiti,” he said. “Now he’s in Atlanta, but there’s severe thunderstorms in the area and they’ve grounded the planes. He’s trying to get onto a standby list for the first flight out here, because of the family emergency. But you know how that goes. Cletus didn’t say as much, but half the people in that airport are probably claiming that Western civilization will fall if they don’t get to their destination on time.”
“He’ll get through,” I said. It wouldn’t be because of his semifamous name, either. It would be partly because of the medical emergency in the family and partly because CJ would use his good Southern manners and give the ticketing agent the look that made women from all walks of life lose their train of thought, and somehow he’d get on that plane ahead of all the blustering petty tyrants who had crucial business waiting.
“Well, he sounded bent out of shape about being stuck there,” Constantine said. He took off his ball cap and ran a hand through his hair.
“Bent out of shape” probably didn’t do justice to how CJ felt right now, I knew. The Mooneys were a close-knit clan. But I didn’t worry about it. I had always said that CJ had a blessed life. The universe seemed to repay his essential decency with favors large and small, and I felt certain that a hole would open in the storm system and CJ would get here well before Porter’s scheduled nine A.M. surgery.
Except that around ten-thirty that evening, maybe two hours after CJ texted us to say he was in Denver trying to get a connecting flight, some kind of alarm went off on Porter’s monitoring equipment. The doctor on call came into the room, and then Porter’s doctor was paged to come in from home. She came out and said something about a clot shifting, being dangerously unstable, and by half past eleven Porter was in surgery.
F*ck, I thought, and took Virgil’s hand.
“Hailey. Hey, Hailey.”
I woke with the hard plastic of waiting-room chairs pressing into my flesh. For a minute, I was disoriented, thinking of Serena saying, They’re still getting the baby out, and that Nidia Hernandez was dead.
No, that wasn’t right. I realized it was Virgil sitting on his heels in front of me. He was smiling.
“What’s going on?” I said.
“Dad’s out of surgery. He’s fine,” Virgil said. “He’s in recovery.”
“Oh, that’s wonderful,” I said.
“Mom went to the hotel to get a couple hours of sleep before he comes around,” Virgil said. “But us kids are having a kind of family reunion up on the roof. You’re invited, of course.”
“The roof?” I said.
“We stole a couple blankets to spread out. And it’s really warm out. Nearly a full moon, too. Oh, and there’s a bottle.”
“You’re too young to drink, you delinquent,” I said.
“There’s no such thing.”
I knew I should leave. The sooner I went back to L.A., the less likelihood that Magnus Ford would even know I was gone. Besides, when CJ got in, he probably wouldn’t care about seeing me. He’d want to see his dad; that was the important thing.
Then I said, “Okay, let me just wash my face and brush my teeth, and I’ll be right up.”
I did those things, then climbed the stairwell to the roof access, as Virgil had directed.
He’d been right. It was a beautiful night out, the American flag snapping in the warm wind, the lights of central Reno in the distance. My cousins were sitting in a rough circle on two blankets that eased the bite of the pebbly rooftop.
Then I realized that we were not a reunion of four. We were five.
As if it were a formal event, like a treaty signing, CJ got to his feet while his siblings remained seated, and he crossed the rooftop alone to meet me. I stayed where I was, near the door. When he reached me, we did not touch. He was wearing a white dress shirt, dark trousers, good shoes; obviously he’d dressed for the possibility that the only open seating on flights west would be in first class.
“Hey,” I said.
“Hey.”
“I’m glad your father’s all right.”
“Me, too.”
There was a moment’s silence. Then he said, “On the phone I didn’t ask if you’d come up to the hospital. On the plane I kept wishing I had asked. I kept thinking that if something went wrong in surgery and Dad didn’t make it out, above all people I would want you with me.”
To take care of him. Like Porter had said.
I wanted to say, You know I’ll always be there, but it wasn’t a promise I could keep. Instead I raised myself on my toes and put my arms around him.
“I’m here.”
“I missed you,” he said.
“I did, too,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
He lowered his face into my hair, and I sighed. But then, by some unspoken agreement, we both stood back, both feeling the eyes on us and our display of affection.
“Come on,” CJ said, and led me to the rest of our family.
“… so okay, it’s Christmas morning, and suddenly Mom’s got this idea to hunt up the home video of their first Christmas with Constantine,” CJ was saying. “So Dad goes to the closet where they keep all that stuff, and before he can find that tape, there’s a video just labeled ‘Ball Game.’ Nothing else. Dad perks up, pulls it out, and says, ‘Hey, want to watch the ball game?’ No idea what ball game or anything. So that’s what we do. Watch the Braves play the Giants in a regular-season game from 1996. On Christmas Day 2001.”
“That’s so Dad,” Moira said.
They were telling stories about their father. It was like a wake. Better, though: one with no bereavement, and a very fine scotch whisky.
“Where did you get this?” Virgil demanded, holding the bottle of Laphroaig.
“Duty-free shop in Atlanta,” CJ said.
“How could you buy something in a duty-free shop? You were taking a domestic flight.” That was Constantine.
“I was extremely nice to the clerk.”
General laughter. Virgil said, “How nice, exactly? Did you have to get your hand wet? Did she—”
“Virgil!” Moira said. “That’s enough.”
Unperturbed, CJ said, “How do you know the clerk was a she?”
The laughter that followed was both scandalized and delighted. We were all pretty well lit up. CJ was stretched out, resting his head in my lap in the casually entitled way I remembered. He didn’t have a sexist bone in his body, but he’d grown up being loved on by a mother and an older sister, and as a result he was like a Labrador who feels it’s always a good time for you to scratch his ears. For my part, I was resisting the urge to stroke his hair.
“Well,” Moira said with one of those sighs that’s half a farewell, “it’s getting late.”
“Getting early,” CJ corrected. It had to be nearly four in the morning.
“I’m glad none of us has to drive. Particularly this kid.” Constantine rubbed Virgil’s head with his knuckles. “Virg, you hold your liquor worse than any Mooney I know. Hailey here could drink you under the table, and she’s two-thirds your weight and not even a Mooney.”
“Yes she is,” CJ corrected.
“By DNA. You know what I mean.”
They began getting up, stretching, Constantine picking up the empty bottle of Laphroaig. Only CJ stayed where he was.
“Hey,” I said. “Are you getting up?”
“No.”
“I can’t leave without my lap,” I pointed out.
“I don’t think it’s a good idea for me to try those stairs in my condition.”
Constantine gave him a surprised look. “You kidding? I’ve seen you drink twice that amount and not be impaired.”
CJ sighed irritably. “I just want to stay out here a minute and sober up and enjoy the night. Is that a problem?”
But Virgil said, “He wants to be alone with Haaaai-leeeeeey,” drawing my name out in a schoolyard tease. “Aren’t you guys getting old for the kissing-cousins act?”
“Virgil, you’re drunk.” That was Moira again. “Leave your brother alone. We’re going.”
Chastised, Virgil said, “I didn’t mean anything by it.” He looked at the two of us, hangdog.
“S’okay,” CJ said.
“Is it, Hailey?” Virgil pursued, like a child.
“Yes,” I said, “we’re good. We’ll see you tomorrow.”
But as they disappeared through the stairwell door, I wondered if I would stay that long, or when I’d see my cousins again. Ford had flickered on the edge of my consciousness like heat lightning all night.
“That feels good,” CJ said, his eyes closed.
I realized I was stroking his hair, like I’d been wanting to, grooming it gently. That hadn’t taken long. His siblings had been gone all of a minute.
I said, “You’re not really drunk, are you?”
“Not so’s you’d notice,” CJ said.
Virgil had been right: CJ had stayed because he wanted us to be alone. We hadn’t been able to talk, not really, in front of his siblings. Except now we were alone, and I couldn’t think of a start. Maybe nothing needed saying. Maybe “I missed you” and “I’m sorry” had covered it.
CJ said, “This last week I was in Haiti, visiting a friend of mine who went down there to volunteer.”
“Yeah?”
“We were hanging out with some international aid workers in the country. They listened to BBC Radio on the shortwave, and that was about it. Not a lot of American news. So I didn’t know anything about you getting accused of murder,” he said. “The first I heard about it was today, trying to get home. At Hartsfield I was in the Delta lounge, watching their TV. The news was replaying the aerial footage of you running that woman to the ground, and I watched it and thought, ‘When did I stop knowing what Hailey’s life was about? Or did I just never know?’ ”
“You know me better than anyone,” I reassured him. “You know the real me. That person on TV, she’s just some crazy chick who grew up from the wreckage when I got kicked out of West Point.”
“That was really hard on you, getting sent home.”
“Sure.”
“I never really got that, I guess,” he said. “You came back and said you were okay. You moved out of my place after just a couple of weeks and found your own apartment. You acted like West Point was behind you. I should have known better.”
“It’s okay.”
“There were some heavy things that happened last year, weren’t there, though?” he persisted. “You’ve never really talked about what happened down in Mexico.”
It didn’t sound like a question, but it was. I was silent a moment. I’d tried so hard to keep my messy life from spilling over onto CJ’s clean, golden one, but maybe I’d been trying too hard. Maybe I didn’t need to see myself as having a double life, but rather one big, expansive one, with CJ part of it.
“Listen,” I said. “Whatever you want to know about my life, just ask me, but do it tomorrow. Tonight you’re tired.”
“I’m okay.”
“No you’re not. Come on. The hotel’s right across the—” I stopped.
“Street?” CJ supplied. “I know.”
“It’s not that,” I said. “I just remembered that they’re booked up. Never mind. I’m sleeping in Moira’s room. You can probably crash with one of your brothers. Unless they’re sharing a room already. That might be a little too crowded.”
“Doesn’t matter,” CJ said. “I’ll get a cab into town. There are other hotels. With Dad out of the woods, it’s not like I need to be right across the way.”
“Okay.”
“Come with me?”
“What?”
“You walk in on Moira now, you’ll wake her up. Come with me. You can sleep in my room.”
“CJ, I think—”
“We’ve done it before. Nothing ever happens.” Then, “I don’t want to sleep alone.”
“Are you still worried about your dad? I thought the doctors said he was going to be fine.”
“I know. That’s not what I meant. I just don’t like sleeping alone. It’s lonely.”
“You mean you don’t do it very often.” I hated the jealousy that immediately rose up inside me.
CJ sat up and faced me, sensing the new seriousness in the conversation. “I do it a lot more than I’d like.” He looked down at our interlaced fingers. “You?”
“Almost all the time.”
He seemed sure that nothing would happen, as it never had before. I wasn’t sure he was right. I didn’t want to be having the thoughts I was having: about being in a dim hotel room with him, the unaccustomed feel of the crisp material of a dress shirt against my cheek. I’d had only a few guys in the past half year, and none of them, to say the least, had been junior-executive types. I was thinking of how it would feel to help CJ take off those formal clothes and touch the smooth, warm skin underneath.
I said, “CJ, I’m not sure how long I can stay up here. And even back in L.A.… my life there is unsettled, to say the least.”
“Look,” he said, “all I want is to sleep about ten hours with you somewhere near me. Doesn’t have to be in the bed, maybe just the next bed over. Then I want a long, hot shower. Then, probably, a blueberry waffle. Maybe two. That’s as far ahead as I’m thinking.”
I played with a strand of hair. “That sounds …”
“What?”
“Like heaven.”
We took the stairs down one flight and the elevator the rest of the way. I emerged into the lobby slightly in front of CJ, holding his hand, and stopped so abruptly he stepped on my heel.
Magnus Ford stood to greet us. He’d probably been down here awhile. My cousins had walked right past him, unaware.
What had been about to happen between CJ and me in the hotel room was going to stay a matter of conjecture, as was my stupid fantasy of a bigger, more whole life with CJ an integrated part of it.
“It was a family emergency,” I said to Ford. “I was coming right back.”
“Hailey?” CJ said, meaning, Who’s this guy?
“You thought I wouldn’t let you come?” Ford addressed me, ignoring CJ. “You should have talked to me first. I would let you come.”
CJ said, “What’s going on?”
“He’s a cop,” I said.
“Oh, I’m a little more than that,” Ford said dryly. “Time to go, Hailey.”
When Ford stepped forward, CJ put his arms around me from behind and stared him down. He still didn’t understand the situation; it was simply a hardwired response to a challenge from another male.
“I have to go with him,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
CJ didn’t move. “Where’s your arrest warrant?”
“Don’t need one,” Ford said. “I’m not arresting your cousin. But we had an agreement, which she violated the terms of by coming here.”
CJ said, “If she’s not under arrest—”
“It’s complicated, but I have to do this,” I said. “Don’t worry. I’ll be fine.” I rose up on my toes and kissed his cheek. “You know I’m bulletproof, right?”
What I’d wanted to say was, I love you, but I couldn’t say it in front of Ford.
“I know,” CJ said softly.
And then he gave me to Magnus Ford.
Ten minutes later Ford and I were sitting outside a mini-mart in his powerful but nondescript black SUV. There were two cups of hot coffee in the cup holders. He’d drunk a little of his. I hadn’t touched mine. I was crying. Not with any energy, just a steady drip of tears that, maddeningly, I couldn’t stem.
“Come on, Hailey,” he said. “You know better. You know better. You think what’s back at that hospital is for you?” His voice was soft, gentle, gravelly. “Does he know about the brain tumor?”
I shook my head.
“When were you planning on telling him?”
I was silent.
“You think that’s what he deserves, to stand next to your grave at twenty-eight, twenty-nine years old?” He let that sink in. “Some guys, they’d bounce back fast from burying a wife, be remarried in a year. Not a guy like that. You know how long he’d be waking up at night and reaching over to your side of the bed?”
I just don’t like sleeping alone. CJ had said it himself.
“Hailey,” Ford said, “we got off to a bad start last week. That’s my fault. I’ve learned to be a tough negotiator. Sometimes I can’t throttle back when I should.”
He picked up my cup of coffee, pried off the lid. “You want some sugar in this?”
I nodded. At least my tears had dried up. For good, I hoped, wiping under my eyes with the caution of someone checking a wound for signs of bleeding.
He tore open a sugar packet, poured it in, and stirred it with a red plastic stick. Then he handed it to me, directly, instead of returning it to the cup holder.
“I don’t think I gave you a clear picture of what it is I was offering you in the interrogation room, other than freedom from prosecution for you and your friend,” he went on.
“Which is?”
“What you were seeking at West Point,” he said. “The development of your gifts to their fullest and an opportunity to be of some value to the world. You need that. It’s not really optional for someone like you.”
“Tell me,” I said. “Where’d you get your psychology degree?”
“Harvard.”
It was on the tip of my tongue to say, Are you kidding? but his face was completely serious. He wasn’t kidding. I was speechless.
“I can make you do this, Hailey,” Ford said. “But if you go into this with the attitude of a child forced to serve an after-school detention, you will be of limited use to me. It’s better if you want it. Do you? Want it?”
The thing was, everything Magnus Ford had said was true. About what CJ deserved out of life and about why I’d gone to West Point. More than that, the man sitting next to me was interesting. Here was a man whose career in government work I probably hadn’t heard the half of, who had a personal fortune yet wore generic cop clothes, and who held an Ivy League degree he didn’t feel the need to tell people about unless asked point-blank. This had the potential to be interesting.
“Yes,” I said. “I want it.”
“Good,” Ford said. He switched on the ignition. “Let’s go.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JODI COMPTON is a graduate of UC Berkeley and has lived in various parts of California, as well as Minneapolis, Minnesota. She currently makes her home outside San Luis Obispo, California.