We were in Lotty’s clinic on Damen Avenue, along with Mr. Contreras, who had surged out of his apartment moments after Clara’s arrival.
“My God, is it Peewee?” he cried. When he saw that the face of the young woman, a stranger, was covered in blood, he’d ordered me to bring her into his place.
We laid her on his couch, and he made an ice pack for her face. “You stay with her, doll. Make her lie still. I’m getting dressed, and then we’ll get her to the doc.”
Clara was clutching her French textbook, and she wouldn’t relinquish it. I wrapped her in a blanket and concentrated on cleaning the blood from her face. While Mr. Contreras changed out of his magenta-striped pajamas, I called Lotty from the phone in his living room to ask if she could cut through the red tape at Beth Israel’s emergency room for us.
She’d been sound asleep, but years of practicing medicine made her alert at once. She told me to bring Clara to her clinic. “If nothing is broken, we’ll put her together there more comfortably. And without worrying all those social workers and insurance companies about reports on injuries to a minor child.”
As soon as Mr. Contreras was dressed, I ran upstairs for jeans, a sweater, and a spare coat for Clara, who’d arrived wearing nothing over her jeans and St. Teresa sweatshirt. I drove the two miles from our place to the clinic with a Lotty-like disregard for traffic laws.
Once Lotty assured herself that Clara’s injuries were superficial—no broken jaw, no damaged eye sockets—she inserted codeine-laced swabs into Clara’s nose and then packed it with what looked like a mile of gauze. Lotty applauded Mr. Contreras for knowing to ice the swollen eye and broken nose, then turned a stern gaze on me, wanting to know what kind of scheme I was running that endangered children.
“It wasn’t Vic,” Clara said. She was sitting in a big reclining chair in the examination room, knees up, head back, another ice pack pressed to her face. Her voice was a little slurred from the drugs Lotty had given her, but she seemed anxious to tell us what had happened.
“I guess they had someone watching our house, Vic,” she said. “Like, you know, I told you how Prince Rainier thought we were talking to you. I guess someone told him you still were.”
I felt sick to my stomach, as if Rodney were standing over me, kicking me again. Maybe I should find him and let him do it a few more times. Lotty was right—I had been running a scheme that endangered children. I couldn’t wallow in guilt now—I needed to get Clara to tell me how bad the damage was before Lotty’s drugs put her to sleep. I prodded her to continue.
“They must have waited until Papi got home from work. He was on the three-to-eleven shift today, so it was almost midnight before he got back. He was eating supper in the kitchen, and they just battered down the back door and came in. It—the noise, the shouting, these men all in black—it was so terrifying I don’t even know how my abuelita didn’t have a heart attack.
“I was doing homework, and I ran to the kitchen. Mamá and Ernie and my grandma were all asleep, but the noise woke them up. The men, they made us all come into the living room. One of them had me, he was holding me. I tried kicking him, and that’s when he hit me the first time.”
She was trembling at the memory, but I spoke sharply, forcing her to focus on details. How many men? Four. How were they dressed? Like Ernest used to dress when he rode his motorcycle, all black leather and studs.
“That was almost the most awful part, because Ernie started shrieking, ‘We’re getting our bikes out! We’re going for a ride!’ So these men, they yelled at him to shut up, and when he wouldn’t, first one man punched him, and when he still kept yelling, this other man, he hit me. Papi and Mamá, they stood there like frozen statues.”
She let out a bark of laughter that turned into a sob. Lotty wrapped her in a blanket, and forced some hot sweet tea into her. After a few moments, when she seemed calmer, I asked why she had come to me.
“Vic, she’s had enough!” Lotty’s voice was a whip. “She needs to sleep, and in a safe place.”
“Clara’s been playing with fire for too long,” I said. “If she’s ready to tell me what she knows, I need to hear it now, before anyone else gets hurt or killed.”
“That’s why I came to you, Vic,” Clara said. “Because they said if we didn’t give them the report, they’d burn the house down.”
My stomach became a lump of ice. “What report?”
“The Army sent it to my parents after Alexandra died.”
Clara’s hands were shaking so badly that the tea slopped onto the blanket she was holding.
I took the cup from her and held it to her mouth. I waited while she gulped the tea down before pushing her to tell me more about the report.