“I have no idea.” Did she think he ran background checks on suspects while he was racing to a crime in progress?
“Then how could you . . .” Her voice died away. They both knew what she was asking.
Vega ran a hand through his hair. It was sweat-dried and coated in grease. He needed a shower. “I know you want me to open up about everything right now. I want that, too. Believe me. Nothing would feel better than to unburden myself to you. But I have to do the right thing here. And the right thing is not to discuss the shooting. Not with you. Not with anybody. For your sake as well as mine.”
“But people will assume that you did something wrong.”
“I know.”
“How am I supposed to defend what I don’t know?”
“I’m not asking you to defend me, Adele. Just maybe not to—”
“Not to what?”
“Not to judge.” Vega swallowed hard and kept his gaze on his hands. He was already failing Isadora Jenkins’s shame rule. “People are going to say a lot of stuff about me in the coming weeks—bad stuff, in all likelihood.”
“Why?”
“I’m a cop who shot an unarmed suspect. Turn on the nightly news and ask yourself who the media is going to believe.”
Adele’s cell phone dinged with a text message. She fished it out of her bag. “I just want to make sure it’s not Sophia.” She frowned as she read the text.
“Is Sophia okay?”
“The text isn’t from Sophia. It’s from Dave Lindsey.” The chairman of the board of La Casa, Adele’s Latino community center. “Dave says one of our clients heard from his cousin that the dishwasher who was shot worked at Chez Martine, that French restaurant in Wickford.”
Vega looked out at the highway that ran alongside the building. Headlights flashed and faded like shooting stars across his field of vision.
“Jimmy? Is that true?”
He didn’t answer. He felt like he’d flicked his finger at a domino this evening and the trail of tiles kept continuing to fall.
“Oh God, please say it’s not true.”
“Don’t tell me you know this guy?”
“I’ve never met him before in my life,” said Adele. “But if he’s the dishwasher from Chez Martine, I know his daughter. She’s Sophia’s babysitter, Marcela.”
Chapter 4
Marcela Salinez followed the sound of Spanish chatter and unfolding metal chairs. Her knees buzzed with the sweet reprieve of being able to sit for an hour. Today, she’d cleaned three large houses. Twelve bedrooms in all. Eleven bathrooms. A dozen mirrors. Walls and walls of glass. Then she rushed home, put a plate of tamales into the oven for her family, grabbed a quick shower, and headed out the door to La Casa, Lake Holly’s Latino community center.
This was her Friday night routine. These women were the only people who understood her, truly understood her. Not her husband, Byron. Not even her other friends, the ones who could tuck their children into bed at night. For the hour Marcela was with these women each week, their children became more than just stilted voices over a long-distance phone line or grainy fishbowl images on an ancient computer screen. Here, in the safety of La Casa, they could laugh and cry as they shared stories of holidays and celebrations they would never know except through the time-lapse photos that papered their tiny apartments and au pair suites.
The women called themselves Las Madres Perdidas—The Lost Mothers.
Their children lived in locks of hair and lost baby teeth that sat in boxes on the women’s dressers, as if they could be mailed piecemeal over a border that would never let them reunite any other way.
This was the last time Marcela would ever attend one of their meetings.
She wasn’t a lost mother anymore.
“Okay, everyone! Time to take a seat,” said Rosa Or-do?ez, the founder of the group, as she finished setting out cake and coffee beneath posters exhorting people in English and Spanish to Dream Big! and Learn Something New Every Day!
The women gathered in a semicircle in front of a dusty chalkboard and balanced cups of lukewarm coffee and store-bought cake on their knees. They chatted to one another about nanny and housekeeping jobs that never seemed to pay enough and rents that only went up. They compared currency exchange rates and the best places to wire money back home. Finally, the talk died down as Rosa took a seat.
“We have something to celebrate tonight,” said Rosa. “As some of you already know, a ‘special gift’ has arrived.” That was the euphemism they all used—regalo especial. They all knew what “special gift” meant. It was the only gift any of them wanted.