Even thinking about a normal routine made her tired. She walked over to lie down on the couch and then drifted in and out of sleep all morning, her raspy cough jerking her awake now and then. Coral finally got up to take a shower around one, and felt better after. She rubbed her body with a silky lotion, something that usually took too much time, and slipped on her favorite cotton pants, a soft old T-shirt, and flip-flops. She looked around the living room. There was Trey’s guitar, and Coral thought of him, on the night before they left for Japan, showing Gus how to play a funk riff on an acoustic.
Gus and Isa loved having their cousin back in Las Vegas. It pleased Coral too. Her boys had so few links to her childhood, now that both Malcolm and Keisha had moved out of town, now that Alabaster and Serenity were not coming to visit Augusta. Of course, the Las Vegas her children lived in was almost nothing like the Las Vegas in which she had grown up. She and her siblings had lived in the middle of a desert—chasing lizards and making playhouses out of old sofas that washed in with the floods—but Gus and Isa lived in a metropolis. They did not walk onto barren earth and see a million mysterious stars above, they did not turn away from a glowing Strip to see a night as black as pitch. The sky her sons knew was never black: the glow of today’s Strip could not be made to disappear with the mere turn of a shoulder.
Trey had lived with Coral and Koji nine years ago, when he was fifteen. It had been a difficult year. Her boys were one and two then, and she and Koji were juggling full-time jobs and diapers and two kids setting records for serial viruses—all without sleep, of course. Then there was Trey: a teenager with a big loop of silver chains, heavy jeans draped around his knees, furious at having been shipped off to his aunt’s.
Ray Junior had called late one night, his voice thin and strained, and asked Coral if she would take Trey, right away, before it was too late. A boy had been murdered, shot dead by another student as he walked out of Trey’s high school. Coral never learned whether Trey had any particular connection to the boy who was killed. It didn’t matter. She and her brother both knew how fast it could all move, how families put it together afterward: who their son knew and what he was doing and how he had ended up at the wrong place at the wrong time. Then you had all the time in the world to figure it out, to see how useless it had been, how trivial—the small details that had cost your son his life.
Ray Junior had seen the signs. He called Coral, and then packed his son into the car and drove ten hours straight to Vegas. Coral would never forget the morning they arrived, and how, just for a moment, she’d panicked, wondering if she could do it. Koji had seen this on her face; he’d given her a wink, and then reached up to give his nephew—already a head taller than he was—a lopsided hug.
Now they could laugh about that year, and look what it meant to her boys to have Trey. He took them to UNLV games at the Thomas & Mack, and showed up at their school events, tall and good-looking and hip. On Saturdays, he drove them to Japanese school and did the end-of-day jobs usually assigned to Coral: washing off the chalkboards and sweeping the floors and taking down the Las Vegas Gakuen poster that temporarily concealed the Clark High School sign in the gymnasium. When Isa introduced Trey to his Japanese teacher, he said he was his brother.
Coral smiled, thinking of this, and then looked around for her phone. What time was it? She’d spent the whole day on the couch. She walked to the study, looking for her phone, and was surprised to see a wash of red light reflected in the hall mirror. What was that? She looked out the window, to the street. A police car in the cul-de-sac. That was unusual. Coral turned away, not interested enough to look further. As she did, she saw the black and white of a second car, then, was that a van? A SWAT van? On Cabrillo Court? She peered out the living room window and was startled to count three black-and-whites, and what was indisputably an unmarked SWAT van. What was going on?
Coral opened the front door, moving slowly, waiting to hear if someone called for her to stop. She stood in the shadow of the entry, where it would not be easy to see her, but where she had a wider view of the street. Two of the cars had officers in them, and two more officers were standing at the mouth of the cul-de-sac, looking at a laptop. She couldn’t see anyone in the van and stayed very still, looking.
Across the way, Mr. Eberle opened his door and stepped outside. The police officer in the car in front rolled down his window and motioned for him to return to his house. Her neighbor looked confused, and then stepped back in and shut his door. Coral didn’t see him go to the front window, though she imagined he was there, crouched down or standing in a shadow, watching just as she was.
The street was oddly still. No motor started, no dog barked, no child rode a bike. There was an air of waiting, and Coral waited too. She couldn’t tell which house might be the problem. A few minutes went by, and then a maroon car pulled slowly up next to the officers on the street. One of them nodded toward the driver of the car and looked back at his laptop. The car sat, silent, but nobody got out. After awhile, one of the cops approached it. Coral saw the window roll down, and the officer lean in slightly, then gesture up the street toward Honorata Navarro’s house before walking back to her companion with the laptop.
The maroon car did not move.
What could be happening at Honorata’s house? Was it something to do with Malaya? Honorata and her daughter were going through a difficult year, and although the boys still asked if Malaya could babysit, she was rarely available anymore—and sometimes Coral was relieved. She loved Malaya, but she was not an easy teenager, at least not now. Coral felt sorry for Honorata; she tried so hard. She owned four houses on the street: her own and three she rented out. And she was a good landlord; her renters almost never left, the yards were neat, the cars were kept in the garages. It was probably because of Honorata that Cabrillo Court looked mostly untouched by the housing crash. A block in either direction, and every street had houses standing empty, with yards turned to flash dry tinder, and bits of trash lodged in the brown branches of dead euonymus shrubs and spikey pyracantha.
Coral shifted position in the entry and peered up the cul-de-sac to her neighbor’s house. It looked as silent and still as the rest of the street. A curved concrete bench stood in Honorata’s front yard—an oddly welcoming detail for a woman who didn’t make friends easily—and the only movement on the street was a mockingbird resting on the back of the bench, his tail upright, and his body weaving a bit as he looked to and fro.