Ben stood up from the table and faced the window.
“We can’t change what’s happened,” Rachel said, her voice quieter now. “We have to be practical, realistic. We need to have a plan—one we’re on the same page about. We need to get her to the gynecologist. Make sure she’s using birth control. I mean, I’ve talked to her about it, but that was in the abstract. I didn’t think it would happen this early.”
“You’re saying we should put her on the pill?” he said.
“You want to lock her in her room?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I do.”
Rachel walked over to him and placed her hand on the small of his back. He melted for a moment. For a split second he would have done anything she said. “Ben.” But then he pulled away and went for the stairs. He wanted to see Emma, his little girl; he wanted his little girl back.
“Don’t,” Rachel said. Somehow she beat him to the bottom of the stairs. “Don’t go up there right now.”
“Emma,” he called up the stairs.
He could see Emma’s closed bedroom door, a NO TRESPASSING sign hanging on a nail.
“Ben,” Rachel said. “Look at me. Wait until you’ve thought it out. She’s your daughter.”
Why did it feel like she wasn’t his anymore? Like she had been taken from him?
“Emma,” he said. “I know you can hear me. Come out here right now.”
“Look at me,” Rachel said. He wouldn’t. He was watching his daughter’s door. “When you’re upset you say stupid things. Things you can’t take back. Don’t do that to her.”
Emma’s door cracked open. He could see her darken the sliver of open space, watching him at the bottom of the stairs.
“Ben,” Rachel said loudly, her hand pressed against his chest. “Go home and think about us.”
He looked at Rachel; he hadn’t heard her refer to them as “us” in a very long time.
“Think about us back then,” she said. “Maybe that will help you understand.”
—
NATASHA SAT DOWN at a bench near the open classroom door. She could see the professor sitting on a table in front of the students, reading with mock anger from a text he had splayed on his lap.
“And what loved the shot-pellets
That dribbled from those strung-up mummifying crows?
What spoke the silence of lead?
Crow realized there were two Gods—
One of them much bigger than the other
Loving his enemies
And having all the weapons.”
He let the words hang in the air for a moment before releasing the students, yelling over the din of their shufflings which poems to read for the next class. Natasha recognized Tucker immediately, though the young man’s hair was long and he had grown a beard. He was bigger than she expected—six foot four, she guessed, broad shoulders, biceps straining his shirtsleeves. She followed him, weaving in and out of the students as they made their way to their classes. He had a backpack slung over his shoulder, a skateboard strapped to the bag with a bungee cord. The barrel of a gun was painted on the board, and band names, too, were drawn in Sharpie across the empty spaces—X, Black Flag, Social Distortion, Dead Kennedys. He sat down at a bench beneath a tree and opened the book he was carrying. He teethed the cap off the pen and began scrawling words across the page.
“You like poetry?” Natasha said.
“The good stuff,” Tucker said, squinting up at her.
She asked him the poet. Tucker dog-eared the page, closed the book, and showed her the cover. Ted Hughes.
“Sounds like angry stuff.”
“Cathartic, maybe,” Tucker said. “Beautiful, if you ask me.” He slipped the book into his backpack and pulled the hair out of his eyes. His body was all muscle, but his face was soft—a boy’s face still. “I didn’t see you in class. You an extension student?”
“I was listening outside,” Natasha said. “The professor was putting on a show.”
“Yeah,” Tucker said, sly smile. “A wanna-be actor.”
“He’d be a pretty bad one.”
“Who are you?” Tucker said, a hardness coming into his voice.
“Natasha Betencourt.” She showed him the badge, her thumb hiding the MEDICAL EXAMINER etched into the metal.
“Let me see that again,” he said.
She showed him, not bothering to hide it this time.
He squinted up at her, fear bleaching his face. “Who’s dead?”
—
TUCKER AGREED TO meet at a park set against the hills and the remnants of an avocado grove. Natasha said she’d give him a ride, but Tucker said he wasn’t getting in any car with her unless she had the authority to arrest him. So Tucker skateboarded there and Natasha followed him in her Z, until he reached a patch of irrigated green shaded by young junipers.
They were sitting on a cement bench near a new playground, watching a city worker push trunks of avocado trees into a wood chipper, when she told him about Lucero.
“How old was he?”
“Seventeen.”
Next to a field newly cleared of trees, men lowered an irrigation system into a hole in the ground.
“One of Wakeland’s?”
“He was a swimmer.”
“Jesus,” Tucker said, biting nails already chewed to the quick, one thumb rimmed in dried blood. “How’d you find me?”
“Your mother.”
He narrowed his eyes at her. “Was my father there?”
“Yes,” Natasha said.
“And my mom told you where to find me?”
“She did.”
He studied her—astonished, it seemed.
“You know I can’t talk, right? I mean, you’ve already found that out.”
“I know that seven years ago you said something.”
He glanced away, at the men lowering the pipe into the ground.
“How’d he do it?”
“Shot himself in the head.”
Tucker nodded and looked at the ground.
“I wanted to talk,” he said. “Wanted it off my fucking back. I didn’t give a shit if people thought I was some freak.”
“But your father didn’t want you to, right?”
“Let me tell you about my dad.” He pulled down the waistband of his pants to reveal scars, striations of them white and welted on his upper hips. “Belt,” he said, letting go of the pants. “He would pull it right out of the loops and go at it.” He bit a slice of fingernail and spit. “I got this because I cried in front of my Little League teammates when we lost a playoff game. I was eight. He said I needed to toughen up, you know. Get a backbone. He called me a pussy.”
“Your father’s the frightened one,” Natasha said. “Sounds to me like you might be braver than him.”
Tucker finished chewing his left thumb and moved on to his index finger. After the men lowered the pipe, a bulldozer dropped earth on it.
“What did Wakeland do to you?”
“You know, no one’s ever asked me that question,” he said. “It was always ‘What happened?’ or ‘the accuser alleges that’ and shit like that. Not even my mother asked me that question: ‘What did he do?’?”
“Maybe she’s frightened to know,” she said. “Maybe she’s afraid it’s her fault.”
“Just like my mom,” he said, “to make it all about her.”