“You want me to tell you what’s going on, then? ’Cause I think I know quite well what’s going on.”
She tried to move away, but he held her still.
“You think I’m stupid or something? Italian dinner, right?” He glared at me now, then tied Deva’s long hair in a knot and pulled it against his chest. She did not seem as shocked as I was by what was happening. It was as if this was a glitch or an annoyance, nothing more and nothing new.
“You went out, that’s what’s going on. You went to one of your all-night parties. Am I right?”
I stood on the cusp of the rock with a body that was unable to move. The chemicals from the previous night rushed back to paralyze me. There was something familiar about that feeling of impotence, a pounding heart inside an immobile body, the mind trying to bend a structure made of lumber. I was far away from Eagle Rock now, standing before Santino’s wild eyes, tuned in to Angelina’s sorrowful snout.
Deva untangled herself from her father’s grasp.
“Yes, I’m sorry,” she whimpered. “We just went out because it was my birthday.”
He walked away from her, shaking his head like he was proud of himself for figuring it out. Then he stopped and caught his breath.
“It was my fault,” I intervened. “I talked her into it.”
He wasn’t listening.
The soles of his shoes rotated against the loose gravel. He turned around and leaped back toward his daughter. Deva moved away with a jolt, causing their bodies to collide against each other on the way. The contact with her father’s hips flung her across the air. She hit the rock and bounced off the quartz like a rubber ball, landing on her feet.
Suddenly I was not made of lumber anymore. I was sober and it didn’t matter if Deva had fallen by mistake. My mind screamed that maybe it wasn’t an accident, that this could be the prelude to something worse. I thought about the bruises I’d seen on her body, the days when she’d disappeared, the times when she’d refused to talk about things. I repositioned those memories in my head and gave them new meaning. Rage mounted inside me until it was some formless incandescent liquid. I clenched my teeth. Deva’s father was coming closer to his daughter again, a look of truce and kindness on his face. That was no truce, though. It was the quiet before the storm. I screamed at him to get away from Deva. He didn’t listen and kept moving toward his daughter, his head tilted sideways like he was trying to take her in. I took a step back. A quaking in my legs like an awakening, and my hands moved forward, hard and strong. I aimed for his belly. It was happening and I let it unfold like I wasn’t part of the picture. I shoved myself against Deva’s father with more force than I knew I had. I pushed him off the Eagle Rock into the small ditch below. I heard the sound of his arms against the shrubbery, the crackle of branches and dry leaves underneath. I didn’t wait to catch my breath or listen to the final outcome. I turned toward Deva and hurried to her. She was a bundle of trembling bones. Her forehead was bleeding from the concussion.
“What the fuck did you do?” she screamed.
I replied with a slow, unhurried voice, hoping she’d made a mistake looking at me like I’d done something bad. Maybe she hadn’t assessed the situation correctly.
“He was going to hurt you,” I replied in a whisper.
“No he wasn’t, you crazy bitch.”
I peered over the rock toward the outcropping below. He was there, heaving, legs open wide on a dry bush halfway down the crag. He was far from dead, I reassured myself, and turned to Deva once again, but her face had hardened. I invited her to get up, but she was somewhere else. Her contours merged into the fading sunlight and she began to recede into the canyon. She gave me a final look of outrage and then she was gone. The sun had disappeared into the ocean, only blue hills and black shadows now. Everything caved in, and a different Deva would emerge out of that concave world. The previous one had departed.
“You’re fucking nuts!” she shot at me with furious, limpid eyes, then climbed around the rock from the side and crawled into the escarpment. Her father was sprawled there. He moaned, eyes turned skyward like a martyr, bedraggled and vacant. Deva hovered over him protectively. I stayed above the rock and looked as her hair fell across his Adonis face. She was Venus, engulfing him back, conjoined. Her face was transfixed by a new light like she’d aged years in the span of a few instants. He let himself go to her embrace and abandoned his arms around her.
I felt stupid and remorseful, but also disgusted.
“Deva!” I screamed from above as she helped her father up. He limped, his arms and face scratched, but he was alive, standing.
“I’m reporting you to the police! I’m getting you kicked out of my country! You crazy Italian bitch.” Even though his eyes fumed, his rage was a show. His body was squat and comfortable in his daughter’s arms, his face a bright-red exploded moon.
“Deva!” I called again.
Her eyes glassed over. “You heard what he said,” she said in a low drawl.
I felt myself droop. I’d heard that drawl before, on the phone from Montana. It was Deva’s tone when she put up her wall. It rose above us, higher than the meteor boulder that had dropped in the canyon. It stretched over the Sicilian islands, the Mojave Desert, the Valley, and Topanga, and it was inscrutable like all the secret rules of children who’d grown up in that canyon. Topanga was a place where things were different and girls loved and feared their fathers, maybe slept in their beds, became their assistants and wives.
“You better leave or I’ll kill you,” her father screamed, starting to hobble his way up the trail.
I waited one more second, hoping to see Deva’s translucent green eyes, if nothing else to bid me farewell, but she did not look up so I got back on my feet and ran away.
24