I woke up Sunday with my pillow over my face and my cell phone ringing in my hand. Too groggy to check the ID, I fumbled the cell to my ear and mumbled a hello before my eyes were even open. I was instantly awake when I heard Dan’s voice.
“Ryan, can you get over to county?”
I came off the bed, already scrambling for my jeans. “What’s going on? Did something happen to Jake?”
“He’s okay physically . . .”
“Dan—what?” I clamped my hand to my forehead and closed my eyes. “I’m sorry. Tell me.”
“Evidently he had a rough night. I don’t know any of the details, but they called and said he wants you to come get him.”
I froze with one leg in my jeans and one bent at the knee.
“Can you go?” he said.
“I’ll be there in ten minutes. Are you coming?”
“No. I’ll drop by your place later and leave his clothes. We’ll have to decide what to do about his school.”
Right. Ginger was not coming to my home to tutor my son.
“We’ll work that out.” I shoved one arm into the sleeve of my leather jacket, still wearing the T-shirt I’d spent the night in. “Do you know what happened? Did someone hurt him?”
“No.” Dan was clearly on the edge of tears. “They just said he told the guard this morning he changed his mind and he’d go with his mother. The guy who called me said he was pretty shaken up.” I could hear him barely holding on.
“Listen, you go, and please—”
“I’m not going to yell at him,” I said.
“I wasn’t going to say that. Just tell him I love him.”
“You can tell him yourself when you come to bring his stuff.”
“I can’t see him, Ryan. I can’t see him and not bring him home.”
“I know the feeling,” I said.
I wasn’t prepared for what I saw when they released Jake to me. He’d looked thin and vulnerable the day before, but that couldn’t compare to the almost transparent boy who seemed to have lost all muscle mass in the night and shook like a wet Chihuahua. The fear in his eyes was so deep I wasn’t sure he would ever emerge from it.
He said nothing all the way home, and I didn’t press him. I was afraid one word, even a kind one, would shatter him. When we got into the house, he glanced around briefly and said, “Where’s the bathroom? I want to take a shower.” It hit me like a kick in the stomach that he hadn’t been there before.
While he stood under the water until I was sure it had long since turned cold, I built a fire in the kiva and heated a bowl of canned soup and set a cup of hot chocolate with whipped cream on the table next to the couch. Despite my lack of domesticity, I did everything short of producing a cat curled up on the hearth to make it homey.
Still, when he emerged from the bathroom, face scrubbed until his skin was raw, dressed in the black shirt and jeans he’d worn the day before, he sat on the edge of the sofa with his knees together and his shoulders curved inward until they nearly met at his sternum.
“I have a T-shirt you can change into if you want,” I said. “I bought it for you at one of the festivals I was shooting, but I never got to give it to you.”
“I’m okay in this,” he said.
“It doesn’t smell like jail?”
“They made me wear those orange things.”
He retreated back into himself. I retreated to the kitchen so I wouldn’t howl in horror. I poured the soup into a bowl and turned to take it back to the living room and nearly ran into him, right behind me.
“Do you want to eat in here?” I said.
“I’m not hungry,” Jake said, but he sat on the edge of one of the metal Harley-Davidson stools at the snack bar.
I’d bought the set because it looked very boy. That was what I had in mind when I picked out everything for the house. The indestructible leather couch and chairs in the living room. The Chicago Bears towels in the bathroom. The Xbox and plasma screen in the den. None of it suited the airy Southwestern feel of the house, but I wanted it to be home for my sons.
But to Jake it was probably just another interrogation room, only this one had curtains and a closer who shared the same gene pool. I bit back all the questions I wanted to ask. He took two spoonfuls of the soup, but I could see he was forcing it down.
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “You might be hungry later. Did you get any sleep last night?”
He shook his head.
“Was it too noisy?”
“They left the lights on all night.”
“Oh, and you hate that. You couldn’t even stand a night-light when you were a kid. Alex had to practically have a hundred-watt bulb in his face, but you wanted it totally dark.”
I was rambling to fill up the silence.
But maybe silence was what he needed after all. I didn’t know.
And neither, it seemed, did he.
When I suggested he take a nap, he said he wasn’t tired. When I offered to turn on football, he shrugged, and I took that as a yes. He finally dozed on the couch under a Bears blanket, and I muted the TV and watched him.
He looked even younger and smaller when he was asleep, without the stoic, I-can-handle-this mask he’d worked so hard to wear. With his hair back from his face, I could see how chiseled and fine-tuned his bone structure was, how he was growing into a sensitive young man who, if he were true to himself, wouldn’t be able to hide what stirred inside.
I wasn’t aware that I was trying to cry again until I heard my own hard sobs. An image came to me unbidden, unwelcome . . . my son withering under a brutal light that never went out. I knew in that moment that he wouldn’t survive in prison. And even if he never loved me as his mother again, I had to keep him out.
That conviction grew stronger as the day wore into the night. Jake didn’t eat. He slept only fitfully and spent most of his time staring at his hands as if he didn’t know what to do with them. Most telling was the way he shadowed me every time I left the room he was in. He tried to make it look like it was merely a coincidence that we wound up in the kitchen at the same time, when moments before he seemed to be conked out on the couch. After three or four times, I knew he was afraid to be alone. Before, that was all he had wanted.
When it was time to call it a night, I suggested he sleep on the couch, and I curled up in the recliner and pretended to drift off. I was awake for every leather-crackling toss and turn he made, every trip to the bathroom, every sigh that came from some sad place in his soul.
“Can I get you anything?” I said around three.
“A new life,” he said.
“A new life?”
He didn’t answer. His breathing became shallow and even, and I wasn’t sure he hadn’t been half-asleep already when he said it.
But it still made my decision for me about the next day. In the morning, after I’d brought in the paper—and discovered a bag of Jake’s clothes on the front porch—and made the coffee and taken a shower, I sat on the edge of the coffee table and put my hand on his arm. He came awake with terror in his eyes.
“It’s okay,” I said. “It’s time to get up.”
“Why?” he said. “I’m not going back, am I?”
“No. But you do have a job.”
He licked at dry lips and squinted at me.
“Get up,” I said. “You’re working for me now.”
He didn’t argue, and I was glad. I didn’t want to tell him I wasn’t leaving him alone, not for a minute, for a number of reasons. Not the least of which was that if he wanted a “new life,” what did he intend to do with the old one?
We spent the morning at a ribbon cutting for a new preschool and a post-robbery scene at a liquor store. Jake carried equipment I usually lugged myself and held lights I didn’t need and gave me directions I could have gotten from Perdita. He did it all without complaint. He was quiet, though not sullen, and it took every scrap of self-restraint—and a few mental visits to White Sands—not to try to coax him out. At least he’d stopped trembling, and when I asked him where he wanted to go for lunch, he chose Arby’s.
I called Frances while he took a bite of roast beef and chewed it endlessly, as if he couldn’t quite make himself swallow it. I’d already told her he’d be with me today.
“What else do you have for me?” I said to her.
“Nothing at the moment. I’m going to free you up to work on your colonias piece.”
“Oh.”
“I’m thinking you should go to that area off the mall and get the food, the crafts, the smiles for the tourists—you know, the stuff that lets us believe they’re happy being poor and oppressed. That’ll be jarring next to the rest of it.”
My heart took a dive. She was sending me with Jake right into the neighborhood where his life had fallen apart.
“Keep your cell phone on, of course,” Frances said. “How’s your son doing?”
“Uh, fine.”
“Is this some kind of take-your-kid-to-work thing?”
I could hear her typing, so I didn’t have to answer.
“I’ll call you if I need you for anything,” she said. “Go for the home run.”
I closed the phone and tossed it onto the table. Jake winced.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Did I startle you?”
“I just get freaked out,” he said.
I took a bite and waited to see if there would be more, but he continued to tear up the sandwich he wasn’t eating.
“Look, I don’t want to freak you out more,” I said, “but I have to go over by, like, Second and Third Streets and shoot some stuff for a piece I’m doing. On Mexican legals.”
I waited again. He stopped ripping at the bread.
“Are you okay with that?” I asked.
“Why wouldn’t I be?” His old defensiveness crept back into his voice.
“Look, Jake, I’m not trying to bring something up here. I just need to know if you can handle going down there right now.”
He shrugged. Frustration needled at me, but I took a deep breath.
“All right, I’m going to ask you some questions, and all you have to do is nod or shake your head. I think we can pull that off without getting into a shouting match, don’t you?”
He sat back in the chair and nodded.
“Did you spend much time down there by where Miguel got hurt before that day?”
“That’s the only time I ever went.”
“Did you ever meet any of Miguel’s family?”
“No.”
“Did you see his mother at the select team tryouts?”
His face jerked up. “How did you know about that?”
“Diego’s mother,” I said. “She was just telling me how good you were to Miguel,” I said. “Did you see Miguel’s mom?”
“Why do you want to know that?”
“I just need to know if you think she or anybody else in their family would recognize you if we saw them this afternoon.”
“Only his mom came to the tryouts,” he said in a voice I could barely hear. “I didn’t even meet her.”
I tried to envision the afternoon ahead. I could do all long shots and avoid the Ocotillo and the other restaurant where Elena Sanchez had worked. If Jake wore his ball cap and I kept him busy, it might work. With one exception.
I swallowed. “I need to ask you one more question, and it’s only to protect you from somebody wanting to attack you or something.”
He squinted at me, the way I knew I did at people when they were making no sense. But he shrugged.
“The day Miguel was hit by the truck,” I said. “Did anybody see you sitting there in it before the police came?”
“There wasn’t anybody else around.”
“Nobody? Then who called 911?”
“I did.”
I stared at him. “You did? Jake, I don’t understand. Did you have a cell phone?”
“You said just one more question.”
My head spun like a bicycle wheel, and I stuck the first stick I could find into its spokes. “Okay. That’s all I need to know. I think we’ll be all right down there. But if you see anybody you recognize, who might know who you are, just—tug on your earlobe.”
“Do what?”
“Like a signal. I’ll see that, and we’ll split. Deal?”
A long breath came out of his nose, the relief I knew he was trying to disguise.
I was glad that afternoon that he didn’t talk much. I needed the mind space to mull over what he’d told me. He’d been in the alley alone, in a truck he didn’t know how to drive. And after he ran over his friend with it, he magically pulled a cell phone from somewhere and called 911. It was a good thing I did have work to do, because otherwise I couldn’t have kept from shaking Jake until he gave me answers.
There was a little activity in front of a dark-looking coffee shop at one end of the mall, so we stopped there first. A group of older Hispanic men were having a good-natured argument, and they mugged enthusiastically for me before I could even raise the camera. I wasn’t happy with the busyness of the scene—it would look cluttered online—so I switched to a 400 lens to get a long view of the empty mall.
All the while, I tried not to let Jake see me glancing at him to make sure he wasn’t about to go into posttraumatic shock. We were nowhere close to the alley, but I had come to think of it all as Miguel’s stomping ground.
I was shooting the last series for the day when Jake gave a stifled cry. When I looked up, he was fumbling for his earlobe.
“What?” I whispered. “Who did you see?”
I looked where he was looking. Detective Levi Baranovic approached us from no more than five feet away. How long he’d been standing there, I didn’t know.
“Mrs. Coe,” he said. “Jacob.”
I didn’t correct him, though I did want to throw Jake behind me and shield him with my body.
“Is there a problem?” I said. “Jake was released into my custody. I was told I could bring him out in public if I kept him with me.”
He cast his green-eyed gaze over Jake. “Would you just step over there while I talk to your mother?”
Jake’s eyes went wild.
“Why don’t you pack up my camera,” I said, handing it to him. And with a hard look at Baranovic I added, “I won’t be long.”
The detective lowered his voice to a growl. “You’re taking pictures of these people for the paper?”
“Yes.”
“What are you trying to do?”
“I’m trying to tell their story.”
“What story? Don’t you think Elena Sanchez and her family have been through enough without you trying to make them look like what happened to Miguel was his fault? Their fault?”
I had to talk with my teeth clamped together to keep from screaming. “You have no idea what I’m trying to do. They’re suffering from injustices most people don’t know about. That’s what this story is—”
His gaze sharpened. “So you’re going to tell their pitiful tale and make it look like you’re on their side, so your son couldn’t possibly have—”
“Are you going to charge me with something, or can I take Jake home? Because I don’t think you have the authority to insult me.” I started off, but I turned back. “No, wait. How about if I ask you a question, Detective? Have you people traced the 911 call? From the day of the shooting?”
He parked his hands on his hips. “It was a disposable cell phone. There’s no way to trace who made the call.”
“I’ll tell you who made it—Jake himself.”
“And you know this how?”
“Because he told me.”
“Did he tell you anything else?”
“No.”
“Look, I’m going to tell you something, Mrs. Coe: leave this to us. Meanwhile, if you raise sympathy for the Sanchez family, which I agree they deserve, you’re going to make things worse for Jacob when he goes to trial.”
“I don’t see that.”
“You should. You’re part of the media—you’ve seen it happen. You’ve probably made it happen.”
“What?”
“Do you want your son tried in the newspaper? Because that’s what will happen if you do this.” He jerked his thumb toward Jake. “Why don’t you put your camera away and prepare your son for what’s about to happen to him?”
I didn’t watch him go. Jake did, and I knew he’d heard every word.