In the fall of 2005 I was twenty-one, entering my senior year at UC Berkeley. I arrived on campus with guarded optimism. The team that I’d led to the Final Four was largely intact. Three guys had graduated and two more had transferred, leaving nine familiar faces.
At our first team meeting I thanked everyone for their support throughout the long recovery process. Last season hadn’t been fun for anyone. I’d ridden it out on the sideline, in a brace, clapping as we dropped game after game. Nobody liked to lose, especially after you’d tasted success. What counted was what you learned from the experience. The time had come to start back up the mountain. We had our new guys to help us reach the top. We had our core guys. We had Coach.
It was a pretty good speech. I’d had fifteen months to refine it. I got a big round of applause. Everyone crowded in to rub me on the head.
One of the new guys was a redshirt sophomore named Patrick Starks, a transfer from San Diego State. Over the spring Coach had shown me tape and asked for my appraisal. I gave it to him: The kid’s jump shot was a work in progress. He needed to log some hours in the weight room. What he did have was a quick first step, a devastating handle, and that ineffable quality known as court vision: the ability to slow down time and move people around in mental space like chess pieces.
Call me naïve, but I’d had no idea, not the faintest suspicion, that I was watching the future.
My own court vision didn’t extend that far.
The Patrick Starks who greeted me that fall had logged the hours. All summer long he’d been running the same drills I had, except on two perfect knees. He bumped my fist, welcomed me back, and proceeded to dismantle me.
I’d never been the tallest or the strongest or the fastest. I’d gotten as far as I had by harnessing and taming a certain reckless instinct. I’d pull up from the hash mark. Run straight at guys half a foot bigger. Sometimes these impulses cost me. On good days they made me deadly. The key was using them judiciously, enough to sow uncertainty in a defender and chaos in his team. They never knew what I might do. I didn’t know it myself till I did it.
You practice and plan and scheme and diagram, and then you go out there and it all falls away, because your opponent is fighting for his life, just like you.
Advancing in the backcourt, I saw Patrick Starks ready for me, his smile hungry, his feet light below hips that slid as if on ball bearings. Now I was the uncertain one, and he was brash and unpredictable. He wanted to tear my heart out. And he could, and he knew it. I pressed against stiffness and heard the echo of pain, and I allowed myself the one emotion no great athlete can afford to feel: fear.
At the end of practice I shook his hand, knowing I’d never start again.
For his part, Coach lobbied hard to keep me around. So what if I couldn’t perform at my previous standard? The guys looked up to me. Without question Starks had talent, but he also had room to grow. I could mentor him. It didn’t have to be martyrdom. I’d get minutes.
No, thanks, I said.
Pride prevented me from using the word quit. Coach was kind enough not to use it, either.
Leaving the athletics complex felt like jumping out of a plane without a parachute. I wandered, bewildered, through the hot smell of laundry blowing behind the PE building, through the eucalyptus grove, over lawns. Around me whirled a startling busyness. Students were talking, reading, running to class. In theory I was one of them. But not really. For three years I’d existed in a bubble of teammates and staff.
Who were all these strangers, lounging on their blankets and throwing their Frisbees and brandishing clipboards? There were so many of them, and their activity was indecipherable, these thirty thousand souls in pursuit of a goal alien to me: getting an education.
My academics were a train wreck. I didn’t see how I could graduate, short of staying on another three years.
I made my way to Tolman Hall, the psychology building, and gazed up at its cratered façade. I had more psych units than any other. Two whole classes. One of those had been taught by a genial, enthusiastic man named Paul Sandek, himself a former college basketball player. We’d chatted a few times after games. I had never been to his office hours, let alone confided in him. I didn’t know then that his playing career, like mine, had ended with an injury.
I could barely remember the names of my other professors.
I consulted the directory, climbed to the second floor, and walked a gloomy hall. Sandek’s door was shut. Hearing his raspy laugh, I turned to go; changed my mind and scrawled a note on his whiteboard.
The door opened. Sandek leaned out, phone pressed to his shirt. Clay. What a nice surprise.
I told him I was thinking of dropping out.
He rubbed his beard. In those days it was more pepper than salt. He apologized to the person on the other end of the line. He’d have to call them back.
It took summer sessions, two course waivers, and an extra semester, but under his guidance I finished my degree. Throughout those months, as Luke caused our family to implode, Paul took me into his, inviting me home for dinner, where his wife, Theresa, a business school professor, put out heaping portions of moussaka or chicken cacciatore. Afterward I rinsed the dishes and handed them to their daughter, a leggy blond high schooler named Amy, to slot in the dishwasher. Cleaning up was as crucial as eating. It was what normal people did, and I needed normal like a blood transfusion.
One night, after Amy had gone upstairs to do her homework, I sat with Paul and Theresa in the living room and they grilled me about the rest of my life. It was one thing to earn a diploma, quite another to find purpose. What interested me? What did I care about?
Initially, I had no answer. Every choice I’d made since fourth grade reflected the single-minded goal of playing professional basketball. In its absence I confronted an existential void.
My parents had shared the same goal. I say that to their credit. My mother, in particular, was unflagging. She’d driven me to every practice; traveled to every game, home or road. Hers was the first face I saw in the recovery room when I woke up after my surgery, and she accompanied me to physical therapy multiple times a week. She had her own reasons for throwing herself into the role of sports mom. I had a bright future, and it was simpler and more directly rewarding to invest in that than in trying to halt Luke’s deterioration. Given a choice, though, I doubt she would have opted to spend her forties driving to Fresno to scream her lungs out. Like every other narcissistic adolescent, I’d never asked her permission. I wanted what I wanted and she took on wanting it, too.
Then I stopped wanting it, leaving her staring into a void of her own. On some level she had to feel cheated: She’d backed a horse that came up lame. In doing so she’d also failed my brother. A new, unshakable conviction took hold of her. She could claw back time; she could and would save him.
But he had broken out of the stall to run wild.
In 2005 Luke was twenty-three. He worked at minimum wage, illegally, or not at all. He moved often, ditching one unthinkable living situation for another. He slept in his car, if he happened to have one. He slept rough.
He tells these stories now like they happened to someone else.
Looking back I feel guilt for how little thought I gave him and sadness at what my parents endured. It’s not as though they forgot about him, and my mom periodically let her pain show. Sitting beside me at PT, she’d yawn, and when I asked if she was okay she’d confess that she’d been up all night, bailing Luke out of jail. Or that he’d cropped up after a month, asking to have our old room for a few nights.
Dull resignation colored her voice, as though he were a leaky faucet.
Always I urged her not to let him in. Always, she did, even though she knew he’d soon vanish along with the cash from her purse.
My father bricked himself up in work, books, hobbies, DIY. Only once, that December, did he lose his temper. Luke pawned a necklace passed down from our paternal great-grandmother. My father discovered the theft and confronted him about it. They ended up getting into a fistfight in the living room. My dad threw him out with a warning not to come back.
My mom called me, sobbing. She was afraid Luke might hurt himself. We needed to find him and get him checked into the hospital.
I thought it was pointless. This wasn’t the first time Luke had gone off the radar. He’d run out of money and come home. He always did. No, she insisted, this was different, it felt different.
Not wanting her to suffer alone, I told her to pick me up. We trawled the streets, taking turns at the wheel. We checked the emergency rooms. We checked with his friends. They weren’t his friends anymore. He had new friends whose names we didn’t know. Nobody’d seen him in a while. Last time they did see him, he didn’t look too good.
At daybreak she dropped me at campus. I napped for two hours and went to my nine a.m. class. My mother went to work. She didn’t call the police. She knew what they’d say.
In 2005 Rosa Arias was twenty-eight years old, a full-time mother to three children: Max, six, Stephanie, four, and the baby, Christian.
She lived in Concord, a middle-working-class city in Contra Costa County, where she and her husband had both grown up. Ivan made good money as a statistician for Chevron. They owned a three-bedroom, two-bath house.
They’d met through Ivan’s younger sister, Vanessa, with whom Rosa worked, at Macy’s in the Sunvalley Mall, the summer Rosa turned seventeen. Ivan was five years older, bookish and mild-mannered. In addition to Vanessa he had four more sisters. Rosa liked that he came from a big family. Having so many women around meant he knew how to treat a lady. She’d always longed for a sister. The house she grew up in, with one brother, was always seething with angry male drama.
The Ariases’ house was loud and full of laughter. People fought, but there was too much going on to stay mad or sad for long. Shy by nature, Rosa decided she would learn to be a part of that kind of family. She decided she wanted that kind of husband and that kind of home.
She was nineteen when they married. She would’ve liked to start having kids right away, but Ivan preferred to wait a little. So she concentrated on nieces and nephews; Ivan’s three older sisters had kids ranging from infants to college-aged. Nobody would turn down free babysitting.
She loved getting together with everyone for backyard barbecues or birthday parties in the park. Once Max came along her sisters-in-law would pass him around, cooing over how delicious and fat he was. They gave her bags of baby clothes, and in the first eight weeks of his life, when he was colicky and Rosa thought she would lose her mind, they took turns coming over and holding him so she could have some temporary relief.
Although she’d met the Ariases through Vanessa, it was Janet—the second oldest, the quiet one—to whom Rosa felt closest. Those big get-togethers could stretch for hours. Ivan and the brothers-in-law happily pulling Budweisers from the cooler, Lisa and Paula and Rachael yakking it up. Hyperactive kids running everywhere with frosting on their faces.
Rosa loved them all, loved being part of it, but after a while her nerves just felt so fried. Sometimes she had to go stand behind a tree. She could hear Gladys asking Ivan Donde se fué, tu delicada florecita? And Janet saying Leave her alone, Mama, can’t you see she’s tired.
Janet was unique in another respect. Lisa had five children. Paula and Rachael had four apiece. Vanessa popped out three, boom-boom-boom, and wanted more. Janet married young and had Lucy right away but then couldn’t get pregnant again. Nobody knew if she and Craig had stopped trying or if there was a problem. To compensate everyone heaped praise on Lucy and made sure her cousins included her in their games.
Lucy Vernon was nine when Rosa came into the circle. Over the next decade Rosa watched her niece evolve from a sunny pigtailed child to an intense, driven, creative young woman. Lucy loved clothes and from an early age talked about being a fashion designer when she grew up. It was Rosa, a skilled amateur, who taught her to sew.
After school, on weekends, Lucy would walk over to use Rosa’s Singer. From the scraps Rosa gave her, Lucy fashioned small items to sell to her classmates, reversible headbands or a clever pouch that attached to a keychain and could be used to hold a tube of lip gloss or ChapStick. Soon she’d saved up enough to buy her own machine. When Rosa was pregnant for the second time, they collaborated for six months on Lucy’s quinceañera dress, beading the bodice by hand.
In 2005 Lucy Vernon was nineteen. The same age Rosa had been when she married Ivan. Lucy’s life looked different. She lived at home, worked part-time at Chipotle, took classes in fashion design and business. She still didn’t have her learner’s permit, let alone her license, relying on friends and family to chauffeur her where she couldn’t walk, bike, or bus. She was an only child. She tended to get what she wanted.
On a December Sunday afternoon Lucy called Rosa to ask if her aunt would drive her to a fabric store in Fruitvale. She was copying a dress worn by Rihanna in Us Weekly. She described it: chartreuse leopard print against a white background, cut high, with a black lace neckline, decorative lace stripes up the front, lace edging the thigh slits.
Ivan—listening in on the conversation as he spooned cereal into Christian’s mouth—saw his wife make a gagging face. He laughed.
Lucy had tried the local stores. None of them had the lace she wanted. A place on International Boulevard showed one on their website that looked close. She needed to see the fabric in person, touch it with her fingers, move it in the light, you couldn’t tell from a screen, Rosa had taught her that. But Lucy’s parents couldn’t drive her. Her dad was on a fishing trip and her mom had taken Gladys to visit a friend in the hospital.
Rosa hesitated. Ivan could see she didn’t want to strand him with three kids, though he often encouraged her to get out of the house. It’d been a while since Rosa and Lucy spent time together. Ivan thought he could detect the same wistful note in his niece’s request. She could have called a friend.
Go, he said to Rosa.
Rosa kissed the kids and told them to behave. She kissed Ivan and got into her car, a 1997 Kia Sportage. It had served her well, but with two car seats and a booster, she’d been talking about getting something with a third row.
She stopped by the Vernons’ to collect Lucy and they drove to Fruitvale, entering the fabric store at approximately four fifteen p.m. and shopping for thirty to forty minutes. Despite their closeness in age, the salesclerk mistook them for mother and daughter. In her recollection it had to do with the fondness on Rosa’s face as she watched the younger woman run her hands over bolts of cloth and imagine, out loud and with excitement, what they might become.
My brother woke beneath the freeway. The sun was almost down, though he didn’t realize that at first and in his disorientation took it to be dawn.
He sat up. He was in an abandoned parking lot surrounded by a chain-link fence. Train tracks ran nearby. There were tents, as well as other bodies lying inside sleeping bags, under tarps, and on the fissured, weedy asphalt. Someone had shaken out his backpack. His clothes were strewn everywhere.
He checked himself for his most precious possessions: a glass pipe, three glassine envelopes of crack cocaine, and a small sum of money left over from pawning our great-grandmother’s ring. These he kept close by, sleeping with the pipe tucked in his armpit or cradled in his limp fingers, drugs in the folds of his crotch or between his butt cheeks. The cash he split between his socks.
Now his feet were bare and the money was gone.
The pipe lay within arm’s reach, its tip broken off.
He reached into his underwear and found the drugs.
He gathered the rest of his things, including a mostly full fifth of vodka that he drank furtively and quickly. One shoe he found behind a concrete pillar. The other was nowhere to be seen. He went around, kicking up piles of garbage, till he found some other shoe that sort of fit.
He stole a pipe off a guy passed out cold and smoked one glassine envelope.
Rolling up his sleeping bag, he shouldered his backpack and left the encampment through a hole in the fence.
At the corner of 8th Street and 5th Avenue he passed a sign for Laney College. He couldn’t remember when he’d last eaten. It must have been a long time; crack suppresses the appetite, yet he felt a gnawing hunger. He turned down 12th Street and entered a convenience store opposite Clinton Square. The owner caught him slipping a banana into his pocket and chased him out, waving a gun and yelling at him in Vietnamese.
Luke went around the block to get away from him. He sat down on the curb, ate his banana, and smoked a second glassine envelope.
Across the street, a bright-green Mustang was parked outside an apartment house.
Sweet wheels. It made him smile. He knew about cars. He hadn’t had a vehicle in forever and never anything remotely as cool as the Mustang.
He finished his smoke and went over for a better look. Mid-seventies. It was really nice. It was fucking amazing. Stars shone in it. The owner had taken good care.
He tested the door handle. Locked.
A bag of Cheetos sat open on the passenger seat. There were crumbs on the leather. It changed Luke’s opinion of the owner and pissed him off. That was no way to treat a beautiful machine, the most perfect car he had ever seen. He tried the passenger door but it, too, was locked. He still felt mad about the man at the convenience store who’d threatened him. He felt so furious he started pounding on the hood. He climbed atop the Mustang and stomped on the roof.
The hell are you doing. A man had materialized on the sidewalk. Get down from there.
Cheetos, motherfucker? Luke said.
The man’s name was Orlando Flores. He lived in the apartment house and was the owner of the Mustang. He registered Luke’s crazed mien and dishevelment and began backing away.
It’s a beautiful machine Luke said. It deserves respect.
Orlando Flores took out his cellphone.
People often refer to a mustang as a wild horse, but that’s incorrect. The mustangs that roam the American West descend from domesticated horses brought by the Spanish, cast back into nature.
A mustang is a feral horse.
That reckless instinct. Never harnessed. Never tamed.
Luke jumped down. He charged at Flores, dragged him to the sidewalk, beat him, and took his wallet and keys. One key fit the car door. Luke got in and fired it up. It roared.
On their way home from the fabric store, Rosa Arias and Lucy Vernon stopped to pick up dinner. Rosa called Ivan to let him know that Lucy would be joining them. Rosa was ordering garlic shrimp for herself and plain noodles and chicken for the kids. She read Ivan the menu so he could choose. Pineapple curry pork sounded good.
The last person who remembered hearing Rosa Arias speak was the hostess who handed Rosa her bags of Thai. Rosa double-checked that there was no spice in the noodles or chicken. Otherwise her kids wouldn’t eat it. The hostess assured her that there was zero spice.
At approximately five forty-five p.m., Rosa and Lucy exited the restaurant. That late in the year, it was dark. They got into the Kia and Rosa drove north on International Boulevard to 29th Avenue, which led to the freeway. She signaled left and edged into the intersection. The light turned yellow. She started to make the turn and a green Mustang traveling in the rightmost oncoming lane at seventy-five to eighty miles per hour crushed into the Kia’s passenger-side door.
Based on the point of impact, one would expect Lucy Vernon to be more grievously hurt. But it was Rosa who was killed outright when her head struck the window.
Lucy hung on for nine more days before dying.
Luke sustained a broken femur, broken ribs, a punctured lung, and a lacerated spleen. He spent four days in a coma and woke up cuffed to the bed rail.