It was a street like any other street in Westchester. Small square homes lined up on either side like kindergarteners on their first day of school. Tidy but timid, they were little houses where your neighbors might live, where your mother might live, where you might live if it was all you could afford in Los Angeles. Two bedrooms, one bath, sometimes a small sun porch in the back. On Orange Street it was still 1965. The yuppies hadn’t found it and torn up the green lawns to do drought-tolerant landscaping with native plants.
Orange was my childhood street and I was stuck there. I’d inherited the house from my mother and I had nowhere else to go. After living in New York City and other points east, I’d come back to L.A. to take care of her. Not that she needed me; she was dying and there was nothing I could do. But I moved right back into my childhood room. I slept in my twin bed with the brown plaid polyester bedspread. My blue ribbon from freshman football was hanging where I’d stuck it in ninth grade on the bulletin board over my desk next to my picture of Bruce Lee. Everything in my room was the same as I’d left it, but covered in a shroud of dust. It made me sneeze. My mother would call out while she still could: God bless you.
Sneeze.
God bless you.
Some days it was our only communication.
Then she died and I stayed in my room and she went to Heaven. At least that’s where she had always told me she was going. And I wasn’t. She would be singing with the Heavenly Choir and I would be roasting in the flames of Eternal Damnation. If only I had died before I was twelve and got caught jerking off in the Sunday school teacher’s car. My mother never forgave me. The Sunday school teacher wouldn’t let me back in her class. From puberty on, everyone agreed I was just like my father, the missing felon.
The first few days after she passed away, I watched a lot of TV and didn’t eat anything. I wanted to see how long I could go without food. It was just something to do. The commercials made me really hungry. So, after eighty-one hours and twenty-two minutes, I ate. Whatever she had in the house. Cans of peaches and kidney beans. Dried prunes. I even made a devil’s food cake from a box mix that had probably been on the shelf since the last time I’d been home. My birthday, three years earlier. We’d had a fight and she’d never made me the cake.
Once I was eating, I started pacing. I made a route from the TV to the kitchen to the back door. Touch the door. Turn around. Kitchen to my mother’s room, and touch the headboard on her stripped bed. Turn around. Into the bathroom. Touch the glass poodle on the window ledge. Turn around. Into my room. Touch the empty fish tank, the blue ribbon, and the row of James Bond books. Back to the TV.
The glass poodle broke. Guess I tapped it too hard that time. It fell on the tile floor and shattered. After that I was careful to wear my shoes. Even in the middle of the night. I enjoyed the crunch when I went into the bathroom to pee in the dark. It sounded as if I were walking on potato chips. That made me laugh. I pretended I was an explorer in the Amazon and I was crushing cockroaches the size of hamsters. I imagined I was king of the world and I had jewels strewn before me wherever I might walk—even to take a shit. Eventually the pieces were all broken down in a fine, annoying grit that stuck to my rubber soles. When I started trailing glass dust all over the house, I cleaned it up.
Cleaning was good. I cleaned a lot. I moved the TV cabinet and cleaned behind it. I found a Christmas card from 1979 when I was six years old. I remember that Christmas. I remember wanting something so badly and praying for it as hard as I could, but what I got was something different. I liked it too, but it wasn’t what I’d been asking for. I can’t remember what it was, only the want like a tight place in my chest. I pushed the couch to the middle of the room so I could get the dust bunnies along the baseboard. I hoisted the armchair on top of it. That looked pretty good to me, so I climbed up and sat in it. Of course I tipped over and fell. I banged my arm hard on the colonial-style coffee table. As if they had coffee tables in the Colonies.
Immediately, I carried the coffee table out to the curb. That was enough of that. Someone driving by would take it home to his mother and she would be so happy. The front door opened in the house across the street. I didn’t know those people. Out came a young black girl, in candy-pink capris and a tight white tank top with glitter in a heart on the front. The neighborhood was mostly black people now. Not that it mattered to me or my mom—even before she was dead.
The girl was carrying her car keys, but she stopped at the door to her little red Chevette. “Sorry about your ma.”
She made me notice the flowers in the yard next door and the blue sky.
“She was old,” I said. “And sick.”
“You puttin’ out that little table?”
“I always hated it.”
The girl laughed. Her teeth were as white and sparkly as her shirt. She nodded. She knew what I meant.
“Do you live there?” I asked.
“It’s my brother’s house. I’m just staying with him for a while.”
“Welcome to the neighborhood.”
She shrugged and her brown shoulders gleamed in the sunshine.
“Wanna come in? Have a drink or something?” I asked.
“I got to go. I’m late for class.”
Loyola Marymount University was right nearby. She didn’t look like one of those stuck-up Loyola students. Stupid Jesuit school. I’d been destined for it starting at about, oh, maybe two years old, but that was another way I’d disappointed my mother. Too dumb to get into Loyola.
“Not LMU?” I asked her.
“Over to the aviation college. I’m gonna be a flight attendant.”
“See the world.”
“Exactly.”
She got in her car then and drove away and I was glad to know she’d be back. I left the coffee table out, but I pulled it off the sidewalk and onto the edge of my lawn. Just in case she wanted it for her mother. Then I went into the house and sat down on the couch. I could see the table through the big picture window. I could see her brother’s house across the street. Later, I’d be busy doing other things and I’d walk through the room and look out the window and see her struggling with it. I’d come out and lift it into her car. Then she’d have to take me over to her mom’s with her so I could help her get it in the house. We’d have fun and then she’d be a flight attendant and fly away.
And one day, awhile after that, I’d see her on an airplane. I’d be sitting in first class, in a really nice suit, blue, no, maybe dark charcoal-gray, and I’d be flying on my way to some big deal and there she’d be.
“Would you care for a beverage?”
“Don’t you remember me?”
And of course she would and she’d be so impressed and she’d look great in her cute stewardess outfit like a military uniform and we’d go right to the airport bar after and talk and talk and talk. Every tired businessman in his wrinkled old suit that came in would be jealous and looking at me, and she’d be looking at me too.
I practiced walking through the living room and glancing out the window. The phone rang and I lost my concentration and I realized I might actually miss her coming to pick up the table if I wasn’t watching every minute. I got the phone out of the kitchen and sat down on the couch with it.
“Hello?”
“Gabe? That you?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“How they hangin’?”
“Who is this?”
“Who the fuck do you think it is?”
Guess I was concentrating so hard watching for her to return that I wasn’t listening very well. It was Marcus, of course. He was my one buddy left from high school, the only other kid I knew who didn’t graduate. He had his own apartment and some kind of import business.
“I got some more work for you.”
I didn’t want to work right then. I was waiting. If I left and went to his office and did something, I might miss her.
“I need you, Gabe. And don’t tell me you don’t need the money.”
Of course that got me thinking. If I had some money, I could ask her out someplace, not just over to the house. I hadn’t showered in a few days or changed my clothes, so I told him I’d be there in a while.
“Hurry,” he said. “It’s important.”
I drove my mother’s car over to his office on the south side of the airport. I went past Dockweiler Beach, the noisiest oceanfront in America. I pitied the tourists who parked their RVs down there for some fun in the sun and then had to shout over the planes coming and going all day. When I was a kid there were houses nearby, but the land had been bought up for the airport expansion. Now it was just weeds growing through cracked cement—the roads were there but the houses, the streetlamps, everything else was gone. It was the driveways that gave me the creeps, parking for no place.
Marcus’s shop was in an industrial park. Row after row of white industrial buildings, like carryout boxes stacked on a metal shelf. They all looked the same except for the company logos. Marcus’s shop was the only one without a sign, just a glass door up three cement steps. I always told him he needed to hang something up.
The same old tired secretary, Kimberly, was sitting behind the desk. Her hair had gotten blonder and more and more like broom straw over the years. She smiled at me and I saw how her maroon lipstick was bleeding up into the wrinkles over her lip.
“Hey, Gabe.”
“Hey, Kimberly.”
I sat and waited. Actually, it was nice to be someplace other than the house. I’d been to the funeral home, of course, and the funeral, but other than that I hadn’t been anywhere. The brown-and-beige-flecked carpeting was soft under my feet. I could feel the glass grit from the broken poodle coming off my soles into the fibers, and I felt bad, but I was glad to be rid of it. Marcus had someone come in and clean anyway. I shuffled my feet back and forth, back and forth. Kimberly looked up at me.
“I like the new carpet.”
She nodded and went back to what she was doing. Whatever that was. I sat on the same beige Naugahyde couch Marcus had always had. I think his parents had it back when we were in high school—in the den. I picked up a magazine off the end table. It was about golf. I tossed it back on the table.
“What the hell you got golf magazines for?” I asked Marcus when he came out.
“Come on,” he said.
I followed him out the door and around to his little storage unit in the back. The sun glared at me, reprimanded me, and I hadn’t done a thing wrong.
“Do you play golf now or what?”
“Pay attention.”
“Golf is a loser game.”
“Will you shut up?”
He unlocked the garage door and lifted it open. I liked the way it looked flat when it was down and then folded like a paper fan when he opened it. I ran my hand over the part I could reach. You couldn’t even tell it would fold.
“Gabe. You with me?”
“Jesus, Marcus. You act like I’m an idiot. “
“This is important.”
“My mom died, but I’m just the same.”
“Your mom dying’s got nothing to do with it. This is all you.”
“That’s right. One hundred percent prime American man.” I laughed. He gave a snort.
Behind some boxes there was a square silver metal suitcase that looked like it held equipment of some kind.
“Grab that,” he said. “Put it in your car.”
It was lighter than it appeared. I’d expected the weight of a piece of machinery. “What’s in here? Hundred-dollar bills?”
“I’m donating to Toys for Tots.”
I laughed. Marcus wouldn’t donate a rotten egg to his starving mother. I carried the case back around to my car. I opened the trunk.
“Don’t put it back there. Put it in the backseat.”
“It’s a fuckin’ suitcase.”
“Backseat.”
“Yessir.” I closed the trunk, walked around, and threw the case on the seat.
“Shit! Be careful.”
“It’s a metal case.”
“I told you it’s fragile.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“I did.”
“No, I’m sorry, Mr. Big Shot Importer, you did not.”
“Then I’m telling you now.”
“Then I heard you now.”
He handed me a piece of notebook paper with a map drawn on it. It wasn’t far away. It was parking lot number 4 in the Ballona Wetlands.
“What am I supposed to do in a parking lot?”
“The guy who wants this will meet you there.”
“In a parking lot? This sounds mighty fishy.”
“To who?”
“Ballona Wetlands—fishy—get it?”
Marcus shook his head.
“Or should I say birdy—it’s a bird refuge, after all.”
“What the fuck would birdy mean?”
“Good point.” I started to get in the car, and then I stopped. “It’s five minutes away. Why don’t you take it yourself? Or get old Kimberly to do it on her lunch hour.”
He wasn’t smiling. “You want the money or not?”
I shrugged, and then I thought of what fifty bucks would buy me and my pretty brown girl. I felt a burn like hot liquid run down my throat into my chest. And lower.
“Wanna come over later?” I asked Marcus. “I got someone I want you to meet.”
“Just get this done. Then we’ll see.”
“Can you give me some money now? I’m starving. I need to get a burger or something on the way.”
“I’ll give you twenty now, but don’t stop till after you make the drop-off. This has to be there—A.S.A.P.”
“A.S.A.P. What are you, some kind of general?” He looked pissed off, and that made me laugh. “And you did not ever tell me before it was fragile. You did not.”
He growled. I loved it when he growled. That meant I’d got him good.
I waved goodbye from inside my mother’s car. It still smelled like her, that perfume she always wore, and the hairspray. She never got that old-person smell like some people. She just smelled like herself until the day she died, and then she had a weird shit smell cause her bowels sort of let go. There was a used Kleenex in the cup holder. Maybe her last Kleenex from the last time she drove the car. I didn’t like to think what was wadded up inside it. It had bothered me all the way over to Marcus’s and I had meant to take it in and throw it away in Kimberly’s little metal trash can, but I forgot. It made me mad to see it, so I opened my window and threw it out. I didn’t want to litter, but I just couldn’t stand seeing that tissue anymore.
This was all I ever did for Marcus, take shit places. Sometimes it was one box, sometimes it was many boxes and I’d get to drive the van. I liked his van; it was more official than Mom’s car. Usually I just took the boxes to the airport and waited around while the guy did all the paperwork.
Awhile back I had asked Marcus, “If you’re an im-porter, how come I’m always taking boxes away? Shouldn’t I be picking them up?”
“I use the smart guy for that.”
We both laughed at that one. I knew the other guy who worked for him.
This was the first time I’d taken anything to a parking lot. I didn’t care what Marcus was into, and I knew I was safe or he wouldn’t have asked me, but it was odd. When I stopped for my burger I would open the stupid case and look inside. Maybe I really was Santa Claus delivering toys. Somehow I doubted it.
I headed away from the airport, toward Westchester proper. There was an In-N-Out on Sepulveda, and if it wasn’t crowded I could just dip into the drive-thru and be on my way in minutes. I had to eat. It was after noon and I’d had nothing. Goddamn traffic. All around me. Who were all these people? Westchester had been a quiet place when I was a kid. I remember watching the gnats cluster in the sun right in the middle of Lincoln Boulevard. I remember crouching on the sidewalk in front of Baskin-Robbins and feeding ice cream drips to the ants. Mom always ate rainbow sherbet. I always had mint chocolate chip. I should have brought her some sherbet when I first got home and she could still eat. It made me feel sick suddenly that I hadn’t. I hadn’t brought her anything. I saw my Baskin-Robbins, but it just looked ugly, sandwiched between Starbucks and an expensive juice place. I felt so sad. And old. Thirty-three and I felt like I was a hundred years old. I wasn’t hungry anymore. I figured I’d just get on with delivering the stupid old case.
I turned onto a side street, Winsford Avenue, and wound back through the neighborhood toward Lincoln. Winsford wasn’t as nice as Orange Street, my street. Nothing looked as nice anymore. The sky was gray and nobody had a green lawn and the goddamn planes kept going overhead.
Then I saw it. I had to turn on 80th to meet up with Lincoln, and there it was: the Collier School of Aviation Technology. Her school. It was right here and I was driving right past and I knew it was another moment of destiny. It was brown cinder block, about three stories high, just a box, but what more did a school need to be? I could see the fluorescent lights on in the upstairs classrooms. That’s where she was, sitting under that vibrating, humming, greening light, listening to a lecture or maybe practicing carrying a tray of coffee cups down a turbulent aisle. Bump. Bump. Her hip jostling against my shoulder.
“I’m so sorry,” she’d say. Then she’d turn and see me. “Oh, it’s you.”
“I wondered when you’d notice.”
I drove into the parking lot. I circled through until I found her Chevette. She really was there. All I had to do was wait. But I had the stupid case to deliver. It was quarter to 2. Her class was probably over at 2. I couldn’t get to the Ballona Wetlands and back in fifteen minutes. I could leave her a note if I had a piece of paper and a pencil, a note that would say, I was driving by on my way to an important meeting and saw your car. Hope you had fun at school. See you later. But she didn’t even know my name.
I sat in my mom’s car thinking about it, trying to decide what to do. She might remember me if I drew a picture of the coffee table, or of the birdbath with the plaster angel in my front yard. But again I’d need a piece of paper and a pencil. I must’ve sat for a while, because then I saw her. I saw a whole bunch of young stewardesses-to-be coming out of the building. They were walking together and talking and they were all so pretty, and then there she was. Prettiest of all. I saw those pink pants and that bright white white white top. She made me smile.
I got out of the car. “Hey,” I called to her.
Of course she looked startled. Who wouldn’t? She was not expecting me, her neighbor with the coffee table, her funny-guy neighbor all showered and shaved and standing by her car. She frowned.
“It’s me,” I said, “the guy from across the street.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“You comin’ over here or what?”
She took a step toward me, then plucked at her girlfriend’s sleeve and pulled her over too. They stopped a little ways away. “What are you doing here?”
“I want to be a stewardess too.”
“We’re called flight attendants.”
“Lah dee dah. Well, I’m a goods-and-services transport technician.”
“What’s that?” It was the girlfriend who asked. Truth is, I can’t even remember what she looked like, I was so blinded by my girl’s shining radiance.
“I make deliveries.”
They both laughed.
“I was driving by on my way to an appointment—”
“A delivery, you mean.”
“And I saw your car. You wanna go with me?”
“On your delivery?”
It was a stroke of genius, thinking of that. I could see she wanted to. She was intrigued. What did I deliver? And where? I was in a service industry just like hers and we were interested in each other’s work. Sitting at the kitchen table at night, I’d ask her about the funny passengers she helped and if there were any babies on the flight, and she’d ask me about Roger the airport guy, and Marcus, and Kimberly. We’d talk and tell each other stories over dinner.
“Your chariot awaits,” I said to her, and I bowed.
“I’m bringing Chara with me. Okay?”
That was her girlfriend obviously, and I was naturally a little disappointed. “Okay.”
Chara got in the backseat. “Ooeee. What’s in there? It smells.”
“It does not,” I said.
“You’re not sitting right next to it. It’s like Clorox or something. Nasty.” She pushed it away from her.
“It’s fragile, so be careful.”
My girl sat up front. She turned toward me and smiled and her brown eyes were big and happy. They were beautiful eyes with black lashes so long and thick they looked like the bristles in my hairbrush. I wanted to feel them against my cheek; butterfly kisses, my mother called them.
“Where we going?” she asked.
“Ballona Wetlands.”
“What for?” Chara in the backseat was a complainer, I could tell. “I need to get home.”
“Won’t take long,” I said. “I’m just giving that suitcase to someone. My friend’s in the importing business. Stuff from all over the world.” I looked at the clock on the dash. It had been quite awhile since I left Marcus. I knew the guy would be there waiting. I hoped he wouldn’t be too pissed that I was late.
“What’s your name?” I asked her.
“Terrell,” she said. “I was named for my dad, Terry, and my aunt, Ellie.”
“It’s pretty.”
“What do they call you?” Chara asked from the back-seat.
“Gabe, short for Gabriel.”
“A real angel,” Terrell said.
“He sure is white,” said Chara.
“Nothin’ wrong with that.”
Right away, Terrell and I were together in the car, a duo. Immediately we were joined and Chara was on her own. I don’t know how long they’d been friends. I don’t know if they even really liked each other, but I knew Terrell was mine. She was falling toward me. I could feel the pull, like she was the iron shavings in my old science kit and I was the magnet.
She couldn’t help turning to me. I was happy. “You’re awfully skinny,” she said. “You need to eat more.”
“After this, I’ll take you for a burger or some french fries.”
“I’m starving,” Chara said.
I wanted to make her get out of the car. I should have, but of course I didn’t. We’re all so nice to each other, nice and polite, until we’re not. Maybe if we were rude in little ways at the very moment we got annoyed, we wouldn’t kill each other later. I drove down the hill past LMU and turned left off Lincoln into the Ballona Wetlands Preserve. I saw the wildflowers blooming and the bog smell was pleasant, earthy, and wet, like a mud puddle in the backyard. We bumped along. The road wasn’t well paved. Terrell squealed when we bottomed out in a particularly large pothole, and I laughed at her.
“How are you gonna be a stewardess if the bumps bother you so much?”
“Flight attendant.” Chara corrected me like a school-teacher.
Terrell just giggled. “I sure don’t like the bumps,” she said to me, and me alone.
She had told me a secret. I felt bigger then, like I’d grown six inches taller and thirty pounds heavier and I had hands and feet like a big man. I wanted to touch her shiny shoulder, but I didn’t because of Chara.
“There,” I said. “There’s the parking lot.”
My piece of paper said parking lot 4 and I saw the little wooden sign with the yellow number 4. The sky was like a baby store—pink and blue. The lot was empty. Marcus would kill me.
“There’s no one here,” Chara said.
“Will you shut up?” I couldn’t hold back.
“I’m getting out of this car.”
“Don’t.”
“I refuse to be spoken to like that. I’m gonna call my brother to come get me.”
“Stay in the car.” This from Terrell. “Please?”
“I don’t want to stay with that smelly old thing.” She pushed the case hard and it made a thump against the other door.
“Don’t touch it!” I shouted.
“What’s in it?” she asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Money. Drugs. You know, Terrell, how they make it smell so the dogs can’t sniff it?”
“Chara.” Terrell frowned, but her friend was getting hysterical.
“It’s not good. It’s not safe. Where are we? What are we doing here? I want to go home! You tell him to take me home!”
Terrell turned around and leaned over the seat. “What’s the matter? What’s wrong with you? Gabe here lives across the street from my brother. He’ll take us home, soon as we deliver this.”
“Stop the car!” Chara screamed.
She opened her door. I slammed on the brakes and she fell forward onto Terrell’s seat. She screamed, and when she came up her nose was bloody. I hadn’t meant to stop short, but I didn’t want her to fall out onto the street.
“Oh my God,” Terrell said.
Chara was scrambling out of the car. She stumbled in the dirt parking lot. She was wearing a little skirt and ridiculous high heels.
“His mother just died!” Terrell called to her. “Wait.”
Chara was trying to run away.
“Where is she going?” I couldn’t help but ask. We were way back deep into the preserve, surrounded by bog and birds and not much else. A black town car came down the road toward us, moving fast, dust in a plume behind it. I breathed a big sigh of relief. My guy. He was later than I was.
Chara was flagging him down.
“Chara!” I shouted. I had gotten out of the car. “Stop. That’s my guy. That’s who I’m meeting.”
Terrell was out of the car and running toward Chara now. The town car had stopped and I could see the man had rolled down his window. He was big; he looked too big for the town car. He was hunched over the steering wheel so his head wouldn’t hit the ceiling. He frowned up at her, at Chara. She was crying and her nose was bleeding and she was begging him to let her in the car, to take her away, to call the police.
“He’s got something bad in that case!” she said. “He’s a crazy man!”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” I hollered.
Terrell reached her before I did and she pulled on Chara’s arm. She was trying to drag her away from the car and apologize to the man at the same time. He seemed amused. He was looking at the two girls, he was looking at my girl and he was smiling.
Couple of silly females, I’d tell him. Chara just fell off her goddamn shoes. Marcus and Terrell and I would laugh about Chara later. I’d sit on that creamy Naugahyde with my arm around her and we’d be drinking a beer and laughing about poor Chara and her stupid shoes.
The guy reached out his window and grabbed Chara’s arm with his giant’s hand. He started to roll forward. Chara had to run along with him. He sped up. Terrell was running too, trying to peel his fingers from Chara’s arm.
I hurried back to my mother’s car. I opened the back door and the case fell out onto the ground. It fell hard and I worried about breaking whatever was inside. I picked it up. Something inside had come loose. Something was bumping around in there.
“Here!” I came running toward the town car. “Take it.”
Chara was trotting now, and blubbering. On those spike heels she was jogging, but she was getting tired. She stumbled and then she fell and made this horrible choking sound, but he didn’t let go, he just dragged her along next to him. Terrell screamed then. A beautiful, high scream, as much like a bird as a woman, in so much pain it hurt my heart to hear it. She put her fists over her eyes.
Good, I thought. Good. No one should see this. My sweet baby can’t see this. The driver dragged Chara until she stopped flopping, and then he dropped her. She lay there and he backed up and ran right over her. Then forward. There was this popping sound, loud as a firecracker but more hollow and round, and then a scuffling, and when I looked again, Chara’s legs were flat, but her arms were clawing in the dirt. I wanted her to die so she’d stop that noise, stop scratching. She was like a fly with its wings plucked off. Terrell had fallen to her knees. I had the case in my hand.
“Here!” I screamed again at the guy. “Here!”
Take this, leave my girl alone. Take this suitcase.
I ran toward him, but he was spinning his car in the dirt, doing a 360, heading for Terrell. She got up. She was no fool, and she started to run. She zig-zagged back and forth so the car couldn’t follow her. Made me so proud the way she ran and tried to save herself. She ran like the wind, like a nymph, like an angel. I was coming straight toward the car. I held the case in front of me. He was coming for both of us.
“Stop!” I screamed at him. “Stop!”
I flung the case at the car, but the catch opened in the air, must’ve come loose when it fell out of the car. A head, a human head, launched out of that suitcase like a sixty-yard pass into the air. I stopped and watched. I saw the face, eyes open, mouth in a sneer; I saw the veins and tendons dangling from the neck as it spun in the air. It went over the fence into the marsh. Splash. A blue heron took off and sailed away. The car idled behind me. The suitcase lay open on the dirt. The foam rubber inside was black and shiny—with blood, I suppose. I couldn’t tell. Brain fluid. Snot. Tears. I turned to Terrell. Run, I mouthed. Keep running. But she was looking at the marsh. She was wondering if she had really seen a man’s head fly out of a suitcase or if it had fallen from the sky. Maybe it had come from that plane overhead. Maybe there had been some kind of midair collision and it would start raining body parts and she would have to help out with all the dead and hurt people. Maybe she was on another plane, serving cocktails and making conversation with the passengers. She was anywhere but here.
There was another loud noise and Terrell went forward. I think I saw the bullet enter her back and slip into her heart. I know I felt it. I heard my mother singing. She and Terrell would be great friends, a mother and the daughter that she never had. That was Heaven. It was. And I felt the heat coming for me up through the ground, I heard it rumbling behind me, getting louder and louder. The soles of my shoes were melting, my bones turning into oil and beginning to bubble, and I deserved it because I had started all of this. There was a moment, BAM, a flash, as I followed that blue heron and I thought my mother’s arms reached for me. I was way up high. I saw it. I saw it all. The Kleenex I’d thrown out the window. My house on Orange Street. The coffee table still on the front lawn. I was sorry. I was so sorry.