The snow came in mid-November, turning everyone into giddy children except two of us. Me because it reminded me, soberingly, of the pristine fields and quads of West Point, and Nidia because she was Nidia, with the weight of the future in her belly. So she watched from the steps as her friends pelted one another with handfuls of snow, put it down collars, and tasted it cautiously. Meanwhile, I put snow chains on our cars, laboriously, with reddening fingers and a little cursing.
December came, and Truckee put on its Christmas finery, white lights glittering along every storefront in the town’s Old West-style retail district. Skiers and snowboarders overran the town, the streets full of muddy SUVs with loaded roof racks. Had she wanted, Serena could have had her pick of the college boys who appraised her from the windows of their Tahoes and Denalis. Winter clothing suited her, the gunmetal-colored trench coat and boots and the long hand-knit scarf I’d bought for her at a downtown boutique.
After the initial adjustment period, Nidia’s confinement proved an oddly peaceful, settled time for all of us.
One day, though, I overheard Payaso and Deacon in a discussion of whether an icicle would make a good impromptu weapon in a fight.
Innocence never lasts.
forty-two
One chilly night I found Serena outside, looking up at the night sky.
“What a trip,” she said, breath clouding in the air. “Look at all those stars. That’s too many, man. That’s just wrong.”
I looked, too, seeing the dusty backbone of small stars that formed the Milky Way. I said, “You know, when the Northridge Quake hit and the lights were out all over Los Angeles, people called the media, saying that they could see a river of dust kicked up by the quake. They said the dust was hanging in the sky, glowing white from city lights elsewhere. What they were seeing was the Milky Way, for the first time in their lives.”
“I bet they were scared.”
“Scared?” I said. “Why? It’s beautiful.”
“You really like it out here?” she said.
“Sure. It’s not so different from where we used to live. It used to get pretty dark and quiet out there.”
“Yeah,” she said. “And you grew up and hauled ass for the city, L.A. and then San Francisco. But you get up into the mountains and you go all white on me: ‘Isn’t nature beautiful?’”
“That’s not a white thing,” I said.
“Maybe not, but-” She shrugged. “I keep thinking of this girl I knew, she was from Lennox but she never got ganged-up. She stayed in school, became an inner-city schoolteacher, that whole trip. So she takes these girls from the hood to the ocean. Some of them have literally never seen it, even though they’ve grown up just about ten miles inland. She thinks this is going to be a beautiful life-changing thing for them. But they get out on the beach, and they start freaking. It’s windy, their hair’s getting messed up, they’re afraid the gulls are going to shit on them, they think the kelp smells funny. They want to go back into town, go to Taco Bell.” Serena grinned. “She gave up and took them.”
“Thanks for telling me that,” I said. “It was so uplifting.”
“I’m just saying, maybe your parents were white, but somewhere along the way a homegirl breast-fed you. You don’t like it up here any more than us.”
“It’ll be over soon,” I said.
“No, it won’t.”
“Sure it will,” I said, confused. “Nidia will give birth, and then at least she’ll be safe. Once Nidia and her child are two separate units, Skouras’s men won’t have any reason to chase her.”
“Insula,” Serena said, “have you really talked to Nidia about that? Giving up her baby?”
I said, “The baby’s going to have to be hidden somewhere, under a whole new identity. It can’t be living with Nidia. As long as they can find her, they can find her child.”
“That doesn’t answer my question. Point blank, have you told her that?”
I was silent.
“That’s what I thought.”
I looked out into the black shapes of the woods. “Why is it so hard to talk to her?” I asked.
“This is a difficult subject,” she said.
“No, I mean about anything,” I said. “Since we got her back from Gualala, you and me, we’ve both avoided being alone with her. Your girls like to kick it with her, but you and me, we avoid being one-on-one.”
Serena lifted a shoulder. “I just don’t think I have anything in common with her,” she said.
“None of us do,” I said.
When we’d rescued Nidia in Gualala, when I’d opened the bedroom door, I’d said, You’re safe, but beyond that I’d said and done nothing to reassure her. I’d tried to get her to kick the bound Skouras soldier in the ribs. Later, after we’d narrowly gotten away from the Highway Patrol officer, I’d spoken only briefly with her about her ordeal in Mexico and then Mendocino County, when Serena and I had reassured ourselves that she hadn’t been sexually mistreated or roughly handled, that she was basically okay. At least that’s what we told ourselves.
The truth was that what had happened to Nidia was difficult to think about, no matter how she’d been treated in Gualala. The extent to which Nidia had lost control of her own life, living with only Skouras’s guards for company-if I let myself think about it too long, it’d sicken me. I couldn’t stand to ask her how she felt, how she’d gotten through it. Because some part of my own psyche feared that I could still, despite all my training and toughening, be like her. It was as if victimhood were a catching illness and I couldn’t afford to get too close to it.
I didn’t have to ask Serena if she felt the same way. I knew she did. It had been Serena, before she’d even met Nidia, who’d called her a “vic,” or victim. I didn’t think either of us was proud of the way we felt about Nidia, but we were in a unique position. The guys felt comfortable around her because they’d always been guys; they’d simply never had to think about being hurt in such a deep psychological way. And the sucias, well, to them this whole thing wasn’t real. It was a movie: Serena and Payaso and I had walked into enemigo territory and taken Nidia back, motherfucking Trece style!, and then we’d made a fucking cop wet his fucking pants, applause, roll credits.
Nidia probably needed to talk to someone about what had happened to her, someone other than Serena’s homegirls, but apparently it wasn’t going to be Serena, and it wasn’t going to be me, either. I’d nearly gotten killed for her, and I’d gotten her back from Skouras, and since then the extent of my commitment had been to assure her that we’d keep her safe.
Somewhere along the way, I’d come to understand that there was no way that Nidia and her baby could live together, not for many years, at least. The baby was going to have to disappear into safe, anonymous hands. Skouras’s men were never going to be able to find the baby, not if they’d never laid eyes on it. Nidia was different. Her they would recognize. As long as they could find her, her baby wasn’t going to be safe in her care, and the opposite was also true: As long as she had her baby, she would be a target.