I stood still, thinking about my options. If I made that promise, I didn’t know how I was going to keep it. If I didn’t promise, I couldn’t just grab an eight-months’-pregnant woman and muscle her back up the hill. And if I let her go, my mission was over and I’d have failed.
I rubbed the bridge of my nose, trying to understand. “What’s going on, really, Nidia?” I asked. “Did you love this guy, Adrian? Is that what this is about?”
Her face was pinched, as though I’d touched a sore spot. “No,” she said. “Johnny was the only one I ever loved. But he would understand this. He would want me to stay with this baby and take care of it.”
She’d told me as much back in El Paso, when she said that Johnny would have wanted her to go to Mexico. Because I hadn’t known she was with child, I hadn’t understood what she was really saying.
Now I thought I did. Nidia wasn’t delusional. She knew the baby she was carrying wasn’t Johnny’s, yet in some way it represented the children they were supposed to have had. She’d loved Johnny and then he’d been killed. Then she’d felt something for Adrian, if not love, and he’d died, too. Nidia had suffered a lot of loss. In her mind, this baby was the universe’s gift to her to make up for it. She wasn’t letting go of that.
I wished I didn’t understand what she was feeling, but I did. I knew how powerful love could be when it came at an age little greater than childhood. I’d been first introduced to my cousin around the same age Nidia was when she’d first seen Johnny Cedillo. That was how I knew that if CJ had died, leaving me with the only child who would carry a piece of his soul into the world, I would not let that baby out of my hands. No matter what the cost, I’d find a way to keep it with me and protect it. And with that realization came the unwelcome corollary: If you could do it for yourself, why can’t you do it for Nidia?
“Okay,” I said, capitulating. “I’m going to help you.”
“You are?” She hadn’t expected to win me over. Her hand was on her stomach as though her child needed physical protection from me.
“Yeah. Come back up, and I’ll think this through all over again. I’ll think of something.”
Nidia relaxed, and her hand moved away from her stomach.
We began the walk back up. I blew on my bare fingers to warm them. Nidia noticed and said, “Do you want my coat?” It was the only way she knew to thank me.
“No,” I said. “I’m fine.”
When we reached the mobile home, Serena was sitting on the doorstep, smoking a cigarette, its red cinder glowing. Nidia’s steps faltered, as if she were expecting a tongue-lashing from Warchild, but I said in a low voice, “It’s okay, I’ll handle her.”
When we were in speaking distance, Serena said coolly, “Out for a walk?” But she clearly saw the pillowcase in Nidia’s hand. She understood.
“Not exactly,” I said, and then to Nidia, “Go on inside.”
For a girl as heavily pregnant as Nidia was, she almost ran up the steps, then slipped through the door and closed it softly.
Serena dropped her cigarette into the snow. “What’s up, Insula?” she said.
I drew in a deep breath and released it in a long plume of steam in the air. “This is about Johnny Cedillo,” I said, and explained the conclusions I’d come to.
Serena scowled. “This girl used to want to be a nun, and now her whole life’s about being a mother?” She shook her head.
“I know it’s hard to understand.”
“She’s not being realistic, either,” Serena said. “No matter where her heart’s at, she’s not gonna be able to defend her baby from the Greek and his whole machine.”
“She expects me to do that,” I said. “She thinks like a child. She was mad at me for not being able to handle everything with no compromise from her. That’s what a kid expects from a parent. And if I can’t, she’ll run away again with no plan, like a kid, and she’ll get herself killed.”
“And you can’t let her do that,” Serena said.
It wasn’t a question, but there was a question inside it, and after a moment, she articulated it. “Hailey,” she said, “why are you doing all this? Some pretty heavy shit has happened to you since you first met this girl. Nobody could have known those guys were going to shoot you in Mexico, but since then… that guy broke your finger, and then you and Payaso did the rescue mission up north, going into the gangster’s house, and you could’ve got hurt there, too-”
“But I didn’t.”
“But you could’ve. Don’t argue with me for the sake of arguing,” she said. “Why are you going all the way for this girl? She seems totally oblivious to the shit that’s come down on you because of her. It’s like she doesn’t care.”
I couldn’t dispute that. I said, “You’re here, too, protecting her. Why do you do it?”
“Not the same thing. I didn’t get shot. I didn’t get my finger broken.”
She was right. I sighed. “Would you believe I didn’t have anything better to do?”
“No.”
“That was only partly a joke,” I said. “My life in San Francisco, even my life before that in L.A., it wasn’t about anything.”
“Whose life is?”
“Mine was supposed to be,” I said. “I was supposed to have a commission by now, troops to command. I was working toward that, and I thought I was doing everything right, but I still got reassigned to Fort Livingroom. This is the only operation I’m ever going to carry out.” I rubbed my arms against the cold. “It might seem extreme to you, the risks I’ve taken, but that’s how I was taught. You don’t protect yourself when there’s a civilian ass hanging out where it’ll get shot. And if Nidia doesn’t fully appreciate what I’ve done, well, civilians rarely do.”
Serena nodded slowly. Then she said, “So what happens next?”
“Tomorrow I have to make a phone call.”
forty-three
The next day dawned quite warm, and everywhere snow was thawing into translucent puddles. Serena and I waded out through it at about ten in the morning, walking out to a quiet place, an empty, slushy meadow at the edge of a ranch.
I stopped and took out my cell phone, leaning on an old-fashioned split-rail fence.
I’d explained it to Serena the night before. “Negotiations,” I’d said. “They may not work, but you’ve always got to try talks before committing to a shooting war.”
She had assumed that I’d want to place this call from a pay phone, but I’d said no. A pay phone, however anonymous, might show its number with an area code on caller ID. My cell phone had an L.A. area code. That was the one I wanted to show up on the screen.
“Then he’ll have your phone number,” Serena said.
“That’s fine with me,” I said. “If you’re thinking he can track my signal, he can’t. The cops could, but not a private citizen.”
I climbed up on the fence and Serena got up next to me, close enough to hear. I pulled up my directory of saved numbers on my cell and found the one for Skouras’s lawyer.
“Good morning, Costa and Fishman, how may I help you?”
“I need to speak to Mr. Costa immediately,” I said. “My name is Hailey Cain, and it’s urgent.”
“He’s in a meeting right now. Can I get your phone number?”
“I’m afraid not,” I said. “Listen, no matter how important his meeting, if you walk in there and say Hailey Cain is on the phone and wants to talk to him about Tony Skouras’s grandchild, I guarantee you he’ll get up and walk out of that room.”
There was a beat of silence, then her voice was stiff as she said, “Please hold.”
And I did, for quite a while. A horse whinnied in the distance. Sweat started to trickle along my spine, under my shearling-lined jacket. Truckee’s part of the Sierras had wide dips between its frigid nights and warm days, and besides, Serena and I were in full sun.