After Logan flumped onto the living room couch, Sandro unfolded a sheet over him. The boy would have to sleep there until Sandro cleared the spare room of training gear.
Warped wood paneling covered the walls, bare except for a Bruce Lee poster. Okay, so what if he didn’t seem in a rush to make the house family friendly. Why bother, with LA coming? Anyway, this was a big step for him, asking her to move in, and she didn’t want to push it. He grew up an orphan in Mexico City. A loner his whole life.
“I remember only my mother take me down an alley and leave me there,” he told her. Blythe could relate. When she and Jackie were in junior high, their own mother ran off with their older cousin. It seemed too easy, how people could erase you from their life, as if wiping a soiled shoe on the grass and walking on. But she would show Sandro not all women would bail on him.
Already fast asleep, Logan held his Conor “Notorious” McGregor action figure in one hand. “Why don’t they have one of Sandro?” he’d asked her the other day.
The fighter turned to her now.
Blythe stood near the front window in a porch lamp glow and unzipped the hoodie to show him, by the play of shadow and light on her bared form, that the evening had just begun.
When Blythe awoke and brushed her long umber hair aside, she read 9:16 a.m. on the nightstand clock. She panicked, used to waking up way earlier for the breakfast shift at the diner, then remembered she’d traded for the day off.
Sandro stood motionless in the doorframe wearing only boxer briefs. He faced down the hall listening — to what? She said his name. He raised a palm to her for quiet.
Then she heard it too, a thwick... ting...
Sandro’s leg muscles flexed, and he stalked down the hall. His hunter’s posture unnerved her.
She sprang out of bed.
In the living room, the couch was empty. From the spare bedroom Sandro shouted: “Little fucker!”
She ran to the end of the hall and cut left into the spare room. Sandro stood a few steps inside the doorway. His face burned with anger. Ten feet away, Logan stood rigid beside a wooden training dummy that once belonged to Bruce Lee. His hand was in midgrab of a small, star-shaped throwing weapon lodged in its chest. The dummy had a cylindrical head with two spindles extending from the torso to simulate arms. Sandro had purchased it through an eBay auction for a small fortune. Many times Blythe had seen him bow to it at the start of a workout.
The razor points of the throwing star had made other fresh holes and chips in the wood. Did her boy have any idea how dangerous these things were?
“Where did you get that, Logan?” she asked.
Logan’s eyes traveled over her body. Realizing her nakedness, Blythe stepped farther behind Sandro.
“I found it in the truck, under the seat.”
Sandro moved to the dummy. At first, he ignored Logan. His finger probed the fresh pockmarks in the wood.
“I... just wanted to make it stick, like Naruto,” Logan said.
Sandro pulled out the star and flicked it aside. He snatched Logan by the wrist, yanking him away from the dummy. A wet pop came from Logan’s shoulder. He yelped and fell to his knees. Sandro stayed on him and raised a hand over the boy, but Blythe flew onto his muscle-sloped back before it could come down.
“I look that bad?” Blythe asked her sister, who had broken down upon entering the hospital room. Jackie never balled. But then she’d never seen Blythe in a hospital bed, Logan asleep against her with his left arm in a sling. Tenderly, Jackie laid the back of her hand on Blythe’s forehead, the only part of her face not bandaged or contused.
After she established that Blythe and her nephew were basically okay, Jackie said, “You can’t keep dragging Logan with you every time you shack up with a creep.”
Blythe wanted to remind her sister she only lived with one other person, Logan’s father. But her nose hurt and her patience was gone. “Jackie, just put a sock in it, okay?” Bad enough she had to deal with questions from the police, and a social worker who tried to bully her into a safe house in Thousand Palms. Bad enough her voice now had a strange bagpipe timbre.
“Did you get my car?” Blythe said.
She had reluctantly called Jackie earlier from the hospital and asked her to retrieve her Jeep from Sandro’s place. Everything else of hers and Logan’s would have to be sacrificed. She would not go near him again.
Sporting a butch haircut, both arms sleeved in tats, Jackie nodded. “Where’re you going? Can you even drive like that?” She had agreed to trade cars, her nondescript white Toyota Camry for Blythe’s burnt-red Cherokee Sport, so Sandro couldn’t trace her whereabouts. Since Blythe hadn’t pressed charges, he might not be held long. But getting hooked into the system, social workers knocking on her door, no, that was not an option. Neither was going back home like Jackie wanted. Sandro would come looking for her sooner or later.
“What about that special item?” Blythe asked.
“Check way under the front seat.”
Earlier that morning, when she awakened in the ER, Sandro had already left her a voice mail. After weepy incoherencies, he actually had the balls to ask if she could bring bail money. She deleted the message.
Jackie moved to her nephew’s side of the bed. Softly, so as not to wake him, she ran a finger over his twitching eyebrow. “At least let me take Logan.”
Blythe extended her hand. “Keys.” The doctor wanted to keep her and Logan another night, but she had her own plans for their recovery.
Dangling the keys out of her sister’s reach, Jackie said, “Tell me where you’re going first.”
“We need the waters.”
Chuckwalla Palms was a boutique lodging with only nine units. A bit pricey, but so were most other spa-tels that exploited the natural springs running beneath town. These mini resorts, dotted all over DHS, walled off guests from a city gone to seed.
At the front desk, the gap-toothed man in an aloha shirt didn’t so much as blink at Blythe’s face, Logan’s arm sling, when he handed over the room key. Locals had seen it all in this town, now more of a desert asylum for misfits, swingers, drifters, career criminals, and lately, migrating millennials.
Blythe had booked a suite that came with a private whirlpool, so they wouldn’t have to use the public pool. Such a room would drain her savings, but she needed time to think and heal, to keep out of Sandro’s reach.
The back room of the suite was a small clay cabana, whirlpool tub sunk below a wooden deck. A tinted sunroof overhead. Logan, wearing blue jammers, a cold gel pack strapped to his shoulder, stepped down into the tub. A sunray lit his hair. Halfway submerged, he stopped.
“Keep going, Logan,” Blythe said, standing near twin timer dials mounted on the wall. “But leave your shoulder out.”
The scent of cannabis touched her nose, wafting in from god knew where. So-called entrepreneurs, hipster types, were converging on the city to open grow facilities. Maybe it would help bring things up, she thought. Or else invite more dopers.
Tentatively, Logan sat on the higher step. Only his head and shoulders above water.
Blythe turned the dials. The calm pool upwelled into a churning froth.
“Hot,” he said.
“Uh-huh, so your pores can swallow those magic minerals.” Her words conjured her mother. For every scrape, patch of eczema, or bonfire burn she and Jackie endured as children, their mother would bring them to the waters, and it did seem miraculous, how the natural minerals soothed their wounds, rejuvenated their spirits. She remembered the fun of breath-holding contests with her sister in the warm shallows of a public pool, no eye sting when you went under. Like swimming in holy water. At the deep end, Mama sunbathed like a starlet, sweeps of blond hair pushed back by her shades. Blythe could see her there, propped up on her elbows, pretending not to notice stares from men, or her daughters calling for her attention.