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.