Keep Her Safe Page 3

  “A las diez.”

  Ten. Four hours ago.

  I gaze out over the rectangular box ahead, the two-bedroom 1960s mobile unit that served as a childhood home to my mother and was left to Mom when my gran passed a few years back. I shouldn’t be surprised. I’m long past buying my mother’s empty promises and then screaming at her with anger and fear every time she breaks them. That was the teenaged, hopeful version of me.

  The stupid one.

  Nodding solemnly at Vilma for her warning, I offer a soft “gracias.” I struggle between rushing and prolonging these last twenty steps to my front door, knowing that one of these days I’m going to open it and find a corpse waiting inside. I haven’t figured out if this twisted knot in my gut is because I’m dreading or have already accepted that outcome.

  Probably both.

  Cyclops’s ear-piercing bark distracts me momentarily. He knows it’s his last chance and he’s peering up at me with that one soulful eye.

  “Rich foods aren’t good for you.” I toss another carrot his way. He gobbles it up and then scampers off under the Alves trailer after Mrs. Hubbard’s tabby cat.

  “You’re welcome,” I grumble, stealing a carrot for myself, though my appetite has all but disappeared. I stare at our mangled front door for a moment, mentally itemizing all of its various cuts and bruises—a size-twelve boot dent where Mr. Cortez tried to kick it in because he was drunk and thought his wife had changed the locks on him; a notch in the frame where thieves tried to pry it open; the streaks of black spray paint where neighborhood punks redecorated.

  Holding my breath, I climb the concrete steps and slide my key into the lock.

  I open the door.

  A cloud of cigarette smoke overwhelms me, making me cringe in disgust. Yet, I try to focus on my relief.

  If she’s smoking, then she’s alive. Though the air is thick enough to choke the life out of a person. “Why didn’t you turn on the air-conditioning?” I scold, stepping into the stuffy, dark interior. It’s 95 degrees out, thanks to this spring heat wave.

  “It’s broken,” comes the languid response.

  “It can’t be. I just bought it!” Marching over to the window, I adjust the dials and check the plug, then smack it for good measure. But she’s right; it has stopped working. And that delivery guy from Aunt Chilada’s whom I bought it off promised it was in mint condition! “Ugh!” I kick the front door wide open.

  Mom squints against the sunlight. She’s exactly where I left her this morning on the couch. Only then she was snoring softly, and now her eyes are red-rimmed and glassy, and she’s sliding her hand out from beneath the cushions, where she stuck her needle and spoon. As if she can hide them from me.

  I used to go searching for her stashes, back when it was vodka and weed and prescription painkillers. Back when I believed I could stop her from using. It’s surprising how many places there are to hide drugs in this nine-hundred-square-foot tin box. But I’d find them and then I’d flush them down the drain or the toilet, because if she couldn’t afford to buy more, then she wouldn’t be able to use, right?

  I learned the hard way that she’s too far gone to go without. She’ll just find other ways to pay.

  So I started leaving cash in a kitchen drawer. Not a lot, but enough. We don’t talk about it. I leave it there, and when I come home it’s gone and she’s high. But I didn’t have extra cash to leave this week because I had to buy this shitty air-conditioning unit that doesn’t work.

  My stomach curls at the thought of what she must have done for today’s hit.

  “If that mangy dog shows up . . .” Mom grumbles, unmoving.

  “Cyclops doesn’t want to be here.” Neither do I. But I’m trapped. In this trailer, in this park.

  In this life.

  The only reason I haven’t walked out that door and not looked back is because she’ll be on the street or in the morgue within a week if I abandon her.

  I struggle to quell my resentment as I set my purse on the dining table and unwrap the taquitos. “Here. Eat. They’re chicken.” Ernie, my manager at QuikTrip, lets staff take the ones that have sat under the warmer for too long to sell.

  “Already did.” She waves the food away, her eyes glued on the old tube TV in the corner and one of her daytime soaps. I’ll bet she couldn’t tell me what the show is called. And she’s lying about eating. She lives off of melted cheese sandwiches and, when she does remember to eat, I come home to a counter of bread crumbs and torn-apart slices of bread, and a fire-conducive layer of processed cheese in the toaster oven. Today, the countertop is exactly as I left it after cleaning up last night.

  Mom has always been thin but she’s a waif now, her dependence on hard drugs gripping her, leeching away fat and muscle, leaving nothing but sallow skin and bones, stringy mud-colored hair, and hollow cheeks where a striking face once resided.

  I’m not going to fight with her about eating though, because you can’t reason with a heroin addict and that’s what my mother has become.

  “I’m gonna get some sleep. Don’t burn the place down,” I say between mouthfuls, moving toward my bedroom. At least there’s a fan in there, and I know enough to tuck towels under the door to keep the stench of smoke from overwhelming me.

  “Jackie Marshall’s dead.”

  That stops me in my tracks. “What?” I would have thought she’d lead with that news.

  Mom uses her hand to mimic a gun and points her index finger at her temple. “She put a bullet in her own head. So they say, anyway.”

  Jackie Marshall. My father’s old police partner and one of his best friends. The woman who turned her back on us when we needed her. The woman my mother is convinced had something to do with framing him almost fourteen years ago.

  Apparently I knew her, back when we lived in Austin, in a nice bungalow with a picket fence surrounding it. In a past life. That life ended when I was six, and I don’t remember much from it. Shadows of faces, glimmers of smiles. The echo of a child’s giggle as a man tossed her in the air, before that man stopped coming home.

  That old life paved the way for my new one, where I remember a lot of hurt, a lot of tears. And a lot of hatred toward the Austin Police Department and a woman named Jackie Marshall.

  “Where did you hear that?” We’re in Tucson, two sprawling states over, and we severed ties when we left, even changing our surname to Richards, my mother’s maiden name.

  “It’s all over the news.” She struggles to hold her phone out for me.

  My mother let go of reality a long time ago, and yet Texas still has a bitter hold on her. She couldn’t tell you who the governor of Arizona is, but she trolls the Texas news pages like a conspiracy theorist during her lucid moments, keeping tabs for the sake of keeping tabs. Since she stumbled on the news story that Jackie Marshall had been named chief of the Austin Police Department two years ago, that vicious obsession has grown.

  So has her drug addiction.

  I’m surprised she’s kept up with her scrutiny lately, given how bad she’s getting.

  “Austin’s Top Cop Commits Suicide.” I scan the news article from this morning, cringing at the gruesome details. Mom prefers the tabloid newspapers to the reputable ones. She says there’s less political bullshit and riskier truth. They also care little for people’s privacy, it would seem. “Her son found her.” Noah Marshall. Mom says I knew him, too. I vaguely remember a boy, not that I’d be able to pick him out of a lineup.

  “What kind of mother does that to their own kid?” she asks.

  “A sick one.” I could make a strong pot-and-kettle comment, seeing as I’ve had to rush my mother to the hospital twice for OD’ing, but now’s not the time. “It says she couldn’t handle the pressure of the job.”

  “I’ll tell you what she couldn’t handle . . .” Mom’s head more lolls than turns, and she settles haunting, bloodshot eyes on me. “The guilt. The festering kind, that eats you up from the inside out after you’ve betrayed someone.”

&nbs
p; Someone like my father.

  “Told you. All these years of lying. Of pretending . . . There it is . . . the proof.” Mom’s gaze is once again glued to the TV. “Chief Marshall . . . It’s all caught up to you, hasn’t it.”

  “Where’s the proof?” This isn’t proof. That’s the problem—Mom has never once given me a shred of evidence that Jackie or anyone else on the police force framed my father. She just believes it down to her core, because she loved him that much, because she can’t accept the alternative.

  When it first happened, she told me that he’d had an accident and wouldn’t be coming home. That’s what I believed, up until I was ten and at the library working on a school project. Curious, I searched his name on the computer. That’s when I saw the articles.

  The headlines.

  The truth.

  I ran home, crying, and confronted her. She told me not to read that crap, that it was all lies, that my daddy was innocent.

  Again, I bought her story, because what else does a girl do when her mother tells her these kinds of things? I wanted to believe that my father wasn’t a corrupt drug-dealing cop who got tangled up with criminals.

  Then I got older, wiser. I asked questions my mom couldn’t answer. I watched her mental health deteriorate as she embraced her denial full-heartedly. And I accepted that what I want to believe doesn’t matter, because everyone else has gone on living their lives while Mom is stuck in the past. Along with me, in this hellhole, unless I figure a way out.

  I’ve long since come to terms with reality: that the evidence pointed to a corrupt cop who got what he deserved. That my father was not the good man she swears he was. That he didn’t give a damn about me or this little family of three, and he deserves my hatred for what he’s done to us, for what has become of my mother, thanks to his greed.

  And now Jackie Marshall has to go and kill herself. It’s fodder for my mother’s delusions. As if Austin’s chief of police would be so twisted up with guilt fourteen years later that suddenly she couldn’t take it anymore.

  I’d be an idiot to believe that her death has anything to do with us.

  I scan the rest of the article out of curiosity. There’s plenty about her fast-tracked career through the ranks to assistant chief, then chief. Jackie Marshall was a “highly motivated” police officer, according to this. Stalwart, focused, career-driven; determined to succeed.

  So how does a woman like they’re describing rise through the ranks and then fall apart when she gets to the top?

  Near the end, I find mention of her corrupt ex-partner, Abraham Wilkes. To this day, my stomach still clenches—with anger, with humiliation, with pain—when I see that name. I guess even the woman they eventually made chief of police couldn’t fully separate herself from the scandal.

  “There’s nothing about a suicide letter,” I note.

  “You think they’d let a suicide letter get out?” Mom snorts. “Come on, Grace. I’ve taught you to be smarter than that.” She fumbles for a cigarette, lights it. “God only knows what she would have admitted to in there. They’ll bury it in the official report, like they buried your father. Use some bullshit excuse, find some loophole. Freedom of Information Act, my ass. That’s the way that world works. They made me stay quiet and so I did. But, I know what she helped do.”

  “Who made you stay quiet?” I ask the question, though I know I’ll never get an answer. I never have.

  “They’ll get what’s coming to them one day.” Her fingers fumble with the charm on her necklace, her thumb running along the edge of the heart—half of a heart, to be specific.

  The other half is six feet underground, deteriorating along with my father’s bones.

  I can handle being near my mother when she’s high for only so long, and I’ve reached my limit. Plus, the stench of her cigarettes is churning my stomach. Setting her phone down, I quietly head for my room. I shed my shorts and work shirt and dive into my twin bed, the mattress lumpy from age. If I turn the fan on high and lie still, flat on my back, the heat is almost bearable. Maybe I’ll fall asleep.

  So . . . Jackie Marshall killed herself last night.

  Does it matter? Should I give it a second’s thought?

  My dad’s still a corrupt cop who got shot while dealing drugs.

  My mom’s still a heroin junkie with one foot in her grave.

  And I’m still their by-product, stuck here, in this shitty life.

  No, Jackie Marshall being dead doesn’t change a single, damn thing for me.

  CHAPTER 4

  Austin Police Department Commander Jackie Marshall

  April 16, 2003

  “Whoever said rank earned you the right to laze around don’t know nothin’ from nothin’,” I mutter, sucking back a gulp of burnt coffee, hoping the caffeine will give me a third wind, now that my second has long since passed. I’ve been on my feet and dealing with crap since seven this morning; it’s almost eleven at night.

  “Go home and let the men handle this,” Mantis sneers. He’s an odd-looking man, with his sloped forehead and beady eyes; not a man that a woman would fall for on looks alone. Although he has a certain bravado that some might love.

  I sure as hell don’t. But I tolerate him because I don’t have much choice.

  And the fact that he’s talking to me—a commander, who grossly outranks him—with such disrespect tells me he knows it.

  “Canning asked me to come down and check on things,” I say through another sip, studying the cruisers parked at various angles across the street, their lights blaring. A wiry white guy with thick glasses and messy blond hair sits in the back of one. “Do we have enough to put this asshole away?”

  “He’s got a meth lab in his house, Marshall. What do you think?”

  “Just making sure you boys dot all your i’s. Wouldn’t want his defense finding a loophole that puts him back on the street.”

  “If he ends up back on the street, it’s because the DA screwed up.” He emphasizes DA like I’m the DA. It’s not the first time I’ve caught the brunt of these snipes, and my brother hasn’t even been elected yet. It’s enough that Silas is running in the next election for the coveted spot.

  “Make sure there’re no fuck-ups, Mantis. And that’s coming straight from Canning.”

  “Relax. We’ve got this one in the bag.” Mantis chuckles, that deep, scratchy timbre of his voice making it sound sinister. “He’s the type to sing like a canary to save his own ass. We’ll get a few names out of him. This is a real score for us.”

  “I guess you’ll be practicing your pose for this week’s photo op, then?” Mantis has been in the newspapers more times than anyone cares to look at his face as of late. But Canning wants the public to know the APD is fighting the fight against drugs, and the best way to do that is through the media.

  “Go home and sleep. You look awful, Marshall.”

  He’s trying to get under my skin, as usual. “Go home and take a shower. You smell awful. Have some sympathy for the poor hooker you hire after shift.” He’s been wearing that same cheap grocery-store brand of cologne for as long as I’ve known him.

  My phone rings then, interrupting whatever lewd retort Mantis was going to throw back at me.

  CHAPTER 5

  Noah

  April 2017

  I shift in the wingback chair, again, looking for a more comfortable position. There isn’t one. These chairs are designed to get rid of people and quick. That a lawyer chose them for his office is counterintuitive to me. You’d think he’d want to keep his clients lounging longer, so he could rack up billable hours.

  “Given everything is going to you, this will be straightforward,” Hal Fulcher explains from across the desk as he scans the summary of Mom’s finances and I stare at the pink mole on his balding head. “She’s got a small credit-card debt . . . a car payment . . . but that’s it. We’ll get this year’s taxes filed, but I don’t expect any surprises. There’s a 401(k); that’s a good chunk of coin. And her life insurance polic
y will pay out, too. That’ll help with the funeral bills, so that’s great news. A lot of them don’t pay out if . . .” A frown flickers across his forehead. “Well, it depends on manner of death.”

  I clear the painful lump from my throat. “My uncle already sorted all that out with the funeral home.” I’m so glad I have Silas to help me. I don’t know that I could handle this on my own. He’s good at getting what he wants out of people. He may be a lawyer, but he’s also a politician. “So, this will work at the bank?” I wave the document that states I’m my mother’s executor. I don’t know the first fucking thing about being an executor.

  “They shouldn’t give you any issues. Bank statements say there’s about twenty grand in her account. Should be enough to pay the bills for a few months. Have you decided what you want to do with the house?”

  “I’ll probably sell it.” My parents sunk every penny they had when they bought it twenty-six years ago, a year before I was born.

  “Maybe you don’t want to rush into that. Property value around Austin is skyrocketing.”

  “That’s what Silas said.” He figures that the quaint, old house, on a quiet street backing onto a park, minutes away from the river, could go for close to a million. A year from now? Even more. Besides, it has fresh blood on its walls. It’ll take time for wary buyers to look past that. If I put it on the market now, I’d be dealing with people looking to cash in on my tragedy and throw me lowball offers. Fuck that. And them.

  “You might want to listen to him. Are you staying there?”

  I shake my head. “I’ve been crashing at my buddy’s place.” Jenson rents a small two-bedroom bungalow with Craig a couple blocks away from Sixth Street—Austin’s big entertainment district. Easy walking distance, which means their place is the before-and-after go-to spot from Wednesday to Sunday.

  For the first few days after Mom died, they kept things quiet, but it’s back to the status quo—me falling asleep on their lumpy sectional, surrounded by people jeering at each other while sucking back beer and playing video games. But I can’t complain; it’s better than being alone, and it’s definitely better than staying at home.