Too frightened to stay, my sister Rhea is given permission to visit some family friends in San Diego. Sixteen and with a driver’s license, it’s easier on my parents if they just let her go. The house feels empty without her, consumed with the sound of my father’s snoring that even the tissue crammed into my ears doesn’t muffle.
Leaning against his side of the bed is his .300 Savage, fully loaded. If I reach over I can touch the cool barrel.
My father is a generic lawyer, taking on everything from divorces to drug offenses. I doubt if he is a good shot, considering he only hunts on occasional trips to Wyoming or Montana with one of his clients, the business ones, the ones he courts—like the handsome restaurateur from Bel Air who used to cart me on his back, table to table, making the candle-lit rounds, checking on things in the kitchen, until one night during dessert he returned me to my family’s table, my breath smelling of wine from my first tasting, a trace of white dust in the man’s dark mustache. Months later, his mind spun from all the cocaine and alcohol, he rolled his Jeep into a sand dune and never came out from the wreckage. My father also represents criminals and typically visits them behind the safety of bulletproof glass.
As I lie in bed, I think of the boy, a few years younger than me, who the night before lay awake in his parents’ bedroom—only his mom and dad weren’t sleeping. They were dead. His sister and a neighbor friend who was sleeping over had been murdered, too. They were ambushed in their sleep by a man with a hatchet in one hand, a knife in the other.
The boy was stabbed in the chest. He was stabbed in the head. Then his throat was slit. The only way he made it through the night, the eleven hours it took until help found him, was by plugging four fingers in the slash to stop the bleeding. He was airlifted to ICU at Loma Linda Hospital. I wonder who’s sitting with him now while he fights to breathe. How hard it must be for him to want to live, knowing the rest of his family has been killed.
The next morning at school, there is no talk of Cooper’s escape. Yet the door to the classroom isn’t propped open with a doorstop. Instead Mrs. Lincoln pulls on it after the first bell, making sure it’s locked. None of us are allowed to use the restroom by ourselves. Not even with a buddy system. We have to be accompanied to and from there in a small group by the teacher’s aide.
Recess is on a rainy day schedule, as if it’s not clear and warm outside. After lunch, we sit on the floor in the multi-purpose room and watch the animated mice movie, The Rescuers.
When we return to the classroom, we’re stuck watching another film. This one is very different. We needed to get our parents’ signatures for it. The boys are sent to Mr. Kroger’s class to watch their own. The movie is actually a slide show with a drawing of a woman; her insides are reduced to a wide tube that leads to two narrow pouches on either side of her hips. These are her ovaries.
Mrs. Lincoln flips the slide. It’s the same drawing, only now there’s a tiny circle with a curvy tail in the middle of the woman’s tube. Mrs. Lincoln narrates from a stapled packet.
“The sperm swims up the canal and breaks through the woman’s egg, fertilizing it. A man and woman have intercourse when they want to produce a child.”
In the next slide, the egg has suddenly come to life and bats a set of long eyelashes. The tiny head of the sperm grows a face and puckers up for a whistle.
All the girls giggle, except for me.
I picture something else. I picture my parents naked in bed, my father sweating and heaving on top of my mother, purposely releasing microscopic live things hidden in slime. While my sister and I may not have seen them, we heard them in our room late one night at the Desert Rose Hotel in Palm Springs when they thought we were asleep. We heard our father’s heavy grunts, our mother’s thin cries. He was smothering her in the sheets. When I tried to get up out of bed to help her, Rhea pinched my ear hard and whispered that I needed to go back to sleep. It was no big deal. Mom was all right. They were just making a baby.
Apparently it’s an act of love. It’s called making love, having sex. In time it will no longer sicken me. It will be something I’ll want to do when I’m older, when I’m in love. But as I sit listening at my desk, even in Mrs. Lincoln’s clinical terms, it still sounds unclean.
My mother seems dirty for letting my father do that to her, especially since they spend most of the time arguing.
After the slide show, Mrs. Lincoln informs us about our monthly friend who will likely appear in the next year or so. She holds up a small cylinder of cotton with a string and instructs us on how best to insert the plastic applicator so that after its removal, what’s left inside will soak up the blood.
My best friend Tomoko makes a face at me. Although she’s Asian, her mother tells her she’s a Japanese girl before she’s anything else. We’re not allowed to play at each other’s houses, not because I’m Greek, but because I’m white. Her mother doesn’t see the difference. Tomoko’s hair is hard to manage, so her mother braids it into two thick pigtails. This style doesn’t make her feel very pretty, so at recess she’ll take a couple of tiny white flowers from the weeds in the grass and tuck them behind one ear.
She points at Mrs. Lincoln and the dangling tampon.
“We have to leave that inside our vagina?” She mouths this part of our anatomy as if it’s something secretive, something bad.
I shrug and pretend that the idea doesn’t panic me.
“Guess so,” I say. “It’s better than wearing a miniature diaper.”
When school lets out, we’re still in lockdown mode, and my mother must waddle through the entrance and past the administrative offices and upper grade playground to Mrs. Lincoln’s room to pick me up.
My mother wears a T-shirt with the word “baby” and an arrow pointing downward in neutral yellow, just below her breasts. Neither of my parents wants to find out the baby’s sex. It will be a surprise, as if my mother getting pregnant isn’t enough of one for the family. She smiles self-consciously because of the slight space between her front teeth or maybe she’s reacting to me. Although I try and smile back, I wind up looking somewhere else. It’s impossible not to be embarrassed by her big belly, that hardened hump of proof she and my father had sex.
The bedtime ritual doesn’t change once my sister is forced to return home a week and a half later. My father puts her to work placing the rest of the dining room chairs against the other slider, the one in our parents’ bedroom. That’s how Cooper entered his victims’ home—through an open slider. For forty-eight hours he had camped out in the abandoned house next door.
He was in no hurry. Running too fast is how most escaped convicts are caught. If he stayed in Chino long enough, he knew the cops would figure he was farther away and stop looking for him here. He was patient and smart about it because he’d done this before. Using his prison contacts, my father learns Cooper had escaped a year earlier from a psychiatric ward in Pennsylvania. Cooper had gotten a real California driver’s license under an alias and had been arrested under this false name. He faked an illness too, so he could be transferred to a minimum security prison.
With a manual bicycle pump, my father inflates the mattress we use for camping. My sister will sleep at the foot of the bed.
“This is stupid,” she complains, pushing the last of the chairs against the glass. Her face is plastered salmon pink in Calamine lotion to avoid breakouts. “He’s long gone to Mexico or Siberia by now.”
My parents’ bed is big, a California King, and I climb up on it and slide under the covers. I’m getting used to sleeping between them, and I like how it’s my presence that helps them get along better.
“How do you know he’s gone?” I ask.
My sister doesn’t bother answering and instead looks for support from our mother, her strongest ally.