After our kiss, the meeting ended quickly. Joshua showed me out, and I wasn’t exactly dragging my feet to leave. I knew that I had to get away from him as quickly as possible or else I was going to be in even bigger trouble than before. Joshua was dangerous—dangerous as a man, dangerous as a lover, dangerous as a member of Venom Brothers. Joshua was the kind of man I should never have crossed.
I wished that I’d really run away.
Back when I was nineteen, my parents were killed. I thought it was a car accident at the time. The details of their deaths were sticky and mysterious to me, almost like something from a movie that I’d fallen asleep in the middle of. When I’d found out, it had been in the middle of the day. I had a part-time job that summer, working as an apprentice mechanic in a garage owned by a friend of my father. I remembered that I’d been learning about vintage motorcycles from the ’60s that week. I'd be annoyed when someone told me that I had a phone call.
“Don’t be long, Leslie,” the garage owner warned me. He was mad that day because Joshua had visited me the previous week, and I’d spent two hours away from the shop. “You know we got a big project on our hands.”
I shrugged as I walked back towards the phone. The voice on the other line had been gruff and unfamiliar—not someone I recognized. When he told me that my parents were dead, I thought it was a joke. I’d laughed.
“What the fuck is this?” I’d said in disdain, glaring at the receiver. From a distance, the man’s harsh voice now sounded tinny and laughable, like something from a cartoon on the television.
I’d gone back to work like nothing had been wrong. When my boss had asked me who called, I’d shrugged and told him that someone had pranked me. When I got home, the house was quiet. That in itself wasn’t unusual, my mom usually spent her summer days at the pool, reading and smoking cigarettes all day. My dad was always at home, though—he loved being outdoors, by the garden. When I went to look for him, he wasn’t there. That was the first moment when I actually believed that something was wrong. His tools were out of the shed and spread haphazardly around in the grass like he’d been in the middle of a project and then he’d been called away. My mouth went dry as I picked my way through the backyard with his mini shovel and trowel in hand. I didn’t want to believe that anything had happened, but it was starting to look like the phone call hadn’t been a joke.
“It’s nothing,” I remember telling myself as I went back inside and turned on the television. “He probably got an idea for dinner and went to the store for ingredients.”
Except my dad never did stuff like that; my mom was the cook of the household. I stayed inside with a glass of water and the TV on until it got dark outside. Then, when my parents didn’t come home, I began to feel really afraid. I went outside and ran down to the police station. I was afraid that my parents would come home and be angry with me if they found out I’d left after dark. Even though I was nineteen, they were still pretty strict. Besides, Joshua and I had just made plans to move in together and I wasn’t sure how they’d take the news. They didn’t approve of people living together before marriage, and even though I wanted to marry Joshua, I didn’t think he was about to ask. After all, he was exactly my age. We were only born a week apart. Some people used to say that made us soulmates.
The police officer down at the station obviously didn’t know what I was talking about. I probably looked like a crazed girl, babbling and sweaty with dirt-streaked legs from running through the downtown streets. LA had never been a picnic, but back then it used to feel grittier. I wasn’t sure if that was because I eventually got used to the city or what, maybe I was just too young to understand it. But the cops stared all the same.
“My parents,” I said in a gasping voice. “They were in a car crash! I got…I got a phone call this morning, but I didn’t believe it and I went home and they weren’t there!”
The cops pulled me into a back room and gave me a blanket and a warm bottle of water. I thought that was strange. Later I found out that they thought I was a kid, and they wanted to make sure I wouldn’t be afraid when I found out the truth. One officer came into the room with me and sat down. It was a woman with shiny thick blonde hair and brown eyes, and I remembered thinking that she looked friendly, but not trustworthy. She looked like the kind of woman I’d had as a teacher in elementary school, the kind of woman who took delight in tormenting the fat, unpopular kids.
“Now, Leslie, here’s the thing,” she’d said, pausing as she looked down at a sheaf of papers. “The bodies of who we believe to be your parents were found.” She looked up at me and reached out, touching my hand with her lotion-soft palm. “They were found in a car, Leslie, a red Camaro. Do you know anything about that?”
I shook my head. “Mom has a Volvo,” I said. “And Dad has a Nissan.”
The officer frowned. “There’s something else strange,” she said softly. “The Camaro wasn’t damaged at all. It was like someone moved the bodies of your parents there, to be found.”
I blinked. “It couldn’t have been my parents,” I said hotly. “They wouldn’t do this to me! They wouldn’t disappear like this!”
The officer looked at me. “But they did, Leslie,” she said softly. She squeezed my hand. “And I can’t explain why.”
Having to identify their bodies was the hardest thing I’d ever done in my entire life. I called Joshua, and he was in the lobby with me, but he couldn’t come inside the morgue because he wasn’t a family member. I could tell that it was killing him to see me in so much pain, but there was nothing I could do. I couldn’t pretend to be stronger just so it would be easier for him. Now, if that happened, I would try to shield a lover from having to see me that way. But back then I was simply too young; I was nineteen and I didn’t know a goddamn thing about the world.
The mysterious phone call haunted me. I didn’t go home from the hospital that night, I slept curled up in the waiting room and pretended I was waiting for a friend of mine. I couldn’t face my parents’ empty house, the way their bills and cell phones were still lying around like they were just about to come home. It seemed to me like they would burst through the door at any moment and leap out, tell me that everything had been a joke.
Not that my parents were the type of people to play such a cruel joke on their daughter. I was their only child, after all.
The first night I was home alone again, I heard a soft knocking at my window. The most familiar sound in the world: Joshua coming to my room in the middle of the night. When I let him in, he crawled up the rest of the rose trellis and lay panting on my floor. I remembered wanting to laugh, wanting to cry, and wanting to bury my face in Joshua’s neck and cry for hours. But I didn’t do anything like that. I simply sat there and let him hold me while I tried to keep breathing. Losing my parents was the most painful thing I’d ever gone through, and Joshua was right by my side exactly when I needed him.
“Why didn’t you just come to the front door?” I asked softly after I’d finished crying.
Joshua made a funny face. I guessed he felt awkward. “Because,” he said quietly. “This is the way I’ve always come to see you. I thought the routine would make you feel better.”
Ever since then, I couldn’t remember loving anyone the way I’d loved Joshua in that moment. He knew me so well. I was a creature of habit, someone who liked things just so and didn’t ever want to leave room for change. Joshua understood me, and he could always give me what I needed.
I’d never felt safer in my whole life.