CHAPTER 3
Grace
Tucson, Arizona
I toss a baby carrot to the sandy ground. “Don’t say I never shared.”
Cyclops dives and devours it in one fell swoop, unbothered by the gritty coating. I’m not surprised. He’ll eat anything he can fit into his yappy mouth. I’ve caught him trotting by with a rat tail dangling from his jaws more than once.
“Now go on.” It’s pointless; the mangy dog can smell the chicken taquitos I tucked away in my purse. He won’t be leaving my heels anytime soon. Persistence is how he’s survived this long. He doesn’t have an owner to feed him; he follows the trailer park’s inhabitants, hoping someone will pity him enough to throw him scraps. Usually that someone is me.
I remember the day he showed up, limping from an infected cut on his hind paw, a chunk of his ear freshly torn out, long since missing his left eye. I had one hell of a time holding him down to clean and wrap that foot of his. That was three years ago, and he keeps coming back.
Like many of the people who find their way to the Hollow.
I stroll along the laneway, ignoring him. It’s two in the afternoon and Sleepy Hollow Trailer Park is practically a ghost town, as usual. Most everyone’s either sleeping off their midnight shift or out working a long day for shitty pay, so they can come back to this.
I pass the Cortezes’. There are six people living in that trailer. It has a sheet of plywood covering a window because Mr. Cortez smashed it with his fist in a fit of rage last month and he doesn’t have the money to replace it yet. Management won’t say anything. Five hundred a month in rent doesn’t buy you much around here, besides a roof that leaks during monsoon season. The park runs out of water at least three times a week, and the smell of sewage lingers in the air more days than not.
It looks like nobody’s home there, and I say a quick prayer of thanks for that because if the Cortezes are home, then no one’s getting any sleep. I was up at five for my shift at QuikTrip and I’m desperate for a nap before I have to bust my ass serving tables at Aunt Chilada’s tonight.
Next to the Cortez family is the Sims trailer, where Kendrick Sims, his sister, her boyfriend, and their seven-year-old son live. While his sister and boyfriend work honest jobs, Kendrick has been in and out of prison more times than I can count. Currently he spends his days hanging around their yard, shaking a lot of hands, and disappearing around corners. Everyone knows he’s dealing drugs.
He lingers by the chain-link fence now, leering at me. But he won’t come sniffing around here. He tried eight years ago, when he waylaid me along the lane one night and started telling me how I should date him because he’s black and my daddy must have been black for me to look the way I do, and that he would teach me all that I need to know about my heritage. He was nineteen.
I was twelve.
No one has ever accused me of having a dull tongue. As scared shitless as I was, I let him have it before running home and digging out my mom’s switchblade from beneath her mattress. I carry it in my purse to this day.
Next to the Simses is the Alves family. Vilma Alves waves from her spot in the crimson velvet armchair that sits outside her front door. It’s her throne; no one dares touch it. Her son brought it home years ago, a treasure from the curbside. It’s remained in that exact place, rain or shine. Mostly shine in Tucson.
“iBuenas tardes!” she calls out in her reedy voice.
“Hola.” I offer her a smile as I always do, because she’s ninety years old and she’s dropped off homemade enchiladas and mole at our door on many occasions, when she knew things were especially rough for me.
She scowls at Cyclops, shooing him away with a wave of her hand and a hiss of, “iRabia!”
I peer down at the scrappy mutt—part terrier, part Chihuahua, all parts annoying—and smirk. “He’s not foaming at the mouth yet.”
She shrugs reluctantly. I’m not sure which is worse—my Spanish or her English. We always muddle past the language barrier, though.
“Hasta luego.” With a lazy wave, I make to move on.
“Un hombre visitó a tu mamá.”
While my Spanish might be terrible, I know what that means. Or, more importantly, I know what it means when a man visits my mother while I’m at work.
My stomach tightens. “How long ago? Time?” I tap my watchless wrist.
“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.”
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.