Lemon Reef (21 page)

Ida lifted her heavy head, her voice groggy and then pissy. “He's in the friggin' Everglades. We can't just go and see him.” Her eyes began to close again; her head drifted downward as if caught in the pillow's gravitational force.

“I've interviewed people in prisons a hundred times. We can so go and talk to him. He might have information about Del.” My voice caused her to jolt. I continued, “I need you to come with me because he's not gonna remember me, and he'll be more likely to talk to me if you're there.”

She lifted her head again and rubbed her eyes. “Yeah, well, I don't know about that. We didn't have such a cozy visit the last time I went to see him. Let's just say”—she thought about it—“he doesn't approve of my occupation.” She laughed to herself and shook her head. “He's dealing drugs and doing time for murder, and he's judging me because I give massages for money.” She pushed her hair back with both hands and then fell back into the pillow. “Go fuckin' figure.”

I hadn't been able to sleep well since my alcohol-induced one-hour nap on the plane, and I could feel my patience running out. “Will you come or not? I can go with Nicole, but it's easier to get into the prison with you. You're not a felon.”

“Jenna.” Ida sat up. “What are you doing here? Why are you here?” The blanket fell out in ripples around her, covering the bottom half of her body and giving her the appearance of being in water up to her waist.

“Why are you asking me this now?”

She waited for an answer to her question.

“To tell you the truth, I really don't know. At this point, I'm just trying to make this turn out the way everyone thinks Del would have wanted it to.” Sharply, I said, “Satisfied?”

“No.” Ida laughed harshly. “Why do you care now more than last week, or the week before that?” Her eyes fell flatly upon me. “You messed her up when she was alive. Now you want to make it up to her, after she's dead?”

My heart hit a speed bump.

“You were the best friend Del ever had. She loved you with all her heart. After you turned on her, she was never the same. Like a part of her just quit.”

“I
never
turned on Del.” A drumbeat started in the hollow of my chest, and my stomach began to twist. I felt immense sadness being in this room with Ida instead of Del, remembering us there. I knew where this conversation was going, and it was Del who I wanted to be having it with. I clamped down my jaw to stop myself from crying.

“Fine.” She fell back against the headboard. “Keep telling yourself that.” Her face was firm, her eyes narrow, her tone pointed. “But you know what I think? I think you hurt her more than anyone else ever has.”

“That sure says a lot, considering you think Talon killed her.”

“Nicole thinks that. I don't. They had problems but not like that. Tal loved Del. He hit her, but you might have hit her, too.” Smiling to herself, Ida said, “She sure knew how to push people's buttons.”

“So where I'm concerned you're defending her, and where he's concerned you're…what? Blaming her?”

“No, I'm saying that hitting her doesn't mean he killed her.” Ida shook her head at the nuttiness of it all. “They've been at it a long time. Del was pregnant the first time Talon hit her. There were a lot of ups and downs with them. The truth is, Del was
crazy
about him. And he was crazy about her, threatened to kill himself if she left him.” I suppressed an eye roll. Ida
would
be reassured by that. “That's how much he needed her. I know that's not what you want to hear, but it's true.” She smiled in a way that seemed cruel and intended to hurt me.

What was I going to do, browbeat her with facts? Suicide and homicide, flip sides of the same coin for batterers; first assault during pregnancy, a clear indicator of severe violence later in the relationship; everything she was saying to convince me otherwise further confirmed my belief that Talon had killed Del.

“Ida,” I said, “how do you explain what he did today? How do you understand him showing up here with this new woman—insisting Khila think of her as her new mother. You call that love?”

“I call that grief.”

I shook my head.

The liner under Ida's eyes, still thick from the night before, was running a little. She sat holding her legs close to her chest like a little girl. “What you told Beasley today, that you and Del were each other's first loves, you were just making that up, right? You know that's not true.”

“So is that what this is all about? You're just mad at me because I told Beasley Del and I were lovers.” I blew out a loud sigh. “Ida, you didn't
know
about me and Del?”

“You and Del?” She paused, and then she said, “I know about you.” Shrugging her shoulders, she added, “I mean, you know, to each her own.”

“To each her own?” I was biting back rage now as well as tears. “You mean, as long as it's not your sister we're talking about.”

“It's
not
my sister we're talking about. Del wasn't gay.”

I breathed in, trying to stay in the conversation, to see it through to a better place. Ida had this side to her, a kind of pathological naïveté that could be just vicious. “Then what are we talking about, Ida? What do you think happened between Del and me? You obviously feel like you know.”

“Because Del talked to me about it.”

The beat in my chest went from whole to quarter count.

Ida's red hair was pushed back from her face, and her skin looked drawn and bland. She seemed tired and old. I noticed in a way I hadn't earlier the heavy makeup, the big jewelry, the exhaustion, the jadedness. She'd clearly worked the night before.

Ida said, “Del told me you were gay, and that you wanted a relationship with her, but she didn't want that. She just wanted to be friends. You punished her by refusing to be friends with her.”

“Del and I were lovers. We were together for over a year.”

“She let you fuck her. I know that.”

“She wasn't just letting me fuck her. She was in it, too,” I said, less confident than I sounded.

“She wasn't comfortable with it, Jen. She wasn't comfortable with what she did with you. She had a right to feel that way. But you got pissed at her because she just wanted to be friends, and to get back at her you told other people about what you guys did together.”

Ida's words were causing shock waves, unearthing buried memories, the last fights we'd had, actions I'd regretted, pain I'd caused her—and Del's face when she turned away from me in disgust at the end and thereafter.

My first impulse was to defend myself. Parts of this were true, sort of, but… “It wasn't like that,” was all I could say. I breathed in a sob. “I mean”—I put my hand over my mouth, thought for a moment—“I can see now that maybe I told Gail as a way of distancing myself from Del. But it wasn't out of spite.”

My voice sounded hollow. What I had been most aware of always was
my
pain, how Del had hurt
me
. My eyes went to the urine-yellow stains in the linoleum floor. Realizing the spirit of what Ida was saying was what mattered most, I stopped arguing and forced myself to listen to the ways in which I had hurt Del—something I had never done before.

“It's just that Del felt so exposed and humiliated. She said you bragged about the sex you guys had like a stupid guy. I mean,
you went into detail
. She couldn't understand why you had done that to her. You were her best friend. She trusted you. To her it felt like you torched the friendship, which was what she cared about the most. People were always saying shit about her—what a whore she was, superficial, slut. You know.” I nodded. “I think when you started talking, when
you
did it too, that was it. She gave up. It was like she just stopped caring, like she became the thing people said she was.” Sadly, Ida said, “Del wasn't those things. She was private and loyal.”

“And loving,” I said, as tears streamed down my cheeks. I'd given up on trying to hold them back.

“She was so hurt, Jenna. I don't think she could even tell you how hurt. I don't think she ever got over it.”

The rain had stopped, and a stream of light filtered in through the window above us, speckled with dust particles and illuminated with colors, like a tiny rainbow—yellows, reds, blues, pinks. The colors changed depending on the angle from which I viewed them, and I thought to myself that the end of a relationship is no different.

I don't know how long we sat in silence before Ida asked, “Why do you want to see Sid?”

I wiped my face with my shirt, resisted explaining myself further. I knew my reasons for telling Gail didn't matter. In my world, consequences outweighed intentions. Not an easy transition to make, but I had to get back on track. I had to talk to Sid and see what he knew. Visiting hours were from noon to six p.m., so if we were going, we had to leave.

I stood up and began toward the door. “Remember when Tar Baby said Sid went to prison and Tal killed Del anyway?” Ida was looking at me with a glazed-over expression. “You remember, or not?” Finally, she nodded. “So what did he mean by that? Did Sid know Del was in danger? Did he go to prison to protect her?”

“To tell you the truth, it doesn't matter to me. I don't think Del was murdered.” Ida got up and began walking out the door with me. “I think it's better if Nicole goes with you to see Sid. I doubt Sid would even see me right now.” In response to my look of confusion, she confessed, “He thinks Tal and I had a thing.” I didn't respond. Then Ida said, as an afterthought, “He's been trying to reach us.”

“Who?”

“Sid. He has something from Del that he wants us to see. Wouldn't say what it is over the phone.”

I stared at her, not knowing which of the last two comments to respond to first or how to respond to either. “How long has he been trying to reach you?”

“How should I know? I've gotten two—well, maybe three—messages from him. He's probably called other people more.”

“Maybe you could've mentioned he was calling, just in case he hadn't called anybody else. I mean, Nicole's phone's disconnected, Del's dead, your mom's not doing too well at the moment, and your dad is somewhere else on the planet. So maybe you're the one he'd try to contact.”

Ida had no idea I was being sarcastic. She just nodded, smiled, and said, “Good point.”

As we walked down the hall toward the living room, the phone rang, and I heard Nicole answer it in her urgent way.

Now she was holding the phone in her hand, looking at the receiver. “That was Tar Baby.” Her brow furrowed into a question mark. “He said, ‘Ten fifteen,' and hung up.”

“That must be the time the trade had taken place.” I glanced out the window, semi-aware I was checking to see if the black Jeep had returned. Maybe it was exhaustion, or maybe it was the image of the mama dog nuzzling her maimed puppies, or maybe it was seeing Khila in distress and feeling helpless to do anything about it, or maybe it was image of Del trying to claw her way to the surface, but at that point, I believed Talon to be capable of anything. As absurd as the idea of our being followed might have seemed to me the day before, I could no longer just dismiss it.

“Let's go see Sid, Nicole.”

I parked outside the prison. As I watched to see if we'd been followed, I couldn't help but notice Nicole removing knives from her pockets and razor blades from her shoes, apparently in preparation for passage through a metal detector. Then she removed the leather pouch she always had hanging from a string across her chest and put it in the glove compartment.

“What is that?”

Her head bobbed to some internal beat. “My survival kit.”

Her answer left no room for follow-up, and I realized I probably didn't want to know what was in it anyway.

We made the hundred-yard trek up the newly paved walkway to the prison entrance. It was an imposing building, a city block in size and several stories high. The walls were cinderblock, with small windows that had bars over them. There was a gate approximately twelve feet high around the perimeter and guard towers in key locations manned by uniformed people with guns.

Because of Nicole's criminal history and my out-of-state “special visitor” status, it took forever to get past security and into the visitors' area. Nicole had to be searched, and I had to clear my visit with the watch commander, who had taken a long lunch that day. Now, waiting for Sid, Nicole and I sat like mirror images in parallel universes. Both of us silent, my head propped by my right elbow, her head propped by her left elbow, we gazed warily at the beige wall before us. Neither one of us knew how to understand Ida.

“I don't know,” I said, my breath feeling as stale as the air in the room. “Either Ida is really stupid, or she is trying to protect Talon.”

“She's trying to protect herself.” Nicole dropped her head back, her soft, light hair falling back with it. “Ida has fucked every one of Del's lovers.” She looked at me. “Except you. Right?”

I snorted.

“Can you imagine,” Nicole said, her mouth twitching, “if Ida did sleep with Talon behind Del's back, and then he killed Del? Oh God.” More twitches and jerky leg movements. “Ida can't think that. She'd never forgive herself.”

“Do you think we can trust her?”

“I don't know. Ida's always been jealous of Del, ever since she came to live with us. She's done a lot of fucked up things to Del, but she loved her, too. So which side wins in this depends on which way Ida's psycho winds are blowing. Anyway, I have to trust her. She's all I have left.”

“He was so horrible today,” I said. “The kid's mother has been dead two days and not only is he bringing his girlfriend around, he's letting this woman refer to herself as Khila's mother. And the woman is
doing
it. I don't know who between them is sicker, him or her.”