When She Came Home (24 page)

“I’ve done so many things wrong or only half right, Rick. I have to try to make up for it. I mean, I never can,
not really, but this is something. Helping Domino. I can’t fail this time.”

She ordered coffee and a churro at Jack in the Box. The night manager recognized her and asked if she had seen Domino.

“She don’t work here no more. Her crazy husband, though, he’s still here most nights. I see him in his car. Waiting.”

“If her ex wasn’t a problem would you hire her again? She was a good employee, you told me so.”

“Too much trouble. I got a kid works now. College kid. No ex-husband.”

The Jack in the Box on Washington Street dated from a time when fast food was a bare bones operation without an inside dining room because almost no one cared to eat on the premises. Frankie took her coffee and churro around the building to where four picnic tables were bolted to a cement slab, under a wide roof of corrugated steel. Though the October days had been warm enough for shorts and picnics at the beach, after sunset the temperature dropped quickly. She buttoned her down vest and sat, leaning against the wall with her legs stretched out along the bench. She was alone except for a couple seated one table away, a man wearing a grayed T-shirt and a jittery woman with small fox-like features who reminded Frankie of Shawna Montoya, the soldier who had been driving the Humvee
when they came to a stop on the edge of Three Fountain Square. She had the same sharp nose and pointed chin as this woman clutching her coffee cup like a hand-warmer, hunched over and talking urgently. Occasionally Frankie picked up a word or two, but she was on the lookout for Dekker and not paying close attention. Several times the woman looked up at Frankie and then quickly away.

After a while a primered panel truck pulled into the lot and Dekker got out. Seeing him away from Veterans’ Villa where he had some authority, she had a moment of doubt about trusting him. He was older than she had realized and his face showed every day of the hard life he must have led.

He stopped at Frankie’s table. “I have to talk to my friends over there. It might be a while. You okay with that?”

“If you’d give me her address—”

He stepped back.

Resigned she said, “I’m not going anywhere.”

He went inside and came back out with a large bag of food. He dealt out hamburgers and French fries to the man and the fox-faced woman who grabbed up the food and ate quickly, without speaking. Her movements were jerky and she almost knocked her coffee off the table, but Dekker caught the cup before it went over the edge. In response the woman crossed her arms over her chest and rocked from side to side, her eyes squeezed shut. They popped open and she saw Frankie watching her.

“What do you want?” She had a deep rolling voice. “What you lookin’ at?”

“You almost spilled your coffee.” Frankie didn’t know what else to say.

“So?”

“I just noticed, that’s all.”

Dekker took several folded sheets of paper from the back pocket of his jeans and opened them out in front of the woman, smoothing them with the palm of his hand. From where Frankie sat she saw that they were forms of some kind. He spoke quietly, using the point of his pen to indicate particular lines.

“I don’t know any of that crap.” The woman shoved the papers away.

Dekker remained calm, talking and smoothing the papers again, and gradually, she settled down and began nodding her head as if she understood what he was saying. Frankie watched, trying not to be obvious, but curious about the woman and the forms and about Dekker, who spent his days counseling at the villa and his nights apparently doing the same thing.

Suddenly the woman pointed at Frankie. “Stop lookin’ at me!”

Dekker turned around. “You may as well come over here and sit with us.”

“Her? Who she?”

“Dawny, she’s a friend of Domino. Her name’s Frankie.”

“She’s a lyin’ maggot.”

The young man at the table was tattooed with brightly colored serpentine shapes, like a vine growing up his arms
and peeking out from under the neck of his shirt. He shoved the remains of a bag of French fries across the table at Frankie. As she reached for one, he grabbed her hand and turned her arm to reveal the small
Semper Fi
tattoo.

“In or out?”

“In.”

“How long?”

“Nine-eleven.” The date was shorthand that explained a lot.

Dawny said, “Assholes.”

Frankie steeled herself not to look away as the young man peered at her from under his thick eyebrows, like an animal hidden in the brush.

“How you know Dom?”

Frankie looked at Dekker for a cue how to proceed. He nodded and she talked about meeting Domino at the clinic and about Candace and Glory being friends.

Dawny still wasn’t happy. She jabbed her index finger on the papers. “So we gonna do this or what?”

Dekker said, “I told you, Dawny, you have to find some kind of ID that shows your date of birth and all. A library card won’t cut it.”

Dekker’s voice was kind, but watching him Frankie sensed that he had not always possessed this self-control. She wondered how long it had taken him to make peace with his demons.

“What about your discharge papers? Can you remember where they are?”

Dawny wasn’t listening to him.

“You got a house?” she asked Frankie. “Where’s your house?”

“Go easy, Dawny.”

“She makes my head hurt.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t mean to hurt you.” Frankie looked at Dekker. Should I say more? she wondered.
Should I leave?
He shrugged and shook his head as if to say that—stay or go—it probably wouldn’t make much difference. Frankie recognized Dawny’s suspicion, her headaches and despondency and pointless anger, as first and second cousins of her own disturbed thinking. Her mind spun away and drifted off down Washington Street searching for somewhere safe, a doorway or a patch of ground behind a bush, against a wall.

It might rain. I’ll need shelter if it rains
.

Dawny was talking about bad dreams and Dekker asked her if she had stopped taking her meds.

“Fuck you and the horse you rode in on.”

The tattooed boy’s laugh brought Frankie back. He said, “Dawny was in the Army. She worked in a prison.”

“Why you telling her that? It’s none of her business.”

“She’s waiting to go on disability but it’s hard to get all the documents together. Plus she mostly don’t make it to her appointments.”

Dawny stood up, her body rigid. “Shut up, bigmouth.”

“Sit down now, Dawny. No one wants to fight.”

“Make her go away.”

“I will.” Frankie scrambled off the bench. “I’ll go over there, I’ll sit. I won’t look at you, Dawny. I promise.”

“Why? You think I’m ugly?”

Dekker’s vivid blue eyes crinkled. He found humor in all this. Maybe that was part of his secret. Without humor how could he face another day of other people’s pain?

“I’ll wait in my car.”

Sitting in her car Frankie thought about Dawny and then of Shawna Montoya. They had ridden together several times. What made Shawna memorable was the way she talked to herself as she skillfully maneuvered the big Humvee. Approaching Three Fountain Square, the road they were on made an abrupt dogleg turn, and just like that, it wasn’t much wider than an alley.
Holy shit and what the fuck, we’ve got us a problemo aquí.
Frankie wondered what had happened to Shawna, if she might be in trouble like Dawny or homeless like Domino or just screwed up like she was. She wondered if any of them had come out of Iraq with their lives together.

Dekker surprised her when he said her name at the car window.

“We have to get out of here before Jason shows.” He looked up and down Washington Street. “He’s a smart guy. He could be hiding, watching now.”

“Where is she?”

“You’ll never find it on your own. Just follow me. If you lose me, I’m not coming back for you.”

At first it was easy to keep Dekker’s clunky primered
panel truck in sight on the neighborhood streets of Hillcrest, but after a mile or so, paralleling Washington on Robinson, it turned right, into an area of irregular residential blocks close to Balboa Park where there were sudden canyons and stop signs at every cross street. He took to the alleys, making so many turns that Frankie lost track of where they were until an old and poorly marked freeway entrance appeared and the truck darted down it and into the stream of traffic merging onto Interstate 8.

The AstroLuxe was an old motel situated far up Mission Valley, well out of the area popular with tourists where the motels advertised free shuttles to the zoo and Sea World and two-for-one breakfast vouchers. It was a dozen units, single story in an L-shaped configuration built back against the valley wall facing south toward the rear of a nondescript office building. In front of the motel, secured by a chain-link fence, there was an aboveground circular swimming pool surrounded by warning signs. No lifeguard, no diving, no responsibility. A red plastic float bobbed on its surface.

The AstroLuxe didn’t feel like San Diego. It belonged in a dead-end corner of the country that had given up hope when the mills closed or the factories outsourced. Frankie did not want to get out of her clean and comfortable car, but Dekker stood on the narrow sidewalk that ran in front of the rooms and gestured for her to hurry. The motel made Domino’s desperate plight real to Frankie in a way that the van never had.

Despite its size, the van had been a homey space fitted out like a tiny one-room apartment with a bed and shelves for cups and plates and plastic cutlery taken from Jack in the Box. Domino and Candace had kept it clean and tidy with hooks to hang clothes on and a plastic bin that was a table at the same time that it stored a loaf of bread, a box of cereal and another of powdered milk, cans of soup, and a bag full of sugar packets, again compliments of Jack. More than knowing Domino and Candace used a one-pound coffee can and plastic bags for a bathroom and that Priest Martha let them shower in the All Souls’ parish hall, the AstroLuxe told Frankie that her friend had come to the end of her possibilities.

“I had no idea.”

“Why would you?”

And yet Domino would not accept Frankie’s offer of a loan to help her until she could help herself. Her refusal had seemed like blind pride. Until now Frankie had not appreciated the depths of her humiliation.

“Where’s the van?”

“Near the Dumpsters.” He pointed at one of the doors. “That’s it. Number eight. We better get inside.”

S
he looked around at the dark parking lot. There were two or three other vehicles parked in the unmarked spaces, nondescript cars and a truck that had traveled a long way. With the office building between them and the freeway roar, it was quiet enough to hear a dog bark in the backyard of one of the houses above the valley.

“I’m sure we weren’t followed. I almost lost you myself.”

“Never underestimate the enemy, Captain. Didn’t they teach you that?”

The caged light over the door cast a burned caramel glow, and both blinds and curtains were drawn across the window. Frankie heard the sound of a canned television laugh track.

Dekker knocked and the corner of the blind moved. The door opened a crack and Frankie felt a whoosh of cold stale air on her face. Candace let out a cry of joy and grabbed her around the waist, pulling her into the room.

“I knew you’d come. I said it and said it and I knew I was
right. Mom said we wouldn’t see you again but I knew we would.”

Domino sat on the bed with several pillows propped behind her. By the light of the TV her transformation was grotesque. Her lustrous dark hair had been dyed a shrieky orange, accentuating the damage done to her beautiful face. The orbits of both her eyes were bruised purple and the lid of one had swollen shut. One side of her jaw stuck out like a cartoon character with a toothache. She had used a towel to make a sling for her right arm.

Frankie tried to keep her expression neutral, but her arms around Candace tightened as if to protect her. Really it was she who needed support.

Dekker said, “He found her two nights ago.”

“Has she seen a doctor?” Emergency room doctors were required to report beatings to the police. “Has anybody helped her?”

“I called Mr. Dekker. Mama had his telephone number on a card.”

“I’m pretty good at first aid,” Dekker said. “I’ve had some experience.”

“You’re a good man to know.” She spoke to Candace, “And you were smart to call him. I guess you’re a good person to know too.” She tried hard to put some lightness into her scratchy voice.

Fresh-faced and hopeful as she always seemed to be, Candace smiled at the praise; but in the cramped room at the AstroLuxe Frankie interpreted her cheerful resilience
and Domino’s stubborn independence, as she hadn’t before. These were their default attitudes and assured that no one would ever pity them. With a pang she understood that she had never seen either of them in a truly unguarded moment.

“He said he loves me,” Candace said and leaned into Frankie’s hip. “But I don’t want him to love me.”

“Enough,” Domino said. Her engorged lips barely moved.

Two suitcases stood at the end of the bed.

“Where are you going?”

“Santa Maria,” Dekker said.

“Tell me how I can help.”

“Don’t… help.”

Candace stood beside her mother. “We’re doin’ okay.”

“Go home,” Domino said.

In the cramped room Frankie felt huge and awkward, all dangling arms and big feet. She had imagined that she and Domino were friends, that they had a particular connection. Whether or not this was an accurate description of their relationship didn’t matter anymore.

“I’m not going anywhere.”

Domino squinted in the effort to speak, drawing her brows together, cutting two deep creases above her nose. “Stay away… Jason.”

“I don’t even know what he looks like. I wouldn’t know the man if I tripped over him.”

Candace laughed. The tightness in Frankie’s shoulders
and back eased a little. She sat beside Domino and carefully, tenderly, drew her into her arms. For an instant Domino resisted and then Frankie felt the starch wash out of her.