Chapter 25 - Sweet Haven

THE sun had risen by the time she arrived at her parents’ house. She had hoped for a bit more darkness, some cover by which she might slip in through the back door, a finger to her lips in case she encountered the maid. A kind of adolescent guilt infused her. Not once, throughout her teenage years, had she slept out without permission. Spending the night in a strange room, with people her parents did not know, had been the ultimate violation of the household rules.

She was yawning and exhausted and desperate for a long, astringent shower, sullied somehow by the night, as though handprints lingered, oily and black, over her skin and clothes. When she saw the car, not in the garage but parked in the road outside the gate, she understood that the night wasn’t over yet, and braced herself for the inevitable skewering from her parents.

The living room, facing north, was dim as she entered and at first she did not notice the figure upon the couch, facing the door, as though waiting patiently for the precise moment when she’d appear.

“Mother.”

Narita jumped, cast a guilty glance over at the speaker. It was Naia, looking surprisingly composed, her hair freshly washed, her T-shirt spotless.

“There’s been a fire,” Narita burst out, to forestall any questions. “JP Torres’s property is gone. Burnt, razed, kaput—good-bye to all evidence. I was there.”

The girl considered this, gave a downturned smile. “Did anyone die?”

She would be waiting for a name, several names perhaps. “No,” Narita said. “Not in the fire.”

“And the house?”

“It’s gone, Naia,” she repeated. “No more crime scene. No more evidence. No more case. Do you understand?”

The girl looked at her with a blank, hopeless expression. What do you want? Narita wanted to cry. This is a good thing for you, don’t you understand; it means you’re free.

“Is it true about the dead girl?” Naia said.

She shuddered at the memory of the blanket-draped form on the stretcher, the young husband pulping his temples against the wall.

“Gemma? How did you know about Gemma?”

Naia shrugged. “How else?” She held up her mobile phone, wagged it in the air. “Was she really murdered?”

Narita was afraid to reply. She went rather self-consciously to the couch and sat down. It was the closest she had ever gotten to her daughter in the week that had elapsed.

“You don’t have to worry, Naia. No one will ever do that to you.”

The girl took a deep breath, as though debating whether to say more.

“It’s not even six, Naia, too early to be about.

“You didn’t come home. I figured you knew something about her death. I stayed up waiting for you.”

There was disapproval, even dislike, in her tone.

“I … was part of the investigation. I spent a few hours studying the case … our case … afterward.”

“Overnight?” Naia said. “With the lawyer?”

“No,” she lied.

“Really,” Naia jeered.

Narita squirmed beneath the steadiness of her daughter’s gaze. She knew that to reveal, even to hint at, details of one’s sexuality to one’s own child was a dreadful mistake. But Naia was no closer to her than a niece, a cousin who had grown up in a far country. In shame, she tried to smile.

“Your Lolo and Lola …”

“Are asleep. They went to the Hollands’ house last night. Came home and locked themselves in and talked for hours.”

“The Hollands.”

The girl regarded her with an expression of wonder. Then she looked away quickly, hiding a smile of contempt: “I thought you spent the whole night studying the case.”

I can’t do this, Narita thought. This is insane. This person is a stranger.

“You don’t know anything at all, do you?” her daughter said. “Tita Antonia told me all about you. How you’re all wind. You’re hot like fire, but you’re all wind. And now you’re going to write about me.”

For a moment, Narita did not understand. Then she hastened to explain, fighting to speak in slow and clear sentences: “It’s not about you. It’s about the case—an in-depth report, a long one. It talks about Donostia. About Sweethaven. How something like that could have happened, could have been allowed to happen … it has nothing about you. Nothing personal. I can protect you. I will protect you; your name will not appear …”

She stopped, appalled at the expression on Naia’s face.

“Sure you will,” the girl said. “Like you have for years. You wrote about me when I was a baby: the diapers and the Kool-Aid vomit and all that crap. You wrote about my pink scissors and my glitter crayons and my pink hearts. You wrote about bad dreams and the best videos for seven-year-olds and what perfumes to buy a kid for Christmas. Go look around in Tita Antonia’s room; she’s got a whole dossier on you. She clipped all the crap you wrote and kept it, and you know the one great thing about you? You wrote all that and you made it sound so real and you weren’t even here.”

Narita remembered: “The Joys of Breastfeeding,” “8 Surefire Cures for Kid Insomnia,” a dozen or so hack jobs culled from phone chat with Antonia and secondhand parenting books in exchange for a bit of cash. And Antonia had kept them. Narita visualized her sister clipping her articles out from pulp and glossy alike, and pasting them up in a folder grimly annotated. Overcome with her own frustration—so gifted, too good to sell out, and none of her drawings, none of her wit, ever leaving the four walls of their home.

She realized then how much easier it would be to give up. She would do the article about JP and his friends, the sense of entitlement that money fostered, the tragedy of the murdered girl in the house with the palm frond crucifix on its door. Her usual survival mechanisms would kick in: she would draft everything on the plane out, sit up for a single night putting flesh to the bare bones of her story. She might even call up Joel, swallowing her pride, for a quote or two. She would mention Sweethaven in passing, so skillfully that her readers wouldn’t ask for more. She would leave, once again, and this time there would be no false hopes, no real reason to return.

Naia was still looking at her, the disgust on her face dwindling until what was left was something indecipherable—a beautiful blank. They sat, listening as in a trance to each other’s breathing. Narita’s throat tightened. She knew she would never be more to this person than a distant, sophisticated relation: not even that. But, unfairly, she had so much more to give.

She wanted to explain that not everyone in the world was wicked or cynical, though most people were; she wanted to show the girl the principles, the tricks, by which one held on and, once in a while, flourished.

But what she knew about her daughter, she had invented. She did not know where to start.

Naia rose, to head back to her room. “You want to know about me, Mother? Then stick around. I’ll give you plenty to write about.”