Mayhem Read online

  She puts an arm around my shoulder as we walk to the gate and collect the gifts and the thank-you cards that have been left there. The birds caw and coo and hop along next to us. There’s one with a brown patch on his beak who seems to be watching me and who is always there when I look.

  “Oh, aren’t you lovely?” Elle says, sniffing a bouquet of stargazer lilies.

  I make a stack of the thank-you notes and slip them into their designated folders in what was once my grandmother’s desk. “Why do they leave presents?”

  Elle regards me searchingly, then goes back to sorting papers.

  “I know Roxy doesn’t want you to tell me anything, but I want to know,” I insist.

  She looks at me surprised, then sighs. “They leave presents because myths make people feel safe. Get that crate of oranges, would you? We can make fresh juice.”

  We place the creamy scented soaps in the bathrooms and store the chocolate-covered almonds and colorful rock candies in the pantry. We stack the vegetables in the fridge and the succulent fruits in bowls. I take these quiet moments with Elle and I store them away. She is steady and strong and certain. As she walks through rooms, curtains wave in the breeze as though reaching for her. This is how I want to be a woman, not like my mother, who is constantly reacting, whose very self seems to be a hostile presence, toxic to her own body so she has to medicate to keep herself blurred.

  Oh, Roxy.

  My mama.

  Waking up at dark, rifling around in all the rooms, crying when she thinks I can’t hear. Since the police station, Roxy has been hitting the Valium hard and is mostly parked on the couch, reading or napping.

  Does this mean she thinks Lyle will come, too, that she wakes up shaking in the night?

  Does she wind her mind around all the ways he might be able to find us? Old phone bills; some acquaintance of Roxy’s who knew where she was from; process of elimination?

  Worse, does it mean she misses him? Would she ever take us back to Taylor?

  So far it seems like Neve and Jason and Kidd come in almost at sunrise, then sleep and leave again in the afternoon, which would explain why they were eating breakfast at two p.m. my first day here. They spend most of their time in the attic, and I don’t want to go up there uninvited.

  They don’t invite me.

  I wonder if I did something wrong. I wonder if that day at the beach, that moment out in the water with Jason—if they decided I was a mismatch. Not cool enough. Not dark enough. Just a girl in a pair of shorts and a T-shirt from Texas.

  Today, alone, I amuse myself by digging deeper into my parents’ closet, looking through old boxes of paperwork. I find a pipe in my grandmother’s desk and stalk about the house with it in my mouth, pretending to say important things. I pet Millie and let her knead me for so long I expect to rise and then bake. Finally, I flop on the bed and stare upward. Not having a TV is hell.

  With nothing to do, I imagine lives for the kids upstairs from before Elle found them.

  In my mind, Neve made a shank out of a toothbrush, melting one end to a deadly point. She stabbed a girl at school with it. The girl died. No one ever found out, but the guilt ate away at her until she started setting things on fire, which is how she wound up living under an overpass, which is how she wound up here. In my mind, Neve glows. She bares her teeth. She is covered in blood.

  I start awake. The house is completely silent. No lights are on.

  I can’t be here another second, in the shadows of the sunset.

  Somewhere, life is happening.

  “Come on.” I throw a rose-colored cardigan I found in my grandmother’s closet over Roxy, who is sacked out on the seafoam-green sofa in the living room. “Let’s go into town.” I still haven’t recovered from scraping together the last of our change to fill the gas tank, but Elle gave me a fifty-dollar bill I haven’t broken yet.

  “Mmm, baby?” I hear a slight slur in her words that means she isn’t a hundred percent sober. Probably not even seventy-five percent.

  “Hey, Roxy? Mom? Did you hear me? I want to go to the boardwalk. Please.”

  Her eyelids flip open and flutter. “Where’s Elle?”

  “I don’t know. Not here.”

  She sits up, hair askew, and pulls her tank top over her stomach. “The car … we’re still out of gas. I don’t think we could make it to the station. Have to get a can or something.”

  “We can walk.”

  “You want to go to the boardwalk?” She nods out again, relaxes back against the cushion.

  “Yes! Please!” I tug on her so hard she falls to the floor in a heap and bursts out laughing. She’s awake now.

  “I bet we still have bikes in the storage shed,” she says, pulling the cardigan around her shoulders. Seeing her on the floor like that, legs flopped in front of her, hair tousled, smiling, I could almost believe there’s hope.

  “Bikes! That’s perfect! Come on!” I jump up and down to wrangle enough energy for both of us.

  “Okay, maniac. Hold your horses.” She’s brightening, looking excited even. “Let me get my face on and we’ll go.”

  While Roxy gets ready, I follow her instructions to the bikes, which are covered in cobwebs. I wipe them down, and when Roxy comes out she’s in some cutoff shorts and flip-flops and her hair is in short pigtails. She’s not so done up and has less makeup than usual. She howls as we fly down the hill. She’s going too fast, and her yipping cries hurt. It’s like she’s calling herself back from somewhere far away.

  Once we reach the bottom, she slows so we can ride next to each other. Crickets chirp, and cars pass us by. The night is warm and inviting. Roxy seems spent and content, hardly pedaling at all, letting her legs fly out to the side so the wheels click beneath her.

  “Thanks for making me leave the house, baby.”

  I don’t say anything.

  “I know it’s been tough lately … again. I’m just so tired. I need a minute to recover. But it’s not fair. I should be with you. I should be helping you.” She looks at me, and between the streetlamps and the waning sunset I see her right down to her guilt. “I know you’re worried about me, worried about Lyle coming for us, making us go back. But you know how I know Lyle isn’t going to come here, May?”

  I stay silent and listen.

  “Because he’ll never leave Taylor. He’s homegrown. I landed in his lap and vanished just as quick,” she says. “Plus all I ever did for twelve years was tell him I never wanted to come back here no matter what. He probably thinks we went back to that shelter and they evacuated us or something. He probably thinks we’re in Timbuktu.”

  “There are a million ways he could find us. He’s totally crazy—”

  “He’s selfish and lazy. Trust in that.”

  “He’s obsessed with you. He’s bad. And he’s an asshole.”

  “Yes,” she agrees. “He’s an asshole.”

  We ride a minute in silence, and then she pedals ahead, and it’s like years are peeling off of her with every turn of her wheels, until I can see my mother shiny, as she must have been when everything was ahead of her and her heart was whole.

  At night, the boardwalk is different from in the daytime. There are still all the people the kids showed me, but there’s more underneath it, like it’s all being powered by an electric current. A group of boys ride over its wooden planks on motorcycles, hooting as a cop on foot runs after them, yelling. It sounds and smells like you would think. Roasted nuts, cotton candy, trash, seawater, hot dogs, popcorn. There are people standing outside little stores with cute names, offering up T-shirts and bathing suits. In front of one of them, two older people in afghans, the man with long hair and a beard, are totally passed out on each other’s shoulders. Along the sides of the boardwalk, people play guitars and fiddles. They sing familiar songs and rattle jars filled with loose change. One guy has a sign painted on cardboard that reads NEED MONEY FOR BEER. The Gecko brothers pass by, nodding militarily as they say, “Evening, Brayburns.” Everyone looks tan and
a little sweaty. Above us, the Ferris wheel spins its slow tour. Any tourists that might be milling around in the daytime are gone.

  “Come on, baby.” Roxy tugs on my arm.

  A man in a yellow G-string and a top hat whizzes by on roller skates and opens up a deck of cards, showing me a spread made entirely of hearts.

  Roxy fluffs her hair, but I am transfixed as we pass wall after wall of more MISSING posters. They’re everywhere concert and event flyers should be. It’s impossible for me to ignore, and I’m not the only one. There’s a buzz as people stop to crowd around, commenting to each other.

  I look into the girls’ eyes again, try to see their souls. Their families must be falling apart. They must be going crazy. I flash on what Roxy would do if it were me, taken from the beach. She’d pluck out her eyelashes. She’d cry and starve herself to death. She would never recover. She’s told me before, told me outright she couldn’t survive losing me and my dad both. It would be the very worst thing.

  What I would do if something happened to you, Cookie.

  It’s like I can actually hear the mothers of these lost girls crying, like I can hear them screaming for their babies.

  “May, stop,” Roxy says. “It’s morbid.”

  I shrug her off even as the pit inside me grows and whispers that they are dead, they are dead, they are dead.

  “May.”

  If this were happening to Roxy, and I were gone, she would expect the world to stop its self-indulgent spinning to find me, to help her.

  “Roxy, don’t.”

  “They probably just took off.”

  “They didn’t.”

  “We did.”

  “One of them is thirteen. You think she just took off?” I cross my arms. My breathing is rough.

  “Fine,” she says, “suit yourself.” She pulls a Red Vine from her purse and munches.

  HAVE YOU SEEN THIS GIRL?

  I say their names.

  KAREN DELANO, 16

  JESSIE CASTRO, 14

  KIMBERLY RAEL, 13

  BENITA JACKSON, 14

  TINA CHAPUT, 16

  LAST SEEN IN SANTA MARIA

  LAST SEEN IN SANTA MARIA

  LAST SEEN IN SANTA MARIA

  Five of them. All last seen here on the beach after dark. I sear their faces into my memory.

  “You have to tell Boner to do something about this,” I say. “We all should be doing something about this. Where are the cops?”

  Roxy looks at me sternly, knitting her brow. “They’re interviewing people? Detecting! How should I know? Having cops crawling all over the boardwalk is not the Santa Maria way. I heard they have extra lifeguards or something, that the beach is being watched twenty-four hours a day now.”

  I look at the pictures again. It’s like there’s a Lyle to worry about everywhere I go. Maybe worse than him. I can’t imagine him killing anyone other than us, and then only if he was real mad. But someone coldly planning? That’s something else altogether. That’s bad to the power of ten. Evil, like Julianna said.

  Don’t deny evil. Crush it.

  Roxy clucks. “Quit obsessing over this stuff. You’re going to give yourself nightmares. And me, too.”

  “I’m not. All I’m saying is there must be something we can do.”

  A group of girls in bikinis walks by chattering and laughing. The beach itself is not lit up at night. It’s nothing but darkness out there, except for the swing of the occasional flashlight.

  “You don’t think it’s the tiniest bit pathological that all these people are acting like this isn’t even happening?” I press.

  Roxy looks at me. “Mayhem, you’re exhausting me. This is not our concern. Why should everyone stop living? Life should go on. Anyway, Santa Maria can take care of herself. She’s got her defenses in place.”

  KAREN DELANO, 16

  JESSIE CASTRO, 14

  KIMBERLY RAEL, 13

  BENITA JACKSON, 14

  TINA CHAPUT, 16

  “But—”

  “No buts. Lord, Cookie. I know it’s upsetting, I really do, but you can’t spend all your time focused on negative things. You have to keep living or you let the bad guys win.” Roxy drags me forward a few paces. I’m about to point out that she hasn’t been living all that much, and has actually mostly been facedown on the couch, when she stops and stares ahead like someone just slapped her into shock.

  “This used to be a thrift store,” she says. “I got pants here once, all leather with fringe down the sides. Matching bra. They were amazing. Damn Elle,” she mutters to herself. “You’d think she’d give me a warning at least.”

  Inside the store, a woman with huge, teased red hair is making scooting motions to a couple of kids, obviously trying to get them to leave. One has a mohawk and a jean jacket covered in safety pins, and the other has on big baggy parachute pants and a net shirt that barely covers his abdomen. His pink baseball cap is slanted to the side. He grins at her, flips her off, and runs past Roxy and me with a videotape in hand.

  “Marcy,” Roxy says.

  “You know her?”

  “Ex–best friend.”

  Roxy with a friend? Roxy with a best friend?

  “Why ex?” I say, as Marcy, who is shaped precisely like a potato, rushes out after the thieves.

  Roxy ignores me in favor of watching Marcy chase the kids. By the time Marcy’s on the boardwalk, she’s out of breath and they’re long gone, having disappeared into the crowd.

  “Little shits,” she wheezes. “If it weren’t for the goddamn asthma … Now I have to get security gates?” She squints at Roxy, elbows resting on her knees. She watches us a minute or two, trying to connect the dots that are obviously flailing around in her brain.

  Roxy crosses her arms and waits. “It’s Roxy, dummy,” she says, softly, then when Marcy still doesn’t speak, “Yeah … it’s me, sugar. How goes it?”

  Marcy pauses like the bottom just fell out of her reality. Her friendly, bright features settle into wariness. “My God,” she says finally, “I honestly thought I’d seen the last of you.”

  “Well, here I am.”

  Something is passing between them, something old and mired, like a current of water, one filled up with trash and seaweed.

  “Your hair’s platinum?” Marcy sticks a hand out to touch Roxy’s head. “I always thought of you as such a brunette. Didn’t even recognize you.”

  Roxy grins, and I can tell she’s relieved. “I needed a change when I left. Anyway, your hair’s red!” Her hands search around in her purse. She comes up with a couple of butterscotch candies and hands me one.

  That’s when Marcy’s attention shifts my way and she gasps. She pushes her hair back from her face as though to see me better, as though to see me at all. She steps forward, eyes getting larger. Now that she’s up close I think she has the biggest eyes I’ve ever seen, a watery green, swimming between her lids. She purses her lips and clasps her hands. “Lucas Machado’s baby girl.”

  I’m aware of myself in the overalls from the big bag of stuff Elle gave me, of the black T-shirt underneath, of my emergent tan, the way the ocean weather has loosened my curls so they spiral down my back and the saltwater has lightened the blue tips.

  She pulls at my hands and rests them in her own. They’re pudgy and soft, and I am immediately comforted, reminded of the three fairy godmothers in Sleeping Beauty who always screw everything up with their magic. She’s like a more punky version of that, as though one of those sweet ladies fell into a bag of makeup and a leather skirt.

  “You’re a vision,” she says. “An absolute vision.”

  When she skims my cheek, I don’t flinch, which tells me something.

  “We all loved your dad, you know. He was a very special man with a big, warm heart and a laugh that made anything seem possible.” She purses her lips again, which I’m already taking to mean she’s thinking. “You have that heart, too. Deep.” She pushes an index finger into my chest and I half expect it to go through my skin. “I ca
n see it.”

  “Stop harassing my kid with all your woo-woo crap,” Roxy says, but she’s smiling. “Marcy isn’t any good at small talk, May. Ask her the weather and she’ll predict your future.”

  “Be that as it may, you know what I’m saying is true,” Marcy says. “It’s impossible that you look at her without thinking the exact same thing. She has his heart, and that’s a blessing.”

  Until it’s not. Deep hearts dive off cliffs with no water to catch them.

  She’s welling up again. “She’s beautiful, Roxy. Just gorgeous.”

  “I know,” Roxy says, and it seems like she’s about to lose it, too. She sniffles. “Shit.” Roxy finds a cigarette, sticks it in her mouth, and glances inside the store. “So you own a video store?”

  Marcy nods.

  “That’s great, Marcy. I love movies.”

  “Me, too.”

  “Really?!” Roxy threads her arm through Marcy’s. “Tell me everything.”

  And then they’re chatting and it’s like I’m not even there and every three seconds or so, one of them says, “What?” and the other one says, “No way!”

  I head into the store, start scanning the shelves. Roxy is into kung fu movies with bad dubbing, so the mouths aren’t even close to moving at the same time. I like comedies where people fall in love and everything is bad and then in the end everything is good. Movies are something we have always done together, Roxy and me, something that has kept me from feeling so lonely as I sometimes do.

  This store has a pretty good collection.

  “… you just left us and … you could have…,” Marcy is saying.

  I stop and listen without turning my head. Roxy has a way of knowing when I’m being nosy.

  “After what happened to Lucas … I…,” Roxy says, and I strain even harder. They’re talking about my father.

  “Good movie.”

  I almost jump at the sound of a deep, throaty voice right next to my head.

  I glance down at the box in my hands. Aliens. I didn’t even know I picked it up. Neve, Jason, and Kidd are right in front of me. Neve looks highly entertained by my sudden fluster. She takes the box from my hand and considers it while I consider her: her breasts cinched into a black lace corset, the necklace resting between them, a row of black rubber bracelets climbing up her left arm, the dagger tattoo running down the right so she looks like a pirate.