Orphan X

8 Unmarred

The scent of the grill intermingled with car exhaust, thickening the air around the splintering picnic tables artlessly arrayed outside Benny’s Burgers. Inside, customers sat scattered among the booths and two-tops, but the dead L.A. heat had dissuaded anyone from eating out here on the square of crumbling concrete that passed for a patio.

Evan dropped onto one of the picnic-table benches facing the restaurant. Through the windows he observed a young girl sitting alone in a corner booth, coloring with crayons, her tongue poking out one cheek in a show of concentration.

He considered just how young an eleven-year-old was.

A few moments later, Morena backed out through the kitchen’s swinging doors, plates expertly stacked up along her forearms. She delivered the meals, checked on her younger sister, then set about busing tables. After a while she breezed outside, squinting into the sun, and dropped a ketchup-sticky laminated menu in front of him.

“Take your order?” She finally looked over her at-the-ready pad, registered his face, and jerked in a breath.

He said, “Exhale. Smile. Nod your head at me as if I just asked you something.”

She did all three unconvincingly.

“It is safe now?” she asked.

“Yes.”

He hadn’t noticed how clenched-up she was until her shoulders unlocked, settling a solid inch. She lowered pad and pen, and he saw the shiny wine-red scar on her inner forearm where she’d been branded by the heated muzzle of Detective Chambers’s gun.

“Can we go back there?” she asked. “Pack up our stuff?”

He’d told her to take Carmen and stay at a friend’s house until he contacted her again. It had been only one night, but he could see in her face that for her it had felt like an eternity.

“Yes,” he said.

“Can you take care of Pokey? He was mamá’s.”

It took a moment. The bird. “I’ll figure something out,” he said.

“What happened to him?”

Evan shrugged. A small gesture, but she understood.

“What if they think it’s me who did it?”

“He had a lot of enemies,” Evan said. Still, she looked unconvinced. “When he turns up,” he added, “it’ll be clear that no seventeen-year-old girl could have done that.”

His peripheral vision caught Carmen’s face moving from profile to full circle in the window across from them. He clicked his eyes over, and sure enough, she’d paused from her coloring to watch him. She must have sensed his stare as he’d sensed hers, because she quickly took up her crayons again.

Evan raised the menu, pretended to peruse it.

“I have to go now,” he told Morena. “I have one thing to ask of you. Only one thing. So please listen carefully.”

“Okay. Anything.” Morena was holding her breath again.

“Find someone who needs me. Give them my number: 1-855-2-NOWHERE.”

“I remember it. Of course I remember it.”

“It doesn’t matter how long it takes you. It matters that you find someone in as bad a situation as you and your sister were. Someone trapped and desperate. You tell them about me. Tell them I’ll be there on the other end of the phone.”

Morena took a beat. “That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

“That’s the only charge?”

“Yes.”

She looked incredulous. They always did. And he knew she would buckle down and honor the commitment, as had every client before her. Evan had never come into contact with a single one of them after a mission was over, and yet the next call had always come.

“Okay. I mean, I’m happy to, believe me, but…” She looked down at the fat, untied shoelaces of her knockoff sneakers.

“What?”

“Why don’t you just find them people yourself?”

“If I looked, I would find the same sorts of people in the same sorts of situations. Do you understand?”

Morena’s face remained blank, her plucked eyebrows arched and still.

He tried again. “When others look, they find people needing my help who I might not find myself.”

“’Cuz we go different places? With different folks?”

“Yes. And you’ve experienced things I haven’t. Which means you can see things I can’t.” He set down the menu. “So I need your help like you needed mine.”

What he didn’t add was that the act of helping was itself empowering, even healing. He wanted Morena to have something to do, the focus of an important task. She’d have to search and assess and then finally step in to give a second chance to another person who had been battered into helplessness. And when she completed her job, when she handed off that untraceable number, she’d be on the other side of the equation — a leader, not a victim.

Closure was a myth, but the undertaking might help her get her foot on the next rung of the ladder.

“I’ll find someone, then,” she said. “I’ll do it quick. I wanna get all this behind us as fast as I can. No offense.”

“None taken. Do it quick, but do it right.”

“I will.”

“Give my number to only one person. Understand? Only one. Then forget that number forever. This is a onetime service, not a help line.”

She bit her lower lip. “So we’re done?”

“Not yet. Your biological father. You were right. He died a few years ago. He had some assets, still unclaimed. A checking account with $37,950 in it. You’re a cosigner on the account.”

“No I’m not.”

“Now you are.”

She slid the pen behind her ear, dropped the pad into her apron, coughed out a note of disbelief. “How?”

He smiled. “The bank’ll be mailing an ATM card in your name to your aunt’s address. Your dad had a union job, came with a small life-insurance policy. A lump sum of fifty grand, never claimed. You’re now the beneficiary. That’ll get you started. You’re eighteen in two months. You can get emancipated or remain under your aunt’s care until then. You have your life back.” He stood and stepped away from the picnic table. “Now we’re done.”

He noticed movement in the window across the patio again and glanced over to find Carmen looking out at them.

“You’ve taken good care of your sister,” he said. “You should be proud of yourself.”

Morena’s eyes moistened. She blinked a few times quickly and gave her sister a little flare of the hand.

Carmen raised her hand to wave back, revealing the unmarred skin of her inner forearm.

When he walked away, Morena was standing with her knuckles touching her lips, regaining her composure. She didn’t thank him.

She didn’t have to.

The next afternoon, between checking on his safe houses, Evan swung by Boyle Heights and took a pass around Morena’s block. The young mothers were there in the front yard across the street, shoving their strollers and smoking. He parked one street over and cut through the backyard into Morena’s place.

The lawn chairs had been left behind, as well as the mattresses in the bedroom, but the bedding was gone and the closet was empty. The stained fish tank remained with its Elmo sticker. Evan checked behind the door and saw that the girls had taken the trumpet, and this gave him an unexpected flicker of happiness.

“Carrot?” the parrot squawked. “Please, please? Please don’t! Carrot?”

Standing in the empty room, he placed an anonymous call to the Humane Society and asked them to send someone to this address.

He walked out into the main room toward the tiny kitchen nook. The surfaces had been wiped down, everything left tidy. On the counter a half-filled bag of birdseed pinned down a handwritten note, which read, “I don’t have this month’s rent. I don’t know when I will. I’m sorry. I hope you don’t come after me.”

Evan looked at the note for a time, then crumpled it up and laid down six hundred-dollar bills.

He fed the bird on his way out.