Page 11 of White Lights
“What was your brother doing at the restaurant at closing time?”
“He was helping me. So I could get out of there sooner.”
“That’s nice,” the second cop says.
“And about how much cash do you typically close with?” the first cop asks. “Before you split it in two?”
“It’s my uncle’s place. I wouldn’t do that.”
She hasn’t lied yet. She hasn’t said Mo wouldn’t do that. And she hasn’t made up the masked man. She’s trying to stay calm, but it’s been a rough night, and this cop is starting to piss her off.
“Why don’t you come with us?” the second cop says.
“I need to find my brother—”
“I don’t think you’re going to find him by walking down the county road in the dark,” the first cop says.
“You’re not in trouble,” the second cop says. “We’re going to go find your brother.”
“Maybe some more details will get clearer on the way,” his partner adds.
Dez knows these guys are out to get her, but she needs to find her brother. She’s spent, scared, out of options. This squad car is her only hope.
She thinks of the man on the motorcycle, wonders where he is by now. He hadn’t really said her name …
The second cop opens the back door of the police car. “Watch your head,” he says as Dez slides in.
“They went that way,” she says, pointing over her shoulder.
The squad car makes a wide, clumsy U-turn before Dez can fasten her seat belt. Her head slams against the window, and when she rubs the tender spot, she realizes she’s still holding the napkin the guy on the motorcycle gave her.
In the moonlight coming through the window, she notices something sketched in ink on the napkin’s front. Her stomach rises to her throat.
It’s a drawing of a woman’s face. An unmistakable portrait of Dez.
IT TWO IN THE MORNING, Dez sits in the hospital waiting room and silently pleads.
Please. Heal. Please.
Around her sit other people’s families, wearing bathrobes and inappropriate shoes, ripped from the flow of their lives into panic and confusion just like Dez. A mounted TV from the mid-nineties is chained to the ceiling, tuned to the weather channel, but Dez stares straight ahead, at a large coffee stain shaped like a three-legged centaur on the vinyl wall.
She’s had no news of Mo, only the vacant, placating line from the receptionist that the doctors are “doing everything they can.” She sits alone, knees knocking with nerves, under a black sludge of guilt.
She hears her mother and her uncle talking in low voices outside the automatic sliding doors. About her. She catches pieces she cannot concern herself with yet.
Lawyer, her uncle’s saying.How expensive?
Her mother’s shaking voice:The district attorney?
Dez’s hand goes to the edge of the eyeball in her apron pocket. She’s been studying the biowaste bin in the hallway behind the receptionist, looking for a chance to get rid of the eye.
But she knows she’ll never get rid of it. Not really. Somehow it will see her for the rest of her life.
She takes out the napkin the stranger on the motorcycle gave her to wipe her eyes. She stares at the drawing, feeling a crater in her gut. The likeness is faithful down to the pattern of her freckles, the curve of her nose, the cowlicked peak of her hairline. It’s somehow more accurate than a photograph. The lines capture an essence Dez sees every time she looks in the mirror. They show the hunger and conviction in her eyes, limned with her deepest fear. That she will never reach her dreams, that she isn’t even worthy of having them.
Every time Dez gets as far as wondering how the existence of this sketch is possible, the mechanical whir of the waiting room’s automatic doors brings her back to her surroundings.
To her brother. To this current crisis, which is bigger than anything she’s ever known.
