When She Flew (2 page)

“For a long time, she flew only when she thought no one else was watching.”

—BRIAN ANDREAS

While the author was inspired by real events as the starting place for her story, this is a work of fiction. All characters, places, organizations, and events are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

1

T
he baby clothes drew Jess first, even though her grandson was now turning three. She couldn’t walk past the tiny flannel buntings, the three-snap onesies in pastel shades, without wanting to touch them. And the shoes! Target always had such cute baby shoes. Just small pieces of leather and cloth and rubber, yet they held so much promise: soon little Mateo would be toddling in baby Nikes, then wearing them to school. Then who knew? Kicking soccer balls, hiking the Cascades. Maybe becoming a cop, like she was, and like the boy’s great-grandfather—her dad—had been. One moment they were babies, the next they were out in the world on their own. It all went by so fast.

Too damn fast
, Jess thought. Nina, her daughter and Mateo’s mother, would be officially out of her teens at the end of the year, Jess was staring down the road at forty. Her dark hair had been sprouting dull streaks she would soon have to admit were gray; laugh lines remained on her face even when she wasn’t smiling. Jess would have loathed being a grandmother except that her grandson was the happiest, most beautiful baby she’d ever seen. Nina had been pretty and exquisitely formed from birth, with tiny shell ears and slim hands and feet, but she’d been quiet and reserved, reticent almost, even in infancy. Not bursting with energy and exuberance, like her son.

What size would Teo be now? Jess ran her hands along racks of little boys’ jeans and corduroys. Fall clothes, and Columbia was stuck in a heat wave. She hadn’t seen Teo since Nina brought him a couple months before for their June visit. He’d always been small for his age, but kids had growth spurts. Should she call Nina at work and ask, or would that only annoy her?

A table full of brightly colored boys’ T-shirts lay dead ahead. T-shirts were forgiving. She could get him a size three for his birthday and he could wear it even if it was too big. Jess wheeled her cart over, even happier to find Transformer characters centered squarely on the front of each shirt. Teo loved the Transformers movie—she knew that much. As she sorted through the shirts, though, she sighed. There were at least ten different half-human, half-machine creatures. He had a favorite, but which one?

She pulled her phone from her purse and hit speed dial.

“You’ve reached Nina Villareal.” Voice mail. It always shocked Jess that her nineteen-year-old daughter could sound so businesslike.

After the beep, Jess said, “Hi, honey. Listen, sorry to bother you at work, but I can’t remember. Which Transformer is it that Teo likes? The one that turns into the truck, or is it the Hummer? I’m at the store right now, so if you get a sec, call me. I’m not on duty until three. Thanks!” She tried to sound bright.

Within seconds her phone rang.

“Neither,” Nina said when Jess answered, not “Hello,” not “Hi, Mom. How are you?”

“It’s Bumblebee,” Nina said. “He only talks about it all the time.”

“Bumblebee, Bumblebee.” Jess ruffled through the shirts and ignored the dig. “What does it turn into?”

Something across the aisle—a sudden shadow, an unspecific darkening—caught Jess’s attention. A thin, middle-aged white man, a little too clean-looking, fingered the girls’ clearance tank tops with a wary expression, eyes scanning, scanning. It was midmorning on a Wednesday. The lights were bright, the store busy with beleaguered moms, sugared-up kids, and prancing teens back-to-school shopping, and there he was, peering around like a spooked but hungry cat.

“Goddamn it,” Jess whispered. It didn’t matter where she was. She saw it everywhere, like some kind of cop curse—the city’s dark side, the bottom of a rock turned over, teeming with peculiar life-forms creeping and crawling through dirt and rot. The dirt dwellers she dealt with were like subterranean worms and bugs: drug dealers and pimps, abusive parents, gangsters and thieves. She had tried for years not to notice them when off duty, but she couldn’t help it. This guy didn’t match the description of the suspect in recent sex-assault cases across western Oregon, but Jess wanted to get a better look. He was definitely up to something.

“Did you hear me?” Nina sounded annoyed. “I said it turns into a yellow car. Mom?”

“Mm-hmm,” Jess said, maneuvering past the table to the other side of the aisle. “Okay, then, thanks. I, uh . . . I gotta go, okay? Bye now.” She clicked the phone off and shoved it into her purse. She knew better than to say anything to Nina about what she was doing. It was exactly the kind of thing she’d always gotten in trouble for: paying too much attention to the bad guys and not enough to Nina. Now her daughter would say Jess was doing the same thing to her grandson: instead of focusing on his birthday present, all she could see was this almost-certain sexual predator. It was what made Jess a good police officer, but she sometimes wondered if Nina was right, if it had kept her from being a good mother. Wherever she went she noticed these things and acted on them. And not just at work.

When Nina was growing up, Jess had checked out every sleepover she had with friends. Was there an older brother, an uncle, a stepfather? All soccer and volleyball coaches were suspect until Jess got to know them. She’d had no problem letting teachers, neighbors, and sons of neighbors know that she wouldn’t have a problem arresting anyone’s sorry ass whoever tried to hurt a kid, and not just hers.

Early in Nina’s life, they’d stopped going to church, and with all the revelations about priests in recent years, Jess felt more vindicated than ever about that one. Jess’s mother didn’t believe the stories about the priests, and insisted that her beloved Virgin of Guadalupe kept a special eye on young girls of Mexican descent. Jess had wondered as a child with an Anglo dad if that meant she only got special protection sometimes. At least Nina had a Latino father to up her chances.

Leaving her cart behind, Jess traversed the shiny floors through bright fluorescence to the girls’ clearance racks, where she feigned interest in a crocheted cardigan stretched out of shape by countless hopeful girls trying it on. She pulled it off the rack and held it up to inspect it. The man moved into the juniors’ section, where two young girls, no more than thirteen, ogled flimsy dresses far too sexy for their age. Jess sighed, picturing Nina back in seventh grade, emerging from a dressing room in just such a dress and looking like a thirteen-year-old streetwalker. Jess had put the kibosh on all slutty wardrobe choices, but she suspected that her daughter wore whatever she wanted to as soon as she was out of the house.

Reaching into her purse for her badge, Jess slipped across the wide aisle to stand on the other side of the dresses. Through the gaps between them, Jess saw the tops of the girls’ heads, hair shiny and probably smelling of strawberry or watermelon shampoo. They chirruped like little birds, giggles punctuating every other breathy sentence. Jess swallowed against an old ache. She missed that sound, along with the pop-diva music through the bedroom door, even the arguing. Just the daily-ness of having a daughter, of having someone at home to cook and care for, and worry about, although Jess still did plenty of that.

“Excuse me.” The man’s voice, hesitant, halting. “Could you, uh, young ladies help me? I’m, I’m trying to pick out a dress for my daughter, and she’s about, well . . . she’s about your size, I think. Are you going to try those on? Could you try this one, too?”

Jess froze, waiting.

“Um, we gotta go,” the taller girl said, and the two hurried across the store to the exit, then stood and clapped their hands dramatically over their mouths before laughing and loping off, escaping into the wilds of the mall.

Jess watched with a mixture of relief and disappointment. They were safe, but now she couldn’t charge him with anything. He definitely was not the six-foot, two-hundred-pound suspect the sexual-assault victims had described, but she could still put the fear of god into him. She stepped around the rack and flashed her badge, shaking her head at the bulge in his dark trousers.

“Officer Villareal, Columbia Police. There are cameras everywhere, asshole,” she said. “It’s not like you won’t get caught.”

“I didn’t do anything,” he said, mildly defiant, but he shrank inside himself when Jess dropped her eyes to his crotch. “I was just shopping for my—”

“ID, please.”

“But I—”

“Now.”

The man’s gummy face turned white. He fumbled in his back pocket, pulled out a wallet, and extracted his driver’s license. Jess took it and studied it.

“Well, Mr. Leander, shall I call in for priors? Do you have a record?”

“No, I swear, this isn’t what you think. I’m just shopping for”—he fumbled again in the wallet, pulled out a school photo of an adolescent girl with a forced smile—“my daughter.”

“That so does not make me feel better.” She pulled out her cell phone and hit speed dial for the station house, then relayed his information.

After thirty or so seconds, during which the man looked as guilty as anyone ever had in Jess’s presence, the officer at the other end of the line replied, “He’s clean.”

“Great.” She snapped the phone shut. “Okay, Mr. Leander. I’m letting you go, but I will remember your name and this, uh, incident.”

“But—”

“What I meant to say was, get the fuck out of here before I change my mind and arrest you.” The obscenities, the threats—they were just part of the job.

The blood rushed back into his face all at once, the sudden red ugly, like something festering, and he squeezed his way through racks of clothes and out into the stream of people who flooded the mall to escape the late August heat. Jess felt sick knowing he’d try again, maybe even today, in another store, another mall, another neighborhood.

She returned the badge and phone to her purse and walked back to retrieve her cart. There’d be hell to pay with Nina the next time she talked to her on the phone, but there usually was. Jess found a size three Bumblebee T-shirt and decided to find a toy to match.

Teo’s third birthday was a bittersweet occasion, both a celebration and a reminder of how long her daughter had been gone and how little Jess had been in the boy’s life. Nina still insisted that she’d had no choice but to go live with her dad when she got pregnant at sixteen. It was so much more complicated than that, but it had left a cold white scar between them where they’d ripped apart—an ache Jess still felt deep in her abdomen, especially when she heard teenage girls chattering, or saw moms and daughters shopping together, talking and laughing.