Dorian watches the flock disappear to the south, where they will roost in one of the palms and then vanish again. After the parrots, the crows always follow, bringing a different sort of energy—a stormy menace. Dorian doesn’t stick around for their arrival.
It’s rush hour and the freeway is eight lanes of traffic going nowhere. The wind is roaring overhead, outpacing the stalled cars. To the east the scattershot skyscrapers of downtown are a gray and purple smudge in the hazy sun that’s fading in the other direction. A few merchant posters—bold black letters on fluorescent paper—are attached to the fence that guards the overpass. “We Buy Houses Cash.” “We Buy Houses Quick.” Two promote concerts for Ivy Queen and Arcángel. Then there is the smog-stained memorial—a dirty cross made out of plastic flowers, a faded laminated photograph, and a filthy teddy bear—to a young woman who died on the overpass or below on the freeway.
No denying that this strip of Western is grim. Strip malls with hybrid Chinese food/donut shops, budget lingerie boutiques, busted ATMs, chop shops, tire shops, pet stores with sickly animals. She passes Washington, then Venice. At Cambridge she glances east. She can see the house, her legacy from Ricky and his parents—a mustard-colored five-bedroom Craftsman on the corner of Oxford one block down. A family house, able to accommodate the older generation as well as Dorian, Ricky, and Lecia.
Dorian lives there alone.
She pauses before continuing up Western. She wants to hold back the inevitable loneliness of the dusty rooms, the bric-a-brac she can’t part with. The skeletons of objects broken in her rage, the faded reminders of everyone who left or was taken.
There’s a bar two blocks north. Lupillo’s. A neighborhood dive—sticky floor, cheap drinks, broken locks on the bathrooms. Same place the bartender was killed a year back. Shot from the doorway by her ex-boyfriend. Now there is a beefy security guy on duty.
Dorian’s heard the owner’s planning to rebrand the place Harvard Yard, a nod to the surrounding Harvard Heights neighborhood. A smartass joke that doesn’t fit the community.
Dorian’s usually the odd person out, neither a heavy-drinking Latino nor a young interloper on her way to a concert or a night out in K-town. The other patrons leave her alone.
She takes a seat on one of the shaky barstools. The bartender’s wearing a T-shirt she’s cropped and tied over her flat stomach. Dorian orders a Seven and Seven that comes in a flimsy plastic cup. Latin hip-hop blasts from the sound system. The place smells like beer and taco grease from the restaurant that serves the bar through a cutout in the wall.
Dorian sips the cocktail through a straw to ease her way into the sweetness before putting her lips to the cup. The bar is nearly empty. Two middle-aged guys are playing pool. Several young women are huddled by the jukebox. The women are easy with one another, their hips bumping, their hair whipping back and forth.
The door opens and Dorian can see a woman standing on the threshold. Her breath catches on the idea that it’s Julianna even though she knows Julianna burns brighter, flies higher than the drop panel ceiling and dirty linoleum of Lupillo’s. Still, her mind tricks her into thinking there’s a chance for her to catch Julianna, stop her from running off, prevent whatever fate awaits her.
When she enters, Dorian sees that the woman couldn’t look less like Julianna. The games her mind can play. She’s seen them all.
The woman crosses to the bar, bringing a smell of cigarettes old and new. She sits down in front of a half-empty glass of something brown, which she polishes in one go.
She rattles her empty, then glances over and fixes on Dorian.
Dorian gives her a quick look, wondering if she’s one of the women who turns up behind the fish shack for a feed before returning to the stroll.
“Who the fuck are you?”
Dorian turns away. No use tangling with strangers.
“I said, who the fuck are you?” The woman is wearing a low-cut blouse that shows a large scar—a raised purplish-black welt—across the bottom of her throat. “What are you looking at?”
“Nothing,” Dorian says.
“Damn right, nothing.” The bartender slides the woman a fresh drink. She sips it, keeping an eye on Dorian. “How’d you know I’m here? You follow me? You been following me? You think I don’t see you?” Her hair is cropped close to her head and slicked down with oil.
“I don’t know,” Dorian says. “I don’t know you.”
The intensity of the woman’s glare is unsettling. She’s convinced of something, that much is clear.
Dorian has a new drink but she’s not sure she’s going to enjoy it.
“’Scuse me? What are you staring at?”
Dorian takes her Seven and Seven down in two gulps and pulls out cash. She’s out the door.
She hurries south. The wind is in pursuit, sending cans and paper plates after her. The palms on Western bend at impossible angles.
“You running away now? You spend all this time following me and you run away.”
Dorian picks up the pace.
“I’m going to find out where you live.”
Dorian pauses at the corner of Cambridge, checking over her shoulder to see how far back the woman is. She spots her down Fifteenth, a block away. For good measure Dorian overshoots her own block, takes a left on Venice, then doubles back on Hobart.
There’s no one out on her street, which isn’t unusual. Somewhere a car is racing down a side street, screeching and skidding. The wind twisting in the telephone lines sounds like someone’s sawing metal.
She opens her gate. The porch light comes on, revealing the messy bougainvillea and the vines that have invaded it. She fumbles in her purse. Her heart is racing. Her last drink hits her hard. She drops her keys. She squats to retrieve them. And there on her front porch by a potted pencil plant are three dead hummingbirds.
4.
IT’S LECIA WHO WAKES DORIAN THE MORNING AFTER SHE fled Lupillo’s. She’s there, sitting at the foot of the king-size bed, dressed in jeans and a white T-shirt, the clothes she’d worn the last night Dorian saw her. The jeans were a little tight but Dorian hadn’t complained. Because look at what some of the other girls had started wearing back then—midriff shirts that looked like men’s underwear, and pants that barely rose to hip height, anything to show belly and butt and a glimpse of pubic bone without being arrested for indecency.
And here she is, still wearing those clothes, one leg crossed over the other, leaning back on her hands, her face angled toward Dorian at the head of the bed. Dorian tosses a pillow to shoo her away. She doesn’t need this ghostly version coming around. She rubs her eyes, hoping the vision will go. But Lecia is as stubborn in death as she was in life. Fifteen years and the same dance, the same standoff.
“Go away,” Dorian says. That’s the most she’ll say. She refuses this ghost. But it’s insistent. And Dorian has to be vigilant or she’ll lose her grip. She works hard to keep the past in the rearview.
She peeks through her fingers. Lecia’s braiding her hair, twisting her wild orange curls into a thick plait just like Dorian used to when she was little.
To talk to Lecia is to be satisfied with spirits and memories. To acknowledge her is to start a dangerous slide, an irreversible descent.