LILA
The greatest love and greatest loss of my entire life moved into the house next door when I was five years old. I was only a kid, so it might be hard to understand exactly how profound my underdeveloped brain understood that moment to be, that moment when Jonathon Booth unfolded his long, lean teenage form from his family’s minivan and stepped onto the lawn fifteen yards from where I sat playing in the grass with my brother, Dane.
But I got it.
Even then, I knew the absurdly pretty man with a thatch of perfectly tousled golden-brown hair and a gait so fluid he moved like water even in his gangly teens would become the epicentre of my life.
I believed every relationship could be distilled down to a handful of moments.
My complicated friendship with the man who would come to be known as Nova began the very same day he moved in.
Dane was trying to entertain me and failing. I didn’t like doing childish things like playing with the cheap, permanently stained toys he bought me from Value Village or reading from any of the books we checked out from the library.
Not even half a decade of life under my belt and I was already an adventurer, eager to drag my older brother from exploration to exploration. We walked through the woods at the back of our property discovering abandoned fox dens and families of deer grazing in meadows between the seams of the trees. I liked to dive into the icy waters that pooled beneath the craggy rocks of the mountains, running down the middle of the province from tip to toe like one great, boney spine and collect the wild flowers that bloomed on the grassy hills until I was coated in pollen and fragrant as wine.
But that day, Dane didn’t want to explore.
He usually gave into my whims, especially because exploring meant we didn’t have to stay in the small cracker box house with our father and his cast of criminal friends.
But that day, one I remember vividly from the exact cerulean blue of the sky overhead to the feel of the silken blades of grass tickling my bare thighs, something was happening in that house that I didn’t understand.
Dane did, and therefore, he’d decided we should stay close.
I wasn’t worried like he was about the sketchy man with the twitch and the leer, pockets bulging with cash and waistband distorted by the press of a gun who was inside with our papá, ‘doing business.’ I didn’t remember that he’d been by before, that he owed Papá a lot of money, and even the bulge of bills in his pockets wouldn’t have been enough to repay him. I wasn’t old enough to notice, as my brother did, that Papá, Ignacio, was the kind of man who exacted payment in the flesh.
Dane barely noticed when the grey minivan rolled to the curb across the street carting a U-Haul nearly as big as our house.
But I did.
All at once, as soon as the engine stopped, the car exploded with activity. An older man pushed open the driver’s side door while the rear automatically pulled back to reveal three adolescent boys who almost tumbled over each other in their quest to get out of the vehicle.
There was loud chatter, the sharp yip of young male laughter, and a lone female voice raised in motherly warning from the other side of the van.
Instantly, I wanted to go over to them.
Especially when the last occupant unraveled his long form from the interior and emerged into the mid-afternoon sunlight.
He had none of the tattoos he would come to be famous for, or the signature five o’clock shadow that perpetually dusted his angular jaw later, but he was still heart stoppingly beautiful, even at seventeen.
Even through the eyes of a five-year-old.
“Dane,” I whispered, about to impart the first secret I’d ever cultivated. A secret that had instantly formed in my untried heart. “Dane, do you see those people?”
It was as if they were too good to be true, and in that neighborhood, they were. We lived in a ramshackle house on the edge of the invisible line that delineated the ‘good’ neighborhoods of Entrance, BC, from the seedier part of town. The house across the street was nice, with a massive wraparound porch and large picture windows, even though the paint was peeling and the yard hadn’t been maintained in years.
The family looked nicer than our surroundings, every single one of the four boys beautiful, the father strong and strapping, the wife, when she rounded the car, young and sweet like one of my kindergarten teachers.
I think I wondered at the time if they were actually real or a product of my often-overactive imagination.
“Quiet, Li,” Dane hushed me, his eyes narrowed, lean torso torqued awkwardly as he strained to hear something.
Immediately, I quieted, my gaze moving to my brother, my protector.
He was twelve years older than me, tall and already stronger than our papá because he spent a lot of time working out to be so. He was smart, too, like a whip, one of his teacher’s had said even though I didn’t understand what that meant.
If he told me to be quiet, I was silent and still as a tree trunk.
Then, faintly, I heard it.
The tinkling crash of glass from inside the house and the low boom like a bass from a blown speaker as my father yelled at someone.
He yelled a lot.
So I didn’t understand why Dane was being so cautious.
I opened my mouth to say so when there was another noise, this one so loud even the neighbors across the street stopped their antics and froze with their eyes on our urine yellow house.
A loud crack like a heavy tree limb breaking off.
A gunshot.
Dane flew into motion, crouched as he jogged across the yard to peer into the kitchen window.
“Stay here, and do not come inside, Li, you hear me?” he ordered.
I nodded mutely, watching with my heart in my throat as Dane slowly opened the screen then the front door and disappeared inside.
This was not the first time we had heard a gunshot from our house.
When your father was a popular drug dealer, the noise was only one of a collection of abrasive sounds in the musical soundtrack of your life with him.
A little scream leaked from my mouth when a throat cleared behind me. Instinctively, I spun around, my fist wrapped around the stupid, stained, plastic bucket filled with flowers I’d picked in the meadow behind our house, I threw it at the person behind me.
The cute teenager I’d been eyeing blinked down at his dirt and petal covered denim shirt then peered up at me through the flop of wavy hair over his forehead. I noticed his eyes, so deep a brown they seemed as rich as the brushed suede jacket my mother wore on special occasions.
I held my breath, my primary fear forgotten in the face of this new, immediate situation.
He was going to hate me, beat me at the very least, or yell in my face for throwing dirt at him, I was certain.
My father had done more for less to Dane over the years.
Instead, his mouth thinned as a hoarse shout sounded from inside our house, and then he bent into a crouch so that we were eye level. His forearms braced on his jean-clad thighs, hands dangling in the gap between his knees so I could see the carefully drawn lines of a Sharpie splitting his skin with illustrations. There was a lone flower striking up from the dirt, but it was what he’d drawn beneath the earth as it edged up one wrist that drew my focus. Little creatures with sharp teeth burrowing deeper, a broken skull crumbling to dust at the edge of an eye socket. It was graphic and as horrible as it was alluring.
“You doin’ okay over here?” he asked, pulling my attention back to his somber eyes.