My voice was locked in its box, shored up under sand like it was buried in the ocean floor beneath leagues of sea water.
The nice-looking woman, the mother, appeared over his shoulder and smiled down at me too.
“Hey, sunshine, why don’t you come on over to our house for a beat? Seems your family is having some trouble, and we don’t want you to be any part of that, do we?”
She had a voice like sun-warmed velvet, worn and smooth. I wanted to listen to her speak all day.
Still, I said nothing.
At that point in my life, kindness was more suspicious than cruelty.
I didn’t understand their angle, and I wished Dane would come out to help me.
Instead, he was inside with our father and a gun.
The neighbor’s dad walked across the street toward us, his cell phone to his ear, his voice low and angry as he spoke into it.
“Yes, Pine Crescent, Entrance,” he confirmed as he stopped before us and immediately took his wife’s hand. He looked down at me, and his voice went soft as he asked, “Hey girl, you think you can give me your name?”
My name.
He was a stranger, and my school teacher had said not to speak to strangers, but I’d already spent the first half decade of my life with strangers coming in and out of my home.
Strangers were the cornerstone of my father’s business.
The teenager smiled at me encouragingly when my eyes fell to him.
“Lila,” I told them. “Lila Davalos.”
“Hi, Lila,” the father said to me, a big smile in his thick beard. “I’m Diogo Booth. This is my wife, Molly, and our oldest, Jonathon. Why don’t you come on over and meet the rest of my boys? I got one about your age.”
“My brother’s inside,” I muttered, finally driven to speak because there was no way I was going to move an inch without knowing Dane was okay.
Diogo cursed under his breath as he shared a tense look with Molly, but the teenager named Jonathon distracted me by reaching out to finger a yellow petal of the sunflower I still clutched too hard in my small, sweaty palm.
“You like flowers?” he asked, low and intimate like he was sharing a secret with me.
I didn’t have friends. Most of the kids at Entrance Elementary School had nicer clothes, nicer homes, and nicer lives than I did, so they didn’t like me much. Some of them pulled my hair or spit on the scuffed patent leather shoes my mother liked me to wear. My Papá said it was because I was different, not just poor. There weren’t many mixed kids at school, but there were a lot of international students, so I thought it had more to do with the holes in my clothes than the colour of my skin.
So I wasn’t used to this attention, to the quality of a kind gaze searching my face in order to know me, in order not to scare me.
It was novel and truthfully, uncomfortable.
I squirmed. “Who doesn’t like flowers?”
Jonathon titled his head, the silken strands of his hair sliding over his tanned forehead into those warm eyes, tangling with his lashes. “Is that why you like ’em?”
Diogo moved away, rounding our little group to go to the house. I opened my mouth to protest because Papá did not like noisy neighbors, but Molly gave me an encouraging smile that shut me up.
“No,” I said quietly. “I like flowers because they’re wild and beautiful.” I twirled the mangled stem in my hand. “They’re free.”
It was the reason I had flowers all over the room I shared with Dane even though he was a boy, and boys weren’t really supposed to like flowers. But Dane was okay with it, with me and all my petals, because he said they were pretty just like me.
I wasn’t pretty, everyone told me so, from the kids at school to Mamá and Papá, but it still made me happy to think Dane thought so. Especially because he was pretty. He had a different mum than me, so he was darker than I was, taking after his African Canadian mother with her flawless skin and fine, dark curls. But he had our Papá’s eyes. Light and bright like the sky just after dawn when it’s newly blue.
I loved his eyes.
“I need to go inside now,” I decided, thinking of Dane alone in there.
Papá didn’t like anyone, not really. But he liked me, and he’d try not to hurt or kill anyone if I was in the house with him.
“I don’t think so, honey,” Molly argued, stepping forward so she was in line with Jonathon then crouching too. “Why don’t you stay out here with us until the police come and check on things?”
“Papá doesn’t like the police,” I told her solemnly. “Most people on this block don’t like them either.”
Molly rolled her lips between her teeth as I fed her the first indication that their family had not moved to a good place.
“Get the fuck off my front doorstep, motherfucker,” Ignacio demanded as he opened the front door at Diogo’s incessant knocking, immediately drawing all of our eyes.
Unfortunately, Ignacio was an attractive man. He had the rich colouring of his Mexican mother and the muscled build of a man who works with his hands. Ostensibly, he was a construction foreman and made good money doing it too.
In reality, he was Entrance’s biggest hard drug supplier.
We didn’t live large. Mostly because it would have drawn even more notice from the cops, but also because Ignacio had a plan.
Make bank then cut and run back to Mexico to live like a king.
My mother didn’t like the heat. She didn’t like drugs, and she didn’t care much about money.
But she loved Ignacio.
So she stayed with him.
I was five years old. I shouldn’t have understood their complicated dynamic, but growing up in an unsafe environment makes kids smart before their time.
I understood.
I also understood Molly’s shocked frown at my father.
He was too beautiful, too well dressed to be the owner of such a rundown house, to be the one to discharge a gun in his home with his kids outside in the yard.
This was Ignacio’s magic as a criminal.
People don’t expect beauty to be bad.
“Is Lila your daughter?” Diogo asked, completely unfazed by Ignacio.
Diogo was taller, built thick and heavy like he could wrangle a bull.
I thought maybe Ignacio should be the one to look afraid, but, of course, he didn’t.
“She done something?” Ignacio questioned, shooting me a look and a wink.
He wouldn’t mind if he had.
In his own way, he loved me. Called me his abejita, little bee, because I always had pollen dust on my nose.
If Diogo had a serious problem with me, Papá would put a bullet in his head rather than chastise me.
Family meant everything.
“No, but we were concerned when we heard a gunshot,” Diogo said calmly as he crossed his big arms over his chest. “Everything okay in there?”
Ignacio’s face tightened, features sharpening, his smile a slick spill of evil between his cheeks. “You a cop or something?”
“No, but I did call them.”
Ignacio leaned a hip against the doorframe and crossed his bulky forearms over his chest. He appraised Diogo as if he had all the time in the world and not a single care about the police coming.
I was five, but I knew better.
“You some big shot from Vancouver, think you can roll into my town and stick your nose where it don’t belong?” Ignacio mused, coiled and still like a snake before the strike.