“You are my sweet girl, but don’t worry, I will see you strong before you are grown,” he promised.
I wasn’t sure why, not at the time, why that sounded so much like a curse.
The only thing I understood with absolutely clarity as I helped my father and brother roll the body up in an old sheet was that I didn’t want to be there doing that. I didn’t want to be wiping blood up with a white towel, watching it turn thick with blood and red as paint. I didn’t want to watch Dane’s jaw clench and his eyes smolder as he glared at our father the entire time we helped him out.
I didn’t want to be there when the police came, suspicious but resigned because they didn’t have a warrant and couldn’t enter our home without one. They questioned Ignacio who lied and Dane who lied, and even me, little Lila with the flowers in her hair who Officer Hutchinson often gave candies to whenever he was called out to check us out (which was often) lied too.
As I said, lying was second nature to me by then, even at five.
There is a saying my mother taught me.
El que con lobos anda, a aullar se enseña.
He who runs with wolves learns to howl.
You are the company you keep.
I had been born to liars, raised by liars.
It never occurred to me to tell the policemen the truth. I wasn’t hardwired that way.
All I knew after that day was that I didn’t want to be there anymore.
In a house with a father who scared me even though he loved me.
In a house with a mother who tried to be gone as often as she could to avoid the monster of Ignacio under all our beds.
I didn’t want to be there.
And my yearning heart had finally found a beautiful flower to land on.
If you had asked me the next morning what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would have told you with absolutely certainty, excitement in my eyes and resolve in my voice…
“I want to be a Booth.”
LILA
From that day on, I was with the Booths more often than not.
For Dane and I, the Booth family was a godsend. Jonathon and Dane were the same age. Milo was four years older than me, Oliver two, and Hudson one year younger.
We fit.
More than that, Diogo and Molly Booth were more than happy to make us fit. It was clear they were not the kind of people that could live across the street from neglected children and do nothing.
So almost every night, we joined them at their massive, hand carved oak table for dinner. Diogo was a fisherman, a good one, so we had seafood nearly every night from the leftovers brought in on his commercial boat. He liked to cook dishes from his native Portugal, rich stews that used the entire fish carcass and rustic bread he made using his big, rough hands. Molly was good at sewing, a necessity with four overactive boys, and she took to making me clothes too. She even forced Dane and I to shower more than our usual once a week.
It took me three days to love Molly.
Maybe three weeks to love Milo, Oliver, and Hudson.
A few months to love the quiet, somewhat rough and blunt Diogo.
And, of course, my little heart had loved Jonathon from the moment I saw him wearing the sunlight like a crown on his pretty head the day they moved in.
I’d never before in my life felt so cared for.
I knew my mother loved us, because she tried as well as she could to show us in little ways that she cared, even if she avoided the house as often as she could. She worked long hours at the diner off the Sea to Sky highway outside town, and the rest she spent at the bar. She drank too much, but the scent of it was sweet in my nose when she returned home late at night and checked on me in bed. She liked wine and sweet coolers that smelled of peaches and pears. I didn’t care that she drank because she was a nice drunk, even affectionate sometimes.
Ignacio loved Dane, and looking back, it was obvious he would have taken a bullet for his son, but he had a poor way of showing it. He was grooming Dane more than raising him. Preparing him to ‘be a man’ the only way he knew how. Being a man meant being ruthless, being loyal enough to kill or die for your brethren. It didn’t mean hugs or praise or shared mealtimes.
He was raising Dane to be a man, but he straight up loved me. I looked like him, for one. Even though I was an ugly child, there was the promise of his carved features in my plump, childish face, the lingering sense despite my mismatched features that they would somehow rearrange themselves as I grew into something appealing.
At least, that was what Ignacio told me. He cared about beauty because it was one of his most effective tools, and I could tell he was excited to see how I might make use of it when I came into my own.
He liked to keep me close, tucked under his arm, perched on his knee, a mini-me doll to draw compliments from his business associates. He liked to play the good papá, the family man drug dealer who was just trying to provide for his family. And he was, trying to provide for me, at least, his abejita, but barely for the son he viewed as a soldier and certainly not for the wife he didn’t love.
Outside our parents, before the Booths, we had no one.
Ignacio’s family was still in the Yucatan and Mamá’s family were originally from Puerto Rico, but her immigrant parents had died years ago.
So Dane and I had each other.
We were more than siblings. More than best friends.
Dane was everything to me, and even though I was only five, I tried to take care of him as much as he took care of me.
It was nice when Molly and Diogo stepped up to help us, though. If anything, it made Dane and I closer because we were happier.
Laughter became a daily occurrence in our lives, and I discovered for the first time that Dane had a belly laugh, deep and low like water rucked up from an old well.
I loved it, and I loved the people that gave that to us.
I should have known that it wouldn’t last long.
Nothing good ever did for the Davalos family.
* * *
* * *
I was six years old when my mother died.
Memory is a funny thing because I couldn’t remember her ever being much of a mother before her death, but as soon as she was killed, I could suddenly recall half a dozen ways she’d been good to me.
The way she worked oil through my thick brown hair then plaited it into braids that made me feel almost cute.
The way she collected cans and jars for me to use as vases for the many flowers I picked in the spring and summer.
The way she made maduros that tasted sweeter than candy, and how she let us eat them straight out of the hot pan, still dripping with oil.
How one time she had crawled into bed with me and Dane after a really bad fight with Papá and held us all night, singing sweetly and telling us stories of her own life when she was a girl.
I hadn’t known much about Ellie Davalos except that she was gorgeous like no one I’d ever seen before. Exotic and curvy and so unique I could pick her out of a crowd just catching sight of her almond eyes or big curls.
I hadn’t known much about my mother, but I remembered every single thing about the night she was murdered.
Because I was there.
I saw who did it.
And then, when she fell to the ground in her sullied yellow summer dress stained with blood, I was the one to catch her.
But first, I woke up to yelling.
Any child in an angry home has their own barometer for domestic disputes.