“Trumpet blasts. An Emancipation Proclamation?”
“My dream, undeferred.”
Joshua craned upright but couldn’t see her. “I want to meet this little celebration.”
“Of course. Just a sec, I need to grab her bottle.” She reached into her purse and pulled out a small hard-plastic bottle with a pink plastic nipple. Joshua did a double take, unsure what he was seeing. It was a toy, a play bottle with pretend milk that disappeared when tipped over.
When Jayden was little, he used to suck on baby spoons for teething. “Does she play with that after she’s done eating?”
Bianca turned around. “What do you mean?”
Then he saw Jubilee.
He knew it had to be Jubilee because Bianca held her like a baby, lifting the toy bottle to her mouth. Only her mouth didn’t open. Man, what the hell? What was going on?
She wore a pink sundress made of terry cloth. Peeking from underneath were pink-and-white bloomers. Her short, tawny hair was parted to one side and fastened with a plastic butterfly barrette. Her eyes, wide open and clear, were gray, the color of a storm. Her lips and cheeks, puckered pink. A dimple indented one caramel cheek. On her wrist, a tiny charm bracelet with “Jubilee” inscribed. She was nonresponsive. Like a dead baby. He almost thought she was a dead baby. But no. A doll. The most lifelike doll he’d ever seen. A stone in Bianca’s arms. A heavy rock in his gut. It clenched like the potato salad was turning bad inside him. He felt the urge to vomit. Not because Bianca wasn’t gorgeous and mysterious. She was. But he was scared. Damn, this was scary. Was this a joke? Was he supposed to play along? He didn’t get it. He shook his head.
“Bianca? What’s going on?”
She stared at the doll as she pretended to feed it. His skin got all prickly like he was watching a horror movie. What would make this woman who seemed so smart and with it and pulled together act so . . . insane? There was no other way to say it, man. She was acting insane. His stomach dropped again.
She’d seemed so normal. She was normal. Right? I mean, everything else. But the doll? He looked at her carefully, quietly. Come on, she had to be joking. He waited for her to start laughing. She was pulling his leg. She had to be.
He sat up and peered into the stroller hoping the real Jubilee was there, waiting to be lifted up, that her mother the prankster was getting him good.
The stroller was empty. This was more than he’d bargained for. He put his hand to his head, rubbed his eyes. He felt so damn uncomfortable and could not for the life of him figure out what he was supposed to do.
“Um, Bianca?” He had to say something. This was too weird. He couldn’t unpeel his eyes from her as she cradled that doll in her arms. She clucked and tsk’d as she moved, staring into Jubilee’s eyes as she worked, then, in the softest, sweetest voice, began to sing:
“Somewhere over the rainbow, skies are blue, and the dreams that you dare to dream really do come true.”
Her song haunted him. It suspended them in this strange mise-en-scène, as if time had stopped, the spotlight directed on Bianca and her baby doll, and he had no idea if he was part of the play or a spectator in the audience. He exhaled. She wasn’t playing. This was Jubilee.
“Oh shit, Bianca.”
If she was listening, she didn’t acknowledge him. He watched her. Watched as she swept baby-fine strands from Jubilee’s forehead. She held the doll’s body to her chest and sang. It broke his heart.
“If happy little bluebirds fly, why, oh why, can’t I?”
She was messed up, bad. Bianca, who seemed so light, was heavy. It fell over Joshua like grief, had him there hunching. He scrolled the index of his memory, skimming his counseling books, flipping page after page. All the stories he’d read. What branch had broken inside her? What scar had healed thus? Does it crust and sugar over—like a syrupy sweet? Maybe it just sags like a heavy load. “Oh shit,” he said again. And because he didn’t know what else to do, because he couldn’t stay there as sad as she was making him, he stood, mumbling something about needing to check on the kid, then walked toward Jayden, pouring bucketsful of sand onto the boardwalk.
He glanced back. Bianca held the plastic bottle to the doll’s O-shaped mouth.
It was jacked up. Come on. It had to be a joke. She was testing him.
But she’d turned so bright when she pulled that doll from the stroller. Her face reminded him of Olivia’s, the day she handed him Jayden. His chest hurt. He pulled his inhaler from his pocket and puffed it twice. Ocean waves roiled in the distance.
Joshua watched Bianca from the safe distance he’d created between them.
His stomach hurt. He thought of the home for troubled youth where he’d interned. Many of the patients were “prodromal,” not yet fully psychotic but showing early signs of illness. Some of them scared the shit out of him. One boy had been killing small animals and drinking their blood, worried he might start drinking human blood. That was sick. But Bianca wasn’t like that. Right?
Jayden was playing in the sand, oblivious to the potential danger. The boy hadn’t been scared of her. If she were twisted, his boy would’ve sensed it. Kids know that stuff, right? He wouldn’t have sat on her lap, wouldn’t have treated her like a friend. Joshua was grasping at straws. What would Olivia have said about Bianca? She was gorgeous. And intelligent. She laughed at his dumb jokes. She liked the journal. She liked Jayden. She didn’t seem sick. He couldn’t imagine her killing anything. Couldn’t imagine her having those dark thoughts. She didn’t seem like a danger. You should walk away, Joshy man. Call it. Time of death, call it. It was crazy, and he was crazy for even considering walking back toward the grass, toward the woman on the blanket who’d already burrowed her way into his mind. Damn. Into his heart.
But he was curious. Maybe that’s all it was at first. He wanted to find out more. He had to know—why Jubilee? Why did Bianca need that strange little doll, who almost looked like a living, breathing infant?
She called him back without calling him back.
She called him back, and he couldn’t help himself, he needed to find out more. He needed more time with her.
What harm could it do to wait and see?
Two
La Bee
One Year Earlier
Before Jubilee
In Gabe’s kitchen, Bianca and Gabe’s mother, Esme, chopped cucumbers, cilantro, and cubes of Monterey Jack cheese instead of the more expensive abalone. Bianca diced with quick, deliberate strokes, imagining the restaurant she and Gabe planned to open in the Imperial Valley. They would ask Gabe’s dad, Hector, for help with the down payment—if they didn’t chicken out. Hector was a huge, formidable man who scared Bianca. But Esme she loved. Esme she trusted. It was her house Bianca went back to instead of Mama’s seven months ago when Dad died.