Los Angeles Noir

began to feel looked-at. When he finally returned to school at Hollywood High, he drew stares everywhere he went. One of the football players said hello and gave him a hearty, friendly punch on the shoulder. Girls touched his scar with soft fingers that brushed against his cheek. Sandra, the one with the flowing black curls, the girl he had stared at for months without saying a word, cornered him by surprise in a hallway. For the first time, he was close enough to take in the scent of her perfume, a basket of overripe peaches that had dissolved into the air around her. Like everyone else, she had heard about his accident.

“Are you okay? I mean, that must have been awful, to be in a coma,” she said. “Are you totally, you know, like healed?”

No other schoolmate had asked about his health. Only Sandra had been thoughtful enough, which to Danny immediately confirmed what he had always imagined: that she was as saintly as she was beautiful. Now he was speaking to her, his nerves steady because he was a wounded warrior, not a boy. They talked about his accident, about life and death, about the school and how stupid everyone was. Sandra wanted to know what it felt like to be dead: She was convinced that he had “passed over to the other side and come back.” He made up a story about seeing clouds and angels that brought tears to her eyes.

Part of it was true; the old Danny had gone to sleep and died and this new Danny had taken his place, a Danny who wasn’t afraid to touch Sandra’s hand the third time they talked, a Danny who knew when to reach over and kiss her, how to wrap his arm around the arch of her back when they necked. A few days after they first spoke, they were under the bleachers at dusk, tugging awkwardly at each other’s clothes, scattered cups and hot dog wrappers at their feet. A week after that half-consummated encounter, they were in his room, fully naked on the bed with the football curtains and his baseball glove as witnesses.

When they said their goodbyes and he watched her walk away down the sidewalk from the perch of his bedroom window, he knew for certain that the old Danny had died forever. He felt possessive of her in a hard, brittle way: Her blue jeans belonged to him, her lips, and the small scar on her chin. It was an unexpected thing to feel; tenderness and vulnerability at one moment, and then a kind of anger the next. The third time they were alone in his room, he pushed her arms forcefully against the floor. He was about to pull his hands away and apologize, but when he looked at her eyes he saw that roughness was what she expected from him all along. The boy who had been shot had to have a core of steel.

Danny took to greeting everyone, all the time, with an angry gaze and found himself losing his patience for the routine and rhythms of the school day. By late morning, he was already squirming in his seat, daydreaming about fistfights, doodling pictures of fanciful weapons. On the bus home, he looked at the other passengers and wondered which one would challenge him, and how he would strike back with balled-up fists and kicks. He always won these imaginary fisticuffs, standing triumphantly over his bleeding adversaries. Finally, and without any good reason, he found his real-life self decking a tenth-grader named Pedro Carrillo in the cafeteria. The guy ran off, sobbing, and for the first time in his life Danny felt like a stupid bully.

In the days that followed, Pedro walked around the school with one eye swimming in a purple cloud of cracked veins. The word on campus was that there would be a settling of accounts with Pedro’s older brothers, a portly senior and even more portly dropout who held court several hours each day in front of a tattoo parlor on Vine Street, next to the star on the Walk of Fame honoring Rin Tin Tin. It was said that one of the Carrillo brothers would jump Danny on the football field during PE, or ambush him in the cafeteria, or that the other would shoot him on Wilton Place after he stepped off the bus. Danny was one young man against three brothers. Asking Elliot for a gun to even the odds seemed like the logical thing to do. Elliot produced one two days later, a snub revolver that bore no resemblance to the sleek weapon Danny had shot himself with. “I got it from a guy on Western, a guy my brothers told me about.”

Danny was headed home one Friday, walking past the elementary school, walking almost at a trot because he was going to pick up Sandra and take her to his room, when something cut past his ear. A half second later he heard the unmistakable report of a gun. Instinctively, he fell to the ground, looking up to see the largest of the Carrillo brothers walking toward him from across the street, a gun at his side, trying his best to assume the fierce and demented look of an actor shooting his way through an R-rated thriller. Danny stood up, quickly grabbed his own weapon from his backpack, and pointed it at Pedro’s brother, stopping him in his tracks. For a moment, the two gunslingers looked at each other with childlike befuddlement. Then Danny began firing, squinting his eyes against the explosions of his gun. Pedro’s brother started running, across the street and into the construction site, where he jumped into a ditch lined with metal rebar. From just a few paces away, Danny fired again, not squinting so much now and sure he would hit his target, but instead he felt a burning pain in his back. He fell, as stiff and heavy as a downed tree, and plopped down into a pile of earth, face first. A woman screamed from across the street. Pedro’s brother moaned from the ditch, calling out, “You shot me, you shot me,” in a pleading voice that seemed to belong to a five-year-old. Danny moved his head, an act of will against the currents of pain that ran up and down his spine, and looked into a deep hole carved into the soil. He saw chunks of mud floating about a pool of black water, and wanted to cry because he knew he would be buried soon, dressed forever in wet earth.

The daylight around him dissolved quickly. He entered a self-conscious dream, lifting himself from the ground and beginning to run through a dark corridor, stumbling toward home and his room, to the bed his mother always made for him. If he could lose himself under the blankets, his mother would kiss him goodnight. The dream ended and he was vaguely aware of being on a bed that was not his own, of lights shining beyond the black universe inside his skull, of his limbs being lifted and prodded, of formless voices chattering about him. He wanted desperately to open his eyes; he tried lifting his arms and kicking his feet, but he had turned into something heavy and immovable After the longest of efforts, he succeeded in opening his eyes, seeing what had to be an apparition: a dark man standing at the center of an aura of yellow light, a glint of metal on his chest, his lips moving but the words unintelligible. Danny slipped back into his nothingness.

“Danny. Danny. Danny.” It was a familiar voice, his mother speaking calmly, evenly. “Danny. Danny. Aqui estoy.”

He opened his eyes easily, naturally, without much effort at all. “Mama,” he said.

She was standing over him, as was Sandra, the two women on opposite sides of the bed, each clutching one of his hands in theirs, rubbing his fingers and his palm with identical strokes. No one spoke. For the moment he merely looked at them-the familiar, round figure of his mother, and Sandra, who had changed in some way he could not put words to. Sandra stared at him with brown eyes swimming in a pool of tears, fixed on him with a strange and desperate intensity.

“You look older,” he said. Danny sensed that many days, weeks, maybe even months had passed while he was asleep. The skin of his arms and hands had turned soggy and the sunlight outside the hospital window belonged to a different, colder season than the one he remembered. The world had aged in his absence.

“She’s having your baby,” his mother said.

He lowered his chin to look at Sandra’s belly, which did, in fact, rise slightly with an unfamiliar roundness. She brought her hands to the roundness and cradled it.

“Our baby,” she said.

Danny felt the blood rushing to his skull, and let his head fall back on the pillow. Being awake was too complicated, so he closed his eyes and waited, in vain, to slip back into sleep.

“Hijo, hijo, are you okay?”

“I knew we shouldn’t have told him,” Sandra said.

“What do you mean? You think he’s not going to notice you with your belly?”

“We should have waited…”

The two women argued, the words bouncing back and forth over his prone body, until he spoke again.

“How long have I been asleep?” he asked with his eyes still closed.

“Three months,” his mother said.

“Almost four,” Sandra added. “The detective was here yesterday and he said he saw you open your eyes. So we came here to sit with you.”

“And to pray,” his mother said.

He fell asleep to the sound of the two women whispering Hail Marys in different languages, his mother’s “… y en la hora de nuestra muerte…” tangled up with Sandra’s “… pray for us sinners…”

Detective Sanabria sat at the foot of the bed, the round and vaguely Olmec features of his face molded into a