Hailey's War

men would come. Truckee was not a big place, and our East L.A. crew didn’t quite blend in, and Julianne’s place, while set back from the road, wasn’t a cabin in the middle of no-man’s-land. It wasn’t safe anymore.

I’d gone into town to buy a car seat and other things the baby would need, and then I’d simply driven us both out of town in the Taurus. White woman, white-looking baby in a car seat, unassuming domestic car: Sometimes plain sight is your best option. On the streets of Truckee, I’d passed several police cars, but if the whole town was in an uproar over a baby’s kidnapping, it had been taking place behind closed doors. No one made any attempt to detain me on my cool, law-abiding way out of town.

“They can’t stop every car with a baby in it,” I’d told Serena and Payaso. “What kind of proof could they demand from me that Henry is mine, anyhow?”

They’d gotten away shortly thereafter, taking fire roads outlined on my area map. It was only now, about two hours north of L.A. on the 101, that we’d finally felt safe hooking up again.

“Have you heard anything from Iceman and Cheyenne?” I asked.

Serena shook her head. “They’ll be all right,” she said. “Don’t worry.”

They had stayed behind an hour, in order to clean the trailer-well, maybe not Iceman, but Cheyenne probably had. I’d insisted on that. When Julianne came home, I didn’t want it to be to cigarette butts in the ashtrays and hairs in the shower drain.

I said to Serena, “Pretty soon we’ve got to call Lara Cortez, so she can get in touch with Nidia’s family. I don’t want her in a morgue cooler indefinitely.”

Serena nodded. “I’ll get a phone number from Lara and call them myself,” she said. “It’s a death notification. Believe me, in la vida, I’ve seen this news dumped on mamis and papis in really screwed-up ways. I want to handle it myself.”

“Sure,” I said.

“Can I hold the baby?” Serena asked.

There was nobody nearby who looked remotely official, so I judged it safe for Serena to be holding the baby. The nearest people to us were a young Latino family who piled out of a green minivan. The kids jumped out, racing for the water fountain. The parents, a man in a straw cowboy hat and a woman in jeans and a warm-up jacket, got out at a more leisurely pace.

I handed Henry over into Serena’s arms, and she held him adeptly, supporting his downy little head. “Hey, Enrique,” she cooed. “Que pasa, lil’ homey?”

She seemed quite at ease, and it was worth considering that if Henry lived at Casa Serena, he’d have a dozen or more experienced babysitters. Most of the sucias had grown up diapering and coddling little brothers and sisters, and many of her former homegirls had babies of their own. But I also thought of Herlinda Lopez’s death and my own shooting down in Mexico. Adrian Skouras’s baby was four days old and innocent as rain, but he had an unwanted gift for bringing terrible trouble into the lives of people around him.

Who the hell could I have given him to? Who would I wish that on?

One answer would have been for me to become his guardian myself, keeping the lightning always potentially poised over my own head. Noble, but not practical. I was inextricably linked in Skouras’s mind with his grandson. Like Nidia, I would serve to identify him wherever we went.

The woman next to me called her children, and they ran to the table, where she’d laid out a lunch of sandwiches and boxed juice, a Tupperware container of apple and orange chunks, and vanilla cookies. The kind of lunch I remembered from my childhood: inexpensive, balanced, charmless.

The best thing would be for Henry to disappear into the anonymous hands of strangers like this, into the heart of mundane working-class or middle-class life. Of course, this family was Mexican, and while I tended to think of Henry as Mexican, he was only half. Henry might grow up to be easily taken for white.

There were infertile couples everywhere who would, in theory, leap at the chance to adopt a healthy, appealing infant like Henry, only four days old. But in practice, most of those couples would ultimately shy away from a dark- alley, extralegal adoption, if I even knew how to set one up. Which I didn’t. It was too bad, really. So many childless couples, wanting-

Wait.

An audacious idea had come to me.

No way. Put it out of your head, Cain.

“What are you thinking?” Serena asked.

“Nothing,” I said. “Come on, let’s go. It’s probably not smart for you to be standing around holding him like that. We should keep moving.”

Serena handed the baby back to me. “See you soon,” she said.

I walked back to the Taurus and strapped Henry into his car seat, backed carefully out of my space, and drove toward the freeway.

But on the road, I couldn’t stop thinking about the idea that had come to me at the rest stop, and by the time I was back in L.A., I knew what I was going to do.

fifty

At Casa Serena, an informal vote overwhelmingly suggested that baby “Enrique” live with the sucias, like a mascot, a baby boy with no mother but a dozen loving, devoted older sisters. The girls passed him around among themselves so much that Serena finally had to intervene.

“He’s fine,” Heartbreaker pleaded as Serena carried him away. “Babies need stimulation.”

“Not that much,” Serena said. “He’s four days’ old, for God’s sake.”

Deprived of the baby they’d quickly come to consider a living toy, the girls turned to the night’s second form of unexpected entertainment, the cable news channels and the latest on the baby-napping. To the sucias, this was the latest exploit of la leyenda Warchild, and they devoured the media reports with a mix of pride and derision. They jeered when Payaso’s GTO was reported as “possibly a Chevy Nova” and laughed outright at the police sketch of Serena.

“That could be fucking anybody!” Teardrop exulted.

Escaping into the privacy of Serena’s room, where she’d made a makeshift cradle from a dresser drawer and blankets, I gave Henry a bottle. Serena followed me in, holding a pair of cold, wet Corona bottles by their necks, then expertly cracked them open using the edge of the dresser and her hand.

When Henry rejected the rest of the formula, I set it aside and turned him upright, jouncing him gently. In a moment, he burped, a loud and healthy sound. Serena giggled, and I did, too.

This was the moment where most girls our age would have asked one another, Do you think you’ll ever want a baby of your own? Serena and I didn’t. We’d already implicitly asked and answered that question. We already knew.

She handed me a beer and said, “Have you thought any more about what to do with him?”

I had-more than that, I’d decided-but couldn’t say so. “Tomorrow we’ll brainstorm.”

She nodded. “Sounds good.” She set her bottle down. “Can I hold him again?”

I handed him over. Serena took him in her hands and bounced him gently. “Don’t you worry,” she said to him. “Your Auntie Warchild and Auntie Insula aren’t going to let anything happen to their littlest homeboy.” She kissed the top of his head. I snickered.

“What?” she said.

“‘Auntie Warchild and Auntie Insula,’” I said. “We’ve gone crazy.”

“A long time ago,” she agreed.

We put Henry in his makeshift bassinet to sleep. I lay back on Serena’s bed, my head at its foot, and took my first sip of the Corona, felt it trace a cold path down deep through my chest. “Ahhh,” I said, eyes half closed.

“No shit,” Serena agreed.

I opened my eyes again and looked up at her print of Halong Bay. It was an image so clean and pure I imagined Serena willing herself to touch it and suddenly be there.

“Warchild?”