Natasha took her brandy to my couch and pulled her feet up. “What was your family like?”
I joined her on the couch. She listened with rapt attention as I open-booked my life for her. I could tell her anything-judgment free. I told her about Tenttown. I told her how my father would tie me up while he beat my mother. I showed her the rope-burn scars. I told her how I was always getting kicked out of school for fighting. When she asked if I had any regrets, I told her that I wished I had killed my father before his liver beat me to it.
“Really? You wouldn’t feel guilty killing your own father?”
“The bastard deserved it. I deserved the chance to kill him myself. His liver robbed me of my vengeance. It was my only chance to see the world as a fair place.”
She wouldn’t let it drop. She kept asking questions about my father and how I could possibly kill him, my own flesh and blood. He beat my mother. I didn’t know how much plainer I could make it.
She asked me if I’d had any happy times when I was growing up. I told her about how my mother and I used to make shabbakia together. Natasha had never heard of it. No surprise there. Nobody had ever heard of it. I’d never seen the honey-soaked pastries anywhere on Lagarto, not once. It was an Earth thing. Moroccan was what my mother would say. I didn’t even know how my mother learned to make it, but whenever she managed to scrape a few coins together, that was what we’d do. It would take the entire day, buying the ingredients, mixing the dough, forming it into rosettes. Then we’d stack up the trays and carry them to the public deep fryers. Next we’d bring the hot golden pastries all the way back to our tent and soak them a pot of honey that sat over the fire. I was amazed Natasha was still listening when I told her that we’d finish it off by sprinkling the shabbakia with toasted sesame seeds.
She had more questions, but I refused to answer until she answered some of mine.
Her favorite flower was a lily. Her favorite food: lamb.
She told me she’d had a big brother who died of pneumonia before she was born. She wished he were still here. She would’ve loved having a brother. She was proud of the fact that her mother saw to it that his first name would be her middle name. That way her brother would always be with her.
She liked school. She didn’t like sports. She loved to read. She hated to play games-cards, dominoes, mahjong…She didn’t like any of them.
I asked about her father. She told me he was a bellhop who dealt O on the side until he made enough money to start his own drug business. When I asked about her mother, she said her mother didn’t know what her father did for a living, and if she did, she’d have to Hail Mary for eternity. She thought her mother had to know on some level, but it was too scary for her to confront, so she just stayed away from the basement.
I wanted to ask more about her father. I’d seen the strange ways she’d interact with him. I knew she was holding something back, but fair’s fair. I held back the fact that I spied on her every day.
I woke with the sunrise, Natasha’s arm across my chest. I traced the scar on her wrist with my finger.
“That tickles,” she said as she pulled her arm away and rolled over.
I curled up next to her, “Where did you get that scar?”
She tensed under my hold. “I ran into a glass door when I was little. I thought the door was open. It was stupid.”
I tried to sound natural but came off guarded. “Oh…that must’ve been awful.”
“It was.”
The room began to warm with the sun beaming in. I didn’t want to let go of her but I forced myself to get up and turn the aircon to full. By the time I went back to the bed, Natasha was already up and getting dressed.
I didn’t want her to leave yet. “Do you want some coffee?”
“Sure.”
The sink was full of dishes from the previous night. I worked around them, rinsing the coffeepot and starting some water on the stove. “You like it black, right?”
Natasha came out buttoning her shirt. “Yeah.”
I was pulling two mugs out of the cupboard when Natasha came up behind me and put her arms around me. “Are you my knight in shining armor?”
I wanted to be. “I don’t know… Am I?”
“When are you going to arrest my father?”
“I don’t know. Soon.”
“What are you waiting for?”
“We need more evidence,” I lied.
“How soon will you have it?”
“Why do you want me to arrest your father?”
“Because I hate him.”
“Why?”
After a pause she repeated, “How soon?”
“I don’t know.”
She held on to me while I poured the coffee. Then we sat across the table from each other. I watched her blow on her coffee before each sip. She barely moved her lips as she blew, like she knew a pucker would be unbecoming. She was all cool grace on the surface, but if you looked close, you could see what I now thought of as the slow burn smoldering behind her eyes.
I asked her, “What about your mother?” She puzzled at my question. “Do you hate her, too?”
She put the mug down. It clunked on the table. “I don’t want to get into it.”
Another week had passed. Natasha and I had seen each other every single day. We would meet for lunch. We would meet for dinner. We would talk for hours.
For me, the highlight of the week came two days ago. I’d left Natasha at my place while Paul and I spent the day beefing up our arrest numbers. We busted a pair of pimps that we’d busted six months earlier, and then we nabbed four dealers, all of them repeats of earlier arrests. As long as nobody paid much attention to the fact that we’d begun arresting the same people over and over, we’d be able to keep up our numbers indefinitely.
After Paul and I had finished a long work day, we went back to the stakeout pad to fast-forward through a day’s worth of video. Nothing new. I’d finally arrived back home at a little before midnight. Natasha was still there, but she’d fallen asleep on the sofa. I didn’t want to wake her, so I went quietly into the kitchen to grab a snack. I flicked on the light. The counters were covered with platters stacked high with shabbakia.
Tonight, I pulled a piece free from a cluster of rosettes that had stuck together. I took a bite and savored every bit of it. I said, “I still can’t believe you made this for me.”
She smiled. “Why don’t you tell me another one of your stories?”
She loved cop stories, the ones where the good guy catches the bad guy. Her fiery eyes would glow as I spun the police tales. Some nights, we’d stay up the entire night, her curled up on my shoulder, me churning out yarn after yarn. It didn’t take long for me to run out of stories, so I began making them up. The one time I’d admitted that most of the stories weren’t true, she’d just hushed me and made me tell her another.
I was eighty-sixed on stories. I had to think on it for a few. I ate another piece of shabbakia while she waited for me to start. I couldn’t come up with anything else so I started with this: “A little while back, Paul and I caught a tip on an offworld buyer who was on the surface looking to score some O.”
“Really, an offworlder?”
I licked my fingers. “Yeah. Her name’s Mai Nguyen, and she has two badass bodyguards…”
I told her how we found Nguyen and her heavies at a hotel and tailed her out to an abandoned factory where a big drug deal was going down. When the seller turned out to be her father, she was tip-to-toe captivated. To Natasha, he was the baddest of all bad guys. I told her the whole story-the abandoned factory, the flycam, how I wound up shitting myself when I got zapped, how everybody got away.
She kissed the scars on my hand and said, “That was the best one yet.”
“But it didn’t have a happy ending. The bad guys got away.”
She smiled that delicious smile of hers. “They didn’t get away. The story’s just not over yet.”
ELEVEN
