breasts. Neither of my parents wants to find out the baby’s sex. It will be a surprise, as if my mother getting pregnant isn’t enough of one for the family. She smiles self-consciously because of the slight space between her front teeth or maybe she’s reacting to me. Although I try and smile back, I wind up looking somewhere else. It’s impossible not to be embarrassed by her big belly, that hardened hump of proof she and my father had sex.
The bedtime ritual doesn’t change once my sister is forced to return home a week and a half later. My father puts her to work placing the rest of the dining room chairs against the other slider, the one in our parents’ bedroom. That’s how Cooper entered his victims’ home—through an open slider. For forty-eight hours he had camped out in the abandoned house next door.
He was in no hurry. Running too fast is how most escaped convicts are caught. If he stayed in Chino long enough, he knew the cops would figure he was farther away and stop looking for him here. He was patient and smart about it because he’d done this before. Using his prison contacts, my father learns Cooper had escaped a year earlier from a psychiatric ward in Pennsylvania. Cooper had gotten a real California driver’s license under an alias and had been arrested under this false name. He faked an illness too, so he could be transferred to a minimum security prison.
With a manual bicycle pump, my father inflates the mattress we use for camping. My sister will sleep at the foot of the bed.
“This is stupid,” she complains, pushing the last of the chairs against the glass. Her face is plastered salmon pink in Calamine lotion to avoid breakouts. “He’s long gone to Mexico or Siberia by now.”
My parents’ bed is big, a California King, and I climb up on it and slide under the covers. I’m getting used to sleeping between them, and I like how it’s my presence that helps them get along better.
“How do you know he’s gone?” I ask.
My sister doesn’t bother answering and instead looks for support from our mother, her strongest ally.
“The cops found that family’s station wagon in Long Beach. There’s no way he’s . . .”
My father pulls out the pump, adds a couple puffs of his own air, then plugs the hole.
“Enough, Rhea.”
He drops the air mattress and it skids at her feet, looking more like it should be floating out on the pool than resting on the bedroom floor.
My mother stays quiet. She is too uncomfortable, too pregnant, to argue about something as trivial as sleeping arrangements. Sleeping through the entire night is her only objective. She props up three pillows where she’ll doze off practically upright. If she lies flat, the baby’s bulk cuts off her air.
A tall glass of ice water sweats on the nightstand. Lately, she can’t drink enough liquids, and sometimes in the middle of the night I hear her getting up to fill her glass at the tap in the bathroom. She’ll stand at the sink and down it in a couple gulps, then refill the glass before returning to bed.
As she stretches a sheet over the mattress, my sister groans loud, exaggerated groans. Where did her fear go? The fear that sent her crying and stuffing clothes in a duffel, insisting she be allowed to stay someplace else. Cooper’s escape was just an excuse to get away from our own house for a while.
“She’s right, Paul,” my mother finally says. “We probably should let the girls sleep in their rooms.”
My father clicks on the safety of his Savage and looks at my mother as if she’s betrayed him somehow. It’s the way he always looks at her when she sides with my sister.
Sometimes it feels like we’re on opposing teams—my father and I left with no other choice but to pick each other. We’ve always been the odd men out, and, as a consequence, he has raised me as both his son and daughter. He has taught me how to throw a baseball, straight and hard, and every summer he buys us season tickets, and together we sit drinking Cokes, cracking peanut shells and cheering on the Angels at Anaheim Stadium.
“Give it a couple more nights, June.” My father says this with the kind of care and caution that makes it clear who he’s really protecting. But he can’t ever keep me safe. I know this now. I know that no amount of locks on the doors, chairs at the glass, or rifles by the bed will change the fact that we’re defenseless in our sleep.
The boy is going to make it, he’s going to survive.
This news told to me again and again does nothing to rid the image I see every night of him left for dead on the floor of his parents’ bedroom—wide-eyed in his struggle to keep the life from leaking out of him between his fingers.
My mother turns out the light, my sister squeaks around on the air mattress, fidgeting to get comfortable.
My father settles on his side, settling in for some raucous snoring.
In the dark, my eyes snap open. This is when he comes, just as he would much later in life, for my father—that malaka in the guise of a black ski mask and gloves. I’m the only one in the family who is still spooked by the bogeyman.
THE FIRST SOUNDS OF FAMILY
I should be suspicious a few weeks later when my sister asks right after dinner if I’d like to go get ice cream. She never asks me to go anywhere, never even comes out of her room. Despite the statewide manhunt for Cooper, our parents have allowed her back in her own bed at night. It’s not like she’s busy on the phone, talking boys with friends. She doesn’t have any. Ever since we moved to Chino, she keeps more and more to herself. She misses too much school because she’s tired. And the few friends she did make have all but given up calling to find out what’s wrong. My parents now pay a shrink in L.A. to figure out what they can’t.
As I reach the car I call shotgun, forgetting in my excitement that I’m to be the only passenger.
We ride in her 280-Z, my father’s old sports car. It was a gift for having aced her driver’s test. The car is intended to be an incentive for her to drive to school, providing her with another kind of license—to show off. Before accepting it, she insisted that the maroon car be painted white like the Z the cool photographer drives in Madonna’s “Borderline” video.
My sister takes me to Baskin Robbins and buys me a double scoop of chocolate chip. For some reason she doesn’t give me time to eat it there. Never before has she let me eat or drink in her beloved car.
I hang behind in the store, convinced this is some sort of trap.
“Are you sure?”
Rhea has the lightest colored eyes in the family. They’re hazel, and they change colors depending upon the light in them. Something dark is in them now, something deliberate and dead set that’s doing more than clouding her judgment.
“C’mon, Paula,” she says. “Let’s just go.”
On the way out, I grab a wad of napkins.
Instead of returning home, she speeds south down Central Avenue, toward the outskirts of the city. We pass Chino Grain and Feed built like a gigantic aluminum shed, where my parents pick up bales of hay and straw for the horses. We pass the grass
