thirty-nine
The McNair sisters, Julianne and Angeline, had been the most beautiful girls in their high-school class back in West Virginia. As with many pairs of sisters who turn heads, the key to their appeal was their contrasts. Angeline, the older of the two, had seraphic red-gold hair and pale blue eyes that her sons, Constantine, Cletus, and Virgil, all inherited. Julianne had glossy dark-brown hair, and her eyes were a deep iris blue. Angeline was engaged by her senior year of high school, to a funny shade-tree mechanic named Porter Mooney. Julianne drank and danced and remained uncommitted through graduation, when she left West Virginia with a girlfriend to see America.
Julianne was both pretty and smart. She was quick-witted to the point of cruelty, but people forgave her easily, because she illustrated why people call intelligence “brightness.” She drew the eye and held it. In photos, you can see that she knows exactly how to lean out for a man to light her cigarette, in a way that is fetching but not too accommodating. He still has to reach. She is the object.
She met a young Army private in a bar just off the base where he was stationed in Texas and married him six months later. Henry Cain was her emotional opposite—simple, hardworking, forthright. To this day, I still don’t know what their marriage was really like. Part of that is because he died when I was very young. But part of it’s probably deliberate obtuseness on my part. I had loved my father; I didn’t want to believe he was unhappy for twelve years. I did know that in conversation, Julianne had used her brains and verbal quickness to chase him around rhetorically like a jay harries a hawk. He’d never openly expressed anger with her. Sometimes, when she would excoriate him for small things, he would shake his head and say quietly, “Why do you have to be like that, Jewels?”
I suppose she did love him, because she loved men in general. After his death, there had been plenty more. Air Force men and guards at the prison, then a switch to artistic blue-state New Men in Santa Barbara and Ojai, where she lived after I went east for school. She’d followed the latest one to Truckee, nearly on the Nevada line. Pretty soon she’d tire of the quiet Sierra life and move to a city, where the lights were brighter and the dating pool bigger.
She had always worked—she couldn’t have afforded not to—but through it all, and between drags on a cigarette, she declared that the world was a man’s world, ambition a joke. Sincerity was anathema to her, a form of submission. Her dislike of authority and sincerity found its natural enemy in her husband’s employer, the Army. Drilling with rifles, starting and stopping and turning when you were told, snapping your hand to your forehead every time you approached someone who outranked you—she thought it was Boy Scouting on steroids. It was not coincidence that I told nearly a dozen people my plans to apply to the United States Military Academy before I finally told Julianne.
“I despair of you,” she’d told me. “You could do anything, and this is what you want? The Army?”
“It’s not just the Army,” I’d said, not once but many times. “It’s West Point.”
In her way, Julianne thought she was a feminist, just by virtue of being smart and having casual sex, of mocking supermodels and cheerleaders. For that reason, she could never admit that being beautiful was important to her. She hid it so well that I was into adulthood before I realized how much she liked it that I wasn’t as good-looking as she was.
She was subtle. She was careful to reassure me that my port-wine birthmark wasn’t “disfiguring” and gave my face “character.” I never noticed how often she brought the subject up even when I wasn’t worrying about it. She sighed, too, about the shallow “California ideal” of the blue-eyed blonde. “It’s too bad you didn’t inherit my eyes instead of your father’s,” she’d say. “Californians are so hung up on that.”
I was mostly okay with not being as beautiful as my mother because I’d long ago realized that it was the reason we got along even as well as we did. If I had been better-looking, our relationship would have been a lot nastier. And had I been beautiful and my father still alive for Julianne and me to compete over—I didn’t even like to think about that.
As it was, I spent my youth being her foil: poor, sweet Hailey, who’d inherited her father’s plain brown eyes and his ass-aching sincerity and went east to play soldier girl in a touching attempt to emulate him. If Julianne “despaired” of me, she privately enjoyed doing so.
I’d called her from the road, told her I was coming up to her little trailer on a half-acre of land outside Truckee. I hadn’t told her that I was coming up with a ganged-up entourage. All in due time.
I’d explained the logic to Serena and Payaso: “It’s not traceable to her, and thus not to me. The land and the trailer both belong to this guy she nearly married. When their relationship fell apart, she started paying rent, but everything’s in his name.”
Now it was about ten in the morning, and we were ascending her driveway. We’d driven all night, taking turns behind the wheel, Nidia sleeping on Payaso’s shoulder. Awake now, Nidia was looking out the window. She didn’t look too happy to see more forested land outside, just like Gualala. I suspected she was probably more homesick for city light and fast food than Payaso and Serena and I were. She’d been without those things a lot longer.
Julianne came out onto her front steps, cigarette and lighter in hand. She lifted the cigarette to her mouth, then stopped when she saw that there were four people, not one, in the car.
Payaso killed the ignition. I said, “You’d better let me talk to her first.”
Serena said, “She doesn’t know who we are?”
“I’m easing her into this,” I said.
I got out of the car. My legs felt shaky, and not just because I’d been riding for so long. My mother hated being told what to do, and I’d never had to try before.
I walked up to the front steps.
“Well,” she said. “Hello, darling.”
“Hey,” I said. “You’re looking good.”
“Thank you,” she said. It was true.
“You didn’t say you were coming with friends,” she said.
“No,” I said. “Sorry, I didn’t.”
She lit the cigarette, the better to give me a narrow-lashed look through the cloud of start-up smoke. “So who are they?”
“The woman in the backseat is Serena, an old friend of mine from L.A.,” I said. “The guy behind the wheel is Payaso. And the girl in the passenger seat is Nidia. She’s six months’ pregnant and needs a place to hide until her baby is born. That’s why we’re all here.”
Julianne said, “Where, exactly, do you mean by ‘here’?” It was clear from the pointedness of the question that she already understood.
I pointed to the ground. “Right here.”
“Is this a joke, Hailey?”
“I think we should go inside to talk,” I said.
She opened the door and I followed her into her low-ceilinged living room. I said, “This girl, Nidia—it’s hard to explain, but it’s my responsibility to take care of her. I don’t have a home of my own to take her to. This is the only place I have.”
Julianne said, “They can’t stay here, Hailey. It’s out of the question.”
I’d anticipated that answer, and pulled out a roll of ten fifty-dollar bills. It was part one of two tactics I thought would persuade her.
“I think you should go to Nevada and stay with Angeline and Porter until we’re gone,” I told her. “This is for gas money and expenses. You could stay here, but I think you’d be more comfortable at your sister’s. Plus, I’d feel better about it. There are men looking for Nidia. I came here because this is someplace they can’t trace us to, but if somehow they did, there’s going to be a firefight, and I’d want you safely away from here.”
Her eyes narrowed. “A ‘firefight’?” she echoed. “I don’t know what you’re up to, Hailey, but maybe you should get some kind of therapy. I don’t think it’s healthy for you to be getting involved with criminals and playing soldier to assuage your feelings over West Point not working out. I—”
Part two: I crossed my arms, pulled my sweatshirt over my head, and stood in front of her in just my bra. As Julianne stared, confused by my behavior, I touched the corrugated, dark-pink scars from where I’d been shot. “Do you know what these are?” I asked.
She knew, I thought, but just couldn’t process the information.
“I got shot,” I told her. “Twice.”
“Jesus Christ,” she said.
I pulled the shirt back on. “I know this is hard to take, but I was never ‘playing’ soldier, not back east and not now,” I said. “When I do something, I’m serious about it. Nidia is my responsibility because I’ve made her my responsibility. And it’s also my responsibility to protect you. Take the money and go to your sister’s.”
She was still staring at me. I wondered if my father had ever talked to her that way.
Then she took the money from my hand. “Is it too much to ask,” she said, “for you to ask your friends to go into town for an hour until I’m packed and out?”