I didn’t know if there was a word for the whirlwind my very upset family created while they tried to treat my wounds, clean me up, and interrogate me all at the same time while talking over each other, but if there was one, I would definitely have to learn it. I refused to answer any questions until after they let me shower. My demand was met with howls of protest, but I held firm in the face of adversity, and when Bug conveniently sent the drone video of our fight with Celia, the family surrendered and released me so they could watch it.
The little dog was a girl. It took fifteen minutes of strategic mat cutting to reveal that fact. After I trimmed the worst of her fur, I had taken her into the shower with me. At first, she cowered in the corner, but by the end of it, she decided bath time wasn’t so bad. The water that ran off her on the first rinse was black and smelled like a sewer. I had to shampoo her with Dawn dish soap twice.
After the shower, she dashed into my loft, running in circles while I dried myself off. One of her parents had to have been a dachshund and the other a Scottish terrier or some similar breed. Her little body was long with short legs that looked delicate. Her black and now glossy fur grew longer and coarser on her back and butt, where it curled backward in clumps. Her ears were floppy, her jaws long and framed with sideburns reminiscent of a Scotty, and when she opened her mouth, her teeth were huge in proportion to her head. It looked like a bear trap from old cartoons.
She was also painfully thin. Getting rid of the mats must’ve cut her weight by a third. Her ribs stuck out and vertebrae protruded from her spine.
I ended up chasing her with a towel for three whole minutes, until inspiration struck, and I threw it on the floor. She burrowed under it and I caught her and dried her off.
Someone knocked on my door. Well, that didn’t take long.
“Who is it?”
“It’s me,” Mom said.
I knew this was coming. The last thing I wanted was to talk to Mom.
After Dad died, everything had been in shambles. The business was failing; our house was gone; we had to change schools, which to most people would be no big deal and to me was catastrophic; and most importantly, Dad wasn’t there. When my mother deployed, Dad took care of us. When I had a problem, I went to Dad before I went to Mom. Up to that point, Dad knew more about me and he always managed to talk me off whatever ledge I had climbed on.
I’d been twelve years old and the idea that he would never be there again was apocalyptic. It felt like my world had ended.
And then Mom somehow picked us all up and made it okay. It took me nearly half a decade to realize Mom herself was not okay.
My mother had spent months as a POW in the Bosnian Conflict. It left her with a permanent limp and enough invisible scars to last a lifetime. She never dealt with it because her husband became sick, so she’d had to go from being deployed six months out of a year to being a full-time parent, and the sky was falling. It came back to haunt her at the worst possible moment. She lost her PI license and the only way she could provide for us. Nevada had to become the breadwinner before she even finished high school. My mother was no longer a soldier or a PI. It made her feel helpless.
The conversation we were about to have would make her feel helpless again, and there was nothing I could do to avoid it. She’d climbed my ladder with her limp and she wouldn’t go away until I leveled with her.
“Catalina?”
I got up off the floor and opened the door.
“Let me see that hip,” Mom asked.
I turned and pulled down my sweatpants. “It’s just bruised. Look, I can put weight on it and everything.” I heroically stood on one foot.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. Nothing broken.”
“Your grandma took your sister and two guards and left. She said something about two Guardians at the Keystone Mall.”
That was exactly the line of questioning I was hoping to avoid. “Uh-huh.”
Mom pinned me with her stare. “Why are there Guardians at an abandoned mall?”