On their way back to the hotel, Lien-hua tried to ease up on the gas. After all, teaching Tessa bad habits would not be the best way to cultivate Pat’s friendship.
Tessa sat quietly, staring out the window. Lien-hua decided it would be polite to start a conversation, but she didn’t want Patrick’s stepdaughter to feel like she was being profiled, psychoanalyzed.
Start with something safe.
“So, Tessa, what did you think of the aquarium? Not the spooky backroom stuff, I mean the fish. The sharks.”
Tessa shrugged. “Yeah, I liked it, but I saw a couple sharks eat this fish. That was way disgusting. I don’t like watching things die.”
Oh. Great conversation starter that was.
“Well, we have that in common then. I don’t like watching things die, either.” Change the subject, change the subject. “I heard Pat call you Raven. Is that your nickname?”
“Just for him. No one else.”
“You don’t like it?”
“No. I do. But don’t tell him. I never had a nickname before. I like Raven.” Tessa paused. Stared out the window, at the clouds.
“Sometimes I wish I could fly like they do. Today, I pretended I was flying with the sharks.”
“While they were swimming over your head?”
“Yeah. I thought it’d be cool to swim with ‘em. I used to swim a lot, when I was a kid. For a while I even wanted to be a lifeguard.”
She swung her gaze to Lien-hua. “Do you swim?”
“No. I never learned how. Just between you and me, I’ve always been kind of scared of the water.”
“Afraid you might drown?”
Lien-hua drummed her fingers against the steering wheel. “Are you hungry, Tessa? Need to grab a bite to eat?”
“I’m OK.”
Lien-hua noted the mileage. Nine more minutes to the hotel.
“So, Agent Jiang. Your first name, Lien-hua, what does that mean, anyway?”
Good. Safe ground again.
“It means lotus. My mother was Buddhist-”
“Was? What, did she switch to something else?”
“I’m afraid she was killed, Tessa. In a car accident. Three years ago.”
Death again. Why does this conversation have to keep coming back to death?
“Oh. Sorry, I didn’t mean to…”
“It’s OK.”
A taut silence. They’d both lost their mothers prematurely. Un-related by blood, thought Lien-hua, but sisters in sorrow.
After a few moments, when the time finally felt right to continue her explanation, Lien-hua said, “Many Buddhists consider the lotus the most beautiful flower in the world. It grows in the mud, but blooms pure and white, untainted by the soil. The Lotus Sutra is one of the most sacred Buddhist texts.”
“A sutra. That’s a discourse, right?”
“Yes. A teaching of Buddha. In the Lotus Sutra, the lotus represents how humans live in a corrupt world but can reach enlightenment and live uncorrupted lives, with absolute happiness and beauty, free from life’s illusions.” Lien-hua paused for a moment.
The next sentence reminded her too much of the incident no one in her family spoke of. It was hard to say the words. “So, when I was born, naming me after the lotus seemed like a good way to honor my mother’s faith.”
“So, do you believe that too?” asked Tessa. “The stuff about enlightenment and happiness and everything?”
Lien-hua nearly missed her turn, whipped the car to the right, snaked between an SUV and a minivan-both with babies in the backseat, both driven by women talking on cell phones-and jumped onto the Five.
“Sorry about that,” Lien-hua said.
“No, it wasn’t bad,” said Tessa. “Patrick was right.”
“Anyway, to answer your question, well… I used to believe in those things, but in this job… well… I guess I’ve seen too much corruption in people to believe them anymore. I think we can live beautiful lives, Tessa, wonderful lives, but we’re not just rooted to this world, we’re also a part of it. I don’t think we can ever be perfectly free or pure. We can’t rise above who we are.”
After a long pause that stretched into awkwardness, Tessa asked softly, “Can someone else lift us?”
The girl’s question caught her unaware. Lien-hua searched for the right words. The right answer. Found none. “I don’t know, Tessa. I guess I never thought of it quite like that.”
When Lien-hua was talking about how people are corrupted, but also beautiful, Tessa thought that, for just a flicker of a moment, she sounded like her mom.
When Tessa’s mom had found out she was dying of breast cancer and that the chemo wasn’t working, she told Tessa one day that everyone has a form of cancer. Tessa hadn’t understood what she meant, but then her mother, who was a faithful churchgoer, explained, “Even Jesus knew that. It says in the Bible that he didn’t trust people because he understood human nature. He knew what mankind was really like.”
“That’s in the Bible?”
“Not an exact quote,” her mother had said. “But it’s in there.
Second chapter of John, the last couple verses. We have cancer of the heart, Tessa. Evil doesn’t crawl into us-Jesus said that too.
It’s already there, in our hearts; always looking for a way to climb out.”
Corrupted.
Rooted to this world.
Just like Agent Jiang said.
And just like Agent Jiang, Tessa’s mom didn’t believe people could become pure; however, her mom did believe people could become purified-lifted from the soil when they found God finding them. Like her mom used to say, “Nobody reaches the Light on their own, but the Light can reach us.” The last time Tessa saw her before she died, she’d asked her, “So, what was God doing when you found him?”
And her mom’s answer had totally floored her: “Shaking me with both hands, trying to wake me up.”
But now as Tessa thought about her mom again, her mother’s words, her mother’s death, the feeling that Agent Jiang was like her mother passed quickly.
Agent Jiang was not like her mother. No she wasn’t. Not at all.
Tessa pulled the lotion out of her satchel and tugged up her shirtsleeve. “So,” she said. “Is that why you got into law enforcement, then? To fight the corruption in the world?” She started massaging the lotion onto the scar the killer had given her. “Or was it just to meet guys?”
Lien-hua was silent for a moment. “Someone I knew was killed, Tessa. Someone very close to me.”
“So, revenge?”
“Maybe. A little. Maybe to try and make a difference. Motives aren’t always that easy to pin down.”
“Yeah. That’s what Patrick says.”
“I’m sure he does.”
Tessa spread some more lotion onto her hand and pressed it against the scar.
Rubbed.
Well there you have it. This scar right here proves how corrupted people really are. Evil coming out of someone’s heart and scarring me forever.
They pulled into the hotel parking lot, and Agent Jiang said,
“It hurts to lose those we love, Tessa. We don’t always know what to do about it. So we do what we have to do. We all find different ways to deal with our pain and loss.”
Tessa stopped rubbing the scar. Pain and loss. Yeah, she knew all about those. The loss of her mother. The painful memory of how she got this scar.
Tessa could deal with the scars she’d given to herself while she was trying to deal with the loss of her mother. Those were her problem. Those didn’t bother her so much.
But the scar that guy gave her last fall, that one was different.
That one she didn’t want anything to do with, ever again. And no matter how hard she rubbed it or put the stupid lotion on it, it was never going to go away. She should have realized that weeks ago.
If only she could get rid of it. Cover it up. Never see it again.
We all find different ways to deal with our pain and loss.
Tessa pulled down her sleeve, then closed the bottle of lotion and slipped it into her satchel.
Trying to heal her scar hadn’t worked.
Maybe it was time to try another way of dealing with it.
A way of never having to see it again.
As she stepped out of the car and Agent Jiang said good-bye, Tessa drew out her cell phone, brought up her Internet browser’s search engine, and typed in the keywords “Tattoo Studios, San Diego, CA.”