Larkin Conner Barkley
LARKIN WATCHED Pike leaving, and in the moment he stepped outside, he was framed in the open door of their Echo Park house like a picture in a magazine, frozen in time and space. A big man, but not a giant. More average in size than not. With the sleeves covering his arms, and his face turned away, he seemed heartbreakingly normal, which made her love him even more. A superman risked nothing, but an average man risked everything.
When he glanced back before he pulled the door, she saw the emptiness in his face, the gleaming dark glasses; then the door closed and she was alone.
“Make it right. Please make it right.”
Said it to the empty house, then felt stupid and ashamed of herself for saying it.
She was more frightened now than even those times when the men from Ecuador were shooting. If her father had abandoned her, then she was truly alone, more alone than she had ever felt or known or believed could be possible. Larkin felt as if she were having an out-of-body experience. She felt outside her own body, yet the air seemed alive on her skin, and the house was so quiet the silence was noise. Like being in the same place twice at the same time, each overlaid on the other and not quite connected. Except for the fear, she felt nothing. She tried to make herself feel something else. She thought she should be angry or resentful, but a switch had been thrown and now she was empty.
Larkin went into the bathroom and looked at herself in the mirror. She wanted to see if the emptiness showed on her face the way she saw it on Pike’s. She couldn’t tell. Looking at herself, she saw her father. She had his eyes and ears and the line of his jaw. She had her mother’s nose and mouth.
She said, “I don’t care.”
She didn’t care what he had done. He was her father. If Pike could carry his father, she could carry hers.
Larkin went back to the table and studied the lists of phone numbers and the phone trees she had been tracing. She found Khali Vahnich’s number, then searched for it through each of the twenty-six single-spaced pages. Each time she found it, she marked it. When she finished with the twenty-six pages, she went back to the beginning and picked out the numbers Vahnich had called.
She found it near the bottom of the second page. She saw the number and recognized it because it was so familiar.
Vahnich had called her company’s corporate headquarters. The Barkley Company.
Larkin saw the number and thought, Wow, this is bizarre, because all she felt was the strange out-of-body sensation with the air humming on her skin. Her vision blurred, so she knew she was crying, but she didn’t gasp or sob and her nose didn’t clog; it was as if someone else was crying, and she was watching it from the inside.
She wiped her eyes so she could see better, and kept searching through the list. She found the number twice more, then stopped because, really, what was the point?
Joe and Elvis were right. Her father was connected with these people, and now they were both in trouble. Vahnich was trying to use her to get something from her father or punish him, and either way, he was fucking it up.
Pike’s father had been a monster. Her father was a fuckup. Didn’t matter. She loved him.
“Make it right.”
She was speaking to herself.