13. When It Rains
WHEN IT RAINS
AS I MENTIONED, MY cousin Roro had a vocational interest in the death of Valerie Nguyen, who was a feature in her Santa Ana installation.
True crime invoked a complicated context, something I’d pointed out to Roro several times, but I couldn’t judge her impulse for exploitation.
Just because something was frowned upon didn’t mean it wouldn’t sell, and she was a living artist who had to eat.
No room for meaningful opposition from six feet underground.
“Okay, so, like this?” Roro asked me, leaning over the register counter of our family’s occult shop, sketching the torso of the disemboweled woman I’d last seen living a life briefly symmetrical to mine.
“Ro, come on. I can’t do this again.” The store, these days never as empty as I hoped it would be, contained a handful of people browsing nearby, all with the sidelong look of would-be eavesdroppers.
It was one thing for Tita Linda to bring up death in her readings, but it felt like quite another for me to discuss in gory detail the precise arrangement of a brutalized corpse.
(Later, sources would quibble over the psychological profile of the serial killer in question, due to the presence of multiple methodologies—the more sadistic forms of violence were performed perimortem and often varied in technique, showing multiple simultaneous blows without clear operational procedure; the killings themselves were technical, emotionless, swift, the work of a doctor more so than a hunter, with the surgical knowledge the perimortem injuries lacked; the posing of the bodies afterward suggested a kind of gruesome penchant for theater, a desire to be witnessed.
Directed, as if to set a morbid scene. Possibly the work of many deranged minds rather than one imprecise monster, though again, experts—and amateur internet sleuths—disagreed.)
“Was it like this one?” Roro flipped back in her sketchbook to one of her other drawings.
I ignored her in favor of a customer who was holding up a desk calendar. “Is this included in the sale?” the customer asked.
“Yes, that’s included,” I called back before dropping my voice. “Ro, this really isn’t the time or place for—”
“Just tell me which organs were removed this time. Was it another hysterectomy?”
I’d grown used to this to some degree—the presence of adrenaline and bile, the odd imbalance that was curiosity emulsified by nausea.
I felt it almost every time I saw Jude, who’d been functionally in a coma for several days by then.
A condition that should have been more tolerable for me than the alternative, and yet.
“I’m not an expert on human mutilation, okay?
Her insides were on the outside—that’s all I know,” I hissed.
Then I smiled at the bargain-hunting calendar shopper.
(“Great shop, but I wish they’d hire an actual Filipinx employee instead of that random blond influencer,” read one of my rave reviews on Yelp.)
“Yes, but which insides.” Roro stared at her drawings as if she were doing a tarot reading, trying to find an answer to a question nobody had asked.
I regretted telling her about it at all, but there were only so many people I could call to discuss a corpse.
As I’d recently come to learn, once you’ve seen one, it’s all you want to talk about.
“You realize that all those other women this summer were killed during the Santa Anas too, don’t you?
Hence the name of the exhibition,” Roro reminded me, unlocking her phone to show me the picture she’d taken of all the sketches positioned as they would likely come together on the wall—a virtual mosaic of one coagulated, faceless brown woman.
“So many people look away, you know? So we have to make them look closer. The violence isn’t just a symptom—the violence is the sickness. The violence is the point.”
Outside, the wind whipped the palm trees. It was another merciless day of heat, and the winds inserted themselves with timely vengeance, as if we’d taken Santa Ana’s name in vain.
Genesis had already texted my work phone: STREET CLOSED. FIRE.
Then: DISREGARD. STREET OPEN.
Then, for what I presumed to be sensory detail: SMOKE.
I didn’t know why she typed in all caps but I’d already had plenty of time to adjust to her being a mystery.
Besides, it was a nice change from Teddy, who I’d gotten a drink with the night before and obligingly slept with, as sex kept conversation to a minimum.
He’d asked if I wanted to get brunch with his family and I said yes.
“Still,” I said to Roro. “Isn’t that … I don’t know, sensationalizing?”
“Glorifying the violence is sensationalizing,” Roro corrected me. “Focusing on the killer is sensationalizing—”
“You’re really telling me that someone’s out there killing women every time it gets too hot?
” I couldn’t relate to that degree of productivity.
At present, my life revolved around air conditioning, and the possibility of lying still in a dark room without any intention to move.
Already I was pondering whether I had time for a nap, and I’d only woken up an hour or so before.
She shook her head vehemently. “First of all, people are out there killing women every time it strikes their fancy, that’s the whole point of the installation.
But what I’m saying is there’s something else here, with these specific murders.
It’s inconsistent, but it’s there.” She frowned down at her drawing.
“The posing of the bodies is new, but the blood draining, the removal of the organs, that’s all—”
“Removal of the what?” asked Tita Linda, who had finished her reading and come around to the mini fridge behind the counter for some nata de coco, which she plucked straight from the jar with two fingers.
JR had been coming to the store less often, with Tita Linda charitably taking his place to allow more time for pigeon breeding.
Despite his pygmy size, JR informed me, Alistair was a natural, the talk of the town.
Rumor had it Tavis Anderson had now expressed a desire to meet JR in person, a message he had sent via his prized female, Deirdre.
I’d asked JR if he knew what he was going to wear and he said probably this, why?
The bell beside the door tinkled as someone who was very clearly not there for shrimp chips or pagan literature walked in.
“Nothing, Tita Linda, never mind. Ro.” I nudged Roro’s arm. “Look who it is.”
Her brows knitted. “Damn. Your mom’s making this place so white.”
“No, that’s got to be the—”
“Hello,” called the twenty-something man with a swoop of auburn hair. He was holding the door for a photographer who lagged behind, shooting the store’s exterior. “I’m Leo Goodman, I’m a staff writer for the L.A. Times. Are you Della Almazan?”
I don’t have time to argue with you right now, my mother had told me that morning when she’d woken me up to get me into the store.
The journalist is coming for an interview today after rescheduling three times and now a pipe burst upstairs.
I have to get the real plumber in today—the “real plumber” meaning not the handyman that was currently a dedicated dooman—and probably a city inspector, just in time for him to close us down over that fucking pigeon, so the least you can do is pretend to be a member of this family and take care of things for me at the store—
“I’m Della’s daughter, Anya. I’ll be right with you,” I said with the brightness of someone who adored her job and cared very deeply about customer service, gesturing to Roro with equal theater as if she were a customer. Behind me, Tita Linda opened a bag of chicharrónes.
Dutifully, Roro snuck a tarot deck from beside the register; I rang it up. We argued briefly in total silence, and then she glared at me as I gestured for her to swipe her credit card. She had tucked her sketchbook safely under her arm by then, thank god.
“We’re going to discuss this later,” she whispered, not very quietly.
“Have a nice day,” I replied, much louder, handing her the receipt. She flipped me off and swung her hips a little as she passed the journalist, never too annoyed to be visually appreciated as she left the store.
Tita Linda, meanwhile, crackled her pork skins in thoughtful silence.
The journalist was still paused in the threshold, glancing over his shoulder for the photographer, who was busy shooting the shop’s exterior.
“I did a pre-interview with your mother over the phone,” he called to me with an air of helpless in-betweenness, “so we’re just here to hang around for a bit, chat with customers, get some shots for the article—”
“Sorry, sorry!” The photographer darted in through the door then, shaking off like a dog as he entered the shop.
“Woof, traffic’s about to be a nightmare.
Hi,” he said, waving to us distractedly, his lens already trained on the assortment of crystals beside the door. “Go ahead and pretend I’m not here.”
“Is it raining?” I echoed, a little astonished, a lot relieved. It explained the darkness in my chest, the tight feeling. It had been a gray and moody morning, made worse by the swampy presence of unresolved heat—the endlessness of summer despite the calendar presence of fall.
“Yeah, just started.” The photographer went back to snapping pictures as the journalist made his way to where I stood behind the register.
“Might make for a thinner crowd,” he said, gesturing over his shoulder to the rain. “People here treat rain like it’s a blizzard.” People here. Lesser people, I understood it to mean.
“Ah, yes,” I joked, “never mind the fires and apocalypse winds, it’s a light rain that really gets us.”
The journalist laughed, an outsider’s laugh.
“You’re from somewhere else, I take it?” I leaned forward, resting my elbows on the counter. Without even really noticing I had already begun to flirt with him.