No Rest for the Wicked

Chapter 8

BM lay awake despite Luna's presence in the bed. Usually, having her there allowed him to fall asleep, but tonight, concern for Luna overshadowed everything. He sensed in his spirit that something wasn't right. Even her unwavering commitment to saving dying languages seemed more like retributive than restorative justice in the sense that she seemed to be in some manner punishing herself instead of seeking justice for the indigenous groups that had suffered so much under colonialism. He supported her work entirely. What he did not support was her self-punishing.

He had noticed that she made frequent references to some unknown offense for which she felt bound to set right. But what did she have to make up for? What had she done that was so bad that she couldn't tell him? He really couldn't imagine his little Norma ever doing anything hurtful to anyone else.

As he gently stroked her cheek, he thought about how there weren't too many true heroes or villains in life. Most of us are just muddling along somewhere in the middle. But we all want to believe that we're heroes. Sometimes facing his own mediocrity was a bit more than he could bear. He had millions of adoring fans, but he still saw himself as Matthew from L.A. All these accolades had changed very little about him as a person.

He noticed Luna shifting her weight slightly as he noted that her eyes were moving rapidly under her closed eyelids. She twitched like a dog having a hunting dream. Beads of sweat formed on her forehead as she let out a pitiful whimper. Just then, a car door slammed outside, causing Luna to sit straight up in bed. Her wide eyes held the frenetic energy of a caged animal that had not yet recognized its surroundings.

She began wiping her hands on the sheets, as if to clean them from some sticky substance clinging to them. "Do you think anyone heard?" she asked BM frantically.

"No, I'm sure they didn't," he replied, playing along, despite being totally in the dark about what she was experiencing. The slamming of the car door must have awakened her mid-dream and had left her confused about what was reality and what was still the dream.

"The blood of Abel cries out from the ground," she told her Woojin-ah with fevered intensity. "No one who sheds blood will be found guiltless," she went on in her quasi-biblical rant.

"It's okay," BM soothed, despite his own misgivings that saying those words would magically produce something else than this panicked state that he saw playing out before him.

"Everyone knows what I did," Luna lamented in her half-conscious state. BM didn't have the heart to tell her that he, in fact, didn't know what she had done, but he suddenly had an overwhelming urge to find out.

When he had rocked Luna back to sleep again, he laid her head down on the pillow, her black curls spreading out over the blue pillowcase. BM slipped out of bed as cautiously as he could and sat in a chair beside the bed, pulling his laptop toward him as he sat close to the nightstand.

Despite his usual aversion to learning things about others from the internet, he did the unthinkable and typed Norma Luna Pérez, L.A. into the search bar. He was not prepared for what appeared before him. There were hundreds, if not thousands, of links. Some had a picture of his little Norma with blood on her face and hands. The headline that caught his attention, though, was one that said, "Will the Daughter of Illegal Immigrant Be Tried as Adult?"

The article that followed gave him two pieces of information he had not known before. The first was that Norma's father had been undocumented. They had literally never discussed that, and the thought had never occurred to him. The second piece of information he learned was that Norma had killed a member of the notorious MS-13 gang, also known as the "Mara Salvatrucha". BM had heard of this group before, but only from the typical sources --- politicians and cable news.

And my girlfriend killed one of these guys? he thought, with a mixture of dread and admiration. He read on. The article stated that Norma's defense lawyer was likely to allege self-defense as the motive for the killing, as it was believed that the man in question had been demanding some type of "protection tax" from her father. It appeared the case was muddied slightly by the fact that the man had been unarmed when Norma had shot him with a .22 rifle. BM was shocked to recall that he had seen that gun before. It had been given to Norma by her grandfather because it was smaller than other rifles and more suited to a young novice hunter. She had called it her "chipmunk gun", though to his knowledge, she had never shot a chipmunk or any other animal with it. He had gone with her once to a shooting range for target practice, but he had never heard of her actually having hunted with the gun.

And yet, she had killed a human with it. The idea was almost incomprehensible to BM as he thought about the vehement pacifist that was lying in his bed at that very moment. This was the same girl who would rescue spiders and take them outside instead of killing them. And yet, she had shot a person.

BM returned to the search results. It was clear that the article he had read was from early in the reporting of the incident. It did not include the trial and the ultimate verdict. His eyes flitted across the long list of articles until he found what he was looking for. "The Elementary Equalizer Found Not Guilty of Murder", read the headline. The article went on to explain that Norma had been found guilty of the lesser charge of Manslaughter, due to the argument that the killing had been done in self-defense and in defense of her father. She had been sentenced to 18 months in a juvenile detention center. Another article, written later, said that she had served 12 months of the sentence and had been released early to the care of her father, at which point, the two had moved out of the greater L.A. area.

BM let out a long sigh. No wonder she had disappeared from one day to the next. He was surprised that he had never found out about the incident, which clearly had been widely reported. He can only assume that his mother had gone out of her way to shield him from the story. He also wondered at his own lack of curiosity that he had never Googled her before. He had accepted the fact that she had left without saying goodbye. Of course, he had grieved the loss, but it had never occurred to him to look into it further. He believed that Norma had simply not cared about him the way he had cared about her.

But that had not been the case. She had been forced into hiding. Who would kill a member of MS-13 and live to tell the story? he wondered. Clearly, staying in L.A. had not been an option at all for her. And all this time, he had never sought her out, believing that she had abandoned him.

He wiped tears of regret from his face as he watched her sleeping. She had needed him, and he had not been there for her. Admittedly, his absence had been partly due to his mother's actions in hiding the story from him, but he had not looked for her either. And for that, he was truly sorry.

As he watched her slightly open mouth taking in air and letting it out again, he thought about how the media had portrayed her. "The daughter of an illegal", "A hardened criminal at the age of 12", "The Elementary Equalizer". He shook his head in disbelief. That last moniker struck him particularly hard. While he was winning soccer trophies, she had been sitting in a detention center. He couldn't help but think that she was treated differently by the justice system than one of her fellow peers would have been, one who didn't live in a barrio and didn't come from Latin American heritage. It was the first time he had ever really seen how different their life experiences had been. Norma, and more recently, Luna had sometimes mentioned the wide gap between them, but he had always written it off. But now, he saw it. There was a chasm between her lived experience and his, and he wasn't sure how to bridge it. And he worried about the possible effects of her stepping back into the limelight as his official girlfriend.