Santa Monica Read online

  Dedication

  For Julia and Caeli

  Epigraph

  Populus felix in urbe felici

  Translation: “Fortunate People in a Prosperous Land”

  —SANTA MONICA CITY MOTTO,

  APPEARED ON THE INLAY OF CITY HALL IN 1938

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Sunday, March 24, 2019

  Prologue: Leticia

  Five Months Earlier

  Saturday, October 13, 2018

  1: Zack

  2: Mel

  3: Regina

  4: Leticia

  5: Mel

  Sunday, October 14, 2018

  6: Regina

  Monday, October 15, 2018

  7: Zack

  8: Leticia

  Tuesday, October 16, 2018

  9: Mel

  10: Zack

  11: Mel

  12: Regina

  Wednesday, October 17, 2018

  13: Mel

  14: Zack

  Friday, October 19, 2018

  15: Mel

  16: Regina

  17: Mel

  18: Regina

  Wednesday, October 31, 2018

  19: Leticia

  Friday, November 9, 2018

  20: Mel

  Thursday, November 15, 2018

  21: Regina

  22: Mel

  23: Regina

  Saturday, November 17, 2018

  24: Zack

  Friday, December 21, 2018

  25: Leticia

  Saturday, December 29, 2018

  26: Mel

  Thursday, January 3, 2019

  27: Regina

  Saturday, January 12, 2019

  28: Leticia

  Wednesday, January 16, 2019

  29: Mel

  Tuesday, January 22, 2019

  30: Zack

  31: Regina

  32: Zack

  Saturday, February 2, 2019

  33: Mel

  Monday, February 11, 2019

  34: Regina

  Thursday, February 14, 2019

  35: Zack

  36: Mel

  Saturday, March 2, 2019

  37: Zack

  38: Leticia

  Sunday, March 24, 2019

  39: Zack

  Monday, July 1, 2019

  40: Regina

  41: Mel

  42: Leticia

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Sunday, March 24, 2019

  Prologue

  Leticia

  HER BROTHER LAY ON THE GYM FLOOR. A STRETCHY BLUE BAND WRAPPED around his neck. The kind, Lettie knew, that the people who came here to exercise looped around their legs or arms when they hopped and squatted to music so loud it hurt Lettie’s ears.

  Her brother’s skin was as pale as the marbled kitchen countertops Lettie wiped down, week after week, in the homes of wealthy Santa Monica families. With his face turned toward the wall of mirrors—sea-green eyes open; thick lashes unblinking—it seemed to Lettie that he was admiring himself.

  She had often teased Zacarias, her half-white, half-Mexican, delincuente of a half-brother, about his love for his own reflection. There he is, she’d say, when she caught him staring at himself in the window of a car, in the door of a microwave, anywhere that offered him a view of his own handsome face and full head of wavy hair, the same coffee color as her own. Your favorite person.

  “Zacarias,” she whispered now, nudging his bare leg with the toe of her sneaker, making the muscles in his thigh jiggle. She swallowed a giggle—her brother loved to make jokes. Even out in public. A risk, Lettie knew, no brown-skinned man would take these days. But Zacarias lived as a white man, free from fear. Lettie was an illegal full-blooded Mexican; Zacarias a handsome mestizo, an American citizen thanks to his rich Floridian papa. They were both bastards but Zacarias wore the ultimate disguise, that of a white man with a perfect Southern California tan. All the doors, and borders, opened for him.

  Lettie and Zacarias shared a mother, and the accident, which is what Zacarias insisted on calling the mistake he had made that almost killed Lettie’s son, six-year-old Andres. It bound Zacarias to Lettie like a shared scar, raised and grizzled. She knew he felt guilt for it—the accident—why else would he spend so much time with Andres and Lettie, take them to Mass on Sundays, picnics afterward, to the grocery store, to Andres’s endless doctor appointments? For which Zacarias paid. Since the accident, he’d begun giving Lettie money before she’d even asked him for it, little stacks of bills on his paydays, which Lettie stashed under a loose floorboard of her apartment. She knew it was shame that drove him to pay her, but she did not care. It was the least he could do.

  “Game over, Zacarias,” Lettie said, fighting a yawn. “Enough, por favor.” She was too tired for childish play tonight.

  But there was no Zacarias jumping to his feet and yelling Surprise!—always the joker, always the clown.

  Louder: “Zack!” The American name he’d insisted she use, especially when they were around the rich white people who put food in Lettie’s and Andres’s mouths, roofs over their heads. The bosses who did not know her brother was a bastard with a Mexican mother.

  “You stop this playing right now, Zacarias.” Firmly—this is how her bosses spoke when they sent their spoiled children to a time-out. Many of these same rich white women stayed thin and hard by exercising at this gym. How amused they would be, Lettie thought, to see their handsome trainer—Coach Zack—acting so silly.

  One of her brother’s hands was stretched out, and just past his fingertips was that damn prayer book he carried everywhere, often tucking it in the waistband of his shorts when he lifted weights, that showoff—wanting the world to believe he was as pious as a monk. How many times had Lettie called his name—Zacarias!—before he lifted his face from the smudged pages, blinking at her, dazed. How he loved his lady saints. Almost as much, Lettie thought, as the many ladies he’d loved in the flesh.

  She counted to ten, waiting to see his wide muscled chest fill with breath.

  Nothing.

  Something was wrong. A loosening spread low in her belly.

  She knelt on the spongy floor of the gym and placed a hand on her brother’s chest. Waited. Prayed his chest would rise and fall, just as she had the first night her Andres had returned from the hospital, after the accident. She had slept on the floor by her son’s bed, startling herself awake to check he was breathing, thanking the Virgin when his tiny chest trembled like a baby bird’s.

  Lettie pounded on the place where she guessed her brother’s heart might lie, using both her fists, begging him to breathe, wake up, rise, move. She shouted prayers to the saints he had loved. Oh, Santa Teresita del Niño Jesús, por favor. Por favor! Please! Please! How could they abandon him—abandon her—now?

  Frantic, she rolled him onto his side. A puddle seeped out from his gym shorts. She smelled the stink. He had shit himself.

  The cheeseburger she’d eaten at lunch rose in her stomach.

  She made it to the bathroom just in time. She heaved long after her stomach was empty, losing control of her bladder. Her pant legs were heavy with warm piss.

  So many messes to clean now.

  Her own face in the bathroom mirror was pale like her brother’s. As frightened as a child’s. Reminding her of Andres, who, at that moment, was sound asleep in her car parked in front of Color Theory Fitness. Only a few steps away from where his beloved Tío Zacarias lay on the floor of the gym, the blue band looped around his neck.

  Lettie knew what she had to do. There were no choices for people like her. No open doors
. Only deportation. She had just three more days before the immigration police took her to the “facility,” where she would be forced to stay until they shipped her back to Mexico. Leaving Andres behind, without a mother. And now, without Zacarias. That Andres would still have his uncle had been Lettie’s only consolation.

  She ran to the gym’s front door and bolted it. Pulled down the blackout shades that covered the storefront window. Locked the second door that led from the reception desk to the exercise studio.

  She found the container of powdered bleach in the bucket of cleaning supplies she used to wipe away the sweat left on the foam mats, weights, and treadmills after all-day back-to-back classes. She tugged on the yellow gloves she wore to clean the gym toilets. The thick rubber refused to slide over her sweaty skin—she pulled until she felt the hairs on her arm rip away. She bent to her knees, sponge in hand, and cleaned. The sponge turned heavy. No matter how many times she wrung it out in the bathroom sink, the water that ran smelled foul.

  Kneeling over Zacarias’s body, gently wiping the spots where she’d touched him—his cold cheek, his unmoving chest—holding her breath so as not to smell his death, she thought of how sad the ladies her brother trained would be to see him like this. The many beautiful Santa Monica women who raced on the treadmills—so fast Lettie had often wondered what they imagined chasing them, as she waited, always waiting, for them to finish so she could wipe down the gray mats where they’d done sit-ups until they moaned. She knew pain was also a pleasure for these women whose lives seemed so free from suffering.

  Her brother had sought out pain, too. She stopped herself from checking his sneaker for the stone he tucked in one shoe during his jogs. He’d proudly shown her the stupid rock once, as if she’d pat him on the back, congratulate him. These fools—the women, her employers, her half-brother who wasted his born luck and his pale skin, all the rich white people of Santa Monica—wasting their fortune. Failing to enjoy their good lives. Making problems out of the air.

  Poof.

  Her half-brother may have been a selfish fool, but he loved his nephew like a son. He would have done his best with Andres. And in the end, everything she, and Zacarias, had sacrificed, and the lies they had told, all to stop Lettie from being deported, was not enough. Not to save Lettie and Andres. Or Zacarias.

  He was free from his burden now, lying there so still. The man who had, in life, never stopped moving—who’d grab Lettie and twirl her around her tiny apartment when a Tejano song came on the radio, drop to the ground and do push-ups until Andres grew bored with counting, throw a back flip on the beach to make Andres squeal and, Lettie thought, smiling now, her eyes turning wet, to steal looks from pretty girls.

  There was no time for memories now. Only work. And work, as she’d told Andres again and again, was why she was here, in America. My people, she’d told her broken boy who would always walk with a limp, we come to this country to work. So you can have everything you want. A life like that of Zacarias. A life that is not all work but also some play. A life so comfortable Zacarias whined the few days a year the sun hid behind clouds. A life so free of problems that not getting a new car or an acting role in a hot dog commercial had felt like tragedy to him.

  For Andres, Lettie understood, it was probably too late. He would not have the luxury of inventing his own problems, not with his limp and his scars and his endless pain from the accident. The thought made Lettie want to grab the blue band around her brother’s neck and twist and tighten, make that beautiful face swollen and ugly, add more mess.

  When the firemen had lifted the car off little Andres, the skin on his legs sheared away, his foot dangling from his ankle, Zacarias had looked right into Lettie’s eyes and whispered, his voice strangled but certain: It was an accident. The same man who lay in front of her now, still at last, eyes open, soft curls like a halo.

  Zack, el ángel.

  A sob pushed its way up Lettie’s throat.

  There were no accidents. Only mistakes. And no matter how hard you tried to fix a mistake—scrub, bleach, polish—a stain remained. Always.

  March 26, 2019 7:31am

  TO: [email protected]

  FROM: [email protected]

  Dearest Fit Fam,

  As most of you have heard, a tragic event occurred at Color Theory Fitness, Santa Monica, on the evening of March 24. We lost our beloved coach, Zack Doheny. I’d be lying if I said I even had words for what happened. I don’t. Like you, I am shocked. Like you, I am confused. I am grieving.

  In his fourteen months working for CT, Zack had become like a nephew to me. If you had the fortune of training with him, I know he had a special place in your hearts, too. Zack let us get close—he was that kind of guy, the kind who let you IN. Who was not afraid to GO THERE.

  The fact is, we never know what is going on inside another person.

  I know this news hurts. Maybe more than anything you’ve felt before. But as Zack was fond of saying when he taught class: “Pain is beauty and vice versa.”

  Sometimes we have to push through the hurt to find out how tough we really are.

  Zack Doheny was not only a dedicated, disciplined athlete and coach; he was also a spiritual man and committed member of the Roman Catholic Church. In his honor, please consider donating to the following charitable causes you can find listed on www.showupforzack.com.

  While Zack’s family has opted to keep funeral services private, I would like to propose a memorial to be held on June 30 on the bluffs at Palisades Park. A short, “Zack-themed” workout will be followed by an informal sharing of our best memories of our dear coach and friend.

  Hope to see each and every one of you there.

  With compassion and gratitude,

  Jensen Davis

  Owner & Founder, Color Theory Fitness

  We are franchising!

  PS: Due to the circumstances, and in compliance with routine police investigation, Color Theory Santa Monica will be closed until further notice. However, our Culver City, Marina del Rey, and Westwood locations will remain open as per usual.

  Five Months Earlier

  Saturday, October 13, 2018

  1

  Zack

  SHORTLY AFTER DAWN ON A SATURDAY, ZACK DOHENY SNAPPED AWAKE IN an unfamiliar bedroom overlooking the western edge of Los Angeles. His naked body felt clammy with sweat beneath the crisp white duvet and his heart galloped as if he’d just surfaced from a nightmare, though he hadn’t been dreaming at all. He sat up and blinked at the window, trying to work air into his lungs and steady his pulse while blotting his damp palms on the sheets.

  Outside, he could see the mellow green peaks of the Santa Monica Mountains and, in the distance, a choppy gray swath of the Pacific Ocean shrouded in the morning marine layer. A multimillion-dollar view. Zack had been in LA long enough to know that a million dollars was not nearly enough to buy a house with a glimpse of the ocean. In Santa Monica, where he rented a one-bedroom on a grimy block of Pico Boulevard practically underneath the I-10 freeway, it was not enough to buy a house at all.

  His fingers flew to the rosary at his throat and he was relieved to find it there, the delicate rosewood beads intact. The woman had gone at him with an animal fervor last night, clawing off his gym clothes and raking her nails into his scalp as she kissed him while sitting on the island of her gleaming kitchen, her lean muscled legs clamped around his waist.

  How easily she might have ripped the beads from his neck, sent them skittering over the polished Mexican tiles of the kitchen floor, into the dark space beneath the stainless-steel double fridge. He could almost hear her careless laugh, see her slender hand cupping her puffy, glossed lips in mock-horror. So often in Los Angeles, Zack had learned, middle-aged women spoke and gestured like teenagers, stretching out their vowels and jabbing the air with painted nails, as if imitating their daughters could make them younger.

  He rolled a bead of the rosary between his thumb and forefinger. It felt smooth and cool in contras
t to the hot, thrumming pulse in his neck.

  Exhaling slowly, he forced his eyes from the window to the opposite side of the bed.

  The woman lay curled on her side facing him, gold-brown hair splayed across the pillow, her slender flank slowly rising and falling. Her ample breasts flared from the sheets, on full display. Au naturel, my friend! she’d said last night, pulling up her tank top in the middle of her luxury kitchen to show him, then doing a little striptease that had gotten him instantly hard. Soon he’d been cupping one au naturel in each hand, eyes fixed on the bare curve of her back as he pummeled into her. In the kitchen, and again in the garden, where huge succulents rose around them like green sea creatures, and later yet again here, on her massive bed.

  Last night, Zack had not been able to get enough. Even after she’d fallen asleep, the acrid-sweet smell of pinot grigio wafting from her pores (as usual, Zack had not touched a drop—the sex itself supplied its own mind-altering effects), he’d found himself hard all over again and had jerked off beside her as she snored.

  This was how his problem worked: a ravenous flame, followed by cold ash. The typical pattern of any dependency, he’d read in Overcoming Sex Addiction, which he’d skimmed in the library but had been too ashamed to check out. Zack gritted his teeth, wincing as the familiar feeling began to take hold inside him: a hollow, gut-scraping disgust that set in every time he slipped.

  The disgust was not for the woman who’d brought him home last night—Joanna? Deanna?—he couldn’t remember her name. It wasn’t her fault. She was just a lonely divorcée out for a sunset run up and down the Stairs, the famous outdoor path that started on Adelaide Drive, where she lived in this big house, and dropped steeply down into Santa Monica Canyon. Zack had been on the Stairs too, a sharp rock wedged into one of his sneakers, one of his variations on daily penance. The pain helped him stay focused as he exercised, reminded him to push himself harder, toward the person he wanted to be.

  But yesterday, the rock hadn’t been enough. He’d nearly collided with the woman on one of the landings, accidentally, her cheeks flushed and ponytail swinging, and their awkward apologies had morphed into flirtation. Soon they were jogging together up the stairs and back onto Adelaide Drive, toward her house, the woman, who was probably in her mid-forties, giggling playfully. She’d asked him to give her a piggyback ride for the last half block of the walk to her giant house on a corner lot, and he had, her knees jammed into his ribs, her sculpted arms roped around his neck.