Is that a good thing, though? Is that supposed to justify everything?
His throat feels tight. The moment this awareness filters in, scattered by other awarenesses, it occurs to Miguel that his throat’s tightness has been the case for a while. How long? He can’t say. But it’s been growing, unnoticed until he finally noticed it; until he finally noticed that he had noticed it.
The thing about breath is that only its absence seems to matter.
The tightness in his chest. His tongue, like a slab of cold beef in his mouth. His limbs electric, like he’s stuck his fingers in a socket under water.
This is crazy. This cannot be happening. The water isn’t cold enough for this to be happening.
Then why are his teeth chattering?
Nothing like this has happened since midwinter. Then Miguel, with his constant companion of the EpiPen, learned to be careful. He wore hats and scarves and even one of those full-face winter masks that made him look like a bank robber; he hasn’t had ice cream since that night at Emily and Nick’s. Under the waves, Miguel frantically feels his own bare arms, chest, for the hives that characterize his allergic reaction, but there’s nothing he can find, no sensation of itching. His throat has only swollen this badly once in the past, that night in early December, back when everything still felt like a wild, reckless game, like they were playing The Big Chill and even at forty it was possible to just be on the verge of the most exciting Act of their lives unfolding. His throat had closed, haha, it had been just part of the madcap adventure of the evening, of the strange collusion he and Chad and Emily and Nick were entering into together. He remembers making jokes before his heart rate had even returned to normal. He remembers the strange, blissful connectedness he felt, standing on their porch with Chad’s arm around him, calling out farewells into the night, while Isabel, seven hours away, was already doomed.
He is swimming to shore. His body has always understood more about survival than his brain. His strokes have been solid, certain . . . it’s just that he can’t bring in air anymore, and suddenly a flailing is upon him, unbidden: he did not authorize this flailing. He did not give his body permission to behave this way, this graceless, this desperate. For forty-one years, he has lived on the precipice of a willingness to die—an unobtrusive, low-key consent; a passive hurry for it to all be done with already, this sublimated shame and confusion and monotony and anger. Nobody is looking. He could go down silently under the blanket of the ocean, and maybe his body would be washed to sea and no one would ever even know what happened. He would not be blamed. Chad has more than enough money. He can step out of the picture, and just like Lina never mourned or celebrated Papi’s death the way the rest of them did, his child will never miss him. Miguel will be only an idea to his daughter, and children’s ideas are invariably better than the real thing.
Why can’t he will it? Stop moving. Stop thrashing. Stop.
The shore seems only farther away. Cupping the water, help, help, but his throat can’t get in any air. Starbursts pop before his eyes: a loss of precious oxygen. He can’t move forcefully enough to get back to land. Mami’s red curtain in their old shanty in Caracas, his body on the other side, desperate to push back the soiled fabric and climb into her bed, but too afraid of Isabel’s disapproval to act. His father’s purple knuckles. Isabel’s cotton underpants as she leapt like an airbender. Tomas’s lush mouth, a pillow made of wine . . .
Coughing, but into the water, water into lungs into water. We are dust and unto dust we shall return. His father, breathing in the water of the Guaire River, trying to open the car doors against the current—why didn’t he swim through a window, was he too drunk? But no—it’s because that never happened; it wasn’t real. Water to water to water. The way Isabel used to hold him while he slept, her arms a thing that would never, ever betray. And that is the thing, isn’t it, Isabel, about all this beauty, all this miraculous pain, all this poisonous life. It is somehow always too short.
LINA
Aunt Pilar and I are sitting on the balcony facing the street, smoking a pack of Delicados she brought back from her last trip to San Miguel de Allende, when an SUV pulls up in front and Miguel, still in swim trunks, soaking wet, inexplicably gets out of the stranger’s car. He looks up at us, and his face looks masklike and frozen as he raises his hand quickly as if to wave, then lets it hover in the air and lowers it. I say to Aunt Pilar, “Do you know those people?” and she says, “Your brother must know them,” and I say, “No, he doesn’t,” even though really how would I know, and Aunt Pilar says, “Well, he does now,” in a tone that makes it clear she thinks Miguel has just picked up a man at the beach, and raises her Guerra eyebrow at me as if to say, Men.
To her implied moral superiority of the lesbian caste, I say, “You’re talking to the wrong woman,” and laugh to myself. She looks confused and I’m trying to figure out whether to attempt an explanation (and what that would sound like) when Miguel—who has come inside the condo—flings the French doors open widely and stands between them, shirtless and drippy still, saying, “Jesus Christ, I almost drowned. Some guy in a boat had to pull me from the water—if he hadn’t come along, I’d be dead.”
Aunt Pilar and I talk on top of each other, yelping the things people exclaim in response to such news.
Miguel waves aside our clucks of concern, collapsing into one of the wicker balcony chairs.
Aunt Pilar is looking at us strangely. We have not, it could certainly be argued, presented in a particularly How to Win Friends and Influence People manner since arriving in Miami. All said, though, she has handled it pretty well, even thinking we are the progeny of the woman who murdered her beloved brother. Now, though, she looks at Miguel as though maybe—despite his overwhelming resemblance to Javier—he is not supposed to be here, as though he is some kind of mistake.
We are, all three, silent. Miguel reaches out to the railing of the balcony, where the Delicados are resting, shakes one out, and lights it. His hands are trembling. He drags deep on the cigarette with his waterlogged lungs, and I think of Isabel, choking on her own blood, suffocating on a bursting dam from inside her own body. I listen to the roar inside my own head. One reason I love the beach is because the natural world and my brain seem, for once, in harmony. If I focus on it closely enough, the sound inside my head is the din of voices, but on days like this, on most days, I can’t make out any individual words; it’s just a dull roar of a crowd that, when I tune it out (which after thirty-one years I have become mainly good at doing) sounds almost like surf pounding against the shore. If you want to know the truth, the first thing I think is that if I went into Aunt Pilar’s house and got out a bottle of rum or some Mexican tequila—my brother’s poison of choice—picked up on the same trip as the Delicados, maybe Miguel would be too shaken up by his near death and Aunt Pilar’s wild proclamations to care that I was pouring a double shot. He looks at me, and his eyes are searching, vulnerable, like he wants me to say something to save him, the way the stranger in the SUV saved him from drowning, but nobody in our family has ever been able to save anyone from anything. I shrug, looking away from his eyes.
“I’m having a baby,” Miguel says. “I’m going to be a father.” And for the first time in my life, I watch my older brother begin to cry.
After Miguel has retired to his guest room, Aunt Pilar stands and pours us, as though reading my mind, two tequilas. She brings one over to me. She has no way of knowing I am a drunk. Why would she know this, any more than she knows Isabel was my mother? Why would she know anything about me? But she is looking at me with a kind of naked love, like staring at a ghost she believes may dissolve if she touches me, Miguel and his wild drowning episode already forgotten. She takes a long swig from her drink and I pick mine up and I am about to pretend to sip just to be polite, but instead I do what of course I would do: I drain the entire goddamn thing in one gulp. My head spins, in the most pleasant and beautiful way imaginable, and I want to bolt up and grab the bottle by the neck. In t
hat moment, I love Aunt Pilar more than anyone on earth, even you.
“I was just about to tell you something,” she says to me, “before your brother, he comes in with his dramatic story, and interrupted us.”
I’m not thrilled, to be blunt, about the fact that she’s trivializing Miguel almost dying while accompanying me on a trip he didn’t even want to make, but I am not one to question the woman who owns the tequila, and I say nothing.
“I want you to know that Isabel loved you very much. That she talked about you to me frequently. She couldn’t admit it to herself or to you, what it really meant to her to have had you so young, and to be unable to care for you, and to have to rely on her mother. I believe how much guilt she felt, in allowing her mother who had committed such an act, to raise her own hija—I believe this is what drove her to assuage her guilt in Church and with so much dogma. She felt she could never be forgiven for what she had done to you.”
Cruelly, it’s as though the alcohol has all evaporated. I am reeling, sober, everything in laser focus and surreal at once. “She told you that?”
“She told me many things,” Aunt Pilar says. She stands with some labor—despite her active lifestyle, she seems to be nursing a bad hip—and goes to a cabinet, a drawer, like somebody in a movie, withdrawing a key. She brings it over to me—without a second drink—and presses it into my hand, caressing my skin as she does so.
The key has a number taped to it. A safety deposit box key, I realize instantly, though I have never seen one before. I close my hand around it.
“She would have wanted you to have this,” Aunt Pilar says. “To keep her things safe.”
I stammer. “What’s in the box?”
“I have never looked in the box,” she says, with some surprise, as though I should know her better, when of course I know her not at all. “Isabel asked me not to.”
I must be shaking. This oracle woman in her fringed scarves and secrets of gunshots to the chest brings me another drink after all, and I down it in one sip, once more.
“Go now,” she says, “before your brother wakes up.” She begins scribbling directions down for me. “Whatever you find there,” she says, “remember that even though there is no statute of limitation on murder, Isabel never told anyone what your mother had done. I don’t believe the information in the box is about Javier. I believe it is about you.”
It is only then that I think for the very first time, Nick: What if those are one in the same thing?
I rush out the door, into the Miami unknown, alone.
It is the very definition of irony, of course, that on my way to the bank, in the back of a taxi, I nearly throw the key out the window and ask to be taken back to Aunt Pilar’s—to Miguel—to everything I know and don’t know. Whatever I thought I was coming here to uncover, it wasn’t this. This isn’t what I want or need. I don’t want to open the box. But my hand—steady now after two tequilas—won’t roll down the window, won’t dispose of the key. Instead, on my cell phone, I call Mami.
“I’m in Miami,” I say, after her depressive, my-daughter-is-dead hello. “I’m at Aunt Pilar’s house.”
“How . . . ?” Mami stammers. “I don’t understand, what are you doing there?”
“We found letters from her to Isabel,” I explain weakly. “Miguel is with me, too. We wanted to understand the nature of their relationship. We didn’t even know who she was, really—Aunt Pilar I mean . . .” I laugh too loudly. “But Isabel, too, of course. We wanted . . . to understand.”
“What would that woman understand?” Mami demands. “She never even met any of you! She never spoke to us again after her brother died.”
“You’re not listening,” I say. “She had an extensive correspondence with Isabel. She knew her very well—better than any of the rest of us did, it seems.”
Mami harrumphs.
“She also says nobody ever drove their car off a bridge,” I say recklessly, though I can’t get the rest out, quite. “She says Javier Guerra was murdered—shot in the chest.”
At this, Mami actually laughs.
“Oh,” she says cackling. “This is priceless. This is just . . . Angelina . . . what are you doing? Who is this woman, even? The sister of a madman who terrorized us? Where does she get a story like this, from Miami? She never visited us once in Caracas! She wrote us off like dogs once he was dead.”
“No,” I say. “She says Isabel told her this is how it happened.”
“Your sister never said that,” Mami says, just like she insisted Isabel never asked to be buried on Beaver Island, even though she obviously did.
“She did say it,” I insist.
“Oh yes? You heard her say it? You know this because some strange lesbian beatnik tells you this?”
“I’m a strange lesbian beatnik!” I shout into the phone. The taxi driver peers back into his rearview mirror at me.
“Aye, the beatniks are from the 1950s,” Mami says, sighing with exasperation at me. “You’re just copying your brother, like you always did.”
“Look!” I demand. “Did your husband’s car go off a bridge or what?”
“Of course it did.” Mami sighs. “Why wouldn’t it have? But what does it matter anyway? He was an unimportant man. We were all better off without him. I can’t for the life of me understand why you—and Miguel, of all people, who saw what Javier was like—would be down there on this . . . what? Criminal investigation of a non-crime, that didn’t exist? And you don’t tell your own mother and then you call me up and say these strange things?”
“Isabel was my mother,” I say. “Not you.”
“Entonces tu no sabes lo que es una madre,” the woman who raised me says, her voice cracking hard.
It is a day for firsts. My brother has wept. And Mami hangs up the phone loudly in my ear.
But I have forgotten to mention why the irony is ironic, haven’t I? I don’t throw the key out the window. I stand in front of a box, untouched since Isabel was younger than I am now, breathing hard, seeing shadows in my peripheral vision, but naturally, inevitably, being who and what I am, I turn the key.
Then: only the small rectangle of space, absent of light. Absent of answers. A trickster to the end, a woman on the run from something I will never pin down, Isabel’s box is empty.
And so you see, Nick, there are only so many variables. Maybe variable A goes like this:
A mother and her beloved son flee the abusive, drunken, mentally ill man of the house, who has been holding them hostage to beatings and borderline starvation for years. The only catch is that one child—the daughter—remains behind, the way people in ancient times sacrificed virgins to volcanoes. For some days, let’s say, Papi expects his good-for-nothing wife to come back in an attempt to claim the little brat. He beats the brat nice and hard so that when his wife sees her, she will cry and gnash her teeth and wring her hands with guilt; she will think twice, looking at those bruises, before leaving him again.
Why he wants to keep the wife in the first place is an eternal mystery we cannot engage here—why do any such men so desperately need to possess women they seem to despise?
Papi—Javier—has such women all over Caracas, like a junkie sometimes has numerous dealers. Somehow, though, this one, his real wife, the one he had before the dark days came, doesn’t return. She and his only son are gone. Javier is left with the smart-mouthed daughter, of whom apparently his bitch wife has also washed her hands. How can this be? What is he supposed to do now? Oh, but he is not a stupid man. Soon, the possibilities begin to register. He hasn’t been able to work in some time thanks to his bottle, thanks to his moods, but the daughter who caused his wife and son to leave is pretty. She is young, but built like a woman. Even Isabel knew this, the day she refused to peddle Mami’s homemade bouquets door-to-door and made Miguel go alone. I’ll find some man to buy my flower instead, Miguel told me she screamed. Maybe every girl is born with the knowledge, the possibility, inside her skin.
(And you would tell me there i
s just no point to wondering about Variable B. No good to be gained by wandering the dark alleys of: Was Javier Guerra my father, too? Safer to just leave it the assumption that I was spawned by some anonymous john. So let’s say)
Javier begins to rent his daughter Isabel out. The money pours in, and Javier celebrates with his favorite lover, perhaps buying her a dress, a splashy night on the town. The lover’s jealous husband gets word, comes to the house waving a gun. He and Javier fight, but the man is distraught and weak-willed—the kind of man whose wife carries on with a bastard like Javier—and easily overpowered. Say that Javier refuses to return the gun, mocking the man, telling him to go home to his empty bed and look for his balls. He rests the gun on some table, flopping back in the chair he was lounging in when the jealous husband arrived. Drinks from the same bottle he was drinking from before the interruption. Laughs to himself. His daughter Isabel hides in her bedroom, heart on fire. Soon enough, Javier passes out in his favorite chair, bottle thudding to the dirt floor.
How easy would it be to leave the bedroom, to walk as if on anesthetized legs to the exact spot where the jealous husband once stood, waving the gun? Look, this gun, still in the room. Isabel stands, holding the gun in her thirteen-year-old hands. She is the top student in her class, her baby brother’s hero. She has saved her family, but somehow she ended up still here. Some people, from the moment of their birth, are made for something greater. Isabel: homeschooler, gardener, church-hopper, warrior. On her first try, she shoots her father in the heart, from the angle at which the jealous husband stood an hour or two earlier. It would be better if she had done it only moments after he left, but she needed to wait for Papi to pass out. In this window of time, the jealous husband has acquired an alibi at a nearby bar, but Isabel knows nothing of that. She flees the house, never to return.
Every Kind of Wanting Page 26
