Our Lady of Infidelity

by Jackie Parker

  “Ah,” says Father Bill and stands up. “Look who’s here!” But Luz was expecting Zoe, not Walt. The Felangela, she had said, to take care of me. Father Bill did not understand. “You hardly know her.” I do, Luz had thought, though she can’t explain it. She hears the things about Zoe that her mother and Father Bill say in the night. Zoe looking for her husband everywhere in the desert, driving the big car from the garage. And the things that they don’t say. Every night Zoe going back to the campgrounds to sleep.

  Luz does not look up. She appears to be holding her own hands, but no, Walt sees, she’s got a rosary. He smiles. She lifts her head slightly. He knows those eyes; he has seen her once before when she was afraid like this. When it was she in a bed in this hospital, her face slathered in ointment, her blistered lips white, and everyone stumped. High Desert police, social worker, doctor, mother, and priest all crowded into that room: “Who took you into the campgrounds, Luz? Who made you go?”

  Luz should have been at his wash today. She should have been one of the laughing children, bending and twisting to straighten the window in their minds.

  His heart is pounding. He is afraid of what Father Bill will tell him. He bends down to touch Luz’s foot dangling from the chair, the red sandal that appears quite new. A powerful longing rushes through Walt. He wishes he could hold her. He has nearly forgotten, or perhaps he has not allowed himself to remember the heat and the smallness of his children’s bodies, the sweetness of their drenching tears. He would sing to them when they cried. He could not stand their sorrow. It surprises him to feel it still within him, even with this child whom he has never once held. His own children are so far away. If they cry he no longer sees it, their grief subsumed by distance. His children who do not know their own father’s house. “Hey, honey,” Walt says and gives the foot a squeeze.

  “Where is Josefina? What happened?”

  Father Bill’s gesture is almost imperceptible. Of course. He cannot say. Luz is right there.

  “So what do you need? I’m here.”

  “Yes,” says Father Bill, “you made good time.”

  CHAPTER 4

  She cringes at their every touch, even the nurse who has tried several times to reassure her. These hands are danger, Josefina’s body knows. It reacts automatically to any strange touch, as if she were still in the Ilopango, waiting for the colonel and the ones in dark glasses, waiting for the wires and knives.

  They take the clothes from her; they look. She hears their questions and knows that she is in a hospital, a safe place, knows because she has been to a hospital before and learned safety there.

  “How did you get these?”

  Ah, they are looking at her. Let them believe some deranged lover has left such scars on her breasts and her thighs. Let them think her body bears the marks of some senseless crime.

  Do they want to hear the history of her country? Of theirs? How else can she answer, and if she does will they think she is crazy? That she has invented such horrors? Each mark is deliberate. Those who did it to her were taught. She will have to give history; she will have to give politics. Where to start? Perhaps with the battle in her own family that went on seven years. She is fourteen. Esperanza, her little sister, just eight, nearly choking on a fish bone because Josefina and her father are once again fighting, and in the middle of dinner. He is red-faced; Josefina is outraged. Their mother’s mild cries are ignored. Three times she claps her manicured hands. Their voices insult the carved oaken table that has been in his family for centuries at which no daughter dared raise her voice. From the mud that has dried in the soles of her shoes, her father has discovered her crime. “You are doing that damned work with the campesinos. You are going again with the communist priests who will get us all killed.”

  “Papi, I am teaching poor people to read!”

  The nurse tries again. William pleads to Josefina in Spanish, “Let her give you the shot. It will be easier.”

  Now she will try to pull herself back. Her arms and her legs are quaking, the cold running through her like ice. And still she sees clearly those men who she knows are not here in the cubicle of the High Desert Hospital, but who appeared in her mind the same as the ambulance in her driveway, the siren, their noiseless white cars. Here they come in dark glasses—those known to her and those unknown—the faces that devour the homely white face of her nurse. If she can wait now. If she can stay in her skin. If she can think of her daughter and do nothing, in time it will pass.

  The nurse says something to Father Bill. All she can hear are her last words, “advanced states.”

  In what way has Josefina advanced?

  “We are also dealing with her post-traumatic stress.”

  Josefina picks out Father Bill’s words from among the voices that are clamoring within and around her, two people and Luz, her eyes tell her now. Two people and Luz are in her room. She hears Father Bill give the words that are as solid for her as the bed table the nurse has pushed to the wall. Beside it stands her post-traumatic stress, a cabinet of steel, the secrets it holds locked inside the drawers. Nothing within it can save her. Her body does not know where she is.

  Outside the drawn green curtains, beyond the white door, another voice teases through. Ah, she thinks, she is coming out of it. This is how she emerges. She pulls herself upward by sound. Now she takes a breath, the air nauseating, thick with spoiling flesh, antiseptic, unwholesome food. The throbbing in her head dulled but present. She can hear Luz’s little voice, even over the respirator in the cubicle of the dying woman to her left, and over the drone of the television, the voice of the far patient she has not seen. Who is it that Luz is speaking with outside the door? Is it the woman that Josefina dreads? The one who has been here to see Josefina one time already, the same woman, the same large white teeth? The one who the hospital sent to study her daughter (and her) when Luz was found in the campgrounds after she ran from her school in the spring? The intruder who came to their house, with papers and questions? But the voice that is mixing with Luz’s is a man’s voice, kind and familiar. Ah yes, now she has it. Outside the room with her daughter is Walt.

  “Okay!” Josefina calls out, and pushes herself into a sitting position, a truce more with herself than with the long-faced nurse. It will take hours, maybe days for the faces to depart. For the cabinet to diminish, four drawers then two, someone to remove it completely, ah, all those files. Still, if she does not assert herself in its presence, this nurse will shoot her so full of the Demerol she will tell everything, they will know what she is, know where her friends are, and then all will be lost. “Ah,” she says and tries to smile. This is the easy part; this is simply the needle for sleep. If she shakes, she will shake. If she is flooded with the images of those men and their cars, she will try not to scream. If Esperanza chokes on a codfish bone, her mother will rise from the chair just in time. Josefina’s little daughter is here now. Her daughter, Luz, seven years old. She is outside the door. The child in her womb who survived every wire and knife and has grown into life.

  But now the nurse is talking quite fast, and Josefina cannot follow. Always the English is difficult when she begins the return to her senses. Another unsafe boundary she must cross.

  “As soon as he gets your results, the doctor will visit. He will explain the procedure. And later the anesthetist will come by and let you know what to expect.” William tells her in Spanish, her William, whom the others call Father Bill. She answers in kind.

  “You can’t send me an anesthetist now?”

  William laughs. This is good. She can joke. She is coming back.

  “Where will they put it?”

  The nurse does not touch her. At last even this long-faced nurse is catching on. She points to the place in her chest, a six-inch tubing will soon be embedded in Josefina’s flesh, as if she needed one more mark of disfigurement, but this is what will save her for the dialysis. She looks at where the object will be. The object she won’t be able to hide from her daughter, nor from her emp
loyers who put up with her absences because she is good, because she loves their cold marble houses, the way they echo like wonderful tombs. Her mother must stay seated. She is rising in protest. The pearls at her neck, her best gray silk suit. “Were I not dead, I could not have survived to see you so shamed.” Ah, her mother has retained her humor. From a house where no girl ever cooked a meal or made a bed, Josefina, the medical student has become quite an expert at cleaning. She knows just the right cleanser for the marble, half measures of vinegar and water for wood, and how to give shine to the tile. It is wonderful actually, a relief, she has found. She wishes she were on her knees now, on the marble, circling the floor.

  “Okay,” says the nurse. “We’ll send someone to clean you.”

  “I can’t take a chower?”

  “What did she say?”

  “She wants a shower.”

  “Not yet. Right now let’s stay with a sponge bath.”

  “And now,” says Josefina, “Can I please have my daughter?”

  “You’re sure?” asks William, her William, whose flesh tastes faintly of cumin, whose mouth kisses her scars.

  Oh, but he has been worried, now she can see it, see him, his tired face. Josefina holds out her hand. She knows just how to rouse him, every place that he loves to be touched. “Please, give me Luz. Tell her that I am here only for tests.”

  “All right,” he says, then goes to get Luz.

  * * *

  Luz stands by the bed and looks at her mother, who is smiling but weakly, her arms held out but not high, a bad smell, strong medicines, something sweet and disgusting like licking blood. When Luz goes into her mother’s neck, her feet on the floor, she stops up her nose and her mouth, as if she is drowning.

  “Why did you fall?” Luz asks to the neck. “Why did the ambulance take you? Why didn’t you go in the car?”

  “We will soon know. Now they will give me the tests.”

  “Will you sleep in the hospital?”

  “Yes.”

  “How many days?”

  “Two or three,” says Josefina.

  “Probably three,” says William.

  “Can I?” Luz whispers, her knee already on the mattress. Even with the smell, she can be close to her mother.

  “Ah, yes.” Josefina says, as she tries to shift her body on the bed to make room for Luz.

  “No, honey,” says the nurse as Luz climbs onto the bed. “Sit in the chair.”

  “Come here, mamita,” says Josefina ignoring the nurse. “See? I don’t break.”

  The nurse looms down, “We’d really prefer if she sat in the chair. Lose, do you hear me?”

  “Luz,” Josefina corrects.

  “I’ll share my chair with you Luz,” Walt Adair says.

  Walt, thinks Josefina. So focused has she been on her daughter she has not even seen him there.

  “She is fine here with me,” says Josefina.

  The nurse sighs softly, opens the curtain, and leaves.

  “No one brushed my hair,” Josefina says and gives Walt an embarrassed smile, “Or my daughter’s. And I am sorry if I stink.”

  “I’m very glad to be called,” Walt says. He is honored. This woman, this child. To be summoned at such a time. The smell in the room is making him nauseous, an overlay of urine as if she were drenched in it.

  “The Felangela can brush me when she comes,” Luz says, picking her head up and smoothing her mother’s wild hair. “She does it so slow. She makes pictures come into my mind.”

  “What are you saying, mamita? The Felangela has never brushed your hair.”

  Walt wishes he understood Spanish. The words are musical, it distracts him for a moment, from the odor. In his other life, it was a thing he abhorred. The sounds of the language. Spanish. The bilingual state of California. These people, he would say to Gwen, why don’t they learn our language? “So we can have workers,” she replied.

  “Already you are imagining you have found someone to brush hair better than me?” Josefina says, this time in English.

  “No!” says Luz.

  “Should I go?” asks Walt, “I could wait outside if you like.”

  “They are sending in someone to clean me,” says Josefina. “William, do you want to go out for a coffee with Walt? Luz can eat ice cream.”

  “I don’t want to go out when they come to clean you,” says Luz.

  “Maybe La Felangela will come for you.” Josefina says.

  La Felangela? Walt has never heard Josefina speak to her daughter like this. He has heard her disparage Our Lady of Guadalupe. She has joked with him about the little saints Luz collects by the dozens, like Ryan’s action figures, Jen’s Barbies. Now Josefina is talking to Luz about angels?

  “I’ll leave you three for a minute. Be right outside, Luz,” he says. Walt goes out through the drapes, then out into the hall. He feels sick. He does not like how she looks, the dark yellow cast of her skin, the vague swelling of her face, the thick rancid smell of her flesh. It doesn’t look good. His heart is pounding. Something very wrong, he can feel it. In the hallway where dinner carts clatter unseen, the smell of boiled potatoes and fish. Now Walt is beginning to feel unsteady and chilled. A young girl goes into Josefina’s room with a pan and a sponge. Luz’s voice comes through the door. Father Bill’s deep calming bass, no doubt urging her to leave. All of them now speaking Spanish. Luz is going to give Walt quite a time.

  Finally, Father Bill comes out. Luz is holding his hand. “Let’s get this child something to eat.”

  “No,” says Luz.

  “We have a girl who needs dinner, and do you know what else? Who will turn on the lights at the church? The people are coming for the meeting. I don’t want them to think I forgot.”

  “From the Feast?” asks Luz.

  “Yes. Who will do it? How about you and Walt?”

  “No!’

  “The fifteenth is almost here for us. There’s a lot to do.”

  “Ah,” says Walt, who has figured it out. “The Feast of the Assumption. Remember last year, Luz?”

  Yes, she remembers. She has been counting the days. But she has been counting them wrong. Mami is in the hospital. She should not have wished the days to pass quickly. She should have wished them instead to stay slow, so slow that this day, with Mami in the hospital by ambulance, would never have come.

  The Feast of the Assumption, thinks Walt, always too hot, always those tables outside in back of the church, with the frosting melting off the cakes, the crocks of bad chili, the bingo over the speaker system, those sad carnival rides, the kids with red faces in the ball-jumping pen. Walt always skips it. The dog days of high desert summer. The families. Especially, he thinks, the families. This year he will have a legitimate excuse: he will be with his own family, in a restaurant, if it all goes well, and before that in the stadium of Fullerton College, watching his son, starting pitcher in the league semifinals. He will not have to deal with the Feast of the Assumption. Though Walt would like to say something to Father Bill about his assumptions regarding Zoe Luedke. That she was honest. That she was competent. He’d like to say right now how wrong his friend was to foist her upon him, and what he, Walt, is stuck with and publicly, but that will wait. Josefina is suffering, from what he doesn’t yet know, and he has been called here for Luz. It would be unseemly to bring up his window.

  Now Father Bill is bending to Luz, his voice rising softly in a question.

  “La Felangela,” Luz replies.

  “Walt is here now. He came all the way here just for you.”

  Luz nods and stands with her back to the wall, gazing at the fluorescent ceiling lights as the men walk away to talk. Even without her lips moving, she has learned she can pray.

  “We’re going to need help for the next couple of days. Someone to watch Luz overnight. Two, three nights at the most. I can cover the days pretty well. She has summer school till nearly three,” Father Bill says.

  “Of course,” Walt says. He is inspecting the Father’s clerica
l shirt. Hard to see blood on the black. If Josefina trusts Walt with Luz, how can he refuse? In fact, he is touched. And actually he realizes, it’s good. Luz has been to his home several times. She loves to walk barefoot through the water and over the stones in his River Rock fountain, to put her hand under the water as it spills out of the mouth of the trout. She has played in the little white trailer he had furnished so carefully for Jen. For Ryan, there’s a room in his house. Luz could stay there if she preferred. If she doesn’t mind sleeping in a bed with sheets and quilt printed with bats, gloves, balls, and the red haloed LA Angels insignia, waking up to the photos of Hall of Fame pitchers—Dizzy Dean through Don Sutton. Perhaps when Luz is away from the hospital, she will be more receptive to him. He agrees to take her.

  But Luz has ideas of her own.

  “I want to only sleep here in the hospital.”

  “Honey you can’t. You know that,” Father Bill says.

  “Then let me come back after I eat.”

  When the nurse comes out of the room, Luz races inside. They catch the door as it swings. Behind the curtains the sounds of two televisions are competing, the cubicles now smell of boiled potatoes and fish, but Josefina looks clean. She wears a brave smile, and her dark hair lies freshly combed against her skin with its yellow dark cast, its smell like a mistaken perfume, thick in the air.

  After discussion in two languages they all agree Walt will stay with Luz at the blue house. But first he will take her to the diner.

  “I don’t want you to be alone in the hospital, Mami.”

  “Alone? I have all the nurses and doctors who are here for my help. I have Father Bill. You go for eating with Walt. Oh, they have taken my money.”

  “I’ll give them money to eat,” Father Bill says.