Our Lady of Infidelity

by Jackie Parker

“That’s where I live,” says Luz. “And I used to even live on his property.”

  “Wait, slow down. You’re not from New York?”

  “She is,” says Luz.

  Who is in charge of this day, Zoe thinks. Luz seems to have taken over. “Hang on!” Mike Lopez says then and puts his hand up like he is going to stop traffic. “I just remembered something.” He goes back into the kitchen; a minute later he has returned. “Someone tacked this up a while back. Don’t ask me who. It’s been hanging by the back door for weeks. Hey, a great event might be headed our way after all.”

  Zoe takes the flyer from his hand. Same wording, same map, same lilac bond, only splotchy with grease. Same dime-sized black dot.

  Before they leave, Mike Lopez writes some numbers down on a small yellow paper and hands them to Zoe. “There are a couple of shops around here where they job-in help. If your Michael found his way to them, you might be in luck. You never know.”

  “Michael and Mike,” says Luz.

  Mike Lopez throws up his hands. “Small world!” he says.

  When they are outside, Zoe makes a noise, somewhere between blowing air and whistling as they are out squinting in the light and looking among the parked cars for the Dart. “Another purple flyer. I don’t mind telling you, Luz Reyes, I’m a little bit freaked.”

  “I’m sorry,” says Luz.

  “What do you have to be sorry for? It’s not your fault. You were a big help. Really. This was my first iota of success.” If the flyer has anything to do with Michael, that is, if she has not walked into her own mistake.

  “I-o-ta?” says Luz.

  “A very small thing. I think. Don’t quote me.”

  When they get to the Dart, Zoe opens all the doors, starts the ignition then the air conditioning, so they can drive without roasting in their own juices.

  “Could the Feast be the great event?” Luz asks when the car is cool enough for them to risk sitting down and closing the doors.

  “What feast?” Zoe asks, turning back onto the freeway.

  Luz explains the Feast of Our Lady’s Assumption—the party Father Bill has every year at night outside of his church that everyone goes to.

  All roads lead to Our Lady in Luz World, Zoe thinks. “Well, how great an event is it?” Zoe asks.

  “To me it’s very great. Bingo that lights up, every cookie and cake that you want, dancing if you like it, and the best thing, the ball-jumping game.”

  “What makes the balls jump?”

  “No,” says Luz. “Not the balls, the children. It’s in a big cage. We go in and jump and fall in the balls, and no one pushes anyone or kicks. Maybe you can come too.”

  “When is it again?”

  “August the fifteenth,” says Luz, “the Feast of Our Lady’s Assumption. Will you be here?”

  “In five days? I may well be. I’ll be back at the campgrounds. Unless, of course, a miracle happens and Michael turns up.”

  * * *

  The campgrounds are meant to be a half-hour foray. It is only a ten-minute drive up the curving gray ribbon of Park Boulevard Road to the Hidden Valley Campsite, a five-step sprint to her dark green two-person eastward-tending tent. A quick dash inside—mere seconds when she will have lost sight of Luz before emerging with her duffle bag in hand. And then, and only possibly, on the way out will Zoe stop the car at the Cottonwood Visitor Station, take Luz inside, Luz’s feet only briefly making contact with campgrounds soil, so that Zoe can check in with the ranger on duty to see if Michael Payne has suddenly appeared during the two, or is it already three days since Zoe has been gone from the campgrounds. Two days or three days that have the heft of weeks, months, even. Yes, Zoe will tell Father Bill, we went to the campgrounds, but only so I could get my clothes. And Luz mostly stayed in the car.

  Zoe knows the roads through the campgrounds. She has been there nearly a week, studied the site map by early light and later by full moon and flashlight. She knows, even without the sign, that ten miles exactly off of Park Boulevard is a spur road to Hidden Valley, a seven-foot brown-painted white-lettered right-pointing marker to her campsite. Park Boulevard on which she drives is the only road possible, and she is checking her mileage gauge at seven miles, at ten miles, then at ten miles-and-a-half, driving even when she sees that Echo Rock Mountain is getting too big, its curved granite face approaching when it should stay away. This is not the way to her campsite, she knows it, but not for five minutes more, having gone over two miles up Park Boulevard and with the sign marker nowhere in sight, does she stop, make a U-turn, cursing loudly as she starts back. The road takes her down and around, nothing to do but follow, and all at once there she is in the vast Joshua Tree Forest, hundreds, thousands of spiky Joshuas all thick-branched and gray, splayed pointing gracelessly up to the sky. “You okay back there?” she says. “I can’t find the road to the campsite, but I will, just bear with me.”

  And, naturally, thinks Zoe, no one to ask, not a hiker in sight, not even a heat-loving German. Meanwhile, Luz in the backseat has gone quiet. So quiet that Zoe thinks for a moment she may have fallen asleep. But Luz is not asleep. She is looking out the window at that bleached landscape, the mounds of dry brush, at the gorgeous endlessness of sky.

  “Could Mami die?” says Luz.

  “Ah,” says Zoe, a soft wind in her voice. “Who would let that happen?”

  “God.”

  And then Zoe pulls to the side of the road and stops the car. “It’s all right,” she says, getting out and opening Luz’s door. Zoe presses her mouth to Luz’s forehead, tasting salt, only the faintest aroma of roses, maybe imagined.

  “I’m sorry we came here. We’ll leave. The heck with my clothes. I’ll take you right home.”

  “No,” says Luz, unfastening her seatbelt, “I don’t want to leave. Please, help me to stay.” Her heart is hurting, and just when she is where she has been praying to be since the spring.

  In the spring, when she was brought home from the hospital, Luz had tried to tell Mami how her feet made her run to the campgrounds. When she told the truth, Mami had said the curse then yelled. “No song from your mind makes your feet go. No phantom Madonna tells you to run away from your school.” Mami walked fast to the telephone and called. “It is your fault that Luz has done this,” she yelled on the phone in the kitchen. “You are turning my daughter fanatic.”

  Father Bill came to the blue house. He knocked on the door of her room. Her mouth was thick with the white cream that spoiled every taste, her lips hard and heavy from burning. Father Bill sat next to Luz on the edge of her bed in a plain white shirt. Luz watched his chest moving up and down from breathing slow. His face turned away to the window. Then he turned back. Father Bill looked very softly into her eyes, the look so beautiful she did not have the words. “Luz,” he said, “don’t open yourself so deeply. You are becoming confused.” She waited for him to name the Rosary and give the number, but he only put soft hands on her head then closed his eyes.

  “Our Lady,” Luz said, trying to tell it.

  “Shush,” says Father Bill, “We can’t speak this way anymore. You must promise me now.”

  “No,” Luz said, “I have to.”

  “You must promise not to think of these things. Will you promise? God doesn’t want you running away from school. He doesn’t want you lost in the campgrounds.”

  She touches his cheek. She says to his heart, don’t be afraid. She prays to Our Lady. She looks into Father Bill’s eyes.

  “Rest now,” he says and stands up.

  “Pineapple or guava?” said Mami, like always walking fast into the room with two pitchers. She made the refrescas to cool Luz for sleep, to cool Luz’s mouth from burning. She put down the pitchers on the small table next to the bed. The pitchers were full. One was yellow, one gold. Luz said pineapple and guava, both. Then Mami brought three bowls and three spoons. Father Bill put the lamp on the floor so there was room. Mami held one bowl. Father Bill poured the syrup, first yellow, then gold. Then Mami sa
t down near her pillow and filled a spoon with the gold. Luz opened her mouth. The cool ice went in. At last Luz could eat, not just drink with the straw. Mami fed her like she was a baby.

  How patiently Luz has waited for Our Lady to show her the way back to the campgrounds. Now it is here. Now Luz must let Our Lady show her the one tree, the place where Luz can once again hear Her voice. Luz moves slowly, pausing before a wooly trunk to listen, to stand in the quiet and wait for the voice. Zoe follows like a shadow. In summer the trees are more silent, more gray and dry, no white sacks of blossoms in the trunk of the Joshuas, no tiny white moths flying out of the branches like upside-down snow. Everywhere, nothing but Joshuas. Joshuas, desert, and the too-bright sky. Luz walks slow, the quiet so loud it is humming. In the spring she walked fast. Our Lady could make her feet fly.

  “What are you doing?” Zoe asks, her words making shapes in the silence of the Joshua forest.

  “Finding the tree.” Even Luz is too loud to herself, though her voice barely carries.

  “There are thousands here, Luz. If you’re looking for one tree, you’ll be walking the rest of your life.”

  Now Luz is so still in her body, when she raises her head and looks up, the wooly gray branches grow soft. Now they dissolve into gold.

  CHAPTER 13

  It is nearly eight when they get back to the blue house. Luz would not leave the campgrounds even after two big horn sheep had come perilously close to where they stood, startling Zoe when they appeared in the distance at the north edge of the Joshua forest. There had been not one single hiker to witness it, the big horn sheep rarely seen and never in flatlands, even a glimpse of them on the mountains considered lucky. She had pointed them out in the distance while Luz was moving from Joshua tree to Joshua tree, her hands on their trunks, her face pressed close as if she were listening for something, sometimes closing her eyes. “Luz!” Zoe cried. “Look at the sheep.” Luz had turned and looked, standing quite still, so still that Zoe thought she might be frightened. “Don’t worry,” Zoe had said, “they won’t come down here.” But the sheep were moving fast, and Zoe saw she was wrong. For now she could hear their hooves, smell the muttony musk, see their buff-colored coats, three hundred pounds of muscular grace, then the indentations in their enormous curled horns and the softness of their eyes.

  “Stay still,” whispered Luz when Zoe rushed toward her with her hand outstretched, ready to grab her and run. “Don’t be afraid.”

  The sheep came within five feet of where Luz stood, then Luz held out her hands. Zoe froze. Luz’s features relaxed, her expression expectant as the sheep came closer, bent their necks, and one after the other nuzzled her cheek. Luz laughed, allowed it, taking each enormous soft face in her hands. When she dropped her hands the sheep remained for a long while without moving, soundless, right beside Luz, Zoe a little apart. After several moments the sheep turned and galloped off, Luz watching until they were no longer visible, said nothing, and went back to exploring the trees.

  What is this child, Zoe had wondered, to whom such a thing happens and who seems to take it in stride? It is Zoe, the witness, who is amazed. Amazed and so moved by what she had seen, almost afraid to break the spell of it by speaking. And there was Luz, feeling her way through a cluster of Joshua trees. “Luz,” Zoe said, “those sheep! Do you realize what has just happened?”

  “Don’t worry. The animals always come to me in the campgrounds.”

  Zoe had walked up to Luz then, lowering herself so she could look at Luz’s face. “What do you mean the animals always come to you? What other animals have done this?”

  “The tortoises, shhh,” said Luz spreading her fingers on the trunk of the Joshua.

  “Luz, how many times have you been to the campgrounds?”

  “I don’t know. I think three.”

  The entire drive back to Infidelity Luz had been quiet, leaving Zoe to wonder about what she seen, and the things about Luz that she could not yet grasp.

  She can hear the phone ringing from the driveway, as she and Luz run up the walk to the blue house. It is ringing again as Zoe struggles to open the locks.

  “Let me answer it,” Zoe says, racing to the kitchen. “This is my fault.”

  “Where have you been?” Father Bill demands. “I’ve been trying to get you for over an hour.”

  Zoe takes a breath and leans against the back door of the kitchen. Luz sits down at the table and stares at Zoe with her dark eyes wide. Something has happened, Zoe thinks, she has seen something extraordinary that Father Bill should be told. Still, he had said not to take Luz to the campgrounds, and Zoe has taken her there, let her stay for quite a long time. How can she not tell him this? Don’t tell, don’t tell, Luz mouths. Please!

  What good will it do to speak of the campgrounds now when Zoe doesn’t have time to do it justice? She will wait until after Luz is asleep, and perhaps, by then Luz will have told her why the campgrounds—where the animals come to Luz all the time—are forbidden. “We’re just getting back from Twenty-Nine Palms. There was so much traffic.” It is a cheap lie, and as she is telling it Zoe does not feel right. Does not like having told it in front of Luz. Still, Father Bill breezes right by it.

  “How is Luz?” he asks.

  “She is fine,” Zoe says. “Here, you can speak with her yourself.”

  Luz takes the phone, listens then responds in Spanish. The conversation is brief. When she is finished, she hangs up and Zoe is relieved.

  “They gave Mami an operation,” Luz says.

  “When?” Zoe tries not to sound alarmed.

  “In the afternoon.” Luz says. “We have to make the refrescas. Mami wants us to do it. I’ll scrape the ice. You can pour.”

  She shows Zoe where the big silver bowls are kept, points to the one they need, tells her to put it in the sink, then goes to the freezer and stands on her toes, takes out a loaf pan of ice. “I will show you how we do it,” she says. “Do you know how to get the ice out of the pan? I can’t do it.”

  Zoe runs the hot water and taps the loaf pan with a knife. Then she shakes out the ice cake. It slides into the bowl with a clang. “Did they say what the operation was?”

  “For her blood,” says Luz. Then she goes to the refrigerator again. “Pineapple or guava,” asks Luz, struggling toward the table carrying first one then another filled plastic pitcher. “You can have both.”

  “Oh no, you can’t use that knife,” says Zoe when Luz goes for the big knife, a nine-inch carver, which Luz explains is used to scrape the ice. “Tell me what to do,” Zoe says. She does the best she can to scrape shavings out of the ice block into the big silver bowl, finally giving up on the blade, hacking great chunks of ice with the knife handle. “Now what?” says Zoe looking down at the ice. “Little bowls,” says Luz, and hands her two yellow ones.

  At the table Luz pours the thick syrup, pineapple, then guava into the ice in their yellow bowls. They eat in silence, the ice block melting slowly in the sink. “We haven’t had dinner,” says Zoe. “Isn’t this dessert?”

  Luz ignores the question. She puts down her spoon. “In spring Father Bill moved us to the blue house to be close to the church. I could hear and see everything.”

  “What do you mean, Luz?”

  “I don’t know,” Luz says. “In the spring I ran all the way to the Joshua trees from my school.”

  “Where we went today? You ran there?”

  Luz hesitates. She must be very careful not to let out the secret, but sometimes her words have a tongue of their own. “Yes.”

  Zoe stops eating. Then she looks at Luz’s face. “Why?”

  Again Luz is silent.

  “I can’t say the reason.”

  “That’s fine. You don’t have to tell me. But does it have something to do with animals? Do you love to be around animals?”

  “That’s not the reason,” says Luz.

  “Is it far from your school to the campgrounds?”

  “Yes.” says Luz, “very far.”


  “Why did you do that?”

  “Will you believe me?”

  “Of course.”

  “Our Lady,” says Luz. “Because she called me.”

  “Luz.”

  “She did.”

  “How did She manage to do that?”

  “She sang.”

  Zoe puts down her spoon. “What did she sing, ‘I am calling you-ou-ou-ou-ou-ou-ou?’”

  “That’s not her song. That’s terrible singing.”

  “I apologize for my voice.”

  “You think it’s a story, but I am not the only one She calls.”

  “Oh, really?” Zoe replies.

  “She calls other people too,” says Luz.

  “Name one.”

  “You won’t believe me.”

  “Does she call Father Bill?”

  Luz thinks for a moment. “Yes.”

  “Does he tell you about it?”

  “No. He says don’t talk about it. Don’t think about it.”

  Good for him, Zoe thinks. Zoe should probably change the topic, not let Luz go on in this way, but there is something fascinating about this child. And isn’t it better for Luz to be making up stories than thinking about Josefina? An operation, Zoe wonders, what could it have been?

  “Okay, I’m game,” Zoe says. “Who else does She call?”

  “She calls Michael.” Luz says this looking straight at Zoe, solemn and round-eyed. The picture of truth, the same intent open stare she had given to the sheep.

  For a moment, looking into those round black eyes Zoe believes Luz knows things about her, thinks Luz is speaking of Michael, her Michael. How can she? And for a moment Zoe is frightened in the way she was when Luz touched her and she felt she would pass out. And then Luz opens her mouth and runs her tongue over her bottom teeth, teasing them, teasing Zoe, perhaps. “Oh, I get it!” says Zoe. “Michael is an angel. Remember, you taught me? That’s his job to be called.”

  “I meant your Michael.”

  “Well, She never called him when I was home.”

  “Yes,” Luz whispers, “she did.”

  “What do you mean, Luz?”

  “She always calls to the souls of hurt children.”