Our Lady of Infidelity

by Jackie Parker

  For a moment no one reacts. Walt appears stunned. He drops the umbrella. Luz continues to nod, as if she approves Zoe’s fall. Then the first shouts go up in the crowd and some of the women spontaneously weep. The rest look around as if they’re not sure they’ve actually seen what they’ve seen and have to confirm it by the shock on a neighboring face.

  “I knew it,” declares Emily Otto, the first one to rise from her lawn chair. “I knew last week from the smell. This child is bringing great things.”

  And with that Luz snaps back to herself and scrambles to her feet, puts her hand on her head and pulls off the green baseball cap.

  “Who gave me this?” And then she looks down and sees Zoe and lets out a cry.

  Zoe opens her eyes onto the piercing blue sky, so beautiful it hurts. Or perhaps it’s the back of her head, maybe both. Immediately, she gathers her limbs and sits up, one hand (the one with that finger) cradling the back of her skull, her focus drawn down from the ethers not by the bump she can already feel; not by Luz, standing beside her calling her name; not even by Walt Adair in his wide-shouldered, bare-chested, creamy-skinned nearness kneeling anxiously toward her—but by someone inside Walt’s office who is beckoning to her through the off-kilter window. What? Zoe inquires, for now the person seems to be speaking. Keep going! Keep going where? Zoe asks in her mind, to what? Zoe’s whole body trembles. It’s all right, says the voice. No need to worry. Don’t strain yourself. You’re just fine. In fact you are superb. There is no one at the window. No one is speaking and yet Zoe can hear it, a voice as clear as her own.

  With enormous effort, she turns from the window to the commotion of real voices swirling around her. To Luz Reyes, looking healthy and miserable, her color restored—exactly the child that Zoe has known.

  “Come here,” Zoe says, as she reaches out to Luz and draws her close.

  “Do you have to go to the hospital?” Luz asks. Two times she has seen her own mother taken by ambulance after a fall.

  “Oh no. It’s nothing. I am fine.” Zoe still feels the force drawing her gaze to the window, wanting her (how can she knows this?) to look once again. Listen! Do you see your own wonderfulness? Only with great effort is she able to keep her attention on Luz. “Why did you fall?” asks Luz. Zoe cannot answer. What was it that knocked her on her back like that—and in public? Now Luz is caressing Zoe’s hair. Zoe winces. “You got a bump!” says Luz. And all of a sudden Zoe begins to laugh. She feels wonderful, unreasonably happy and safe. “You’re sure you’re okay?” Walt asks, his gaze so acute, his umbrella so wide, his nakedness looming over her so generous and musky she nearly forgets where she is all over again.

  “Absolutely. Really, I’m great. How ’bout you, Luz?”

  “Good,” Luz whispers into Zoe’s ear, “but why are the church people here? Why isn’t Walt wearing a shirt?”

  When Zoe fails to answer, Luz turns to Walt standing up now, the umbrella upside down on the ground, hands in his pockets. “Honey,” he says. What can he tell her that will not frighten Luz half to death?

  Luz pushes out from Zoe’s embrace, grinds the toe of her new red sandal on the sidewalk scuffing out what is left of the shine. “Why is everyone staring at me?”

  And before they can figure out what to do next, Luz takes off on visible feet, looking gravely insulted and for all the world like she is about to cry.

  CHAPTER 24

  Father Bill is lost in a paradise of fan palms and faultless white stucco, the houses, the walls that enclose them. He can’t find the one where Josefina works, an address he knows by heart. He drives down the wide, empty streets, not a car or a person in sight, all the streets identical, all the numbers elusive. She has said that the Palms reminds her of the neighborhood in San Salvador where she grew up, San Benito, where the wealthy and the privileged live protected by walls of brick and stone embedded with shards of glass sharp enough to slice off a hand. The Palms is San Benito bleached, lacking character or color, or the mercy of shade.

  In the nights in San Benito there was often the clamor of gunfire and in the mornings it was not uncommon to find a body propped outside the gate, the eyes gouged out, limbs missing, the thumbs tied together behind the back when the arms had been spared. In those years the bodies or parts of a body might be found anywhere. No way to escape them. No neighborhood safe.

  As Father Bill reaches the end of the street, he sees he has been driving in circles. He tries not to think of Luz on the sidewalk, the gathering crowd. Of Walt waiting for him to return. He continues the Rosary he has been saying on the drive. His prayer remains thin, at a distance, his heart closed down by his fear. The sweat collects under his arms, staining Walt’s shirt.

  Driving back to the street he has come from, he damns the perfection of fan palms that tower above him, the braided brown trunks, each tree costing thousands, enough to dress and feed a whole village, build a small school in the country. Buy farm equipment and books.

  At the corner he turns left when all logic tells him he should have turned right and finds the street that has eluded him, the house he is looking for only a few driveways up. He pulls up to the gate, an imposing obstruction, a golden wood he could not name. The gates of San Benito are iron and intricately forged, with space enough for a hand to slip out a last forbidden gift to a dangerous sister: twice imprisoned, a disappeared husband, her whereabouts tracked.

  Now he presses the button on the intercom, then breathes with deliberate slow breaths, reaches once more for the rosary. “Blessed are thou among women,” he says. Josefina’s voice comes through, formal and cool. “Yes, who is this please?”

  By the time the gates have opened and he has driven through them, she is standing on the wide marble steps, the front door open behind her, her hand over her mouth.

  She knows instantly by his presence, the restrained, measured step—the walk of bad news—something irrevocable has occurred. By the time he says his first words, the visible world has shifted for Josefina. The courtyard is shaded by the thick, leafy branches of ancient ceibas, the air humid and heavy with dust-laden rain, San Benito in summer. She is home.

  “Everything is fine. Luz is all right.” He reaches out to touch her arm; the sharp smell of lemon ammonia comes at him. “Walt found her outside the car wash. She is there with him now.”

  “No,” she says, covering her mouth.

  “Look at me. Luz is at the car wash with Walt.”

  Luz has turned up at the wrong place in time. Not desaparecido. Appeared. Appeared at the car wash. Father William in the wrong clothes, tight at the jaw, his color all wrong. She looks into his hooded eyes. She knows that look, the same look whenever he brings them bad news from the prisons, Ilopango for the women, Mariona the men. The look all the priests carry when they come to report the name of another whose body was found.

  Her mind breaks cleanly, a shard of glass sliced through the moment as through a hand. Only for an instant does Josefina wonder why her mother has allowed her inside the gates of the home from which she has been banned, or why Father William, dressed in ill-fitting lay clothes, speaks to her in English and of Luz. Luz lives in a time Josefina has not yet come to. It is years too soon for these words.

  “You have called Tutela Legal?”

  “We don’t need a lawyer. No one is in jail. Luz your daughter is down at the car wash and Walt is with her. I will take you. You can see for yourself.”

  From inside the house a woman’s voice calls out, “Josefina, who’s there?”

  “Wait here. Can you do that? Don’t go inside. I’ll just be a minute,” Father Bill says.

  He steps inside the cool white entry, white marble floors, high, gleaming staircase—a palace. From where does she find the strength to clean such a palace? Lydia Darrow, a tiny figure the color and texture of oiled bronze, stands at the top of the staircase wrapped in a thick white towel. She gasps when she sees him. Immediately he announces his name.

  Ah, she thinks, the plainclothes priest.
/>   “Josefina’s daughter has had an accident. I have to bring her right away. Where is her purse?”

  “My God, the little girl now?” says Lydia Darrow, hugging her towel to her skeletal body as she pads down the stairs. “Where is she?”

  “She is outside waiting. She is very upset.”

  “No, the child.”

  “She is with a friend.”

  “Not the hospital again?”

  “Not the hospital yet.”

  She arrives at the bottom of the stairs. She is older than he thought, her lined face furrowed with concern. “What happened?”

  Perhaps he could tell her the truth. Josefina has said she is a woman with heart. But what is the truth about Luz? He does not know.

  “She had a bad fall.”

  “What terrible luck. I’ll get her things.”

  “Thank you. I appreciate that.”

  Lydia Darrow goes quickly down a white corridor, a corridor longer than the echoing stone one where he walked as a young seminarian—why does he think of this now?—so lit with God’s presence, so blessed and blazing with love, so sure of his call. She returns with her arms full: clothes, purse, Josefina’s familiar white sandals. He takes the things carefully lest the sleeve of Walt’s shirt touch her oiled flesh.

  “Make sure Luz gets to a doctor.”

  He nods, surprised to hear Lydia Darrow pronounce Luz’s name.

  “I hope it’s all right if we leave Josefina’s car. Someone will come by and pick it up later.”

  He leaves before she can answer.

  Josefina is on the step exactly as he left her, staring into the blinding light. He grips her around the waist and they hurry to his car.

  “You have seen her?” she asks, breathless. “You promise me Luz is alive?”

  “I promise you.”

  She lets herself down onto the front seat, her feet resting on the stones of the driveway. The courtyard too bright, not a single sheltering tree. Her mother upstairs in her high white bed, Esperanza even now gathering the rosary from the carved silver box on her dresser.

  He has to bend down and lift up her legs, then place them on the floor of the car, tossing her things in the back seat, not caring how they fall.

  “You tell me this,” she demands, low and accusing as if someone close by is listening: “How can it be that now they take even the children?”

  “There has been no one taken. No one has disappeared. I will bring you to Luz. You can see for yourself.”

  He closes her door.

  On the drive Father Bill tries to engage Josefina with small talk, but it is impossible. She is lost in this moment working its way into the ever-present past. Who did he say was taken? Raphael again? Raphael or Esperanza? Esperanza in her place?

  He reaches once more for the rosary and enters the stillness. Each word of the prayer a stone dropped into water, and he has been parched, each syllable a perfect bead of water on his tongue. “Hail Mary, full of grace.” This is the heart of him now, the self he has lost. Grace has come to him although he has forgotten to ask. At a time when he no longer feels worthy of asking. Now, driving, Josefina lost to her demons, Luz on her knees in a state he dare not think of, the air in the Cavalier has grown softer. Perhaps even Josefina can receive it.

  He drives without thinking, contemplates the Glorious Mystery. He is risen out of the battle he has been waging with the day. “Blessed are thou among women. And blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.” He reaches the freeway, no idea how he arrived.

  “Josefina,” he says, but she does not answer.

  He drives on in silence, continuing his prayer. Very quickly, it seems, they begin the climb up the steep Infidelity grade, the place where only two weeks before his radiator went straight into red, the steam shooting out in a tremendous explosion of white. Where the stranger Zoe Luedke stopped her car for him and took him to the garage. Zoe Luedke, he thinks, of whose hands he had dreamed. He did not treat her kindly. There will be no time to apologize to Zoe now. She must already be gone.

  The light up ahead has softened. And now he can read the first Infidelity sign.

  When they are almost in sight of the car wash, Josefina turns from the window and looks straight ahead, not yet toward him, her eyes still closed. He knows not to speak. He must simply wait. She cannot be rushed. Perhaps he should drive right past the car wash and take her home.

  “William,” says Josefina, “why are you wearing Walt’s shirt?”

  The question brings him such relief that for a moment he cannot answer.

  “Was there blood?” she asks. “Is that the reason?”

  “There was no blood. Luz is not hurt.”

  “I sent her this morning to Mass.”

  She is not yet clear. She has forgotten they are not allowing Luz Mass.

  “Can you tell me what day it is?” he asks.

  “I know the day. It is Wednesday. It is the day of the feast of your lady that you love. I know where I am. I have recovered myself. I know what has happened. You came to my work. You are taking me to Luz. Tell me again why is she at the car wash when I sent her this morning to you?”

  “You didn’t put her on the summer school bus?”

  “Don’t you hear me? I sent her to Mass.”

  “But why?”

  “To make her happy.”

  “But why didn’t you bring her?”

  “She always walks to the church by herself. What’s wrong with you?”

  “She never came to me. She walked to the car wash.”

  “No,” says Josefina without hesitation, “Luz did not walk.”

  She grows quiet again, her index finger moving reflexively to the gauze, which covers the access. She is only a week out of the hospital. He wonders again if perhaps he should take her straight home to rest, let Walt look after Luz a while longer. Still, he was counting on Josefina to bring Luz out of the unreachable place where he left her.

  Whom does he care for in this moment? Who has the greater need? Josefina? Luz? He feels like a man torn between his wife and his child. And what of his parishioners whom he abandoned on the sidewalk? He is not Dr. Raphael Reyes, the husband of Josefina, the father of Luz. Only moments ago he had been given back his wholeness, through a great gift of grace. How quickly he has lost it. Under the complicated love he bears for this woman, he has forgotten himself—more times than he can count. No wonder he has suffered. No wonder Luz shakes him so deeply. He behaves like a man, not a priest, and an unenlightened one at that, as if by his will he can control things. As if his will can shape what Luz is.

  Just up ahead to the right he can see the diner, the curved glass windows fronting the freeway, and beyond it the Infidelity Motel with its pink neon sign. The blind light of morning has begun to disperse and the world is visible again, even the dense sweep of mountain from which he takes strength. Now Josefina leans toward him, straining to see across to the car wash where Luz waits: in what state he does not know. He has not yet prepared her and is a little startled himself by what he sees: the sidewalk is thronged with people, umbrellas, lawn chairs like a popular local beach.

  “What are they doing out there with my daughter?”

  He checks his rearview mirror and sees that the traffic behind him is clear, quickly swerving two lanes to the right, and drives into the parking lot of the Infidelity Diner where he stops the car and turns his face to Josefina.

  “What is wrong? Why are we stopping?” she asks. “I want to go to my daughter.”

  “You are going see some things that will upset you.”

  “I knew it!” she cries.

  “It’s not what you think.” He puts his hands lightly on her arms, enfolding his fingers in her flesh, as familiar to him now as his own. “Are you going to be able to hear this, or should I take you home?”

  “She is alive? She is not hurt?”

  “Not hurt, no.”

  “Just say what is wrong. You are driving me crazy.”

  Then he tells Jose
fina. When he has finished, he looks down at his hands in his lap. Josefina’s hands cover them, the aroma of lemon ammonia rising between them.

  Anyone seeing them like this, outside the diner in a small gray car, windows rolled up, in late morning—after breakfast, before lunch—might think them lovers. Lovers who have conspired to meet where they won’t be recognized and few people will be around.

  “You are finished?” she asks. “You have told me everything?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you think she is a saint?”

  He laughs. “No.”

  “Do you think she is genuine in her prayer?”

  “Yes.” And suddenly he feels a surpassing calm. “Genuine, yes, but the rest I cannot yet say.”

  And now he will have to live it. He will truly have to let Luz go. The right love and she is weightless. If only he can remember to release her.

  “William,” says Josefina, “you are everything to me, but also you are a priest. I know this. I am sorry to tell you. All you priests are a little crazy. Those people on Walt’s sidewalk? They are crazy as well. My Luz did not walk. She was taken again. Now I am certain. Someone is stealing my daughter.”

  CHAPTER 25

  It is close to eleven when Father Bill and Josefina arrive on the sidewalk and discover that Luz is not there.

  Though the crowd has doubled, it is eerily quiet. Some of the people appear to be napping. Others stare at Walt’s window with glazed, sleepy eyes. At what in the window, no one has said. No one has declared that a vision has visited the town of Infidelity. No one claims to see anything at all in that off-kilter window. No one except Zoe Luedke has been knocked flat by the power of spirit or heat or low blood sugar.

  The breakfast regulars, the few tourists from the Infidelity Motel, Walt’s overflow customers, and the mothers on the summer school phone chain who are huddled in the back in a cluster, bright pastel short sets, expressions of the tenderest inquiry on their faces—everyone is strangely subdued. The rumors fly elsewhere in Infidelity: something has happened that no one can name. Something that started with Luz, the second grade girl with the reclusive mother. The child who gives the other kids nightmares, runs off from school on impossible feet, turning up by herself in the strangest of places: the campgrounds? The car wash? (Maybe she’s taken.) No one knows how.