“Not yet,” says Luz.
“You are doing very well, Luz,” Father Bill says.
Somewhere inside her Luz begins to drop into herself. This drop is a little bit heavy, different from rising in the ocean of gold. In several long minutes Luz Reyes returns to herself. Long minutes divided by quarter-inch segments. Each minute measured by one patient flea. Now she does not want to run. Her feet are not telling her mind where to go. In this way Luz settles down in her body: peace in the blue house restored.
“Can you stay on your bed if we leave you alone?”
“Yes,” says Luz, lifting her arm to work her two fingers in case.
“Maybe you’ll sleep for me, mamita?”
Luz closes her eyes and listens to the footsteps of her mother, of Father Bill. How many footsteps to the kitchen? Luz counts twenty-two till she hears only the voices.
“She can’t go back to the window,” says Father Bill.
“She will play with the children. But I must go back.”
“Only you then,” says Father Bill.
That night under the canopy sewn for her happiness, to keep in the good dreams and send away bad, Luz dreams Our Lady has come to her bed in the shape of a shadow, tall as the canopy, gray as smoke with a burned smell besides, a sweetness like spoiled meat. “Don’t look for the face in the window,” says Our Lady, “I will never be there.”
No matter how far in the gold Luz can go. No matter how Luz loves the world. Never will Our Lady show Luz Her face.
CHAPTER 48
Several days later Josefina awakens to find the Madonnas of the Centuries have left her walls. The pieces of scotch tape that held them, marking their places with small uneven stains. Josefina, loathe even to mention Our Lady by name, has decided to wait for her daughter to explain. But so far Luz says nothing. Another day Josefina discovers the yellow dress balled on the floor of Luz’s closet. She washes and irons it and then places the dress on a high shelf, too fine to be discarded. Josefina will give it away.
Who would believe it is Josefina who goes every day after work to the window to sit on a beach chair (with the traffic whizzing by on the freeway and neighbors and strangers crammed in behind her) to commune with illusory eyes? The eyes, which seem always so urgent, call to her with their dark gleaming presence. How intensely they gaze, as if trying to reach through the glass, to feed their love into her very heart. Never in her life has Josefina felt such yearning, not even in the days when she and Raphael could not bear to be apart for even one hour, as if already they knew how little time they would share on this earth.
Now even more than the love of her neighbors, even more than the joy she gets walking with Luz to the field, seeing Luz welcomed in play by the children, Josefina has come to enjoy, in a way that seems almost perverse, this time that she spends with the eyes.
In the short weeks since Luz walked to the car wash, she has lived such a wonderful change. No more lost days, her mind and her body dissolving, no more mornings when she is scarcely able to get out of bed or care for her child. Gone the fear of strangers, of the least sound or gesture that could, without warning, cause her captors to rise close as her breath: the guards at the Ilopango with their relentless fists, their black masks and razor blade knives. The soft-voiced colonel in his impeccable uniform and high polished shoes who entered her cell in the hours when she had lost count of the time. Under his arm the thing he had said was a radio—“You want to hear musica, Josefina?”—but had wires. Her body still bears the burns.
No longer does she imagine with each passing car on the freeway, the jeeps with blind windshields of bulletproof glass, the plate-less white death cars, impossible to trace. There are sometimes white jeeps on the field behind the car wash, but no one is coming to take her. She and her daughter are safe.
Does she credit the sidewalk for her body’s great healing? Does she thank those splendid dark eyes in the window for the peace that has come to her mind? After eight years of suffering, she is too grateful to search after answers; she has simply returned to her life.
Each morning Zoe comes down from Walt’s trailer to watch over Luz while Josefina is at work. At two o’clock Zoe drives Luz to the field to meet Josefina after her workday is through. Is it for love of her daughter that Zoe remains in Infidelity, or maybe for her? (Or for Walt?) Or is it the window? What is it Zoe is seeing? Josefina wonders. She dare not ask, nor if Zoe asked her, could she explain. They all have their secrets, Josefina thinks, letting Zoe into the house, kissing Luz good-bye. Then she drives to the Palms to the home of her employer. The long palm-lined streets that never fail to remind her of San Benito, her family, the home where no girl made a bed, swept a floor, her mother, her father, Esperanza at the gate begging her to run for her life, not to come in. The family whose deaths she must carry, even now, in the midst of such goodness, such hard-won peace.
CHAPTER 49
From where he sits, outside on the rock by his fountain, Walt can look straight through the open windows of his house to the far end where Zoe leans at his kitchen counter, making her call.
When she came out the first night she’d got through to Michael, she looked stricken. Like she’d looked when she came to the car wash that day and smashed through his wall. “Michael is back,” she said. And then had gone straight to the trailer. Then she came out again and knocked on his door. “Don’t say anything to anyone.” All that night Walt kept waking up, getting out of bed to see if the trailer’s outside light was still on, if the Nova was still parked in the gravel beside it.
Nearly a week and nothing has changed. Zoe keeps to the same routine. Luz in the morning. The window in the afternoon. Dinner with Luz and Josefina, sometimes Father Bill joins them, sometimes Walt. And then they drive back, she follows him on the unmarked road from the hill district, parks the Nova, goes into his house. He turns on the lights. It’s a small house. No place to go and not hear every word that is spoken. Walt goes outside and sits by the River Rock fountain, his back against stone. He does not turn it on until she comes back outside.
It is true that each night the call is a little longer, but only by minutes, two, three. But when she comes out to him, it is as if nothing has transpired. She does not speak about Michael, and Walt does not ask. They sit together on the ground wrapped in blankets. They look up at the sky. They talk.
He has Michael to thank for her company, he thinks. The hurt Michael has done to her. Is there another woman involved? She does not say. Michael is another man who has failed his commitments. Maybe Walt is her balm.
Zoe knows now, though he had not intended to tell her the sad story that led him to Infidelity, first the kickbacks to the title company, the indictment, how he’d declined to sue the partner responsible. A friend since college. He just paid the two million plus court costs and walked away. And then walked away some more. “Oh,” he said when he watched her face change, “so now you’re impressed. Two million in fines impresses you?” “Surprised,” she’d said. Her eyes round. “How big was your house?” “My house?” He laughs. “Square footage.” “You don’t want to know.” “Over five thousand? Over six?” she had asked. “Over six under ten,” he said, “and let’s leave it at that.” “There have to be steps,” she had said, “between that kind of life and this one.”
“Not steps. A steep hill. And I just kept rolling. I’ll tell you the strange thing. At the very time I was leaving my wife and my children, I was thinking of them probably more than I ever had. And of myself. In ways I had never had time to think of them. Like, how were they really? How were we? And what was it exactly that I had been contributing besides a vague kind of love and massive infusions of cash?”
She is watching him, a bittersweet smile on her face. Huddling against the cold in her green woven blanket. His blanket. He puts his arm around her. “We don’t talk about these kinds of things,” he had said. “Who?” “We. Us. Men. At least my buddies never did.” “Does that mean I’m your buddy, Walt?” “I guess so,” h
e had said. “And you’re certainly mine.” “Yes, I am. So that means I can’t charge you for the trailer.” “You can charge me,” she says. “But I can’t pay. Not till I finish the Grosvenors’ kitchen.” “The Grosvenors?” “My clients who are wondering about me right now.” “How big?” he asked. She turns to him, their faces close, she tilts her head. “The Grosvenors’ kitchen or their house?” “Their kitchen,” he says. “A thousand.” He whistles, “A thousand square feet of kitchen. Someone’s got some highfalutin clients waiting. Be careful. I know those people. I used to be those people. If you’re late they’ll sue.” “He’s on it,” she says. “Michael?” “Yep. Just like nothing has happened. Hired back the crew. He’s doing the prep work right now.” “I see,” says Walt. Then he waits for her to say more, something, anything. But she has withdrawn. He can feel her shutting down, watch the light go out of her eyes. “So, what is it Michael doesn’t talk about?”
She looks at him. Is she going to say it is none of his business? “Michael doesn’t talk about the past.”
“Does that have anything to do with him going away?”
“I think it has a lot to do with it.”
He takes his arm away then and moves off a little. He can’t do this, he thinks. He can’t start hearing about the life of the man he was hoping would never come back. “That’s too bad,” he says.
She sighs, covers her mouth with her hand in a way Walt had seen Gwen do when they were in the midst of a fight. And then they sit and listen to the sound of the River Rock fountain, and beyond it to the silence around them, and the humming in the silence comes back to remind them what they have been missing. At his car wash there are a hundred or more people camped in tents on the field, waiting for the excitement of morning at the window. “Maybe we should go in,” he says. It comes out wrong. His voice, husky, low. It comes out the way he means it. A seduction. She takes the hand from her mouth and looks at him again. Maybe we should go in. Would she go in with him if he asked? It is getting very easy between them, he thinks. He had better be careful.
She leans over and kisses him softly on the cheek, her mouth lingers two seconds, three before she withdraws. She knows his smell now, deeper, less sharp than Michael’s. She is happy in this place, sleeping in the little white trailer. Quiet, alone. A single white bed. A small wicker dresser. She likes being outside with Walt, likes the water flowing out of the mouth of the old River Rock fountain, the erasing sky, the dark, far from the life she does not know how to return to.
“I think Luz’s vision is coming to me,” she says then. Her own words surprise her. This is not what she intended to say. She had intended to tell him the way she cannot feel her husband’s presence. When he speaks to her, when he tells her how much he wants her to come home she feels nothing. It is a familiar feeling, this. Her old sense of distance. No love. No anger. Not even the hurt. When she tells Michael where she is, he doesn’t believe her. If he doesn’t believe that, how will he ever believe the rest of it? She wants to tell this to Walt, but it would be the worst kind of infidelity speaking to a man she wants to sleep with about the husband she cannot face.
But at least she can tell Walt he is not alone. She too has seen faces, a plain face at first but now it has changed. It is beautiful beyond description. A face and voice. Very clear, very strong. She trusts it completely now. Whatever it is the voice is right. She is doing very well.
“Do you think we have any idea how lucky we are to have these things coming to us?” she asks.
“I do,” he had said. “I think we know. I think we all do now.” Right now, as they sit under the night sky, there are many camped on the field behind his car wash, speaking as they are, perhaps. Waiting to return to the window.
Where will he ever find a woman he can share this with? he thinks. One who, when he speaks of the faces he sees and the places within him they touch, will not think that he has lost his mind.
She smiles, stands for a moment, then says goodnight.
He watches her walk through the cactus garden and down to Jen’s trailer and go inside. The lights go on in the trailer. She draws the curtains.
One morning she is going to leave him. The hurt will drop from her and she will want to go back to her life, to her husband. Maybe it wasn’t a woman, Walt thinks. Maybe Michael had a moment like he’d had. Only now he’s turned back from his moment, realizing his life with Zoe was worth it. What does Walt know? Only that soon she will be gone. She will be everywhere then for Walt. Moving about in the trailer; in the kitchen with her mouth on his phone. She will be beside him at night by the fountain. At the car wash whenever he looks at the window he will think of her face.
CHAPTER 50
“Do you have to go back to your Springs?” Luz had asked when she walked into the kitchen to hear Mami and Zoe talk in low voices about Michael. “Don’t bother Sewey,” her mother had said. “Are you going?” Luz says again. “Not yet,” Zoe says. “Don’t ask Sewey questions. She needs to be quiet to think.”
There is nothing that Zoe cannot tell her, Josefina says, nothing wrong that she can feel. “He is your great love,” Josefina says. “After what he has done either you kill him or you turn to ice.”
She is ice. The first time he had answered she couldn’t speak. She listened to his voice shape her name. Zoe? Three times. The fourth, a demand. “Yes,” she had said and quietly hung up the phone.
“You turn to ice and then slowly, you melt.”
CHAPTER 51
With each revelation he betrays her. His Stockholm caller asks for the names of her parents. He gives them. She asks for details of appearance. He says Josefina’s mother was blond, he remembers her long polished red nails, her upright posture, the elegant suit she wore the day she had gone with him to the prison (without her husband’s knowing) to beg for her daughter’s release. He knows Josefina’s father’s was stocky, that his hair was thick and black, that he wore a thin mustache. This Josefina must have described to him. Her sister, on the other hand, he had seen only once, through the gate, on the very last day. Sixteen, so lovely, so much like Josefina, though smaller, thinner. Esperanza, a terrified girl.
He is able to tell his caller the name of the toy stores her father had owned, “El Rey de Juguetes.” To describe the exterior of the home of her parents, that gate. He remembers the grillwork as well as the enormous shade tree in the courtyard by the fountain, that the large house was stucco and pink. No detail is too trivial to his caller. From time to time she asks him to pause, and there is only silence between them. Perhaps she is writing down his words. “Here is what I will need from you,” she says finally. “A photograph of Josefina and her child, the most recent. A copy of the little girl’s certificate of birth and a complete copy of Josefina’s medical records.”
He had hoped it would be the reverse—she in Stockholm sending records of a possible donor to them, to the High Desert Hospital. When he’d said this, she paused once again. “I am sorry. This is the only way I may be able to help you.” And then, just when he was certain the call was at an end, she had asked if he knew how Josefina had arrived in the States.
“We drove out,” he answered without hesitation. He had said it deliberately. Nosotros. We.
“You are the one who drove? You are the American priest who helped many escape?”
“Not so many.” Not Dr. Raphael Reyes. Not Sister Jean. Not Seguro Montes. S. J., countless others who might have been saved. She asked him for the date and he gave it; after all he had given away everything else, why not this? She had gone silent. The silence lasted so long that this time he thought he had lost her.
“Get the papers to me right away,” she said. Then she dictated twice the address where they were to be sent: a post office box. He had thanked her too profusely, he is certain. “When do you think you’ll get back to me?”
“I cannot answer.”
“You will have good news for me, I know.”
“Vamos a ver,” she had said.
; He sends the photograph from Luz’s communion in the spring, the three of them standing on the steps of Our Lady of Guadalupe, Luz in her white dress, tight at the middle, the veil a little crooked on her head, her triumphant smile. Next to her Josefina looked resigned, slightly swollen of face, the symptom he had entirely overlooked. As for himself, the sun must have caught the camera at a bad angle, for his presence in the photo seems tenuous, as if he is not wholly there or the light had begun to digest him.
You steal my papers? You send my address to strangers? How do you know that they don’t come kill me? For days afterward he imagines how Josefina would suffer if she knew what he had done. Each time he looks at her, he averts his eyes.
He uses his Durable Power of Attorney for Health Care to obtain and then copy her medical records. If he had not listened to the hospital social worker, he would not be planning to send through the mail to a stranger in Stockholm Josefina’s address, the record of her illness, the photograph of Luz, proof that Josefina Reyes still lives, a fact she has tried to conceal from the world for eight years. Lives, has a child. All of this his caller demands.
The next morning, after confession and Mass he will sneak off to the post office and mail them. He must first meet with those who are not of his parish but who nonetheless wait daily in the hall outside his office to discuss their experience at the window. He has found a little phrase that seems to silence their endless questions. “Think of it as the larger love,” he says. Heretical. How would he explain if his bishop should hear he had spoken these words?
He has been working to find Josefina a donor. And she believes her body has cured itself. If she knew what he’d been doing, would she fall prey to self-doubt, lose faith in her body and her delicate hold on it, fail? How he can punish himself, Father Bill thinks as he slips into his car. Josephina’s voice in his mind stronger at times than his own.
Our Lady of Infidelity Page 23
