Our Lady of Infidelity

by Jackie Parker

  He goes to the clinic to collect her records, has a brief face-to-face meeting with the doctor, who comes out to wish him well, then drives like a madman to Twenty-Nine Palms, stopping first at a drugstore to make copies of the records and then to the crowded post office where he stands on line for close to half an hour. Not till the clerk has dropped his overseas mailer in the bin does Father Bill let out his breath.

  When he returns to the rectory, Hope Merton has left a message. She has more phone numbers for him: people coming out of the woodwork to offer to help Josefina in any way they can, some names he recognizes both from El Salvador and from the churches in the States that kept them, one night, two nights, he can hardly remember till they arrived at the yellow house on Oak Street. “I’m going to see about refinancing the house,” she said. “It’s a quick way to make sure we have the cash on hand.”

  Just like that—make sure we have the cash on hand—an afterthought, almost. When he leaves the office, walking out into the tremendous heat of the day he realizes what has just happened. The money for Josefina is there. The impossible thing has arrived once again. The faces of those who helped them get into the country when Immigration refused Josefina Reyes entry come to him. Faces he has not seen in eight years. No reliable proof of persecution. “She has been tortured,” he pleaded. “She has been jailed twice, the last time for nearly two months. Her husband murdered. Her parents, her sister . . .” There were documents from the Red Cross. There were forms from Tutela Legal supporting her case. Yet Immigration had turned her away. No reliable proof of persecution. They drove back to Mexico and days later were met in the night at the border in Tucson, people who gave their first names only, who took them to sleep and to eat in the home of a minister. Illegal entry. Illegal actions. How surprised he had been by the world, in those years. How he has learned.

  Once he has mailed his parcel to Stockholm, Father Bill enjoys a series of days of pure happiness. Luck has come to him through Hope Merton. Perhaps, through his Stockholm caller more luck will arrive. And a change has come over Infidelity. He hears of it everywhere. He feels it among his parishioners, a change in the very air of his church. Something beautiful has settled into their lives. The larger love, the strangers are saying. Only briefly does he worry about Luz now. There seems little to worry about. She did not complain when they told her she was no longer allowed to sit at the window. Why, when Josefina returns home from work she will go to the window but Luz cannot. Now Luz plays with the children on the field. The mothers watch out for her, no stranger allowed to approach her. “You should see how the children run to Luz when we arrive,” Josefina tells him. “My popular daughter!”

  He has moved into trust once again. Going lightly in his thoughts, letting go of his fears when they alight: that something is not right with Luz, that Josefina’s condition will slip, that his search will not bear fruit, that the beauty will be taken from his people, from the town. He does not dwell in impatience to know who in Stockholm has the photo of Josefina, of Luz, the copies of Josefina’s medical records from the High Desert Hospital. He remembers the rightness of things. Hope Merton will refinance her house. He thinks of his dream in the spring, the hands he had seen. He gives thanks for Zoe Luedke, for Walt Adair, for the window.

  CHAPTER 52

  No one would know how quickly the peace of these days will vanish. How fragile a hold Luz the child has on the thing that’s come through her to them. Luz, safe at play on the field, no longer roiling in her ocean of gold.

  Each day, hand-to-hand, an object passes in secret from stranger to stranger to one of the children—to Tommy or Ashley who know how to take it so no one can see. From those who crave proof that Luz Reyes the child is the thing they desire and fear.

  The children bring earrings, a key ring, a pink stone, a bracelet with links shaped like fish, a heavy gold ring from a man Tommy thinks might be a king. Luz has hidden them all far in the back of her sock drawer inside the socks she no longer wears that are too little now for her feet.

  There are many true souls on the sidewalk who have discounted the rumors—the healings Luz grants, the wishes received, the old loves rekindled, the ones who see Luz in their dreams. Many others have forsaken the sidewalk and are not there to witness the act when at last it is done.

  Though no one disputes that her feet are still touching the ground, once she appears Luz moves like lightning, no hands can stop her. Suddenly, she is once again among them, muddy and hot from the field. There she goes past the Ottos in a flash, past the moon-faced man looking out from the depths of great silence, stepping nimbly past coolers and chair legs, not even brushing an elbow or a knee. By the time Josefina stands up, struggling to free herself from the two smoky eyes, Luz has stopped at the last row of sitters—eye-to-eye with a big, sturdy woman ruddy of face in a swirl-printed rough amber dress. “Here,” says Luz and holds out a gold link fish bracelet. The woman flushes deeply, cries out, cries out again, her ruddy hands flying up from the trough of her lap. “You don’t understand.” The bracelet in her fist, the child in her arms, “There is no way she could know this was mine!”

  CHAPTER 53

  So unsettled is Luz by what she has caused, so distressed is Josefina by the lies of her daughter, the gifts kept in secret Luz was warned not to take, that for two days and nights the blue house is wracked with confusion and tears. “You can’t tell the truth? So now we ask.”

  The children are brought to the blue house to be queried by Josefina, by Zoe. To be studied by Father Bill’s all-knowing eyes. They crowd on the brown couch or crouch on the floor. The timid stay close to their mothers, the brave on their own.

  In a bowl are the objects in question. Luz had emptied her sock drawer, unballed the socks, revealed her treasure: a gold braid hoop earring, a feather pendant, a half-carat fake diamond stud, tiny pink crystal, Tecate key ring. Nothing of value, nothing to rival the jewel-eyed fish bracelet, belonging to the ruddy-faced woman, which at least, Luz reminds Josefina, she’d returned.

  “Who gave these for Luz? What person? What do they look like if you don’t know the name?” Josefina demands, ignoring the tears of the children, their mothers’ appeals.

  “I gave Luz the bracelet,” Ashley admits, bowing her lovely red curls.

  “And when did the lady give it to you?”

  “Not a lady. A man.” Ashley raises her doll-like face and looks Josefina straight in the eyes. An old man. A soft hand.

  “What old man? Who gave it to him?”

  Ashley pulls at a curl and chews the inside of her cheek. “Tell the truth,” says her mother (who knows when her daughter is lying). “I am. We never know.”

  “When you give Luz a present, don’t you say who it came from?” asks Zoe.

  “We can’t,” Tommy Platz says. “That’s the game.”

  “But do you, maybe sometimes?” asks Father Bill.

  “No!” Tommy booms, proud he can follow a rule.

  “Sometimes,” says Ashley, “but that’s not the one.”

  “Never,” say the rest. “I didn’t, I swear.”

  Father Bill on the floor with his arm around Luz, his poor little novice with her unwelcome gifts. “They never tell you who it belongs to? Not even the bracelet?”

  “Maybe,” says Luz. If no one has told her, then how did she know? Everyone baffled, the children, the mothers, the Felangela with her wide-open stare. But no one more baffled than Luz.

  CHAPTER 54

  From her worry over Luz and her lying, from the rumors of her daughter everyplace in Infidelity and other places as well, from all those who gather on Mariposa Lane day and night just for a glimpse of her child (forcing Josefina to cover her windows with sheets), without drinking so much as one sip of tea before bedtime, Josefina starts again to wake in the night. Two times and three times at least she gets up to pee.

  And now that she cannot go back to the window, Josefina cannot stop thinking of the eyes. Their impossible yearning burns in her body, in her b
reasts, in the scars on her breasts, throbs in her watery ankles. She goes to her window for a breath of cool air. And there, outside on the street in the dark, standing vigil, are the strangers, burning holes in the night with their candles.

  Luz too is unable to sleep. Her mother is once again sick, going again and again to the bathroom to pee. Hot and cold fears come through Luz’s body. The toilet flushes. It flushes again. Luz thinks of her bad deeds, the gifts she had hidden, of her lies. Of the children in trouble for her sake because of their games. Of the strangers on the street. Of school starting soon. Of her running feet. Of Zoe Luedke going away soon never again to be seen. Luz thinks of the bracelet, how it burned her but so beautiful, gold fish with ruby eyes. Of the big ring from Tommy that he put in her hand when they ran wild on the field, a gold ring with strange words that now she can’t find. It was not in the bowl.

  “It was the feet again,” Luz says when they talk every day of the bracelet. Mami and Luz and Father Bill. “The feet took me to the lady.” And the bracelet that burned.

  “I understand,” says Father Bill.

  “The mind tells the feet,” says her mother, who does not want to hear Luz’s lies.

  “But how did I know the right lady who the bracelet belonged to?”

  That no one can say.

  “Shhh,” says Zoe Luedke, Felangela. “Don’t think about it so much Luz. Remember that we are still little. We still love the world.”

  But how can Luz tell the Felangela Our Lady refused her. She has lost all the family. Her mother is once again sick. How can Luz love the world?

  “Mami peed two times in the night.” Her voice is soft. The softer the words the less they can grow.

  “Is Mami a tortoise that must not pee?” the Felangela asks.

  Yes, thinks Luz. If you pick up a tortoise it will pee. If it pees it will die. “Is she going again to the clinic?” asks Luz.

  “I don’t know. If she does, the treatments will help her. Should we look for the ring now?”

  But no matter how many times the Felangela looks with her, no matter how many times in the night Luz wakes and gets off her bed and goes to her dresser and opens her sock drawer with barely a sound, unrolls the red socks kept for cold days and Christmas where she’s sure that she tucked it, the gold ring stays lost. It cannot be found.

  CHAPTER 55

  “Make it go away.” The bishop’s voice is gravelly, his speech tired and slow. And make sure that no one from your parish is being drawn in. If they are, don’t tell me, just stop it. Do you know the owner of the car wash?”

  “Yes, in fact, I do,” Father Bill says.

  “Will he listen to you?”

  “I think he will.”

  “Tell him this is dangerous. Tell him these things hurt people and they always end badly. Get him to close for a few days. And don’t let that woman bring her child back to the car wash.”

  “All right,” Father Bill says.

  “What does she want?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Money?”

  “No. There’s no money changing hands.”

  “I’m counting on you. Use your charisma. Here’s your chance to take it out of the deep freeze.”

  “All right.”

  “Is there anything else I should know?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “And I don’t want any more secondhand news. You tell me if something is happening that might hurt us. This has already gone on too long.”

  “I’m sorry you had to hear it this way.”

  But what way, Father Bill wonders as he hangs up the phone. Certain parties are talking, the bishop had said. Word is getting around. The bishop was vague—and careful. There were things he could have asked that he didn’t. He did not mention the blue house rented for four hundred dollars a month. He did not ask Father Bill why it has taken him so long to return his calls. All evening and into the night Father Bill has been at the blue house or outside it, speaking with the strangers whose number increases every hour who wait for the next miracle, the next great event. Over and over, he has asked that they leave, told them their presence upsets Luz and her mother, their candles are a hazard. He points out the weed-choked embankments, the dry brush on the hillside beyond. Their only concession is to cross to the opposite side of the street. Now the neighbors are ready to call the police. He relayed none of this to his bishop, nor was he asked.

  “No policía in my house,” Josefina begs. “Say to them, Josefina is begging them please don’t call.” He has prevailed on the neighbors to hold off, even revealed Josefina’s history, as much as he dared. “How could an innocent woman be tortured?” they ask. “What did she do to be jailed?” “She was a medical student,” he says. “She was in college. She taught the poor how to read. The head of her college was killed. A priest,” he says, wanting so much to say his name. Seguro Montes, S. J. If he names one he will not stop. He will be all night telling horrors. Professor Raphael Reyes, his friend, the husband of Josefina, the father Luz has not seen, his body delivered to the home of his mother in the coffin of a child, arms and legs missing. El Mozote, a whole town minus one, eight hundred souls, children, women, the old. Lined up and shot. Brutalized. Raped. The killings went on all day long. “What kind of country is that?” they asked. “That was El Salvador,” he said. “That was what it was.”

  There are strangers camped on their street waiting for a miracle, a big one this time—the great event. Now they have this, a woman from a part of the world they cannot understand who was tortured and fears the police.

  When he returned to the rectory, he went straight to his desk to check on his calls. His bishop had phoned twice, instructing him to call back no matter the hour. The conversation was brief.

  Make it go away, that is his charge now. As if he could. Father Bill has been trying and failing since spring. Luz is beyond them. She is in other hands. Heresies of thought, he thinks as he gets up from his desk. Heresies of deed. He thrills to the experiences total strangers relay to him. So many people being opened in ways he has only read about, never seen.

  He turns off the light in the office and walks the narrow hall to his bedroom. He does not undress. He has taken to sleeping in his clothes, removing only his shoes, his belt. He is hungry much of the time. He grabs meals out of cans. At least once a night he wakes, throws on a jacket, and walks from the rectory in the chill air to sit with the strangers.

  Luz is what you are, what we all are, he tells them. What so many desire and fear. One night he had driven to the car wash and sat with the moon-faced man, a holy man, he knows now, and discovered the depth of his own yearning. Deeper than he could imagine. Only fear of being seen made him leave the sidewalk that night. Each day he falls further, committing the acts that place him outside his own doctrine. For the good of the faithful, the bishop will be forced to petition for his dismissal if he does not pull back. It will not be the first time. Heresies of word. He has named it. What gave him the right? Because he answers their questions. Because he believes it: the larger love. He always had dangerous tendencies. Too inclusive, disrespectful of boundaries. It is why he gave up his career in the Church. The very reason he went to El Salvador. Across what border will it take him this time? He does not know.

  The next morning he goes through his rounds and does not let himself think of the sidewalk. Nearly noon and he has said Mass, heard confession, turned away those who are not of his parish as the bishop has ordered, chided the strangers on Mariposa Lane once again, and once again been rebuffed. The phone rings in the rectory just as he is leaving for the blue house to check on Luz. It is Hope Merton, her voice is full of excitement. She has heard from the bank. The money for Josefina will be in her hands in less than two days. “What will you do if our donor cannot come to Josefina?” she asks. Our donor, she has said, as if one has already been found. Still, he does not hesitate. “We will go wherever we need to go.” “You will be able to do that? “I will do it,” he says. Now he
knows.

  At the blue house, Zoe looks at him appraisingly. What reason has the priest to be happy? The strangers outside. Them trapped within. Josefina’s health failing. Luz, heavy with guilt and with fear. For what has he dreamed her? For what?

  “Where’s Josefina?” he asks.

  “She went to work.”

  “And Luz?”

  “Go away,” Luz says when Father Bill knocks on her door.

  “I miss you,” he says. “I need to see you Lucy, Luz. Get dressed and come out. I will wait.”

  Then he goes into the living room and sits down next to Zoe on the brown couch, her clothes in a heap on the floor. She is back with them now. Since the strangers have come to their street, they cannot be alone. He sighs, puts his hand over hers.

  “She’s scared,” Zoe says.

  He nods. “How did Josefina seem?”

  Zoe shakes her head. “Not great.” Her eyes fill at his question. Zoe turns her face away, bends to pick up a pair of white cotton slacks from the pile of her clothes, smoothing the creases, refolding them, smoothing again.

  “Josefina is going back to the clinic.”

  “When?”

  “The end of next week. It’s the soonest they can take her.”

  “Why do they have to suffer like this?” Zoe says and lets the pants fall from her hands.

  “I don’t know,” says Father Bill.

  “How will Luz go back to school? She can’t sit in a classroom with these things coming through her.”

  “Shhh,” he says. “Control yourself now. Don’t jump ahead. Try not to be afraid for them. That will only make it worse. It is going to be all right.” He puts his hand briefly over Zoe’s, the left one with the missing felangela. “Can you persuade Luz to get dressed?”

  She nods but does not get up. “I don’t know how to return to my life.”

  He has nearly forgotten that Zoe has a life outside of Infidelity.