Our Lady of Infidelity

by Jackie Parker

  CHAPTER 70

  Luz awakens to hear Zoe’s strange cry in the room next to hers, where earlier the soft voices were rising and falling behind the gray wall. The voices, and then Zoe’s cries, each night the same.

  Soon Zoe will return to Luz, to sleep beside her in the high wooden bed just as she has every night since they came to the green place, which is how Luz thinks of it, green of the grass, green leaves that make strange rustling noises in the night, the strong sound that is wind when it rains, three nights, maybe four, Zoe’s smell like an animal, something wild that might come from the trees that are everywhere, behind every road, trees that shut out the sunlight with many branches, heavy with leaves and many secret homes.

  Zoe comes back to the bed and sleeps beside Luz until morning, but Luz does not move near to Zoe or let Zoe touch her, only listens to her breath, waiting for the long ones before she lets herself fall into her dreams.

  A doctor has looked at her foot. Each day he wraps it in a brown bandage; he has given her small crutches so she can walk by herself without being carried. They hurt, digging into the skin under her arms. She cannot use them for long. She cannot go down the stairs by herself, there are too many, the staircase too steep, a long way to fall, the wood dark and slippery. She can sit on the seat in the resting place with her foot on the cushion, and look at the window, very big, full of diamond-shaped glass where the light comes through in colors like Father Bill’s church. An old house, says Zoe. Hundreds of years old, she says. Hallways Luz has not walked, rooms she is afraid to see. Turns she could take and never be found.

  Each night since she and Zoe arrived, when she is first put into bed Luz hears the voices from the big room where they eat dinner, chicken and corn, tomatoes as large as Zoe’s hand. Luz and Zoe and Michael. Michael at last, the first one in life Luz has known who could disappear and come back. Handsome as she had thought he would be, with a soft voice that turns sharp when he and Zoe talk in the night and a way of looking at Luz that makes her ashamed for even now, here, she remembers how she has wanted to have her own father.

  In the night when she is alone in the room that smells like old things and wood, Luz looks at the small lights outside that fly in the dark. Fireflies, Zoe has said, that come only in summer. If only Luz could step on that foot they could catch some. Instead, Luz catches voices, the ones in this house, angry and deep; they go back and forth with no rising, not like her mother’s and Father Bill’s went, ending always in laughter. Then Zoe and Michael climb the stairs, talking softly so they will not wake her, stand in the doorway of her room in the dark: Zoe a light and a person, Michael whose light flies up to the ceiling like the fireflies, as if it has not learned where in his body it belongs.

  Soon Luz will not look at these things. She will not listen for the back and forth voices or the sound of her name. When the call comes and she is helped to the phone to hear Father Bill say the words that Luz begs not to hear, begs even Our Lady who hates Luz, who Luz also hates, that the word of her mother’s death will never be spoken, she will be ready. Luz will already know how to do it, let go of each thing, each voice, each color, every strange smell and taste so she will not be in life like her mother.

  CHAPTER 71

  He touches her so perfectly, this man who hurts her, the husband who runs. Each night Michael enters her, Zoe feels him a little bit differently, touching a different place, a different current of gold. Now she is molten. A furnace of gold burns between them. Why is it only the body that brings them to such a place? Why doesn’t it last?

  Sometimes now when she looks at Michael, even here in their bed in the dark, Zoe sees his face dissolve into light. After that happens, she is filled with peace. How can she explain this new way she sees? How she has been changed? He did not sit at the window in the High Desert, did not go out in search of a great event. Michael, who does not know what Luz is.

  Over and over Michael tries to assure her. “It’s not you. It’s me. It was nothing you did or did not do.” Then what? “The past is the past,” he says. But it lives on, lays down its print in our grain. “I came back, didn’t I? I’m here.” “But what if it happens again?” What if it does? It is not enough for him to love her and then to leave. Leave and come back. That she will have to decide frightens her. She puts her hand on his neck, resting her fingers on the spaces between the bones. “I love your face,” he says.

  Not enough.

  Each morning, looking out through the maples she watches their leaves break into fragments gold and green, a pattern of light emerging, a grid of light beautiful beyond telling, like the face she saw floating over the window. How can she keep this from her husband? The beautiful world within?

  She used to feel something at the core of herself was missing, an absence that could be seen. Now she feels whole, bruised, cracked open, ringingly alive.

  Tonight it is her face she sees when she looks at Michael. Seeing hers, does he see his? “Something is different,” he says and smoothes back her hair, buries her mouth with his. “You feel different.” She puts her mouth on his, closes her eyes, breathes in the heat of their bodies, trying to erase the thought of their end.

  He has heard her talking to the priest, or the one who is no longer a priest. She has tried to explain why she stayed in that place. The people she grew to love in such a short time. Now it has made him suspicious.

  “Who is Walt?” he asks as she shifts from him, making a move to get up, as she does every night, going to Luz. He pulls her back.

  “You know. The one who lent me the Civic.”

  “Who is he to you?”

  She reaches for his hand. “Michael, I have to go.” She is moving out of his arms, into the night air.

  He watches her get out of bed in the dark, the long line of her back, the delicate curve of her breasts as she reaches for the nightgown, which had slipped to the floor. She has not spent one full night beside him. She says it is Luz. He sees it as punishment, leaving him after such lovemaking. She leaves so he will have only her absence beside him. As he has done to her.

  “All she has to do is call out to you.”

  “I’m afraid she’ll run.”

  “Run where? Zoe, she can’t even manage the stairs.”

  “I’m sorry,” says Zoe as she opens the door, steps into the hall, her heart hammering, afraid when she gets to the room where Luz sleeps, Luz will be gone.

  CHAPTER 72

  “Could I die?” Luz asks Zoe. The doctor has shown her the X-ray, and explained she must have an operation.

  “Of course not. It is only to fix a very small bone in your foot.”

  Maybe I could, Luz Reyes thinks, wondering how she could make it happen, she and Mami, their souls floating out at the very same time, on powerful wings, returned to the place of the light.

  CHAPTER 73

  “Sit down, Josefina,” says Maria Teresa, the mother of Raphael, as she pulls out a chair. “You are going to a party with your husband.”

  In the dream Josefina understands. Her mother-in-law has come to invite her into the country of death. Josefina sits down in the chair. The room is empty, without a ceiling, without visible walls. Now the old woman is dragging a second chair toward her. She places it opposite Josefina, walks behind it, folds her arms across her chest, waits.

  What kind of party is this? Josefina wonders, but still, even if the party is to be her own death, the excitement runs through her. She is going to see him at last. The longing is so powerful she can barely remain in the chair. Josefina sits several minutes, Maria Theresa watching, the empty chair before her. And then without warning Raphael is there, seated with his legs crossed and his eyes closed, his mother gone.

  Josefina is overjoyed. Here he is and in one piece again. His body has found itself, dressed itself finely, in a formal blue suit, polished shoes, even a tie. If only he would open his eyes, Josefina thinks, for his lids are shut in a way that suggests he is still thinking.

  And then they are open. If she cou
ld run from the chair she would do it. If she could move herself down to the floor, she would crawl on all fours to touch even his feet. But she cannot move, cannot tear her gaze from the eyes of her husband. Never has she imagined one human being to carry such pain. And yet she must pay attention. He is showing her something with his eyes, the agony of the return, the effort he has made, is making at every moment, and only for her sake, for the love that he feels to give her this gift, himself in his body once more, all he has done to bring himself back.

  “You have a daughter!” Josefina cries. “A wonderful child who looks just like you. So bright and so stubborn. She lived, Raphael. I was able to bring her to life.”

  But he does not react. Is not cheered by the news of his child, his eyes fixed on hers, a monumental effort being enacted before her. And now she understands, she is not to say anything. He is the one who has come here to speak. She must listen.

  Without warning she explodes into love, a quality of love she has never before known, every cell of her being charged with it, every part of her pulsing as if she herself has become the earth’s sun.

  “You will live,” Raphael says at last. “You will live, Josefina.” And then right away he falls silent, slipping from her sight even as he remains on the chair looking at her with such longing she cannot endure it. If he does not close his eyes, in spite of what he has told her, Josefina believes in this moment, she is certain to die.

  CHAPTER 74

  Father Bill enters his office, checking the red message light on the phone. The rectory has a hollow feel. The bookcases empty, only a single yellow pad on the desktop. His personal papers are packed in boxes stored in Walt’s trailer. His few clothes and possessions still in the trunk of the Cavalier, which shortly he will have to return to the Diocese. No idea how he will pay for another. He sits down, hits the red button, ready to copy his final messages. A few from the Diocese, several from his parishioners, former parishioners, asking him to dinner, inquiries about Josefina, offers of help, a call from Zoe with the results of the X-ray on Luz’s foot. Not good. When he hears the voice, he is already so surrendered he does not move. Not a blip. He hears the name with such equanimity that he wonders if perhaps he has grown numb. “This is Esperanza Guerra, Father Bill. I have good news.” Is it true that no miracle will surprise him now, no tragedy? Will he have lived to know both?

  One month, they had told him at the center. That is how long it will take to schedule a transplant, in the unlikely event that a donor is found. A donor has surely been found. She has already purchased a plane ticket. She is flying in less than a week with her mother. Her mother. How will he ever explain this? How will Josefina bear it? Her mother and her sister alive. Flying in one week from Stockholm with the results of the tests.

  He is in a battle now. He will have to move mountains to make this happen before the month is out. He will have to allow the mountains to be moved for him. He closes his eyes, asks for help. A month will be too long to wait. Let the center open up for her, the surgeon, the schedule. Let it be done quickly.

  His Stockholm caller, he thinks. No wonder she could barely speak to him. Her sister was dead, she was certain. Esperanza had believed for eight years that her sister Josefina was somewhere in the coffee fields, a body dump in the countryside, her unborn child, impossible to imagine what they had done to Josefina. She has no sister. Surely not a living one in the States. The child could not have been born.

  CHAPTER 75

  The call comes in the night just as Luz knew that it would. First three rings then four, then Zoe’s faraway voice calling, “Luz! Luz!” Then her long ohhhhh of joy, loud enough to excite a whole house, excite even a child keeping vigil in a strange bed, letting go of the beautiful things of the world, waiting for her mother to die.

  CHAPTER 76

  The blue house is a confusion of flowers and languages, English and Spanish. Two sisters who look so much alike when Luz turns away and looks back she does not know, for a moment, who is her mother Josefina, who Esperanza, her aunt. The one with the pain in the back, who walks slow, Esperanza. The one who cannot laugh yet, who covers her stomach and walks fast and is bossy in Spanish and English, Josefina. And there on the couch in a gray suit, long red nails and white pearls, the grandmother who looks like no one, too beautiful for anything but stories, who with everyone laughing and crying is right now shaking her small golden head at the noise.

  CHAPTER 77

  Sometimes in the night when Zoe is asleep, her hands search the bed for her children, one and then two, waking in panic when she discovers Luz is not there. Even with all of them crowded together in the family bed, Walt hanging onto the edge for dear life, Zoe thinks she has come up short. It is Luz who is missing, Luz Reyes, the first child of her heart.

  How strange, Zoe says, and even William cannot help but agree, strange that Luz and Josefina are living in Stockholm, the country of Zoe’s ancestors, a place she and Walt plan to visit, as William does every year in his travels. But with two kids under four and unruly ones, minds of their own from day one, two stepkids in college nearby, Walt’s business, hers—Zoe Luedke Fine Furniture—right there on the property, Zoe and Walt can barely get to the A&P let alone off to Europe, at least not now.

  If she worries about Luz, it is not without cause. Five surgeries to repair the delicate bone, which took years to heal, bouts of pain, the right foot curled at the toes, hard for the foot to lay flat. Then the Swedish, her shyness, sleepless nights filled with strange vivid dreams. Still, in Stockholm Luz lives surrounded by family: cousins, her aunt, and her grandmother, who all adore her. Not to mention her adoring mother. And, too, there is a close-knit community, exiles, all. Salvadorans who found safety in a distant land and in spite of the crazy cold climate decided to stay. Now she has only a limp, and a faint one. It is Luz’s fears that trouble Josefina most. And now that she’s older, Luz keeps them to herself.

  On his last visit to Stockholm, William was able to convince Josefina to let him spend a little time with her. For years Josefina refused to allow it and Luz avoided him, off with her cousins for most of his visit.

  He took her to Berzelii Park, bribed her with the coffee Josefina forbade Luz to drink as they left the apartment. They find an empty table, sit down opposite each other under a white market umbrella, people filing by. “Here is my big secret. I just want to be normal for once. Is that too much to ask?” Then she fixes him in a stare, the same dark eyes, her features softer, hair cut short, framing her face. She is growing more to look like her mother, he thinks. What a miracle she is. He wants to stand up in triumph for Rafael Reyes and Josefina Guerra. “You are going to have a beautiful life.”

  “Right. With this foot? You’re just saying that. My mother told you to say it.”

  “No one told me. I see it as clearly as I see your face.”

  “What do you do, actually, for a living I mean?”

  He had laughed. A renegade priest, a storefront congregation. He barely gets by. “I guess you could call me a teacher.”

  “Are you glad you aren’t still a priest?”

  “Yes and no.”

  She sips the coffee, puts it down on the table, cradling the cup. “Is it my fault?”

  “No. It had nothing to do with you. It was me.” She doesn’t believe him and says so. Blunt. Her mother’s daughter. “I would not lie to you, Luz.”

  “Oh, really.”

  “Is there anything you would like to ask me?”

  “About what?”

  “Infidelity.”

  “I don’t remember it.”

  “You don’t remember anything?”

  “It was hot. My mother was always sick. And you filled me with a lot of crap.”

  “What do you mean?” he asks gently.

  “I don’t remember.”

  “You were a beautiful child.”

  “I was a beautiful child. I’m going to have a beautiful life. Only right now my life sucks.”

  “Well, you’re fourte
en. This is the time to be miserable. Try to enjoy it!”

  “Thanks,” she says, picking up the coffee and concealing her smile behind the cup, “that’s a big help.”

  She’s fine, he told Josefina. Try not to worry so much. Fine with those moods and that foot, she had said. He understands nothing. The worries of a mother are endless. She shares them with her sister, with her mother, and with Zoe, who has always understood.

  Luz will come back to her gifts, William thinks. It is right that for now they lie fallow. He will wait to see how she carries them as she moves into the world. He leaves Stockholm happy. Though it is always hard saying good-bye. He does not need much these days to be happy. In the States he has no lack of students. All he had to let go of seems worth it now, even Josefina. He sees it all around him, every day, as clearly as he did at the window, the way the world is opening. All of them who come to him opening as he was opened that summer in Infidelity, through Luz, to the larger love.

  EPILOGUE

  When we finally learned that the monk had been fasting, hadn’t eaten in days, nine, maybe ten, maybe more, pretty much all of us let out our collective breath. Starving to death being a whole lot more acceptable here than dying of joy.

  No one goes around anymore claiming the miraculous had chosen to settle in Infidelity, unfurling its great golden wings. (Or were they green?) No more gift-bearing children wandering among us, not a single one this year changed into forward-bent light.

  No holy visions remained in Luz’s wake. Hardly anyone pointing to things not humanly possible to be seen.

  The sidewalk’s still hot. Mostly empty. (No chairs allowed now that Platz owns the car wash.) And if people feel better for having put themselves out there in public for reasons too deep to talk of, more power to them.