by Laura Resau
She’d loosened her grip on Pablo enough that he squirmed away. He had tears too, silently flowing. I sat with him on the bed and rocked him the way Mr. Lorenzo was rocking Dika and whispered to him in Spanish.
“Just fireworks, principito,” I said. “For the town fair. They just scared Dika, that’s all. Just fireworks.” Once Pablo stopped crying, I took off his white shirt, wiped Dika’s blood away, and put a clean blue sweatshirt over his head.
Ángel appeared in the doorway in loose basketball shorts and a T-shirt and his black leather coat that skimmed his ankles like a robe. “Dad? Sophie?”
I led Pablo to the door, and on the way out, took Ángel’s hand. “Let’s go, Ángel.” We went out into the cool air of the courtyard. I was wearing my white nightgown, the same one Ángel had seen me in that morning when I’d had chicken feathers in my hair.
“It’s okay,” I whispered to him, trying to convince myself as much as him. “She’s upset. Not badly hurt. Your dad will take care of her.”
“What happened?”
“They bombed her house in the war. She must have thought the fireworks were bombs.”
Once, she’d showed me a picture of what her house used to look like. It was old and big, three stories high, with stained glass windows. The backyard was shaded with trees and bushes, and in the sunny spots, flowers and grapevines. In the picture, she was sitting at a picnic table full of people laughing and raising their glasses in a toast. “One day, we eat and drink together,” she had said. “Next day, they steal things, kill families, burn houses. Everything kaput.”
“Her house is gone now, Ángel.” Goose bumps sprang up on my arms. It was barely dawn, half-light, before things completely took on their daytime shapes, their clear boundaries, when hidden layers lay exposed.
Ángel said, “She’s an amazing lady, isn’t she? To be able to leave everything behind and start a new life.”
“You and your dad did,” I said. I remembered what he’d said the night before about his father’s scars.
“I don’t know.” He looked at the ground, at a line of ants. “Maybe my dad did.”
Pablo squatted by the ants, following their path around the patio, to the base of a flowering tree.
“Why did the soldiers hurt your dad?” I asked. “What happened to your mom?”
He shook his head.
“Tell me, Ángel.”
“Sophie, you don’t want to know these things.”
I looked down at spots of Dika’s dried blood on my knuckles. For once, I wasn’t worried about AIDS or hepatitis B or C. Fretting about germs multiplying on a toothbrush seemed ridiculous compared to what Dika or Mr. Lorenzo had been through.
“I do want to know, Ángel.”
He took off his coat and put it around my shoulders. “Here. You’re cold.”
The leather was lined with a soft fabric that held a hint of his smell. Pablo slipped inside the coat and leaned his head against my waist.
Ángel had left his sunglasses in his room. Through the dim blue air I could see his eyes. They were shinier than most people’s eyes, and I couldn’t tell if it was because of held-back tears or if they were naturally that way.
After we’d been sitting together in silence, I noticed the sound of trucks idling outside on the street, and voices. There was more commotion than you’d expect for six a.m. We peered outside the iron gate.
Dozens of people knelt, all the way up and down the street, pouring buckets of colored powder over stencils on the pavement. Very carefully, they sifted patterns through cardboard cutouts. Then they lifted the stencils to reveal perfect flowers and moons and stars and Virgins and crosses and hearts and birds. They worked intently and quickly. Back in Tucson, one of Mom’s artist friends had a painting of women in a tower, hard at work weaving the world into existence. Now, waking up before dawn, I had the feeling we’d caught them in the act.
A girl my age, covered with green and purple powder, spotted us watching and nodded. “Buenos días.”
“Buenos días, señorita,” Ángel said. “Excuse me. What is it you’re doing?”
“Decorating the streets with colored sawdust.”
“Why?”
“For the parade!”
Pablo wanted to watch, so we dragged two plastic lawn chairs from the patio to the sidewall and watched the pictures take form and color as the air grew warmer and the light changed from purple to lemony white. Pablo fell asleep in my lap and when his weight made my leg numb, I moved him to Ángel’s lap. Ángel closed his eyes and pressed his nose to Pablo’s hair and breathed in the little-boy smell. I smiled at the sight, as if we were married and Pablo was our son. Imagining this made my chest tingly at first, and then achy.
Another firework sounded, and I jumped and hoped Mr. Lorenzo was holding Dika tight.
“You think they’ll get married, Ángel?” I asked.
“My dad’s crazy about Dika.” He opened his mouth to say something else, and then closed it.
“What?”
“Nothing. Just—” He paused. “I want her to be happy.”
I nodded. A few weeks ago, I would have asked why on earth anyone would marry Dika without a gun at their heads. But now I wondered if her zaniness was a veneer for something tender and real. It reminded me of our doorframes, which used to be painted in a seventies palette of pea green and rust orange and dead-leaf brown—until Juan scraped the paint off. Underneath was solid maple that he sanded and polished until it was so pretty and smooth I couldn’t resist running my hand over it whenever I walked through.
In the weeks before our trip, Mr. Lorenzo would sometimes walk with Dika to the Salvation Army. That was her glass-collecting time. One day, out of curiosity, I followed them.
All business, Dika tromped down the streets carrying a plastic grocery bag. Mr. Lorenzo walked beside her in his flannel shirt. When Dika spotted a good piece, she bent down like an aging geologist and held it to the light, examining it, and offering it to Mr. Lorenzo. He admired the glass too, and sometimes ventured to pick up a piece himself. Once he found a red piece and spent about five straight minutes looking through it, tilting it this way and that, his eye only millimeters from the glass. Then he put down the glass and looked at her. I studied her too, and saw a large sixty-year-old body with tanned cellulite and orangish blond hair with an inch of gray-black roots showing. But the look on Mr. Lorenzo’s face said he saw something else, a goddess, saturated with colored light.
We watched the artists’ slow progress down the street. Right in front of our hotel they’d made a dove inside a circle of flowers. Now, farther down the street, they were making a picture of the Virgin of Guadalupe in her starry cape on a sliver of moon.
The sun was peeking behind a building now, illuminating the walls across the street, each painted different colors. Deep red, mustard yellow, lavender, candy pink. Next to the rainbows of sawdust paintings, so many colors were almost dizzying.
After Dika’s house was bombed, she stayed for a little while in the rubble—minutes or hours or days, I couldn’t tell, because she was crying as she spoke, and it didn’t seem right to ask questions. She shuffled and sorted through the debris, picking out pieces of green crystal wineglasses, sharp bits of vases, amber and violet, crushed wings of a blue glass angel. Some of the glass was smooth, melted in the heat of the explosions, some jagged. Finally, she picked out one shard of red glass, and put it in her pocket.
When I asked Dika why they bombed her house and why they put her in prison, she said, “No reason. No reason. Only the hate.” Juan explained what he’d gathered from the asylum paperwork and what he’d read about the war. Serbian soldiers had rounded up Bosnian Muslims to kill or imprison. Dika didn’t practice the religion, but that didn’t matter. The Serbian soldiers bombed her house, found Dika in the ruins, and sent her to a prisoners’ work camp. After her release, she got political asylum in Germany and worked in a factory there until her visa expired. That’s when she called us. Until then, I’d
never known she existed.
The day of Dika’s phone call—the year before Pablo came—was my fifteenth birthday, in May, just before rainy season, when my allergies were worse than ever and I had to sit on my hands to keep from scratching my red, goopy eyes. We were celebrating, Mom and Juan and me. We sat at the kitchen table, drinking champagne beneath the fan that blew around hot, dry evening air. Mom always found excuses to pop open a bottle of champagne and celebrate life.
The phone call came just after I’d opened my presents—a book of e. e. cummings poetry and a moonstone ring—just as we were about to cut the cake that said ¡Feliz Cumpleaños, Sophie! I was holding the knife, in the middle of a sneezing fit, getting my inner elbow snotty, when the phone rang.
Mom answered. She listened a few moments and looked confused. “I’m sorry. Who is this?” she asked in a few languages before she ended up back with English.
After she hung up, my sneezing fit had stopped, and the cake was cut and put on plates, the blackberry sherbet melting into pools beside it. Mom said, “Looks like my great-aunt will be coming to live with us.”
“Who?” Juan and I asked at the same time. Mom hadn’t had any contact with her family since she’d run away over fifteen years earlier.
“I don’t know, really. I think she said her name was Rika—or Dika—or Mika or something.”
Juan and I looked at each other and then at Mom.
“She’s Bosnian.” Mom drew out her words, looked out the window, squinting, as if there were a faraway TV screen. “She says she married one of my great uncles in England—met him on a business trip he took to Yugoslavia. They got divorced a few years later. I think I remember her. I think one time she had Christmas supper with us, when I was about your age, Sophie. And we drank bottles of spiced wine and ate loads of cinnamon biscuits together.” She bit her thumbnail and stared at the melting purple sherbet. “But that could have been someone else.”
At first, Mom figured she had only a vague, slippery memory of Dika because of the champagne, but the next day, she felt just as foggy. Over breakfast, she shrugged and said, “Well, whoever she is, relative or not, she’s been through a lot and she needs help.” Over the next few days, Mom wrote letters to INS and filled out forms to say she’d sponsor this Bosnian lady. We searched Mom’s single worn childhood photo album for a picture of Dika, but found nothing that jogged Mom’s memory. In the middle of getting the spare room ready, she suddenly said, “Hey! I think when we were drinking that spiced wine, she told me about her travels. My mum and dad were big worriers, hardly ever left our town. So this lady was refreshing. A free spirit. I think I wanted to be like her, fun and adventurous….” Her voice faded out, lost its confidence. “I think.”
Mom couldn’t call any of her relatives in England to check up on her alleged great-aunt’s story. She had run away from England when she was eighteen with an American guy she met there, a vagrant backpacker who her mother despised. Mom traveled with him to Nepal and Morocco and India, and while they were passing through Tucson on the way to Mexico, she found out she was pregnant with me. They decided to stay in Tucson, at least through the pregnancy. But then my father got busted for dealing acid and took off. Mom decided to raise me alone.
When Dika arrived in the late summer, once the visa papers were in order, all she brought were three bags: one of clothes, one of toiletries, and one of glass, each in its own canvas duffel bag. Bags of newly collected glass filled her closet. Piles of glass were heaped on her dresser, which she’d moved to the center of the room, where it got the most sun. Sometimes I caught glimpses of her in there, sitting in the worn armchair, watching the glass, occasionally holding a piece up to the light, close to her eye. In the prison camp, gazing into her red glass helped her make it through each day. And still, her favorite piece, it seemed, the one closest to her heart, was that original red shard.
What it came down to was this: if she hadn’t forced her way into my life, I wouldn’t be here now, sitting in the fresh morning air by a street of strange artwork, with Pablo sleeping beside me, and Ángel secretly playing with wisps of my hair and sneaking glances at the top of my nightgown in the shadow between my breasts.
At midday the sun was blazing and people lined the streets, crowds of people, some carrying umbrellas for shade. There were old women wearing checked aprons and shawls folded on their heads; old men in woven palm hats and stained white button-down shirts and goatskin sandals; little kids in Disney T-shirts holding each other’s hands; guys my age with baggy jeans and baseball caps; girls with tight skirts and halter tops. We had no umbrellas, so we pressed ourselves against the wall and waited for the parade and breathed in smells of roasting corn and sizzling meat. In front of us, a sawdust picture of a big white flower spanned the street, and farther on, a swirling medley of animals—foxes, deer, rabbits—filled an intersection.
Earlier, over scrambled eggs and refried beans in the courtyard, Dika had insisted on coming with us to see the parade, even though every few minutes more fireworks exploded. Mr. Lorenzo held her hand the entire time, and with every boom, I saw him squeeze it while her eyes tensed up and beads of sweat broke out above her lip. After each explosion, she wiped her forehead with a handkerchief and said, “Ha! That was not so bad!” and I breathed out in relief.
I held Pablo’s hand, and when no one was looking, Ángel would slip his hand into mine for a moment, or I would let my arm graze his, or he would touch me with the excuse of pointing out something and let his hand linger a few beats. The crowd was pushing us into each other and we let it happen. I loved the shade created just for a moment between his arm and mine, his face and my neck, my hair and his hand. And in this space, I could almost forget that he was leaving for good.
The parade came into view, first a big truck with the moreno Jesus on it—the dark-skinned Jesus on the cross—El Señor de los Corazones, the patron saint of Huajuapan. He had black flowing hair and a red velvet skirt trimmed with golden tassels and covered with milagros, silver prayer charms, pinned to the fabric. His skin was deep brown, darker than Pablo’s or Ángel’s. Women walked behind him, carrying umbrellas for shade, singing a hypnotic song about the Virgin and the Father and the Son, a mournful tune that I knew would be stuck in my head for days.
Then I realized something that gave me chills: The parade was destroying the artwork. But of course it would get destroyed. What had I been thinking? That the people would just push their way through crowds along the sidewalk instead? That the pictures would magically stay there forever?
I turned to Ángel. “They worked so hard on that! It’s so beautiful!”
He nodded.
The truck carrying Jesus inched toward us, followed by the women’s wobbly, high-pitched song. I tried to soak in the flower and fox and rabbit and deer before the wheels plowed through. After the women passed, children in uniforms marched by, playing earsplitting trumpets and drums. Then people from the sidewalks joined the parade, and children wove around their parents, screaming and laughing and kicking up the sawdust.
My heartbeat quickened; my skin grew prickly, my head dizzy.
At that moment, Pablo slipped his hand out of mine and disappeared into the crowd. “Pablo!” My voice didn’t carry far with all the noise and music. And then I saw him, in the street with the other children, stomping on the colored sawdust, destroying every last trace of the pictures.
“I can’t believe they’re doing this!”
Ángel spoke calmly. “But I think that’s the point, Sophie.”
“What?” I felt faint. I took a gulp from my water bottle and tried to keep my eyes glued on Pablo. “To make something incredibly beautiful, and then, before you even get to enjoy it, mess it up?”
He gave me a puzzled look. “What about the memory? You’ll have that.”
I glared at my reflection in his glasses. “Memory isn’t something real. Something you can touch.”
“But the memory changes you, right? It makes you a different person.”
I looked at him, hard, then grabbed his sunglasses and looked at him even harder. His eyes looked very fragile underneath, very uncertain. My hands shook and my head felt as if it were swarming with insects, and all the people and noises faded and Ángel and I were the only ones there.
“Forget it, Ángel.” My words shot out like little bullets. “Go to Guatemala and stay there and forget everything.” I threw his glasses on the ground and pushed my way through the crowd, past the ruined sawdust pictures.
At least Pablo won’t stay here, I thought; at least he’ll come back with us. I scanned the crowd in the street and saw him, jumping up and down on a sawdust flower. In the book, when the Little Prince was about to go back to his star, he told his pilot friend to look at the stars and know that he would be on one of them, laughing. So for the pilot, it would be as though all the stars were laughing. I wondered if one day I’d see a guy in sunglasses with skin nearly the color of the moreno Jesus, and instead of crying I’d smile at the memory. Or if one day Dika could think of her house and garden before it was kaput and smile, or if Mr. Lorenzo could think of his wife before whatever happened happened and smile. If we could ever wade through all that sorrow to find a little shard of happiness.
I ran alongside Pablo and cupped my hands around my mouth and yelled, “Let’s go, Pablo!” He waved at me, but he didn’t come. His sweaty hand had slipped out of mine so easily.
And then, suddenly, Ángel’s hand was on my hip and he was turning me around and pressing me to him and whispering, out of breath, “Lime-girl.” I felt my breasts against his chest, and I breathed in his soap, the detergent of his T-shirt, the sunshine on his neck. In the middle of all those people, next to the destroyed Virgin on the sliver of moon, with only a few tiny stars left on her cape, I could see why someone would want a moment of complete happiness, even if it wouldn’t last. I pressed my lips against his neck and hung on.
