by Laura McNeal
My birthday was in November.
She stepped into a pair of black heels I’d chosen for homecoming back in the fall and hadn’t worn since. My father had pinned on my corsage and kissed both my ears, a routine he’d started when I was little, and then I got into the backseat of Eldon Barton’s mother’s car and pretended not to notice that Eldon’s hands were shaking. I still saw him at school sometimes and we ignored one another.
My mother jabbed an earring into each of her earlobes. She lifted her hair to study the effect. “Oh my God,” she said. “My ears have gotten old.”
I said this was ridiculous, and I leaned close to see that she did have wrinkles on her earlobes. “Nah,” I said. “Ears don’t age.”
She let her hair fall back over the wrinkles and sighed. “I’m off,” she said.
“You look pretty,” I said. Losing weight did make her look pretty. It just didn’t make her look happy. Maybe my uncle was right about that.
When she was gone, I had three choices: homework, moisturizing my earlobes, or a moth-to-the-flame ride down to the river. Amiel’s insistence that I go away, por favor, still stung, so I sat on the sofa and studied the room. What a mess the house was. I lay back on the bed and closed my eyes. The project I’d told my father about was half truth, half lie. We had nine days of school left, and four of them would be devoted to tests.
For a while, I did geometry, and then I began reading—cross-legged and pillow-supported—a chapter about the War of 1812 that beckoned me, ever so softly, into the early stages of sleep, blurring the sunlight on the sofa and the glossy page and the backs of my hands, and I remember that when my phone rang its way into my sleep, there was too much glare on the tiny screen of the phone for me to see Greenie’s name displayed there in tiny insistent letters.
“Calling to report weird phenomenon,” she said.
“What’s that?”
“Well, Hickey’s mom belongs to the Land Conservancy, you know?”
“No.”
“And they were having this big Clean Up the River campaign today, and she made Hickey go with her because she says all he ever does is hang out with me until late at night and then sleep for, like, eternity the next day, and she thinks he’s going to get juvenile diabetes from lack of exercise.”
I thought his mom probably had more to worry about than juvenile diabetes, Hickey being the bony type, plus I was pretty sure he was fabricating the love with Greenie, but I didn’t say anything. I pictured the river instead. I saw a bunch of people armed with orange plastic bags and trash pokers gathering around Amiel like a haz-mat team.
“I told him his mother should take you next time,” Greenie said, “since you could be, like, Miss River Hike of the Santa Margaritaville, and he said he would definitely pass on your name as a potential member.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“Anyway, Hickey’s going along picking up garbage, and he’s texting me every few seconds to tell me the disgusting nature of trash he’s found, and like five seconds ago I get a message that says he’s found some letter you dropped on the trail.”
I had just picked up the joined pair of silkworm cocoons and was trying to see inside them. “A letter I dropped on the trail?” I asked. I set the cocoons down. “What are you talking about?”
“I don’t know. A letter. With your name on it. He didn’t, like, open it.”
“Why not?”
“It wasn’t addressed to him, dummy. He’s a respectful person. It was addressed to you, I guess.”
“To me? It said Pearl DeWitt and my address and everything? Was there a stamp on it?”
“I don’t know. He just said there was this really thick envelope with the name Pearl on it. He knows you go there, like, hourly, and it’s not like Pearl is a common name if you’re under the age of eighty-nine. So he figured you were the Pearl in question.”
I couldn’t think what it was. There were the notes I’d written to Amiel, of course, but I hadn’t used envelopes. Would Amiel use an envelope?
“So where is Hickey now?” I asked.
“Out on the trail, poking more trash. He’s picking me up after, so we’ll come over.”
“When will that be?”
“I think he said two o’clock.”
Twenty-nine
Hickey and Greenie stayed to watch me open the envelope. I told them to go away and make out or something, but they just sat on the sofa and waited.
“Who do you think it’s from?” Greenie asked.
“No le clue,” I lied.
We were all surprised, though, when I broke the seal with a steak knife and found a bundle of twenty-dollar bills with their edges all soft and torn.
“Are you selling drugs?” Hickey asked. He seemed hopeful.
“Hickey!” Greenie said, smacking him. “Are you?” she asked.
“Not that I know of,” I said.
“Count it,” Hickey said.
I was concentrating pretty hard on hiding from them a torn piece of paper that was tucked down in front of the sheaf of bills. I wanted desperately to read it but just as desperately to prevent Hickey and Greenie from knowing anything at all about Amiel de la Cruz. I began to count the money just so that I could hide the torn piece of paper.
“It’s two hundred and forty dollars,” I said.
“Why is somebody giving you two hundred and forty dollars?” Greenie asked.
“More like totally failing to give it to you,” Hickey said.
“I don’t know,” I lied. The amount of Amiel’s medical bill was $240.
“If you think it’s some mistake, and it’s really for that other Pearl, the drug dealer of La Santa Margarita,” Hickey said, “I can keep the money for you.” He did a pretty good Spanish accent, which annoyed me.
“I’d better ask my uncle about it,” I said. This made no sense, so I had to keep improvising as I talked. “He pays the workers in cash, see, and maybe one of them dropped it.”
Hickey and Greenie stared at me. “In an envelope with your name on it?”
“Well,” I said, “sometimes my uncle loans money, too, and maybe somebody was paying him back.”
“Again,” Hickey said slowly, “I have to point out the weirdness of putting your name on the envelope. Are you, like, your uncle’s cashier?”
This was a terrific idea, and I seized it. “Yes, actually. I am. He’s thinking of making me a part-time secretary. I balance his checkbook and whatnot.” Whatnot? I had just used the word whatnot.
“But do the guys who pick your uncle’s avocados go, you know, recreational hiking a lot?” Greenie asked.
“No, I don’t think so,” I said. “But they fish and stuff.” I had actually seen some Hispanic guys at the river once with professional-looking nets. I remember wondering what in the world they might catch.
“They do?” Greenie asked. “Weird.”
“Why is that weird?”
“I don’t know. It just seems kind of wildernessy. The few times my dad’s had a Mexican help him with yard work, the guy brought those cup-o’-noodle things.”
“Some of them are different,” I said.
“Yeah,” Hickey said, getting suddenly animated. “Some of them are totally living in the wild here. Remember that story a while back in the newspaper?”
I shook my head. I was holding the envelope closed and wishing they would go away so I could read the note. I wondered if Amiel realized that he’d dropped the cash and was looking frantically for it all over the trail.
“A bunch of migrants were living in a canyon over in Carlsbad, I think it was,” Hickey went on. “And there were these places in the reeds where they would go and meet prostitutes. The reason it was in the paper was one of the women was told she’d have a good job when she came over to the U.S., and she could earn back the money to pay the coyote who brought her across. But then she found out she had to work in one of those reed brothels.”
“That’s disgusting,” Greenie said.
“Y
eah,” Hickey said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a place like that in Fallbrook.”
“I’ve never seen anything remotely like that,” I said numbly. “Anyway, thanks for bringing this. You could have just kept it, obviously.” On impulse, I reached into the envelope and pulled out a twenty. “Here,” I said. “You should get a reward. I’ll replace the money when I give it to my uncle.”
“No way,” Hickey said, standing up and looking insulted. “No. I don’t need a reward to give people their own stuff back. If you don’t find the owner, though, you can buy us all a Pedro’s.”
Greenie stood up, too, and they made their way out of the living room, onto the porch, and into the sun.
Thirty
I fished out a little shred of paper, its shape as irregular as Illinois, and read,
Please give this money to Mrs. Agnese.
Thank you from Amiel.
I was freakishly disappointed. The bundle of cash might have made it unlikely that I would find a passionate letter that began, Fly to me, mi amor, but he could have said something a little more personal.
Then again, wouldn’t it have been more direct—and easier—for Amiel to knock on the door and give the money to my aunt? Or my uncle? Why involve me at all?
I heard a car door shut, and in a few minutes, my mother came scuffling through the avocado grove. Leaf-scuffling can be fun when you’re in a good mood, as long as you forget to worry that you’ll scuffle over a rattlesnake, but my mother looked as if she’d welcome a fatal snakebite. I stuffed the money and the note under a sofa cushion and went to meet her on the porch.
“Mrs. Bookseller, I presume?” I asked, trying to be chipper for her.
My mother didn’t look happy when she said she didn’t know yet.
“Was the interviewer nice?” I went on in a peppy tone. Somehow our roles were upside down, like our old house. Normally, the teenage girl dresses in a sensible skirt and goes to job interviews and the mother asks if the interviewer was nice.
“Kind of patronizing,” she said stiffly, tossing her purse on the chair. I could tell by the way she avoided my eyes that she wanted me to clam up. Go away, she was thinking. Leave me alone.
Once you’re upside down, though, it’s hard to revolve back to the right position. If I weren’t peppy, who would be? What would happen to us?
“Want me to make you Breakfast in a Barrel?” I asked. Breakfast in a Barrel was the egg-and-potato burrito we’d eaten every morning on a family vacation in Hawaii and then adopted as a dinner dish.
“I already ate,” she said. She didn’t sit, and she didn’t go to the computer to check e-mail. The only people she heard from anymore were attorneys, so who could blame her? “Thanks,” she added.
“I’m going for a walk,” I said. I waited a little too long before I asked, “Wanna come with me?”
I’m sorry to say that I was glad when she shook her head, glad when she said she was going to take a nap and then maybe check out some more job listings. “Okay,” I said, relief insulating me from her. It was the same stuff that deafened and padded me when I stood there and watched her scream insults at my father in the dark avocado grove. She needed saving, but I didn’t move. It was as if my mother, the expert swimmer, were drowning, but I had never learned to swim.
“Okay,” I said again, and watched her go to her bedroom, take off my homecoming dance heels, and lie down fully clothed on her unmade bed.
Thirty-one
I waited until she was asleep before I slipped the money back out from under the cushion and made for my bicycle, taking a roundabout way to see if there were still loquats on the tree.
Loquats taste like tiny peaches dipped in lemonade. They’re kind of like the manna God dropped every day for the Israelites: delicious if you eat them right away, but if you try to put them in a bowl for the next day, they go brown and wrinkly. It’s best to eat them outside so you can peel the skin off with your teeth, then bite the globe in two so you can examine and remove the cluster of two or three slippery brown seeds. These you also have to throw out, but it’s fun to look at them first, all puzzled up together and wet like something from a tide pool. I once ate twenty-two loquats without being sick. On this occasion, I ate three or four, then snapped off a whole branch and tucked it carefully into my backpack for a picnic at the river.
I found Amiel where tall, skinny oaks and sycamores bend toward each other like a cathedral over Agua Prieta Creek. The path curved sharply to the north ahead of me, deep inside the arched bower of trees, and I saw him when he was just fifty yards away, a dark-haired boy wearing a red plaid shirt, his head down as he scanned the ground for something.
Because he was so busy looking down, I had three or four seconds to think of what to do, and sometimes when you have time to think of what to do, you see what a ninny you are. I stopped walking. I sat down on a fallen log. I faced away from the trail and pretended, like a ninny, that I was completely unaware of him. I thought my act of obliviousness would be more realistic if I had some reason to be sitting down, so I opened my backpack and brought out—presto, chango—the branch of loquats. I snapped off one, peeled it, bit it in half, and pretended to examine the glossy brown seeds. I could hear footsteps, so I knew Amiel saw me, but I didn’t turn my head. I ate the other half of the loquat, and then I dropped the interlocking seeds.
The footsteps stopped. I could feel that he was near me, and I still couldn’t speak. I reached into my backpack, felt for the envelope all thick with money, and pulled it out. I held it out to him and then, only then, did I have the courage to look at his face.
There are emotions your face can’t hide, and he was intensely relieved. His bandaged hand, worn leather work boots, and black eyebrows—all the heavy parts of him—appeared to become weightless, the way your arms do when you’ve pressed them hard against a doorway and then stepped away to let them float all by themselves. Greenie and I used to make our arms float all the time, going from doorway to doorway in her house.
Amiel looked at the envelope for a few seconds, and I waited for him to speak. He smiled instead, showing the white tiles of his teeth.
“A friend of mine found it,” I said. “Isn’t that weird?”
All around us the just-born leaves of the sycamores brushed against each other in a wind that was blowing from the north. It was hot like the Santa Anas, and it would burn clouds away like a welder’s torch and bake the new leaves into card stock.
Amiel looked up at the sycamores, where the limbs were mottled white and gray and the huge green leaves, nine inches across, touched gently together. I looked at his hands, one swollen and wrapped, one narrow and finely made, and I held out a loquat. He took one and bit into it, and I took another one, and we ate them without a word in the shadows.
This is the most beautiful place, I thought but didn’t say. I feel the strangest happiness. The words weren’t specific enough somehow. I didn’t have words for what I felt.
Maybe that’s why, now that Amiel’s gone, I trace and label the parts of the sycamore in my college botany classes: pistillate flowers, rounded sepals, acute petals.
“You dropped the envelope, I guess,” I said.
Amiel nodded.
“What do you call it again—hacer mal …” I couldn’t remember how to say “juggle.” I tossed one loquat to the other hand.
“Hacer malabares,” he whispered. He couldn’t juggle with his hand in a bandage, and we couldn’t talk, so what I felt—the strange happiness, the nearness of him—just got larger and had nowhere to go, as when the sycamore tree swells and strains against heavy bark.
The rigid texture of sycamore bark entirely lacks the expansive power common to the bark of other trees, so it is incapable of stretching to accommodate the growth of the wood underneath, and the tree sloughs it off in great irregular masses, leaving the surface mottled, greenish white and gray.
Amiel handed the envelope back to me. “Sí,” he said, lifting his hurt hand slightly. He tried to
curve it into the letter C.
“She won’t take it, you know,” I said. “My aunt.”
He nodded very slowly and intensely at me. “Sí,” he said again.
I’m not good at arguing with people. I took the envelope and put it in my backpack. All the greenness around us fluttered in the wind, and I was afraid he would go away, but he didn’t leave me, and he didn’t speak. I suppose I couldn’t stand it any longer, the silence and the nearness of his hand to my own skin, which like sycamore bark entirely lacked expansive power. I turned my face with the intention of speaking, and he turned his face to mine with the intention of hearing. I had nothing adequate to say, he had nothing to hear, and so we left our faces in that position of mute expectation. His cheeks were flat and long and smooth, hollowed by something that was now gone, like the interlocking loquat seeds. On one cheek, he had a little scar like those craters on photos of the moon. His eyes were both still and not still. His lips were dry, and I felt them near to mine the way you can feel a fever before you touch a sick person’s skin. I couldn’t say if he moved forward slightly or if I moved my face, but we did move, and our lips touched. He smelled like dust and loquats. I would have stayed forever in that moment, but he broke away. His face was darker and more melancholy than before—angry, even.
“Sorry,” I said, my first impulse being to apologize.
He looked around us. I knew what he was looking for: witnesses to our kiss. The chest-cracking swells went on inside me. The trees were just the same in their posture, blind to us, invisibly growing inside that stiff bark. The brown seeds we’d spit out lay all around us, dirty now. I thought of saying, It isn’t wrong. Why is it wrong?
It wasn’t wrong in theory. It wasn’t forbidden. But I understood that it was very strange and different, someone like him and someone like me. The people who have nothing aren’t allowed to touch the people with cars and houses. They can work here. That’s all.
