by Laura McNeal
It was mid-July when my mother’s friend Louise asked my mother, “What’s Pearl doing on Mission Road without a helmet?”
By this point, my mother was so thin she could wear things from the junior department at Macy’s, and she wore brighter lipstick. Between her eyebrows were two wrinkles I’d recently learned (from reading the type of magazine she never used to buy, but now, confusingly, did) were called the “11.” When she was angry with me, the lines deepened. I watched them go dark as she said, “Where in the world have you been going?”
“Just the river,” I said.
“With Greenie?”
“No.”
“I already told you it isn’t safe for you to be there alone, and it isn’t safe to ride your bike on Mission Road.”
“The migrants do it.”
Occasionally, you saw muscled men in helmets, sunglasses, and Spandex using the bike lanes of Fallbrook, but mostly it was dark-skinned men in ball caps.
“They,” my mother said, “have no choice.”
“What else am I going to do all day?”
“If you’re going to ride your bike like a migrant, you can get a job like a migrant.”
“So it’s safe to ride on Mission if I have a job.”
My mother blinked. She twisted an earring. “Not safe. Just defensible. And you have to wear a helmet.”
“Fine,” I said.
So the following morning, while my mother watched, I put on a hideous old helmet that used to be Robby’s. I told her when I would be home and exactly where I was going to fill out applications: Major Market and Subway. But after I left those places, I stopped, on a whim, at the Cup o’ Europe, which was right across the alley from the fake Irish pub and had a WE’RE HIRING sign in the window.
The manager, Chloe, was this big friendly woman with a cold, and she was just being polite, I could tell, in letting me apply for the job at all (PREVIOUS EXPERIENCE PREFERRED, the sign said in smaller letters), but as she was reading the top line of my application, she said, “Are you related to Sharon DeWitt?”
My thigh muscles felt like ironing boards. “Yes,” I said.
“As in?”
“She’s my mother.”
“Well, that would be odd,” she said, letting out an overly big laugh. “Do you two bicker?”
“Not usually,” I said, shrugging.
“You could work together?”
“I guess so. Why?”
Another overly big laugh. “You know she works here, right?”
I felt my neck prickle and wondered how many of the people sitting on the big comfy sofas and big comfy chairs were listening in on our conversation while pretending to work on their laptops. As far as I could tell, the Cup o’ Europe was not a bookstore. There were some used books in the back, where a sign said, LEAVE ONE, TAKE ONE!! but most of them were large print. Also, the two girls working the coffee machines were teenagers, not grown women like my mother.
“What a coincidence!” I said, trying to work up a laugh. It seemed really, really strange that no one I knew, such as Greenie, had mentioned my mother’s new job at Cup o’ Europe. During the school year, I would have heard about my mom’s job from seven people within ten minutes of her first shift. But since school let out, I’d stopped speaking to practically everyone.
“I guess you two need to talk more, huh?” Chloe the manager said. “I’ll bet you’re like my kids. Always rushing off to do whatsit with whosit.”
“Pretty much,” I said. “Ha!” I paused because it’s hard to follow up a fake laugh. “Probably we shouldn’t work together, actually,” I said.
“You’d want different shifts?”
“No. I think I should just, you know, withdraw. Don’t tell her I was here, even.”
But of course Chloe told her. The next night during our soup course (the only course), my mother set down her twisted shred of a napkin and said, “Chloe said you came by.”
“You said you worked in a bookstore,” I said.
“They sell books. After a fashion.”
“I don’t know why you had to put it that way to me is all.”
“I think they’re planning to sell books. That’s what they told me when I applied, anyway.”
I blinked at her, and she picked up the remote. We watched anchormen, crime tape, the fuzzy progress of car chases, and finally, for comic relief, a tour of the thing I had thought existed only in my imagination: a house that was literally upside down. A man in Poland had painstakingly wedged the pitched roof of a house into the ground and built the rest of the house up from there, balancing the weight somehow on the point of the triangle. The foundation was high and flat like a tray held up by a waiter. On the edge of this elevated foundation, a little cypress tree grew (or merely pointed) straight down.
“The house took twice as long to build as an ordinary structure,” said the newscaster, “because being inside the house made the workers dizzy.”
Long lines of curious families waited outside the house for a tour. “Some people have waited as long as six hours to see the inside,” the newscaster announced as Poles and Germans, looking just like Americans in their baby carriers, Windbreakers, T-shirts, and track shoes, traipsed unsteadily through upside-down doorways to run their hands along upside-down beds. I began, sitting there beside my lost and lonely mother, to plan my pilgrimage to this place where I would finally be at home.
Thirty-five
The next day, Subway called to say I was hired, which meant long bike rides, no time to sink myself down in the river, and the persistent smell of mustard on my skin. Twice that week I got phone messages from my father, but they didn’t mention his condo or Paris or plans of any kind to see me, so I didn’t call him back.
I rode home that Friday at five o’clock, long after Amiel would have gone home. The grove felt empty, and I knew the guesthouse would be empty, too, because it was open-mike night at the Cup o’ Europe, a shift my mother was unhappy to take. I was halfway up the porch steps when I saw something small and dark beside the screen door: Amiel’s tin box. The black enamel felt so warm from the sun that it almost burned me when I picked it up.
I sat on the porch in case he was out there somewhere, watching me, and I pried open the lid. I could hear crows calling and lizards rattling through the dried bougainvillea blossoms and eucalyptus bark. “Is that you?” I called hopefully, not daring to say Amiel’s name in case my aunt was outside. A lizard blinked at me from under a curled leaf and did a couple of push-ups to show me he had the situation under control.
The tin held a small, flat piece of wood. On one side, in charcoal, it said only,
SÍ.
I held the wood in my palm and considered the crow poking through the avocado leaves for food. My last question to Amiel had been, Can I come back here?
And now I had his answer in my hand, sharper than a Scrabble tile.
Sí.
Thirty-six
I tried conversation, of course. I’d never spent time with anyone who was so quiet. When Amiel took me fishing, I said, “What kind of fish is it?”
He shrugged.
“I guess you wouldn’t know the American names.” I watched the water reflect the sky. I watched the dragonflies buzz the reeds. But I could only keep still for about two minutes before a question rose to the surface like a swimmer up for air. “Do you think they’re native?”
He shrugged. Again, how would he know? It went on like that until finally he pointed to the water, raised his left eyebrow, and whispered, “Silencio.”
“I love it when you speak the Espanish,” I whispered back.
He rolled his eyes because I wasn’t being quiet, so I sat still and didn’t say a word until, forty or fifty years later, we had a big flapping fish on the line. “Woo-hoo!” is what I said then, and he had to give me the silencio sign again.
“What?” I said. “We’ve got it now.”
He pointed to the other side of the river, where the trail cut through the trees.
/> “Oh,” I said. True. We didn’t want other hikers to notice us.
Next we went to gut the fish. He had me dig a hole with a sharp, flat rock he brought out from its hiding place. Then he started to cut the fish, and I started to look away. I was studying the tree limbs in order to keep my mind off the vomit impulse when I asked him how he got to the United States.
He was wiping his hands by then. “Caminando,” he said, and he made his fingers walk like little legs.
“But how did you know which way to go? Did you have a coyote?” I knew that’s what newspapers called the smugglers who brought illegals across, but I didn’t know what Amiel was likely to call them.
In any case, he didn’t answer. He made me bury the guts, and then he took the edible parts of the fish in a piece of newspaper up to the fire pit in the old stone house. It was six o’clock on a Monday, and the gnats glowed like fireflies. I could hear a rooster and a dove, both cheerful sounds. I did some sweeping with a little broom I’d brought and Amiel built the fire.
“So you didn’t tell me how you got here,” I said once I’d done my sweeping. “Or about your childhood. Like how you learned to do circus stuff. Or the accident when you hurt your throat.”
I sat cross-legged beside him and he fed little bits of dry bark to his fire.
Without a word, he poked at the fire until it was big enough to ignite sticks. He set an array of firewood on the coals, and then his hands were empty.
“I’d just like to know about you,” I said.
Amiel took my hand, and at that moment, the doves seemed to be making their sound just for me. He drew the shape of a 2 in my palm, and when I read the number aloud, he whispered, “Long.”
“Too long,” I said. It was like texting for early man, and I wanted to do it some more.
Amiel just nodded and looked at the fire.
“If it’s long, you could tell me a little at a time,” I said.
He kept holding my hand and watching the fire, and we were happy.
Thirty-seven
August came. At work, I wore flat, baggy, plastic gloves to layer meat and vegetables on sandwiches that were too often for people I knew at school, who always thought I owed them free extra portions of bacon and avocado. I don’t know if my father was in Paris, but Robby was. Robby always spent most of August there with my uncle, my aunt Agnès, his grandmère, and Monsieur Pouf the tortoise, whom I imagined on a leash held by Robby, scraping its slow way past the Eiffel Tower.
Robby and I had barely spoken all summer, but he sent me a postcard of Tintin and Snowy. Bonjour le you, he wrote. France is le bon. Plan going très bien so far. Will parlez-vous when we get back. Robby.
I didn’t know what the plan was, unless it was the one where he went on dating someone he didn’t respect, but the next day, I had a surprise customer at Subway.
“I’d like a turkey on whole wheat, please,” Mary Beth said, and I said what I’m supposed to say, which is, “Do you want that toasted?” Then I couldn’t help looking shocked to see her.
She asked if I was going on break soon, which unfortunately I was, and that’s how I came to be sitting in a booth with her as she unwrapped her sandwich.
“You look tan,” I said. “Been playing a lot of tennis?”
“I have, actually,” she said. “I need the money, so I’ve been teaching more lessons.”
I said that sounded nice.
“Mrs. Wallace went to Paris, though, so she’s not taking lessons right now.”
This was a new twist. “I didn’t know you were teaching her,” I said.
“Yeah, that’s how I first met the Wallaces,” Mary Beth said. “Agnès was looking for someone to help her brush up on her game, and the regular coach at the club recommended me.”
This all seemed logical. I decided to ask if my uncle took lessons, too.
“No,” she said. She looked away and fiddled with the wrapper of her sandwich. She ate a stray piece of lettuce.
“Did I do something wrong with your sandwich?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “I just don’t feel that hungry. Do you want it?”
“That’s okay,” I said, though I did. I hadn’t eaten yet.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
Finally, after a long, uncomfortable pause, Mary Beth said, “I came here because I wondered if Robby said anything to you.”
“About what?”
“About me.”
“I’ve barely spoken to him,” I said, not wanting to look straight at her. “First he was at these college prep camps and music camp, and now he’s in Paris with my aunt and uncle.”
“I know,” she said.
“Oh,” I said, confused. “So did you two go out this summer or not?”
“When he was home, we did,” she said. “And I drove up to Orange County once when he was doing that music camp and we met for dinner.”
That seemed kind of serious. “To tell you the truth,” I said, “he’s never gone out with girls much. He’s always kind of focused on school and track and music.”
“Yeah, he told me that,” she said. “He said I was the only person he’d ever wanted to date.”
That seemed misleading at best, given what the reasons for his interest had been.
“And now he’s just completely stopped calling me.”
“It’s probably expensive,” I said.
“And e-mailing me,” she said.
“Well, I haven’t gotten any e-mail from him, either. I don’t know what the setup is at his grandmother’s. She’s kind of old and she might not be wired for that kind of thing.”
“I’ve been to Europe,” she said. “There’s an Internet café on every corner.”
“Well,” I said, out of excuses, “I just wouldn’t wait around for him. He’s really fickle lately. He’s not even as friendly with me as we used to be.” I wanted to add, Besides, he’s just a high school student, but to point out that he was beneath her seemed insulting to both of them.
She sighed and looked truly miserable. “Okay,” she said. “Thanks for talking to me about it. I realize he’s too young for me, but he doesn’t seem young. And I just thought there might be some reason why he went from sixty miles an hour to a dead stop, you know? I just don’t get why he’d be so intense about it and then, for no apparent reason, just shut off.”
“I don’t know, either,” I said, and reminded myself that Mary Beth had engaged in some sort of romance with my married uncle and was not deserving of sympathy. I told myself not to eat her sandwich, either, even though my break was nearly over.
“Are you sure he didn’t say anything else to you?” Mary Beth asked. “He didn’t say, for instance, that he was going to stop dating me because …” She waited for me to fill in the blank.
I tried to formulate an answer in my mind as she wrapped the sandwich back up. It crossed my mind to say, He saw you kissing my uncle. Or, He wanted to stop you from breaking up his parents’ marriage. I should have said these things, I think now, but I didn’t, which made me wonder if I was losing my compulsive honesty now that I spent most of my time leading a secret life.
“No,” I said to Mary Beth. “He didn’t.”
“Okay,” she said. “Thanks, anyway,” and, taking the sandwich that she didn’t want, she walked away from me, and as I’d feared she would, she dropped it in the trash.
Thirty-eight
I told my mother I had more shifts at Subway than I really did so I could be at the river when I wasn’t at work, waiting for Amiel to draw letters on the trembling skin of my palm. More often, though, he wrote what he had to say on the dirt or answered me, if the weather wasn’t too hot and dry, in his raspy voice.
I would ask a question: “So where were you born?”
It took a while to spell out San Ygnacio, Guanajuato.
Another time, I asked about his father.
Estados Unidos, he wrote.
“But where? Here?”
The answer wa
s too long to write, so he whispered, “My father sent my mother money until I had four years, but then he stopped.”
“Why?”
Amiel shrugged.
“What happened to your mother?”
With the stick he drew what looked like a small hill, and then he drew a cross on top of it.
The day I finally spotted the green string hammock wadded up in the willows and brought it to him, he untangled it and strung it from one tree to another and then, with an elegant bow that reminded me of his juggling performance, he offered it to me. I laid myself in the hammock and asked, “How did you learn English, anyway?”
He shrugged. “A guy. Un maestro.”
I waited for him to add more, but he didn’t. He pushed gently on the hammock, and I swayed under the restless trees.
“Did he teach you juggling and stuff, too?”
He nodded.
“Did you see me that day I took a nap in this?” I asked.
He didn’t have to speak to answer that. He nodded slowly, and the hammock went on swinging under his gentle touch.
“What about the accident? The steering wheel?”
He looked away from me and kept his fingers knotted in the hammock string, allowing them to go back and forth, to slow me down, to stop the movement entirely. This time, he took my hand as I longed for him to do, and he used his finger to make the number 2. “Long,” he whispered, and my ride in the swing was over.
Thirty-nine
We hadn’t kissed except for the one time with the loquats. But on August 21, three days before the return to school, clouds rippled overhead like dirty fleece, turning the river into a room lit evenly from within.
