Álvaro slid down to sit on the top stair and watched Janna sleeping. She was what he’d given up for Lent. Promised to keep his distance until the appointed hour. He could hardly breathe. In her face he saw all the girls he’d gone to identify at the morgue. He saw the fragility of the cheekbones, the narrow bridge of the nose, and the smooth line of the jaw and knew exactly how they could be shattered, knew how easily the slender cord stringing the knuckled vertebrae in the young necks could be snapped.
He’d listened to their stories come out in scattered bursts and jangled laughter, in threats of revenge and promises of good behaviour. Orphans, many of them, their parents dead in la violencia. Others were runaways, some with stories of abuse that had stranded them in jagged indifference, legs jittering, elbows and knees scabbed, and fingers picking at tufts of hair, scratching at sores. Stories that left him raging at the indifferent politicians, at the bored policemen, and, often, at the parents. He’d prayed for them, days and weeks and months of prayer. All offered up for those children and none for his own. In all those years, not one.
Clara at the morgue, her voice in his ear, “How do you confess a sin if you don’t even know you’ve committed it?” It was seeing her face so clearly in Janna’s that made him realize how deeply his transgressions were embedded in his own ignorance. The way the puff of white hair feathered around her ear, the deep indentation of the lobe, the gold stud.
If Janna woke up and looked over her shoulder at him, he would see Clara’s debutante portrait, the one he’d seen the day he left for the novitiate in Mexico City, steadfast in his dutiful sense of giving her up, a novice in the first flush of faith. If Janna spoke, he would hear Clara’s voice, the way it sounded when he phoned her to ask if he could visit and congratulate her on the children she’d so kindly adopted. How fierce she’d sounded about those children. How determined to prevail over what he pitied as her barrenness. His sense, even stronger after the torture, of holding truth as a grenade. Three grenades. The truth about the children; the truth about Vinicio; the truth about himself. Not knowing she had a secret of her own stitched up in her scarred uterus.
He had finally seen her. Just a year ago, he realized, stunned at the distance he had travelled since that meeting. It was unexpected, a week or two after the chaos of the Easter celebrations when Emilia went missing. He’d heard they had an unidentified female at the central morgue, a very young one found in one of the ravines. He draped his stole over his shoulders as the drawer was pulled out, averting his eyes until the body was made decent. He was ashamed at his relief when he saw she wasn’t Emilia. She was a child, no more than thirteen, with gracefully plucked eyebrows and the remnants of mascara on the thick lashes resting on the cheekbones. Her face was unmarked but the hair was scorched right back to the skin. The attendant stroked the eyes open and the wide-eyed stare triggered some memory. As he struggled to place her, he said the prayers, knowing everyone within hearing was taking them in for themselves. Their daily bread, the city’s death.
He made the sign of the cross on her forehead and ran his hand down over her eyes to close them once again, letting his palm rest over her nose and mouth, feeling for some memory of breath. He wanted the reminder of the cold skin to fuel his anger, his two years of push-ups, chin-ups, and punching bags in rage for the street children of Guatemala City.
When a woman called out his name, uncertain, in the dank low-ceilinged corridor, he barely recognized her. It had been thirty years and there she was, a thin Ladina matron leaning on her husband’s arm. The grey streaked her black hair like ashes and what must have been slender elegance had been ravaged. His heart broke for her obvious misery even as he felt sudden joy; maybe Vinicio was here somewhere, another slab of flesh on a metal tray. But then he realized who the girl was. He’d only seen her the one time, dressed up on the float, but it was her.
Clara saw the recognition and cried out. It was a cry there was no defence against; it ripped something apart inside him. Ana Elisabeth’s ghosts crowded in to fill the space between his ribs.
“Where is she?” Clara whispered.
Álvaro nodded to the attendant and waited in a small office for them to come out, wondering at whatever it was that was implacable in the universe. Whatever it was that had brought them both to this place. He nodded when the husband, his face full of fear and disgust, asked him to stay with Clara while he went to get the car.
As she sobbed in his arms, he looked over her bowed head to the diagram on the wall showing the muscles of the heart, how they are damaged by different kinds of trauma. Blood vessels drawn in pink and blue. Coming and going. The lungs, great pink sponges. This stranger who was Clara told him how Lucía Madriela, for that was the name they’d given her, had started wearing tight clothes, lots of makeup until she looked like a hooker. Just teenage rebellion, they thought, until the nightmares started. One night, she lit her hair on fire.
Vinicio tried to help, she told him, and Álvaro held himself very still. He’d found her a good therapist and even took her there himself. Adoption has its problems, he’d explained. But then Lucía refused to go. They had no choice but to hospitalize her, Clara cried, no choice. She kept lighting fires. Vinicio was taking her to the clinic when she opened the car door and jumped out and was gone. Vinicio looked everywhere for her, she told him. But it was no use.
“I have prayed a hundred million novenas asking forgiveness for what we did,” she said, reaching up to touch the scar on his chin. “But it seems we are both still being punished.”
What did she know? What did she think they were being punished for? What kind of God did she believe in?
“Clara,” he’d said, “we were children. We loved each other sincerely. We stopped. No one was harmed.”
“Your mother never told you?”
His heart jumped. “Never told me what?”
She shifted in the metal chair as if it hurt her bones. “How do you confess a sin if you don’t even know you’ve committed it?”
“Never told me what, Clara?”
“She gave me something that killed the baby.” She clutched him, her fingers bruising his arms. “I had to do it, don’t you see? They would have killed you.”
He sat back. Thought back. The memories emerged, faint at first, a young boy’s petulance. Clara had stayed at home while the others went to a party on a nearby plantation. His mother had sent him on a dozen errands and when he’d tried to sneak into Clara’s room, the door was locked. His mother, inside, told him to go away. When she finally left the room, he was afraid to try the handle. Afraid of some woman trouble he had no business with. Instead he’d followed her out into the early morning dimness to a place where there was a rock and a smear of ashes. A place even Vinicio didn’t know about. Flower petals and candle wax. She dug under the flat altar stone and then pulled out a dark package from under her shawl. She placed it in the dirt, covered it, and tipped the rock back in place. She lit candles and sprinkled whiskey into the flames.
Black circles around Clara’s eyes and then she was gone with her mother to Los Angeles. A good school there, Vinicio said. And no more words between them. He and his mother, the two people Clara had trusted most in the world, had done this to her. And she had no one to tell but a succession of priests, none of them knowing her lover was also her brother. He wanted to tell her everything. To take her with him deeper into the dark house.
But the door had opened and Vinicio was there. He gathered Clara into his arms, his dark blue eyes challenging Álvaro. Álvaro stared back, Ana Elisabeth’s whole village fluttering between his ribs. Like some demented village dog indifferent to the boot, he barked out his warning.
“Clara?”
She turned, her face as pale as the tiles on the floor.
“Vinicio knows why Lucía lit all those fires. Ask him what she saw that day her mother died. Ask him what he did to her aunt.”
Her face crumpled through confus
ion into loathing. Vinicio just shook his head as he turned with her to walk away. He knew he had nothing to fear. And now that Álvaro had broken his silence, he had made himself one of the dead. When Clara turned back to hiss at him, to curse him and his mother, he was left with her loathing and the knowledge that everything that had happened to him was deserved. Every single flick of Vinicio’s razor had been triggered by the evil inside himself, his spirit long stolen by the mountain gods. He had wished then that he had died in the torture chamber, died without knowing.
It was from that knowledge that he’d fled. The sight of another life broken through his bungling. The sight of Clara’s hate. It finally cut him loose and sent him down into the place where loud music drowned out some of the chattering ghosts, where the kids took him to a basement so he could let every nerve jangle with electric pain until they shared their little bags with him and the world went numb at last.
Janna stirred and rolled over, her back to him now, her ear poking up through a tangle of hair. Despair flashed briefly as he realized how inextricably she linked him to the Fortunys. She was evidence of their claim upon him, and he would happily shoot either Vinicio or the old man if they ever came into her presence. And yet he also wanted Clara to know about her; it was as if the child who had been laid beneath the stone had come back to them, cleansed of the double taint of their blood. He wished his mother were still alive because she would know what to do. More than any of them, she was able to live with what was outside her and what was inside her. She would come to this girl and take her hands and pull her into an embrace. The smell of smoke on her blouse and in her hair, the smell of smoke and tortillas and coffee.
He listened to Janna breathe. He found himself breathing in as she breathed out, as if her exhaled air was entering his lungs, spreading through his chest and down his arms into his hands until it was all he could do not to touch her. But he remembered what had happened the last time he had reached out to her.
A door opened downstairs and he heard Joseph’s voice. Joseph, who hovered on the edge of complication. He put on some music in his bedroom just below. Janna stirred again. Álvaro pushed himself to his feet and went downstairs. He was not going to be the one to wake her up.
†
As Trevor parked his dusty pickup on the small street thick with blossoming cherry trees, Isabel was prepared to dislike every Coleman she met. The house was set back behind a tall hedge and cedar fences intertwined with vines Isabel didn’t know the names of.
Trevor whistled. “Christ almighty, these places must be worth millions.” He turned to Amy, who they’d picked up on their way through town. “They going to let us in?”
Amy told him that his Gitxsan blood was very high style in these parts and that Soryada would feel right at home, but the rest of them might have to go around to the back door. “You could maybe get taken on as a gardener,” she teased Isabel.
“Look at these plants. I only ever see them in gardening magazines and they’re growing here like the bloody nettles and thistles grow at home.” Isabel glared at them all. “I hate Vancouver. It’s just so moist and bursting with vegetation. So clean.”
They all laughed except Soryada. She walked over to an evergreen shrub, its leaves threaded with white veins. She didn’t know what it was called, she said, but she remembered it from when she was a little girl. “It’s like me.” She said a word in Spanish.
“A transplant,” Amy said.
A car turned onto the street, a black sports car, the little cat leaping on the hood. They all watched it pass, the driver invisible behind tinted windows. No one moved until Isabel snorted. “The way that Janna has always been able to get everyone so they’re stepping carefully. Tiptoeing around her moods. Bringing us all here to meet in front of perfect strangers. Does she think we’ll behave better if there are witnesses to our idiocy?”
“Mom.” Trevor’s voice held a warning.
Isabel heaved two big shopping bags out of the truck. “This should sweeten her up. There’ll be something in this pile of prezzies she likes and even if she doesn’t, she damn well better fake it.”
The others trooped behind her up the stairs. She knocked on the front door. There was the crash of feet running down stairs and then a boy as tall as Trevor at the door.
“Hey,” he cried joyfully, ushering them into the hallway. “Let the wild rumpus start!”
†
The house was alive now; voices drifted up the stairs. A laugh that could only be Trevor’s spiralled through the house, and Janna sat up, happy. Thomas Coleman stood at the open door.
“Professor Coleman,” she said, blinking back at him.
“You slept well?” he asked, all courtesy.
“Yes,” she answered. “This room is very peaceful.” She gestured at the painting at the foot of the bed. “You feel that your presence somehow comforts her.”
He nodded.
“Is she yours?”
He nodded again.
“It’s very beautiful.”
“Yes. Your father is very fond of it.”
For some reason, those words made the fact of Álvaro easier. She nodded. Swallowed.
“Now,” he said, “in honour of this special occasion, we have set out a large amount of very tasty food. Would you accompany me downstairs before that charming brother of yours and my cavernous son demolish everything?”
†
Isabel had tucked herself into a chair in the corner of the living room, wishing she had a glass of rye and soda in her hand instead of iced tea. Joseph had already taken Trevor upstairs to show him a new computer gadget. Amy and Soryada were helping Margaret Coleman in the kitchen. Thomas Coleman had lit the fire and disappeared. Music trickled in from hidden speakers, some gypsy guitar.
Someone came down the stairs, the slow heavy steps of an old man. Álvaro. He paused in the doorway, his eyes shadowed, and looked at Isabel as if she might have an explanation. Janna, she thought at once. Something’s happened.
Álvaro pulled a chair up to sit near her, their knees almost touching. He was wearing a white shirt, open-necked, and black jeans. Black running shoes. His hair stood awry, flattened in some spots and sticking up in others.
She touched it lightly. “Young men spend quite a bit of time and gel to get their hair to look like yours.”
“They do?” He scrubbed his head with his hands.
She ran her finger down the scar splitting his eyebrow. He shivered and drew back.
“There’s nerve damage,” he said. “Sometimes I feel nothing and other times it’s all a jangle.” He rubbed a spot above his ear. “I’m always hitting my head. My brain doesn’t seem to know where my head is located.”
“Where is she?”
“Upstairs.”
Isabel had to force herself to stay seated, to not go to her and lay her hands upon the girl’s body.
“What’s she up to?”
“Collecting her courage, I suspect.”
“I’m not so sure this is a good idea.”
Álvaro shifted in his chair to ease the ache gathering in his knees. “This must be hard,” he said. “It’s been how long since you’ve seen her?”
“None of your business,” she said.
Álvaro put his hands up to ward her off.
“Listen to me,” Isabel laughed. “That girl makes me crazy and the closer I get to her, the madder I get. No matter how hard I try, we’re going to have to have a fight before we can have any fun. Maybe I should just go up and get it over with.”
Álvaro told her about how his father was away for weeks and months at a time. When they got word that he was on his way home, usually when a neighbour’s kid was sent running to tell them he’d like a chicken killed for his dinner, his mother would pick up the machete with such irritation that Álvaro hid until the yelling was over.
Isabel was l
aughing with him when they heard from upstairs a whoop and a scream. Álvaro jumped to his feet, one hand on Isabel’s shoulder. Trevor, his muscled bulk distorting the words on his T-shirt, burst into the room, carrying Janna under one arm, her knees hammering his back, her fists on his chest. He stood her up and pushed her gently toward Isabel.
“Here she is, Mom.”
Álvaro hovered beside her, his hands looking for a place to settle, one of them curled in a fist. Janna looked from him to Isabel and squawked out a laugh. She flopped into a chair. “Hello, everyone.”
Isabel wanted to touch her, to run her hands down the thin, muscular arms, tell her how good she looked in the sleeveless blouse, that pale yellow so nice against her dark skin, how the beige bell-bottoms were a bit long but that was probably because she was barefoot, her toes just peeking out. She wanted to get rid of the bobby pins holding the hair behind her ears in those silly clumps, brush it out. Cut it maybe.
She bent to the shopping bags full of presents and pulled out a box. She took it over to Janna and kissed her on the cheek. Peaches. She still smelled of peaches. She brushed a wisp of hair off her cheek.
“I love your shirt,” she said, straightening the corner of the collar. “Try these. They’ll be perfect with it.”
Janna held the box.
“Go on.”
Janna unwrapped the platform sandals, a ribbon of yellow threaded into the dark leather straps. “Hey,” she said. “Thanks, Ma. Where’d you find them?”
“I’ve been getting secret shopping tips from the Queen of Bargains herself. Lily Thomas.”
“Who?”
“The old lady who used to live across from…” Isabel stopped. “She had a beautiful garden.”
Janna dangled the shoes from her fingers.
“She used to have a classy ladies clothing store. When I was a little girl, your grandmother bought me dress-up clothes there.” Her hands slipping across the rustling, silken, and glittering racks of dresses while women talked above her head. “They tore down her house.”
The Taste of Ashes Page 27
