What the hell is in here?
The noise of the television continues to blare. I picture myself carrying the box out to Elena, the two of us pawing through it on the couch. But I don’t.
I place the box down carefully on the floor and gently wiggle off the lid, trying not to disturb the dust even more in case Mami checks on it from time to time. I realize I’m holding my breath.
Inside there are a few square color snapshots, faded into paler versions of their once-vibrant selves. I recognize me as a baby, propped up on the couch clutching a plastic rattle, and one of Elena and me as little kids—our pudgy faces, our stained T-shirts. And there’s one with a man holding me above his head like he’s won me as some prize at a fair. It’s my dad. I recognize him from other photos I’ve seen, but I’ve never seen this particular photo. He’s tall and lanky, with a wide, toothy grin. I don’t recognize the background. This must have been back when we lived closer to where Amy’s family lives, in one of those little garden apartment complexes that always looks like it could blow over in a big storm.
I dig through the box carefully, taking note of how everything is arranged. There are more pictures, including a few of Mami and my father back when she lived in Healy with my dad’s family, the family that cut Mami and Elena and me off after their son married Mami because they didn’t want him marrying someone who wasn’t born in the United States. There’s Mami sitting primly on the edge of the couch with a fake smile. There’s another one of Mami and my father on what must be their wedding day, something I’ve never seen actual proof of. They don’t look much older than me, and that’s because they weren’t. Standing on the steps of what I guess must be a church, they stare out at the camera. Mami looks genuinely happy, the smile even reaching her eyes. I stare at it for a long time because it’s such a rare sight to see.
Then, underneath the photos, I find a slim stack of yellow papers, like the type you’d tear from a legal pad. The stack is held together by a rubber band so thin and old I’m afraid it might break if I pull it off. But I can find another rubber band, right? And how often can Mami go in this box if it’s as dusty as it is?
I listen. The game show has ended. Elena has moved on to a soap opera. I slide the rubber band off slowly, then unfold the papers. A piece of newspaper slides out, but it’s the letter that catches my eye.
Dearest Carrie,
I’m writing this letter in the house where we first met, in the place where I first saw you and knew we were destined to be together forever. I don’t even know what to say to you. I left because I need some time and I know you need it too, but now you’re not even taking my phone calls, and the last time I called I could hear little Laney Bird crying and crying in the background. Please don’t shut me out.
We can work this out, at least for the kids’ sake.
Frank
My heart is thumping. Hard. This doesn’t make any sense. Our dad left us—he didn’t want to work it out. A shiver travels up my spine and my mouth goes dry. I should stop right now. Something deep down tells me that if I keep reading, keep unfolding, keep looking, I’m heading toward a place I can’t come back from.
But I don’t stop. I never, not for even a second, consider stopping.
Carrie,
I hope you’re reading this since you won’t answer my calls. My folks won’t say it but I know they’re hoping you come back here. I know you don’t want that but for right now it could be the best option. You know they’d never support divorce and I know you wouldn’t, either. If you come back here, maybe you can stay here in the house with them and they can help with the kids and I can start back at U of H again and get a better job and that will help our money problems. That would be one stress taken care of anyway. The only kid left in the house is Deirdre so there’s a lot more room than you remember. Either way, something has to change. It’s been too long since we’ve seen each other and since I’ve seen the kids and I miss the kids and yeah, I really do miss you.
Love,
Frank
Mami told us she woke up one morning the summer before Elena turned two, and the car was gone and the money was gone, and a week later she got one letter from him that was postmarked Los Angeles.
And he never sent us any money.
And he never gave a shit about us.
This is what she’s always told us, what she tells us now, and what I have always believed to be true without questioning it. Always.
But before I even finish reading the rest of the letters I know—I know—that all of that was a lie.
My heart is racing now. Blood is rushing in my ears. The noise of Elena’s soap opera is seeping through the walls, which sets me even more on edge. There’s the sound of sweeping orchestral music that indicates that some cliffhanger moment, some crazy plot twist, is playing out on the screen.
I peel back the remaining pages. There are four letters in all, but none have dates on them. They all offer a different version of the same thing. Frank, my father, writing to my mother from Healy, Texas, where he’s staying with his parents—my grandparents—begging my mother to communicate with him. To let him see us. The letters don’t say why he’s in Healy instead of Mariposa Island except for vague references to “needing time.” Not just for him but for Mami, too, apparently. His multiple mentions of “Laney Bird” must be Elena even though I’ve never heard Mami use that nickname for her. I feel a weird pang of jealousy when Frank refers to me in his letters as Joaquin, no clever nickname.
I stare at the blue, inky scrawl that is my father’s handwriting. He touched this paper, I think. He wrote this note. He smeared a word here. He accidentally tore the paper there. My father touched these letters. These.
My hands are shaking. How can I tell Elena? Suddenly, I imagine all the letters laid out on Mami’s bed, facing up, waiting for her when she gets home from work.
It would be a shit show.
And she’d deserve it.
I hastily gather up the letters—one, two, three, four—and I’m about to get to my feet when I see the folded piece of newspaper. I set the letters aside. I pick it up. I unfold it.
It takes me less than five seconds to process what I’m seeing. Carefully clipped, not a snag or a tear to be seen in the newsprint, is my father’s obituary. It’s dated November 2, 1971.The picture chosen of my father is a formal one of him taken in a studio, wearing a suit, and in the photo he’s staring right at me through years of lies and resentment. As if he’s been wondering just when the hell he might be found.
The clipping is as light as a feather in my hand, the cheap pulp not even that yellowed after spending year after year tucked away in a box in the darkest part of the darkest closet in the house. I hold it tenderly, like a relic.
The rest of the room, the rest of the house, has fallen away, dropped off somewhere. I don’t hear the television or anything at all. A wave of nausea rolls over me. I stare at the obituary.
Francis “Frank” Patrick Finney is not living in Los Angeles, California, and probably never even went there, because he died at the age of twenty-nine from reasons left unsaid. According to the Healy Register, he leaves behind a mother, a father, four siblings, and several nieces and nephews, all of Healy. Their rich, rolling Irish names are listed one after another, like floats on parade. As for Elena and me, there’s no mention of us. It’s as if we don’t even exist. Like we’re the tragic ending that’s been edited out of an old fable to keep from scaring little kids.
We’re just two children abandoned on an island with no one to look after us but the scary witch.
CARRIE
1971
The lesson that a baby will not magically turn a bad marriage good is a lesson that is almost always learned too late, and in this way, Frank and Carrie Finney were very typical students.
The day Joaquin had been born it was good. It was not perfect. Frank’s parents came down from Healy. Carrie didn’t want them in the hospital. Frank pleaded. Carrie held firm. She wanted control over th
is one thing. Frank’s parents drove back to Healy, steaming mad and sure that their son had ruined his life by marrying this girl they had so stupidly tried to help.
There had been some ideas from Frank about what to name the baby, but Carrie had held firm on this one thing, too. The nurse at the hospital had pronounced it “Joe-a-kwin,” and Frank had rolled his eyes because he knew this would be his firstborn’s burden all his life, but Carrie didn’t care. Her little boy’s name was the weakest tether to the homeland she would never see again. And she liked how Frank couldn’t really pronounce it, but she could.
The baby was a perfect pink gumdrop, and as sweet as one, too. He rarely cried, and if he did, it was easy to solve—gas, sleepiness, hunger for a bottle. Later, when her infant daughter Elena wailed with colic, Carrie thought to herself that Elena would not have even been born had Joaquin acted so horribly. Not that Elena had been planned, exactly.
But no matter how good an infant Joaquin was, everything was harder for Frank and Carrie now. Money was tighter. Free time was rarer. Carrie was moodier, angrier. Frank tried to placate her with little gifts—cheap boxes of chocolates from the drugstore. A small bottle of top-shelf rum. But nothing worked. Everything Frank did set Carrie on edge. The way he blew his nose. The sounds of his chewing. The sigh he expressed every damn time he sat down on the couch, like a train pulling into a station.
Each day was the same for Carrie. It was the same for Frank, too, but Carrie didn’t see that. All she knew was that she was the one trapped at home with the baby, tending to the baby, trying to go grocery shopping on a very tight budget with the baby. At least Frank got to leave the crowded apartment each day to go to work.
At dinnertime, over frozen television dinners or sad spaghetti or cold sandwiches, Frank would try.
“How was your day?” he’d ask.
“Fine,” Carrie would answer with a shrug, Joaquin in her lap.
Frank would wait for Carrie to reciprocate. And wait.
“My day was good,” he would finally offer. “I made two sales.”
“That’s good,” Carrie would answer. “We need the commission.”
After dinner Frank would settle in on the couch to watch television and Carrie would escape to her bedroom with Joaquin, whom she cuddled with a fierce protectiveness. Here was a living little creature that seemed to hang on every coo and every smile Carrie offered. Here was someone who really loved her, maybe for the first time since Juanita. Carrie would find herself finally relaxing a bit when she curled up with him, softly singing him the words of the songs she remembered Juanita singing to her when she was a little girl.
Duérmete mi niña
Duérmete mi amor
Duérmete pedazo
De mi corazón.
Sometimes Frank would wander into the bedroom and find Carrie and Joaquin asleep on the bed, and he would shrug and sigh and relegate himself to the couch in the living room.
When Joaquin was around a year old, a night of too much rum made Carrie give in too quickly and soon she was pregnant again. Elena arrived and quickly was wailing at all hours of the night and day, and the walls of the apartment closed in on Carrie, inch by inch. Joaquin’s little wooden blocks seemed to breed overnight, spreading everywhere. Elena’s small pink mouth would open wide, wider than Carrie thought possible, and she would not shut it for hours at a time, driving Carrie to stuff her ears with cotton balls and drink cocktails at lunch. She could never keep the apartment totally organized, totally clean. She thought perhaps she should take the children out to the courtyard, but the idea of speaking with any of the other mothers made Carrie panicky, so she’d spend days inside the apartment with the babies, the television on at all hours, counting the minutes until Frank came home just to give her something else to look at.
Frank would give Carrie “breaks,” as he called them, by driving Joaquin—and later Joaquin and Elena—up to Healy to visit with his parents. Carrie would spend those childless Saturdays on the couch, sipping rum from a juice glass, watching terrible television, and then bursting into tears over missing her babies, the only real things she felt were hers. When Frank would come home, Carrie would lash out.
“I suppose your parents think I’m a terrible mother,” she would say, her arms crossed, her face in a pout.
With a strained expression, Frank would simply answer, “No, Carrie, they don’t. They want us to move back to Healy.”
Carrie would think of the yellow bedroom. The dumpy couch with the cheap doilies. The landlocked small town of busybodies and nobodies. Her lying in-laws who hated her. The idea of returning made her skin crawl. The idea that by not returning she would anger Frank’s parents made her feel vindicated.
“I’m never going back there,” she’d announce with finality, and Frank knew she was serious. And he looked at the cluttered apartment, at the mounting bills, at this woman who had been his childhood crush and was now transformed into someone he didn’t know at all, maybe had never known. And he began to panic.
One Saturday morning after a nasty fight about the late rent, Carrie woke up to a note and one hundred and fifty dollars on the kitchen counter.
Carrie,
I went up to see my folks. I want to work this out but I need some time to think things through. I pawned my watch so you have some cash. I’ll be in touch.
Frank
Carrie had stood there in the middle of the kitchenette, staring at the letter, reading it over and over again. Anger boiled so deep inside of her that she thought she might be capable of punching a hole right through the wall. In fact, she made a fist. She caught a glimpse of a smudge on the kitchen wall, probably made by Joaquin toddling around. All she could see was everything that was wrong. The rust on the refrigerator door handle. The chip in the coffee pot. The grime caked all over the stove.
When she was a little girl she had been waited on hand and foot.
She’d had the most beautiful quince dress in history.
She’d been a princess on a beautiful island. A real island, not some sad little substitute.
When the babies woke up, she dumped Cheerios in bowls (from the secondhand store!) and read Frank’s letter over and over again, waiting for tears and finding none. She spent the next few days in the apartment, Elena fussing, Joaquin standing at the front door banging it and begging to go out. Carrie just watched him from the couch, unable to move. She somehow managed to feed the children: Cheerios, water, milk, and slices of orange over and over. For three days straight.
When the letters and the calls started—asking her to talk, begging her to move to Healy, urging her to pick up the phone—Carrie didn’t respond. In fact, since Frank was the only one who ever called her, she stopped answering the phone completely once she knew it would only be him on the line. Not answering the phone was easier than having to answer it and then hang it back up again, although it was a bit less satisfying.
Carrie folded the letters that came through the mail slot and put them in her nightstand drawer. At night when the children were asleep, she opened them and read them, and she felt a small glimmer of that power she’d once held over Frank years ago when they were teenagers.
If he wanted to talk to me so much, he shouldn’t have left, then, should he?
The power she felt emboldened her to leave the apartment at last. To take the children and make their way to the corner store and the liquor store. When they walked hand in hand, she smiled as Joaquin closed his eyes and relished the breeze finally blowing on his sweet, chubby toddler cheeks.
Then one Saturday afternoon there was a knock at the door. Carrie worried it was the landlord, asking for the later-than-usually-late rent. She slowly opened the door to find two Mariposa Island police officers. One younger, one older, both with crew cuts and ruddy faces. Carrie wondered if the younger one thought she was pretty. She pushed wisps of her hair back off her face. She had to start paying better attention to her appearance.
She invited the officers in, offered them glasse
s of water. She took a sip of her rum and cola. She wondered if they could smell it on her breath, but it was already almost four o’clock, and who could blame a mother of two small children for having a drink.
The officers settled in awkwardly next to her on the couch, glancing at Joaquin and Elena, who were scribbling on old newspapers with nubby crayons that had seen better days.
“Now what’s this about?” It was so rare that she spoke with anyone, so unusual for her to interact beyond the basic need to buy something at the store, that she wondered if they could pick up on her accent. If they would ask her where she was from. She loved when that happened, on the rare occasion it did. So many people knew nothing of Cuba. Or they only knew sad things.
Before everything happened, it was the most beautiful place on earth. This is what Carrie always told people. She hoped it made people jealous to know that she had once lived in the most beautiful place on earth.
“Ma’am, are you the wife of Francis Finney, originally of Healy?” the young officer asked.
“I am,” Carrie said, nodding. How she hated Frank’s given name.
“Ma’am, I’m sorry, but there’s been an accident.”
Carrie nodded again. She said nothing. She stared and blinked as the officers explained what they had been told by the Healy Police Department. That the night before Frank had been coming home (but this is his home) from downtown Healy and had run off the road into a tree. He’d died on impact.
“Ma’am, is there a relative or friend we can call for you?” the older officer asked.
The Liars Page 18
