by Mary Morris
“Miguel, it’s me. Rachel.” She hesitates. “Mrs. Rothstein.”
There’s silence, but she can see his eyes glistening at her.
“What are you doing here?” He turns back to his telescope.
“I’ve been looking for you for a while.” She takes a step closer. The ground is rocky underfoot and she teeters.
“Why?” he whispers.
Rachel thinks for a moment. There’s a long answer and a short one. She decides on the short version. “I wanted to see if you were all right.”
Miguel breathes a deep sigh. “I’m so sorry…” His voice cracks. “It was all my fault.”
Turning her flashlight back on, Rachel shines it straight ahead and takes another step toward his shadow, which is all she can see. “I’m sorry too.” She walks in the direction of the sound of his voice. “I want to tell you that Davie is fine. Physically, that is. You did all the right things. That’s what the doctor said.”
“I never should have taken them for a hike.”
“Maybe not, but it’s all right.” A cold wind blows, and Rachel steadies herself against a stone. “The snake didn’t use much venom.”
Miguel looks down, nodding. “It was an old snake.”
In the dark she can barely make out his face. “I’m sure the kids felt cooped up. You took them for a walk. There was nothing wrong with that.”
“I blame myself.”
In the darkness he hears her voice. “I never blamed you. And everything is all right.”
“Jeremy’s a bully,” Miguel says.
Rachel nods. “I know. But he’s been better since the snakebite. He looks out for Davie now.”
Miguel is quiet, but she is close enough that she can make out his smile. “I’m glad.”
“But Davie isn’t doing so well. He’s afraid of everything.” Rachel takes a step toward him. “So is this where you come? When you want to be alone?”
“It’s where I come when I want to look at the stars.”
She moves closer. “May I look too? I’d like to see what you see.” She stands beside him. “I want to understand what brings you here.”
In the cemetery he can barely see Mrs. Rothstein, but he feels her presence. She seems to float behind him like a ghost and yet he wants to reach out and touch her. He wonders if his hand will slip through her body or if he will really touch it. He realizes how much and for how long he has wanted to do just that. Perhaps since the first time he saw her. He wanted to feel her skin. Her smell is fresh like mint and almonds. He imagines that she uses soothing creams on her skin. That she gets her nails done and has all the calluses scraped away on the bottoms of her feet. He envisions her polished toes and her strong but elegant hands. He wants to hold them in his. But not in the way a man and woman touch. It is different. She brings him comfort. That is what he feels with her. Comfort.
Behind him he hears the sound of stones rolling and Mrs. Rothstein lets out a shout. Turning, he sees that she is stumbling, almost flying his way, and he reaches out his arms to catch her. Her flashlight falls, striking the crumbling stones. It shines weirdly on the stone like when you shine a flashlight under your chin to make a scary face. And though he manages to grab her arm, he hears the crunch as her knee strikes a slab. She lets out a sharp cry. “Mrs. Rothstein.” Miguel holds her delicately in his arms. He will carry her down the hill if he has to. “Are you all right?”
She isn’t sure. Moaning, she clasps her knee. It’s the same place she banged just moments ago. Perhaps she has broken her patella. She’s in extraordinary pain, but all she can think about is his arms and how strong this boy is. Rachel wonders if one day, years from now, when she is an old woman, one of her boys will catch her like this. Miguel holds her firmly, helps her up, and leads her to a rock where she can sit.
He bends down to pick up her flashlight. Miguel never uses a flashlight. He has good night vision. Like a raccoon. But now as he bends to pick it up, it shines on one of the fallen stones. Rachel stares. As Miguel begins to move on, Rachel stops him with her hand. “Wait. Can I see that?” With a groan she stoops down. As Miguel holds the flashlight steady, Rachel runs her fingers across the stone. “What is this place?” she asks.
“It’s just the old cemetery. No one’s been buried here since anyone can remember.”
“Who is buried here?”
Again Miguel shrugs. “I don’t know. My relatives, I guess. We’ve lived in this valley for hundreds of years. Why?”
She runs her fingers across the letters carved into the stone. “Because this is Hebrew,” Rachel Rothstein says.
* * *
From his place at the counter of his store Vincent Roybal feels something change. Something in his universe has shifted. It has been a while, he realizes, since he’s heard his dead son’s voice. Pascual, Vincent mutters to himself. They named him for Easter because it is the time when everything rises from the dead. Perhaps at last that boy has found his rest.
Vincent grabs a cigarette and goes out into the night. He stands staring at the sky, his gaze moving up the hill. There under the oak tree all he can make out is a single beacon of light, but it is more than that. He knows in his bones that his story, the one he has been trying to tell for so long, has almost come to an end. And nothing will ever be the same.
* * *
In his mother’s garage Roberto is working on Miguel’s El Camino. He’d promised it to Miguel for his birthday but he’s more than a month late. Now it’ll be his Christmas present. He’s already rebuilt the engine and chromed it. It’s one of the best internal combustion engines anyone’s ever seen. He still needs to realign the brakes and fix a leak in the exhaust pipe. Once that’s all done he can finish the bodywork. He’ll ask Miguel what he wants for his paint job, but Roberto is thinking big blue sky, the moon and stars. Maybe a telescope on the hood with the zodiac around it. Roberto is so pleased with himself that he thought of this. He’s going to start drawing it tonight.
It’s late, but he doesn’t care. He likes to work on cars in the evenings. It keeps him away from the things he needs to stay away from. He jacks up the car in his driveway, gives it a shove. It is in place, the wheels are locked. She’ll hold. With his wrench in hand, he slides under on the creeper. He checks the axle and the exhaust. But he still can’t see where the leak is. He slides more deeply under the car. He’ll get it into shape. Really into shape. Miguel has been asking for four-wheel drive. He’ll make this a beauty for his son. And he’ll paint it a shade of shiny blue because Miguel likes the sky so much. A comet shooting along the side. He wants to see him drive off in this car when he goes to college. He wants to see his son get into this car and drive away. Roberto is smiling. He has been sober for twenty-five days. He is going to show Miguel and MG that he can be responsible. After all, she hasn’t divorced him yet, has she? Perhaps she’s just biding her time. Perhaps this is how he’ll find his way to get home to her. Under the car he finds a place where the pipe has rusted. He can stick his finger right through it. He’ll have to replace that. He bangs on the pipe with his wrench, testing to see how weak the metal is. As he bangs on it, he hears the sound like a sigh. He listens, not sure what it is, but then he sees from the corner of his eye. The jack has slipped on the uneven ground. Not very far, but it is at an awkward angle. Carefully Roberto starts to ease the creeper out from under the car. But before he can, before he can do anything, the jack slips from its hold on the lip of the car. And the car falls on Roberto’s chest.
He takes a deep breath as if this will keep his ribs from crushing. As if when he lets out that breath, he can lift the car off his chest. He presses his hands against the chassis. He just needs a little space to slip out from beneath the car. But he can’t exhale and he can’t breathe in. All he feels is the weight of the car pressing down. His ribs aren’t strong enough to hold up a car. They are breaking, caving into his chest, piercing his lungs. With all the strength he can muster in his arms, he pushes against the bottom of the car. The car he w
ants his son to drive away in. As he pushes, he sees flames. He sees MG’s face, lying beside him, her hair resting against his cheek. He watches her breasts rising and falling.
He sees a child, not Miguel, slipping out of her, being born, hears his first newborn cry. And he sees a creature coming out of the woods, cresting the hill. Perhaps a big yellow dog. It stares at him with its yellow eyes. Its coat is glossy as if it has just been bathed. He has never gone on his vision quest, but now it comes to him. Those yellow eyes, the shiny fur. Something wild that has eluded him for so long. He sees it there as the light of day is rising on the ridge. It is not afraid of him. Not at all. It is waiting for him, beckoning, there at the edge of the forest. It disappears among the trees from where it has come, and with whatever strength he can muster, Roberto follows the creature into the woods.
* * *
It’s just after nine when Rachel gets back and Nathan still isn’t home. In the living room the sitter is watching old episodes of Star Trek and Rachel pays her and tells her that she can go home. As the girl drives off, the house is so quiet, so still. It doesn’t even occur to her to call Nathan. She already knows what she’s going to say to him. It can wait.
She goes into the boys’ rooms to check on them. Jeremy is spread out all over his bed, sleeping on his back like a cat, his mouth open. Gently she pulls the sheet up to his chin. He looks so peaceful in his sleep. Hardly the troubled boy he’s been. She plants a kiss on his brow and then goes to check on Davie. When she gets into Davie’s room, he is curled up into a ball, muttering to himself. Indistinguishable sounds that could be words. He looks pale and his forehead is damp. My boys, my sweet, sweet boys. As she kisses him, a tear slides from her eye and lands on his cheek. His pain is her pain. She wipes the tear with her finger and for an instant Davie latches on. “There, there,” she whispers into his ear, and he lets go, drifting back into the place where sleep takes all children, troubled or otherwise.
It is difficult for Rachel to explain the fierceness with which she loves her children. How there is nothing she would not do to protect them. She would take a bullet for them. She would put herself between them and a wild beast. And now she has found Miguel again and he will help her boys be stronger. He will help Davie be braver and Jeremy softer. Rachel always believed that Miguel would.
Rachel goes into the living room and gently opens the sliding door that leads outside to her studio. It has been days since she’s been out there but she wants to go now. It is one of those cold desert nights and she probably needs a sweater but she doesn’t want to go back into the house. She wants to keep going. Overhead the sky is clear. It seems so odd that just hours ago she stood with Miguel under this very sky and read to him the words she could decipher from the headstones. And then as they were leaving he turned to her and said very matter-of-factly, “You know your husband is having an affair, don’t you?”
And this had not surprised Rachel at all. “Yes,” she replied, taking a deep breath. “I know.”
She turns on the light. Her studio is a shambles. It is filled with random, unfinished things. All these hands and feet, extremities. She grabs a cardboard box and a trash bag. Into the trash bag she throws the objects she knows she will never complete, including the ones that shouldn’t be finished. She picks out the ones that interest her, the ones that show some promise, and puts them into the cardboard box. Perhaps she will return to those. Perhaps she will not. She is done with body parts. No more heads or hands. She does not know yet what her new work will be, but she knows that it will be a work of the heart.
She is almost done tossing out what she doesn’t want when she hears the car drive up. It is close to midnight. Rachel breathes a deep sigh. She doesn’t look forward to her task, but nothing will change her mind. She flicks off the light in her studio and drags the bag of shattered limbs outside, ties the bag up, leaves it beside the trash, and walks toward the house. Nathan is already inside. He has found the house quiet, dark, except for the bathroom nightlight of cowboys and ponies and the tiny blue lights that illumine the hallways. She sees him from the patio as she walks to the house, but he does not see her. He has flicked on a light and is pouring himself two fingers of Scotch. It does not occur to him that Rachel is not in their bed.
When Rachel walks in, she startles him. “Oh my god,” he presses his hand to his heart. “You scared me.”
Rachel almost laughs. The cardiologist with the hand to his heart. Then she says without any hesitation, “Her name is Dawn and she’s a nurse. She was taking care of Jeremy when Davie was bitten by the snake.”
Nathan stands still, the glass trembling in his hand, the ice tinkling. “Rachel—”
“Everything that happens between us now will be for the boys. We won’t fight. There will be no scenes. We will make it as easy for them as we can. We will decide together what’s best for them. To stay here. To go back to New York. I’ll need child support, of course, and probably ten years of alimony until the kids are older and I can get a profession going for myself. My mother can help out with college. I won’t be asking you for more than what we really need so don’t worry about that.”
Nathan sits down in an armchair with a sigh. “You know I’ve tried.”
“No, actually you haven’t, but I understand. I’m not that easy to live with. I’m scattered. I can be erratic. But I am a good person and I do not hurt people.”
Nathan is staring into his glass. He takes a sip, then puts it down. Then he picks the glass up again and takes another sip. “Look, I’m not in love with her. I can stop this. We can get help.”
Rachel feels as if she has gone for a long swim in a cold lake. She is as fresh and clearheaded as she’s been in years. “There’s nothing more to say. Let’s do this amicably.”
As she turns to leave and go to bed, because for the first time in months she will sleep well, he calls out, “How did you know it was her?”
Rachel turns to him one last time. “Because she knew my name.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
DENTISTRY IN THE DMZ—1956
Private First Class Rafael Torres sits in the dental chair, reading the final pages of David Copperfield. Though the room smells of disinfectant and the light is harsh enough for surgery, Rafael is engrossed. He has just finished a tattered copy of From Here to Eternity but found it reminded him too much of his present life. He prefers all the trials and tribulations of poor David. From time to time he pauses to read the essays of Emerson, which he recently found in the mess hall lending library. He had never known the pleasures of reading before, but now he cannot stop.
It is early and bitter cold outside. They have no appointments booked until eleven and the dentist, Art Rubin, hasn’t arrived. A harsh wind blows through the Quonset hut, but Rafael has the heater pointed directly at him. He will stay warm as long as the generator doesn’t give out. It is his job to get in early to warm the hut, get drinking water, put it in the #10 grapefruit juice cans and keep it from freezing. He washes the instruments and prepares the amalgams of mercury and silver for fillings or the mixes of zinc oxide and eugenol, which smell like clove and supposedly alleviate pain inside a tooth that has been drilled in half. Once his preparations are done, Rafael does whatever he wants until their first appointment, and usually that means he reads.
Rafael Torres has never had much of an opportunity to read until now. But then before the army he’d also known very little about teeth. In fact before arriving at the 38th parallel he had never been to a dentist or even a doctor, unless you counted the witch doctor at Santa Domingo who cured him of a restricted bowel when he was five by making him drink a green potion whose taste has remained forever bitter in his mouth. He’d never had a vaccination that he knew of or his tonsils out. It wasn’t that his parents didn’t believe in doctors. It was that they didn’t exist within thirty miles of the hills of New Mexico where Rafael was born on a plot of land that his father farmed. There was, however, a school where he learned the fine art of auto repair a
nd the rudiments of reading.
He was sixteen when he dropped out of school. For a couple of years he fiddled with cars in a mechanic’s shop. Then he was drafted. After ten weeks of basic training at Fort Leonard, he was sent to Fort Sam Houston for medical training. At first he thought it was a clerical error. His skills, such as they were, beyond auto repair, were in the farming and distribution of beans. He might make a good logistical officer. The closest he’d ever come to medical experience was birthing a goat. At Sam Houston he watched films about the various medical opportunities available to recruits. After hours of viewing, Rafael determined that the only guys who weren’t crawling in the mud and dragging bodies away from the front lines were the dental assistants, and he was the first in his unit to volunteer for the post. Though later he would regale his children and his grandson with stories of combat, Rafael Torres spent his entire tour of duty in a Quonset hut.
For twelve weeks he studied the tooth and its structure. He learned about enamel and nerves. Then he was flown up to Seattle and was shipped off on a military vessel with twenty-five hundred other men who slept in bunks that were stacked five deep. Traversing the Juan de Fuca Strait they hit a major storm and everyone on board got sick. Rafael quickly understood the advantage of the upper berth. After three days at sea, he convinced the naval officers that he was a medic and they allowed him to sleep in the infirmary where he had a warm bed and no seasick soldiers who rained vomit down on him.
