'Round Midnight

by Laura McBride

  She trembled involuntarily.

  “I didn’t trust your uncle. But here you are.”

  Honorata began to shake, and tried to hide it by wrapping her arms tightly across her chest.

  “I wasn’t sure you would walk off the plane.”

  Tears filled her eyes, so she lowered her face. She could feel him waiting, waiting to hear what she would say, but she could not speak. The silence stretched out, and Honorata knew that she had to look up, she had to speak, but before she could, she heard him turn and leave the room.

  “Good night, Rita.”

  Jimbo didn’t come to her room that night. He didn’t give her a bath, he didn’t have sex with her. Honorata was relieved. She crawled into bed and pulled the covers completely over her head. In the blackness, hot and without enough air, she slept deeply.

  A few mornings later, after Jimbo had finished with her, he brought up the ring again.

  “It’s an engagement ring. I have the band that goes with it. Would you like to go to Vegas?”

  How strange that he would ask her this. What did he imagine?

  “I’ve never been there.”

  “Of course you haven’t.”

  They sat quietly.

  “Are you wondering why I want to marry you?”

  She looked up at him. She didn’t want to say anything, but she stared straight in his eyes. She didn’t often look at him this way, though she already knew it moved him.

  “I want a wife. I know my money . . . I know that you are here because . . . because your country is poor. I understand that. But I want a wife. I don’t want a whore.”

  Honorata noticed that his foot was shaking as he spoke, though his voice was measured, matter of fact.

  “I want a family.”

  She looked in his eyes still, not answering.

  “You’ll have to sign papers. I’m not giving away my money. But I’m a generous man. When you’re my wife, those papers won’t matter.”

  Honorata looked down then. Her heart fluttered with the faint memory of the woman she had been, the girl. She saw Kidlat’s face, the smile she had known her whole life, the narrow plane of his back, and the knees that rounded out too large for his calves. She thought of her father, before he died, and the lime green of the rice fields, and how her stomach had lurched when she had taken the jeepney up the Mountain Trail with him. For a moment, she remembered the soft island air on her skin, the slap of wet fronds against her thighs, the slosh of water running through the fields, the trill and mutter of birds, and the squawk of the rooster being beaten for pinikpikan.

  She should never have gone to Manila. But she had loved Kidlat. And how would her mother have lived if she had not gone to the city?

  Jimbo was waiting. Honorata said nothing but pulled him back toward her pillow, buried her head in the thin strands of hair on his wide chest, and flicked her tongue against his nipple. He moaned. This was the only way she knew to avoid answering.

  13

  “I had a rooster, and the rooster pleased me,” sang Coral, after stepping through the arch of paper flowers that festooned the door of the kindergarten classroom.

  “Cock-a-doodle-doo!” yelled Faraz, which Coral ignored. Sara dropped her box of crayons, and Coral ignored that too. The rest of the children hurried to put away their things—the construction paper to the middle of the table, the crayons and scissors into the slots of their desks—and two boys raced to be first to sit on the color block mat.

  “I fed my rooster on a green berry tree.”

  The children on the mat joined in.

  “The liiiiittttle rooster went cock-a-doodle-doo, dee doodly doodly doodly doo.”

  “The duck!” called Aaron from his desk near the bookshelf. Coral ignored him.

  “I had a cat and the cat pleased me.”

  More children were on the mat, singing now. They wiggled a little, scrambling for place, and Coral slowed the tempo of the song, without quite looking at any wiggler.

  “I fed my cat on a green berry tree.”

  No more wigglers, and even Aaron was putting his art project in the correct spot on the bookshelf.

  “The liiiittttlle cat goes meeeeow, meeeow, the little rooster goes cock-a-doodle-doo dee doodly doodly doodly doo.”

  By the time they got to the duck, all the children were assembled, each on his or her own color square, and Coral had motioned for Aaron to sit cross-legged next to her. They finished the song with the lion, roaring with wide-open mouths, and just after the last doodly doo, Coral paused, raised her hands high, and then all together, in perfect time, every child clapped once.

  “Hoorah! Mrs. Barrosa’s class, you are on top of the world today.”

  “Hi, Miss Jackson.” “Hello, Miss Jackson.” “Miss Jackson, are we doing the love song today?” “Yes, the love song!” “Can we do the love song?”

  Their voices came in an excited rush, but nobody jumped up or shouted. They sat eagerly waiting.

  “We can do the love song today. But first, can anybody tell me what we are learning about music this month?”

  “About music writing!”

  “Yes. About music writing.”

  Coral held up a card with a treble clef.

  “And what’s this?”

  “It’s an S!” “It’s a cliff.” “It’s the high voice sign.”

  “Good. It’s a treble clef.” Coral sounded out the two words carefully. “Let’s say it together.”

  “Treble clef.”

  “And again?”

  “Treble clef!”

  “Three times, like bells ringing.”

  “Treble clef, treble clef, treble clef!” the children sang out, pitching their voices even higher than they were naturally.

  “Perfect. Does anyone remember the name of the other clef?”

  “Basic clef!” yelled Faraz. “It’s the basic clef.”

  “Good! Bass clef. Let’s try that one together.”

  “Bass clef.”

  “Three times, like a choo-choo train.”

  “Bass clef, bass clef, bass clef!” the children chanted, puffing out their chests in the effort to deepen their voices.

  On Tuesdays, Mrs. Barrosa’s kindergarten had music right before their day ended at 11:40, so Coral would stop five minutes early to line them up; she was the one to give each child a high-five good-bye and to watch until everybody had left the playground with an adult. The children who spoke Spanish had someone waiting to walk them home, but most of the rest walked or skipped to a designated pick-up area, where a driver with a van marked Happy Daze Care or Kids Korner waited. Last week, one child had been left after all the others were gone. Coral wasn’t sure why, but she had already decided whose turn it would be for the love song today.

  “We have five minutes left,” she said to the class.

  “The love song!” “It’s love song time!”

  “Yes, it is. And today the love song is for Melody. Do you all know that melody is a music word too? It means a series of tones that we like. Melody, did you know that?”

  Melody shook her head shyly.

  “Do you want to have the love song today?”

  The little girl nodded.

  “Do you want to tell us someone who loves you?”

  She shook her head.

  “Well, then, we’ll start with me.” Coral sang, “You’re the one that I love, I love, I love, you’re the one that I love, sweetest one of all.”

  The children joined in. “You’re the one that we love, we love, we love. You’re the one that we love, sweetest one of all.”

  Melody was wearing a faded purple T-shirt, with a peeling green Baby Bop on the front. “You’re the one that Baby Bop loves, Baby Bop loves, Baby Bop loves, you’re the one that Baby Bop loves, sweetest one of all.”

  Melody smiled and touched the hem of her shirt.

  “Butterflies,” she said so quietly that Coral almost didn’t hear her. “You’re the one the butterflies love, butterflies love, butt
erflies love, you’re the one the butterflies love, sweetest one of all.”

  The children sang brightly, beaming at Melody as they picked up their cues from Coral, and when she motioned for them to stand, they kept singing, more quietly, as they found their backpacks and unhooked their sweaters, and the ones who were going to day care retrieved their lunches from the shelf near the door. Melody stood on the mat the longest, listening to them sing about her, and saying softly to Coral, “Minnie Mouse.” “Puppies. “Mrs. Barrosa.”

  Coral watched the children line up and thought about how her life might be if she had not come home last year; if Augusta hadn’t casually mentioned how many teachers the district was hiring; if the thought, initially so ridiculous, hadn’t grown on her—after an argument with Gerald, after she had washed her favorite sweater three times and it still smelled like smoke from the club, after her check for the PG&E bill bounced, after Tonya mentioned that she had seen Gerald at a bar in Bernal Heights, on a night that Coral thought he had driven home to help his aunt replace her water heater.

  Little by little, the option her mother was suggesting took hold. Coral had her teaching certificate, she’d never intended to become a singer. Singing had started as a dare. They were all at a club in San Francisco for someone’s twenty-first birthday, and there was an open mike call. Some of the guys started chanting “Sing! Sing! Sing!” until, laughing, she and Tonya went onstage. After that, it happened fast: someone in the club offered them a gig, for tips, and soon after that, there was another offer. Tonya dropped out to manage their bookings—that surprised Coral—but Coral kept going to school, showing up first to class and then to her student teaching bleary-eyed and hoarse. Whether she had done so because she wanted to finish college or because she would never have dared tell Augusta that she’d quit, she wasn’t sure.

  And was that whole life a detour? For most of the six years that Coral had sung with Tonya and then with the band, she felt like she was doing exactly what she should be doing—that the music, her voice, the way people responded, the songs she wrote in her head, over and over, all the time, this was who she was and who she was born to be. And what did it mean that she could simply drop out of who she was born to be? That one day she would wake up and realize she was so tired; so tired that not being tired didn’t even seem like a real state. That she would wake up and know she had fallen in love with the wrong man, and that she wasn’t strong enough to fix this. She would wake up longing for a morning, missing daytime; she was so damn sick of living at night, of a pink-fingered dawn meaning it was time to go to bed. If she didn’t get out of there, if she didn’t get away, she’d go under. Music or no.

  She wasn’t Tonya. She wasn’t Gerald. She was weaker than they were. And she needed her mother. She needed to go home. Coral laughed when she told her friends that she was back home living with her mother—she was careful to make it sound like a drag—but, really, she had been so grateful for the sound of her mama in the next room, for the blue sofa with the lumpy pillows, for the wooden swordfish Ray Junior had made in shop class hanging on the wall, for the mesquite tree dropping spinners on her window sill, for the suffocating, sweltering, clean, dry heat of a July noon. It was all beautiful, it was all home, it was all the way the world felt right.

  So when the principal at Lewis E. Rowe offered her a job teaching music, she didn’t hesitate, she didn’t waste any time worrying about what anyone else might think of her decision. She said yes. And from the first week—when she couldn’t find the fourth-grade classroom, when the air-conditioning hadn’t worked, when the fire alarm had gone off just after she’d sent one small child to the bathroom—from the very beginning, it seemed to Coral it was a pretty good choice.

  Still, not everything about coming home to Vegas was easy. Just this morning, she had woken to that old sense of something not right. Coral kept her eyes closed, but the pressure was there: an emptiness so vast it had presence, pushing against her like a force, daring her to wobble, lean, tumble in, tumble back. If she didn’t open her eyes, she might fall back asleep, the pressure might go away: it might not be there waiting when she woke again.

  This was a Vegas feeling, as old as she was, a feeling that stretched as far back as her own memory. How many mornings had she felt it? This dread or sadness or longing or fear—she was never sure quite what. When she was small, perhaps five or six, she had asked her mama:

  “Who is it that sits on my bed in the morning?”

  “Who sits on your bed?”

  “On my chest. When I wake up, and I can’t breathe.”

  “You can’t breathe?”

  “I can’t breathe. And then I try really hard, I think about how I want to get up, and she goes away.”

  “She?”

  “The person, sitting on my chest.”

  “Do you know what she looks like?”

  “No.”

  “I sometimes come in the morning and look at you. I might even give you a kiss. Do you think that’s what happens?”

  “No. It’s not you, Mama. I would know if it was you.”

  “Hmmm. Well, I think it’s a dream, Coral. I think you’re not quite awake. It might be a nightmare that you have.”

  “It feels like I’m awake.”

  “Yes. I’m sorry. It must be scary.”

  “It hurts.”

  “It hurts?”

  “Yes.”

  Years of practice had taught her to get up as quickly as possible. The impulse to lie still, to fall back asleep, could ruin a morning. She sat up and swung her legs over the side of the bed. The sun slanted through the slats in the windows, striping the pale carpet with bands of light and shadow. Long ago, she had shared this bedroom with Ada, and they had made up a rhythm to step on these stripes of light. Coral placed her feet carefully along them now and stepped the rhythm again, remembering her sister’s raspy voice and the way she would suddenly pinch Coral at the waist to try to make her lose her footing.

  Their twin beds were still covered with the same blue-and-yellow blankets. Some of Ada’s dolls were lined up on top of the chest of drawers, and the teddy bear that their older sister Althea had won at the Clark County Fair still sat, slumped and dusty, in the corner. When Coral reached the door, she leaned down and touched the bear’s nose. Then she turned to look back at the room. It was almost time to leave her childhood home. She’d never live here again—and that was good—but still, it ached a bit.

  That was another thing about living in Vegas. Houses were cheap. She’d already saved up enough for a down payment. She never could have bought a house in California, but here, even with 10 percent interest, it didn’t make sense to rent. The realtor suggested she wait to buy until the first houses were built in the northwest, next year, but Coral didn’t think she would like a master-planned community or a neighborhood filled with the thousands suddenly arriving each month from Ohio and New York and places farther away. Vegas had always been a boomtown, but things were changing much faster now. At her interview, the principal had said that Steve Wynn’s new casino would need to make a million dollars a day just to stay open; that a hundred thousand people would live in Summerlin alone; that eighty-nine new schools were going to be built.

  When she drove across town, Coral could see that the vast vistas of her childhood—rock and hill and sky—were already disappearing, replaced with rows and rows of red stucco roofs, the sky above blue and streaked with the puffy white plumes of commercial jets or the slowly twining ribbons left by F-15s flying in formation. When she was growing up, the streets had simply ended in desert. And there was a certain odor—dusty; maybe it was creosote or another plant—but Coral almost never smelled that now. Sometimes, if she were way out by the dam, there would be a whiff. When she was a child, the neighborhood would flood—though there might not have been any rain in the valley, just in the mountains—and everyone would put on swimsuits, moms and teens and toddlers, and race outside to splash in water that seemed bewildering, almost mystical, though it was
crowded with bits of trash left in the desert and the dead bodies of pocket mice and shrews. Once, there had even been a gray rabbit, soaked to half its size, with its ears absurdly long by comparison.

  Memories like these could make her feel unsteady again.

  What would Augusta say if she knew what Coral was thinking, here in her childhood room? If she knew what really brought Coral stumbling downstairs for a coffee, for a sniff of the way her mother smelled, for the sound of the voice that made the world shrink back to its proper size and made Coral feel safe just by saying hello? Did Augusta know that her daughter still woke up with a heartsick feeling, that her thoughts turned so often to what her mama had told her a dozen years earlier? Did Augusta guess that her youngest child didn’t feel quite solid at the center?

  The other day, a first grader raised his hand and asked not if he could go to the bathroom or if they were going to sing about alligators, but what color was she: black or white? Coral started to laugh, and to tell him that she was the color of a milkshake, or a malt ball, but just in time, she caught the expression on the face of a little girl at the back, her hair in tightly-braided rows, and so Coral answered directly, “I’m black.”

  And the little girl smiled, carefully looking down at her desk as she did so. This feeling, too, Coral remembered.

  14

  It was summer in Chicago before Jimbo asked about the letters.

  “Rita, did you write these?”

  “What?”

  He stood there in a striped silk bathrobe; a giant with a packet of letters in his hand. She could see bits of pink stationery, words in blue ink handwriting, a couple of airmail envelopes. She had never seen any letters. She went blank, and then, in a flash, realized what they must be. Her face must have shown her shock.

  “You didn’t sign them, either?”

  The magnitude of her uncle’s betrayal loomed. That’s how it was done. That’s how it was usually done. Manila pen pals. Poor women who wrote letters to rich men, in the States, in Russia, other places. They wrote letters back and forth, and the women always knew what was coming; they wanted out, the letters were their chance.