“You have a station wagon?” I ask.
“It’s actually our granny’s, but she’s not driving it any time soon.” Color puts her finger to her chin. “It might actually be our great-grandma’s.”
“Oh my God, road trip!” Jesús says. “This is the best idea you’ve had in a long time, Color.”
“Thank you.” She curtsies.
Color starts to buzz with plans. Her energy spreads through the whole room. For the first time since I gave the baby away, I feel like maybe everything isn’t lost, like maybe putting her word on the wall in Heaven gave her a way to be found. Maybe I didn’t move to New Mexico to get away from her. Maybe I moved here to get closer to her.
My head spins, unable to wrap around the idea that this could really happen.
“You would do this for me?” I ask.
Color just says, “Duh,” like it’s that simple, but again, a nugget of discomfort lodges itself in my throat. Nothing is simple.
“I get shotgun,” Jesús says as he takes off toward the door. I stop him before he gets too far. And this has officially gone too far. For the past few minutes, I’ve envisioned us crammed in a station wagon, smiling, wind in our hair, free, but that truth doesn’t exist for me.
“There’s no way I’ll be allowed to do this,” I finally say. “There’s no way Tom will let me go.”
Jesús touches my arm. “There is no way you can’t do this, mon chéri.”
“There’s always a way,” Color says. “The universe is speaking to you, Esther, and we need to listen, or else.”
“Or else what?” I ask.
“She’ll start to scream. The universe does not like to be ignored.”
“The universe sounds like Tom.”
Complex Math Problem: If two opposing forces are pulling a whole person in different directions, will the result inevitably be a broken, fractional mess?
If I do what Tom wants of me, my past may haunt me forever, but if I listen to the universe, Tom might haunt my future indefinitely.
“Don’t worry.” Color hugs me tightly. “The universe never says anything it doesn’t mean.” And then her finger is up in the air. “Truth—the universe is always speaking, but people are too consumed with their own voices to hear her.”
15
The gray-haired pet store guy watches me as I look through different items to decorate my fish tank. I’ve decided not everything around me needs to be dying. Not if I can help it. My fish deserves to be surrounded by more life. I pick up a plastic plant and think this might work.
“Any luck getting to California?”
“Not yet,” I say. “Right now, I’m just trying to get to Albuquerque.”
“Albuquerque? What’s there?”
The colorful rocks look like a nice additive. Everyone and everything needs more color to feel alive. “Answers,” I say. “And psychics.”
“I called one of those psychic hotlines once. Huge mistake.”
“Why?”
The guy behind the counter scratches his head. “I didn’t need to pay a dollar ninety-nine a minute to have some lady tell me I’m a loser.”
“But was she right?” I ask. “Did she answer your questions?”
The guy shrugs. “Yeah. I just didn’t like what she said. But I guess that’s the risk you take.” Then he asks, “What’s in California then?”
It’s really none of his business, so I don’t tell him. I set the plastic plant down and settle on the colorful rocks.
“Well, who will watch your fish when you go?”
“I’ll set her free by then.”
“It’s a girl fish?”
“Yes.” I hand him money for the rocks.
“You’re gonna set her free? After all of this?” he says. “After months of taking care of her? Spending money?”
“That’s been the plan all along,” I say.
“Why not just do it then? Save yourself the time and effort.”
I take my change and my decorations. “I’m just not ready to let go yet.”
Complex Math Problem: One plus one equals two. What happens if you’re a two, but you don’t know the ones who made you?
Our family picture sits on the mantel of the fireplace in the living room. I’m already living in a kiln, and my house has a fireplace. Tom says it’s an accent piece. It’s not there to work, but to look good. What Tom doesn’t know is that he’s the accent piece of this family, expertly picked by Mom from a Christian dating site. I knew she was lonely when Hannah and I were younger, but I didn’t realize how completely loneliness turned to desperation for her. And desperate people are willing to overlook things to get what they need. Mom’s pretty good at that.
“People are package deals, Esther.” Those were Mom’s words. Even when I glance at the sunshine coming in the window today, I see rain lashing outside, Mom at our old kitchen table, a glass of wine in front of her. I watched the drips run down the windows and melt holes in the snow.
Mom took a gulp of her wine. The glass was only half-full. One more sip and it would be half-empty.
“Sometimes you don’t like everything in the package, but you deal with it because for the most part, it’s good. Tom is a good man. And one day, you’ll find a good man, too. That’s why I’m doing this.”
“So I can find a good man?” I asked.
“No. So your package isn’t completely damaged.” Mom pointed at my round belly. Even now as I look down, knowing nothing is in there, I think I feel the baby kick, like a phantom limb that once was a part of me, but was tragically removed. “This is not your future,” Mom said. “You can start over.”
I think what Mom really wanted to say was that this was not her future. That’s why she married Tom in the first place. That’s why she puts up with his bullshit. So the future wouldn’t be as shitty as the past.
I pick a family photo off the mantel in our house in New Mexico and touch the Esther who stares back at me, a fake smile plastered on her face. It was taken a little over a year ago. We’re different now, for a lot of reasons, but the most important one is that underneath the pressed and ironed clothes and the posed body, a baby had attached herself to me. No one but me knew this when the picture was taken. Her heart was beating, and her body was growing, along with mine.
I touch my abdomen again, relieved of the weight it carried for nine months. Sometimes when the wind blows fast and hard through the desert, I hear the empty pieces of myself, whistling.
“Do you need me to find you so you won’t be lost forever?” I ask the old Esther. “Or maybe . . . Do I need to find you so I won’t be lost forever?”
Is this about me or the baby? As I stare at the picture of myself, I’m not sure I can detach one from the other. After all, she is a piece of me.
Mom knew the baby was a part of her, too. That’s the thing with women—we’re all attached by the pure science of our reproductive systems. The egg that made me was in my mom, and after I was conceived, little eggs formed in my small ovaries, and she was there, years before she was ever born, a piece of her inside an unborn baby, who was living inside another person.
I’m pretty sure that’s why Mom said what she did the night the rain melted the snow and she got drunk on a bottle of wine. When life feels so complex that nothing makes sense, the truth we bury sneaks out.
“Tell me what an axiom is,” Mom said.
“A statement accepted as true without proof.”
“You want to know what God is, Esther. God is an axiom.” A little wine dribbled down her chin, and Mom used the back of her hand to wipe it up.
“What does that have to do anything?”
Mom exhaled, exhausted. I didn’t blame her. “I don’t know. Everything I thought I knew, I don’t. Life has surprised me, Esther. I guess I have the Axiom to thank.” She leaned on the table, her eyes dropping. “How are we supposed to accept something as truth if it can’t be proved?”
“I think it’s called faith,” I said.
“So
me people would call that bullshit.” Mom sat up quickly and collected herself. “Don’t tell Tom I said that.”
Then she started crying. Her tears dripped on the papers she was protecting from my sight.
“I thought I lost you,” she said. “When I was seven weeks pregnant, I started bleeding, and I thought for sure I was having a miscarriage. I called your grandma, frantic and frightened out of my mind. And you know what she said to me?”
I shook my head.
“She told me to get used to it. She told me that being a parent meant being perpetually afraid that something might happen to the one thing you don’t want to lose. That every day you’ll worry and think about this possibility to the point of madness, until all that’s left is to throw your hands up and have faith that it’s all going to be OK.” Mom shook her head. “We have enough to worry about, Esther. I’m doing this to spare you that feeling. You’re too young.”
“But what about throwing your hands up and having faith?” I asked.
“Faith and bullshit wear the same clothes. It’s impossible to know which is which.”
I sit at our kitchen table in New Mexico, surrounded by beige walls, still clutching our family picture. Across from me sits the memory of Mom and her near-empty glass of wine. She’s exhausted. She’s unraveling like a piece of rope cut from the bundle.
“California,” Mom said.
With my eyes on my belly in the family picture, I whisper, “Mom sent you to California. That’s not fair.”
Mom’s response whispers across the table to me, as vivid today as it was months ago. “God the Axiom doesn’t seem to care about fair, or dads wouldn’t run off in the middle of the night and leave their babies behind.”
“But California?” I begged her.
“Don’t ask me any more, Esther,” Mom said. “I hate lying, but I’ll do it if it means protecting the one thing I can’t lose.”
I set the picture back on the mantel.
I guess lying to protect something that’s important to you, something you can’t let go of, is acceptable.
Maybe I should let lies carry me all the way to Albuquerque.
16
The car won’t start. We stand in the garage at Color’s house as she tries to turn over the engine. Her house is the opposite of mine. Whereas the front lawn at my house is a groomed patch of dead grass that Tom has professionally mowed every other week, Color’s lawn is overgrown with weeds and tall grass and thistles. Color says she can’t bring herself to kill anything, even the dandelions. Tom, on the other hand, doesn’t water our grass because our water bill is so high. He’s paying for tidy dead grass.
And an axiom is truth and truth is an axiom, but everything still remains unproved, which makes things really complicated.
I wish I lived at Color’s house.
The base of the station wagon is covered in rust, and the tailpipe practically drags on the ground. A dead animal smell comes from somewhere inside the car. That can’t be a good sign.
Color bangs the steering wheel. “Damn it.”
“I don’t think hitting it is going to work,” Jesús says, petting the hood. “Give it some love.”
That’s when the car officially dies a bad death of smoke and exhaust and old age.
“Thank goodness we haven’t had an emergency until now,” Color says, waving smoke from her face as we walk out of the garage. “This is so symbolic. You think something is there to save you, but it turns out it’s broken, just like you are.”
“Maybe this is a sign,” I say.
“It’s just a sign that we need to go in a different direction.” Color wraps her arm around me.
“And what direction is that?” I ask.
Color doesn’t offer an answer. We walk into her house, a mess of dirty dishes in the sink, mail piled up. Most look like bills that probably need to be paid. But I get it. If I cleaned houses as an after-school job, I wouldn’t want to come home and clean more.
“Don’t worry. We’ll figure it out,” she says eventually. “There is always another way, or the universe wouldn’t have created a right and left side.”
I’ve never met anyone more confusing and brilliant at the same time.
“I could steal a car,” Jesús says, taking cookies out of the pantry.
“No,” I say. He offers me a chocolate chip cookie and winks.
As we drown our sorrow in sugar, Moss comes down the stairs to find us huddled in contemplation.
“What were you doing in your room?” Jesús wiggles his eyebrows at him.
“Nothing.”
“Do you need any help doing . . . nothing?” Jesús blows him a kiss.
“Shut up.”
“Your angst only makes you hotter.”
Moss groans and rubs his buzzed head. “I’m going for a run. I’ll make dinner when I get back.”
Color says, “These walls are getting to me. I can’t think. Let’s put some more stars on my ceiling.”
Color’s room is just as messy as the downstairs, with clothes strewn all over the place. Even her underwear. The bed is only partially made, and a real mini evergreen tree sits potted in the corner, decorated with twinkle lights. Her ceiling is so star covered, you’d think she captured the Milky Way and painted it there.
With a fresh pack of glow-in-the-dark stickers, Color jumps up and down on her bed, adding more stars to her galaxy. I lie on the ground, staring up at her.
Jesús puts on one of Color’s dresses and a bra he picks off the ground. He holds his arms out wide and spins.
“Do you think Brett would be convinced?” Jesús asks.
Color grabs Jesús in his nether region. “It’s a hard sell.”
“Well, it is now that you touched it.” Jesús crosses his legs and sits down on the ground.
“I can’t imagine having a penis,” Color says. “All that stuff between your legs. It must just get in the way.” She jumps and puts another glow-in-the-dark star on the ceiling. “And it’s just so hard all the time. It’s like walking around with an extra arm in an uncomfortable place.”
“It’s really hard that much?” I ask.
“More than I’d like to admit,” Jesús says with a wicked grin. “You don’t want your third arm coming out at the wrong time. Scares people off.”
Moss sticks his head back in the room. “I’m leaving soon.”
“We were just talking about touching penises. Interested, Fungus?” Jesús asks.
Moss glances at me for a second. I catch the unreadable look he’s so good at producing and feel my face melt into an embarrassed expression. My stomach goes on another roller coaster ride. Damn it. It seems that Moss could gaze at me in any way—mad, sad, angry, disgusted—and all I’d want to do is touch his perfectly plump lips. He forces his eyes back to Jesús. “That dress looks hideous on you.” Moss walks away and shuts the door.
Jesús examines himself in the mirror. “He’s right. I’m not meant for drag.”
“We’re all in some form of drag,” Color says.
“Ooh, can I use that for my senior statement?” he asks.
“What’s mine is yours.”
Jesús flops back onto the ground and groans. “I might never come up with anything for this stupid senior statement.”
I understand his frustration. The truth is hard to find. It likes to hide, shifting shape, and depending on who finds it first, they can remold it anyway they want.
I get up, telling Jesús and Color that I have to use the bathroom, even though I don’t have to go at all. I just want to poke around for Moss and his lips, instead of lying there feeling lost. I really want to dislike Moss. I want to not care. But then all of a sudden, he’ll care for just a moment, and it jumbles me up. It’s obvious how much he loves Color, how he takes care of her. And even Jesús, despite all their jabbing back and forth. The words might be sharp, but the tone . . . there’s love there somewhere. Love is the sexiest thing I’ve ever seen. And it all just gives me hope for something . . . mo
re. Hope that maybe I can embrace love again.
I stop outside his bedroom where the door is partially open. Nothing is on the floor. The bed is made, and a map of the world hangs on the wall, with red tacks all over it.
I take a step closer and catch Moss getting dressed. He’s shirtless and pulling his shorts up over his boxer briefs. I can see the outline of his butt and his muscular legs. The human body is pretty sexy, too, especially when covered in lean muscle.
My stomach rolls over and inside out. I bite my bottom lip and know I should turn away. Walk away. Get the hell away from this scene, but I can’t. I watch as he sits down on the end of his bed and ties his shoes. He runs his hand over his buzzed head and exhales. He lets go of his breath as if he’s tired. Tired of what, I don’t know. He barely speaks. And why run so much if he’s so tired? Though I think I know that answer. Sometimes letting yourself be consumed by feelings is scary. We’d rather engage in a fistfight, knowing we’ll accumulate some bruises, in an effort to avoid the internal scarring that hurts more. As if Moss is in my head, he stands up and jumps up and down, like he’s getting ready to fight someone. Or something.
Complex Math Problem: If you punch a cloud, will the cloud split into fragments, or will you? In other words—If your enemy is invisible, who breaks into fractions when you throw a punch? Would it just be easier to preserve the whole and surrender?
Moss pulls open his bedroom door wider, quicker than I have time to move, and nearly runs into me.
“What do you want?” he asks as we stumble back from each other.
“I was just . . . looking . . .”
“Looking?”
I point at the map on the wall. “The tacks on your map . . . what are they for?”
His lips stay tight. My mouth is so dry I can barely talk. Damn the desert.
“I’m leaving now,” he says, walking past me.
“Will you ride me home?” I ask quickly.
“Ride you home?” he says sarcastically.
I bite my tongue and swallow the little bit of spit in my mouth. “It’s getting dark, and I rode my bike here. I thought maybe you could run next to me? To make sure I get home safely. I know it’s not the path along the river, but . . .”
The Infinite Pieces of Us Page 8
