“Since I don’t know,” said Jane. “It helps me personally, and it helps me figure out what to tell the kids when a pet dies.”
I nodded, smiling. “Raven, Hammy the hamster, the betta fish …”
“All living happily in heaven,” said Jane.
“With Mom, I gather,” I said.
“With Mom,” said Jane. “Who watches over us.”
“I wish I could believe that,” I said morosely.
“It’s not so hard,” said Jane. “Just believe it.”
“Then why did you lose the baby?” I said, anger rising in my gut. “And why did I, if there’s some benevolent God and a heaven?”
“I don’t know,” said Jane.
We drove out of town in silence, taking County Road 14 past Lake Lenore into the national forest. We passed the remains of Ash, a town founded by the owners of the Bachelor Mine, and crossed Dexter Creek. Jane pulled the truck over. “I’ll do it,” I said.
“Thanks,” said Jane.
I climbed out of the truck. In the chilly morning, I knelt to turn the knobs on the front wheels that would lock the hubs and engage the four-wheel drive. I got back inside, and Jane put the truck in gear and drove up the steep dirt road to the Wedge Mine. “I always feel like we’re going to fall off,” I said, grabbing the dashboard as Jane expertly handled a sharp switchback.
Jane sighed.
“What?” I said.
“That about sums it up,” said Jane.
“What does that mean?” I said.
Jane bit her lip and did not answer. In the dawn light, with her hair tucked under a Ouray High cap, she looked sixteen again, and I remembered how ethereal she had been, always pale, dreamy-eyed, sort of floating on the outskirts of our family. Before Dennis and the kids had worn her down, she’d been a blond angel.
“I used to think you looked like an angel,” I said.
“Not anymore?” she said slyly.
“No, but …,” I said.
“I don’t mind being a fat mom,” she said matter-of-factly. “Nobody saw me when I was perfect. I was invisible. Now I’m in the middle of everything. I’m the anchor.”
“The heart,” I said, moved.
“Yup,” said Jane. She put her shoulders back, and I saw in this gesture how proud she was of what she’d accomplished.
“I’m proud of you,” I said.
“Thanks. I’m proud of you, too,” said Jane.
“For what?”
“For accepting your life,” she said. I was silent, chewing that one over. I hadn’t accepted my life at all, which was the problem, I saw now. But wasn’t striving for your dreams supposed to be a good thing?
“I haven’t accepted it,” I said.
Jane drove to the trailhead and pulled the brake. She gathered our backpacks, which she’d filled with sandwiches, trail mix, and lemonade. “Let’s go,” she said.
“Hold on,” I said. “I said I haven’t accepted it. I want a baby and I fucking deserve one, just as much as you do.”
“Okay,” said Jane. “You’re right.”
“Damn right I’m right,” I said, jumping out of the Toyota, my feet landing hard on the cold ground. I shouldered my pack and began walking along the trail, pausing only to enter our names and the ungodly hour in the trail register. It was barely light.
Wordlessly we hiked through aspen, spruce, and fir. I was fueled by rage and unhappiness, and I moved quickly. My thighs burned, and I soon left my sister behind. I reached the meadow and stopped, sitting on a boulder to wait for Jane. I took in the view—there was Ouray, looking like a doll-sized town from twenty-five hundred vertical feet above. As I looked out at the Red Mountains and Hayden Peak, I remembered hiking this same trail with my parents, Jane in a pack on my dad’s shoulders. I must have been six or seven. When my mom said, “Keep going to the Bridge of Heaven,” I’d been scared and stopped short.
“I don’t wanna go to heaven,” I protested.
“It’s not the real heaven,” my mom said.
“Bet the real heaven looks a lot like it,” Dad said, adjusting his pack.
“Oh, no,” Mom said. “The real heaven looks like this.” She’d taken my hand and Jane’s and kissed my dad.
“Such a softie,” Dad said, smiling.
“Come on, honeybun,” Mom said to me, tugging me forward.
Jane finally reached me, breathing heavily. “I don’t feel so good,” she said, reaching into her pack for a water bottle and peanuts. “This might have been a better idea in theory.”
“You can do it,” I said. “But it’s okay if you don’t want to.”
“I wanted to say goodbye to her there,” said Jane.
“What?” I said, thinking of my mother.
“It was a girl.”
Jane sat next to me on the boulder. This felt like a good time to say what I needed to say. “Jane,” I began, “if you get the test, you’ll be able to take preventative measures. I just think it’s something you need to do.”
“We’re all going to die, Alice,” said Jane, pulling her knees up.
“Okay,” I said, “but for the kids’ sake, I just think—”
“Number one, it’s none of your business,” said Jane. “Okay? I’m not an idiot, and I’m not naive. I understand how it all works. I get the brochures you send in the mail. But … I want to live. Just move forward. I don’t want to try to … shape everything to my will with a fucking hammer.”
“A fucking hammer?” I said.
“If I had known I’d lose this baby,” said Jane, tearing up, “I wouldn’t have felt her feet kicking inside me.” Her eyes grew damp. “I got to feel my daughter’s kicks, and they felt like butterflies.”
I frowned and opened my mouth, but Jane stood quickly and continued up the trail. We hiked for three more hours without saying a word, finally reaching the highest ridge. On the Bridge of Heaven, Jane reached her arms up to the sky. “Goodbye, my baby girl,” she said. She began to sob—raw, wrenching cries.
“It’s okay,” I said, holding her, starting to cry myself.
“It’s not okay,” said Jane. “But it’s the way it is.”
Her words hit something inside me, something hard and cold. I felt as if I had been punched. I thought about holding Mitchell, when I’d thought he was mine. I’d touched his face with my nose, breathing him in. And then, hours later, I relinquished him, and was left by myself in his room, staring at the crib.
But standing on the Bridge of Heaven next to my sister, my memory shifted. I hadn’t been alone, in truth. Jake had been there, next to the crib, just out of focus. His heart was as shattered as my own, and I had not even seen him.
“It’s the way it is,” I repeated.
And Jane repeated, “Goodbye.”
43
Carla
MY FIRST MORNING in America was just as I’d dreamed it would be. My mother did not go to work at the Texas Chicken restaurant. She stayed with me, cooking tortillas, beans, and stew on the hot plate in the corner of the room. She sang and let me sleep all day in one of the two beds. Whenever I woke, she fed me, the savory sopa de mondongo like happiness on a metal spoon. She stroked my face, repeating, “Mi bebé, mi bebé,” and when my brother Carlos came home from school, he pounced on me like an overgrown dog, hugging me and looking so big and easy in his sweatsuit made of nylon material.
It was then that my perfect day concluded, because at this point I was introduced to my new sister, one-year-old Marisol; her father, my mother’s boyfriend, Mario; and the two other families who lived with us in Room Sixteen.
I would never sleep in a bed after that first morning. My mother took me on the bus to Fiesta Mart, where I chose a Dora the Explorer sleeping bag and three stuffed animals, and we carried them back to the Ace Motel. I made a place next to my brother on the floor. It seemed fun—like a game—for the first few nights. The television was always on and the other families had a total of seven children, so it was very loud. At night I tried not to hear
the arguments, financial discussions, and sexual relations inside our room, and the drunkards and drug addicts who congregated in the Ace Motel parking lot.
My mother asked me about Junior only once more. We were alone in Room Sixteen, a rare event. “I know what happened to Junior was what God wanted,” my mother began. “I am thankful for all that He has given me. I am thankful He brought you to me in Texas.” She looked down at her clasped hands and managed, her voice thick with unshed tears, “I cannot help but ask you, Carla: why?”
I told her what had happened, confessed that I had climbed into the combi when I should have waited. My mother held me and rocked back and forth, a low cry coming from her throat, the sound of a heart breaking. My face pressed to her chest, I became hot with fury. “You left me alone in Tegu,” I said, pulling away from Mami. “I asked you to come home and you didn’t come. I could not fight the Resistol! I did my best!”
My mother put her head in her hands. When she raised it, I saw how unkind America had been to her. Her face was lined. Underneath her eyes, the skin was grayish. She stared into a middle distance, as if lost herself. She was a woman who maybe should have stayed. “There is no use in regret,” she said unconvincingly.
“What does that mean?” I said. “Why did you never send for me?”
“This is God’s plan,” said my mother.
“Do you really believe that?” I said. “God’s plan is for Junior to be lost in Mexico?”
“We cannot understand His ways,” said my mother. “We can only have faith. God brought you to me. God will watch over Junior.” Her eyes glittered. Her jaw clenched with the effort of believing the only thing she could believe.
“He is probably dead,” I said.
Her face blazed and she raised her hand to slap me, but stopped herself. Her arm fell to her side. She closed her fingers around the cross she wore on a chain around her neck. “If he is dead,” she said. “If he is … if he is …” She could not finish. Her faith, I saw then, was a rope dangling above an abyss of despair. She could hold on to the rope or let go. Finally she concluded weakly, “We will all be together in heaven.”
I felt both admiration and pity as I stared at her. She tightened her embrace. “We will be together,” she whispered. I relaxed into my mother. She believed it, she believed it, she believed it.
But America! It was easy (too easy?) to distract yourself from weighty matters here. Everything was so bright—it was as if stores had more light bulbs than the ones at home. The streets were very wide and there was no trash on the ground. There seemed to be endless space—supersized restaurants; huge cars; fat white, black, and brown people eating triple-decker hamburgers.
My mother told me that when she first came to Texas, the only food she knew how to order in English was a hamburger. “I ate so many I could not eat another,” she said. But then McDonald’s started numbering the meals—it was the best thing to happen in her life! “I could order a Number Six!” she exclaimed, “I could have anything—fish, chicken, the McRib sandwich!” My mother was chubby, and I looked forward to becoming as plump as an American myself.
My first week in America, we walked to McDonald’s, and when we got there she told me to order whatever I wanted. I chose a meal with two meat patties and cheese and sauces and pickles. We waited for a Guatemalan man to wipe our table with a rag and then we sat down and I bit into my Big Mac. It was so delicious I could hardly believe it was real, but I still found room to eat every single french fry in my bright red french fry holder. Even Coca-Cola tasted fatter in America.
My mother brought me with her to work at the Texas Chicken. It was not as I had envisioned. My mother did not wear a banana-colored uniform. She wore elastic pants and a shirt that grew dirty as she stood over hot vats of oil transforming frozen things into hot, delicious things. Pieces of hair fell out of her net and she brushed them back with the top of her hand, but she could not stop working long enough to readjust the net or find a bobby pin. The sight of her cheeks growing red and the way her hair kept falling back in her eyes made me not only sad but actually sick, and I went into the bathroom and vomited. Then another Honduran woman came and cleaned the toilet with a rag and a bottle of sanitizer.
My mother was paid $7.25 per hour. She was allowed to pee twice during her eight-hour shift. My head spun when I thought about how long it must have taken her to earn the two thousand dollars I had given to the Snake. (Carlos told me later that she had sold her car to get the money, a car she had saved for years to buy.)
After my mother’s day at Texas Chicken, we rode the bus back to Room Sixteen. My brother and his friends and the other families were sprawled around the room like laundry. “Ma, you gotta pack me a better lunch than PB&J,” said Carlos, his voice loud and obnoxious. “I already told you I don’t like peanut butter!”
My mother nodded and smiled in an indulgent way, and I hated Carlos right then. I hated him even more when he made a mistake in his video game and said, “Fuck!” and threw the controller at the TV, making my mother wince.
I could not stay inside Room Sixteen, and I could not go outside Room Sixteen because the Ace Motel had some bad elements, my mother said. Her boyfriend, Mario, worked behind the meat counter at the HEB grocery store, and we did have plenty of meat that was still perfectly delicious even though the date on the package said it had expired.
My new sister, Marisol, was dreamy and sweet, an American citizen and someone who had never known anything sad or difficult besides how loud it was in Room Sixteen. She only had a few words and none of them were Spanish. She grabbed one of my three stuffed animals (the elephant), and when I asked for it back, Mario said, “Don’t pick on your little sister, Carla! For Christ’s sake, get over it, you’re twelve!”
Before work one day, my mother took me to a giant American high school. Carefully, she filled out the paperwork that would enroll me in sixth grade. I was too old to go to the elementary school with Carlos. When I told Carlos I was scared to attend the middle school and did not speak any English, so I did not know how I would ever know what the teachers were talking about, Carlos said, “You will learn, and I will tell my friends to keep you safe.”
I did not ask, What friends?, and I also did not ask, Safe from what?
One evening, we went to a green park. Mario brought charcoal and ingredients for a picnic. Carlos played futbol with older boys and then joined me under a live oak tree. “Can I ask you about my brother?” he said to me under the tree.
“He is my brother, too,” I said. I put on the sunglasses I had found on one of the tables at the Texas Chicken.
“I know,” said Carlos.
“He was sniffing the Resistol,” I said.
Carlos’s eyes bored into me. “How could you leave him behind?” he said. “I just don’t understand.”
I ripped a dandelion out of the ground. “He made it to Ixtapec,” I said. “I was caught and he ran away. I found him in a shelter there. A man offered a ride in a combi, and Junior was not there when the ride was leaving.”
“So you abandoned my brother,” said Carlos. He stared at me, waiting. When I did not respond, could not find words to respond, he stood up and ran to join the games with the other children who looked like me but who were nothing like me at all.
“He is my brother, too,” I told the live oak tree.
44
Alice
I BOOKED A FLIGHT home the next day. Jane was doing fine with her big and small boys around her, and I missed Jake and the restaurant and my friends and the swampy smell of Austin and its buttery, sumptuous light. When I called Jake to give him my arrival info, he answered his phone with a whisper, “Hey, can’t talk, I’m at Dillard’s.”
“What?” I said. “What are you doing at Dillard’s?”
“We already tried Forever 21, the Limited, and Macy’s,” Jake said. “Evian can’t find the perfect dress. It’s a freaking disaster.”
“You took Evian to the mall?”
“You weren’
t here and her mom had to work,” said Jake matter-of-factly. “She can’t go to Homecoming in a sack.”
“So Marion’s going ahead with Homecoming?”
“I don’t know.” Jake’s voice dropped again. “But I don’t want to be the one to tell Evian, and that’s for damn sure.”
I heard Evian’s voice in the background, bossy and loud: “Jake! Are you even looking at this dress?”
“I am!” called Jake. “Hold the phone, Evian, I think that’s the one!” To me, he said quickly, “Got to run, honey. I’ll see you tonight.”
“Okay,” I said. “Jake …?”
But his attention was diverted back to Evian. “I’m not sure about the sequined headpiece,” I heard him say, and then the phone cut off.
Jake and Pete were waiting for me in the truck outside Austin-Bergstrom Airport. “I missed you so much,” I said, bending down to the passenger window to hug my dog.
“Hey,” protested Jake from the driver’s seat.
“You the most,” I said, climbing into the truck, scooting Pete to the backseat, and kissing Jake. He kissed me back, then handed me some pieces of paper stapled together.
“Hot off the presses,” he said.
“Oh,” I said. “The Bon Appétit?”
He waited, his eyes bright and trained on me. I looked down. In the grainy mock-up his agent had faxed, there was my husband in jeans and a dark shirt, standing with his boots crossed next to the pit. The caption read, “Best Barbecue in America? Bon Appétit Talks to Jake Conroe, Rising Star.”
“Rising star?” I said. “My God, honey! Look at you! Look at your hair!”
“They did it for me,” said Jake. “That’s called ‘product’ in there.”
“I’m so proud of you,” I said. And I felt it, too, coursing through me—pride and gratitude. “You’re a rising star.”
“True,” said Jake.
A security guard rapped on the truck. “Move along,” she said.
I opened the window, holding up the fax. “Look!” I said. “That’s him! That’s Jake Conroe!”
The Same Sky: A Novel Page 17
