Irises

by Francisco X. Stork

  “Leave me alone,” she said. She shook his arm off.

  “I can’t leave you alone. I’m going to stay with you. I can stay without talking, but that’s the best I can do.” She sniffed. He offered her his red bandanna. “It’s clean, honest.”

  She wiped her eyes and unconsciously blew her nose. She giggled despite herself when she realized what she had done. “I’ll wash it for you.”

  “Yeah, you better. When do you think you’ll have it clean? I’ll come pick it up.”

  She wadded the bandanna in her hand. “What are you doing around here anyway?”

  “I came looking for you. But first you have to tell me why you were crying.”

  “I can’t.” They started walking.

  “Well, at least tell me where we’re going?”

  “I was going to church. I don’t know where you’re going.”

  “Okay, I’ll go with you.”

  “Have you ever even stepped in a church?”

  “Not actually stepped in. Not lately, anyway. But I take my jefita and my sisters to church every Sunday. I wait for them by the park and then pick them up.” They stopped in front of the church. “It’s closed,” he said.

  “It stays open until ten p.m. At least it used to when my father was alive. He kept it open in case people wanted to go in and pray.”

  “Something happened to you that’s serious. Tell me.”

  “It’s private.”

  “Okay. I’ll leave you alone,” he said reluctantly. “But I wanted to tell you something.”

  “What?”

  “They let me out of the gang. Well, almost. I have to go through a couple more things. Nothing major.”

  “More beatings?”

  “It’s just stuff. Nothing I can’t handle. And I painted the wall white yesterday. It took only four hours. Do you want to come with me tomorrow and take a look at it? We can start putting up those dots you talked about. You know, the ones we need to connect to make the drawing.”

  “I don’t know if I can help you anymore,” she said.

  “Let me go inside with you,” he said. “I promise I won’t say a word. You need to be with someone right now even though you don’t realize it. Honest. I can tell.”

  She wanted to go inside the church to think, to consider all that Kate had said about Mama. Yet there was something about having him next to her that was good, that was needed. He was keeping her from thoughts she couldn’t face.

  She shrugged and said, “The church is open to all.”

  The sanctuary was dark and cool except for the evening sunlight coming in through the windows. They sat next to each other in the same place where she and Kate always sat. At first she was conscious that he was sitting next to her, their shoulders almost touching, but then she noticed that she could forget about him if she wanted to.

  He seemed to be absorbed in something other than her. Then she saw him take a pencil from his pocket and begin to doodle on the back of the weekly pledge envelope. She watched him for a while and then she spoke.

  “What are you making?”

  “Oh, nothing really. I like to draw when I’m quiet. It helps me think.”

  “I do that too.” She smiled.

  There was silence.

  “Was it your mother? Were you crying about your mother?”

  “Yes,” she said, looking away from him.

  “Tell me.”

  She hesitated. Then she spoke, her eyes fixed on the altar. “My sister thinks we should let her go.”

  “Let her go?”

  “Disconnect her from her feeding tube.”

  “And you disagree?”

  “I don’t know what to think.” She looked at the cross in the altar.

  A ray of sunlight entered through one of the windows. The only sound was the sound of their breathing.

  He cleared his throat. “My father was an alcoholic. He died a couple of years ago. His liver was in bad shape. He was also a heavy smoker, so he had emphysema as well. There toward the end, he was home with an oxygen tank. There was really nothing they could do for him at the hospital. You know what he used to ask me whenever he saw me?” She shook her head. “He wanted me to give him some tequila. He used to tell me where he had a bottle hidden in the house. He would beg me for a drink. ‘I’m dying,’ he’d tell me. ‘What difference does it make?’ ”

  “And what did you do?”

  “I gave him the tequila. I’d wait until my mother wasn’t around and I’d give him a sip. That’s all he wanted, a sip now and then. It made him peaceful, just tasting it.” Marcos began to doodle on the envelope again. Mary watched. Then he spoke softly. “After about a month of being at home, he died. He and I never got along too well before that. He was mean when he was drunk. He was mean to all of us. I thought I hated him for the way he was with my mother and my sisters. But we got close that last month. Those little sips of tequila that I gave him brought us together. He apologized to me for all his meanness.

  “I don’t know why I’m telling you all this, except that you telling me about your mother reminded me of him, of that last month of his life. There toward the end, he was ready to go. It was like he lived long enough for us to grow close, and once we were, he felt he could die in peace. I watched him die. He was at peace.”

  Mary reached over and took the pencil and the envelope from his hand and for a second their eyes met. Underneath where he had drawn what looked like a rose, she began to draw an iris. It felt good to draw again.

  She had been wrong about him. Yes, he had been in a gang, but his heart was good. He liked her, she knew, and she was proud of that. She looked inside herself and saw that she liked him too.

  Was there light in Mama now? Have you seen a light in her? Kate had asked. She hadn’t seen it. Even when Mama was in the hospital right after the accident, there had been no light in her. Was Kate then right about Mama? Perhaps she couldn’t see Mama’s light because it was already gone. A deep sadness came over her at the thought.

  Kate was right about her inability to enjoy painting since Mama’s illness. But the sadness she was feeling now felt different from what Kate had called her grieving — this was more like what she had felt at Papa’s death. She had let Papa’s soul depart in peace. Maybe Mama wanted to make sure she and Kate loved each other. Kate seemed different now, more like a sister. That’s what Mama would want.

  Mary rested in Marcos’s presence, in the thought of Mrs. Fresquez and Renata, in knowing she was not alone. And in the midst of that comfort she found a seed of peace. She leaned slightly to her left and her shoulder touched Marcos’s shoulder.

  Mary began to draw a second iris. Kate was full of feeling toward life, toward the future. It was the way Mary once felt about her painting: an openness, a freedom, the kind of hope she sometimes felt in front of a blank canvas, where everything was possibility. They both wanted to do something with their lives. They both wanted to give. They were sisters. They were their father’s daughters. They were their mother’s daughters. She was of the same kind as Kate. How close to her she felt just now, now of all times. They were alike and they were different, like the two irises she had just drawn.

  She sat like that, next to Marcos, bathed in the quiet of the church until the sun went down.

  “I better go home,” she said.

  Marcos took the drawing of the irises. “It’s beautiful,” he said.

  “Thank you,” she answered. She started to get up.

  “Can I walk you home?”

  She sat down again. It took a long time for her to answer.

  “Okay,” she said, and then, after a pause, “I want you to meet my sister.”

  Mary sat on a canvas chair, the easel in front of her. She was painting the lemon tree behind Aunt Julia’s house. It had rained earlier in the day and the air was cool. The door opened and Kate stepped out.

  “Wow! You’re almost done,” she said.

  “Almost.” Mary continued painting.

  “Can
I join you?” Kate asked.

  “Sure,” Mary answered. Kate brought a green patio chair and sat down next to her.

  Sound came from Aunt Julia’s bedroom. “Aunt Julia likes to nap with the television on,” Kate said.

  Mary smiled. “She falls asleep with it at night also.”

  A yellow finch perched on one of the branches of the lemon tree. Mary and Kate were silent. The finch twisted its head to look at them and then flew away. “It’s nice out here, isn’t it?” Kate said.

  “It reminds me of our yard back home.”

  “Do you miss El Paso?”

  “I miss Renata and . . .”

  “Marcos.” Kate completed Mary’s sentence. Mary blushed and smiled all at once. “Is he still coming to visit?”

  “I was waiting to see how Aunt Julia’s checkup turned out. He wants to come for Thanksgiving. He’ll only stay for two days.”

  “I’m sure Aunt Julia will be okay with that. You and I can sleep together and he can have the other guest room. Now that I’m more settled in school, I’m going to try to come on weekends.”

  “You don’t have to. I’m sure you have lots of studying to do.“

  “But I can study here just as easily as I can in my dorm or in the library.”

  “Aunt Julia’s TV doesn’t bother you?”

  “No, I like a little background noise.”

  Kate watched Mary paint for a few minutes, then she took a deep breath. She spoke slowly, deliberately. “Today is the anniversary of Mother’s death.”

  Mary put her paintbrush and palette down and stared at her feet. “I know,” she said.

  “Are you okay?”

  There was a pause and then Mary answered. “I’m okay.”

  Kate leaned forward and took her sister’s hand. “This is not the right word, but I’m grateful to you. I don’t think I would have gone through with it if you had been against it.”

  Mary pulled her hand gently away and placed it on her lap. “I’m at peace with everything. It took a long time for me to get to that place, but I did. Thank you for waiting, for giving me that time.”

  “Sometimes I look at you and you seem so sad.”

  “I miss Mama. I miss Papa too. I don’t feel guilty or have doubts, but I do miss them.”

  “I miss them too.” Kate tucked her hands under her legs.

  “Are you okay?” Mary’s voice was kind. “You seem worried. Do you have doubts?”

  “Not doubts, exactly, but all kinds of images run through my mind. Maybe Mother suffered when we disconnected her from her feeding tube. Maybe, in her own way, she felt hunger and thirst. I guess it’s normal to have those thoughts.”

  “Dr. Rulfo did all he could to make sure Mama wouldn’t suffer. He said she didn’t. Kate, Mama’s in heaven with Papa. I believe she’s alive right now in a way she wasn’t before. I am certain about it. Aren’t you?”

  “My faith is not as strong as yours. It never has been.”

  “Maybe you have faith and you don’t even know it. You want to make something good of yourself, you want to be useful. That takes faith. You told me once that it was Mama’s dream that you go to Stanford. And now you’re going there and you’re doing it for Mama. Aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, that’s faith. You believe she’s watching you, and you believe she’s with you now, even if you don’t say it out loud like I do.”

  Kate shook her head. “How did you get so smart all of a sudden?”

  “What do you mean, all of a sudden?”

  They smiled.

  “I think I hear Aunt Julia snoring,” Kate said. “I better go cover her up. You coming?”

  “I’ll be right in,” Mary said. “I want to work a little longer.”

  Mary picked up the brush. She gazed at the tree and waited. Then she saw a soft light shine among the leaves. And she painted.

  Acknowledgments

  I want to thank my faithful agent, Faye Bender, for all her help throughout these long years. I am grateful to Anna Stork for sharing with me her valuable insights into the minds of young women. Most of all, I am indebted to my editor, Cheryl B. Klein. This is a book that came into being thanks to her loving attention.

  About the Author

  Francisco X. Stork is the author of five novels, including Marcelo in the Real World, which received five starred reviews and the Schneider Family Book Award for Teens, and The Last Summer of the Death Warriors, which won ALAN’s Amelia Elizabeth Walden Award. He was born in Monterrey, Mexico, and spent his teenage years in El Paso, Texas, where Irises is set. He now lives near Boston, Massachusetts, with his wife. Please visit his website at www.franciscostork.com.

  Text copyright © 2012 by Francisco X. Stork

  All rights reserved. Published by Arthur A. Levine Books, an imprint of Scholastic Inc., Publishers since 1920. SCHOLASTIC and the LANTERN LOGO are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission of the publisher. For information regarding permission, write to Scholastic Inc., Attention: Permissions Department, 557 Broadway, New York, NY 10012.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Stork, Francisco X.

  Irises / by Francisco X. Stork. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: Kate, eighteen, and Mary, sixteen, must make some adult decisions about the course their lives should take when their loving but old-fashioned father dies suddenly, leaving them with their mother, who has been in a persistent vegetative state since an accident four years earlier.

  ISBN 978-0-545-15135-1 (hardcover : alk. paper) [1. Coma — Fiction. 2. Sisters — Fiction. 3. Death — Fiction. 4. Identity — Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.S88442Ir 2012

  [Fic] — dc23

  2011023798

  First edition, January 2012

  Photography by Yolande de Kort/Trevillion Images

  Jacket design by Christopher Stengel

  e-ISBN 978-0-545-39263-1

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of publisher.