She choked out a sob, letting him take Jubilee as she wobbled backward, landing on a couch that reminded her of the borrowed one she’d been bleeding on for two days, in the empty house-for-sale two hundred miles away. But soft and beige and beckoning, this one whispered safe. Whispered let go.
Her eyes fluttered. Matty said, “Wait, what the hell?” His voice reminded her of a flashing siren. It sounded an alarm. Something cold and blacktop and ugly. She squinted, willing herself not to fall asleep. Was something wrong with Jubilee? She tried opening her mouth to speak, but her tongue scraped sand. She’d become a noiseless womb. Mami’s here, she thought of saying. But she couldn’t recognize her own thoughts.
“Shit, Bianca. What’s going on?” He seemed repulsed by Jubilee, holding her away from his body unnaturally. Was he angry Bianca had stayed in the Valley with Gabe, then come back with Gabe’s baby? Matty had always hated Gabe. A childhood of abuse had given Matty a sixth sense that Bianca hadn’t developed. Where she trusted everyone, he trusted no one. Yet surely Matty would forgive her mistakes, now that she was here, that she’d come home. Accept her for what she’d become. That’s why she’d gone to him instead of Mama.
Hug her, she tried saying. The words wouldn’t form. Hold her tight. It’s calming.
“Bianca? What is this?”
She closed her eyes. Matty’s living room swelled and shrank, a lung, breathing her in, breathing her out.
“Handro,” Matty yelled. “Come help me. Something’s wrong with my sister.”
Jubilee was safe. The flashflood was gone. The arroyo was dry. Bianca was a lungfish. Drowning.
“Handro? Get my phone. I need help . . .”
Hail Mary, full of grace. Switch off the light and grant me peace.
And the light switched off.
Before Bianca’s father had left for good the year she’d floundered at Holy Cross, he’d gotten sober. He’d changed. He wasn’t the drunken asshole who called her brother a faggot and her mother a fat slob, but a man whose whole life could be summed up with one word: regret.
That night at Matty’s house, Dad was there with her, she was sure of it, telling Mama he’d called the family and they were praying. Maybe he was there. When Bianca had nearly died, her dad, her red-bearded gringo, her mad scientist of a father, soft-spoken-with-the-alcohol-gone, had finally come to pray.
Mama was there. That was verifiable. As in, others would agree that she was in the room and not just a part of Bianca’s imagination or . . . the other things they would say about her. Still, though she was flesh and blood, Mama’s voice floated specter-like above Bianca’s head. “Sana, baby girl. Sana.” She meant sana, sana colita de rana. Heal, heal little frog’s tail. The rhyme Mama had recited to her from girlhood, and she’d never outgrown. Translated literally it hadn’t made sense. She’d asked Abuela why they prayed for a frog’s tail to heal. Bianca hadn’t understood the difference between dichos and prayers, or maybe there was no difference since Abuela hadn’t corrected her. She’d only replied that the frog grows a new tail, a type of healing. Then she’d handed Bianca an empanada filled with mashed sweet potato.
Now Mama stroked Bianca’s hair as if she were a child again, home sick from school. Bianca had sometimes stayed home even when she wasn’t sick so Mama would take care of her, so she’d pay attention.
Mama lifted Bianca’s arm, turned her palm over, held two fingers against her wrist. Did she have a heart? Was it beating?
Am I alive, Mama?
Mama’s lips pressed against her forehead. But the dead couldn’t feel, could they?
Mama smelled like rosewater. Could the dead smell rosewater?
“Has she said anything? Has she woken up at all?” Mama’s voice was thorned with worry.
“No, she’s been like that for an hour.” Matty sounded thick and heavy. It reminded Bianca of the sourdough bread he loved to bake, yeasty and pungent in her memories. “I called you as soon as she got here. She was crying and rocking that . . . doll.”
Jubilee. He meant Jubilee.
Mama was crying, and Bianca pictured rosewater. No, not rose. Holy. The kind she had sprinkled around their house. Tinged with alcohol. Waters breaking, no taking. Yes. Waters taking.
“Can you drink this, baby girl?” Mama put water to Bianca’s mouth, and she drank.
Handro’s polka-dotted socks poked at the couch’s edge. He said, “I’ll get a washcloth.”
Mama peeled off Bianca’s sweater, fingertips pressing the wet stains across her breasts, below each nipple. “Why didn’t I drag you away from there, mijita? He hurt you, didn’t he?” Mama gave guilt a voice. It hurt Bianca to hear.
She wanted to tell Mama to stop pressing into her stomach, stop prodding her; she tried moaning, but Mama only kept pressing her backbone, her abdomen, her thighs. Each kneading of Mama’s hands into her skin throbbed, but not in the healing way of a sobradora giving a massage to get the blood flowing or cupping at the lungs to break up a phlegmy cough. No, Mama’s hands were like knives now. Everything hurt. When Mama reached Bianca’s buttocks, Mama called to God in Spanish. And Bianca knew. Mama had found the blood.
“Pick your sister up, mijo. We need to take her to the hospital.”
“Mom, we shouldn’t have left her there . . .” Matty’s voice shook as he lifted Bianca off the couch. It scared her.
While her family carried her, wherever they carried her, she dreamt.
She hovered on a bridge, dirt-covered and crossing a concrete canal. Dippy Duck, the baseball-capped mascot to the irrigation district, stood at the other side calling: “Play it safe. Be cool, swim in a pool. Stay out, stay alive.” She had swum in canals though, as a girlchild, used her blue-ribbon swim-team skills in the precarious ditches in the countryside.
Water rushed through the canal. Instead of carrying twigs and leaves, tiny corpses. Dozens of them. Tiny faces mired in scum, sealed in the ditchwater, swallowed by its rushing force. She lingered, transfixed by the mud caked in their hair, their toothless gums. Green, grimy liquid pruning their fingers.
From the bridge, she sat motionless in the truck. Gabe’s pine-green truck on the bank between the ditch and stacks of sweet-smelling hay. They were a depression in the brown earth.
He reached across the center console and caressed her thighs, as she sat cross-legged in jersey-knit sweats. She recited John Donne.
Sweetest love, I do not go,
For weariness of thee,
Nor in hopes the world can show
A fitter love for me.
He buried his face in her hair and began sobbing. She called him a sissy la-la for all the times he’d told her to stop crying.
She was a stick. Lying in the mud. Beside tiny bodies. Drowned.
Mama had never told Bianca the story of La Llorona. She’d never sent her to bed frightened on purpose. Instead, they’d said their bedtime prayer together: Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord my soul to keep. Guard me Jesus through the night, and wake me with the morning light. Mama had omitted the most insidious parts of the prayer. She’d protected Bianca that way, deleting the dangers.
Bianca didn’t learn until later: If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take. Gabe had taught her that, like La Llorona. Gabe and his mama, Esme.
Her stomach growled. She was waking, or coming back.
When Bianca was a girlchild, Mama had read her the gospels. A child comes back to life there too—through the miracle of belief. How crystal a thing, belief. How shimmering.
Bianca thought of Jubilee.
She opened her eyes. Hospital room. Clock on a wall. Wires and machines. A small salmon-colored pitcher on a tray.
“Mama?”
A monitor beeped.
“Mama? Matty?”
She pulled herself into a sitting position. She was dizzy and dehydr
ated still, that cotton on her tongue and lining her throat, but less fuzzy. Less prickly. She could keep her eyes open and focus on the objects around her. Balloons and a bouquet of white daisies. A card with a ballerina bear. She wore a hospital gown.
She tried her still-numb feet, pressing them against the linoleum floor. It was cold, but the jolts of pain were gone. It was like waking from a dream, unable to tell the difference between the dream and reality—how a young woman awakes believing for a moment she can fly. It isn’t until the sleep crust wears away that the wings retract into the shoulder blades.
Mama told her later she’d been unconscious for two days, three hours, and twenty-seven minutes. Bianca had asked how many rosaries Mama had prayed. Mama hadn’t kept track.
The urge to pee stung her bladder. The catheter pinched. Instead of pushing the red call button for a nurse, she called to Mama, but before Mama came into the room, Bianca remembered Jubilee. She needed her baby.
“Mijita? Baby girl?” Mama hassled through the doorway, a portrait of concern, and Bianca thought of the Bible verse Mama had taught her, how an angel had troubled the water. And how whoever stepped first into the troubled water was made whole.
In the room, Mama’s gaze landed on Bianca sitting up in bed, and her face relaxed. She sighed and pressed her hand to the rosary around her neck, whispering, “Gracias a Dios.” Mama had lost more weight since Bianca last saw her. She looked good, but tired. Her jet-black hair streaked golden around her face, covering any gray. But her face was Oil-of-Olay smooth. If she had wrinkles, they were well-concealed. So different was this thin, angular woman from the round giantess Bianca had grown up with.
“You’re awake,” Mama said, and she thanked God.
But her arms were empty.
“Where’s Jubilee?” she asked. Bone tired. Bianca was still bone tired. And troubled. The water was still troubled.
“Who?” Mama’s forehead creased. There they were. The wrinkles.
“Jubilee. My baby.” Bianca felt cold. Wings retracted too soon. Or, cut off. She wanted to return to the place between wake and sleep.
Mama pursed her lips, tilted her head. The expression that flickered across her face was inexplicably sad. She looked at Bianca and said, carefully, “You didn’t bring your baby.”
Bianca scanned Mama’s face, waiting for the punch. “Yes, I did. I was holding her when I got to Matty’s. Where is she?” She stood now, stepped away from the bed and faltered, her legs buckling. A humming in her ears. Someone was singing. Or a memory of a song. “Matty?” Come away to the water.
Mama reached out, supporting Bianca’s weight. “Let me help you.”
Down by the water.
“Help me find Jubilee. Matty had her.”
The milk of Mama’s eyes juddered sharply, muddying at the center. Like Bianca was a girlchild again and had done something terribly wrong. But Bianca couldn’t focus on that.
“Matty?” Bianca called again, louder than was normal for a hospital. She didn’t care. Down by the banks of the hanky panky where a bullfrog jumped from bank to bank. A nurse rushed in, ordering Bianca back to bed, checking her monitors, catheter, IV drip. Bianca wasn’t pacified. “Matty!”
The nurse paged the doctor.
“Shhh, Bianca. Calm down,” Mama whispered, stroking her daughter’s tangled hair. “He’s down the hall in the waiting room. I’ll get him, pero cállate, the doctors will give you another shot.”
Bianca felt like a child. Her pulse pounded in her ears. “Matty,” she screamed again. “Where’s Jubilee?”
And not a drop to drink.
When Mama came back into the room with Matty, he looked at Bianca with a mixture of relief and pity. “Bee?” His brows furrowed. “You didn’t give me a baby.”
“What?” Like a bridge over troubled water, I will lay me down. “Yes, I did. I drove her to your house.” And pray the Lord my soul to take.
“No, Bee,” he said quietly. “You drove this.” He held her up as proof. She was still wearing her furry pink bunny pajamas. No one had changed her. “Not a baby. A doll.”
Sail on, silver girl. Sail on by.
The humming sounded like water. And water soothes. Water soothes the soul.
And what is a soul but a bubble in the void. But floating in the vacuum of nothing?
Dad had taught Bianca about quantum universes. He’d sat her down the way he had when he’d taught her about Mole day or Pi day (sometimes even brought her a slice of cherry pie that a student had given him). The way he’d taught her to drive, the way he’d taught her to ride a bike.
In the many-worlds hypothesis, he’d said, anything that could’ve possibly happened, but didn’t, has happened in another universe.
Bubbles, bubbles everywhere.
In this one, Jubilee was alive.
Bianca stretched out her IV-wired arms. Mama nodded, and Matty handed over Jubilee.
Step into the water, child. Be made whole.
At some point, a therapist named Dr. Norris came in and evaluated her. In what sounded like something from an absurd Monty Python movie, he explained to Mama and Matty that Bianca was in shock. She’d need a low dose of Clozapine to start, antidepressants, and a weekly therapy session with him, but she wasn’t a danger to herself or anyone else, humming Simon and Garfunkel and so on. She wasn’t a danger, so she could go home. Bianca heard him. She heard them step into the hallway so they could ask their worried questions without her hearing. She heard anyway. She knew what they thought was happening. She knew what they thought.
But here’s what she saw. Once upon a time, there was a girlchild. A brand new girlchild, smiling. So innocent, so new. Her mama held her tightly, and she was safe. The end.
After all, Jesus rose again, didn’t he? And his mama must have held him. Mother Mary in a teal robe, clinging to her child—Pietà turned beautiful. Restored to babe in arms.
Bianca’s daughter had returned. Her Jubilee. And she wouldn’t let her go.
ONE
A Wounded Deer
With Jubilee
Bianca bounded through the front door of the redbrick house, Jubilee tucked in her arms, and called out loudly for the guys to hear, “I met someone!” Then under her breath as she brought Jubilee to nest in the crook of her neck and shoulder, whispering into her curls, “A really nice someone.”
Five months had passed. Bianca had reenrolled in college for the fall semester because she wouldn’t go back to lying face down in the grass in the front yard the way she had after dropping out the first time and moving back to the Valley with Gabe, depressed as nobody’s business but too stubborn to kill herself. Besides, she had Jubilee to consider. That’s what she told herself. She said, You absolutely cannot kill yourself because you have a daughter to consider. Dr. Norris said her self-talk was an encouraging sign and Jubilee certainly would not want her to kill herself.
She could never be sure if she was joyful or manic, whether she was like her father dancing around the kitchen, him bare-chested in his weekend shorts and her stepping on his feet (Dance me, Daddy! ) while he’d stomp her around the kitchen tile, how she’d thought he was so joyful when he wasn’t shitfaced and shattering their belongings against a wall . . . Or whether she was getting better. Whether she was nothing like her father at all. Nothing like a body in a bathtub. Or his spitting image.
She was staying with Handro and Matty on Woodland Street, attending Cal State Fullerton, a commuter school and easy to transfer into as a sophomore, unlike the prestigious schools she’d cared about before whose matriculation agreements had meant her credits from Holy Cross didn’t convert.
At the redbrick house, going to college, raising Jubilee with the help of her brother and his boyfriend, none of it felt like pretending, at least not in the way it had with Gabe.
Matty watched Jubilee during the day while Bianca went to scho
ol and during her therapy sessions. Their relationship, now, in the redbrick house, reminded Bianca of the way it had been between them when Matty had helped raise her back in the Valley. Big brother, five years older, Matty had borne the brunt of Dad’s drunken, bigoted rages, yet he’d still managed to be a loving stand-in—a brother turned caregiver when Mama was busy studying for nursing school or locked in her room crying and eating herself to sleep and Dad was mean-drunk. Matty had taught Bianca how to braid on Barbie’s hair, how to cook arroz con pollo (without burning the red rice tar-black to the bottom of the pot the way Mama did), and how to sing along to all the musicals from deep in the diaphragm, where all her power came. Mama loved musicals as much as Matty, and she’d cry at nearly every one. They’d spend most weekend nights together watching all the classics before Matty got to high school and started going out with his drama-club friends instead. Their favorite was Hello, Dolly, and they’d belt out the tunes (“Before the parade passes by!”). Matty teased that Bianca sounded more like a country-western singer than a Broadway diva (“Not through your nose, Bee. From your diaphragm!”), but she didn’t care. When they were singing along to The Unsinkable Molly Brown or Westside Story, just the three of them, there was no one ridiculing or hurting them. Mama protected them that way too. She thought she was protecting them with Bible verses, but really the musicals had made them the most resilient (“I’m gonna feel my heart coming alive again!”).
“Matty? Handro?” Bianca called when she didn’t see them in the house. “Are you guys here?” She wanted to tell them about Joshua.
“We’re out back, Bee,” Matty called. “Grab a plate.”
Still holding Jubilee, she tossed her bag onto the desk in the guestroom-turned-her-room. The guys had taken down Matty’s framed comic book posters so Bianca could put up the wooden Frida reprints she’d bought four-for-twenty-dollars in Mexicali. The truth? Before today, Bianca had been mostly limping along. She missed her dog, Kanga, who, let’s face it, had saved her back in the Valley when she couldn’t save herself. Matty’s cats had clawed the shit out of Kanga, so Bianca had sent her to live with Mama and Abuela in Buena Park, even though their plot of cement backyard didn’t have any grass and Mama couldn’t be trusted to take Kanga for walks or pet her belly. Mama acted like Bianca was made of china and would break apart any moment and it was all Mama’s fault. Even Matty and Handro treated Bianca like a breakable thing. She wanted to believe she’d ever felt normal. That she’d feel normal again.
Jubilee Page 2
