Jubilee

by Jennifer Givhan

  But then a birth and a death. Both like drowning. Dad had been drunk, and Bianca could never forgive Mama. She should have saved him. Compared to that, Gabe felt relatively easy to forgive. What were ninth-grade bloody thighs next to a father, drunk in a bathtub? The water must have felt so warm on his cheeks, his face, his eyes.

  The stars. The beer. The mariachi music and night sky, blinking. She tried controlling herself in Gabe’s backyard. For his family. For Esme. But the alcohol brought it all back. Sourness, bitterness rooted inside her, knotted and spindling her gut. A sick swishing. A turnip or sickly red beet. Pulled from her uterine strings to her feet. Splitting open. A cactus skull. Nopal on the patio. Prickly pear. A bright-pink cactus flower, sprouting then dying in sticky water.

  The backyard swayed and dipped around her so she couldn’t remember they’d been arguing. Faces blurred. She was drunk and screaming. How long had she been screaming?

  Bile rose in her throat.

  “You parade Katrina and Lana around like you’re a family, taking them to birthday parties like I’m the other woman. While I wait for you like an idiot. Soy estúpida. I’m so fucking stupid. Putting up with it. Are you ashamed of me?”

  “Bee, you’re drunk, shut up.” Gabe yanked on her arm.

  “No, they should know. They should know what you put me through.”

  “I never asked you to come back. Sit your drunk ass down, show some respect.”

  “Ooh, Gabe, you’d better control your woman,” Frank teased. “Looks like someone can’t handle their alcohol.”

  “Looks like someone can’t handle their business,” Hector said. He glared at Gabe.

  “Shut up, old vatos,” Esme countered. She turned to Bianca. “Mija, don’t you think you’ve had enough?”

  The backyard spun; Bianca steadied herself on a stucco pillar beneath the patio, then staggered onto the grass toward the swing set where she and Lana had played. She jumped onto the swing, standing straight, knees locked, rocking back and forth. “I have had enough.”

  “What the hell is she doing?” Frank asked, chugging the last of his beer. “She really loca?”

  The neighbor’s dog barked.

  “Get down, Bee. You’re gonna wake up the neighbors. You want them to call the cops?”

  She kicked him. “You fuck me nights then go play daddy to Katrina’s baby.”

  Gabe threw his bottle at the slide, glass smashing against aluminum, beer trickling down like tears. He’d almost hit her with the glass.

  “Shut up, Bee. Shut the fuck up!”

  “Hey, son, you’d better take her home,” Hector called. “This isn’t funny anymore.”

  “Tell them, Gabe.” Bianca wouldn’t stop. “Tell them how we had a baby too. Tell them how I lost her. How you wanted me to get rid of her. How Esme took me to the Clínicas.”

  “That’s enough,” Gabe yelled, covering her mouth and heaving her off the swing over his shoulder. “You’re going home.”

  Gabe hoisted her across the lawn, clutching her tightly. She was going to be sick. She knew he’d throw her in his truck, drop her at home. The house would be dark. And cold. And silent. She wanted to stay at Esme’s house. To wake up to a family. Not broken by a father’s death.

  She bit Gabe’s hand.

  “Fucking bitch.” He dropped her onto the grass. “You bit me.”

  “I’m sorry,” she sobbed. “I don’t want to go back there tonight.”

  She wilted, a heap on the grass, her dress wadded, revealing her chonies.

  “Esme,” Hector muttered. “Take her to bed.”

  She could stay. Hector said it. She could stay . . .

  Esme helped her up, wiped the grass from her dress and smoothed it over her ass and legs.

  “It’s okay, mija. You had too much to drink. We understand.”

  “I lost the baby, Esme. I lost her. She bled down my legs. You saw her. My little cactus flower. You saw her.” At the end of her freshman year in high school, when she was fifteen years old, she’d had the abortion Gabe and his mama had encouraged her to have. The beginning of her senior year, Gabe had made a baby with someone else. Bee imagined her little cactus flower blooming in Lana’s bed, instead of the gray-eyed baby sleeping in her place. She choked as she sobbed, “I want her back.”

  “Shhh, Bee. Cállate. I know you’re upset, but Hector doesn’t know about that. You’ll break his heart. Please stop, mija. Please.”

  “For Christ’s sake, Esme, what’s she talking about? Get her inside,” Hector called.

  “Ay, mujeres,” Frank clucked. “What can you do with them? That one’s sure got spirit though, don’t she?”

  Esme took Bianca inside, while Gabe sank into a patio chair and grabbed another beer.

  Before the glass door shut, Hector asked, “Son, what the hell have you done?”

  Three

  Reborns

  With Jubilee

  Bianca asked Dr. Norris if he believed in love. His office was in Anaheim, the next city over from Matty’s, off the 57 freeway near the giant red A at Angel Stadium, but she’d never been there because Dad had been a Dodgers fan. Outside in the courtyard was a wishing fountain; copper pennies and silvery-shining quarters and nickels and dimes, each representing someone’s desire, covered the aquamarine tile. Before every visit to Dr. Norris, she dropped in change from the wallet she kept in Jubilee’s diaper bag or, if Jubilee had stayed home with Matty, in her canvas book bag with a scene of the tattooed tree outstretching her branches to hand the boy an apple from The Giving Tree. Bianca’s wishes were always the same but they came out as prayers. It took her a long time to discern what she was telling herself since her thoughts had sometimes become muddled in her mind, like speaking another language in a dream and she knew what it meant in the dream but when she awoke she realized she couldn’t speak that language so she must have been making up the words.

  They seemed so real in the dream.

  On Dr. Norris’s wall hung a picture by an artist named Tanguy whom Bianca didn’t know anything about, but she could tell he was surreal and she liked that about him. The painting was called The Lovers, and it would have taken a real creative mind to comprehend what he’d meant because the whole painting was underwater and the so-called lovers were comprised of salt bones, taupe mineral deposits, curvy-lined wishbone figures like various parabolas on a piece of ocean-colored graph paper that nearly puzzled together but not quite.

  The painting was like splitting the wishbone with Matty. And it made her think of Gabe. But at her therapy session after the picnic on the beach, it made her think of Joshua too. Above the lovers, smaller pieces of the same bone material floated haphazardly, unconnected to any larger bodies. One figure looked like a woman’s torso, another the head and horns of a white-skulled buffalo, and another a dancer’s lithe leg bending in a jazz-style arabesque, or a fishhook.

  The Lovers hung beside Dr. Norris, and Bianca often studied it while avoiding discussing the disarray of her life or her unresolved anger at Mama and Matty since Dad had died or why she would rather stay home and care for Jubilee than go out and make friends. She didn’t know the answers to any of those things. But she began to find the most remarkable possibilities in the painting. The day after the picnic, she also decided the wavy-boned figure she’d thought represented the lovers lying together not quite fitting was only one person. The other person stood at a distance in the sand, her long black hair coiled around her salt-pillar body, the long clean bone of her spine growing up from the ocean floor.

  All of this had prompted her to ask Dr. Norris what felt like a ridiculous question. She knew the purpose of their visits was to “unshock” her—as Mama would say when she called or showed up at Matty’s with a box of the pan dulce from the Mexican bakery down the street, always with several pink conchas: “Baby girl, you have to keep seeing Dr. Norris, so he can unsh
ock you.” Bianca pictured him jumping from behind his desk and yelling or growling in his scariest voice. She would scream and throw her hands in the air the way they do in cartoons except her eyes wouldn’t pop from her face; she would be cured and could stop taking the antidepressants and antipsych meds and could go back to Abuela’s without everyone looking at her as if she were about to unzip herself and reveal a hideous monster beneath her skin.

  They all acted glad enough Jubilee and Bianca were home, but their kindness felt like a facade. She told Mama while wiping the sugar dust from her mouth and sprinkling it back into the pan dulce box, “I’m not shocked,” but then refused to talk about Jubilee except to say she needed her and would everyone please leave her alone because if she didn’t have a home here, she’d go find one somewhere else. Matty would tell her to stop being dramatic, and Mama would get that look like either the beans had made her gassy or she was about to cry. Of course they wanted her home. Of course they didn’t wish she’d stayed in the Valley. Of course Jubilee was perfect. After a few cycles of that scene, they left their questions about Jubilee to Dr. Norris, who’d mostly left Jubilee out of it and instead asked about Bianca’s childhood and what had happened before she moved to Santa Ana.

  A few times, they’d ventured into Dad’s history of mental illness, and once she’d admitted how she used to float through the hallways upside-down when she was a girlchild. Was she really floating, or had it just felt like floating? he’d asked. She’d shrugged. When he mentioned dissociation, she began humming. And never brought it up again. Sometimes, when she was supposed to be talking about herself, instead she told him the plots of the novels she loved and watched to see if he caught on and knew she was shitting him. He never let on, though she suspected he knew.

  Dr. Norris spoke with a Scottish accent like the priest at St. Bruno’s, where Mama would sometimes drag Jubilee and her to Saturday-evening Mass and try to get her into the confessional box. But Bianca had drawn the line and said they’d wait in the pew beside the statue of Mary and the ever-glowing prayer candles, which appeased Mama. Bianca only liked going to church to listen to the priest’s accent, which reminded her of Mel Gibson in Braveheart, though neither Dr. Norris nor the priest looked anything like the long-haired, stallion-riding William Wallace.

  “Something’s happened, Bianca. You seem more relaxed today.” Dr. Norris’s short brown hair balded at the edges, his facial expression welcoming, the smile lines at the corners of his eyes and mouth like little rivers. Bianca might have told him about Joshua, so inviting were his mannerisms and that accent, but something told her he might react more cautiously than Matty, so she held back. Instead she asked if he believed in love.

  He answered with a clarifying question of his own: “Love at first sight? Or love over time? Or both?”

  Since she didn’t know what she meant and was tempted to launch into a Shakespeare sonnet (“Love is not love / Which alters when it alteration finds, / Or bends with the remover to remove”), she shrugged and curled her legs beneath her on his therapist’s couch (typical beige pleather).

  He asked if they were still talking about Gabe, or if she had someone else in mind, but she assured him it was purely rhetorical, that she’d discovered those lovers on his wall weren’t conjoined after all but separated by ocean and sand and whatever material they were made of.

  He said he’d always thought of the lovers as the other swirling figures at the top, searching for matching pieces.

  “But that’s just it,” she said. “What if you find a matching piece? What if you find another salt bone and it matches your own strange shape and you fit together and everything seems perfect?”

  “Well isn’t that the goal of love?”

  “I don’t want to lose my own shape again.”

  “Then don’t,” he said, as if it were the simplest thing in the world, holding on to one’s self.

  After the beach, Joshua had searched online and found dolls called Reborns. He’d typed in “baby doll delusions” and found a documentary about women in the UK who collected Reborns, lifelike dolls painted to look like newborns, with the same purple veins, skin folds, iridescent eyelids, mohair dyed by hand and stitched into the scalp to match the downy hair of a real baby. Women custom-ordered dolls from artists called Reborners. Advertisements on eBay promised:

  Send me a photo, and I can make a replica of your baby.

  Facial features, hair color, eye color and weight will be done to your preferences.

  I can make up a birth certificate also with names and dates that you choose.

  Custom babies start at $500.00.

  Prefabricated Reborns went for a hundred bucks, and even cheaper on Amazon.

  Therapists endorsed the Reborns for dementia patients, particularly women; hugging the dolls released oxytocin, the same as nursing mothers release when they breastfeed. Holding and tending to the dolls helped elderly patients in nursing homes feel more relaxed and calm. One old woman kept her doll with her at mealtimes, while the nurses wheeled her through the hallways, at bedtime. All the nurses went along with it, like it was her real baby.

  Some people thought the dolls were creepy. They posted so in the comments. Reborns fell into the uncanny valley, the way robots that were too lifelike inspired disgust instead of awe. The closer to humanlike a thing got, the less we humans could accept it. Strange creatures, we were.

  But Jubilee wasn’t like that. She didn’t repel Joshua. He’d always been attracted to the strange, and the sad.

  He’d collected action figures since childhood. He knew everything there was to know about comic books. The X-Men series had been his bible since boyhood. It had saved him as he shuffled from foster home to foster home, protected him and given him strength all through his teen years, when Patti sent him to the group home. None of the jerks there could touch him. He was Beast. Didn’t a part of him believe the worlds of Marvel and DC actually existed? Didn’t a part of him rebel if a storyline infringed on the canon he so revered? How were dolls any different?

  After their first visit, Jayden said, during bath time, “Jubilee’s not like the babies at daycare. She doesn’t cry. She’s kind of a lump.” He stuck soap bubbles to his face to make a beard, then added, “I still like her though.”

  Joshua explained that Jubilee was a really quiet baby. Babies cry to ask for something. Maybe Jubilee’s mama already knew what she needed, so Jubilee didn’t need to ask.

  Kids are so blunt that if Joshua had said anything else, Jayden was liable to hurt Bianca’s feelings. It wasn’t really lying. For Jayden, his stuffed animal Walter was real. A furry dog he made at Build-a-Bear, with a little heart he put in the dog’s chest himself. Walter went to recess with Jayden every day. Once, Walter was lost at the park, and Jayden was crying like a real person had vanished. He made himself sick crying. Joshua took him back to the park with flashlights, and they found Walter in a tunnel slide. It wasn’t just a stuffed animal to him, it was a best friend. What was the difference between belief, the imaginary, and therapeutic representation? Was Bianca’s reality any less valid?

  Joshua would allow Jayden to come to his own conclusions. For now, Jayden accepted that Jubilee was real. Perhaps in some ways Joshua was lying to him. But Joshua already lived in his own world anyway, through his superheroes. Even though the “rational” adult part of him knew that he was just a weird boy grown into a weird man, part of him still believed he had special powers, a second sense. Maybe Jubilee was Bianca’s second sense.

  The wounded boy in Joshua remembered how powerful belief could be.

  He called Bianca later that week, then again, and again. They’d hung out at the park on weekends with Jayden, and talked into the witching hours most nights. They met at the bowling alley on campus in the basement of the student center a couple of times before Jayden’s pickup time. Since Bianca never took Jubilee to school, it all seemed so normal. He wouldn’t kno
w, since he’d never dated anyone before her, but he’d have bet they looked like any happy new couple.

  The first day she invited him to her house, he was that weird mixture of nervous and excited. It felt like fieldwork, like an exploration. He’d get to watch how Bee lived in her own environment. Not in a clinical way. Only, that’s how he’d reconciled any misgivings. She was his case study.

  He pulled up to her brother’s house in Santa Ana. On the front door hung an autumn wreath decorated with leaves. A pumpkin sat on their porch mat. It seemed normal enough. He walked up to the porch and knocked on the door.

  Bianca answered, dressed in cotton shorts, a long-sleeved flannel, and fuzzy slippers, all bright pink. She looked sexy even in pajamas. She kissed his cheek and invited him in. He followed her with the tingle of her lips still on his skin.

  She’d already sketched a portrait of her brother during their many late-night phone conversations. Matty was a freelance tech writer and editor, but he wrote and illustrated comics, well-known amongst enthusiasts, which Joshua was. Joshua didn’t know Matty’s work, but he was eager to learn. Joshua did know that Matty watched Jubilee for Bianca every day she went to school or tutored at the writing center. He gathered that Matty also watched Jubilee whenever Bianca went to what she referred to as “appeasing her mother” appointments, which Joshua had gleaned were therapy sessions, though she wasn’t forthcoming about anything related to her past or Jubilee and he was still afraid to ask her point-blank.

  “Josh, this is Matty,” she said. “Well, Matthew if you want to be fancy about it, but I call him Matty and so can you. Handro, well, Alejandro, is at work.” She’d told Joshua that Handro worked at a gay bar downtown. They entered a nook past the foyer set up like an office. Lining the walls were black-framed pictures of comic book characters Joshua didn’t recognize. The room was decorated in red and black, koi fish paintings, Chinese letters. A black-and-white photo of a little girl who looked like Bianca on a tree swing foregrounding a wooden fence leading to the beach. Matty sat at a desk chair and stood when they came in. He was taller and broader than Joshua, but he sensed something similar about them, something in the way Matty looked at him, as though he could’ve been a stand-in Matty. He shook Joshua’s hand.