Jubilee

by Jennifer Givhan

  “It’s nice to meet you, Josh. I’ve heard amazing things. Bee hasn’t been this happy in a long time.”

  Bianca nudged Matty in the ribs. “You’re not supposed to tell him . . .” She twisted her shoulders and lowered her chin, and in a deep exaggerated voice, she drawled, “Keep them guessing, always, darrrling . . . Keep them guessing.” Was it all a game she’d lost the rulebook for? Was she playing from some alternate set of instructions the rest of them only needed to find?

  “You’re too much,” Matty said to her, his voice not resentful but more complicated than Joshua could decipher in that moment, so he recorded it in his list of mental notes, cross-tagged under brotherly protection and how are families supposed to love each other? When Matty squeezed her shoulder, she recoiled slightly. A lesser observer might not have noticed, but Joshua did. She put her arm around Matty and hugged back, the cognitive dissonance so palpable in the room it was a wonder none of them were morphing into creatures beneath their disguises.

  “Hey, Matty, Josh is a comic book aficionado. You should take him to Comic-Con next May.” Joshua had told her he’d wanted to go to the annual comic book convention in San Diego. He’d never done any of the things he’d wanted to. Before college, he’d won a round-trip flight to London. Only he couldn’t scrounge up the money for backpacking, not even for bunking in hostels. Mostly he’d been afraid to go alone. He wished he could say it was Jayden that kept him from traveling, but that’d be a lie.

  Matty said he’d be glad to take Joshua, that it would be fun. Joshua made another mental note at the way he said sure and fun. He seemed genuine, but Joshua knew how even genuine sometimes masked condescension, how he could’ve been teasing and Joshua wouldn’t have realized it until later.

  Bianca said, “Matty’s always trying to recruit new comic book fans, right, brother?” Then she added, smiling, “And pad his booth with supporters.”

  Matty asked Joshua’s favorite comic character. “Beast, easily.”

  “An X-Men fan.” Matty winked at Bianca, and again Joshua couldn’t tell if he approved or was laughing at him in code.

  “Hey,” Bee said, clapping her hands. “What if we all went on this trip? I could take the kids out to the beach while you guys are in the convention. We could go to Sea World.”

  “The kids?” Joshua asked, laughing. He looked toward Matty, who raised his eyebrows.

  Bianca’s smile vanished.

  “What kids?” Matty asked, frowning at his sister.

  She’d meant Jubilee and Jayden, but Joshua couldn’t account for the tension at his mistake. Bianca crossed her arms in front of her chest. “Josh knows who I mean,” she said, her voice flat. She stared at her slippers against the linoleum floor of Matty’s makeshift office.

  Joshua felt the rope of his stomach hockling into a knob, but not for the reason he probably should have felt sick. She’d invited him on a family trip, and he’d insulted her. “Of course we can bring them,” he said, trying to lighten the mood of the room. “That would be fun.”

  Matty looked at Joshua as if trying to figure something out. “More than Jubilee?”

  “My nephew, Jayden. I’m his guardian.”

  “Oh.” Matty’s voice was cold.

  Bianca looked like she was about to cry. Joshua felt compelled to apologize for something though he didn’t know what. Matty filled the silence. “So, Beast? Good old Dr. Hank McCoy. Before or after he grew blue fur?”

  Bianca walked back toward the foyer and disappeared behind a corner. Joshua watched her leave before turning to Matty, who’d sunk back down into his swivel chair. Joshua had so many questions. Instead, he answered Matty’s question. “I can relate to him in either misshapen form.”

  Matty sighed. He opened his mouth then closed it. Sighed again.

  “Do you think I should say something to her?” Joshua asked.

  “About Jubilee? No. Listen, Josh—she’s in a bad place right now. I haven’t seen her as excited and, well, normal, as she’s been since she met you. I honestly think you could be amazing for her. But I can’t expect you to hang around. Hell, I’m her brother and sometimes I can’t figure out what I’m doing playing house for her, um, well, you know . . .” He couldn’t say doll, could he?

  “It’s not role-playing then.” Joshua tried to keep his voice lighthearted, like he was in on the joke. Matty shook his head and stared at his hands; his fingers were red and raw in patches.

  After a few seconds, Matty said, “They’ve met—your nephew and Bee?”

  “He adores her.”

  Matty picked at his fingers with his nails. What wasn’t he saying? He grabbed a comic from the pile on his desk and handed it to Joshua. “Let me know what you think.”

  Joshua thanked him and turned to leave, but Matty reached for his arm. “Hey, Josh, if you want to take off—it’d be the sanest thing to do.” He narrowed his eyes.

  Bianca was rattling pans in the kitchen. She was singing.

  “She cooks when she’s upset,” Matty said.

  “I’ll go help her,” Joshua said, and Matty half smiled, his eyes warm again. Like Joshua had passed a test.

  In the kitchen, Bianca was chopping vegetables and singing a Spanish lullaby, but what struck Joshua more than the sweetly doleful tune combined with the sharp knife in her hand was the steady clicking of a rocking baby swing, a sound he remembered from Jayden’s babyhood. In the living room, Jubilee, placid and unmoving, was propped beneath a set of colorful stuffed animals dancing above her on their spinning mobile.

  Bianca saw him and stopped singing. Then she looked down at her cutting board and, still chopping, said, “We’re trying Thai food tomorrow. Pad Thai noodles, vegetable spring rolls, yellow curry, and sweet-spicy pineapple fried rice. And the pièce de résistance? Fried plantain à la mode. You and Jayden should come.” She looked up at him so hopeful and so hurt. He looked again toward Jubilee in the living room; beside the swing was a little statue of a Buddha burning incense on the mantle above bamboo stalks and a fish tank.

  “Of course we’ll come,” he said, turning back to Bianca. “What are you making now?”

  “Chile rellenos,” she said, holding up a poblano from the cutting board and scraping out the seeds. “Nana taught me to make them for love.”

  “Like a potion?” he asked, moving toward the steel-gray kitchen island, pulling a bar stool out and sitting down. She smiled, her face shining, steeling his nerve to continue flirting. “May I taste?”

  She frowned a little, squinting one eye like a sailor. She was the cutest damn woman he’d ever met. “These chiles don’t taste good until they’re blackened, but there’s sweet tea in the fridge, and pan dulce in that pink box.” She nodded to a pastry box on the bar.

  Joshua picked a sugary brown pastry that looked like a little pig and bit into its leg. Gingerbread. It was pretty tasty.

  “Oh, you picked the marranito,” she exclaimed, watching him.

  “Is that bad?” Should he spit it out?

  She laughed. “No! The marranitos are my second favorite. Little piggies. Little puerquitos.” She smiled vaguely, wistfully, like she was just remembering something. “I used to raise pigs, down in the Valley.”

  She hadn’t talked much about where she grew up, and he wanted to hear more. But she’d resumed her chopping and humming and didn’t seem inclined to continue the livestock conversation, so he let it go, found glasses in the cupboard and served them each a glass of tea from a pitcher. After a few moments of silence, he said, “I knew who you meant, Bee. Before, in Matty’s office.”

  She nodded, taking a sip of her tea and choking back a sob. Soon her tears were falling onto the chiles, and she made a joke about Como agua para chocolate, how she would accidentally poison them with her sadness like Tita did the wedding guests by crying into the cake. Joshua wanted to take Bianca into his arms. Whatever had broken
inside her, he wanted to fix. There were clues, of course. Bits and pieces in what she’d told him about her past that fit together with whatever she was doing with Jubilee. She’d had a boyfriend, who’d had a baby with someone else. She’d been cryptic. It stung that she hadn’t told Matty about Jayden, but Joshua hadn’t admitted everything about his own complicated situation with Olivia and the courts.

  “Too late,” he said about the poison cake. “I’m already sad.”

  While Bianca cooked, cracking eggs and coating the chiles before throwing them onto a hot skillet, he thought of Patti’s house. He hadn’t been around a woman cooking in a long time.

  He leaned in to taste a piece Bianca offered him, after wiping the grease on a paper towel. “Cuidado, Joshy. It’s hot.”

  “No one’s called me Joshy in a long time.” He bit into the chile.

  “You don’t like it?”

  “No, it’s fine. I like it. It reminds me of Olivia, that’s all.”

  “Do you ever hear from her?”

  “Not in over a year. We’ve been looking. It’s weird. She loves Jayden. She just can’t . . . you know . . . get her act together, I guess. She’s a mess. She’s family, I want her to change, but I don’t know. She’s . . . Olivia. Growing up, she was like a mom but then she’d bully me worse than anyone.”

  Bianca leaned over the table, setting down the food; she looked at Joshua with her hazelnut eyes shining sad and focused. He said, “I ran away to find her the first night they separated us. I didn’t find her that night either. Didn’t know where to look. Patti came searching for me in her car, calling out, ‘Joshua,’ but she pronounced it with a y like Yoshua. ‘Yoshua, where are you?’ I felt bad for running. I hated her for sending Olivia away, but I understood. Olivia was mean. So I stepped into the streetlight holding my backpack with all my comics and ramen noodles, and waited for her to see me. She pulled over and said, ‘Yoshua, I was so escared’ in her thick accent, then she crossed herself and hugged me.”

  “Yoshua,” Bianca whispered. “I like that.” She was hugging him; he was crying. What was it about this woman that cut through him? Loving her would be like slicing onions. Loving her? Damn. Loving her. “You can blow your nose on my shirt if you want,” she said. “It’s nice and soft.”

  He pulled away, sniffling. “Thanks, but I’ve been snotted by Jayden. It’s not pretty. I’ll use a napkin.”

  “Suit yourself. But I would’ve snotted you,” she said, winking. She poured him another glass of tea; he gulped it down, ice and all. She laughed. “I guess you like it.” She hadn’t said anything about Jubilee, hadn’t checked on her in the swing or made any gestures that she was worried about her. He took that as a hopeful sign.

  Bianca leaned against his chest, her face nestled into his neck. “Your hair smells good, like baby oil,” she said, breathing him in.

  “You like baby smells,” he whispered.

  “True.” She pulled a curl toward her nose. “Still, it’s good.” When she let go and the curl bounced back in place, she laughed. “Springy curls.”

  “Will you write a poem about my hair?” he teased.

  “Sure. Here it goes: Oil, oil everywhere and not a bite to eat.”

  “That’s awful.”

  “You didn’t give me time to think.”

  “Fine. I’ll expect a serious poem next week.”

  “Be careful what you ask for, Joshy,” she said, using a mock mysterious voice again. Then she lifted two chile rellenos with a spatula and set them on his plate, beside the pile of rice. She called Matty into the room, and they had the most hopeful meal Joshua ever remembered having.

  Four

  Bar Crashing

  Before Jubilee

  Bianca hated waiting as much as she hated the Valley. It was Friday night, almost a week since she’d had made a fool of herself in front of Gabe’s entire family, and he still hadn’t shown up. He’d promised to come over to the empty house-for-sale around the block from him where she was now crashing alone with her family ghosts since Dad had died and Mama had moved back up to Whittier with Abuela.

  Her girlhood house: a long, squat, beige-stucco ranch-style similar to Gabe’s only hers was so beige it was almost mustard-yellow and shuttered and the garage had been converted to a family room by the previous tenants, an elderly couple who’d wallpapered the whole thing in hideous paisley patterns that made her dizzy, and there were incongruous, black-steel bars curling across the windows, sharply pointed at the ends. The garden had gone to seed, the veining trellises spidering up the walls and encroaching upon the windows and roof. She’d agreed to help tend it, to keep it tidy enough to sell. But Mama’s green thumb had turned black on her daughter. Bee couldn’t keep a potted plant alive, and the best she could do for Mama’s garden was remember to spray it with a hose every week or so.

  Inside the house: a strange mash-up of borrowed furniture, pieces she’d dragged over from Lily’s garage around the corner, pieces that didn’t fit or match or fill even a quarter of the empty space; a love seat in the middle of the room, a mosaic lamp on the floor, a checkerboard for a table, a minifridge. Mama had sold the appliances for funeral money, so Bee did laundry either in the sink, with strawberry-scented Suave shampoo, or at Lily’s—but there were so many people living there, including Lily’s chronically ill mother and elderly and ornery grandmother they called Little Gran, it was always a hassle—or at Gabe’s. His mama still did his laundry, but Bee slipped some of his dirty items in with her own. It made her feel like they were a real couple who washed their chonies together.

  Gabe had said he would bring giant Jaliscience burritos from across the tracks on the Eastside, and they could watch movies in bed. He forgave her for causing un desmadre, that ruckus at his parents’ house the other night. Forgave her drinking too much and saying fucked-up things in front of his whole family. And he was sorry for the way he’d responded. He should’ve been more sensitive, after all they’d been through. This weekend would be just the two of them, like old times, he pinky swore.

  Real quick though, he needed to stop at a happy-hour meeting with his coworkers, to get on his boss’s good side (since his boss was Katrina’s big brother). When Katrina got pregnant, Gabe had still intended to finish college. He’d worked a forklift in a warehouse every night in Rancho Cucamonga and hoped to go back to school after the baby came and Katrina was settled with her mom in the Valley. But driving the three hours back and forth got old fast, so Katrina’s brother got Gabe a forklifting job at a feedlot he managed in Westmorland, where Gabe could spend his lunch breaks at Katrina’s mom’s trailer, hanging out with Lana.

  Bianca tried his cell phone. It had been hours since he got out of work and surely he’d done his diligence at the bar, but he didn’t answer and she didn’t leave a message. She would wait exactly seven minutes longer before calling Lily.

  Moonlight filtered through her parents’ old curtains. Mama hadn’t taken them down when she’d moved out. (She’d said, “I can’t stand it here, mija. If you want to waste away with that no-good boy, fine. But you’ll have to do it alone.”) Dressed-up in her rhinestone jeans and paisley halter top, Bianca sprawled out on the full-size mattress she’d bought at a yard sale when she’d moved back, the only item she’d actually bought for the house. She flipped her journal to the gothic story she was working on. It wasn’t any good, but it helped her feel less like a college dropout. In her story, a woman was watching antiquated sconces cast shadows, which flickered on the parlor wall in her husband’s empty manor, until Bianca believed the shadows were inching toward her. It was all very Daphne du Maurier. But not quite Hitchcock. She figured if she were living in a haunted house, the least she could do was use the Mary Shelley atmosphere and write a ghost story.

  But inspiration wasn’t coming. Her thoughts sludged, muddying the water. She couldn’t dredge anything useful. She set down her pen and reached toward
the flame of the Cristo candle she’d bought at the dollar store, set on a teacup saucer she’d taken from Lily’s house then placed on the floor beside the mattress. In a plastic holder, it was white with a picture of Christ holding a lamb around his neck, flowers around the frame. She picked it up from the carpet and poured the wax into her palm, creating a candle-wax replica of her handprint, like Lana’s handprints. Gabe’s girl. Not mine. In Gabe’s hallway, Esme had hung a small round clay molding tied at the top with a pink polka-dot bow; in it, two tiny hands and the words, “Baby’s First Handprints.” Not their baby’s, not the-baby-who-never-existed.

  Like the protagonist in her story, all the lights in her house were on because she too was terrified. Of family ghosts. Of familiar spirits. Of blood. She missed her dad. But she willed herself not to think of him right then. Not while she was alone. Instead, she focused on balancing the candle as she lay on her back, stabilizing it on her navel. It flicked as she breathed in and out. If she were a curandera, a healing woman, she would pass an egg over her chest and stomach. She would crack it into a glass, and the yolk would reveal the cause of her trouble. Her susto. Gabe’s Nana taught her this. She didn’t know if she believed it any more than she believed in the Cristo candle, but she liked the idea. Anyway, she’d rather be a healing woman than a sick one. Rather a blazing woman than the kind who waited around. She was done waiting. Done putting up with Gabe’s bullshit. His seven minutes were up.