Jubilee

by Jennifer Givhan

  Matty came to his rescue. “That’s putting a lot of pressure on him, Mom.”

  “Well, it’s true. When my girl came home from the Valley, she was a mess. Before that, she’d been lost. We couldn’t reach her. I couldn’t reach her. When she showed up with Jubilee, she was stronger. We saw our Bianca again.”

  “So we go along with it,” Matty added. “Hell, I babysit for her.”

  “Is she delusional though?” Joshua asked, regaining his composure. “It’s not a choice she’s making?” He recounted what he’d found online about dementia patients and role-playing.

  “She has a tough, stubborn streak I both admire and don’t understand,” Rosana said. “If she were playing, she wouldn’t let us in. I’ll tell you though, mijo, she’s never referred to Jubilee as anything but her baby.”

  Joshua told them how upset she’d gotten at Anne Geddes.

  “She’s not ready yet,” Matty said.

  “But you can help her,” Rosana said.

  The pit of Joshua’s stomach felt empty although he’d just eaten a huge Thanksgiving meal. Why did they think a weirdo like him could help Bianca? He wasn’t a counselor yet. And Bee was a feminist. She wouldn’t want a man to fix her problems anyway. He understood that much about her.

  Matty cleared his throat and sat forward in his chair, leaning closer. Joshua wanted to scoot away but couldn’t without appearing rude, so, uncomfortable as he felt, he forced himself to stay conspiratorially close to Matty. “Josh, I have to ask you. What if she doesn’t recover? What will you do? Spend your life with my sister and her doll?”

  “Ay, leave the poor guy alone, Matty,” Handro said, hugging his partner’s shoulders. “They’re dating, not getting married. Right, guy?”

  “I mean, I could imagine myself marrying her . . .”

  The words were out of his mouth before he could stop them. What was it about this family that made him open up? Any family really. He wasn’t used to family. He wanted to hang his head in embarrassment, but he looked up to see the damage. Bianca’s mother’s eyes had lit up while Matty’s darkened. Joshua wished he could take back the insanity he’d just put out there. His heart thudded. What are you saying? Marrying her? Before dinner you weren’t even sure she still wanted to be your girlfriend. You idiot. His dress shirt and collar felt too warm, his tie too tight around his neck. He loosened it. Bianca’s mother rubbed her rosary beads between her fingers. She said nothing.

  Matty asked, “What does Jayden think of her?”

  “Who? Jubilee? He loves her.” Joshua was glad for the change of subject. “I can’t tell if he believes in Jubilee the way Bianca does or not. It’s a game he loves playing with Bee.”

  “We’re all playing the game, aren’t we?” Matty said, his voice bitter.

  “Ay, mijo, it’s not forever.” Rosana patted her son’s hand.

  “It’s been months, Mom, and nothing’s changing.”

  “Everything’s changing,” she said, looking at Joshua. “This young man is changing everything.”

  Joshua stood up, too quickly not to seem rude, but he didn’t care anymore. He needed air. This conversation was a crazy train. He’d meant to get some answers about a woman he cared for, not become some kind of savior.

  As though she sensed they’d pushed too far, Rosana took his hand in hers, said, “Give my daughter time, mijo. She’ll come around.”

  These words would cycle through his mind for months to come. Give her time. He didn’t know why he’d told her family he’d consider marrying her, but he did know he wanted to spend as much time with her as possible.

  Whether he needed to throw away his case notes or throw in the towel, he wasn’t sure.

  Jayden fell asleep on the ride home, worn out from the new people and full of pie. Joshua carried him upstairs to their apartment, Bianca following. He had offered to take her home, but she wanted to stay.

  She still hadn’t mentioned what had happened the other day at the Anne Geddes store, but she did ask what Joshua thought about her family and whether or not her mother seemed genuine. “What do you mean?” he asked, lugging the sleeping boy through the apartment. When she didn’t answer, he turned to look at her.

  She shrugged. “I don’t know what to think of that woman.”

  He waited to see if she would explain, and when she said nothing else, he turned back toward Jayden’s room to deliver his sleepy parcel to his bed. He didn’t mention the intense conversation after dinner, or how strong Rosana came on. Instead, he plopped Jayden gently down.

  “I’ll change him,” Bianca said, handing Jubilee to Joshua.

  This was new. A good sign. He watched with his usual interest as she helped the stiff little zombie boy into his night pull-ups and pajamas, his arms and legs hanging limp. From the doorway, Joshua held Jubilee like he would a stuffed animal, in one palm against his thigh, then caught himself and propped her against his shoulder, hoping Bianca hadn’t seen.

  “Night-night, mijo,” Bianca whispered, kissing Jayden’s forehead. Something like a fishhook caught inside Joshua. He couldn’t tell if it hurt or not.

  Before she could slip away, the zombie awoke. “Bee, you forgot a story.”

  “Tontito. Were you pretending to sleep?” Jayden’s eyebrows shot up. She’d caught him! Bianca laughed. Joshua couldn’t pin down what he felt at their camaraderie.

  She picked a book from the shelf and read: “There was once a velveteen rabbit, and in the beginning he was splendid. He was fat and bunchy, as a rabbit should be; his coat was spotted brown and white, he had real thread whiskers, and his ears were lined with pink sateen.”

  Jayden listened, spellbound. When Bee got to the part where the fairy turns the velveteen rabbit real, hopping on his haunches with the other forest rabbits, Jayden sprang from the bed then crouched on his rump and twitched his nose. Joshua laughed. How long would it stay like this? Jayden playing along. Joshua—playing along.

  He liked the justice of the velveteen rabbit proving himself in the end.

  “If he’d been my bunny,” Jayden said, “I’d have known it was him right away.”

  “Hmm. Then you’re a smart boy. Time for bed, mijito.”

  “Can I say good night to Jubilee?”

  Since the Anne Geddes store, Jayden had asked a few times if Jubilee was a doll or real. So what if the kid believed? What harm could it do?

  Joshua brought the doll from the doorway to the bed, and Jayden kissed her nose. “Night-night, Jubilee Bunny.”

  He switched on the constellation nightlight, which glowed blue against the wall (Jayden’s favorite was Ursa Major, the Great Bear), then he and Bianca left the room, keeping Jayden’s door cracked so the hallway light could shine in. He was afraid of the dark.

  At a safe distance from the boy’s room, Joshua whispered into Bianca’s neck, “Spend the night?” He wrapped his hands around her waist and kissed her shoulders from behind as he nudged her toward his bedroom. He’d wanted to pick her up and bury himself inside her all evening. He’d been so worried she would leave him. Yet here she was.

  “Yes,” she whispered, taking Jubilee from Joshua. “Let me put her to bed first.”

  He pulled his body away from hers and moved toward the bed while she set the doll in the bassinet and covered her with a blanket. She did not go through the whole bedtime routine he’d witnessed many other nights. Another good sign.

  Now she turned to him and began undressing.

  She’d slept over before, but this felt different. The nights Bianca had spent with Joshua, he’d held her close to his body but nothing more. His dick throbbed at the nearness of her thighs and ass, cradled against him, but he hadn’t wanted to pressure her. The truth was, he’d been scared. What would she think of the way he made love? She’d had a life before him. Her ex was her first. Did she shape to the curve of his body? What would she think of
Joshua’s body, his style? Let’s face it, he didn’t have a style. He had nothing to compare her to. He’d been a weirdo kid, a loner young man. The farthest he’d ever gotten was an awkward kiss with a sort-of friend at senior prom. But now, he ached for Bianca. Hoped that would be enough to carry him through.

  She pulled her dark-blue chiffon dress over her head, revealing a matching bra and lace thong. He’d anticipated this for three months, if he was honest with himself. He moved off the bed and came toward her, pulling her body against his.

  She was crying.

  “Did I do something wrong?” he asked, her tears on his skin. “Am I hurting you?”

  She held her hand to her face; he cradled her cheek in his palm.

  “No,” she said. “The opposite.”

  He traced the lines of her stomach and breasts.

  They were both made of scars, like her stretch marks, white and jagged and beautiful.

  He kissed each one.

  In the story of La Llorona, a woman comes unhinged from unrequited love. She drowns herself by drowning her babies. She is lost. She is gone forever to the riverbank. And her song sounds of death.

  This is no kind of ending.

  This is no kind of love.

  Rivers take, yes. But rivers bring back.

  Joshua came inside Bianca with such sweetness (I know of a river that empties into a gulf in the belly of Mexico. I know of an ocean that belly spills into, of salt I must drink, brindled fish I’ve become. Salt on my skin, my lover is drinking too. I know of a cycle that carries away what is clean, what is made clear. I know rain. I am rain. Love, let me rain into you. I know groundwater, freshwater. Oh love, the river is coming. Listen. She’s singing again).

  Twelve

  Nightbloom

  Before Jubilee

  The Brawley public library didn’t have many books, but it was a life source to Bee. She wouldn’t start at the community college for another couple of months, and she didn’t have enough money to buy books. Her job at the Desert Herald paid a little above minimum wage, but she was helping Mama pay the mortgage on the house-for-sale and when it sold, she’d have to find somewhere else to squat. She also had gas and groceries and puppy food and health insurance. Books weren’t a luxury but a necessity, and if she could’ve eaten the pages rather than the ground beef tacos she sustained herself with, she would have. But the library made it possible for her to eat both books and tacos, and she was currently living on Gloria Anzaldúa and Ana Castillo, one for sustenance and the other for sweetness, both of which she needed. Anzaldúa wrote, “Awareness of our situation must come before inner changes, which in turn come before changes in society. Nothing happens in the ‘real’ world unless it first happens in the images in our heads.” Bianca tried imagining a world in which fathers don’t violate their households, in which mamas teach their daughters to be strong rather than cower in a corner, or a world where cowering in a corner, too, is a kind of strength. Perhaps Mama had been teaching Bianca a survival tactic.

  Mama was the living one, after all.

  Yet here, now, Bianca felt defeated. She could’ve been so much more. But when she looked in the mirror, she saw a shadow. The aftereffect of something bright and glorious. Its absence.

  She hadn’t always been obsessed with babies. There was a time she believed she would change the world, lead a movement, follow Dolores Huerta and Sylvia Mendez, Ellen Ochoa, and Sonia Sotomayor. Where her bisabuela had picked pecans and oranges in the orchards, climbing the tallest trees with her small girlbody, dropping the fruit to the baskets below where her tías and tíos and primos stooped to pick those that had fallen on the ground; where her abuela had sewn in the garment district in downtown Los Angeles with her bisabuela, both women taking the bus each morning and evening, making the beautiful dresses to be sold in Beverly Hills and maybe worn by a movie star; and where her mother had cared for the ill, had gone to their crumbling homes, those diabetic elderly dying in the heat in the Valley—Bianca would grow and tend to the broken world, would find where it ached and heal it, would locate its source of ugliness and make it beautiful.

  Only, since she’d met Gabe and become La Llorona, she’d been growing the ugliness inside her. She could sense it warping the roots from within. The cactus flower had dropped from her when she should have been having a quinceañera, blooming across the dance floor in a bright, sequined dress, not spending the night at her boyfriend’s nana’s across town so that her mama wouldn’t know what she’d done, not taking a Tylenol for the cramping and eating the caldo de rez they’d made for her. They’d taken such good care of her.

  Had they done it for her? Or for their son’s chance at a football scholarship?

  She’d never know.

  What she did know: She was blessed with a safe procedure. She was blessed with women to check her for bleeding. She was blessed with choice.

  Only, she hadn’t chosen for herself.

  She hadn’t.

  Awareness must come. And it did. Too late.

  If she’d chosen for herself, she would have chosen the cactus spines. She would’ve chosen the one night a year the night-blooming cereus uncoils its moon-white skirt, opens its opalescent throat, and allows the bats who’ve flown hundreds of miles with their young clutching to their fur as they swim through the air, half starved from waiting, to drink their fill and feed their next generation of creatures who can see through the dark. She’d have been a Queen of the Night and taught her daughter to give her body to no Gabe.

  She knew that, deep inside.

  Where Anzaldúa and Castillo dwelled, where she fed on the nectar of their toughest blossoms.

  These truths would moonstone in her palm and she would grasp her hand shut, hold it tight to her heart, and try to carry it with her toward the front door, out onto the walkway, into the world.

  Until Gabe would bend her over. And call her gordita or cochina. Chubby girl. Dirty girl.

  She’d open her palm, and the stone had turned to dust.

  She swept it away on her jeans.

  A daughter doesn’t solve anything; she needed her mama to tell her this.

  But she makes the world a lot less lonely. A lot less ugly.

  Thirteen

  The Sign

  With Jubilee

  After Thanksgiving, Bee stayed with Joshua most nights. She only returned to Matty’s for clothes and essentials. It all felt so natural, though a wriggling worm in the pit of his stomach kept reminding him that he was acting as irrationally as his almost-live-in-girlfriend. He pushed that nagging whisper down. When he was with Bee, it almost felt like Jubilee was a real baby. Bee was that convincing. Or he just needed her warmth, needed her glowing.

  One morning, a few weeks after Thanksgiving, Bianca told Josh the news she’d been keeping secret because she hadn’t wanted to jinx it. Jayden was still in bed, but she and Josh were sitting together with coffee and a plate of cinnamon rolls, their textbooks open. Finals loomed. She curled her legs beneath her on the couch in what Jayden called crisscross applesauce.

  “I’m going to New York,” she blurted, her words ballooning toward the ceiling.

  Joshua looked up from his psychology textbook, a lopsided grin spreading across his face, though his throat felt sandpaper rough. The first thought that rushed through his mind: he hadn’t realized she was well enough for long trips across the country. Then a sting of shame: had he thought his almost-live-in-girlfriend, the woman he was trusting around his almost-son, was too unstable to travel across the country? He cleared his throat and spoke carefully. “That’s amazing, Bee. When? For how long?”

  She told him about Elena, her writing instructor, and how, several weeks before, she had told Bianca about an NYU workshop for undergrads during winter break. She had recommended Bianca for a minority scholarship and given her the application materials. Bianca submitted a sample of h
er poetry along with the application, and they’d accepted her. Between the NYU financial aid and a Cal State travel grant, the trip was paid for.

  She just had to get on a plane and go.

  She’d never been on a plane before, she told him. A few years ago, she’d had no idea there were such a thing as writers’ workshops. She’d had no idea there were other living poets. They taught her the dead cis white guys in school. She’d soaked all the rhymes in and could say them by heart. But they hadn’t spoken to her directly, hadn’t climbed into her window and whispered, You’re safe. She knew Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath because she wrote to them in her journals, pages and pages of responses to their poems, pages and pages of their responses to her, or at least, as she imagined their voices in her head.

  At Holy Cross she’d found out that Sandra Cisneros was giving a reading at the Santa Ana public library. She’d found her books online and devoured them like Nana’s enchiladas. Like posole on New Year’s Eve. She’d filled her belly with her red-hot words—

  You my saltwater pearl,

  my mother, my father,

  my bastard child,

  heaven and hurt,

  you my slavery of sadness,

  my wrinkled heart.

  Bianca wanted badly to be a Loose Woman like her. To shake loose. Shake free.

  She told him all of this, and yet, she said, “I can’t tell if I’m excited or scared.”

  Joshua shut his textbook and listened between the lines. This kind of passion he’d only seen her pour into Jubilee, now she was talking about something real. Had this been the sign he’d been waiting for? A sign that she was truly on the road to recovery? “This is incredible, Bee. Excited. I think that’s what you should be.” He turned and faced her again, hiding his relief and hope, trying only to show his enthusiasm and support. “You should definitely go.”