She got it halfway down before she had to stop for air.
Gabe was smiling wryly at her. “Feel better?”
“Never,” she said, heart-on-sleeve.
He came closer, wiped the tomato juice from her upper lip. “Sorry about the mugs. My parents had a party last night, and all the glasses are still in the sink.”
She smiled now too, thinking but not saying aloud, Tontito, why not wash one then? Instead she said, “I can pretend I’m a wino this way, hiding my liquor in plain sight.”
He kissed her. Tenderly, the way he had when he was still a boy and she was still a girl. Before they’d grown and fucked everything up.
She pulled back, groaning but not with passion. “My head hurts.”
“You drank half of Mexico last night.” He chuckled.
“Did I?” She remembered dancing, she remembered the strippers and being angry, so hurt. But had she drunk more after that, after she’d gone to sleep it off in the truck? When alcohol was involved, Bee couldn’t often remember everything she’d said or done. It scared her, mostly because it reminded her of Dad. “Do you know why they call it hair of the dog?” she asked him.
He squinched his eyes in a mock thoughtful expression. “Mmmm, no. Lay it on me, Profesora.” He squeezed her ass, pressed his face against her neck, kissed her collarbone.
Her red-bearded father had taught her this. He’d also read to her from his two favorite Roberts—Burns and Louis Stevenson—in his best burr, his birthright and hers, although her dark skin and hair in this Valley had cut her off from her Anglo side. “It’s from a Scottish folk remedy for rabies; plucking hair from the vicious dog and applying it to the wound will cure the infection.” She pressed her fingers together and tweezed a piece of Gabe’s baby-fine black hair, pulled it out.
“What the hell?” He groaned then playfully bit her shoulder. “I’m a dog now, huh?”
“A vicious one.”
She dropped the strand of hair into her mug, feeling like a bruja, a powerful witch. And gulped the rest down.
Shakira sang, My hips don’t lie. Gabe’s ringtone. He was low-key obsessed with Shakira. They’d seen her on Univision, before she’d crossed over to Gringo pop lovers, when she was still a so-called political rockera with black hair, singing angsty Spanish calls-to-arms. But Gabe loved the blond, belly-dancing version better. Of course he did.
He reached across the bed to the floor, fished his phone out of the jeans he’d worn to the club, tapped the screen.
“Who was that?” she asked.
“Alarm.”
Did his eyes shift upward to the left, a sign of lying? Bee couldn’t tell.
“Why’d you set an alarm for a Sunday morning?”
“To remind me to call Lana.”
She wanted to say, how sad. He needed an alarm to remember to call his daughter. But then she thought, she wished her Dad could set an alarm to call her. She said, “Oh, that’s sweet.”
He took the phone into the next room, and Bee, alone with her empty mug, got up, smoothed out her wrinkled dress, and went to see if Esme was awake yet, maybe needed help with breakfast.
Turned out Lana had a fever, pobrecita. Gabe and Katrina fought over why she hadn’t called him. Lana was two years old. Did Katrina still need to call Gabe every time their baby was sick? Yes, she did. Dammit. Of course she did. He wanted to be there. He had a right to be there. Why was she always trying to keep his kid from him?
Bee heard this version when Gabe relayed it to Esme, as Bee browned the tortillas in the skillet and scrambled the eggs for the migas.
When it was finished, he guzzled down the breakfast, pecked Esme on the cheek, and said, “Come on, Bee, I’ll give you a ride home on my way to Katrina’s.”
Hadn’t he meant Lana’s?
Bee didn’t even care this morning, honestly. She was so fucking tired. Of course he hadn’t invited her. Did she even want to spend her Sunday in his baby mama’s trailer in Westmorland, listening to them fight over their feverish toddler?
God no.
Her head throbbed.
“I’ll call you later, okay, punk?” A sobriquet he’d called her since high school, but right now she felt like his kid sister, his fuck buddy. As she stepped out of the truck via the side rail, he said, “I love you.”
She knew he did. She also knew it wasn’t enough.
If she explained why she was digging in the backyard with the rusted shovel Dad had left in the shed on the side of the house, who would have understood?
Not Gabe, that’s for sure.
She would’ve called Lily, but Lily was dealing with a houseful of demons of her own. Not quite as literal as Bee’s. But nearly everyone in Lily’s house had one ailment or another, and Lily’s forever-boyfriend Sam meant well but never quite got the hint that sometimes girlwomen need alone time. As in, girls only. Things between Lily and Bee hadn’t been the same since they’d gotten a Gabe and a Sam. No, she couldn’t call Lily. She had her own frustrating life and didn’t need Bee’s added drama. Therefore do not worry about Bee, for Bee will worry about herself. Each Lily has enough trouble of her own.
Her oft-neglected boxer scampered around Bee as she gripped the shovel and struck the hard dirt beneath the dead, yellowed grass where a girlhood swing set once stood, before its metal hinges sagged and warped, the slide rutting inward, a sharp, jagged tuna-can lid, and they’d had to tear it down before it collapsed. It was a good thing Gabe had dropped Bee off; she’d almost forgotten about Kanga, and the pobrecita had needed her breakfast too. It was a wonder she could keep this puppy alive. What had she been thinking, getting a dog in her precarious existence? Always hovering on an edge. She couldn’t scrape together enough money for dog food a few weeks back and had cooked up the ground beef she’d bought for her own tacos, fed the dog a whole bowlful. Lord, the vomit. She hadn’t known any creature could vomit such copious amounts. Bee felt horrible. She had no right to be a dog mother. Much less any human creature’s mother. And that thought had gripped her with a sadness she still hadn’t been able to shake.
Rust flaked off the shovel handle onto her hands. She could already feel blisters forming. She gripped tighter. The weeping shade tree in the center of the yard kept her from the sun, but the humidity in this desert, even in November, clung her sweat-heavy dress to her in minutes. She still hadn’t taken off her dancing clothes. Her dad had planted the lebbek tree, an Indian deciduous he’d read about in the Desert Herald (in a section called the Horticulturalist, which gave plant advice for their plot of desert) and had gone out and bought a fledging, planting it dead smack in the center, so when it grew, and it grew rapidly, requiring little moisture in the soil, it would cool almost the entire yard. He’d read the article aloud to Bee, and she’d loved the poetry of the journalist: “Another strong point in their favor is the ease with which they may be transplanted at all ages, with little danger of loss.” She loved the shade tree’s other names too. Its apodos: flea tree, koko, woman’s tongue tree. With its tufts of downy dandelion, its long, iridescent, string-bean seed pods. She could see the fleas and the tongues, slipping in and out of the leaves.
Sometimes she’d pluck as many tongue pods as she could, peel each one back, give each round seed a name before planting it in the dirt, praying she would sprout into a girl who could talk back, sassy, a girl who could speak for herself.
The problem came when she started seeing real tongues, not seed pods but slick, pink, slimy things, wriggling from the branches.
Severed tongues. They floated her to the ceiling at night. Kept her pinned where she shouldn’t have been.
Had Bianca floated through the hallways at night, upside down, before the tongues?
She must have.
Had it begun the night Dad first attempted suicide? At Bisabuela’s house in Los Angeles? His slurring, seizured exit through the hallway and into
the night when Bee was four years old.
Bee had two fathers growing up: 1.) the fun-loving Dad who danced her around the kitchen on his feet; made her the jelly to his peanut butter sandwiches; rode her on the back of his bicycle, always with a helmet; pushed her on the swing set beneath the shade tree he’d planted for her, reciting, Oh, how I love to go up in a swing, up in the sky so blue; taught her as many numbers of pi as she could keep track of, insistent they could follow the irrational number into infinity. That father had carried her into infinity.
2.) the other Dad. The mean drunk. The terrifying drunk.
And only one of them had died.
The mean drunk had stayed with her. He haunted her.
One need not be a Chamber—to be Haunted—
One need not be a House—
The Brain has Corridors—surpassing
Material Place—
quoth the Emily. “So that now, to still the beating of my heart, I stood repeating,” sayeth the Poe. Her hands ached in the familiar way of the shovel. How far down had she hollowed last time?
As she thrust into the plot of backyard, scabbed over from her latest dig, she recounted as many words as she could for house, starting with Frida’s Casa Azul, Blue House. Split house. Hothouse. Icehouse. Fish house. Dollhouse. Broken doll. Scratch that. Broken house. Greenhouse. Black house. House of cards, crumbling. Slaughterhouse. Housewarming. Welcome home, baby. Hell house. Or was that hellhound? Sugarhouse. Housefly, buzzing on the dog vomit house. Houseplant, wilting. Madhouse. Ay, there’s the rub. Angry fucking haunted house. Root house. Belly house. Father house. Dead house. Severing her from before and after house. Too many befores and afters. Severing her like the seed pods of her women’s tongues. House tongue.
She’d never told anyone about the abortion. Not even her parents. Especially not her parents.
Thud. The shovel knocked against wood, a familiar sound. She dropped to the ground, and on hands and knees began digging with her hands, dry, rocky soil caking under her fingernails. Kanga sniffed at the edges of the hole, pawing curiously at the clods of dirt that Bee was scooping to the edges; she didn’t shoo away her dog. She’d never had company out here before, not like this. It felt nice not to be alone. And not to have to explain what she was doing.
Sweat beaded her neck and forehead, as she cupped her hands into the earth and dredged up the wooden box, the size of an old-fashioned milk crate that could hold half a dozen glass, quart bottles of milk, lidded; she’d found the crate in her dad’s chemistry lab at the high school, where she used to visit sometimes when she was a little girl, mildly sick, and Mama was working because there was no other family in the Valley. So she would curl up in Dad’s lab, making a bed for herself beneath his desk, his lab coat for a pillow. Other times, when school had let out early but her brother had commitments, Dad would pick her up and bring her back to his lab, and she’d wander around reading all the labels on the bottles of chemicals, playing with the eye-washing station, swiping her finger along the countertops searching for traces of magic in the science.
In one storage closet, she’d found a crate of beakers and wanted so badly to conduct experiments of her own that she pulled it out and headed toward the swivel stools and counter when she tripped on the linoleum floor and lurched forward, dropping the crate and all its glass contents. Dad had found her gingerly picking up the largest chunks.
She’d expected him to scream, like at home. Her body instinctively waited for the flinch. But instead he asked if she was all right. She nodded, and he got the broom and dustpan. After they’d finished cleaning, he’d taken out another set of equipment, filled one beaker with water, added phenolphthalein, then poured the mixture into a second beaker he’d filled with a base. In this way, he changed water into wine. The glass of clear water turned spectacularly bloodred. Bianca had gasped in wonder and delight, clapped her hands. “Another, Daddy. Another!” Whether he’d performed another or not, she couldn’t remember, but he’d sent her home with the crate, filled with a few supplies (sans chemicals beyond basic kitchen-pantry ingredients) so she could recreate her own experiments whenever she wanted.
As the years, too, changed from water to wine and her father’s alcoholism worsened, Bianca buried the box. Not empty. Its contents:
1.) The Nutcracker pin that broke her mama’s heart. When Bee was a tin soldier in the ballet, a professional show put on by the Yuma Ballet Company, who’d come all the way from Arizona and recruited young dancers in the Valley, Mama had been so proud. After the final curtain call, when all the other girls’ moms brought them flowers, Bianca’s mama had given her a gold-plated Nutcracker pin. Bianca had been so angry, she’d shoved it back in Mama’s hands, tears streaming down her face. She’d never gotten flowers before, had wanted to be just like all the other girls in town. In the car ride home, Mama had said, her voice low and plaintive, Flowers wilt, mija. I wanted to give you something that wouldn’t die.
2.) Bee’s first communion rosary. From the day of her mismatched lacy white socks and the pristine dress, the white-flowered wreath and satin slippers that Mama had bought for her at the swap meet in Calexico. Bianca had lost the dress and socks, the wreath and ballet slippers, or maybe Mama had put them away in her cedar chest at the end of her bed. But the rosary Bee had kept in her bedroom. And she’d put it in the coffin box when she wasn’t a girl anymore.
3.) The baby outfit she’d shoplifted the day she’d found out she was pregnant. A simple, yellow onesie. Though in her heart, she knew it must’ve been a girlchild. Come to save her. She’d kept the pregnancy test too, its cross still marking someone was there.
4.) One jagged face piece of the porcelain doll her father had smashed in a drunken rage. Bee couldn’t fit all the bruises into the box. But this doll named Penelope she’d loved all through girlhood. What was left of her. She fit. Mama had thrown away the rest, but this piece had hidden under Bee’s bed. And she’d salvaged it. Buried it here.
In the graveyard of broken things, stolen things. Her father had stolen her girlhood. Gabe had stolen her girl. Or at least, the girl she’d been.
You’re not supposed to exhume bodies in a graveyard but Bianca couldn’t help it. She had to hold the skeletal remains under the lebbek tree, its tongues warbling in the desert heat. She had to lie on the matted grass and clutch the dirt while the dog ran off to sniff out a neighbor’s cat. She had to hold them until she buried them again. She couldn’t let them go.
Eighteen
Heart. Beating
With Jubilee
Joshua watched Bianca hanging her Frida Kahlo reprints on his bedroom walls, which had been bare before she began refurnishing, and he liked the new colors. The Broken Column. Still life with Pitahayas. Monkeys, monkeys everywhere. Portraits in beads and parrots. But The Two Fridas was Bee’s favorite; she’d said: “One woman, a part of another woman, cauterizing her own heart. Two women in one. One hanging on. The other letting go.” All while balancing atop their bed, hammer in one hand, wooden painting in the other, nail between her lips.
Instead of backing off as Matty had advised, Joshua had asked Bee to live with him for real, and she’d agreed. They’d gotten her a background check and fingerprint scan since she’d be an adult living in the house with Jayden, same as Joshua had when he’d first become a kin caregiver, but she’d passed that with flying colors—though he had to admit, a part of him had been scared she wouldn’t. He felt a little ashamed he was so relieved to see in official documentation that she had no history of arrests or convictions. He’d ticked that off his mental list. Whatever had happened to her in the Valley, it hadn’t been criminal.
The past few weeks though, since she’d officially moved in, she’d been moody and sullen. He wouldn’t go to Matty again. It wasn’t so bad; nothing he couldn’t handle. He’d heard that women could act bizarre—you know, hormones. Besides, compared to Olivia, Bee was a cakew
alk. He hadn’t lived with a woman since Patti and that was back when he was a kid, so he hadn’t paid attention to whether she’d left tampons in the trashcan or whatnot. He just figured Bee must’ve had a painful period because she went to the bathroom a lot and wasn’t interested in sex. He didn’t ask more than if she needed anything. He didn’t want to be insensitive so he gave her space. She let him cuddle her in bed and she still kissed him. He could’ve kissed that woman for hours, asthma flaring or not, though he could swear since he’d been with Bee, everything was better, even his asthma. He needed his inhaler less and less.
He helped her move into his place the week she got back from New York. They wanted it settled before the spring semester. After he’d finished loading the last of her things into his car and gone back to get her goldfish, Matty had taken him aside through a sliding glass door to the side yard and warned him that though she seemed fine, to watch her closely. He repeated mentally unstable, and Joshua shifted the fishbowl in his hands, uncomfortable. “She could still relapse, you know,” Matty had said. “She’s not cured or anything.” He said cured in a way that made Joshua think he wanted her to relapse. But that was crazy. He’d probably misread his tone.
Now Bee was all moved in, and they’d set the goldfish on a table in the living room to make it official. She and her Jubilee were living with Joshua and his boy. Nothing left but to hang artwork in their bedroom, she’d said.
“I have big news.” She stepped down from the bed where she’d finished nailing in The Two Fridas. She sat cross-legged on the comforter, staring at Joshua.
He took a deep breath, trying to gauge whether it was good news or bad, her moods had been so quirky lately. But she looked cute sitting there all serious for an important meeting in her pajamas, hammer in her hands, and that watermelon glow that hadn’t left her cheeks and face since she’d moved in with him. In fact, she looked more beautiful than ever.
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