Jubilee

by Jennifer Givhan

  She said nothing, but kneeled to stand. With his free hand, Joshua helped her the rest of the way up. But she didn’t follow him into Jayden’s bedroom.

  Joshua helped Jayden into his pajamas. Jayden asked, “Why was Bee yelling like that? Was she mad at me? Did I do something bad?”

  Joshua’s head hurt. What the hell had happened?

  “No, sunshine. You didn’t do anything wrong. Bee gets scared sometimes. I think it’s the new baby.” He tried explaining to him about pregnant women, but Joshua wasn’t sure he understood any better than Jayden did.

  That night, Bee lay in their bed, comforter pulled to her neck. Joshua sat beside her.

  “What happened, Bee?”

  She shook her head.

  “Did you remember something?”

  He could have sworn she looked at him with a flicker of recognition, some emotion he couldn’t pinpoint. Like she wanted to tell him something. Like guilt.

  She turned away, toward the window, the lights from the arboretum and university glowing against the dark glass. “No.”

  “Jayden thought you were mad at him.”

  She was crying now. She wiped her face. “I’m sorry.”

  In the weeks following, he asked her what had happened in a few different ways. Played the waiting game some more. Gave her more time. Shifted tactics. Asked again.

  She never answered.

  He’d read in a book called Suspicious Minds something that hit him with the gravity of their situation. The authors said that although delusions appear to be irrational thoughts, they are normal thoughts about abnormal experiences caused, most likely, by brain disorders. When someone has a strange experience, they try to make sense of it. They say a delusion is a rational mind coming to grips with bizarre psychological events.

  He didn’t believe Bee had a brain disorder. And he didn’t think her therapist had suspected that either, otherwise he wouldn’t have let her stop attending her sessions (she wouldn’t tell him so, but Joshua gleaned the meaning behind her words and didn’t press when she told him she was free of the unshocking Dr. Norris). But that bizarre experience part sank in. Whatever had broken in Bee had congealed in Jubilee. Joshua told himself they were fixing it together.

  It never happened again. He didn’t let her give Jayden a bath by herself again either, but still. He told himself it was normal for a pregnant woman to freak out. Hormones. Jayden was fine. The date was set. Nothing had really happened. It was a silly scare. She didn’t need a therapist. He was practically a therapist himself. He’d figure this out for them. She’d open up. He’d help her open up. They were fine.

  Nineteen

  Ghost Already

  Before Jubilee

  Bianca used to like the rodeo. It came to Brawley each November, Cattle Call Park filling with kettle-corn-eating swarms of townsfolk for the event that claimed them statewide fame. The two hotels in town booked up. Main Street held a parade. The rodeo itself transpired in the river’s northeast basin, the rich white farmer’s side of town, where the only houses that could pass for mansions spackled the few blocks saddling the cliffs above the park. People from all over the Southwest came to watch cowboys and cowgirls barrel race and rope calf. Cars flattened the sallow grass. People trudged dusty fields toward the arena. Sparkly-booted girls in pink-fringe cowboy hats and suede-vested boys in Wranglers flashed through the crowd. The smell of barbacoa mixed with musty alfalfa, and the metallic chain-linked fence engulfed them as they approached the booths of concessions below the bleachers. Sweet, salty kettle corn stirred in black, cast-iron cauldrons sold for five dollars a bag, Mama’s favorite part of the rodeo. Bianca had brought her a bag every time she’d gone without her. Now, she considered mailing one to Abuela’s. But deep down, she didn’t want to send her mama anything sweet.

  As they wandered the concessions before the show, Gabe held Bianca’s hand on one side, Lana’s on the other. His little girl had recovered quickly from whatever’d fevered her the weekend before. They’d already attended the Chili Cook-Off and the Cattle Call Parade, but Lana’s energy hadn’t seemed to wane. She’d been chattering all morning about the horses and floats and could she buy this trinket or that sugared snack.

  Gabe steered them toward the Budweiser stand. Its line stretched farther than any other, longer than the kettle corn line. He bought two cups, and no one asked questions though Bianca didn’t show ID and couldn’t have if they’d asked.

  Esme had gone ahead with her comadres and was already in the stands when Gabe, Bianca, and Lana took their seats on the benches near the bullpens, facing the afternoon sun. Bianca didn’t say anything when Gabe handed her a beer; as she sipped it, a girl she knew from high school sang the National Anthem all American Idol style, kicking off the rodeo. People cheered and yelled as the first event unfolded: wild bronco saddling. Only men ran into the arena, though women joined in most of the other events. The bullhorn blasted. Bianca peeled paint chips from the bench as she watched, the sticky mess clotting under her fingernails.

  A few minutes later, Lana complained the sun hurt her eyes. Bianca shaded her with an oversized umbrella Esme had brought, but Lana wasn’t appeased. She demanded a hot dog, so Bianca offered to carry her down to the stands to buy one.

  “Come on, chulita,” she’d said, taking the girl by the hand and leading her down the bleachers. Though she didn’t earn much at the Desert Herald, she made enough to buy her boyfriend’s daughter and her a snack. She sat beside Lana at a Sequoia-shaded picnic table, crunching churritos with lemon and chile between her teeth and licking the spicy sauce from her fingers while Lana stuffed a hot dog into her mouth in too-big bites and got mustard all over her face. Longing washed over Bianca. Lana. Won’t you pretend you’re mine? Girl with sticky yellow mouth. Woman with sticky yellow ache. They were a landscape. That needed smudging. Lana. I want to be a mama. She wiped Lana’s mouth with a napkin. Lana chatted about the food, the booths, the grass, the cowboys.

  They finished eating then headed back toward the bleachers, stopping under the metal stairway to admire the horses in their holding pens. She swooped Lana up and leaned her against the fence for a better view. Girl giggling at horses. Brown, with flies in their eyes.

  Outside the fence encircling the arena an asphalt road curved a mile round. It’s where she and Gabe used to run in high school. When she was still a cheerleader, and he was still the boy who’d knocked her up.

  Beyond the road, a playground and picnic spot with built-in barbecues. How often she’d zipped past birthday parties, screaming children, piñatas strung from trees. Holding Lana, it wasn’t so ridiculous. I thought that would be us. This had been their favorite place. Before she’d realized what she’d let go in the Valley, that depression in her belly. I was too young. The way they ran, they were preparing for their sprint out of town. Gabe would call out between breaths, “Come on, punk, just a little farther.” She’d bite her lip, lift her head, and keep running. It stung her chest. Her legs throbbed. But she ran. After they’d gone a few times around the arena, he’d yell, “Let’s go up the hill.” He, bounding up the asphalt, climbing out of the dell and she, plodding along after him, huffing and puffing. If she lagged behind, he’d look over his shoulder and mouth, “A few more steps. You can make it.”

  Lana fell asleep on Bianca’s shoulder, and for a moment Bianca considered herself quite motherly before she decided all small children who haven’t napped will tire after eating and wandering around in the afternoon sunshine. She sighed and held the girl tightly anyway as she crept back into the stands and plopped beside Gabe, feeling too nostalgic. And bitter. He didn’t notice, only offered her a plastic cup of beer. Esme took Lana from Bianca’s arms when she saw Bianca holding both the girl and the cup. Bianca said nothing, but the lingering warmth where the girl’s breath and sleep-dampened skin had been now felt prickly and strange. The clamminess of a fever breaking, without the rel
ief. She chugged the beer. It was bull-riding time: each rider had eight seconds. Eight measly seconds. “Look at that poor jerk,” Gabe said, laughing at a thrown cowboy being chased by a bull while the rodeo hands waved and zigzagged so the cowboy could flee the ring.

  She stared at Gabe. Boy she’d watched grow into man. Man she wasn’t sure she liked. Lana curled on the bench, her feet propped on Bianca’s lap, her head on Esme. Bianca lifted Lana’s legs off her and set them on the bench. “I’ll be right back,” she whispered to Gabe, but he didn’t look at her.

  “All that beer,” he said, moving his big feet out of her way. As she scooted over him, he slapped her ass, but she didn’t let him see her react. She lurched toward the aisle, heading toward the bathroom stall, but when she got there, retching, she only hovered above the toilet, waiting for something that wouldn’t come.

  Outside the bathroom, while she rinsed her hands with drinking fountain water, she realized some guy stood nearby watching her and chuckling. She wanted to tell him to fuck off but decided not to start a fight with a stranger, especially not one wearing cowboy boots.

  “The sink’s not working in the lady’s room either?” He flashed a smile that meant I don’t know what destruction we’re capable of. His hair was the color of summer squash beneath his cowboy hat. His green eyes playful. He wore tight Wranglers and cowboy boots.

  “No, it won’t turn on. I know this isn’t exactly hygienic, but I had to do something.”

  “Let me get you a paper towel,” he said. “Hang on.” And for some reason, she did. He strode (there’s no other way to describe his cowboy walk) to the other side of the building where he asked someone behind the booth, “Excuse me, ma’am, may I please have a paper towel?”

  When he came back, his smile inviting and startling as ever, he held out a stack of napkins. “This is the best they could do,” he said, handing them to her.

  “Thank you.” The veins in her neck fluttered as she wiped her hands in the compulsive way she might have were she Lady Macbeth instead of La Llorona. When she finished drying, he took the crumpled napkins, threw them into the trash barrel, then kept his hand out to shake hers.

  “I’m Luke, by the way.”

  “Luke, I’m Bianca.” Her stomach roiled again, but in the way that meant hunger not illness. “Do you work here or do you just enjoy standing outside the restroom handing women napkins?”

  “I rode in the show today,” Luke said. “And hey, don’t knock the napkins. This is a great way to pick up the ladies.” He winked, and Bianca tried hard to remember the scar on Gabe’s cheek. Or his smell of Cool Water cologne. “Did it work on you?”

  She shook her head, wondering what he smelled like. She wasn’t quite close enough.

  “Aw, darn it. I was sure I had you at paper towels.”

  She laughed, aware of the heat prickling her neck and cheeks, and the fact that she sounded like a silly eighth-grade girl, opening herself to loss. “Well, thanks again, but I should get back up to my seat. Someone’s waiting for me.”

  “Oh, of course,” he said, and she pretended to ignore the disappointment in his voice. Given enough time, hope faded. Hope, that thing with feathers, fell ceremonious as tombs. She misquoted Emily, but it still felt true. “You’re so pretty,” Luke said, “of course you have someone up there. Is it serious?”

  “Dead serious.”

  “That bad? Well, I know a cowboy who’d be glad to revive you.”

  “You’re too kind, cowboy.” She couldn’t believe she’d said that aloud. “You are the cowboy, right?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” He took his hat off and gestured a bow.

  Her chest matched the stomping from the arena. How easy it might have been to give in. To walk away. How easy it might have been to let go. But the sticky yellow girl up in the stands caught the rutted burial ground inside of her, and she knew she couldn’t. “Even so, cowboy, my someone has been around awhile, and I think I need to finish the rodeo with him.”

  “May I at least buy you a beer?”

  “That, you can do.” Her face felt hot, and she eyed the stands again, making sure Gabe wasn’t watching.

  “Well, let’s go then, pretty lady,” he motioned her to pass, touching her elbow. She focused on the Budweiser sign instead of his tight jeans.

  After buying two drinks and handing one to her, Luke raised his cup to hers and said, “Cheers. To what might have been great, were there not someone up there.” Then he motioned his cup to the bleachers. “And to that lucky guy up there.”

  Luckiness tasted sour in Bianca’s mouth. “It was nice to meet you, cowboy,” she said. “Thanks for the drink.” He tipped his hat, and she walked away. But when she climbed back up the stairs and sat beside Gabe, he asked how she’d gotten the beer. She handed it to him, considering lying. Instead, she settled on the truth. “A nice guy at the concessions bought it.”

  “Wow. That was nice of him.” He took a sip. “And what did you do to deserve it?”

  “Nothing. He saw me standing there and asked if I wanted a beer.”

  He made a sarcastic grunting sound and looked at her like she was one of those rag dolls people buy to scream obscenities at, frustration dolls. “Yeah, right,” he said. “That guy was trying to get in your jeans.”

  “Gabe, just drink the beer. Free beer is free beer.”

  “Yeah. Right.”

  “Here, let me have some then.” She grabbed the cup back from him and chugged it.

  “You looking to get drunk?”

  “Maybe.”

  “You know what I do to you when you’re drunk?” He smirked in a way that made her feel muddy, and she checked whether Esme or Lana noticed, but one was watching the rodeo and the other was sleeping. Gabe pulled her close to his body, but she felt herself becoming ghost already, some unfortunate legend. The kind you already know the ending to but read anyway because there’s something powerful pulling you through. Like it would hurt you not to finish.

  In his pine-green truck after the rodeo, after he’d dropped off his daughter with Esme and took Bianca out to the country, past Brandt road, past the fields of alfalfa, between the haystacks, beside a canal flowing with irrigation water, Gabe groaned, “So you like to pick up nice guys at rodeos? You’re a little slut who lets guys buy you beer?”

  He unbuckled her seatbelt then pulled her across the bucket seat to his lap, her ass on the steering wheel. She didn’t think to open the passenger door, to press chancla to packed dirt, to jump into ditchwater. “Are you a slut, Bee?” He slapped her face, his palm flat against her cheek. He tore open her blouse, squeezed her breasts together.

  “No,” she whispered, kissing him back, not sure if they were playing a game.

  He laughed, clenching her shoulders. Then he pushed her away from his body, held her in front of him, looked hard into her face, and she got her answer. “You’re not?” he asked, his voice cold and flat. “Then why did you let some jerk hit on you?”

  “It was just beer, Gabe.” She didn’t want to apologize. Why should she apologize? She hadn’t done anything wrong. “Can’t we let it go?”

  “You want me to let it go that my girlfriend is a puta whore? Fine. I’ll let it go.” He pushed her hard from his lap, slammed her to the passenger seat, yanked her jeans from her hips to below her ass, unbuttoned his own jeans, climbed on top of her and thrust in. She didn’t cry out, but she could taste the blood-salt in her mouth where she’d bitten her own skin. “Is this what you wanted, puta?”

  “No,” she whispered.

  He thrust harder, tearing at her skin. She winced.

  “No,” she said again, louder.

  But he wouldn’t stop.

  Girl with sticky yellow mouth. I was much further out than you thought. Mama’s favorite kettle corn stirred in a wide, black cauldron. Drowning in sweetness. She’s yours, not mine. I’m yours, not
mine. This world is yours, not mine. It is too cold always.

  “Say it, say you’re a slut.”

  I used to love you. We snuck up to your Nana’s rooftop across the tracks, wine coolers in your back pocket as we climbed. Lay on the sleeping bag you’d heaved up there, mapping ourselves in the stars. Reading each other’s palms.

  “Puta whore. You wanted that drink. You took that drink. Now tell me what you are.”

  Chaser lights blinking, across the street. And somewhere in the distance, a girlchild swimming. Under a bridge. Through ditchwater. Immobilized, arrested by stones, a fish without fins, her scaly body slick with desire. No, not desire. The girl is swimming for her life.

  “Tell me, goddamn you.”

  On her hands and knees, her face pressed against the bucket seat, tears rolled down the upholstery, stains at her cheeks. Out, out damn spot. Life’s but a walking candle. And I haven’t gone for weariness. I’ve just gone.

  “What? I can’t hear you.”

  “I’m a slut.”

  “That’s right.” His fists through her hair, pressing her down, down.

  She had to leave Gabe. She finally knew that.

  Twenty

  A Slice of

  Wedding Cake

  With Jubilee

  Joshua married Bee on a brisk early-March afternoon, the ceremony held at the historic Norwalk courthouse where Bee’s parents had been married twenty-one years earlier with Bee in her mama’s belly. Only Rosana, Matty, and Handro came to witness. Joshua wished he could’ve invited Olivia and Patti but had no idea how to contact them. And either outcome, whether they’d shown up or ignored his invitation, would’ve hurt.

  Joshua married Bee despite or perhaps in spite of any misgivings.

  Matty had taken Joshua aside before the wedding and given him another of his take-care-of-my-sister speeches. Joshua had become inured to Matty’s big-brotherly ways and, smiling wide, thanked him.