When I Knew You

by Desireé Prosapio

Chapter 21

  After a few minutes of digging through the articles we went into the kitchen, a big beautiful room with a wrap around counter. The oven buzzed and Gustav rushed over with a pair of pot holders to take out a pizza.

  "Frozen, I'm afraid," he said. "I'm not much of a cook." He set it down on a cutting board and searched the drawers for a cutter.

  "So I take it you don't live here?" I asked, aiding in the search.

  "No, this is my niece's home. Her husband builds airplanes. As a hobby. There's a landing strip in the back. Everyone in the neighborhood flies." He pulled out a teal colored pizza blade and held it up triumphantly. "Aha! As I was saying, my niece and her husband are off on a trip and won't be back for another week."

  Irena had found some glasses, and Lupe returned from a pantry with cans of soda. I tracked down plates and napkins. As we sat down I asked my question again. "Why did you call my mother?"

  Lupe looked surprised. "Because of her reputation."

  Gustav handed me a slice. "Kati, your mother was pretty well known for researching land grants in the area. She was writing a thesis about challenges to ownership in oil and gas fields. She was going to get include her findings in her dissertation. She'd been doing the work for years."

  "When I asked my attorney," Lupe said, "he claimed your mother was the best in the state. And the price was right." Lupe said.

  "What price?" I asked.

  "She did it for free." Lupe took her slice from Gustav. "She said we were related somehow. I never found out how."

  "I believe your grandmother knows why, Kati." Gustav took out a fork and knife and started cutting his pizza. "But Antonia probably would have done it anyway. She rarely charged people."

  I glanced at Lupe and Irena. I'd never seen anyone eat their pizza with a fork and knife before. Irena smiled wryly and picked up her pizza and started to eat. Lupe and I did the same.

  "She was like that," Gustav said between forkfuls. "She worried at knots. Things that didn't finish neatly, didn't fit the record; they nagged at her. That's what I told her. She could not help but worry at knots."

  I thought of Antonia at the table, counting the pennies, determined to understand. Maybe that was the part of my mother that had remained when she lost everything else. Maybe she was always a woman who was determined to untangle one thing or another.

  "Is the locket here?" Lupe asked.

  I'd forgotten I was wearing it. "Yes, I did. I didn't want to lose it." I unlatched the chain and handed it to her. I thought of the woman with the light eyes. "Who is the woman in the photo?"

  "It's my great-grandmother," said Irena, opening the locket. "The lock of hair is from Javier when he was a baby. He was a strong baby, used to pull his hair right out of his head, then start crying. At least that's the story I heard." She snapped the locket closed. "Javier gave this to my mother when they married, had it engraved for her. He said it was his most prized possession."

  Lupe rubbed the locket between her fingers, then handed it back to me. "You keep it for now. You and Antonia might be able to use it to find the truth."

  I felt my mouth go dry. "I don't know what I can learn. I'm not an expert like she was. I don't even understand any of her notes, or any of the clues she left."

  Lupe looked at Gustav for a moment, then turned back to me. "When your mother called me a month ago, she had complete confidence in you."

  "I'm sorry Lupe. She..." I searched for the words. "She hasn't known me for a very long time."

  "Take it, Kati," she insisted. "I believe she had her reasons for trusting you with all this." She placed the locket in my hand and closed my fingers around it. It reminded me of my mother giving me money for lunch, closing my hand into a fist so I wouldn't lose it on my way to school.

  Gustav and I watched as Lupe and Irena pulled out of the driveway. I felt his hand on my shoulder and I looked back at him, my strength beginning to crumble.

  "How am I going to find her?" I said miserably. "Where is she?"

  Gustav was silent and shook his head. His phone rang in his shirt pocket and his brow furrowed as he answered. He walked ahead of me into the house and I shut the door behind us.

  "I understand," he said, then hung up the phone.

  I sat in the living room. The final envelope was still on the table, filled with information about DNA. I was about to slip my fingers under one corner to review it again when Gustav came back in the room.

  "Kati, I'm afraid we must leave. I have a gentleman who is..." he pursed his lips as he thought. "Who is keeping an eye on certain people and it looks like it's time for me to go."

  "What?" I was confused, and more than a little panicked. "Gustav, I thought you came back to help me. I need you to help me find her."

  He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. "Right now my being with you is more dangerous for both of us." Headlights strafed the front window behind him. He looked over his shoulder, then bent down to start gathering all the paperwork. "I'll call you if I can. But for now, we've got to leave."

  We shoved everything into my backpack and walked outside. A dark sedan with New Mexico plates idled in the driveway. The windows were tinted so dark I couldn't make out who was inside. Gustav put his hand on my shoulder as I headed for the car.

  "You will find her, Kati. You will unravel what is happening." He looked at me with an intensity I didn't expect from him. "She believed in you. She always believed in you."

  "She was a fool." I said miserably.

  "Your mother was many things, Kati," he said. "But she was never a fool."

  I drove along the highway for a while, heading east, eventually stopping at the park high up on Scenic Drive. The city stretched out in a dusty carpet from the base of the mountain, orderly streets cross hatching the desert. In the distance, Juarez curved around the ribbon of the Rio Grande. Across the border tall white letters were scrawled on the mountain, urging everyone for miles around to read the bible. Dusk was slipping into the sky, brilliant orange creeping into the fading blue.

  My head was swimming with images: Lupe's mother on the screen, her eyes filling with tears; Eliah at the fire, the man I thought was a harmless lovesick guy, flames reflecting in his eyes; Antonia listening to her voice on the tape in the dark hotel room.

  The tapes. I remembered the pink shoebox in the hospital, Margie saying Antonia wanted me to hear what was on them. If there were more tapes, if the man hadn't taken them, they had to be with Abuela.

  So many roads led back to Abuela.

  "That's it, mom?" I said, exasperated, running my hands over the piles of papers I had spread on the dashboard. "I'm supposed to unravel what you were working on from all of this?" I buried my head in my hands, trying to think.

  It's got to be here, Kati. She was so close. She said she was so close.

  I ran my hands through my hair. I looked at the envelopes, the papers, the articles I'd printed. I turned the locket over in my fingers, looking at the inscription on the back. Siempre mi corazon. 1960. I hung it back around my neck.

  Something niggled at my brain. A whisper of an idea.

  I thought back to the day I met Gustav. When we were waiting for the man to jump from the pole. We'd already spent a day and a half with him and the rest of the staff of the half way house. The retreat was a gift from a corporate foundation that was funding the group. They were in the middle of strategic planning, considering expansion.

  The woman, Carol, and I were talking through some of the challenges they had getting started.

  "At the end of the day," she had said, "we have to break it all down, ignore all the noise all around us, and figure out how to take the next step without losing what makes us special." She had bent down and picked up a small, unremarkable pebble from the stone pathway. "How do we keep from being just another rock on the path? How do we know what will make us shine and what will make us just like everyone else?" She had dropped the stone back onto the ground. "The problem is we can't always figure out what is noise and
what's real."

  "That's pretty common in an organization at this stage," I had said, thinking about a few startups we'd had visiting the property the month before. They struggled with the same thing. "I tell you what. It's not on the schedule, but let's do an organizational inventory."

  She had looked skeptical.

  "I don't mean a physical one. I mean an inventory of your organizational goals and assets." We had continued that way for a few hours, with her core group joining in to decipher and untangle what made them unique, what they wanted to continue, and what resources they needed.

  After the process was done and they had a solid plan that would take them well into the future, they decided they needed to make the leap literally as well. We had headed back to the ropes course to complete their retreat with a leap of faith from the telephone pole, the most challenging of the course obstacles.

  I thought of Maurice making the leap, I could see him flying out, reaching with great determination and a good bit of style to ring the bell. It was the day Gustav had visited and announced that Antonia was back. I felt like it was a lifetime ago.

  Again, I scanned the papers on the dashboard. It's here. It's all here. But I can't see it.

  I started the inventory, pulling all the photos I had gathered, putting them in separate piles. I placed all the photos of Javier Bonita—the one with Estella and the ones from the articles my mother, Lupe, and I had gathered. There was a resemblance between them; and with the black-and-white picture, I could see how easy it would be to confuse the two. But in the wedding photo with Estella, Javier had light green eyes and a full, joyful smile. The article of the land baron described his eyes as very light blue, almost gray. I stared closer at the pictures, but with the squint it was impossible to discern their color. He definitely didn't have that easy smile, either.

  My mother had been looking into land deeds having to do with Javier Bonita. As far as Estella was concerned, something had happened to Javier. Javier had gone missing sometime after he went to Texas. But according to Detective Alacon, Javier didn't disappear; he abandoned his wife and daughter in Chicago to start a new life in Texas.

  Flipping through the photos, I spotted the one from the Trent Bonita campaign for governor that I'd downloaded at the library. It was a simple headshot, the candidate in front of the Texas flag, a tiny flag lapel pin shining on his dark suit jacket. Trent Bonita's eyes were a sparkling light blue. Which didn't mean anything, other than somewhere along the way he'd inherited blue-eye DNA.

  I pulled out the article about the dig on the Bonita ranch. It was a little over two months ago, a few weeks before Antonia woke up. Trent had his unfortunate photo opp, digging up someone who had been buried on his family ranch. In the article there was a white pickup truck in the background, door slightly ajar. I remembered watching the archived news coverage at the library, the elder Bonita getting out of that truck, waving away cameras.

  Javier Bonita. Somehow, when Antonia looked into the deeds, this Javier got worried. And when powerful people get worried they react to protect themselves. It didn't make sense that someone like Javier Bonita would worry that his abandonment of his family in Chicago would be exposed. Abandoning a family wasn't exactly career limiting in Texas by any stretch.

  No. There was something bigger old man Bonita was worried about.

  There was one photo missing. Eliah Trevino. Who the hell is Eliah? There was nothing on the tapes—at least the one I had—about him. But Antonia was convinced that Abuela did know him.

  Abuela. Abuela was chatting with Eliah. Granted, he could have charmed his way in, but with everything going on I couldn't imagine her trusting a stranger at the door.

  I couldn't put it off any more. I had to see her. I gathered the photos and tossed them and the envelopes back in my backpack and headed for home.

  Chapter 22

  I parked a few houses down the street. As far as I could see only Abuela's car was in the driveway. I didn't think Eliah knew what I was driving, but I waited a few minutes just in case. In the end, I decided to go through the spaces between houses and jump the rock wall in the backyard. I could see Abuela sitting at the kitchen table through the sliding glass door to the back porch. A tall glass of tea was in front of her, and she kept glancing down at the cordless phone.

  I waved at her, not wanting to startle her. She looked relieved to see me, a small weary smile lightening her face. She put her finger to her lips, asking me to be silent, then pulled the door open and I walked in. She embraced me warmly and I instantly regretted my earlier suspicion of her. This was my Abuela. She'd given everything to me, she'd come to our home to take care of Antonia and me, ending her own independent life in her house across town. Because that's what you do in a family. You take care of each other.

  She held me close, whispering in my ear. "He has her. And he is listening. Don't say anything. Not a word."

  I could feel her tears on my own face as we stood here, holding each other.

  "Is he here?" I whispered. I felt my hands starting to shake.

  Abuela broke our embrace and shook her head no. She took my hand and we walked to the back bedroom, Antonia's room. All the drapes were pulled and the bed was neatly made. Abuela went over to the dresser and grabbed the dry erase board. We sat on the bed and she wrote a note. E called after you did. He told me he had Antonia and that he knew you'd called.

  I nodded, then took the board to write her back. Who is E?

  She looked confused, then wrote The tall man.

  I stopped her. I pointed again to my question.

  She stared at the words for a moment. She erased her previous words and wrote. E is Javier Bonita's son.

  I was confused. All the stories I read about the would-be governor, Trent Bonita, listed him as an only child.

  I took the board from her, and erased it slowly as I thought it through. I wrote. How do you know?

  She looked away from the board and I followed her gaze. There was a photo on the wall of Antonia in college, standing with a group of friends. Everyone was smiling except Antonia, who's attention was on something off to one side. Abuela walked over to the dresser under the picture and opened the bottom drawer. She pulled out the pink shoe box and a folded yellow sheet of paper and set them next to me. She took the board and wrote Javier Bonita died. A monster took his place.

  She walked to the closet and pulled out a dark blue tote bag, putting the box and flyer inside.

  I wrote quickly. You need to leave. It's not safe.

  She placed her hand on my cheek for a moment and shook her head. He won't harm me. Find Antonia.

  How do you know that? I wrote.

  The phone rang and we both froze in place. She opened the door and looked out. It opened on the side of the house, into complete darkness. The phone rang again. She pulled me into an embrace.

  "We are both in danger here. Meet me at the hall," she whispered in my ear. She put the bag over my shoulder, gave me a kiss on the cheek and pushed me out into the darkness.

  I got into the dark truck and drove to the pool of light under a lamp post down the street. The yellow paper was a flyer for Bingo Plus on Montana Street. Abuela, I assumed, had circled the seven p.m. start time and wrote "Esther" in her flowing script along one side. It was already eight, but the bingo hall was open until ten tonight, according to the hours listed on the flyer.

  I opened the box, finding a small stack of bills, maybe a couple hundred dollars. Did everyone in my family horde cash, I wondered, thinking of Antonia's cash in the lining of her purse. I shoved the cash and the flyer into my backpack and headed east, trying to focus on where I was going.

  The parking lot was packed at the huge bingo hall, the bright happy colors of the giant letters on top of the building aglow in the bright spotlights. I stuffed my hair into my baseball cap and headed for the front door.

  "B seven!" The bingo caller's voice was deep, filling the giant open room. Long brown folding tables were lined up in rows like tables in
a grade school cafeteria, and from what I could see, there had to be at least a hundred people inside.

  "Can I help you?" A young man with vivid red streaks in his hair and a nose ring was sitting at a table by the entrance, stacks of bingo cards in front of him along with a small metal lockbox. He had simple geometrical shapes tattooed on his hands, and a set of mathematical equations. "We started an hour and a half ago, but I can probably still get you in. Do you have your own daubers?"

  He gestured to a collection of fluorescent colored inkers on the end of the table which were, in turn, surrounded by a frightening array of multi-colored troll dolls.

  "Um, well," I said, adjusting my backpack, "actually, I'm looking for Esther?"

  "She's in the back, but I can't leave the table." He turned to his side and leaned down. For the first time, I noticed a little girl, probably about five-years-old, sitting on the floor, playing with a half dozen troll dolls. "Go get Tia, Colette."

  The little girl jumped to her feet and took off at a run. He looked after her, shaking his head.

  "She runs everywhere. My mom wants her to be a singer on Broadway, but I think she'll make a better track star."

  Little Colette returned a minute later with a large woman in a lime green knit shirt and matching capri pants and sandals. When she saw me, she walked faster, then grabbed my hand, leading me without a word to an office. I looked back and noted that Colette was settled down with her troll dolls which looked like they were lined up for a race.

  The office was small, but neat, with boxes stacked along one wall and posters of various bingo card patterns and designs hanging in black frames. A scent of roses filled the air and I spotted the plug-in air freshener, next to a gold-colored troll doll and dauber.

  "I'm Esther, a friend of your Abuela. You're Kati, right?" She examined me closely as if she was checking me over like a winning bingo card. " Yes, yes, you look so much like Antonia."

  "Yes, I wasn't sure if—"

  "Sit down," she said abruptly. Esther grabbed her purse off the desk. "Diane—I mean, your Abuela—she will be here soon and she said you two needed total privacy." She mimed zipping her lips, then continued in nearly a whisper. "Don't worry. I get how these things go. You'd be shocked by the things that happen in that hall. Shocked. I mean it. This won't be the first time we had a secret meeting in here, and it won't be the last." She nodded toward the door. "I'm going to grab a smoke and keep an eye out," she said with a wink, then walked out, closing the door behind her.