The Infinite

by Nicholas Mainieri

  “Colby thought you’d win for him, because he came to see you.”

  The humor didn’t occur to her. “I ran too hard too early.”

  They sat there. Luz knew she was not being herself, and she knew Jonah didn’t understand. One of the American cooks sat at the other end of the bench, palming his smartphone, a cigarette clamped in his lips. When the smoke wafted her way, an immediate nausea swept from belly to throat. She got to her feet. “Let’s go to your house.”

  “You sure?” Jonah asked, opening his own phone to check the time.

  “Come on.”

  They crossed the avenue into his neighborhood. A corner saloon, iron bars across its windows. A food truck, the smell of barbecue, a gathering of men. They passed the whitewashed brick of the cemetery where Jonah’s parents and brother were buried. Palms arched out over the street, dead fronds underfoot.

  Señora McBee, Luz prayed. Help me find the right words, help him listen. Please.

  His bedroom was dark and cool. Luz closed her eyes. How to start? He kissed her, and she realized that she had been wrong in everything. There was no unique opportunity. There was no special consideration. What she had, in totality, was this singular moment, this lone moment with Jonah in which they could ascend together. Tomorrow, her being would shift. Tomorrow, everything changed.

  Forget it, she told herself. Forget it, for just a while.

  They lay afterward in the quiet, and Jonah was saying something. Luz’s mind swung wildly between a numb stasis and a jittering frenzy. Focus, she thought, listen.

  “I haven’t wanted to say this out loud,” Jonah said. “I was worried how it would sound or I’d jinx it or something. But I keep thinking about the future and the old auto shop and how perfect it would be if I could get it open again. If I could make some money and, you know, we’ll be together. We’ll make a life together. That’s what I want.”

  His words had come out quickly and now there was nothing. Luz realized she wasn’t breathing. His vision was the kind of thing she had wished for, too. The kind of good thing she had believed Jonah could fashion into reality. She heard him withering with doubt, and he started up again, fast, nervous.

  “I mean, I know it seems impossible, but I’m gonna try to talk to Dex and see what he knows about loans and—”

  Luz spoke into the dark: “I’m pregnant.”

  A moment of absolute silence. She heard him swallow. He rolled toward her. She could hear him blinking. “Pregnant.”

  “Yes.”

  He began to stammer with questions. What? When? How? She told him she’d suspected it for weeks. She told him of the test that morning that confirmed it.

  “Wow,” he said.

  She had imagined him panicking, rattling off options in an attempt to fix it all at once. But to be quiet, to take it in—this was his way, and she loved him for it. She let him hold her. She told him she was staying the night. “What about your pops?” he asked.

  “I’m not afraid.”

  “Does he know yet?”

  “I’m not afraid of telling him, either.”

  “It’s going to be okay,” Jonah tried. She didn’t reply. He said, “I promise.” Then he said, “The auto shop stuff, that can wait. Colby and me, we were talking about the bonuses you get for enlisting in the army. Well, you know, he’s been talking about it. Thousands of dollars. I mean, I’ll do that with him. We’re gonna need something quick. We’ll be all right. We’ll be okay. I’ll help take care of everything.”

  Luz listened to him dismantle his dream for them in a moment, and saltwater burned in her eyes, and she whispered, “Not tonight.” She wouldn’t let him hear her cry. She pressed into him. “Not tonight.”

  4

  THEY WOKE, SUNDAY MORNING. THEY WALKED TO THE CHURCH on St. Charles at her request. The same one his mother used to bring him to. A cavern of a church, rafter beams in shadow. It had been a long time for Jonah. They sat in a pew near the back.

  An ancient priest read at the lectern: “Where two are gathered in My name, I am there . . .” And another rare memory surfaced—he had been here with his mother and heard these same words, and they made him imagine some large and invisible being crouching among the rafters. It felt very silly now, sitting here with Luz, watching her pray. She clasped her hands, shut her eyes. He remembered his mother praying, just so. What did they ask for, and of whom did they ask it? Jonah wished to understand.

  But he couldn’t. He couldn’t know that Luz knelt and spoke to their mothers, asking them to look kindly on her. She asked for something solid and definable to emerge from the murk of tomorrow. She asked them for strength.

  5

  HER FATHER WAS RED-FACED AND FUMING WHEN SHE FINALLY got home. She walked past him and Rodrigo to the back of the house so that her father would have to follow. She sat on the edge of his mattress. No longer was she the frightened little girl, and no longer was he the father who comforted her in the night with stories of her mother.

  Her father was bellowing in English, demanding to know where she had been, and so Luz said she’d spent the night at Jonah’s and stayed there with him all day. Her father’s cheeks bulged and the vein in his forehead stood out and his skin darkened. He was shouting in Spanish now, and Luz bowed her head and let it wash over her.

  She said it quietly, in English: “I’m pregnant.”

  Her father shouted for another moment, and then he stopped when he finally heard her. Luz looked at him and repeated herself.

  He blinked and his mouth worked. He turned and seemed bewildered. He grasped at the air in front of him like he was blind, and then he pivoted and collapsed to sit on a lower rung of the loft ladder. His shoulders sagged and his arms hung limply. He wasn’t looking at her. “Please tell me this is not the truth.”

  “It is true, Papá.”

  “Luz.” It was a whisper. He covered his face with his hands. “Luz. Luz.” He asked her how long.

  “Six or seven weeks.” The words were like misshapen objects in her mouth.

  He shook his head. “And you tell me now.”

  “I didn’t know. I didn’t know how to tell you.”

  He sighed, said her name again, but wouldn’t look at her.

  “It is going to be okay, Papá. It is.” She paused. She didn’t know if she believed this, but she said it to her father again anyway. Her own reckoning was yet to come. Her own reckoning and the reimagining of everything that lay ahead, everything she might hope for. Her father didn’t speak. She went on: “Jonah is nice, Papá. He cares for me. I think, I think one day he will want to m—”

  “¡Basta!” her father shouted, standing and raising his hands. He called her irresponsible. Foolish. And how many times had he ordered her to stay away from that boy? “Who have you become, my daughter?” He was screaming. He swiveled and kicked the ladder and it fell, slow like a tree, and Luz watched it falling, and it slammed against the ancient cypress floorboards with a boom she felt in her heels. She pulled her feet off the floor and drew her knees to her chest. Her father stood, back turned, hands on hips, head hanging. When he spoke, his voice was quiet, hoarse. He spoke with resignation: “You will have to go back to Las Monarcas.” He turned and threw his hands up. “You will have to be with your grandmother.”

  Luz was on her feet but she didn’t remember getting up. “Papá—”

  “Luz,” he said. He didn’t raise his voice but he punctuated with a hand chopped through the air. He turned the hand over and ticked items off with a finger against his palm, beginning with the fact that they were not American citizens. “We have no money. How can we pay for doctors? Raise a child? Look at me.”

  Her vision warped, melted, bled away. Woozy on her feet.

  “What do I know about taking care of you? How am I to do this? The work is going away from here, this city.” He grunted with disgust. “Do you know how I worry for you, every night you walk home from the streetcar? After the things that have happened to me, to Rodrigo, to the rest of us? And
now I must worry about you and your child? No. No. It cannot work. Your grandmother—”

  “Papá, no—”

  “Yes, Luz. Your grandmother will take care of you. She will help you through this. I will still send her my money after you are back. I will be able to send more.”

  “I won’t go.”

  “Yes. You will.”

  Luz crossed her arms, willed her world to steady. “I am staying in New Orleans.”

  He massaged his brow. He pointed to the door. “I am going for a walk.” He said that she would indeed return to Mexico. They would talk more once he was calmer.

  “I won’t go!” she cried after him, but he didn’t reply.

  She sat again on the mattress. The front door opened, clacked shut. The world dimly trembled. She heard Rodrigo get up and nervously shift his weight before settling down again. Her father was gone a while. Nothing would hold in her mind—words she sought skittered away like pebbles thrown against pavement.

  6

  NO SCHOOL,” PAPÁ SAID THE NEXT MORNING. “THERE IS NO need.”

  “I’m staying in New Orleans,” she said. “I’m not going back to Las Monarcas.”

  He said, “You will do as I say.”

  He hadn’t raised his voice, and so she was the one to scream. He endured it with a blank face. Winded, she turned from him and stomped to the back door but stopped; he had forbidden her from leaving the apartment.

  He stayed home all day to make sure she did as well. Work for him wasn’t assured, anyway, he reasoned, and Rodrigo might have luck on his own. Regardless, in a few days’ time there’d be one less mouth to feed on their American dollars. Luz vacated whichever end of the house her father decided to occupy. A charged silence gridlocked them. When Rodrigo returned at the end of the day he didn’t speak, shuffling around the apartment and averting his eyes.

  HER FATHER STAYED HOME WITH HER AGAIN ON TUESDAY. LUZ SAT alone on the stoop, blind to the hot, crawling day. Inside, her father planned her departure. The street blurred, and Luz contemplated what it would take to truly defy her father—to defy him in an active way. If Jonah drove past, could she run from the stoop and get into the truck and never turn around? Let her father go to the cops then, she thought. Let him wager that the police would care to find a single undocumented Mexican girl more than they’d care to call la migra on his behalf. This was the only way: get up and go. Run, as fast as she was able. But the prospect put cold fear in her belly, and so she sat and waited, and Jonah didn’t come by, and there was nothing she could do to get in touch with him.

  THE DAY DARKENED, AND LUZ REMAINED ON THE PORCH STEPS. Rodrigo mumbled greetings when he returned and climbed around her. When the screen squealed open again, it was her father on his way out. He looked down at Luz. “Walk with me—?” her father began, but Luz got up, stepped around him, and went inside. “Luz, please,” he called after her. “Come talk with me.”

  But Luz didn’t answer, striding wordlessly past Rodrigo on the futon toward the rear of the house. When she finally glanced back, her father had disappeared.

  Luz paced the shadowed recess of the back bedroom. She began to stretch, her instinctual prerace routine. Hamstrings, then quads. She sat on the floor and did hurdlers. She twisted her trunk, loosened her back. She looked at the back door.

  If you’re going to go, go right now. The soles of her feet prickled. Start running.

  7

  ACROSS HIS KITCHEN TABLE HE’D STREWN PAMPHLETS GATHERED at the recruiting office with Colby, as well as Internet documents he’d printed at the library. It had been two days since he took Luz home. She hadn’t shown up in school, she hadn’t called. His stomach throbbed like some dull-toothed creature had been gnawing it.

  But his fear and anxiety did not derive from the idea of fatherhood. There was something vertiginous about the surprise and acceleration of it, sure, but the reality was still a thing he had imagined for himself and Luz. And it wasn’t even the disintegrating of his fanciful vision concerning McBee Auto and some kind of idyllic American future that frightened him, either. Maybe that kind of life just wasn’t meant to be available to them—and that could be okay, as long as their life was vested with purpose. The new responsibility, once it came to be, would shove any questions about the reason for his own being to the periphery. He looked at his brother Bill’s photo on the wall. Jonah, now, would go into the military for his family with the force of necessity—this was a different thing. He wouldn’t be combing the indifferent world for something to fill the void. No, Jonah would construct his own meaning. Do it himself, create it and name it and know it. This was a gift, and with it came great relief.

  What did frighten him, however, was Luz’s father. Why hadn’t Luz called? Where had she been? How could he get in touch with her if her father was keeping her locked away?

  Jonah was pacing when there came a knocking on the door.

  It was Luz, panting, weeping. Jonah had never actually seen her cry before.

  “Luz!” Jonah said, letting her inside. “Jesus! Did you run all the way here?” Then, “Should you be running like that?”

  She was shaking her head, composing herself. “I ran to and from the streetcar. Jonás—” She leaned into him.

  He got her a glass of water. Jonah waited for her to say something. Then, “Are you okay?”

  She seemed to be wrestling with the words. “Papá, he . . .”

  “Listen,” Jonah said, “no matter how angry he is, we’ll get through it. I’ve got a plan. I’ve—”

  “He wants to send me back to Mexico.”

  “What?” Jonah said.

  Luz wiped her eyes. “He says I need to go back to Las Monarcas. Abuela can take care of me. We can’t afford to keep me here . . .”

  “No, no,” Jonah said. “That can’t happen. No. Look, here—”

  He started gesturing at the documents on the kitchen table.

  “I told him no,” Luz said. “I told him I won’t go. But he won’t let me out of the house. He’s going to make me go back.”

  “No, Luz,” Jonah tried to interrupt. She was going on, frantic. “No!” Jonah said. “I’ve got a plan. I’ve been doing research.” He started lifting brochures and printouts from the table. “You’ve got to tell him about my plan. I’m going to enlist, I’ll be able to take care of you and—and the baby. I’m going to.”

  “Jonah,” Luz said, her voice falling to a whisper. “Jonah.”

  He rifled through the papers. “Right here. I found out that families get extra money for housing. So if we have to go somewhere or whatever. I mean, we’ll have to go wherever they send me, but—”

  “Jonah. This isn’t what you want.”

  “Yes,” he said. He set the papers down. He reached for her hands. They were hot against his fingers, freezing with nerves. His heart hammered. “We would have to get married.”

  Her features jolted.

  “To really make the army thing work, I mean. But—but that’s what I want, too.”

  Light caught in the water around the rim of her eyes.

  “Can you tell your pops that? Tell him I want to marry you and take care of you. He doesn’t have to send you back. You can stay right here.”

  8

  JONAH DROVE HER HOME. SHE TOLD HIM TO GO QUICKLY, BECAUSE the apartment’s front door was open and the light inside was on and she knew that her father must have come home from his walk furious. She wanted to be able to go in and speak to him without having to contend with his anger at seeing Jonah’s truck.

  She kissed Jonah and told him she’d call as soon as she could.

  The truck whistled off and she waited a moment on the sidewalk. She breathed. Closed her eyes. Felt the night heave around her. “Okay,” she told herself.

  She climbed the steps and went inside and halted. She had prepared to be screamed at as soon as she entered. Her mind failed, at first, to interpret the scene. Papá sprawled on the futon. Rodrigo paced.

  Rodrigo looked at Luz and started
to speak. “Moses fue a buscar—”

  For me, Luz thought. He was looking for me.

  Blood covered Papá’s face. His shirt was wet. He held an ice pack to his forehead and blinked, lids slick and red, as Luz came and fell to her knees beside him. “Papá, Papá,” she was saying, and he reached for her hands with his free hand, and Luz thought, I made you go looking for me, even as she imagined what must have happened—Papá walking, distraught over his daughter. He spares the apartment a last glance and passes beneath the watery globe of a streetlamp, a seething cloud of insects. He loses himself in thought—Oh, my Luz—as the dark clings to him and he marches himself breathless. Is it my fault, bringing her to this place? Of course he wonders this. Can he trace his daughter’s mistake to the choice he made, long ago, to leave home for El Norte? His Luz, his daughter, who has she become to allow this to happen? And this is when, his senses shrouded by thought and the heavy night air, somebody behind him grunts: Hey. Papá turns and glimpses a figure and a flash of movement. Dread ices through him in the helpless instant before the pistol barrel whips out of the dark, and everything—inside and out—bursts bright and soundless. He is on his back, the world reassembling in a dim throb, as the figure turns out his pockets and disappears. Warm blood floods into one eye, and Papá thanks God for the small grace that most of his cash remains back at the apartment. Nothing hurts yet but it will soon, and he thanks God.

  “This is my fault,” Luz told him, while he lay bleeding on the futon. “I’m sorry, Papá,” she said.

  Her father’s eyes sought her. Guilt thickened like sludge in her belly.

  “Okay,” Luz said. “Okay, Papá. I will go.”

  9

  TWO DAYS. TWO DAYS OF FRAYED NERVES AND A TIRED, FEEBLE feeling. Two days of waiting, minute by minute, for his phone to ring, and nothing. He finally mustered the courage to call the Hidalgos’ cell phone, but when her father answered he hung up. Luz didn’t appear at school and Jonah didn’t know what to do, save go to their front door and make demands. He visualized steady hands and a steadier voice, a confidence that would eliminate questions before their inception. Jonah hesitated, and, worse, he knew he hesitated because he was afraid.