Ana sat next to Beatriz on the couch and the two of them listened to the indistinct voices in the foyer and then silence before Larry returned to the living room.
“Ana, can you come help me?” Larry asked.
“Buenas noches, ma’am,” one of the police officers said to Ana when she joined Larry in the foyer.
“Buenas. How can I help?”
“This young lady says she belongs here. Can you vouch for her?” the other officer said. They stepped aside to reveal a slip of a girl, who stood nervously on the doorstep. The girl handed Ana a note and began to speak frantically in Spanish.
“Please don’t let them take me! Ayúdame! Help me, por favor. I was told to come!”
Ana could scarcely understand the girl, she was speaking so fast. She opened the envelope the girl gave her and read the note before she stopped and looked at Larry, the policemen, and the girl, who had run out of words and stood there panting, waiting. Ana began to improvise.
“Híjole! Someone should have picked her up hours ago! Why didn’t you call us, mi’ja?” Ana took the girl by the hand and pulled her inside the house.
Larry didn’t know what was going on but knew to follow Ana’s lead.
“We thought someone was going to pick her up. We had a big pachanga, and you know how it goes. We didn’t hear the phone. I’m very sorry for the trouble, officers. Very sorry,” Ana said.
The officers gave Larry, Ana, and the house a quick look, decided they liked what they saw, and let the girl stay. When Larry closed the door, he turned to look at the girl and then Ana, and back at the girl, who carried a small backpack, and a larger, overstuffed envelope clutched against her chest.
“I am not your aunt,” Ana said to the girl in Spanish. “She’s in here.” Ana guided the girl into the living room and Larry followed dumbly. When the three of them entered the living room, Beatriz was already standing.
“Beatriz, there’s someone here for you.”
But the girl didn’t need an introduction. Beatriz knew who she was from the shape of her face, the curve of her eyes, the curl of her hair, the deep amber of her skin, and the gummy smile she suspected was beneath her tightly pursed lips.
“I am Celeste,” the girl finally said when she saw Beatriz.
“I know who you are,” Beatriz said. “You’re Perla’s girl, aren’t you?”
“Sí,” the girl said, somewhat relieved. “I’m from Perla.”
Who else could she be? Until this moment, Celeste’s existence was unknown, but now here she was, standing in her foyer, wearing her sister’s face, looking like a windblown waif. As suddenly and fiercely protective of the girl as she felt, she dreaded asking the question she knew had to come next.
“Y tu madre? Where is she?”
“She’s gone,” the girl said, in a small but steady voice. “Se murió.”
Ana gasped, her hand flying up to her mouth. Beatriz felt as if a stone had fallen into her chest. Larry couldn’t believe he heard what he thought he heard, and studied his wife’s every move. His Spanish wasn’t perfect, but if he had understood…
“Cuando?” Beatriz asked calmly.
“Last month.”
“I’m so sorry for your loss,” Ana said, lowering her eyes.
Beatriz summoned all her strength to suppress her grief over the ultimate news about her sister, to deal with what she knew she could control. She tenderly extended her hand to Celeste.
“Welcome, mi’ja.” Beatriz turned to Larry. “This is my niece, Celeste. Perla’s daughter. We need to make her a place to sleep.”
“Of course, of course,” Larry said. “And Perla?” he asked tentatively. But when he saw the tears sliding down his wife’s face, he realized that he already knew exactly what had happened to her.
* * *
Larry couldn’t sleep. The house was finally cleared of visitors and in the late-night quiet, he began to worry. He worried about Beatriz and her choking incident. He worried about whether the fog around his brain would turn into a full-press hangover. But most of all, he worried about the appearance of Celeste. A meteor hitting the house would have been less astonishing. Larry Milligan loved giving surprises. He didn’t like getting them. He prided himself on being well prepared, always ready, never taken aback, never thrown for a loop. If the rug was pulled out from under him, it didn’t matter. He’d already anticipated it and bounced back so fast, whoever had tried to disarm him was the one left bewildered. No, the last time he felt taken off guard was when he fell in love with Beatriz.
Larry sat in the armchair near the window while Beatriz slept in their bed. The large envelope Celeste had arrived with was on his lap. He and Beatriz had taken a quick look at what was inside but stopped when Beatriz became distraught at the sight of Perla’s death certificate.
“Okay, okay, let’s stop. We don’t have to do this now,” Larry suggested. “Tomorrow. Let’s get some rest.” Larry held Beatriz until she cried herself to sleep, a thick knot in his throat, wishing he could take away all her pain, all her confusion, all her grief. When he was sure Beatriz was sleeping, he gently pulled himself away from her, got out of bed, and sat in the chair to sort through the rest of the envelope. He turned the reading lamp near the chair toward him so the light would not disturb her.
The first things he saw were some of the official documents he and Beatriz had already looked at. That wasn’t surprising. It was the other contents of the envelope that perplexed him: newspaper clippings, articles torn from magazines, and a newsletter about the Women of Juarez—the long trail of young Mexican women, mostly poor factory workers, who had been brutally killed since 1993.
“Las Estamos Buscando,” the headline on the newsletter read. Larry puzzled over the headline. We’re kissing them? No, that can’t be right. He ran the words through his internal translator again. We’re looking for them. He was pleased to make the translation without consulting Beatriz or digging into his dog-eared English-Spanish dictionary.
We’re looking for them. He stared at the rows of women’s faces on the newsletter, all of whom looked like familiar strangers to him. He reared back when his eyes got to the smaller text beneath the photos: “Juarez Femicide…”
Jesus! Why the hell would Celeste have this stuff? he wondered. She’s just a kid! Larry didn’t know much about girls, but he was shocked that this deeply serious subject was of interest to Celeste. It was disturbing and ugly and tragic. Shouldn’t she have pictures of rock stars and shoes, or notes from boys? Something inside him began to growl, like a dog whose senses are on high alert, ready to protect what is his.
Larry took pride in sheltering his family from the harshness of life. The hard things he’d witnessed as a boy were not even remotely visible in the periphery of his sons’ lives. Before the police officers arrived on his doorstep a few hours earlier, the last time he had seen a cop at his door was when he was a boy. They were always looking for an uncle, or a friend, or a friend of a friend, maybe Lucy for a short period in her wilder teenage years, or one of Lucy’s boyfriends—but they never came for Larry. He was the good kid. The favored son who kept his head low and stayed out of trouble. Although he was never the one they were looking for, he always felt ashamed when the cops came to their door. Worst of all, he hated watching his mother explain to their nosy neighbors what the fuss was all about. Instead of brushing off their shameless prying, she answered them with nervous laughter and sad jokes: “Oh, they’re selling tickets to the Policeman’s Ball door-to-door now. They didn’t come to your house?” or, “The Mr. Donut ran out of donuts and they wanted some of mine!”
His poor mother. She even went so far as to learn how to make donuts so she could give them to her neighbors to sway them to believe her. No one ever did. Larry always helped her deliver the small, plastic-wrapped bundles, listening to his mother tell the recipients that they were doing her a favor, taking the extras off her hands. Larry remembered how his mother winked at him as she explained that the donuts were made from an �
��old family recipe,” instead of the recipe she’d torn from an old Ladies’ Home Journal and stuck on a kitchen cabinet with a piece of masking tape. Larry hated the neighbors’ smirking smiles and the inflated small talk, all meant to get his mother to tell them more about her wonderful donuts. He didn’t know if his mother was oblivious to their sarcastic interest or if she was ignoring them. All he knew was that it was enormously important for her to enact this ritual, over and over again, and because he loved her, he would not let her make her donut deliveries—or, as his sister Lucy liked to joke, their mother’s “walk of shame”—alone.
Beatriz turned in her sleep to face him. Her face was peaceful and serene, her ripe lips barely pressed together. Larry remembered how they met at a party when they were students at the University of Michigan. He winced when he remembered what a fool he’d made of himself when she told him she was from San Antonio, just like him.
“Well, what are y’all doing all the way up here, little lady?” His Texas drawl had been made thicker from one too many beers, and besides, it had usually worked on the Yankee girls. Beatriz had not been as easily impressed.
“Well, what are you doing all the way up here?”
“I’m a student,” he said.
“Congratulations. So am I.”
“You are? Well, how about that,” he said. “So, how come you’re not going to school down there?”
“How come you’re not going to school down there?”
“I got a scholarship,” Larry said proudly.
“Me, too.”
“Yeah, of course you did.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing, I just meant I got an academic scholarship.”
“So did I,” Beatriz had said, deciding it was time to move on. Larry realized he needed to try a different approach.
“No, wait! Don’t run off like that.” He tried to think fast. “So, um—how ’bout them Spurs?” He was relieved when Beatriz decided to give him a second chance. As it turned out, she knew more about the Spurs than he did, and in spite of his drunken missteps, Beatriz decided Larry wasn’t half bad.
Later, when he’d finally convinced her to spend some time with him, they had been shocked to discover that although she graduated from a private Catholic high school, her first two years of high school were at Harlandale High, where Larry went for a couple of years until his parents transferred him to Jefferson High. They made this discovery over an early-morning breakfast of coffee and bagels before their classes began. When they put their information together, they had decided that they must have been at Harlandale at the same time, at least one of those years.
“I don’t know how I could have missed you,” Beatriz had laughed. “A tall bolillo walking down the hall would have stood out among a sea of Mexicans!”
“And I know I wouldn’t have missed you,” Larry said. He bit his tongue as soon as the words came out. At the time, Larry didn’t want to believe he was falling in love with Beatriz, but he was. He told himself that Beatriz was fascinating, unusual, and that it was good to know someone from back home, and nothing more. He was wrong, of course, but he stubbornly fought against the obvious.
“Oh, I bet you had your pick of all the pretty little señoritas,” he remembered Beatriz teasing. To Larry, the girls at Harlandale High were all the same to him. He didn’t see anything special in any of them, and since most of them spoke a combination of English and Spanish (heavy on the Spanish), he wasn’t even sure what he would say, even if he had found a girl that interested him.
“Maybe we were destined to meet here, where you couldn’t help but notice me, like la mosca in la leche,” Beatriz joked.
“Like a fly in the milk?” Larry asked, eager to add to his stockpile of amusing Spanish phrases.
“Muy bueno! Very good,” Beatriz cooed. Larry remembered how his heart had flip-flopped when she complimented him. He quickly took another bite of his bagel and looked away, so she wouldn’t see him blush.
“Oh, look!” Beatriz said. Larry looked around them to see what she was talking about.
“No, turn toward me,” she explained. When he faced her, her deep eyes caught his and he felt as if she’d captured him in an invisible tractor beam. She reached over and delicately wiped some cream cheese stuck on his face with her forefinger, then slowly pulled her finger back to her mouth and licked it with the tip of her tongue.
That was it. He was a goner.
In Larry’s version of the story, Beatriz batted her eyes at him suggestively. In Beatriz’s version of the story, she says they didn’t have any napkins and the cream cheese on his face was so honking huge, she couldn’t understand how he couldn’t feel it.
“And you ate it!” he would counter.
“So?”
“It was how you ate it! You were—you know how you were!”
“Oh, please,” she would parry back. “You could have smeared a dozen bagels with the glob of cream cheese I wiped from your face. And in my family, we never waste food. It only made sense to eat it!”
That was what eventually fused them. Besides the very real attraction, they both understood what it was like to watch their parents skip a meal so that their children could eat. Larry had sad memories of his mother giving him food from her already-sparse plate and vowed that his children would never, ever, have that experience.
Larry would never forget the one time, after he’d helped his mother on another one of her donut runs, when he had gone out to ride his bike and happened upon one of their neighbors depositing the donuts his mother had just delivered into the trash.
“Oh, hello, darlin’,” the neighbor woman had said when she saw Larry straddling his bike, watching her from a short distance. The woman waved him over.
“You know I love your mother to death,” the woman had said in a low voice. “But honest to goodness, if I keep these in the house I’m going to blow up like a balloon, and my husband, he has the diabetes. So we can’t keep these in the house. Here, darlin’,” she said, pulling the wrapped donuts from the trash and handing them to Larry. “Why don’t y’all go have a nice treat? It’ll be our secret, okay?”
Larry remembered holding the package as the woman quickly strutted back to her house. He remembered riding off to one of his favorite places in a nearby park, confused and hurt by what had just happened. He hadn’t had much of a sweet tooth, and his mother had threatened him with something worse than death if he even thought about taking one of the donuts for himself, and the picture of the donuts in the recipe she used looked delectable. But when he finally took a bite into one of his mother’s donuts, he was embarrassed all over again. His mouth flooded with a greasy wad of sugar. He spit the glob from his mouth and broke the rest of the donuts into small bits and threw them onto the ground. A few birds flocked over the crumbs, picked at them and dropped them, cocking their heads as if reconsidering, then finally flew off with the huge crumbs—to use as building material for a nest somewhere, Larry decided.
Beatriz stirred in her sleep and Larry looked up at her, brought back to the present, remembering his original task. He stuffed the newsletter and the other papers Celeste brought back inside the envelope. She’s just a kid, he repeated to himself. She’s just a girl. But there was something about all the information, this mess from the outside world that Celeste brought into his house, that gnawed at him. When Beatriz began to murmur in her sleep, he went over and sat on the edge of the bed next to her. He was relieved when he could hear her steadily breathing but worried when he saw she was frowning. Beatriz whined and her mouth began to tremble. Larry leaned down and whispered in her ear.
“Shh, shh. It’s okay. You’re safe. I’m here, baby. I’m here. It’s just a dream.” He kissed her lightly on the cheek, gently stroked her hair, and whispered to her some more until she calmed down. After a moment, Beatriz lazily opened her eyes.
“Hey,” she sighed.
“Hey, yourself,” Larry said, pleased he had rescued her from a bad
dream.
“You’re still up?” she asked
“I couldn’t sleep.”
“Why can’t you sleep?” Her voice was sticky with sleep, her eyes too heavy to keep open.
“All the excitement, I guess,” Larry said.
“What time is it?”
“It’s early. Go back to sleep, baby.”
“I can’t sleep if you’re not here with me. Come to bed,” Beatriz murmured.
Larry returned to the lamp and turned it off, then crawled into bed with his wife. They lay facing each other, their heads sharing the same pillow, their foreheads grazing. Larry was finally drifting off to sleep when Beatriz spoke again.
“It’s going to be a lot different with a girl in the house.”
“Hm-hmm.”
“All these years, surrounded by my boys. I’m going to like having a girl around. Sweet.”
“It’s nice she came to visit you,” Larry said.
“I’d like to paint the guest room for her. Get new sheets, pillows, and matching curtains… make it bien pretty…” She fell asleep before she could finish her thought. It was just as well. Larry had fallen asleep moments earlier. Neither of them was coherent long enough to realize that they were sailing on two diverging wavelengths. Neither of them heard the faint, distant thunder, warning them that they were going to be surprised by a furious storm.
FOUR
It was the pain skulking in Celeste’s abdomen that woke her up and filled her with dread. She sat up in the couch her aunt had made into a bed for her, quickly made sense of her surroundings, then bolted from the room, anxious to find a bathroom. She had no idea where she was going, but she knew she had to move fast. She padded barefoot down the hall, recognizing the foyer where she was delivered the night before and the living room next to that. Through the dining room there must be a kitchen, and in there, she hoped, maybe a bathroom. Her instincts were good. Across from the patio door was a narrow door to a half bath. Celeste rushed in, closed the door, and hurriedly prepared to empty her bladder. As she sat on the commode, she realized the source of the pain in her abdomen. Her underwear was stained a garish crimson. She groaned and quickly inspected the jeans she’d slept in. The blood hadn’t seeped through yet, which brought her some relief, but now she was annoyed on top of everything else. Maybe that’s why the policemen didn’t hurt her last night. Maybe they could tell she was not clean down there—or worse, they could smell her. That idea made Celeste shrivel with embarrassment. She pulled off her jeans and her underwear. She thought about trying to wash them, but it was no use. They were ruined. She stuffed her underwear into the bottom of the small wastebasket and unfurled a long length of toilet paper that she folded, and folded again, placing it between her and her jeans. That would hold her for a while, she hoped.
Sisters, Strangers, and Starting Over Page 4
