Chapter Six
It was mid-June when Eva left. Water ran low and slow in the acequias, the air was thick with sun dust and juniper pollen. Aspen leaves had thickened and darkened and now danced delirious in the wind.
Anna, Eva, and Esperanza set out in the middle of the night across a searing emptiness so Eva could fly out of Phoenix and get to the other side of the continent on a nonstop flight and, from there, fly on to London. The sun found Anna at the wheel, Esperanza snoring in the passenger seat, Eva prim and erect in the backseat, a map over her little legs, eyes fixed maniacally on the road ahead.
“I don’t understand. What have I done? What have I ever done to leave you with such little confidence in my driving skills?”
“Mom, look at the road.”
“I’m looking at the road.”
“No, you’re looking at me, look at the road.”
They stopped three times total—once because Esperanza had tears in her eyes from the pressure on her bladder but, faced with the indignity of squatting by the car in partial view of traffic, settled mutely in her seat again, closing her eyes like the martyrs of her religion—and they got to the airport five hours before departure.
“Go have fun,” Anna said, tossing Esperanza the car keys.
“Are you crazy?” yelled Eva. “She’ll go gamble!”
The two women looked at the child.
“Hija,” Esperanza cut in haughtily, “I have no money to gamble with.”
The two hugged with surprising formality, and it was only thanks to an unplanned backward glance that Anna caught a furtive tear sliding down Esperanza’s cheek. “Wave to Espi,” Anna said. Eva waved.
“Wave a little harder.”
“Mom.”
“You’re hurting her feelings. Wave.”
“I’m waving.”
“Jesus. Will you remember my name when you get back?”
Only at the gate did Eva’s senior citizen façade come crumbling down. She clung polyp-like to her mother’s arm.
“Please, Mamma,” she pleaded through a mask of tears, “I don’t want to be with Daddy, I want to be with you.” It took the personal intervention of the captain to get her on the walkway.
“Don’t forget to feed Paco,” were her parting words, shouted with a broken voice. “And fix the brakes, okay, Mamma? Promise me you’ll fix the brakes.”
Esperanza had to be paged by airport security and was belligerently drunk by the time they hooked up at baggage carousel number four. “Stole my money,” she said, spitting on the floor. “Fucking Indians stole my fucking money.”
Anna drove in silence through a fantasy of gradually graying rock until the New Mexico border, when Esperanza awoke from a dead sleep and said, “We should have a border, no? How come we don’t have no border?”
“It’s the same country, Esperanza.”
“No it’s not. I know history, that country is Indian country.” Anna shrugged.
“I know history,” Esperanza said. “That thing back there is Indian country.”
Anna took the car to the shop the next day and was treated to a stinging display of hostility. “You’re lucky to be alive,” the mechanic said, tossing her the keys.
Her little girl called from London. “You fixed the brakes?”
“Yes, my love.”
“Were they bad?”
“Yes, my love.”
“I told you.”
“I know, my love.”
The boy kept calling and Anna kept standing there watching the phone ring, incapable of lifting the receiver.
She could conjure only fragments of what his presence in a house without Eva would bring: his smell on her sheets, his music on her stereo, the collapse of time, the erasure of time, the thinning out of sounds, the muting of voices, the heartbreak of flesh against flesh—and she was ready for none of it.
“I nearly killed my little girl driving up to Phoenix, my brakes were so bad,” she informed Mia’s machine. “Don’t go to Phoenix, by the way, no point in ever setting foot in Phoenix. The guy at the car shop was appalled. He asked me if I had children. I said no. He said, ‘Haven’t I seen you with a little blondie?’ I said, ‘Me? A little blondie? Look at me, I’ve got Bedouin blood.’ He gave me a dirty look. The guy’s got children. His brakes don’t need fixing.”
Mia called back within half an hour. “I know the guy. He beats his wife.”
“He beats his wife?”
“Kicks the shit out of her.”
“How do you know?”
“Have you seen her?”
“No.”
“That’s all you have to do. Take a look at her.”
“That’s terrible. I was just saying, though, I should have gotten those brakes fixed sooner.”
“Not by that motherfucker.”
Summer progressed, Eva was gone, judgment suspended, so it wasn’t long before the phone rang again, and Anna took the call.
“What are you doing?” Eva asked her mother the next time they spoke.
“Nothing,” Anna said, watching the boy come out of the bathroom with a towel around his waist.
“Nothing? You must be doing something.”
“I swear to God, I’m doing nothing.” The boy approached, his intentions clear, and she waved him furiously away but he sank slowly to his knees and ran his hands up her calves.
“Mom,” she heard Eva say as if through a fog, “you never just do nothing.”
“I do too.”
And her little witch, her little magician, her miniature Merlin, from across a continent and the incalculable density of an ocean said, “Is somebody there?”
Anna shot to her feet. “Is somebody here? Why would someone be here?”
“Mom.”
“What?”
“You’re sounding all strange.”
“I’m sounding strange? What about you? Are you picking up a British accent?”
“Mom, I’m in Britain.”
“I know you’re in Britain, but that doesn’t mean you have to pick up a British accent. I’m leaving you at baggage claim if you come back with a British accent. You can hitchhike home.”
“Daddy says I sound like a Yank.”
“Don’t listen to a word your father says. You know what he’s like.”
“I know,” Eva sighed. “Daddy’s irresponsible.”
“Crazy irresponsible. Off the charts irresponsible.”
“It’s what he says about you.”
“Like I said, don’t listen to a word your father says.”
She emerged from sleep the next morning in a different skin, both lighter from the touch of the boy’s hands and heavier with the awareness of some ineluctable slide. She turned to face him and recoiled. She’d never seen him asleep before and she was out of bed before she knew it. This was not the integrated man-boy she had fallen for, not the thing standing loosely in his body; this was a child pushing up from childhood, a changeling called upon to impress a tender geography of bone and memory into the cramped, unyielding mold of manhood.
She was in the kitchen staring at nothing when he came in.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“You’re a child,” she said.
He said nothing. He took her by the hand and pulled her back to bed, covering her body with his, pinning her head between his elbows, letting his mouth fall open slowly against hers. In the silence of the ripening day, she traced every ridge, every curve of the boy’s body, committing to memory not the body but the soul before its sure alteration.
“The die is cast,” she said.
“The what is what?”
“One die. Two dice.”
“One die, two dice. I see. What about the die?”
“It’s cast. Alea jacta est. I had to study Latin, long story. Do you know who Caesar was?”
“Yeah, the Roman guy.”
“The Roman guy. Do you know what he did?”
“He got stabbed.”
“That too, that too.
But before that, he took his army across this river called the Rubicon and marched on Rome. His chances of success were ridiculously low but, like he said before crossing the Rubicon, the die was cast.”
The boy ran a slow hand through her hair. “Good attitude,” he said.
“Can you blame me?”
“I can and I do.”
Anna let her gaze drift to the window. “Your father is going to flay and quarter me.”
“My father,” said the boy, “needs to learn how to mind his own business.”
“He’s your father.”
Leaning back against the pillows, folding his face into a caricature of distress, the boy raised his voice to a falsetto. “Are you okay, buddy? You okay? Should we cut down that tree you keep falling out of? Eat frozen food so you don’t burn your hand? Get rid of that second story so you don’t keep going down the stairs on your fucking head while I’m doing little Bunny over here doggy style in the next room?”
Anna stared, her breath caught in her throat. “Your father raised you.”
“My father did no such thing. Age four, I packed my own lunch.”
Anna cleared her throat. “Your father was younger then.”
“Age four. If I didn’t pack my lunch, no one would pack my lunch.”
“We make mistakes,” Anna said.
“I don’t give a fuck. Mistakes, no mistakes, that’s in the past. But this, this is my business, okay? My business. Not his.”
“He’s worried about you. Your father is worried about you.”
He sank his fingers into her arms. “Don’t you get it? I’m in this. I’m in this for real. I’m never letting go.”
“Christ,” Ree said. “Is that what you wanted?”
They were at the sushi place having lunch. Anna let out a sigh.
“I don’t know. I don’t know what I wanted.”
Ree poked her seaweed suspiciously with a chopstick. “Well,” she said, “you’ve got it.”
“Got what?”
“I don’t know.”
“Will you stop poking the fucking thing and eat it?”
Ree lifted a single strand of pickled seaweed to her nose and sniffed it. “I don’t know about this.”
“Why did you order it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Because you’re stoned. You thought you were ordering something else.”
Ree raised her green untroubled eyes to meet Anna’s. “You’re absolutely right. And you know what? I’m not eating this shit. So. You’ve got it. What are you going to do with it?”
“I don’t know.”
“No?”
“No.” The two sat staring out at the sacred mountain, the site of a million pilgrimages under the great New Mexican sky.
“I’ve got premonitions,” Anna said. “Intimations of disaster.”
“Oh shit,” said Ree.
“Oh shit is right.”
“It’s like something out of Aristotle.”
“Sophocles.”
“Aristotle.”
“Aristotle’s the philosopher.”
Ree lifted a chopstick against the light, measuring out a corner of heaven with it. “Whatever,” she said.
Summer advanced with the subtle power of amnesia, and soon no covenant was safe. Every day Esperanza complained about some item she hadn’t seen before. A baseball cap. A new iPod. Handfuls of change. Spectacularly, one day, a bong.
“You should see it,” Anna told Dr. Roemer. “The thing’s on wheels.”
“Are you happy?”
“I can’t tell.”
The doctor picked something off his shirt. “I’m not surprised.”
“No?”
He shook his head. “No.”
“Why not?”
“No one can make you happy.”
Truth reveals itself through absence, absence through truth. Sitting in the doctor’s office, pierced by a stare so ancient there was no placing it in time, Anna felt herself crash into a zero moment of total certainty. It lasted only a second but the outlines remained, lingering in the form of a slow suspicion, a pale doubt.
“What are you talking about?” she said. “You’re married. You’ve been married twenty years.”
“Yes, but the minute I start depending on my wife for my happiness, I’m screwed. The minute I wake up and think, I hope my wife is in a good mood otherwise I’m screwed, I’m screwed. No one can make you happy. Only the thinking in your head can make you happy.”
Anna checked her nails; they were disgusting. She always checked her nails, and they were always disgusting.
“Why do you feel the need to get so dogmatic with me all the time?”
“Dogmatic?”
“Dogmatic, imperial. What’s the problem here? You’re married, I’ve got a boy staying at my house, no one’s upset, it’s all good, but you’re lecturing me. Why are you lecturing me?”
“Because you keep coming in here all fucked up.”
“You’d be out of a job if I didn’t keep coming in here all fucked up. You should thank me, you should make your gratitude felt.”
“Tell me what happens when Eva comes back.”
“When Eva comes back?”
The doctor gave her his mandarin look.
“He leaves.”
“Just like that?”
Anna looked away.
“He picks up all his stuff and leaves?”
“Something like that.”
“Come on. Can we be serious for once?”
Anna shot to her feet. “What do you want from me? Tell me what you want from me.”
Seconds ticked past, silence thickening around them like a shroud.
“Why do you pay me?” said the doctor.
“Who knows? Who knows why I pay you.”
“You’re free to leave, Anna. Door’s right there.”
“Look,” she said, sitting back down. “All I want is a break. I have led the life of an indentured servant. I have been reduced in every possible, conceivable way to the role of a caregiver. What about me? Who takes care of me? I’m tired, Doctor Roemer. I have been constrained beyond all reasonable parameters, I have been enslaved, shackled like some goddamned convict and I’m tired. I need this. I need it more than words could possibly begin to express.”
“Well,” the doctor said, leaning back in his chair, touching his fingertips together, “you’ve got it.”
Strangely, it rained, and to placate Esperanza, who hated the rain and the boy with total impartiality, Anna left the boy at home and drove them to Las Vegas, where she sat for three days with a magazine she never opened by a pool without a deep end. Esperanza raged like a brushfire past her on a couple occasions, and when they finally hooked up in the lobby for the trip back home, she had the breath of a dragon, the eyes of an assassin.
“What did you steal?” said Anna as soon as they were in the car. “You must have stolen something to keep going like that.”
Wasted beyond speech, Esperanza produced a sound between a grunt and a chuckle and passed out cold. When she came to, hours later, Anna had catalogued her findings over three days of complete inertia.
“How can he not know what went on in World War Two. Fifty million people died in World War Two. Fifty million. That’s a shitload of people, Esperanza, a shitload, but we live in an age where the volume of information available is so massive, the stream so deafening, that kids today are separated, mentally and emotionally separated, from what went on last month, forget fifty, sixty years ago. Is it a good separation? I don’t think so. The Second World War defines who I am in a very concrete way: the mass graves, the death marches, the gas chambers, the aerial bombings, the gutting of an entire continent. How can a college kid not know about this shit? What is it that these kids know about? They know how to download a video from YouTube while updating their status on Facebook. They know how to send one hundred text messages a day and disfigure the English language in the process. The rest they know nothing about. Nothing. Zero.
It’s as if it never happened.”
Esperanza sat there looking like she’d been hit with a stun gun.
“Eee,” she said. “Why do you get all upset? Don’t get so upset.” But the second they got home she gave the boy a tight black smile and said, “Find out what happened in World War Two, hijo.”
“Why do I need to find out what happened in World War Two?”
“Don’t know,” Anna said, kissing him softly on the neck. “Seems like a biggie to me.”
The Fourth of July came and, with it, an astonishing parade of people reclined, barely awake by the look of it, on their motorcycles. Esperanza added a fourth layer of hair gel and disappeared. In the days that followed, Anna lost track of time, lost track of herself, allowing the boy to wash her hair in the shower, shedding her clothes in favor of his, wearing his jeans, his shirts. He stood in the kitchen while she washed his dishes.
“I want my shirt back,” he said. Their eyes met.
“Now?”
“Now.”
She turned, undid the first button.
“Slowly,” the boy said. “I want my shirt back slowly.”
Chapter Seven
They lay in bed, separated by nothing for hours, and there were times when Anna swore she could feel the boundaries of her skin loosen and dissolve, times when she felt his secrets slip under her tongue and rest there. How he slept: on his back, his arms thrown over his head. What moved him: the flight paths of birds—there was one directly over her house, she’d never noticed—the exact spot where the Rio Hondo crashed into the Rio Grande and there gave up its soul with a visible shudder. The way he used his fork and knife, with surgical, suffocating precision, contrasted to the way he held his beer, with a slack wrist. The nearly mechanical steadiness of his young breath. His long, long silences—empty spaces strikingly void of expectation, placid parentheses in which his need for words simply disappeared.
The Boy: A Novel Page 7
