The Caregiver

by Samuel Park

  Driving home, I tried to hide my nervousness. I focused on the traffic lights. The cars immediately in front of me, with license plates from as far as New York and Florida. The afternoon sun cascading down the asphalt.

  Next to me, Kathryn kept her eyes straight ahead, out the window. She had not looked at me in the eye once since we’d gotten in the car.

  When we arrived home, Kathryn did not get out of the car like she normally did. She hesitated, her right hand floating over the door handle. Her hands, it was hard not to notice, were as delicate and small as a bird’s. It was clear: She could not look me in the eye.

  I was parked on the curb by the driveway, and cars whooshed past us on the road. I remained fixed in my seat, awaiting Kathryn’s lead. Kathryn finally took a deep breath and said simply, “You know you can’t work for me anymore, right?”

  She offered no further explanation. She did not say, I saw this, or I know that. She was not going to dive into the minutiae of it, the details, the narrative. The question allowed no discourse, no argument.

  “I know. But—”

  “What would you do in my place? In my condition?” Kathryn spat.

  What could I possibly say? It felt like even if I explained to Kathryn what happened, she wouldn’t believe me. I shrugged.

  Kathryn kept going, as though she distrusted silence. “Is there anything worse you could’ve done to me?” she snarled. “Short of switching out my medication?”

  I shook my head. “I’m not interested in your ex-husband. He was just—he was just helping me with something.”

  Kathryn scoffed. “And to think I was going to leave you this house—”

  “You were never going to—” I interrupted her.

  “Maybe I was!” she shouted, wringing her hands in exasperation. “You were like a daughter to me!”

  Was I? Or had she said so to inspire my devotion? Her daughter. That wasn’t a role that I’d asked for. If I’d accepted it, it had been out of habit or from a lack of imagination.

  “I don’t want to be anyone’s daughter,” I said, clutching the steering wheel. “I just want to be me.”

  Kathryn’s eyes widened with anger. “Well, I don’t want you to be my daughter, either. I used to think you must really love your real mother. If you treat her anything like how you’ve treated me today, I think, in fact, you must really hate her.”

  In the car, there was an excitable energy between us that could find expression in any number of gestures. I wouldn’t be surprised if she slapped me, or started crying, or let out a scream.

  “The truth is,” she said in a tone of palpable asperity, “I know nothing about you. Or where you came from. Maybe this is all natural, back where you grew up.”

  With that, Kathryn left my Honda and slammed the door.

  I watched as she headed back inside. I understood the unspoken procedure: I’d have to make arrangements with the new caregiver to come back for my things, preferably when Kathryn wasn’t around.

  As I put the key in the ignition, I gazed at Kathryn’s back, knowing I might not see her again. I felt an unexpected ache, couldn’t turn my eyes away. I wondered if it was possible to be exiled from my own heart.

  chapter twelve

  THE INVASIONS BEGAN ON A tuesday morning, on an unreasonably hot summer day, a day so hot that the West Side felt like East Hollywood, and East Hollywood felt like Brazil. I woke to find three little ants roaming around the same spot on the water-splattered sink, looking lost. Their black uniforms stood out against the bright whiteness of the ceramic. I watched them through the goggles of morning drowsiness, hoping they would choose to go elsewhere of their own volition. Reluctantly, I recruited Bruno’s help. He’d been going through an exercise kick and I could hear him huffing and puffing as he lifted free weights in the living room.

  We stood over the sink, staring at the ants as they chased their own behinds.

  “It takes just one to venture into the wrong place, and pretty soon we’ll be overrun,” said Bruno.

  “Can we lure them outside, maybe with melted brown sugar?” I asked.

  “What if that just attracts more?”

  “That’s true.”

  “It’s not enough to kill them. We have to get rid of the trace,” said Bruno, furrowing his brows. “I wonder how they ended up here in the first place.”

  “They’re probably thirsty,” I said, looking out the window at the punishing morning sun. “I mean, you have to admire these little creatures. They’re so selfless and cooperative, foraging for the collectivity. It proves that communism is actually endemic to nature. I wonder how they take water back to the colony.”

  “Maybe they carry it in their mouths and spit it out into this really large bowl once they get back to the colony, and the other ants drink from it.”

  Bruno’s tendency to make light of things was something I was now used to. I hadn’t left my room for days, and Bruno was really the only person I spoke to. It was so nice to speak Portuguese with him, after weeks of being trapped in Kathryn’s English.

  “There’s probably lots more of them behind that wall.”

  “I’m gonna check in the kitchen and see if we have traps,” said Bruno. “They’ll eat the poison and take it to the queen. Matricide.”

  “Something about killing them feels wrong,” I said, leaning forward slightly. “I don’t mind killing predatory insects like spiders or mosquitoes, but ants, they’re just going about their day, doing their own thing.”

  “I’d love to stand here all day and ponder with you, but I have to get back to my weights,” said Bruno. “We gotta get rid of them.”

  He stepped forward and turned on the faucet. Without smashing them, he swept the ants with his fingers into the running water. They hardly resisted, dying the second they hit the stream. The ant that Bruno hadn’t yet gotten to began to run faster, in a more disorderly manner, as if trying to escape. Bruno got to all of them. A few seconds later there were only blotches of water where his hand had been.

  The next morning, I woke but did not leave the bed. It became clear by now Kathryn wasn’t going to change her mind, wasn’t going to bring me back to the house. I closed my eyes and when I reopened them, I found Bruno in the bathroom of my suite. He wore a torn-up yellow T-shirt he’d gotten from a secondhand store, the words Á Boute de Souffle printed on it.

  “Are they still there?” I called out, groggy with sleep.

  When I heard no answer, I slowly pushed the blankets away and got out of bed. I joined him at the battleground.

  The little creatures, small but ambitious, had taken possession of the sea of white that was my sink. Some of them ran in an orderly line, others circled around in their version of figure eights. I noticed two of them bumping into each other for a deliberate second, and they appeared to kiss, or relay, before heading in opposite directions. I sensed their busyness, their preoccupations. There was an unspoken logic to their actions I wasn’t privy to.

  “We should call our landlord,” said Bruno. “He’ll bring the pesticide guy. Those people who got rid of the cockroaches last year.”

  The creatures seemed harmless—tiny, unable to fly, running away when you weren’t even chasing them.

  “Maybe we should wait.” I pondered. For a moment, I felt thankful for this distraction.

  “What for? It’s only going to get worse.”

  I sighed. “I’m just not convinced we have control over the matter. What if they call the pesticide guy and the ants just retreat for a while and come back after a couple of weeks?”

  “They will die,” he said. “I’m going to spray Raid all over them.”

  “Some of them will die, but not all of them,” I said. “God knows how many ants live in that colony. God knows where that colony is.”

  Bruno put out ant traps on the sink, right in their trail, but the creatures brazenly ignored them, stepping around them, avoiding the gloomy dark hole. Bruno and I had never met such well-trained soldiers before. We would ha
ve to restrategize.

  “We need to find the colony,” said Bruno.

  “It won’t be easy,” I said.

  Bruno twisted his face. “You know what the problem is? You don’t know what you want. Do you want them dead, or not?”

  He was right. As if emboldened by my hesitancy, the ants had begun to multiply. They were not only on my sink, but on the floor as well. Even though Bruno had killed some of their brethren the day before, the ants were acting as if nothing had happened, as if they didn’t notice me and were just minding their own business. Unlike elephants or dolphins, the ants had no memories. They focused entirely on their own foraging, on making it to the next meal.

  A few minutes later, I watched as Bruno came into my bathroom wearing oversized plastic goggles and a metallurgical worker’s yellow mask over his nose and mouth. He leaned over the floor, regarding the zone of kill with the intensity of King Lear marking maps divvying up his kingdom and then, with great flair, he sprayed the Raid in a straight Maginot Line. I watched as the ants died instantly. Some, as if smelling the hint of toxins, began to scurry wildly. Bruno, merciless, sprayed over them, too. He then wiped the area with a paper towel, restoring the tiles to their immaculate blanchness.

  I returned to bed. The bamboo-slatted windows kept the light out. The red light of the answering machine on the nightstand remained dormant. No call from Kathryn. My heart sank. I let the weight of the comforter cocoon me.

  Bruno left my door open when he crossed my bedroom to exit the bathroom and I could hear him finally heading back to the living room. I heard his footsteps as he walked by; I could hear him crossing the hallway, clearing his throat. Starting his weight lifting always made him do that.

  Sometime later that afternoon, I received a call from Bruno. He was working more and more at Renata’s restaurant, taking cash for shifts when the video store wasn’t busy. He said that a man came in and asked him if he knew a woman named Mara Alencar. Bruno did not say he did, in case he was a stalker, dangerous in some way. He offered to take a message, in case said Mara Alencar ever came by. The man declined.

  When I asked Bruno to describe him, I thought he’d conjure the picture of a fifty-something tall American man, in the manner of Nelson Weatherly. Instead, Bruno said he was our age, and, based on his accent and clothes, a Brazilian. Not an immigrant, but a tourist, someone only in town for a few days. Bruno could always tell when their feet were headed back. He could also tell he had money, in the way he made eye contact and wore ironed clothes.

  The first thought that came to my mind was that maybe it wasn’t me the man was looking for. Maybe it was another Mara Alencar. Maybe there were hundreds of Mara Alencars scattered around the world, each with our own secrets, our own stories.

  Who in the world could possibly be looking for me? What Brazilian man could be after me, ten years after I’d left it behind? I had no ties to that country anymore.

  There were only two men who might ever come looking for me.

  One was my father. I’d only seen him once, fleetingly, in a moving bus, when I was eight, and after that, I’d never seen him again.

  The other was Lazarus.

  Bruno said this man was our age. But I hadn’t seen him since my mother died. He had no idea I’d moved to America.

  I took a deep breath, cut off the reverie. So much wishful thinking! The man looking for Mara Alencar wasn’t Lazarus. The man looking for Mara Alencar wasn’t even looking for me. But it was nice to think that the past could reach for me, and right itself.

  I reached for the phone and dialed a fifteen-digit number, starting with the country code. It was our old number, in the apartment that my mother and me shared. It rang and rang, and this was the best part for me, the part that still made me do this, so many years later. While it rang, it was still possible to believe that Ana would answer, and I could hear her voice, the slightly annoyed voice she always deployed when she picked up the phone.

  As usual, a woman answered. A housewife, I imagined, with curly hair and a shift dress, taking care of her own husband and her own children. “Hello?” she’d repeat, ever so patient. Hello, hello, hello. Finally, she said, as she often did, “Stop doing this. Why’re you doing this? It’s not funny. I wish I knew your mother so I could tell her how naughty you are.” She probably pictured a boy in his early teens. “I’m gonna hang up now.” She never did. “You hear me? I’m gonna hang up.” And we stayed on the line, a few seconds more, the two strangers, until her tone softened. “You don’t have to do this.” She sighed. “You can find some other way to pass your time.”

  The next day, Bruno called me again from work. In the background, I could hear the clacking of metal pans in the kitchen, the furor of pizzas getting made.

  “That man who asked about you yesterday is here again. He’s having lunch.”

  I wondered for a moment if I had heard him right. “Are you sure it’s the same man?”

  “Yes. If you come right now, you can still catch him,” he said and hung up.

  I swallowed hard. Curiosity won me over. I slung my nylon satchel over my arm and grabbed my keys, adrenaline slowly building.

  At the restaurant, within its white and blue tiled walls, it wasn’t hard to recognize him, as he sat by himself at a table for two by the window, elbows resting on the checkered plastic laminate. His sandy brown hair, his slight frame, his poor posture. He looked like he’d been poured into his seat by an uneven hand. He didn’t look that different from the last time I’d seen him. He matched the mental photograph I consulted once in a while, a portrait I’d taken with my irises. His waiter hadn’t removed the second set of glasses and dishware. They never did—this wasn’t a fancy restaurant—but for a moment I thought maybe he was waiting for someone.

  Bruno saw me standing there. He was in the kitchen, an apron around his waist, placing a hot pizza inside a white cardboard box. He didn’t say anything, as though he saw that I was in a trance and feared what might happen if I woke from it, in case superstitions were true. Bruno, looking very self-satisfied, just smiled and nodded, as though he’d given me a gift. I never mentioned Lazarus to him in explaining my life’s history. All Bruno knew was that a good-looking, rich Brazilian man had come after me.

  The restaurant was full of customers, a couple of large groups and a row of twosomes against the wall. It was almost two o’clock. Both Portuguese and English all around me, the crest and fall of mirth and laughter.

  I walked over and stood by Lazarus’s table. He was wearing a forest green shirt with the sleeves rolled up stylishly. It was tucked into his blue jeans and bunched up around his waist. He’d left most of the buttons unbuttoned, revealing a black undershirt.

  He must’ve thought I was the busboy, because he gently pushed his empty water glass in my direction. Then he looked up and saw me and pulled the glass back toward himself. He didn’t say anything at first and seemed genuinely shocked to see me, as though he hadn’t summoned me at all.

  “Do you remember me?” I asked, in Portuguese, putting my hands on top of the chair gently, as though it were a friend’s shoulders.

  Lazarus let out something between a cough and a chuckle. He held his hand out and pointed toward the empty seat. I lowered myself onto the wooden chair. Face-to-face, it was fascinating to see what time does to memory. He had expression lines I didn’t remember him having, and his eyes were a newly darker shade of brown. He’d lost the amorphousness I’d attributed to him in my head.

  “Mara Alencar,” he said simply.

  “In America,” I added. “Is it a coincidence that we’ve run into each other?”

  He shook his head like I expected him to. “I’m not here by chance. I’ve been looking for you,” he confessed. “I’m in town for some business and I thought, why not give it a shot? How big can this country be?”

  I smiled at the joke. But I was still surprised by his interest. As monumental as our brief time together had been for me, I expected it to be a mere footnote in his own l
ife.

  “How did you even know I was in America?” I asked.

  “I went to your apartment after you left me.” There was a halting quality to his voice. “They told me you’d moved to Disneyland, to Los Angeles. I said to myself, if I were ever here, I’d look for you.”

  “Los Angeles . . . and Disneyland are both very big and crowded,” I said, without hiding my amusement.

  Lazarus shrugged. “But there are only a handful of Brazilian restaurants in the city,” he said, taking a sip of his nearly empty water, a gesture to hide his nervousness.

  I nodded. “And how did you find my address in Rio? I don’t think I ever gave it to you.” I knew for a fact what my young sixteen-year-old self had and hadn’t given him.

  Lazarus hesitated, as though about to share something uncomfortable. “I found it in one of my father’s notebooks on his desk. Your mother’s name, her phone number, her address.”

  A chill rushed through me. Lima had had not only our phone number, but also our address? I felt immediately transported, remembered exactly how it felt to be in Lima’s ghastly presence. Ten years could be ten minutes ago.

  “He had our address?” I asked, in disbelief.

  Lazarus looked at me unhappily and nodded. Bruno, carrying a tray of Margherita pizza, suddenly appeared next to us. Lazarus shook his head to Bruno, turning down the offer. I didn’t look at Bruno or acknowledge him, too consumed by the conversation. Once Bruno moved on to the next table, Lazarus locked eyes with me and said, “After you left that day, I asked my father about what happened, and who you really were, and what he did to your mother.”

  Was there more to the story that I didn’t know? The thought occurred to me: I had run away so far, so far out of reach, so that the shame of the past couldn’t reach me, that perhaps I had made it so absolution couldn’t reach me, either. But Lazarus had crossed an entire continent to find me, like a letter that had taken too long to find its destination, but finally had.