Chasing the Sun: A Novel

by Natalia Sylvester

  Then a grasp. She squeezes his hand and opens her eyes so quickly, it’s like she’s been scared awake.

  “Papi?” Her eyelids rise and fall.

  “I’m here, hijita. How are you feeling?”

  “Is Mom here yet?”

  “What?”

  She looks around the room, which is barely lit by a warm yellow bulb in the back corner and a sharp ray of white light coming in through the half-open door to the hall. Cynthia searches between the light and the darkness but finds nothing. “Why is she still not here?” Her voice cracks and tears fall down her temples to her ears. “Tell her to come back. I want her to come back!”

  Andres doesn’t know what to say. Her cries are his cries when he goes to bed at night and when he wakes. He has no answers for any of them. “I know, I know. Shh . . . it’s okay. It’ll all be okay. Just go back to sleep. Please.” He begs her to stop.

  “Why won’t she come back?” She cries so hard her body shakes and her eyes squeeze shut, but somehow the tears still come. Andres sways her in his arms until her questions turn to deep whimpers, then to moans, then to silence and a weary sleep. Behind him, he hears Consuelo sniffle, trying to keep quiet as she blows her nose.

  “Is there anything I can do, señor?”

  “No. Thank you. All we can do now is wait.”

  “Cynthia is a strong girl. She’ll be all right, you’ll see.”

  He forces a smile and sits back down on the chair next to Cynthia’s bed, facing away from Consuelo. They’ve never spent this much time together, but now he understands why Marabela confides in her so much. Anything she says has a quiet certitude about it, as if she could hold a mirror to all truths. He knows she’s not just talking about Cynthia, and he fears that if he turns to see the sadness in her face, he won’t be able to contain his own.

  “I hope you’re right.”

  “That’s the most important part. You have to have hope. Esperanza.”

  Andres nods and reaches for Cynthia’s hand, careful not to pull on her IV. He remembers how his father once ripped the IV from his wrist and announced that he was tired of waiting. He never mentioned for what, but everybody knew. Still, Andres sat for days at his bedside, just as he’s sitting now with Cynthia, and talked to the doctors daily, searching their words for any glimmer of hope. All they could tell him was that they needed to wait. Esperar.

  Andres doesn’t understand how one word ever gave birth to the other. There is no hope left in waiting.

  Cynthia’s fever breaks around four A.M., and they wait for the curfew to rise, as the muted predawn light augurs the sunrise. When they arrive home, Andres expects to find Ignacio still sleeping in his bedroom, but the boy is sitting in the darkroom with his head on the desk. He wears the headphones that connect to the tape player, and the cable stretches across the room like an empty clothesline. The play button is pushed down, and even from the entrance Andres can see the cassette turning, the thin brown film winding slowly around and around. He takes three large steps across the room and pushes the stop button, and only then does Ignacio notice his father is home. He slips off the headphones and lets them dangle around his neck.

  “How is she?”

  “Cynthia will be fine. She just needs lots of rest now. So do you.” He pushes the eject button on the cassette player but Ignacio bolts up in protest.

  “Put it back!” His eyes are red and swollen. It’s five o’clock in the morning and Andres wouldn’t be surprised if his son spent the entire night listening to the tapes.

  “What are you doing? Where’s Guillermo?”

  “He went home hours ago.”

  “And you stayed here all this time?”

  He doesn’t answer. He only turns away, looking defeated.

  “I knew I shouldn’t have let you do this. I just wanted you to be ready to take the call. Did they call?” Andres asks.

  Ignacio slouches so low that it looks like he might fall off Andres’s chair. He wipes his face with his sleeve and pushes himself up. Each movement seems like a huge effort, like he’s aged sixty years in just one night. With one hand, he yanks the headphone cable until it snaps off the tape player. He stretches his body over the table and rewinds the tape. After several seconds, he presses play.

  The two of them stand in the room, fingertips resting on the desk, and listen.

  Hello?

  Who the hell is this?

  This is Ignacio. I’m Andres’s son. He can’t talk tonight.

  Is this a joke?

  No—he had an emergency. He’ll be back tomorrow, but he left me in charge. I—I need to talk to my mother. Please.

  He’s not the one who decides who’s in charge. This isn’t his office, where his secretary takes a message and he gets to call back at his earliest convenience. If he thinks he can get away with ignoring me . . .

  He’s not ignoring you! He had to take my sister to the emergency room and he told me to pick up if you called. He says he just needs a couple more days.

  Here I was, about to cooperate, and he blows me off. That’s not a proper way to do business. I’m a little insulted. Tell him he’ll need those extra days because the price isn’t moving. Tell him that’s what he gets for making me waste my time considering his bullshit.

  No, he didn’t—he didn’t plan this. You have to believe me! It was just an emergency. Please, let me speak to my mom.

  She can’t come to the phone right now. She’s having an emergency, too. You understand, don’t you?

  No, wait! You can’t do that! We’re doing everything we can!

  I don’t make deals with intermediaries. You’re the little secretary, you give him this message, all right? Tell him everybody’s going to pay for this.

  Ignacio jumps across the desk to stop the tape. Nothing is audible at that point; it’s just a lot of begging and crying, and it’s hard to tell which side of the line the sounds are coming from—if it’s Marabela pleading in the background or if it’s Ignacio being tortured by the helplessness of the situation. Andres is relieved when the boy shuts it off. He knows there’s nothing more to hear, nothing more that will help them. He covers his mouth and feels his own stubble scratch his fingertips. There are no words that will help the situation, nothing he can say that will erase his son’s voice begging for his mother’s life. He wishes he could unhear it for both of them.

  Only now does he get a chance to look around. All the tapes they’ve made are scattered around his desk, separated from their cases.

  “Did you listen to all of these?” The boy nods. “I didn’t give you the keys so you could listen to them.”

  “I wanted to be prepared.”

  “Did you feel prepared?”

  He shakes his head.

  “Have you just been playing them all night?”

  Ignacio nods, his lips pressed tightly together. Andres walks around to his side of the desk and puts his arms around his son.

  “You did good,” he whispers, though he knows there’s no such thing. “Nobody is ever prepared for this sort of thing.”

  “I have to know what they did. I have to know what they did to her.” He steps away from his father and rewinds the tape, just a couple of seconds this time. The screams and the begging fill the room again, and Ignacio kneels so that his ears are closer to the tape player. “Right there!” He pauses, rewinds again. “Is that her? Does it sound like a weapon?”

  He’s about to press play again when Andres stops him. The boy slaps his hand, and Andres has to pull him away, but he won’t stop resisting and pretty soon Ignacio is hitting him; they’re rolling on the ground and pushing each other’s face away, trying to reach for the tape player to see who can make the sounds come back, who can silence it, first. Finally Andres rolls over on top of him and holds him down.

  “Stop! Whatever’s happened has happened. Nothing you do will change it,” he says. He watches as the words sink in, watches as his son, who so desperately wants to be a man, cries like a child for his mother.
<
br />   He thinks of the few conversations he’s had with Marabela lately. Some he replays on the cassette, but the one that scares him the most is only recorded in his mind.

  Hola, Andres.

  ¿Dónde estás?

  You know I can’t tell you that.

  When will you be back?

  I don’t know yet.

  And the kids? What do I tell them when they ask me where their mother is?

  I just need some time. To think.

  Don’t do this, Mari.

  Don’t beg, Andres, and don’t try to play the victim, either. I know what you and your father did, after what happened with my picture. Did you really think I’d never figure it out?

  Is that what this is all about?

  You went behind my back. All these years, knowing you didn’t support my work, that’s one thing. But to find out you jeopardized everything I—

  We were protecting you! I was only thinking of you and the kids. Don’t pretend I’m the bad guy when you’re the one who got everything you wanted. All day long you do nothing but hide away in the darkroom . . .

  You left me with nothing else. And that’s what you always wanted, isn’t it? To have me safely tucked away inside. It all makes sense now.

  Mi amor, please. Come home and we’ll work this out. We need you. You can’t just leave.

  Or else what? This shouldn’t come as a surprise, when you really think about it.

  Andres has tried to think about it, from every possible angle, but still he hasn’t found a way to fix things. He can’t go back far enough or dig deep enough to understand where they started to fall apart.

  He thinks back to the conversation and remembers the familiar silence on the other end of the line, the gentle click, the monotone beep that went on and on and on. Three days after they spoke she came home. Said she couldn’t leave the kids. She ordered a foldout bed from the furniture store across town, had it delivered while the kids were at school, and tucked it away in the closet. They agreed it’d be temporary, until they could work their problems out, but the promise stayed as hidden as their separation. Every night, Andres would pull out the bed and fall asleep with Marabela lying too far from his side. In the morning, he’d wake up and expect her to be gone again. Now, every morning, he wakes up and she is.

  In the morning Lorena comes over with more groceries: chicken, vegetables, and noodles so Consuelo can make soup; a pink blanket, a stuffed toy rabbit, and a digital thermometer for Cynthia. Andres tries to tell her it’s unnecessary—they have their own thermometer—but Lorena insists hers is better.

  “The digital reading is more accurate. And what little girl doesn’t like new things for her room? Is she sleeping now? When can I see her?”

  They tiptoe up the stairs and stop at Cynthia’s door, quietly stepping inside once it’s clear she’s in a deep enough sleep. He puts his hand on her head and practically engulfs it with his palm. It’s still warm, and he fights a sudden urge to curl up next to her, his little furnace, and let her energy soothe him.

  “What did the doctor say?” Andres’s mother asks.

  He points to a bottle on her dresser. “One tablespoon every four hours. And lots of fluids.”

  “What time did you start?”

  “Two.”

  Cynthia was so tired, she hadn’t even protested when the doctors put the spoon in her mouth. She’d closed her eyes, leaned into her father, and swallowed.

  Lorena looks at her watch. It is almost ten o’clock. Andres tugs at the child’s shoulder and she yawns herself awake, suddenly remembering the body aches and the dewy sweat on her skin. She looks exhausted and in pain, but despite breathing with her mouth open, still manages to reject the medicine that Andres tries spooning in.

  “Let me try,” Lorena says. “Shh . . . this will make you feel better.” She fills a glass of water from her nightstand and holds it close to the spoon, ready to switch one for the other. Lorena puts the spoon in Cynthia’s mouth and lifts it quickly toward the ceiling, and Cynthia looks up and tilts her head back, like a fish caught in a hook. As soon as she’s swallowed, Lorena puts the glass of water to her lips and pours the liquid down her throat, gently closing her jaw. Cynthia is too stunned to protest.

  “Look how easy that was. Look how easy it is to be a healthy, good little girl. Are you hungry?”

  Cynthia nods and Lorena extends her hand. They make their way past Andres and head downstairs to the kitchen. He watches as Cynthia takes her time with each step, leaning into her grandmother for balance.

  DAY 12

  He wakes at five knowing his sleep won’t return. When he tries to close his eyes, he feels like he’s entering a prison, and he’s afraid to stay there long. He grabs a pair of pants and a shirt in the dark, unsure if they go together but completely unconcerned either way. He cringes as he turns on the engine in the garage. It’s amazing how a sound he normally doesn’t notice can seem deafening at such a quiet hour. It follows him as he pulls away from the house.

  By the time he reaches the end of his block, the music from his tape player has ended, and Andres doesn’t bother flipping the cassette over because he feels the need to be quiet, inconspicuous. Driving so slowly reminds him of when he used to sneak into the house late as a teenager—the door always creaked, but he’d crack it open little by little in the hopes that it would make a difference.

  He contemplates driving through the stop sign he’s approaching like cabdrivers do during the day, speeding right through and honking their horns twice to warn oncoming traffic.

  Up ahead a man and a woman lean over a rusted car with the hood popped, poking at the engine like it’s a dead animal that might come back to life. The woman smokes a cigarette while the man rolls up his sleeves. His hands are black and oily.

  Andres slows down at the sign but doesn’t come to a full stop. He looks straight ahead, ignoring the man nodding in his direction.

  “You know anything about cars?” he yells through his window.

  Andres hits the gas and watches the man and woman in his rearview mirror. Both have their hands in the air, making vulgar gestures in his direction. In a few seconds their silhouettes are swallowed by the darkness.

  He turns the corner into another neighborhood where none of the houses seem to match. A boxy gray-and-red brick fort with wooden panels over its window presses against a home made of white painted cinder blocks. Black bars cover the front doors, and those who can’t afford a proper gate have built cement walls with shards of broken glass sunken along the top. The street is poorly lit, with three of its lights out. A brownish basketball skitters onto the street, its momentum dying with each bounce. It stops in the middle of the road, maybe ten yards from Andres’s car, and he lets the car idle, wonders if he should get out and push the ball aside or if someone will be coming for it soon. To his left, he hears skin slapping against the pavement, tiny feet running toward him. Here is a little boy, no older than nine, playing in the darkest hours of the morning and diving in front of a moving car to save his basketball. Andres stops and watches the boy, who is now practically tiptoeing to his ball as he keeps his eyes on the stranger behind the wheel. When he reaches the ball he snatches it, pauses for a second, and takes off. As Andres drives away, he tries to shake the image of the little boy’s eyes. He recognized his own fear in them, and now that he knows what it looks like he sees it everywhere—in the man who pumps gas across the street, in the teenage girls who stumble down the sidewalk, in the transvestite prostitute who steps forward and back, indecisive, at the intersection while Andres prays for the light to turn green. It is a fear that he can’t get away from, and seeing it in others doesn’t make him feel any safer.

  He makes it to the institution in his best time yet, barely under a half hour. Walking into the lobby is like listening to a giant seashell; the building gives off a heavy silence, but he’s comforted by its vastness.

  “You must be crazy to be coming by so early,” Betty says when he reaches the sign-in window
. “You know these are emergency hours only.”

  “It is an emergency,” Andres says. He tries to keep his voice to a whisper, tries to go for a joke. “I may go crazy if I don’t see her right now.”

  Betty just rolls her eyes. “I can’t have you disturbing the patients.”

  “I’m not disturbing anyone. It helps her to see me.”

  “Yes, but not when she’s sleeping.”

  “But she’s an early riser. She won’t be sleeping right now.”

  Betty hesitates. “We have rules here, and visiting hours. We can’t change the rules for everyone.”

  “Betty . . . please. I need to see her.” It’s clear the begging is getting him nowhere, but he can’t imagine leaving and facing this day without seeing Elena. He sets both hands on the reception desk, practically reaching for Betty’s, and looks her straight in the eyes so she can’t look away. “Please. I’m trying to help her recover, but the truth is, seeing her helps me, too. Elena’s the only person I can talk to. She’s the only one who understands what I—what my wife—is going through right now. You understand?”

  Betty leans back in her chair and cups her hands together in her lap. “I’m sorry. I know this must be hard but—”

  “Betty. I wasn’t actually joking when I said I may go crazy . . . Please.”

  She looks over her shoulder at the hallway. “Fine. But only if she’s already awake.”

  Andres breathes a sigh of relief. He knows Elena will be sitting in her chair as usual, waiting for the sun to rise. When they reach her room and peek through the window, he sees her just as he imagined, and the predictability soothes him. “Thank you,” he whispers to Betty, and then, in a voice that’s barely any louder to Elena, “Hey. Got room for me?”

  He sits on an arm of her chair with his arm stretched over its back. Outside Elena’s window, the moon and the sun are visible in the sky, both so dim their light cancels each other out. The two old friends sit in silence. Finally, Elena rubs Andres’s arm and asks how he’s doing.