by R. L. Fox
As I water the plants and examine closely the fruits of their bountiful growth, I can’t help thinking of my mother. Why is love intensified by absence? I miss my loving, unreliable, batshit crazy mother. It’s not that I curse a lot now or anything, but that term best describes my mother and her attempts to come between Daniel and I, and to mold me with her lies into something I didn’t want to become. She just couldn’t resist trying to fit me neatly into her world, instead of guiding me along while giving me enough freedom to shape my own existence, make my own choices and learn to take responsibility for them. I can’t do anything about not seeing her or talking with her, and I don’t really wish to. I’m content here in Mérida with Daniel; our home is bliss.
Nonetheless it’s sad, sort of tragic in a way, that I can’t share with my own mother the experience of being pregnant and, in six months, the experience of having a baby. I’ve enjoyed reading The Secret Life of the Unborn Child. Thank God for Cristala, my friend, who’s also pregnant and married, like me, and only a year older, and for Russ and Maggie, Americans who have been really kind to us. On Thanksgiving I helped Maggie prepare the turkey and all the trimmings and I learned so much about how to cook. I knew next to nothing about it before, since Carmelita had always prepared the meals in my mother’s house.
There’s no way I can even visit my mother, for she’d surely call the police and they might arrest Daniel for kidnapping a girl under the age of consent and having relations with her. But maybe they wouldn’t arrest him since he’s only two years older than me, and he’s underage himself.
I’m certain my mother is pissed and has hired a private detective to find us, so it might be just a matter of time, but I don’t know what more we can do to avoid being found. Move again? Neither of us wants to do that. I suppose we’ll just have to take our chances. We’re planning to go back next summer, after I turn sixteen and have given birth to our baby. It’s unlikely then my mother will still try to come between us.
We were married here, in October, in an Episcopal church in the city, but that doesn’t count in the U.S. My mother would make me give up our baby, Emma Suzanne, Suzanne after Grandma Hartford (I love the name “Emma,” too) or William Michael Jonathan, after my dad, Daniel’s brother and Mr. Christie. Then I would be miserable all over again, without Daniel and our baby. I wouldn’t be able to share with Daniel the experience of helping form a new person’s soul, of guiding our child on its life journey. In a few weeks we’re going to have an ultrasound but we don’t want to know our baby’s gender until she or he is born.
I still miss my dad, my one and only dad, and I still talk to him and write letters to him. Sometimes when I’m writing to him in my diary it feels like my pen is being held and directed by someone else, like God or something. I hope my dad supports me in what I’m doing. I’ll never get over losing him. Not completely. If our baby is a boy, I see him growing up to be a lot like my dad.
I know I haven’t felt the same since my dad died. When I lost him, I lost my mentor, the person who was meant to help guide me through the many parts of growing up. It sort of took away the person I was inside, for a while, removed a piece of myself that was integral to making me whole. But talking with Daniel about it has made me feel better. I often tell him who my dad was. I also allow myself to cry when I feel sad. Now there’s a special place in my heart that guards the memory and essence of my dad. I will always be my dad’s child.
It’s a good thing my mother gave Daniel so much money. I’ll be able to attend a private bilingual high school here, with an American high school curriculum, starting in January. Mr. Shapiro, our friend, knows the people who run the school and he’ll make sure I get enrolled okay. I could do independent study, at home, instead, but I think I’d rather attend school. Of course I’ll have to take a leave when I give birth.
We have all these fake Mexican and American documents that we picked up in Tijuana: birth certificates, passports, visas, work permits, social security cards, everything. I have a driver’s license from Texas that says I already turned sixteen, and a ninth and tenth grade transcript from a school there. I’m Sarah Taylor now that I’m married to Daniel. My name before was Sarah Bates. Daniel has thought of everything.
Deep down my mother knows she did a lot of wrong things where Daniel and I are concerned. I believe she really does like Daniel. Inside, underneath the temporary psychosis, my mother is actually free-spirited, open-minded, and not just a stuffy old lady.
I’ve been wondering why it is that I’m able to perceive such things, why these things are obvious to someone as young as me, when they seem invisible amid the conventions of the grownup world and are so overlooked in the adult campaign of deceit.
A few weeks ago, during the Day of the Dead festivities, Daniel and I watched a puppet show in the city. Puppets never have to pretend, I remember thinking, like my mother, constantly clinging to the façade of her social status. No, puppets never put on an act, like some people do all the time. That’s ironic.
I’ve been listening, through an open window, to the musical notes in the air. Daniel is playing the piano, his Yamaha keyboard, which sounds just like a baby grand. He practices daily, with scales and arpeggios and chord progressions, usually after working on his movie script, but I’ve not heard him play a song before, like the blues tune he’s pumping now with such joyous passion.
He’s also working on a proposal for NASA to fix the moon problem. The deadline for submissions is December 31. I don’t fully understand Daniel’s theory, but it has something do with redirecting the flight of a rogue asteroid so that it passes close to the moon and influences the moon’s orbit with its gravitational pull. I hope the moon problem gets fixed by next year because the future depends on it, the future of Daniel and me, our limitless future, the endlessness of our love.
Sometimes Daniel works mornings on his proposal at the store. Evenings, I love helping him learn Spanish. He’ll be eighteen in four months, and that seems old. I’ll be married to a guy of legal age, but that’s okay because it’s Daniel. I’ve been thinking of writing a book about us, Adventures in Togetherland, when I grow up a little more—but I’m pretty grown up now. At least it feels like there’s not much room to grow up anymore.
The piano music has stopped, and the man I love appears at the back door. I look at him and smile invitingly.
Epilogue
Daniel
Sunday morning, November 23
Mérida, Mexico
“You’re feeling better,” Sarah tells me, as with precision, like usual, she diagnoses my mood. Although I’d bought the keyboard weeks ago, until this morning I was having difficulty putting together what it takes to let loose with a tune like Dr. John’s “City That Care Forgot” from memory. The remnants of despair are still with me, but I’m beginning to learn how to deal with it.
“I have unpacking and stocking to do,” I say. “Come with me after church?”
“Sure,” Sarah replies. She adds, “Cristala and Juan are coming at four. We should have plenty of time.”
The bookstore we purchased from Russ and Maggie Shapiro in October, after the wedding ceremony, is a godsend. It fills our lives with the joy of hard work. Since we began to stock English-language items, and to advertise in Mérida’s English-language newspaper, The Times, business is booming. We might even show a profit this month. There’s a large contingent of Americans residing in the region, and the decision to bring them into the store is paying off.
Russ and Maggie have really helped us settle in. We first met them at the Episcopal Church. Russ is a retired physician and has arranged for Sarah’s medical treatment, during and after her pregnancy, at the Clínica de Mérida.
Of course, I never thought I would become a father at this age, but I’ll have to make the best of it. I had the worst father in the world, perhaps, so that will serve as a blueprint for “what not to do.” I’ll give our baby plenty of attention and plenty of love, and the rest will take care of itself, I’m su
re.
I say to Sarah, “Remember, Juan and I are doing the fishing thing tomorrow morning. Will you be all right at the store for a couple of hours?”
“I’ll be fine,” she says, with a kind of studied unconcern. “Just don’t drown in the Gulf.”
I laugh in honest delight. I am so absorbed in the future we’re constructing, that I can hardly contain myself.
Early morning sunbeams shine adoringly in Sarah’s dark hair. She’s an angel, with the faith of a child, I think, in the beauty she is destined to bring forth. There’s a certain lightness in her, and thus a lightening of my spirits. I will make her my queen in this world.
“I have a riddle for you,” she says.
“You and your riddles,” I reply lightheartedly. “Isn’t it a little early in the day for that?”
“Never too early for a good riddle.”
“All right,” I relent, “Go ahead.”
“Sometimes I’m taken lightly and sometimes darkly. Most everyone wants to embrace my wonders, but only a happy few ever have. What am I?”
“I have no idea,” I answer.
“Life would be very different without me—perhaps nonexistent. Human survival depends on me. I’m capable of permanently changing lives; as I move dangerously close, I bring with me the power over life and death.”
“That’s easy, the moon.”
“Wrong,” says Sarah, dismissively. “All right, here’s your final clue, your final chance to get this right: When I show up in full splendor, people tend to behave strangely.”
“Like I said already, the moon. It has to be the moon.”
“Well,” Sarah says, that may be a possible answer, but what’s the best answer?”
“I don’t know. What else could it be?”
Sarah gazes into my eyes with a look that melts my heart. “True love, silly.”
Again I feel that pleasing sense of my being a dominant key in Sarah’s life. I kneel beside her and run my hand gently over her expanding mid-section. “All my life I wanted ... Didn’t you?” I say cheerfully.
We look at each other, and then we both cast down our eyes, perhaps with the acute self-consciousness of young adults. Sarah’s happiness seems to blend well with the dazzling clear light, absorbed and refracted.
I close my eyes and kiss her softly. Her lips are always warm and always seem to bestow upon me a magical energy that sweeps through me, such as a sorcerer might feel when he touches some life-renewing amulet.
For the first time in all my years, I know more than just the fact of being; I know the passion to exist. Now is actually itself, and I care only about the girl in the pale blue dress. I’ve learned the worst lesson life can teach—that it makes no sense. But I’ll always try to make sense of it anyway.
Though I know I can never entirely forgive myself for Mike’s death, I will forget the dreadfulness of my past. It’s as if I’ve been born again, luckily, in Sarah’s arms, her touch keeping me from falling too far into myself. “It’s no use going back to yesterday,” she’s told me.
Sarah looks at me tenderly. We kiss again. A robin perches on a tree branch and begins to sing. The sound is as delicate as a caress. It seems Sarah and I have reached a point where we can work from some small faith in ourselves, a place from which love may be able to heal even the deepest of our wounds. Perhaps for each of us a scab will form, and then fall away, leaving new skin.
— The End —
