All grew quiet. She heard a couple of ice cubes stir in Damian’s drink, and though Martin said nothing, his gaze clicked into some invisible place just shy of her feet.
“It was simple. Two witnesses, a priest, a bouquet of days-old flowers. Nothing worth remembering,” Elda said.
“I doubt that’s true.”
“Isa,” Martin said.
“Fine.” She rolled her eyes and turned toward Claudia and Damian. “What about you guys? Any big plans in the future?”
“What? You mean a funeral?” Damian said. “It feels a bit early for me to start picking out caskets. Maybe we should do a hey-I’m-not-dead-yet party. Tell everyone that I am, but then they show up and surprise: it’s an unfuneral.”
“You’re crazy,” Claudia said. “And everyone would kill you.”
“Seriously, though, Clau.” All that was left to do was jump for it, gracefulness and tact be damned. “You remember when we were little and we used to plan our weddings? I wanted a long dress with poufy sleeves, and you wanted a Jessica Rabbit dress, but in white. Your bridesmaids’ dresses would be mermaid pink, and mine would be baby blue. And I always pictured my father walking me down the aisle. Of course that didn’t happen, but I like to think he was there in spirit.” A long pause. “You always said you wanted your mom and brother to walk you. You never wished he could be there, though? Omar?”
Right there, she knew nothing had gone too far until she said his name. It was in how Claudia’s lips opened, so slowly, she could see the edges stick together as the rest of her face seemed to float apart. It was in the lights screaming and the couch cushions squirming and the air Isabel stopped breathing, knowing they were all holding back. Elda excused herself to use the restroom.
“You’ve always had a hang-up about my father,” Claudia said once Elda was gone.
“It’s just hard to believe he’s not a big deal.”
“That’s because you had a father.” It sounded like an accusation.
“And what? Were you jealous?” Isabel began to laugh at the thought of it but stopped. “Oh my God. You were.”
“Don’t be a drama queen, Isabel.”
“Is that what you thought I was being? After my father died?”
“What? No. I never said that.”
“You never said anything.” With her dad gone, Isabel had moved to her mom’s place, a small house in a new development just a couple of blocks outside of her school district. She didn’t bother making friends at her new school; it was hard enough most days to breathe, let alone smile or talk to complete strangers. She took comfort only in the weekends, when she knew she would be able to sleep over at Claudia’s. Then that, too, had changed. “You were so dismissive. And distant.”
“We were at different schools, Isabel. People grow apart.”
“I lived twelve minutes from your house! I know because I counted them. Every Friday.”
“Isa,” Martin said.
“No. You weren’t there, Martin.” She looked again to Claudia and felt a familiar shame well up inside of her. “You acted like nothing was wrong. Like I should just get over it.” She remembered her last night at Claudia’s house, how she had cried herself to sleep on a folded-up comforter on the floor next to Claudia’s bed, afraid she would hear her.
“I was trying to be supportive.”
“You stopped calling me.”
“You stopped calling first.”
“I was depressed.”
“I was there for you. My mom was there for you. All those times she drove you to the hospital.”
“You didn’t even say hi at the funeral. And after that, you were too busy with all your other friends to ever hang out.”
“Look, I’m sorry, okay? It wasn’t easy being around you. I didn’t know how to deal.”
“Sure you did. You did what you guys always do.”
“What is that supposed to mean?” Martin said.
“You shut me out. You shut out your father . . .”
“Don’t go there, Isa.”
“Why? What are you people so afraid of?”
“Don’t you get it?” Claudia leaned in close and spoke to Isabel in a deep, slow whisper, like she would to a child. “This isn’t about you. Or Omar. It’s about her.” She nodded her head in the direction of the bathroom. “When I was little I’d ask my mom about him, and it killed her, every time.”
“So you just stopped?”
“I stopped because I care about her too much. And I couldn’t care less about him.” Claudia leaned back into Damian’s arms and took a sip of her drink, her eyes suddenly smiling at Isabel over the rim of the glass as Elda came back into the room.
Isabel sat still, dumbfounded. Before she could say anything, the back door opened. The alarm chimed twice, friendly and upbeat, as Eduardo and Diana made their way through the living room.
“Good night. Thank you so much for a lovely evening,” Diana said. Everyone stood up to kiss and hug, and Damian tapped his pockets for his keys.
“You’re in the blue truck? I think I blocked you in. We’ll head out with y’all.”
Everything else felt like echoes until they were gone.
CHAPTER 20
MARCH 1981
She didn’t want to tell Omar, but Elda thought she had an infection. Her insides burned when she went to the bathroom. It had woken her several times this evening, and she had tried to ignore it because she was afraid of stumbling through the dark, narrow hallway.
But the dreams had started again. When she was a child, Elda had shared a mattress with her younger cousin and had frequently wakened mortified at having soaked the mattress. She would dream she was swimming in a river, with no one around to notice if a small cloud of water around her suddenly turned warm. In reality, she had been wetting the bed.
Ever since, even in adulthood, Elda considered this recurring dream a nightmare. The incidents had stopped later in her childhood, but the fear remained. What if now, sharing a bed with Omar as husband and wife, she revealed herself to be little more than a child?
She got up before the dreams could continue.
It was the deepest hour of the night, when even the sleepless slip away, and being awake felt like an intrusion. Elda stepped between the mattresses, careful to maintain her balance. She could feel everything inside her shifting, readjusting, to make room for her child.
In the bathroom, she didn’t turn the light on. She closed the door behind her, but didn’t lock it for fear of the harsh click. The light from tonight’s half-moon barely made its way through the small window over the toilet.
She regretted not slipping on her shoes. She imagined her socks absorbing the urine and sweat of strangers who had come through this house before her, and it made her long for a shower. The tub was right there, the shower curtain pulled open. No one would have to know.
She unrolled a wad of toilet paper and wiped off the seat before using it, then washed her hands and arms with soap and water all the way up to her shoulders. She tried to fit parts of her chest and abdomen over the sink, then cupped her wet hands and brought them to her face. She had been bathing like this for three days, and still it felt like the earth clung to her.
Elda tapped the wall for a hand towel. As her arm searched the air, she sensed the space around her shrink, and she knew, even before she opened her eyes, that she was not alone. She saw a dark figure behind her and felt his hand slap over her mouth. She tried to scream, but it was nothing more than half a breath. All she could see were her own eyes growing in the mirror. They traveled to the knife against her neck, then down the length of the arm holding her, then finally, the face.
He seemed so much calmer now that he was in control. His grip over her mouth loosened. Gently, he pressed his other hand against her back, folding her body over the sink. He pushed her down until keeping her eyes locked on his reflection hurt, as if they might stretch out of her skull. But she couldn’t not look at him. She couldn’t let Miguel do this without a witness.<
br />
His jeans rustled, shuffling down his legs. Her own legs began trembling. Rattling. She couldn’t make them stop.
“Always so delicate.” He traced her spine with the knife down to the small of her back, then wrapped himself around her. A gasp escaped, hollowed by the cold metal blade, thin against her belly.
“You keep acting like something’s gonna fall out of there,” he said.
And then she collapsed. Her legs failed her. She tried grabbing the sink as she fell, and her knees hit the tile. Her arms were still wet and sudsy from the wash, and though he tried to stop her, she kept slipping from his grasp until she heard the thud of his blade landing in the sink, and her fingers gripped around the sound. In the dark, she thrust the knife in his direction.
His flesh was thicker than she had expected.
It was painful, even to her, to push so hard and have his weight collapse back onto her own.
He rolled over and felt for the blade.
“No!” Without thinking, she pulled it out and clutched it close.
“You fucking bitch. You fucking bitch!” His rage barely reached a whisper.
Eventually, or perhaps immediately, Elda screamed.
The walls filled with footsteps. Someone turned on the lights, and she tried shielding her eyes with her hands, but they were covered in blood. She felt Omar lift her away, and she heard Marisol telling the children to go back to sleep. One of the coyotes kept calling for more towels and more pressure and once, she heard him say, “Sangre, mucha sangre,” and again she looked at her hands and nodded, agreeing that yes, there was far too much blood.
She didn’t notice how quiet it had gotten until she looked up. In the hallway, in the light that was coming from the bathroom, stood Tomás. Elda watched him watch his father on the floor. She knew, from the way the boy’s back collapsed for an instant before he breathed again, that she had killed the man.
CHAPTER 21
It always started the same. In the moments before they said, “I’m sorry, it’s okay,” and meant it, they became strangers. Too polite. Isabel recognized the motions, but didn’t know what came next.
It was the first time they had fought this long. They spent days after Eduardo’s party staying out of each other’s way. Their anger was the winter, and their moods, an unsurprising forecast, shifting but still governed by the nature of their hostility.
On the first day, Martin was volatile. He slammed doors and spilled coffee over the rim of his mug when he placed it on the kitchen counter. She, on the other hand, was tranquil, taking pleasure in how little his anger fazed her.
By the second day—by the time she’d really had a chance to think about it—Isabel was more irritable than a cat. Why should she be the one to apologize when it was Claudia who had hurt her the most? How could Martin not take her side? If he didn’t want to speak about his father, fine. But ignoring Omar wouldn’t make him go away.
Martin brooded over every little thing on the third day, as if he begrudged the weight of his own limbs. He grunted and hunched, a sight made more spectacular by how quickly his disposition changed when he spoke to Eduardo.
Overall though, it could’ve been worse. At least they were peaceful, at least they became well rehearsed at avoiding each other’s eyes. They were hyperaware of their bodies and personal space, in which they each orbited without crossing into the other’s. Their gravity didn’t allow for touching. It was practically a new form of intimacy.
Then he called her from work for a favor.
Now, of course, Isabel knew that thirty minutes before an important pitch meeting was not the right time. And she wasn’t even passive-aggressive about bringing him a clean shirt after he spilled his chocolate protein shake on the new one. She didn’t ask, because she could already imagine: Martin never closed the blender properly at home, so why would it be any different in the office break room?
She laughed to herself in the car, picturing the liquid lunging out at his face and chest, but then she felt guilty and slightly protective of him. With that ounce of sympathy, she suddenly knew they would get through this.
“Oh, good. You brought the right blue one,” Martin said when she tapped on his office door.
What other blue one was there? This was the one he wore most often, the one he paired with dark jeans and a jacket on casual days, and a gray suit anytime else. She had watched him try it on at the store after she had sneaked into his fitting room. There were light blue shirts and navy shirts hanging in their closet, but Isabel always knew what he meant when he said his blue shirt. She resented the implication otherwise.
“Thanks. You rushing off to work?”
“Not yet.” She sat in the chair in front of his desk, placing both hands on the armrests. “I have ten or fifteen minutes.”
Not bothering to close the window blinds, he began unbuttoning his shirt. No one in the office paid them any attention; they sat hunched in their cubicles, plugged into their headsets. “I have to head out in a few, but stay as long as you like.”
“Which client is this for again?”
“The bank.”
Hence the tie, which he straightened as his eyes scanned his desk. It was a perfectly symmetrical knot, and one he’d never, in all the years they had been together, asked her to help him tie.
“Who taught you to tie the knot?”
For a moment he looked confused, but he was too preoccupied searching for something under piles of papers to dwell on it.
“Your tie,” she said. “Who’d you learn it from?”
He pressed his lips together and looked down. “My grandfather. When I was twelve.”
“Was it hard for you?” She thought she caught the hint of a nod.
“The tie? I don’t know. I don’t remember. What’s this about, Isa?” Perhaps he’d found what he’d been looking for, or perhaps it no longer mattered. He began piling things into his arms with a nervous quickness.
“I was just wondering. It occurred to me that there are a lot of things I don’t know about you.”
“Jesus. Do we really have to do this now? I’m prepping a huge meeting, and all of a sudden you don’t know me?”
“I’m not saying I don’t know you. Just things. All those stories couples know about each other because they’ve heard them tell them a million times. You never told me your grandfather taught you. I assumed that your father did when you were little, or maybe your mom did after he—” She had been speaking so fast she hadn’t known where this was headed, and now that she did, Isabel hesitated.
“After he what?”
“Nothing.”
“No, really. After he what?”
“After he left.” She crossed her arms and turned her head toward the window, not wanting to see the look on his face. Her neck turned cold, her cheeks, hot.
“Is this how it’s always going to be? Everything ends up back at him?”
“I don’t know. I just . . . that’s the problem. We’re supposed to know each other and share a life together, and there’s this huge part of your life that I know nothing about.”
“Not huge. Seven years isn’t huge.”
“You know that’s not all it is.”
“You keep trying to make him mean more than he does.”
“And what? I have no right to ask? I’m your wife.” The word hissed past her lips. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see his coworkers fidgeting. They were children awakened from slumber, suddenly alert. Isabel lowered her voice. “I don’t keep any secrets from you. Everything that is me is yours.”
Martin came around to the front of his desk and took the seat next to her. His body fell into it, legs sprawled, back slouched, as if resigned to finally apologize. The wood creaked as he sat up abruptly, steeled. “He didn’t just leave, Isa. He went to prison for killing a guy. He’s no saint.”
He kissed her on the forehead and left the office—a quick, hard peck, just for show. Martin’s coworkers had stopped pretending not to watch them. She stretche
d her lips into a smile in his wake, and on her face it felt foreign, a fragile, broken thing.
CHAPTER 22
MARCH 1981
They had watched the coyotes fling Miguel’s body into the back of the van, and it’d sounded like a bag of sand. Omar had thought it would rumble more, perhaps get tossed around as they slammed the van shut and climbed in, but the body was decidedly still.
He wrapped a bedsheet over Elda’s shoulders. The air was warm and stagnant, but she was shivering, and this gave him something to do. The men had left fifteen minutes ago, and still he and Elda stood in the short hallway, staring at the locked door.
Every once in a while Elda glanced over her shoulder at Tomás. He cried in Marisol’s arms, then curled up in bed to sleep. He woke, sat up, and went to the bathroom. There was a moment of hesitation as he stood at the door. Omar had to stop Elda from going to him.
“Mi amor, no.” He held her closer and tighter. “Now’s not the time.”
“Then when?”
He didn’t know. “He’ll be with his family soon.”
Tomás, Marisol, and her daughter all had someone who would pick them up and pay the rest of their way. They had often spoken about their futures to pass the time, and Tomás had told them about his aunt, his father’s sister, whom he had never met because she had left before he was born. “She’s the one who’s paying,” he had said, right before his father had told him to shut his mouth.
Omar and Elda were the only ones who had just each other. They had paid in full before leaving and simply had to trust that things would work out as expected.
“Where do you think they’ll take his body?”
Tomás came out of the bathroom, leaving the door open. From where they stood, Omar could see the spot where the man had lain as a circle of blood swelled around him.
“Some place far. Some place where it’s just another body if it’s found.” He winced. They had come all this way without acknowledging the shoes and sweaters and empty canteens all around them. Twice, Omar had sworn he had stepped over a human skull in the desert, but he had convinced himself it was just a rock, just the darkness playing tricks on his mind. “Come. Rest. We’ll be leaving once they return.”
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