Sanctuary Line

by Jane Urquhart

  “No,” I said, though whether in refusal or agreement I wasn’t sure.

  He only kissed me twice after that; once when I said the word no and again a few moments later. It is foolish and sentimental to suggest that something like that can alter one’s outlook completely, but it seems to me that that is what happened. There was a whole life in those kisses, I think now, or at the very least a full young adulthood. There were the letters we would never get to write to each other. There was next summer and the one after that. In my weakest moments, barely awake at dawn, I think there may have even been the possibility of us operating this farm together in those kisses, tending the orchards and planting the fields, and perhaps some children waiting to be born. I realize that this is all an indulgence. How would we have managed it, after all? The immigration papers, the long road of schooling and changing ahead of both of us before immigration could even have been thought of. There would have been his family, and mine, both objecting vigorously, the complete incompatibility of our winter childhoods. His Catholic religion. My utter lack of any religion at all. Any one of those things could have left us staring at each other in the cold light of day; the combination of these factors, any rational person must admit, would have made anything I imagined impossible.

  And yet we keep these things, don’t we, these unresolved touches in the dark? I bring the girl I was that night back to life as I tell you this, her astonishment in the face of shared love. She walks right up to my elbow, completely empty of the hard knowledge she would gain only hours later, and for a moment or two I am able to see everything through her eyes, the way the beach looked, and the smooth surface of Teo’s palm when he held my hand as we walked back to the house, my sudden awareness that the keys to the car were still in the pocket of the shorts I was wearing and had been wearing when I drove up and down Sanctuary Line that afternoon. I bring that girl back and with her comes Mandy, innocent of love or war, asleep in her yellow bedroom in the house, her dreams a concoction of summer dances, disturbing poetry, and new fall fashions.

  The car was parked at some distance from the house, which was a good thing because, careful as we were about closing the doors after we slid into the front seat, and in spite of the fact that I didn’t turn on the lights until we reached the end of the long drive, I feared the noise of the engine starting up might have alerted someone, though I knew the one most sensitive to noise, my aunt, was safely across the lake. As it was, we drove undetected down Sanctuary Line until we came to a public boat launch where we could park. Teo put his arm around me and I placed my head on his shoulder, aware that if he had been a boy from the pavilion and not from Mexico it would have been him, not me, behind the wheel. We caressed each other and talked, comfortable now with the affection that was growing between us. The radio softly played the songs that were popular at that time, and among those songs were lyrics describing the end of summer and the separation of lovers. We were quiet when songs like this played. Neither one of us spoke about our own impending separation, the miracle of the present, this intimacy taking precedence over anything that might happen next.

  “He never went with Pancho Villa to the mountains, my great-grandfather,” Teo told me. “I said that because of all those stories your uncle tells. I think you will love me if I have stories too.” He put his hand on the back of my neck under my ponytail. “Maybe you cannot love me if I tell you only we are poor and my grandfather did nothing but work till he died of a cough, and my great-grandfathers had no barns that blew away or lighthouses, or even any land” There had never been any gunfights, he confessed sadly. He said their lives – the lives of everyone he knew – were unimportant replicas of other unimportant lives being lived all around them. The people simply worked and then they died. And, surprised to find myself feeling womanly and adult, I ran my fingers over his cheekbone. I didn’t care about the gunfights or the mountains. When I had said the word no down at the beach, it must have been in response to a premonition of what would happen later that night because everything I felt sitting beside him in the car was simple and natural and affirmed. He opened my blouse and placed his face and then his mouth on my small breasts and, though I was startled by this, nothing in me wanted to stop him from doing it. He kissed my hands and placed them under his shirt on the silk of his own skin near his waist. Then he carefully closed my blouse, button by button, with his mouth on my mouth. I was aching under the spell of this transformation, this evolution of feeling. For the first time I knew that there existed a state of being that was both unbearable and hungered for.

  There have been a few men in the intervening decades, and I have known physical pleasure and satisfaction, but the ghost of Teo – a boy I was just beginning to know – has always stood between those men and me in any room we entered. Maybe I was hoping to resurrect his ghost in them, or maybe that’s not it at all. But I have stayed with no one I have touched for longer than a few months because not one of them, in any real way, has truly touched me.

  Later, when we returned to the farm, I slowly eased the car back into its spot near the end of the lane and we walked hand in hand across the lawn, skirting around the picnic table where the Monopoly board glowed in the moonlight. There on the grass, Teo tried to teach me to dance in the way that he and his mother danced, but I was awkward and stumbling and finally he threw his hands up in mock despair and laughed at me. Then we danced in the slow way that teenagers at the pavilion had been dancing all summer long, while Teo quietly sang once again the sad song about la Chamuscada. I asked him if the Burnt One had died, and he said no, she didn’t die, at least not then. The house was dark and silent. Everyone is asleep, I thought, and Teo and I had no business being out here in the dark alone together long after he should have been in the bunkhouse and I should have been in the narrow bed across from Mandy’s in her room. Tomorrow Teo would have to be back in the trees; the harvest was in full swing and each evening trucks filled with produce departed for the city. Tomorrow I would begin to pack up my summer clothes in preparation for my return to the red brick house and to school. Still we stood with our foreheads touching and our arms around each other swaying in the dark as if this were the most natural thing to do at one o’clock in the morning in the vicinity of orchards. From the window beside this table I can see exactly where we stood, though the fences have fallen into disrepair and the trees are mostly dead and choked by weeds. He kissed me once more, and this time his tongue began a slow exploration of the inside of my mouth. It was in the middle of this kiss that we became aware of lights in the drive and quickly drew apart, hurrying behind a cedar bush beside the house as my aunt’s car came to a halt ten feet from where we were standing.

  I will never know exactly why my aunt decided to make the return trip in the middle of the night, but at that moment I thought it was because she couldn’t bring herself to believe my uncle would be able to properly oversee what was going to take place in the kitchen. She doesn’t trust him, was the thought I recall passing through my mind. Teo was still holding my hand when we saw their bedroom window blaze with light, then close down to darkness again. My aunt reappeared in the moonlight and hurried across the yard, passing within three feet of us as she moved toward Teo’s mother’s trailer.

  What happened next is almost too painful to describe. The trailer windows flooded with light, and then there was yelling and commotion, a terrible howl and Dolores’s voice pleading for something – could it have been mercy? – in Spanish. Instinct should have kept us, the children, out of the fray, but instead it propelled us directly into it, where we saw everything. My uncle standing there naked, slowly turning to the wall. Teo’s mother, also naked, with her hands clasped over her skull as if she were being brutally pushed toward execution. And my aunt, her mouth twisted into a hard silent line, unleashing all the fury she had bolted inside her, bringing her fists down over and over again on Dolores’s brown flesh, her breasts, her thighs, while my uncle stood motionless, his back turned, doing nothing. Though it must have
been only seconds, all of this seemed to go on for hours, and I remember thinking first that my uncle would stop it and then, when he remained silent and still that it would never stop, that Teo and I would be standing forever inside a trailer while this collision of outright violence and brutal immobility unfolded before us.

  It was when my aunt turned to lift a chair from the corner of the room that Teo intervened, ripping it from her hands, then pinning her by her shoulders against the wall. She struggled for a moment or two, then wrenched herself from his grasp and fled into the night. Silence entered the room. The only sounds I remember were Teo’s sharp breath and the ironically peaceful lapping of the great lake. Then Dolores removed her hands from her head and looked toward my uncle, who was stepping into his trousers. “Stanley …” she began, “Stanley, por favor …” Her voice left her and she sank back onto the bed. He looked in her direction. “Naufragio,” he murmured, shaking his head. His face was grey, his expression almost empty, and without looking back, he moved into the dark, following his wife.

  He had done nothing. He had said nothing but that one word. He protected neither his lover nor himself. Instead he followed his wife back to the house to receive the full force of her rage, leaving the woman he had been making love to in the custody of her son. I was still reeling from the brutality that had exploded out of my aunt and that seemed to be reverberating in this small space. I was also processing the fact of adult nudity with what I believed then to be the ugliness of that mature flesh, and the ugliness of what I realized must have passed between my uncle and Dolores, and I knew that Teo would have been trying to deal with all of that as well. He was on the other side of the table now, closer to where his mother lay.

  “¡Yo la mato!” he said, breathing hard. “¡Yo la mato!” The anger in his voice terrified me.

  “No,” his mother said. She had a pale blanket around her. I couldn’t stop staring at the swelling around one of her eyes. Teo was speaking rapidly to his mother. After one statement or another, he would hurl himself at a wall, either with his fists or with his body. Dolores said nothing except the word no and then more urgently, in English, “No fight!” Even humiliated and wounded, she was proud, and there was something pitiless in the tone of her voice; she didn’t seem to pity herself and, she did not appear to pity her young son, as if she felt that he had no right to the fury that was coursing through his blood. No right at all, even after he had seen his mother as no child should ever see his mother, beaten, dishevelled, and in the immediate aftermath of love.

  “Amor,” she was saying to him now, as if to answer the question he kept asking, a question I would have been unable to understand. “¿Porqué?” he had kept saying. “¿Por qué?”

  Teo stopped at the sound of the word his mother had spoken and stood completely still. Then he looked, just for a moment, at me. I was standing on the left side of the door, having moved not one inch since we both plunged through the cedars my aunt had planted and into the insane adult world contained by the four walls of that old rusting trailer. “Amor,” Teo repeated, with bitterness in his voice.

  “The keys,” he said, thrusting his open hand toward me. “Give them to me.” And then more softly, “Please.”

  “I won’t,” I said, now starting to cry.

  “Please!” he said again, begging. “I ask you to give them to me.”

  “No,” Dolores said. Was she speaking to me or to her son? “No.”

  Perhaps he was going to drive into the town to find the local doctor. Maybe, just maybe, that is what he had in mind. Certainly, he could not have entered the house to use the phone. But, and this is what haunts me, what I can’t forgive myself for: I could have done that. I could have shaken myself out of my own paralysis, walked right past whatever viciousness was unfolding in the kitchen, gone into the parlour where a phone sat on my uncle’s desk, and made the call. I could have kept those keys firmly in my pocket.

  It was Teo’s helplessness, his desperation, and my own confusion that must have caused me to hand him the small sliver of power contained in the two flat fragments of metal I had in my possession. “I’m coming with you,” I said, but even before I had finished the sentence he was out the door. I could hear the sound of tires spinning on the white gravel drive and I knew he was gone.

  The inside of that trailer has never left my mind, and it will never, I’m certain, leave my memory. It presents itself each time I insert keys into the ignition of any car I’ve driven. It surfaces when I am shopping for groceries or bending over a microscope in the lab, and it slams itself into my consciousness any time a man has tried to make love to me. Dolores appeared not to notice me. She lay down instead on her bed, under the picture of the Virgin that hung on her wall. She rolled onto her side, away from me, and pulled the sheet over her shoulders, but even through this sheet and the blanket that still covered her, I could see that she was shaking. The chair my aunt had lifted lay on its back like a dead animal. There were two glasses and a half-bottle of wine on the arbourite table, and one other chair, still upright. I remember wondering, pointlessly, whether my uncle had sat on the piece of furniture my aunt had later chosen as a weapon. Dolores’s voice cut right into this thought. “Go,” she said. “Just you go.”

  Halfway across the yard I found Mandy, still partly stunned by sleep, standing like a white pillar on the lawn. Unlike the others who had remained in the house, she had been blown right out of her room by the tornado of invective that had burst into the house, a storm that must have brought to her attention in fragmented detail the scene I had witnessed, and shards of her parents’ relationship.

  I had no idea where to place my own feelings, no idea who was guilty, whose heart had been more painfully broken, how this terror had been born or why it had chosen to visit us. The attacker and the attacked, the adulterers and the spouses all seemed like one grotesque, vindictive adult to me. But seeing my cousin in her pyjamas, so disoriented and forlorn, her face still smudged by sleep, her eyes filled with such terrible knowledge. What could I say then, what can I say now about that? Except that all this year I have wondered what Mandy’s lover might have felt had he seen her right there, right then. What would he have said to that thin child who stood in the dark yard with her arms and legs shaking in reaction to the ugly words she had heard and the hostile faces she had seen. Would he have taken some pity on the human side of her and drawn her with real affection into the comfort of his arms? Would there have been something in him that could recognize her vulnerability, something that would cause him to want to console and protect her?

  I took Mandy’s hand that night and led her over to the picnic table where that useless Monopoly game still sat, its pieces in place on various squares of property as if we might simply resume the game. We sat together on the bench, facing the lake and waiting out the night, neither of us saying much. We were still there when the dawn began to appear over the water, still there when the police cruiser bringing news of Teo’s death turned off Sanctuary Line and made its way down the drive.

  Mandy and I sat in the back seat of my uncle’s car late the next morning, waiting to be taken somewhere by some adult or another. Not my uncle, no, it wouldn’t have been him. It was likely my mother, wanting to get us out of there, telling us to get into the car, then being detained by the emergency in the house, talking to her brother, her sister-in-law, trying to add calmness to what was by then an impossible situation. The boys were in their room. There was no way to know what they were doing, but hearing the sound of the little television set when we’d passed by their room suggested they were looking for ways not to have to think. Something in them would have been broken. My uncle was refusing to speak to any of us. When we had last seen him, he was in the living room, sitting at the kitchen table he had recently moved there, staring out the window at the lake and smoking one cigarette after another. My aunt, on the other hand, having dismissed the painters the minute they arrived, was standing by the counter in the empty kitchen, one hand on eith
er side of the sink, her arms tensed as if she feared she might vomit or collapse. She was looking out the kitchen window toward the road at the end of the lane, waiting. Rain fell softly and covered the car’s windshield with small bright bulbs of water, but I could still see my aunt at the window, her face blurred by moisture. For a moment only, I recalled being a child in the back seat of another car, one sold years before, how I had been placed in the back seat for safety, and how, when I wasn’t looking out the window, I could watch the small crescent moons refracted from the face of my mother’s wristwatch tremble on the fabric ceiling.

  There is no misery like a young person’s misery, no tears like a young person’s tears, no thought that grief should be concealed: grief is the dictator of this small brutal state, and its edicts control everything. I don’t believe I have wept in any significant kind of way since that late-summer morning, even for Mandy, my partner in early sorrow.

  The police had arrived about six in the morning, had delivered their news, and had gone away again. The car, they said – the car with Teo in it – had crashed through the cement railing of the overpass that crossed the highway and had fallen, nose first, onto the pavement below. The two officers had taken Dolores with them when they left. Had taken her to see her only child one last time at the hospital where the ambulance had delivered him. What my aunt was waiting for at the window was Dolores’s return, though how she could have faced her under the circumstances was more than I could imagine. But face Dolores she would, with all the practical arrangements for her return to Mexico efficiently taken care of. The two plane tickets waiting at the airport: one for Dolores, one for her brother. The procedure for the transport of the body, the phone calls, the discussions with officials, had been interrupted by the heated and unanswered questions she flung in the direction of her silent husband.