Carry Me Like Water

by Benjamin Alire Sáenz

  “A little.”

  They were quiet for a long time listening to the breeze, a cricket, and each other’s breathing.

  “A cricket is supposed to bring good luck,” Eddie said.

  “Uh-huh,” Helen said lazily.

  “I don’t feel sleepy.” Eddie’s voice was quiet as the breeze.

  “I’m not either.”

  “Wanna talk?”

  “Something in particular?”

  “Not really.”

  “How was work today?”

  “Oh, let’s not talk about work.”

  “That bad, huh?”

  “Not really. I like work—it’s just fine. It’s even fun—can you believe it? I just wish I could take some time off right now.”

  “Well, you have a month after the baby comes.”

  “I want a month before the baby—just me and you. We could stay home, and we could talk all day long—and I could spoil you. And we could get to know things.”

  “Things?”

  “About each other.”

  “Don’t we know what we need to know already?”

  He said nothing.

  “Eddie? You falling asleep?”

  “I was just thinking.”

  “Tell me.”

  He sat up in the bed and hugged his bare knees as he faced his wife in the dark. “Remember the deal we made, Helen?” He waited for her to say something, but she remained quiet. “Helen?”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Well, I don’t think it’s such a good idea anymore.”

  Helen looked directly at the ceiling. “We promised, Eddie.”

  “It was a game, Helen, It was just a silly game.”

  “And it was your idea, Eddie. You said, ‘Let’s not talk about our pasts—let’s never talk about them.’”

  “I didn’t know then that we were going to get married. He rubbed his face with his palms. “We have pasts, Helen—they don’t go away, you know? I think I want to tell you.”

  “That means I have to tell you, too, Eddie.” He understood his wife’s tone perfectly.

  “It’s time, Helen.” He tried to hide his desperation. “We’re going to have a baby. I want you to know everything. Some of it’s not very pretty. Don’t you think you should know?”

  “Damnit, Eddie, I don’t give a damn about anything but the present.”

  “Carpe diem and all that shit, huh, Helen?”

  “Yes, carpe diem, Eddie. I don’t want to think about the past—not mine, not yours. It’s not as if I lived this life of crime, as if I was a prostitute or a drug dealer or as if I killed anyone—or any of those things. And you either.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Don’t be funny. I know you weren’t a criminal—or a rapist.” “That’s not the point, honey.”

  “I’ll tell you what the point is, Eddie: I left who and what I was behind because it wasn’t a life at all, not at all. It was shit; it was like being dead, Eddie. And I’m alive now, damnit. I breathe and I laugh, and—look, if I told you all about it, it wouldn’t even be that interesting. It hurts too damn—look, Eddie, I don’t wan’t—Eddie, I don’t care about what you used to be. I don’t care how good or how bad it was—it’s over. The past is just a dream—even if it had been a good dream—it was just a dream. There’s nothing real about it.” She reached for his hand and squeezed it. “This is all I want—just you and the baby.” There was a stubborn note of finality in her voice.

  Eddie squeezed her hand, and got back under the blankets. They said nothing else as they held on to each other in the cool night. Helen felt the warmth from Eddie’s body as he pressed against her. She rubbed the palm of her hand on his back. “I love you, Eddie,” she whispered. The breeze through the open window reminded her of something in her childhood. She fought the memory by playing a game: “A is for apple. B is for Boy. C is for calendar. D is for Diego”—the name just came rolling out as if it were natural. She didn’t want to think about him, his deafness, her brother, the brother she’d abandoned, the brother she had run from, the brother who paid unwelcome visits and spoke to her as she walked down the street, as she washed dishes. Maybe he was dead—but she knew he was alive and living in El Paso. She wanted him to be dead—that would be easier. But he was alive and he was poor and he had no one. How could she have left him? She didn’t want him in her room; she didn’t want him in her head. She started over again. “A is for apple. B is for birth. C is for coffee, D is for deliberate, E is for my Eddie …” She listened to her letters, and her husband’s familiar breathing as she fell asleep.

  How long can we keep it back? Eddie thought. We can’t stop it. It’s coming. For both of us.

  A full moon, round and desolate, hung in the night sky like a dead man at the end of a rope. Eddie ran his race, the leaves of the trees slapping his skin as he moved. Shadows danced around him like fighters in a ring. He ran, eluding them, but he knew he would not win the race, but he ran not knowing what else to do. He looked at the moon as if it were a god who might intercede; Eddie tossed it a prayer. Please! Please! He kept running. Behind him, footsteps pounded the ground like fists, the earth about to break. Pain cut through his lungs as if they were being scraped raw by the razor-blade air. He rubbed his chest and kept running; his legs tightened; he pushed himself toward the light of a house in the distance: Have to reach that light, have to reach. The footsteps grew closer.

  The man’s breath was at the back of his neck—hot, sour, stale. Eddie screamed, no one to hear him but the moon. The man grabbed him, spun him around, breathed in his face, threw him to the ground. As he slid, his pants tore and his knees went numb. He could smell his torn skin against the earth—just a boy. He could feel the hand ripping at his clothes. He was being crushed by the huge body. “No! Get off me! No!” His voice went hoarse. “No,” he whispered. He felt the man’s hand over his mouth rubbing him into silence. He felt like a limp armless doll. A sudden pain—a knife cutting him in half The man smiled and kissed him on the cheek. He lay on the ground and looked up at the deaf moon who never heard his prayer—the deaf moon whose dull light kept the earth in darkness.

  Eddie woke from his dream, lost and wincing from the cramps in his legs and stomach. He nibbed his calves, and wiped the sweat from his face. He felt his heart pounding as if it wanted to leap out of him, as if it were a knife tearing at his skin. He hugged his knees and looked out the window. He stared at Helen who was still asleep. The moonlight was kind to her, he thought. He rose from the bed and pulled the curtains shut, then lay back down and shook. “No, I hate—you—I hate—why are you back goddamnit?” For ten years that dream had come to him, that dream that had taken over his nights, his mornings, his life—for ten goddamned years. When Helen had come into his life, the dream had vanished. She had been the miracle that had sent it away, had sent away the shame, the guilt, the great sadness that was his childhood, the sadness that followed him to adulthood. He had seen something of the same look in her when he had first spoken to her. They had been mirrors of each other, had used each other as stumbling blocks to memories that could not be healed by willful amnesia. Helen was a woman, not a miracle. It was not her fault. Now the dream was back, and he knew he would not be able to run from the grief, the anger, and the remembering that came with it. He sat on the edge of the bed and wept silently. He kept himself from howling—not wanting to wake his wife.

  At five-thirty in the morning, Eddie opened his eyes at the sound of the alarm. His hand reached over to switch off the annoying beep. He slowly eased himself up and sat at the edge of the bed and willed himself to wake. He was groggy and exhausted. He turned his head and saw Helen sleeping peacefully. He envied her. She could sleep through anything. She was not like him—her sleep was not easily disturbed. He had suffered from insomnia since his father had—since his father had started coming into his room—since he was seven. Now, his dream was back. It was as if his father was still disturbing him, preventing him from sleeping his entire life
. The dead do not sleep, he thought, and they do not let the living sleep either.

  He leaned over and kissed his wife. He lightly touched her belly. She moaned softly but continued sleeping. He wanted to climb inside her brain to find out how she saw the world, to find out what peace was like, to find out how it felt to love simply and easily.

  As he stepped out of the shower and dried his skin, he felt as if he were still dirty. He covered himself quickly with his clothes. He watched the coffee pour down into the coffee maker. As the almost-black liquid streamed into the glass pot and the aroma filled the kitchen, he thought of his father. His father used to watch the pot of coffee boil on the stove every morning. He thought of his dream. “How could you have done it, Papa?” He was that little boy again. He saw that boy that lived in his head, became that boy, him, that boy with the wide-open eyes and a mouth that was sewed shut by a father’s sickness. He wondered if he would ever stop being that disturbed child. He hated that disfigured, confused little boy, wanted to exorcise him, bum him into ashes, bury him in an earth that would never surrender him ever again to the open air. He had the urge to throw the glass pot of coffee against the wall. But the wall wasn’t his father.

  Then he had met Helen. A new life, he had thought. The impossible had happened: He had fallen in love, and the dream that haunted him had vanished. But as he sat there, he smelled his father’s breath next to him, and felt his heavy body on top of him. “God damn you.” He whispered it again and again, “God damn you.”

  He had the urge to call in sick, but remembered he had an important meeting. “An important meeting, an important meeting,” he mumbled to himself, but it wasn’t important—not to him—not to anybody. They were all just pretending. Every meeting was labeled important as if to mask their insignificance. He had lied to Helen. He hated his job, found it relentlessly boring, and he felt it was killing him. He thought of a newspaper article he read about a woman who was addicted to cutting herself with a razor blade. He had read it at work and he had not found it a strange thing. He wondered what it would be like to cut himself—every day, slowly—but he thought going to work every day was the next best thing to slicing himself with razor blades. He wanted to quit, but could not bring himself to live off his parents’ money. It was dirty, their money; it was more than dirty—it was not money honestly earned. When he had asked Esperanza how much money she made, she had told him she made four dollars an hour—six days a week—no overtime no matter what. Four dollars an hour to keep his mother’s house immaculate. A month after his parents’ funeral he had written her a check for a hundred thousand dollars. She had refused to take it. “Please,” he had begged her, “please take it.” He had seen where she lived, had known that she cared not only for her own children, but for her mother and father who were old and had nothing and knew no English, who had lived poor and would die poor and would know nothing of the world except for the fact that it had made them work. He had gotten down on his knees and wept. “Please take it. Please. Esperanza, you have to take it.” He refused to get off his knees. “You have to take it.” She had held him in her arms as if he were a little boy, but he had refused to stop crying until she agreed to take the money. He felt forgiven when she took it. It was the only part of his parents’ inheritance he’d ever spent.

  He closed up his parents’ huge house, their corrupted house, their protected house that could not protect them from themselves, from their own violence. He’d worked his way through college by waiting on tables and working at pizza joints. He had re-created himself in the image of the working class. He had been an activist throughout his college days, and almost none of his friends had been white—and if they were white, they were either gay or strictly blue-collar. He always remained the friendly outsider among his own friends, keeping himself at a distance. He never allowed himself intimate relationships, as if he was punishing himself, doing penance for the sin of being his father’s son, never allowing himself to be touched, to be known, to be loved. Whatever he had suffered, he had never known material deprivation of any sort, and he carried the knowledge that his parents’ money was his for the taking at any moment he chose. He knew his poverty was chosen—chosen, and therefore disingenuous. If he had been taught to believe that private lives were necessarily miserable, then he was also raised with a deep sense that the public world was created for him and for his kind. He was too sensitive, too damaged, and too honest to believe he could ever know what it was like to be a worker. His own struggles had never been theirs, and though he succeeded in hiding his privileged background, he could never hide it from himself. When he watched young men with a background similar to his, he wanted to spit in their faces. He could tell them by their clothes, their confidence, the way they walked on the street as if they already owned it, the way they talked to each other, the knowing way they condemned people with just a look because those people did not acknowledge their superiority. His own class grew up with a peculiar and odious sense of entitlement, and he could read his own easier than he could read the people he loved or admired. He was disgusted by them, and wondered why more of them were not murdered. But he knew that he could not hate them without also implicating himself. So he lived hating himself, hating his own people, and always knowing that he suffered from a very peculiar sense of self-loathing.

  His father’s lawyer had warned him to sell the house: “If you don’t sell it, I’ll take your inheritance.” Eddie had simply switched lawyers—something the lawyer had not counted on. “I was your father’s best friend,” he yelled. “I was his friend.” “Do you abuse your children, too?” He’d asked as he walked out the door. He didn’t know why he wanted to keep the house.

  As he sat and drank his coffee in the kitchen, he stared at the morning paper. The headline read: DROUGHT NOT OVER DESPITE RECORD RAINS. He didn’t want to read about the weather. It suddenly occurred to him that he could go back to teaching high school—he had loved that job, and now he sat and wondered why he had left it. It wasn’t respectable—”You teach high school?” Too many people had looked at him as though he were unfit for anything else, as if he had settled for a second-rate profession. Now, he had money—and it was his. He had earned it. “But I haven’t earned it,” he mumbled. “Janitors and teachers and waitresses and farmworkers—they earn their money.” He was disgusted with himself. He was becoming like his parents—his house was even beginning to look like theirs. “I have to quit. I have to quit.” He thought of the baby and Helen. What did they want? What did they need? He looked around his house. “They sure as shit don’t need all this.” He was tired of pretending he liked this house, that he liked his job, but he had led Helen to believe he was happy—perfectly happy. What would she say if he said he wanted out—not out of the marriage, but out of this life that led to nothing. His parents had lived for comfort. He laughed to himself when he thought of how they ended their lives. He was glad he hadn’t been in the house when his mother decided to kill his father—then herself. “If I had been there, she’d have offed me, too.” He remembered the lawyer reading the will. Everything went to him—nothing for his older brother. Well, a hundred dollars. A hundred fucking dollars—and millions, millions for the younger son who had learned to make himself mute, learned to dress up for them, smile for them, be nice to them, respect them. He was nothing more than their nigger. He was their possession, their property, their houseboy. “Take the money, Eddie, you earned it. You showed your father a good time.” He still remembered the last time he’d seen his brother. He pictured him sometimes sitting at the edge of his bed looking at him with his deep serious eyes that didn’t know how to be happy. He knew his parents had sent him away because he’d beat them up. He remembered his parents’ bruises, and he had always wished he had been strong enough to inflict wounds on them. He loved his brother even more for having fought back. He’d beat them, beat them because he had escaped from their control. When his parents had died, he had looked for his brother—but he hadn’t looked hard enoug
h. “I should have hired a detective. I was too young and too stupid.” He laughed. “Oh, so today is beat up on Eddie day, huh? Stop it, Eddie, stop it. Take the money, Eddie.” He pushed his hair back, then pulled it with a closed fist. “Would I be such a bad man if I took the money? Would I be like my parents?” He shoved his parents away from his mind. He brought his fist down slowly on the table, then opened it. “If I find Jacob, he will save me, he will save me and Helen. We will be whole, we will all be whole.”

  When Helen woke from her deep sleep, she looked at the clock and saw that it was after ten, “Oh shit,” she said. She forced herself up from the bed, and slowly made her way downstairs. She found a note from Eddie on the kitchen table:

  Sorry I didn’t wake you, but you looked so peaceful. And besides, the baby needs you to rest. Call me after you get back from the doctor. I want to know what she has to say. Want to go to dinner tonight?

  Love you, Eddie

  She held his note in her hands and shook her head at his handwriting. “Such terrible handwriting. I bet you got F’s in penmanship.” She was suddenly filled with a deep sense of regret. She knew nothing of her husband’s childhood, nothing of his past. He was somebody’s flesh and bone. He was somebody’s blood. He had not created himself, had been a part of someone, a part of the world—and she knew nothing of that world, just as he knew nothing of hers. She was sorry about their stupidity, and today she had a sudden urge to know everything about him.

  She stared blankly out the window. The sun was beating down on her garden, and she knew it would be a hot day. Hot days always reminded her of El Paso. Eddie didn’t know where she was born, where she had lived until she had moved to California and met him. He didn’t even know the name she was bom with—the name she’d legally changed as if she could change herself by picking a new name. One magic day she erased Maria Elena Ramirez from the record and she became Helen Rosalie La Greca. She’d found the last name in a phone book. She invented a vague Italian family whom she had broken with. As she sat there, her legal name seemed to slide away and she felt an alliance to her birth name and her brother and her hometown—it wasn’t love exactly—just an intimacy that could not be affected by legalities. She could not banish what she had been.