Carry Me Like Water

by Benjamin Alire Sáenz

  Maria Elena studied his angry face. She took his arm and squeezed it. He wadded up her poem in his fist.

  “I don’t know anything anymore,” he said.

  “That’s OK,” she said, “Has knowledge ever made us more decent?” She smiled at him. “Lizzie needs me,” she said. “I’m going to go sit with her.”

  “Shouldn’t you call a doctor or something?”

  “Rose doesn’t want one.”

  “Did you dream that, too?”

  “She told us.”

  “You mean in a normal conversation.”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh.”

  Jake sat at the kitchen table drinking a cup of coffee, reading the newspaper and holding his nephew in his arms, occasionally giving him a spoonful of oatmeal. “Hey Eddie, look at this, it’s Maria Elena’s ad in the newspaper.”

  He walked over from the sink where he was doing dishes and glanced over his brother’s shoulder.

  “Think it will do any good?”

  “Well, she claims Diego used to be a newspaper freak.”

  “Can’t she just go to the cops?”

  “What a great idea,” he said. “How come we didn’t think of that?”

  “Straight people have a hard time thinking.”

  “Very funny.”

  “Thank you.”

  Eddie laughed. He kissed the top of his brother’s head. “I want you to stay forever.”

  Jake nodded. “I can’t, you know.”

  “I know.” Eddie walked back toward the sink and began drying the dishes. “Can I ask you a question?”

  “Sure.”

  “Do you think about death all the time?”

  “No. Just every day.” He laughed.

  “Seriously?”

  “Sometimes, I don’t think about dying—I can’t. I’m still healthy. I feel fine. It’s hard to believe I’ll get sick because I have this thing in me. I’ll believe it when I feel it. Lately, I’ve been waking up at night—and I can’t sleep, and I’m afraid. Remember, when we were small and we used to wait and pray Dad wouldn’t come in? It’s like that. And I can’t stop shaking.”

  “So what do you do?”

  “I go to Lizzie.”

  “What?”

  “She holds me. She doesn’t make me talk. She just leaves her door open, and sometimes I cry and she doesn’t make me turn the tears into words.”

  “Good,” Eddie said. He continued drying the dishes while his brother continued reading the newspaper. He stared at his reflection in a plate. For no reason in particular he understood clearly that his life, and his brother’s, had been nothing more than a narrow escape. For whatever reason, whether by chance, by coincidence, or by fate, they had been brought together again. Here we are, he thought, in this kitchen, my brother and me and my son, I am the luckiest of men. And I understand the meaning of what I have escaped. He wanted to thank someone for his life. He would light a candle to Saint Jude, the patron saint of impossible causes as a symbol of his gratitude. He made this promise to himself as he looked at his reflection in the plate he was drying.

  Again, the three women were together in a room with a candle. Only this time, they were not waiting for a body to rise, but to fall away from the earth. The two younger women had sat all morning with the old woman who worked harder and harder for each breath she stole. The candle burned in the room, and often the younger women would stare, shifting their gaze from the old woman to the candle. The old woman’s eyes had been shut all morning, but suddenly she opened them as if to look at the visible world one last time. “I want to taste some water,” she said.

  Lizzie poured her a glass and helped her drink it, a simple but difficult task.

  “I tasted a leaf this morning,” the old woman said softly. “It was as good as this water.”

  The women nodded.

  “I want to tell you something, Lizzie. I want you to know. The body is a friend. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, Mama, I understand.”

  “Good,” the old woman said. “Then don’t leave it until it’s time.” They were the last words she spoke. Rose’s breathing filled the room for the rest of the day and the two women kept a vigil at her side. She had risen with the desert sun, and with its setting, she took her last breath. Her final day had been peaceful and she had died willingly. It was the kindest of deaths. The old woman had lived her life—it had been what it had been—nothing grand—just a life. But she had at least lived it in some comfort, and she had at least had her say, and she had at least died welcoming the great silence that lay before her as if it were a quiet sky full of stars. Elizabeth wept in the arms of her friend not because she raged against her mother’s death, but because a daughter never welcomes the death of a good mother.

  15

  ON THE DAY Mundo was buried at Concordia Cemetery—not far from Mary’s grave—Diego received a letter in the mail informing him he had gotten the job at the flower shop. “I don’t want the job,” he wrote as he sat at the kitchen table. He flashed the note at Luz who was sitting quietly across from him smoking a cigarette.

  “You want to die, too—is that it?” Luz asked and though Diego could not hear the anger in her voice, he could see it everywhere on her face.

  “I’m too sad to work.”

  “I’m sad, too,” she said, “so what? Dieguito, we have to keep on living. Did you see Mundo’s mother at the funeral? She’s dead, poor woman—given up, feels nothing. Couldn’t you see that?”

  “She’s had a hard life.” He slapped his pad on the table.

  “So what? I’ve had a hard life. You’ve had a hard life. So what? We’ve got to keep living.”

  “Live to work?” he wrote.

  “Yes. Live to work. Please, my Diego. This day is too sad. Flowers are a good thing. Tell them you’ll take the job.” She looked at him, carefully searching his face for a sign. “He wanted you to have the job,” he added. “He taught you to drive. He did that for you—a good thing. Don’t throw it away, my Diego.”

  Diego watched her as she took another drag from her cigarette. She looked worn and pale. Today, there was not much fight in her eyes, but there was still enough strength in her to keep despair from possessing her body. The look she wore made Diego forget about his own sense of despair. Besides her, Mundo had been his only friend. And before that, Mary. He was disgusted at the way they had died, not died—been killed. They had lived hoping—and for what? And his myth, the one he needed so desperately, the myth of Carlota’s buried jewels, it had died along with everything else. He had never known how much power a legend could have and now it was as dead as Mundo and Mary, as dead as the houses in Sunset Heights that had once stood at the top of the stairs that went nowhere. But the aging woman in front of him was a wall that refused to crumble, a wall that had been spit on, written on, pissed and defecated on, and still the wall refused to crumble. That wall was all he had left. But even Luz needed comforting. He did not want to fight her, not today. “I’ll take the job,” he wrote.

  “Good,” she smiled.

  “Will you quit one of your jobs?”

  “Such nice handwriting.”

  He looked at her sternly.

  “I don’t know if I can, Diego.”

  “You work six days a week. At least quit your Saturday job—you don’t like that lady anyway—and she never pays you extra for ironing. Let her iron her own damn clothes. If you don’t quit at least one job, then I won’t deliver flowers.”

  She laughed, then clapped her hands. “OK, my Diego, I’ll quit my Saturday job.”

  “Good,” he wrote.

  That afternoon, he walked toward downtown to accept the offer of a job delivering flowers. On the way there, he stopped at the steps that went nowhere. He climbed them and looked out at the city around him. He thought it was a sad city. He gathered the trash with his fingers as if his hand were a rake. He told himself he’d come back with a trash bag and rake up the litter. Things didn’t have to be so dirty.<
br />
  The man he was replacing taught Diego everything he needed to know about the job. He gave him a map of the city, showed him how to look up addresses. Every day for two weeks, they delivered flowers and then drove around pans of the city, places he never knew existed. The city was bigger than he had imagined and he liked the fact that they were always so welcomed at the doors they knocked on. Luz had been right, it was a good job. Even the saddest of people smiled when they were handed flowers. The man who was training him warned him that not everyone welcomed flowers. “Once,” he told him, “one lady threw a vase of roses at me. ‘Tell the sonofabitch to shove them up his ass,’ she said. Just be smart and be careful. If they don’t want them, just take them back. You’re just a delivery man. The people at the shop will handle everything else.”

  He liked the people who worked there because they laughed a lot. One of the women wrote him a note and showed it to him. “A man who doesn’t talk,” she had written. “I’m surprised a woman hasn’t swept you up.” She had stood by him as he read it and then laughed. He liked it that she could joke—at least she wasn’t afraid of his deafness. The job was going to be just fine, he thought.

  Diego was anxious to go on the rounds by himself. On Friday, at the end of his second week, he came to work and was told he would be on his own. He smiled at his boss and nodded. He showed him a card he had lettered to take along on his deliveries, I’M DEAF, it read, BUT I READ LIPS. The boss nodded. “Good idea,” he said. “You’ll do just fine.” Diego loaded up the van for the morning’s deliveries. Diego wrote down the addresses, studied his map, made some notes, and drove out into the streets of the city.

  For some reason, he felt compelled to peek into some of the notes and read them. He felt as if he was a part of the messages that were being sent along with the flowers. He trembled a little when he read the first note: “Betsy, Happy Birthday you old bag of bones. Love, Tonya.” Diego shrugged his shoulders. He wasn’t at all sure he would like to be called an old bag of bones. He read a few more of the notes before finishing his morning deliveries. One of the notes was attached to a large plant and said: “Rachel, I know you’ll miss him. I loved him, too. My thoughts are with you, Letty.” He figured it was death, must be a death. He wondered who the “him” was, and wondered, loo, about the women, what they were like. Maybe they weren’t even friends. Maybe they were sisters. He wished he had more information. He enjoyed the morning deliveries, felt free because he was able to drive through the streets. His last delivery before heading back to the flower shop was a dozen yellow roses to a woman who worked on the fourteenth floor of a bank building. When he walked into the suite 1404, he showed the woman at the front desk the name on the card. He also flashed the card that informed her he was deaf. “I’ll show you to her office,” she said. He followed her down the hall and opened a door. He walked in, smiled at the woman, and held out the roses. Instead of taking the roses, she took the small envelope, opened it, and read the card. She said something to him, but her lips were difficult to read. He held the flowers in one hand, and showed her his card in the other. She nodded and said something else. He put down the flowers on her desk and wrote out on his pad: “Some people’s lips are hard to read. I can’t make out what you’re saying.” She smiled and nodded as she read his note.

  “I don’t want the flowers,” she wrote on a piece of paper.

  He nodded. “Don’t you want to give them to someone?” he asked.

  “If you could deliver the man who sent them to me, I’d make him eat them.”

  Diego laughed. “I understand,” he wrote. He took the flowers and drove back to the flower shop. When he went home that afternoon, he was happy. He worked in the sun, he worked in the city and had contact with its people. He was grateful for the job, and he promised that he would go by the cathedral in the morning before work and light a candle in memory of Mundo. He would not forget his dead. When he got home, Luz was making dinner, and he read the paper at the table as she cooked. He looked up from the paper occassionally, and watched Luz hover over the stove.

  “We need to buy a better kitchen table,” she said. “Why don’t you look in the ads to see if anyone’s selling something reasonable?”

  Diego turned to the ads and went through all of them. His eyes fell on the ad his sister had written. She was alive, she was back. He kept himself from trembling. He read it over and over. It was for him. He knew the address—it was the large white brick house on the corner of Yandell and Los Angeles, He had noticed that some people had moved into that house in early August. It had been run down and they had wasted no time in making it look friendly and welcoming. Before, he had always crossed the street when walking past it because he had thought it was haunted. But the people had given the house a new life and it seemed a happy place, Luz had mentioned that she had seen an old woman sitting on the front porch holding a baby—and that the woman had waved to her. If they were rich, he thought, at least they were friendly. My sister, my sister lives in that house.

  “Is something the matter?”

  Diego watched Luz move her lips. He shook his head. He did not want to tell Luz about his sister’s ad. She would make him go. She would drag him over there, and make him face her immediately. But as he read and reread her ad, he realized he did not know if he wanted to go and see her. Lately, he had wanted her forgiveness, but he realized now that he was afraid to see her. After all this time, she had become a myth, a legend like Carlota’s jewels. She was what he made her—but she was not real. What did he have to say to the real woman who was his sister? What if she would feel sorry for him? He did not want her to feel sorry for him—he wanted her to love him. The big white house was not far from where he and Luz lived. She was rich now. What did a rich woman want with a poor deaf man?

  “What are you thinking, my Diego?”

  “Nothing,” he wrote, “my first day on my own tired me out.”

  “Eat,” she said, “you have to eat.”

  He nodded. “I’ll wash my hands,” he wrote. He got up from the table, taking the section of the newspaper with the ads with him. He did not want Luz to see it. He placed it in his room. Luz never went in there.

  That night, as he read in bed, he closed the book and stared at Maria Elena’s ad. He cut it out and placed it in the book. Would she know him? He tried to imagine her life in that big house, he tried to imagine what a house like that looked like on the inside. Maybe she had married a gringo with lots of money, a gringo who did not want to have the poor inside his house. He would not go, he decided. She was dead to him, as dead as Mundo and Mary. He hoped she would place no more ads. If Luz saw it, she would make him go. He would not go. He would tell Luz it was too late for forgiving. What was a sister? He had grown accustomed to his exile. He belonged by not belonging. I will not answer her ad.

  The next day, when he was sorting out his afternoon deliveries, Diego noticed his sister’s address was on one of the cards. He moved the two dozen roses to the side and decided he would pretend to forget them. Maybe his boss or someone else would deliver them. He would not take them, he could not take them. It would be humiliating to deliver roses to his rich sister, who would feel sorry for him. Diego got in the van, but before he could drive away, his boss motioned for him to wait.

  “You forgot these,” he said.

  There was no way out. Diego smiled and shrugged his shoulders.

  “It’s OK,” his boss said. “Mistakes happen.”

  “I don’t want to deliver these,” Diego wrote.

  “What?” his boss asked.

  “It’s just that those people are mean. I live around there—they act mean.”

  His boss read the note and nodded. “Well, that’s none of our business, Diego. These flowers are paid for, and it’s our job to get them there. They won’t hurt you. You’ll be fine.”

  Diego nodded and drove off. He was angry at his boss for having found him out. There was nothing to do except deliver the flowers. He would save that delivery f
or last, he thought. He would ring the doorbell and run away. Maybe the old lady would answer the door, and he would be spared from running into his sister.

  At the end of the afternoon, only his sister’s flowers remained. He stopped the van at the Circle K on Yandell and bought himself a soda. He lit a cigarette and smoked it. After he put out his cigarette, he decided to read the note that went with his sister’s flowers. It was probably from her gringo husband. Who could it hurt? It was a very small transgression. He opened the envelope and read the card: “Maria Elena, You are water, you are rain. Te adoro, Eddie.” He liked what the note said and he thought that maybe his sister had married a nice man. But what was that to him? He was surprised at his own anger. But he couldn’t help but think of his sister, of her name—it was a good name. He wondered if she was happy, and wondered why she had written that ad and why she wanted to see him. Was his memory painful in her heart? He began feeling sad, but made himself stop thinking about her. It was no use. What was done was done. Luz had told him he had to stop regretting. “Forgive yourself,” she said. “Why are you harder on yourself than God. Who do you think you are, anyway?” He smiled. I will stop with all regrets. I am still young. Regrets will make me old. He finished his soda and drove down the street to the big house. It was only a few blocks away. He would ring the doorbell, and if his sister answered, he would look down, hand them to her, and run away before she was able to see his face. He had the advantage in this game, he thought.

  He pulled up in front of the house, carried the flowers carefully in his hands, remembering that his boss had told him that balance was everything when it came to the art of carrying flowers. He made himself stop shaking. He prayed Maria Elena would not answer the door. He concentrated on not dropping the flowers—it was his job to carry them—not drop them. Rather than reach for the doorbell with the flowers in his hands, he placed the flowers on the ledge to the front porch, made sure they would not fall, then reached for the bell. As soon as someone answered the door, he thought he would point to the flowers and run—yes, that is what he’d do. He waited for a long time, then decided to press the button again. After waiting a while longer, the door opened. His heart felt as if it would jump out of his body and free itself at last. He prepared to run. A young, pretty woman with white hair smiled at him. “Yes?” she said. “May I help you?” He was relieved. It was not her, he did not have to run, he could act normal, walk away, go home, eat his dinner with Luz, and live his life, a sisterless life he had grown accustomed to living. The woman looked at him carefully as though she was studying every pore on his face.