by Jon Pineda
He could not bring himself to look at her again. There was more light now.
The girl’s cough startled him.
Her eyes were open; the pupils of each were dark as her hair.
He looked away. He closed his eyes.
Above him were the holes in the painted gourds. Large holes that were doorways into the same structured hollowness. An inexplicable nothingness that he had, from time to time, mined with a bent spoon and a tiny flame.
“I’ll call someone,” he pleaded as he tried to climb out of the pit. “I’ll make sure they know you’re here. I won’t forget you.”
He picked up the shovel. He thought of ridiculous things like the prints made by the tread of his boots. Should he go back down and try to smear them clean? Would that even be possible? All was evidence that someone as insignificant as himself had actually existed. This thought was a tormenting one.
But there were very few things that tied him to this world after all. His brother and his family, yes. The few bleary Polaroids stashed in a drawer somewhere in Taos, he imagined. He would wipe the shovel down and drop it in a nearby ditch. The murk of water would clean the rest. He didn’t want to be spotted carrying it any farther than he had to.
He dragged his foot behind him as he tried to leave the site. He felt he was being pulled down. Tackled from behind. That’s when he remembered the football, his nephew’s name on it. It seemed important to remove that from the site too. He didn’t know why or what it meant. He searched the brush near the pit. He couldn’t find it.
Then he did.
The ball lay hidden in the grass like some kind of giant egg. He picked it up, as if he were being watched, and slipped the ball under his flannel shirt. He hunched to hide this held object. Pressed to his side, it felt like a tumor that had moved on its own, out of his body and into a strange kind of freedom that was never meant to be.
No, it was a stolen egg from long ago.
Shoe made one phone call, an anonymous one to the company office. The receptionist was a silver-haired woman named Josie, whose large collection of Hummel figurines from home had eventually found their way to her desk at work. She was busily arranging them into a kind of narrative when the phone rang. The interruption flustered her slightly at first, and then the cord almost tipped her cup of coffee. It was all she could manage not to yell into the phone as she put the receiver to her ear.
Shoe cupped the bottom half of the phone with his hand. His nieces were in the next room arguing with each other over whose turn it was with the hair dryer. They were getting ready for school. He wished he had chosen a quieter space, or even better yet, had called from a pay phone. That would have been the smart thing to do, he could hear his childhood friend Vin goading him.
“Excuse me, sir, but I kent hur you,” Josie had calmed down but was fumbling over her own accent. She reached for the small boy in a kelly-green short coat and orange bow tie. He had his eyes closed and was singing his song into the air above him. It didn’t make sense to have him facing the statue of a woman carrying a basket of flowers in one hand and holding a little girl’s hand in the other. The woman wasn’t the girl’s mother anyway. The woman was taking the girl to her mother.
“There’s been an accident,” Shoe said.
“A what, honey?” Josie said. She decided on putting the boy to the farthest end, where he could sing out over the edge of the desk. Past the clear plastic square of paper clips and out into the void of the office. Then Josie put on the glasses hanging from a thin chain around her neck and glanced at the clock on the far wall and wrote the time on a pink pad where she normally recorded Mr. Towson’s While You Were Out messages.
“Go on,” Josie said into the phone.
It sounded to Shoe like the woman had said gone.
“Go on,” Josie said again, slower from her irritation.
“At the site near Pinewood Meadows,” Shoe said, trying to picture the billboard nearest the entrance that zigzagged until it reached the huge field, where the giant machinery was. “You’ll find a girl there. She’s hurt.”
“What girl?” Josie said, writing down Pinewood Meadows.
Then her wide eyes fell right to the little girl on her desk. This one wore a bonnet that matched the half-oval lace apron tied around her green and orange dress. She was being led home to her mother. Josie studied the figurine, the painted commas of the girl’s gleeful eyes. The flower basket woman’s matching happiness. Maybe they could hear the boy singing after all. Maybe the boy’s voice was so bad that it had brought them joy.
In the hours before dawn he woke, having heard a noise in the kitchen. It was too early for it to be Mary. He felt around in the dark. There was nothing for him to use as a weapon. Over near the front door, he bent down and felt around blindly. One of his new boots fell against his arm. He decided, at the very least, he could swing it so that the hard end, the hidden steel, would strike first. That would knock someone unconscious.
He rounded a corner into the small dining room. There was the sound of glass clinking against glass. When he could see into the kitchen, he found the refrigerator light cast across his nephew’s face. The boy looked surprised to see his uncle staring at him. He nearly dropped the gallon of milk he was holding with both hands.
“Sorry, Tio,” Mario said. “I missed dinner.”
“Where were you?”
Mario drank from the milk carton and put it back in the refrigerator. He closed the door so he didn’t have to see the scar on his uncle’s shoulder. The only light in the kitchen was coming in as a faint, yellow glow from the bulb over the neighbor’s garage door. It was enough to frame his uncle’s silhouette.
Mario took a seat at the table by the window. He opened the curtain so that more light could come in. Shoe, seeing his nephew do this, dragged himself over to a seat and sat opposite the boy. Shoe waited for him to speak.
Outside, there were the sirens of emergency vehicles. Their blaring so far away. The sound wasn’t entirely unpleasant. Shoe’s eyes had adjusted, and he could see his nephew making a fist with one hand and covering it with the next. Then the boy traded off, so that the hand that had been a covering was now a fist; the prior fist, a covering.
“You brought back my football,” Mario said.
“I found it,” Shoe said.
“Where?”
“Where do you think?”
Mario bit his bottom lip, pulling it down against his tongue.
“Were you there?” Shoe said.
He wanted his nephew to deny it. He wanted the boy to wonder aloud that he had loaned it to the girl, or to another boy even. That he didn’t know where his football had been. That way Shoe would know for sure.
Mario made a fist with the other hand and covered it again.
Shoe remembered when he had been Mario’s age, before he had been taken by the old man and his soldiers. Paul was pulling him aside and asking why he had stolen eggs from the neighboring houses. When Shoe had denied any wrongdoing, Paul had hit him so hard across the head that Shoe thought he was going to throw up. He didn’t know how to tell his older brother that it had been a joke, that the other boys were testing him and he was going to go through with it, even though he didn’t like eggs back then. It was supposed to make his friends laugh.
They could hold these things in their hands, these little stones the color of snow, not that any of them had ever seen snow; but the deal was that Shoe, the boy Exequiel, was to take as many as he could find and hide them until each rotted and became splotchy gray and shadowy. He and his friends were going to use them as weapons against one another. The smell would stay on whomever had been struck. It would be funny to see the adults crinkle their noses as the targeted boy passed them in the square, everyone wondering then what terrible thing had died.
“So you know?” Mario said.
Shoe nodded, but he wasn’t sure if his nephew saw him do so. “Yes,” he said.
Mario heaved, trying to hold in his breath, but he couldn’t
. It blurted out, like air suddenly escaping a balloon. He thought she would have gone home on her own, but today, Tom wasn’t at school and then he heard that she had been found and was now in a hospital. He could cry remembering her leaping in the air and him, stupid as he was, thinking only of beaming her good with the ball.
“What happened?” Shoe said.
“We were just playing,” Mario said. “I was chasing her. We were throwing the ball at each other. I threw it at her and she fell. I thought she was kidding. It was so dumb, Tio. Anyone could have made that jump!”
“You threw the ball at her?”
“I was playing.”
“That’s how she fell?”
His uncle’s last question made him cry.
“I know it was stupid,” Mario said.
He bunched both fists and covered his eyes with them.
The yellowing light brushed his nephew. Shoe leaned across the table to pull one of the fists down, but Mario drew back and continued to hide his face. He coughed against his folded arms.
When Paul had hit Shoe for stealing, Paul had been the one to weep immediately. Somewhere along the line his brother Exequiel had strayed. Of the lessons their parents had taught them both, Paul had been the only one who took them to heart.
Shoe watched his nephew. He thought for a moment that he was seeing his brother Paul again, that he himself had been the one to throw the ball at the girl and that the girl had fallen right before his eyes. This boy, a younger version of Paul, had just reprimanded him for stealing away some part of this girl’s life, and yet, at the same time, Shoe saw himself in this same boy as well. The boy’s presence was like a door opening onto every version of himself, every boy he had ever known.
“Why didn’t you tell anyone?” Shoe said finally.
“I wanted to, but I was scared. I thought they would think I tried to hurt her.”
“But you did by not telling anyone.”
“Yes,” Mario said, bringing his arms down now. “But not like that. I wasn’t trying to hurt her. It was just a game.”
“I know,” Shoe said, leaning back. Part of the chair felt cold against his skin. It made him almost shiver. Hearing his nephew’s words—It was just a game—caused him to pause. He swallowed. As if he could take back the words. Not that he had uttered them, but he would take them in, maybe hide them behind his scar.
“What should we do, Tio?” Mario said.
The question lay on the table between them.
He realized then he should have just left things in place. He should have climbed out of the pit and run as best he could with his foot as it was and found a phone, any phone, and called an ambulance directly. He wanted to go back in time and make a different choice.
Or go back even further.
Back to a time when he was still a boy in another country. There were no hard questions, no actions to take other than waking and surviving and laughing in between those moments. He could barely see his nephew’s face. He knew his presence in this boy’s life had compromised the situation.
Worse, still, was having left the child. Not that he could have saved her himself, but he could have been the one to save her. Maybe his life could be different if only he had a way to get back to certain moments. He could still hear a boy from another life saying, Check, and then laughter when Shoe looked bewildered at the chessboard.
It was the foreman, Mr. Towson, whose picture was in the paper the next day. His white comb-over and large square teeth. His dark eyes. He had been the one to find the girl. He did not mention the anonymous call to the office. He did not mention Josie to the reporters. He was being hailed as a hero.
Mary had come into the kitchen and pointedly set the paper down so that the article was faceup, like the girl had been.
“They didn’t know your name, did they?” she said.
“No,” Shoe said.
She nodded.
“There’s no way for them to know?”
“I don’t think so. I never filled out any paperwork.”
When he had come back the morning before, only an hour or so after leaving for work, she did not question him. He wasn’t her husband. He could do what he pleased. Only that night did she find out from Paul that his brother had quit his new job. Not only that, but Shoe would be leaving for another job opportunity farther south. Now there was this, and her heart felt heavy.
Mary scanned the article.
“Paul is going to see this,” she said. “He’ll recognize the company name.”
“I know it.”
“You’ve brought us bad luck.”
Shoe did not have an answer.
“You know that, don’t you?” she said.
“Yes.”
“We’ve worked too hard to make a life for our family.”
“I know,” he said.
“You don’t know.”
He wished she would make him breakfast now, as she had done the morning before. But that was over. He knew it. He would spend the rest of his life, wherever he happened to be, thinking about those hands of hers.
two
The pediatric ward had been decorated with an undersea theme. Tom followed behind his father as they wove through a corridor full of young children in wheelchairs, some pushing themselves and others being pushed by their parents or by nurses with round, pleasant faces.
Someone had taped a laminated sketch of a blue octopus with orange polka dots over the water fountain. Its suckered arms curved, undulating toward the floor. Tom was thirsty, but he wasn’t going to ask his father to stop. He knew his sister had come to, and it was exciting.
He wanted to ask her if she remembered anything.
He especially wanted to tell her he was sorry for what had happened, for telling her to get out of his life. He hadn’t wanted that at all and he was prepared to play whatever game she wanted to play now. He would go wherever it was she wanted him to go.
“You need to move your legs,” his father said to him.
They passed more children in wheelchairs. Tom found himself nodding at each one, smiling. He hoped they understood he wasn’t making fun. He was letting them know in his own way he had yet to see his sister.
From the ceiling hung ornaments of starfish suspended at various lengths by clear fishing line, just like his model airplane. The starfish twirled as he and his father walked past in a rush. They could have been snowflakes from a distance.
At the end of the corridor, his father knocked on a wide door and then pushed it open slowly. They walked inside to find his mother sitting beside the bed. Teagan was sitting up, looking confused. His mother was feeding her red wobbly squares of JELL-O.
“They used to call that nervous pudding,” his father said, wringing his hands. “I read that in a history book once.”
“Who did?” his mother said.
She kept feeding Teagan.
His sister sloppily licked at her lips.
“Hey, Sissy,” Tom said.
Teagan’s head drooped in a curve, as if on a swivel, but then lifted back up temporarily. It repeated its track. She grinned on its upswing and red liquid dripped down her chin. Across the side of her head was a gash that had been clamped shut with sutures. He could see the chewed condition of her hands, her fingertips busted along the nail beds.
“You silly goose,” his mother said and wiped his sister’s mouth.
“What’s wrong with her?” Tom said.
He didn’t care that Teagan had to hear him ask it.
His father looked right at him and then pointed him out into the hallway. The place they had rushed to reach, Tom was now being told to leave.
The door closed heavily behind him.
Tom stood next to a fire extinguisher mounted on the wall.
Someone had decorated his sister’s door with a laminated drawing of a giant seahorse. He had not noticed it on his way in. Purple and pink, it had huge, cartoonish eyes. The length of the seahorse’s body curled like a question mark. It was something Tea
gan would have loved to have drawn herself, he thought. If she still could do such things.
For those first weeks, Mario would not ride his bike anywhere near Tom’s house. He didn’t want to make eye contact with Tom, for fear of what he might say should he glimpse his friend’s grief. He didn’t want to see Teagan again, not that he would anytime soon. She was still recovering in the hospital; but just the thought of her remembering him in that moment made him sick. He prayed she would forget.
Each day he pictured looking into her eyes and seeing some smaller version of himself looking back, staring down as he had from the top of the pit. Stories on the investigation had taken over the local paper, and there was coverage on all of the news channels. The exact details on the progress of the investigation were being withheld by the authorities. All that was revealed was that someone had come forward and mentioned having seen a man that morning in the general vicinity. For a time, children weren’t allowed to go outside at all. Parents were fearful this person might be out to harm other children. A neighborhood task force had been assembled. Even Mario’s father had joined.
At first the person everyone was looking for was a black man in his early to late thirties, medium build, with a Yankees ball cap. While that was the description being broadcast, Mario felt he could breathe easier. Sometimes he wished he had gone to Tom and told him everything. It was not too late.
He thought, at the very least, he could come forward and say he had seen someone else, but then he knew questions would follow, and they would ask him to describe this person, and he imagined himself sitting in front of a police officer and having to conjure a face that did not exist. That would have been worse, to have sent them on a wild goose chase. He decided he was doing the right thing by saying nothing.
But then another person came forward.
