“You don’t want the children baptized, do you?”
He was quiet for a moment. He bit his lip.
“Oh, I know what biting the lip means.”
“We haven’t even had the second one yet.”
“She’ll be here in no time.”
“I hope it is a she,” he said nodding. “We’ll name her Elizabeth.”
She nodded, “But you’re changing the subject. I want them baptized, Eddie.”
“If it makes you happy, amor.”
“Why don’t you just pat me on the head and send me out the door?”
“All I’m trying to do is compromise.”
“Is that the best you can do?”
“Nena, I don’t believe—and that’s not new information. Yes, it’s the best I can do.”
She nodded. She tried to hide her disappointment.
“Don’t be sad,” he said. He placed his hand on her belly. “You don’t want her to be sad, do you?”
She shook her head.
“Do you love me?” His voice was soft as the warm air in the room, as soft as the twilight.
She nodded.
“You want to make love to a godless man?”
“No,” she said—then smiled. She clutched the note she was holding.
He stared at her clenched fist.
“Can I read it?” She handed him the note. “Think it’ll work?”
“Maybe.”
“Did you try the phone book?”
“Of course.”
“Why don’t you try a detective?”
“Can we do it my way?”
“Stubborn.” He slipped his hand under the T-shirt she was wearing. Her skin was damp. He kissed her neck.
“Eddie, can I ask you a question?”
“Can I stop you?”
She pushed his hand away. “You hate E! Paso, don’t you?”
“It’s a strange place,” he said.
“Meaning it’s ugly.”
“Yes. It’s ugly.”
“You wanted something nicer.”
“I didn’t say that, Nena, I’ll make it home. California’s gone now. I’ll never get it back.” He brushed her hair back with his thumb. “California used to be the future, didn’t it?”
“I always thought the border was the future.”
“You were right,” he laughed, “ours anyway.”
Lizzie looked up from rereading what she had just written in her journal. She knew Jake was at the door wondering whether he should knock or not. She rose from her bed, opened the door and stared at him as he stood motionless. He stared at her, almost pleading.
“Are you lost?”
He started to turn away.
Lizzie pulled him into the room. He let himself go wherever she led him. “You don’t want to go,” she said. She saw he was afraid, saw he was shaking as if he had been out in the cold for a lifetime. Not even the heat of the desert morning could warm him. She led him to her bed. When he started to cry, she held him tight, though she could not keep him from shaking.
“Sometimes,” he said, “I’m falling, I dream I’m falling—and there’s nothing but an endless hole. I just want to hit the ground and break—I just want to do anything except keep falling. Sometimes I get night sweats. That’s the way it begins.”
She let him speak, he who was not used to speaking. “I’ll miss my body—just like I miss his.”
“It’s just a body,” she wanted to say, but said nothing.
She lay down on the bed, and held him until he stopped crying, until he stopped shaking.
“I’m sorry,” he finally said, “I don’t know why I came to your room.” He could not say he needed comforting.
“It doesn’t matter why you came,” she said.
He started to rise from the bed.
“You can stay,” she said.
“I’ve never slept with a woman,” he said.
“Well, now you can say you have.”
Jake smiled. He fell asleep exhausted as he leaned into her.
As Lizzie held him, she remembered a dream she had once had, a dream she could not remember for a long time, a dream that had frightened her. She had not had a body, and she was in a church, and her mother had become Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrows. Jake had been in that dream—though she had not known him then. That dream had come to pass, only in the living of it. She had learned not to be afraid.
That night, in Lizzie’s arms, Jake did not dream he was falling. He dreamed of the thunder and the rain, of the desert being gifted with water. He was standing alongside the bushes and the yucca, holding his nephew in his arms—and they were being washed by the downpour. He was as clean as his nephew. When he woke, he was surrounded by Lizzie’s smell. He slipped away softly—and she did not wake. He laughed to himself. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d slept in all his clothes. Thunder echoed through the room and he took in the smell of the falling rain; he held it in lungs. He walked to the window and stared out into the dawn. Peace was this moment—it was only this moment. He unlatched the screen; he stuck out his hand and felt the rain.
“I’ll say one thing about this place, Nena—lots of drama in the sky.” Maria Elena dug her head into Eddie’s chest. “Ummmmm,” she said.
“Is that a go back to sleep ‘ummm’?”
“Just listen,” she whispered. A bolt of lightning seemed to hit right outside their window. The loud crack of the thunder startled her. She jumped instinctively.
“Guess that woke you,” he said. The rain pounded the ground like millions of nails being pounded into wood.
“God is busy today,” she said.
“Did you pray for rain?” Eddie teased.
“As a matter of fact I did.”
“So we can attribute what’s going on outside to your evening prayers.”
She laughed. “Well, I won’t stop you. Whose turn is it to make the coffee?”
“Yours,” he said.
“No fair—I’m pregnant.”
“I forgot,” he said as he kissed her. “It’s cold,” he said, and pulled her closer.
They listened to the rain for a long time. He was happy listening to the rain and feeling the warmth of his wife’s skin. He wanted to tell her that he loved her, that he would always love her, that his life had been a long drought and that he would always be thirsty for her, thirsty and grateful. He was happy. Who’d have thought that I’d wind up in El Paso listening to a morning thunderstorm? Who’d have thought I’d ever be happy?
“Where are you?” Nena shook him gently.
“Just thinking. This place,” he said, “it could be mine.”
“Good,” she said, “because we’re not moving.”
Maria Elena rose from their bed and went into the bathroom. Eddie watched her as she moved from the bed. He always liked watching her move about the room in the morning. When she disappeared into the bathroom, he looked toward the baby’s crib. It felt odd not to have the baby with them. He fought the urge to go into Rose’s room and get him. She had insisted on watching him for the night. “Do it for me,” she’d said. “I don’t always want to spend the night in an empty room. And he loves me, you know?” Eddie wondered if the baby was sensing the rain. He was such a strange and calm and intelligent child. What a lucky man—what a lucky, lucky man.
Maria Elena came back into the room. “I miss the baby,” she said.
Eddie didn’t seem to hear her.
“Where are you now?”
He stared up at her blankly.
She slapped him gently. “Are you there?”
“I was just thinking about Lizzie.” he said.
“And?”
“I was just wondering if she was out and about in the rain.”
“Sans her body, you mean?”
“Yeah—sans her body.” He paused for a moment. “What do you think about all that, anyway?”
“You asked me that already.”
“I can’t remember what you said.”
“You probably weren’t listening.”
“Of course I was listening—I just forgot. I can’t remember everything. What’d you say?”
“I said I thought it was wonderful—strange but wonderful.”
“And you have no problems that she just up and leaves her body anytime she wants?”
“Eddie, I either have to take her word for it—or I have to believe she’s cracked. Does that woman look like a lunatic?”
“No.”
“A liar, then?”
“No. But—”
“But what?”
“I don’t know. I’m starting to worry about her.”
“Oh, you think she needs help.”
“Don’t put words in my mouth, Nena. I don’t think we need to ship her off to the funny farm—I just get a feeling.”
“I’m listening.”
“Well, she seems more distant, less emotionally engaged. She’s not one to hold back—and yet lately she seems almost unreachable. It scares me. I don’t know why—and you’ve noticed it, too. I can tell by the look on your face.”
She stared into her hands, then started doing exercises with her fingers.
“You used to do that all the time when we first started dating.”
She reached over and combed his hair with her fingers. “What are we going to do about Lizzie?” Her voice cracked. “We’re losing her. Rose, too.”
“Rose, too?”
“She’s preparing herself.”
“That’s silly,” he said.
“No. I know.”
“How do you know?”
“She’s just tired, Eddie. She wants to.”
“You mean if I wanted, I could just lie down and die.”
“Of course.”
“That’s crazy.”
“People do it all the time—it’s just that some people do it differently, and for different reasons. She’s tired, and she’s old, and she’s in pain. She’s had a life, you know? Who wants to live forever? And I can’t say that I blame her. But Lizzie, Lizzie’s another matter—these experiences, well, they’ve confused her.” She scratched at the sheets with her fingernails as if to tear them. “We can’t do anything, you know?”
“Tell her to come back.”
“No.”
“Why not? I’ll tell her.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“She has to make a choice.”
“I don’t believe this. I just don’t believe it.”
“Good, so it will be easy to disregard the whole matter.”
Eddie threw himself off the bed. “When are things going to get simple around here?”
“You want simple, Eddie? When have things been simple? When you were a child, were things simple? We’ll be parents for a second time, and we haven’t even begun with the first—is that simple? Hell, Eddie, sometimes even our sex is complicated.”
He laughed grudgingly—almost disgusted. “I’m going for a run.”
“In the rain?”
“It’s stopped.”
She looked out at the clearing sky. “So it has.”
He put on a pair of jogging shorts. He tied his running shoes and stared at them. “Will you talk to Lizzie?”
“She already knows what I think.”
“Because she knows you or because she’s stealing your thoughts.”
“She doesn’t have to steal them, Eddie.”
“Right.”
“You’re mad.”
“No, not really. It’s just that I need to take a day off from the truth.”
“Take a day then,” she said. She stretched across the bed and kissed his back.
13
BONES. DIEGO SAT at his desk tracing the word, letter by letter, with his finger. He pretended his fist was full of sand—he emptied it out onto the desk. He blew it away with a breath. He thought the statue of Christ the King had a sick sense of humor.
Luz and Mundo had tried to comfort him all week long, but he refused to hear anything at all on the subject of the treasure. “At least we found something,” Luz said, “and we placed a cross to mark the grave—those things are very important, mi amor.”
Diego nodded, but was unable to hide his disgust. He wondered why the treasure had been so important.
He had begun to dream of his mother, and his dreams had brought back the memory he had hid from himself. He remembered clearly now that his mother had jumped out in front of a car to save his life because he had not heard it coming, because he had not been paying attention. He had been taught to be careful, to always look because he could not hear. But he had stepped out into the street because he had been thinking about a story he had read—a story, a stupid story. The next thing he felt was a hand pushing him out of the way. Then his mother lying there crushed. He found it odd that he had forgotten how she had died. He had not been a child when it happened. He suspected now that his sister had left because she blamed him for her death. Her blame was not exactly misplaced, he thought. He began to despair, to hate himself, and he no longer felt anything except the full force of the dullness of his life. Diego was caught in a body that could neither speak nor hear, and he hated it, hated his life as he had never hated it before.
Bones. He traced the word on his desk again. He decided that he would start a new suicide letter. This time, he would carry it out. This time, he would end the nonsense. Mundo had come by every day and taken him out into the country to teach him to drive. It had been easier than he had thought. To keep his mind off the coffin and the skeleton and the deceiving Christ, he studied the driver’s manual late into the nighl. On the fourth day of his driving lessons, Mundo had taught him to parallel park. Mundo tried to make him laugh, but Diego refused to let himself be amused by anything. Since he had nothing else, he let the act of driving become everything. He learned to drive in six days. He had never found anything difficult to learn—except for speaking. He had refused to learn to speak at school because he did not want others to hear his voice. Why should they hear what he could not? But driving a car—that was easy. On Monday morning, Mundo took him to get his driver’s license. He got a perfect score on the written. Mundo explained to the uniformed official that Diego was deaf. The DMV officer pointed when he wanted him to turn in a particular direction. He look his picture and was given a temporary license. There was only one restriction placed on his license: All vehicles he was to drive had to have outside mirrors. Diego looked at his temporary license. “That’s all?” Diego wrote. “That’s all,’ Mundo nodded. Diego shrugged.
“Look, ese,” Mundo said, shaking him, “you got to get yourself together. You got to stop thinking about that coffin. No one cares, man. Did you really think we were gonna get rich, ese? This is America, Diego, and most people don’t get rich in America—got that? You been listening to the wrong people.”
“It’s not about being rich,” Diego wrote. He didn’t even want to try to explain his disappointment, couldn’t even begin to write the words that said what it had felt like to hear that voice speak to him. To have waited so long to hear and then discover that the voice had been a lie. “You’re right,” he wrote. “It doesn’t matter.”
Mundo tossed him the keys. “You drive,” he said, “you’re legal now—and now you can apply for that job delivering flowers. I talked to the guy about you—told him all about you, ese,” Mundo didn’t tell Diego that he’d turned down the job offer himself because the guy was a do-gooder—the kind that was always trying to help fix other people’s lives. “No,” he told him, “I got a job—it’s my friend that needs the job.” He looked straight at Diego as he sat in the driver’s seat. “The guy says to go in and make your application.”
I won’t get the job, Diego thought as he looked away from Mundo and turned the ignition, and if I do get it, it’ll be because he feels sorry for me. I’m sick of people feeling sorry for me. Mundo directed him to the flower shop. They parked around the comer. “Just go in there,” he said. “Put in your applicati
on, got it?”
“I don’t want the job,” Diego wrote.
“You gotta work, ese. You and Doha Luz, gotta make the rent. That tough old lady ain’t gonna last forever—you need to work.”
“You don’t work,” he said.
“I get by,” he said. “I got some skills, bro.”
“Teach them to me.” he wrote.
“No, ese. I taught you how to drive—that’s the only skill I wanna pass on to a guy like you.”
“I’m not going in.”
“I’ll kick your ass all the way to the door,” Mundo said. He grabbed Diego’s pad away from him. “Just try it,” he wrote. “If you hate it—then quit. Just try it.”
Diego threw the keys on Mundo’s lap, stole back his pad and pen, and slammed the car door. He stomped toward the flower shop hating the power Mundo and Luz had over him. He stared at the door to the flower shop. He read the sign: IF YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT TO SAY, THEN SAY IT WITH FLOWERS. He pushed open the door and walked inside.
Mundo stood at the door smoking a cigarette and watched Luz as she stood over the kitchen table rolling out tortillas, each one as perfect and round as the one before. One at a time she cooked them on a comál she had inherited from her mother, the smell of them filling the warm September air. She reminded him of his mother—except his mother had been more frail and had not been strong enough to keep fighting. Diego sat at the table patiently cleaning beans. His mind was on his letter and on his sister. He thought his final letter would be one in which he would ask her for forgiveness. It was his fault they were orphans. If he killed himself and left the letter to her, the authorities would be forced to look for her. As he fingered each pinto bean, he tried to imagine her face.
Mundo flicked his cigarette into the backyard.
“We have ashtrays,” Luz said, “act like a person.”
“It don’t hurt the ground. Doña Luz.”
“It does hurt the ground—and who the hell do you think cleans them up? The maid?” She cackled at her own joke.
He liked her laugh. “Don’t take a clean backyard so serious.”
“That’s what’s wrong with you,” she said as she handed him a tortilla right off the comál, “you don’t take your life seriously. What do you do? You hang out with gang members, you drink beer, you get into fights, you take up space—you call that living?”