“Sometimes,” I finally whispered. “Sometimes I still miss Juliana.”
“You think of her too often,” she said.
“Not too often.”
“It’s been a long time.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“I like thinking about her.”
“Why?”
“I just do.”
She shook her head. “She was young. And her father killed her. And you loved her.” She looked at me.
“That’s not a sin,” I said, “to love someone.”
“No,” she said. “And it’s not even a sin to love the dead.”
“So there’s no sin. So there’s no problem.”
She shook her head. “But what about the living?”
“The living know how to take care of themselves.”
“No. That’s not right, hijo. Óyeme, Samuel. The dead. It’s the dead who know how to take care of themselves.” She kept looking at me. “Let her go, mi’jito.”
I nodded. But I didn’t know how. To let go. I was like her. Refusing to let go of things. And she knew. And she couldn’t teach me to unclench my fist. She couldn’t. She knew that, too. I pulled out another weed.
“See,” she said. “Only the living care about pulling weeds.”
One afternoon, I dropped by her house. She wanted to go outside. I helped her to the porch. She sat there, looking out, saying nothing. And I knew she was already leaving. “¿Qué va a pasar con mis rosales?” She looked at me.
“I’ll take care of them,” I said. I remembered that summer when she’d shown me everything about caring for roses—about which parts of the bush were dying and which parts were being born.
We sat there for a long time. “Todo lo que nace tiene que morir.”
I nodded. Mothers and girls and boys who went to war. And women who loved God. And roses. They all had to die.
I went to church and lit a candle for her. I whispered her name. All my life, people had been dying. And I wondered if it would ever stop. I knew it wouldn’t. But I hoped anyway. “Don’t take her.” That was my prayer. What did God want with a strict woman who liked to lecture people and keep a neat lawn? What did God want with a woman like that?
A few weeks later, I came home after studying at the library. It was after midnight. Dad was waiting up for me. He never did that. He’d done it a little when I was in high school, but not a lot. “Mrs. Apodaca’s in the hospital,” he said. I saw what he was holding in his eyes. I hated to see that look.
“What about Gabriela?” I said.
“She’s here. She and Elena are asleep.”
I nodded.
“If Gabriela comes to live here—” He looked at me. “Is that okay with you?” He didn’t have to ask. But he did. He was like that, my father.
That was the first time in a long time that I wanted to kiss him.
“Seguro,” I said. “A man can’t have too many sisters.”
My dad nodded. “You’re a good boy.”
“I’m not a boy anymore, Dad.” That’s what I said.
“No,” he said. “You’re not.” He looked sad, like he couldn’t even talk. So he just whispered. “Mrs. Apodaca wants to see you.”
He looked at me, tired, my dad. Weary—that was the word. Mostly he tried to hide those things from me—but not tonight.
“She’s been good to us,” I said.
“You didn’t always think that.”
“She was hard.”
“And now?”
“She’s softer now.”
“She was never as hard as you thought.”
“I was a boy. I didn’t know.”
My dad put his hand on my face, then pulled it away. “Maybe it’s you who’s softer now?” It wasn’t really a question. “It’s not a bad thing to be soft,” he said. He reached down and scratched his prosthetic leg. A nervous habit. Reaching for something that was gone.
Mrs. Apodaca was praying her rosary when I walked into her room. She placed her finger on her lips. I could see the outline of her bones. Her flesh was abandoning her, like leaves abandoning a tree in November. She looked so thin. And her skin was gray, like a spent and poisoned soil. I bowed my head and let her finish. I knew how she felt about her prayers. I wondered what she was praying for. I had always wondered that.
When she was done, she gathered the rosary and placed it on her lap. She looked at me. “Why haven’t you painted your truck?” she said. Her voice was dry and old. But she wasn’t that old, Mrs. Apodaca—in her fifties. It made me happy to see that look of disapproval on her face. “Tres años andas en esa troca.”
“Sí, Señora, almost three years.” I smiled. “I guess if I don’t paint that truck, people are going to think I’m poor.” I handed her a glass of water.
She half smiled at my joke—then drank the water slowly, her hands shaking. “People already know you’re poor,” she said. “And they also know that you take no pride in the things you own.”
Still lecturing—that was okay. I’d fallen in love with her lectures. “Sí, Señora,” I said.
“Estoy muy enferma,” she whispered.
I nodded. It sounded like defeat. Back then I didn’t know the difference between acceptance and defeat.
“Y cansada. Hijo, estoy tan cansada.” She took a deep breath and closed her eyes. “I had a dream about your mother. She was beautiful, tú mama.” That was the only time she sounded soft, Mrs. Apodaca, when she talked about my mother. “You were so strong when she died.”
I didn’t remember it that way at all. I shook my head.
She pointed to the chair. “Siéntate. I want to tell you something.”
I sat and moved my chair right next to her bed.
“My mother and father, they gave me to God.”
“I know,” I said. “When our parents baptize us, they give us to God.”
“That’s not what I mean. My parents, they took me to a convent.” She looked at me. “That’s how it was done, sometimes. When your family was rich and you had too many daughters. They would give a daughter to the church.” She smiled. “Maybe—,” she shook her head. “Al cabo no importa. That’s where I learned English, in the convent. Those were my assigned subjects—English and Spanish. That’s what I would be teaching in the school we had.” She looked at me. I knew she wanted me to ask her something. But I didn’t know what to ask.
“You didn’t want to be a nun?” Maybe that wasn’t the right question.
“Seguro que sí. To be a nun is a holy thing. I wanted to be a nun. Yes. But I didn’t want to teach the daughters of the rich. Anyone could do that. I wanted to work with the poor. Like Catherine of Sienna.”
I didn’t know anything about Catherine of Sienna. “And they wouldn’t let you?”
“No.”
“And so you left?”
“I wasn’t obedient.”
“I know,” I whispered.
She laughed. Me too. Then we just looked at each other. Like we were friends. “But my family,” she said, “they’d given me to the Church. I shamed them. I broke a promise.”
“It was your father’s promise.”
“A good daughter keeps a father’s promise.”
“I don’t think so.”
“You’re like me. Too ready to disobey.”
“There are things we have to fight.”
“You like to fight, don’t you?”
“I’ve had to learn.”
“Is it such a good thing to learn?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because I want to live.”
“To spend your days fighting? That’s no way to live.”
“You did,” I said. I shouldn’t have said that.
She didn’t smile. She didn’t get angry. She didn’t say anything. She looked at me. And I wondered what her eyes had been like when she was a girl. “There was a gardener.” She shook her head. “He brought me here, ese jardinero.”
“Mr. Apo
daca?” I said.
She nodded. “Octavio.”
I understood now. Why she never spoke of Mexico. And why she carried herself the way she did.
“Was it hard?”
“I hated it here,” she said. And then she squeezed my hand. “It was just a place to run to. Because I could never go back. I had to choose. Octavio or Mexico. And here—,” and then she smiled. “Oh, but I had Octavio.” For a moment, I could imagine her as a girl, running away from the convent with a young man named Octavio Apodaca. A young girl like Gigi. Like Angel. Like Juliana.
“I’ve written everything down,” she said. She took out an envelope, the pages bursting out from it. “I want you to give this to Gabriela—when she’s old enough.” She pushed the envelope into my hands then looked away. “Will you?” she whispered. “No tengo a nadie.” I remembered the day I’d caught her crying in the church. “I lost three in the womb before Gabriela. God never let me see—.” She stopped. I hated to see her cry, to see her so weak. I hated that. Sometimes, when I was growing up, I hated her for being strong. I’d wanted to see her just like this. Weak. I’d sometimes prayed for her to break.
I was ashamed.
She tried to keep speaking, but her lips were trembling.
“I’ll be a good brother,” I said. “I promise.”
She fell back on the bed and nodded. I wanted to wipe her tears. But I wasn’t sure if it was the right thing to do. She closed her eyes and nodded. “I ran,” she said. “But from God? You can’t run from God.”
We all belong to God. That’s what she’d told me once. So that’s what I whispered, “We all belong to God.”
She nodded, and kept nodding until she fell asleep. I sat there, staring at the envelope with the story of how she’d come to the United States. The story for Gabriela, so she’d know.
I sat there for a long time. When I got up to leave, she opened her eyes and smiled at me. “There’s a picture,” she said, “of me and your mother before you were born. It’s in my house. I want you to have it.” She closed her eyes again. “If you see anything else,” she whispered, “just ask Gabriela.”
“No,” I said. “That’s enough.”
I don’t know why, but I kissed her hand. I thought of Pifas, his hands, how they’d stayed in another country. Maybe something was growing there, in that piece of ground where Pifas’ hands lay buried. I wondered if roses grew in Viet Nam.
I kissed her hand.
I came home. I tried to study. I went to bed. I woke up in the middle of the night. I was dreaming of my mother. She was wearing a white dress. She was young and she was calling my name.
I got up, put on my pants and walked across the street, shirtless and barefoot. I walked into Mrs. Apodaca’s house and looked for the picture of her and my mother. It was on Mrs. Apodaca’s dresser. They were so young, my mother and Mrs. Apodaca. They looked like girls, like sisters. I never thought of Mrs. Apodaca as being beautiful. But in that picture, she was as perfect as a new moon. I took the picture and held it. I sat in that room for a long time. In the morning, when I woke, I was lying on Mrs. Apodaca’s bed, hugging the picture of her and my mother.
Two days later, Mrs. Apodaca died.
But she and my mother were alive in that photograph.
The day after Mrs. Apodaca’s funeral, I had my truck painted cherry red. I hung up one of Mrs. Apodaca’s rosaries on the rearview mirror. It smelled of roses. After a while, I took to talking to Mrs. Apodaca when I drove that truck. Even now, that rosary is hanging from my rearview mirror. When I drive, I still talk to her. Well, I don’t really talk to her. I argue with her. She still thinks she has all the answers.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
I still hear from Jaime. After everything that happened, he and Eric finally got together, and then, well, Eric was killed in a car accident. Accidents, they happen. They happen all the time. That’s how life is. We have plans. And then something happens. And everything’s gone. Like Mrs. Apodaca’s garden. Like my father, who got up to get a drink of water in the middle of the night, and had a stroke. He hung on for a while, but he was so sick. And he finally let go. “Voy a ver a mi Soledad.” Gone to see my mom. Those were his final words. The day after his funeral, I found a sign he’d painted on a piece of plywood among his things. He’d made the sign a couple of months before his brother was supposed to come home from serving in the Korean War. The sign said: “Welcome to Hollywood. Population 67.” Then the 67 was crossed out and said 68.
But his brother never never made it back. He was shot two days before he was supposed to come home. In Korea. A bullet right through his heart.
Tonight, I’m sitting here, trying to remember the boy I was when I fell in love with a girl named Juliana. We lived in a place called Hollywood. I can still see the streets and the houses—small—all of them. Some of them neat and taken care of, some of them as ragged as the people who lived in them. Some of them, more or less in the same shape as when they were built. Some of them, with rooms added on in every direction, rooms added on with leftover materials. You didn’t call a builder. You didn’t call an architect. You did it yourself. And it came out like it came out. The one thing you never did was move.
Some of us made it out. Most of us didn’t. Not alive, anyway.
Not fair. Hell no.
When she was a little girl, Elena used to ask me, “If you could be anybody, Sammy, just for a day, who would you be?” I never had an answer. But now, I have an answer. If I could be anybody just for a day, I’d be Jesus Christ, that’s who I’d be. I’d go to all the graves. I would stand there. I would close my eyes and lift my arms. I’d be Jesus Christ—I’d stand in front of the graves of all the people I loved. And I’d raise them back to life.
All of them.
And after they were all alive again, I’d hug them and kiss them and never let them go. And I would be happy. I would be the happiest man in all the world.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz was born in his grandmother’s house in Old Picacho, a small farming village in the outskirts of Las Cruces, New Mexico, in 1954. He was the fourth of seven children and was raised on a small farm near Mesilla Park. Later, when the family lost the farm, his father went back to his former occupation—being a cement finisher. His mother worked as a cleaning woman and a factory worker. During his youth, he worked at various jobs—painting apartments, roofing houses, picking onions, and working for a janitorial service. He graduated from high school in 1972 and went on to college. He studied philosophy and theology in Europe for four years and spent a summer in Tanzania. He eventually became a writer and professor and moved back to the border—the place where he feels most at home. He lives in El Paso, Texas, forty miles downriver of Las Cruces, and teaches creative writing at the University of Texas at El Paso.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Sammy and Juliana in Hollywood
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