In Perfect Light

  Just as Mister looked into the face of that woman who was as angry as she was beautiful, the name Andrés Segovia entered Grace’s thoughts. Her first two appointments had canceled, had left her with some unexpected time on her hands. Unwelcome, this extra, unexpected time. So she willed herself to think of Andrés Segovia—think of him and spare herself from thinking of her breasts, which looked like they were fine and healthy but weren’t, spare herself from thinking of her body, the decay, the final test that was coming. She spared herself of thinking of useless radiation and treatments and medications, and she spared herself of thinking about Richard Garza, the way he’d kissed her hand, and what she’d seen in his eyes in that endless second of recognition. She spared herself from recalling the bitter tears that fell like a summer storm as she walked back to her car. Hadn’t the tears stopped? Hadn’t the trembling ceased? Hadn’t she known that she wouldn’t cry again, not ever again, because that’s not how she was going to spend her final months or years or however long it was that she had left? Hadn’t she decided right then that whatever was coming, she would take it and hold it and not be afraid, and make no room in her house for self-pity? So wasn’t the worst over now? Hadn’t it hit like a hurricane, like one of those storms Andrés Segovia had written about—hadn’t it hit and left her standing? And what was her death, anyway, after Sam’s?

  She thumbed through the two files on her desk. She shook her head at her morning cancellations. That was a way of putting it. Cancellations. One of them was back in juvenile hall for attempted rape. Women take things from me they do, you don’t know what they’ve taken. What? What do they take? Tell me. The other was in the hospital, car wreck, drunk driving and No, no I don’t have an alcohol problem—I swear I don’t. Women problems, alcohol problems, symptoms of diseases that were as deeply embedded and alive as the cancer in her breasts. If they could only get at something in themselves to hold onto. Didn’t they all have some kind of safety belt to protect them from all their wrecks? If only they could reach that place. If only was a place, a desert where her clients were condemned to wander like La Llorona wandering the river, looking for her drowned children.

  Six months’ worth of counseling, and nothing to show for it. Her fault, mama’s fault, whose fault, daddy’s fault, their fault, personal responsibility, yeah their fault. Their fault. Wasn’t it? Wasn’t it that heart-breakingly simple? Too bad they weren’t corporations—then they could legally be people without having to be responsible for the havoc they caused. A shame that they were just flesh-and-blood people. Too damned bad. Damnit! These two were smart, both of them. She shook her head and put their files back in their place. In case they ever came back. She made a mental note to go see the girl in the hospital. But not to accuse. She’d had enough of that.

  Andrés Was Crying

  Al Mendoza had to tell them. Not that he liked to squeal. Even on a guy like Andrés Segovia, who was permanently pissed off at the world. When they came up to him, the two detectives, he knew why they were there. He had a bad feeling. He hated this shit. So they asked. And he gave them Andrés Segovia’s name. He answered all their questions. “And you took him home? What did he say?”

  “Nothing, he said nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  “He was crying.”

  “Crying?”

  “Yeah, crying. That man hurt him.”

  “Yeah? How?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Then how do you know?”

  “I just do. Andrés was crying. He’s not the kind of guy who does that sort of thing.”

  “Kills people with his fists, or cries?”

  “He doesn’t do any of those things.”

  “Well, a few nights ago, he did both.”

  Timing and Order in the Universe

  At two-forty-five in the afternoon, Grace is listening to a boy talking about his father. He hates me. He says I’m only doing this to get back at him. I told him being gay was a helluva way to get back at your father. I told him if I wanted to get back at him, I’d have sold his golf clubs. He smiles. The other kids in the group laugh. He loves his golf clubs more than he loves me.

  Andrés Segovia is sitting in a room—two detectives are asking him questions. Why’d you kill him, son? What did he do to you? When did you meet him? Tell us. We could book you. We have enough evidence. A whole shitload of people saw you beat that man with your fists. And he’s dead. We got a coroner’s report that points the finger at you, son. We could take it to the DA right now. Right now. Andrés Segovia looks up at them. So what’s stopping you?

  Dave is in court. The jury is in. The head juror says guilty. He utters the word with respect. His client bows his head and whispers, bastards. In his heart, Dave knows his client is guilty. He is wealthy and has paid him top dollar. Top dollar, and today they’ve lost. Guilty. He whispers to his client that they will appeal. And anyway, he thinks, they will suspend the sentence—or most of it. White-collar crime. No one was killed. It was only a few bucks that were stolen. Only money.

  Mister is talking to Liz on the phone. “She hated me, Liz.” She’s just angry, Mister. Maybe she has a right to be.

  “When do we stop being angry, Liz?”

  Dave? Grace?

  Her afternoon was relatively easy. Some paperwork, some reports, a phone call from a lawyer that informed her that another one of her clients would not be returning. Back in jail. Sorry. But would she like to have lunch? No thanks. I eat lunch with the birds at San Jacinto Plaza. She actually told him that. She hated men who mixed business with pleasure. Especially the ones who were married. Call your wife.

  She had one last session with a client who was moving to Chicago. And she had a two-hour session with eight gay and lesbian high school students. She’d never cared for group sessions—but these kids, she liked them. They were smart and wonderful and a lot less damaged than most of the people she saw. Survivors, all of them. She let them talk. That’s mostly what they needed. She asked questions. No crisis among them this week. A discussion of who was worse, ignorant teachers or homo-phobic bullies. “Those are our choices?” one of them asked. They all laughed. Not a hard afternoon. She was grateful for that.

  At five-thirty, she wrote out an informal report on her first session with Andrés. He was self-possessed and well spoken. He was clearly the man who’d written the words on those creased pages she had in her possession. It was also clear to her that he was the man who’d held four policemen at bay.

  She looked around the room. It still smelled slightly of smoke, despite the fact that she’d opened her window and lit a cinnamon candle. Not that she cared all that much.

  There was a knock at the door. Before she could say, come in, the door opened. She found herself staring at the smiling man in the doorway. It had been a long time since she’d seen that smile. She remembered the first time she laid eyes on him. No smiles, not back then.

  “Dave? What are you doing here?” She got up from her chair and offered him a friendly, if formal hug. He kissed her on the cheek. Too much cologne. She preferred cigarette smoke.

  “How are you, Grace?”

  “You didn’t really come here to ask me how I am.”

  “No. But that doesn’t mean the question was insincere.”

  “I suppose not.”

  “God, Grace. You’re still the same.”

  “Older.”

  “Probably tougher.”

  “Probably. Life does that. You haven’t changed much, either. Well, your wardrobe’s changed.”

  “Why does everyone pay so much attention to what I wear?”

  “Because you want them to.”

  “You know, you should’ve gone all the way and become an analyst.”

  “I’m fine where I am.”

  He shook his head. “How come you never remarried, Grace?”

  “How do you know I didn’t?”

  “Did you?”

  He was wearing that familiar grin. “I didn’t want to remarry.” br />
  “You’re really very beautiful.”

  She ignored his compliment. “What about you? What are you, in your mid-to-late thirties?”

  “So?”

  “You’re really very beautiful.”

  “You’re mocking me.”

  “You had it coming.”

  He laughed. “Women keep breaking up with me.”

  “For no reason, I suppose.”

  “You sound like my mother.”

  “How is she?”

  “Never better—since my father died.”

  “That’s a mean thing to say.”

  “Yes. But it’s also true.”

  “You came here about Andrés, didn’t you?”

  “You don’t change, do you, Grace? Always getting to the heart of the matter.”

  “You should know better than to show up at my doorstep and expect me to discuss a client.”

  “Grace—”

  “What?”

  “He’s been arrested.”

  “What?”

  “They say he killed a man. With his fists.”

  “I don’t—” She stopped in the middle of her sentence. “You think he did it?”

  “It doesn’t matter what I think.”

  “It does matter. It always does.”

  “I think there are extenuating circumstances. That matters, too.”

  “So you’re taking his case?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “I suppose you came to tell me he won’t be seeing me again.”

  “Of course he will.”

  “From jail.”

  “I can work that out. He needs to see you, Grace. He needs to see someone.”

  She nodded. “But I don’t work for you, Dave. I work for him.”

  “Meaning?”

  “What he says stays in this room.”

  “If he tells the story once, it hurts less the second time.”

  “You think that if he tells me what happened, then he’ll tell you, too.”

  “Something like that.”

  “I hope you’re right.”

  “You’ll keep seeing him, then?”

  “I’ll wait to hear from you.”

  She looked at him. There was an urgency in his voice. She nodded, remembering. How old had he been when he’d come to her office? Hard and lost and still a boy. No, a man who had not yet learned to be a man. “Are you all right?”

  “Yes, I’m fine.”

  “You don’t seem fine.”

  “Don’t I?”

  “I think I can tell.”

  “You haven’t seen me in years.”

  “He’s important to you, isn’t he?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s a long story, Grace.”

  “Listening to long stories is what I do for a living.” The faint smell of cigarettes kept nagging at her senses. And then suddenly the odor of stale cigarettes gave way to the smell of gardenias and agave. Gardenias and sage and agave. How very strange.

  “Grace?”

  She looked at him. His eyes seemed to be holding a question. Such a handsome man in that particular white-boy-all-American-no-one-can-hurt-me kind of way. Except that he had been hurt. But he was fine now. More or less. And she was overcome with a strong sense of affection for him. But he seemed so far in that instant.

  “Grace?”

  Everything was fading, all the lights in the room going out. And the sun, too. It was all so odd, as if the whole world had stepped out, run away from her—left her. Alone. In the dark. God. Everything was as black as Andrés Segovia’s eyes.

  “Grace? Grace?” She heard a voice. It was Dave. The boy who had been sent to her by his desperate mother, will you see our boy? Will you talk to him? Dave, who had refused to speak to her for sessions and sessions until one day he did nothing but cry, for hours. And she’d held him all that time, and she remembered how her blouse had been soaked in his tears. Dave. She stared in the direction of the voice. Dave?

  “Grace? Are you all right?”

  She reached out her hand in the darkness.

  The Light

  Mister surveyed the room. Another sleepless night. He rose from the bed and walked into the kitchen in the dark. He poured himself a glass of water. He put the glass to his lips and drank. He thought of rain. He thought of his father, how he told him that they were children of a God who died bleeding and crying out for water. Tonight, he felt as thirsty as his father’s God.

  He walked into Vicente’s room. Newly painted. Yellow and orange. Liz had painted it—just in case. “A happy room,” she said. So many unhappy rooms in the world. So many unhappy boys. “The child who lives here is going to be very happy.” Liz was so certain. That was their job now, to make a boy happy. That’s what Sam had done for him—make him happy. And Grace, too. Grace, I don’t want to fight anymore.

  He pressed his face to the wall and breathed in the smell. Vicente would be able to smell the fresh paint. He would take him in his arms and describe the room, and find a way to translate the morning light and how it made the room look like it was a candle burning in a dark room. Vicente, this is the room where we reinvent ourselves.

  He sat there. In the darkness. He tried to picture his father, what he had looked like, the color of his eyes. He tried to picture Vicente. He tried to understand what it meant to see.

  In the morning, he woke and found he was lying on the floor, the light flooding the room. He smiled. Liz was coming home today. He would make love to her. They would bring Vicente home for his first visit. God, the light in the room was beautiful.

  The Dark

  They take you to a room in the downtown station. They ask you questions. You decide you do not want to answer them. They ask you if you want a lawyer, and you tell them you do not want a lawyer—but you do not want to answer questions, either. They play the game. You know what role you have been assigned. Finally, you get tired of them. You say only, “Do what you have to do.” And so they say they have enough to charge you with. You nod. They are angry because you will not sign anything. You will not say anything. It will be better if you sign a confession—that is what they say. But you know it is not your job to sign anything, no, not your job to help them.

  They lead you to a small room and search you. They pat you down, look in your shoes, make you take off your belt. They put handcuffs on you. An officer walks you outside, his hand on your shoulder. Another officer accompanies him—he has your file with him.

  They run into a fellow officer, and you are there on the sidewalk, in handcuffs, and you hang your head, and you tell yourself that no one is looking at you. You tell yourself you are invisible, and you keep your head bowed. You do not look up, not for any reason. You think they will talk forever—they are laughing and joking and making small talk—and finally, they haul you into the jail. You are relieved you are no longer on public display. And again, you are searched. They make you take off your belt and your shoes, again. It does not matter that they have done this already. They do it again. And then they put you in a holding cell. It is not too busy, so you do not have to wait in the holding cell for hours, and you are glad you do not have to wait there for very long because there is a drunk man in the cell and he is shouting out his life story, shouting it out to anyone who will listen My father was the biggest bastard since Hitler.…And they call your name and lead you out of the holding cell and they photograph you, and the photograph goes directly into a computer. And then they fingerprint you on a new machine. Like your picture, your fingerprints go directly into the computer. So, now everything about you is in the computer. And you will be in that computer until the day you die.

  And then, like magic, a bracelet with your photograph appears out of a printer hooked up to the computer, and the officer puts it on your wrist, and they lead you to a counter where they will classify you. They ask you questions—they want to know if you are violent or gay or if you have a disease or if you are crazy. You say you are not gay and
that you have no diseases and that you are not crazy—but you also tell them that you feel like hurting them. And then you smile. But they do not smile back. And then they take you to a woman dressed in dark blue who gives you a TB test. You do not have to wait in line for a long time. She smiles at you, and you wonder why. And you smile back at her—and you wonder why.

  And after that, they take you to another counter. A large young black man with a smile as large as his hands gives you a basket full of things for your new life: an orange jumper, a blanket, a towel, cheap canvas tennis shoes, a cheap toothbrush, a bar of soap, toilet paper. As he turns the basket over to you, he points to a place—a special cell—and you are forced to take a shower. And you feel dirty as you shower, and you shiver as you dry yourself because you are cold and you feel more naked than you have ever felt—and then you put on your new clothes. And they take away everything you walked in with—your wallet, your watch, your belt, your jeans, your shirt, your shoes, the receipt and the quarters you had in your pockets.

  And you belong to them.

  “I’ll get you out of here as soon as you’re arraigned.”

  “I did it, Dave.”

  “It’s not that simple. You didn’t mean it.”

  “How do you know?”

  It was strange that Dave was more concerned than he was. Maybe he’d care tomorrow. Maybe he’d never care about anything again. He was glad he didn’t have a cellmate. Tomorrow, they would move him in with other men—but not tonight. Tonight he was alone, and he was glad. Maybe, when he got to prison, he’d beat on someone, anyone who needed beating, anyone. And they’d put him in solitary. And he’d work to stay there. So he wouldn’t ever have to see another human being.