In Perfect Light

  Grace signed in her name on the sheet. The waiting room was mostly empty—too late, everyone had gone home. She thought of pouring herself a cup of coffee, despite the fact that she’d already had too much of it for one day. Coffee. Her love for it had rubbed off on Mister. When he’d opened up his coffee shop, she hadn’t approved. “It’s your fault, Grace. Where the hell do you think I got the idea?” She took a deep breath, took in the smell of some kind of antiseptic cleaner and coffee. Not particularly good coffee, she could tell. But it was a doctor’s office, not Starbucks. She’d skip the coffee.

  She sat down in the almost empty waiting room and looked at her watch. She thumbed through the stack of magazines. People, Newsweek, Business Week. Why couldn’t doctors order magazines like the Nation or Mother Jones or El Andar? She put the magazines aside. There was no reason to care about them.

  She studied her watch. She was early for her 5:30 appointment. She was always early. Too afraid of being late—that’s what Sam had always said, “If you’re late once in a while, nothing bad will happen.”

  “Nothing good will happen, either, Sam. What’s so great about keeping people waiting?”

  “Important people keep other people waiting all the time.”

  “Important people are rude.”

  “Important people are busy.”

  “Well, I never want to be that busy.”

  He’d kissed her. That’s what he’d always done when he was losing an argument.

  She’d been thinking about him lately. Could almost smell him. Too much. Too much of Sam. But it was better to think about him than think about the news Richard Garza was about to give her. She concentrated—turned her thoughts toward Mister. And then, as she whispered his name, she remembered that afternoon when he’d come home and confessed he’d gotten an F in English. He was in the eighth grade. He’d gone to his room and sat for what seemed like hours. When he came out, he said, “This is a list of books I need to read.” He’d looked at her and said, “Take me to the library.” And he’d read them all. And never stopped reading after that. Years later he’d confessed, “I was getting back at you.”

  “For what?”

  “You loved books. So I decided to fight you.”

  “What made you decide to stop fighting me?”

  He’d smiled at her. “I figured out I’d never win.”

  Maybe he’d gotten tired of never winning. Maybe he’d gotten tired of trying to please her. Anyway, Grace, you can’t be pleased. Isn’t that what he’d accused her of? And he was more right than wrong. She’d wanted to tell him that he pleased her more than he could imagine, but that’s not what she’d said to him. What had she said? She couldn’t remember now.

  “Grace Delgado.” She looked up at the woman who called her name. She walked down the hallway into Dr. Garza’s office, and for an instant she wanted to turn back. She took a deep breath. No one can run from a storm. She smiled back at Dr. Garza’s nurse.

  “How are you Grace?”

  “Fine, Flora. Fine.”

  “How’s your son?”

  It comforted her, this small talk. “Oh, he’s the same.” She knew the routine. She got on the scale as she talked.

  “I love his coffee shop.”

  “He works hard.” She watched Flora’s hands as she pushed the weights of the scale.

  “Work, Grace, it saves us and it kills us.” She wrote down her weight on the form. “You’ve lost a little weight.”

  “A little.”

  “Gain it back, damnit. You’re making the rest of us look bad.”

  Grace laughed. She looked at the scale before she got off. Five pounds. Without even trying. Women her age didn’t lose weight without trying.

  As she got off the scale, she caught sight of Richard Garza. “Grace? Como estas?”

  His Spanish comforted her even more than the ritual of small talk. “Encatanda de ver nacida.”

  He smiled. “That’s nice. Didn’t know you were so poetic.”

  She shook her head. “Something I read in a novel.”

  She followed him into his small office. Neither of them said a word as they settled in. He took out her file, flipped it open. She knew he was studying the files more out of nervousness than anything else. He looked at her, smiled, then quickly looked back at the files. He’d keep his head in those files all evening if she’d let him. “No matter how hard you stare at those damn things, the results won’t change.”

  He put the file down. “Grace, I wish I had better news.”

  “Just don’t lie to me.” She had the urge to laugh. “Not that you’re any good at it. Bet your wife wins all your arguments.”

  He bit the side of his mouth, then nodded.

  She could see there were tears in his eyes. She thought more of him for their presence. Sam, he’d have cried, too.

  “I wish there was—Grace, it’s not the end. I think we should—”

  She placed her finger on her lips, stopping him in mid-sentence. “Richard. Let’s save the talk for another day.”

  “Grace—” She saw his lips moving, but she didn’t hear a thing. She wished Sam were in the room so he could hold her.

  How Everything Comes Back

  Sitting. In a car. Like a stone. Everything about his body heavy. He could sink into the earth. As he stared into his hands, he understood that they were throbbing as if they had become his heart. He rubbed them as if to rub out the tightness, but the rubbing made the hurt even worse, and so he stopped. Ice. That was what he needed, to soak his fists in ice and freeze the pain. That was the answer to this simple problem. But how did you freeze a heart, the days and weeks and months that made a life? How the hell did you freeze that?

  He looked around, confused, trying to remember how he came to be in that car. He looked at the driver. Al, yes, he had been with Al in a bar, and there had been a man, yes, the man. And he’d remembered him, remembered how that man had lied to him years ago, and how the smell of him just came up through his nostrils and settled in his throat and how he’d wanted to take a bath because just smelling him made him feel dirty and—for the longest second—how he’d wanted to jump in an ocean, scrub himself raw until all of his skin was gone so he could grow a new outer shell, a shell that man hadn’t touched, and he hated how everything came back to him in an instant almost as if it wasn’t a memory at all but a moment in time he was condemned to live and relive, a scene in his life he’d have to step into over and over again until he got his lines right, but he would always get it wrong—and just then he was in the scene again, a boy again, young and inexperienced and stupid and inarticulate and how the man was making him do things he didn’t even have a name for because he was twelve, twelve, and what did twelve-year-old boys know, and then he stepped out of the scene and looked at the man and he felt nothing but the purest kind of rage, an anger so distilled that it was as clear and sparkling as champagne and he knew that what the man had done to him, that man, that man who was sitting there, there, right there—what he’d done to him had started something inside him because something started to break then—and there he was—sitting right in front of him—and it wasn’t fucking fair that he was sitting there all nice and neat and put together like some gentleman out of a magazine, like some reproduction of a suave movie star, wasn’t fucking fair when he, he, Andrés Segovia, was all broken into pieces and he knew that he had this one chance to do something, to say something, to try, to try, to act, to not be passive because he wasn’t twelve anymore and for the longest time he hadn’t had a say in how he got to live his life, and it wasn’t even a conscious decision, no, it wasn’t like that, it wasn’t as if he had decided I will hurt this man, I will hurt him but God, it had felt good to say I hate your fucking guts for what you did to me, I hate, I hate, God, it was good to say that even if he was saying it with his fists, but even then, he knew that it was his fists that were in control and not him, not his mind, not his heart, and maybe it wasn’t possible for a guy like him to be led by his he
art because something was broken, so goddamned broken that nothing could fix it, not all the saints in all the churches in Mexico, not the Virgin herself, not his mother if she came back to life, nothing, nothing in the large, ugly, violent, fucking world, nothing in its past or in its future could fix what was broken.

  He looked at his fists and opened his hands and he felt his hands so tight that he couldn’t really open them, not really.

  “You could’ve killed him.”

  He looked in Al’s direction.

  “Yeah,” he whispered.

  “Why did—” Al didn’t finish his question, already knowing that Andrés didn’t have an answer, and knowing, too, that his disapproval did not matter in the least. “You’re lucky he didn’t call the cops.”

  “Yeah. Lucky.”

  “He could’ve called them, you know?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Except he knew something, didn’t he?”

  Andrés shrugged. He didn’t want to talk about this, not with Al, not with anybody. “Look, doesn’t matter.”

  “Maybe not. But you could’ve killed that guy.”

  “Maybe I should’ve.”

  “Yeah, well. What did he do to you?”

  “It’s a long story.”

  “Yeah, well, it must’ve been something really bad. No cops, that’s what he kept saying. No cops. There he was, all beat up to hell, and all he kept saying was don’t call the cops. So you must have something on him that’s really bad.”

  Al nodded and kept nodding, and then they were both quiet for a long time. Al seemed to be just driving, not really going anywhere. Andrés didn’t care. He just sat. He wanted to sleep. That’s what he wanted to do.

  Finally Al whispered something, and Andrés looked over at him.

  “Where do you live?”

  “Sunset Heights. On Prospect.”

  Al nodded, then drove. It wasn’t far.

  Andrés nodded off. Couldn’t have been long, though he felt he had been sleeping for hours. He opened his eyes and found they were on his street. He pointed. “Over there.” Al slowed down, then stopped in front of the run-down apartments. “Nice place,” he said, then laughed. Not a convincing laugh.

  “Yeah,” Andrés whispered. “I’m tired.” He reached for the door, but found he couldn’t turn the handle. He winced.

  “Here. Wait.” Al got out of the car and opened the door for him.

  Andrés got out, and for an instant he felt like an old man. “You treat your dates really good,” he said, then laughed. He didn’t notice if Al laughed or not. And then he couldn’t stop laughing, but he knew, really, that he was crying. And then he didn’t want to stop, so he just let himself cry, and he didn’t give a damn about anything. Not anything.

  “Can you get in all right?” He heard Al’s voice, but he couldn’t speak, he just couldn’t. He didn’t remember if Al had helped him into his apartment. He didn’t remember if it was Al who’d placed his fists in a bowl of ice. He had a fragment of Al inside him, of Al whispering something to him. Maybe it didn’t happen. Did it matter how he got there? The pain in his fists, maybe that was the only thing that was real. Him, sitting there in his chair in his small apartment, his fists stuck in the ice. He looked around the room, then pushed himself onto the bed, and he was so tired, but he couldn’t sleep, so he forced himself to get up and he forced himself to find the bottle of bourbon that he almost dropped because he couldn’t really hold it very well because his hands were so numb, but he managed to swallow some of that liquor that soothed him like a lullaby, and he liked how it burned, and he drank some more, and then he felt better, sure, better, so he stumbled to his bed and fell on it.

  Before he went out, he swore he smelled his brother, Mando. And maybe he heard him, too. He wasn’t calling for him, not for him. He was calling his sister, searching for her, but it was useless because she was lost forever. And then, all of a sudden, his father was saying something to him, and his mother, too, and he could feel and smell his father’s hot tobacco breath on his neck as he rode a bicycle through a lost city. He was dreaming them—all of them—but even in his dreams he was pushing them all away, pushing them toward a place so dark that not even the angel of God would bother to search the face of it to find them.

  Studying the Light

  Mister woke thinking of his mother. Of his father. Of Vicente.

  Of Liz. Why did people think they could be alone? Everyone you loved or hated or touched or who made you tremble or bruised you—they were always there, ready to enter and take over the room. It didn’t matter at all if you opened the door or not. They came rushing in. They knew the way, knew how to make themselves at home. His entire house was crowded when he woke. It was like waking up in the middle of a cocktail party, all the guests staring at you—waiting for you to say something intelligent, something interesting, something they didn’t know.

  He pictured Sam holding Vicente. He pictured himself standing next to Grace, both of them watching Sam and Vicente. He pictured himself and Liz holding Vicente, and then Grace standing next to them—and then Grace disappearing. It occurred to him that the problem with Grace had almost nothing to do with him—or with Liz, for that matter. Grace was looking for Sam. She’d been doing that ever since he died. And she’d never find him again. And despite her iron will, and her refusal to fall into a permanent state of self-pity, she had become nothing more than Sam’s widow. Sam’s widow, who spent her free time trying to fix people who were so broken they were beyond fixing. But she was trying. So why couldn’t he just give her a break? “For the same reason she can’t give Liz a break.” The sound of his own voice startled him. The anger in it. Where had that come from, he who had been the happiest of boys?

  He walked into the kitchen and stared at the light in the room. Always staring at the light. He’d learned that from Grace and Sam. Sometimes, when he was a boy, they would all study the light in the room. Sam would sketch something, and he would watch, trying to see what Sam saw, trying to understand what he was learning, wanting to be the light, wanting to be the pencil Sam was holding.

  They would all three sit in the light.

  All morning.

  Not saying a word.

  Because you didn’t need words when you were sitting in the light. Things weren’t that simple anymore. Not even empty rooms filled with light. Because rooms were always full, full of memories and voices and people who were either dead or impossible to love.

  Good Things, Bad Things, Good Things

  Mister?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s hard to hear you. Is it your cell?”

  “The place is packed. Just a second. I’m walking toward the office.” Mister looked at Sara and pointed at the cash register. He spun his finger in the air, his signal for “Take over.” He walked past the morning coffee crowd and made his way down the hall, cell phone in hand. “Keep talking, I’m heading toward my office.”

  “I just wanted to go over a few things with you.”

  He took the keys out of his pocket and opened the door to his office as he talked. “Few things?” He pushed the door open. “Good things, Linda?” He switched on the light and shut the door.

  “Hard things—but good. They’re good things, Mister.”

  He sat down at his mostly clean desk. Bad things, good things, bad things, good things. But good things. Hard things, good things, bad things. “Okay, I can talk in peace, now. Busy day.” He tried to keep calm. There was news. About the boy. Good things, good things—

  “Mister? Mister? Are you there?”

  “Oh, sorry. I must’ve zoned out for a second. Something gone wrong?”

  “No. Nothing’s gone wrong. I was talking to the Rubios, and they thought maybe you could bring Vicente home with you for a visit.”

  “A visit?”

  “You know, just a small visit, so he can get to know you and Liz. Is she back yet?”

  “No. Day after tomorrow.”

  “We’ll wait till she
gets back.”

  “Good.” He stared at the blank wall in front of him. Why was it blank? “I’m a little scared here, Linda.”

  “That’s normal.”

  “Liz isn’t scared.”

  “Women are stronger.”

  He liked the sound of her laughter over the phone. “Like I needed you to tell me that.”

  “He might be scared, too,” she said.

  “But he might not be.”

  “No, he might not be, Mister.”

  “Still, it’s a good idea that he come over and check out his new home.”

  “The Rubios think so?”

  “Yes, and they’re right. As soon as Liz gets back, we’ll arrange it.”

  He felt his heart beating. Just like when he came back from a four-mile run. Like that. But there was something in her voice. Something else. Sure there was.

  “Mister?”

  “I’m here.”

  “You okay?”

  “I’m fine. But you wanted to talk to me about something else.”

  “Yes.”

  “What?”

  Linda was choosing her words, he could tell. She was careful around judges and clients. Probably careful with her husband, too. “She wants to meet you.”

  For an instant, Mister felt off balance. And then he suddenly understood who she was.

  “Mister?”

  “What about Liz?”

  “She doesn’t want to meet Liz.”

  “Why not?”

  “She said she wanted to meet the father. That’s all she said.”

  Father, he thought. “When?”

  “You don’t sound too sure. You don’t have to meet her, you know. She’s relinquished her parental rights.”

  “She did it. She really did it?”

  “Yeah. This morning. The ink’s not even dry yet.”

  God, his heart could be loud sometimes, loud as if it had its own will, its own logic, its own voice. “Really?” He could feel his voice cracking.

  “Yes, really. He’s not hers anymore.”