“And so you addressed your journals to him?”
“Yes—I addressed my journals to him.”
“Did it help?”
“It helped.”
“Do you know anything about him?”
“I know my parents had him arrested when he left the house.”
“Why?”
“He beat them up. They deserved it.”
She nodded.
“The night he left, I asked him if Dad had ever touched him. I didn’t realize it at the time, but Dad had used him for—for the same thing. I think he wanted to protect me. I think he confronted my father—I’m not sure—but I think that’s why he left. I think that’s why he roughed them up. I don’t know—maybe I’m making all this up. Do you remember when you told me you loved me?”
“Yes.”
“And, I asked you: ‘Are you certain?’”
“Yes, I remember.”
“You thought it was a strange thing to ask. For me it was completely logical. I’ve never been certain about anything. Sometimes, I’m not sure I know the difference between what I’ve made up—about him, about me—and what really happened. Sometimes I think everything about me and my brother is a lie. I want to be certain. Anyway, he was eleven years older than me, and it was good that he left—good for him, anyway. Sometimes, I hated him for leaving me behind. But when I think about it—how could he have taken me with him? My parents would have never allowed it. It wasn’t that they loved me—it was just that they needed to have control. He was just a kid, I used to ask our maid to help me find him—but she said she didn’t know where to look. I asked my mother about him all the time, but never my father. My father told me never to say his name. One day my mother was drunk and I asked her about Jake. She told me that he was a homosexual. She sneered when she said it. I wanted to cut her open, but I just smiled at her as she sipped on her scotch. ‘Your brother’s a sick and violent animal,’ she said without emotion. ‘You’re better off without him.’” Eddie shook his head and looked at his wife. He wanted to ask what she saw. “Can we go to the beach?” he asked. “I need some air, I want—I want to feel the sand on my feet.”
She smiled at him. “I need to see the doctor in half an hour. After that, you got yourself a date.”
He nodded. “Is the blanket still in the car?”
She nodded. “We should take some sweaters. It’s always cold there.”
“It feels that way because you’re from the desert.”
“It isn’t cold for you?”
“No—not really. Cold? Cold was the house I was raised in.”
“Help me up.” she said. She held his journals in one arm and held the other arm out. Eddie gently helped her up. “If this baby doesn’t pop out soon, we’ll need a crane to lift me out of chairs.”
“Beautiful,” he said.
“I don’t feel beautiful.”
“You should.”
She placed her palm on her husband’s cheek. “Never leave me.”
“Never. What if you leave me?”
“Nunca.”
“Nunca?”
“First Spanish lesson. Nunca. Never.”
“Nunca,” he said.
She combed his hair with her fingers. “What happened to them?” she asked.
“My parents? A week after my eighteenth birthday, my mother took a gun and shot my father—then shot herself. Nice, huh? The old girl just couldn’t take it anymore. Did you know their house is still standing—my house really. I actually pay someone to live there. Well, actually, they live in what used to be the chauffeur’s house.”
“You were very rich?”
“Am rich.”
“How rich?”
“Well, I haven’t checked in a while. This guy handles everything. He gives a copy of everything to my lawyer.”
“I didn’t know you had a lawyer.”
“You’ve met him.”
“Where?”
“Company parties. He does some work for the company.”
“So how much?”
“Thirty million dollars—something like that—well, no, a lot more—I can’t know—I’m not that interested. And then there’s the house. You want it?”
“Their house?” She grinned. “I have a house. Besides, I’d rather be homeless than to live in their house.”
“Me too. Do you want the money?”
She was half-amused, half-disgusted by his question. “No,” she said, “I don’t want the money. I have enough.”
“What am I going to do with it?”
“Do you have to solve it today?”
“No,” he said.
“Good, then grab the sweaters and help me down the stairs.”
“To the doctor’s,” he said, and kissed her halfway down the steps.
Eddie was sleeping in the waiting room when Maria Elena came out of the doctor’s office. The receptionist smiled knowingly at her. “They fall asleep everywhere, don’t they?”
Maria Elena smiled. “But they’re so nice when they’re asleep.”
Eddie woke at the sound of her voice. He smiled lazily.
“We don’t have to go to the beach,” she said, “you look tired.”
“No. I want to go. I want to look at the sea. Did you know that sometimes I dream that you and I go to the water’s edge?”
“And what do we do there?”
“We’re just there, that’s all. And we’re looking out at the water, standing at the place where the world ends.”
“Do we want to jump in?”
“Maybe we do. I don’t know.”
As they drove toward one of the beaches near Pescadero, Maria Elena told Eddie what the doctor had said. “Perfect, Eddie, the doctor said perfect—just as I suspected. He says I’m healthy and the baby is perfectly healthy and that he doesn’t anticipate any problems. He told me not to worry. I told him I wasn’t worried one bit.”
“You lied to him like that?”
“I didn’t lie.”
“The hell you didn’t—you’re worried as hell about this baby.” “Why shouldn’t I be?”
“I didn’t say you shouldn’t be, but you should at least admit to your doctor that you’re a little worried.”
“Oh, there’s nothing wrong with a little lie.”
“One thing leads to another,” he said.
When they arrived at the beach, already it was foggy and cool, nothing of the noonday’s warmth left in the sky. They walked hand in hand saying nothing, both of them staring at their bare feet as they walked, both of them listening to the waters swaying back and forth on the earth, the two of them riding the sound like a swing. They felt each other’s palms. “I have a brother, too,” she said breaking the silence. Eddie liked the sound of her voice against the beating of the waves. He looked at her, and noticed the sea in the background framing her face.
“What’s his name?” he asked.
“His name’s Diego.”
“Like the artist?”
“Yes. Well, actually my mother named him after the saint.” “What saint?”
“You ever heard of Our Lady of Guadalupe?”
Eddie nodded, “The Virgin.”
“The story goes that she appeared to a poor Indian whose name was Juan Diego. My mother was very religious. She loved him.”
“The saint or your brother?”
“Both.”
“Do you believe?” He watched her eyes.
“In what?”
“Don’t be funny—you know what I mean.”
“I dunno. I guess I do. I can’t help it really.”
“So what happened to your brother?”
“I don’t know. I left—abandoned him.”
“Don’t be so hard on yourself. I’m sure he can take care of himself.”
“No, Eddie, you don’t understand—he’s deaf. He’s kind of an innocent. I just left him. He was young when I left—around twenty—maybe younger. I can’t remember his exact age right now. Isn’t it funny—I worked so hard to forget
that I’m actually forgetting. I didn’t want to take care of him. I didn’t want to be poor. I didn’t want to be Mexican. I didn’t want to live in El Paso my whole damned life and never go anywhere and never see anything and die there. I didn’t want to sacrifice my life the way my mother did.”
“Did you hate him?” He stared at her feet in the sand.
“Yes.”
“Do you still?”
“No.”
“Do you want to find him?”
“I don’t know.” She squeezed his hand. He stared at her face, her tangled hair. She resisted the urge to comb his hair—it was a useless gesture in the wind. She wondered why she didn’t tell him the truth, why she didn’t tell him that her brother was an obsession, a ghost who haunted her, stalked her. She knew she could never again be at peace if she didn’t find the brother she had thrown away like a paper plate. She shrugged her shoulders. “I guess I don’t know a lot of things, huh?”
“I have another question; Where in the hell did you find the name La Greca?”
She laughed. “In a phone book.”
He smiled at her. “Is that the truth?”
She nodded.
He bent over laughing. “A phone book. A goddamned phone book.” She thought he would laugh all afternoon. “Maria,” he said, “Can I call you Maria?”
“Call me Nena,” she said.
“Nena?”
“My mother called me Nena. It’s a nickname.”
“You speak a lot of Spanish?”
“It was my first language.”
“Really?”
“Yes. My mother spoke to me only in Spanish—and my father spoke no English.”
“Neither parent spoke English?”
“Mama’s English was fine. But she loved me in Spanish.”
“She loved you in Spanish? How do you love in Spanish?”
She smiled and looked into his eyes, then laughed. “I’ll show you sometime.”
They walked a long time without speaking. When they turned to walk back toward the car, Eddie led his wife to the edge of the water. They looked out at the waves. “What do you see?” Eddie asked.
“Desert,” she said.
“Desert?”
“The water always reminds me of the desert. You can drown in the desert, you know?”
“I have a confession to make,” he said.
“Another one?”
“I hate my job,” he said.
“Quit,” she said.
“And I hate Palo Alto.”
“Good,” she said. “We’ll move. Lizzie will be thrilled.”
“And what about Maria Elena?”
“Maria Elena doesn’t care where she lives as long as she lives there with Jonathan Edward Marsh.” They stood at the edge of the water for a long time, neither of them wanting to move. They both looked out at the ocean as if they were searching for some lost thing, as if they might find the faces of their brothers on the far horizon.
4
THE WINTER CAME and went. One Saturday in the early spring, Diego ran into Mary as he was walking down Stanton Street. It was she who had noticed him first. “Juan, honey!” she yelled, but since he had stopped looking for her, he did not notice her until she ran up to him, pulled his arm, and turned his face toward her. When he caught sight of her lips, he smiled and laughed. “Juan, darling,” she said. He hugged her as if he was never going to let her go. She giggled like a little girl, and finally pulled herself away so he could see her lips. “Juan, sugar, ain’t you somethin’. You missed Mary, did you?”
He nodded.
“Ain’t you the nicest thing?”
He took out his pad and wrote, “Where were you?”
“They sent me away, Juan, put me in a place where they talked at me forever. Asked me questions ‘bout everything I ever done, everything I ever thought. I never did let ‘em know, I just looked at ‘em and made things up. And that weren’t the worst of it neither, no sir, Juan, but I don’t want to think about it no more. I’m back now, Juan. It sure is good to see you, honey. Just lookin’ at you makes me forget about that awful place. I’m back.”
Diego smiled. “Would you like to have lunch with me?”
Mary laughed. “Oh, Juan, you’re sweeter than my mama’s pecan pie. But really, I’m so busy.” She played with her dishwater blond hair and combed it back as if she were in front of a mirror. “And look at me, Johnny, I’m a mess.”
“But you still look better than me,” he wrote. He winked at her.
“If I didn’t know better,” she said, looking at his pad, “I’d swear you was makin’ a pass at me, honey.”
He laughed. “It’s an honest offer.”
She grabbed his arm and looked at him. “If I wasn’t so hungry, darlin’, I’d be more difficult.” She looked at her watch. “I suppose the rest of ‘em can wait while Mary eats with a gentleman.” She kept talking, telling him how good he looked as they walked. “Ever so much better than James Dean. Why, Juan, you look better than the sun in a blue sky after forty days of rain. Don’t you know that, Johnny?”
Diego smiled at her and nodded.
She talked all the way to Sol’s Barbecue. They sat at a table near the window, and Mary kept talking. She talked and talked for over an hour and ate at the same time. Diego couldn’t make out half of what of what she was saying. Even her lips were impossible to read with Sol’s barbecue hanging out of her mouth. He noticed she was pretty—he had never noticed that before, and he also noticed she didn’t smell like pigeon shit anymore and that she didn’t seem to be as crazy. Diego figured she would always be a little off, but she wasn’t crazy like before. “And,” she said—enunciating every word—”them people where I was at never did believe me about me bein’ the Virgin. There was one man in there, Juan, I swear he was the craziest, meanest man I ever did meet. Said to me one day, T hear you think you’re a virgin.’ ‘I’m not a virgin,’ I says to him, ‘I’m the Virgin.’ ‘That a fact?’ he says. ‘Indeed I am,’ I says. ‘Well,’ he says to me, ‘I can smell a virgin for ten miles, and you don’t smell like no virgin I ever smelled.’ And I says to him, ‘That’s because your nose ain’t smart enough to smell the real thing, ya hear? Your nose couldn’t tell a skunk from a mangy mutt. Your nose couldn’t tell a cat from a possum,’ That’s what I tell ‘em. But I’m boring you, ain’t I, Juan? Me and all my stories—but one thing, Juan, one thing I tell you, I tell you ‘cause I know you won’t breathe a word: I ain’t goin’ back. I told ‘em I’d be back, but it weren’t true—I ain’t never goin’ back to that place. I live on the streets ‘cause the Virgin ain’t got no place to lay her head. S’posed to be that way.”
Diego nodded all the way through Mary’s story. He touched her hand, then pulled himself away. Even though he had never known very much about her and she liked to talk too much, he had missed her. The streets of El Paso had not seemed the same without her.
“Will you meet me on Saturdays and have lunch with me?” He showed her his pad.
Mary stared at him. She thought for a while. “No funny business?” she asked.
Diego shook his head.
“Well, I don’t know, Juan,” she said, playing with her hair. “God knows what he’ll have me doin’. It’s so hard to say.”
“No funny business,” he wrote, “and I promise I’ll pay for the meals. A Virgin needs to eat good meals. And besides, maybe God wants you to spend some time converting an old sinner.”
Mary laughed, pointing her head toward the ceiling. For an instant, she looked like Luz. “You silly thing, you ain’t no sinner. You’re an innocent. I swear you’re so pure that the sun shines off your face. I swear it’s true.” She looked at her hands, rough and scarred, and stuck them out in front of her. “I do believe I could use a manicure.” She put her hands against her face. “Juan, honey, I don’t see how I can resist such a tempting offer, it comin’ from a gentleman and all. We can meet here every Saturday if you like, but if we agree on it, and if you ever stand
Mary up, then Mary’s gonna be plenty upset. Mary won’t forgive a man who leaves her lookin’ like a fool.”
Diego nodded. “I promise I’ll never leave you waiting,” he wrote.
She smiled, kissed him on the cheek, and stood up. “It’s settled then, honey,” she said. She winked at him and disappeared out the door, taking the crackers on the table with her.
Mary walked into her one-bedroom efficiency and smiled. She had more secondhand clothes than furniture: a bed, a table, a chair, and a closet full of dresses. She thought of Diego, his boyish handsome face, his shy smile, his straight white teeth. She wondered why some woman hadn’t seduced him away from his virginity. She was sure he was a virgin. As far as she was concerned his deafness was more of an asset than a handicap. Most men were in love with their own voices. She wondered what he thought of her, did he tike her, could there be something—she shook her head. She reached for her medicine, stared at the label, and took her dose. She was better since she’d been taking it. Maybe the doctor at the hospital where she’d been had been right. Maybe sanity was a better option than all the craziness she had been living the last five years. The medicine made her feel as if she had a center somewhere inside, a center with an intelligent heart. Maybe, if the pills worked—if they kept working—maybe she could get back her children. Maybe just see them and hold them, just for a short time. New Orleans was a long way from El Paso. Mary did not even remember how she had gotten here. “Maybe the pills, maybe the pills and Diego will save me.” She looked around her room. It wasn’t much, but it was belter than the streets. “Maybe I’ll find me a nice picture.”
Diego stayed behind at the restaurant and ordered another cup of coffee. He wondered what Luz would say about his new relationship. He knew she would think he was a pendejo. He could almost see her lips saying: “That pinche gringa’s gonna soak you for all the money you got. Isn’t it just like a Mexican man to fall for a gringa.” He smiled to himself as he drank his coffee.
He walked toward the Bowie Bakery tike he did every Saturday by way of La Fe Clinic. As he reached the Alamito projects on St. Vrain, he noticed Tencha running in the middle of the street like a scared rabbit. She was waving her hands in the air like the flags on the river. Diego sensed she was in trouble, and ran toward her. She was yelling something and crying, and all the while her hands were waving, Diego grabbed her and shook her. “¡Lo mataron!” she screamed. Diego saw the words but didn’t understand. He looked at her face. “¡Lo mataron!” she screamed again, pointing toward a dumpster. The green-eyed nurse from the clinic stepped out into the street and stared at them. Diego motioned her over for help as he dragged Tencha from the middle of the street. Tencha kept yelling and kicking and screaming, and Diego was happy he didn’t have to listen to her screams. If they sounded anything like the expressions on her face, then he was sure the noises she was making were awful. As Tencha waved her arms, she caught his cheek with her elbow. The nurse grabbed her and tried to settle her down. Diego took a deep breath, and stared at the nurse who was trying to calm the crazed woman down. Luz would slap her, he thought. He remembered the dumpster Tencha had pointed at. He walked toward it and stared at a man’s body lying on top of the garbage. He ran toward the nurse and pulled her away from Tencha. He tugged her toward the dumpster, “My God!” she said. He watched the nurse closely. She wanted to run, but didn’t. She took a deep breath and reached her hand in the dumpster. She grabbed Diego’s arm and spoke directly into his face: “I can’t reach him. Can you help me get him out?” Diego nodded, hesitated, then jumped onto the dumpster. He climbed inside trying to ignore the stench of rotting food. He slowly and awkwardly lifted the man’s body, and he was surprised that the body was still warm and not very heavy. Slowly, he and the green-eyed nurse managed to pull the body out without dropping it and lay it on the sidewalk.