Joe said, “You didn’t share the part about Bergeron Love being dead now.”
“Yeah, well, that part would kind of ruin the fun, wouldn’t it? Everybody would get all ashamed when they found out they were laughing about a dead person, right? Five days after the naked visit she was dead.”
“Short shelf life for a crazy story.”
“Exactly.” Joe didn’t care that Hil ordered a beer at Chuy’s. It was his opinion that beer didn’t actually count, since it took so much of it to provide a buzz. He hadn’t had a drink in five years, but it had been only two hours since he’d downed a Xanax. He was checking his watch to see when he could have another.
“You could tell the dead part next time, like it just happened. A follow-up on the first story. Chapter Two.”
“Could do. You know, if it weren’t for you and blind Jim, I’d quit this meeting.”
Hil had first chosen the meeting because it was near the medical center and coincided with happy hour. She’d thought she might meet a doctor. Instead, she’d found Joe, a guy she’d known in high school, gay, also looking for a doctor. “I wanted to meet doctors because my dad was a doctor, and I like the fact that these guys are just like him, and yet also, hello, they’re no better than me.”
“A syllogism,” Hil had supplied. “It makes perfect sense.”
“Sort of. And maybe you can tell me why I’ve chosen to live with a porno addict?” he then said.
“Same reason I live with a morbidly obese woman? It’s good to have somebody else’s bad habits around to put your own in perspective?”
“Agreed. Also to compare and contrast. To get a little clarity.”
“I should have known doctors wouldn’t think of A.A. as a dating opportunity. In fact, the opposite.”
“Live and learn,” Joe said. “Or live and don’t.”
It had been an unusually clear Wednesday when the emergency vehicles had screamed into the early-morning quiet, halting at the gates of Bergeron Love’s beautiful ruin. Boyd the boyfriend had come out to unlock three generations of fence: the faded white picket one that matched the house, the black iron one with its spiky tips, and the hideous yet effective chain-link with concertina wire, the enclosure of most recent vintage. Bergeron Love had been wheeled out on a gurney, feet first, just as she might have predicted she’d exit that formerly lovely home, the place where she’d been born, raised, loved, and abandoned. Suicide, Hil had guessed at the time—Bergeron Love’s last jaunt had been a kind of farewell tour of the neighborhood, exposing herself, putting herself at risk because she no longer cared what happened.
Also watching the action was the man who’d been reported for abuse, the man who might simply have been bathing his child. What was going through his head? Hil wondered. Good riddance, racist wore.
Hil lied at A.A. meetings. There she led a life of sobriety; there she had not had a drink for eleven months now. Soon she would reach her fictitious one-year mark. When she told Bergeron’s story, she was at least telling the truth. But was it a story? Twenty years’ worth of half-known information, neighborhood gossip. She’d told it at two different meetings, starting at different places: the naked visitation, the phone call to Child Protective Services. She could also have told a version that began with Bergeron campaigning for city council, using Hil’s coffee table as a soapbox, she and her husband both horrified and amused by their new neighbor, still newlyweds themselves, their moving boxes barely unpacked, their son a few years in the future. Or she could have begun with the homeless man who’d been discovered lying beside Bergeron’s kidney-shaped swimming pool one night, the man who’d somehow breached the various fences, empty bottle of isopropyl alcohol in hand, and who would have died, had Bergeron not summoned an ambulance, had she not moved with surprising speed to get him aid. Or Hil could have begun with the cocktail party that Bergeron had once interrupted, pushing into Hil’s house in an ivory evening gown and trying to seduce her husband. “He’s flirting with me!” she’d gaily shrieked, laying her head on Hil’s husband’s chest. “Look out, Boyd, you’ve got competition! Careful, Hil! You’ll lose him!” Hil and her husband had laughed about it later in bed. As if he would be attracted to the likes of Bergeron Love! Or to anybody else, he’d declared then tenderly to Hil, holding her close and naked, romantic, affectionate, still hers.
It was not a suicide, the neighborhood learned from Boyd after the vehicles had driven soundlessly away, their emergency lights extinguished. A heart attack, very sudden, there in bed. She’d grabbed his earlobe, he told one neighbor, illustrating by grabbing it himself, his face a shocked white, mousier than ever. She couldn’t speak, Boyd said. That neighbor told the rest of them, and that was the end. Everybody went back inside.
Allistair would come home, Hil thought. He’d have to. It would be up to him to decide what to do with the Love estate, the squalid monument in which he’d been raised, the mosquito-ridden pool, those many cats, the lingering boyfriend.
Meanwhile, Hil had found a new meeting to go to, one so close to her house she could walk there. Handily, there was a pub situated on the route home. Maybe at this meeting she’d start the story of her eccentric neighbor by talking about the son as a teenager, Allistair trying to keep his mother from trouble at two or three or four in the morning, calling to her uselessly, “Please come back inside, Mom! Please get out of the street!”
KIRSTIN VALDEZ QUADE
Nemecia
FROM Narrative Magazine
THERE IS A PICTURE of me standing with my cousin Nemecia in the bean field. On the back is penciled in my mother’s hand, Nemecia and Maria, Tajique, 1929. Nemecia is thirteen; I am six. She is wearing a rayon dress that falls to her knees, glass beads, and real silk stockings, gifts from her mother in California. She wears a close-fitting hat, like a helmet, and her smiling lips are pursed. She holds tight to my hand. Even in my white dress I look like a boy; my hair, which I have cut myself, is short and jagged. Nemecia’s head is tilted; she looks out from under her eyelashes at the camera. My expression is sullen, guilty. I don’t remember the occasion for the photograph, or why we were dressed up in the middle of the dusty field. All I remember of the day is that Nemecia’s shoes had heels, and she had to walk tipped forward on her toes to prevent them from sinking into the dirt.
Nemecia was the daughter of my mother’s sister. She came to live with my parents before I was born because my Aunt Benigna couldn’t care for her. Later, when Aunt Benigna recovered and moved to Los Angeles, Nemecia had already lived with us for so long that she stayed. This was not unusual in our New Mexico town in those years between the wars; if someone died, or came upon hard times, or simply had too many children, there were always aunts or sisters or grandmothers with room for an extra child.
The day after I was born my great-aunt Paulita led Nemecia into my mother’s bedroom to meet me. Nemecia was carrying the porcelain baby doll that had once belonged to Aunt Benigna. When they moved the blanket from my face so that she could see me, she smashed her doll against the plank floor. The pieces were all found; my father glued them together, wiping the surface with his handkerchief to remove what oozed between the cracks. The glue dried brown, or maybe it dried white and only turned brown with age. The doll sat on the bureau in our bedroom, its face round and placidly smiling behind its net of brown cracks, hands folded primly across white lace, a strange and terrifying mix of young and old.
Nemecia had an air of tragedy about her, which she cultivated. She blackened her eyes with a kohl pencil. She spent her allowance on magazines and pinned the photographs of actors from silent films around the mirror on our dresser. I don’t think she ever saw a film—not, at least, until after she left us, since the nearest theater was all the way in Albuquerque, and my parents would not in any case have thought movies suitable for a young girl. Still, Nemecia modeled the upward glances and pouts of Mary Pickford and Greta Garbo in our small bedroom mirror.
When I think of Nemecia as she was then, I think of her eati
ng. My cousin was ravenous. She needed things, and she needed food. She took small bites, swallowed everything as neatly as a cat. She was never full and the food never showed on her figure.
She told jokes as she served herself helping after helping, so that we were distracted and did not notice how many tortillas or how many bowls of green-chili stew she had eaten. If my father or little brothers teased her at the table for her appetite, she burned red. My mother would shush my father and say she was a growing girl.
At night she stole food from the pantry, handfuls of prunes, beef jerky, pieces of ham. Her stealth was unnecessary; my mother would gladly have fed her until she was full. Still, in the mornings everything was in its place, the wax paper folded neatly around the cheese, the lids tight on the jars. She was adept at slicing and spooning, so her thefts weren’t noticeable. I would wake to her kneeling on my bed, a tortilla spread with honey against my lips. “Here,” she’d whisper, and even if I was still full from dinner and not awake, I would take a bite, because she needed me to participate in her crime.
Watching her eat made me hate food. The quick efficient bites, the movement of her jaw, the way the food slid down her throat—it made me sick to think of her body permitting such quantities. Her exquisite manners and the ladylike dip of her head as she accepted each mouthful somehow made it worse. But if I was a small eater, if I resented my dependency on food, it didn’t matter, because Nemecia would eat my portion, and nothing was ever wasted.
I was afraid of Nemecia because I knew her greatest secret: when she was five, she put her mother in a coma and killed our grandfather.
I knew this because she told me late one Sunday as we lay awake in our beds. The whole family had eaten together at our house, as we did every week, and I could hear the adults in the front room, still talking.
“I killed them,” Nemecia said into the darkness. She spoke as if reciting, and I didn’t at first know if she was talking to me. “My mother was dead. Almost a month she was dead, killed by me. Then she came back, like Christ, except it was a bigger miracle because she was dead longer, not just three days.” Her voice was matter-of-fact.
“Why did you kill our grandpa?” I whispered.
“I don’t remember,” she said. “I must have been angry.”
I stared hard at the darkness, then blinked. Eyes open or shut, the darkness was the same. Unsettling. I couldn’t hear Nemecia breathe, just the distant voices of the adults. I had the feeling I was alone in the room.
Then Nemecia spoke. “I can’t remember how I did it, though.”
“Did you kill your father too?” I asked. For the first time I became aware of a mantle of safety around me that I’d never noticed before, and it was dissolving.
“Oh, no,” Nemecia told me. Her voice was decided again. “I didn’t need to, because he ran away on his own.”
Her only mistake, she said, was that she didn’t kill the miracle child. The miracle child was her brother, my cousin Patrick, three years older than me. He was a miracle because even as my Aunt Benigna slept, dead to the world for those weeks, his cells multiplied and his features emerged. I thought of him growing strong on sugar water and my aunt’s wasting body, his soul glowing steadily inside her. I thought of him turning flips in the liquid quiet.
“I was so close,” Nemecia said, almost wistfully.
A photograph of Patrick as a toddler stood in a frame on the piano. He was seated between my Aunt Benigna, whom I had never met, and her new husband, all of them living in California. The Patrick in the photograph was fat cheeked and unsmiling. He seemed content there, between a mother and a father. He did not seem aware of the sister who lived with us in another house nine hundred miles away. Certainly he didn’t miss her.
“You better not tell anyone,” my cousin said.
“I won’t,” I said, fear and loyalty swelling in me. I reached my hand into the dark space between our beds.
The next day, the world looked different; every adult I encountered was diminished now, made frail by Nemecia’s secret.
That afternoon I went to the store and stood quietly at my mother’s side as she worked at the messy rolltop desk behind the counter. She was balancing the accounts, tapping her lower lip with the end of her pencil.
My heart pounded and my throat was tight. “What happened to Aunt Benigna? What happened to your dad?”
My mother turned to look at me. She put down the pencil, was still for a moment, and then shook her head and made a gesture like she was pushing it all away from her.
“The important thing is we got our miracle. Miracles. Benigna lived, and that baby lived.” Her voice was hard. “God at least granted us that. I’ll always thank him for that.” She didn’t look thankful.
“But what happened?” My question was less forceful now.
My mother shook her head again. “It’s best forgotten, hijita. I don’t want to think about it.”
I believed that what Nemecia told me was true. What confused me was that no one ever treated Nemecia like a murderer. If anything, they were especially nice to her. I wondered if they knew what she’d done. I wondered if they were afraid of what she might do to them. Perhaps the whole town was terrified of my cousin, watching her, and I watched Nemecia too as she talked with the teacher on the school steps, as she helped my mother before dinner. But she never slipped, and though sometimes I thought I caught glimmers of caution in the faces of the adults, I couldn’t be sure.
The whole town seemed to have agreed to keep me in the dark, but I thought if anyone would be vocal about her disapproval—and surely she disapproved of murder—it would be my great-aunt Paulita. I asked her about it one afternoon at her house as we made tortillas, careful not to betray Nemecia’s secret. “What happened to my grandfather?” I pinched off a ball of dough and handed it to her.
“It was beyond imagining,” Paulita said. She rolled the dough in fierce, sharp thrusts. I thought she’d go on, but she only said again, “Beyond imagining.”
Except that I could imagine Nemecia killing someone. Hell, demons, flames—these were the horrors that I couldn’t picture. Nemecia’s fury, though—that was completely plausible.
“But what happened?”
Paulita flipped the disk of dough, rolled it again, slapped it on the hot iron top of the stove, where it blistered. She pointed at me with the rolling pin. “You’re lucky, Maria, to have been born after that day. You’re untouched. The rest of us will never forget it, but you, mi hijita, and the twins, are untouched.” She opened the front door of her stove with an iron hook and worried the fire inside.
No one would talk about what had happened when Nemecia was five. And soon I stopped asking. Before bed I would wait for Nemecia to say something more about her crime, but she never mentioned it again.
At night I stayed awake as long as I could, waiting for Nemecia to come after me in the dark.
Any new thing I got, Nemecia ruined, not enough that it was unusable, or even very noticeable, but just a little: a scrape with her fingernail in the wood of a pencil, a tear on the inside hem of a dress, a crease in the page of a book. I complained once, when Nemecia knocked my new wind-up jumping frog against the stone step. I thrust the frog at my mother, demanding she look at the scratch in the tin. My mother folded the toy back into my palm and shook her head, disappointed. “Think of other children,” she said. She meant children I knew, children from Tajique. “So many children don’t have such beautiful new things.”
I was often put in my cousin’s care. My mother was glad of Nemecia’s help; she was busy with the store and with my three-year-old brothers. I don’t think she ever imagined that my cousin wished me harm. My mother was hawkish about her children’s safety—later, when I was fifteen, she refused to serve a neighbor’s aging farmhand in the store for a year because he whistled at me—but she trusted Nemecia. Nemecia was my mother’s niece, almost an orphan, my mother’s first child.
My cousin was fierce with her love and with her hate, and somet
imes I couldn’t tell the difference. I seemed to provoke her anger without meaning to. At her angriest, she would lash out with slaps and pinches that turned my skin red and blue. Her anger would sometimes last weeks, aggression that would fade into long silences. I knew I was forgiven when she would begin to tell me stories, ghost stories about La Llorona, who haunted arroyos and wailed like the wind at approaching death, stories about bandits and the terrible things they would do to young girls, and, worse, stories about our family. Then she would hold and kiss me and tell me that though it was all true, every word, and though I was bad and didn’t deserve it, she loved me still.
Not all her stories scared me. Some were wonderful—elaborate sagas that unfurled over weeks, adventures of girls like us who ran away. And all her stories belonged to us alone. She braided my hair at night, snapped back if a boy teased me, showed me how to walk so that I looked taller. “I’m here to take care of you,” she told me. “That’s why I’m here.”
After her fourteenth birthday, Nemecia’s skin turned red and oily and swollen with pustules. It looked tender. She began to laugh at me for my thick eyebrows and crooked teeth, things I hadn’t noticed about myself until then.
One night she came into our bedroom and looked at herself in the mirror for a long time. When she moved away, she crossed to where I sat on the bed and dug her nail into my right cheek. I yelped, jerked my head. “Shh,” she said kindly. With one hand she smoothed my hair, and I felt myself soften under her hands as she worked her nail through my skin. It hurt only a little bit, and what did I, at seven years old, care about beauty? As I sat snug between Nemecia’s knees, my face in her hands, her attention swept over me the way I imagined a wave would, warm and slow and salty.