In Perfect Light

by Benjamin Alire Sáenz

  “You should at least let me take Ileana.”

  Andrés wanted to say yes. It would hurt to have Ileana gone. But she would be safe with Xochil in California. “Yolie won’t let you take her.”

  “I know.”

  “Here,” she said. She took a scrap of paper from her purse and wrote down a number. “This is my sister’s number. If anything ever happens, you call her. You call her, okay?” She kissed him. Just like his mother used to kiss him. “Mando loves you. Don’t ever forget that. No matter what happens.”

  He saw her disappear over the bridge.

  When he got back home, Yolie looked as sad as she had ever looked. More sad than angry now. And he wished her anger would come back because she was strong when she was angry. And the sadness made her look old and broken. After a while, she started going out at night. She’d come back late, and Andrés could tell that she’d been out drinking. He could smell the alcohol on her breath. That’s where she met this man—in a bar. That’s what Andrés thought. He had money. He was older. Not old. But older. Maybe in his thirties. It was hard for Andrés to tell ages, but that’s what he’d decided. Not old—but too old for Yolie. He wondered what had happened to Eddie. But he was afraid to ask her. When she got mad at somebody, she made them go away, and if you asked her about it, she would get angry. Maybe Eddie had found another girl, because guys did that. Mando—he was always leaving girls and finding new ones.

  He guessed that Yolie needed a boyfriend and that maybe it didn’t matter that he was older. And it was okay that he had money—maybe he would take care of Yolie and take care of him and Ileana, too. But Andrés didn’t like that he was always dressed up. Like his dad when he took his mom out dancing. He dressed that way all the time. Maybe he was a businessman. Maybe that’s why he was always dressed up.

  Yolie had money now. And she had new dresses. And there was food in the house. And meat. He liked eating meat. So maybe Yolie would get married and they would all be the kind of family that Mando dreamed they would always be. Maybe she was doing this for Mando—and for all the dreams he’d had.

  Even as he was telling her the story of his life in Juárez, he could tell she was tired. For no reason at all, he thought that she looked like a nun. The beautiful kind. The kind that gave and gave because that’s what they knew how to do. And the giving made them more beautiful.

  “Did you ever see Mando again?”

  “No. One day, about six months after he’d been arrested, Yolie got some money. I don’t know how much. Some guy came by the house and said it was from Mando. A bundle of money. Yolie hid it in the courtyard. She wanted me to know where the money was. She told me if anything ever happened, I should take the money and go back to El Paso. You know what she told me?”

  Grace shook her head.

  “‘You want to go back there, don’t you? You want to go to school. You want to be more than what you were born to be. More than what they will ever let you be. I don’t know why you love the fucking United States of America. It will never love you back.’ Funny, the things you remember.” He looked away from her. “You know”—he was looking away as he spoke—“I didn’t understand what she was trying to say to me.”

  “And now?”

  “She was right. America won’t ever love me back. Anyway, I’m not so in love with the idea of America anymore. But maybe none of this has to do with America. But there’s one thing Yolie forgot to tell me—Mexico never loved me back, either. Who the hell ever said that countries love?”

  Grace wanted to shake him gently and scream, A country will never love you like a woman. “I think countries are as silent in their love as God.”

  Andrés broke into a laugh. “That’s pretty damned silent, Grace.”

  She laughed with him. She felt a pain.

  And Andrés, even as he laughed, he thought, God, she looks tired. He wondered what it would have been like. To be her son. To be loved by her. To be cared for by a woman like Grace Delgado.

  Order and Timing in the Universe

  It is five-thirty in the afternoon.

  Andrés is in the middle of a session with Grace.

  A bus, twenty minutes late, is pulling up into the downtown depot. The first passenger to get off the bus is a fifty-five-year-old white man who likes to describe himself as being half Irish, half German. He is an ordinary-looking man with a middle-aged paunch who has come to live with his sister who retired in El Paso. This man who is getting off the bus, this middle-aged man, he has been in prison for seven years. He has been released to El Paso courtesy of the Oklahoma Parole Board. He must register with the police department in the morning. His sister believes he has been in prison for armed robbery. He does not know how to tell her that he has a particular kind of addiction that happens to be against the law. He knows they call him a sexual predator. He is offended by this label. He is enraged by the lack of understanding in the world. He knows himself to be kind and gentle. Especially to children.

  He sees his sister and waves. He embraces her and kisses her on the cheek. He is thinking that she is looking old.

  Mister is looking for information on the Internet. He sees the time on the corner of his computer as he searches: 5:31 PM. He is hoping the information he finds on the Internet will help him with Vicente’s blindness. Today he feels inadequate. He knows he and Liz will have to rely on more than knowledge and facts. He prays that his instincts are as good as he believes them to be.

  Dave is looking out the window of his plane. He is flying to Baton Rouge. From there he will rent a car and drive to Lafayette and visit with Rosemary Hart Benson. She was polite on the phone, her voice was soft and kind—but she was relieved that someone was willing to take away the boxes her brother left in her attic. She has always been afraid to see what they contain. She thinks the boxes will bring her bad luck.

  Dave is wondering what he will find. So much depends upon what is in those boxes.

  Blindness and Books

  Not that he liked sitting in front of his laptop computer and searching the Net. Not one of his favorite things. He preferred libraries and bookstores. But the Internet had its uses, and he couldn’t argue with the speed. Even for someone as patient as he was, the speed was seductive.

  He typed the word blindness into the space provided. In seconds, a list appeared. 623,000 entries. Too much help was no help at all. He added the word children to blindness, and his search was narrowed down to 246,000 entries. He glanced at the first few entries—most of them having to do with prevention and causes of blindness in children. That wasn’t what he was looking for. It was too late for whys. What to do now, that was what he wanted to know. He added the word “education” which cut down the entries to a mere 133,000. He began combing through the list. Support groups, educational groups, state programs, federal programs, nonprofit programs. Info on braille and some online schools. How could a blind kid go to school online? He found a site entitled What’s New on Blindness. Information, information. With a click, it was all yours, all that information. That was the new capital. Click, click, click, a book by a woman on braille literacy. A place called the Texas School for the Blind. Publications and more publications—for sale—click, click, he ordered a book on the fundamentals of braille, and a book about language assessment and intervention with children who had visual impairments. The book was advertised for speech and language pathologists, and there was a table of contents that included chapters on language development, assessment, and strategies for effective intervention. There was even a chapter entitled “Limited English Proficient Children.” He talks. That’s what she’d told him. When he wants to. But did he speak English or Spanish, or both? The thought occurred to him that someone had taught Vicente a good many things. A babysitter who spoke only Spanish—perhaps a grandmother. There were so many questions he should have asked the mother. And he hadn’t. And now it was too late. Or was it? He would talk to Linda and ask her if she thought it was a good idea to get in touch with the mother again. He
doubted she would consent. Why not try?

  He studied the table of contents. A lot of lingo, and he wasn’t an SLP, as they apparently called themselves, but he’d dive in and see what he’d learn. What could it hurt? He ordered the book. A start.

  Learning to Run

  Ileana moved into Andrés’ room. She slept in the bed that once belonged to Mando, the bed he’d slept in with Xochil. Andrés didn’t mind. Ileana was sweet, and she liked to ask him questions at night—questions about where feelings came from. Questions about the world. “You study the stars, don’t you, Andy?”

  “I don’t really study them,” he said. “I count them.”

  “Why?”

  “To see how many there are.”

  “How many are there?”

  “I haven’t finished counting them yet.”

  “How many do you think there are?”

  “About one for every person who ever lived.”

  “One for Mom and Dad?”

  “Yeah, one for them, too.”

  “What are they made out of, Andy, the stars?”

  “Mostly hydrogen and helium. That’s what makes them burn. That’s what makes them light up the sky.”

  “Is that why Jesus’ heart burns—because it’s made of hydrogen and helium?”

  “Yes. That’s right.”

  “I want a heart like that, Andy, a heart like a star’s.”

  He fell in love with the things she said. So they were roommates, now, he and Ileana. And best friends—since his other friends didn’t like him that much. His other friends liked getting into trouble, stealing things, and picking on smaller kids. He didn’t like that. Anyway, having friends didn’t matter. Ileana mattered.

  Yolie and the man whose name was Homero had their own room now. They sometimes groaned like Mando and Xochil, but Ileana never said anything about the groaning.

  Yolie did everything for Homero. She washed his clothes and ironed for him. She cooked for him. Everything he asked her to do, she did.

  They were like a family for a while. Everything was nice—except Andrés was bored, and he would complain, and Yolie said she might ask Homero to buy him a new typewriter, but Andrés told Yolie he didn’t want one. Not anymore. He was done with writing letters to Mrs. Fernandez. He was done with words and paper. Words on paper were dead. As dead as he was.

  Yolie and Homero kept buying him more books, mostly paperbacks. In English and in Spanish, and Andrés would read them, but he was getting so tired of reading and reading and reading, and he didn’t care anymore. About anything.

  The man told him maybe he should begin running. It would be good for him. So Homero bought him a pair of tennis shoes, special for running, and he got him a book about running and a book about stretching because stretching was important if you were going to be a runner, and Andrés read the books, and he decided it wouldn’t be a bad thing if he started running. So every morning, when he got up, he would stretch just like the drawings in the book, and he began to run. At first, he hated it. But it was better than staying at home all the time, and reading was okay, it passed the time, but it was hard to do nothing but read, and after a while he liked the feeling of running, how it hurt, but how it felt good, how his legs would ache and his lungs would ache, too—but it was good and he liked it. And so he ran and ran, one mile. And after a while, more than a mile, then two miles, then three. And when he ran, he thought of Mando, of how he was in prison, and he thought of him all caged up and he thought that maybe he had to run and be free for the both of them—for himself and for Mando. And he began to talk to Mando as he ran. He would tell him everything.

  There’s something about Homero that’s not right. I don’t like the way he looks at Yolie. And I don’t like the way he looks at Ileana. And even me, he looks at me sometimes and it feels like there’s a worm crawling around in my shirt and I shiver and feel cold. But he’s nice to us, and I know he pays for everything because we don’t have any money except the money you had sent to us. Homero wasn’t home, and Yolie and I hid it, and I understood that she didn’t want Homero to know. Which is a very smart thing. He would talk and talk as he ran and never stopped until he couldn’t catch his breath, and after a while he learned to talk to Mando with his mind. He didn’t have to use his lips at all.

  So he was a runner now. Running through the streets of Juárez. He found a route where there was less traffic because cars had no respect for the art he was cultivating. After a while, he knew just what streets to take and what streets to avoid. Yolie said he was running too much, that he was too young and that it wasn’t such a good idea for him to be running as much as he did, but he told her it was okay, that he liked it.

  She could tell he was happier, now. So she didn’t fight him. Everyone needed to have something. He had his books and his running. Yolie had Homero.

  I’m a runner now. And one day I’m going to run across the bridge, and no one is going to stop me.

  “Did you stop running?”

  “When I started living here again, I started. But I just—I don’t know. It reminded me of everything, and I didn’t want to think about it, so I just left it alone.” He realized just then why he’d gone to Juárez that night—because of the running. The running and Juárez, somehow they belonged together. And so he’d needed to go there. It was so odd, how the body remembered. “I ran the other night,” he confessed.

  “Did you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why?”

  “It was my birthday. I wanted to celebrate. I thought I’d run.”

  “Happy birthday. How was your run?”

  “Okay. It’s kind of an insane thing to do.”

  “A lot of people spend a lot of time doing it.”

  “That and counting stars.”

  “And smoking cigarettes.”

  “It’s insane.”

  “If everything was perfectly sane and ordered, what would the world look like, Andrés?”

  “Like a computer.”

  “Better to have a heart and all the chaos that comes with it.”

  “Only a person with a perfectly ordered life could say something like that.”

  “No one’s life is perfectly ordered.”

  “Not even yours?”

  “I’m the only exception.”

  He laughed at her joke. She could be funny.

  Everything was pretty good until after Christmas. At Christmas, they had special cookies and presents and lights—lights all over the courtyard and all over the kitchen. Yolie and Homero put them up, twinkling lights, red and blue and yellow and green. Yolie learned how to make mole—not the kind that came in a jar but the real kind that took all day with all different kinds of chiles, chipotle and chile pasilla and un-skinned almonds and cloves and tomatillos and peanuts and sesame seeds and garlic and Mexican cinnamon and a special kind of chocolate, and the house smelled as beautiful as it had ever smelled, and then they all made tamales because Yolie said it was what Mom would’ve wanted, and he thought of the time when Yolie had yelled at him and told him never, ever to tell her again about what their mother would’ve wanted. And he thought that people changed their minds about things all the time—but it was something they had to do on their own. When you tried to make someone change their mind, they wouldn’t. They just wouldn’t.

  So they made tamales and Ileana mostly made a mess, but she laughed all day and she was so happy and beautiful and Andrés thought that whatever her heart was made of, it burned, and it was the only light in the house that mattered.

  It was a good Christmas, and the house was warm, and they burned lots of candles so the whole house looked like the inside of a church, and Andrés thought that maybe there wouldn’t be any more sadness. There had been enough of troubles and enough crying, and maybe now all of that was over. But he knew that Yolie wasn’t happy. It was as if she was acting. Or maybe it was just him. Maybe he just couldn’t believe that everything was going to be okay. He was like a dog guarding a house, ready to leap a
t any intruder. A good guard dog never slept all night. And that’s what he was now, a good guard dog. And he hated himself. Because he couldn’t believe that they were at peace now. And maybe he was just making things up about what he saw on Yolie’s face because he didn’t like Homero. Deep down, he didn’t like him. But maybe that only meant that his heart was getting hard. Mando had said that every man’s heart had to get a little bit hard—because if it didn’t get hard, he would just stay a boy. So maybe he was becoming a man. Being a man, that was a good thing.

  But right after Christmas, everything began to change. Homero began to stay out late. On New Year’s Eve, Yolie waited for him to come home. She was all dressed up. They were going to a dance, and she looked beautiful. And she was a woman now. And he thought that maybe Yolie could find a better man than Homero, someone younger, someone who would make her more alive. Homero made her into someone old. Yolie waited and waited, but finally she said she wasn’t going to spend the New Year waiting for a man who was never going to come, so she went out by herself.

  Andrés told her he would go with her.

  “No,” she said, “you stay here with Ileana.”

  She gave them some firecrackers and told them they could go out at midnight and light them. And she left. She had this look. He knew that look. She was going out because she was determined to live.

  At midnight he took Ileana outside, and they lit firecrackers. And there were lots of people out on the streets. Some were banging pots and other kids were lighting firecrackers and everyone was yelling and hugging each other and repeating over and over, “¡Feliz Año Nuevo!” And the streets were so full, and suddenly Andrés realized Ileana wasn’t next to him and he felt something inside and he started searching the crowded street, Ileana, Ileana, and then he saw her and he grabbed her and hugged her and they went inside.

  Ileana fell asleep on his shoulder. But it didn’t matter, because he wasn’t sleepy. He just lay there, listening to his little sister breathe, and waiting for Yolie to come home. Like the guard dog he’d become.