The Shrine at Altamira

by John L'Heureux

Russell turned around, startled, and saw a little girl, not much older than John, crouching in the shade of an abandoned car. In her lap she held a cat with a sunbonnet on its head. The cat seemed perfectly content.

  “You don’t live there,” she said again. Her voice was high and thin, and she sounded angry.

  “How do you know that?” he asked.

  “Because Uncle Emory lives there,” she said.

  Uncle Emory? The old bastard had become Uncle Emory? “And what’s your name?” Russell asked.

  Immediately the screen door banged open and a woman stood there, her hand on her hip, a cigarette in her mouth. “Janelle,” she said. “You get in here. I’ve told you not to talk to strangers. Now you get in.”

  Janelle went slowly up the stairs, the cat dangling from her arms.

  “Her name’s Janelle,” the woman said, making a point, and then she closed the screen door and latched it.

  Russell shrugged and turned back to his father’s house. He rang the bell, but there was no answer, so he went around to the back and tried the door. No luck. He checked the little ledge above the bathroom window, and sure enough the key was there. The old man was always locking himself out.

  Inside, the house smelled of coffee. Russell stood in the kitchen and looked around, half expecting to see his father slumped unconscious over the table, but the room was empty. A checkered oilcloth covered the table, and in the middle there was a little wire holder for paper napkins and a set of salt and pepper shakers in the form of owls. A cup and saucer, a plate, and a frying pan stood in the drainer, and some odd bits of silverware were soaking in a glass. The floor was clean. Russell found himself getting angry at all this domesticity. The shelf over the sink had been fixed, he noticed, and the cabinet doors were all shut. The sonofabitch. Who did he think he was kidding?

  Russell walked slowly through the other rooms. The linoleum in the bathroom was new, but the living room and the front bedroom were the same. Only now they were tidy. His father’s bed was made and on the table next to it was a little blue book, One Day at a Time: My Life in Alcoholics Anonymous. There were some AA pamphlets too, and Russell opened the one on top, called “Let Go and Let God.” It began with what looked like a prayer. “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.” He tossed the pamphlet back on the table. And then something at the head of the bed caught his eye. The spread was turned back a little and something black and silver showed from beneath the pillow. He lifted the pillow a tiny bit and then, shocked, pressed it back in place, smoothing the spread tight across it. He began to blush. There were rosary beads there. He left the room at once.

  He was dizzy and his head had begun to ache. He should get out of here. He stepped into the bathroom and ran some cold water. He pressed it to his face and then looked at himself in the mirror. His face was bloated and there were deep lines beneath his eyes. He was becoming his own father. He dried his face and tucked the towel back on the rack. He should get out of this place at once.

  Nonetheless he stopped at the door of his old room and looked inside. It was even smaller than he remembered. There were new window shades, but everything else was the same. The little iron bed, the kitchen chair next to it, the battered oak dresser from Goodwill. It could be any boy’s room, he thought, and smiled bitterly.

  As he was getting into his car, he heard Janelle calling goodbye. She was standing by the screen door, the cat struggling in her arms. He stopped and waved to her. She waved back, and as she did, the cat broke free and dashed around the side of the house and was gone.

  Janelle kept on waving.

  He drove aimlessly and found himself across town, parked in front of his own decaying house. He stared at it, a square box somebody had faced with stucco that was crumbling now. He went inside and walked through the little rooms. None of it was familiar. Who were these people who lived here? He understood that they were Maria and John and himself. But who were they? In a dim way he recognized the furniture and the clothes in the closet and the pictures on the wall, but in another way, with a strange kind of clarity he could not explain, he saw that these were all foreign objects, they belonged to nobody, they simply didn’t matter. He could burn this house down at any minute and not one living thing would be lost. Maria was at work. John was at day care. He stood, looking around, and he could almost hear the flames.

  He sat at the kitchen table and slumped forward, his head on his arms. What was he doing here?

  He went next door to Ana Luisa’s house. They had lived with her while Maria was pregnant. He tried to remember those days, but what came to him was only a hollow ache, as if his insides had been scooped out. That’s what he wanted, really, to have his insides scooped out—everything, his heart first, and then his stomach, and then whatever else was in there. He pushed his fist into his belly. If he could just tear himself open, he could spill the poison out.

  He walked through the rooms, looking around. It was all meaningless, even the joke glasses hanging next to the mirror in Maria’s bedroom. They were just a pair of glasses with big eyebrows and a nose attached. They meant nothing. In the living room, he stopped in front of Ana Luisa’s shrine. His photograph was there now, and John’s, both of them smiling. He picked up the seashell, turned it over in his hand, and tossed it back on the little altar. Meaningless, all of it.

  He drove to the mobile home park and found the trailer where they’d lived right after their marriage. Somebody else lived in it now. Diapers were hanging outside on a clothesline. He had put his fist through the wall there. Again he felt only that hollow ache.

  He drove back to his father’s place and looked at it from the car. Janelle was nowhere in sight. The house was closed and dead. And he was dead.

  But he was not dead, and that was the problem. He drove north to Half Moon Bay and then south along Route 1 and parked finally on a cliff overlooking the Pacific. It was early afternoon and the sun dazzled on the water and the sky was clear and deep. He could not see or hear another human being.

  He could walk to the edge of the cliff and take one step too many and it would be all over. Or he could start the car and ease it forward, slowly, until it dipped a little and then lurched, barely hanging on the edge, barely, barely, then—bang—hurtling down the side of the cliff, turning over and over in the air, landing with a hollow crash, half in, half out of the water. An accident, if they wanted to think so.

  He watched the sun as it descended the sky. It touched the water and spread along the line of the horizon until all the world he could see was divided in two. Finally it was night. Still he sat there, looking.

  Slowly, a smile came to his face. What was keeping him alive, he realized, was anger at that father of his, the hypocrisy, the lie.

  And somewhere deep beneath the anger, hope. That she would love him yet. That she would let him love her.

  What John knew was that he had to be a good boy. But he was never sure what a good boy did. At nursery school he could play and run around and make noise, but when he got home, he had to be very quiet. His mother was studying. Or she was busy making the dinner. So he was quiet. Sometimes, though, she was in a good mood, and she didn’t want him to be quiet. She would say, “What’s the matter with you? Why do you just sit there as if you’re scared to death?” But he could never be sure when she wanted him to be quiet and when she didn’t. With his father, it was safer to be quiet all the time.

  When he grew up, he was going to buy them a big, big castle on top of a cliff, like the castle in Snow White, and he would always be a good boy, and they’d be happy all the time.

  Maria was given another promotion and another good raise. She had been with Ackerman, Holt, and Sawyer for over a year, and she’d been promoted every three months, so now she was studying nights to become a legal secretary.

  Mr. Foster had asked her out again and again, but she always said no, even though he was an attorney. Foster was a loser, she
could tell, and he was fat besides, so there was no point in investing time in him. Time was money; she had learned that very quickly. And money was her ticket out and up.

  She had plans for herself. These plans included money and a good job and a better house—and John, of course—but they did not include Russell. She couldn’t look at him, with his milky blue eyes. She couldn’t stand to think of him. He didn’t come home most nights, and when he did, he slept on the couch in the living room. She almost never saw him, but it was bad enough just knowing he was there, and she always knew because he left money on the kitchen counter. A few dollars, nothing big. Just enough to infuriate her.

  John was four now, old enough for preschool, and she didn’t want him exposed to Russell’s drinking and his violent moods, she told herself, and so she had the locks changed on the front and back doors. At the same time, she had Mr. Foster send Russell a registered letter saying that she was filing for divorce. The time had come. She had to get on with her own life.

  Mr. Foster was glad to do this for her, free, but Maria insisted on paying him. From now on she’d owe nothing to anybody.

  “You must be crazy! You must be out of your mind! Nobody in our family has ever been divorced.”

  Ana Luisa had been going on like this for half an hour, and Maria had stopped listening. She stubbed out her cigarette and waited. It was better to let her just keep raving until she stopped from exhaustion.

  “You’ll bring disgrace on our name,” Ana Luisa said. “If we don’t like our husbands, we ignore them or we scream at them or we hit them with a pan, but we don’t divorce them. Never, never, never a divorce in our family!”

  “Nonetheless,” Maria said.

  “Nonetheless! Nonetheless! What is that supposed to mean? Is that a reason? Is that an explanation?”

  “Nonetheless, I’ve filed for divorce.”

  Ana Luisa stopped, finally, and stared at her daughter in silence. Maria stared back at her and lit another cigarette. She let the smoke seep about between her clenched teeth. Still Ana Luisa was staring at her.

  “What?” Maria asked. “Say it!”

  Ana Luisa blessed herself and said softly, “God will punish this. As you know.” She turned and went out through the kitchen, where John was seated at the table making a mess of a peanut butter sandwich. “Pobrecito” she said, and covered the top of his head with kisses, and then she was gone.

  At home, she lit the candle and knelt down before the shrine. “Virgen Santísima María,” she said, “what a disgrace! That our family should come to this!” She sat back on her heels and bowed her head. If only she knew what to do. Her back hurt and her legs hurt and she had a headache, and what she really wanted was a nice glass of wine and the chance to lie down on the couch and watch Wheel of Fortune on TV. Nevertheless she continued to kneel before the shrine. “Virgen Santísima,” she said over and over, letting it go at that, since of course the Virgin knew all her troubles anyway. She ignored the pain in her back and legs. She gazed into the Virgin’s painted face, and after a while she lost herself in the smell of the candle and the shimmer of the flame. “Virgen Santísima María,” she said, whispering.

  Some time passed. A feeling of peace seemed to flow from the statue into her own heart, and then to overflow her heart and fill the entire room. “Maria.” The candle guttered out, and still she knelt there.

  It was dark outside when Ana Luisa finally rose from the little shrine and went to the kitchen to prepare chiles rellenos. When they were cooked, she would bring them over to Maria and John, and they would eat them, and life would go on as if there were never going to be a divorce. Then maybe there wouldn’t be.

  Ana Luisa sang to herself as she worked.

  Maria got up in the night to use the bathroom and, when she checked on John, she discovered him lying with the covers off, hot and shivering. His chest was wet and his forehead felt like fire. She got a cold facecloth and placed it on his brow. He did not wake up.

  Maria sat beside his bed, waiting. When the cloth was no longer cold, she replaced it with another and continued to sit there. John was not sleeping, but he was not conscious either. His arms twitched, and his head rolled from side to side on the damp pillow. Whenever she touched his brow, he shook her hand away. His whole body seemed to burn. “Daddy,” he said once, or so it seemed to her. Toward dawn, the fever broke, and he fell into a calm, deep sleep. Maria continued to sit by his side.

  John woke up hungry, eager to go to nursery school. He had no sign of fever, and there was nothing to indicate he had lain thrashing in his bed through much of the night. Maria saw him off with Ana Luisa, and then she called the office to say she was sick. Dizzy, exhausted, she went back to bed.

  The next night, it was the same thing. The high fever, the limbs on fire, the twitching, convulsing little body. “Daddy,” he said, this time quite clearly. Toward dawn the fever broke, and he slept.

  Her child was sick, and Maria had no idea what to do about it. She took John to the doctor, who examined him thoroughly, listened to what she had to say, and then frowned and shook his head. He could find nothing organically wrong.

  “These things sometimes happen,” the doctor said, “and then they pass. He’s a fine-looking little boy.”

  “I’m a good boy,” John said.

  “But what is it? What’s the matter with him?”

  The doctor gestured for the nurse to take John into the next room, and when they’d left, he sat thinking for a minute. “How are you?” he said. “You’ve lost a lot of weight. You look good.” He smiled encouragingly, but when he heard she was getting a divorce, and why, his look changed to disapproval, and he said, “Divorce is hard on kids. Even very young kids.”

  “My husband’s a drunk,” she said. “Besides, he’s deserted me. I have to get on with my own life.”

  “Yes, of course,” the doctor said.

  “He’s violent. He put his fist through the wall. God knows what he might do.”

  “Has he ever struck you?”

  “No,” she said. “But he could. He might. You never know with him. He just goes crazy.”

  The doctor nodded.

  “It’s my life,” she said.

  “And your little boy’s,” he said. “John’s.”

  Maria began to cry, quietly. “But what can I do?” she said. “I’ve done everything I can. John is afraid of him. And I can’t stand him anymore. I can’t even bear to look at him. It’s like he’s locked me in a trap, and I’ve got to get out. He won’t let me breathe. I can’t,” she said, and she began to pound her knee with her fist. “I can’t do it anymore. I can’t. And I won’t.”

  “No,” the doctor said, “I can see that. You’re doing the right thing. You’re doing what you have to do.”

  She stopped crying then and wiped her eyes with a tissue. “My mascara,” she said.

  “You look fine,” he said, and rang the buzzer for the nurse, who came in at once, leading John by the hand. He was holding a green lollipop.

  “Green!” he said to his mother. And to the doctor, “Green is my favorite!”

  “I wouldn’t worry about those fevers,” the doctor said. “He’ll be fine in no time at all.”

  But the fevers continued every night, and Maria continued to watch by his bedside. She was sitting there, drifting in and out of sleep, on the night Russell came back.

  It had been raining for days, and it would keep on raining, and the sound was very soothing. Maria dreamed she was in a boat. The sun beat down and the boat idled among the water lilies. It was very peaceful. She reached out, trailing her hand in the cool water. She could stay like this forever.

  When the knock came, she turned it into the sound of oars tapping gently on the side of the boat. But the knock came again, and a third time, and Maria sat up, awake. She glanced in at John, who turned from side to side on the pillow, his brow glistening with sweat, and then she went to the door.

  Russell was not drunk, she could tell that at once. H
e stood there in his blue poncho with water streaming down his face and said nothing. Was he in one of his crazy moods? She couldn’t tell, but she was not afraid of him tonight.

  “I’m sorry it’s so late,” he said.

  “The baby’s sick,” she said, her finger to her lips. “So be very quiet. He’s got a fever.”

  “Oh. I should have brought him something.” He was whispering. “A panda or something.”

  “Do you want a beer?”

  “No.” He made a move toward a chair. “Okay, yes.”

  “Which? Yes or no?”

  “Can I sit down?”

  They were still whispering.

  “Do you want something to eat? Some cheese?”

  “I got the letter from the attorney. You’re divorcing me.”

  “I’ve got to.”

  “I know.” He nodded agreement. “I know you have to.”

  They were like old friends getting together after a long separation. As if all feeling had been suspended.

  Outside, rain beat against the windows.

  “No drought this year,” she said.

  “No. No painting either.”

  They laughed.

  “I’ve always hated it, painting.”

  “I know.”

  The rain let up suddenly and in the new silence they could hear the clock ticking. The mood shifted.

  “How are you?” he asked. “You look beautiful.”

  “I’ve lost weight.”

  “You look really nice.”

  “I’m getting the divorce, though.”

  “Yes.”

  “You aren’t going to oppose it. You can’t, you know.”

  “No, I know that.”

  “Well, what are you doing here? In the middle of the night and everything? Are you out of your mind?”

  He looked at her. He could rape her if he wanted, they both knew that. He could fuck her on the kitchen floor. Or kill her.

  They both knew what he could do, if he wanted.

  “Don’t get funny,” she said.

  He continued to look at her.

  She looked back at him.