by Mira T. Lee
She can’t remember. All she can remember is the knife: dull gray metal, ten inches or so, with a slender, curved blade, a vicious point. Something wicked from a common kitchen.
She is shaken, disturbed. Her head feels weightless, detached from her body. Two of the interns volunteer to walk her home.
• • •
She lies in her small bed in her small room in the city. Today, of all days. That ride, of all rides. And how did she miss it, when those men came aboard, dark and suspicious, shifty-eyed. The wrong place at the wrong time. Unlucky. A coincidence. Or perhaps, inevitable.
She shuts her eyes. A siren’s wail. The screech of tires. Dutch. German. Fumes, cigar smoke, thick in her lungs, a burning on her skin, real or imagined, she doesn’t know. She yearns to speak with Essy, hear her daughter’s voice, but the casita still has no phone. She could call the main house. But then Mami would answer. Or Tía Camila. And then everyone would know.
A woman, running around alone like that. What does she expect?
She crawls out of bed to escape the voices. Creeps downstairs. Steps outside, where two older couples, retired American expats, beckon to her. “Lucia! Come join us.” She sits for a few minutes in the wrought iron chair with the heart-shaped back, sips 7-Up through a straw. But their words float, each syllable headed in its own direction, and she cannot follow their meaning. She could be a hologram, her solid self still embedded upstairs.
She excuses herself, returns to her room. Locks the door, shivering. She opens the bottom drawer of the metal dresser, where she keeps her hair dryer and rubber bands, the bitter-tasting tonic from the curandero, her ample collection of pills. Blue pills, white pills, pink pills, red pills. The white pill now. The blue one, too. The blue ones she hasn’t touched in several years, but now anything to help her relax. And seven drops of the tonic in a cup of water, for her debilidad. She throws it down her throat.
She climbs onto her bed, pulls closed the shutters, banishes the outside world.
She sleeps. She wakes. She checks her clock. It makes no sense. One moment, groggy, like she has slept for days, yet only fifteen minutes have passed, the next moment it is three hours later. Eyes adjust to darkness. Her stomach growls. She cracks open the shutters. Adjusts her eyes again. The café tables below are empty. The calle is empty. She falls asleep, and the next time she wakes, she feels refreshed, throws open the shutters, but it is eerily still outside. The moon is out, perfect and round. But the clock says six o’clock. She is puzzled. It must’ve stopped. Time, stopped! For some reason, this amuses her, and if only it were true, that she could pause the time, go elsewhere for a while. She would visit Yonah. They’d sit on the bench, chat with the smokers. But no, he is in Israel. They would float in the Dead Sea, reading a newspaper. But no, he is in New Jersey, by the ocean, and they will go for long walks, and Loco Coco will offer to braid her hair.
But no. The incident on the bus. It’s a sign. She must read the signs, and now she sees, it has been distilled for her in the clearest way possible. Her directive. Her role. Her identity. The words, placed inside her emptied-out head: Please, I have a young daughter.
For a mother to leave her child, it’s impossible.
She cannot leave Essy behind.
• • •
They will go in stealth. Disappear without notice. There can be no other way. She will write him a letter. Apologize. Offer to bring Essy for the summers, holidays, school vacations. Like joint custody. Since he cannot set foot in America. But he is a man. He can have more children. He can have twenty more children from twenty different chicas. She. She is too old.
She will go to the travel agency in Cuenca, her pockets full of cash. She will purchase two one-way tickets.
But no. In every plan, a hitch. Always, one must overcome unforeseen obstacles.
“You’ll need to have her exit papers,” says the travel agent.
“Exit papers?”
“Signed by her father.”
“But I’m her mother.”
The agent shakes his head. “No child allowed to leave the country without permission of both parents. Child abduction protections. It’s the law.”
But I’m her mother.
She stares at him in disbelief, this man in his cheap blue suit and blue tie. She bites hard on her lip. She will not cry. She shifts her stare to the wall, to the ceiling, to the floor.
“Señora, is there a problem? Do you still wish to purchase the tickets?”
The ceiling, descending, hovers just inches away from the top of her head. She pushes a packet of cash into his hand. “Sí, por favor.”
She is dizzy, trembling. Plunging toward entropy, and as she steps out to the street, each of her body’s limbs seems to have its own mind. She needs a plan. A scheme. She sees how it is, this scheme against women, to make a woman ask a man for permission to go somewhere with her own blood-child. For nine months, she grew the child in her belly, and who has the right to say what she can or cannot do with her child?
She can forge it. His signature. A simple illegible scribble, a roll of the pen. But the thought makes her anxious. Her tank top sopping with sweat, she tries to breathe, relax. Breathe. Relax. She can’t. If she gets caught, then what? Then she will be arrested. Then Manny will know. He will know what she has tried to do and he will let her rot in some Ecuadorian jail to be devoured by rodents and forbid her from ever seeing her daughter again. And then what. All this, for what?
• • •
She cannot sleep. Eyes squeezed shut, she lies awake. She must align her thoughts. Make them straight. Fling them like an arrow. Abracadabra. Then, a flutter of wings. Opening one eye, she sees a pigeon has landed on the balcony. Dirty, limping, with a pecked-bald head, it must’ve just been in a fight. Poor bird. Pretty birdy. She’ll fetch it a cup of water, but when she returns it is gone. Poor pretty bird, where could it go?
Abracadabra. She knows. She knows!
She will tell Manny she wants to bring Essy to visit her sister in Switzerland. It makes perfect sense. In all the years Jie has lived there, they have never visited, and that is unacceptable! Of course they want to go to Switzerland, to visit, to see the sights. The Matterhorn. Heidi. Sound of Music! Not once did she ever resent him for not being able to travel back when they lived in New York; it was a simple fact of their lives. But this time—this time she will say she would like to go to Switzerland, and she will invite him to come, because he’ll say no, of course, because he dislikes change, he is a boulder of inertia, and he doesn’t like Jie and Jie has never liked him. Well, they don’t have a single thing in common, do they!
“For how long?” Manny asks, frowning.
“Four weeks,” she says. Essy should learn something about the other side of her family, what little there is—this is true. This is true. This is the truth.
“It’s a long time.”
“It’s expensive. Doesn’t make sense to go all that way for a week.”
He scratches his chin. She tries to sense his thoughts. Waits, hyperaware of her shallow breaths, jumpy and frantic inside. Surely he can see the guilt, thick as sludge as it oozes through her pores. She forces out a smile.
“You could come, too,” she says. The words, a dribble, her lungs choked up, a rock in her throat as surprise rolls across his face. What a great idea. A family trip!
“No.”
“No?”
He shakes his head. “No, I wouldn’t go.”
“Then I’ll get two tickets.” The two tickets to Newark, connecting through Atlanta, tucked behind her underwear in the top drawer of her metal dresser in the city.
He frowns. “It’s a long time.”
“It’ll be wet season.”
Wet season. It can be unpleasant. All the rain, the floods, seeping into the casita, turning the floor to mud, and they must lay down flattened cardboard and wear rain boo
ts. Essy hates the mud.
“Mud,” she says. She can hear it now, Essy wailing about the mud. Surely, he can hear it, too.
And then he nods, and she must suppress a shout. A nod. A slow nod. It’s enough.
She is efficient. When she returns from the city the following week, she brings the exit papers, and when she leaves the campo again, they are signed by his hand.
• • •
She is buoyant. Giddy. All the world bright and beautiful again. She will miss the trees, the river, the winding dirt roads, the women squatting beside their buckets of potatoes, Vera and Isabel and Luz (Vera’s brother’s Taiwanese wife with a miscarriage, Isabel’s youngest son starting school, and Luz, dear Luz, still dreaming about her cockfights!). She will miss the chicken buses. And Mami. And Fredy. But no, she cannot think about this.
The days pass, a blur. In the campo, she tries to tuck herself in a corner, flatten into a shadow, remain quiet, inconspicuous, forgettable. At the office, the interns amplify her excitement. Switzerland. They’ve never met anyone who has gone to Switzerland! She almost believes her own story to be true. What will you do there? Oh, her sister will have plans, so many plans, all kinds of touristy things. She tells no one—not the interns, not her boss, not Mr. Lo at the Chinese bodega or the kindhearted curandero—that she does not plan to return. She will work things out! She and Essy will stay with Nipa while she works things out.
On her final day in Cuenca, she takes a circuitous walk before heading into the office. Everything feels new once more. Bye-bye red-tile roofs. Bye-bye cobblestone sidewalks, bye-bye colonial archways and ornate railings and rows of Juliet balconies above. Bye-bye palm trees and cathedrals and pigeons squabbling in the square, bye-bye almuerzo, bookstore, post office, Internet café. Her limbs feel light, as if injected with helium, her head floats over her shoulders, even her eyebrows, her eyes, the creases in her forehead, lured upward by some antigravitational force.
That evening, she does not go out for pollo con fritas and colas with the interns. The next morning, she must catch an early bus back to Martez. That weekend, she and Essy will make the long journey from the campo to the airport in Quito. She still has to pack, she explains.
That evening, she sits, goose bumps flaring on her legs as she makes contact with the cold tile floor in her room above the café. She has never, not once, sat on this floor, and now as she peeks under the metal bedsprings which have supported her for over a year, she notices the candy wrappers and stray coins floating among the lint and cobwebs and dust bunnies and hair. Her own dark strands of hair.
She notices a spider’s web, a mesh of fine wires, tucked in the corner of the room. Now that she is low, near the ground, she sees the silky fibers glisten in the light like something wet and metallic. She crawls over to examine it. There it is: a small black spider, no bigger than a dime. It has not yet completed its task. The web has only radial strands, like a wheel. She bends down, breath so close the strands waver and dance. She watches as Spider hops counterclockwise from spoke to spoke, dragging its thread. It fascinates her, to see a creature so busy in an act of creation.
She remembers learning once how a spider spins its web. About the nonsticky strands on which it sits while it constructs its sticky trap. She remembers reading about scientists who conducted experiments where they fed spiders the blood of severely ill mental patients, and the spiders spun cockeyed webs. This spider’s web is a marvel of nature, perfectly symmetric.
She pricks her left index finger. A red droplet forms. She offers it, but Spider does not seem interested. It is still too busy, spinning, hopping, pinning its thread at each spoke like a housewife pegging laundry. She digs out a silver centavo from her pocket. With her right thumb, she presses the injured finger, squeezes a bubble of blood onto the coin. She watches the bubble jiggle, a delicate half dome. She places the coin on the floor.
The voices from the café are louder now, rough and German. She wishes they would stop. She dislikes German, its angry nature, its hard sounds, even worse than Hebrew. She keeps picturing herself at the door of Yonah’s cozy beach house. A clapping screen door. A welcome mat to wipe off their shoes. Shoes! Neither she nor Essy have appropriate shoes for winter in New Jersey. Only a pair of tall rubber rain boots for mud. She looks at the piles of clothes she has folded, laid out on the bed. She has accumulated a few new items since she arrived, but nothing right for winter.
She is hot. Scorching hot. Burning hot. She will go for a walk. She needs air.
She heads downstairs. The Germans are still outside, their table crowded with frothy steins.
The calle is empty. Street lamps cast tall, looming shadows. Geometric patterns pop out from the cobbled pavement, the iron fences, the shards of broken glass on the walls. The walls, gray and ominous. Like the dull blade of the butcher’s knife. A woman should not walk by herself at this hour. She cannot risk it, not now, getting mugged or abducted or robbed or raped. Not now. She must return to her room. She cannot let anything happen to her now.
She returns. She locks the door. She will pack quickly. Go to sleep. Let the morning come and gather her.
The spider has finished its work. The web hangs perfectly in the still of the room, waiting to snare its prey. Spider is nowhere to be seen.
She hears a sound. Wood on wood. A knock. Though it could be her imagination. No one ever knocks. No one knows she lives here, except her coworkers, and Jonesy. She wonders if he has come to wish her well. More likely, it’s one of the drunk Germans wandering upstairs looking for el baño. Occasionally a patron does that.
This time it comes firmer. Knock-knock, knock-knock. Suddenly she is feverish with fear. An intruder. A burglar. The masked hoodlums from the chicken bus. She swings around, panting. Does she even own a knife? Is it better to yell out, confirm her presence, will this scare him away? A rapist. But she will scream out the window and everyone below will hear, and if they don’t then she will hurl an object down to get their attention. Her eyes dart, lock on the antique brass lamp on the dresser. She can block the door with the dresser, tie a sheet to the bed frame, drop out the window. No. She is indulging in childish games, hide-and-go-seek, chase, planning routes of escape.
“Quién-es?” she says, deepening her voice.
There is no peephole, no chain, so she grabs the antique desk lamp, throws the weight of her body against the door. If she opens it and the stranger forces his way in, she will slam this object on his head, run to the window and scream for help.
“Quién-es?” She cracks it open an inch, then another inch more.
“Lucia?” says the voice.
A woman’s voice! All at once her body relaxes. Why did it not occur to her, silly, that it could be a woman at the door?
“Lucia, open up.”
It is Miranda. Her sister. Jie.
She recalls what happens next as a jumbled dream: the figure pushing at the door, crowding into her room, all mouth: You. You. You. Commands and accusations. The crescendoing voice, buzzing of mosquitoes, everything too loud, too many words, and she covers her ears to stem the drain of energy from her head, because this is what they want: to drain her, to muzzle her, to take away her power, her feelings, her desires, her will, to shut her up and stuff her into a shoe box and stick it on a high shelf, where she will sit and sit and gather dust quietly like the mental patients of yore. What the fuck are you doing? He’s her father, Lucia. You cannot. Thou shalt not. Like Moses and his ten commandments. And then her face under the spell of the figure’s hot breath, frantic wetness spilling down her cheek. The spider. Where is the spider? Where are the pills? Pills, pills, pills. Always the pills. The pills like a leash around her neck and everyone with a hand to pull. It’s wrong, Lucia. Too loud, too electric, she lashes out, all arms and fists. You want pills, here are the pills, and she rushes forward, thrusting the pills in the monster’s face as it gags and spits. I will tell him, Lucia. I w
ill tell him what you’ve tried to do. And then she hears her daughter’s name and she goes blind with rage, GET OUT, yes, goddammit, yes, I am taking the goddamn pills. Four white pills in her palm, straight down her throat, and she pitches the open bottle out the window. There are your fucking pills. A shower of hail hits the pavement. Lucia. She jerks away, flings open the red plaid suitcase, grabs a tank top, hurls it to the floor—and then all the neatly packed items, the jeans, the bras, the books, the shoes, the hair dryer, at the window, at the bed, at the dresser, at the wall, and then the antique brass lamp at the monster by the door. It strikes, on the forehead, and then there is red, red, red. Blood, and the red-streaked too-loud figure a blur. Stop, Lucia. She covers her ears, musters every drop of air in her tightening lungs. YOU. GET OUT. GET OUT OF MY FUCKING LIFE.
She retreats into the corner, nose to knees, rocks back and forth. A thunder on the stairs. The Germans are coming, big men with rough voices. Her skin goes cold. Please, no, don’t let them lock me up. Please don’t take me away.
6
Manuel
She started acting different a few months ago. Not crazy, like loco, not the way she’d acted after Essy was born. But she kept secrets, and got mad if he asked too many questions. Though it was not his way, to ask many questions, and he often wondered if he should ask more. What of all those evenings she spent apart from him, in Cuenca? Did she have friends there? Were they Americanos? Were they young or old? Did she go straight home after work, make herself a bowl of noodles? Or did she loiter at the office, gossiping, go for drinks with her colleagues until the bars and restaurants closed? Sometimes when they were together she would stay up late, sit in the uncomfortable high-backed rocking chair in the corner of their bedroom, scribbling away in her notebook. “What are you doing?” he asked. “Work,” she said. “What kind of work?” She shrugged, eyes tight on her page, and if he pressed she’d sigh, followed by a bloated exhale, and this meant she had nothing more to say. These past few months, she’d seemed extra impatient, exhaling often, as if she did not want to expend extra energy funneling her thoughts through her mouth, as if she’d rather expect him to read her mind.