Our Lady of Infidelity

by Jackie Parker

  Then, after he has looked at his very last face, Father Bill raises his hands no higher than his waist, turns them upward, opening his palms to the impossible blue desert sky, holds them that way a good several minutes, as if he is weighing the air.

  Is it a blessing, or an inquiry, or a sign of submission? No one dares ask.

  CHAPTER 32

  Under Josefina’s watchful eye, not a word issues forth from Luz’s mouth, not for the six hours they remain on the sidewalk. Until the end. Not a twitch out of Luz or a syllable of joy. No one able to read her expression, concealed as she is by the chair, the umbrella, and that broad brimmed sunhat. The standees report she would rise on the hour and hover a little, inches, no more, off the chair. Others were sure she was snoring, probably fast asleep.

  No one knows who gave the order for food, but just around one people start bringing in quantities of it, plates and utensils, and they arrive with their children. And then some go home for the tables. Chico lets the women set them up in back of Walt’s office under the awning in sight of the San Jacinto Mountains and the long expanse of summer-white desert. As more people show up, trying to get on the sidewalk, the crowd threatening to spill into the far right lane of eastbound freeway traffic, the overflow folks head back there, parking their cars in the wide open area across from the little white structure that houses the wash. The lights blinking on and off all day as all day those cars go on through. And that’s where the confusion came from about the crying. It is the car wash patrons, not the sidewalk folk, in tears.

  Without Walt to prepare them, the first-time customers are goners. All kinds of memories and feelings are evoked by the experience of that wash, no way to resist. The pattern of the pinpoint overhead bulbs, their surpassing brightness and quantity, combined with the in-your-face thrust of the wash cycle water, then the slow noiseless balm of the rinse cycle all coming at you in under three minutes. An emotional workout. In the minds of many the wash and the sidewalk seem linked, some people saying to get the sidewalk benefit you had to first buy a car wash.

  Once the food tables go up out back, the dancing soon follows. Just an old boom box, upbeat tunes (in respect to the youngest), people moving in public (instead of their cars). Then one of the kids finds the hose and the spigot in back of Walt’s office and turns on the water. Mud on the ground like you wouldn’t believe. Someone aims the hose at the dancers and no one complains. Lots of people get drenched and happy and stay that way. Nice sounds for a weekday. More laughter than usual. A party kind of day. And the sidewalk vigil continues. In silence, in self-communion, in rapturous sighs. And no one claiming to see anything on that window.

  By midafternoon the light has eased, diminishing throughout the High Desert to the normal mid-August glare. Traffic on the freeway thins out as it usually does in the pre–rush-hour lull. Walt in the stands at the stadium of Fullerton College, the game in its final slow inning. Father Bill at the church, getting ready for his favorite feast day. In the middle of all the preparations, all his fears about Luz, he remembers the prompting of guidance that had come to him on the sidewalk, goes into his office to call Hope Merton, knows her number without even checking, surprised that he knows it, six years since he’s called, more surprised when she picks up the phone, “My God, Bill, I can’t believe it is you. I was thinking about you all morning.” Six years since he’d taken Josefina and Luz from the safety of her home. And very quickly, with no idea he is going to do this, he explains Josefina’s imminent need. “A relative, any blood relative, or barring that someone who knew her who might be a compatible donor. I’m grasping at straws, but I don’t know how else to do this. Do you think,” he had said, “there’s some way you can help?”

  “Give me a few days,” she says. “I’ll see who I can reach.”

  Three hours later when he is changing his clothes for the feast she calls back. In three hours she has given him this: Ten cities, fourteen phone numbers. “Not hard at all,” she says when he nearly breaks down. “We’re all still in touch.”

  And now he is no longer alone. Hope Merton does not ask him to say why he has not called her in all this time. Others had been driven the four thousand miles from the prisons of El Salvador, Ilopango, Mariona, walked up the back steps of her suburban New Jersey in darkness, some of them unable to walk, had been carried. Unable to remember, once they’d moved on, where it was they had been or the name of the woman who’d saved them. “Can you tell me a little about Luz?” she asks.

  “I don’t know where to start. She’s quite a handful. She looks a lot like Raphael.”

  “Could you send me a photograph?”

  “As soon as I get a chance.”

  She had started to give him her address. He knew it. Down to the zip code.

  After that he hears the truck gears grind and goes out to sign for the ball-jumping game and watch the men set it up in the usual place. Then his committee arrives, fresh from the sidewalk. He explains that they are not to speak of it, or of Luz. Not at Our Lady of Guadalupe. It has nothing to do with the church. As if he had not even been to the sidewalk. As if he has not already blessed them.

  They go on with the feast preparations as if nothing had happened that morning, or is happening this very moment. They put up the game tables, get out the electric bingo, eat the traditional egg salad and watermelon lunch that no one really relishes but has become custom, sip politely at Emily Otto’s ginger mint tea. Their tasks done quickly and in silence, then everyone leaves. Father Bill does not have to ask where they are going. He simply thanks them, tells them he will see them later at Our Lady’s Mass, goes into his office, sits down at the desk, takes the yellow pad on which he has written the names and the numbers Hope Merton has given, and starts his calls.

  CHAPTER 33

  Zoe settles into the deep-cushioned beach chair, looking at Luz’s sturdy brown legs stretched out on the chair beside hers, her scuffed red sandals. Luz should take off her shoes, Zoe thinks. At least open the straps. Let those little feet breathe.

  “Front row, look up and stop daydreaming. I have an important announcement.”

  The commanding tone catches Zoe off guard. She looks to the window. Nothing is there.

  “Now pay attention. You won’t be in this class forever.” She knows she is probably hallucinating. That she is not in her right mind. But what if she is being compelled to attention by some force she does not even believe can exist? She could not endure it, knowing such a thing were true. Coward that she is, she chooses not even to try looking away from the window. If she tries to look away and cannot, she will panic. Easier to let the window make its announcement and hope it’s a short one and interesting at least. Zoe squints and waits. Nothing. A pause. Zoe’s mind drifts off. She thinks about Luz, who appears to be sleeping. She wonders about Walt and his son. “You are doing very well,” someone says. Once again she’d been tricked. That time warp again. And it wasn’t even an announcement, just a compliment of sorts. “You are doing very well.” There she had heard it again.

  I’m what? No, I’m not, Zoe thinks. Are you kidding?

  “Yes, you are. You are doing wonderfully,” the voice replies with great warmth. Now Zoe feels a gentle effusion of adoration coming at her being at a level so deep and so natural that for a moment she wonders whether it is simply one of her own misplaced joys that is flooding through her body. A stored joy knocked loose from her memory, detached from its cause, making her feel very much the way she felt after she and Michael made love. Not quite in her body. Not quite on this earth. She curls her feet and draws up her knees, wishing for a quilt or a sheet. In spite of herself she has a strong desire to melt down into it, drift off, maybe sleep. A joy so persistent and nearly unbearable in its persistence that for a moment Zoe has the uncanny sensation that something is wrong with her. She is simply unable to stop the good feeling, no choice but to bask in it, feeling wonderfully, floatingly well, as if all things and everything were perfect, as if she is in fact doing very well. And aft
er some minutes or seconds or maybe even a half hour of basking, her mind returns and starts clicking. Several inches above her, it seems, Zoe can hear her own mind, attempting to figure out in what way anyone might think she is doing very well. There are so many ways in which Zoe judges herself to be doing not at all well in this moment. Marriage-wise, of course. Hers is not well at all. It is ill, perhaps dead. Her husband has left her a month ago now, not a word or a call, just a bunch of random thoughts and dreams. Which most likely are her thoughts, her dreams, her wishful thinking, not some mystical messages from Michael saying he is on his way back. Michael is afraid, says the voice. But of what? Zoe wonders. The voice in the window does not reply. What good is this voice if it won’t answer her question about Michael? A voice in the window? she thinks. Maybe Luz is not alone in her delusions. Her transport. Zoe herself may have fallen into transport. By no means can a person who falls into transport be judged to be doing well. Nonetheless, physically, she feels superb. Her body is in love with itself in this moment, all its swirls and swallows and juicings. Just fantastic how well she feels. Zoe is ripe as a fruit. She is studded with seeds. At any moment she could burst through her skin. But just past this moment is the future, the unbearable beauties of autumn. How will she stand it when she has gone back to Cold Spring and every day has to face the gold, the reds, and across the Hudson the tree line golden and scarlet and orange, more vivid and smoky each day, the cold air on her face as she steps out the back door and walks to her shop? The walk in such air, the smell making her feel so alive in her Michael-less emptiness. A person doing well does not dread the future, does not cringe at anticipated beauties of the fall. If she goes back and Michael remains nowhere-to-be-found, she will expire of longing and beauty.

  And in this very moment when she is most self-condemning, most certain of her unwellness on nearly every level of life, she sees it—just for an instant right there in the window, a face so beautiful it brings tears to her eyes, a womanly face, the sweetest, most perfect of features. Now the face breaks into a luminous smile, so deep and golden Zoe is unable to bear it. She hears herself sigh long and luxuriantly as great sounds of pleasure escape from her once again and she can feel herself falling, falling, but this time, already reclining on Patty Platz’s white-padded beach chair, there is nowhere to fall.

  She sinks deep into the cushions, and after a while feels herself quite pleasantly beginning to rise. Gently lifting until she is nearly sitting up. Now she is sitting up, her head making faint nodding motions, inclining itself toward the window like a sun-tending seedling or a person in deep conversation. Go on, yes, keep talking to me!

  You. Are. Doing. Very. Well. Indeed.

  This is a dangerous drug, Zoe thinks. Very dangerous this sidewalk experience.

  Zoe tears her gaze from the face in the window and shoots up in the chair with a jolt, startling Josefina out of her own reverie or transportation and startling the two rows of sitters behind her.

  Josefina looks up. Even Luz slowly turns toward her. Oh no, Zoe thinks as she sees the big hat on Luz’s head start to swivel—all of them ridiculous under the umbrella, under these hats—I won’t let those eyes come at me again. And now fully herself, she gets off the chair and runs down the walk toward Walt’s office, where the music comes from and the smell of barbecue rushes toward her, the chatter and laughter and smoke, all the people in back of the office who are having a party. Zoe heads toward them, toward the noise and the commotion where life is going on as it should.

  CHAPTER 34

  All afternoon Josefina reclines on the sidewalk in comfort, enduring the heat and the light. Her sleeping daughter amazes her—such fortitude—no child can remain still for this long, she thinks, certainly not her child. But there Luz lies in a state of great calm, unnatural, confusing, quite beautiful, in fact. She can’t help but smile.

  Behind her Josefina hears deep sighs of pleasure—indecent—are the old ones making love on their chairs? Now she hears movements, shuffling feet, chairs scraped against asphalt as some people rise and others, the waiting, come to take their places. Indifferent to the heat, the people keep arriving. Her neighbors, their faces familiar, the names she can hardly keep straight. She has been inhospitable these six years. Never one time inviting them for a meal or sharing a coffee (no coffee now, say the doctors, and no real tea). How long since she has thought of what it might mean to be once again friendly, not to be worn down by fears. Yet now, in this moment, her back to a whole host of strangers, she has no apprehension. Her shoulders do not stiffen; the skin on the back of her neck does not turn cold. She has not felt such safety since when? Since she was a child in the home of her parents before she knew her country was at war with itself, the breeding ground of horrors, disappearance, and torture. No home in El Salvador safe.

  Another great sigh fills her. Each one seems to release the heaviness she carries and has come to accept in her body, release her from her own history. Nothing to carry, time to dream! And what waking dreams visit Josefina as she lounges like a lady of leisure, like her own mother, in fact. Her mother in her silk suit and pearls in the middle of summer looking cool, not a hair out of place, her long red nails. So surprising, this sidewalk sojourn, Josefina thinks. So much pleasure and ease comes to her from this day of her daughter’s great punishment. If only the Felangela could share it, but there she goes jumping out of her chair once again. What is wrong with this Sewey who lacks patience for relaxing? Where does she go this time? To the field where the noise comes from now, music and laughter, the smell of grilled meat. Josefina is starving. What can she eat with that diet they have put her on? Only meat. Chicken, the whites of eggs, beef, rice, and bread. Oil. No salad. Few vegetables. Almost no fruit. Oh, it is the fruit that she misses most of all. The sweet guava, the papaya with its full belly of gleaming black seeds. It is the watery foods she must avoid. Even now she dare not drink water, only put ice in her mouth, letting it melt on her tongue. She takes a cube from Patty’s cooler and places it in her mouth. “Are you thirsty, mamita? You want to suck ice? Here, you must drink.” She puts a cube in Luz’s mouth. “Good, take another. You want to hold it in your hand?”

  The ice melts in Josefina’s mouth. She used to do this when she was a child. Ice in her mouth. Esperanza as well. Who could hold it the longest, without biting down, chewing it into bits? Esperanza, always the winner, opening her mouth to show it was still there on her little pink tongue. And suddenly she can feel herself as she felt at that time, ten years old. Wiry and strong. You are still young, Josefina says, addressing her disobedient body. You used to be perfect, remember? The sense of well-being returns in a rush, as if memory itself could command it back. And now she is the one who is sighing and making indecent sounds. And Luz does not even turn to her mother. Her sleepy little saint.

  Now Zoe is back, sitting down in her chair. Josefina gives her a questioning look. “Okay?” she asks. Zoe nods, but how annoyed she appears in her Chinese straw hat and her disheveled white dress, squinting at the window, which seems to disturb her. Of course, it is crooked and her fault. Don’t look, Josefina thinks. Don’t study your mistake. And to think Luz waits for the Virgin to appear in such a poor receptacle. Josefina cannot help but smile.

  And only when she remembers how Luz had walked from the house turning right and not left and onto the freeway in the midst of that light, does the fear that she carries return. A miracle, Josefina thinks, that her daughter was not hit by a car.

  “Mamita,” she says, leaning toward Luz, testing her forehead, the back of her neck to make sure she is not too warm. “How are you doing? You want to wake up? You need the bathroom? You want a break?”

  Luz turns her head slowly and regards Josefina with half-closed eyes, as if she is partly asleep. All at once Josefina feels from her daughter such love, such naked and powerful love that she must turn away. How the shame burns through her then. What is wrong with her that she cannot endure her own daughter’s gaze?

  “Esperanza is
coming for her rosary,” Luz says huskily.

  It is some minutes before Josefina can recover from the force of that gaze and is able to bring herself to speak. “What do you say, mamita?”

  But Luz has turned away, and after several moments Josefina has lapsed back into the familiar well-being. She feels it flood through her, the sense that her body is once again perfect, smooth, unscarred. Filled with incredible energy.

  She lets out an enormous breathy sigh and gives the window a cursory glance. In its center a brightness has appeared no larger than a fist. Very quickly it begins to change color from white to indigo to black, burning out like a short-lived star and leaving in its wake an eye, a single eye only, dark and relentless. Like the eye of the dishonored dead.

  CHAPTER 35

  Just around four, the temperature drops without warning, the sky becoming a rare welcome gray. First the winds, then a brief steady rain. The smoky aftertaste like flakes of blown ash dissolved in the mouth.

  And after the rain, the strangers begin arriving in numbers, and the cars and vans continue arriving past evening and long into dark. The next morning, there they were on the field. License plates from all over the map, from far-flung states.