“You are ready to eat? You must also be ready to dance!” Josefina teases. Then she looks at Luz, who does not stir, who appears hardly to be in her body. Josefina puts a hand on Luz’s face, which is warm and alive. Now a kiss, but the kiss does not cause Luz to stir. (Does she smell roses again?) “Mamita, sit up.” Luz does not respond. “What is it?” Josefina asks.
“Something happened,” says Zoe.
Something has happened in her absence? Right away the chicken churns up from her belly, the gall rising straight to her mouth. Down on the ground where it could so easily be lost she sees the green soapstone rosary, Esperanza’s, where Luz must have dropped it or perhaps it fell out of the pocket of her yellow dress. “Is she sick?” Josefina asks Zoe. “What’s the matter? What’s wrong?”
“She’s fine,” Emily Otto replies. “She’s resting now.”
“All right,” she tells Zoe as she bends to scoop the dropped rosary from the ground. “Mamita, the children are begging for you. Come now to the field and spend half an hour for play.”
And still Luz does not stir.
“Get her up,” the Felangela says in a low voice.
“I am trying.” There is acid in her mouth and her throat, her arms growing heavy from fear. She removes Luz’s feet from the chair, puts her hands behind her back to make her sit. “Please, one more minute,” Luz says.
“You can get up?” Josefina asks, grateful for those four little words.
“Yes, Mami, but not right away.”
Without thought Josefina’s gaze goes to the window. An accidental glance, she is sure. And there is the eye, glaring at her once again. The eye she has waited hours to see that must have been biding its time.
Now you appear? Exactly in the moment when Luz is in trouble and I am preparing to leave? She stares into its glittering center unblinking, mustering all of the strength of her resolute will. “One minute, mamita,” she says as she senses Luz trying to sit up. Then Josefina lowers herself to her chair. “Yes, yes,” she tells Zoe who is urging her to stand. All morning she has waited for it to appear. How can she leave? She leans forward, the better to face it. And all at once the sparks in the dark smoky iris sizzle out. All life leaves the eye. In a blink it is gone. Immediately two eyes appear, brilliant dark eyes full of passion and force. The eyes hold her spellbound. She takes in their power, feeding it into her heart.
“Josefina, please,” the Felangela insists. But Josefina cannot move a muscle. She has nearly forgotten her daughter. She is caught in a marvelous stare.
CHAPTER 45
Josefina throws up her hands and declares that her daughter is out of control. She has been dancing without rest through the blue house for nearly one hour. Her running feet pound the floor, her ceaseless chatter is driving Josefina to consider a whiskey, to enjoy one, then to open a beer. At this rate Josefina won’t be able to coax Luz to bed until midnight. Ah, thinks Josefina, bustling from stove to counter with her bowl of risen maseca, her skillet of moist chiccarones, the hill of tomatoes she is just now getting ready to chop (her diet be damned), the scallions, the two kinds of cheese, her three iron skillets, her lovely white bowls. Her daughter is herself, only more so. Such a handful. So much noise in a four-room house. Thank God! Josefina who worries too much, imagines too far, and here is her Luz: alert, much too noisy, spinning and leaping and perfectly fine.
“Luz, go to play in your room; you give me a headache. Sewey wants to talk just with me.” Zoe is chopping cilantro at the table, to add to the parsley heaped in a small yellow bowl.
“But I want to talk first. Zoe, you forgot to say you are still little.”
“Did you hear me, Luz?”
“But Zoe forgot one part.”
“Continue and you will be talking to no one all night!”
“Say it, please, Zoe,” Luz pleads, moving backwards to the doorway that leads to the living room, eyes in the back of her head, a loud hopping exit. Luz is no lightweight. On the bare wooden floors her hops resound.
“What should I say? ‘I am still little?’” says Zoe, her right temple pulsing, her thoughts running wild.
“Yes, but no question!”
“Luz! Stop trying to be the boss of Sewey.”
“But she didn’t say it right.”
“Wait, please come back for a minute, Luz,” says Zoe, putting down the knife. “Josefina, I want you to hear something.”
“I can come back?” asks Luz, pausing dramatically in the doorway, one foot in the air.
“If Sewey says yes.”
She does.
Luz hops to the table where Zoe is seated, while Josefina fries something sweet and oniony in a big black skillet, the room already steamy, all the rooms of the blue house rich with it, the smell creeping down the halls, through the barely open windows, chiccarones wafting down Mariposa Lane.
“What do you want, my Zoe Felangela?” says Luz flopping down on a chair.
Zoe puts green fingers on Luz’s sweaty arm, looks Luz in the eyes. “Tell your mother what you did on the sidewalk today,” she says quietly.
“What did you ask?” Josefina calls from the stove.
“Okay.” Luz pauses. The answer does not come to her mind. She asks her nose and her eyes and her cheeks. They don’t know either. “Maybe take a rest?”
“What was the question?” Josefina asks.
“You got up from your chair and ran right into all those people. Tell your mother about it.”
“This is what made her sick?” Josefina is growing concerned.
“She wasn’t sick. She ran,” Zoe says.
Josefina turns from the stove, her hand automatically cupping the place where the access resides.
“I didn’t do anything bad,” says Luz.
“You got up and ran into the rows. Some people fell.”
“Luz,” Josefina says. “This is what you wanted to tell me?”
Zoe nods.
“You don’t remember, mamita?”
“You mean when the people turned into lights?”
“What do you mean lights?” Now Josefina turns off the flame under the iron skillet and goes to sit at the table. The chiccarones will absorb too much oil. Seven for dinner and only six chairs and Luz has run once again without her seeing. What can she do? Her child is impossible. The pupusas must wait.
“Luz,” Zoe chides. Now Luz stands with her mother’s hands on her shoulders—who knows? She may run.
“You didn’t see it? Maybe you will see it tomorrow. How the people can turn into lights.”
Luz slips away and begins to skip around the table. “People, lights. Lights, people,” she recites. She taps her mother on the top of her head. “Now you’re a light,” she taps her again. “Now you’re Josefina.” She skips away, this time stopping at Zoe. “You’re always a light and a person, Zoe Luedke, Felangela.” She taps Zoe on the top of her head. Then she stops and smiles, quite happy with herself. “Can I take Zoe for playing now in my room?”
“Go play alone until I call you.”
“I want to stay where Zoe stays.”
“Luz,” Josefina calls sharply. “I have no more patience with these games. Look at poor Sewey who you have made exhausted. You know what she’s talking about, Sewey? You know the lights?”
“No. Of course not.”
“Maybe you will see them tomorrow,” Luz says. “Maybe everyone will see them.”
“Stop it, Luz. People were hurt from her running? She is becoming misbehaved like Tommy Platz?”
“Not hurt,” Zoe concedes. How can she tell this? Zoe knows what Luz Reyes can do with a look. “Tell Mami also why you want to go to the sidewalk. Tell her the real real reason.”
“What are you asking?” Josefina wonders. She has the cold heavy feeling in her arms, a taste of a new fear, as if something has just slipped right past her. Something that she will not like. “She goes because I ask her to go.”
Luz looks at Zoe, perfectly blank. “Everyone goes now to the sidewalk. But n
ot Father Bill.”
“Yes, you do know the reason. Not everyone—you,” Zoe insists.
“Because Mami likes it. And we aren’t scared anymore of the people.”
“No, we are not afraid now. They are our friends,” says Josefina.
Luz hops in place. “Friends. Not friends. Not Friends. Friends.” Luz hops away, circling the kitchen near the stove and the counter. Something is bound to fall down.
“Luz! Be careful before you hurt yourself.”
“But why can’t I look at the people? Why did Zoe tell me, ‘Luz, no!’”
“What did she do, Sewey?”
“She ran into the rows.”
“Yes, yes, you already said that. What do you think is the problem? You needed exercise, Luz?” Josefina asks.
Luz cozies up to her mother, who encircles her in her arms.
“Zoe tells me always, ‘Luz, don’t look at the people!’”
“Where do you get such a crazy idea, mamita?”
“Can I look at the children? I’m afraid if I do.”
“Why?” says Josefina.
“Maybe I’ll hurt them from looking.”
Josefina turns to Zoe, “You think Luz will hurt the children?”
Zoe, sinking fast, out of her element, out-Luzed. Is she the only one in the room who knows what has happened? If she does know. If it happened as she thinks. If Luz is what she is. Will Luz or won’t Luz hurt children by looking? No idea. Zoe says, “No.”
“That is crazy talking, Luz. Sewey doesn’t think you will hurt anyone. Come and give me your thumb. The dough is ready. You remember still how to punch holes for our pupusas? Tomorrow no more sleeping all day on the chair. You will play with the children, your friends. On the field you can dance and give no one a headache. You can run like you want to—and take off your shoes to jump in the mud! That is the way the children have fun. Not hopping in a small house to drive people crazy. Not running on the sidewalk when people are quiet.”
Luz and her mother stand up, Luz gives Zoe a sidelong glance, her tongue worries the backs of new teeth.
Luz Reyes is insulted, thinks Zoe. She does not understand. Knows. Doesn’t know. Doesn’t know. Knows. What does Luz Reyes know of herself?
“La Felangela está furiosa,” Luz says, standing by her mother at the counter, plunging her thumb into the first ball of soft risen dough.
“Sewey just wants to keep you close like I told her to do. Tomorrow you apologize to the people. Do you know who you ran into on the sidewalk?”
“Maybe.”
“Think to remember. You are too crazy still with that energy. You can be calm now? We have guests soon coming for dinner. You will promise to behave?”
Luz the vessel, her little cells charged up with gold. “Yes! Now can I stay in the kitchen? Can I chop the long onion? Zoe, watch me. I can use the knife. Pupusas,” says Luz, “Chick-a-roans. Do you remember how to say it? Dance to remember. Pa poo-sas. Chick-a-roans. Look, Zoe. Do it like me!”
CHAPTER 46
The meal is memorable, though not without mishap. The pupusas moist and delicious, plentiful enough for a tribe (with four set aside for the latecomer, Walt). All it lacks, in the chef’s considered opinion, is a fifth of Espíritu de Cana—her country’s sugar cane vodka—and a little less espíritu from Luz would not hurt: two dropped pupusas, one broken plate. A meal in which, before fleeing the kitchen in tears, Luz is finally ordered to eat standing up.
They are six at a four-seater table. Red-and-white checkered napkins, yellow plates, the orange manzanita from the Ottos’ sparse garden in a blue water glass. Father Bill has spoken the blessing. Josefina serves the steaming pupusas on a big yellow platter, a bowl of tangy curtido, and the meal has begun—no forks, warm snowy dough, fragrant, savory filling. They struggle to eat without dropping the juicy parts onto their plates. No one mentions the sidewalk or speaks of the ocean of gold. No one suggests Luz Reyes can knock people flat with a look.
Soon the table is littered with empty brown bottles of Negro Modelo, soon their fingers are dripping with pupusa juice. There is chatter in two languages, Luz’s wild elbows and slippery hands. Josefina fills their plates once again and Emily Otto starts to describe a man who sat down next to her on the sidewalk. Zoe puts down her beer. Her fourth, her fifth? She has lost count. Emily Otto discussing the sidewalk. In front of Luz. Luz the child.
“Such an interesting man with a big round moon face and a feeling about him that makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck. My arms, too.” “Dearie,” says Wren, calling her attention to Luz, listening intently. Now it is too late.
“He was big,” says Luz with her mouth full. “The biggest of everyone.” She chews for a while then looks up at the ceiling, remembering, seeing it now, then looking at those at the table able to see it by feeling, each one a person, a light. “He was the biggest light.”
Lights. People. People. Lights.
Emily Otto draws in her breath.
“Lights?” Father Bill says, looking steadily at Luz.
“Sometimes the people turn into lights.”
“Is that so?” asks Father Bill.
“Maybe they do.”
Josefina snorts. “I have seen people turn to sand. To coffee.” She looks at Luz. “I am sorry. That is a terrible thing I just said.” Luz and her stories are driving her crazy. Too many stories already from Luz. She feels tired from Luz’s stories, yet so alive from the dinner, its great success. From her body that has cured itself as she knew that it would. Now comes the darkness, the excitement of night gathering outside the windows of her kitchen, and William already so happy. Tonight, right now in fact if she had her way, she would take this man straight to bed.
Then Luz’s plate falls from the table and shatters, and Luz runs from the kitchen. “Ignore her,” says Josefina, “let her go. Don’t,” she says, her hand on the back of the priest, who is reaching down to pick up the shattered plate. “Más tarde,” she says. Her hand tracing the muscle that sheaths it. The Ottos look at each other then turn away. The doorbell is ringing. Josefina forced up from her table after all. “Ah,” she says, “at last this is Walt.”
“Let me see what I can do with Luz,” says Father Bill, getting up from the table.
As soon as they leave the kitchen, Emily Otto turns to Zoe. “I understand this is difficult, but do you see why you’re needed? Josefina has no idea of her child. It’s why you were sent.”
“Emily, don’t,” whispers Wren.
“Can’t you see how she’s suffering? She needs to know this. Father Bill knew you were coming to us. He dreamed your hands. We’ve been waiting for you since the spring.”
CHAPTER 47
“Where are you going?” Walt says as Zoe bolts past him out the front door. He follows her into the street, where she wrestles with the Nova’s heavy front door, which swings back as she drops into the driver’s seat. He catches it just in time. “What’s going on?”
She puts her head down on the steering wheel. “I can’t stay there anymore. I’m sleeping in my car.”
“What happened?” He squats close to her, holds onto the open door so it stays open, the smell of beer wafting toward him.
“Too hard to explain.”
“If you need someplace to stay tonight I’ve got a trailer.”
“A bed?”
“A bed already made. Even a bathroom. Clean towels. The works.”
“Who else sleeps there?”
“Nobody.”
“Okay, let’s go.”
“I promised Josefina. She wants to feed me. Why don’t you come in for a few minutes? Then I’ll take you to the trailer.”
“No,” she says. “I’ll be out here resting my brain.”
“What happened to your brain?”
She raises her head slightly, tilts, tries to focus her gaze on his face. “I just found out why my husband left me. It’s Father Bill’s fault.”
“I’d like to hear about that.”
“Not from me you won’t. My backpack. Can you bring it? It’s on the floor near the couch.”
“Okay, but don’t go anywhere.”
“I already have.”
It is going to happen, Walt thinks as he reenters the house with its rich food smells, the wash of beer. He finds the Ottos alone in the kitchen, quietly arguing, hears Father Bill’s voice intoning from Luz’s room. No Josefina. No Luz. “Come try one of these unpronounceables,” Emily says. He is going to wake in the morning and see Zoe inside the trailer, just as he did in his dream.
* * *
Father Bill sits on the edge of Luz’s white canopy bed holding his hand eye-level before her, the thumb and the index finger a quarter inch apart. Luz, propped on four pillows, tries to keep still while she copies his motion, keeping her eyes on his fingers. “That’s right. Very good. Just a little bit bigger. That’s the size of a flea.” Luz breathes hard, feels her mother’s hands firm on her shoulders. A gold force moving straight through her body, making her feet want to run. “Good job, mamita,” says Josefina, bending to kiss her daughter’s moist brow.
“Are you ready for the next part? Concentrate. Pretend this is you way up here.” Father Bill raises his fingers a foot above Luz’s dark hair. Luz must look up. “Okay,” breathes Luz, working hard. Working so hard to make her feet stay. “Now, without moving a muscle, move yourself down.”
“Me?”
“Come down just a little. One quarter of an inch. Like a flea. Like this. Did you see the flea move?”
“Yes.”
“Now pretend that the flea is you. Close your eyes.”
“Okay,” says Luz. She closes her eyes. A small door drops open below her. Just enough space for the flea. Now for her. “Okay,” she says, “I did it.”
“Can you do it again?”
“Come down a very little bit more?”
“Yes, but keep your eyes closed.”
“What is this doing for her?” asks Josefina.
“Shhh,” says Father Bill, “Luz knows. One more time. One quarter inch more.”
“One flea?”
“That’s right. Move one flea down. How does that feel?” Father Bill asks, his heart in his mouth. “Is that far enough?”
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