Our Lady of Infidelity

by Jackie Parker

  “Her chances for transplant are not good. She is low on the list. There is no money. Father Bill is looking for a donor; for money, too, I think. Among people they knew years ago in El Salvador. He hasn’t told her. He’ll have to tell her now.”

  Ah, Walt thinks, he broke their silence.

  “He was worried about how he would explain his phone bill to the diocese. I guess that is the least of it for him now.”

  “I should think so.” Walt wonders what Father Bill has said to his bishop today. From the length of his meeting, he expects it is a lot. It is nearly nine o’clock. Father Bill has been gone since morning. “And how about your explanations?”

  He is asking her about Michael. She does not want to tell him what Michael says. His fears for her. How her staying is breaking Michael’s heart. Michael’s guilty heart. He thinks she is living in delusion, inventing what she is trying to explain.

  “I’m sorry.” Walt puts a finger on her arm. A coin of flesh, that is how much of her he has. “I shouldn’t be asking you about Michael.”

  She stands up. “Let’s clear.”

  CHAPTER 58

  “You are awake, mamita? Did you get hungry for me?” Josefina makes her slow way into Luz’s room. The gold stitches in Luz’s canopy winking at her in the dark, the gold thread that she bought not at the sewing department, but at the jewelry department, that small lie she told her daughter.

  When Josefina turns on the lamp, Luz tries to sit up but her arms are too weak, cheeks deeply flushed, her black eyes glazed. “Why is the ball-jumping game on the roof?” she asks, her voice husky as if she has suddenly caught croup.

  “What are you telling to me?” Josefina sits down on the edge of the bed, leans into the cloying sweet smell, the engine of illness churning its way inside Luz’s flesh, her own head pounding now straight across the front of her skull.

  “Green ones. Purple ones,” croaks Luz, her mother’s mouth on her forehead, her mother’s cold hand on her cheek.

  “You have fever, mamita. Where does it hurt?”

  “No, I don’t want to be sick.”

  The red liquid for fever is in the bathroom. The spoon Josefina needs all the way in the kitchen. Once again the effort of walking, her feet weighted and dulled. When she gets to the kitchen, Zoe and Walt are standing at the sink cleaning up, her friends whom she has just shattered with the precipitate truth.

  “Luz is sick.” Josefina breathing hard now from the exertion of walking.

  “Can we do something?” says Walt. “Do you want to call a doctor?”

  “First I will try to bring down her fever.”

  When Josefina returns, Luz is shaking. Something hot makes her freeze in her skin, but they cover her with only a sheet. “I am cold,” Luz says. Still, Father Bill’s trick makes her laugh. “Why did he send me the ball-jumping game from the feast?”

  “First swallow, then tell us about the game.”

  Josefina and Zoe and Walt on the edge of Luz’s bed counting minutes. The liquid Luz swallows does nothing. Her temperature climbs. Her skin remains dry as a tarp. To silence her crazy talk, they tell stories. Josefina sings to Luz in Spanish. “That makes me happy,” says Luz. Walt reads out loud from the wall the twenty-seven Tortoise Facts and asks for more. “Butterball shell,” says Luz. “They are my friends. They know my name.” “That’s not a fact, it’s a story,” says Josefina, her fingers on Luz’s wrist. Luz’s pulse is too fast. Her skin is too dry. The ball-jumping game comes and goes from the roof, a red one, a green one, a purple one. Luz’s lips are burning.

  “We must put her in the tub.” Josefina says

  “Not naked!” cries Luz.

  “Can you walk, mamita?”

  “I’m not a baby!” says Luz.

  Josefina insists they can do it alone. She goes on numb feet, supporting her daughter, the pulse of her blood beating against the frame of her skull. On the way to the bathroom Luz vomits. How thin Luz has become and how suddenly strong. She struggles, “No bath!” she cries. “I am freezing!” Only by guile and by softness does Josefina persuade Luz to step out of the soiled yellow dress and into the lukewarm bath water. “Come, mamita,” says Josefina, leaning into the water, her arm a cushion for Luz’s head, “So the water can cool you.” Luz steps into the tub on unsteady legs. Her teeth chatter. The water is cruel. When she lies back, the shaking goes straight through her body. “Mozote,” cries Luz. The girl in the tree, the branches piercing her thighs. She goes high in the tree in her mind singing the notes so sharp the sound breaks like glass in her ears. She pleads with the children to climb with her, higher, and opens her arm, cries out that she is little—that she still loves the world.

  Every sound that Luz makes carries out to the street. “What are they doing to that child?”

  When Josefina cannot lift Luz from the tub she calls out for help. The people outside cross over, approach the blue house. Wait.

  When at last she is carried to bed, Luz calls out for shoes. Josefina grabs Luz’s red sandals from the closet floor, puts them on, does not fasten the straps. Luz sinks into her pillows, her summer pajamas unfastened.

  Walt, crossing the street, goes person to person, begging each one to leave. “She’s got fever. She’s sick. It’s the last thing they need tonight. Don’t wait for the neighbors to call the police, go home.”

  “I’m going to call the police,” he says to Zoe when he returns.

  “No police in my house. Not now!” Josefina insists.

  When Father Bill finally arrives, it is close to eleven. Mariposa Lane is ablaze with candles. “A child with a gift,” he had said to the bishop. “It is nothing but beautiful. You must see her yourself.” After that, there was no turning back. He had spoken the words that would shadow his end. When he enters the house, there it is once again that rose smell, the odor of sanctity. Luz in her bed in her summer pajamas and sandals, her face blazing.

  All night they attend to her. Walt feeds her ice chips; he washes her face with a wet paper towel, runs ice along her palms and wrists, as he did when she ran to the car wash. Hourly they wrestle her into and out of the tub, urge her to swallow another spoonful of the red liquid for fever. “Where does it hurt you, mamita?” “Nowhere,” says Luz, “everywhere.”

  Luz swallows each mouthful of water, from each hand that gives it, with such wrenching smiles. “I am sorry,” she says and each time grows teary. “Why are you sorry?” asks Father Bill. “Nothing is your fault—nothing.” It is four in the morning when Luz sleeps at last and, at last, the blessed sweat flows.

  Josefina and Zoe, Walt Adair, Father Bill, the late-coming, dissident priest—all of them able to say they were with her, saw her and held her, and watched the fever burn through her all through that night.

  CHAPTER 59

  The way the desk clerk would tell it, the door did not open. He simply opened his eyes and looked up, 4 a.m. on the round lobby clock. There she was, dressed in her summer pajamas, her left hand upraised in a fist. Before he could even say her name she had sailed right by him, red sandals not quite touching the carpet. He called out to her as she passed, but she did not hear or did not choose to hear, just kept going down the dimly lit hallway, dark braids bobbing, pajama shirt sailing behind her.

  Blankenship tried to reach for the phone, but by then he could not move a muscle. His hands remained on the counter as if buried in bedrock. That is how he finally knew her depravity. In her presence he could not lift even his hands. The moment her followers came through the door, twenty out-of-breath strangers who had seen Luz take flight, full movement returned to him, and he leapt off his chair, able to join them as they sped down the hall in her wake. At the end of the hallway Luz stood before room number four—a view room with a trio of Joshuas just outside the plate glass, the cloud-obscured mountains beyond.

  After a moment she reached for the door and it opened. Or perhaps it was already open. The night clerk was sure Luz’s hand had not even grazed it, she had slipped no card in the s
lot, had surely not reached for the handle.

  When they saw the moon-faced man down on the floor kneeling in prayer at the foot of the bed, heavy brown robe with the cowl at the back, a great ahhhhh escaped from the throats of the strangers, nearly in unison. Ahhhh. A Franciscan, thought Blankenship, so that’s what he is. The night clerk had known all along there was something peculiar in the moon-faced man, who had smiled but not uttered a word to him in the nine nights of his stay.

  The monk’s eyes were closed, his mouth moving wordlessly. And so he remained even with the sounds of the strangers who knew him but did not till this moment know what he was. Even in the presence of Luz, who at last settled down, feet resting on the carpet like a winged insect alights on a leaf. The monk nodded twice then, as if Luz had spoken. With the slowness of dreams she reached through the air for his hand, opened her fist, revealing a heavy gold ring, which she slid on his finger with ease.

  “Thank you,” the monk says in a throaty half-whisper. Only then did he open his eyes and look up at Luz, a long adoring moment. Then he reached for her hands, placing them on the crown of his head, the gold ring glinting, that room growing as bright nearly as day.

  When Blankenship felt the light begin to pull at him, golden and hot, he lit out like he was on fire, ran down the hall and straight to the street in terror for his life.

  At the door of the diner, Bobbie was fiddling with her key. She was unable to sleep that night, not a wink, and had come a half hour early to work. She could not say why.

  When Blankenship tells her what he has just seen, she says, “All right, I’m game. Show me.” But he refuses to go back. He stands like a wind-addled sapling until Bobbie takes his hand. “Come on, honey,” she says. “You show me Luz.”

  When they get to the room, they are bathed, child, monk, and at least twenty followers, in a cloud of white. A smile on the face of the young Franciscan, Blankenship will later say, like none he has ever seen in his life nor does he wish ever to see on this earth. Reason enough to have lived, others will say, to have witnessed it. Nearly eclipsing the beauty they’d seen at the blue house, when Luz had emerged through the door as if it were smoke, sailed down to the freeway in her summer pajamas and red-sandaled feet, floating one solid mile, trailing a glorious light.

  CHAPTER 60

  Josefina is in the first phase of sleep when the ringing phone jolts her awake.

  “Luz is at the motel,” Bobbie says matter-of-factly. “You’d better get down here.”

  What craziness is this? Perhaps Josefina is dreaming. “Está enferma,” Josefina says, her lips grazing the phone.

  “What did you say?”

  “Luz is sick. She is asleep in her bed.”

  “Go look. I’ll wait. I want to hear you tell me she’s where you think.”

  Josefina sighs loudly. “For you I will look.” She puts the phone on the pillow and eases her way to the edge of the bed. When her feet touch the floor she feels nothing. She waits for the pain that precedes sensation, then the faraway sense of the floor, raising and lowering each foot before risking her weight. Finally, she is able to drag herself to the doorway then into the hall, palming the walls for support. Only briefly does it occur to Josefina that her daughter has in fact left the house. Perhaps she is dreaming. How can it be that Bobbie, a sensible woman, has made such a call? When she gets to Luz’s room, the faint light of morning has already intruded. There is Luz, right where she should be, asleep under her canopy, and there is Zoe, whom Josefina has nearly forgotten, her long body curled on a thin blanket on the floor beside Luz’s bed. Josefina shuffles around to the side, leans down to Luz, whose face appears peaceful and soft, her chest rising and falling with even slow breaths. Luz in the midst of a beautiful sleep. Josefina puts her lips against Luz’s broad, stony brow, which is cool and damp. Luz shudders, a deep easeful breath as if expelling the last of her illness.

  “Something wrong?” Zoe murmurs. “Shhh,” Josefina says, “we are fine. Sleep.”

  Then Josefina goes slowly out of the room.

  “Did someone phone?” William calls from the couch. Josefina pauses in the hall, one hand on the wall for balance, the other on her forehead to contain the throbbing. “No one,” she says. “Are you all right?” he asks as he pulls off the sheet and begins to sit up. “Stay, try to sleep. I am returning to bed,” she responds. What is wrong with that Bobbie, she thinks, to make such a call and at such an hour?

  Now her house is once again quiet. Even from outside the house comes no sound. No low hum of talk from the strangers, whom she trusts must be sleeping. Still, so unusual is the silence that Josefina goes back into the living room and raises the sheet from the near window and looks out. The first light of morning has gilded the fronts of the small stucco houses that face hers and the tops of the tall, graceful weeds, and not one person standing or sitting, not a living soul to be seen anywhere. “What is it now?” says William. “Finally,” says Josefina turning to him, “the strangers have gone.”

  On her way back to bed, she goes to the bathroom, avoiding her face in the mirror, the urine she makes now, scant, alarmingly dark. And though many minutes have passed, when she returns to her room and picks up the phone, Bobbie is still on the other end, waiting. “We had a bad night. Please, leave us in peace.” Then without listening to Bobbie’s reply, Josefina hangs up, bends down with slowness and care, so as not to add to the pounding in her head, and unplugs the phone from the jack. Returning to bed she sleeps badly and heavily till the light is fierce and the voices on the street jar her awake, till they are ringing her doorbell and pounding their fists on her door.

  CHAPTER 61

  Dead of joy is the rumor when the young monk is found, his rapturous face pressed down on the rank flowered carpet of room number four, his body smelling faintly of roses.

  Hadn’t the night clerk predicted that Luz Reyes was dangerous? That the whole sidewalk business would come to no good? Now he had proof. From the moment he first glimpsed the body—from the doorway, no closer; he was afraid to go into the room—to the moment Walt Adair knocked him out, Blankenship kept insisting Luz had killed the moon-faced monk with a look.

  “No one was murdered,” Bobbie tells the police, tells everyone who gathers outside the motel, all who walk into the diner, each person who phones her, strangers who ask if it’s true. “I saw it myself. Saw him living and then saw him dead. That sweet man died of his joy.”

  Even before the monk’s death is confirmed, the rumors, that just days before were considered too wild for belief, are being touted as fact: Luz can run and her feet do not touch the ground. She can know whom an object belongs to without being told—she can find her way to the owner, come hell or high water! And she can knock people flat with a look—maybe worse. Not a parent, that morning, whose heart is not seized with the fear of it. Could our children be right about Luz after all? Have they been telling the truth—and not been believed—since the spring?

  Before the crowd descends at the motel, the rescue squad shows up in force. The green EMT van arrives first, then the volunteer fire crew, and then in the midst of the first rush of Labor Day traffic, come the high wailing sirens and red-flashing lights of the Highway Patrol, four black and white squad cars blocking the entrance. Walt Adair, just getting ready to open the car wash, instead leaves his office and drives across in the Civic to see what is wrong.

  By eight o’clock people from all over Infidelity are heading to the motel, complaining of the three-digit heat, scared out of their wits about Luz.

  The Mariposa Lane watchers who claim to have witnessed the marvel in room number four are called back by the sirens, inciting all kinds of excitement talking freely of what they had seen. Just before dawn, they say, Luz passed through the door of her house as if she were vapor, and sailed right past them on those fast-flying feet. By the time she reached the freeway, they could not even see her. She had turned lustrous. She was nothing but forward-bent light.

  Still, they followed he
r luminous trail (mostly on foot) to the motel front doors, which were shimmering faintly. When they entered they found her looking just like herself, though hovering a bit over the threshold of room number four.

  What passed between Luz and the monk in that room, they could not adequately convey, the tenderness of the exchange surpassing anything they had seen, beyond what they’d been given on the sidewalk, far beyond what they might have hoped for when hunger, or instinct, or chance, or something beyond them to know had sent them to Infidelity, a place which appears on no map, a black dot on a small lilac flyer.

  Pilgrims unite for a great event. Was this their event? Joy ending in death?

  Some time after the ring had been given and the gold air subsided, Luz herself vanished. Not a trace of her remained to be seen. “Don’t be alarmed,” the monk said, rising to his feet to calm all who had shared in his bliss and witnessed the feats of the child. “She is safe. She has returned to her mother.” Then he blessed every one, told them not to seek after Luz and asked for some moments alone.

  “Bullshit,” said Bobbie, when she heard what the strangers were saying. “Blankenship’s a madman, and these people are deluded. No one in this town can trust what we see anymore, let alone blame a child.”

  * * *

  In the one hour that it takes to pronounce his death, the CHP has its officers fanning around the motel to keep the curious at bay.

  Dead of joy, everyone is saying by then. The EMT guys have never seen anything like it, a face so blissful, as if the monk has simply slipped out of his skin.

  Most of the sidewalk regulars are gathered by then, with Walt Adair saying over and over he was with Luz for most of the night, she was sick, blazing with fever, hardly able to stand on her feet. But he is just one. Too many say differently. Too many too afraid to believe anything but the very thing fueling their fear.

  When the monk is brought out, it gets quiet. They carry him out already zipped up. “Take him out of the bag!” someone calls, though many feel the sweetness right through the plastic, embarrassed in public by their uncontrolled tears.