by Laura McNeal
“Hi,” I said.
“Hola,” one of the workers said, and I could feel them all wondering what I was doing here and what I would say to my uncle. It was three-thirty, and I had a general sense that the workday started at seven for everyone, since that’s when it started for Amiel. There wasn’t anything wrong with what they were doing after hours, but I didn’t know how to say that.
One of the men started to pick up his crate and go, but the little boys were shrieking, “¡Más! ¡Más!”
Amiel made a gesture to the man, as if to say, “Sit down,” and then he said to me, in a scratchy sort of English, “You can stay.”
That he had spoken was surprising, more so that he spoke English, but that both of these things should be on my behalf filled me with a spreading liquid happiness. I sat down on my backpack and hugged my knees and was permitted to belong where I didn’t belong. He juggled the six balls, and when they asked for siete, he juggled seven, then ocho, then the high-altitude popcorn explosion of nine. He bowed, and we clapped, and after he stowed the juggling balls in a canvas bag, they thought of more stuff for him to throw: avocados, oranges, and finally, long toy swords that the little boys brought from the house.
“Ay, los cuchillos,” one of the men shouted, laughing.
Amiel nodded and slowly, with one eyebrow arched, put one sword between his teeth.
The little boys clapped and the men said, “Andale,” which I couldn’t translate, and Amiel juggled the toy blades for a while, throwing them high and catching them by the handles. He never missed, and we clapped, and then the woman started bringing out plates of rice and beef and salsa to us. One of the little boys brought Amiel and me cans of 7UP, but the men, I noticed, all drank beer.
The men talked to each other in Spanish while we ate, which was nice, though I caught nothing more than a few words, and when my watch said it was four-thirty, I stood up. “Thank you,” I said. “Thank you very much. I have to go home and make dinner.”
They nodded, and as I walked away, I could hear them laughing and saying, “¡Dale un machete! ¡No, DOS machetes!” I knew what a machete was. I had grown up seeing workers cut branches with them like they were cutting butter, but I thought Amiel could juggle anything, so I didn’t even look back.
Twenty-two
It was my mother who came to tell me one of the workers had cut his hand on a machete, who first saw Amiel holding his bloody hand on the driveway, and who remembered a doctor in town who did urgent care. While she was wrapping his hand with a towel that I brought, my aunt Agnès came out of her house and called my uncle, who didn’t answer his phone. Despite the blood and glaring sunlight and confusion, I wondered where my uncle was and if he was with Mary Beth.
My aunt decided she would be the one to take Amiel to the doctor since she could speak Spanish as well as French and Italian, and when she opened the door of her immaculate Audi and told Amiel to sit on the leather seats that smelled of Agnès’s musky vanilla Frenchwoman’s perfume, she told me, “You come, too, Pearl. You can help me to find the address.”
My mother couldn’t very well say I was grounded, so I sat down in the front seat and watched the workers who had sat on boxes during Amiel’s juggling show, and who had evidently brought Amiel to the driveway, hang back with their arms folded. I wondered if they had goaded him into it or if he had wanted to impress them.
All the while the blood was soaking through the towel, and as my aunt was closing Amiel’s door, she gestured for him to hold up his arm and said, “Arriba del corazón.” “Above the heart.”
I remember, along with my fear and dread, my determination not to say that he’d been juggling and thereby prove my loyalty to Amiel. We reached at last the plain stucco building, the tinted glass door, the receptionist’s pot of fake flower pens, the smell of cooked onions left over from someone’s lunch, and the tall, skinny doctor taking Amiel right back. Agnès told me to go with Amiel while she arranged things in the front office. Her self-possession, her clothes, and her coldness were all working for us now. Whenever Agnès wanted to say that something was “impressive,” she always said it was “impressing.” That’s what my aunt was, too. Very impressing.
When Amiel reached the white-papered bed in the white-shiny room, he started to faint. I was too far back to help, but the doctor must have thought that could happen because he caught Amiel in both arms. He asked me to help Amiel sit down, and when Amiel opened his eyes and stirred his legs, the doctor was unwinding the towel. Amiel’s right index finger swelled on either side of a deep burgundy gash.
“How’d you do it?” the doctor asked him. He spoke through a wispy brown mustache and studied Amiel through glasses that emphasized his baldness and fine, wrinkly skin. His voice was quiet and he wore a plaid shirt under his white coat.
I was going to say he was working in an avocado grove when Amiel said, in a low, raspy voice, “Machete.”
“I’m going to have to see how deep it is,” the doctor said. The gash was making me dizzy, and I would have liked to sit down on the floor.
“Why don’t you hold on to his other hand,” the doctor told me, so I took Amiel’s left hand while Amiel looked away and, flinching, unwillingly tightened his grip. I looked away, too, once I saw the raw bone.
“It’s not cut, the bone isn’t,” Dr. Woolcott said. “Still, you messed yourself up pretty good. Are you left-handed?”
Amiel looked confused.
“Do you understand English?”
Amiel nodded.
“I just wondered why you cut the right hand.”
“He’s got an injury to the throat,” I said. “He doesn’t talk much.”
Dr. Woolcott accepted this and went to unwrap a hypodermic needle.
I’ve had stitches before, and I’ve had needles of thick numbing liquid eased into my gums like fiery arrows, but I’ve never had anything done to me like what I saw that day. Amiel held my hand because Dr. Woolcott told him to hold it while the fiery needles of pain were thrust into thin bony places, but then, during the black stitches, Amiel dropped my hand.
“What’s wrong with your voice, son?” Dr. Woolcott asked as he washed his hands afterward.
“Accidente,” Amiel whispered, using the Spanish form.
“What kind?”
“Esteering wheel,” Amiel whispered, holding an invisible one with his good hand and showing how it had struck his neck.
“Laryngeal fracture,” the doctor said, nodding to himself. “Where’re you from?”
“México,” Amiel said, the x that becomes h in Spanish softening further in his voice.
“Well, your hand should work okay when it heals,” the doctor said. “Keep it clean. You’ll need antibiotics and something for the pain.”
My aunt, crisp and efficient in white linen, stood up when we approached the waiting room. She wrote a check from her beautiful wallet and smiled at the receptionist, the doctor, Amiel, and me.
“I pay for,” Amiel told Agnès in the car. “How much?”
My aunt said it wasn’t necesario.
Amiel insisted in English, and she refused in Spanish, and then they stopped talking.
We drove through downtown in silence, stopping only at the pharmacy to collect his prescriptions, and I tried to imagine Amiel gripping his handlebars with that swollen, stitch-filled finger as he rode his bicycle home. I was worried, too, about how he would keep a wound clean when he lived without a faucet. I knew I couldn’t tell my aunt Agnès, or anyone else, that we needed to deliver Amiel to his camp on the river, but I couldn’t stop myself from interfering, either.
“Aunt Agnès?” I said. “Doctor Woolcott said that Amiel shouldn’t be alone for the first forty-eight hours. In case something goes wrong. Also, I don’t think he can ride his bicycle.”
My aunt Agnès trained her elegant eyes on Amiel’s reflection in the mirror.
“¿Vives solo?” she asked.
Amiel lied. “No,” he rasped. “Estoy bien.”
“¿Dónde vives?” she asked, so he told her part of the truth, and when we came to Willow Glen, she guided the smooth ginger car down through the narrow corkscrew of the canyon, gliding to the oak-dappled river, down, down, down, as the air-conditioning softly buffeted my face. She told Amiel, in her Spanish, something about her esposo, which even I knew to be “husband,” and his bicicleta. Hoyt would bring the bicycle, I assumed, but where would he leave it? I didn’t know.
We reached the bright emptiness of the dead end, where the aloe field lay in pale green stripes. Seven rusty mailboxes stood openmouthed in the heat. I couldn’t help seeing them as Agnès did: she believed American mailboxes were disgraceful, worse even than our clothes. At the far eastern edge of the aloe field, you could see a little blue house, quaintly square like a playhouse or a shed, and beyond that, on a ridge, a trim yellow cottage.
My aunt was driving very slowly now, uncertain where to turn.
“¿Dónde?” she asked again, and Amiel clicked open his seat belt.
“Aquí,” he whispered.
Agnès stopped the car, and the engine ticked expensively at our feet. The sky was the color of birds’ eggs and the river trees were green ink.
“Gracias,” I could barely hear him say, and I wondered if it hurt to speak or if he just found it difficult.
“De nada,” my aunt said, her expression confused. “I could take you all ways to your house,” she said, bending her head slightly so that she could look through the windshield at the yellow house on the ridge.
Amiel shook his head, and when he closed the back door, he stood waiting for us to drive away, so Agnès made a careful circuit through the dirt circle where people parked when they came to hike the river. I kept watching him, and he watched us, long-limbed and silent, and the last thing I saw him do as my aunt pointed her car up the asphalt road was to remove from his back pocket a plastic bag, in which lay folded the white square of my letter. He didn’t hold it up or smile or wave or wink. He didn’t make any gesture at all besides holding the plastic envelope of my feelings so that I could see he had them, and then we drove away.
Twenty-three
“It is always the pity when my husband hires young ones,” Agnès said to her windshield and me. “I tell him, non. The young ones, non. Only the married who are having other family here, like brothers and uncles. This one, he is new, non?”
She waited, so I said, “Yes.”
She shook her head. “America. All friendly-friendly outside—‘Hi! Bye! Have a nice day!’ Beneath: nothing.”
It was amazing to me that my uncle had persuaded this elegant, decisively critical person to leave Paris for Fallbrook. It had something to do with Western movies was all I knew. My uncle liked to joke that the real best man at his wedding should have been Clint Eastwood, who had apparently been the first dusty American to impress young, movie-watching Agnès Pleureux.
“Hmm,” I said. I never liked to hear her thoughts on America.
Then she launched a zinger. “You are in love with him, non?”
I had never thought of Agnès as perceptive, maybe because to her I’d never been worth perception.
“No,” I said flatly, inwardly ringing like a struck bell, and she shrugged.
“L’amour, la tousse, y la galle ne se peuvent celer!” she said with an amused smile. “The love, the cough, and the scab cannot be hidden!”
I coughed uncomfortably. It seemed to me that lots of scabs would be easy to hide if you kept your clothes on. I was going to argue that point, but she went on.
“It is not you, but the culture,” she said with what I think was fondness, though it might have been amusement. “The culture says you cannot have, so you want. You think my maman was wanting American rancher for me?”
I was glad we’d switched to talking about her. “I’m guessing not.”
“She tried to tell me that the tortoise cannot live with the parakeet.”
I assumed she was the parakeet in this metaphor. “Is that another proverb?” I asked. Agnès was full of them. You’d think the French spoke in nothing but taglines for Aesop’s fables. My favorite was the bizarre “You cannot teach old monkeys to make faces.”
“Non. We had these animals in our house.”
“Really? You had a tortoise?”
“Oui! Monsieur Pouf. He is still living with my maman. Do you know, tortoises they live for a hundred years or more? He wanders off, but we find him.”
A strange image came to me of Agnès’s mother, a beautiful freeze-dried flower of a woman in a gauze scarf, walking slowly through the Tuileries in search of a tortoise while my father passed by in one of his impeccable shirts, an impeccable lover on his arm. Would my father nod? Would he help look for Monsieur Pouf? I tried to think how many times my father might have encountered Agnès’s family. Had there been three vacations there before I was born or just two?
I thought of confiding in Agnès so I could hear her thoughts about my father’s departure and his attempt to lure me to Paris. I was afraid, though, that for Agnès the correct answer was always “yes” when offered an invitation to Paris.
We were idling at the place where Willow Glen met Mission Road. A bunch of animals grazed on the grassy slope beside us: pygmy goats, llamas, a miniature horse, a bristly pig, but no hinnies, mules, or misbegotten geeps. As often happened, cars were hurtling both ways on Mission Road, one after the other like missiles, and Agnès looked right, then left, then right, then left, watching for the gap that would allow us to dart out and join them. The car kept up its steady breathing of cool air on our legs, and I shivered. The angle of the sun illuminated the face of each driver in the cars heading west so that you saw, with weird clarity, each woman or man talking, thinking, worrying, squinting, or laughing and then folding down the visor to blot out the glaring sun. I watched each fleeting person as if they were characters in a silent movie, and then I saw someone I recognized: a pretty woman in a silver-green car, her chin tilted slightly up, her brown hair loose and wavy around her shoulders. Mary Beth Farlow didn’t glance our way, just held the steering wheel with one hand, adjusted the visor, and raced past us toward the sun.
When we were safely on the road and headed in the direction from which Mary Beth’s car had come, I felt the strangeness of knowing something I hadn’t told.
“Young people do what they want always,” Agnès said, turning briefly to glance at me. She wasn’t smiling this time. Instead, she looked a little sad. “But I will tell you a saying my father told to me. Amour fait beaucoup, mais argent fait tout.”
I waited because the only word I understood was “love.” “Which means?” I asked.
“Love does much,” she said, “but money does all.”
Twenty-four
On Saturday, my sentence was over. Still my mother didn’t get up from her desk or leave, and as the hours passed, I felt like a helium balloon in her hand, bobbing around the house. Noon. One o’clock. Two. At two-thirty, she started to change her clothes for birding with Louise. “Are you and Greenie doing something tonight?” my mother asked.
“I don’t know. I have to call her.”
“I haven’t seen her much. Did you have a fight?”
“No,” I said. “She has a boyfriend.”
“Is he nice?”
“Not really.”
She applied lip balm, sunscreen, and a hat. “Want to come with us? The lagoon is beautiful this time of year.”
“Nah,” I said. “Sorry.”
I could tell she was remembering the preschool me, the one who cried and cried about being separated from her until finally she withdrew me from the program and let me stay home. Every day for the first week of blissful reunion, I clapped her cheeks, brought my lips close to hers, and said, “I can’t get enough of you.”
“Bye,” I called out to her from the porch, and she hesitated, then walked away.
I stuffed my backpack with bottles of purified water, a tube of antibiotic cream, some Luden’s Wild Cherry cough
drops, and a roll of bandages so old they might have been Lavar’s. They were still pretty clean, though.
I swung my leg over the bike and headed away from the house, anxious to see Amiel, but there in my path was my uncle, blasting toward me on his motorbike.
“Hey, Pearl,” he said, stopping the bike and removing his helmet. “I understand you helped Abdiel yesterday.”
“Amiel?” I asked.
“Yeah, Amiel. Agnès isn’t too great with blood. Is he okay?”
I nodded.
“Hey, listen,” he said. “I’m supposed to take his bicycle to him, right? That’s what Agnès said.”
“Uh-huh,” I said. The backpack full of chilled water bottles pressed against my spine.
“You can show me where he lives, right? When did you become a cyclist, anyway?”
Part of Hoyt’s charm was his constant question-asking. He was like a caffeinated gambler at a slot machine.
“I was just going for a ride,” I said.
“Well, why don’t you ride his bike, and I’ll pick you up after you drop it off, okay?”
“Well, I guess I could.”
“Tell me how far it is and so forth, the address, and I’ll give you a head start. I’ll come get you.”
I shifted the weight of the bottles on my back and was alarmed by the loud bubbly sound they made.
“I was going to Greenie’s afterward, though.”
“Hey, that’s no problem. I could take you there afterward.”
“Well, it’s not …” I wasn’t good at improvisation. I paused as if I were working out a logistical problem. “You know, I think I could walk from where Amiel lives to Greenie’s, really. And then her mom could take me home.”
“You sure?”