The Exquisite and Immaculate Grace of Carmen Espinoza

by Rebecca Taylor

  Finally, it came apart, unwound like snakes slithering into a thousand different directions.

  In the next scene, the boys dumped her and her clothes onto a front lawn before speeding away in a truck. After that, an older man had her by the hair and was dragging her, naked and crying, into the house. Inside, he threw her against the wall of her bedroom, grabbed the bible from her dresser and threw it at her face.

  The picture dissolved and reformed again.

  It was her bedroom. Twilight seeped through her bedroom window throwing everything under shades of blue and gray. It looked quiet. She was curled up on her bed, her knees near her chest, her hand resting on the large mound of her belly.

  When she sobbed, her shoulders shook.

  The image came apart quickly. “Wait,” I said. I wanted a minute, needed to think. I knew exactly what I had seen, knew exactly what it meant. With that picture, my whole world shifted—my very existence.

  There was no waiting, the next image was already forming.

  My mother is again in her room, and everything is changed. Her posters are gone, and a crib in crammed into the corner.

  A toddler sits crying on the floor.

  My mother ignores it.

  I can not hear it, but the baby’s face is getting redder as its crying is growing more intense. My mother is sitting at her vanity staring into her own tired reflection. The baby falls over sideways, its face an intense compression of hysterical crying—my mother leans closer to her mirror and puts her hands over her ears. Her own eyes and lips pressed tight until, like a triggered bomb, she explodes. When she turns to the crying baby, her face looks like unleashed rage—she shouts something over and over at the child too young to understand. Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!

  Suddenly, her door opens and the man who had dragged her into the house and thrown the bible in her face storms into the room. He shouts at my mother and slaps her across the face before bending down to pick up the baby.

  Before bending down to pick up me.

  He carries me, still screaming, out of the room.

  As my mother lies in a heap on the floor, the room around her begins to come undone, a few threads at a time until finally, she too unravels, pulls apart, fades into the reality of what all of this is—not a movie, a memory. The catalog of a time, seventeen years ago, when my mother was forced to become the person she was not prepared to be.

  My mother.

  The constant caretaker of a consequence.

  The living reminder of a horrifying night.

  I didn’t want to see anymore, I wanted to stop looking. It was enough, just this, but the next memory began to form anyway—the truth did not care about my capacity to handle it.

  I steeled myself, prepared myself to again have my eyes opened to the worst.

  But my mother was smiling again. A big, bright, red smile. Her eyes were playful, gazing up into a face I had not seen in almost thirteen years. My father.

  “No,” water rushed past my throat. He was not my father I reminded myself. It had been a hope I had hung onto for so long, a wish made on so many nights—that my father would come back to get me, to save me. Now I knew why he never did.

  The picture looked familiar, and then I knew why. The photo. The only family picture, the one I had stolen from my mother’s drawer. Here we were, come to life, walking through the amusement park. My mother was smiling up at something her husband, Daniel’s father and my step-father, had just said. A few steps in front of them, Daniel stood on a curb, looking down at something holding his attention on the concrete below.

  Suddenly, I knew what was coming. It was at the edge of my own memory, like a peering into light fog, submerged near my conscious.

  “Don’t,” I begged.

  But I had no impact on there past events.

  There I was, four year old me, walking up to Daniel from behind. My arms moved fast, action without thought, my hands connected with his back and shoved him knees first onto the cement.

  His shocked expression crumbled into distress, then tears as he sat back and looked at his small, bloody palms and knees. My parents ran to him, and as my father scooped little Daniel up into his protective arms, my mother turned on me.

  I remembered this. The movie continued to play out before me and also ignited a long dormant flame inside my head.

  She grabbed my arm and yanked me to her side.

  My body went limp, an automatic resistance to what was coming next, but my mother just yanked my arm straight up and smacked my bare leg to make me straighten them before hauling me off to an unoccupied bathroom.

  Here, in the epiphany pool, I watched a woman dragging her daughter away and the image began to fall apart, but inside my head, I knew what happened next.

  In that bathroom, my mother towered over me. She slapped my head and shoved me against the bathroom stall, “How do you like it,” she hissed into my face with an expression of pure hatred.

  My heart pumped panic through my blood as my ears and head rang from the force of her hand. She pushed me towards the toilet and my feet slipped on the small white tiles beneath us. My hand landed in the cold water and my face against the seat. She grabbed my hair, pulled me up, then shoved me down again.

  “Get up,” she hissed. “You’re a pig.”

  With my hands on the plastic seat, I pushed myself up, wishing she would decide she was finished punishing me and open the stall door.

  She bent over, her face a horrible sneer, and whispered to me, “If you ever touch him again…I’ll kill you.” She stood up, glared at me, stared at me, gave me all her attention alone in this small and scary place. It wasn’t the way she looked at Daniel, she never looked at me the way she looked at him.

  The main door to the bathroom opened and the sound of women’s voices echoed off the walls.

  My mother slid the latch on the stall. “I hate you,” she whispered, and walked out.

  Chapter Nineteen

  The Truth

  I already remembered, remembered everything, but the image formed anyway.

  Daniel is standing at the top of our stairs. He is smiling, big cheeked, bright eyes. In his hands, he is holding a small, dark haired doll. My only birthday gift.

  Behind him, I walk out of our bathroom and see him. My brows furrow and my mouth opens wide, I am screaming at him.

  Daniel jumps, and turns toward the sound of my voice.

  I charge across the hall, arms reaching, mouth screaming.

  Downstairs, my mother comes running—she will be too late.

  My hands connect with Daniel’s chest, and his small body launches backwards.

  Just as my mother arrives at the bottom of the stairs.

  On this movie, there is no sound, but my memory has it, stored deep within me for all these years. Daniel’s head cracking against a wooden stair, the weight of his body breaking bones in his neck, the soft thump of his body landing a breath later.

  My mother is charging up the stairs. Her hair is half rolled into hot curlers on top of her head, one eye lined in black, her white bra glowing against her dark skin.

  Her red lips morph from fierce anger into a terrified despair. She stops on the stair just below Daniel and it’s as if she is frozen in time. She does not move.

  Neither does Daniel.

  At the top of the stairs, I clutch my doll to my chest.

  Chapter Twenty

  A Promise

  There are no more images. When the threads of light pull apart this time, they keep moving into the dark, a thousand lines of light swim off in every possible direction.

  I am alone in the dark.

  My eyes close even though it makes no difference—there is nothing to shut out. The water rushes in and out of me with every breath while pressing in on me from every direction.

  My mother didn’t kill Daniel—I did.

  “I didn’t mean to,” my lips moved, and even though there was no sound for them, they still had the feel of a childish plea—the exact words
I had used that day.

  I didn’t mean to—but I still did.

  Broken hearted and dying from grief, my step father left us. Daniel had been his only son, and intentional or not, I had killed him and he could not forgive me.

  I didn’t know if my mother had ever loved me, maybe she was not capable of loving the result of that horrifying night, but I did believe she had always thought of me as her punishment, her cross to bear. And after Daniel died and my step father left, like the images in these inky waters, my mother began to come apart.

  She started calling me a demon.

  She believed I was the devil.

  She protected herself from me with crucifixes and bible verse and, worst of all, distance. It was the distance, more than anything, that had made me believe there was something wrong with me, like I was a foul thing not to be touched.

  Her last words to me, on the day I left her house, echoed in my head—the devil took him from me. For my mother, that devil had always been me.

  My body began to move. It was impossible to tell which way I was going because I no longer knew from which way I had come. I could be floating back up to the surface, or deeper still into a fathomless eternal suspension. Neither option was something I wanted.

  Was this my punishment? My own personal trap in The Between for the offense I’d committed against Daniel? I had stolen his life and now I would be forced to exist here, in a watery prison of nonexistence?

  Or was I heading back to the surface, back to the faint who had so patiently waited for my time to run out?

  All around me, the water seemed lighter, more dark gray than black. I didn’t allow myself to believe I was for sure heading to the surface because if this was just some trick my brain was playing, the disappointment of being wrong would crush whatever hope my heart still clung to. The truth was, given the choice, I would rather die than stay trapped here forever. And maybe, on the surface, there was still the chance of seeing Ray one last time.

  A murky doubt pulled at my chest and filled my insides with a vacuous foreboding, an uncertainty that I was certainly never going to see Ray again—because I didn’t deserve to. I wasn’t entitled to ever feel that warmth again, the touch of his hand, that look in his eyes. Love. Someone, something, had loved me in this world and now I would never experience that again. I had killed Daniel—and then failed to save him.

  Something slithered between my waist and the inside of my arm. My body jerked and a wave of repulsion rolled though me—what was that? It felt like a snake, or a long worm. I held my sides tight with both my arms while I tried to peer into the gloomy darkness all around me. The water was lighter, but still too dark to see.

  Something slipped past my neck and sent a shiver down my back, I twisted my body, tried to see, and caught sight of something disappearing into the dark waters. It looked like legs, ghostly human legs. I stared into the now dark blue water, straining to see beyond my eye’s limits, but whatever, or whoever, was gone.

  Movement around my leg made me jump, and when I looked down, two wide eyes stared up at me.

  I screamed, but the sound was muffled by the water around me and inside me.

  The face screamed back.

  Reflexively, my feet kicked at the thing and tried to get away from it. With a quick undulation of its transparent form, it slipped through the water until it stopped a few feet in front of me and continued to stare from a distance. Then, with an unnaturally severe arch of its back, it shot away into the dark.

  My heart pounded loud inside my head. As the water continued to grow lighter and lighter by degree, my head turned first one way and then the other as my eyes caught glimpses of movement, flickers of shadows in the water all around me until, finally, the water was teeming with the rolling movements of—what were they? Like underwater faints.

  They swished and swam all around and over me, I closed my eyes and tried to force myself to stay calm, but it was impossible. A frantic panic clawed at my chest. Maybe the water was no protection at all, the faints had found me here. I expected the pull to start at any moment, the feel of them sucking my life away.

  Past their chaotic swirl, the water was getting brighter and when one of faints somersaulted in front of me, I could see a bright iridescence shining from within it. A moment later, I could see that all these faints had the same glow, a shimmering light that came from within them.

  I looked up.

  Above me, the gaping surface of the water hung there, like a wide mouth waiting for me to crawl through. My body was still moving, drawing through the waters, and now I knew where. I kicked my legs and pushed with my arms, wiggled the way I imagined people who knew how to swim would do, but after several exhaustive minutes I stopped. All my activity did not increase the pace of my ascent at all—it seemed to only excite the faints all around me into an even greater frenzy.

  I worried about stirring them up, drawing even more attention to myself. Already they seemed fascinated by me—I didn’t want them to suddenly decide they were hungry.

  And why weren’t these faints feeding on me?

  The surface, like a great white beacon of light, was only feet above me now. A feeling lodged in my chest, a feeling I wished would go away because it hurt, it pressed against my heart and made it difficult to swallow. With the sight of the surface, a large burden of hope had found me, ballooned inside me, and as I rose, the balloon expanded until the pressure of it forced a rising tide of emotion out in front of it.

  I didn’t want to die.

  Not yet, please. I was so sorry. Sorry for everything. Sorry for Daniel, sorry for my mother—I was sorry for myself. For the whole stupid world were sad irreversible things happened. Where people hurt each other, and they meant to, and they meant to hurt themselves. It was an ugly place, full of horrible people, events, and circumstances that seemed almost designed to damage. To set you up for failure.

  Set you up for pain.

  And still, I did not want to leave it yet.

  I did not want to die.

  I did not want to become one of these ghosts, a faint destined to cling to the barest breath of a life.

  Even though it was so broken. Even though I had so much to fix. Even though I was probably cursed by actions that were unforgivable—I still wanted my life.

  The hope in my chest expanded so wide, the pain of it was so great, I knew for sure it would burst any second and kill me.

  The softest of whispers brushed against my cheek, and when I looked, I saw my mother, floating in the waters beside me. Her hair floated out around her head, a wild dark mane framing her ghostly transparent face. She was staring at me, looking directly at me, into me, the expression on her face was one I had never seen directed at me before.

  Her brows bunched between her eyes and her mouth pulled itself into a mournful frown. My mother had often looked sad, but this was something more—she looked sad for me. There was the light of recognition in her eyes and I thought, maybe, she might actually realize who I was. “Mom?”

  Surrounded by water, my word echoed inside my head, but she had heard me. Her face looked surprised, then very sad again. “Why are you here Carmen?” she looked around us, as if she were just waking up to this strange world around us. “You should not be here,” she shook her head.

  “Daniel is here,” I said, my words swimming out on the water in my lungs. “He came to find me, he needed my help.”

  She stared at me, her hair undulating in the water that was moving more now that we were getting so close to the surface. “Daniel?” she shook her head. “He’s not here. Not here.” Her expression grew even darker. “Carmen, tell me my children are not in this strange place. Tell me this is some horrible dream.”

  The bruise from the rope she had tied around her neck stood out in sharp contrast against her translucent form. “It’s not a dream mama.”

  She closed her eyes and arched her neck, as if she were racked with pain. “It’s too much,” she cried. “It is too much to bear.” She ret
urned her gaze to me, “This is my punishment. I see that now. I always thought you were my punishment. God’s punishment for my ways, my choices. My punishment for not listening. I believed you were sent to remind me, always, that I had done wrong things in my life. Disobeyed.”

  Her face hardened into an expression of deep sadness, of tremendous regret. It was too much, like looking into her soul. My eyes shifted to the waters around us.

  “It never occurred to me that you were something else altogether. That you were a gift. A light to try and help me see through all the darkness that had happened to me. But I shut my eyes to you. I closed my heart and shaped you into a haunted thing.”

  “Stop mama.”

  “No. It was your hand that pushed him, but my blindness that drove you to it. It’s my fault he died Carmen, not yours. Not a child. I always blamed you, and I was wrong. I’m sorry Carmen.”

  “I’m sorry too,” I tried to say, but my voice had no strength and came out as a soundless rush of water. I kept moving up, but my mother had stopped and I now stared down at her. When the surface slapped against the top of my head, I reached my hand down to her, “Come with me,” I pushed the words harder so she could hear them.

  She shook her head, “I can not leave here Carmen.” She looked around at what seemed to be her watery cell. “I’m not sure how.”

  The air above hit the skin on my forehead and I pushed my face down into the water so I could watch her as long as I could.

  “Carmen!” she shouted.

  “Yes mama!”

  “Save him!”

  “I’ll will! I’ll try!”

  Her face crumbled into despair.

  “Save yourself!” she cried. “Save my daughter!” and she slipped into the depths below.

  When my body broke the surface, my arms splashed for the land nearby as my lungs began to eject what felt like gallons of water from my insides. Coughing and choking, I struggled to grasp at the sharp edge of land and hang on while my body desperately tried to haul air into lungs still swimming in water.