Where to Choose

by Penny Mickelbury

  She ran back around the house. She stopped when she reached the door. Luisa was standing in the doorway holding a gun, pointing it at Carole Ann.

  “Luisa.” It was a word spoken, not a name called in greeting, be­cause Carole Ann did not know how to greet the person aiming the gun at her. And not because of the weapon, but because this Luisa was unknown to her. The familiar, soft roundness of her body and face had metamorphosed into hard angles. The crinkles around her eyes seemed to have flattened, and the laugh lines around her mouth frozen into hard ridges. Carole Ann searched the mouth for signs that it once had whispered “Madre de Dios” a dozen times a day. These lips were straight lines, the fullness drained from them. This Luisa was flat. Like a doormat. And empty, like a zombie. The irony was not lost on Carole Ann, but she hadn’t the strength to in­dulge it.

  They stood staring at each other, Luisa framed in the door of the lovely house that should have—perhaps at one time had—wel­comed guests, for it was, Carole Ann had concluded, the guest house of the estate. She detected movement in her peripheral vi­sion, off to her left. Luisa, she was certain, could see only what was directly in front of her, her peripheral vision restricted by the door frame. Tommy was bleeding to death, slowly and surely. She had to do something. She took a step backward and Luisa raised the gun a couple of inches. It was an automatic of some kind. Carole Ann didn’t know; she didn’t like guns. But she could differentiate be­tween a revolver and an automatic. She raised her hands over her head and took another backward step.

  “You’ve already shot one person, Luisa. Don’t make it worse.”

  “I killed him so it can’t be worse,” Luisa said, and Carole Ann felt a silly rush of gratitude. The voice hadn’t undergone alteration. It still was Luisa’s slightly sing-song little girl voice, still heavily ac­cented after almost half a century of Americanization.

  “Will you kill me, too, Luisa?” deciding it best to allow her to think she’d killed Tommy.

  Her answer was a dead stare. There was no light in her eyes. There was nothing remaining of the Luisa Carole Ann had known. This Luisa blinked slowly, like a lizard, and Carole Ann recalled the night that Grayce was attacked; the night that she killed Grayce’s attacker. Luisa had sat dead like that in the living room that night. Was that the beginning? For from that night on, Luisa had been ab­sent from their lives, and they had been so engrossed with the effort of preventing those lives from collapsing that they had not forced the issue of Luisa. She had seemed not to want to be involved in their troubles, and they had accepted her right to steer clear of dif­ficulty. After all, Luisa hadn’t shot anybody or been beaten up, even though she’d been charged as an accessory, along with Bert and Angie.

  “They found out, didn’t they? The police. When they charged you but then didn’t arrest you. They found out that you were-—”

  “Say it!” Luisa hissed at her. “Say it! The policia find out I’m illegal alien. Illegal. Alien. Wetback border rat. They all want me to con­fess, to get sent back, so they can keep their business, Pablo and Hector and Ricky. But I say no! If I go back, they all go back, I tell them. All my life nobody ever does what I want to do. Never! No mas. No mas. ”

  Carole Ann watched the sadness envelop Luisa, and so heavy was the mantle that it caused her shoulders to sag, and the gun lowered enough that she could have chanced an escape. But Luisa looked at her through half-closed eyes and emanated a hatred so forceful that Carole Ann flinched. And when she flinched, the gun inched back up into heart range.

  Carole Ann wanted to be able to say something to this woman at whose table she had eaten, in whose home she had slept, for whom she had baked her favorite coconut cakes for her birthday. To this woman Carole Ann could think of nothing to say.

  “What happened, Luisa?” she finally managed. “What did we do wrong?”

  Luisa’s now skinny lips curled as if she were preparing to spit. “They always thought they were better than me, with their good jobs and big cars and new clothes and furniture and bridge clubs and friends. Anglo jobs and Anglo friends and Anglo cars—”

  “What the hell are you talking about, Luisa!” Carole Ann forgot to be afraid and dropped her arms. “These are Black and brown women you’re talking about, women just like you!”

  “Not like me! Never like me! Like the people in the Ebony maga­zine. Black Anglos, caring about nothing but working hard and sav­ing money and sending kids to college.” She finished with an anguished wail that spoke of sorrow, ancient and deep; and of regret and loss and anger.

  Flashes of movement left and right. She kept her eyes glued on Luisa’s gun and her peripheral consciousness attuned to the fact that help was at hand. And grateful as she was, she knew that they would kill Luisa. To them, she was not a mother figure; she was a smuggler, a kidnapper, an illegal alien, and an accessory after the fact in the negligent homicide deaths of twenty-three people. Tears welled up in her eyes and she extended a hand to Luisa, and took a step toward her.

  “Let me help you, Luisa. You know I can help you.”

  “I don’t need your help. I don’t need them, either,” Luisa snarled. “Not anymore. I’m rich, too. I’m going home to Juarez and be rich.” Then she fired off a round.

  Carole Ann floated to the ground on a wildly rocking wave of pain and euphoria. The pain was searing in its place, and the airy eupho­ria balanced it. Yin and yang. She smiled. Al would appreciate the reference.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  When she opened her eyes the first time, she saw her mother and smiled at her. Her mother wept. She closed her eyes again and won­dered why her mother was crying. The second time she opened her eyes, Grayce, Roberta, Angie, Addie, Warren, Valerie, and Anthony were looking down at her. Why were they all here? And where were Tommy and Luisa? She closed her eyes and welcomed the return to unconsciousness. When her eyes opened the third time, they saw Jake Graham.

  “Jesus,” she mumbled through lips too drugged for proper move­ment. “What are you doing here?” And he laughed and cried and she laughed and cried with him and he called her the granddaddy of shit magnets and they both laughed and cried until she fell asleep again.

  Eventually, after four and a half days, she woke up and remained awake. Her mother was dozing in a chair next to the bed, holding her daughter’s hand. When Carole Ann moved, Grayce sat up, wide- eyed and attentive. “My baby,” she whispered, a wide grin overpow­ering the tears. And she held and rocked her daughter for a long, long time. Then, as always, she released her.

  Carole Ann assessed herself. She was fuzzy and groggy and hun­gry. When she tried to sit upright, screaming pain radiated from her left shoulder, down her left side, and around to her back. She sank back into the pillows and began wiggling feet and toes and hands and fingers. She lifted her legs and arms and moved her head from side to side. With her right hand she felt her head and face, and she explored the bandage that all but covered the left side of her torso. To touch herself caused pain, so she stopped.

  “Ma. Luisa?”

  Grayce inhaled deeply, as if she were doing yoga breathing exer­cises. “She’s dead. Anthony says they shot her after she shot you.”

  Carole Ann nodded. “Tommy?” she asked in a whisper, and was caught by surprise at the transformation in her mother.

  Grayce snorted in a very unladylike fashion. “He’s at Bert’s, eat­ing everything under the sun and driving her and everybody crazy! That boy is as hardheaded as they come. Won’t do a thing you tell him and laughs when you fuss at him. And Valerie lets him get away with it!”

  Carole Ann interrupted Grayce’s raving. “Tommy’s at Bert’s eat­ing and laughing and I’m still in here?” She moved to sit up and flopped quickly back into the pillows, stifling the cry of agony in her throat.

  “Luisa’s aim had improved by the time she got around to shoot­ing you,” Grayce said dryly. “Tommy’s wound bled a lot, but wasn’t serious. The bullet went straight through. You, on the other hand, almost died,” and her voice c
aught on that last word and tears filled her eyes and spilled down her cheeks. “You’ve got to stop all this, C.A. Please promise me you will.”

  “Stop what, Ma? This is the first time I’ve ever been shot.”

  “Stop this attitude for one thing!” Grayce snapped. “There is nothing funny about what you just did here. Or what you did in Louisiana. I used to worry about you defending all those hardened criminals, but you’ve been in more danger since you stopped prac­ticing law than when you spent all your time with drug dealers and murderers! You’ve got to stop it.”

  Bilious rage arose in Carole Ann and she released it, not minding that it was directed at her own mother. “You talk like I wanted to get shot! What was I supposed to do? Let them kill Tommy? I owed him! He saved my life, Ma! Do you understand at all what kind of weight that is? He risked his life, and lost his job in the process, trying to save me. I was obligated to go get him, and I’d do it again. Just like I’d go again to find out who killed Al. That was my obligation to him.”

  “And what of your obligation to yourself?” Grayce asked, her anger icy and cold, the antithesis of her daughter’s. “Do you need to die to satisfy it?”

  Carole Ann and her mother locked stares. The mother was the teacher and therefore the master, and so the daughter was the first to yield. She looked away, wounded by her mother’s anger and still harboring a sense of betrayal at the secrets kept from her, a justifi­cation for her own anger. “I feel like I’m down the rabbit hole,” she said.

  “The difference being everything you’ve experienced is real,” the mother replied, without anger but still full of parental resolve.

  “I think Luisa hated us.”

  Grayce shook her head in disgust. “Luisa always blamed every­body for her problems.”

  Carole Ann groaned. Another secret about to be revealed. This was worse than the rabbit hole. Reality always was. “So you’re say­ing you knew how she felt?”

  “I knew, we all knew, of Luisa’s resentment. But it was her choice to live as she did. She allowed Hector to control her from Mex­ico—”

  Carole Ann was incredulous. “You knew he was alive? You’ve al­ways known? About everything?”

  “Not everything,” Grayce replied, shaking her head. “That he was alive, yes. He had to be. How else was Luisa supporting herself and the children? She never earned more than minimum wage and she refused every opportunity we put in her path. And over the years, C.A., there were so many that we lost count. Luisa refused— flat out refused—to study English, to earn her GED, to take any of the skills training courses we set up for her and paid for. She accused us of acting like Anglos.”

  “She said that to me!” Carole Ann had forgotten and the memory returned with force. “Black Anglos, she said.”

  “Nigger Anglos, Hector used to call us,” Grayce said with a venom Carole Ann never before had witnessed. “Told Mitch he was a fool for being in the Army and told me he was a dead fool after he was killed. He called Bert’s Charlie a thief after he bought his own rig. Hector refused to believe that a Colored man could—or would—work long enough and hard enough to afford his own rig. But he saved his real nastiness for Angie. He called her puta, and if you don’t know what that means, you’ll have to ask someone else. Bad enough for Hector that she was a lesbian, but with a Black woman? And after Dottie was dead and he found out that Angie was the beneficiary of Dottie’s double indemnity life insurance pol­icy—” Grayce forced a bark of dry laughter from her throat that sounded as if the effort had hurt.

  “You knew all these things and continued a friendship with Luisa? Why?”

  “Because!” Grayce snapped. “We were all she had! Hector was nothing without her and so he held on to her, and she was nothing without us and she held on to us!” She heard all the questions writ­ten on her daughter’s face. “She was our friend, C.A. We couldn’t turn our backs on her weaknesses and her madness any more than if she had cancer or...or...diabetes or some other thing that slowly kills the body. What Luisa suffered from—and you’d have to get a name from the therapists—was slowly killing her spirit. Now, if we’d known about the illegal-alien smuggling, things would have been different! We knew that Pablo Gutierrez traveled back and forth to Mexico and that he brought Luisa money from Hector. But that’s all we knew, all we wanted to know, and if we did anything wrong, it was that. We didn’t want to know more. About Hector and Luisa or about Mr. Gutierrez’s trips and his strange visitors. We just wanted to live our lives and to be happy.”

  “But what a price you paid, Ma.”

  Grayce laughed, a real laugh this time, though slightly tinged with irony. “Happy always has carried a high price, C.A. That’s one of the things we could never make Luisa understand. But I hope and pray that you do. Happiness is so easy to have that people think it’s free. But you pay. When you make a painful decision, you’re buying your happiness. When you do what’s right for you, even if it’s not right for somebody else, you’re buying your happiness.”

  Carole Ann grinned at her mother. “Are you sure about that, Ma?” she asked, confident that no trace of the setup in progress was revealed in her voice.

  “Of course I am,” snapped Grayce righteously.

  “Then everything I’ve done in the past year should be a pretty big down payment on a big bunch of happiness,” she said, and winced. Because of the pain caused by the motion of raising her arms in vic­tory, and by her mother’s sniffed, “Serves you right.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Summer was in full swing when Carole Ann got back to Washing­ton. It was ninety-six degrees and the humidity was 89 percent. It was not yet ten o’clock in the morning. Whenever D.C. did this, Ca­role Ann gave serious thought to living elsewhere. They’d been play­ing this game for more than fifteen years, she and D.C., and D.C. still was the most miserable place in the world in the summer and she still lived in it, almost on the bank of the Potomac River, the muggiest part of town.

  From the balcony of her penthouse condominium she could see most of Washington and a good bit of that part of Virginia closest to Washington, the Potomac River the dividing line between the two. Boats sped and bobbed and glided across the placid surface, imper­vious to the heat.

  Despite the protective overhang that shielded her balcony, she was drenched in perspiration. But so grateful was she to be home that she dismissed all thoughts of retreating to the air-conditioned interior. This was her home. This was her view. She had missed it. And she intended to savor it. She leaned over the railing and looked down at the ground. Grass and flower beds trimmed to neat and or­derly submission. Not the wild, exotic splendor of Jacaranda Es­tates—this was azalea and rose and forsythia and pyracantha coun­try. People, despite the heat, clad in full business armor, rushing to and fro; nothing casually elegant or laid-back about them.

  She knew that it was both unwise and counterproductive to con­tinue drawing comparisons between D.C. and L.A., yet she could not stop. Everything she saw here with her eyes, her brain compared and contrasted to similar items and objects there: The Potomac and the Pacific; azaleas and bougainvillea; government lawyers and studio executives; Jacaranda Estates and Foggy Bottom; home and home. Different places for different people. She was not now who she had been growing up in Los Angeles, and she had been mistaken to expect that things and people there would have—or should have—remained unchanged. And though she’d made peace with those changes before she left, she would, forever, remember her hurt. And that she knew to be unfair.

  She stretched out full length in one of the rattan chaise lounges and removed her robe, exposing her still-healing wound to nature’s heating pad. She could not feel the sun directly because of the over­hang, but she welcomed the moist heat, so different from L.A.’s crispy dryness.

  “You gotta stop this, C.A.,” she muttered to herself, doing the work for Tommy or Jake. And back her mind and memory went to Los Angeles, Tommy’s new home.

  He had fallen in love with the place. Not to
mention with his new car, which he’d gone to retrieve immediately upon leaving the hos­pital, which is what had annoyed Bert and Grayce so. And though Valerie, too, loved the old convertible and the beach and Rodeo Drive, she was enchanted most by Jacaranda Estates. Where they now would live, next door to Roberta, in Sadie Osterheim’s house. And Tommy and Anthony would be Jake’s West Coast operatives. And Anthony’s mother, the former Gloria Jenkins, would be the new property manager at Jacaranda Estates. And Anthony and his fiancée would be the new residents of Luisa’s house. All made possi­ble because Carole Ann was the new owner of the land beneath Jacaranda Estates. “The person best equipped to carry on my dreams and my work,” according to Arthur Jennings.

  Carole Ann didn’t know what to believe, or think, or feel about the old man’s unexpected—and unwelcome—gift, but she was cer­tain beyond a shadow of a doubt that she did not want to remain in Los Angeles to “carry on” for Arthur Jennings or any other reason, so she’d returned to Washington.

  She’d run away from L.A., her mother said, just as Jake had ac­cused her of running away from D.C. Was it only three months ago? She marveled at the effects of the passage of time. She’d gone to L.A. seeking refuge and definition in the secure embrace of her home and family and had found, instead, that everything she’d revered as sacred was tarnished and ugly.

  “Preposterous!” her mother had almost shouted when Carole Ann had attempted an explanation of her feelings. “You were loved completely and fully and nothing that happened could ever affect or change that!”

  “But why didn’t you ever tell me?”

  “Because you didn’t need to know. Because it was none of your business. Because it was too painful. Because we had to live every day in the present. We couldn’t afford to think about or worry about or cry about the past.”