“It always rains on my birthday,” Teresa told Bergen. They had run to his car, yet had still managed to get soaking wet.
“So you think it’s personal?” Bergen said. “You think it’s a comment from the heavens?”
Teresa shrugged. She crossed her legs and pulled her skirt down. “You don’t have to do this,” she said politely. “I don’t care if we go out to dinner.”
“It’s my pleasure,” Bergen said. He started the car and drove down Divisadero Street. “It’s not every day I get to take someone out to celebrate the fact that she’s sweet sixteen.”
“I’m not so sweet,” Teresa said.
“You are in my book,” Bergen said.
For the first time, Silver had forgotten her birthday. He hadn’t been home for days; he was looking for an apartment in San Francisco, he was putting his business in order, moving the boxes in their garage to a warehouse he had rented in Daley City. He was too busy to leave behind a silk scarf or a box of chocolates, he hadn’t even remembered to send a card.
“Chinese, French, or Mexican?” Bergen asked.
Teresa looked at him as though he’d just asked the stupidest question in the world. “I don’t care,” she told him.
Bergen chose Chinese; they parked in the center of town, and then ran to the restaurant. Inside, Bergen hung up Teresa’s coat and then his own. They sat in a red booth, and Bergen ordered for them. Teresa curled a strand of hair around her finger and sighed.
“I know being young isn’t easy,” Bergen said, after the waiter had put the dishes of food on the table.
“Are you telling me that when I’m old I’ll be happy?” Teresa asked.
Bergen put food on both their plates. “I’m happy,” he said.
“I’m glad someone is,” Teresa told him.
“What would it take?” Bergen asked softly. “What would it take to make you happy?”
Teresa picked up the chopsticks by the side of her plate. “I can’t use these,” she said, close to tears.
“Use your fork,” Bergen suggested. “You know,” he told her once she had begun eating, “I wanted us to go out together, just you and me, because I’ve started to think of you as a daughter.”
Teresa put down her fork. “Well, I’m not,” she said. “I’m not your daughter.”
“I don’t care,” Bergen said. “I think of you that way anyway.”
After the meal, Bergen put the present he had bought her in the fortune cookie bowl. When Teresa opened the small black box she saw a pair of pearl earrings.
“They’re beautiful,” she said. “They’re perfect.”
“The other part of your present is from your mother. She’ll take you to a jewelry store tomorrow where they’ll pierce your ears. I don’t know who would want that as a present, but that’s what she said you wanted.”
Teresa got up, went around to the other side of the booth, and kissed the detective’s cheek. “It’s just what I wanted,” she said.
On the way home, Teresa turned on the car radio. “I had a pretty good time,” she admitted.
Dina had stayed home so that she could surprise Teresa with a chocolate fudge cake. But once they were back in the house, Teresa no longer felt like celebrating; she sat down at the kitchen table and rested her head on her palm.
Dina opened the box Bergen had given Teresa and looked at the earrings approvingly. “You can wear these to Silver’s wedding,” she told her daughter.
Teresa pushed her plate of cake away. She had met Lee once, at a dinner arranged to introduce the families. Silver had barely been able to stay in his seat; he wandered around the dining room in Lee’s house, as if desperate to stretch his legs. Teresa had been careful not to look at Lee for too long, but one glance told her how happy Lee was, how much in love.
Bergen reached for Teresa’s plate. “If you don’t want that cake, I’ll take it.”
“Go ahead,” Teresa told him. “I hate chocolate.”
“Since when?” Dina asked her daughter. “Since Silver decided to get married?”
Teresa glared at her mother. “I don’t care what he does.”
“Oh sure,” Dina said. “What good does it do to pretend we won’t miss him?”
After Bergen had gone into the living room to switch on the TV, Dina asked where he had taken Teresa to dinner.
“A Chinese restaurant,” Teresa said. “He ordered. I don’t know the name of anything we had.”
Dina went to the kitchen doorway and looked into the living room. “Too bad,” she said to herself.
“Too bad about what?” Teresa asked.
“None of your business,” Dina told her daughter. “Anyway, you’re too young to know about romance.”
“Too young,” Teresa echoed.
“That’s right,” Dina said. “Otherwise you’d know exactly what I meant.”
But Teresa did know; she knew that some things couldn’t be forced into being, no matter how hard you tried. Arnie Bergen couldn’t be her father no matter what he did, just as certainly he couldn’t be the man of Dina’s dreams, that Aria who rode across the desert.
“I know you wish you were in love with him,” Teresa said.
“Let me see those earrings,” Dina said, ignoring Teresa. “I want to make certain he got the right ones.”
They were the right ones, small pearls on fourteen-karat studs. Teresa had her ears pierced the following day. She sat in the back of a jeweler’s in the shopping mall outside town, a woman dabbed at her ears with alcohol and then made tiny holes with a thin needle. Teresa was told not to remove the earrings for at least six weeks, and so she did wear them to Silver’s wedding; she wore a blue ribbon in her hair, and the pearls took on a sea-colored cast, bluish, as if veins ran through them. The wedding ceremony was in Lee’s parents’ living room; streamers had been hung across the ceiling, a tall vase of roses stood by the doorway. Lee’s older sister, Joyce, was the maid of honor, she wore purple and had flowers threaded through her hair. Lee’s wedding dress had been her grandmother’s—the hem had been taken up, and because her grandmother was stout, the wedding dress fitted over Lee’s stomach, and no one would have guessed that she was more than four months pregnant, they would not have guessed until they noticed Silver at the far edge of the living room, unless they saw his panic, and his dark eyes which seemed to be calling out a dare, even from a great distance.
Silver had already found an apartment—a first-floor flat in the Mission District with two bedrooms and a wooden porch overlooking a yard where nothing but weeds and stray birds of paradise grew. On the day of his wedding, Silver wore a new black suit, tailored in Italy, and a shirt so white it seemed to have been made out of neon. He stood in the center of the living room, right beside Lee in front of the justice of the peace. When they took their vows, Teresa held on to the back of a wooden chair, she held on so tightly that her fingers turned pale. After the ceremony, after he had kissed Lee quickly, Silver shook hands with his new father-in-law and with Bergen. And when the relatives gathered around the dining-room table, holding plates in one hand and drinks in the other, Teresa ran up to the second floor and locked herself in the bathroom. She left the light off, but leaned over the sink and looked at herself in the mirror. She was still staring into her own eyes when Dina knocked on the bathroom door.
“Where are you?” Dina said. “What are you doing in there? Her relatives are all pigs; if you’re not downstairs in two minutes all the food will be gone, it will be too late.”
Teresa ran the water in the sink and washed her hands and face.
“Do you hear me?” Dina said.
In the bathroom, Teresa shivered; Dina’s voice echoed off the tiles, the water in the pipes sounded like a thousand frogs.
“This is ridiculous,” Dina said to her daughter through the door. “You can’t spend the whole time in the bathroom. What will Silver think?”
Downstairs Silver was thinking he had never felt so sick—he couldn’t eat a bit of the food spread
out on the dining-room table, not the small cheese sandwiches, not the little pink cakes. When he looked around the room he saw only strangers: Lee’s mother, Lee’s sister Joyce, and in the corner, smoothing down her hair, Lee herself.
Silver walked over and took her by the arm. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.”
“I haven’t had anything to eat yet,” Lee said.
“I said, come on,” Silver told her. He grabbed a beer from the table and got his car keys out of the pocket of his new black suit.
Even though Silver wanted to make a quiet exit, everyone followed them outside to see them off—it was a tradition, there was rice to be thrown. Silver swallowed hard and turned the key in the ignition; when he backed out of the driveway he had to drive slowly so that he didn’t run anyone down.
Lee sat close to him. “Where are we going?” she whispered.
Silver looked at her as though he had never seen her before. “What are you talking about?” he asked.
“Tonight,” Lee said. “Where are we spending our wedding night? We should go somewhere special.”
“We’re not going to any fancy hotel, so just forget it,” Silver said. “We’re just going to go home—we might as well, we have to go there sooner or later,” he told his new wife as they pulled out of the driveway.
Upstairs, Teresa was opening the bathroom door.
“Well,” Dina said. “It’s about time.”
“I felt sick,” Teresa said.
Dina narrowed her eyes. “Listen to me,” she said. “He’s married now, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
“I don’t care about that,” Teresa said. “I don’t care if he’s married.”
“I couldn’t stop him,” Dina said, as if apologizing. “He never listened to me. You know that.”
“I’m sick,” Teresa cried. “It’s not because of Silver—you’re crazy if you think it is.”
When they got downstairs the house was empty; there were beer bottles left open, small cakes with one or two bites taken, a stack of presents piled on the couch.
“We’ve missed saying goodbye,” Dina said, and she rushed outside so that she would be in time to wave. “Hurry up,” Dina called as the screen door slammed behind her.
But Teresa didn’t hurry, she didn’t even move; alone in the house, behind the screen door, she watched as Silver’s car made a turn in the road and disappeared. When she closed her eyes she could still see him, she could see him more clearly than any relative who had gathered in the driveway to throw rice. He had one hand on the wheel, his collar was open, the new suit jacket had been thrown into the back seat.
When Teresa opened her eyes and stared into the mesh of the screen door it was just as if she were looking into a fortune-teller’s crystal ball, just as if she stared into a cup where only the tea leaves remained. She could still see Silver: he was driving west, following the sun, but he looked into his rearview mirror, and when he did he somehow managed to see beyond the glass, he could see right into the living room where Teresa stood alone, still wearing pearls in her ears. There, among the roses and the regrets, she looked back at him, she called to him and finally let him know, after all this time, that her heart was breaking, it had shattered into thin pieces that fell onto the floor. And in his car, on his way to San Francisco, Silver heard her cry, and it was then he knew that there wouldn’t be a day when she wouldn’t be looking to the west, watching the constellations, listening to the sound of the river, waiting for him to come back.
FOUR
THOSE DAYS WHEN DINA searched through medical textbooks looking for a disease were long forgotten. She had become another woman, everyone said so. She polished the wooden floors all through the house until they shone like mirrors; in the mornings, when she added cinnamon to the coffee she brewed, the scent filled every room; her garden was the loveliest on the block—sunflowers grew in rows, blackbirds sang in the trees. In the place where she had always parted her hair a streak of white had appeared, but if anything it made her look younger; she seemed surrounded by a white halo, a circle of clouds, and her dark eyes looked twice their size. Whenever she caught sight of her own reflection, in the mirror at the end of the staircase landing, or in the glass above the medicine cabinet in the bathroom, Dina smiled shyly. She never thought to question why she suddenly looked exactly as she had year before; miraculously, she didn’t seem one day older than the girl who had waited by the iron gate on evenings when the air smelled like sage, and hoofs shook the ground, and evenings were long, as blue as heaven.
Because Dina was so unused to being happy, because she still feared the evil eye, she never dared admit to anyone how crazy she was about Friday nights, the time when Bergen drove up from San Francisco to see her. She never told a soul that she had fallen in love, she couldn’t even tell Bergen. But during the week, with not even fifty miles between them, Dina wrote Bergen letters every night. And then, each morning, she would walk down to the corner. She stood in the sunlight opening and closing the letter slot of the mailbox carefully, with the tentative touch of a girl who was head over heels.
Alone, in his apartment, Bergen sat in an easy chair by the window each afternoon. He opened the letters Dina sent him with his fingers instead of reaching for the brass letter opener on his desk. Her letters were always written on translucent notepaper, and the paper shimmered when light from Bergen’s window fell onto them: those letters nearly blinded the detective with longing. And even though she never once wrote that she loved him, Bergen knew that she did. He knew that she had given up the notion of being rescued by an Aria even before she confided it to him in one of her last letters. And though Dina no longer looked anything like that girl whose photograph he had carried for so long, Bergen was more in love than ever before, and he unfolded each letter she sent with the passion some men save for a kiss.
When he drove up to see her Bergen never talked to Dina about the letters she sent: his emotions seemed far too clumsy, his words too coarse. Instead he brought her gifts, which he hid for her to find in the breast pocket of his sports jacket. During the week he shopped carefully, spending hours looking for the right cologne, a perfect shawl, a bottle of Portuguese wine, new work gloves to use in the garden. It amazed Bergen that he could love her even more the way she was: a woman of forty-five whose dark hair no longer shone with youth, whose flesh was ringed with thin veins the color of turquoise. It was not that he had forgotten the girl in the photograph, or that he no longer loved her, but the woman who ran out to meet him in the driveway was the woman he now dreamed about every night.
They had more time alone than ever before. Since her graduation from high school, Teresa had worked as a waitress at Max’s Café on Webster Street. Whenever she was given the weekend shift, Bergen and Dina had the whole house to themselves. They played gin rummy in the kitchen, they watched the sky from beneath the wisteria vines on the back porch, they held hands in the dark. And although Bergen still checked in to the Lamplighter Motel each time he came to Santa Rosa, there were times when he stayed with Dina till morning, and on those nights they held each other tight, and each felt they had never lived before. After four years they saw each other as if for the first time, and that may have been why Bergen never noticed that Dina was losing weight, that her skin had become discolored and her hands were now so fragile that in sunlight her bones seemed to rise up through her flesh like pale fish forced to surface. Bergen overlooked everything but Dina’s beautiful eyes, her smile when she saw him. He overlooked it all, and, in the end, it was too late to do anything; Dina had cancer.
There wasn’t a cure in the world that could bring her back; if there had been, Bergen would have found it. He would have driven her to every clinic in Mexico, he would have sold everything he owned in order to buy a machine that could breathe life back into her, for however short a time—for one more hour, one more kiss, one last night spent beside her. When the doctors at the Haven Street Clinic told them it was too late for surgery or radi
ation, too late to do anything at all, Bergen moved out of his apartment in San Francisco and into the Lamplighter Motel. He put Dina’s picture on the dresser next to his alarm clock, he brought all five of his sports coats with him and hung them in the closet. Every day, after he and Teresa had spent hours on the wooden chairs they had set up next to Dina’s bed, Bergen drove back to the Lamplighter and at night, after the moon had risen, Bergen took long walks, but he always wound up in the same spot; no matter what direction he started off in, he ended up standing at the edge of the motel pool, surrounded by empty chaise longues, circled by a chain-link fence that had been painted the same odd green as the water in the unused pool.
“Move into the house,” Teresa said finally. “You’re here every day. It doesn’t pay to stay in a motel.”
Bergen shook his head no. “She wanted us to live in separate houses. She was independent.” The detective surprised himself by talking about Dina in the past tense, as if she were already gone, instead of only asleep in the upstairs bedroom. “She’s still independent,” he added. “She’ll always be that way.”
“You can move into Silver’s room,” Teresa said. “She’ll never even know you’re here.”
“She’d know,” Bergen insisted. “The motel is fine. Anyway,” he teased, “I get a free breakfast at the Lamplighter every morning—eggs and toast.”
Bergen didn’t bother to add that he never ate the eggs and toast; instead he had two cups of black coffee, one right after the other, then got into his car and drove straight to Divisadero Street. The detective continued to live in the motel all winter long; the women who changed the sheets and vacuumed the carpets all knew him by name, the waiter in the dining room left a pot of coffee on Bergen’s table every morning. At the end of March, not long after Teresa’s eighteenth birthday, Bergen noticed that Dina could no longer raise her head from her pillow without his help. Soon it was difficult for her to swallow the tea he brought to her. And so, one evening after Dina had fallen asleep, Bergen asked Teresa to walk him out to his car.
White Horses Page 14