Just Breathe

by Susan Wiggs

  “Sure thing.” He grinned and went to work.

  She watched while he cleared the table and cleaned the kitchen, admiring his assured movements as he performed mundane chores. Every once in a while he’d glance at her, a sideways look of almost palpable intimacy. At odd moments, his presence nearly unraveled her. This wasn’t supposed to be happening. Not here. Not now. And not with him.

  But it had been so long, she thought, since she’d been close to someone. There was a kind of loneliness, she discovered, that settled in the bones and turned to ice, and when that cold numbness began to thaw, every nerve ending came to painful life. Worse, she wasn’t just lonely in general. She was lonely for him.

  It had been a pleasant evening. She could ruin it with her next question. Don’t, she told herself. She took a deep breath and asked anyway. “I think it’s time you told me the full story about Aurora’s mother.”

  “I told you the night of the puppies.”

  “You gave me a few facts, but not the reasons behind them.” She watched him closely. His shoulders stiffened and his jaw tightened. She took another breath. “What happened, Will?”

  * * *

  Will’s heart was racing even before he turned to face Sarah. He stood with his hands on the edge of the counter, the sharp angle pressing into his palms as he braced himself. There were things about Marisol he’d never told anyone, and yet here was this woman, urging him to open up. “Why do you want to know?” he asked, feeling a mixture of suspicion and relief.

  “Because I care. About Aurora and...about you.”

  They’d been working up to this moment for a while now. He realized that if he wanted to be closer to her—and he definitely wanted that—he was going to have to level with her. In a way, it was a relief to share the old, old burden. “Outside,” he said.

  She glanced toward the stairs. He could hear Aurora giggling, still on the phone.

  Zooey, the puppy, followed them into the twilit yard and immediately started sniffing the perimeter. Will motioned Sarah to a lawn chair and waited while she lowered herself awkwardly. Then he sat down next to her and stared off into the distance, trying to frame an explanation. Sarah deserved one. She really did care about Aurora. He had to be cautious, though. There were things about the past he didn’t ever want Aurora to know, things he’d never told a soul.

  At the end of his high school career, everyone had expected Will Bonner to take off like a rocket. Certainly Will himself had expected it. All through his senior year, he weighed offers from a host of Division I schools. The bush league team for the Athletics was putting together an offer for him, should he choose to postpone college or even try to juggle the two.

  And he’d wanted it all. Nearly had it, too, except that fate threw him for a loop.

  He was a typical impulsive teenager in every sense of the word. When he and his friends decided to celebrate high school graduation by driving to San Diego and from there, taking a tour company bus to Tijuana and getting blazing drunk, it was nothing out of the ordinary. Stupid kids had been doing this since the beginning of time. The young man’s pilgrimage to a Mexican border town was a rite of passage. Their fathers had made the journey, returning with bags of Acapulco Gold stuffed in their Levi’s. Their grandfathers had, too, and their fathers before them, bringing back cheap tequila and souvenirs. Some said these border town weekends had started in the days of Prohibition, when it was the least risky way to find something stronger to drink than lemonade. Others traced the custom even further back to Victorian times, when the lure of easy women tempted young men from their chaste lives. California boys grew up hearing about Avenida de las Mujeres, the legendary street festooned with bougainvillea spilling from window boxes, adobe walls painted with bright swirls of color, and willing women framed by every doorway.

  “The summer after high school, I went down to Mexico with a group of guys,” he told Sarah. “We took turns driving to San Diego. Somebody—I think it was Trent Lowery—got tickets on a party bus from there to Tijuana. You park on the U.S. side and the bus takes you across the border.”

  “I think I get the picture.”

  He steepled his fingers together and relived the occasion, which had begun as such a lark. He had headed south of the border for a night of drunken revelry. The journey ended up changing his life. He hadn’t seen it coming, not any of it. The only things on his mind had been drinking tequila and getting laid.

  Through a fluke—or, according to his friends, an error in judgment—Will had made it through high school with his virginity intact. This was not a testament to his virtue but to his habit of going steady with a girl who was adamant about saving herself for marriage. Although he endured locker-room teasing and worse, the situation never changed.

  Until graduation weekend. His girlfriend of two years broke up with him. Will was determined to revel in his freedom. It was high time to end his celibacy.

  The old part of the border town had reached out to embrace the boys from the Bay Area—rowdy kids who had too much money and too little sense—with arms draped in temptation. The women themselves were intoxicating with their soft, musky flesh, oiled hair and ripe lips. At first Will was dazzled, but no amount of tequila could completely blind him from seeing beneath the painted lips and cheap, colorful dresses. These women—some of them excruciatingly young—were virtual slaves to sleazy pimps and hard-eyed madams who moved like wraiths through the streets, addressing tourists with hissing voices.

  “So that’s what we did,” he told Sarah. “In Tijuana, we started at the horse races, and almost immediately, I won a huge purse. A run of dumb luck netted me $11,000.”

  “My Lord. You had the Midas touch.”

  Up to that point, his whole life had gone along in that fashion. Nothing but pure luck was on his side. He had no idea that within hours, his luck was about to change.

  “I probably would have lost it on the next race, except it was time to party,” he said. “We found open-air bars, bands playing on every street corner, people selling souvenirs and trinkets from blankets spread out on the sidewalk.” Absently, he ran his hand over the dragon tattoo on his arm—another souvenir of that crazy trip.

  Will and his friends, already lit with tequila, were invited to Casa Luna, located at the end of the avenue. “We were in a baila—a dancing club,” he said, using the euphemism. The house’s colorful, flower-decked façades concealed tiny rooms that reeked of harsh cleaning fluid, sweat and urine, the backyard crammed with manure, goats and garbage, a miserable lean-to where assorted children were left on their own to play. Business was conducted in semiprivate berths separated by moth-eaten drapes. By the door of each room was a stoneware holy water font. Patrons were invited to anoint themselves upon entering and leaving.

  “I was pretty wasted on tequila,” he said. The telling got tricky here. He lost his virginity to a girl whose lazy-lidded eyes concealed a look of boredom and despair. He hadn’t yet learned her name was Marisol. The experience had been exhilarating, sordid and distasteful all at once. The girl invited him to linger afterward—for an extra price. And through a pink tequila haze, he’d been tempted, because by that time, he’d convinced himself he was half in love with the girl, but she laughed and sent him on his way.

  It was said that a young man came of age with his first sexual experience. Will knew that wasn’t true. Getting some girl to give you a blow job or even to go all the way with you didn’t mean a damn thing. In his case, the transformation from boy to man had happened overnight, that was true. But it had nothing to do with sex. He had turned into a man thanks to the desperate need of a child.

  Just before midnight, he decided to head home. His plan had been to make his way back to the bus, sleep off the tequila while dreaming of the girl with the lazy-lidded eyes and waiting for his friends to show up.

  “I was about to leave when I noticed the smell of somet
hing burning. It turned out to be a fire, and everybody had to evacuate into the street.” He had never told anyone what sort of house it was, how the fire had started or how he had come to be in the middle of it all. “A crowd gathered in the street but nobody seemed that concerned. There were goats and dogs in the backyard, going crazy. It took forever for the firefighters to arrive and once they did, the building was a goner.”

  Sarah’s face was pale by now. “Aurora was in the house, wasn’t she?”

  He nodded. “On the roof. Four years old and scared to death.”

  “And her mother...?”

  “It was chaotic,” he said. “They got separated.”

  “By the fire?”

  He didn’t answer that and hoped she didn’t notice. “The ladder truck couldn’t get into position. The street was too narrow. The firefighters couldn’t access the roof through the inside, and there was no outside fire escape.”

  “How did you get her off the roof?” Sarah asked.

  He hesitated. “How did you know it was me?”

  She smiled briefly. “Will. Give me a little credit.”

  In that moment, shocked sober, Will had discovered something new about himself. He was born to save people. “I went to the roof of the building next door.”

  He could hear the screaming and praying as though it were yesterday. With no training, working only from instinct and adrenaline, he had no time to hesitate or weigh his chances as he crossed a rickety pipe that connected the roofs. The roofing material had felt soft and yielding under his feet, and the soles of his shoes seemed to stick in it.

  The tiny child he did not yet know as Aurora shrieked with terrified sobs while her fists pummeled at the billows of smoke. He must’ve looked scary as hell, a big guy running at her, scooping her up and grabbing her in a football carry. He remembered how light she felt to him, like a small wooden toy. The fire crew used the ladder to form a bridge between the two buildings. The crossing was more stable than the corroding drainpipe.

  He didn’t look down, and he didn’t let go.

  “That’s when the situation got complicated,” he told Sarah. He was staggering down a twisted iron staircase in a rain of water from the fire hoses when he heard a sound as if someone had dropped a whole raw turkey onto concrete. In the alleyway behind the unkempt backyard, he spied the young prostitute he’d been with, spectacularly pretty despite being drenched with water, being beaten by her encargado.

  “Mama!” the child had cried out.

  Will set her down and charged like a freight train. The pimp probably never knew what hit him. The woman was hysterical. Not because of the beating or even because of the danger to her child, who was now clinging to her skirt. But because, she shrieked, when Uncle Felix came to, she would be punished. Worse than another beating, she told Will in a tortured mixture of border-town Spanish and broken English, she would be banished. Shoved out into the street to whore for table scraps, like a stray dog. She’d have to sell her child just to survive. She’d end up selling her to a man like Felix, so what good had it done to attack him?

  In fumbling Spanish, Will told her that surely there had to be other options. Then he had looked at the terrified young prostitute and the wide-eyed child with scabs and sores everywhere, and realized she spoke the truth. They had no future, these two. None at all. Unless he could think of something to do.

  He had hesitated, sensing that this had the potential to be a career decision. Then he took them both by the hand. The woman stumbled and cried out in pain from her injuries, protesting that she couldn’t walk. He swept her up into his arms and carried her while the child clung to the hem of her mother’s skirts.

  “Como se llama?” he asked the woman.

  “Marisol Molina, y mi hija se llama Aurora,” she said.

  Aurora, like the dawn. Marisol told him her “uncle” had put her to work at age thirteen and she’d given birth at fourteen, naming the baby after her favorite Disney character.

  Will looked for shelter half the night, it seemed. Churches were supposed to provide sanctuary, but their doors were locked and barred against intruders. Finally, he discovered a health clinic staffed by an elderly doctor and nurse whose air of weary compassion had mingled with a resigned sense of futility. They treated Marisol’s wounds, the worst of which was a dislocated shoulder, and gave Aurora medicine for her cough and ointment for her sores. The nurse had a lengthy, private conversation with Marisol that caused her cheeks to flush with shame, and the three of them left together.

  Out on the street in the hazy light of morning, Will felt more confident. He shouldn’t have. The police stopped him. Felix Garcia—the pimp—was looking for his “niece.” He was worried sick about her. He feared she might have been kidnapped. Will gave the police the reassurance they were looking for—an enormous bribe from his winnings at the racetrack. With their pockets lined, the police lost interest in detaining Will. But they still intended to deliver Marisol back to Felix.

  Marisol had given the police a long and desperate explanation. Will had trouble following the conversation but he thought he understood.

  “Did you just tell him we’re getting married?” he asked her.

  “Today,” she said. “Right now. It is the only way to keep from being sent back to Casa Luna. You will need to give them more bribe money, of course.”

  It was then that Will discovered he would do anything to rescue people.

  Sleepy with fever and the medicine from the clinic, Aurora had napped through the hasty wedding, which had to be expedited by still further bribes at the pasillo, the city hall. They emerged with all the proper documentation.

  “Just like that?” Sarah asked, her eyes round with wonder. “Wasn’t there some kind of blood test or, I don’t know, a waiting period?”

  The border guards on the U.S. side had also been incredulous. They took Will aside, told him a dozen ways to get out of his predicament. They’d seen it before—upstanding American boys trapped by wily Mexican putas. They could fix it, they assured Will. Within a few hours, he would be free to walk away from the woman and child, leaving them behind in Mexico like so much unclaimed baggage.

  “Thank you,” he said. “But this wasn’t a mistake.” He didn’t want his freedom back if it meant throwing the woman to the wolves. Besides, he truly believed his feelings for Marisol would turn into love. “I meant to marry her. We’re staying together.”

  It wasn’t that simple. The actual process took weeks and the intervention of a compassionate immigration lawyer, one of Birdie’s professors at San Diego State.

  He shook his head. “If you know the right people to ask, and if you meet their price—which I was able to do, thanks to the racetrack winnings—anything is possible. Back then, $11,000 was a small fortune in Mexico.”

  Sarah stared at him as though he’d turned into a stranger. “I don’t know what to say.”

  He shrugged. “It’d be nice to say we all lived happily ever after, but it got complicated.”

  The first order of business was to have both Marisol and Aurora seen by doctors in the U.S. Aurora was found to be remarkably healthy for a child who had suffered such neglect. Marisol—to the surprise of no one but Will—had a sexually transmitted disease.

  Fortunately, it was treatable, and Will hadn’t caught it from her. Finally, after they had been married for several weeks, they had their wedding night. Introduced at last to pleasure by a beautiful, experienced woman, Will Bonner fell in love as only a nineteen-year-old of limited experience could.

  Some in Glenmuir were aghast. What about the future he’d planned for himself?

  Will never answered that question. Something had changed deep inside him, that night in Mexico as he stood on the soft, tarry roof of a burning building. For the first time in his life he’d felt a tangible sense of purpose. He had been put on this ear
th for a reason, and that reason was not to score runs or win awards or sign contracts. “I would not have picked this life,” he concluded. “This is the life that picked me.”

  * * *

  In the flower-scented yard, darkness had fallen and the peepers came out. Will felt shaken and hollowed out, as though he’d just run a marathon. It wasn’t easy, baring his soul. He’d never done it before, never taken this risk with his heart, but this was Sarah. He trusted her. He wondered how it was possible that he could have such an intimate relationship with a woman he’d never even held in his arms. He had no idea what she tasted like, or if her lips were as soft as they looked, or if she would fit into his embrace as though she belonged there. Maybe he ought to—

  “How much of this does Aurora know?” she asked, getting awkwardly to her feet.

  “Almost nothing,” he said, the moment gone, even though the desire still lingered. “Her mother never had much to say about it.”

  “Why would Marisol turn her back on someone like you?” Sarah asked.

  “Why would Jack turn his back on someone like you?” he countered. “Love’s funny that way, eh?”

  They went inside, and Sarah asked for a cup of tea. He went to find a tea bag. In the short hallway between the back door and the pantry, there were photographs and artwork, a gallery of Aurora’s childhood since the day he’d brought her and Marisol to Glenmuir. His mother, who had taken classes in art therapy at Berkeley, had urged him to encourage Aurora to draw. The early stick figures were like ancient cave drawings, scratches of someone who no longer existed, their meaning unclear. Even Aurora herself couldn’t explain the significance of the dark scribbles, the crudely drawn figures. They were locked somewhere deep inside her memory along with her recollection of the fiery night in Mexico when she’d come into his life.

  One of the gifts of childhood was the resilience of the human spirit. The thready scribbles of Aurora at age five quickly gave way to sunny, sophisticated drawings she’d brought home from kindergarten with pride—pictures of him and her mother flanking her smiling self. The riotous color of her stepgrandparents’ flower farm. The natural beauty all around, from Alamere Falls to the deeply shadowed forests of bishop pine to the majestic lighthouse station at Point Reyes.