“Estelita, you cannot leave me.”
“I can.”
“I won’t let you.”
“You don’t have a choice,” I say and walk out of his office, my neck hot. I can feel where his fingers drove my head underwater, and it makes my skull tingle. His secretary gives me a weak smile, and I don’t smile back. I don’t always have to smile, I think.
In the hallway, the air is cool, and no one follows me. I can do this, I tell myself, fear and joy bubbling side by side. I can walk away from men like Ricardo.
Propelled by my newfound independence, I go to a Realtor’s and spend the day looking at apartments. There’s one in Sherman Oaks that looks promising, with a deck and a swimming pool. I tell the Realtor I’ll come back tomorrow to look at it with my daughter.
Before my rehearsal, I eat in a small Italian restaurant on Sepulveda, linguini and clams and a glass of white wine. The studio is only five blocks from the restaurant, so I leave my car parked on the street and walk. The sky is clear, and a few stars sparkle past the glare of streetlights.
I am rehearsing for next weekend’s performance at the Chi Chi in Palm Springs. Ed shows up at the studio and sits in the back as I go through my number. When I leave, he holds the door open for me as he tells me that my voice is as spectacular as ever.
“You flatter me.” I step into the street and slide my arm under his.
“I flatter no one. It’s the truth, and if you weren’t the best, you wouldn’t be mine so you’d better stay that way.”
“Yes, sir.”
The night has grown chilly, and I have forgotten a coat. Ed slides his off and wraps it over my shoulders.
“Such a gentleman.” I kiss his cheek, and he gives an abashed smile. “There’s no need to walk me all the way to my car. I parked three blocks away.”
“I’m not letting you walk alone at night on these streets. This isn’t the best neighborhood.”
“I’m sure I’ll be fine.”
“Still not leaving you. Besides, I haven’t officially congratulated you on getting the role of Lupe Velez.”
“You’re the one who told me I got the part.”
“Yes, but I didn’t say congratulations.”
“No, I suppose you didn’t.”
“Too much flattery’s not good for a gal. But this is a big one. It’s going to be your comeback, little lady.”
I wrap an arm around his plump waist. “Or my beginning. I’ve never booked a role this substantial.”
“You’re going to have to get serious.”
“I’m always serious.” I pinch him, and he grimaces. We walk in silence for a few blocks before I say, “I’m getting a divorce.”
“Sorry to hear that.”
“No, it’s good. Nina and I are going to get our own place.”
“How is Nina?”
We’ve reached my car, and I pull out my keys, jiggling them in my hand. “She’s good, I think. The hospital seems to have settled her, for now.”
“She’s young. Kids experiment.”
“Right.” I kiss his cheek and go to remove his coat, but he says, “No, keep it. You can bring it to me next week at your table read. I’ll be eavesdropping outside the studio door. This is going to be one crackerjack of a picture.”
“I don’t know what I’d do without you.” I kiss his cheek again, and he gives me an army salute as I get into my car.
Through the rearview mirror, I watch him standing on the sidewalk as I pull away, his combed-over hair shining silver in the streetlight. Ed is not in love with me, I think, wishing Virginia were here so I could say as much to her. He’s what a true friend looks like.
Rehearsal has energized me, and I feel restless and wide-awake. I turn on the radio and sing along to The Temptations thinking about driving to Mamá’s to tell her about the movie role. I want it to be the perfect moment, which tonight probably isn’t. It’s past ten, and she’s most likely in bed. I’ll tell her tomorrow, I decide, heading back to Virginia’s, hoping you are awake and I can tell you about the apartment I found today.
The house is dark when I pull in, and Virginia’s car is not in the driveway. It is a Saturday night, and I wonder if she’s gone out. She rarely goes anywhere besides a required doctors’ function. When I turn my key in the front door, I discover it’s already unlocked, which is annoying, but not alarming. You often forget to lock the door.
I flick on the hall light and call your name. There’s no answer. I don’t like it when you’re out late. Late nights mean partying, and you’ve been on the straight and narrow since you were released. I leave Ed’s coat hanging in the hall and head to the kitchen where I see a note on the table. Gone out with Delia. She came home from the hospital today. Don’t worry, we’re just going to a movie. I should be home by 11pm. Nina. Relieved, I make myself a gin and tonic and go into the living room to catch the end of Doctor Zhivago on NBC’s Saturday Night at the Movies. When Virginia comes home, I plan to tell her I am sorry I was rude this morning, but I don’t share her feelings. She must understand. It’s not exactly your average declaration of love, if that’s even what it was.
At eleven o’clock the movie ends, and neither of you are home yet. I click off the television and look out the window. A sliver of a moon sits low in the sky, and the street is empty. I wonder if Delia is bringing you home. I should meet this Delia, I think, heading to the bathroom.
The walls of Virginia’s bathroom are covered in pink-and-black tile, and she has a matching pink-and-black soap dish and toothbrush holder. I undress, thinking about what I’ll buy to decorate our new apartment. I put on my nightgown, wipe the makeup off my face with cold cream and brush my teeth. In the medicine cabinet is my bottle of Valium. Ricardo first prescribed these to me a year ago when I was having trouble sleeping. They do wonders. Twisting off the cap, I drop the last two pills into my hand surprised that’s all I have left. I was certain I had more. I head to the kitchen for water wondering if Virginia will write me a new prescription.
In the blue glow of our streetlight, I fill a glass of tap water. I am about to pop the pills into my mouth when I pause and notice that I hold two smooth white tablets in my palm. Usually, they are a pale yellow with a V stamped in the middle. A fleeting thought passes across my mind that something is not quite right. Are these my pills? The light is not good, I tell myself, and I can’t see all that well. I toss the two pills into my mouth and wash them down with water, which is so cold it gives me an instant headache.
Or maybe it’s not from the water. Moments pass, how long I don’t know. A gust of wind rattles the windowpanes above the kitchen sink, and I watch the branches of the cyprus tree lift and sway outside the windows and worry about my sisters. A storm is coming. Where are you, Nina? With Josepha? I must make sure you are not under the ficus tree. You don’t know Cuban storms. The branches could come down on you. But when I turn to look for you, the kitchen confuses me. Where is Mamá? This is not our kitchen. Dizzy, I collapse on my knees and find that I have vomited all over the floor, gin and linguini and clams splashed over shiny, peppermint-green tiles. I think Oh, yes, this is Virginia’s kitchen, and she doesn’t mind if I spill eggs on her floor because she is in love with me.
I crouch on all fours. Breathing is painful, nearly impossible. The pills, I think, those were not my pills. My heart races faster, and my chest squeezes. I crawl down the hall toward the bathroom, my stomach convulsing. Hot pain. Sweat. Everything seizing. My gut lurches, and for a horrifying moment I wonder if I am going to soil myself, and then I think I might vomit again. Only nothing comes. When I make it through the door, I collapse on my side on the bumpy, pink bath mat. My eyes blink rapidly, and I try to focus on where the edge of pink tile meets the foot of the sink. The line ripples and blurs. I can see my hand lying near my face, my fingers curled slightly over my palm, my thumbnail painted red. I try and hold on, but I�
�m plunging underwater. The air has gone out of the room, the oxygen sucked from my lungs.
Where are you, Nina? I do not want to die alone.
Chapter Thirty-One
* * *
Shells
Mother,
The smell hits me when I step into the kitchen: sour and noxious, a smell that will haunt me after tonight. It is when I flick on the light that I see the vomit on the floor.
“Mom?” I call and hear a moan from the bathroom.
You have collapsed on your side with hair plastered against your cheekbones. A chill goes down my spine, and I stifle a cry, dropping to my knees on the pink throw rug and pulling your head into my lap. It flops against my arm as if you’ve lost all control of your neck. “What’s wrong? Are you sick? Mom, can you hear me?”
Your eyes flutter open, and there is a look of terror in them that scares me as much as the odd angle of your body and the vomit in the kitchen. Your voice is sharp and ragged and barely above a whisper. “El me dio algo. El me dio algo, Nina.”
“What? What were you given, Mom?” Your eyes drop shut, and I shake you, hard, but they don’t open. “Mom! Mom! Wake up. What were you given? Who gave you something?”
Your eyes stay closed, breathy words crawling from your lips, each an immense effort. “Ambulance...call...not Mamá...she worries...not Mamá.”
Your head drops forward, rolling from my arm to my knee. I ease you to the floor and run to the kitchen, digging the phone book from the drawer. The emergency numbers are on the first page, and I grab the phone, shaking all over as I dial the hospital.
A woman answers, and I blurt out, “I need an ambulance, quickly. My mother is sick.”
“How sick?”
“Very.”
“What are her symptoms, dear?” The woman is infuriatingly calm.
“Throwing up, and she can’t stand.”
“Can you put her on?”
“No.” I am getting angry. Why is she asking me all of this? “I said she can’t stand. She needs an ambulance.”
“Don’t worry, dear, I’ll send one right now. What’s your address?”
I give her our address, hang up and rush back. You haven’t moved. You look small as a child, your silk nightdress shell-smooth over the still form of your curved back. “Mom?” I crouch down and pull the sticky hair from your cheeks. I am scared. Your face is an unnatural red, your forehead sweats, your smooth, white eyelids shielding your eyes don’t flutter or shift. I am shaking so hard I can barely put my hand to your mouth.
Your breath is faint and soft on my palm, so I go back to the kitchen and dial Grandmother Maria. I don’t care what you say. I need her.
It takes seven rings before she answers, her voice groggy. “Hello?”
“Grandmother? It’s Nina. Mom is sick. Very sick. I called an ambulance. You need to come right now.”
“Is Virginia there?”
“No.” Where is Virginia? If there was ever a time I’d want her around, it would be right now.
“I’m coming, Nina. I’m coming.” The line goes dead. I hang up and return to you.
Awkwardly, I lift you from the floor, supporting your neck under one arm and your knees under the other. You are small and light, but I am not strong, and I have a hard time getting you out without hitting your dangling legs against the bathroom doorframe. I manage to make it down the hall and into your room, dropping you on the bed harder than I intend. You moan, and a frothy string of vomit dribbles out the side of your mouth.
“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.” I smooth your hair and press my palm to your clammy forehead. The color has slid from your cheeks, and your skin is cool to the touch. I arrange your nightgown over your knees and crawl over you, half sitting up as I move your body so that you are leaning against me. We haven’t curled together like this since we lay on the church floor in Mexico. “What do I do, Mom?” I whisper. “Tell me what to do.” It’s my turn to rescue you, and I don’t know how.
Your face contorts, and your body writhes as if something is tearing you up inside. It makes me hurt all over, watching your brow furrow and your jaw clench, your back growing stiff against me. It feels like an eternity passes, one in which I watch your muscles slowly relax, your face pale and your breath grow quick and shallow.
In reality, it is less than ten minutes before Grandmother Maria explodes through the bedroom door in her nightgown and bedroom slippers. She has beaten the ambulance, driven through the Los Angeles streets at seventy miles an hour in her nightclothes.
But she has not driven fast enough.
When her eyes fall on you, her cry shreds the air. She falls where she stands, crawling to you on hands and knees, her face twisted and tortured, and I am reminded of her crawl toward Josepha and Che, how little it did then and how little it does now. “No mi Estelita, no mi niña, no mi niña.” And yet, not even in Cuba when she lost her husband and was witness to her granddaughter’s rape was she this undone. Every line in her face, the gape of her mouth and the sheen in her eyes holds a suffering so huge I can’t look at her. It is all of her pain rolled into one, her husband and children and grandchildren. She lived her life for you. Without you, there is nothing.
The body that leans against me now feels heavier than the one I lifted from the bathroom floor, as if your lightness came from the lightness of your soul. Nothing here but an empty shell anchored to the bed, filled with the weight of sand. I feel it under my fingernails, grit and salt. I hear the thunder of waves crashing against rock, and then your bedroom ceiling opens to the night, and I see your beautiful, colorless face etched in the sky, your dark brows arched, your full lips pale. My throat seizes. How is it that you will never reach out to me again? Never speak to me or look at me again? My mind collapses under the finality, the incomprehension: How are you here and not here? Where have you gone?
Chapter Thirty-Two
* * *
Death
Daughter,
I have gone nowhere and everywhere, Nina. It is dark and light and terrifying and beautiful.
You were with me and are with me still. There is grit and sand under my nails, too, but we are not hollowed shells, we are songs set free.
And there is so much more for you to sing, so many stories to tell, so much life for you yet to live, Nina the Memory Keeper.
Chapter Thirty-Three
* * *
March 13, 1966
Crazy Nina
Mother,
The morning after your death everything hurts. It is as if my skin has been peeled away from my body. The sheets hurt my limbs, the light my eyes, the lawn mower grinding outside the window hurts my head. How can someone be mowing the lawn when you are dead? How can anyone be doing anything? I want to bury myself with you, but instead I am forced to wake up and continue to live in this ugly, terrifying world.
Without you nothing is beautiful.
I get up, dress in bell-bottom jeans and a ratty T-shirt and go to the kitchen where my grandmother and Virginia sit at the table drinking coffee. I hate them for drinking coffee, for waking and dressing and moving forward. Virginia rises and folds me into her arms. I let her hug me, my body stiff and unresponsive. When she pulls away, I see her eyes are red from crying.
“My God. Oh, dear God, I’m so sorry,” she whispers.
“Where were you last night?” This morning, I am dry-eyed and angry.
“I was having a drink with a colleague. I wish I’d been home. I had no idea she was sick.”
“She wasn’t sick.” I fill a glass of water and drink it down in one breath. Grandmother Maria is watching me, her resilience restored.
“I made you breakfast. You need to eat.” She points to a plate of eggs and toast.
I set my glass on the counter with a sharp clink. “I’m not hungry.”
“Don’t make her eat if she doesn’t want to.”
Virginia sits back down. She is dressed in her Saturday casuals: capri pants and a white button-down shirt, her hair messy from sleep, her face pale and puffy.
Grandmother Maria snaps her head in Virginia’s direction. “Mi hermosa nieta will do whatever I think is best for her. Eat,” she orders me.
I sit down and shove a forkful of eggs into my mouth. You, Mom, know I hate eggs. How does no one else know this about me? Grandmother just doesn’t care, I think, scraping every last bit of yoke into my mouth to prove a point.
“There. Happy?” I stand up and dump the empty plate in the sink. Grandmother rises and unhooks her purse from the back of her chair.
“Come,” she says. “Last night I told the police I would bring you over this morning.”
“To tell them what happened?”
“Yes.”
Virginia twirls her empty coffee cup on the table. “Are they doing an autopsy?”
Grandmother turns her back to Virginia. She doesn’t like this woman. “I don’t know. I have no authority. I am just her madre. Come, Nina.”
I follow my grandmother outside where the world feels stretched thin: the roads, the buildings and sky. The brick police station and the large men in padded uniforms inside, they all look unreal, like actors. The officer sitting in the chair across from me is young, with a soft pink face, freckles and curly hair that’s been cut short on the sides with tight curls springing up on top. Pinned to his jacket is a badge with Officer Brown on it. They took Grandmother Maria to a room where I can see her through a large, glass window. She sits—back erect, purse clutched in her lap—on the edge of her chair.
I look back at Officer Brown, who moves his knee rapidly up and down, his eyes shifting from the wall behind me to his notes. He is uncomfortable. “I know this is hard, but I need you to tell me exactly what happened last night when you found your mother.”
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