“Okay, sounds like a yes.”
It is a yes! I feel good today. Matt asks me to stay standing, so my knees buckle and he catches me under the elbow so that I don’t fall. I want to laugh about this with him, but of course I can’t, so I try to get my mind to rest. My trick is that I think about nothing, that I pretend there is nothing around me, there is nothing for me to do, and then, sometimes, my body will be a little less of a rebel.
“Matt,” I say. “Nice day.”
“It is a nice day. That’s really good, June. Thank you.”
My eyes water, I am so pleased with myself.
He keeps me firmly by my elbow, and without telling me what to do, he walks me slowly down the hall and toward the back door. I like to have my exercises outside, even if it’s hot. I’ve always loved the sun. Just before we walk outside, my legs lock. I push back against him, as if I don’t want to go.
“She’s in a mood today, Matt. I think she wants to stay inside.”
Matt doesn’t listen to Helen. He hums a little tune, something I don’t recognize, but I try to get it. What is he humming? And just like that, we are out the door and in the sun. I love Matt.
“That’s probably enough for today. Are you tired?”
I’m not tired. I want to keep going. I don’t want to go in the house. I don’t want to watch television. I don’t want to take a rest. But Matt is already leading me back to the door. I, of course, am walking along as fast as I have all year.
“So here I am, very glad to be unhappy.”
When I sing, the words I want come out. Sometimes, anyway. I don’t know how it works. I can sing the lyrics to songs I don’t even remember knowing. I never know what I will sing until I hear my own voice. But a lot of times, the lyrics make sense. Isn’t that crazy? Believe me, it makes me a lot crazier than anyone else. One thing I can’t control, though, is how I sing them, so right now I sound as cheery as a little bird. But I don’t want to go inside.
Matt grins. “Do you still believe the rumor that romance is simply grand,” he sings. Matt sings in a trio at the Venetian. He’d like to be a musician full-time, but it hasn’t worked out yet. Isn’t that amazing? That I would get a physical therapist who sings? It’s not, really. It’s how the world works. If we could just see it.
“Since you took it right on the chin, you have lost that bright toothpaste grin,” I sing back. I know I’m smiling now.
“I did it my . . . way!” Matt belts out.
And I laugh.
Which is exactly what I wanted to do, and sometimes happens, especially with Matt. He leads me inside, so our session is done, but I am happy. I look at the ground and think as little as I can, so that I feel this.
“You tired her out.” Helen comes over and touches her palm to my cheek. She does things like that when someone else is around.
“Maybe. She’s pretty tough. Right, June?”
I shimmy with my shoulders and wink. I can just imagine what that looks like, now that I’m eighty-two.
“There’s the spirit!”
“Okay, Miss June. I think you’re ready for a little rest now.”
I wish I could give Matt a hug, but my head flops forward and shakes a bit, I don’t know why, and he puts his hand on my chin and says he will see me on Thursday. And then, like he does every time he leaves, he sings:
“S’wonderful, s’marvelous, that I should care for you.”
And my head flops further forward. I can’t even see him leave, which is for the best, because I am crying.
Marshall will be fifty-four on his next birthday. That’s how old Del was when he died. He thinks of it, I’m sure. Partly, he’s just a bit of a hypochondriac. Goes to Scripps for daylong medical testing and all that fuss. Marshall knows more about his hormone levels and genetic profile than I know about my own hair.
Not that anyone wouldn’t wonder.
His dad drops dead without a hint, and his mom ends up a raving idiot. Singing Christmas carols at a Jewish wedding and asking the cute young man at the table on the other side of the restaurant for a dance. He thinks these things mean something—that they express deep down desires I no longer have the ability to repress—but if they mean something, I sure as hell don’t know what. They feel as random to me as they do to anyone else. I try to laugh. I mean, I would laugh if I could do what I intend. I think I must have had something to learn about humility, and now I am learning it.
Of course, Marshall’s hoping to avoid ending up like Del or me. I hope he doesn’t end up like this too. But the game’s rigged: there’s no way to win this one. It’s possible to play in an entirely different way if you really see that. That’s what I wish I could say. That’s what I wish I knew how to share. This is a game you can’t win, so don’t play to win. Play to play. Play to keep everyone else in play. That’s the long game here. That’s what I want to tell him.
Marshall moved to Santa Monica after he sold the El Capitan. He and Janie bought a condo years ago, and the kids spent all their vacations there, so it made sense to make a permanent move. When he visits, he asks me if I’m ready to come to California. He says there are some nice assisted living programs, or I could live in the old condo, with caregivers, just as I live now. He seems to think that I’ll go downhill if he moves me out of this house—this house and all its memories.
I don’t know.
I don’t feel like the house is me at all. I wouldn’t mind going to California and seeing the kids once in a while. But I don’t have a way to tell Marshall what I want, and I don’t try. I don’t empty my mind or start singing or make any effort to communicate what I think at all. This way, Marshall will choose what he wants. He’ll leave me here if he doesn’t really want me that close, or he’ll take me there, and I’ll live in the condo or in assisted living, and it will be what he wants.
But I do like seeing him. I love the kids.
I know that it’s not fun for them to see me. I don’t think there’s much in the experience for them. So I don’t want to want it. But I do.
I have hours, days, months to think about things.
I think just fine.
I think about my childhood. I think about my bubbe, and how she talked to me in Yiddish, and how I must have understood when I was small, even though I didn’t later. I think about the cabin at Kittatinny Lake that we shared with our neighbors two weeks every summer, and how it felt to have my back hot with the sun and then how cold the water was. I think about my neighbor’s dog Pal, who would come to the lake with us and then go with me as I rambled farther than anyone else in the woods. Momma would say that it wasn’t safe, but Poppa would say, “She’s okay. She has the dog.”
There were ponds all over that country, and Pal and I would find one, and then I would throw sticks, and he would chase them, over and over. I can almost feel those summer mornings, the smell of the water and the trees, the quack of northern shovelers in the reeds, the heft of a good solid stick in my hand. There was one pond Pal didn’t want to go in. He went in once or twice, then whined and barked and wagged his back end trying to get me to follow him away. “Come on, Pal!” I said, “Fetch!” And I hurled the stick as hard as I could, and Pal wiggled and waited and plunged in and jumped back out without fetching, and just as he barked again, loud, there was a huge sucking sound, and the water spun, and Pal barked madly while I watched, frozen, as a whirlpool formed right in the center of the pond. And like that, with one huge roar, all the water disappeared down into it.
They were old mines, those ponds, and if Pal had been in the water, he would have gone down that whirlpool with it. I ran all the way back to the cabin, yelling about what I had seen, and after I had finally gotten out my story, so that everyone could understand me, Momma started to cry. She kept saying, “Thank goodness you didn’t go in! For once, June, you thought before you acted.” She said it over and over, kissing me and crying, and Lew, who was my neighbor and in fourth grade with me, hugged Pal and said he was a hero, and looked at me and said, “W
hy did you take him? He’s our dog. He could have been killed.” And even now, more than seven decades later, I hear Lew saying this, and I hear the cracked fear in my mother’s voice, and I remember how it felt to see that water begin to turn and to hear the sound it made, and the way the pond disappeared.
I think about other things too.
I think about how my son called himself “Hammerin’ Marshall” after he hit a home run to win the opening game in Jaycee Park when he was thirteen years old. I swear he actually grew taller thinking about that hit, and a few years later, I remember the suddenly deep sound of his voice when he asked his dad whether he was also worried about Hammerin’ Hank Aaron, whether Del thought maybe something was going to happen to Hank that winter, when he was one long ball shy of Babe Ruth’s home run record. I couldn’t even look at Del when he answered Marshall, couldn’t bear all the memories our son’s enthusiasm brought up. There were so many people who didn’t want a black man to surpass Babe Ruth—he got death threats—and so many people who did. Hank Aaron had grown up in Mobile, and, of course, every time that fact was mentioned on the nightly news, I thought of Eddie.
I think about the first years running El Capitan. I think about Del. I think about Cora. I think about my mother and my father. How someone once vivid, vibrant, present in this world, can suddenly and absolutely be absent from it. Sometimes I think the joke is about to be revealed, that Del or my father will suddenly come around the corner, and how we will laugh and cheer and feel as if we will explode with joy in discovering that of course the impossible was impossible: that the people we loved have not disappeared completely and forever, lasting only in my memory, which is nearer and nearer to not lasting at all.
What if we could just see each other now and then? A quick hug, one dinner, a sunny day? What about that? It would be enough, wouldn’t it? If we all got to shimmer in, here and there, and feel the cold rush of sea wave against bare ankle, the whisper-soft skin of our grandmothers, hear the low rumble of my poppa reading a bedtime story, or an eight-year-old Marshall singing “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” under a tree? It doesn’t seem too much to ask of a universe so vast, that the absolute be a little less absolute, a little more bearable, a little more as it really feels: that the people I love are still present, are still real, are still near me.
“It’s time for dinner. I’ve cooked a piece of salmon.” I’d forgotten Helen.
We’ll have dinner, and then she’ll go home. Jessy will be here tomorrow. There’s no one with me at night. Everyone worries about this except me. I might fall, I might do something I don’t mean to do, it isn’t perfectly safe. But I hope Marshall doesn’t hire someone to be with me at night. I’ll miss that little bit of privacy, even if I mostly sleep through it.
“It’s only a paper moon, sailing over a cardboard sea . . .”
“Take a bite now, while it’s warm.”
“But it wouldn’t be make believe if you believed in me.”
I pick up my fork and tap it on the table to the rhythm of the song. I am feeling good, and I mean to eat, but this is what the fork does.
27
Engracia should not have opened the door.
Ms. Navarro and the man stared at each other for a long moment. Then he said, “How could you? How could you keep my daughter from me?” and his voice squeaked, as if he were a child, a tiny, high voice in a huge man’s body. Ms. Navarro did not answer. She turned quickly, but before she could move, the man rushed forward and grabbed her; he held Ms. Navarro between his arms and refused to move.
“Call the police!” she said to Engracia.
Engracia stepped toward them, and the man wrapped his arm tighter around Honorata, lifting her tiny body a few inches off the ground. “Stop!” he barked. “Nobody is calling the police.”
Engracia saw his great arm wrapped around Ms. Navarro’s thin neck. It seemed that he could snap it as easily as she snapped a sheet onto a bed. She froze, unsure what to do, and then he gestured, using Ms. Navarro’s body as a sort of pointer, and Engracia stumbled into the study next to the entrance, the only room downstairs with a door.
Behind her, the man half carried, half dragged Ms. Navarro into the study. Her face was curiously slack. She neither struggled nor screamed.
“I have a gun,” he said. “I don’t want to use it. I don’t even want to get it out. But I will.”
And he moved his jacket aside, so that Engracia could see it, resting there against his soft, heaving belly.
“I want to talk. I want to talk with Rita. And you’ll have to stay here and listen.”
Engracia nodded her head, her eyes glued to Ms. Navarro’s face, which remained oddly calm, removed.
Then he turned back to Honorata. “I’m going to let you go. Don’t scream. Don’t run. We’re going to talk.”
Sweat poured down the man’s neck and into his shirt collar. He was panting, looking around, trying to figure out what to do.
He released Ms. Navarro, and she stumbled to the nearest chair, sunk into it, looking like a child more than the intimidating woman she had seemed an hour earlier.
“My name’s Jimbo,” the man said to Engracia.
“Engracia.”
“What? What’s your name?”
“Engracia.”
“Sit down there. Just be quiet. I don’t want to hurt you. I’m not going to hurt anyone.”
Engracia tried to take a breath, but her lungs were constricted; she could not seem to inhale. Which was strange, because she didn’t care if she lived or died, and she had already had the thought that perhaps this strange man—this sweating fat man, too old to be breaking into someone’s house, with his gun, and his belly, and the hair limp on his head—was the answer she had prayed for.
Still, the body resists destruction. She knew that.
Her heart pounded, and she tried again to breathe, but her chest did not fill. The room looked to her as if someone had blown red smoke into it.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Ms. Navarro said. “You’re going to go to jail.”
The man stared at her but said nothing. Engracia expected him to erupt, she expected to see fury in his eyes, but instead, she saw pain. He looked as if he might cry.
“You won’t get away with this. I know you’ve been looking for me. I’ve been here all along, all these years. And you never found me? You can’t even find someone easy to find.”
The man looked confused. Ms. Navarro kept speaking.
“Why are you here now? Why did you come now? All these years. I thought you had stopped looking.”
“I never looked for you.”
And again, Engracia saw that he was not angry, that the violence with which he had grabbed Ms. Navarro, ushered them into this room, was somehow not there. The terror of those few seconds was still present, though. Even her skin was alive with it.
“You never looked?”
“I never looked.”
“Why are you here now?”
And at this, the man let out something between a wail and a cry. And he threw his hands to his head, and his whole body shuddered. When he lifted his arms to his face, Engracia saw the gun again, a black handle, the glint of metal. The gun gleamed there, waiting. He spoke.
“How could you?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Malaya. Malaya.”
The name came out the second time like a wail. Engracia could see that the man was losing control.
Ms. Navarro did not react to her daughter’s name. But she spoke anyway.
“What are you talking about? What Malaya?”
Engracia watched silently, trying to understand the game these two were playing, remembering what the man had said already, that Ms. Navarro had kept his daughter from him.
The man grabbed Ms. Navarro’s arm. His fat white fingers dug into her skin, and she called out, but he did not release her. He held her arm, and looked at her, staring into her eyes, and Ms. Navarro shook all over and turn
ed her eyes away first.
Malaya was his child.
Engracia could see it.
She could see it in their eyes, in the way they interacted, in what was not said. Slowly, she reached into the deep side pocket of her pants, where her cell phone was. She’d had the phone for only a few months; she could still remember the salesman explaining how to call 911, that all she had to do was open the phone and hold down the 9 button, that a chip in the phone would bring help to her.
The salesman had showed her this feature, and Engracia had cried, tears dripping down her face, at how wrong he was, at how little he knew of what phones could or could not do in an emergency.
But this was different.
This was Las Vegas, and her cell phone would work. If she could find a way to press the 9 and hold it, someone would come.
Her fingers fumbled, searching, searching.
“What are you doing?”
His voice was loud and panicky. Sweat ran in rivulets down his face.
Engracia said nothing. No English words would come. She opened her mouth, and nothing, no sound at all, came out.
“Call the police, Engracia.”
“Shut up!” Jimbo turned back to Engracia. “Don’t call anyone. That better not be a phone in your pocket. No one is calling anyone.”
Engracia placed her hands on her lap, still unable to think of a single word in English. Taco came to mind. Taco Bell, Taco Time. Nothing else.
“I never looked for you. I respected your wishes. I thought you were in Manila, or back home. I never looked for you. I never even came back to Vegas. I never tried another woman. I never tried again.”
Ms. Navarro would not look at him. She stared stonily at the floor, ignoring his fingers still buried in her arm, her body trembling, trembling. Finally, he released her arm and stepped away.
What was she thinking? Why was this man here?
“You knew I wanted a family. A wife. A child. How could you hide her from me?”
Now Ms. Navarro’s voice cracked out of her.
“I didn’t hide her. She’s not yours.”
'Round Midnight Page 22