June thought about asking Jessy to come with her to services next Friday night, so that she could hear the cantor sing the prayers all the way through. Then, too, maybe it would make her laugh if June pulled such a stunt again. It would be good to see Jessy laugh.
33
The phone rang six times, but Jimbo did not answer it.
Ms. Navarro sat back on the couch without saying what had alerted her; what she had been listening for. But she was thinking about something. Engracia could see that her attention had shifted. What was it?
She still held Honorata’s hand in her own. She squeezed it lightly, but Ms. Navarro did not respond. She had not responded to Jimbo’s questions either, or to what he had said about Malaya. About how he could have already seen her. About how he had come to tell Ms. Navarro that he was going to see Malaya. He hadn’t wanted to go behind her back.
“If you’d just opened the letter. You would have known she found me.”
“This isn’t my fault.”
“Isn’t it?”
They sat silently again, the red glow of the police cruiser on the wall outside, the sound of the phone, ringing, ringing, still in their ears.
Malaya. She would be coming home from school now. Engracia couldn’t see a clock, and she didn’t have a watch. But the light in the window. It would have to be about the right time. What would happen if Malaya walked in now?
These were, perhaps, the last moments any of them would be alive. They all knew it, and they were all afraid, and somehow the experience linked them: the woman who had lied to the man, the man who had a gun, the woman who did not know if she wanted to live or die.
Jimbo was still sitting on the floor, his back against the wall with the window. Honorata leaned into the couch, but Engracia could feel her alertness. It was one thing to wonder if she wanted to die, it was another to imagine a teenage girl walking through the door right now. Engracia could not bear it that Malaya might walk in. That something might happen to her.
“Mi hijo died,” she blurted. “My son. Diego. He died.”
Her voice came out cracked and accented. Engracia concentrated. She would have to say this in English. They would have to hear her.
“He was ten years old.”
Ms. Navarro let go of her hand. Engracia did not move. Out the corner of her eye, she saw the man looking. She stared at the table in front of her. The wood was ornately carved, with a thick slab of greenish glass in the center. Through the glass, she saw her own foot in its dirty white sneaker. She could see her heel and then, under the glass, the rest of her foot, as if it had suddenly grown larger.
“I have only one child. He died.”
Silence.
“When he was a little boy, he told me that when he grew up he would give his money to everyone on the street, to everyone who was hungry.”
Ms. Navarro shifted slightly in the seat next to her. Engracia saw that the red glow of the police cruiser was also reflected in the greenish glass, just at the edge, a sliver of red.
“He said he didn’t know why people walk by people who are hungry, who ask for food. ‘Why do we do that, Mama?’ I told him we do not have enough money to feed everyone. That my job was to feed him. And he told me that his job was going to be to feed them.”
She inhaled deeply. Her heart thudded dully in her chest, and her stomach, fluttery and unsettled for the last hour, cramped. Still, it was not as hard as she thought to speak. Engracia had no one to tell about Diego now. The padre. Mary from work, who had come to see her. But she wanted to talk about her son. She wanted someone to know who he was. And she wanted these stupid, stupid people, who had their daughter, to stop it.
When Diego was small enough to swim in the bathtub, he had put his face in the water and said he could see Dios. When he was three, Juan took him to the Los Angeles County Fair, and they came home with two fish in plastic bags. Diego named them Hombre and Nacho. One time in first grade, he jumped out of line before he was supposed to leave the teacher and came running up to Engracia: “Mama, I can write in Spanish! Not just English. There are words in Spanish too!” Even then, he liked to crawl between her and Juan in bed, and sometimes, if he thought she was asleep, he put his thumb in his mouth and stroked her cheek with his small, gentle fingers.
Remembering the feel of his fingers on her skin nearly choked her. As always, she wanted to cry, she wanted to scream, she wanted somehow to force the universe back on the track it was meant to be on. But nothing, nothing that she did, nothing that her body could do physically, could express the horror of what was true, of what could not be changed. Even tears, the instant they fell, or screams, at the moment of sound, became nothing at all, worse than no movement, no sound, because they were so much less than what she actually felt and so much less than how utterly unbearable this fact was.
“He wanted to go to Death Valley. A scientist came to the school, and told him about the sailing stones. He wanted to see them.”
She stopped. This was hard: what Diego had wanted and what she had done. Engracia listened for any sound in the room, her eyes not leaving the coffee table with her foot, distorted by the green glass, beneath it. Ms. Navarro and the man still said nothing. It was as if time had stopped. There was no gun. There was no argument. There was no girl about to walk in the door. There was just this moment, with Engracia hanging in space, concentrating, trying to tell them. She had to tell them now. Before Malaya came in.
“When the scientist came, Diego was happy. He didn’t like Las Vegas. He missed his papa. But he liked the scientist.”
Engracia heard the man sit down flat against the floor.
“I wanted Diego to go to college. I told him to study hard. Maybe he could be a scientist.”
There was no other sound. The phone did not ring.
“Diego was afraid here. Without his papa. One boy even had a gun.”
Honorata made a sound.
“And I was afraid. I was afraid of the boys here. I was afraid of the men on the street.”
Everything was coming out all wrong. She wasn’t making sense.
“He wanted to go to Death Valley. But I was afraid to take him there. By myself.”
Engracia closed her eyes. She could not tell this story. She could not talk about what she had done. She could tell them something else. Something about Diego.
“His name was Diego Alejandro Juan Diez-Montoya. He was born in Abril, in San Diego, the United States, on the eleventh. Every year, I decorated his cake with flowers.”
Out the window, the stucco continued to glow red. Engracia looked up and saw a shadow move—a man on the wall, perhaps.
She heard Jimbo stir, as if he were getting up. Maybe the man on the wall would shoot him now, before she had told them, before they understood. She had to tell them.
“He wanted to go to Death Valley, and I was afraid to take him, so I bought him a skateboard.
“But he was disappointed. He still wanted to go to Death Valley.
“So I told him I would take him to Red Rock, to the trails there, and we would look at the paintings the Indians made a thousand years ago. And on a different day, we would go and see the sailing stones.
“I told him we would go on Saturday, when I came home from work.
“But first I had to sleep that day because I work all night. So I told Diego to watch the television and to wake me at noon. I told him do not take the skateboard outside. Because his friends are too crazy. And he does not know how to ride it yet.”
Engracia shuddered. Por favor Dios mío, ayúdame. Help me.
“Diego woke me at noon. And we got in the car right away, so we would have lots of time to find the paintings on the rocks.
“And he was quiet. Tired. I say, Diego what’s the matter? But he say he is fine, he is happy, he wants to see the rocks.
“I know something is not right, but I think it is these boys, his friends. Or maybe he watched the news on the television, and something happened. I wait, because he will tell me wh
en he is ready.”
Ms. Navarro shifted in her seat, and, very gently, she put her hand on Engracia’s back. Engracia accepted this because she knew Ms. Navarro wanted to help, and she knew she was sorry about Diego, but also, she did not like it. Because even now, nothing anyone did ever helped. And also, Ms. Navarro hid her daughter from her papa.
“I turned on the wrong road, the one before the Red Rock, and we drive a long way, looking for another sign. And Diego is very quiet. He says, ‘Mama I am sick. My head hurts.’ And then he throws up. In the car.”
“ ‘Diego,’ I say. ‘You should tell me you’re sick. It’s the car. It’s too hot.’ But Diego is not listening to me. His eyes don’t look at me, they are not looking at anything, but there are tears. I see tears in his eyes.”
Engracia saw that the man was no longer looking at her. He was holding his head in his hands, staring at the floor.
“I know he is sick, and I don’t know where I am, so I try to call an ambulance. I stop the car, and I get out my phone, and the call doesn’t work. I say, ‘Diego, Diego, wake up. What’s the matter?’ ”
But Diego did not reply. He leaned his head on the window, with the mess from the getting sick still in his lap, and he did not answer, and he did not look at her.
“So I start the car, and I turn around, and I drive very fast. There is no one on that road. It’s not going to Red Rock. And I keep dialing and dialing, and my phone does not work.”
Diego threw up again. Engracia tried to hold him, tried to pull his head under her arm while driving with the left hand, and pushing on the buttons on the phone with her chin. She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t hold him and drive and phone. Diego was limp now, so she put his head in her lap, and she drove the fastest she had ever driven. Finally, there was the road she needed. She stopped. And the phone worked. And someone must have seen how desperate she looked, right through the window, because a car stopped and then another, and everyone tried to help.
Was it better to drive him to the hospital? To wait for the ambulance? In the end, she left her car on the side of the road, and a man in a Mercedes drove her and Diego very fast toward town, and when he saw the fire engine, sirens blaring, coming toward them, he pulled over. One paramedic worked on Diego and tried to rouse him, and another paramedic asked her questions. Before they put them both in the ambulance, the first paramedic said, “Where did he get this bruise? Here, behind his ear?”
And that was when Engracia knew that he must have fallen, that he must have taken the skateboard, that he must have gone outside when she was sleeping. And, of course, he would not have told her that he fell, because he would not have wanted her to know that he had disobeyed.
“He died in the hospital. Two days later. When they asked me if they could turn off the machine.”
Engracia could not say more than this. She could not keep speaking, even if these idiotic people, who had their daughter, did not understand. She had tried. She and Diego had tried. If this is what Dios wanted, she had tried.
There were tears on Ms. Navarro’s face now. She stretched her arm all the way around Engracia’s back, and when she squeezed, Engracia could feel how her body had changed. Her breathing was ragged, but her body was no longer rigidly on alert. Instead, it was soft, heavy, pressing into Engracia.
“I didn’t know. I’m so sorry.”
Engracia relaxed into Honorata’s arms. She was a mother too. Engracia knew that the other woman had spent seventeen years afraid of just the thing that had happened to her.
A horrible sound erupted from the man.
He was crying. He was crying, and he was trying not to, and his face was hidden, and his big, fat body shook. Engracia thought that he cried like a child, without any ability to hold himself back. He snorted, and his nose ran, and he could not catch his breath, and his body twisted and shook. She was grateful for how deeply he suffered. He suffered for her, for Diego, and, somehow, this helped.
Just then, the doorbell rang.
At first, nobody moved. It rang again, and there was a loud knocking.
Engracia looked out the window and saw a man crouched on the wall and another across the street. They were wearing helmets and military gear, though surely they were the police. They were watching her in the window, and they were looking toward the front door—toward whoever was ringing the bell.
Jimbo looked up.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry, Honorata.”
And then he looked at Engracia. “I am so sorry.”
Engracia saw in his eyes that he had given up, and she thought that he might shoot himself now, but that he would not shoot her and he would not shoot Ms. Navarro. They looked at each other, the man’s face swollen with his tears, and red, like the glow of that light on the stucco.
“I’m sorry about your son.”
Engracia looked at Ms. Navarro, who was watching them, her face stricken, no longer angry.
Engracia leaned over to the man. He had been sitting on the floor, and she was on the couch, so when she leaned over, and he put his arms around her, they met in a kind of crouch near the floor. He put both his arms around her, and as he bent his head near her face, she said, “The gun. Give me the gun.” He didn’t reply. She didn’t know if he had heard; if he understood. Engracia wondered if there was a gun trained on the two of them now, someone out there waiting for some distance between her and the man, someone trying to understand what was going on in here.
“The gun.”
She said it with urgency, because there wasn’t much time. The person at the door was knocking loudly now, and he was yelling something, though she wasn’t sure what.
Jimbo gripped her shoulders tightly. Engracia slowly moved her hand forward, toward his soft body, toward the gun stuck in his waistband. The man said nothing. And then she had the gun in her hand, and before she separated from the man’s embrace, she dropped it in the deep pocket of her cotton pants.
“Open up! Police!”
Engracia and the man separated, and they looked at Honorata, who was looking out the door of the study, toward the hall.
Almost at once, they all stood. Engracia waited for the shot, the bullet that would come through the window.
“This is the police. Open the door!”
Honorata moved out of the room, toward the door. There was no shot, and so Engracia and the man followed. She didn’t look at Jimbo, she didn’t say anything; she could feel the gun against her leg, pulling the band of her slacks lower.
Honorata opened the door, and the policeman said, “Ma’am, is everyone all right in here? We’ve been calling you. We had a call earlier. What’s going on?”
And Honorata said, “Everyone’s fine. But I want this man to leave my home. I want him to go.”
“Has he hurt you? Is there a gun?”
Jimbo and Engracia stood behind Honorata, the three of them all staring at the police officer. Except for his size, Jimbo looked the least frightening of all. An old man, older than he had been two hours before, with his eyes still swollen, and the sweat beaded in his hair and beneath his ear and along the collar of his shirt.
“I’m ready to go,” he said.
“Well, ma’am, what’s going on here?” the officer repeated. “Has this man been holding you? Has he hurt you?”
And there was a silence, while Honorata looked at the police officer, and Engracia looked at Honorata, and Jimbo looked down at the floor.
“No. He didn’t hurt me. He didn’t hold me. I just don’t want him in my house anymore.”
“Are you sure about what you’re saying? We can hold him. We’d like to ask all of you some questions.”
Honorata drew herself up—she was not much more than five feet tall—and she said firmly, “This is my home. I didn’t call you. I want this man to leave, and he’s ready to leave. I want you to leave too. I didn’t call the police. I don’t need you.”
The police officer turned around and looked at another man standing a few feet
behind him. That man shrugged his shoulders and raised an eyebrow.
“Someone called us, ma’am. There was a 911 call from this address.”
Honorata did not answer.
“Ma’am, we understand these situations can be really complicated. But we want to be sure you’re safe. We don’t want something happening to you later. Do you understand?”
“I understand that this is my home, and I didn’t call the police, and I haven’t done anything wrong.”
“Nobody thinks you’ve done anything wrong, ma’am. We just want to make sure you’re safe.”
“I’m safe. But my daughter. She should’ve come home by now. I heard the school bus. Do you know where she is?”
Engracia felt Jimbo go rigid. He looked up, out the door. The police officer saw him look.
“Sir, what are you doing here? How do you know this woman?”
“We’re old friends,” said Jimbo quietly. “I was in Las Vegas, and I came to see her.”
The man standing at the edge of the yard, behind the police officer, came forward then. He said, “Mrs. Navarro, is that right?”
Honorata nodded yes.
“I’m Tom Darling. I’m a lieutenant in the Metro Police Department. We got a 911 call from this house a couple of hours ago, and we’ve been watching you pretty close. We have your daughter just on the next block. She’s fine. But we didn’t want her to come home until we knew that everything was okay here.”
Honorata nodded. “Thank you.”
“So, before we let anyone go, we’d like to talk with each of you. Just for a minute. One by one.”
Honorata turned and looked first at Engracia and then at Jimbo. Their eyes all caught, and their faces did not move. They stood silent and immobile, and an agreement was made.
“Okay. Would you like to come in?” Honorata asked.
34
When Coral and Tom talked a few days later about what had happened, he said that they had gotten lucky; the waiting had paid off. There was no doubt in his mind that there’d been a gun, that the man had been holding the two women; the whole thing could have ended in a very different way. But the gun got ditched somewhere. They patted him down; they searched the room where the three of them had been waiting. And what else could they do? The two women insisted there was no gun. Honorata Navarro wanted the police off her property.
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