She glanced back down at the burn barrel. When the housedress was nothing more than embers and a few sheets of gray pansy-patterned cotton, she tossed in the postcard, on which her neighbors had written, as a postscript, How are the cleanup efforts going? Any new Daisy developments? Everyone, even the atheistic Smiths with their Buddha statue out front and their maypole out back—both, incidentally, destroyed in the storm, carried off, in fact, to parts unknown—knew about Viv’s obsession. It was embarrassing.
Thou shalt have no other god before me. Viv had had many gods before him. Trevor. He was her first. Her little angel on earth. How she’d worshipped him, even with his faults, his little slips into strange silences and unexplained bursts of anger and despair. The drugs and Dr. Nelson had helped and later the job at the grocery store. Still, even a doting mother had to admit Trevor hadn’t quite turned out exactly as she’d hoped. There would be no grandchildren. She was sure of that. And no wedding to plan and lose weight for.
Food. That was another false idol of hers. Cakes, mostly, and ice cream and sometimes, in a pinch, candy. Puddings, too. Anything sweet. Not that she didn’t enjoy every now and then a fried chicken or a good roast, but she could say no to those things. She had no power over sugar. Just the smell of it made her heart beat faster. Especially after Henry died and all those nice people from the church piled her countertops high with condolence. So many cakes, so little time. There’d been cold cuts and veggie trays and chips and dips, of course, but the cakes. Yellow, red velvet, carrot, white, confetti, spice, pineapple upside down. Chocolate, obviously. The cakes had crowned the whole offering like iced jewels and Viv approached them each morning with what she hoped was the proper amount of reverence. Thank you, Lord, for the bounty I am about to receive. Here’s to you, Henry.
She planned to put several in the freezer for safekeeping, but instead she and Trevor devoured them all in a matter of days, and when the last piece of carrot cake disappeared, they both stood up from the table at the same time and wandered outside to lie in the backyard in a daze of sugar sweat and shame.
Daisy. Her final god. For the past month Daisy Gonzalez had controlled almost every aspect of Viv’s existence. She used the girl as an excuse not to shower at regular intervals—who knew when the news might interrupt one of Viv’s soap operas with an update, a break in the case?—or cook nutritious meals or keep her home in tolerable order. Viv and Trevor had lived exclusively on store-bought confections and microwave dinners. The trash can overflowed with plastic containers flecked with food and mold. Cat hair and dust bunnies had taken over. They rolled on the floor like tumbleweed. Mr. Greenjeans complained constantly. He liked things neat. So had Viv, but that was before. Before Daisy disappeared and Viv had succumbed to a kind of sick excitement not unlike what she’d felt on her wedding day—terror and anxiety mixed with a delicious anticipation and a sense that the boredom, the suffocating sameness of the day-after-day existence in Colliersville, Indiana, had finally come to an end. Viv Hochstetler now lived in a place where things happened. Not to her, but all the same, she was a witness, like the funny and sad and funny/sad characters who, each week, orbited around Lina Lordell in a dizzying circle of half-truths and fake testimony and, sometimes, real and estimable grace. Viv, too, was a witness to history. Hence the scrapbook. Admittedly, Viv had splurged on the pretty gingham cover and acid-free paper, but didn’t a little girl being kidnapped warrant a little extravagance, not to mention a few more applications to her God than might be considered strictly necessary or in keeping with his teachings? She had hoped and prayed for Daisy’s safe return so often, cast her eyes up to the crucifix in the kitchen with such concentration and vehemence, she wondered if even Jesus himself might tire of her constant requests.
“Please, Jesus, save little Daisy and deliver her back to the loving arms of her poor daddy. Please, Jesus, lord in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done…”
She prayed to Jesus but thought only of herself, and that was blasphemy. That was vile wickedness, as was her fantasy of Daisy’s eventual discovery by a nice teenage volunteer who would find the girl perhaps in a park or a shed somewhere, shaken but largely unharmed and fully ready for her cameo on the evening news, after which Viv would stride out her own front door, upright and healthy as you please, and walk—yes, walk—the full four miles to the Gonzalez place in the Bottoms and hand Mr. Gonzalez her scrapbook, wrapped up tight and pretty in a pink ribbon, a token of her joy and sisterly love. The sheer arrogance of such fantasies! Like she was some sort of latter-day Moses humping his tablets down the mountain, only this book wouldn’t be instructional per se, it would be atonement—a fat, sticky-in-places apology for all the unkind words hurled at Daisy and her people ever since Helman Yoder had recruited a hundred illegal immigrants to milk his cows and then left them to their own devices when the dairy was shuttered. Viv was well acquainted with the prevailing opinion of Colliersville’s native population toward Mexicans of all kinds, even Daisy and Hector Gonzalez’s kind, which was legal and documented and pretty much as American as apple pie, and it was a hateful thing to behold. Had a gaggle of twelve-year-old boys called Daisy a dirty spic? Told her to go back where she came from, even though where she came from was here? This very town. This very state. This very soil with its clay and silt and sand. Oh Daisy. Poor Daisy. No wonder she had wilted and died.
Viv had bought the DVD Olé! Mexico from Agua to Zapata as a way to educate herself against the ignorance of people like Shellie Pogue and the entire Seaver clan, who thought the solution to illegal immigration was to build an eight-hundred-mile humming fence along the Rio Grande that would electrocute men, women, and children upon contact. That or just shoot to kill anything moving in the desert. “Lizard or otherwise,” Shellie had said once, and Viv had cried that night alone in her bedroom because she’d said nothing. Like mother like son, she thought now. It was all her fault.
Viv watched Olé! three times all the way through and many times in fits and starts, pausing to ask Trevor questions and turning on the subtitles when the accents of the nice lady narrator and her sombrero’ed puppet friend got a little too thick for her to understand. The DVD, which didn’t so much burn as melt over the sad remains of her housedress, gave an overview of everything from Mexico’s most beloved artists and holidays to its main exports and key historical figures. Viv kept returning and returning to the part about the Day of the Dead, all those beautiful, sugared skulls. “That’s how we should do it,” she’d told Trevor one day while they wolfed down Hot Pockets in front of the television, and what she meant was not forget them. Not forget men like Henry who died young simply because remembering them was too painful. We should dance on their graves, she thought. Sing their favorite songs. Talk about them to anyone who will listen. Tell stupid stories and cry on shoulders and wail through the night. Laugh out loud because, in the end, we’re all in this together. This perverse idea of dealing with death like we’re proper people, like we’re decorous and genteel and well mannered, and death is something to be buried cleanly and without feeling, is killing us, she wanted to shout. Killing us.
Daisy’s funeral would take place in two days. Viv read about the arrangements in the paper that morning right after she finished the article on Brianna Pogue and Josh Seaver being indicted for manslaughter. Both had attempted courtroom confessions of a sort and Viv read their stories clean through, trying to think of the two with something like Christian kindness but couldn’t. Brianna Pogue and Josh Seaver abducted Daisy Gonzalez on a lark. They took pictures of the girl playing basketball and spending time with Juan Cardoza and, having coaxed Daisy into the old Udall place for the night, sent the photos to the police station. They thought if they built up enough suspicion against Juan and were successful in talking Daisy into blaming Juan for the incident, they would at the very least get Juan fired from the janitorial post he “stole” from Josh. They knew Juan wouldn’t be a good advocate for himself and hoped the police would hand him an
attempted kidnapping charge, maybe even slap him with an intent to harm. They planned to send Daisy home to Hector the next day. “So we get our revenge,” Brianna said, “and nobody gets hurt.” But then they woke to find Daisy killed by a support beam that had fallen in the night. It was an accident, Brianna swore. A stupid, horrible, tragic accident, and Brianna said she and Josh would never be the same. “So really we’ve had our punishment already,” Brianna said. “You don’t even have to put us in jail. We’re, like, in jail already. The jail of our own minds.”
Viv tossed that morning’s paper onto the blaze and watched Brianna’s face and Josh’s five o’clock shadow curl to black, then bone white. Viv supposed the devil was getting a room ready for them in hell.
She’d saved the scrapbook for last because the fire was at its hottest and it hurt her the most to give it up. The book was almost as fat as Mr. Greenjeans and its contents spilled onto the ground. Viv had to crouch next to the barrel and gather up a handful of articles and photographs bleeding ink onto her hands. Bending over was a catastrophe. Her hair stuck and melted to the side of the barrel. Her back ached with the effort of hoisting herself upright. I am a joke, she thought. I have grown ridiculous.
She held the book, pages down and fanned out over the flames, watching as they ate up Daisy’s pretty face and a story about Hector Gonzalez’s private pain. Next to burn was an article about a rash of anti-Mexican vandalism that had broken out in the Bottoms. Then some recipes for Mexican hot chocolate and flan and another article about Hector, who had been put on temporary leave from the school. Viv held on to the book as long as she could, until the heat singed her skin and her fingernails seemed to expand. Then she let it drop down into the ash, a gray cloud bursting upward into her open eyes. The sting. The choking and falling back. It was what she deserved.
When it was all gone, when everything was smoke and trash, Viv flopped down onto the cold grass and stared up at the sky, thinking about Mexico, all their dead, of suns and sons, marigolds and mothers. Daisy had had a mother but she died in the same accident that left the little girl a paraplegic. Trevor Hochstetler had a mother and it was time she started showing up.
The moon looked like a scooped hand reaching out to cup a neck. To support or to strangle? Viv didn’t know which. She’d have to stand up eventually. She’d have to go in. She closed her eyes. Her stomach growled. Down, boy, she thought, rubbing it in a circular motion. Down.
Enemies
(July)
He hadn’t put flowers on Joy’s grave for weeks, not since the tornado and the Mexican mess and the drawn-out settlement sessions with Maria Pinto and her lawyer. Today he brought tea roses because they’d been on sale at White Swan. Also, with their small buds and delicate coloring, they struck him as something a little girl might like. Not that Joy ever had the chance to be a little girl. Dolly delivered her stillborn at eight months, so Joy never got to open her eyes or kick her legs or cry out against the injustice of it all. He would never forget as long as he lived her tiny perfect face when they wiped it clear of blood. The bloom there.
He put the roses, slightly wilted now from the heat, on Joy’s headstone and said a short prayer. The prayer was always the same—Dear Lord, bless her and keep her. We loved her so. She brought us joy. Amen.
Which was true. She had brought them joy. Those were probably the happiest months of his and Dolly’s life together. All that planning, all that hope. Decorating the nursery, which was now Dolly’s sewing room. They’d tried to have another but it had come to nothing and so they didn’t have a family; they simply had a life. They watched TV most nights, fell asleep in front of Jay Leno. They cooked on weekends, big meals that took a lot of time to make because they had so much of it to use and get through. And they went for drives in the country while listening to talk radio. They dreamed about getting a farmhouse and a few acres. Dolly said, “How about horses? Two to start. And maybe a few goats.” Chuck nodded his head sure, knowing that they’d never get around to any of it. It was nice to think about it, though. To imagine a different sort of day.
“Mr. Breeder?”
Chuck turned and there was Maria Pinto, clutching a bouquet of carnations. Also crying, by the shadowed look of her eyes.
“Hello,” he said.
He hadn’t seen Maria since the final settlement conference, when, on the advice of his lawyer, Chuck agreed to give her the full amount she asked for. Eighty thousand dollars, to be paid in installments over the course of eight years. He wasn’t, as he’d burst out, made of money. Did they think he was some kind of gangster? “I run a Laundromat, for God’s sake!” He was ashamed to find he was shaking. “You wanted to break me? Congratulations. I’m broken.” He was even more ashamed of that admission. Why had he shown such weakness in the presence of his enemies?
Maria was paying her tardy respects to Nina Morales, the woman behind the blood curse, who had died of a heart attack at the height of a heat wave. Mr. Aguilar and Mrs. Gutierrez discovered Nina’s body on the Fourth of July. They found her, slumped over a chair near a leaking window, fireworks exploding just outside and painting her already blue face bright blue. And red. And white. It was a smell situation. Sad. The whole thing. Sad. But Mr. Aguilar and some of the other men thought it funny—a nurse dying alone in the condemned apartments with no one to help her. Ironic, they said, also because Nina hadn’t died in the tornado like Ulises and Elena. Maria slapped them upside the head every chance she got. “You don’t even know what that word means.”
Maria hadn’t been able to attend Nina’s funeral because of the settlement conference and so every Saturday since she placed a bouquet of carnations on the small pink stone they’d all pitched in for. It was the least she could do. That, and give $100 toward the headstone fund Mrs. Gutierrez got going because Nina had no family. Even Basketball Juan had forked over $50. He and Nina had been friends of a sort.
“How are you?” Maria asked Mr. Breeder. The question was a matter of politeness, a habit. She wasn’t really interested in his answer.
“Fine,” he said. “Just fine. And you?”
“Fine, too,” she said.
Seeing Mr. Breeder here was strange and Maria didn’t like it because he looked sad and like he might have a secret. She preferred keeping things simple between them—he was a bigot, she was a warrior on the side of right, but she worried she hadn’t really done much to advance any cause. The blood curse had been Nina’s idea anyway—Maria didn’t really understand it—and walking by the Beacon Street sidewalk blotch was a little like waking up with a hangover and shameful flashbacks of sluttish behavior the night before. The stain reminded her of things she would just as soon forget.
An unintended consequence of the blood curse was that Hector Gonzalez now had a daily reminder of the very place where his wife had died and his daughter was made a cripple. Had Nina known, she would perhaps have had second thoughts about spilling blood just there. It was Brianna Pogue who brought that piece of town history back to the forefront of people’s minds. Maria heard all about it a week ago while flipping channels. What she’d wanted was the weather but what she found was a morning cable access talk show with Brianna, pasty in prison-issued orange, as the guest. Seated on a beige couch next to a large fake fern and an empty bookcase, Brianna looked thinner but otherwise unchanged by her month behind bars. Just as Maria was going to turn the TV off in disgust, Brianna blurted out that three years before, she saw Tina, Daisy’s mother, and little Daisy herself get run over by Diana Seaver and her Irish limb-salesman lover. They were in the man’s truck, Brianna said, and she knew that because limbs kept falling out of it. Arms, hands, legs. “You name it,” Brianna said.
“Are you positive?” asked the soft-voiced host. “You want to be careful not to falsely accuse people on live TV.”
“Why?”
“You could be sued.”
“Do you think I care about that now?”
Brianna admitted that at the time of the hit-and-run, she was trip
ping balls and did not trust her own eyes, but that over the years she’d grown more and more convinced that what she saw was what really happened. “I’m as sure about that as I’ll ever be about anything.” Then she shared with the host, a demure woman in a black skirt suit, a stage-whispered theory that if she and Josh had left town after Daisy died they would not simply be committing the same sin as Diana Seaver and the Irishman but would, in effect, become them.
The host was confused. “Can you elaborate?”
“It’s like we wouldn’t be just ourselves anymore,” Brianna explained. “We would be Diana and that salesman, too. We would inherit their sins. Our souls would merge. Maybe our bodies, too. You know, the Doppler effect?”
“I think you mean ‘doppelgänger,’” the host said.
“Whatever,” Brianna said. “Magic is what I’m talking about. The black kind.”
Maria shook her head to rid it of the memory—of course Brianna Pogue had found magical thinking in prison—and peeked past Mr. Breeder’s shoulder at a small stone angel.
“So,” he said. He shuffled left to hide the grave, but Maria had already seen it: JOY BREEDER, BELOVED DAUGHTER, 1976. No second date. The stone, next to Nina’s and just as modest, was somewhat sunken. Gray granite. A reluctant grave, whereas the monument right to the west, Daisy Gonzalez’s grave, was large, looming, stacked high with fresh flowers and ferns.
Thirty-four years ago, Mr. Breeder had had a daughter. So long ago. Maria wondered if Mr. Breeder’s memories of Joy were like those Maria had of her childhood home in Mexico City and the ones her Ranasack friends cherished of their lives before Colliersville—wavering images at the back of the mind, brief and shifting flashes of beautiful and sad and funny moments mostly divorced from pain because it was hard to imagine they’d ever happened in the first place.
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