Irises

by Francisco X. Stork

  “All right. You can have more time, but you don’t have to push me away in the meantime.”

  “You’re the one who’s been acting strange, like your manhood was humiliated because I didn’t jump at your offer.”

  “I’ve been acting strange because you’ve been strange,” he said defensively. Then he spoke in a different tone, as if he’d just understood what she said. “My offer? You say it like I made you some kind of business deal.”

  For a moment she was surprised at Simon’s sensitivity. She hadn’t thought he could perceive the nuances hidden in her words. “Wasn’t that what it was? You were offering to take care of us. The only thing I wasn’t clear about was in return for what.”

  She realized the cruelty of her words too late. Simon pushed down on the accelerator and the car sped down the empty street. “Simon, be careful,” she pleaded. He slammed on the brakes and then resumed speed at a crawl. Kate felt her anger turning to deep sadness. She opened the glove compartment and took out a package of tissues. She used one to wipe her tears. “Honestly, I didn’t have anything to drink,” she said.

  “I believe you,” he said.

  She looked at the tissues. “Remember these?”

  Simon nodded and then his face contorted as if he was about to cry. They were both silent. About a year after they started dating, they had gone to Ascarate Park one Saturday evening after a football game. They kissed and fondled each other for a long time and then Simon insisted on revealing himself to her. She touched him and he immediately exploded in her hand. The package of tissues she held now was the same kind she took out of her purse then.

  “You made sure that never happened again, didn’t you?” She heard the resentment in his voice. But it was true. They had kissed and touched many times since then, but Kate had never again let them be as intimate as that.

  She reached over and touched his hand. He jerked it away. Perhaps he sensed that the sentiment behind her touch was similar to pity.

  It was only half a mile to her house. When they arrived, he parked in front of the house and turned off first the headlights and then the motor. There was a look of steely determination on Simon’s face. He held the steering wheel and looked ahead as if he were driving on a straight road somewhere in the middle of the desert. Then he turned to face her, his back to the door. “I guess I need to know if you love me or not.”

  “That sounds almost like a threat.” She said this with humor in her voice, but the question troubled her.

  “It’s no threat. I just need to know. I can wait if you love me, but if you don’t . . .”

  “Can’t we talk about this some other day? I’m not feeling all that well.”

  “Tell me. Why is it so hard?”

  “I’ve told you many times that I do.”

  “But you never meant it. Tell me only if you mean it. If you don’t mean it, just say so.”

  “Why don’t you think I meant it?”

  “I don’t know.” He let his head fall on his chest for a second. “You were always cold. I thought it was just the way you were. I guess I never really felt you liked me as a man. That you liked being with me.”

  “I liked you as a man.”

  “Liked?”

  “Like. Like you,” she corrected herself.

  He shook his head. “Sometimes it felt as if I was someone you needed to get you out of the house.” He looked at her and she could tell he was asking that she deny what he had just said. But she couldn’t. He took a deep breath and said with finality, “I need to know if you really love me.”

  She rubbed her eyes. All the emotions, the thoughts, the images and memories had made her sick with confusion. She needed to clear the cobwebs so she could figure out how best to respond, calculate the best way to proceed. She needed to buy time before responding to his question, the vital question of love’s meaning. “Why now? What set you off like this?”

  Simon tilted his head back and stared at the roof of the car. “How can you not tell me that you were thinking of going to college at this place in California? How can you not even tell me when you got accepted?”

  “Bonnie,” Kate said.

  “She didn’t mean to tell me. She just assumed you told me. It’s normal for a girlfriend to tell her boyfriend, don’t you think?”

  “I wasn’t sure I was going. I’m still not sure.”

  “But you want to go.”

  She thought for a few moments. She had come to a place where there were two paths and she needed to choose one of them. She pushed through the haziness and saw the one that had to be taken. She was tired of hiding what she wanted from her father, from Simon, from Mary. She was plain tired of pretending. The truth will set you free, Andy had said.

  “Yes. I want to go to away to Stanford more than anything else.”

  She could feel Simon stare at her in disbelief, shock, hurt, anger, she didn’t know what. He swallowed. “I need to know if you love me. If you love me, I can wait for you.”

  She looked at him tenderly, gratefully. “Simon, you don’t want to do that.”

  “I would. I would wait if . . .”

  “If. That’s just it. You want me to promise you that in four years, I’ll come back to you and marry you. Isn’t that what you want? But after college comes med school and I don’t know where I’ll be. There are so many years. I can’t make any promises. You can understand that, can’t you? I can’t make any promises.”

  He shrugged his shoulders. “Yeah. I guess you can’t. You make it seem like I’m asking for too much. It’s not too much to ask if you love someone.”

  “Simon . . .” She saw him close his eyes. He seemed to know what was coming. He opened them again and looked at her. He was ready for whatever she was going to tell him. “I’m having a hard time figuring out what love is.”

  “Oh, come on!” he said, exasperated.

  “Obviously, I care for you. It’s just that going to Stanford means so much to me. It’s part of who I am, of who I want to be.”

  “But I told you I would wait.”

  “And this caring for you, maybe it is love, but it’s not strong enough to give you any guarantees about what will happen when I’m away or when I graduate.”

  Simon nodded. “Fine. Whatever you say,” he said.

  “It doesn’t mean what we have has to be over. Can’t we just see what happens?” She owed it to him to say that. She owed it to his kindness and his patience.

  “No, we can’t just see what happens. You think I’m stupid or someone you can step on? You want me to stay and wait for you for four years even if you don’t feel anything for me? I always knew you had a selfish side, but I didn’t know how bad it was. It’s not just me. You’re going to go away and leave your sister with your mother? You don’t think that’s selfish? Why this place Stanford? You can pursue your dream of being a doctor here. Do you give a damn about anybody other than yourself?”

  Kate listened to Simon without responding. He wasn’t telling her anything new. She had questioned herself endlessly about whether her desire to go to Stanford was selfish and she had never been able to resolve the question. Every time she thought about it, she became more confused. But right now she wanted him to have the last word. Her silence was her last gift to him.

  When he saw that she was not going to say anything more, he said, “I guess this is what they call breaking up.”

  “Yeah,” she said. She was still holding the package of tissues in her hand. She placed it on the dashboard. She looked at Simon one last time and then opened the door.

  “Kate,” Simon called when she was about to close the car door.

  She leaned down to look in at him. She thought maybe he was going to ask her to reconsider, to say he was willing to leave things as they were. She wished he would say that. What she would be stepping into without him was new and it frightened her. She wanted him there and yet she didn’t.

  “I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to work at the restaurant anymore
,” he said. “It’d be too hard. I have to tell my folks that we’re not together and they’re not going to want you around either.”

  Kate laughed a short, disbelieving laugh. “You’re firing me.”

  “Yeah.” She saw a sad grin on his face, and then he started the car.

  The house was dark except for a yellow outdoor light. Father claimed that yellow lightbulbs lasted longer than white ones of similar wattage. It was a ridiculous notion, but Father had been full of unscientific ideas. When she was younger, Kate tried to persuade him of his many errors, but she gave up because she never won a single argument, no matter the evidence and no matter how hard she tried. The longest and most bitter argument had been about evolution. She once brought home a book that traced in pictures the development of humans from ape to man, and Father almost burned the book on top of the stove as blasphemy. Andy would laugh if she ever told him that story.

  She stood outside the house and watched Simon speed away. It was funny. Here she just broke up with her boyfriend and she was thinking about how different Andy was from both Simon and her father. Andy had given her permission to think about what was right for everyone even if it went against some people’s beliefs. It was right for her to go to the best college she could get into, and as hard as it still was to consider, it was right to see the truth about Mother.

  She opened the screen door carefully and then the wooden door. Aunt Julia was snoring on the pullout sofa bed. Kate gently placed her backpack on the floor and headed for the bathroom. When she turned on the light, she saw a white envelope propped against the mirror of the medicine cabinet. She moved closer and read the return address, then smiled and pressed the envelope to her chest. Her first impulse was to wake Mary up so they could open it together, but she ignored it. She grabbed a nail file and carefully slit the envelope, then she took out the single sheet of paper and unfolded it. There was no check. She began to read, her eyes widening, her chest constricting as she went. Words dripped into her consciousness like acid.

  Claim denied

  misrepresentation

  false statements

  medical records

  preexisting cardiac condition

  not disclosed at time of application

  Fraud

  She dropped the letter in the sink, closed the lid to the toilet, and sat down. She tried to get her brain to function. There must be a way out, a way to fix this terrible mistake. Father lied in an application for insurance? Father did not disclose that he had a preexisting condition? It wasn’t possible. There must be a way around, a way to get to where she wanted to go. She pushed her mind to strategize, but her mind could not generate the necessary voltage. It was like one of Father’s yellow lightbulbs.

  She heard her mother groan. She opened the door to the bathroom and walked to her mother’s bedroom. There was a lamp next to her bed that Mary kept lit during the night. Mother’s sleep cycles usually coincided with the sleep cycles of normal people, but tonight her eyes were open. Kate fingered the feeding tube that connected to her stomach. “What should I do?” she whispered. Then her mother’s face turned toward her, and in her eyes was an urgent message she couldn’t decipher.

  She went to her bedroom, feeling her way with her hand against the wall. She had left the bathroom light on and so she saw that Mary had fallen asleep with her overalls still on. She must have stayed up waiting for Kate to get home so they could open the envelope together.

  Kate stopped at the door. There were many times in the past year when her room had been a friendly space filled with her hopes for the future. Tonight it was dark and solid and closing in on her like a vault. She needed air. She needed the light of truth and the warm unencumbered sky of freedom. There was only one place she could think of where these might be found.

  When Mary woke up the following morning, she saw that Kate’s bed was empty. The bed was made, but Kate always made her bed as soon as she awoke. Mary thought she must have left early for school. The library opened early and Kate went there often, especially when she worked late the night before.

  Mary found the letter from the insurance company on top of the sink. Her heart sank when she read that Papa had made false statements, and she couldn’t believe it could ever be true. But what bothered her most was what she imagined Kate must have felt when she read the letter. Kate had counted on that money to pay for Mama’s care, to pay for someone to live with them when she went to college. The letter must have devastated her.

  Mary could hear Aunt Julia in the kitchen boiling water for her instant coffee and her daily bowl of oatmeal. She wished she had woken up when Kate came in. She could have stayed up with her and comforted her, listened to her vent her anger about Papa if need be. It hurt to think that Kate didn’t feel like talking to her, but maybe she felt it was too hard to talk about Papa’s deception, if that’s what it was.

  Mary put the letter in the back pocket of her pants and then went to see Mama. Her eyes were still closed. She checked her diaper to make sure it was okay and checked that the liquid mixture of food and water flowed at the same rate that Talita set it every day. She turned off the bedside lamp and opened the curtains so light would brighten the room. She lifted Mama’s head and fluffed her pillow, then took a hairbrush from the drawer in the bedside table and brushed her hair.

  It always made her sad to brush Mama’s hair. Touching Mama always brought the realization that Mama had gone to a different, inaccessible place. She felt lonely. Mama used to have beautiful black hair that came to the middle of her back. After the accident, her head was shaved so the doctors could go into her brain to stop the internal bleeding. Now her hair was no longer black but a lush silver-gray that gave Mama a distinguished look. When people entered the room, Mary saw them turn solemn and reverent, as if they were in the presence of royalty.

  “Where’s your sister?” Aunt Julia asked Mary when she came out of Mama’s room. Aunt Julia was in the bathroom. She had a habit of leaving the door open when she was in there.

  “She went to school early,” Mary said. She hurried to the living room before Aunt Julia could ask any more questions. As she started to put away the sofa bed, she saw Kate’s backpack. Kate never went to school without her backpack. It was so unlike her to leave the insurance letter in the bathroom, to go to school without her backpack. And now that she thought of it, Kate’s teddy bear was in the same position on the bed as it had been the night before. Had Kate not come home the night before?

  Mary looked at her watch. She figured Simon or Bonnie was awake by now. She went back to her room and found Kate’s address book. She called Simon first. His mother answered, sounding upset that Mary had called so early. After a couple minutes, Simon came to the phone.

  “Simon, is Kate there?” There was a long pause. Maybe he had just woken up and he hadn’t understood what she said. “Is she there with you?” Mary repeated.

  “Why would she be here?” His voice sounded strange, irritable.

  “I thought she might be. Did she . . . did you drop her off last night?”

  “Yeah, I dropped her off,” he said coldly. Part of Mary wanted to pursue why he was using that tone of voice, but more than that, she wanted to find out where Kate was.

  “Did she call you or anything after you dropped her off?”

  “Nope. Did something happen?”

  Mary heard concern in his voice, and for the first time he sounded like the Simon she always knew. “She’s not here.”

  “Maybe she went to school.”

  “No, she left her backpack here. She never goes to school without her backpack.” Then, out of the blue, it occurred to her to ask, “Did you guys have a fight or something?”

  “We broke up,” he said. He sounded like he didn’t want to elaborate.

  “What?”

  “She broke up with me or I broke up with her. We broke up together. I don’t even know what happened. All I know is it’s over. I can’t talk right now. I didn’t get any sleep. I might skip sch
ool today.” He was mumbling. “Maybe she went over to Bonnie’s.”

  Mary hoped Simon would offer to help her find Kate, but he sounded as if he had all the hurt he could take for a while. “I’ll try Bonnie,” Mary said, and hung up.

  Mary called Bonnie, but Bonnie’s brother told her she was in the shower and Kate was not there. She asked him if he could have Bonnie call her before she went to school.

  Aunt Julia had been hovering while she was on the phone.

  “Something happened to Kate, didn’t it?” Aunt Julia finally asked.

  Mary tried to sound calm. “I don’t think anything happened. It’s just that she left so early and she didn’t take her backpack.” She decided not to mention that Kate’s bed hadn’t been slept in.

  Aunt Julia dismissed her concerns with a wave of her hand. “Oh, she just forgot. Or maybe she has all the books she needs at school.”

  “She always takes her backpack to school. It has her calculator and everything she needs for her classes.” Mary went over to the backpack and lifted it. It was heavy. Mary could never understand how Kate could carry such a heavy load without being permanently hunched over. Her own backpack was light by comparison.

  “I heard you on the phone with Simon just now. She got here safely last night, and then she left early to go someplace. Why are you so worried all of a sudden? Have you ever known Kate to not take care of herself?”

  Mary picked up the cushions from the floor and placed them on the sofa. In those few seconds, she struggled with herself whether to tell Aunt Julia about the insurance letter. She remembered the conversation they had the day before and Aunt Julia’s response when she asked her about coming to live with them. She took the letter out of her back pocket and handed it to her.

  In the kitchen, the kettle began to whistle. Mary went to turn off the stove while Aunt Julia read. When she came back, she found her slumped on the armchair, shaking her head. Mary could see that she was reading the letter for the second or third time. Aunt Julia dropped it on her lap.