Jubilee

by Jennifer Givhan

  Copyright © 2020 by Jennifer Givhan

  E-book published in 2020 by Blackstone Publishing

  Cover design by Zena Kanes

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion

  thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner

  whatsoever without the express written permission

  of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations

  in a book review.

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious.

  Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental

  and not intended by the author.

  Trade e-book ISBN 978-1-5385-5676-4

  Library e-book ISBN 978-1-5385-5675-7

  Fiction / Literary

  CIP data for this book is available

  from the Library of Congress

  Blackstone Publishing

  31 Mistletoe Rd.

  Ashland, OR 97520

  www.BlackstonePublishing.com

  for Lina

  “I did not hold my head stiff enough when I met him and so I lost it just like the dolls.”

  Toni Morrison, Sula

  Prologue.

  The Night Water,

  the Bridge

  April 24th

  Keep driving. Breathe deeply. Bianca prayed the words Mama taught her to pray.

  Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.

  Everything ached. But she had to make it to Matty.

  She sucked in sharply at the thought of Matty. What would he say?

  Off the road, tumbleweeds swept the dry arroyo beds. Stalks of alfalfa swayed in the Anza-Borrego night, their shadows dusting the earth. Mound after sage-smudged mound, like burial plots as far as the basin stretched in every direction, a pelvic bone, a sopa bowl scraped clean.

  Monsoon season, the channels would swell, the quick rise and fall gathering mud and mosquitoes. Floodwaters would return. But this season of Lent, the embankment cradled rocks. Carrizo Creek and Alma Wash lay arid beside the mud caves, silent as salt-creek pupfish led astray, unable to find their way before sand swallowed water.

  Blessed art thou among women.

  Along the toxic Salton Sea, figs fell from palms and plopped to the brined beach. Black mission figs Bianca had peeled countless times with her teeth, sucking the pulp-pink flesh in the dirt lots behind her girlhood house. Summers, she had gathered the purple bulbs into the folds of her T-shirt then chucked their bulbous little heads off the mesa down toward the New River, watching the wine-colored skin splatter against the gorge.

  And blessed is the fruit of thy womb.

  Slip-faced dunes tilting their horns toward a brittle sky nodded solemnly as Bianca passed Seco del Diablo and Canyon Sin Nombre. Of the devil and without a name. The moon above had a name, La Luna Blanca. She’d sung to Bianca when Mama could not.

  At the highway’s edge, the Painted Rocks hunched restless as sleeping beasts at the mountain pass, signaling the way toward Palm Desert. Their tattooed bellies, their colorful graffiti, “Victoria & Angel 4-ever” and “Cynthia was here” and “Tres Locas,” hushed by dark.

  Holy Mary, Mother of God, payer for us sinners.

  Bianca wiped her swollen face on her sleeve. She’d been crying again, her cheeks and the tender skin around her eyelids rawed with salt and rubbing. Her vision blurred with dehydration and exhaustion and the ceaseless fucking tears she couldn’t stop. She should’ve asked Lily to drive her, despite the awful things her friend had said. Bianca was so exhausted she would have endured even the corrugated tin of Lily’s snark to stay awake. Bianca turned the radio to a loud cumbia rock station and rubbed her eyes again, clearing the salt and haze, refocusing on the road. It was too late to turn back. Anyway, she didn’t need her eyes. Not on this drive. She knew the landscape by heart. She didn’t need to see it, filling the car with an ache. It was a rearview mirror she wished she could break. Years of floodplain evolution, the basin come to this: A woman driving home. A woman driving away from home.

  Now and at the hour of our death. Amen.

  She checked the back seat. Her boxer curled in a brown ball of fur, snoring in piglike grunts beside the rear-facing car seat. She couldn’t see Jubilee. But she could imagine the steady swell and sink of chest, the pair of butterflied lungs, small wings flapping, steady compression of a fire bellow stoking the flame. Bianca let out the breath she’d been holding. “We’re almost there, baby girl,” she whispered as she thumbed the steering wheel like rosary beads, then recited the prayer again. And again.

  Where Highway 86 met the 60, she left the Imperial Valley behind, its story stitched into her ribs, leaving her thighs and breasts and belly sore, a blood-soaked pad pressed against her crotch.

  Left with the fork, past Beaumont, past mountain switchbacks and Chino’s cow shit, toward Orange County, toward Matty. He’d know what to do.

  The sky gathered a milky haze, La Luna Blanca playing hide-and-seek with the clouds. In girldom, hiding was Bianca’s favorite game. She would slink into a laundry closet or the accordion-doored pantry where Mama kept her one bottle of brandy (for blessing the house, she’d said the time Bianca had caught her with it). And wherever she’d hidden, she’d wait. Girlchild tucked into a storage basket or flat-fished at the bottom of an empty bathtub in a dark bathroom, stifling the urge to giggle, the need to breathe. She wasn’t even sure she’d told anyone they were playing. She would just climb in among the soft piles of linen or cans of stewed tomatoes and wait for salvation. She was so sure someone would find her.

  She merged onto the 57S, toward Santa Ana, the radio threading static through the hills. By day, the cattle grazed like some postcard pastoral smack dab in the congested intestines where Orange and Los Angeles counties crossed. But tonight, shadows and darker shadows walled the asphalt beyond the metallic gleam of guardrail. It would only take one turn too sharp, too steep. One nudge of the foot, and off the edge she’d soar.

  How had she ended up a twenty-year-old driving home to her family? She should’ve been a junior on a university scholarship. She should’ve been a writer working on her first collection of poems. Or, at the very least, in a coffeehouse somewhere beside some scraggly goateed undergrad or supportive Lily-alternative (insert college version of girlhood best friend here), snapping instead of clapping after each alliterated slam rendition of Slay, Queen! She should not have been bleeding. Not yet. Not this much.

  In the city, light pollution made the stars impossible to see, but Bianca took comfort in the glowing haze above the chiaroscuro of buildings and houses: a nightlight in the sky whose dim bulb reminded her of the bedroom she’d shared with Matty at Bisabuela’s house.

  Matty didn’t know she was coming.

  Later Dr. Norris would ask what she’d imagined would happen when she got to Matty’s. When Mama heard she was home, she would cross herself and praise the Lord her daughter was back for chocolate eggs and three-cheese broccoli casserole at Abuela’s with the family. She’d be the prodigal daughter returned for Easter ham. Mama would insist she attend Mass. She could practically hear the aunts whispering, Mija looks like caca. Pobrecita. What happened to her?

  Something was wrong. Deep down she knew it. But she couldn’t think about that. Not if she wanted to keep driving, keep breathing. Even at two in the morning, the city kept an eye open. It yawned. It blinked bright red and yellow and orange. Gas stations and twenty-four-hour drive-throughs flickered as benign as white flies circling streetlamps in the Valley.

  She exited at Main, where Santa Ana bordered the rest of Orange County. Matty and his partner, Handro, had bought a house and fixed it up, near the courthouse in the historical district, a few blocks from the public
library where Bianca had gone the year before to hear Sandra Cisneros. She’d signed Bianca’s copy of Loose Woman, a dog-eared, well-worn book of poems blessed by the living author herself: ¡Write on, chica!

  A few blocks later, Bianca turned right at the stoplight past the carnicería, the market with a squat merry-go-round outside the glass doors. At the edge of the parking lot, a cheery-looking Payday Loans with its green dollar symbols spray-painted onto the windows.

  Downtown gave way to houses, colorful and cluttered. During the day, the paletas man would trudge through the neighborhood with his cart, ringing his bell, selling Popsicles and bags of churritos, crunchy pinwheels of pork fat with chile. Women with children would vend plastic cups of fresh melon slices, pepinos, pineapple. Some of their husbands and brothers would stand at the freeway’s edge to sell flowers and bags of oranges.

  Once, in the Valley, a man had stood in a parking lot selling a single orange. Gabe had been waiting for Bianca across the street in his truck, but she insisted on stopping to see what that man was about. He’d sliced the orange in half and to every person who passed he offered this one piece of fruit. Why this orange? Had he picked it from some nearby tree and chose to sell it rather than eat it himself? And who would want a halved orange, cut by a stranger in a parking lot? After she’d climbed into Gabe’s truck, she’d realized she should’ve bought the orange from the man. He’d had a need. To fill that need, he’d offered his fruit. He’d sliced it open, so Bianca could see it was good, it was ripe and would taste delicious. She wished she could’ve been so open with her own need, so ready to slice her gift and offer it, with no pretense, no artifice. Simply a woman with an orange.

  Santa Ana reminded Bianca of licking the lemon and chile from her fingers with Lily. The two girls would sneak the lead-filled Mexican candy Mama had warned Bianca not to eat or it would turn her blood black. Still she and Lily had pushed the sweet-spicy goo through the holes of the pop-top like worms, then squished it onto their tongues and spread it across the roof of their mouths until they went numb with heat. Bianca could handle it until she couldn’t. Like her BFF’s candor. For all her badass behavior, Lily could be chile-sharp. Bitter. Bile in the back of the throat. Driving away was milk, a salve to Bianca’s memory. Leaving was bread in a burnt mouth.

  Even leaving her Lily of the Valley.

  The apodo fit her blond-haired, blue-eyed, porcelain-ivory-CoverGirl-foundationed best friend forever since junior high. Lily, no regular white girl. She ate chiles like pepinos, and not just the kind in the bag with onions and carrots, but the really hot kind they put into the blender for salsa. Lily could do the washing machine Selena-style like nobody’s business and understood what a busticaca was. And in junior high, Lily had lined her lips with a darker brown than even Bianca had dared, when they were going through their chola phase. Lily still preferred the tangy granules of the candy called Lucas, like the boy’s name, rather than a chocolate bar. And when they were kids, Lily poured lime crystals into her hand, sucking her palm then waving it all “Wáchale” at passing cars as they sauntered down Rio Vista shaking their hips (because that’s how junior high girls walked anywhere) meaning both “Check me out” and “Watch it, man.” She would bawl out anyone who tried to holler at them for real though, anyone who slowed the car too slow and rolled down the window. Lily would curse a storm and scare them off while Bee giggled and rolled her eyes, then her friend would link her arm through Bee’s elbow and say something like, Don’t forget how that one girl ignored a guy’s catcalls so he tracked her down and killed her. You can’t mess with these scrubs. To Lily’s way of thinking, she was slaying dragons. She had protected them like that. Had understood she’d needed to protect Bianca. La Dreamer. La Empath. La Heart on Her Sleeve. Bianca had needed a practical Lily to pin her feet to the ground so she didn’t go fluttering off into el cielo.

  But Lily dealt in truths like lead around the neck and the ditchwater rising. Bianca couldn’t stand her friend right now. She’d promised to text her when she was safe at Matty’s. “Stay at my house, Bee,” Lily had insisted. “Don’t just take off in the middle of the night.” But Bianca had to get away. She’d made up a story about not burdening her. A lie. No, she couldn’t handle listening to Lily’s shit opinions wrapped as tough love, callous dronings on what Bee should’ve done instead. What difference would it have made?

  Or maybe she was afraid to show her Jubilee.

  Matty’s porch light shone against red bricks at the end of Woodland Street. The natives of Santa Ana pronounced it like the guitarist Santana with a Spanish accent, all one word. But the streets had English names like Baker, Treeline, or Moss. Names that conjured up forest images, though there were no state parks in Santa Ana. At Tía Lydia’s in the ritzy beachfront section of Orange County called San Juan Capistrano, twenty miles away, all the street signs were in Spanish, and Tía’s friends pronounced them funny, making Campanilla sound like “camp vanilla.”

  Bianca’s legs ached, but not from driving her stick-shift all night. She pitched into the driveway behind Spacedog—Matty’s nickname for the silver Nissan Sentra he shared with Handro. She yanked the parking brake and released the clutch, forgetting she was still in first gear. The car lurched, then died. Shit. She hadn’t done that in years. Not since Dad had taken her out to the country beside the irrigation ditches and vegetable fields and taught her how to drive a stick because a girl should be able to do that kind of thing for herself. Exhaustion settled like powdered dirt onto her chest and shoulders; she fought to keep from resting her head on the steering wheel.

  What would Matty think?

  She pulled down the visor and checked her face in the mirror. Her forehead and cheeks glimmered fever-pink, slick and shiny with sweat. The bluish pool of bruises had yellowed to soggy pears across her cheeks and chest. Her dark hair matted in frizzy curls around her face. Her ass and inner thighs throbbed; the pad in her chonies clung hot and sticky against her skin. Her stomach hurt. But she was at Matty’s. He would take care of them. He always had.

  She glanced toward the house. She wasn’t afraid, despite Santa Ana’s reputation. The neighborhood was safe, though most people assumed otherwise. “You live in Santa Ana?” people asked, wide-eyed. “Isn’t that dangerous? Especially for you guys?” Matty and Handro shook their heads. When they’d moved in, the handyman across the street had welcomed them, offering to fix up the place. Did they need help pulling weeds? With plumbing? Could he park his work van in the double driveway they shared with the neighbors since the house next door was vacant? Matty and Handro were fine with the firecrackers every holiday, the mariachi music weekends, and the avocado tree lobbing its fruit onto the grass in their backyard. And the neighborhood was fine with them, the mariposas in the redbrick house at the end of Woodland Street.

  Bianca pressed chanclas to cement; a shockwave of cramping curled her over. Knees buckling, she hunched, hands to thighs. She could’ve been a leaf in an electrical storm, crinkled and burning.

  Once the painful jolts released her to the dull, steady drum that had replaced her body, she pulled the handle, and the front seat swung forward. She reached back to unbuckle Jubilee, pink and fuzzy in a bunny-eared romper. Kanga cocked her unclipped ears and wagged her stump of a tail. Earlier that morning, back in the Valley, Bianca had balanced atop a lawn chair on the backyard porch of her empty girlhood house, then wrapped a cord around her neck and hung the slack around a patio post. She’d stared at her dog. She’d willed herself to kick the chair. To do something besides stand there, wobbly in bare feet, with the cord dangling down her chest. She’d closed her eyes and prepared herself to fall. But Kanga had barked and barked until Bianca climbed down and knelt on the slab of unfinished patio cement, still bleeding between her legs.

  She hugged Kanga’s brown neck and cried into her fur. Then she remembered Jubilee.

  She’d broken herself into pieces, for Jubilee.

  “Come on
, girl,” she said to Kanga. To Jubilee, “We’re at uncles’ house.” Jubilee didn’t blink or cry, but Bianca soothed her anyway. “Shhh, shhh, sana, sana,” she whispered, patting the pink romper and resting the soft body against her shoulder. Bianca padded up Matty’s porch steps and rang the bell.

  Kanga barked. No one came.

  She rang again.

  This time, heavy footsteps across the wooden floor; Matty had woken up. Handro nearly floated when he walked, his petite frame almost hovering, a slender ghost gliding on the tip of his own long white beard in a Remedios Varo painting. But Matty was solid as sculpture.

  The curtain rustled; Matty peeked out the door’s glass window.

  Bianca tried smiling, but her face wouldn’t oblige.

  Locks unchained, unclicked, and the doorway flooded with warm yellow light, revealing Matty, her massive older brother, his black hair sleep-rumpled, his dark eyes tired and confused. He was technically her half-brother through Mama, but Bianca would’ve punched anyone who said so, like she’d punched that bitch Vanessa at the Catholic school who’d called Mama a whore (she’d said “ho”) for having kids with two different dads. Matty was her full brother.

  “Bianca?” Barefooted and gym-shorted, Matty stared at her. “Are you okay?”

  She nodded, tears landing on Jubilee’s fuzzy hood.

  His eyes narrowed into a frown. “Is that . . . a baby?”

  Bianca nodded again, unsure whether he’d be loving or judgmental.

  “Oh my God. Come in.” He reached for her arm and led her into the house. “What happened?” He pulled her into his wide body for a hug. “Jesus, you’re burning up.”

  She tried to speak. Couldn’t.

  “Here,” he said, leading her to the couch, “let me hold your baby.” He reached for Jubilee, but Bianca couldn’t let go. She hadn’t slept for days. She must’ve looked crazed. A La Llorona out of the waters, stealing dreams. “Bee, I’ll hold your baby so you can rest.”