After the accident and her long, long hospital stay, she’d come home for a short period, but by then, the town, her family, everyone related to the accident victims, had moved on. Elena, hobbled and vividly scarred, was a painful reminder of what they had lost. Conversations died when she entered a shop. Everyone was excruciatingly polite. Even her family seemed like strangers, so solicitous and focused; they didn’t seem to know what to do with their eyes when she sat with them. It was as if she were a giant, life-sucking shadow, and no one could be happy while she was in the room.
Her mother wept when she left for a job in Santa Fe after only a few weeks home. “There’s work here,” she said. “Stay and Uncle Glen will help you find work in a restaurant if that’s what you want.”
But you couldn’t go back in time. Elena had to move forward.
Each time she returned, never for more than two days, usually only one, she felt as if she were driving under a heavy rock of emotion that squeezed all the life out of her. It was hard to get a full breath in Espanola, and today was no different. She felt as if there was some curse hanging over her, a spell with a ticking clock—if she stayed longer than forty-eight hours, the clock would run out and something terrible would happen.
Her mother’s house was down a dirt road, a frame house painted white, with faded green trim. An elm stood sentry over the small, neat square of lawn, carefully enclosed by a chain-link fence covered all summer by sweet peas. Elena parked. A black and white dog, fluffy and friendly, rushed to the fence to bark a welcome. For a moment, Elena was startled—her mother had raised enough children, she always said, what would she want with a dog?
And yet, that was undeniably Maria Elena’s ’88 Buick parked precisely under a fiberglass carport. It probably had all of thirty thousand miles on it. Mama drove it to mass and the grocery store.
As Elena got out of the rental, the dog sat down expectantly, black button eyes and soft curly fur, as adorable as a toddler in mittens.
“Hey, you. What’s your name?” she said, chuckling. “Is it okay if I come in?”
The dog barked politely in return. Shifted foot to foot and waited as Elena came up the walk, reached over the gate, and petted its head. “You are adorable!” She opened the gate and squatted down to scratch the wiggly, ecstatic creature.
“Who’s there?” said a voice, and Elena straightened. A figure came out onto the porch, a very, very old woman in a flowered blouse and neat blue slacks. Elena’s heart caught. Her grandmother’s hair was completely white, wispily pulled into a long braid that hung over one frail shoulder. Her hands were misshapen, twisted with arthritis. She wore giant, very dark sunglasses—she had macular degeneration and couldn’t see very well.
“It’s me, Mama,” she said, coming closer. “Elena.”
“My daughter?” the old woman said, peering, and Elena realized she couldn’t see her. With a pang, she rushed forward and put her hands out, taking her grandmother’s cool, veiny hands into her own to kiss them, then raised them to her face. “Yes,” she said, “your daughter Elena.”
The elder Elena made a tiny noise and began to cry. “Oh, m’ija! Oh, I am so glad to see you!”
“Let’s go inside, Mama. I brought doughnuts. You want some?”
“Sure I do! Let’s go have some coffee, too! Did you meet my little dog? That’s Henry. He’s such a good boy. He sleeps with me and everything, can you believe it? Come on, Henry.”
“I have a dog, too,” Elena said. “Alvin. He sleeps with me. Or, well, he did. He sleeps with a young woman I know. She lives with me.”
Mama settled Elena into a chair. “Tell me everything.”
Sitting in the kitchen of her childhood, still painted a cheerful yellow, the table covered with an oilcloth that was probably as old as she was, Elena took the dog on her lap, feeling the terror and sorrow fly away from her. Here in her mama’s kitchen, she was safe. This was where she had learned to cook. In this tiny room with its tiny stove and deep sinks, with this tiny woman.
Safe.
When they’d eaten and gossiped and laughed over the shenanigans of the dog, Maria Elena finally said, “Tell me why you came today, m’ija.”
“Mom, I need to go to the place where we were in the accident. I don’t think I can go by myself. Will you come with me?”
Mama didn’t even hesitate. She nodded. “Sure. We can take Henry, too. He’ll like it.” For a minute, Maria Elena sat in the chair with her hands folded in her lap, peering at her daughter. “You sure? You got sick last time.”
“I’m sure. I need to—” She paused. “Say goodbye.”
Maria Elena nodded, patted her hand. “It’s about time.”
The night they wrecked, Elena, Isobel, Edwin, Penny, and Albert had gone to see a movie. Isobel smuggled in a bottle of rum she stole from somewhere, and Elena drank some of it, but not very much because she was pregnant and didn’t want to hurt the baby. Edwin promised to drive them home and left it alone. Penny and Albert poured some into their Cokes.
After the movie, Elena was very sick to her stomach and curled up in the back seat. Albert, who worshipped Edwin, sat in the front passenger seat, scorning his seat belt. Isobel and Penny got in the back with Elena.
Twenty years later, on a bright January day, Elena and her mother drove down the narrow road toward the site. It wasn’t hard to find. It was on a narrow strip of road leading east from Espanola into the mountains, curving and dangerous and utterly ordinary. She drove beneath the long stands of cottonwoods that grew along the road, bare now, but in the summer, this was a deep tunnel of shade. The trees were nourished by the water in the acequia that ran along the road, carrying irrigation water to the farmers who grew melons and chiles and tomatoes in the sunny fields.
There was a small café at a junction, and Elena parked the rental car there. A dog trotted along on an errand, skinny and cheerful, and overhead, a magpie squawked, then lifted off, showing off his black and white splendor.
Elena turned off the car. Mama, holding Henry on her lap, said, “You go. I’ll stay right here and wait.”
Elena nodded. Zipping up her jacket, she got out. The quiet stunned her. The only sound was a thin finger of wind rattling leaves from last season that clung to the bare branches of cottonwood trees.
She headed up the road a little way. It wasn’t far. Four crosses marked it, two very well tended, one less so, one nearly completely faded now. Clusters of pink plastic carnations were twisted around the base of one wooden cross, painted white. Names had been varnished into each one, with dates and other little markers. Elena stepped between the prongs of the barbed-wire fence alongside the acequia, then gathered her aching parts and jumped over the ditch to an enormous, old cottonwood tree.
At shoulder height, a deep gouge in the shape of an uneven star showed in the creasing of bark, and she put her fingers to it. Her palm fit it exactly. Here the car had hit and come apart, exploding like a rocket into a dozen pieces. Her brother had told Elena it took days to find all the pieces.
So many years, so many many many years, she had blocked this moment. Now she reached back trying to bring it forth. Beneath her hand the tree was a living being, pulsing with sap drawn from the earth. It had memories. Surely it could give forth the violence of that single, horrific moment so many years ago.
But the air remained undisturbed. Elena’s memory offered nothing but the same things she’d thought of a thousand times, that single, clear moment when they went airborne, when they sailed as if in an airplane, high into the night sky. She saw stars and held on to the edge of the seat. There wasn’t time to be horrified, only curious, and slightly protective. She clung to the door handle, watching the sky and branches entwine, and then there was a huge explosion of noise.
There was the gap. She was flung from the car and landed in the ditch. The next thing she could remember was the depth of silence, the only sound the tick-tick-tick of cooling metal. Her body and mind were strangely separate, as if her head was in some ent
irely different location than her arms and legs. She could feel, far away, the cold on her feet, and across her belly was the sinuous movement of water, but she couldn’t seem to communicate with any part of her body to change the circumstances. She drifted. She thought perhaps she might be dead.
And yet, there was a woman singing to her, brushing her hair from her face—La Llorona, the weeping woman, tending Elena until someone could come.
And after a time, there was Isobel, sitting next to her. “I couldn’t find you at first,” she said, and took Elena’s hand. “There’s a man coming. Hang on. He had to go back and call an ambulance.”
Elena tried to speak and could not. La Llorona stroked her forehead and hummed. She patted cool mud into the bleeding cuts on her back and Elena did not mind. Her sister sang an old song that one of their brothers liked to play on his guitar, about a man who chased his wife into heaven to kill her and her lover a second time.
“Where’s Edwin?” Elena asked, or thought she did, but no one answered. There was no sound at all except that soft, gleefully mournful tune. High, high in the darkness, four stars shot across the sky, and the next thing Elena knew there was a man bending over her, swearing in Spanish.
So long ago, Elena thought. Her spine felt watery and she bent to press her forehead against the tree.
After a time, she sensed the presence of her sister.
Isobel stood nearby. “It looks different in the day,” she said, looking around. In the bright noon light, her braided hair had a sheen like a waxed floor. “None of us knew a single thing. It was so fast. It made it hard for us to know what happened.”
In the middle distance, where the acequia bent toward the fields to the south, there were four other figures. Waiting, Elena knew. There was Edwin with his fall of shoe-black hair, and Albert and Penny, as chubby as always. A little girl, watery, holding Edwin’s hand. Elena found herself sinking to her knees, in the cool mud that saved her life.
There in the dark, she’d held on to her sister’s hand with all her might. “Don’t leave me alone, Isobel!” she had cried.
“I won’t leave you,” Isobel had promised.
And she had not.
“Why did all of you die and I didn’t?” Elena asked now.
“It wasn’t your day,” Isobel said simply.
“It shouldn’t have been yours.”
Isobel smiled softly. She bent and kissed Elena’s head, right at the part, and tears like a volcano gushed up through Elena’s esophagus. “I have to go now, Elena.”
“Please,” she said, and held out a hand. “I don’t want to be alone!”
“You aren’t alone anymore.” She moved away on strong sturdy legs, wearing the striped shirt she’d borrowed from Elena’s closet that night. Elena watched them through a wavery glaze of tears, the family that had stayed with her until she found her own—brothers in Patrick and in Ivan, a sister in Mia, a daughter in Portia. And her mother, waiting there in the car.
And Julian.
Julian.
Elena bent her head to the earth and let her grief pour out, her sacred tears watering the ground. She wept and wept and wept, all the tears she’d been holding for a lifetime. Then, when she was finished, she lay on the ground and released it all to the earth. To the heavens.
When she could breathe again, she stood and brushed herself off. At the line of crosses, she paused and tidied it up, plucked away a stray weed, and straightened the flowers, then went back to the car.
Maria Elena had fallen asleep with her head against the glass, her dog curled in her lap. With a vast tenderness, Elena bent and kissed her cheek. “I love you, Mama,” she said. “I’m sorry I have stayed away so long.”
Maria Elena opened her eyes, and for a long moment, she blinked in confusion. “Elena? I wasn’t dreaming?”
“No, Mama,” she said. “You weren’t dreaming.”
Mama kissed her hand. “Good. I been saying a lot a prayers for you, you know.”
“Thank you.”
On the way home, she read the script. It didn’t take long. It was a tale of a woman tortured by the loss of her family, long ago, and how she made her way to a whole life again. When Elena finished, she closed the folder and lightly pressed her fingers against it, and looked out the window, letting it fill her up.
It was a mature ghost story, scary, but also tender and wise. And it wasn’t really about Elena and her losses at all, but like everything else he wrote, it was Julian’s attempt to make sense or make peace with his mother’s murder.
So much love, she thought, gazing down at the craggy tops of mountains. So much love he had in him.
FORTY-FOUR
Julian was writing in his office when he heard Elena come in. He put his pencil down and walked to the mezzanine, where he could see the entryway. She hobbled into the hallway and bent to give hugs to Alvin and the pup, who came racing out to see her. Portia, too, came leaping down the hallway, an elfin creature who said something chirpy to Elena and took her coat. Elena said, quite clearly, “Please don’t mind when I do this, okay?” And hugged the girl.
Portia hugged her back, fiercely. “I don’t mind at all. Not at all.”
He took a breath against the arrow of emotion that went through him. Elena said, “Where’s your dad?”
“In his office, I think. Are you ready to eat? I made macaroni and cheese. From scratch.”
“You did?” Elena squeezed her arm. “You are becoming quite a cook, aren’t you? Let me talk to your dad for a minute, then I’ll be right back down.”
“I’ll set the table,” Portia said, and this, too, pierced her father, standing overhead. He’d never known till now that such a little thing like that could make such a difference. A simple meal, eaten together. She loved to set the table. “And should I maybe make that spinach salad? Would that be good?”
“Perfect. You have good instincts.”
“Thanks!” Portia bounced off to the kitchen, followed by hopeful dogs.
Though he was tempted to spare Elena the climb, Julian stayed where he was. Behind him, in the study, played the soundtrack he’d created for the restaurant, which had somehow become the soundtrack in his head for the script. Below him was the great room, and beyond that, the brightly lit kitchen where his daughter sang along to her iPod and made supper for them all. He was standing almost exactly where he’d kissed Elena the first time, and now he waited as broken Elena made her way up the stairs in her determined and laborious way.
A softness of air moved over his face. Julian thought he smelled Tabu, the strong and exotic perfume his mother had loved. For years after she died, things she’d owned still smelled of it. He wished that he really did believe in ghosts, that he might one day really see his mother again.
Elena came down the mezzanine, one hand on the banister, and she stopped a few feet away from him. She looked absolutely exhausted, her face bare of makeup, her eyes swollen. She held up the script. “I read it,” she said.
He nodded.
“I went to Espanola today,” she said, and he could see she was struggling with great emotion. “To…um…see the place where we wrecked. I haven’t been able to stand it before this.”
He waited.
“That night,” she said, her voice breaking slightly, “we went to see a movie. It was a ghost story. I thought it was the saddest movie I ever saw in my life, and not a single person in that theater seemed to understand that it was a movie about losing somebody you love and not ever wanting to say goodbye.” Tears were pouring down her face now, a remarkable thing all in itself, but Julian felt so poised for her next words that he couldn’t take that in yet.
She took a breath and steadied herself. “The movie was The Importance of Being Earnest, by this hotshot young director, who didn’t know he was writing my life, because he was writing his own.”
He moved as she did, and he gathered her into his arms and she fell hard against him, and both of them were crying, and it was so strange and so weirdly beaut
iful. “Maybe there are soul mates, huh?” he managed to say.
And his broken love, his sad and lonely lost soul mate, nodded against his chest and clung to him. He pressed his mouth to her hair, and touched the scars on her back, and said, “Please let me take care of you.”
“Yes, please.” She raised her head and breathed in. “What is that perfume? Something you wear, sort of dusky. It feels like I should recognize it.”
A sweet waft of air brushed his face, smelling of Tabu, and Julian was too overcome to speak. He let his own tears fall into her hair and they stood like that, rocking back and forth.
The doorbell rang.
Julian raised his head, smiling. Perfect timing. “Remember that I ordered a Christmas present for you that didn’t quite get here?”
“It’s here?” Elena asked. “Cool.”
“I’ve got it!” Portia cried.
The sound of voices reached them, and Elena’s face went absolutely still. She looked up at Julian, eyes filling with tears. “Is it Juan?”
“Merry Christmas,” he said. “It took a little bit of doing, but he’s here to stay.”
“Oh, Julian,” she whispered. “You are the real thing, aren’t you?”
“I guess you’ll just have to stick around and find out.”
From downstairs, Portia called, “Come and get it, everybody!”
Elena took Julian’s hand.
“Let’s eat,” she said.
EPILOGUE
MEXICAN WEDDING COOKIES
1 cup butter
1/2 cup white sugar
2 tsp vanilla
2 tsp milk
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 cup chopped almonds
1/2 cup confectioner’s sugar
In a medium bowl, cream the butter and sugar. Stir in vanilla and milk. Add the flour and almonds and mix until well blended. Cover and chill for at least 2 hours.
Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Shape dough into small balls and bake for 15–20 minutes. Let cool slightly, and roll in confectioner’s sugar while still warm. Cool completely, and roll one more time through the sugar.
The Lost Recipe for Happiness Page 34