“Are you okay?” Ian asked.
“Yeah,” she said, turning to him and smiling. Why couldn’t she just focus on this, on Ian, who loved her and took her to see beautiful things and packed picnic lunches for them? She wanted to remember every detail of their day, so she could recall it perfectly in the future. Someday when she was sad.
“Why’d you do all this?” she asked.
A strange look crossed his face, then he smiled. “Because I love you,” he said, like it was the most obvious thing in the world. “And . . . because you seem, I don’t know. A little sad lately?” Emilia looked down at her sandwich and tried not to cry. But before she could stop it, her eyes filled with tears.
She’d felt strange and melancholy lately. Since their date, Ian had called and stopped by, but Emilia still felt lonely. She didn’t know how to explain the kind of loneliness she felt. So she’d tried to cover it up and pretend nothing was bothering her. But Ian had noticed something was wrong anyway. And now he felt sorry for her.
“Hey,” he said. “Hey, what’s wrong?”
The tears rushed so fast they took her by surprise.
“Emilia?”
She shook her head. His voice, the concern in it made her eyes sting more. For a minute, she couldn’t speak. Even if she knew what to say, the words would get stuck in her throat. All she could do was press on her eyes and shake her head, before taking a deep breath and letting it out.
“What’s wrong?” he whispered.
“I don’t know,” she said finally, bringing her hands away from her face. “This is just really sweet.”
Sweet Emilia.
“It wasn’t supposed to make you cry,” he said.
She managed to laugh. “I know, I know.” She lay down and looked at the sky, which, while dreary, still hurt her eyes. She felt fresh tears form as she stared above. “I’m so stupid. Nothing is wrong,” she said. He reached for her hand and kissed the green clover ring.
“You’re not stupid.” He kissed her hand. Then he kissed her eyes and then her cheek, and made his way to her lips. And this time she pulled him closer.
“Would you tell me?” he said. “If something was wrong?” He searched for some kind of answer in her face.
“Of course,” she answered. “But there’s nothing, I don’t think. I just . . .” She shook her head. She really didn’t know why she had started crying. She watched a bird fly overhead. A cold wind blew over her and she shivered.
“It’s the weather,” she said suddenly. That was all it was. The way the chilling cold came so quickly, and the world changed from the bright oranges and reds and golds of summer and fall to the sludgy gray of winter. Emilia always got this way when it got cold. Ma, too. There was something in the cold that brought back the past so quickly, and it always seemed to catch them off guard.
Emilia hated winter. It got in her bones and made her cold for months and months no matter what she did to warm up. And it marked another year without her father. Another sad Thanksgiving had already passed. Soon would come Christmas, then New Year’s, when she and her mother and her brother would force more cheer and bring more attention to her father’s absence by not bringing any attention to it at all.
She missed him, and most around this time.
Emilia suddenly felt relieved. “I always get this way!” she told Ian a bit too excitedly. “It’s just because it’s so cold. And dreary.”
He lay down next to her and held her hand tight, and they stared at the sky together. She wiped her face and smiled.
Yes, it’s just because of the weather.
That was why she felt this way.
“Are you sure?” Ian asked, bringing her hand up to his chest.
“Positive,” she said. She rolled over and looked at him—Ian, her Ian, with the shy smile and soft brown eyes. She leaned into him. “Really, that’s all,” she said. She kissed him, and under that white-gray sky, she held on to that day, those passing seconds and perfect moments, for as long as she possibly could.
* * *
*
That night Emilia dreamed of oceans. She was at Jones Beach and she watched Ma and Dad and Tomás in the distance from where she stood just under the boardwalk. They were laughing over there, on Ian’s flannel blanket. When she saw her father, in the sun, away from the cold that took him so far from them, she wanted to run to him and ask him why he’d left. But they were all laughing and she didn’t want to ruin it. It was so beautiful to see them laugh. They had all been beautiful once.
Emilia started crying. Her tears flooded down her face, down her body, and into the ocean.
She looked down and had the sense of moving, of spinning and falling, as the water rushed in and out. She watched her toes sink into the warm sand, deeper and deeper, until her feet disappeared. She wiggled them, but they were cemented in the heavy sand, so she looked toward the horizon again, at the sparkling sea and faraway seagulls that looked like confetti in the sky. She heard them cry, and Emilia watched as they came closer toward her. She watched as their magnificent white glowed in the bright sun, and suddenly they changed. They turned darker, grew smaller, and Emilia realized they had transformed into her black crows.
She reached out to them, tried to walk toward them, but realized she had sunk in the sand to her knees. As she looked down, she suddenly sank to her waist.
She looked over at her family, tried to call to them, but when she opened her mouth, she tasted earth and dirt and grass. And then she felt something unwinding from her mouth, as if from a spindle, and she saw branches and moss shooting out where her tongue should be, sprouting up and around her.
They covered her so completely, she could hardly see through.
She tried to speak again, but she couldn’t. None of them could hear her silent calls. She caught a glimpse of Tomás pointing to the sky, to the birds. And Emilia watched as they dove and dipped down to the water and plucked jewels from the ocean. Green and pink and white jewels that glittered and blinded her. She felt them land on her, the weight of their small bird bodies as they perched all around her branches, nestling those gifts into her mossy hair.
More and more birds came, turning the sky dark, cawing so loudly before plucking more and more jewels from the ocean. She watched her parents rush from their place on the beach. She heard them call for her.
Emilia!
I’m here! Right here!
But they didn’t see her. And they couldn’t hear her. They didn’t see how she was sinking under the weight of all her crows, all those jewels.
She tasted the grit of sand and salt in her mouth. She felt it in her nostrils. And she looked one more time at the water, the sparkling water. Until suddenly, a phone rang in the distance. She was sure it was a phone. But on the beach? Emilia told herself it was a dream and then slowly, as she came to, felt herself back in her bedroom.
She felt her mother standing over her, too, watching her breathe. Emilia was half asleep, but she knew it was Ma. It didn’t startle her; she’d grown used to Ma doing this over the years. And tonight, in that half sleep, Ma’s presence comforted Emilia, made her feel like she was tucked under a warm wing, hidden, protected.
She felt her body relax; she felt the expulsion of her breath. As she fell into a deep, easy sleep, she even saw fog rising from her mouth in her dreams. And it felt so good, that release, that relief.
* * *
* * *
Emilia’s mother watched her daughter breathing, just as she had when Emilia was a baby. But she couldn’t stand there too long without being overcome with the desire to cry. Emilia was asleep, in some other world, dreaming who knew what dreams while a terrible reality was delivered the way so many terrible realities are—with the shrill ring of a phone call at night. Nothing would ever be the same.
Again.
But her mother refused to cry in that room, where Emilia might
hear her, so she closed the door and, with heavy steps, went back downstairs to her own room.
The Next Morning
The next morning Emilia kissed her mother quickly before leaving for school. Ma pulled her in and gave her a long hug. Ma had been like this, melancholy and affectionate, since she woke up.
“What’s that for?” Emilia said, laughing and pulling away.
“Just . . . because,” Ma said. She let go and turned toward the stove.
“Okay . . .” Emilia gave Tomás a funny smile and shook her head.
Tomás shrugged and watched his sister walk down the hallway and out into the world yelling goodbye to him and Ma as she closed the door behind her.
Tomás turned his attention back to Ma. He watched as she stood by the stove and poured boiling water into her coffee cup, added instant coffee and sugar.
She was dressed for the day, but her hair and makeup weren’t done yet. He hadn’t thought much of Emilia’s comment about Ma being tired, but now he thought, She does look tired. He finished half of his English muffin and wiped the crumbs from his mouth.
“You have lots of appointments today?” he asked. Ma didn’t respond, so he tried again. “Ma?”
She looked over as if she just now noticed him sitting there in the kitchen.
“Tomás?” she said as if she had to place his face. Sometimes Ma forgot he was around, but it didn’t really bother him much anymore. He’d grown accustomed to the way most of her attention was always on his sister. Sometimes he thought of them as one, the way she and Emilia were with each other, little separate pieces of the same whole. Tomás noticed that sometimes Emilia didn’t even have to speak, because Ma had learned Emilia’s silent language that year, had learned to figure out what Emilia needed or wanted even when she didn’t have the words to ask for it. Even though Tomás had envied their closeness, and still did slightly, he’d taught himself to understand. Emilia had paid a terrible price for this, and he knew she and Ma would both gladly have given it up to change the past.
“You okay?” Tomás asked Ma.
She nodded. “Yes.” But she stood there, still stirring.
“Do you have many appointments today?” Tomás tried again.
“Oh . . .” Ma shook her head. “I don’t know.”
Tomás crunched on the other half of the English muffin and observed the strangeness and silence that settled around them like a fine dust of snow.
What’s wrong with her? he wondered.
The phone suddenly disrupted the silence, shrilling loudly, and Ma jumped. It rang again and again, and even though Ma was closest to it, she didn’t move. Finally, Tomás walked over to answer it.
“Hello?”
“Nina DeJesus, please,” the voice said on the other end of the line.
His mother stared at him, her mouth slightly open and her green eyes so wide and pale. Tomás thought she resembled a fish.
“Who’s calling?” he asked. His mother rushed toward him.
“Give it to me, Tomás . . . ,” she said as the voice on the other end said something about the call being “a private matter. I can only speak to Nina DeJesus.”
“Tomás!” His mother’s voice was piercing as she pulled the phone out of his hand and gripped it.
He stared at her and she cupped her hand over the mouthpiece. “I said I’ve got it.”
“Okay, okay . . . ,” he said. His cheeks reddened with embarrassment and a small prickle of pain stabbed at his heart. Her voice was so harsh. He felt like a small child being chastised, when he was nineteen, a man now.
Tomás stepped back and Ma said nothing more. He mumbled something about being late for work and made his way down the hall. He grabbed his jacket from the closet and stood in front of the door.
“Ma, don’t worry if it’s another bill collector . . . ,” he yelled. She was always resentful when they called and he picked up the phone, when it was apparent that even with Tomás’s paychecks, which she never wanted to accept, they were still struggling. “I get paid tomorrow,” he yelled down the hall again, and waited for a moment, listened for an answer or the beginning of a conversation, but heard nothing. So he opened the door and felt the cold rush into the house as he stepped outside.
The whole way to work, he played the incident over and over in his head. Why had she let the phone ring and ring like that? He couldn’t make sense of it.
Once he got there, Tomás waited for one minute before punching in at exactly 8:00 AM. He counted his drawer, then stood at the register, waiting for customers. The music coming through the store speakers was too loud and blaring for early morning.
Something’s wrong, Tomás thought as he reorganized some chocolate bars. She looked scared.
He dropped one and picked it up, noticed it was slightly open. He threw it in the bin of damaged merchandise. It reminded him of how his mother would check their Halloween candy when they were younger.
Why is she scared?
Tomás thought back to last night. Ma had acted strange then, too, after getting a phone call. He was downstairs watching a TV movie because he’d grown bored of his book. And when he went into the kitchen to get a snack, Ma was at the sink, silent, a glass of water in her hand.
He hadn’t paid too much attention to it then. Or how she’d gone upstairs to check on Emilia afterward. But she’d stayed there so long. He’d even forgotten she was up there until she came back downstairs and crossed in front of the television and went back to her bedroom without saying a word.
Has Dad been calling? Is she worried Emilia or I will pick up and it’ll be him?
The thought was ridiculous. His father had been dependable in that, at least. When he left, he left for good. No forwarding address, no phone calls, no cards. Nothing. As if he fell off the surface of the earth. Tomás imagined his father floating around helplessly in space, Earth just a faraway, unreachable ball of blue-and-green swirl. That’s how far away he felt.
Perhaps he would call, though, if something had happened to him?
Maybe he was sick. Maybe he was in a hospital. Tomás pushed the thought to the back of his mind, where, maybe, he might think about it later. But not now. Because he didn’t know how he would feel getting that news. He’d started hating his father a long time ago.
Tomás stood there, thinking.
No, it couldn’t have been that.
His mother wouldn’t have reacted the way she did. She wasn’t scared of their father. She was angry at him. Like Tomás. She could tear him from limb to limb. An image of his father as a tiny puppet in his mother’s hand being torn apart came to Tomás’s mind and made him laugh and feel sad at the same time. If Tomás answered a call and his father was on the other end, he’d just hang up.
Maybe she’s worried Emilia will answer Dad’s call one day, Tomás thought.
Maybe their father would try to come back into their lives. And disrupt the world they—Ma and Tomás and Emilia—had worked so hard to try to make normal again. The last thing they needed was their father.
Emilia would be so bothered if she could read Tomás’s mind. She had frozen their father in Alaska to preserve him forever.
Alaska, why would you think he’s in Alaska? Tomás asked Emilia once, just a few months after Dad left.
He is, she insisted.
He’s gone. He left us. He’s a shithead.
It was as if Tomás had slapped her. He immediately regretted it. And then he’d had to explain to Ma why Emilia wouldn’t stop crying.
Just let her believe that for now, Tomás. Just give her that. Sometimes the truth is so ugly, people come up with coping methods, Ma had said. Deep down, she knows the truth and she’ll accept it when she’s ready.
And so he let Emilia have her lie, her fantasy, even though he always felt guilty about it and he worried how much of it she believed. Once or twice, he even let hi
mself imagine it for a split second, before shutting the idea out of his mind completely.
At least his mother understood. At least, even though there wasn’t the affection or attention for him that she had for Emilia, Ma knew how Tomás felt about his dad and she understood. They didn’t have to pretend with each other. He could make a sarcastic remark on Father’s Day around her and she wouldn’t chastise him. And she was honest with Tomás. He told himself it was because Ma must think he was stronger, could handle more. Because she didn’t have to worry about him the way she always worried about Emilia.
So why wasn’t she up-front about that phone call? he wondered.
She was shaking. She was scared. And this fear seemed different from the one he saw when she sat and looked at her checkbook at the beginning of each month, or when Emilia left the house for any reason. That fear was constant; it deepened the fine lines on her face and made her sigh with her whole being. But this fear was . . . raw.
This fear he’d seen only once before, all those years ago when Emilia went missing.
That day flickered into his thoughts, and he looked quickly around the drugstore for something to fixate on so he wouldn’t have to remember. But his gaze fell on the women on the advertisements around him, their faces made up perfectly, their lips lined beautifully. And an image of his eleven-year-old self quickly settled inside his mind.
At the exact moment Emilia lay in the woods just beyond the playground talking to the birds, eleven-year-old Tomás was looking at himself in the mirror. He had never seen himself that way before.
The material of Emilia’s dress rubbed against his skin. It was soft and made him feel alive; from the pit of his stomach a strange flutter rippled throughout the rest of his body. After years of admiring her dresses, Tomás finally had the chance to try one on because Ma had bought it too big for Emilia. It was a simple dress. Charcoal gray with a black collar.
The Fall of Innocence Page 6