by Naima Coster
She shook off his hands and headed for the door. Jon followed her, and Penelope saw Darnell and his coworkers notice them. They had another reason to dismiss her now, to look down at her: she was no one, a nobody. She was nearly outside when Jon caught her arm.
“Why are you touching me? I told you I was leaving.”
“Fine. I’ll come then.”
“Is this a sex thing? Are you finally tired of waiting to fuck me?”
A few heads turned toward the door, and Jon looked down, embarrassed. A gaggle of new couples arrived, and Penelope and Jon had to step out of the doorway to let them into the gallery. They were all silk and denim, laughter, silver and gold.
“Will you just stay with me?” he said. “We have to talk about this.”
Penelope could see herself saying yes. She could see Jon folding her back into the party. They would spend another miserable hour there and then go home to his studio, its eggplant-colored walls. He would unfold the futon so it was wide enough for them both, and they would share a quilt and fall asleep to the faraway rattle of the M train. Perhaps he noticed her soften.
“I don’t want the night to end,” he said.
“Things end, Jon.”
“Jesus Christ, Penelope, what’s wrong with you?” He spoke through his teeth, and Penelope could see he was finally angry at her. It was the first time he had looked at her this way: his eyes wide, his hands on his hips. They had never fought before, and here they were. She had been waiting for this. He had finally reached his limit, and soon they’d be done.
“It’s not my fault,” Penelope said, “if you don’t know whether you want to fuck me or leave me alone.”
“I don’t know yet,” Jon said. “I’m having trouble deciding whether to fuck somebody who occasionally treats me like dirt.”
His voice was low, but Penelope had a terrible feeling that everyone had heard, everyone knew what he had said to her. She leaned in and gritted her teeth before she spoke.
“No wonder your father drank.”
Penelope left before she could see his reaction. She made it three blocks, and then she stopped to lift a lid off a trash can and hurl it into the gap between two buildings. Then she kicked the aluminum can over and over until she had dented it, then she threw the trash can into the alley as well.
“Holy shit, girl. You mad or something?”
She hadn’t noticed two men at the corner, shivering and smoking. They had seen her rage, and now they were laughing at her. She flipped them off and cursed them and marched down the block. She was breathless before long and had to sit down on the curb. She waited for her eyes to focus, the colorlessness in her brain to clear. Fucking antibiotics.
It took a few minutes for her to stand, but when she did, she could breathe again, her head emptied out. It would take her an hour to walk back to Halsey Street, and she didn’t think she could make it on her own. She was frightened, suddenly, sure that something awful might happen to her soon—she would be murdered on the way home, she would trip over her own feet and fall into the path of a moving car, she would get another call about her father, this time to say he had fallen out of his wheelchair.
She stopped in a bodega to calm down. She needed the light inside, the voices of other people. She wandered the aisles. She wanted a cigarette—something to hold in her hands, something to breathe in. They had Parliaments behind the bulletproof glass, and a thrill ripped through Penelope when she saw the rare blue pack. It was her mother’s brand: the scent of her hair, of the burning air she would leave behind her in a room, the ash that fell between the rows of vegetables in the yard. By the time she reached Halsey Street, Penelope had demolished five cigarettes, her head full of fog.
Penelope half expected to find Jon waiting for her on the stoop. Perhaps he had gone home to get his bicycle, maybe he had rushed here to catch her to make up. She reached the gate and there was no one inside, and Penelope thought, Fine. She blew a gorgeous gray puff of smoke above her head into the starless, clear night.
It would mean nothing to lose Jon, to never sit in his studio again, to never have him over to sit in the parlor, on the navy loveseat they had found together. Life without him would be no different than this: night walks with herself, the ease of darkness, silence, the street.
Inside the house, in her new bedroom, Penelope went through the humble pile of mail she had left on top of her trunk. It was a stack of catalogues, supermarket circulars, and health insurance bills she hadn’t delivered yet to Ralph, and her letter from Mirella. It had arrived nearly a week after she had returned to Brooklyn, but Penelope hadn’t told anyone, not her father and certainly not Jon. She had read it, many times, measuring what she could say, whether it was safe to say anything at all.
The envelope was crinkled and stamped with an inky seal—La República Dominicana. Penelope slid out the letter and her chest began to expand so quickly she had to remind herself she wasn’t dying. It was her body’s response to her mother, to Mirella extending a hand to her across the ocean. The letter ended without a signature, the date printed in the upper right corner. Mirella had written to Penelope the day she left DR, but it had taken days for the letter to reach her. The mail took so long between countries.
Penelope switched on a light and sat on the floor. She read the letter over and over again.
Hija—
You are gone, and the house is not the same. I have learned that to be a mother is to be left behind. I did it to Ramona; you have done it to me. When you were a girl, you used to follow me around, and I did not like it. I was not fit to be followed.
Sometimes, I dream of you, here, in this house. You are a girl, and I am different. Your room is the one that faces the garden. I know you loved the mountains, and my mother’s little shack, but I was never from that village, and you didn’t belong in all that dirt.
Did you ever hear the story that my father swallowed pills so that he would die? They say he had debts; they say that’s why we lost everything when he was gone. I do not believe it. I know my father loved me.
But I do wonder if he wanted to die. I have often wanted to die. Maybe there is something in our blood. Something ancient and ugly that my father gave to me. Sometimes, I think maybe that is why I hated Brooklyn, and, eventually, your father, being a wife. But then I think, no—anyone would have hated that.
The day you left us, I was happy for you. I was sad for me, and I was happy for you. You needed to go and find your life. Have you found it?
18
NOTICIAS
It was April when the phone rang, a Saturday and warm. Penelope was reading on a pillow beneath the window in her new room, only a few minutes of light left in the day. A cup of tea cooled on the floor. She had her brushes splayed out beneath her, and a new roll of paper on the easel, as if she might paint. She had been working up the nerve and losing it for days. She had thought often of what Jon had said to her—You live like the world is happening to you—and it made her put down her brush every time she picked it up. If he had been trying to motivate her, he hadn’t done a very good job.
She thought it might be Jon calling until she realized it was the landline ringing upstairs in her parents’ room. And then it was obvious who it might be—Mirella. Anyone else would have called her on her phone. Penelope bounded up the stairs, rushing to answer before her mother hung up.
She found the phone on the nightstand next to Ralph’s empty bed. She sat down and lifted it to her ear. She was shaking, happy, desperate to hear her mother’s voice. She had never found the nerve to write back to her, but it didn’t matter. Here was her mother, chasing after her, reaching out her hand again.
“Mami?”
“Buenas.” It was a man on the other end, and Penelope asked who it was.
“Marcello. Remember me? I am your mother’s friend.”
“Buenas,” she said and waited for him to explain why he had called.
“Ay, Penélope,” he said. “Something very grave has happened.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Penélope, I am so sorry. Penélope, Penélope, I am so sorry.”
“What happened? Is this about Mami’s letter? I’m going to write back to her soon.”
“She’s dead, Penélope. Your mother, she died.”
Penelope felt as if someone had turned over a load of gravel into her throat.
“What happened?”
“She was crossing the road. To go to the German bakery. You know, the one she took you to when you were here? She was hit by a motoconcho.”
“But how?”
“I don’t know. I wasn’t there. I was at home. I was in the shower. The watching-man came and found me.”
Penelope felt the gravel again. It seemed to fill both lungs. “I don’t understand, Marcello.”
Mirella had been crossing roads since she was a girl, in Santiago, in Aguas Frescas, then in Bed-Stuy, and Manhattan. She was the one who had led Penelope across to the bakery. How could she have forgotten to look both ways? How could she have been blind to the motoconcho?
“A baby was killed, too. It was riding on the motoconcho with its mother. You know how these Dominicans are—three, four, five people on the back of a motorcycle just so they don’t have to pay as high a price. Everyone else survived. Except the baby and your mother.”
Penelope shut her eyes as the room began to seesaw beneath her.
Marcello explained that he had been trying to reach her for days. Mirella didn’t have a number for her written down anywhere—she must have known it by heart. And the day of the accident, they lost power in the town for days. As soon as it came back this morning, he went straight to the Internet café and found this number.
“How long has it been?”
“Three days. We burned her last night.”
Penelope wondered if she was really speaking to the same Marcello who had appeared in the foyer of her mother’s house, red-faced and carrying a bottle of wine, a little pastry box tied with string. The same man who had fetched her mother dessert plates, topped off her glass without her asking, and looked at her as if she were all shine. For a moment, she considered asking him, “Is this the same Marcello I met?” But what other Marcello could there be? What other Penelope was there with a mother named Mirella? What other daughter on Halsey Street had a mother who had lived by the sea? She was a daughter with a dead mother. My mother is dead.
“I have her ashes.”
“Ashes?”
“Yes. In a little urn. I don’t know if that’s what you wanted—for her to be burned—but I had to make a decision.”
Penelope shut her eyes.
“My sister is coming in from Assisi soon, and I will leave with her in a few days. I don’t think I can stay here—”
“I see,” Penelope said. “I don’t know what to do.”
She couldn’t imagine her mother in an urn in a box being flown across the sea. What if something happened to the urn? What if her ashes were lost? She wouldn’t fly to DR—what would be the point? She should have flown to see her when she was alive. She should have written back to her while she was alive. She had waited too long.
“I know it’s not easy, Penélope,” Marcello said. “You’ll have to talk to your father to make a decision about the remains.”
Penelope was hit doubly by Marcello’s words: first, remains, and then, your father. Her mother no longer had a body; she had left only dust behind. And how would she ever tell Ralph? He would be destroyed, crushed even more by Mirella in death than in life.
“Fuck,” she said.
“Oh, I am so sorry, Penélope. Your mother—she loved you so much. I know she wanted for the two of you to spend more time together in this house. The morning you left, she went into the guest room where you stayed and she just sat on the bed with the lights off for a long time, and I went to check on her, and she said, ‘Marcello, déjame en paz, por favor,’ and so I left her, and I thought to myself—”
Marcello blew his nose and started up his crying again.
“I thought, ‘Oh! She’s waiting! She’s waiting for her daughter to come back. For the flight to be delayed, for Penélope to change her mind. Maybe she thinks if she doesn’t make the bed, if she doesn’t turn on the lights, she can keep her . . . She can keep her here with her.’ Oh, she loved you Penélope, she—”
Penelope hung up. She yanked the cord from the wall so that Marcello couldn’t call back. She lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling, the web of thin lines crawling through the plaster.
“Jesus Christ.”
Penelope heard her own voice and sat upright. “Jesus Christ,” she said again, and she realized she didn’t know how to arrange herself: Should she stay on the bed, or sit, or stand, shift to her side? Should she close her eyes and let the silence of the old house fill her ears with its liquid weight? Should she wrap herself in these sheets—her parents’ beige and fraying sheets? Penelope got up and ran down the stairs, out into the yard, to the garden. Her mother was dead.
It was newly dusk, the night coming on blue and calm. Penelope sat on one of the old dusty lawn chairs, gathering dust from the seat onto her fingertips. It rolled apart as if she were shearing wool. She opened the neon orange umbrella overhead, and then she didn’t know what to do. She lit a Parliament from her back pocket and smoked it fast, scattering ash over her lap.
“Fuck,” Penelope said, and she waited for someone to answer. A voice to shush or reprimand her. “Fuck!” she said again, testing the air, the night, as if she might find someone there to speak to her. “Holy fucking shit,” she shouted, but again no one answered.
A fat orange tabby cat appeared from behind the shed. He stared at her, his fur fanned out in a mane around his square head, his white paws drawn close together. Penelope made a weak kissing sound, hoping he would come to her, but instead he leaped to the top of the shed and out of the yard. It was then that she started to cry. She shook out a second cigarette, lit it, and dragged hard. The smoke caught in her throat and she coughed; she snuffed out the glowing end on her wrist. It hurt as much as she expected, enough to make her pound her foot on the ground. She pressed the hot end again onto the inside of her arm, and the burns were the worst thing happening to her. She counted: three, four, five, and then she waited for the pain to pass, the flash points of heat on her flesh. When the pain didn’t lessen, she ran inside, defeated, to hold her arm under the tap. She had failed, unable to sit out in the garden and bear the pain until her skin blistered.
Even under the cold water, she felt her skin burning. It made her cry harder, how pathetic she was—her plan hadn’t worked, and now she would have the scars. When she could stand to pull her arm out of the water, she went to find her phone, tracking water through the house. She found it on the floor of her room, near her easel, the unused brushes, her cold cup of tea.
It took Jon a while to answer.
“I didn’t think you were ever going to call again.”
“Hello.”
“So you’ve changed your mind about me then?” His voice was cold, distrustful.
“My mother’s dead.”
“What?”
“Mirella, my mami, she died.”
“What happened?”
When Penelope didn’t answer, he asked if she was home. She answered yes, and Jon said, “Twenty minutes.”
She lay down on the floor to wait for him, facedown. She splayed out her arms so that her sores could rest on the cold floor. When she heard Jon knock, she stood and crossed to the door, unsure of how she went. Her body moved itself forward, and she rolled down her sleeves to cover the burns.
“What happened?” Jon said, as he charged into the parlor.
“She died.”
“Fuck, Penelope.” He laid his hands on her shoulders, and they felt heavier than hands. They fixed her to the ground where she stood. He was talking to her, but she didn’t understand. He said her name, “Penny,” and then he stared at her, as if he expected some part of her to come burst
ing through.
“What?” she said. “What do you want from me? What is there to say?”
He shushed her, like in the movies, although she wasn’t crying. He hugged her, too, although she wasn’t there with him in the parlor anymore.
She was overtaken by the accident, and she felt that she was there, at the precise instant, the precise spot where her mother was hit. She saw the motorcycle knock Mirella off her feet, the other cars spinning to avoid the crash. Penelope didn’t see the child who had died; she didn’t care about the child. She saw the woven basket in her mother’s hand bursting, her white dress ruined by gasoline. Blood on the road.
And then, she was off the road and with her mother, in the airport, on the morning she left DR. She had the signed deed in her purse, and her mother was there, in front of her, in her ridiculously oversized shades. The air glided through the palm trees, the clamor of passengers, rude honks and shouts, the call of birds.
Without warning, Mirella had pressed her cheek to Penelope’s cheek, roped their bodies together with her skinny arms. Her perfume and cold skin, the clang of her metal bracelets.
“I want you to come back, hija,” she had said and kissed her, as if they had always said good-bye this way. “Come this summer. You can bring that boy from the photograph.”
And Penelope had said only good-bye. It was all she could muster then.
Mirella’s curtains flapped in the breeze. They skimmed the floors, and rose, then fell against the window once more, like sails, although the room and her house weren’t floating toward anywhere. She watched the curtains inflate and drift. She contemplated the invisible strength of the wind.
Soon the midday sun would be overhead and scorch everything in her garden, and Mirella would have to go out to meet it with her hose. Who else would make sure her plants were watered? That they were safe in the dirt? But she stayed where she was, on the edge of the bed. The guest room was dark, except for a small pool of light beneath the window. It stretched toward her and shrank away as the curtains fluttered.
Mirella breathed in the roses, their faint sweetness. They grew outside, just below the window. The blooms were impressive, like pink miniature cabbages. She left on the thorns in case anyone should try to steal a bunch.