The plaza itself was hard packed dirt, a few spots of grass surviving the pounding of fiesta goers over the years. Images of a dozen fiestas flipped through my mind: little girls dancing on the tops of their father's shoes, high schoolers walking in hormone-laced circles around the plaza holding hands until they could sneak off out of the view of their protective parents, mothers yelling across the plaza at little boys running away from them through the crowd, the metal legs of lawn chairs straining underneath abuelos and abuelas, and dull brown sparrows picking through fallen popcorn and nachos.
The church sat above the plaza, a plump old tia, observing with warm affection the antics of her nieces and nephews. White-washed like the trunks of the trees, the church looked pristine, its slopping sides easily shielding decades of necking teenagers, its wooden doors swinging wide open when they invariably returned years later with their tiny babies wrapped in yellow blankets.
I pulled into the side parking area, taking note of the cars but realized it was largely worthless. Would they know I was here? Who were "they" anyway? Who the hell was I running from? The engine ticked off heat with an impatient beat.
Sunlight brightened the curves of the walls of the adobe church, adding to the sense of serenity and sensuality, a strange and compelling mix for a Catholic church. What may have, at one time, been meant to be austere was revealed by countless painters to be something altogether different.
I got out of the truck, careful to pack the recorder into my bag, and headed inside.
The foyer was cool, as it had always been when I was a child. In the doorway was the marble container with holy water and I automatically reached out and dipped my fingers in to make the sign of the cross. Across the foyer were the red votives lined up at the feet of the statue of the virgin and child, their right hands raised in frozen blessing above the few flickering candles. Rows of pews, dark wood with kneeling pad raised, lined up neatly toward the altar. On the ceiling was the mural depicting some long-dead artist's odd vision of heaven, a heaven populated with the homeliest angels ever to inhabit a church. They floated above the empty pews, carrying incense and playing harps, each one with a face so odd, it was as if someone insisted they be perfectly androgynous, but in the ugliest way possible. Even their feet were big and rough as if Heaven's roads were tough on soles.
I'd sat through mass hundreds of times in this church as a child until my mother had stopped believing in just about anything. I remember the mumbling priest, the seemingly endless standing and sitting and kneeling, playing on the kneeling pad, which was the only softness seat in the entire place.
"Can I help you?"
I whirled, startled. I didn't see anyone at first.
"Down here."
I looked down. A tiny man in a priest collar stood there, an oversized smile on his face, thick hands clasped in front of him. He couldn't have been four feet tall.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I didn't mean to startle you. I keep doing that. The ladies in the office are always telling me to get louder shoes."
"Really?" I said, confused. Certainly they wouldn't see him coming, I thought, then winced, waiting for lightening to strike me down. Making mental fun of a little person priest had to be pretty high on the sin parade.
He leaned in conspiratorially, and I found myself crouching a bit. "I catch them gossiping. Now they never know when it's safe."
"That's... ironic," I said.
He looked surprised, then let out a delighted laugh. "You know, you're right about that."
"I'm actually looking for Father Henry," I said. "Is he here today?"
He shook his head. "Father Henry retired last year. He's in Arizona these days. I'm Father Vincent."
Priests retired? Wasn't that what heaven was for? "Retired? No, no, that's not possible," I stammered. "He has something for me."
My stomach tightened and my head began to throb. I closed my eyes for a minute and the vision of fire leaping out of my apartment window flashed in my mind, Eliah's hardened face staring into the fire, red lights flashing.
I felt a gentle hand on my arm and opened my eyes, meeting the tiny priest's searching gaze.
"Is your name Katarina?"
Father Vincent stepped up on a stool and drew the curtains closed in his office as I sat down on the high-backed chair opposite the large wooden desk. Pictures in simple wooden frames covered one corner and more trailed around the walls of the room. Many were of young men and women around dilapidated houses. A few were of groups of teenagers with Father Vincent in the middle like a younger brother, his arms stretched wide as if presenting the group to the photographer. Other photos had nuns and priests gathered, plastic badges hanging from their necks, smiles broad, the tiny priest always a focal point.
The room smelled faintly of incense and dust motes floated in the rays of sunshine that still peeked between the curtains. Fatigue from the last few nights settled around my shoulders and I slumped back heavily.
"Long drive?" Father Vincent asked as he sat down in the chair behind his desk.
"Very. I usually like to drive, but it's been a ... rough couple of days."
He politely waited for me to elaborate, and a silence stretched out between us. He wasn't Father Henry, not the priest my mother told me to meet. My accident, the fire, the pounding in my head—I couldn't talk to him about it just because he wore the collar. An eavesdropping little person priest at that.
"You look a lot like her, you know," he said, breaking the silence. He reached down and I heard the creak of a drawer opening. He began rummaging around.
"Like who?"
He looked up, his brown eyes meeting mine for a moment. "Antonia. Your mother."
My breath caught as I held his gaze. No one had told me this before, but I'd spent hours before the mirror in our bathroom, searching for my mother's face in mine. Maybe if I could find it, I'd find some remnant of her, of the other mother who had huge books on law and philosophy on her nightstand and used to fix dinner every night. Sometimes I would see a flash of something that looked like Antonia, a curve, a shadow, but it was lost the moment I focused in on it, slipping away before I could embrace it. When I'd ask my grandmother who I looked like, she would just smile and send me off to my room saying "You looked like you."
Father Vincent placed a manila envelope on the desk and closed the drawer. His fingers, thick and worn, rested on top. He wasn't letting it go yet.
"Yes. You have her high cheekbones, her chin. Even her hair. She used to wear it like that, pulled back. Your eyes, though..." He gestured to the area below his eye and I remembered that both mine were still swollen from the accident. I probably looked like hell.
"It's hard to tell right now," I said, "but they don't look like hers. I was... in a car accident." I said, reaching for my own face, suddenly self-conscious and wishing for a decent bit of Beverly's concealer.
"Ah," he said, his face betraying the doubt.
I opted not to try to convince him I wasn't in some sort of domestic violence drama.
"So, my mother," I said, curious. "You knew her?" I tried to keep my tone level. Truth be told, I was ready to bleed him dry of information. Abuela never talked about the other Antonia and was impatient when I asked about her. It was as if by asking I was disloyal to the new Antonia. So I kept my curiosity tucked under a rock in my mind, along with the fragments of my own childhood memories, shredded by time into tiny slivers of the "other Antonia" or as I knew her then, Mom.
Father Vincent tried to smooth the envelope's creased corner. "I knew Antonia back in high school."
"Really?"
He laughed. "Don't look at me like that. Priests are allowed childhoods, you know. Even little priests."
"I always thought priests were grown right in the back behind the altar."
"Not since reformation," he said.
"Actually, I've..." I hesitated, weighing my words. "I've never met anyone who knew her back before the accident."
"The accident. So horrible. We all wer
e in shock." He looked away for a moment, gazing at something beyond the photos on the adobe walls of the office.
"I was pretty young when it happened," I said. Young, but not so young that I forgot a single detail. Not the coolness of the hospital bed rail, the sickly green glow of the machines, or the tangle of cords going into the wall like hungry snakes. Those memories collided with the piles of pennies, the counting, the reading of Dr. Seuss. Go, Dog, Go!
There was, somewhere deep inside the shell of Antonia, there lived another Antonia, my Mom. She woke up and spoke, and all I wanted was to meet her again, somehow.
I leaned toward Father Vincent. "What was she like?"
He took a deep breath. Come on, Father. Tell me. What's the harm?
"Antonia Perez. I tell you what, she was tough. And smart. Much smarter than she let on. She kept everyone on their toes. We didn't think anything could slow her down in this world, let alone stop her."
He leaned back in his chair, his small frame fading into the dimness of the room. "I think after the accident your grandmother wanted to protect you and your mother. Most of the people your mother knew came around, but your grandmother kept saying the specialists said it was better for Antonia to just start fresh." He shrugged. "Personally, I think she just was glad to be rid of us all."
"Why do you say that?"
"We all thought she'd come back. Antonia, I mean. The one we knew. Some of the old crew really kept pushing, sending names of specialists from all over the country, calling over and over. But your grandmother accepted the reality of the situation much faster. She wanted to move on, to help you and Antonia, I imagine."
Father Vincent hesitated. He rubbed his chin and took a deep breath before continuing. "Did your grandmother tell you about Sylvia?"
"Not that I can remember," I said.
"No? It was such a big deal, I thought she might have." He shook his head.
"Why, were they friends?" I asked.
A tense laugh caught before he could stop it, a slip of priestly diplomacy. "No. Not at all. Antonia didn't have friends like Sylvia."
Silence stretched between us as he sat there, considering me.
"I really would like to know," I said. "I'd like to know something about ... the other Antonia."
"You know what? You should." He gently pounded his fist on the desk. "Antonia, she was worth knowing. When I say she didn't have friends like Sylvia, it's not that she actively disliked her. It's that Antonia was always beyond us. She didn't connect with things most of us were focused on in high school. She didn't date, didn't have the patience for all the little dramas. Antonia was distant in a way. But let me tell you, she was a force." He leaned forward on his desk. "She did not believe in tolerating things that were clearly and fundamentally immoral.
"So no, Sylvia wasn't her friend. Sylvia was a girl in our high school who got pregnant our senior year. It was the kind of thing that happened a lot in those days. But this was different. Sylvia ... she took matters in her own hands and attempted to terminate the pregnancy herself."
My stomach clenched. "Oh, no."
Father Vincent nodded. "Antonia found her in the girls' dressing room off the gym, but it was too late. She'd lost too much blood. It was bad enough, and it would have ended there..." He hopped off his chair abruptly, and walked to the window, swaying side to side with each step to handle the curve of his legs. He parted the curtain a hands width and light streamed in creating a long slash across his face. A potted plant with spires of blue flowers was on the window sill, stretching up for the sun.
"What happened?"
"She died, maybe while Antonia was there, I was never sure. But Antonia knew what all of us knew: Sylvia had been sexually abused by her stepfather for years. Benny Duran. He was a county commissioner. He was powerful back then. We were more rural, more dependent on cotton, the dairy, that kind of thing. He pretty much ran things.
"No one would talk about it, none of the school officials anyway. We didn't have grief counselors or any of that like there is now. After the funeral, Antonia was furious. No one would help Sylvia when she was alive, and no one would talk about her when she was dead. No one even considered going after Duran. No one but Antonia."
I tried to imagine her back then, tried to construct her from the high school graduation photo that hung in the hallway. Her long hair in waves, her smile clearly forced, eyes penetrating the glass.
Father Vincent turned back to face me, away from the window. The curtain moved silently back into place, and the room was dim again.
"After about a week Antonia left the note that Sylvia had written in a display case here, at the church. It was tacked right in the display case where we list services, upcoming meetings, agendas, flyers. The priest at the time claimed he 'couldn't find the key.' By the time the sheriff came to get it out with a crowbar, word was out all over town and on into El Paso. Duran was an abuser and had gotten Sylvia pregnant.
"The sheriff never formerly said who put that letter in the display case. But we all knew. Antonia had found Sylvia. She'd gone to the office stained with Sylvia's blood. That's why she had the note. And she knew what would happen to that note if she just left it with Sylvia."
"You mean they would have ignored it?" I asked.
"More like 'lost' it. Her father had been getting away with it for years. Everyone had been turning way from that situation, ignoring it. But they knew. We all knew."
"That's horrible."
Father Vincent nodded, a pained look filling his eyes as he pulled himself back into his chair. "It was. I wish I could say it isn't like that anymore. Anyway, at first the commissioner tried to say the letter wasn't real, then when they proved that it was Sylvia, he tried saying that Sylvia was crazy. Then they proved the baby was his.
"Then it got ugly. He tried to go after Antonia. Claimed she'd forged the note. But he'd lost his grip on everything by then. Everything fell apart."
We sat in the quiet of the room as I tried to absorb all of this. The woman on the tape, that Antonia, this is who she was. She wasn't the woman I grew up with, the one who had to relearn to read every week, who had to hold my hand when we crossed the street because she would forget to look both ways. The woman on the tape was the same as the one he was talking about. Someone who saved the truth from a dying girl so it would not die with her in that school locker room.
"I understand your grandmother not telling you," Father Vincent said, straightening his frock. "Word was she was furious at Antonia. But they were never very close. At least not then."
My grandmother. Sitting in the kitchen, working with mom on the alphabet. Tracing each letter, endlessly working on Ds and Bs which always confused her. There for me, there for my mother, always there. How could they not be close?
"You know, your mother, she was like that plant on the windowsill. It's sage. We have it planted around the back. It can keep growing no matter where you put it, or what it goes through. It grows tall, blooms late, demands little from the world. But it thrives." He got a faraway look in his eyes for a moment. "I have it there and planted it in the back to remind me of what we can do, even with very little. So, when Father Henry gave me this" he said, lightly resting his fingers on the envelope, "after he'd been holding onto it for ten years, I wasn't surprised. When I came two years ago he made me promise to take care of it because someday someone would ask for it."
"Did he tell you what was in it?"
"He said he didn't know. He said he thought it was better that both he and I didn't know."
I wondered if the same held true for me.
"But he did say it was from Antonia. From before her accident. To tell you the truth," he said, "I'd pretty much forgotten about it. Then he called me a week ago—"
"What? He called last week?" I thought of my mother on the tape, her memory starting to slip right about then.
Father Vincent nodded. "Out of the blue. He was very upset. Wouldn't tell me why." He lifted one end of the envelope, his fingers lingerin
g over the shiny packing tape, pushing down on a tip that had curled up. "He wanted to know exactly where I'd put it." His eyes met mine. "He said 'Katarina will be by to pick it up soon.' And here you are." He paused, then pushed the envelope toward me purposefully. "I imagine there's something pretty important in here."
Trust no one, Katarina.
"I don't really know. But I appreciate you taking care of it all this time." I reached across the desk and took the envelope. It was light as if it contained only air. I rose, painfully aware of my sore back and rib.
Father Vincent looked disappointed, then rose from his chair. Maybe he hoped I'd open it in front of him. "If you need anything, let us know."
"I will. Thanks again."
The phone on his desk buzzed. He reached over and pressed a blinking button on the phone.
"Father? There's a man here to see you."
Father Vincent reached over and pressed a button. "I'm almost done, Rosa."
I smiled my thanks and began to move toward the door, giving a little wave before reaching for the wrought iron handle.
"Okay." Rosa's voice over the intercom got softer. "He said it's about Antonia."
I froze, my hand inches away from the handle. My hand began to shake and I stepped back away from the door. Father Vincent was pale, his eyes wide. The shaking in my hand was extending to my arm as I pulled the envelope to my chest and desperately surveyed the room for another door. There was one, just to the right of his desk. He nodded and waved me to it, then returned to the phone.
"Thanks, Rosa. Just a moment."
The adjacent room was small with a tiny window and full-length mirror, the scent of incense heavy in the air. Along one wall was a collection of robes, gold, purple, blood red, and the fabric looked heavy. Bright brocade trimmed the sleeves of a few, others were plain, about half of the robes draped down to the floor while the other half looked like they belonged on children. Directly across there was a small wooden bookshelf and a hard chair. There was no other door.
When I Knew You Page 6