Voices of Ash

by Jill Zeller

  He blathered on, voice fading, winding up high and then slow, like a warped tape or film. Hank needed sleep. He could, any minute, he told himself, get up and leave Carl to his wallow. But he didn’t think he had the strength, as if Carl’s voice were keeping him pinned to the sofa like a butterfly in a glass specimen case.

  The sound of a car pulling up saved him. Carl stopped talking. They waited in the semi-dark to see who it was, the philandering Dad or the all-night-party girl Connie. Connie won out. They could hear the sound of her heels thumping in the vestibule, the clank of her purse being deposited on the hallway table, a sigh, and two more heavy clunks as she kicked off her shoes.

  When she came through into the living room, she was perfectly silent, betrayed by a sharp intake of breath when she saw them on the couch.

  “What happened?” she snapped, her voice strained and a little hoarse. “You two camping out together like we used to do as kids in the backyard?”

  She flopped down in the chair Hank generally occupied, near the open French doors. “Is there any coffee?”

  “Joaquin isn’t up yet. It’s Saturday.” Hank couldn’t keep the anger out of his voice. He saw, in the dimness, Connie tilt her head.

  “You’re up. Carl’s up. He knows how to make coffee.”

  To his credit, Carl said nothing. Hank wondered if he had passed out.

  “Connie, listen. There was an accident.” Hank knew he sounded tired, his voice muted as if he were speaking underwater.

  Sitting up, Connie gripped the arms of her chair.

  “What?”

  Hank explained and Connie got to her feet, paced back and forth in her stockings as he told the story. She wore a blue cocktail dress, tight and form-seeking and rainbow-sleek. Peeling off a pair of short blue gloves she threw them on the couch next to Carl.

  “Oh my God, oh my God.” Connie’s hands were fists at her sides as she stalked back and forth like a soldier doing turns for punishment.

  “She’s going to be all right, the doctor said.”

  “Why? Why would she do it?”

  Carl was silent, eyes closed. He made no movement. Shifting forward, Hank thought about getting up, changed his mind. He had asked himself the question over and over. He and Carl had spoken, asked, pondered, tried to come up with reasons.

  Did Mom lose her balance and fall? Was she drunk? Or did she do it on purpose? And if so, why? Carl thought it was because of Dad’s infidelity. Hank knew a more pure reason, but he said nothing of it. Not yet.

  “Is Dad at the hospital?”

  Hank didn’t answer, and neither did Carl. Connie stopped pacing. “Oh.”

  Hank’s role as the keeper of the family secrets seemed to be compromised. It was evident that he was the only one who didn’t know Dad had girlfriends, but he realized he should have known. And he could, at least, pretend he did know.

  Reassuring Connie that Mom was recovering and Connie didn’t need to go to the hospital, Hank sank back down on the sofa, and thought he heard her tread away, softly, like leaves, to the French doors, to the pool.

  And when he woke up several hours later on the couch, Carl was gone, and sitting up, Hank could see Connie curled in one of the lounge chairs beside the pool. Someone had put a blanket over her.

  Twenty-Three

  Susan leaned against the headboard, hair threading across her shoulders like a skein of wool upset by a cat. She held a glass of water. Hank had just slid off her, pulling from her, cold shock cycling through him.

  “I don’t know, Hank. She said someone was sick at home. She’s taken some days off from the hospital to take care of whoever it is.”

  He had felt, the last two days while Mom was in the hospital, that his ribcage was made of paper maché, and would break and crack any time if anyone put too much pressure on it. And then there was the difficulty with his hearing, which seemed to be getting worse. But he had heard Susan, and he knew with certainty that he could not stand not to see Luz this Friday.

  Susan's attitude confused and frightened him. She didn’t seem to care, either way, about his passion for Luz. He knew this couldn’t last, that this wasn’t normal, that any other woman would throw jealous fits. But neither Susan nor Luz seemed to care about the way they shared Hank, as if they had made a pact.

  “But who is it? Her mother?”

  Susan dipped her fingers in the water, put them in her mouth. “She didn’t say, and I didn’t pry.”

  Sitting up, Hank ran his fingers through his hair. He felt as if he were on a tightrope between two sky-scrapers and couldn’t decide, or remember, which way to go. Before Susan, before this winter, he had a plan, of sorts, to live and home and ride his bicycle, maybe sign up for some races. But now, he felt like he had entered a race and no one had told him the route.

  “I don’t see what you are so worried about. She’ll be back next week.”

  But he didn’t believe it. He spent time, before leaving Susan’s, in the studio, petting her growing zoo. The raven Luz had given him occupied a place of prominence on his desk, centered in the middle of his blotter, which he never used. It was like, he thought, having Luz’s father, Julio De Mar in the room with him.

  When Friday came, word was Mom would be coming home from the hospital soon, likely this weekend. When Carl told him what happened, Dad was appropriately devastated; Carl said uncomfortably that Dad started to cry. Dad went to the hospital every day, and was spending every night at home.

  Hank felt a deep round hole open up inside him. He almost felt like weeping, but stifled it, kicking himself. Get a grip, man. Pull it together. He wondered if this was what Joseph went through when he was in a battle, bullets trying to kill him, seeing his buddy’s heads blown open and pieces of brain ending up in his lap. Hank hadn’t heard the end of the story Joseph started. In fact, most of the day when Hank was there, Joseph was asleep, having been, Susan admitted, up all night and out of the house. She did not agree to imagine what he was up to.

  That Friday, without Luz, Hank wandered through the house. No one liked to swim since Mom’s accident, so he walked around the pool and back inside a few times. No one was home. Carl, after his drunken confession after Mom’s accident, seemed to be avoiding Hank. Dad was at the hospital, and Connie—he never knew Connie’s schedule any more. But today, as he stalked around, unable to lie down or sit down or even tune the Peugeot, Connie showed up.

  Hank encountered her sitting in the kitchen, a glass of Coke in front of her, smoking a cigarette and flipping through Variety. Joaquin was at the market, and Hank, seeing Connie there, almost turned around.

  “Wait a minute, Hanky boy.” Connie blew smoke, squinted as it travelled across her face. “What are you doing home? I thought you had a standing appointment every Friday afternoon.”

  Sighing sharply, Hank felt a spike in his irritation. “You are my social secretary then? Keeping track of me?”

  Giving him a curious sideways look, Connie raised one eyebrow. She was growing her roots out, the golden straw color showing as the platinum hung onto the strands. She wore a swim suit under a shiny robe, maroon, spotted with white. “Hank, it is my sworn duty to keep track of everything, including my little brother.”

  “What the fuck do you know about me, anyway?”

  Now both eyebrows rose in amazement. Hank wished he had met her with his habitual silence, but it was too late now and he felt a little bad about it. The damage had been done. Putting down her paper and turning in her chair, she appraised him.

  “Perhaps it is time, dear son, to speak of your life, and how I can help you get your freaking act together.” She gave him a smile, eyes bright, head turned at an angle as if she was in front of the camera. “For one. I know where you go every Friday afternoon. And I know who you see.”

  The counter behind Hank, on which he leaned, arms folded, itchy and breathless, went colder. The room was hot actually, the back door open to capture any unwary breeze from the ocean.

  “Hank,” Connie’s voice
went sweet, coddling. “It’s OK. I think it’s really cool, actually, to use the vernacular of my betters. But you know what. Me knowing? I can help you out. Today, especially. So what’s the issue?”

  “You don’t know anything about what I do on Fridays.”

  “Oh, don’t I? Well, for one thing, you get on your bike and you ride down to Venice. I know because I followed you a few weeks ago.” Connie picked up her Coke, swirled it, but didn’t take a drink. “I think, actually, it was before you got sick. I saw the pretty lady, Miss Chagall, right? She is gorgeous, in a bohemian kind of way.”

  He should have known. He was supposed to know everything. But he had to grudgingly admire Connie’s talent for observation.

  As if she read his mind, Connie added. “I am an actress, after all. My entire life is research, observing the human condition. I have studied you a long time, my Hank.”

  Hank’s heart ticked up a beat, and he thought he might take the bait, although he knew he couldn’t quite trust her. “So what is this thing you can do for me?”

  Shifting to face him, crossing her legs, Connie picked up a pencil and examined it, in a way, Hank thought, very like Mom.

  “I know where Luz lives.”

  This data caused Hank’s heart to thunder, and sweat broke out on his palms and under his arms. The thought of going to Luz’s house terrified and excited him at the same time, in the same manner when he was setting out on a century ride.

  Surprisingly, it did not take Connie very long to change her clothes; Hank thought she had just thrown on a skirt and blouse over her bikini. In sandals, she clacked down the stairs, where he waited, having put on a fresh shirt. He wanted to stop for flowers, but he was damned if he was going to let Connie see him doing anything like that.

  Hank drove. His hands kept leaving damp marks on the wheel of the coupe Connie had bought, needing a car, she argued with Dad, because the studio was no longer coming for them, so she could get to restaurants and parties where she was making a lot of new friends and potentially finding new jobs. Sitting next to him, smoking Connie seemed, since the break-up of the act, calmer, more reasonable, less likely to fly into a rage.

  “So how is it you know where she lives?” Hank kept his eyes on the road, and thought he sounded off-hand, casual.

  Making a smoke ring, or trying too—they both had their windows open—Connie looked out the window at expanses of lawns greening with spring rain, bordered with color. The air was fresh and Easter-like.

  “I’ve known a long time. It was back when she used to come over. You would sneak her into the house.”

  I did? How come I don’t remember any of it? He knew she glanced at him, but he kept his gaze ahead.

  She continued, “So one day Carl and I followed her home. We were bored, you know. We’d never seen you with the same girl that often. In fact,” she snorted, coughed, and stubbed out her smoke in the ashtray. “We thought you were a fag, because you are so pretty. So we were glad to discover differently.”

  This was not news to Hank. And at this point he no longer cared. But he was disappointed. More memories of Luz came crowding in, spindling him with nerves because there was so much he had somehow forgotten. Walking Luz to Sunset, get her a cab—which she didn’t like, but if she stayed too long, she had to get home quickly so her parents wouldn’t be suspicious. They held hands sometimes. She walked with a pleasing sway, and smelled of chocolate and mango. The first time they ever kissed was that last day, in Hank’s room. It was the last day, because a wall came up in his mind and he couldn’t remember anything else.

  He felt himself growing hard, remembering that kiss, and he hoped Connie wouldn’t notice anything. But she was turned away, her elbow on the car door, drumming her fingers on the side panel to the music on the radio. During the pauses, they would hear their father’s voice exclaiming the virtues of soap or whiskey.

  Connie directed him through Hollywood, southeast into downtown, and then full east, to streets lined with bodegas and panaderias. Brightly colored garish marquees and odors of tortillas. Women with multiple children in tow crowded the sidewalks, carrying brightly colored bags of groceries.

  Leaving the packed traffic of battered vehicles, Connie directed Hank into a quiet avenue lined with small oaks, the same rusty cars parked at odd angles, children kicking balls in the middle of the road. The houses were stucco, like Susan’s, aproned by tidy gardens. They travelled the street for four long blocks, until Connie, peering out the window to her right, as if seeking the place of memory, told him to stop.

  “There. Pull over into that parking place up there.”

  Hank did so, and Connie turned toward him. “Back there, the yellow one.”

  The yellow one was a small bungalow tucked between similar others, one brown, one white. But the yellow one, Hank could see, could be none other than Luz’s and her mother’s, because it was the most beautiful house on the block.

  There was no lawn, but a garden of riotous color; the steps rose to an arch of pale pink roses, leafing out, blooming earlier here than anywhere else. Blue trim around the windows and a blue door. Brilliantly striped curtains, one of them fluttering through the opening. It was hotter here than in Westwood, farther from the sea’s cooling breath.

  Children called and screamed—there was a school down the block. The air smelled fresh and floral. Connie was looking at him.

  “Well, aren’t you going in?”

  Hank couldn’t move. He was afraid of what it might do to Luz to see him on her porch, invading her sanctuary. She had never invited him here, as if she were ashamed, but he didn’t see what she had to be ashamed of. The neighborhood was nice, delightful, in fact, warmer and more alive than Susan’s edgy Venice street.

  “Go on. You wanted to see her today. Today is your day. Go on!” Connie’s voice was soft, urging. She had hidden her perpetual sardonic smirk under a sisterly smile. She was a very good actress, he thought, opening the car door.

  Connie’s snicked open just after. “I’m coming too. Moral support and all that.”

  “No. I don’t need any of that.” Hank was on the sidewalk. He needed to do this alone. He needed to cut himself away from her.

  Shrugging, Connie nodded. “I’ll just wait on the sidewalk. Luz’s mother might feel better seeing your older sister is with you.”

  Giving her a rolled-eye look, Hank turned away and started up the steps. His heart thundered, pounded, but he kept going.

  At the top of the steps a little garden opened up on either side of the walk. A child’s tricycle sat near the steps. Hank climbed onto the porch, looked back to see Connie standing on the sidewalk, holding her pocketbook in front of her. She had even put on gloves. She gazed at him through green sunglasses and nodded.

  Turning back to the door, Hank lifted his hand to knock, and it opened.

  He stared into a dark, cool room. No one stood in the doorway, not Luz or her mother, whom Hank had never met. A dizzying wave went through him—the magic of Luz, a door opening by itself.

  Then he heard a sniffle, a cough, and it came from somewhere lower, and as he looked down he saw a small child, about three maybe, clinging to the doorknob.

  He was a pretty boy with black curly hair, eyes the color of licorice and framed by lashes miles long. His cheeks were flushed red and he gazed up at Hank, eyes round with curiosity.

  Footsteps behind the boy, the sharp quick voice of Luz. “Diego! What are you doing out of bed?”

  She swept into view, hair pulled back from her head, wearing a cotton shift and an apron. Her eyes were for the boy, and she swept him up, then started, almost tripped, when she saw Hank in the doorway.

  Twenty-Four

  “O Dios mio.” Her eyes widened; she gripped the little boy, staring at Hank. He couldn’t read her face, he faltered, wanted to run. But Connie was coming up the steps behind him.

  Then a smile, uncertain, but real, brought up the corners of Luz’s mouth. Hearing Connie she frowned, peered out through the o
pen door to see who it was.

  “Oh, Hank. Is that your sister? Won’t you both come in?”

  “Thanks, Miss Del Mar.” Connie swept past Hank as Luz pulled the door open wider. “I could sure use a glass of water. Hot isn’t it?” Her voice faded as she disappeared into the house.

  Hank stood frozen, seeking any clue from Luz. The little boy, Diego, gazed at him, fingers in his mouth. Shaking her head, she smiled again, and without a word, tilted her head toward the room, inviting him in.

  The room was dark, cool, one window open for a breeze. A braid rug, heavy wooden furniture; bright colors flowed over the walls, with paintings of bright, magical beings, flying and playing musical instruments. An array of photos on a white-painted table, and Hank recognized Julio Del Mar, sitting stiffly beside his wife.

  So I did meet him. Where, and when?

  And there she stood in the kitchen doorway, fragrance of oranges and spices circling around her, a small woman; had to be Luz’s mother Rosa.

  She was tiny, a little round in the middle, nose prominent, eyes narrow and piercing, lips parted in surprise. She wore a simple cotton dress, much like Luz’s, and a woven apron. But her hair was the surprise, made Hank stop and stare. Her hair was perfectly white, strung in two braids, one draping her shoulder, the other disappearing down her back. Her face looked young, eyebrows thick and black. Wiping her hands, she waited, looking at her daughter for the introductions.

  Luz made them, and Hank stumbled forward, holding out his hand. A silence followed, as Mrs. Del Mar looked him up and down. He quailed, waiting, keeping his hand before her, ready. Even Connie, standing beside the sofa under a painting of a white bird in a sapphire sky, kept her mouth shut.

  Mrs. Del Mar stared up at him, closed her mouth, sighed. Then, Hank watched a keen admiration shift the muscles of her face, and the barest wisp of a smile. She took his hand and shook.

  “Esse chico, cara mia.” She said. “Please, sit down. I will bring a tea.”

  “Oh, Mrs. Del Mar, please don’t go to any trouble.” Connie leaned forward, gave Rosa a brilliant smile.