The Things They Didn't Bury

by Laekan Zea Kemp

  “I was trying not to.”

  Ana pinched her again. “Well, try harder or I’ll pluck those eyes right out of your head.”

  They stopped just outside the door, Ana leading them to a row of empty chairs across the hall as it fell closed behind them.

  “I thought we were going to the vending machine,” Nita said.

  “You got any money?” Ana quipped.

  Nita shook her head.

  “Well me neither. Your father just needs a minute.”

  Liliana glanced back at the door, at the grey rubber stop that still held it ajar a few inches and though their voices were low, whole words being swallowed up by the electronic whirr of the hospital, she could still catch fragments—a solitary exhale, prefixes and wandering syllables.

  “I know how I look Manuel,” Raul said, “but I look worse than I feel. Trust me. They’ve got me on enough morphine to stop an elephant. I can’t feel a thing.”

  “Where are Lydia and your boys? Why aren’t they here taking care of you?”

  Raul sighed. “Lydia had to go back to work. She used all of her time off last summer when I was going through chemo and the boys aren’t boys anymore. They’ve got their own lives. One of them’s married; the other has a different girlfriend every week. They come when they can.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me last summer, when all of this started?”

  “There was no sense in worrying my brother who lived half a world away. Besides, the doctors were more positive then. They expected me to be in remission in no time.”

  “And now?”

  Raul squeezed the bed rail tighter and closed his eyes. Manuel stared at his brothers hands clasped around the bar, the gray bones of his knuckles slicing through his skin. Manuel slid to the edge of his chair placing his body closer to the bed. He took his brothers hand between his own and pressed it to his face. The skin was dry and cracking and it smelled like chemicals.

  “Will Liliana be going to University?” Raul asked.

  Manuel squeezed Raul’s hand a little tighter. “The Universities—are they safe?”

  “It’s over, Manuel.”

  “Maybe for now. Beasts like that never stay in hibernation for long.”

  “Manuel, every day I see more and more of the Argentina from when we were boys. I promise you don’t have to worry about the girls.”

  Manuel brought the cusp of his hand to his brow.

  “And you,” he asked.

  “You don’t get to worry about me either.”

  “You’re my brother, Raul. I get to worry.”

  “I am your brother, and you are mine. But I’m also an old man. We both are,” Raul patted Manuel’s closed fists, “and we can’t go back.”

  Manuel looked out the window. He could see planes flying slanted toward the airport, a man down on the street wearing a fedora and selling ice pops, and people in bright clothing sitting beneath large red umbrellas on a sidewalk patio. Compact cars rolled into the hospital’s parking garage and people were passing through the glass walkway above them and into the next building.

  The door clicked open and after a small nod from Manuel Ana led Liliana and Nita back inside. Manuel kissed his brothers hand and stood from his chair.

  “Tell your uncle goodbye.”

  Both girls took turns leaning over their uncle’s hospital bed and kissing him once on each cheek. When it was Liliana’s turn her uncle squeezed her hand lightly.

  “So here’s the graduate,” he said.

  Liliana nodded, trying to emulate her uncle’s proud smile.

  “Your father and I have been talking about you going to University. It’s the middle of the semester but I’ll call General Vidal and get you an appointment.”

  Liliana looked to her father.

  “General Vidal? The military’s still running the school,” Manuel asked.

  “They’re still transitioning. But he’s a friend.”

  Manuel nodded. “I’ll come see you tomorrow.”

  And before Raul could tell Manuel not to trouble himself they were gone.

  Back at the vineyard the warm air outside was still swirling and thick, the humidity lingering though the sun was down. Liliana smelled the sweet almond aroma of her father’s tobacco and followed it out onto the porch where she found him slouched in a small metal chair, one leg hiked up on his knee, the mahogany pipe pursed between his lips. His eyes were closed and the smoke trailed thick from his lips, swirling above his head like a halo—the white mist lit up by the soft glow of the moon.

  She watched her father, chest rising and falling as something like sleep slipped over him. When he finally opened his eyes and saw her lingering by the front steps he didn’t say a word.

  “Is that why you wanted to come back? For Uncle Raul?”

  He waited, silence spilling over them again, and then nodded once—the motion almost lost as he took another draw from his pipe. Liliana’s father never said much unless it was necessary but even then he always found a way to give the shortest or most ambiguous version of the truth, something to mull over in agony while he sat there, his words, his face void of any emotion. And so he was the silent and strong core of their family around which everything else orbited.

  “How sick is he?” Liliana asked, poised for another one of her father’s pseudo-answers.

  Her father took a deep breath. “Sick.”

  Chapter 6

  Liliana

  Liliana finally finished unpacking all of her things, which wasn’t much, mostly clothes and old books. But she had tiptoed around the box of her mother’s things all afternoon, not sure where she should put them, a part of her a little afraid to sort through it all. It had taken Nita all of ten minutes to take from it what she wanted, but maybe that was because their mother was more of an idea, a fictional character to her, rather than an actual person. Liliana, on the other hand, couldn’t see the things that belonged to their mother without thinking of her touching them, of her wearing them, caring for them.

  She finally sat on the edge of her bed, grabbed one of the cardboard lips, and pulled the box to her. It was full of dusty leather books, some without covers, and all in Spanish. The spines were all warped and a pile of loose cream-colored pages covered the bottom of the box. She grabbed a rag and pulled them out one by one, wiping the covers clean before shaking the pages over an empty wastebasket. She fingered through some of the stiff leaves, her mind working quickly to translate the titles, and added most of them to her bookshelf. Then she scraped up the loose sheets of paper and flipped through a few of them before letting the pages slip from her fingers over the wastebasket, her eyes catching on some black scroll, handwritten, and slightly faded.

  Liliana pulled out the pages and rubbed the rough paper between her fingers. They had been stiffened by water and the handwriting had bled into the drying creases and folds. Liliana could barely make out the words but there was a small monogram at the top of each page—the small black outline of a bird clutching a thorn twig between its claws. She noticed the same black sketch of the twig running across the spine of a leather book lying at her feet and she picked it up, cradling it in her lap. She opened the cover, running her fingers along every grey water stain and smudged pool of ink. Most of the pages were stiff, cracking and curling under like a wave as she tried to turn them, tearing a few that had dried together. But eventually the pages started to become smoother, the writing more legible and more intact the more pages she turned.

  Finally she reached some undamaged pages with clear dates written in the top left corners, every line below filled with large cursive letters that slanted dramatically to the right. Liliana let the pages fall until she was holding just the back cover and etched into the soft leather, Liliana traced the small indentions that spelled out her mother’s full name.

  Chapter 7

  Diego

  Diego looked down at the beach. He was high up on the ridge but if he stared into the water for too long he could feel it starting to rise,
trying to reach him. He always stayed on the edge of the tree line where the small stone cliff started to edge out from underneath the grass. It hung just a foot out over the beach but Diego liked playing there, he liked being high over the ocean, as if he were in command of it somehow.

  He saw something flashing in the sunlight; it was long and slinking down the beach. He pulled on his hat to block the sun and saw the older girl, her arms folded over her chest as she found a place to rest in the sand. He had expected her to look less like an Argentinean and more like an American—blonde hair, blue eyes, high-pitched voice, and obnoxious clothes. As if the simple act of moving countries could change someone’s DNA. But there was something else about her that caught him off guard, something he couldn’t put his finger on, something he couldn’t see. But maybe it was just the fact that the only thing he knew about her, about any of them, was that her mother was dead, that she had been killed in the war. Diego’s father hadn’t known her well but still enough to say that she was different. She had a tendency to sneak out her bedroom window late at night and she had a sharp tongue, a blunt boldness that scared most men half to death.

  As she moved closer to the tide Diego began to wonder if the girl was anything like her. And though he knew she wouldn’t be able to hear him sitting at the edge of the waves, tide lapping against her ankles, he stopped playing anyway. The sun combed honey through her dark brown hair, turning everything, her skin, and the sand beneath her gold.

  A sharp whistle barely trembled against Diego’s ear drum—the sound swallowed up so much by the waves that he would have ignored it had the girl not turned to face the house, acknowledging that she had heard it too. His father was calling for him. After stashing the guitar in the shed at the edge of the vineyard Diego met him on the front porch of the main house. The old woman was with him and she was holding a bucket of paint in one hand and a small brush in the other.

  “The house is in bad condition,” she said between tight lips. “We start repainting tomorrow.” She sat the paint can down and Diego noticed the others stacked across the porch.

  “We’ll scrape the house down first,” Diego’s father said.

  We, Diego thought, until you’re too drunk or hung over and I have to do it all myself.

  “I think everyone would be more comfortable if we could get the house in better condition, less…grey,” Ana said to them.

  The house was falling apart—everything about it looked dead or dying. He had never seen it as it had once been, as it should have been with white walls and bright blue shudders, a hanging porch swing and a garden in front that sprawled out from end to end. He had only ever seen it in a state of decline. He suddenly realized what a solemn place it must have been to come back to. They had probably had a nice house in the states and they had left it for this, for a house that looked as dead and ghostly as its former inhabitants. But they weren’t just any inhabitants. They were the girl’s grandparents and her mother. He thought of her sitting there in the sand, at the edge of the ocean, as far away from the house as she could get.

  “I’ll start tonight,” he said.

  Chapter 8

  Liliana

  Liliana let the journal fall open against her knees, the wind blowing off of the ocean sending the pages fluttering before finally fanning them apart. Though she knew Nita would have wanted to see it, she was her mother too, Liliana’s first instinct hadn’t been to share it with her but to run—to carry her mother’s journal as far from the house as possible. She knew she was being selfish but it was her who had always been the one to sit wondering for hours what Isabella was like—not just who was she, but who had she wanted to be, who had she wanted Liliana to be. Nita was so young when she died, and Liliana hated to say it, but the loss wasn’t as great, the wound not as deep. As she sat there, fingers pressed to the raised ink of her mother’s pen, she thought that just for a little while she wanted it to be just the two of them. As if Isabella was sitting right next to her, whispering a lifetime’s worth of secrets into her ear.

  She scanned a few of the pages, not reading them yet, not focusing on the words but on the deep impressions made by the pen. She circled the swirling f’s and a’s and traced her fingers over every indention, feeling the words with her eyes closed as if she were reading brail, feeling the words as if they were actual things—her mother’s things. She lifted her hands and the wind caught the pages. Then she pressed them down gently with her thumbs and began to read.

  …was lit up by the headlights for only a second and then the tires rolled across his flesh sending the dark man and the woman jolting headfirst into the roof of the cab. The truck swerved and almost rolled into the ditch, but the wheels clawed themselves back onto the road and a few moments later it was gone. The next day someone found him. It was probably Trini’s neighbor Mr. Paz. He’s half blind but he knows that old dirt road like the back of his hand and since being half blind never stopped him from driving, the moment his truck rolled over the body he knew something was wrong.

  Liliana flipped back to the next page but all of the ink had bled into tiny streams flowing off the edges of the paper. She flipped forward and scanned the sentences.

  Mr. Paz drove into town and straight to the police station. Apparently patrol took their time getting out there. Everybody knew Trini’s stepfather was a worthless drunk and it wasn’t the first time someone had found him lying unconscious in the middle of the road. Trini called me ten times that morning and as the patrol car was making its way up the road she was gripping the phone and whispering into the receiver, telling me who was there, what they were doing, dissecting every nuance of their body language. Every now and then I would hear a gulp and then a moment of silence before she broke into tears. I could even hear her teeth chattering on the other end of the phone as she tried to contain her guilt. At first I tried to soothe her. I stayed calm hoping she would hear it in my voice, sense my confidence, and absorb it somehow. I told her we did the right thing and I knew she believed me. It’s all over now, I told her and I heard her exhale a deep sigh.

  Liliana flipped back another page and her eyes caught the frayed ribbing in the center of the spine. Pages had been ripped out. She searched the stiff folds of pages she had yet to turn and the thin leather pocket cut into the back cover. She flipped the pages over her knees, letting them fan out but nothing shook loose. Then she remembered the pages she had left in a dry crumpling pile at the bottom of the box and she clutched the notebook against her right forearm before taking off toward the house. Her bare toes leapt from the sand, springing across the hot soil of the vineyard before padding up the cool wooden stairs to her room where she landed on her knees in front of the box.

  Trini’s purple flesh turned blue in the moonlight. I could see her trying not to wince every time she moved. He smelled like ass and alcohol and my hands were losing their grip on his sweat soaked shirt. Trini was trembling as we pulled him out onto the dirt road in front of their house. Fucking get it together Trini, I told her. She burst into tears and I pushed her out of the way, taking her place at his feet. I grabbed both ankles and swung them around so that his entire body was lying diagonally across the road. Trini grabbed my wrist and started to pull me toward the house as two tiny spotlights were dancing up the road. I gave him one last kick in the stomach and we ran toward the house. Trini was ahead of me. I heard the engine of the truck coming closer and something pulled me back. I ran and crouched in the ditch and watched as the truck started to speed up. The windows were down and I could see a dark man dangling an aluminum can out of the window and the small blonde head of a woman was bobbing up and down like a fishing cork within the frame of the driver’s side window. The body of Trini’s stepfather

  Liliana stuck the loose sheet into the crease and re-read the next page, her eyes plucking each inspired word from the veined bound leaflets of her mother’s journal as if they were gold flickering beneath a shallow tide, as if they were stars lighting a way through her dark memory. And suddenl
y that relentless need for words, the one that had plagued Liliana in school and sent her unraveling every time she stepped foot in a library, that need for devouring them and stringing them together until something beautiful sprang forth didn’t feel so foreign anymore.

  “Dinner.” Ana’s dry voice flew up the stairs.

  Liliana heard Nita’s footsteps coming down the hall and she stood up, spinning in a circle and scanning the room. Nita stopped at the top of the stairs and Liliana tossed the journal under the bed.

  “You coming?” Nita asked poking her head around the corner.

  “Uh, yeah,” Liliana sighed as she pulled the door closed behind her.

  Their father was sitting at the kitchen table holding a sheet of paper up to the light and staring at it through his reading glasses. There were more papers on his lap, a stack of them piled on top of a yellow folder. Liliana could see some kind of seal at the top of the page he was holding, the shadow of it outlined beneath the light.

  “What are those?” Nita asked.

  “It’s an application.”

  “For what?”

  “University. They’re for Liliana.” Their father set the sheet of paper on the top of his pile, gripped the stack with both hands, and lifted them in the air. “You’re uncle had them sent over,” he said as he slid them over to her. “He set up a meeting for you tomorrow morning.”

  Liliana pressed her finger against the shiny foil seal. It was silver and showed the imprint of a woman, her face in her hand, leaning her arms on a table, and looking into the sun. She quickly flipped through the pages but stopped when she saw a sheet titled Social Communication Degree Plan. She held it up to her face.

  “What’s this?”

  Her father pulled on his glasses and motioned for her to flip the page.