The Infinite

by Nicholas Mainieri

  11

  THE GATE WAS SET INTO AN ORANGE STUCCO WALL. IT SQUEALED open. She walked into the courtyard, gravel sloshing under her shoes. Wooden wind chimes clacked. A sprawling vine flowered along one interior wall. The center of the courtyard contained a thin tree, an iron table and chairs, a few potted plants. Doors were set into the walls, a total of four separate apartments. Luz remembered. Her grandmother’s door was in the highest corner of the courtyard, amid the flowering vine.

  A vacant hummingbird feeder hung from the eave, rotating in the breeze. It slowed and reversed direction. Luz moved toward the door, feeling strangely detached. As if she was physical form only, all motion and no spirit. A homemade wreath encircled the door knocker. Luz knocked, and the door opened almost immediately.

  Her grandmother was short and thin. Long slacks folded over her feet, bare toes sticking out, and a linen shirt draped loose past her waist. Her silver hair was cropped close and ruffled. Her eyes blinked through their spectacles. She stared at Luz, and Luz could smell the leather goods, and the spices from the kitchen—the ground corn and the dried chiles that would be strung on twine across the window above the sink—and there was another scent, too, something more difficult to name. The scent of years, perhaps, of a childhood. Something unremembered until now, and yet still no memory gave it a face. But it was there. This was where she had lived.

  “Luz,” her grandmother said, water glistening in the corners of her magnified eyes. She pulled her inside and embraced her, and Luz felt her sharp bones.

  Abuela brewed coffee and told Luz that she’d waited the entire first day and night, sitting up and worrying. Her father had called, saying he’d heard nothing, and finally two days later called to say that Luz had been delayed because of an auto problem of some kind. Her grandmother had waited in the apartment each day since then, not going to the market, not going to Mass, fearing that Luz might arrive when she wasn’t home. And as the days stretched, her grandmother began to fear much worse things. She had called Luz’s father. He knew nothing.

  The living room was painted a bright blue. Sunlight slanted in through a skylight. There were plants on the windowsill and a watercooler in the kitchen and woven rugs over the concrete floor. A sagging couch, a couple of rattan chairs, a small table. A miniature crucifix on the wall. In an alcove at the back of the living room, her grandmother kept her workbench and tools and strips of tanned leather hanging from hooks. Luz remembered a television, but there wasn’t one anymore.

  Her grandmother brought coffee to the table. “I’m sorry for thinking such terrible thoughts while I worried,” she said. “But you are here now.”

  Luz smiled weakly. She lifted the coffee mug to her face, felt the heat on her lips, and her grandmother jolted and said, “Wait!”

  Luz set the mug down and her grandmother took it and shuffled toward the kitchen. “My mind,” she muttered. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what I was thinking. No coffee for you.” She slung the coffee from the mug into the ceramic sink. “I will pour you some juice. That is good. Very good.”

  Luz got up and crossed to the kitchen entrance, stood barefoot on the cool cement.

  “I have orange juice,” her grandmother was saying, peering into the refrigerator.

  “Abuela,” Luz said. “I can have the coffee.”

  “No, you cannot.” She shook her head.

  Luz stepped toward her and gently gripped her shoulders. Luz looked her in the eye and spoke slowly: “I can have the coffee.”

  Her grandmother blinked through her glasses. She swung the refrigerator door shut. Her grandmother opened her mouth, closed it again. Luz let go of her and returned to the table. Through the front window she watched the hummingbird feeder turn, refracting sunlight. Two birds blurred into view.

  When her grandmother shuffled back to the table, her question was a whisper. “What happened, Luz?”

  Luz shrugged. Tears welled and burned beneath her lids. She pulled her hair back over her ear, where her scalp was sore to the touch even as the cut itched and healed. “Do you see this cut?”

  Her grandmother leaned and squinted. She shook her head, reaching tentatively for the spot Luz indicated. “I make my works by feel now.”

  “Don’t I look terrible?” Luz asked. “Can’t you see?”

  The old woman seemed on the verge of weeping. “You look beautiful to me.”

  In the window, a collection of large red hornets zipped toward the bird feeder and harassed the hummingbirds until they flitted away.

  “Have you been to a doctor?”

  “In Monclova. Yes.”

  A hummingbird timidly returned, and a hornet zoomed after it. There was silence in the apartment.

  “It was a car wreck, Abuela,” Luz said. “I only told Papá the car broke down. I didn’t want to worry him. I’m okay now.”

  “I don’t understand,” her grandmother said. “A car wreck a week ago. Are you sure you are all right? If it was violent enough to induce—”

  “Well.” Luz swallowed. She sought an answer. “I was in the hospital.”

  “Luz! Nobody called—”

  “I’m okay now,” Luz said. “Please, Abuela. I’m okay.”

  Her grandmother sighed. “You should have called, Luz. Or the doctors should have.” She looked out the window, but Luz doubted that the old woman could see the hornets ransacking her bird feeder. She sat and watched her aged and battered hands rest in her lap. “Maybe I should not tell you this,” she said.

  “What?” Luz asked.

  “I told your father not to send you back here.”

  “You did.”

  She nodded. She removed her glasses and wiped her eyes. She left her glasses off while she spoke. “When you left me six years ago, I was devastated. But I knew it would be for the best. I knew you needed to be with your father.”

  The bird feeder spun and the hornets scrabbled over the sugar-water trough.

  “And I told him, two weeks ago, that you needed to stay in New Orleans. To be near this young man whose child you carried. If, of course, you did indeed love each other.” She put her glasses back on and looked at Luz. “Your father had no answer for that, or he wouldn’t talk about it. He was adamant. New Orleans was more awful than I knew. I told him he had forgotten the trouble one can find here. The truth, of course, is that every place has its trouble. There is no perfect home. He insisted that you must be with me, that I could help. It wasn’t feasible for you to stay, he said. I told him that mistakes do happen, but their outcomes are not always what we expect. Mystery, Luz, shrouds God’s plan. If we are true, then our mistakes might be made useful. But there was no talking to your father. He wouldn’t even tell me the young man’s name.”

  Luz swallowed. “Jonás.”

  Her grandmother hummed. Repeated his name. “Did he love you and did you love him?”

  “Yes,” Luz answered, though it seemed a very long time since she’d seen him. “I believe so.”

  Abuela took hold of Luz’s hand. “Then I am truly sorry.” She turned her face to the window. They sat. “Well,” she said after a while.

  The bird feeder spun. The red hornets, vile looking, clung to it. To this thing that was not made for them. She wished for the hummingbirds and their furiously pumping hearts to return, for the hornets to vanish. She wished for it in a desperate way she couldn’t quite understand.

  12

  HER GRANDMOTHER DIALED THE NUMBERS, AND LUZ PUT THE cordless phone to her ear and listened to it ring in another country. Her lungs constricted. Her pulse quickened. When her father answered he stuttered, said hello twice. Someone was shouting in the background, shouting in Spanish. It sounded like preaching. She could hear traffic, too. Car engines. Somebody honked. Luz knew where her father was—outside the home improvement center, in the heat and the sun, hoping for work.

  “Hi, Papá.”

  “Luz,” he said. “Thank God. One moment.” And he was breathing and walking, the background noise receding. “Are you
all right?”

  “I’m okay, Papá.”

  “What happened, Luz? Something must have happened.”

  “Everything is going to be fine,” she told him.

  “Luz—”

  “I love you, Papá,” she said, and she held the phone out to her grandmother, covering the mouthpiece. She said to her, “You tell him, it’s okay.” She placed a hand over her stomach. “I can’t.”

  Her grandmother took the phone. Her father’s voice was quick and frantic in miniature. Luz lifted her rolled sweatshirt and the concealed knife from the tabletop and walked down the hallway. “Moses,” her grandmother said into the phone.

  Three doors at the end of the hall: her grandmother’s bedroom, a bathroom, and the room Luz had shared with her mother and her father, when he had been around.

  She shut the door behind her, muting her grandmother’s voice. The room was warm, sunlight filling the lone square window. The walls were painted a peach color, but she couldn’t remember if they had always been. A bed with white sheets. A crucifix on the wall. A wooden wardrobe. Nothing more. They had shared this bed.

  Luz set her sweatshirt down atop the wardrobe and opened the doors. There were women’s clothes hanging inside it. Luz went weak in the knees. She lifted out a white linen dress. Something nice and light. Something she saw her mother wearing in the spark and flare of remembrance. Luz held it out in front of her, and the sunlight made it glow. She held it against her own body. It would fit. In life Luz was the same shape as the memory she held of her mother. She sat hard on the edge of the bed, the dress across her lap, and she put her face in her hands and cried.

  The bedroom door opened. Luz wiped at her eyes and sniffed and got up and put the dress back into the wardrobe.

  “I thought—” her grandmother started, “I thought you’d like to have them. I thought—I don’t know what I was thinking.”

  “Thank you, Abuela.” Luz went and hugged her. “Thank you. I am not upset because of them.”

  They sat together on the bed. Luz asked how her father had taken the news.

  “Your father,” her grandmother said, shaking her head and trailing off. Now she looked at Luz. “Did you see any stray dogs on your way into town?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Do you remember when Las Monarcas was overrun with stray dogs?”

  “Not really.”

  “Well,” her grandmother said, “it was. But there are fewer strays now, and this gives me hope.”

  “Abuela. What are you talking about?”

  “A growing willingness, perhaps, to see choices through.” She smiled wistfully. “Nevertheless. Your father, as a boy, went out to play, and he returned home with a stray puppy. Something small and precious he found near the walking market. Have I told you this story before?”

  Luz didn’t think so.

  “Okay. So. Your father brought the puppy home. I was furious. Your father had already named the puppy—I forget what—and he kissed it on its snout and begged me to keep it. I told him he did not understand how much work it would require. Feeding and training and watching. I said, Sometimes you will not be able to go play with friends because you will need to stay home with your dog. He pleaded, he promised. I understand, Mamá, I understand. And so I told him, Okay, Moses, but you must understand one thing. I said, You must remember that if you have this dog, you are responsible for it. You are responsible forever.” Abuela waved her hand and made a sorrowful sound.

  “The poor dog. He was very good to the puppy at the start. But the best intentions always fade, hmm? Moses would come home from school, and I would tell him, You cannot go out right now, you need to feed and walk your dog. It became a chore, you see? Your father would groan.” She paused, clasped her hands together. “One day I came home from the market, and the puppy didn’t greet me at the door. So I asked Moses. Your father said the dog ran off, the dog got away from him outside and ran off. But I had seen that puppy with him. It would not run away, not back to what he had rescued it from. I said, Moses, you are telling me the truth? And he swore it. He swore he was telling the truth. But later that night I passed by his room. Well, this very room, I suppose. And I heard him crying from within. Not crying like he merely missed something. Do you see?” Abuela looked at Luz. “I never told him I heard him crying like that, that I knew he was lying.”

  The dresses hung in the wardrobe in silence. Luz rubbed her eyes.

  “My mind,” her grandmother said. “I was certain I’d told you that story before. It is an important lesson.” She patted Luz’s knee. “I will get started on dinner.”

  Luz sat there alone, something sticking in her mind. The story, in the end, had seemed very familiar. Perhaps her grandmother was right. Perhaps Luz had heard it before.

  13

  SHE TRIED TO CALL JONAH, BUT IT WENT STRAIGHT TO HIS VOICE mail. After the beep her mouth worked in silence, and then she hung up. She went to bed. She was exhausted. She woke sometime during the next day, hot and racked with thirst. The room was bright. Abuela had placed a glass of water on the nightstand for her. Luz drank from it and fell asleep again. She didn’t get up until that night.

  While they ate supper, her grandmother asked if she’d like to attend the Easter vigil that evening, but Luz shook her head. “Mass tomorrow, then,” her grandmother said. “On Monday I’ll return to work, and we will figure out something for you to do.”

  The evening was quiet. Luz heard the muffled tones of conversation in the courtyard. The church bell tolled the hour. A small sound. She returned to bed and fell again into an exhausted and dreamless sleep.

  When morning rose, Luz wouldn’t get out of bed. Her grandmother attended Easter Mass without her. Later, her grandmother prepared dinner in silence.

  Luz asked, “Do the monarchs still return this time of year?”

  Her grandmother blinked. “Perhaps. I never make that hike anymore.”

  Luz couldn’t stop thinking about the migration, corralled, circling on the hill.

  XI

  La cuenta, por favor.

  1

  THE BUS JONAH NEEDED WASN’T ONE OF THE LUXURY LINERS THE woman had described but rather a utilitarian regional conveyance. When it pulled out, he sat in the hot vehicle crowded with Easter-weekend travelers and watched the land roll by through the rhomboid window. Beige and green and flat, the gray mountains floating on the horizon. A new landscape. The highway was a narrow two lanes. He fell asleep, exhausted, and he woke up in Lampazos de Naranjo in the late afternoon. He stepped off the bus into the old town. His transfer to Las Monarcas, unfortunately, wouldn’t leave until the evening of the next day. He didn’t know what to do so he started walking, and he felt good, imagining that he drew closer to Luz with each step.

  When dark began to fall he feared he might get lost, so he made his way back to the bus station by trial and error. He went inside and found a bench against the wall. He clutched his backpack to his chest and closed his eyes. A worker nudged him awake at some point in the night, quizzing him in Spanish. Jonah didn’t understand but he showed him his ticket, and the man groaned and went away. Jonah nodded in and out of a fitful sleep, waking for good when the sun was full up and flooding the station with warm light.

  He stretched and checked the time. He walked outside and followed bells to a square. People streamed from the church. A band, dressed in white, was just beginning to play in the gazebo at the square’s center. Jonah watched an older couple dance. A stray golden retriever appeared, licked his hand, and then departed in search of someone with food. Jonah’s stomach growled.

  At the edge of the square he spotted a café with outdoor tables. The young waitress gestured for him to sit. A young man in slacks and a collared shirt drank coffee at the adjacent table. He was reading the middle of a newspaper, and Jonah could see the front page and its color spread.

  The headline in big, bold type: EL SAQUE DE ESQUINA DEL VIERNES SANTO. The image beneath it was a close-up of what appeared to b
e a soccer ball with something wet and dirt-caked stretched across it. Jonah stared and, as with one of those illusional pictures generated by computers, the hidden content coalesced. On the soccer ball was the skin of a human face. Eyeholes and lips. Nostrils, stretched to gruesome diameter.

  The young man lowered the paper and looked at Jonah over the top of it. He said, “You can borrow it when I’m done if that’s what you want.” He had a Texan drawl.

  Jonah hardly heard him. He asked what the headline said.

  The man folded the paper shut and looked at it. “You don’t read Spanish?”

  Jonah shook his head.

  “They’re calling it ‘The Good Friday Corner Kick.’”

  “What?”

  The young man rolled his hand through the air. “Some renegade narco. Cartel killed him, stitched his face onto a soccer ball, and kicked it down the street.” He chuckled grimly, shook his head.

  “Jesus,” Jonah said. “That happen here?”

  “Nah. Couple hours west, in Monclova.” The man lifted his coffee mug and sipped. “I’m actually gonna take a ride over there today, before I head back to the States. Do some research—”

  They were interrupted by the waitress, who asked Jonah something. He didn’t understand the words, but he knew what she wanted. On the menu Jonah pointed to café, which he knew was coffee, and then to the cheapest food item, whatever it was. The waitress smiled and bowed her head and disappeared. The man had gone back to his paper. Jonah stared at the face on the soccer ball.

  The waitress brought the coffee, along with a little cinnamon bun. He’d eaten it and picked the crumbs from the plate when he waved off his third coffee refill. Then he sat there and waited. The waitress passed by and smiled, but she didn’t say anything and she didn’t bring the check. Jonah tried to look like he needed something, needed to get somewhere, but still she just smiled politely and brought him no bill.