One Year of Ugly

by Caroline Mackenzie

  A month passed. Still no update on Aunt Milagros and nothing from Román. I was a woman possessed. When a new illegal turned up, now heralded by the doorbell ringing, never the triple knock, I practically catapulted myself at the front door, tearing outside into the street to see if the jeep was driving away. It never was. The new illegal(s), usually startled by my bat-out-of-hell sprint out the front door, would tell me the same thing: ‘He said to wait for him to leave then ring the doorbell.’ It was a kick in the crotch every time. I couldn’t understand why he’d abandoned me.

  Morning after morning I’d wake up and for the briefest split second, I’d be fresh and ready to take on the day, but the tumour of pain in my chest would surface again in an instant, and I’d be heavy, leaden with missing Román. I stopped working on the novel altogether, not even bothering with the sporadic writing spurts I sometimes managed despite my hectic translation schedule. Shirking my duty to contribute to our already tightly stretched household budget, I told my translation agency I’d contracted dengue and couldn’t work. All I did was stay in bed, crying, not caring that I wasn’t earning a cent and that as a result our household forcibly became vegetarian whenever we were burdened with illegals. I fed my family the same dengue line – said my bones ached, I had fever, a rash on my stomach, headaches, whatever symptoms I could dredge up on Google. Papá’s gentle questioning and my mother’s less-than-gentle interrogations about my dating status made it pretty clear they didn’t believe the dengue spiel, but when I stuck to my story, they played along, brought me soup and toast in bed, even offered to take me to the doctor, though God knows we wouldn’t have been able to pay the bill.

  It dragged on.

  But, strangely, I started to perk up. My misery was snowballing into something else, something less agonizing and easier to manage: rage.

  I rolled around in my fury like a pig in shit. At least it felt better than moping day and night. And of course, any time I felt that fury fading, I could always rely on Aunt Celia to keep up my angry momentum. She’d been no stranger to romantic frustration during her marriage, but had she let it get her down? Had she let Mauricio’s bad behaviour turn her into the soggy, crying lump I’d been for weeks? Hell no. When Mauricio started straying, she didn’t wallow in heartbreak, she broke him. One of my favourite bad-ass moments in her memoir went down when Mauricio was even more slick than in the Miami glory days, his renewed Tony-Montana-esque swagger attracting the attention of every woman under fifty in that nowhere town. Heavily pregnant, Aunt Celia had clocked them eyeing Mauricio’s Orinoco-croc boots, his tight imported Levis and ropes of thick gold chains. Still, she convinced herself time and again that no one would ever stray from a woman like her, least of all Mauricio who she’d stuck by through thick and thin, even during their days of penury when he wouldn’t get out of bed for months after the demise of his honey empire.

  After Ava was born, however, Mauricio started staying out for whole nights. Then whole weekends. Always ‘working’. Celia would be pushing Ava along in a stroller for a walk to the park, and even with the jewellery draping her neck and wrists, even with the Parisian make-up and the Egyptian creams perfuming her skin, she felt as small and ugly as a garden gnome when she saw how other women eyeballed her. She was sure they were laughing at her, poking fun at the cuckolded wife of Mauricio the Crocodile Baron. Then she’d go back home all riled up. Ava would be dumped on one of her grandparents and Celia would attack Mauricio with full force. Her jealous rages got so bad at one point that all the knives in the house had to be hidden beneath floorboards, under flowerpots, behind various appliances. Everyone in that household knew Celia was capable of murder and Celia was proud of it. She wanted Mauricio to know she might slit his throat if he ever dared come home stinking of another woman’s nether parts.

  And then one day he actually did.

  After throwing a frying pan, two vases, and a water jug at Mauricio, who’d become adept at dodging flying objects, Celia chased him out into the street where anyone could see, wielding a hammer. Mauricio had never been one for beating his wife, so he didn’t try to restrain her. He just kept on running, Forrest Gump style. They ran through the streets of the dinky little town centre, with everyone staring delightedly. They ran through several backyards, through an artisanal market, and finally onto the border of a small coffee farm. There, Mauricio spotted a massive beehive and ran to it, raising his arms to keep Celia away. ‘Stop, goddammit, woman! STOP!’ Ironically, given that he’d made his first fortune in a honey-smuggling racket, Mauricio was fatally allergic to bees. One sting and his throat would swell right up. He figured if he stood beneath the hive Celia would back off, scream at him for a bit, then cool down, like she always did.

  Wrong!

  Celia hurled the hammer at the beehive and burst the thing right open. ‘Bull’s eye!’ she screamed, arms pumping victoriously.

  Mauricio was of course stung in the resulting swarm of angry bees, and would have died of anaphylaxis had the farm owner not saved him in the nick of time with an EpiPen he kept handy for his son, also deathly allergic to peanuts.

  Celia watched the whole thing casually from a near distance: Mauricio’s face swelling as he gasped for breath, the farmer running to the house hollering at his wife to get the EpiPen, and finally the EpiPen being rammed into Mauricio’s thigh.

  Purged of her anger, confident that Mauricio wasn’t going to die, Celia left him there on the coffee farm and went back to the town centre where she treated herself to a leisurely churro at the town’s one little café.

  None of the women in the town ever eyeballed Celia after that. None of the men did either. She’d earned her stripes and everyone knew she was a tiger. Or as she put it: a tigress not to be fucked with.

  I had that tigress anger in me now. I wasn’t going to feel sorry for myself or slip ’n’ slide down some bleak rabbit hole of heartache. If Román thought he could ghost me, well … maybe I wouldn’t be nuts enough to throw things at him or commit murder by bee sting, but I’d keep my head high, stay nobly stoic in my misery.

  And that’s what I did. I translated almost compulsively to make up for my lapse in earnings, so at least had the silver lining of a rapidly fattening PayPal balance – never mind that the bulk of it was spent feeding illegals – and did my best to keep working on the novel. Even in my lowest moments, I wouldn’t let myself cry over Román any more. Instead I watched reality TV marathons on my laptop. There was no better balm for my aching insides than the voyeuristic sadism of observing mentally unstable, emotionally unhinged Americans expose their basest selves for the sake of cheap entertainment like screeching monkeys tugging at their genitals and flinging faecal matter to entertain onlookers at the zoo – because, after all, things could always be worse. I could be a reality TV star.

  That guilty pastime is exactly what I was indulging in one night from the comfort of my bed, watching some garish specimen of humanity blather into the camera about how she was ‘the realest, classiest person’ in a household comprised of individuals all handpicked by astute producers for their collective lack of a fully developed prefrontal cortex, when I heard a scratching at my window. I froze, hit Pause on the laptop. A spinster cat manifesting for me just like it had for Aunt Milagros?

  Then a tap, tap, tap. I stared at the window, my ears ringing with pumping blood, heart like a bouncy castle with fifty fat kids jumping on it. It had to be Román out there.

  I tried focusing on Aunt Celia. I pictured her chasing Mauricio through the street, watching with satisfaction as he was stung by bees. Where was my anger? How had it all drained away in an instant, leaving me full of nothing but pathetic, desperate hope?

  I went to the window, pulled back the curtain and cracked the louvres open slowly, a small part of me praying it would just be Aunt Milagros escaped from her holding cell, a cigarette between her teeth, air rifle at her side. I could handle that. My heart wouldn’t ache, my insides wouldn’t hurt, my tongue wouldn’t be incapable of forming a
comprehensible word.

  But no Aunt Milagros. Sliced up by louvres, unmistakable as the face of Christ: Román.

  ‘Come outside,’ he whispered.

  Rubbing my arms, trying to stop myself shivering, I knew it wasn’t the cool night breeze that had given me the shakes. I crept through the living room, past the couch that held yet another sleeping ‘dancer’, whose open suitcase had revealed actual clear heels and nipple tassels, and made my way out to the porch. Scanning the dark backyard, my eyes finally settled on him leaning against the mango tree, dressed all in black like the Sunday morning we’d met. The night was clear, cloudless, only the stars and melodiously noisy frogs watching on as I walked across the dew-dampened grass, trying to craft the perfect opening line, hoping to arrange my features into something resembling indifference. It was all for nada. By the time I got to the tree, I was tongue-tied as a tween swooning over her boy-band crush.

  Immediately, Román pulled me into him, buried his face in my hair, slid his hands hungrily over my body like a blind man. ‘Yola …’ It was a sigh.

  I felt a flame lighting the wick on a stick of dynamite, on a roman candle, on pinwheels – the fireworks were coming. Still, I pulled away, doing my best to keep my expression hard.

  ‘I know you’re mad,’ he said, taking my hand to press the fingertips to his mouth. I closed my eyes in spite of myself then drew my hand back.

  ‘Where the fuck have you been?’

  He kissed my cheeks, tried kissing me on the mouth but I turned my face away, hoping he wouldn’t see how my nostrils were fluttering, my bottom lip quivering.

  ‘I had to stay away,’ he said. ‘After everything with Milagros …’

  ‘So it’s because of her that you dumped me? Because it’s too complicated for us now?’ Jesus, I sounded like a child. I only realized I’d given in to crying when Román wiped my cheek, the tenderness of it making me feel as though a blood-pressure band were constricting my chest, squeezing tighter and tighter. ‘You could’ve at least explained yourself, Román. I didn’t know what the hell happened to you or where you’d gone. I felt like a complete idiot.’

  ‘I’m sorry you felt that way, but this isn’t a game. You think Ugly’s gonna tap me on the wrist for seeing you? After Milagros, I was being trailed constantly. Ugly holds me responsible. I had to protect you and myself. As for Milagros …’

  I took a step backwards, as if physical distance would help lessen the effect of his excuses. ‘Yeah, I get it, Aunt Milagros fucks up and I’m the one who has to suffer. You just do whatever the fuck you have to do. Who gives a shit about how I feel, right?’ I’d had no one to talk to for weeks about how I’d been feeling. It felt so good to finally get it out. I couldn’t stop. ‘You had a million different ways to let me know you were okay, that there was a reason you weren’t anywhere to be seen. But you let me sit there like an idiot, waiting for you like a desperate asshole. Big bad surveillance expert and you can’t figure out how to leave a note? Eso es pura paja, that’s total bullshit and you know it.’

  Román grabbed my arm and pulled me back into the tree’s shadow. His breathing was harder. So was mine. My wrists were clamped together in his hands, my balled fists useless and tiny. He jammed his mouth against mine. I wanted to jerk my face away but couldn’t stop myself giving in.

  ‘I couldn’t risk contacting you,’ he said again when we’d broken apart. ‘What don’t you understand? Ugly would kill us both. Don’t be such a fucking child.’

  ‘Bullshit. You could’ve still …’

  His mouth on mine. Opening, sliding my lips apart. The taste of his tongue. I pulled his lower lip between my teeth, bit down hard. He yanked his head back and touched a finger to his lip, checking for blood and staring at me like I’d lost my mind.

  I crossed my arms over my chest. ‘It’s not as easy as a quick sorry and a kiss. You don’t know what the last two months have been like. I expected more from you.’

  His eyes bulged, the first time I’d seen his emotions get the better of him. ‘Expected? You can’t have expectations in a situation like—’ He cut himself short just as he’d begun to shout, then turned and pressed his hands against the tree trunk, his muscles shifting and sliding beneath his T-shirt as he rolled his shoulders back and exhaled hard through his nose. I didn’t care if he was about to lose his temper. I’d been losing mine for two months.

  When he turned to face me again, he’d composed himself. Usual cool, crisp Román. ‘Go to the San Fernando High Street tomorrow. Wait for me in a parking lot somewhere.’

  ‘You want me to drag my ass two hours down the highway to meet you? What the fuck for?’

  ‘Listen!’ Something in his tone made my mouth snap shut. ‘There are icebergs up ahead. What Milagros did was bad, not a boo-boo I can slap a Band-Aid on. Ugly wants repercussions. Just find yourself on the San Fernando High Street tomorrow and wait for me. Any parking lot.’

  I knew better than to stay on my high horse then. I’d never heard that kind of urgency in his voice.

  ‘What time?’

  ‘Doesn’t matter. I’ll know when you leave Port of Spain. Just do what I’m telling you.’

  Though I stayed stiff, he pulled me to him, pressed his mouth to mine one last time, and then left. Watching him walk away, I dragged my fingers through my hair, wanting to scream, chase him, beat him with my fists, let him pull me down onto the grass and fuck the anger out of me because goddamn had I missed him and already I was hating myself for not being able to hold back my rage when all I’d really wanted was to wrap myself around him. More than hating myself, I hated him for making me need him so badly that I couldn’t help but be furious at his absence, couldn’t help illogically dismissing his explanations and pushing him away – the one person I wanted more than anyone.

  * * *

  When I slipped back into the dark living room, the dancer was waiting for me, sipping a beer on the couch. I froze, caught red-handed.

  ‘Don’t worry, I won’t tell,’ she said, waggling a pair of thin, severely arched eyebrows. She smiled a greasy smile. ‘Relax, bruja, I won’t say a word. God knows I wouldn’t kick Román outta bed.’

  ‘Listen,’ I croaked, ‘it’s just that if my family knew, they—’

  But she didn’t care what I had to say.

  ‘There must be something about that tree,’ she interrupted, clearly enjoying herself, languidly running a two-inch teal-blue fingernail along the mouth of the beer bottle. ‘I saw your brother and that pregnant chick really going at it under there a few nights ago. I mean really going at it, doggy-style. Weird. Isn’t she your cousin or something?’

  And that’s how I found out Sancho and Vanessa were fucking.

  BACK-HANDED FAVOURS

  Exactly like when I’d seen Sancho and Vanessa fooling around under the mango tree all those months ago, I opted to forget what the dancer told me. She’d be leaving in a couple days anyway, then there wouldn’t be anyone left who knew about their little secret – not to mention my and Román’s secret. Problem solved.

  In any case, Sancho and Vanessa were hardly at the forefront of my mind. The following morning, as Román had instructed, I wrangled the Datsun out of Zulema’s custody and drove to San Fernando. By eight a.m., I was parked at a pharmacy, and within a few minutes, a pop of a horn called my attention to a dark-tinted black SUV driving into the parking lot. It stopped in front of the Datsun, idling. I hesitated, unable to see through the heavy tint. As much as I wanted to see Román (regardless of how angry I still was), I wasn’t stupid enough to get into some strange car that I couldn’t see into. I stayed put. My phone rang once from a private number then cut off. I knew for sure then that it was him. He must’ve used another car in case the jeep was too easy for Ugly to track.

  I opened the passenger door of the SUV, slid into the dark, leather-swathed interior, and let Román run his hand up my thigh. He leaned in to kiss me. As much as I’d planned to stay close-mouthed and icy, I couldn’t help but let him. />
  ‘Thank you for coming,’ he said, pulling out of the pharmacy lot.

  ‘Did I have a choice?’

  He snorted. ‘As if you could ever be forced into doing something you didn’t want to.’

  ‘So what’s going on with Aunt Milagros?’ I said tightly. ‘Every lawyer my father speaks to says not to contact the police station where they had her because of our status here – we don’t have a clue what’s going on, if charges have been laid or what.’

  I noticed as Román’s knuckles bulged. He was gripping the steering wheel hard.

  He ignored my questions. ‘We’re going somewhere safe that we won’t be seen. We’ll talk there.’

  ‘Román—’

  ‘It’s a beautiful place,’ he said, cutting me off. ‘Somewhere I’ve wanted to show you for a long time.’

  Now I was really on edge. But I knew there was no coercing Román into talking about something until he was good and ready. So I sat back and took in the drive as we made our way out of the small city and into the wilderness of the countryside.

  As we drove on for more than an hour, I started recognizing places I hadn’t seen since we’d rocked up on the shores of Trinidad in that pirogue without the faintest idea what lay in store for us. We passed through La Brea, where two years ago my father had shared all of his recently acquired trivia about our new home.

  ‘You see how the roads are lumpy and uneven? It’s because of the asphalt overspill from the Pitch Lake that makes the ground shift all the time. See how it makes the houses wobbly and tilted?’

  ‘And look!’ he’d said, rhapsodizing over the sights like we were cruising through a Grimm Brothers-crafted Enchanted Forest. ‘You see the stilts all the houses are built on? They’re drill pipes from the rigs. This used to be real oil country.’

  ‘Uh huh.’

  ‘Did you know the Pitch Lake is the largest natural deposit of asphalt in the world?’