“Are you ready?” he asked. She nodded.
The door was held open for her, and she walked to the bed and looked down into the vast blue promise in her daughter’s eyes. Two small arms reached up. Anna leaned in, cupping Eva’s face with both hands.
“Mamma,” Eva whispered fiercely, as if parting with a secret. “I dreamed we were getting chickens.”
“I’ve always wondered,” Anna whispered back, “why do you want chickens?”
“So I can chase them. They’re fun to chase, Mamma. Can we get chickens?”
Chapter Sixteen
The courtroom was empty when she got there, fifteen minutes before the hearing. Anna lowered herself slowly into a seat and opened her file.
The restraining order had been lifted, both passports handed in. After three weeks of rehabilitation in the hospital, Eva had moved with her father into a house with open views on Dolores Road. A request, filed by her father, to take Eva out of the country had been unhesitatingly denied. A motion to deprive her of visitation rights in the absence of a definitive custody arrangement had also been rejected, so every other day at noon Anna had gone around, to the hospital at first, to Eva’s new home later, with progress reports on the chicken coop, whose proportions might have fallen slightly short of Eva’s expectations but whose twelve tenants showed clear appreciation by refusing to strike out for loftier spaces.
Today the judge—a rotund woman with three sets of spectacles, none of which she could ever find—would rule on Eva’s request, submitted by Anna, to visit her mother regularly for the undeclared purpose of rousting a dozen oblivious chickens out of their tranquility.
Anna’s lawyer came, hurried as usual, and sat puffing next to her.
“Slow down. You’re always out of breath.”
“Slow down? How am I going to slow down when I’m always in this courtroom arguing shit on your behalf?”
Anna smiled. They’d started out badly, she and the lawyer, but over time a genuine alliance had formed, largely thanks to the plaintiff’s lawyer, who wore cologne and a Cartier tank watch, and drove up from Santa Fe in a Ferrari.
It had been vicious from the start. Eva’s father had come prepared. Anna’s journals—stark testimonials of drug addiction during her previous life on the equator, six volumes in total, all stolen from her study years before—had been submitted. A signed affidavit from a former nanny describing a predawn drive during which Anna, drunk on vodka, had fallen asleep at the wheel had also been presented. Another affidavit, this from one of Anna’s “friends,” detailing a pattern of physical neglect during Eva’s infancy, had been produced in triplicate. Photographs of Anna visibly intoxicated, with or without Eva, had been numbered and catalogued in fastidious order, along with a black-and-white picture of a child blowing out two candles on a cake—one of them for good luck.
They smelled the plaintiff’s lawyer before they saw him, but when Anna turned around to witness the grand entry, she found, to her surprise, that he wasn’t alone. Eva’s father was advancing next to him down the middle aisle, nodding in agreement while tightening his tie. Anna covered her eyes and sank lower in her seat despite the pain.
“What’s he doing here?” whispered the lawyer.
Anna sank lower still. “He doesn’t want her near the chickens.”
“What chickens?”
“My chickens.”
“You’ve got chickens?”
“Twelve. I’ve got twelve.”
“You? Twelve chickens?”
“I know,” Anna said. “I know.”
When the moment came, the argument was made that unsupervised visits could result in abduction. Mexico had a notoriously porous border, and children had a way of fitting nicely in car trunks.
“Car trunks?” whispered Anna.
“Silence,” said the judge. “Motion denied. The child can, and will, visit her mother in her own home. No need to rise.”
He was waiting for her by the door. “I’m warning you,” he said.
“Do me the fucking favor,” she said.
“Anna.”
She turned. He had the eyes of a drowning man, nothing she’d ever seen before. Still, her voice was like a whip.
“What?”
“Do you have any idea of what I’m going through? Do you have the slightest idea of what your gross irresponsibility has forced upon me?”
She closed the distance between them in two long strides.
“What, precisely, have I forced upon you? Taking care of a child? Taking care of something for the first time in your life?”
He did not pull back. He put a finger against her breastbone and said, “I took care of you. For seven years I took care of you, and you were worse than a child. You were crazy. Coming home drunk, disappearing for days, doing cocaine in the bathroom, destroying every single vehicle I placed in your possession. For seven years. And now I’m in your country, at the mercy of your judicial system, trying to keep a child from being hurt again. A child who keeps telling me, day after day, that she does not want to be with me. Do you have any idea of what you’re putting me through? After everything you’ve put me through?”
“You gave me nothing. The whole time you were with me, you gave me nothing.”
“I gave you everything.”
“You gave me nothing. The day I got fired, where were you? The day I miscarried, where were you? The day I gave birth to your child, where the fuck were you?”
“I’ll tell you where I was: away from you.”
Their eyes locked. “Away from me?”
“Away from you. You destroy everything.”
“I cooked for you. I kept your house in order for you. I carried your child for you. I was there when you needed me, and you never were. Never. Not once.”
He ran a hand through his hair. “I bought you a horse. Every car you ever drove was mine.”
“Keep your horse. Keep your cars. Leave my daughter alone.”
“She’s my daughter, too, Anna. And now answer me. In good conscience, answer me. How could I possibly leave her in your care?”
“Because it’s what she wants.”
“You’re completely irresponsible! In fact, allow me to rephrase that: you’ve set the new gold standard for parental irresponsibility west of the Mississippi.”
“I’m not irresponsible!” shouted Anna. “I made a mistake! A mistake! It was a mistake!”
“Well,” said Eva’s father, “it’s not the sort of mistake you get to make again.”
It was still summer when Eva opened the gate to the chicken coop and stepped inside, but only barely. The season was losing its fiber, it was losing its voice. Anna and Esperanza sat on a bench built exclusively for an audience partial to the chickens. The two had never talked about it, never exchanged so much as a single word. Anna had come home from the hospital and found Esperanza asleep on the couch, the cleaning channel on.
“Eee,” Espi had said. “You scared me.”
Anna had stood over her, a wave of bile rising like poison in her throat but then almost instantly subsiding.
“Are you hungry?” she’d asked. Espi had shrugged. Anna had gone to the fridge and found it full of organic lettuce, full of spinach, carrots and beets, yogurt and tofu, and, upon closer inspection, three bars of dark organic chocolate.
“There’s quinoa in the pantry,” Espi had said. “And wild rice.”
Anna had gone to the hospital a week later with the chocolate and a dozen roses.
The nurse on the second floor had shaken her head.
“Sorry, ma’am.”
“How’s that possible? He’s tall. Giant kind of tall.”
“No, ma’am.”
“He’s black. Tall, black, very beautiful.”
“I’m sorry, ma’am.”
“Could it be that he only works at night?”
“No, ma’am. We rotate.”
“You rotate?”
“We sure do.”
“You’re telling me I’m cr
azy? You’re telling me I imagined a guy seven feet tall?”
“No, ma’am. I’m telling you we got nobody like that working here.”
Eva’s coop tactics were undeniably clever. She singled out an unsuspecting denizen and followed it stealthily, looking elsewhere—as if on a different errand, perfectly unsullied by thoughts of capture. She came up to the plumed thing at an angle, then swooped down. The chicken squawked—a hideous sound, a death-cry almost—but over time, as Eva crooned and cajoled, it developed something close to acquiescence, settled into something close to comfort in her arms.
“Did you ever chase chickens when you were little?”
“All the time,” Espi said.
“Why?”
“They’re fun to chase, no?”
They sat in silence until Espi said, “What happens if he gets her?”
Anna pulled her elbows in. “I get her back.”
“How?”
“The way mothers get their children back. They get their shit together.”
“You think he’ll let you?”
“He won’t have a choice. He’s stuck in New Mexico, and I will appeal and appeal and appeal until I get her back.”
Espi took a deep drag and raised her eyes to heaven. “I fucked things up pretty good, no?”
Anna shrugged.
“But you didn’t tell me he was all mean like that!”
“He’s not mean, he’s English. They have their hearts taken out at birth.”
Espi crushed her cigarette underfoot. “Like they do in New Mexico,” she said.
He came at five that afternoon. Eva was standing in the coop with a seemingly sedated chicken in her arms.
“Look, Daddy!” she yelled. Eva’s father waved.
“Nice house. Very Zen but for the chickens,” he said.
“I’d like to take her to the river.”
“That’s out of the question.”
“Summer is almost over. I’d like one last trip with her down to the river.”
“Out of the question,” he said.
She asked the judge and the judge said yes, so hope sank tender roots in Anna’s heart. She packed a picnic, put the dog in the back, picked up Eva, and together they drove down the canyon, into a narrowing world of blackened basalt, past walls of perfectly vertical rock, to the river, and there they sat on a boulder watching different currents shiver in the sun as Anna spread peanut butter on a slice of bread and Paco ran in and out of the water with a stick in his mouth. Then they surveyed the bank one square foot at a time, searching for minnows.
“Mamma.”
“What?”
“You’re moving too fast.”
“What are you talking about? I’m practically standing still.”
“You’re scaring them away.”
“Okay.”
“Slow down.”
“Okay.”
Eventually they got hold of two, Fred and Minnie, soon rechristened Mack and Cheese. They turned stones and scraped the bottom for minuscule insects the minnows would grow fat on. They sat on the rock, the girl in her mother’s lap, blinded by the river. Later they dragged the old tree trunk closer to the edge and set off, Eva in the front, Anna in the back, for the rings of Saturn, the shoulder of Orion. “‘O Captain! my Captain!’” yelled Anna. “Where to?”
Eva turned, folded herself into her mother’s frame. “Home with my Mamma,” she said.
Anna had heard it said that live water healed memories, so when it was time to go she sank her hands wrist-deep into the river and closed her eyes. Later she would realize that the opposite was true, that memories themselves—meticulously preserved, often revisited—are the key to redemption. This one in particular would become a constant companion, a fixed star in the months that followed. Not the crash beneath an umber sky. Not the sclerotic pulse of the hospital. Not Eva’s birdlike body under a white sheet. This. This light and tumult, this wild, wild hope.
Eva’s father was sitting in front of the coop when they got home. He stood, both hands in his pockets.
“Eva,” Anna said. “Go to your room.”
“But Mamma . . .”
“Please go to your room.”
They watched her disappear inside the house.
“The judge has just ruled,” he said. “She’s mine.”
The sun sank a little lower. The earth gave up all sound.
That was how fall came that year.
Acknowledgments
My deepest thanks go to my editor, Asya Muchnick, and my agent, Elaine Markson. Thanks also to Alice Sebold, Allegra Huston, Kate Christensen, and Julian Rubinstein. Eternal gratitude to Jen Hart and Andrea Meyer at the Love Apple for employing the unemployable.
About the Author
Lara Santoro spent most of her career as a foreign news correspondent, based primarily in Rome and in Nairobi working for Newsweek and the Christian Science Monitor. She was born in Rome and currently lives in New Mexico. She is the author of one previous novel, Mercy.
Also by Lara Santoro
Mercy
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Contents
Title Page
Welcome
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Lara Santoro
Newsletters
Copyright
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Copyright © 2013 by Lara Santoro
Cover design by Allison J. Warner. Cover photograph by Herman Nicholson/Millennium Images, UK; line art by Alex Stsiazhyn.
Cover copyright © 2013 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
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First e-book edition: January 2013
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ISBN: 978-0-316-20625-9
The Boy: A Novel Page 13