Gun Love

by Jennifer Clement

Leo, Helen, and I were quiet in the car on the drive home because we were in the perfect childhood dream of companionship and safety.

  And on that afternoon the dream was in the real world. We knew that for one day we’d crossed over.

  27

  I chose the earth under the magnolia tree.

  I only know how to do a Jewish burial, Mr. Brodsky said. It’s the Chesed Shel Emet. This will be your last act of kindness toward your mother.

  Mr. Brodsky gave me two trowels and a small rake and told Leo, Helen, and me to go to the garden and dig a hole deep and big enough to hold the box of ashes.

  Pearl, Mr. Brodsky said, to bury someone is considered the greatest act of love.

  The three of us walked out to the garden. The sky was a deep blue and streaked with the long white trails from airplanes. The white ribbons appeared and disappeared above us.

  We knelt around the magnolia tree. I handed the rake to Helen and the trowel to Leo.

  You two start, I said.

  I think this is a good place, Helen said. You’ll always know where she is.

  Helen had no idea where her parents or her two siblings were buried. A sniper who’d shot at people randomly in a park had killed her family. It was even in the news, Leo told me. He’d read all about it. The sniper was carrying many guns. He’d killed fourteen people before the police shot him.

  Helen wasn’t shot, as she’d been inside a baby carriage and, because of this, had been in foster care ever since. She knew her family had been from Miami and insisted she remembered her family and even knew what they looked like, but Leo and I knew this was impossible. Helen was going to get the family’s belongings when she turned eighteen and hoped there might be photographs in those things.

  Leo and Helen began to dig.

  So, what was she like, your mother? Helen asked as she held the rake in her small hand and began to scrape the top layer of grassy dirt off my mother’s grave.

  I lay down on the grass beside the tree and looked up at the sky, toward the streaks left by the airplanes.

  She was just a mother. Nobody knows me anymore, I answered.

  No one ever knew me, Helen said. Was she pretty?

  She could play the piano. She knew how to speak French.

  Did she look like you?

  She was a little like me, but not pale the way I am.

  Did you know that man who killed her?

  No. He was a stranger.

  I wasn’t going to fill Helen’s mind up with Mr. Don’t Come Back. I picked up a trowel.

  So what does the word, that word “foster” really mean? Helen asked.

  She could never stop talking.

  Foster home? she said. Foster care? What’s foster? What’s the word? What does “foster” mean? I just don’t get it.

  After a while, Mr. Brodsky came outside wearing a shawl over his shoulders. In his hands he held the box with my mother’s ashes and a prayer book. He also carried two small dark-blue Kippahs for Leo and him to wear.

  Helen, Leo, and I stood around the small grave in the garden while Mr. Brodsky placed the box inside the freshly dug hole. Then we all took turns throwing handfuls of dirt over the box while Mr. Brodsky read a prayer aloud.

  He said, Exalted and hallowed be God’s great name in the world that God created, according to plan. May God’s majesty be revealed in the days of our lifetime and the life of all Israel—speedily, imminently, to which we say Amen.

  Once the box was buried, Helen said we had to buy some flowers to plant there.

  Is there anything you want to say? Mr. Brodsky asked me.

  I shook my head, but inside I was hearing the songs, my mother’s songs, the chorus-of-my-life songs.

  After the burial, Helen and Mr. Brodsky went back to the house. He tutored Helen in math on the weekends. She skipped circles around him as he walked. We could hear her nonstop chatter as they walked away. Helen was asking, Do you believe in heaven, Mr. Brodsky, sir? I do. It just has to be. It has to be. Otherwise why’s there a sky, sir? Why?

  Let’s go to the playhouse, Leo said.

  I never said no to him. Loving him meant saying yes.

  The playhouse was made of wood and painted white and had two windows. Inside there was a living room with two small, child-sized chairs and a kitchen area with furniture made out of wood. The stovetop burners were painted red to look as if they were lit. The playhouse also had a small bathroom and a bedroom with a short single bed in it. Both the kitchen and the bathroom had running water.

  Leo and I washed off my mother’s grave dirt in the small kitchen sink and shook our hands dry in the air.

  To one side of the sink there were two cans of tuna fish, a half-eaten loaf of bread, and a small jar of mayonnaise. There were also two small boxes of Corn Flakes.

  In the bathroom there was a toothbrush and a small tube of toothpaste.

  Do you think someone’s living here? I asked Leo.

  No. It’s just Helen. She likes to come here and bring stuff, he said. She thinks the playhouse is hers. I never come here.

  Leo and I lay down on the playhouse play bed. It was small, so we couldn’t stretch out completely and had to pull our knees up.

  Sunlight came in through the window and warmed our bodies.

  I lay my head on Leo’s chest and listened to his heartbeat under the blue cotton shirt. Two plastic buttons pressed into my cheek.

  He said, I love thinking about space.

  What do you mean? I asked.

  You know, everything that’s being discovered. The Big Bang, new galaxies, all of that. The universe.

  It’s warm in here, I said. Do these windows open?

  No. They don’t open.

  And we fell asleep in our little house, in our little bed under a little window.

  In my dream the playhouse lifted up off the earth. It floated in the air toward the horizon and high above our new joyful sorrow.

  28

  In the evening, after my mother’s funeral, I went into Mr. Brodsky’s study for the first time. He was sitting at his desk reading the newspaper. His computer was also open and the light from the machine lit up Mr. Brodsky’s face.

  Give me a minute, he said. I want to finish this.

  As he continued to read, I walked around the room and looked at the photographs that were on tables, bookshelves, and even hanging on the wall. The room was like a photography museum.

  Mr. Brodsky folded his newspaper and looked up at me.

  There’re so many photographs, I said. Do you know all these people?

  Yes, They’re of my family. Some are old from far away, from Odessa, in Ukraine. A few are from Berlin. I really should get rid of them all, he said. I’ve thought about it for a while now.

  Why?

  One of the things that are so troubling about old photographs is that you know what happened afterward. It’s as if you look at the photo and then zoom, just like a movie, you know what’s coming.

  Mr. Brodsky stood up and walked over to where I stood. He picked up a photograph I was looking at.

  So, he said. Here’s a photo with my father and our new puppy. I’m about five years old here. I look happy with the dog. But I know that he then had to kill that dog because it learned to coax chickens into a corner and eat them. In that happy photo, we didn’t know the movie that was coming. But when I look at the photo now, today, I know it’s all going to go wrong with that dog.

  I don’t have any photographs. Well, I need to look through my mother’s bags. Maybe I’ll find some there, I said.

  You will learn. You’ll see the happy photograph and then, in your mind, you will see the movie that comes afterward.

  The killing?

  Yes.

  So there is no such thing as a happy photograph?

  I don’t
think so. No.

  29

  Only three weeks after I’d been left at Mr. Brodsky’s house, I heard someone ring the bell at the front door. My first thought was that the social worker had come to take me to another foster home. Every day I dreaded this.

  I was alone in the basement doing the laundry. This was a chore that Mr. Brodsky had given me, as he liked everyone who stayed at his house to help out with something.

  I liked to sit in the warm basement and look into the round porthole window of the washing machine. There in the ocean of blue Tide and water I’d watch my clothes mix with Leo’s clothes through the wash and rinse and spin cycles. When I moved the clothes to the dryer, I’d never untie my blouses that were knotted up with his shirts. I always folded his clothes with care, even pressing them with my hands, so at least there would be devotion in the clothes that held his body.

  I walked upstairs and opened the front door.

  It was Corazón.

  She opened her arms and took me into her and held me tight as if I were her own lost child.

  She said, Mi niña, my poor child, my baby girl.

  But I pushed away from her, because I was not hers and I knew I wasn’t belonging to anyone. There was no comfort beyond warm clothes. People feeling sorry for me was going to make me feel like spitting.

  I closed the front door and led her into the kitchen.

  How did you find me? I asked as she sat down on one of the chairs that circled the round breakfast table.

  Corazón was all made up, as always. She even had her false eyelashes on. Her long, fake fingernails were painted red and had a perfect white dot painted in the middle of each nail. Her black hair was streaked with blond and she was wearing light-pink lipstick.

  Corazón said, Mi niña, I came to get you away from this horrible place. This house, she’s not for you.

  How did you find me?

  Muñeca, let’s go and see Selena’s grave. We have to go and take her some flowers. They killed your mama just like they killed Selena. Don’t tell me this is a coincidence.

  Corazón reached for my hand across the table to hold it in hers, but I pulled away and placed my hands in the pockets of my jeans. Just because my mother was dead, it didn’t mean I needed my hand held to cross the street.

  Corazón leaned back in her chair and looked at me as if she were fitting me for a dress. The ribbon of measuring tape was in her eyes.

  She said, Pearl, it’s gun love. That’s what the man felt for your mother. He bought that gun and didn’t even know it was for her until he saw her. So you must think of it as a sacrifice. Life is always on the edge of death. It was a good day to die. God knows: I would hear and would be heard, I would be wounded and I would wound, I would be saved and I would save. I have the bus tickets to Texas. We’re going to Corpus Christi and we’re taking some flowers for Selena’s grave. You’re coming.

  Yes, I said.

  I knew you would never say no to this.

  As she was speaking, I knew I’d rather run off with her than be taken off to some other foster-care home. It was only a matter of days. I wasn’t going to become Helen or Leo and march in a band for somebody.

  I looked at Corazón and I saw my escape road away from a daisy chain of foster homes.

  The Risk Star was shining bright above the foster home.

  Where’s Ray? I asked.

  That stupid Ray. He disappeared. He’s so lazy. He’s so damn lazy, when he goes to pick the oranges, we will already be drinking the juice. You know! And Eli and Pastor Rex—those two rats—they got out of there before your mother was even taken away. She was still warm, almost alive, you could say. Well, like a rose is alive in a vase. Not really.

  How did you find me?

  Listen, Pearlita, I always say: if Ray dies tonight, I’ll take my time getting there to say goodbye to him. Let him wait for my tears!

  How did you find me?

  Noelle told me. Your social worker told her mama where you’d be for the next few weeks in case someone showed up looking for you, like an aunt or cousin.

  Where are you staying? I asked.

  I’ve spent these last nights, all weekend, sleeping in that estúpido little playhouse in the garden and eating tuna fish. That man never left the house so I could go and see you.

  I was quiet for a minute. I looked at Corazón and knew everything she said was true. She was not going to give me away to the United States of America fate. She was betting on Mexican love.

  Maybe it’s better than living in a car, I said, and smiled.

  I don’t know how you and Margot survived that. Well, I guess she didn’t.

  Corazón told me that everyone at the trailer park was still there except for Pastor Rex and Eli. She said that on the day my mother had been killed both men had disappeared and had not returned.

  Pastor Rex? I asked. Why did he leave?

  And Corazón explained it all.

  Pastor Rex, well, who knows if he’s even a pastor, she said. I do doubt it. He, Eli, and Ray have worked for years in the south of Texas and Florida getting guns to sell in Mexico.

  I wasn’t surprised, because there was no surprise left in me. I’d used it up.

  She also told me that only two days after I left, our car had been hauled away from the visitors’ parking area.

  It was so fast, Corazón said. It was suddenly gone.

  I wonder where they took it.

  After the car was taken, everyone was there, walking around where your car had been parked, Corazón said. I found a complete roll of Life Savers there. I didn’t pick them up as they’d probably been there for ten years.

  She made me laugh.

  There was also a bullet there, under the car in the grass, Corazón said. I didn’t pick that up either.

  I knew that was the bullet, which my mother and I had looked for. It was the bullet that had left a clean hole in the car with a dark ring of residue.

  When I thought of our car being towed away, I remembered sleeping in the backseat with my mother while Mr. Don’t Come Back slept in my place. He’d been the only person who’d shared that car with us and knew what it was like to like to sleep in the dark Mercury with the taste of Raid on one’s mouth. My mother and I didn’t know we’d invited our fate in to receive our homeless hospitality.

  And that Sergeant Bob, Corazón continued, he said people get killed all the time and that it’s just not news. And all he was saying is that your mama was the albatross. That bird.

  And what did April May say?

  I don’t remember. Noelle said she’d seen everything, but she didn’t tell that to the police. Mrs. Roberta didn’t want that loca Noelle talking to policemen, as she’d get her story all mixed up. That Noelle said midnight is knocking.

  When Corazón came, I didn’t hesitate to say yes. I was leaving. But first I needed to do something. I told her we’d leave in two days.

  It’s going to be so special to see Selena’s grave. It will be almost like being with her, Corazón said.

  Corazón knew everything about the story. She knew Yolanda Saldívar, Selena’s manager and her killer, always claimed that the gun accidentally went off. Corazón had read this was impossible, as the .38-caliber revolver required eleven pounds of pressure on the trigger to fire.

  That kind of pressure is no accident, Corazón said.

  When I spent time with Corazón in her trailer cleaning the guns, Corazón said, On March thirtieth, 2025, when Yolanda gets out of jail, I’m going to be there. I will be there standing at that prison gate.

  What are you going to say to her? I asked.

  I don’t know yet. I’m figuring it out.

  You’re not going to kill her?

  I won’t have to, niña. Someone else will take care of that job.

  Maybe I’ll just ask her why the
hell she just didn’t slap Selena across the face like a good Latina. Why did she have to kill her? Who kills a nightingale? I want to hear her answer to that.

  You must be hungry. What do you want for breakfast? I asked.

  She’s a beautiful kitchen, Corazón said, and stood up and caressed the black-and-white marble counters. Then she opened up one of the cupboards and looked inside.

  Look at all this chocolate and boxes of cookies, she said. I want to eat everything in here.

  I helped her around the kitchen and watched her cook up some scrambled eggs. I prepared her a glass of orange juice from freshly squeezed oranges.

  I’m going to bathe too, she said. I haven’t bathed in days. There’s no shower in that playhouse.

  Yes, of course, I said. I’ll get you some clean towels.

  If you’re raised up in a car you’ll give anyone the chance to have a shower.

  This house smells like orange flowers, Corazón said. Did you notice that?

  No, I said.

  Well, it does. Someone sprinkles orange flower water all over the place.

  After she’d finished eating breakfast, I took her to my room and then she had a long shower.

  While she was bathing I took the gun out from under my pillow, where it had been since the day I’d arrived, and placed it in one of the dresser drawers.

  When Corazón got out of the shower she lay on the bed wrapped in the large, white towel and fell asleep.

  I sat in the chair at the window and looked at Corazón’s kind face.

  She’d saved me from the girl-without-a-friend loneliness of the empty trailer full of guns, and now Corazón was going to save me from being in the we-don’t-want-you-here foster-child life.

  When Corazón woke up and opened her big brown eyes, she sat up straight and patted the bed with the palm of her hand and said, Come sit next to me.

  I stood up and sat next to her and she wrapped her arms around me. She caressed my hair and kissed my cheek and forehead. She rocked me back and forth in her rocking-chair body. I let her treat me like a doll.

  Do you have a cigarette there for me? she asked.