Paraíso

  “Did I have any clothes on?”

  “I don’t know. I swear to God.”

  “It was always the same.” Her voice was flat. “Like a dance we did. In the middle of the night when everyone else was asleep. She’d say I was sick, and she was going to make me feel better. Much better. It was always hot and steamy, and I’d be half asleep myself. She’d be wearing that pink wrapper of hers and smiling as if she really loved me. She’d fill her thing up and lay me down on the table to get ready. And that’s when you came in. I could see your eyes…. You were looking at us, Peter. I could see you, and you could see us.”

  I’m moving through rooms in our old house that I thought I knew and seeing them freshly, as if a filter is gone. I see that my sister has by far the best, big windows facing east and south, a porch overlooking the rose garden and farther on the little stream that flowed through the bottom of our property. My room is isolated and much smaller, off by itself down a long corridor in the back part of the house. That’s okay. Our father’s huge fragrant bathroom: bay rum, English soaps, talcum, cabinets of toiletries, an extra-large claw-footed tub, and an open rain-head shower, where he performs his morning and evening ablutions and emerges as groomed as a prize-winning show horse.

  Turning the knob on our mother’s door and, amazingly enough, it isn’t locked. In the sitting room I see the cream damask-covered sofa she’d sat on while I rolled a toy truck down her pregnant belly and she opened her blouse. In the bedroom, the big TV at the foot of what I now see is an invalid’s hospital bed with a black electric motor underneath to control its various angles. A few books on the bedside table: Truman Capote’s The Dogs Bark, Tom Wolfe’s The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamlined Baby, and The Poetry of William Blake. I’d given her all three for Christmas on successive years and inscribed the flyleaves. The inscriptions are there when I check. At least she’d loved Capote and Tom Wolfe. I knew because I’d hear her talking about them to friends.

  On a shelf under the table is a locked red leather-bound diary dated 1976. The year my sister and I took off for Mexico. Should I cut the strap and open it?

  No.

  Out the door again and across the landing at the top of the big staircase. Left down the long hall that leads past my sister’s bathroom to my bedroom. Stopping at the door to that bathroom and slowly pushing it open.

  Everything inside seems crystal clear and sharp as if lit by a halogen bulb. There’s the white wooden table with the pull-out section. There’s the claw-footed bathtub and the Crane porcelain toilet. White tile walls, and hexagonal tiled floor. Glass shelves in a polished zinc framework beside a bevel-mirrored medicine cabinet. On the shelves, the accoutrements of my sister’s toilette, each one standing out in stark relief. The room smells exactly like our mother’s bathroom, foreign and indescribable.

  The players are not around, but I can imagine them going through their dance. Just as my sister described it. I can almost see them.

  “Please tell me. What happened after I came in?”

  “I thought you were saving me, but you only stared for a minute and then you were gone. I think you slammed the door. She made me promise never to talk about it. ‘It’ll be our little secret.’ In her coziest voice that she hardly ever used.”

  “But what was going on?”

  “Guess. You know. You do.”

  Then she was sobbing, dry, heaving sobs that shook her body under the blanket, almost as shocking as what our mother had done to her. I got up and knelt beside her cot and put my arms around her until she stopped. I was going to say something more, something about the fog lifting and beginning to see clearly, that kind of stuff, but realized she was asleep.

  Straight on Till Morning

  The sharp whirr of the little quail’s wings wakes me as it flies down from its perch on the rafter and lands with a little thud on the sideboard. I watch it wander around pecking at crumbs and finally fly out the lightening window into the gray dawn. I’m lying on my back, and the wood floor beneath my thin blanket feels very hard and cold. But kind of reassuring. It holds me up.

  No rising slowly out of sleep as usual. I’m totally awake. Calm and sharp like I’ve never been before, or at least can’t remember being. A few birds are starting to sing outside, maybe one of those big yellow and black orioles? A warbler or two? Somewhere in the distance a dove is sounding off, answered by another closer in and a third farther away. The pungent air through the window smells of pine, flowers, and damp meadow with a touch of wood smoke from the stove. Straight above me, the rafters intersect the weathered roof boards at intriguing angles, clear as an Eliot Porter photograph. A fly buzzes slowly from one side of the room to the other, sounding like a human voice so soft you can’t make out the words. And then lands on the counter, where I watch it wander around and finally drone out the window.

  When I roll toward the cot where my sister lies, my body feels tenderized as a piece of hammered meat. My right shoulder, side, and hip take up their own painful but reassuring contact with the wooden boards. My right wrist smarts with the handcuff burn. She’s still there, I can see her shape beneath the blankets, facing away from me so I can’t hear her breathing. But of course she’s alive. And so am I. Never more so.

  On my back again, stretching my stiff, bruised arms and legs as far out as they’ll go, enjoying the pain, engulfed in a delicious dog-like yawn, thinking about Claire tossing and turning in the next room, wondering whether or not to go in, then doing it, her blond hair spread on the pillow, her warmth rising, her eyes unreadable as they mostly are. No words. Arms reaching toward me as I bend down? Where is she now? What is she doing?

  Tenderized or not, I know I could carry my sister down the mountain if I had to. Face whatever music I may have to face about the death of Marco, my enemy. His knife’s still in my pocket; I felt it when I rolled over. Incriminating evidence. Have to take care of that.

  Sooner or later, there will be five of us: my sister, Claire, Isabel, the baby, and me. Full house. Si Diós quiere, as they say here. If God wishes it, things will work out.

  I have a feeling they will. Had it since I first woke up. You know? That feeling of sureness you get once or twice in your life?

  After a while I can hear the cot creak as my sister rolls over toward me. “Peter?”

  “I’m here.”

  “Peeterr …” She draws out my name in a new way that makes me very happy. “Listen. I wonder what happened to the film…. I gave it to him, you know.”

  I remember I’d felt something else in Marco’s pocket when I reached in to extract the handcuff key. God, do I have to mention it? It’s moot now, after all.

  I decide I’d better go ahead and tell her, even if it means I’ll have to dig Marco back up again.

  FIN