Because of the Sun

by Jenny Torres Sanchez

  “Come on,” I tell him. I suddenly don’t want him in my room. Thinking I’m as stupid as Ruby. That just because it seems like my heart wants to love him, like my lips want to kiss him, that I’ll do what she did; play the same part, believe that he wants me,

  he loves me,

  he’ll never leave me.

  Until I believe it enough that I don’t care what might happen.

  I suddenly wish he were anywhere but here. I search for words to explain, because I think he deserves an explanation, but all I can say is “Get out.”

  “What?”

  “Get out. I don’t want you here….”

  He looks confused. “What the hell? I’m not…” He stares at me like he’ll figure it out, and he thinks he has, because he nods like he knows, but he doesn’t.

  He walks past me, but the thing is I don’t want him to leave. And I hate that I don’t want him to go. I want to yell at him Go! I want him to stay. But I won’t beg. I won’t beg like my mother did. He’s halfway down the hall.

  “Paulo…”

  He turns around and looks at me. “Hey, listen, I wasn’t trying anything.” He shakes his head. “I mean, you get in my truck; you tell me you’ve seen my movie, right? So you know, you know….” His voice sounds choked, but he recovers. “But then I try to find out about you, and, Jesus, I’m just trying to screw you? What the hell is that all about?”

  My cheeks are flushed and hot. “That’s not what…” But I can’t lie.

  “Yes, it was,” he says slowly.

  I hate her. My mom. For making this so complicated. For making my life, my choices, this moment, about her. For rising from the dead at the worst times.

  “Still, I wasn’t trying anything.”

  I look at Paulo and nod.

  “Do you want me to go?” he asks.

  If I say no, it’s not the same thing, I tell myself. It’s not begging him to stay. It’s not being Ruby.

  I shake my head.

  He comes over. He looks at me like he’s trying to figure something out and then takes my hand. “Come on,” he says, and we head back to the kitchen.

  We sit at the table. I feel embarrassed for thinking the worst of him.

  “I have posters up in my room, Dani. Old pictures. You could walk in and figure out things about me. But you don’t reveal anything.”

  He rubs the back of his neck.

  “I’m sorry,” I tell him. “I didn’t think.” I stumble over the words and none seem right, so we sit in a silence that threatens to suffocate us.

  “I’m nowhere near that smooth, anyway,” he says. He smiles, and I know he’s trying to make things better. But I feel like I’ve messed something up. I feel like a part of me I didn’t even know was there suddenly showed up, a part I don’t understand. I feel like something has changed.

  After a while, he reaches over, taps the lotería game. He gave it to me as a souvenir from our trip to Mexico and I’d left it on the table. He pulls the box toward us.

  “So like I told you the other day,” he says, breaking the tension, “this is basically Mexican bingo, with pictures instead of numbers. I never really played it the way you’re supposed to, because it’s always been just me and my abuela, and when she used to work at the store a lot, it was basically just me.” I imagine Paulo in the trailer, long days alone. “Usually I’d just look at the pictures.”

  He shuffles the deck. “I’d pretend they were sort of like signs for something. I’d pick a few cards and try to figure out what they were telling me.”

  “Were they ever right?”

  “Nah…” He looks at the cards, and I think he’s not totally convinced. “Here, pick some.”

  “Why?”

  “Just pick a few. Pick six. That’ll tell me something about you.”

  “You first.”

  He shrugs. “Okay.”

  He starts going through the cards and I watch him look at each one before making a choice.

  Finally he puts six cards on the table between us.

  “Okay,” he says, holding up a card with a skull. “This one is because of la muerte, which took my parents.” He tosses the card on the table and picks up one with a red devil on it. “And this one is because of the way they died.” He studies the card. “He had something to do with it.”

  I don’t know what to say, but Paulo just moves on.

  “This is because of the blood that runs through my veins, my father’s blood,” he says, holding up a card with the Mexican flag on it. “And this one,” he says, holding up a card with a flowerpot full of red roses on it, “is for my mother. She loved roses. Red, red roses.” He looks at the card and kisses it before putting it down. “This one,” he says, looking at the next card, one of a man carrying a guitar, “is because my father loved music. Couldn’t sing a note and only knew three chords, but somehow it sounded just right, you know.” He stares at the card and a look of sadness comes down like a veil over his face.

  He picks up the last card, of a man holding a machete. “And finally, this is because…” He smiles, looks embarrassed. “This is one I always thought would be me. The man I want to be.”

  I look at the card. “You want to carry a machete?”

  He laughs. “No,” he says. “El valiente. It means ‘the brave one.’ Courageous.”

  Paulo looks at the cards and then at me. “Your turn,” he says. He hands me the deck and I take it. I’m scared of what I’ll see. I’m almost certain the bear will appear on one of the cards.

  Each one feels full of meaning, like I’m holding somebody’s story or history or future in my hands. I look through the deck slowly, not really knowing if I’ll choose any card, but then some of the images make my heart pound faster and my hands tingle. I could easily pick out any six cards and lie about them. I could do that.

  But I don’t.

  I pull out a card with a heart.

  Then a sun. And one with a star.

  A liquor bottle. And a woman.

  Atlas.

  I lay them out on the table, beneath Paulo’s cards.

  “This last one,” I say, my voice suddenly shaky, “is how I feel, how I’ve felt as long as I can remember.” I hold up the card with Atlas, the man carrying the world. Then I put down that card and pick up the one with the woman wearing a red hat, red shirt, red lipstick, and a short skirt that reveals her thighs. “Mostly because of this one, my mother….” I look at the woman, who has a small, knowing smile on her lips. “She liked attention” is what I say to Paulo. “Lots of attention…but not from me.” I put the card down before I think about it too much and pick up the next one.

  I hold up the card with the star, trying to find the words for why I picked it. “This reminds me of her because it’s a pinhole of brightness in a dark sky,” I tell Paulo while looking at the card. “And there was something, I don’t know what or why, that made me…” love her…wish she loved me? “…that made me love her, even though…” even though I shouldn’t have? Or I didn’t want to? Was she right? Was I just a terrible daughter? “…even though she made it hard.”

  I swallow and pick up the card with the sun. “But usually…usually she felt more like this.” I look at the burning, consuming sun. This is how she felt to me. I couldn’t get close to her. She never wanted me close to her.

  I put down the sun and pick up the liquor bottle.

  “This one,” I tell him, “is because it’s how I knew her best. With this in her blood. I always wondered what she would have been like without it…but now I don’t know if I really want to know.”

  I put down the bottle card and pick up the one with the heart. With its thin veins and thick valves, I can almost hear it beating, almost see it pulsing. “And this one,” I say, turning the card in my hand, tracing the outline of it as I try to find the words to explain. “This one is because…I want to feel empty and dull. But coming here makes something keep squeezing this.” I point at the heart. “And making it throb and making it…”


  I look at Paulo. His eyes are soft. “Making it hurt?”

  I nod. I can feel it now, my heart racing. Each violent beat makes it feel bruised and swollen in my chest. I think my heart must be black and blue. I imagine it, a mottled thing in my chest, poisoning my blood, pumping that poisoned blood throughout my body.

  Paulo reaches over and wipes away tears I didn’t mean to cry.

  I look at the scattering of cards and I look at Paulo and I want to ask him if we’ll be okay. But I kiss him instead. Because I want to. Because I won’t let her ruin this. I kiss him and pull him toward the couch and even though I can feel his hesitation, he follows me. And we kiss until my lips feel raw, and I pull him close to me and try to take away his past and he kisses me back and tries to take away mine. I never want to stop.

  The room darkens, and I think the clock moves faster. Night falls and we’re in the dark, on the floor, breathing fast, staring at the never-ending ceiling because something keeps us from going any further. We stay that way in silence.

  Then Paulo reaches for my hand, holds it softly in his, and asks me if I want to hear the rest of his story.

  Yes, I tell him, because his voice, the way he holds my hand, tells me he needs to. And I remember suddenly what he said at the Pink Store about his heart.

  In the dark I can hear his breath. I can hear how it quickens. I think I can hear his heart, thumping faster as he starts talking. He tells me how on the day his parents died, the day a stranger came for them, he was eight years old. He was in his room. And when he heard the gunshots, he hid under his bed.

  His movie flickers into my mind. I see the woman look toward an opened door and I picture myself walking down the hall, to a room with a bed pushed against the wall. I look under it, see a boy pressing his small face against the cold cement floor, staring out at the room so intently for so long, he can describe the exact shade of blue painted on the opposite wall. I can see it. Those walls swelled, like they were breathing, and I heard the sound of water before the world became so, so silent, before a great bird came down and carried me away.

  The whole thing plays and replays like a movie in his head, he says. It makes me think of how our minds work and how grandmothers get strange feelings that send them flying across borders, swooping down to carry a little boy away, to safety.

  Paulo says his heart turned to a black stone when he caught sight of them, his parents’ bodies on the floor as his grandmother carried him away, and he says he died right there, in her arms, turned into a zombie who didn’t wake until she helped him grow a new heart.

  I squeeze his hand, bring it to my face, wish I could take away every bad thing that’s ever happened to him.

  I’ve made myself remember them other ways, too. The way they looked when they were smiling at me, or wearing a particular shirt or skirt. But the thing that bothers me is that’s how I always remember them first. And I can’t hear them anymore, he says. I can’t remember their voices. I can’t remember the exact sound of my father’s singing. And the harder I try, the quieter they get.

  He asks me if I remember my mother’s voice, and I close my eyes and try. But it’s like remembering a song; I know what it sounds like, but I can’t truly hear it. It’s just a memory, blurry around the edges, fading notes, becoming thinner, fainter.

  All I can hear is a low, faint rumble. And it grows. Louder. Closer.

  And I know it’s the bear. Coming after me.

  I can hear him running toward me. Finding his way back every time I banish him. I look out the window, waiting to see his face pressed against the glass.

  I hear myself tell Paulo suddenly, “There’s a bear coming for me.”

  He doesn’t say anything and I wonder if he’s heard me, but then he says, “What does he want?”

  “He wanted my mother. He killed her.” My voice doesn’t sound like mine. I feel like I’m outside myself. “A wild bear, in our backyard. He mauled her and chewed her pinkies. But I know,” I tell Paulo, “I know he was chasing her before then. And he finally found her and…”

  I start laughing because the thought that flashes in my mind is A bear ate my mother. And it’s like the dancing jackrabbit and Doña Soledad with her Joker smile. And then I’m thinking of Little Red Riding Hood and how her grandmother was eaten by a wolf but a lumberjack killed the animal and opened him up and Grandma emerged from the belly alive and whole. And even if I found a lumberjack, even if I resurrected the bear they say is dead, even if we opened him up and Mom was there, I don’t know that she would come out. I think she’d still stare back at me with that look on her face that said Why are you bothering me?

  I would tell Paulo this, except I’m laughing and I can’t stop. And the laughter turns to crying. I put my hands over my mouth and hear strange, high-pitched sounds coming from my chest, a screeching whistle, a signal for the bear.

  Paulo puts his arms around me so tight I think I’ll stop breathing and tells me I’ll be okay, keeps telling me that, even though I don’t believe him. Even though I’m sure my heart hasn’t turned to stone but has exploded instead and the shrapnel is shooting and ricocheting around inside of me, piercing me.

  We stay that way, until I’m too tired. Until nothing matters. The darkness becomes a thick blanket that muffles time and makes me sway between reality and sleep. If I could stay here it wouldn’t be so bad, I think.

  I have to go, I hear eventually. And I don’t know if it’s Paulo or my mother speaking, but there is a kiss on my cheek and a soft touch. And it doesn’t matter because everyone goes. And my brain flutters with images of death and cards and the sun and voiceless words find their way into my ears and into my brain.

  I’ve been here forever,

  forever in the burning sun,

  in the endless orange dust.

  Something inside me is breaking,

  or waking!

  —

  I’m almost asleep when those words jolt me awake and I look out the window.

  He’s there.

  My breath comes quicker as I see him getting up on his hind legs, pressing his paws against the glass, opening his great mouth. I try to stay calm. I know this time he won’t leave unless I face him. I have to follow him, wherever it is he leads me.

  I get up in that darkness. And I walk outside to the barn, that tomb that holds the trailer. He walks ahead of me, but I can hear his breath in my ears the whole way.

  Clocks spin,

  nights rise,

  days fall,

  and I go back,

  back,

  back.

  I’m unborn.

  NEW MEXICO, 1992

  As told by Shelly Falls

  “Get the hell up,” I tell Anna, hitting the lump on the bench that serves as seating in the kitchen area of our tiny trailer. A motor home, actually. A dirty motor home that our father drove from Colorado to New Mexico when I was two and my sister Anna Ruby was one, and planted out here in the middle of nowhere. In the middle of the desert.

  If it weren’t for him, we’d never know it was stolen. We’d never even know we once lived in Colorado. But he liked to tell the story of how he stuck it to the dealership where he’d worked. How he snuck into the place in the middle of the night and drove the motor home right off the lot with the keys he’d swiped earlier that day.

  Picked you all up at the motel and we were a full eight hours away before the first salesman arrived and began to realize anything was missing.

  He’d laugh telling us how he pulled one over on them. They fucking owed me, he’d say, all that time fighting in Vietnam and I come back and I’m a salesman. Nobody even knows or cares about that war we fought. Nobody gives a shit. Well, fuck everyone. I gotta watch out for me. Gotta put a roof over your heads, food in my babies’ bellies.

  There were plenty of times there was no food in our bellies, and when I ask Mama about where we lived, if it was a house and if we had our own room, she says we were nomads. That the road was our home.

  �
��The road and motel rooms?” I ask.

  She pretends she doesn’t hear me.

  I don’t remember the long drive out here. My memories have always been full of dirt and the thick, stagnant, angry air of our motor home. Colorado has never been real to me. I don’t believe it even exists.

  “Get up!” I tell Anna Ruby again. She doesn’t move. I kick her and she makes a sound like a whimper before thrashing her legs and nearly nailing me in the face with her feet. I shove her legs away, hard. “You’re so useless!” I yell. The words escape my mouth and even as they’re coming out, I think, Stop! You sound just like him.

  She doesn’t answer.

  Mama is outside. I look out at her from the small, dirty window of our trailer. Yesterday morning she was standing out there that same way, like the world had crushed her, while Daddy slept on the bed. Yesterday morning was when I woke up with bruises and a headache so deep it felt like my head would break. The first thing I remembered was how he’d choked me and hit me the night before because he knew I hated him and he couldn’t do anything about it.

  Mama holds a mug of coffee in one hand as she stares at the mountains. She looks tired. And old. And defeated.

  She doesn’t look like a woman who just killed a man.

  She stands by the fence in her blue nightgown. I check to make sure it’s really her even though I know it is. She looks so strange.

  I sit back on the bench and think.

  What the hell do I do?

  I get back up.

  “Let’s go,” I tell Anna Ruby. “Come on, we’re going to school.” I pull the brown blanket off her and she thrashes again like a wild animal. The look she shoots my way reminds me of the feral cats that roam the desert and I almost expect her to claw at my face, but she just snatches the blanket back and hides under it.

  “I went yesterday and we’ll both go today,” I tell her. “We have to go!”

  It’s crazy! It’s unreal. This isn’t fucking real, I say to myself while I stare at Anna and try to keep my voice steady.

  She doesn’t move or say anything. I pull the blanket off her and throw it on the floor. She begins to thrash again and it pisses me off so I throw myself on her, ignoring the shooting pain throughout my body, and hold her down with my body. She shakes her head and I grab her face harshly, hold it in my hands.