Because of the Sun

by Jenny Torres Sanchez

  You remember that time, I ask him, when he held his gun to her head? And when we were little and had to run to Doña Marcela’s house?

  I was barefoot and the pebbles dug into my feet as we fled—Mama carrying Anna in her arms, and me blinking hard to see straight in the dark night.

  The first trailer we came to was Doña Marcela’s. The outside light flicked on and the door opened just before we got to it. We hurried up the wooden steps and into her small living room. She closed the door behind us and locked it, and Mama fell into a chair, Anna still in her arms. I stood next to her until Doña Marcela took my hand and led me to the couch. She didn’t say anything, just continued into her kitchen, filling a teapot, getting a cup and saucer. She plucked leaves and twigs from a plastic bag and dropped them into the cup. Stood waiting for the water to boil and then poured it into the cup.

  I watched her movements. Her hands looked as harsh and as soft as they’d felt when she held my hand. She made the tea and brought it over to Mama.

  “Hierbabuena,” she said. My mother looked up at her like she didn’t know who Doña Marcela was, let alone why she was handing her a steaming cup.

  “Drink this tea,” Doña Marcela said. “Good herb.”

  Doña Marcela took Anna from Mama’s arms and put her on the couch. Then she went to a room in the back of the trailer where I saw her daughter, Rosa, poke her head out. Quickly, I walked over to Mama. I wanted her to hold me the way she’d held Anna, but she had the tea in her hands now, so instead I watched as she lifted the trembling cup to her dry lips. I touched her arm and her hair. I heard the shaky breath she took and the light clatter of the cup as she returned it to the saucer and the way she winced when the tea went down her throat. I stared at her neck, red and blotchy and already bruising.

  “Why…?” I asked her. She shook her head softly, but I had to ask. I wanted to know. “Why’d you ever marry him?”

  She sucked in her breath, startled by my question. But she began telling me why. He was broken even before the war, she said. But she loved him and thought she could fix him.

  Then one day, he’s at my house, on one knee when I open the door. No ring in his hand, just a draft notice.

  I try to picture it in my head. I try to see Daddy like that. But I can’t.

  He needed a reason, he said, a reason to come back. So I said yes, because…he looked so scared. Mama started to cry then and set the cup and saucer on the round table on her other side. I thought I’d keep him together. But then he left. And he came back worse. And now…She looked at me. Then at Anna. And put her face in her hands.

  I looked at the tea she had set down. The light amber liquid looked pretty, like magic. I took the cup and lifted it to my own lips, sipped it carefully. It tasted like mint and lemon but also like dirt and trees. I didn’t like it, but I liked the name. Hierbabuena. Good herb.

  Doña Marcela returned with blankets. She covered Anna with one and handed another to Mama. Then I noticed a washcloth in her hand. She led me to the couch. When I sat down, she kneeled and wiped my bare feet with the warm washcloth.

  I don’t know why, but it made me cry. I held my hands over my face as the tears kept coming and Doña Marcela hummed and wiped gently. And I felt like something in me came undone.

  When she finished, her hands guided me next to Anna, stupid Anna, who was already in a deep sleep. Who didn’t even have to run. Who had been half-asleep and whining that she wanted her bed as Mama carried her. What would she remember of tonight? Maybe she wouldn’t even know what had happened.

  But as I lay there next to her, I knew I wouldn’t forget. I wouldn’t forget Mama’s heavy breathing that filled the night, or the small whimpers that escaped her mouth as we ran and ran, or the pebbles that imprinted themselves on my feet forever.

  I fell into the black hole of sleep, and even though Doña Marcela’s humming penetrated the darkness, it couldn’t cover up the sound of the whimpering and Mama’s breathing. I knew then that’s what people sounded like when they were scared, desperate. I knew then that we were all animals. Prey. I worried we would attract coyotes or other predators from their dark caves. I watched the door for as long as I could keep my eyes open.

  In the morning, Mama was curled up on the small chair she’d been in the night before. She was still looking at me and Anna, and I wondered if she’d slept at all.

  Doña Marcela gave Mama more good herb tea.

  And then we got up and left. Out into the bright morning.

  I looked down at my feet. They would get dirty again, but I followed Mama as she carried Anna and we walked the dirt road that led us back to our place.

  When we walked in, Daddy was dressed and I had a flash of him as he’d been the night before, in just his underwear as he fell and crashed all over the place trying to grab Mama. How he finally caught her, climbed on top of her like that, nearly naked, and wrapped his thick hands around her neck. She’d tried to free herself; her face had turned colors. She’d looked like she would burst, and her tongue glistened as she tried to yell but only spit came out.

  “Good morning,” he said. And moments later, there was Mama again, standing by the sink with that weary smile.

  I can still see his face now, through cigarette smoke, staring at me like he hated me because I knew what he was. I didn’t care if he was broken before. I didn’t care if he was scarred for life. I didn’t care about anything but me.

  And Mama.

  And Anna.

  You remember? I ask Jesus. I look at the door, think of the animals that can smell Daddy’s body and will stampede in at any moment and find us.

  They’ll trample Mama.

  They’ll swallow Anna whole.

  And me, maybe they’ll just circle me forever.

  Somewhere, I hear a loud roar.

  It’s not the roar of the engine that wakes me. I hear it, but it’s almost like a memory that has floated into my dream. What wakes me is Anna’s ice-cold grip on my arm.

  “Shelly!” she says. “Shelly!”

  I look over and see Anna’s eyes wide and scared. “He’s back.” Her whisper is so tight and high, it sounds like it could break. “He’s back, he’s come back for us, Shelly.” She starts crying and my body fills with fear as she mutters things that don’t make sense.

  “He’s back….”

  “Anna…he’s never coming back,” I whisper as I pull her close, hold her tight, try to explain about the car.

  But she keeps on. She gets up, looks out the window, and when she can’t see anything, she opens the door.

  “He’s back! He’ll come after us,” she says. “I know it.”

  I try to pull her inside, and Mama is next to us now and she’s holding Anna and she’s telling her everything is okay, but Anna pushes Mama away. She pushes me away.

  “You’re wrong!” she tells us, over and over, as she cries and finally lets us bring her inside.

  “He’ll come back for all of us!” she says. “Especially, especially for me. Because I was supposed to believe in him!”

  I look at Mama, but she looks as scared and lost as I feel, as wild as Anna looks, and all she can do is hold and soothe her. But even as Anna quiets down, I keep hearing her repeat the same thing.

  He’ll come back for all of us. Especially, especially for me.

  And I want to tell her it’s not true, but I can’t.

  I can’t lie to her.

  Because I think she’s right. I think he’ll be back for all of us.

  Shelly heard me. Or she heard the bear. Because she found me in the trailer in the middle of the night.

  Somehow she knew he’d come to show me the bench that served as my mom’s bed when she was younger and that he’d opened the cabinets and pulled out clothes and sheets and pictures and other relics of their past. Somehow she knew he’d wrapped a black bandanna around my forehead and blocked the door so I couldn’t get out.

  “Anna,” she said when she saw me. I hadn’t heard her come in. I wanted
to run past her, outside to the desert, keep running until only nothingness surrounded me. But all I could think was that she had come. She hadn’t left me alone with the bear.

  So when she kept staring at me, when she started crying and telling me about the life that happened in that trailer, I didn’t run. I didn’t leave her. Not when she’d come for me.

  Now the sun is coming up and we are sitting here, exhausted from having purged and absorbed too much.

  She looks over at me and I recognize for the first time those things I’d see when I looked at Mom. The secrets that were always there, locked somewhere deep inside, buried and pushed down, but now they have burst, exploded, landed around me.

  Shelly leans back and closes her eyes, but keeps talking. “Your mom ran away a few weeks later. Never heard from her again. Joe told me some time later that he gave her money and a ride to the airport. He was going to go with her.” Shelly smiles, but it disappears quickly. “She told him he could never love someone like her. That she wasn’t good enough for him.” Fresh tears slide out of Shelly’s closed eyes.

  My mind is still reeling from everything, everything I know now and what it all means, and I’m trying to keep it all straight in my head, even though my mind aches and feels soft.

  “We kept thinking she’d come back,” Shelly says, shaking her head. “Your grandmother died of lung cancer a couple of years ago. But every day she sat waiting and looking out at the desert, waiting for Anna to emerge.” Shelly looks out the dirty trailer window like she might catch sight of my mom in the distance. “But she never did. And it was my fault she left. I couldn’t help her.”

  She looks around the trailer. “I told Mama we should go. But she wouldn’t leave in case Anna came back. So I built that house with every cent I’d managed to save, so at least she wouldn’t have to live in this trailer where so much happened. But when the house was finally finished, your grandmother couldn’t bring herself to spend one night in it. She slept here. Every night.”

  Shelly looks like some kind of soldier on a battlefield. She looks like she needs medics to come and put her on a stretcher and carry her to safety. She reminds me of Mom, the way she looked tired so often. Tired because of all of this.

  My eyes fill with tears and I whisper her full name. “Anna Ruby…,” I say. “Anna Ruby…”

  “Your grandma read about some waterfalls in Georgia named Anna Ruby Falls. Said she was going to take us there one day. Anyway, I’d already been born when she read about them, so your mom got the name instead…Anna Ruby Falls. She was proud of it, always saying the whole thing whenever anyone asked her.”

  “Anna Ruby Falls…,” I say. I look at Shelly. “I didn’t know. I didn’t know her at all.”

  I always thought I knew her better than anyone, that I knew who she really was. I was her constant. I was a floating camera, watching her, judging her all the time. Watching the things she didn’t care to hide from me, the way she dressed, the way she drank. The way she was quick to backhand me. She didn’t have anyone else. She only had me. Only me. So I was the only one who could know, really know, who she was. I knew how terrible she was.

  Except I didn’t know anything.

  “She never told you that story?”

  I shake my head. “I…I didn’t even know…her name was Anna. She just went by Ruby. Only Ruby.”

  Shelly looks at me and we sit in silence.

  “I thought she was Ruby…,” I tell her.

  I didn’t know her at all.

  We walk toward the house, squinting at the bright day.

  I can see the bus from here, headed for school, and it looks more out of place and irrelevant than ever. I remember it was yesterday—yesterday?—I started school and watched Paulo’s movie. I shake my head and almost cry at how time keeps floating around me, escaping me, sneaking up on me.

  “I have school,” I say aloud. “It’s only the second day….”

  Shelly looks at me, a crease in her forehead. “Get some rest,” she says.

  When we get inside the house, she starts making coffee and I sit at the kitchen table wanting to ask her more questions but not knowing how. Not now.

  She has to work tonight, she says, taking a sip of coffee and putting a cup down in front of me. She stares at me when she sees me touching the bandanna. She looks worried, as if she regrets telling me anything. She sits and rubs her forehead.

  I get up and I hug her and I whisper I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry until she leads me to my room and tucks me into bed and smooths my hair and kisses my forehead.

  She tells me there’s nothing to be sorry for. She smiles at me, and I think it’s the first time I’ve seen her smile.

  And then she leaves.

  My head is full of the past and present. Images and objects and people I know and don’t know float in and out, surround me, and disappear again.

  I wake up when the sun is going down, and get up because I can’t go back to sleep. When I see the note on the counter in Shelly’s handwriting telling me she’s gone to work, dread and panic fill my chest. I’m alone in the house again. I can’t stand the emptiness. I get dressed and go outside and stare at the setting sun. I beg it to come back, to burn me and my thoughts and a past I was never a part of but that feels like it could kill me.

  The sun keeps falling, dipping down past the horizon, illuminating the sky in dusty pinks and delicate oranges devoid of anger and fire. No, it seems to say.

  I walk anyway. I think about walking to Mexico. But my feet carry me in the opposite direction, to Doña Marcela’s house. When she answers the door, she lets me inside and I sit down at the table.

  The kettle screeches.

  Moments later, she sets the tea in front of me and I look at it. The amber liquid.

  Hierbabuena.

  I drink it and ask her for another cup. I fill myself with it. I fill myself with good herb.

  She gently tells me to lie down on the couch to rest and I do. When I close my eyes, I hear Shelly’s words. I think of my mother on this couch where she once slept, in a place she once ran to for safety in the middle of the night. I bury my face in the cushions. And I smell earth and heat, salt and sky. And I think it’s her.

  I think it’s you.

  I breathe in deeply and choke on silent tears. Silent sobs.

  And I cry myself to sleep.

  I feel the pounding of the earth before I see the bear.

  I feel the rumble beneath me. And I know he’s coming.

  But now I know everything.

  Don’t worry, I tell myself. Even though the pounding is getting stronger and my heart is beating in my throat. Even though my hands have gone cold.

  No te preocupes, Paulo’s grandmother says. I look to the side and there she is, her hair flowing about her. And then she’s ten feet away, twenty, and then perched on top of faraway mountains.

  The earth shakes.

  Rocks fall from the mountaintops and crumble to dust when they reach the bottom.

  I stare at Doña Marcela, who floats above the mountains, watching.

  I can’t do it, I tell her. I can’t do it! I scream.

  She puts a finger to her mouth, shushing me. I can see her breath. It comes out in a great puff. It becomes clouds illuminated by the moon and stars.

  I can already imagine the bear’s paw over my face, the heaviness of it, the strength behind it. I can already feel him crushing my chest. I can already feel the scratches on my skin.

  When a bear keeps coming for you, stalking you,

  you must make yourself big,

  you must make noise,

  you must fight back.

  I don’t know where the voice comes from, but it fills my head. And I know instantly that I have to fight the bear. It’s the only way he’ll go away.

  But I can’t.

  The earth shakes more violently and I fall to the ground. When I look up, I see Shelly close by, but she’s on the ground too, and when I try to get to her, I see him.

&
nbsp; Running.

  Running.

  His breath heavy, his mouth foaming.

  Heading toward us.

  I try not to think of his teeth and claws piercing my flesh. I try not to think of suffocating under the mass of him, his bristly fur. I close my eyes and wait.

  But the earth stops shaking. And when I look again, I see he has stopped about a hundred yards from me. And he is waiting.

  I look at Doña Marcela and she points to the sky.

  The stars pulse like hot little diamonds. Thousands of them. Millions. And the clouds move like fog across the pale moon and then swirl and dance and transform. They become eyes, and face, and hair.

  They become Ruby.

  She floats down in front of the bear and I understand. She has come back. She has come back to help me fight the bear.

  My chest swells with a million things I want to say. In seconds, it all comes out, without any words. And she smiles and I hear her. God, I hear all the things she wanted to say. And it breaks my heart even more because if I’d only known…if I’d only known, we might have had a chance.

  She hasn’t moved, yet I feel her all around me.

  Remember this, I tell myself. Remember all of this when you wake.

  I look at Shelly and she is crying, but she gets up and walks toward us.

  The bear drags his paws on the dirt like a bull.

  Seconds pass.

  Infinity.

  And then he charges.

  His face changes as he gets closer. It transforms to faces I’ve seen before, the faces of men who spent nights in the backyard pool with my mother. They laugh, smile, stalk, but Mom just stands there.

  The bear rears up on his hind legs, but Mom is everywhere. She is strong now, she doesn’t even flinch.

  He can’t reach her. Even when he puts his paws out, so close to her head that her hair flutters, she just looks at him, like he will never get to her. But I know. I know he can. I know he has.

  I scream. The stars turn red; they turn into a thousand hot little suns. I see pink water. I see Helen watching from a window. I see myself in my room.