A few days after I leave the bear head on the table, Shelly says we have to talk to a therapist.
I’m worried Shelly might go to jail for helping her mother bury her father’s body all those years ago. For never telling anyone. We look up laws on the Internet anxiously and hold on to hope. We think she won’t be charged because she was a minor. So we go.
Over the next month, she starts telling Dr. Marques everything.
I do too.
It goes something like this:
“I’m trying to forgive her.”
“Maybe you’re not ready to forgive your mother yet.”
Silence.
“Not forgiving her makes me feel bad. How can you not forgive a dead person, but also, how can you? They’re fucking dead.” I’m angry, the way I used to be when my mom was around. I remember how I hated carrying all that anger with me. It’s exhausting.
“Are you upset?”
I laugh. “Yes.”
“Can you tell me why?”
Silence. Then, “Because she died.” Dr. Marques looks at me. She wants more. There’s more of an answer here and it’s coming together in my mind, in my chest, and becoming words. “And because I never got to tell her how fucked up she was, and now she’s gone and I’m the one who has to deal with it.”
Heat creeps into my face and I look at Dr. Marques. She nods in that way that means keep going.
“I didn’t get to say that, but I wanted to so many times and now I can’t. And I’m pissed that I want to tell her she was fucked up. I know it’s because she went through so much. But she never explained anything. Never. So it made me feel fucked up. And that’s how it always was. She was fucked up, she did fucked-up things, but I, I was the one who felt fucked up. It’s not fair.”
Dr. Lopez nods again. “It’s not,” she says. “But it’s certainly not too late for you.”
And I start to cry. Because I cry all the time now.
And I think of how my whole life, I fought against being like my mother, surrounding herself with false love. And I think of Shelly, dwelling in that big house all alone, not letting anyone in.
What would happen to me?
“I don’t want to hate her. I don’t want to be full of hate,” I say through my tears. “I want to forgive her. But…”
“What makes it so hard to forgive her, Dani?”
Silence.
“She never asked,” I say finally. “Her father did wrong by her, but my mom…she did wrong by me.”
Silence.
“And she never asked for my forgiveness. She didn’t even think to ask. And now she’s off the hook. But I have to forgive her even though I hated her. Because…”
Silence.
“Because what, Dani? Why do you want to forgive her? Try to put the feelings into words.”
“Because…” Because forgiving her will make me feel better. Because somehow it means we were really mother and daughter. She really gave birth to me. Once, she really carried me in her arms. Once, she really…loved me.
“Because…I loved her.”
“Okay.”
“I loved her.”
Dr. Marques nods.
“And because I just…wanted to be enough.”
“Enough for what?”
“I don’t know….” Silence. Enough so that it wouldn’t matter that I made her into something maybe she didn’t want to be. A mother. Enough so that she changed her mind. Enough so that all that happened before I was born was worth me, was worth me being born.
“Enough for what?”
Silence.
Enough so she wouldn’t hate me.
“Just enough. I wanted to be enough.”
Dr. Marques nods again and the session is over.
Paulo is in my room. The bear head is in the corner.
“You gonna keep that?” he asks.
I look at it. I took it out of the closet last week. I don’t know why I want it somewhere where I can see it as soon as I walk into the room. It makes Shelly uneasy; I can see the way her eyes brush over it when she comes in my room for some reason or other. But she doesn’t tell me to get rid of it.
“I guess,” I tell Paulo. He sits down on my bed and looks at it.
“Has he come back?” he says.
I shake my head.
“Are you worried he will?”
I remember the way the bear fell into that great hole. The way I’ve tried to conjure him up and he doesn’t come.
“No.”
I sit down next to Paulo and stare at the fuzzy head. The open mouth.
“How’d you get through it?” I ask him.
“What?”
“Your parents.”
Paulo takes a deep breath. “I’m not through it,” he says. “It’s part of me. Sometimes it still feels huge and fresh, and sometimes it feels like it happened to someone else. But…” He smiles.
It makes me smile, the way Paulo smiles.
“What?”
“It’s stupid.”
“Tell me.”
He looks at me, his eyes filled with sadness.
“I figure I can’t change it. And it can make me good or bad, but I want to be good. I want to have good in my life. I want to be el valiente.”
“El valiente…”
He laughs, poses like he has a sword in his hand, and looks to one side like some kind of warrior.
I laugh, and he looks at me and suddenly says, “Dani, you’re beautiful.”
I look away, because no one has ever told me I’m beautiful. And the way he says it, the way he looks at me, makes me believe him, this guy I have feelings for and who actually seems to care for me. I shake my head.
“You are…,” he says. And he brings his face close to mine and presses his lips against my lips. The way we kiss, it’s as if we are breathing together, and I think, I want to have good in my life too. Maybe I can be el valiente too.
I can face the world and all it gives me.
I can carry it on my shoulders and still stand.
I can remember her without hating her.
I can know that somewhere, sometime, I was—am—loved.
Paulo pulls away. “I remember the first day I saw you,” he says.
My mind flashes with images of the sun, the store, Paulo, and pink.
I look down, remembering.
“Hey,” he says suddenly. “I want to do something.” I think he means go somewhere, but he gets up and grabs the bear head.
“Can I borrow this?”
“What?”
“I’ll give it back. I just…I want to do something. And it’s just for you.”
I look at the bear head, the way it’s tucked under Paulo’s arm. I don’t think I want it out of my sight.
“It’ll just be for a day…two days. And I’ll bring it back. Please.”
“Okay….”
“Great.” He kisses me again. “I’ll give it back in two days…maybe three….”
“Three?”
“I promise…I just…You’ll see.” He makes his way to the door.
“Now?” I want him to stay.
“Yeah, I’ll…it’s a surprise.”
And he’s out the door and gone.
Three days later, the bear head is back. In the corner of my room. Like it never left. Paulo dropped it off at night, didn’t even come in, just handed it to me and told me we’d meet up after school the next day.
“Okay, now will you tell me what’s going on?” I ask him when I get off the school bus and he is there, waiting for me.
“Not yet.”
Jessie and Chicken look at us and smile like they’re in on the secret.
They watch, walking backward and blocking their eyes from the sun, as Paulo and I drive off in the opposite direction, the dust an orange screen between us.
“Where are we going?” I ask.
Paulo doesn’t look at me, just keeps driving, his eyes on the road. “You’ll see.”
We head toward Deming, away
from the border. We don’t stop until we get to some buildings on the side of the road, buildings I’ve never bothered to find out about. They just stand there, in the middle of nowhere, abandoned.
“Here?” I ask Paulo.
He slows down, stops, puts the truck in park, and shuts off the engine.
“Yep,” he says. He gets out of the truck and goes around to the back, gets a box I didn’t notice before, and gestures for me to follow him.
As we walk, he tells me about the place. “This was an old movie set. They shot Sonny Boy here, this crazy movie with David Carradine, back in the late eighties. You ever seen it?”
I shake my head. “But I know who David Carradine is.”
He smiles. “Cool. Anyway, the movie studio built the set hoping to film more movies here. But that’s the only one that was.”
“Is it any good?”
Paulo gets this look on his face like his head is going to explode.
“It’s one of the most fantastically bizarre movies I’ve ever seen. But yeah, it’s good. The fact that a lot of people disagree makes me love it even more. It’s just crazy, with this kid who gets his tongue cut out and…” He explains the movie. I love the way he looks as he tells me everything about it. How his face and his whole body grow more animated, like movies are blood, the essence of life.
I want to tell him I love him, and then I feel stupid, so I say, “So what, now the set is just here?”
Paulo nods. “Yep, crew packed up and left and we got this.”
I look around. “Are we allowed to be here?”
“Of course. Why wouldn’t we be?”
He heads toward a patio with a large, cream-colored stucco wall.
“Right here,” he says, putting the box down. I watch as he pulls a blanket out of the box, then a computer, wires, and extension cords, and what looks like a projector.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
“I’ll be right back,” he says, and before I can ask anything else, he takes off running.
I look around. At the crumbling walls, the way this particular spot is basically a three-walled room with a half ceiling and a cement floor. There is a cutout for a door, but no door. From the outside, the set looks like an old Southwestern structure, but this side is completely unfinished, empty and bare but shaded.
I see Paulo making his way back, dragging a generator. He sets it up far away from me and plugs the projector and computer into it.
I watch as he turns the empty box around, sets the projector on top of it, and then looks at me nervously.
“What the hell are you doing?” I ask, laughing at the elaborate setup. “Is it the Carradine flick? We could’ve watched it at my house.”
He laughs and shakes his head. “Nah, nothing like that. I mean…I wanted to show you it here”—he gestures at the desert—“in the middle of nowhere. In the most desolate of places. Because…there’s something beautiful about you seeing it out here.”
He’s fidgety and I wait to see if he says more. Finally, he reaches over and grabs my hand. In that moment I think of how when Paulo grew a new heart, he grew a beautiful one.
He looks at me and says, “I’m really glad I met you. I’m glad you’re here.”
I’m embarrassed and touched and I can feel myself getting hot the way I do when I don’t know what to do.
“I’m glad I met you, too,” I tell him, and I think what these months would’ve been like without him. I never looked to him for saving. I was never going to be my mother. He didn’t save me. But he was there when I needed someone.
He looks at me and says, “This is for you.”
And he starts the movie.
The first time I see her, I’m watching Pulp Fiction and I’ve got the newspaper spread out on the counter. I’m reading the terrible news about the border and the drugs and the guns….
Paulo is narrating and there’s a shot of him at the gas station, just like I saw him that day. He’s even wearing the same clothes. There’s a newspaper in front of him and then close-ups of the newspaper, the date…quick cuts to the violent headlines about murders and found corpses and the newspaper stack piling up, up, up. Then back to Paulo, standing at the counter.
I try not to be apathetic about that shit, because apathy is dangerous and it’s easy to be that way when violence is constant. I look up because if you look out at the land, at the orange earth and blue sky, you can leave some room in your brain to think about the world being beautiful instead of so fucked.
The screen fills with fast-forward shots of orange earth and blue skies, flowers growing, and the sun rising and setting.
So I’m reading the paper when I look up to glance outside and that’s when I see her. Walking toward the gas station, all stumbling and shaky.
I watch as Jessie comes on-screen, wearing jean shorts and a yellow T-shirt, just like I was wearing that day…I didn’t even remember until just now. I feel my heart beating faster, anticipating and not knowing what will appear on the screen next.
I saw this movie once, I forget which one it was, where this guy suddenly sees the girl of his dreams. Shit, that’s because it’s every movie, right?
Clips of movies with couples meeting romantically follow, as Paulo continues to narrate.
The whole slow-motion bit, as the guy is dumbstruck and the camera zooms in on the girl laughing with someone or at something, pushing her hair behind her ears all shy-like, and then it zooms in on the idiot guy just standing there and staring until the girl suddenly looks right at him. Only at him.
That’s how it happens in shit movies, and that’s why they’re shit. That’s not the way things go down when you’re out in the middle of nowhere.
Back to a shot of Paulo at the gas station counter.
No, no, this went down so different. She walks in looking like she’s come straight out of hell. Like a fucked-up heavy-metal song.
More fast-forward shots that feel chaotic and out of sync as the camera tries to zoom in on Jessie, on me.
She’s red and sweaty and her eyes are dull and her hair flies around her like birds have been pulling at the strands. And she walks up and down the aisles, staring at everything on the shelves. But she’s empty. An emptiness that comes through in her eyes.
Shot of Paulo watching me.
And then she steals gum.
I watch as Jessie pockets the gum just like I did, the little plastic squares tucked between her fingers and then slid into her pocket. I watch as she walks down some more aisles and then out the door, as she peels a piece of gum open and puts it in her mouth.
And then she goes in the desert and fucking passes out.
Shit…now, that’s how it happens in a Robert Rodriguez or Quentin Tarantino movie. That’s how it happened to me. That’s how I fall for her.
Shot of Paulo’s face, close-up, and then he grabs a water bottle and runs out of the gas station.
And then a shot of me, coming in and drinking soda.
Another shot of me, taking the calendar and more gum.
I don’t say anything to her because that’s the way my guy in a movie would play it. I just watch her steal and then I watch her go. Because I know I’ll see her again.
Another shot of me, looking over at him.
Another shot of me, standing in the desert.
A shot of the sun going down as I stand staring at it.
Then the sun rising on me.
And then a shot of a pair of feet in dusty sneakers walking.
And walking.
The sound of gravel and dust.
And more walking, fast and slow, fast and slow.
Until finally the sneakers stop.
I knew when I met her, I knew I’d make a movie about it all.
The camera pans over, and suddenly the bear head comes into view.
But the bear has flowers where its eyes should be. Flowers in every color coming out of its mouth. Petals and sugar skulls surround it.
All that was ferocious about it h
as disappeared. Now it’s this thing of strange beauty.
But this is as far as I can take it. This is what I’ve witnessed. The rest, only she knows.
The camera pans back to the dusty sneakers and then zooms out until both the bear head and sneakers are in the shot. And then it fades to black.
—
I sit there, looking at the stucco wall. I feel how my body has tensed, how my fists are clenched so hard my hands hurt. And I tell myself to breathe because I don’t think I will otherwise.
We sit in silence. We sit with only the sound of the generator in the background.
We sit and we breathe.
I finally look over at Paulo and I see how hard it is for him not to say anything. I can see how he wants to ask me if I liked it, if I know why he shot some of the angles the way he did, if I noticed the lotería cards he placed in some of the scenes that only I would ever understand. I know he wants to ask me everything, but I can’t speak. I can’t say anything at all.
So I kiss him. And I kiss him. And I kiss him.
The next morning, Shelly is at the kitchen table when I walk in.
“Long night?” I ask her. If she’s up it’s because she never went to bed after returning from her night shift.
She nods but says nothing, just looks at me like she did when I first got here.
“What’s wrong?” I ask, tensing up.
She shakes her head. “Nothing. I was just thinking…I’ve been here my whole life. Never even been on a plane.”
I wait. It’s not like her to be indirect or stretch out whatever is on her mind.
“I was thinking…you have a couple of days off from school coming up. We could go to Florida.”
I take a deep breath. Florida. My mind instantly fills with the ocean. But I don’t want to be there. For now I want to stay where it is bare, where there is nothing to hide from. Where there is hierbabuena. Where bears have been buried and sprouted flowers.
I start shaking. I can feel my arms and legs being pumped with adrenaline that is supposed to make me stronger but somehow makes me feel weak and shaky.
“Florida…,” I whisper.
Shelly nods.
I’m worried we will become nomads. I’m worried this is the beginning of a bunch of apartments that will be too small, of houses that will be too big. Of pools and large backyards that meet with forests and hide bears.
Because of the Sun Page 17