by Matt Burgess
At around 3:30 in the afternoon, Alfredo staggers into the apartment. Legs quivering, he bangs into the doorframe. His keys slip out of his hand. He is home an hour later than expected, which would normally elicit from Isabel a certain set of questions, but she finds herself distracted by the sweat pouring off his reddened face. He carries—or attempts to carry—an enormous cardboard box. A stack of today’s mail slides across the top of the box, and when Alfredo’s knees buckle, an envelope corner stabs him in the throat.
“Oh my God,” Isabel says. She holds Christian Louis’s hands in the air, while he, with the grace of a stringed puppet, puts one foot in front of the other. He tries to get at his father, and Isabel follows. “Tell me that’s not a birthday present,” she says.
“It’s not a birthday present,” he says.
“Well, what the H is it?”
“What’s H mean?”
“Hell,” she whispers.
“We can’t say ‘hell’ in front of him?” he asks, setting the box down on the floor. “It’s in the Bible.”
“Alfredo,” she says. “What’s in the box?”
Seemingly too eager to go looking for the scissors, Alfredo uses his keys to slit the packing tape. When he gets the cardboard flaps open, he gives a chunk of Styrofoam to Christian Louis, who sticks it right in his mouth. Alfredo reaches into the box and pulls out—tada!—another box. This second box doesn’t look like it conceals more boxes. It is a self-contained animal, made out of plastic and metal, with a three-pronged plug for a tail and a pair of accordion wings.
“An air conditioner?” Isabel says.
“An air conditioner,” Alfredo says triumphantly. “I figure, what kind of environment do mosquitoes love the most? Hot and humid, yeah? I figure, where does heat go in a six-story apartment building? To the top, right? To our floor.”
Isabel checks the box for dents, to see if it fell off the back of a truck.
“How much?” she says.
“Don’t worry about it.”
“I worry about it. How much? Where’d you get the money?”
“It was mad cheap. It’s August. Ain’t no one buying air conditioners in August.”
“Well,” she says, pulling the Styrofoam out of Christian Louis’s mouth, “I hope you got a real smart place to put it, because it ain’t fitting in them windows.”
Alfredo looks up at the windows, tilts his head to the side.
“It’ll fit,” he says.
He grabs a magazine from the stack of today’s mail and carries it with him to the futon. Leaving behind him, in his wake, bits of cardboard and torn-up tape and plastic wrapping and Styrofoam blocks and Styrofoam crumbs and the air conditioner itself, all over Isabel’s floor, expecting, as he always expects, someone else to clean up his messes. Christian Louis, whose disloyalty knows no bounds, toddles over to his father. Alfredo picks him up, holds him in his lap with an arm wrapped around his belly, with a soft and easy tenderness. For not the first time in this past year, Isabel feels jealous of her own son. The baby books warned her that this happens to fathers—they look at the nine-month tenancy, they look at the breastfeeding, they look at the close bond between mama and child, and the resentment wheels start a-churning—but Isabel didn’t read anything about mothers envying their children. You kidding? Good luck trying to find “maternal resentment” in a baby book index. But why shouldn’t she feel jealous? When Alfredo holds Isabel it is stiffly, at a distance, as if he had a cold he didn’t want to give her.
She has repeatedly told him—most often in bed, in the dark, when it is easiest for her to say these kinds of things—that she does not blame him for the incident, for what happened to her. The man who was responsible was responsible. She cannot say it any clearer than that. But there are moments, moments like right now, when Christian Louis is literally out of her hands and her mind can go to work on attacking itself, and she starts wondering if she’s got it all backward. What if Alfredo isn’t worried about Isabel blaming him? What if it’s the other way around? His brother is dead and he blames her. What can she say to that?
In his father’s lap, Christian Louis rips pages out of the magazine. Alfredo looks on indulgently, which annoys not only Isabel, but also, it seems, the white guy on the cover, a cartoon soldier whose face is frozen in teeth-gritted frustration. A video game character probably. The magazine is called GamePro, and according to Alfredo he needs to subscribe because there isn’t anyplace in Corona where a guy can just walk in and buy a magazine. He didn’t explain, however, why a guy who doesn’t own, much less play, a single video game would want the magazine in the first place. But Isabel has some ideas.
Alfredo wrestles a torn-out page from Christian Louis and holds it above his head. The baby—sorry, the toddler—strains to get at it. Forget the Fisher-Price musical learning table, forget the Styrofoam. This page is the only thing he wants. He climbs Alfredo’s chest, grabs at his hair, but Papi lifts the page higher. He’s reading it, and Isabel figures it must be the one page in the magazine devoted to tournament news. Alfredo, she assumes, is looking for Winston’s name. For reasons mysterious to her, Winston and Alfredo haven’t talked in over a year. When male best friends break up—is there a better way to put it?—it’s either over a woman, which can’t be the case here since Isabel would be that woman and God knows Winston’s terrified of her, or it’s over money, a more likely explanation. But not necessarily the correct one. Maybe Alfredo just got tired of trying to convince Winston to quit drugs. Maybe Winston is a pair of concrete boots, and Alfredo felt he had to leave him behind when he left his old lifestyle behind. Maybe Alfredo couldn’t look at Winston without feeling corrosively guilty. (Maybe Isabel is projecting here.) She doesn’t know. She doesn’t know what happened between those two, just as she doesn’t know how much the air conditioner cost, or where he bought it, or how he carried it home, or where he got the money to pay for it. She does know, however, that the more she asks, the less likely he’ll be to provide answers. She watches him crumple the magazine page and toss it onto the floor.
“And who’s cleaning that up?” she says.
“Give me a minute.”
“And the box in the middle of my floor? Maybe you haven’t heard, but I’ve got a birthday party to throw.”
“Where’s the balloons at?” he says, grinning. “I thought there was supposed to be balloons.”
“Are you crazy?” she asks. “Don’t you know they’re a choking hazard? I had a cousin once who—”
“No balloons?” Alfredo says. “No balloons on his birthday?” He spins Christian Louis around, so that he faces his mother. “Lookit,” Alfredo says. “Lookit how sad he is not to have any balloons.”
Spit bubbles up between his lips. He reaches toward her—that’s right, that’s right, he ain’t playing Daddy’s dirty little games—and Isabel tries to take him away, tries to lift him into the air, but Alfredo has hold of his foot.
“Where’s the screwdriver at?” he says. “I’m gonna take the bars out of one of them windows and put in the AC.”
“It’s not gonna fit.”
“It’ll fit.”
It fits. While Alfredo muscles it into the window frame, Isabel worries the AC’s droopy ass will slip out of his hands and pancake some poor soul on the street. But he read the instructions for once. As he puts in the mounting brackets, he almost looks like he knows what he’s doing. He uses the window to anchor the unit, and while that doesn’t exactly seem sturdy enough, Isabel is past the point of doubting his competence. Isabel, as a matter of fact, is officially impressed. Alfredo spreads the accordion wings an inch in each direction—this is a tight fit—and secures them to the window frame. He takes a step back and slaps the top of the AC. It doesn’t budge.
“Not bad, huh?”
“Not bad,” she says.
“Don’t go all gushy on me,” he says, and his thin lips smile. Because she hasn’t asked in a while, because it seems as if she’s no longer interested, he says, “I char
ged it to the Visa.”
“Okay,” she says. With the monthly bills getting fatter and fatter, she and Alfredo had agreed to put a freeze on their credit card spending, but she chooses not to reprimand him here because (1) that he paid with the card means that he did not pay with cash, which means that he did not go out and do something stupid to get that cash; (2) Isabel has made some recent credit card purchases of her own, including, but not limited to, the birthday balloons that are currently hiding at the bottom of the trash can, the birthday cake, the birthday candle, and the musical table birthday present; (3) as he paces in front of his successfully installed air conditioner, Alfredo looks happier than he has in weeks, maybe months, and Isabel needs his good mood to snowball.
“Well what you waiting for?” she says. “Plug it in.”
The machine grumbles to life. Isabel and Alfredo lean toward it, as if welcoming a friendly visitor into their home. In his mama’s arms, Christian Louis struggles to get at this strange new beast, to touch its buttons and flashing green lights, to slide his fingers into its upturned vents.
“Shouldn’t the air be cooler?” she says.
“It needs to warm up.”
“It needs to warm up to get cold?”
Alfredo hooks the hem of his work shirt over the vents. The air impregnates him, swells his shirt so that the buttons seem to be straining. He chuckles, a deep ho ho ho, as if this is what’s expected of all men who’ve been suddenly, stupendously potbellied.
“Get out the way,” Isabel says. “You’re blocking the air.”
“Thought it wasn’t cool enough for you.”
“Move it,” she says.
Alfredo comes close to her, to steal Christian Louis’s nose. “Can you say no more mosquitoes?” he asks. “Can you say no more sweaty balls?”
This is the moment to be terrific, she thinks. With the AC humming. With Christian Louis straining between them, in Mama’s arms but reaching for the thumb in Papi’s fist. This is the moment to tell him everything. May not get a better chance all night.
“It isn’t very cold though, is it?” he says.
“It’s fine,” she says. Like any longtime couple, in order to practice their craft they sometimes switch positions in an argument. “It just needs time,” she says.
“Maybe something’s wrong with the filter.”
“It’s fine,” she says. “Leave it alone.”
Stooped over, squinting, he hits some of the beep-beep buttons on the AC’s console.
“It’s fine,” she says.
He adjusts the temperature. He switches the settings from cool to fan to money saver, and back again to cool. The AC groans with impatience. Alfredo turns it off, stares at it with his hands on his hips. He gives it a light slap, a warning to get its act together, and when he turns it back on, the AC sputters, clears its throat, and then shuts down completely. Just like that. At the same time, the living room light goes out. At the same time, the kitchen light goes out. At the exact same time—when the AC shuts down, and when the kitchen and living room lights go out—the refrigerator stops humming. And the coffeemaker clicks off. And the microwave clock goes dark. And the sound of all the power in the apartment going dead seems somehow louder than the sound of all the power in the apartment alive.
“Goddamnit,” Alfredo says.
“I told—”
“Don’t,” he says. He closes his eyes. “Don’t say a word.”
What do they do first? They do what everyone does first. They try flipping the light switches. With blank expressions on their faces, they flip the switches up and down, well past the point of where it might actually start working. They go hunting for the circuit breaker box—why is it so f-ing hard to locate the circuit breaker in a studio apartment?—and, oh hello, they find it in the cupboard with the pancake mix and the number one birthday candle. How about that? The main circuit breaker is big and black and serious-looking, the mother of all light switches, and it turns over with a satisfyingly loud click. But it doesn’t do any good. The power stays off. They open the fridge and immediately regret opening the fridge, allowing all that cool fog to escape. They take the AC’s fat-headed plug and slide its three prongs into a surge protector, then they take that surge protector and plug it into the wall. They try turning on the AC. Nothing. They try flipping the light switches again.
Outside, cars are honking their horns. Alfredo opens a window and hot air jumps into the apartment. The honking grows louder, angrier. The building across the street is dark, each of its apartments without light, but that might not mean anything. It’s early still, not even five o’clock, and most people haven’t come home from work yet. To get a better look out the window, Alfredo leans forward and bangs his head.
“I can’t fucking—”
“Hey!” Isabel tilts her chin toward Christian Louis, who sits on the carpet and plays with the Styrofoam. “Language please.”
“I can’t get my f-ing head,” Alfredo says, “through that f-ing window with them bars in the way.”
“Well,” Isabel says. “That’s kind of the idea.”
He presses his cheek against the bars. “I think I can maybe see the street corner. Wow. I think the traffic lights are out. This is crazy. Hey—you wanna go outside?”
She comes up behind him, puts her chin on his shoulder. “What if it’s terrorists?” she says.
“In Queens?”
With Isabel still hovering over his shoulder, Alfredo tries calling his parents. The cell phone screen flashes Connecting … Connecting … Connecting, a promise it eventually breaks with Signal Lost. Alfredo redials and gets the same runaround. A call continuously pushed up a mountain, a signal that’s never found. When Alfredo tries again without success, Isabel volunteers her own phone. It was a gift from Alfredo, given to her last June after the incident, and it has only five numbers saved in its memory: Alfredo’s (duh); the video store where she still works part-time; Pizza Sam’s; Peking Kitchen; and the Batista residence, which Alfredo is dialing right now, and which, in a moment of bored rebellion, Isabel labeled “Babysitters R Us.” When the words flash across the screen, Alfredo smirks.
The call goes through. Sort of. It seems to connect—Isabel thinks she might even hear a ring—but then an automated female voice tells them that the network is busy. Whatever that means. Sounding almost bored, almost distracted, as if she were washing her robot hair, the automated voice tells Alfredo to call back later.
He taps the phone against his chin, stares distantly over the top of Isabel’s head. She knows that look. He has officially checked out, transported himself into some past or future self. He walks into the kitchen, and, as Christian Louis had done hours earlier, he rattles the doors to the cupboard under the sink. He asks where the scissors are, so he can cut the duct tape on the handles, and it unfortunately falls to Isabel to tell him that the good scissors are, well, they’re inside the cupboard under the sink.
“Where are the bad scissors?” Alfredo says. “Or do I not want to know?”
“You can use a knife,” she says.
“That’s why all the knives are dull?”
“The knives aren’t dull,” she says. “What you want in there anyway?”
A direct question. How foolish of her. She sits on the futon, watches Alfredo saw at the duct tape with his massive wad of house keys. He has his back to her, his shoulders hunched near his ears, and while Isabel can’t see his face, she’s pretty sure his tongue is clamped down between his teeth. He throws open the cupboard doors. He pulls out all the candles—all the pillars and floaters and votives and tea-lights—and stuffs them into a blue plastic grocery bag.
“What the fuck?” she says.
“Language!” he says, sounding delighted to have scored so easy a point.
“Those are mine,” she says.
“Don’t worry,” he says without turning around. “I’m gonna leave some here.”
“Those are my candles.”
“Don’t be selfish, all right
? I’m taking them to my parents. Remember them? You used to live in their house for a year?”
“You can’t be serious,” she says. “You’re leaving?”
“My parents are old, Izzy. The power has gone out. I’m going to go over to their apartment, see if they’re okay.” He fills a second bag with Isabel’s candles. “I’m not being a bad guy here.”
She picks Christian Louis up off the floor and pulls him into her lap. “We’re coming with you.”
“You can’t, I’ll be going way too fast.” He snaps his fingers. “I’m going to run over there.”
“But it’ll be dark soon.”
“Exactly,” he says. “Exactly my point.”
“But,” she says, and Christian Louis grabs at her mouth, as if he wants to shut her up, keep her from saying something she can’t take back. She bites down on his fingers, softly, then not so softly. “We have to sing ‘Happy Birthday,’ ” she says. “We have to open presents. We have to eat the cake before it melts.”
Alfredo comes out of the kitchen to stand over them. His stomach grumbles; the bags hang heavy in his hands. Isabel won’t say anything, and he won’t look at her. He stares down at the carpet, afraid, she thinks, to see the chastising scar zigzagged under her eye. In the movie version of her life … no, no, no, no, no, no, no … she promised herself that she’d leave that line of thinking behind. She doesn’t live up on the screen, she lives in this life, in a hot, powerless studio apartment in Corona, Queens. She seizes Christian Louis’s wrists. She can’t have him reaching toward his father. Alfredo needs to know he’s leaving not two people but one unit, united against him. She jiggles the baby on her knee. She shoves her nose in his hair, smells the sweet soft crown of his head. Baby powder. Ripe apricots. No-tears shampoo. When Alfredo walks away, the glass of the votive candles clinks together, as if they were toasting to someone’s health, as if they were wishing the world’s travelers a hearty bon voyage.