When Isael left to use the bathroom, Henry stopped, standing over me, and said, “Thank you.”
I stared at him, stunned. “I was supposed to be watching them,” I whispered.
Eva Posidas clicked her tongue. “Los niños estaban conmígo. Permití que ellos jugaran afuera. Nada es su culpa. Ella tiene nuestras gracias por encontrar a Luisa.” She patted my knee once then knitted her fingers together again and pressed them into her lap.
I looked at Henry.
“She’s upset, the English goes. She says it wasn’t your fault,” he said. “They were supposed to be with her, she let them play outside. She appreciates what you did for Luisa.”
“I didn’t do much,” I mumbled through the heat of anger toward the old woman for her carelessness and her stoicism.
His index finger touched my arm. “You were there. You kept her alive.”
“Such that it is,” I said, rubbing the palm of my hand along the spot he’d touched.
Eva Posidas made a small whiffy sound and moved one hand through the air before it settled back into her lap. “A Sarita se la está comiendo el temor y ella no puede encontrar en símisma el perdón y tener esperanza. Ella piensa que entiende mucho, pero ella sabe poco. Ella nunca vivirá bien hasta que entienda que nadie lo puede tener todo o lo entiende todo. Ella piensa que es fuerte, pero ella es débil. Sólo al abrazar nuestra debilidad podemos ser fuertes.”
I’d looked at Henry as soon as I heard my name. “What did she say?”
He watched Isael approach us from the hallway. “You give up too easily and you try too hard.”
“Jesus! Who do you people think you are?” But I said it softly, for now Isael was in front of us, his eyes checking my face again. I gave him a tired smile. “It’s okay, Isael. Promise.” He nodded, but I knew he didn’t believe me. I didn’t blame him. I didn’t believe me either.
I sat there, my body aching and restless, thinking about Eva Posidas’s long rush of words and Henry’s short translation: you give up too easily and you try too hard. What did that mean? It was a paradox, unsolvable. And what else had Doña Eva said that Henry hadn’t translated?
Just when I thought I couldn’t spend one more minute in that room, Jose came down the hall, his hands jammed deep into his pockets. Isael ran to him, and he pulled the boy into a tight hug before he stood and told us that Luisa was alive.
Her heart was beating, but she couldn’t breathe on her own; an EEG showed brain activity; although the wound to her head itself was not deep, there was a great deal of swelling around the brain; she was in a coma; StarFlight would take her to a major trauma center in Las Cruses later that evening. There was hope, Jose said; we all needed to pray.
I slipped out as everyone gathered around him. The sun was disorienting; I’d expected it to be dark outside.
The street where I lived was deserted except for Penny Face sitting on his bench, staring at nothing. I got out of my car and walked across the street, pulled toward him despite myself. His eyes seemed to track me as I approached, but it was a trick of the light and shadows. There was no comprehension, no intelligence, no one at home inside those eyes. I squatted down on my heels in front of him. Saliva had crusted in one corner of his mouth, and his body odor reminded me of a mixture of wet river mud and cockroach-infested apartments I’d worked calls in.
“What do you know, Penny Face?” I said softly. “What’s chasing you?”
He just stared at me, those blue watery eyes with nothing in them.
“Luisa, you know her? The little girl across the street? She was hurt today. Badly. She says you talk to angels. I think you see something else, don’t you?” I tapped him on the shin.
A hot flush ran through me, and I stumbled to my feet and stepped back as briefly, quicker than a finger snap, Penny Face was present, here, seeing me, a mind processing information, and then, even quicker, so quick I thought I might have imagined it, his lips turned up slightly into some semblance of smile, a horrible, familiar smile. And then he was gone, blank again, the wind rustling the leaves on the ground, and my stomach clenched tighter than steel.
I crossed back over to my house, trying to quell the tremble in my body, the dryness in my mouth. The empty plate that had held my lunch still sat on the back stoop of my house; the back door was still open. The ash gray cat had disappeared. My stomach twisted and turned. I stood for a minute looking up at the quiet hills beyond my house, taking deep breaths before I put the dish in the sink, opened the can of red paint, stirred it, and started painting the half wall in the kitchen. It was unabashedly red.
I’d just finished the first coat and sat down on the porch with a cigarette and beer, looking everywhere but at Penny Face, when Henry pulled into my driveway. He got out of his truck and walked slowly up the sidewalk.
“Want a beer?” I asked, lifting mine toward him. “There’s more in the fridge.”
He shook his head. “I don’t drink.”
“Really. You look like a drinking man.”
He reached out and wiped a finger across my cheek and held it out to me.
“Smoke. Burns my eyes.” I used the heels of both hands to wipe my cheeks and jaw dry.
“Uh-huh. Should quit smoking then.” He reached out a hand. His palm was large and deeply lined, the fingers long and narrow with little hair on the knuckles. His nails were clipped close; one had a fading black spot that covered half the nail bed.
“What?”
“Let’s go for a drive.”
“Right.” I didn’t move.
“I’m not the biting kind.”
“I’ve heard that one before.”
“Trust your instincts.” He smiled slightly.
I thought of Luisa’s comment about the police taking him away, about a woman and baby dying. “Where to?”
“Something I want to show you.”
I shook my head at the ground. “Henry.” After a minute I looked up at him standing there steadily, waiting. I looked at the lines around his eyes and mouth, the slight stubble starting to sprout on his chin and cheeks, his hand still hovering in front of my face. I took his hand, warm and dry and firm, and let him pull me to my feet. “Let me close up the house.” I went inside, closed the back door, put a flannel shirt on over my tank top and jeans, laced up my hiking boots, then took a box down from the closet shelf and tucked the one gun I hadn’t been able to bury, a .38 Chief’s Special, in a small belt holster, into my waistband. I buttoned the shirt up partway and went back onto the front porch, locked the front door. Henry was in his truck, the engine running. I slid into the passenger seat and fastened my seat belt. “Okay,” I said, feeling as if I had a foot in two worlds—the past and the present—and neither of those worlds willing to let me be. “Show me what you want to show me.”
When he brought the truck to a stop thirty minutes later, I didn’t move. My stomach was a hot coil.
“The locals call it Moon Mountain.” Henry pointed toward the hill that wanted to be a mountain. “The back side is scarred and puckered, just like the moon. Not much grows there.” He got out of the truck and looked at me. “Coming?”
I hesitated.
“What are you scared of?”
“I’m not scared.”
“You brought a gun.” He pointed toward my waist. “Most people carry them because it makes them feel big or they’re scared.”
I shifted forward and sideways in my seat. “Guns have never made me feel big. And I’m not scared. I’m in the woods with a man I don’t really know. I’d say it was prudent.”
He shrugged, grabbed a bottle of water and shoved it in his back pocket, and slammed the truck door closed.
I followed him into the woods, relaxing slightly when he took a path that ran perpendicular to where I’d buried the tarp. We hiked steadily for twenty minutes on a trail that cut up sharply through mostly pine trees. The sun had dipped well below the tree line, and the air was much cooler here. I kept my eyes on his back and his hands, tucked my elbow ag
ainst my waist several times. My body ached, my stomach burned, and my breath came in short, hard gasps by the time we rounded a bend and came down into a small clearing.
My stomach flipped once, and I took in a deep breath. We were surrounded by tall, slender trees. Sunlight filtered through golden leaves that danced and fluttered, like thousands of pale butterflies, but with a soft clattering noise. The trunks were a light gray, almost white, with mottled darker patches. I reached forward and touched one; it was both cool and warm.
“Populus tremuloides,” Henry said. “The common name is quaking aspen, but everyone just calls them aspens. They’re more common in the northern part of the state. This is the only stand in the county. The elevation is high enough and cool enough for them to thrive.”
I looked up through the branches. “Seems more like dancing than quaking.”
“Quaking isn’t necessarily negative, is it? You can quake with joy as much as you can from fear.”
When I looked over at him, he was smiling at me, that compassionate half-smile, the tiny sugar lines folded up near his eyes. And his eyes, full and tender, seeing me. Too much there, in his eyes, for me to stand. Tears close to the surface burned again, as quick and as hard as the bile roiling in my stomach. I turned away, trying to bite back the waves of nausea, gagged twice. I bent over and retched, again and again, sobbing as I did, furious and defeated, one hand out on a trunk supporting me, and then Henry was by my side, his hand cupping my forehead. I tried to pull away, but he held me firm, whispering, “It’s okay, let it come, just let it come.”
My knees buckled, and I sank to the ground on all fours. I cried long past the time I stopped throwing up. Henry kept his arms around me, and eventually I relaxed against him. The leaves fluttered above us, a million muted wind chimes. Every cell in my body felt like heavy cotton batting.
I pushed myself up, took the water bottle he offered, and rinsed and spit several times before drinking. The water felt good against the back of my throat. I sat down, lit a cigarette, and closed my eyes. I was conscious of the heat of his body next to mine. “Well, I feel like an idiot.”
“Welcome to the human race.” His tone was mild and gentle.
“Yeah.”
“It’s more than Luisa, isn’t it?”
“It’s enough,” I said.
The trees fell silent. I could hear birds calling and answering, the shuffle of living things around us. I felt silly, suddenly, for bringing my gun. This man was not going to hurt me. I remembered the hesitation I’d felt the night I’d buried my police gear, the fear that made me hold one gun back, just in case. In case of what, I wondered now. That life was behind me, and I was going to have to find a way out of it. Into what, I had no idea. But it involved more than burying equipment and relics from a past life, that much I was beginning to grasp.
“That old man across the street from you,” Henry said, “anyone ever told you about him?”
I opened my eyes, thrown by his question, still lost in my own thoughts. He was tracing a stick through the leaves. “Penny Face?” I shook my head, as much to shake away the memory of the glint of recognition in his watery blue eyes when I’d come back from the hospital.
He looked over at me briefly and smiled. “Good name for him. Lewis Jones. Do you like stories?”
I felt a rush of déjà vu and eyed him warily. “Depends.”
“On what?”
“The point of the story.”
He cocked his head slightly and expelled a short, soft breath. “Doesn’t it exhaust you?”
“What?”
“Being so guarded all the time?”
Irritation and something deeper swept through me again, and then it was gone. “What is it you want from me, Henry?”
“I want you to understand.”
“What?”
“We aren’t alone.”
The earnest look on his face made me laugh. “Jesus.”
“What’s so funny?”
“You. Sounding like a sci-fi movie: we are not alone. We’re all alone, Henry. Luisa back there fighting for her life, Marisela and Jose frantic with worry and probably guilt, Doña Eva and her stupid stoicism, Isael seeing his sister like that, even Penny Face howling at whatever, and you with the need to feel better about yourself by taking care of others. Each one of us. Alone with our demons. And there’s not a damn thing anyone else can do to help us.”
“You’re very wrong, Sarah.”
I wanted to be angry, but there wasn’t a patronizing tone to even one of his words. “Are you always so certain of everything?”
“Only the few things I know for sure.”
I was tired, worn down; it seemed worthless to argue with him. I flicked my hand toward him and said, “So tell me Penny Face’s story,” and then stared at the leaves on the ground as he talked.
“He had three boys. Young, not a one over ten. He was gone a lot, some kind of sales job. His wife was one of Doña Eva’s sisters. She wasn’t real healthy, mentally fragile, a skittish girl from what I’ve been told. He came home one weekend and the boys were dead. She’d shot each of them in the head while they slept.”
I winced, thought of Penny Face’s eyes again, his absent self. They would never go away, those images; they’d always be with him. I’d run from them too, if I were him. “What happened to her?”
“State mental institution. She died not long after. That was nearly fifty years ago, and Lewis still blames himself, thinks he should have seen it coming, gotten her some help, gotten the boys away from her.”
“Ah.” I wondered again who Penny Face was really cursing with those wails—himself, his wife, fate? “That proves my point. No one can take his pain away. He’s lost inside it. Alone.”
“You’re wrong. You’ve seen it. All of us out there with him. Why else could we quiet him?”
“But he still does it,” I pointed out. “He sits like a statue when he isn’t wailing. You haven’t cured him.”
“Cure is relative. It’s a choice, isn’t it, to fall into that hole or stay above it? There is some choice.” He gave a half-laugh and folded his arms against his chest, his shoulder brushing mine. “And who’s to say that his howling isn’t a climb toward sanity? I’m sometimes tempted to join him myself.”
There was an invitation in that last sentence, but I let the silence stretch out between us, my mind chattering, arguing. The sun had disappeared, and now the golden leaves appeared almost translucent in the dusk. “Luisa—” I stopped, briefly seeing her again in the ravine, feeling her draped across my body, sticky finger poking at my face. I took a deep breath. “Luisa mentioned something about a woman and baby dying.”
His smile was tender and bitter at the same time; the upper lip curled halfway, but soft. The lines of his body softened too, and I realized he’d been waiting for this, that this was really the reason he’d brought me out here. It wasn’t about me at all. Or Penny Face. It was about him. Everyone wants to tell their own story, eventually.
“Veronica. My wife. Marisela’s cousin. She was pregnant with our first child.” His fingertips moved restlessly across his legs. “I used to drink pretty heavily back in those days.” Another long pause. “We were on our way back from dinner, out on Route 24. Another car was in the oncoming lane. He was drunk too. She was killed instantly, she and the baby. The other driver and I walked away.”
Henry’s story wasn’t a new one. I’d seen variations on that story over the years. Usually someone walked away, and often that someone was the person at fault. All the world’s tragedies, I thought, big and small, were too much to grasp, to hold onto. They could dissolve me to boneless weeping if I dwelled on them too long, so I didn’t. I didn’t even go close. But an individual’s tragedy was another matter, especially when it was staring you in the face. It didn’t matter how inadequate it sounded or how inadequate I felt, but “I’m sorry,” were the only words I knew to offer.
“I’m sorry,” I said. I put a hand lightly on his knee. “I’
m very sorry.”
His hands moved slowly, restlessly, over his legs, like a living creature in motion simply because it was alive. “They couldn’t determine who crossed the line first, who was at fault, him or me. We were both legally drunk. So we both went to jail. Four years. That house you live in? It was ours. When I got out of jail a couple of years ago, I moved back in. Doña Eva had left it just as it was.” He took a deep breath. “But she told me I had to go, that I needed to find another place. One of the few times she’s been cruel to me. It was hard, seeing them, Marisela and the rest of the family, knowing they must blame me. And then last year Doña Eva invited me to a family dinner. It was awkward at first. Always an edge there, of course. But, if anything, I’ve been closer to them than before, when Veronica was alive.” He paused again, then said softly, “The hardest part was learning to forgive myself.”
“And have you?” I asked very carefully.
There was that smile again, the one that filled his eyes. We looked at each other in the falling darkness, and I felt a slight tug inside.
“Have you?” His tone was kind and barely audible over the noise of the leaves.
I let the protest die on my lips and thought about Gwen and Doris Whitehead. I saw Jeannette’s face again, Vince falling backward into the water, Roger’s body on the ground. I felt the muscle memory of Luisa’s body across my legs and sent a short, fervent prayer upward: please spare her. I thought about Penny Face and his howls and my police gear buried under the red dirt at the base of this mountain, and I knew that my own story was one I would tell only to myself, but over and over, for the rest of my life.
Anything You Say Can and Will Be Used Against You Page 26