Forcing Amaryllis

by Louise Ure

  “I’ve been trying to place it, but can’t come up with anything. Have we met before? Maybe at Presidio Grill?” he said, naming one of the better restaurants in town.

  I glanced down and started to form a response, but nothing came out. My arm seemed suddenly hot where he held me, and I heard Amy’s nightmare screams echo in my head. I swallowed the gasp building in my throat.

  3

  I don’t know how I made it out of the jail without causing a scene. I remember Kevin’s voice calling me to wait for him, but I ran out of the building and back to my car, stopping only for the obligatory searches by the officers. My fingertips were numb, and I shook with both chills and sweats.

  What had happened back there? For just a moment—standing there at the table with Cates’s hand on my arm—I pictured Amy’s attack as clearly as if I’d been there. And I saw Cates’s hand holding the knife.

  Could Cates really be the Animal, as I had called him all these years? Amy hadn’t known his name and didn’t give me many details about the rape, and I had probably let my all-too-vivid imagination fill in the gaps with wild guesses and vapor-filled assumptions. Now, of course, she couldn’t tell me anything, but I needed to be with her anyway.

  I started the car and headed back to the office to clear my desk and get across town to my sister.

  Saguaro Nursing Home sat right across the street from the Tucson Medical Center on Grant Road. The proximity was only cosmetic; they shared no staff or medical resources, but I felt better having a world-class hospital this close to Amy.

  It had taken hours before I was free of Jessica and her demands. I didn’t arrive at the nursing home until the end of visiting hours, but the staff was used to me by now and let me in almost anytime. My heart pounded with the urgency of seeing her, but I still drove twice around the lot and searched for a space under a streetlamp and within sight of the front door.

  “Ms. Gentry, when can we expect this month’s check? …” Damn her. Why did the nursing home’s business manager have to be working so late?

  I waved at the woman as if she had simply called out a greeting and turned left down the first corridor. The marbled green linoleum usually gave me a peaceful and cool feeling, even in the heat of summer. Tonight it seemed dank and mossy, as slippery as my thoughts.

  Amy’s room was the fifth on the left, with a window looking out to a small garden area and the front parking lot. Sometimes I stood outside the window after a visit, calling quiet encouragement to her the way I’d done when we were kids sneaking out of the house at midnight to go toilet paper somebody’s house.

  I took a deep breath to calm myself, eased open the door, and breathed in the cool, antiseptic smell of the room. A small night-light glowed at knee level, casting soft shadows up the wall. The roses I’d brought last week from the back garden had died, forgotten, in a dry vase on the windowsill. Mrs. Pilker, Amy’s nonagenarian roommate, rumbled a snore in the bed closest to the door.

  I tiptoed to the second bed and looked down at my sister. A call button pinged at the other end of the hall, then rubber-soled footsteps moved that direction in response.

  Amy hadn’t changed. Her features were still relaxed into an exemplar of sleep: lineless brow, full, soft lips, and delicate shallow breaths. Her arms were outside the covers and had been positioned by her sides. The stuffed prairie dog and jackrabbit Aunt Giulia had given her were nestled close to her fingertips. Amy’s closed eyes looked sunken—bruised—and her skin had a soft, bloated texture, as if she had been underwater too long.

  She hadn’t opened her eyes for more than two years now, but with each visit I still hoped her smile or grasp would welcome me. I brushed a strand of dark hair off her face and stroked her cheek with the back of my fingers.

  “Amaryllis, my little Flower Bud,” I said, using our mother’s private nickname for her. “How are you this evening? We’ll need to be quiet tonight. Mrs. Pilker is asleep, and you know she needs her beauty rest.” I resettled the stuffed animals higher on the bed around her pillow and, careful not to disturb the IV, tucked her arms under the light blue blanket.

  “Do you mind if we don’t read tonight, Amy?”

  It was an empty question. Except for two euphoric moments of semi-wakefulness, Amy had slept—like a space traveler on an intergalactic journey—for almost seven years. In homage to my mother’s philosophy that possibility becomes fact when you say it out loud, I still insisted that Amy could hear me. We were in the middle of reading Gulliver’s Travels, but I didn’t open the book. The words would only swirl and blur before my eyes tonight.

  “Let’s let the Lilliputians have at him tonight, and we’ll catch up with them later.”

  I leaned forward so that my forearms were cushioned by the edge of the mattress and stroked the shape of Amy’s hand under the blanket. We sat silent for long minutes.

  “Oh, Amaryllis, am I just jumping at shadows? Am I going to keep seeing him around every corner?”

  There was so much I wanted to say to her, and so much I wanted her to say. I stared at the boxy weave of the cotton blanket, remembering the story of Amy’s rape.

  She was nineteen then and rich with the dark, Hispanic beauty of a ripe pomegranate. Amaryllis Del Arte had inherited her father’s Latin coloring, while I carried my father, William Gentry’s, lighter, English genes. She was quick to laugh or flirt and could twirl on one arched foot like a music-box ballerina. She was going to be a nurse.

  My phone rang at two o’clock that morning seven years ago, two hours past the end of Halloween night.

  “Come get me,” Amy had whispered, and told me where she was.

  I jumped into a pair of sweatpants, threw a denim jacket over my pajama top, and ran to the car. It took almost an hour to reach the No-Tell Motel on the outskirts of Nogales, sixty-five miles to the south.

  I pounded on the door to room six. Two minutes passed like an eternity before Amy opened the door. Her right eye was sealed shut, and she clutched a bath towel to her naked body. Blood ran down between her legs.

  “Oh, Amy, what happened?” I sat her on the bed and brought a glass of rust brown water from the bathroom.

  “Attacked,” she said. “Parking lot, leaving the rodeo. He tied me up.” The strips of cloth were still wound around her wrists.

  “He used a knife on me.” She gestured to her lap, and I gasped.

  She had lain in a black corner of the rodeo parking lot for hours, she said, fearful of the pain, the blood, and his return. Only in the early morning hours had she been able to crawl to her car, drive to the closest well-lit haven—a room at the seedy No-Tell Motel—and call me.

  I couldn’t find her purse anywhere. Maybe it still lay in a gravelly rut in the parking lot. Maybe her attacker had it.

  “No doctors,” Amy said between clenched teeth. I paid no attention to her protests and drove to the nearest hospital with Amy’s broken body braced by my arm, her head resting in my lap.

  Amy wouldn’t tell them what had happened, and after a while they quit asking. The attending physician, Dr. Sanji, was a brown, round-faced man with a thick accent that left his syllables as distinct and separate as the pickets on a fence. He knew these wounds were not self-inflicted, but without her help he could take no action. That night he cleaned and sutured and braced, but he couldn’t touch the real damage, the damage to Amy’s soul.

  I brought her home and had the locks changed. Amy’s listed address was different from mine, but she had carried a spare key to my apartment and I had an overwhelming fear that somehow her attacker would find her again.

  After three days Amy could walk without help but would not leave the house. Bruises blossomed like storm clouds across her face and her rib cage.

  I thought if she could talk about the attack, then we might begin to leach it out of her before her heart turned as hard as Tucson’s limestone bed of caliche. But she rarely spoke, preferring to distance herself from that night by hiding behind a wall of silence. It’s not real unless you
say it out loud. We’d learned our lesson well.

  I tried to coax her with her favorite foods: albóndigas soup with its light broth and savory meatballs, pipian de gallina with pumpkinseeds folded into the chile sauce. She shrank into herself, unaffected by hunger or the aromas of cooking.

  Now, looking down at her sleeping form in the nursing home, I wondered again if I could have done something else. Could I have brought her back from the brink of that chasm with more doctors or more love or more time? On Thanksgiving Day, three weeks after the rape, Amy’s near-perfect suicide attempt took all my options away.

  4

  By Saturday morning I had more of a grip on myself. Cates was no rodeo mugger who attacked women in parking lots. He was rich and well educated, and his lawyer was sure he was innocent of these current charges. I was letting my fears elope with my imagination.

  Amy had been raped, but I was the one who now cringed and cowered. I had become the victim without the crime, violated by proxy. Suspecting Cates was another symptom of my disease. I knew that. I conjured up bogeymen behind every tree.

  That still didn’t mean I wanted to spend any more time with Cates. Come Monday I swore I would tell Jessica once and for all that I couldn’t work on the case, and then I’d put him out of my mind.

  But right now I needed someone to calm my jangling nerves. Someone granite-solid and soldier-straight, someone whose voice didn’t go into a higher register when they talked to children or animals. I needed to see Aunt Giulia.

  Try this one,” Giulia said, handing me an empty crossword puzzle grid. “I think I’ve got a winner here. It’s called ‘To Err/Heir/Air is Human.’ All based on homophones, but there are only ten real clues. All the others say ‘sounds like sixty-one across’ or ‘sounds like three down.’”

  Giulia had been supplementing her income for the last two decades by creating mind-numbing crossword puzzles. She was the only person I knew who could tell you the four-letter word for “bacchanalian orgy cry” and could use it in a sentence.

  “Of course, it won’t work on the East Coast,” she said, referring to the new puzzle. “They pronounce one of those ‘errs’ like the sound a Rottweiler makes right before he attacks.” She leaned across the mobile home’s plastic dinette table and shuffled among bills and newspaper clippings until she found her package of Mores. She lit the tip of the thin brown cigarette and drew in a first inhalation as if it were a breath of the purest mountain air. She treated the lighting of a cigarette like a tea ceremony.

  “Did you use hoard and horde?” I asked.

  “And the third one. Here’s another hint to get you started. I also used gamble and gambol.”

  “As if that’s going to be any help.”

  Spinning the crossword puzzle around on the table in front of me, I described meeting Raymond Cates and told Giulia about my frenzied impression that he might be Amy’s attacker.

  “It was his hands,” I said. “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe it was just the situation. He’s accused of having killed a woman by putting a gun inside her and shooting her. That’s not so different from what happened to Amy. I mean, it was a knife and …” I swallowed hard.

  Giulia held her cigarette at chin level between her thumb and forefinger like a Frenchman, and watched my eyes. “What was it about his hands that made you think he was Amy’s attacker?”

  “He’s missing the top half of the ring finger on his right hand.” I pictured that shortened finger resting on my sleeve as the meeting at the jail broke up.

  “So?”

  “Remember Amy’s nightmares those first few days after the attack? She kept saying ‘day-doh’ or something like that. And she never remembered it when she woke up.”

  Giulia rolled the tip of her cigarette in the ashtray. “I know you were trying to make something of it even then. It might have been a name or a street or something she saw that night.”

  I nodded. “But yesterday at the jail, when I saw his hand, it came to me—almost like a seasick feeling. I knew what it meant.”

  Her eyebrows hunched.

  “Dedo. It’s Spanish—finger. Maybe Amy was trying to tell us how to identify him.”

  Giulia sputtered her disbelief. “Why wouldn’t she just have told us there was something strange about his fingers?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Giulia kept shaking her head. “And in Spanish? I know Amy’s bilingual but—”

  “You remember how Papa used to tease her about dreaming in Spanish when she was tiny? He said it was his special gift to her.”

  Giulia smiled at the memory. “Yes, but even if that’s what she meant, there must be a thousand men in Tucson who have something wrong with their hands or fingers.”

  I thought about Mr. Rondo and his missing arm. Between the mines, the ranches, and the cotton crop, there are a lot of ways to hurt yourself in this town. And I wasn’t even sure if Amy had meant a deformed finger, a burned or unsightly hand, or maybe a strong, evil one that held her by the throat. Maybe “day-doh” wasn’t a word at all.

  Giulia ground the butt of the cigarette in the ashtray and rose to pour me coffee. “We’ve had seven years to get used to what happened to Amy. I don’t like it, but it happened. We can still love Amy and take care of her, but we can’t let this rape incapacitate us. It can’t define us. That would mean that he won,” she said.

  I sighed. It seemed so much clearer in my mind than in my explanation to her; so much more real. “This felt different. Maybe because we were at the jail …”

  “Let’s go back to the beginning,” Giulia said, humoring me. “What else do we know about Amy’s attack?”

  We went over the details for the thousandth time. Amy was attacked leaving the rodeo. She said he had a black truck, but she didn’t know what kind it was and she didn’t see the license plate. His belt buckle was silver and shaped like a sun, with rays. Amy had thought he was a cowboy, with his boots and Stetson hat. She said she never got a good look at his face.

  Giulia took notes with a mid-century penmanship that danced across the page like the Rockettes.

  “She said the knife he used had the design of a snake on the handle,” I continued.

  Giulia grimaced, probably remembering Amy’s shudder as she’d tried to translate her dark memories into darker words. “Coral and turquoise, right?”

  “Yep, and she said he called her Sweet Thing.”

  Giulia paused. “Well, there’s not much we can do about a nickname, a knife, or a belt, but I’ll tell you what. I’ve got a friend at the motor vehicle division. I’ll ask her to find out what kind of car Raymond Cates drove seven years ago. We’ll find out that it wasn’t a black pickup truck, and you can go back to a normal life, okay?”

  I nodded. It was good to have Giulia’s levelheaded thinking involved.

  I picked up a faded photo of Amy and me taken in front of the house on Seneca Street when we were girls. Our house was pink stucco, with rounded archways and two cherry red steps leading up to the front porch. It looked like a piggy bank with lipstick on. We played jacks on that red concrete porch until we wore a gray divot in it and the mechanical bounce of the ball could no longer be counted on. Then we graduated to lipstick ourselves. In the photo those colors had faded to a gentle blush.

  Momma had married Franco Del Arte less than a year after the divorce papers showed up. She knew from the first day of my father’s absence that he wouldn’t be back, that he had to seek softer climates and cooler passions. And she knew from the first day she met Franco that he was the man she would spend the rest of her life with. Amy was born that same year, and I found happiness in the role of big sister and six-year-old guardian angel. I was Socrates to a single pupil, a general whose troops numbered one.

  Momma had expected to have a whole garden of children, but we were the only two flowers that grew before she lost control of the car on a stretch of sandy road outside of the aptly named Why, Arizona.

  Aunt Giulia let us sleep through the night rather t
han come tell us our parents had been killed coming back from Mexico. “What could you have done at three o’clock in the morning,” she said, “except be less prepared to face the day?” She took a leave of absence from her job at the Arizona Daily Star, moved into our family home, and set out to learn how to be a mother. She used to joke about acting in loco parentis, but never told us that loco had nothing to do with going crazy.

  I gave Giulia a hug and took a copy of her new puzzle back to the house.

  The rest of the weekend was taken over by mindless errands and time with Amy. I tried balancing my checkbook and gave up after an hour’s hunt for a fourteen-dollar difference. What did it matter? That extra fourteen bucks wouldn’t go far in paying for Amy’s care this month anyway.

  Our parents’ small life-insurance policy had been just enough to pay for their funerals. Giulia still helped as much as she could with Amy’s care, but without insurance it took the bulk of my salary to cover it. And I wasn’t willing to turn Amy over to the state system, even though it would have cost less. There just wasn’t enough hope there.

  I did transfer the balance on my credit card to a new card with a low introductory interest rate. Maybe if I kept moving the money around to new, low-interest cards, I could keep paying for Amy’s hospitalization without pulling more money out of my meager savings account.

  On Sunday I took Giulia to visit Amy. We tucked her limp arms into a new pink nightgown, brushed her hair, filed her nails, and rubbed buttery kukui-nut lotion into her hands, all the while keeping up a running chatter of gossip and recipes and news about Giulia’s co-workers.

  Giulia never once looked at Amy’s face, concentrating instead on the sleeve of the nightgown or the palm of her hand. Perhaps she saw too much of my mother in her. She missed her sister like a lost limb, even after almost ten years, and I thought of the terrible finality Amy’s death would mean to me. I could always convince myself that my sister might come back to me someday. Giulia knew she’d lost her sister for good. She’d already had to say it out loud.