The blinds were closed and the room was dim. My mother lay in her rented hospital bed beneath many colorful quilts. Wisps of hair curled around her forehead like tiny, black worms. Her entire face seemed deflated, drained of blood. Cora twisted open the blinds. A plane of white light spread into the room and my mother’s eyelids fluttered. I sat beside her, stroking her forehead. She felt cool and damp, the way I imagined a snail feels inside its shell. “Hi, Mama,” I whispered close enough for my lips to touch her ear.
She blinked and looked at me with eyes so black they resembled the spaces between stars. “I was supposed to get you from school.”
“It’s summertime,” Cora said, pushing the wheelchair to our mother’s bed. She bent down, unfolding the footrests and adjusting the handles. “We told you last time, Mama. School’s been out for a while.”
My mother reached for Cora’s face. Her nails had been painted a bright, strawberry red by Miss Cynthia. They were short, studded berries that moved along Cora’s head, petting her like an animal. My mother winced. “It’s hard to keep track of the weather,” she said and rolled onto her side. She closed her eyes, letting out a long, guttural moan.
Cora said, “You shouldn’t be here. You’ve only gotten sicker. I knew it would make you worse. No one listens to me.”
My mother bit the edge of her pillow, her teeth sinking into the case. She spoke in murmurs and groans.
“We can’t understand you,” Cora said.
“Babies.” She breathed. “Can you get—” She cried out. “Miss Cynthia?”
Cora looked as though she’d been struck. She shook her head and reached for the bed’s remote. I asked her not to, and tugged on her arm. She pushed me off and raised the mattress until our mother sat upright, the quilts falling to her waist. It looked as though her limbs had evaporated. I pressed her sleeve, expecting only air. She looked confused and small like a feverish child home sick from school. I scooted off the bed and I stared at the hump of her feet—shivering and slight—beneath the quilts. I placed my hand over her right foot.
“She’s not feeling good,” I told Cora.
“That’s why she’s leaving,” Cora said. “That’s why we’re taking her.”
Cora hunched over and slipped her hands beneath our mother’s side. With a jerk of her neck, she gestured for me to do the same.
“I don’t know,” I said. “She hurts.”
“It’ll be easy. Remember when Papa did it? He lifted her like a baby.”
“Fine,” I said, doing what Cora asked, positioning myself against my mother’s hip.
Cora nodded. “All right, Alley Cat. One. Two. Three. Lift.”
My mother’s body rose from the mattress. Her pelvis poked my palms and her nightgown pulled straight behind her. We had her. She was in our hands, rising to the roof like smoke. We could carry her. It was possible. She’d glide home in her wheelchair, beautiful and thin, elegant in the sunlight. But my mother opened her eyes and I saw how far we’d really gone. Nowhere at all. With a frightened jolt, she wailed and squirmed. Cora lost her grip first, placing my mother’s deadweight on me until we both flopped against the bed, the metal handrail, the plastic remote. I let go and backed away as my mother cried out, over and over.
The door opened then and Miss Cynthia stepped into the room. She walked behind the wheelchair with her rooster apron hanging loosely over her legs. She stared at us, her glasses white with light and her mouth a gaping black hole. “What in God’s name.”
* * *
—
When Miss Cynthia told our father what we had done, he drove us home in silence, his disappointment thick as he leaned into turns and idled at red lights. The street was like a horse’s long back, dark with specks of light. I went to bed that night listening to the sounds of Cora crying quietly on the other side of the wall. I tried reading more about the horse named Marcus, but everything he did seemed suited for a cartoon, something enjoyable, something fake. Cora tapped her wall a couple times, code for me to enter her room, and I stepped through the darkness and lay down in her twin bed. Her long hair was wetly matted against her Little Mermaid pillowcase. She pulled me close to her and said, “Don’t worry. We’ll figure out another way to get her. I promise.”
But Cora didn’t have to find a new way to bring our mother home, because not long after, while the three of us were at Julian Plaza—my father on his knees, pulling white hairs from drains, and Cora and me watching Nickelodeon in the rec room—our garage was robbed, the thieves taking everything my father sold to pay Miss Cynthia.
That evening, my father pulled into the back driveway and sat for a long while staring at the open garage door. He finally stepped out and inspected the busted lock. He crouched down, yanked blades of grass from the ground, and let them blow away in the wind, as if they’d point him in the direction of the thief.
At dinner, my father sat very still at the kitchen table. He breathed into a clenched fist. He kissed the tops of our heads and smoothed our hair. His work shirt was torn at the elbow, and his stubble inked over his chin and cheeks. “We’re bringing Mama home in the next few days. It’s going to be tough. I’ll have to work most days, but I know my girls can take care of her while I’m away.”
“I’ll stay with her every day,” Cora said.
My father covered his face with both hands. He stood from the table and walked to the bathroom. We heard the sink running, and beneath the sounds of rushing water, a long, guttural sob.
* * *
—
A few days later, a heat wave moved into the city. Sweaty children rushed the streets in ripped-up shorts and cotton tanks. Cora and I watched them from Julian Plaza’s lobby, where we sat in black plastic chairs. Above them, the day moon was a sliver of a fingernail. Cora fanned herself with a Christian newsletter, dropped off earlier by a black woman in a blue skirt clear to the floor. The hanging chalkboard only announced an ice cream social and the birth of a grandchild named John Michael.
“I’m bored,” Cora said.
“Do you want to play outside?” I asked.
Cora allowed her legs to dangle back and forth to the beat of the ticking clock. “Hydrant water is dirty.” She slid further down in her chair, surprising me when she asked, “What else do you want to do, Alley Cat?”
I thought about the rec room, the Chinese checkers, the TV. We could eat packets of coffee creamer, pour sugar in rows for ants, toss rocks into the dumpsters. None of it seemed worthwhile. “Want to race?”
Cora dropped the Christian newsletter to the floor. She sat up and smiled. “We’ll run each floor until we get to the top.” She paused before saying, “On your mark, get set—”
“Go,” I yelled.
We started down the hallway, and I pretended the green carpets were grass while the ceiling lights were rays of sunlight. After zigzagging up to the next floor and the floor after that, we came to a level with nearly all apartment doors open. It was swampy hot. Tenants sat in their crammed one-bedroom apartments, their metal fans blowing with wisps of paper. I saw an orange couch. I saw macramé wall art. I saw a lone silver head leaning into a bowl of soup. Some watched black-and-white movies, the volume at full blast. Maidens in white tied to railroad tracks. Cowboy heroes shot dead.
As we raced through every floor, zigzagging through Julian Plaza’s ancient insides, I remembered a time when I was very little and my mother wasn’t sick. It was summer and she wore a brown print dress and tall loud sandals with gardenia perfume and olive oil in her hair. She carried me on her slender hip while Cora walked beside us. We were visiting old people to give them pies—apple and rhubarb, strawberry and pecan. The pies weren’t for everyone, just those without family, the people who needed them most. My mother knocked, and when each door opened, the people of Julian Plaza beamed with happiness, as if they’d never seen a young woman so lovely in all their long lives
.
GALAPAGO
The day before Pearla Ortiz killed a man, she had lunch at home with her granddaughter Alana. They sat together at the aluminum table in the small canary-yellow kitchen and ate turkey wraps with a wet kale salad. Alana had stopped by on her lunch break. She worked downtown in a glass high-rise for a marketing firm specializing in oil and gas and was dressed plainly in a brown shift dress, her lightened hair pulled high in a ponytail. Pearla watched Judy Garland sing in black and white on the television above the refrigerator and methodically chewed kale her dentures couldn’t easily break down. She preferred her usual, flour tortillas with beans and rice, but she had learned to humor her granddaughter, who despite her prickliness, was good-hearted in her own way.
“We’ll look at a few communities this week, get an idea of what’s out there.” Alana pushed a brochure across the table. She explained that it was for a senior home called Wellspring Acres, the print too small and too pale for older eyes.
Alana had been suggesting for years that Pearla sell her home on Galapago and rent an apartment in a building for seniors. The Denver housing market was booming, Alana often said, and retirement homes were much more chic than they used to be. Even houses on the Westside were going for a half million dollars. But Pearla had been on Galapago for sixty-two years, since she married Avel, when they were the first in the family, on either side, to own property.
“Gramma, did you hear me?” Alana took a swig of water and used her thumb to clean a smudge on the glass. She spoke louder. “It’s more social, easier to take care of.”
Pearla spit a ragged piece of kale into her palm. She nodded before turning back to Judy Garland. “That poor girl. How the world just ate her up.”
Alana stood from the table. She clicked off the television. “Let’s focus, Gramma.”
Pearla laughed. Her granddaughter looked so bossy in her career clothes, but whenever Pearla looked at her, really looked at her, she still saw Alana as an eight-year-old girl who had come to live with her grandparents on Galapago Street after her mother, Mercedes, died. Alana arrived with nothing more than a suitcase filled with stuffed animals and chapter books. Managing household grief became another task as endless as chores. Avel sometimes cried beneath the forked apple tree in the backyard, and to hide his sorrow from Alana, Pearla would close the windows and turn up the country music station, drowning out everything with a twang. Now, thirty years later, Pearla wondered if she should have let Alana hear him cry.
After they finished lunch, Alana dutifully walked Pearla to her bedroom, a dark space between the kitchen and living room where the windows had long ago been boarded up. In that little room, lighted by lamps, Alana got to work making the queen-size bed. Pearla was embarrassed. There wasn’t a day in her life she let a bed go unmade, but when her hands were particularly arthritic, she had trouble straightening the sheets and turning the quilt. She stood near the doorway, over the crushed pink carpet, and smiled as Alana finished, prideful as she fluffed pillows.
“You’d think I’d get a smaller bed, since Avel’s been gone all these years,” Pearla said.
Alana reached out, lightly smoothing her grandmother’s white curls. “Long as you’re comfortable, Gramma.”
Before she headed back to work, they stood on the cement porch for a moment, the day unexpectedly pleasant for early March. Pearla gazed beyond Alana’s shoulders at the rows of Westside houses, evenly spaced with wide porches and tiny square lawns. They were stout homes, some colorful, some beige, with chain-link fences and barred windows. There were old street signs reserving parking spots for the elderly, handicapped neighbors. But most of those folks were gone. While Pearla was once friendly with everyone on Galapago Street, now she knew almost no one. In the past decade, couples with expensive cars and Anglo names had moved onto the block, altering the houses and gutting the yards, once hacking down old Mrs. Archuletta’s prized peach tree in a single afternoon.
“I have no interest in leaving, mija,” Pearla said, before kissing Alana goodbye. “Hell, the Lord will take me soon enough.”
* * *
—
The District 7 Police Station was busy at six in the morning. Clerks drank coffee and shuffled papers while criminals and victims shuffled in and out of fluorescent-lit hallways. Pearla sat for some time in a waiting room beside a stack of Good Housekeeping magazines and a fake plant that looked like a mini aspen tree. Alana arrived just before the detective called them back. She had applied a full face of makeup. She was shaking, much more than Pearla, and had a dazed look about her as she clutched her black leather jacket close to her chest.
“The only crime committed was armed burglary,” said the detective, a middle-aged man with clever eyes inside a very big head. His name was Ralph Vigil and he had a jovial belly, like a melon beneath his dress shirt. His office was a white cubicle with flattened brown carpet, the only decoration a free Mexican restaurant calendar, a month behind, pinned to the felt wall. He began speaking to Pearla and Alana from behind a cherrywood desk but soon stood and rolled his chair beside Pearla. He swayed forward as he spoke, his arms resting on his bony knees. “The locks were busted on the back door. The nine-millimeter tucked into the young man’s waistband was loaded. Case closed.”
A gun? How had Pearla mistaken a gun for a knife? She stared at her reflection in the silver badge clipped to the detective’s front pocket. Her face was long with clear hollows, and her once-dark hair was now a white nest. Without her usual rouge or lipstick, she appeared a ghastly gray, as if she were living in a black-and-white movie. Pearla cleared her throat to make her voice seem strong. She asked, “How old was he?”
“Nineteen,” the detective said. “We get kids in here as young as fourteen who have shot up entire families, sometimes for nothing more than an Xbox. Count yourself lucky, ma’am.”
“Oh Christ.” Alana threw her arms around Pearla.
“The city is in flux, ladies. Lots of mixed income levels. They say things will cool down once the area is fully gentrified, but I’m skeptical.”
“It’s always been bad. I don’t see how it can change,” said Alana.
“You a Westside girl, Ms. Ortiz?”
“Born and raised, but now I’m in Highlands.”
“You mean the Northside? ¿Como que Highlands?”
They laughed at that popular T-shirt slogan Pearla had seen young people wearing. Since the newcomers had started moving to Denver, they’d changed the neighborhood names to fit their needs, to sound less dangerous, maybe less territorial.
Pearla said, “You still haven’t told me his name, Mr. Vigil.”
“Cody.” The detective flicked a nondairy creamer packet into his coffee. The white powder clumped together and sank to the bottom. “Cody Moore.”
* * *
—
Crime was always part of the Westside. Their first break-in was in 1956, summertime. Newlyweds, Pearla and Avel walked home from Benny’s dance hall, their arms linked. It was a cool night, the moon a slit of light. Avel’s unruly hair was greased to shine, leaving smears across Pearla’s neck as he kissed her on their cement porch. Sliding his callused palms beneath her salmon dress, he unlatched her stockings and guided apart her thighs. They entered the house, ready to make love right there on the living room floor but found the room ransacked. The thief had taken a box of silver jewelry from inside the bedroom closet. The next day, Avel and his cousin Benito welded iron bars over the windows. Pearla began doing housework in the mornings to avoid the afternoon shadows that fell upon her home like a cage. For over twenty years she sought out the stolen silver in pawnshops, once reclaiming a turquoise cuff from the glass case at an antique shop on South Broadway. “Lovely piece,” the Anglo saleswoman said. “It’ll look wonderful with your coloring.”
The second break-in was autumn of 1978. Pearla and Avel were recovering from the hurt that their only child, Merce
des, had gone a bad way. She was addicted to alcohol and barbiturates, hitchhiking from town to town across the Southwest. In Bisbee, Arizona, after going to an all-night club with a dirt floor, she slept with a man whom she only remembered as having one blue eye and one green. Pregnant with Alana, she returned to Denver, got a little apartment, a respectable job selling office supplies on Sixteenth Street, and threw herself a baby shower that was only attended by her parents and her best friend, a warmhearted gay man named Miguel Orlando. Within a decade, both Miguel and Mercedes would be dead—she of hepatitis and Miguel of AIDS—but the shower was beautiful. The four of them devoured far too many tamales and slices of tres leches cake, the party going until after midnight as they shared family stories and their aspirations for the baby inside Mercedes.
“It’s going to be a girl,” Avel said to Pearla, back home on their porch swing. “A strong one.” He slid off his cowboy boots, allowing them to air out in the night. For a moment, the couple sat with their joy. When Pearla headed inside, nothing was unusual about the house until she entered the bedroom. In the far corner, broken glass glinted across the oak floor. Squinting upward, Pearla looked to the shattered window, where a small child was perched between the iron bars, its legs dangling as if it sat in a tree. The child stared at Pearla, the light inside its eyes suspended as it swooped from the window ledge, fading into the alley, taking with it the diamond necklace Avel had given Pearla after hitting the jackpot on what he thought, at the time, was a lucky slot machine in Central City.
The next morning, Pearla asked Avel to nail wooden boards over the bedroom window, blocking from the room both thieves and sunlight. It took some getting used to, but the darkness grew on Pearla. She draped the boards with pink satin and decorated the walls with colorful, gauzy scarves. One night, after the boards were up for nearly two years, Pearla dreamed of the child with light eyes, its legs sliding beneath the satin, moving like tentacles over everything in sight. Pearla then purchased a silver-plated pistol and placed it in her stockings drawer, never believing she would actually fire it.
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