* * *
—
A week after the shooting, though Alana had paid for a professional cleaning service, Pearla still found blood dried between cracks in the kitchen walls. She made a solution from vinegar and salt, sponging away the brown mess as she waited for her granddaughter. They were to visit a senior home, a community called St. Lorena, no saint Pearla had ever heard of, but it had been decided after the young man’s death that Pearla was leaving Galapago, and that was that.
As she hunched over and cleaned the walls, Pearla fought her mind’s tendency to drift. In the canary-yellow kitchen, the lace curtains rising and falling from brass vents gushing heat, she saw Cody Moore’s stomach muscles in a defined V as he reached for what she thought was a knife. His fingernails were wide and chewed, and his saucerlike green eyes were dryly blank. How had she not noticed it was a gun? Was Pearla that blinded by old age? And did it change things that, like her, the boy was carrying a weapon? Knives killed people all the time, but guns killed them more. One thing Pearla was certain of. She was ashamed that even in her old age, she wanted to live more than die.
After she had finished in the kitchen, Pearla dropped the sponge into a trash can and went outside to gather the day’s mail. She accidentally marked a bundle of coupons in reddish brown fingerprints as she waited on the porch for her granddaughter to arrive.
* * *
—
“The most noticeable thing about our residents is their collective smile.”
Alana and Pearla listened to a tour guide, a young redhead in a goofy kitty sweater. They were paused in the lobby of St. Lorena, overlooking the ice of Sloan’s Lake. Everything was vanilla-hued with mahogany trim. Skylights illuminated the hallways, where residents curved over aluminum walkers. The tour guide pointed out the wooden rocking chairs facing the mountains, the baby grand piano in the recently renovated dining hall, and the locally designed iron screens over the brick fireplaces.
Pearla asked if there was a Catholic church nearby.
“Certainly, and Mass is performed in Spanish two times per day. Noon and five o’clock.”
“We speak English,” Alana said, matter-of-factly.
The tour guide looked as though she wanted to apologize.
Pearla said, “Thank you, pumpkin. Church is important to me.”
The next stop on the tour was an apartment belonging to a seventy-eight-year-old woman who was visiting her grandchildren in Lake Tahoe. It was a studio with stucco walls and taupe carpets. A twin bed, covered with a childish purple comforter, occupied space in the far corner, beneath a painting of a blond Jesus. The tour guide explained that the apartment was a popular choice for independent elderly women rather than using the word widow.
“Where does she keep all her things?” Pearla asked. “Her furniture, her clothes?”
The tour guide relaxed her face. She had kind green eyes. “Learning to separate ourselves from unnecessary clutter is one of the hardest aspects of transitioning out of an independent living situation and into a community home.”
Pearla said she had no more questions, and they moved on to the cafeteria, where a rack of gray roast beef warmed beneath a heat lamp.
* * *
—
Alana was late.
“You drag yourself to Mass this morning?”
She told her grandmother not to start with any church talk.
They drove the freeway to the cemetery without conversation, the radio on a news program. As they entered Mt. Olivet’s iron gates, clouds seemed to clear and sunshine brightened the headstones and mausoleums. They first drove by the graves belonging to rich folks, those with marble angels and stone beacons. All her life, Pearla had put aside money for a respectable grave, prematurely using the money for Mercedes, giving her daughter a proper stone. Her own parents were buried in the desert with only wooden crosses to mark their bones. The crosses decayed over time, crouching into the earth, until one summer, on a road trip to the San Luis Valley with Avel and Mercedes, Pearla couldn’t locate her mama’s and papa’s graves anymore. She left wildflowers and sage near a mile marker that seemed close enough.
“They don’t mow regularly?” Alana asked, prying crabgrass from her grandfather’s grave. Pearla’s own headstone was beside it, an open dash for her death date.
“Not on our side,” Pearla said, referring to what the archdiocese used to call the Spanish section. It was near what were once referred to as the Oriental and Negro sections, across the tracks from the suicides and unbaptized babies. The rules weren’t enforced anymore, but families were buried near one another and so things stayed intact.
Pearla rummaged through a plastic grocery sack on her side. She pulled out washrags and spray bottles. She handed some to Alana. “Start with his name and the dates. I’ll get the back side.”
The vinegar solution spread into the headstone, releasing an odor like rust. Alana was decent and kind, arching her back and rolling up her coat sleeves before she scrubbed. Pearla had to give the girl that. She had never been lazy. Always a hard worker.
Avel’s headstone was soon brighter than it had been. The wind was calm as Pearla placed plastic marigolds beneath his name, the orange petals only slightly wavering against the yellow grass. The women then prayed the rosary, the hard beads slick in their hands.
From a distance, the section of the cemetery where Mercedes was buried seemed like an empty field. It was only standing directly above the graves that Pearla could read any names. Destiny Dixon, Sabrina Cordova, Susana Mullins, and there, toward a chain-link fence beside the train tracks, Mercedes Angelica Ortiz. Pearla loathed standing over graves, worried she was stepping on a face or a chest. Maybe it was because when she was a little girl, a priest had once told her that hell was really just a grave.
“Hi, Mama,” Alana whispered. She kneeled and yanked massive weeds from the flat headstone’s corners, the roots held by frozen dirt. Years ago, she had spoken of buying a nicer plot for her mother, but over time she had changed her mind or, worse, maybe she had forgotten. “We miss you, Mama. We miss you so much.”
Pearla cupped her mouth with both hands, holding in a choking cry as she stood on the dead grass above her daughter’s feet. She always expected Avel to go first, it seemed the usual way, but when Mercedes passed, it stole something from inside her, a bone she couldn’t quite name. “I pray for you, my baby. Every day.”
On the drive home, Alana said, “We have a move-out date for you, April first.”
“If your grandfather was alive, mija, he would be ashamed to live anywhere but our home.” Pearla glanced out the window at identical housing developments rolling over the foothills. They reminded her of locusts, devouring the land. “I hope he doesn’t somehow see any of this.”
Alana seemed stunned, taking her eyes off the road, almost looking directly at her grandmother. “Some drug addict came into your house with a gun and tried to kill you. You’re not staying there, Gramma, and that’s the end of it.”
Pearla went quiet then. She wondered about Cody. Was his body in a cemetery? Was it near a freeway or train tracks? Did he have, at the very least, some flowers? Even plastic would do.
* * *
—
The night it happened Pearla dreamed of a memory, only different. She was seven years old and still lived in Saguarita, where her papa worked the mines. They had a company house, a one-room cabin without electricity or heat. The floor was dirt and the ceiling was patched with grass where, sometimes, blue sky winked and snow drifted down onto their bed quilts. Pearla ran between the mountains, the land beneath her feet jagged with quartz and sagebrush, her little body a blur of white lace and black braids. It was church Sunday and she was late. When Pearla’s legs couldn’t carry her any faster, the wind picked up and she lifted over pine trees and the mirrored ponds, where she saw herself sailing toward that adobe steeple with
her arms open to the land.
Pearla awoke at half past two when the pressure in her gut surged all the way to her throat. For a moment, she sat motionless in bed, surrounded by rosaries and unlit candles across her nightstand. Pearla reached for her flannel robe, laid out beside her on the mattress, but a feeling stopped her. She held her breath and listened. There was something in the kitchen, a small metallic rattling, the creak of redistributed weight. The sounds entered Pearla’s body like a vibration in her bones rather than her ears. Pearla prayed. She asked for help from everyone, Mercedes, Avel, her mama and papa. A vision came to her, a young Anglo man with an exhausted heart, nearly dead as he shivered in a room without windows, without lights.
Don’t aim a gun, Avel had once told her, unless you’re prepared to kill what’s standing in front of it.
With her robe buttoned clear to her throat, Pearla reached for the silver-plated pistol in her stockings drawer, her heart beating so loudly that she feared it would be overheard through her rib cage. Pearla walked into the kitchen, where a young man was bent over, fumbling with the locks on the basement door, the stove’s electric light shining across his shaved head. When he turned to face Pearla, for a long second their eyes met. How dull and vacant. How wasted and long. There was nothing of great value in the house, the basement in particular. Only old paint cans and fishing nets with rusted metal handles. What an unfortunate misunderstanding. Time began to move oddly, slowly and flat. Pearla was certain Avel would be coming through the front door at any moment. The young man would run off, down the alley. The old couple would talk of saving money, taking in laundry or boarders, anything to afford a home in a better neighborhood. Maybe north toward the Italians on Lowell or east toward the Jews by the university. Anywhere but Galapago.
But that life was done.
The young man snapped into movement, reaching for something in his waistband, a knife with a dark blade. Pearla shivered in pink slipper-socks, her pistol aimed. She said, Please, please. The young man could not focus—it looked as though his eyes were borrowing his body. He stepped forward once. There was a blue sparrow tattooed on his right forearm, a name written beneath the wings. When Pearla pulled the trigger, the young man’s body went lax and dropped to the linoleum floor as reddish spray exited his right side, splattering the eggshell kitchen walls.
“I aimed low for his legs,” Pearla told the 911 dispatcher. Gasping between tears, she repeated, “I aimed low.”
* * *
—
Alana cleared Pearla’s vanity, pulling photos of Mercedes and Avel from the mirror and placing them in a shoe box. She had already packed most of the kitchen while Pearla stood by, watching in wonder, as her granddaughter tossed out expired boxes of pancake mix and old jars of Mrs. Archuletta’s peaches. She was moving in three days.
Pearla shuffled around in the bedroom’s lamplight, taking stock of what she needed. She had drawers filled with dried Revlon nail polish, tubes of coral lipstick worn down to stubs, empty bottles of Chanel No. 5, but what was empty when you could always squeeze out another drop? The closet was jammed with hand-sewn dresses, worn decades ago at some dance or baptism. Beneath the bed were boxes of hats that had long ago gone out of style, come back in, and gone out again. Avel’s cowboy boots lined the closet floor, a pointed row of ancient leather. All of it junk, and all of it precious.
Alana said, “I know it’s hard, Gramma, only taking what you need.”
“It’s not like I’ll take any of it with me when I’m dead,” said Pearla with some hesitation. “Might as well start now.”
Alana asked her grandmother why she must say such morbid things.
Pearla flapped her hands in the air, as if to say, What, how do you mean? She then lifted an amethyst necklace from her vanity. It was a gift from Avel the year before he died, a small heart-shaped stone with golden roses along the sides. Pearla looked deeply into the stone’s color and noticed it had changed into something warmer, brighter, but she soon realized that it was only a ray of sunlight. Following the warm line, she discovered a small, roundish hole had developed in the wooden boards covering her bedroom windows. Pearla pushed aside the pink satin and examined the wood, smoothing her palms over the brittle surface.
“Mija,” she said with sudden urgency, “let’s get this down.”
Deep inside the closet, Alana retrieved a hammer from Avel’s orange toolbox. She jimmied out the rusted nails bottom to top until the dusty boards dropped with a crash and, for the first time in forty years, the bedroom was flooded with light.
CHEESMAN PARK
I told the bank manager I was leaving Los Angeles for Denver because I missed my mother and the mountains and that while California was beautiful, it was too crowded and expensive. She hugged me with her bony body, smelling of watery coffee and mint. “Back to the Mile High you go,” she said. “You were always a team player, Liz.” That evening, as I carried a box of my things to the car, rust-colored fog cloaked the parking lot. The reflection of my face was blurred in my driver’s side window. My hands trembled as I got in my car and thought of the real reason I was leaving and wept.
* * *
—
I grew up in North Denver with my mother and father. They met in their mid-twenties, kids who lived to drink and play pool, occasionally snorting cocaine when they could afford it. I admired them—my outgoing mother with black 1960s Hollywood hair and my father with his gentle green eyes and a confident work-boot gait. But as much as I loved them, they also terrified me, my father in particular. He once hurled a sack of groceries filled with jars of strawberry jam and maraschino cherries at my mother’s jaw. Other times, he just used his fists. It’s not his fault, my mother would tell me, painting a picture of his childhood in Detroit, where one night his schizophrenic father shot his mother and then turned the gun on himself.
The winter I turned thirteen, my father left us for another woman. I cried myself to sleep for six months. My mother did the same until we moved into a two-bedroom apartment overlooking Cheesman Park. “Always remember,” she said the day we unpacked. “This is our home.” But I didn’t feel at home and, when I was nineteen, I moved to California with hopes of modeling or doing commercials—people often said I possessed striking “exotic” features. It didn’t work out. I got a job as a bank teller. I went out every night and I learned to recognize faces under barroom red lights. I often found myself in the company of drug addicts and midwest runaways. I usually had two or more unsteady boyfriends at a time. I always felt alone. One night, as I leaned over the wooden rail along the Santa Monica Pier, breathing in that ripe fragrance of sea and salt, I gazed into the rolling black tide, wondering what it would take for me to finally return home.
* * *
—
“Come here, mija,” my mother said. “Let me get a look at your face.”
I stood in her front room, my skin covered in an oily sheen and my mouth sour from the sixteen-hour drive. My mother eased herself out of the wooden rocking chair. She took my face in her waxy hands, turning my chin from side to side. She grimaced, deepening the line between her penciled-in eyebrows.
“You should have seen me a week ago,” I said. “My face looked like rotting fruit.”
My mother shook her head, her black hair in a bun, a silver line streaking behind her left ear. “You’re as beautiful as ever, Liz.”
My bedroom was the same as when I was a teenager—coral walls, mirrored closet doors, and a twin bed beneath a window that overlooked the park with its stone pavilion and rolling greenery. The park lights had come on. The damp asphalt shed steam as though the entire park was vaporously lifting into the sky.
“I never got around to changing it,” said my mother. “I had all these plans. I wanted to get a treadmill in here, maybe turn it into an office, but who knows, I said, maybe my daughter will come home someday. Then she won’t want to sleep on a printer.”
We laughed and my mother began fluffing pillows, straightening sheets. She was still beautiful with wet eyes and a long unlined neck, though her movements had slowed in recent years. She was a woman who adhered to order. Life had a schedule. Things needed to be cleaned. Rules needed to be followed.
“There’s room for all your things in the closet and the storage space is open in the basement.” She flicked on a brass lamp at my bedside, and I saw her eyes settle on my face. “Have you thought about what I said, about getting a job?”
“Thought I’d take a few weeks off. Get my mind straight.”
My mother stepped away from the bed. She stood on her tiptoes and kissed my forehead. “Make sure you find something to do, something to be proud of. You’ve got to stop thinking about it.”
* * *
—
The man I had been sleeping with in Los Angeles was alone for the weekend, his fiancée in San Francisco visiting family. We were in bed when I told him it wasn’t fair, that I loved him, that I often cried. Leave her, I said while he choked me as he always did during sex. He said nothing and I bucked, drawing blood from his face with my nails. A lamp broke. The room went dark. It wasn’t out of the ordinary, but then it was. He slapped my face into the wall, chipping a tooth and breaking my nose. I heard the brittle crack replay again and again as I staggered outside.
I drove to my apartment with my dress inside out, my hand cupped over my bloody mouth. Two officers responded to my 911 call. One was a woman in lip gloss, a French manicure on her fingernails. In my pink bathroom, I wore a lacy bra and black panties as she snapped photos of my injuries. Afterward, she gave me a pamphlet on victims’ rights. I had never called 911 before and as I stood there half naked and shivering, I wished that I hadn’t. A detective called the next morning. In a booming, breezy voice, he told me he understood how scared I must be, but pressing charges would mean a trial. It could take weeks, months, to convict this guy. It’ll be tricky, he explained, especially since you two weren’t technically dating. I eventually agreed. What I wanted most, I told him, was to go home.
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