I remained silent, running my fingers along the rippled bridge of my nose.
“Oh, fine,” she said. “But I won’t stay long.”
* * *
—
The Mermaid Room had a low stucco ceiling, an elevated square stage, and a black-and-white checkered floor. Onstage, a sad girl in a satiny dress, a purple iris pinned to her hair, sang into a microphone. Stormy weather, she sang syrupy and sweet. Since my man and I ain’t together.
Monica was in a back booth, leaning over a clear drink with a lime. She wore a slinky sequin top that showed the notches in her rib cage between her breasts. Her eyes were closed and she nodded, humming and swaying to the music. She didn’t look up as my mother and I scooted across from her and flung our purses into the booth’s corner.
“Damn,” Monica said. “How does someone so young know about so much pain?”
“She must pay attention to life,” said my mother.
Monica opened her eyes, grinned. “You made it, Mama Liz.”
We ordered a round of drinks, my mother sticking to red wine as Monica and I sipped tequila. Monica wasn’t her normal chatty self, so I asked what year the building was built, how long Bruce had owned it, where the band was from, if she could sing.
“Oh God, no. I’d bust someone’s eardrums.”
“She can sing.” I lifted my drink toward my mother. “Can’t you, Mama?”
“Not like this girl. Not in a million years.”
My mother adjusted the collar on her chiffon shirt, centering her crucifix necklace above her sternum, covering a black mole. Her gaze was on the singer, whose dress had a liquid sparkle that turned blinding when she twisted her body toward the right light. The bar erupted with applause as she exited the stage. She curtsied to the left, moving in a milky blur toward the bar. A quartet began setting up.
Monica shuffled through her purse, pulling out a pack of cigarettes. “Care to join?” she asked, and I nodded.
* * *
—
I stood on the sidewalk with Monica, smoking and listening to her talk about a bartender she used to date. “God,” she said. “And he always wanted me to be on top. Like it was the fucking Olympics.” I laughed and blew smoke toward the bar. I could see my mother through the windows. She remained in the booth, resting her head against the cool wall, her dark hair spreading into shadows. She slowly sipped her wine, keeping her face to the table when a man in a fedora approached her. She tore a napkin to pieces and shook her head.
“Can you believe that singer?” Monica asked. “Will you stay for her second set?”
I told her I couldn’t, that I needed to get my mother home. We finished our cigarettes, and when Monica opened the door, music fell into the street. In the distance, a storm gathered beyond the city, thin veins of lightning illuminating the sky.
* * *
—
That night the pelting sounds of rain covered my mother’s snoring. I imagined her in the next room, her body a breathing lump beneath a white quilt. For the first time since I had come home, I thought of how lonely she must be. Each day she focused on tasks instead of herself. I wondered if she had ever tried to date a man from the college, a divorced professor perhaps.
I rolled onto my side and fell asleep, where I dreamed of my father. I’m going ice fishing, he said. I told him I loved the ice houses. He kissed my forehead and I felt his shape, solid and stifling. He brought me to the lake. We carved a hole into the ice, and he reached inside the black water until he was snagged like a fish caught on a hook. The hole grew larger as he screamed and I feared that when it was done with him, that darkness was coming for me. That’s when I woke up and looked at my phone. 3:17 A.M. I had five missed calls, all from Monica.
She was outside our lobby in her white SUV with tinted windows and leather seats. Monica kept the motor running as I got inside. “Let’s go for a drive.”
I shook rain from my hair. “My mom might wake up and get scared if I’m gone.”
“It’s not like you sleep in her bed. How will she know you’re not there?”
“I’m her child,” I said.
Monica drove us down narrow one-way roads, weaving in and out of alleys. The rain fell in slanted white lines. The radio was low on an AM station—someone was talking to someone else about bees and honey. There were hardly any headlights on the road.
“Did you have fun tonight?” Monica asked.
“Bruce’s old bar is cool. I like the vibe.”
“It never changes. Different bands play, different girls sing, but it always feels like home.”
Monica turned off the main road and stopped the SUV. Her headlights beamed outward until they fell upon a set of stone pillars. We were in the lot beside the park’s pavilion.
“You know, he chased me for years.” Monica lit a cigarette. The flame cast upward shadows on her face. “I used to make fun of him. I told people he was just some old pervert.”
She rolled down the window, exhaling smoke in a hurried line. Her slinky top darkened as rain fell sideways onto her arms and legs, some of it making its way onto my face—the unmistakable warmth of Colorado rain in summer.
“Once we were together, I hoped people realized it was about love. Not that other stuff, money or convenience.”
I asked her what people she was talking about. She carried on without an answer.
“He wanted a baby. Give me a little girl, he’d say. I heard him crying in the shower about it. This huge man, beneath that running water, crying. And now that he’s gone—” Monica faced me. She raised her voice and it broke. “I only want him back.”
Between the low chatter on the radio and the constant thumping of rain, it was easy to remain silent as Monica began to cry. Her profile was sharply lit by little lights inside the car. She seemed calm despite the tears rolling off her jaw and into her chest. In that chaos, the heavy fog of breathing, the sounds of a storm, I saw Monica check her reflection in the rearview mirror. From beneath her seat, Monica then handed me a flask and told me to drink. I could be anyone, I thought, and she would still say these things. Monica didn’t want help or comfort. She wanted to be seen.
“Take me back home,” I said, raising my voice. “My mom will worry.”
Monica continued sobbing, throwing her arms around, waving to nobody. Beyond the fogged windows, I stared into the black spaces between the stone pillars. I wanted to go home and crawl into bed. I wanted to wake up and see my mother off before she left for work. We’d have black coffee with fried eggs. She’d encourage me to get out of the house, leaving an umbrella for me in case I decided to walk.
That’s when I saw the man. On the curb before the stone pavilion, his head was slumped and he appeared to be sleeping upright in a shiny leather jacket.
“That guy,” I said, pointing to the windshield. “He shouldn’t be out here in the rain.”
“What guy?” she asked, and when I pointed again, Monica opened the door and, with me following her, ran through the rain.
We were a few steps away when I realized it was the homeless man. He was sitting on the sidewalk with a fifth of whiskey, water drizzling down the grooves of his wrinkles. When he saw us approaching, he smiled deliriously and lifted the half-empty bottle. “A swig,” he said, “for you, the beautiful ladies.”
Monica was stunned, like she was seeing a ghost, but it was the image of someone else in her dead husband’s jacket. She knocked the whiskey from the homeless man’s hand, breaking the bottle at my feet, the amber-colored liquid instantly swallowed by the sidewalk and the early morning rain.
“We don’t need roughhousing,” the homeless man said. “You wasteful girl.”
Monica yanked his left arm. “This is my husband’s jacket.”
The homeless man said nothing. He opened and closed a fist, as though muscle memory was forcing him t
o reach for the bottle.
“You dug it out of the trash,” Monica yelled. “Didn’t you? Like a dog.”
The homeless man frowned, muttering something about being thirsty, and Monica grabbed a fistful of his hair. He let out a howl. “Stop, miss, please. I wasn’t causing you harm.”
Monica’s face relaxed as something went blank in her eyes. It was a look I had seen countless times in my father’s face. Monica jerked the homeless man’s neck with both hands. She toppled him onto his side, letting out the dull boom of a body on concrete. With the tip of her pointed heel, she kicked him in the gut, the face, anywhere she could. The homeless man wailed in agony.
Monica lifted her leg to kick him once more, but I kneeled beside him to block her blows. Her foot lodged itself into the small of my back, sending me forward until my face was an inch from the homeless man’s. He was crying, the grooves in his face drenched with rain. I pleaded for Monica to stop.
“I gave it to him,” I said. “I saw him at night without a coat. I had the boxes in my car. I wanted him to be warm.”
Monica paused her kicking. The homeless man removed one arm from the jacket’s sleeve and then the other, tossing the coat onto the curb, where it rested like a dog’s tongue. He shivered in a sodden flannel, soaked to his skin. I leaned down to him and whispered soothing lies that everything would be all right. The homeless man looked at my face, his eyes webbed in bloody veins.
“Someone hurt you,” he said. “They hurt you bad.”
I walked home in the rain and stayed in the shower for a long time. Wrapped in a towel, I leaned in the doorway of my mother’s bedroom. Silently crying, I watched as she slept.
* * *
—
Not long before I left California, my mother called just to chat.
“I’ve been looking at some photos of myself,” she said. “Mostly from when I was with your father. I’m a little embarrassed.”
“Why’s that?”
“I can tell how sad I look. It’s something in my eyes. There’s this dull light inside them. I’m starting to wonder if it’s always been there. If I looked that way before your father, when I was a teenager, or even a little girl.”
“You just have dark eyes,” I said. “Plenty of people do. I know I do.”
“No, it’s different. What happened to me that made me look so sad?” She laughed and I heard her sipping from a glass. “I get embarrassed. I kept wondering how many people recognized that sadness in me. Probably more than I’d like to know. But it changed.”
I asked her how, pulling the phone a little away from my ear, holding up a finger, and letting the man in my bed know it wouldn’t be much longer.
“The world did. It became less urgent, somehow bigger, and I didn’t worry so much about being loved.”
TOMI
When my nephew Tomi was a baby, I stole the thousand dollars his mother, Natalie, kept in her closet. It was for his college fund. She had placed the money in a rinsed-out mason jar, wrapped in a knockoff Fendi scarf and hidden beneath a pile of balled socks. Hungover and dazed, I crept across their carpeted floor, taking the jar and spending everything on liquor and clothes within a week. Natalie always suspected it was me, though Manny said I would never do something like that. “Who,” he demanded, “would steal from their own blood?”
Six years later, I stole a ’94 Honda Civic and drove head-on into an elderly couple’s picture window at four in the morning. It was in the northern suburbs. Every house and driveway looked like a white gravel road. An old man wore striped pajamas as he dusted shattered windshield glass from my face. Blood flooded my mouth. A tooth dragged down my throat. The old man placed a towel on my lips and told his wife to call an ambulance. When he leaned back through the car door, his pajama arm resting on the steering wheel, he said, “Look at you, jita. You’re just a baby.”
I served my time at La Vista Correctional Facility in Pueblo, Colorado. My family didn’t call much and they never visited. I marked the days on two calendars—the first filled with illustrations of wildflowers and the second with photos of horses in empty rustic fields. Toward the end of the horses, my attorney wrote to say that I was up for early release, so long as I had a place to live and I got a job. I planned on moving into a halfway house off Colfax Avenue when Manny called to say I could live with him and Tomi.
“Won’t Natalie be pissed?” I asked Manny over the phone.
“She’s gone. She left me.”
I told him I was sorry, even though I had seen it coming. At seventeen, Natalie had moved into our house with only a snap-close suitcase, two Navajo blankets, and her belly full of Tomi.
“Why are you doing this?” I asked Manny before hanging up.
“You’re my sister, Cole, my blood. But please don’t fuck up this time.”
* * *
—
When he was twenty-one and I was fifteen, Manny inherited our family home after our father died of a heart attack while shampooing his hair. Our mother was already long dead. When I was very little she swallowed an entire bottle of painkillers. At La Vista, I read in an anatomy book that the heart has no nerve endings and for a little while, I believed my parents died without any pain. We lived on Denver’s Northside, in the shadow of Mile High Stadium, a neighborhood that was now called Highlands, though only white people said that. Our house was a slender brick square that rested on a high plot, giving it the illusion of something great among knifing condos and black BMWs. The gentrification reminded me of tornadoes, demolishing one block while casually leaving another intact. Our block, Vallejo Street, was unrecognizable.
I was released from La Vista early on a Tuesday morning in late autumn. Manny met me outside in his white Tacoma that reeked of corn chips and coffee. He wore his canvas Carhartt, his dark hair newly streaked white.
“Look at you,” he said, pinching my cheeks. “Someone called Jenny Craig.”
“Yeah, prison don’t have any Bud Light.”
“Damn shame. I’ll get you some chicharrones for the road.”
He turned up the radio on a Neil Young song and beat out the chorus on the steering wheel. A red rosary dangled snakelike from the rearview mirror. Taped to the dash were Virgin de Guadalupe prayer cards and a Sears baby picture of Tomi.
“How is he?” I asked, brushing the photo with my hand. “Since Natalie’s been gone.”
“I don’t know. Sad.” Manny pinched tobacco into his left cheek. “He’s failing a class called Read and Relax. You tell me how a person fails to read and relax.”
We drove by a yellow traffic sign, bullet-holed and bent, warning against picking up hitchhikers when near a correctional facility. The sky beyond was larger than I’d ever seen, an oily gray with arrowheads of birds.
“Impressive,” I said.
* * *
—
Manny parked the Tacoma outside our house. I pointed to a glass high-rise that had appeared where a vacant warehouse once stood. It reflected the clouds, the winged tips of the mountains. “That’s pretty fancy,” I said.
“Yeah, real fancy. It also ruins my view of the stadium. These property taxes are fucking me,” said Manny. “But we were here first. I’ll be damned before I move to the suburbs.”
Inside, Tomi was on the living room floor, his hair a mop of black strands. He clutched a videogame controller, swaying right and left, forward and back. His glasses were smudged with spotted fingerprints, reflecting the sparkling blue lights of the television.
Manny hung his Broncos hat on the rack and unzipped his Carhartt. He had grown softer around his middle and I wondered if I looked older, too. “Get up,” he said. “Say hi to your auntie.”
Tomi flung forward. Videogame blood splattered the screen. “Hi to your auntie.”
“Ay.” Manny walked over, swatting Tomi’s head with his right palm. “Don’t act like such
a shithead. She’s traveled a long way, Son.”
Tomi looked at me, squinting with sarcasm. “Why hello, Auntie Nicole.”
“Just call me Cole, Tomi. Really.”
Manny showed me to the windowless basement where I had stayed before La Vista. Everything was the same as when I left. The stench of mothballs, the hanging lightbulb, my faded size 16 jeans stuffed into a cardboard box. I spotted my Kmart futon with a busted seam and Manny gave the white aluminum frame a good shake. “It won’t be too comfortable. There aren’t any pillows.”
“Why not?”
“I think Natalie took them. I’ve looked everywhere. Tomi and I slept with our heads on folded towels last night. I shit you not, towels.”
“That’s child abuse. Even the prison had pillows. Get some new ones.”
“It’s the principle of the thing. Natalie thinks she can take off like that, stealing sheets and pillows and whatever else I can’t find around here.”
I nodded and looked past him, studying a rippling crack in the cement wall. The room was as big as four cells at La Vista, maybe five. “I gotta nap.”
“I need to head back to the office, anyway.” Manny handed me two stolen hotel towels for pillows and told me to enjoy.
* * *
—
I woke up a couple hours later to the sounds of gunshots. Tomi was in the same position as before, seated on a leather sofa cushion like a little Buddha. On the television screen, things were being blown up. He kept his eyes to the TV when I said hello. “You woke me up, dude. I was trying to take a nap.”
Tomi lurched forward with his videogame controller, his mouth shiny with spit.
“So, you’re pretty big now,” I said. This was an understatement. He was the heaviest little kid I’d ever seen. “What’re you playing?”
“Call of Duty.”
“What’s that?”
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