I told her yes. I pulled her from the stoop.
She lay beside me in bed. It was warm, though the windows were open and the ceiling fan was on high. I pushed the bedspread onto the floor when my mother’s back grew sticky with sweat. Her eyelids squeezed, her lashes fluttered. “I think we’re done here, Neva. I think it’s best we go home.”
At four in the morning, a deep vibration shook the bed. It was the garage door opening. Casey was back. My mother woke up, making a sound like she was catching her breath. She ran to him in the courtyard. I watched them argue through the front windows. Something about a flat tire, a friend’s flat tire, difficult properties down on the border. My mother’s hair flew around her face, covering her eyes. Her nightgown was transparent and she was naked beneath the thin fabric. As she spoke to Casey, my mother covered her belly, hiding her midsection’s scar. That’s when I went back to bed and listened to their fighting until my mother came inside just before sunrise. She grabbed face wash from our bathroom and stood in my doorframe. We looked at one another.
“Don’t worry,” she said, breathless. “I’m not upset anymore.”
She turned and stepped into the hallway, locking the door of the carriage house before she left for Casey’s.
* * *
—
On Christmas morning, I woke up from a dream of snow. When we lived in Saguarita, I would have run to the living room to hug my mother, kiss my grandmother, and open my stocking filled with practical gifts. The kind no one wants but everyone needs—socks, underwear, floss, ChapStick. I walked through my mother’s bedroom and opened her closet. My face was against her things. Cheek to sleeve, lips to collar, nose to cotton. I fell into her jackets and blouses, dresses and skirts. I breathed in, smelling a thousand different spices, all of them sweet.
Outside the fog had rolled in, low to the earth, seeping into the asphalt and grass. I found my mother loading the car, hunched down in a long white dress and straw hat, two braids falling around her shoulders. She waved to me as I stepped barefoot over the cement path from Casey’s house to the street. The sky was all clouds with a single prominent streak, an airplane’s tail sailing east. My mother slammed the trunk before turning to me on the sidewalk. Her eyes were large black pools. Her face was dewy and young, just as it was the day we arrived in California. “Hurry now,” she said. “Grab your bags.”
“Where are we going?” I asked. “Home?”
My mother clicked her tongue, stifling a laugh. “We’re going to the beach with Casey. Remember?” I looked at her face for a long while hoping to catch a hint of sarcasm, an eyebrow raised, an upper lip curled. But my mother only smiled with faintly blue lips, moving her fingers through the air, edging me on with beautiful wide nails. Behind me Casey walked outside in sunglasses, briefly lifting them from his face as he pulled my mother in for a kiss. With closed eyes they knocked against the car door. My mother’s hat flew from her head, exposing her wide forehead before swirling into the sky and landing swiftly at my toes. I picked up the hat, bringing it to my mother, who took it gently from my hands, the noble arcs of her thumbs mirroring my own. The air went still between us as I grazed her skin, so cool and strange, nearly dead.
Casey asked, “You don’t feel well, chica?”
I told him I was fine.
“Then hurry,” said my mother.
Her stance was wobbly and unrefined, as though she had given someone else permission to wear her skin. That’s when I knew she was forever caught in her own undercurrent, bouncing from one deep swell to the next. She would never lift me out of that sea. She would never pause to fill her lungs with air. Soon the world would yank her chain of sadness against every shore, every rock, every glass-filled beach, leaving nothing but the broken hull of a drowned woman. I turned away from my mother then, heading toward the carriage house, whispering no so many times that I sounded like a cooing dove. My mother asked more than once for me to stop. The further I walked, the further her voice moved from giddy to shrill, rising above the hibiscus and palm trees, booming off the front house and carriage house doors.
ALL HER NAMES
Michael was aging. His smile was young but the slack of his skin and the hollows of his face belonged to someone much older than thirty-three. He was a sales manager at a medium-size marijuana dispensary on Colfax Avenue that resembled a cellphone store, complete with kiosks of edibles and cases of “hardware.” Whenever Alicia’s husband, Gary, left town for his annual auctioneers’ convention, she called Michael. She recognized her inability to spend an evening alone. That, and she still loved Michael. Probably always would.
When night fell, Alicia slipped into his old teal Nova, a vision out of a lowrider magazine, even if the interior was a pigsty. She could see a crumpled sweatshirt, some woman’s black tights, and three empty spray-paint cans on the floor. Alicia picked up one of the cans. It rattled like pebbles as she rolled it across Michael’s lap. “Keep this shit in the trunk. Joaquin got charged with a felony last summer.”
“Only because that pendejo couldn’t outrun the bull. Besides, someone has to make these invasive yuppies uncomfortable. Weedy motherfuckers. Growing out of control.” In his worn leather jacket, Michael gestured toward Gary and Alicia’s concrete-and-glass house, a black square among the updated Victorians. “Where to, my little gentrification Malinche?”
“Lawrence Street.”
“Why the hell we going there, Cia?”
“It’s my dogs. Fleas. All over their ankles and behind their ears.”
“Have you considered the vet?”
“No, no,” said Alicia. “They need that real medicine, that herbal stuff.”
* * *
—
Their names were Kane and Oscar, Gary’s from before the marriage, black Labs always in hysterics. Alicia tolerated the dogs, only shuddered at their clumsy galloping, their narrow bodies twisting around the end tables and chairs. That morning, after wrangling them into the backyard, where Kane, her least liked, gnawed an entire fallen tree branch, Alicia went upstairs to discover that she was pregnant for the second time in her life. She was twenty-nine, thirty in a week, a perfectly acceptable age to have a child, but Alicia felt dread. Almost grief. She was wrapped in a white bath towel, hunched over the toilet, as she broke the plastic pregnancy test in two, burying it beneath the unused tampons and wadded Kleenex. She wouldn’t tell a soul, not even Gary. Especially not Gary, who’d had so much to say lately about her biological clock.
They’d been married two years. Gary was fifty-four, a spry white-haired auctioneer from Nebraska who owned the largest farm and automotive equipment auction yard in Denver. He’d been interested in reaching a wider, Spanish-speaking audience when he first saw Alicia at a meeting for the Univision network. “You,” he told the twenty-six-year-old graphic designer, “have a great fuckin’ nose.” Alicia grew to call him her rancher, her vaquero, her daddy. Gary simply called her by a childhood nickname—Ali Bird. She liked him to call out, with his auctioneer’s tongue, this name in bed. All her names, really. Alicia Monica del Toro, and, later, Alicia Monica del Toro Parker.
Not long after the wedding, Gary took Alicia on a weekend trip to Key West, where they chartered a speedboat called Contender and rode out to meet the sunset across the glassy plane. With the sea breeze strangely still and their faces warmed by rum, Gary held his wife from behind. “We’d make some damn good-looking kids,” he said.
“You already have two dogs. What more do you need?”
“Give me just one, Ali Bird. A son to carry on my name.”
“You don’t need a son for that,” she said. “I carry that name.”
* * *
—
Botánica del Cobre sat adjacent to Tacos Jalisco, a narrow food counter with a limited selection of carnitas and tequila. Michael insisted on stopping there before anywhere else. “Just a shot or two, you know, to get the
night rolling.” It was packed with a few Mexicano families, several Chicano rockabilly couples, and of course, a smattering of Anglo newcomers, white kids in Carhartt hoodies and Red Wing shoes, the clothing of work they’d never know. “I hate ’em,” Michael said, clearing salt from his bottom lip. A young bleached blonde in a crop top eyed him from the soda fountain, obvious and driven. “I’ll screw ’em, but I hate ’em.”
“Story of your life.” Alicia wasn’t as irritated as Michael by the influx of Denver residents. Mostly, she imagined, because she lived among them, greeted them by name at the dog park, walked alongside their designer strollers on Saturday mornings.
“You can handle it, Cia.” Michael scooted a glass of Hornitos across the table.
“Watching my figure.” Alicia wasn’t sure she believed this, but it sounded plausible. “Come on, del Cobre’s closing soon.”
Michael tossed back the second shot. Beneath the table, he cupped Alicia’s knee, a muscle memory pat. “That’s one place,” he said, “that I’d be happy to see close for good.” He smiled at Alicia. “For the record.”
It had been over a decade, she thought, since they first visited the botánica. Alicia’s father was dying of liver cancer brought on by years of working the uranium mines outside Denver. The doctors prescribed morphine, OxyContin, fentanyl patches. Nothing masked his agony without shutting down his brain. “That’s it,” Alicia’s abuela Lopez told her one autumn afternoon. “Your papa deserves to die with dignity of mind.” She sent Alicia and Michael down Lawrence Street with a piece of paper on which she had written a list of herbs in her shaky script. When they returned to his bedside, Alicia’s father held her hand and asked in an empty voice, “Were you in the garden, Stephanie?” That was the worst part, how toward the end he often confused Alicia with her mother, Stephanie Elkhorn, an Anglo woman who, when Alicia was four, packed her purses and thrift-store dresses and didn’t come back.
* * *
—
They entered the botánica to the ringing of bells, a banana rind tied around the brass doorknob. Protection or warning. Either way, some kind of brujería. The walls were covered in crucifixes and mirrors, rodent skulls, and santo candles. An old man wearing several orange and black necklaces lounged in a lawn chair, catching the end of some sports program on a decades-old radio. He fiddled with the antenna and waved at Michael and Alicia, motioning toward a bilingual sign on the counter: Ask me about free cleansings for New Yr. Bring eight lilies & 1 coconut. Must wear white.
Michael pulled Alicia near, speaking warmly through her hair. “For the dogs, right?”
She shushed him, pressing him away with an open palm. “Excuse me,” she said to the clerk.
A woman in a pink frock, her back slightly curved, emerged from behind a beaded curtain. She stepped onto a wooden box, standing tall at the long counter with display cases of fresh cow hearts and dried cobra skins. “¿Les puedo ayudar en algo?”
Alicia only spoke enough Spanish to bump her way through a sales transaction. When she was growing up, Abuela Lopez sometimes spoke to her in a southern Colorado dialect, almost archaic. Michael’s family was from Bakersfield, making him useless unless you needed Spanish slang for pussy and 40 ounce. Alicia checked that he was out of earshot when she asked, in her broken Spanish, for an herb called neem.
“¿Para?”
Alicia flashed the canary diamond on her left hand, out of shame or conceit, she couldn’t decide which. She then turned her back to Michael, pointing to her womb.
“No se garantiza que funcione; y también duele.”
Alicia nodded.
“Entonces ya lo sabe,” said the clerk. “Lo sabe mejor que yo.”
“No way,” Michael hollered from across the botánica, “this incense is made from, I shit you not, viper sperm. What the heck?”
Alicia ignored him as the woman headed into the back room. The sounds of the radio cracked away from sports and into conjunto music. When the clerk reappeared, she held what looked like an urn and gave explicit directions to steep the leaves in boiling water for half an hour. Alicia said gracias, paying in cash.
Outside the moon was nearly full.
“Fleas?” Michael asked as they walked toward the Nova, their shadows slim on the grainy, amber-colored asphalt. He opened the passenger door with his key. “I don’t like it when you lie, Cia.”
She faced him, studied an L-shaped wrinkle across his cheek. “I’m pregnant. I don’t want it. The end.”
“You should tell Gary, if you haven’t. It’s the right thing to do.”
Alicia turned away from Michael as he shut her inside the car. It was colder than before, the light shining in such a way that the moment seemed slow, as if time had slightly realigned to another beat. “It’s not really any of his business,” she said. “And it’s none of yours, either.”
* * *
—
They parked the Nova outside an abandoned adult theater on Twenty-third Street. The lot sloped into a cement trail that ran along the South Platte River, leading to the Union Pacific rail yard and Confluence Park, a spot where, over 150 years earlier, according to Alicia’s freshman history class at UCD, Denver was founded when an Anglo named William Greeneberry Russell discovered gold and the city erupted. Before that, it was an Arapahoe camp. Now it was a desolate hillside filled with stoners and the homeless, flanked by multimillion-dollar condos and public art. The new Queen City of the Plains.
They moved toward the river, a row of Section 8 apartments on the left. Alicia remembered her first place after Abuela Lopez died and the bank took the house on Galapago Street. It was a basement studio with subterranean windows and cruel lighting. Cobwebs and spider sacs appeared often. Alicia would open the window, shoot a stream of ammonia from a spray bottle, and break the sacs against the corrugated steel lining the glass. They never had problems with insects on Galapago, though once while riding her bike past the old house, Alicia saw an Anglo woman in a purple dress gingerly directing a group of exterminators through the yard. Watch your step, she had said. The new owners are still improving the foundation.
Michael and Alicia halted before a human-size cut in a chain-link fence. The whole of the Union Pacific rail yard was visible, an elegant expanse of routes sending trains north into Wyoming, east into Kansas, and west, through mountain passes and white-out valleys, into Utah, a journey ending in California sunlight. Alicia loved the idea of her name riding so far. Not Alicia del Toro Parker, but her tag name—K-SD, easily pronounced cased. Michael reached for Alicia’s hand, but she smacked him away. She climbed through, effortlessly. He followed, the fence trembling.
At the yard’s western edge, they searched out a clean freight. Within the aisles of tracks, Michael and Alicia passed the ghostlike shapes of hoppers and field mice stalked by feral cats. The bodies of homeless men sunk into the jagged banks of the yard, their busted boots and clumped sleeping bags gray mounds among the dirt. Michael lit a cigarette. Beneath the yard lights, his face seemed younger, his teeth ivory, his eyes shining. They continued on past empty cars with crude tags by amateurs. There were massive DEKO signatures, left by a long-standing Denver crew with gangbanger tendencies. Michael exhaled his smoke, pointing to a character tag, SNOOPY with chicken scratch beneath it: MILE HI CITY. He hated this shit, and she agreed. They moved behind a yellow switcher where, some twenty yards ahead, was a water tower with a silhouette of a K-SD piece. Michael said, “All I remember was climbing that rickety ladder”—he paused, adding, as if for good measure—“your ass in front of me the whole way.”
“Good God. Let’s hit this train, already.”
With their backpacks heavy, they rushed the tracks, the iron walls forming a canyon in the night. It was like old times, when they were young and Michael was enough. Alicia bumped him with her right shoulder. “I always think of you, Mikey. When a train rolls by my place at one A.M., it’s
all you.” She loved the trains, how they charged forward, creating their own sense of time.
“Me, too,” he said. “I hear the sounds of the tracks rattling, the horns blaring, and those caution gates getting lowered. It gets me all hot. Then I turn to the chick beside me in bed and say, ‘This reminds me of my ex-girlfriend.’ ”
Alicia stopped walking, her boots hitting the ground with a smack. “You’re an asshole. I don’t want to hear that.”
“Why not, Cia? You’re the married one. Same dish every night.”
“I don’t see why you have to jab, that’s all.” In the far distance, she spotted their freight, clean under shadows, a track pointed toward Kansas.
“You don’t know why?” Michael said.
* * *
—
The first time, it was Michael’s. Alicia was nineteen. At the King Soopers on Speer Boulevard, she shoved an E.P.T box into her unseasonably warm coat and biked to the house she shared with her abuela Lopez. Alicia took the test in her upstairs bathroom, later emptying the wastebasket in a nearby park. A clinic doctor prescribed a pill that knifed Alicia’s insides for three days and two nights. On the third day, dizzy and partially blind with pain, Alicia staggered into the kitchen, where she found Abuela Lopez standing at the counter chopping pork with a butcher’s knife. It was spring. The windows were open. The perfume of lilacs pushed into the house and mixed with the stench of raw meat.
“Abuelita,” she said, “I need to tell you something.” Before Alicia could finish, Abuela Lopez missed the pork, slicing her right thumb, blood flowing over the meat.
Abuela Lopez called her granddaughter many names that day. Selfish, cruel, stupid, childish. When she got the bleeding under control and her temper sealed away, she told Alicia, “Before all this bullshit, we only had the herbs, mija. Why didn’t you ask me?” Abuela Lopez knew what plants to use, the temperature at which to sip the tea, how many cups for how many days, how long the cramps would curl Alicia’s insides, and to what extent she should expect tenderness in her breasts.
Sabrina & Corina Page 17