A Handbook to Luck (22 page)

June 20

Leila

I
t was a hot summer morning near the Caspian Sea. Leila stood on the balcony of her villa and looked out over the blue water. In the eaves, a mourning dove was cooing over the fledglings in her nest. The winds were shifting south, ruffling the sea. A patch of clouds was darkening like a slow stain across the skies. A man stood by the edge of the sea gutting fish. Leila had read in the local paper that the number of sturgeon in the sea had shrunk by twenty-five percent. Thousands of seals, turtles, and migratory birds were also dying. What decided these natural catastrophes?

The kitchen was nearly empty. Leila had given away most of the villa's contents to the people in town. Only the chandeliers, the grandfather clock, a side table, and two chairs remained of the furniture. Her husband knew nothing of this because he hadn't been to the villa in a year. Leila made herself a cup of tea and set out her breakfast: flatbread with cherry preserves and dates. Then she served herself a dish of coffee ice cream, crushing a few walnuts with the flat of a knife and sprinkling them on top. It cheered her up to have a little ice cream with breakfast.

Today was Leila's birthday. She was twenty-nine years old. Nobody had remembered it—not her daughter, not her husband, not her father or friends. The grandfather clock in the dining room chimed nine times. She'd listened to it every hour for the past two days. Every minute weighed on her like a tiny sinker, dragging her to an airless place. It was worst after midnight, when the glaze of another day seemed unbearable and the stars looked so shockingly white.

Leila felt guilty leaving her daughter in Tehran with a sore throat but she knew the servants would take good care of her. All Mehri had to do was call and someone would be there to sharpen her pencils, or bring her a cup of tea, or pick up one of her blue exercise books from the floor. Already, she'd forgotten the dream of going to California.

The water level of the Caspian was rising an average of eighteen centimeters a year for reasons that were mysterious to scientists. Was it the clearing of the local land for agriculture that had increased the runoff? Were the underlying movements of tectonic plates responsible? (Seismologists were detecting an unprecedented amount of activity below the sea.) Was it the increase in rainfall? Nobody knew for certain. The Caspian was thirty meters below sea level. Leila studied the graceful curve of the coast and thought it only a matter of time before they were all underwater.

It was confusing to organize the day's pills. Dr. Pezechpour made certain not to give Leila enough at any one time to kill herself, but she'd still managed to collect quite a few. (He'd told her that Iranians killed themselves with stunning infrequency. Was this supposed to be encouraging?) The silver bracelet Enrique had given her was tucked next to her peach-colored pills. Leila slipped it on. It felt heavier than she'd remembered.

There were few psychiatrists left in Iran. Baba had inquired discreetly among his colleagues until he'd found Dr. Pezechpour at the University of Tehran, teaching anatomy and willing to see Leila on the sly. Dr. Pezechpour could be trenchant but he was annoyingly fond of maxims. “Iranians are like wheat fields,” he said. “When the storm comes, they bend; when the storm passes, they stand up again.” He never considered abandoning the storm altogether.

Behind the villa, the Alborz Mountains shone blue-black in the sunlight. The cypress trees formed a protective ring around her house, giving off a sharp, medicinal scent. What would she give to go running naked into the sea? Men were judged by the risks they took. And women? By how few. In April, Sadegh had changed his mind and forbidden her to leave the country. No amount of begging would make him relent.
Do you think I'm stupid, Leila? A fool with no eyes in my head?
It was her own fault, she decided, for losing weight and getting those beauty treatments. Her husband knew she wasn't looking this good for him.
Tell me who you were planning to see in California! Tell me, whore, or I'll have you locked up for adultery!
Leila retreated to her room and stayed there for days.

New hatcheries were rising up along the Caspian. Breeders were releasing millions of sturgeon fingerlings into the waves. The hope was that the fingerlings would grow and produce more of the roe that was selling for hundreds of dollars per kilo on the world market. How many lives, Leila wondered, depended on this caviar? She pictured herself slowly entering the sea, surrounded by fingerlings, her chador snatched by the wind like a lost, dark kite.

What would Enrique remember of her then? And Mehri? Would she join forces with Sadegh to vilify her? Sometimes Leila looked at her daughter and knew she was raising a girl who would end up hating her.

Others had managed to find a sense of purpose. Maman was happily married to Mr. Fifield, who'd just bought the biggest landscape architecture firm in Great Britain. Yasmine had left the country and was studying engineering in Munich. (In her last letter she'd quoted some German: “Every hour moves through your heart and the last one kills.”) Uncles and aunts and cousins were forging new lives overseas. But Leila merely had the sensation of no sensation, of being outside her body, of watching it from a faraway shore that was already vanishing.

Her bathrobe slipped off one shoulder and Leila gazed down at her body, sheathed in its soiled nightgown. She'd grown flaccid again, heavy with gravity. She was what she couldn't have imagined becoming: a matron, a housewife, a nobody. Was this, too, written on her brow? There were two cigarettes left in her pack. She secured one between her lips and lit it. How satisfying to feel the hot smoke filling her lungs. She smoked and swept the apartment to calm her nerves. Sometimes she read poetry.
The birds have gone in search of the blue direction. The horizon is vertical, vertical, and movement fountain-like and at the limits of vision shining planets spin.

The same dream plagued Leila night after night: peasant women, their faces veiled, gathered around her in groups of three or four, unraveling mountains of fine thread for hosiery factories. Would they use the untangled strands on the spindles, idle in the dim corners of the room? Would they make something beautiful and new? When she told Dr. Pezechpour her dream, he said: “No matter how fast you run, your shadow keeps up.”

Leila went to her bedroom and extracted the tan suitcase from the closet. It contained the wet suit that Enrique had sent her for her birthday seven years ago. She unfolded the rubbery legs, creased from so much time in storage. They looked as if they might crawl around on their own. The flippers were faded but still sturdy and good. She set everything down by the front door of the villa.

This afternoon she would write to Enrique on her best stationery and apologize to him for raising his hopes. She would say that it wasn't enough anymore for the seasons to turn, for the mourning dove to tend to her fledglings. Everything was a copy of something else, unoriginal, uninspiring. She would tell him that all she wanted now was to follow the birds in a blue direction, learn more than she knew before. (Last night she'd seen an owl swoop past her window, its eyes swathed in white like gleaming bandages, and she'd imagined it was her brother.) Maybe the end was like the beginning, she would say, all loneliness and nothingness.

Leila lit her last cigarette. Outside her window, wooden boats methodically plowed the sea. How much sturgeon would be harvested from the Caspian today? Leila no longer cared. She didn't believe in the sea anymore. With the French doors of the balcony shut, the villa was, at last, completely silent. Even the leaves of the cypress trees were mute. Leila extinguished her cigarette in the crystal ashtray and watched the smoke drift through her fingers. She noticed the veins in her right hand, the way they wound around her wrist. Her pulse was surprisingly steady, like the strokes of the clock announcing the hour.

July 4

Enrique

T
he Fourth of July started out promisingly enough, pure and hot. The neighbors trickled in with their children and fruit pies, cole slaw and ice cream. Marta arrived to help with the party and brought her son along. Soon the kids were clamoring to jump in the pool. The boys from down the block insisted on holding a swimming contest but Camille and Sirenita won every race. Enrique knew it was petty, but he loved that his daughters beat every boy in the neighborhood. Those expensive swimming lessons had really paid off.

Enrique offered his guests beer and wine coolers. Everyone was drinking heavily but nobody seemed the worse for it in this sun. He felt a slight buzz himself, which made him blandly anxious. Enrique looked around at his life—the children in the pool, his wife tossing a salad, the solidity of his house and his neighborhood (they didn't have an ocean view but they were a short walk to the ocean), the hummingbird whirring near his newly planted jasmine. Did any of this really belong to him?

Things weren't ideal at home but they were still better than he could've hoped for growing up. The hotel rooms and cheap apartments that he and Papi had lived in had seemed normal at the time. Nobody they knew would've told them differently. The truth was that there was no logic to their existence, but it existed all the same. And they'd been happy in their own way. What Enrique worried about most in those days was that his father would die before him. Now that the worst had happened, what else did he have to fear?

Maybe his childhood had ruined him for any ordinary life. He never trusted when things were good, at least not in any calculable way. He wasn't even sure what “good” meant. In any case, it probably wasn't how most people defined it. Besides, what did “good” matter when it could so easily disappear? Since he'd begun corresponding with Leila, he'd been tempted to walk away from his life every day. It scared him that he might be capable of this.

Enrique wanted to go to Las Vegas for a while and clear his head. Nothing else focused his attention like a high-stakes poker game. He missed the twenty-four-hour neon, and the crowds on Fremont Street, and the endless sunsets at Red Rock Canyon. And he could always count on a good table at the Diamond Pin. Last he'd heard, Jim Gumbel had remarried and Johnny Langston had shot up the giant cowboy at the Pioneer Club that repeated,
Howdy pardner, welcome to Las Vegas.
How else was he supposed to get any sleep?

Enrique planned to take his son with him this time, show him where Papi used to perform. Already, Fernandito could do a few decent magic tricks, including one with fake blood and a stuffed vampire bat that made his sisters scream. For his birthday he'd asked for a fine top hat and a magic wand just like his grandfather's. It unsettled Enrique to think that Fernandito might follow in Papi's footsteps. How was it possible to both encourage
and
protect his son? It pained him to think of leaving his children. No matter their troubles, Papi hadn't abandoned him.

The barbecue was sizzling with burgers and prime cuts of steak. The women, slightly sunburned and wearing pastels and plaids, were bunched together in a far corner of the patio. Their husbands settled around the picnic table for a poker game. Enrique had known most of the men for years—several were regulars at the Grand Casino—but nobody ever exchanged anything more than a few pro forma complaints about the Dodgers.

The afternoon whistled with early fireworks. The kids climbed out of the pool, towel-wrapped and shivering, and ate their cheeseburgers and chips, except for Fernandito, who was busy practicing a trick with brown eggs and pennies. One of the mothers, a preschool teacher, read a story to the younger children about a lonely circus elephant. Enrique remembered the poster from Varadero from his and Papi's first apartment in Santa Monica. In the poster, an elephant with a jeweled headdress stood on its hind legs warily eyeing the ringmaster while a tiger roared behind them. No animals—humans included—were meant to be domesticated, Enrique decided. It took away their fire for survival.

At about four o'clock, Delia sent Marta out to buy more wine coolers at the liquor store on Entrada Avenue. She was supposed to buy sparklers for the kids, too, if she could find any. The doorbell rang and a postman handed Enrique a special delivery letter from Iran. A delivery on a holiday? His last letters to Leila had gone unanswered for months. He didn't know what to believe anymore. A part of him was giving up on her entirely; another part still wanted her to make him hope. Who was it that said the devil tortured men by keeping them waiting?

The letter was postmarked two weeks earlier, on their birthday. The stationery was thick and cream-colored and her handwriting was perfect, as if Leila had written a draft before copying out what she wanted to say. Enrique couldn't focus on most of what she'd written. He tried to slow down his reading, but none of what she said made sense. Why was she apologizing to him? Why couldn't she visit him? Had her husband found out about their affair?

Leila's letter only went round and round with incomprehensible sorrow. There were no specifics, no promises, no explanations, just this one fact: she wasn't coming to California. Enrique felt like overturning the damn barbecue, uprooting his jasmine vines, anything to relieve his frustration. Why couldn't he convince her to trust him? Why couldn't he convince himself? He read the letter for the tenth time, looking for a clue. Miserable, he jammed the letter in his pocket and returned to the backyard party.

Just then everything happened so fast that he couldn't have related it with any coherence. In retrospect, every piece of the sequence might have been anticipated, recognized for its importance, for where it could lead. Accidents didn't happen all at once. He had to believe that. What could be more predictable than a barbecue on the Fourth of July?

Yet it seemed to Enrique that everything did occur simultaneously: the girasoles' faint lace in the sky; Marta gone off to the liquor store with forty dollars in her purse; the arrival of Leila's last letter, with its sad, circular language; the kids crowding into the twins' room to play Monopoly; the adults so busy with their card games and conversations that nobody—not one of the twelve of them—saw Marta's son slip into the deep end of the pool.

Enrique returned to the backyard party and spotted the boy floating facedown in the water, his shorts ballooning a bright red. For a second he thought it might be Fernandito, and his heart jumped up his throat. As he raced toward the pool he saw that it was the babysitter's son and immediately dove in after him. After the shock of the cold water, time slowed to an impossible degree. Enrique swam as hard as he could, terrified that he would run out of breath before reaching the boy.

José Antonio was unconscious, his skin sallow and cold. Enrique tucked him under one arm and pulled him to the edge of the pool. Gently, he settled the boy on the lawn. José Antonio's head flopped to one side. Water poured from every orifice. Enrique pinched the boy's nostrils, pressing his mouth over José Antonio's. It tasted, disconcertingly, of potato chips. Above them, the palm trees rustled.

The children raced downstairs when they heard the commotion and started screaming, convinced that José Antonio was dead. But Enrique could feel the boy's pulse and knew he still had a chance. José Antonio's chest rose and fell with every breath. Then his jaw began moving from side to side. Suddenly, his eyes opened wide and he stared straight at Enrique. His pupils fanned closed like dark petals. Enrique leaned the boy forward and patted him on the back until everything in his stomach came up pale yellow.

“There's still time for you,” Enrique whispered and held him close.

In life there was a before and an after, Enrique believed, a gap between what you wanted and what you got, between what you planned and what actually happened. There were no advance warnings, no billboards advertising a tragedy to come. The moment before always seemed so ordinary, like any other. Pink programs and straw hats whirling through the air. Wayward storks landing in a confusion of feathers and legs. It hurt Enrique to remember this.

There was no convincing “why” to anything, no answers, just good luck or bad tilting life one way or another. Enrique didn't put faith in odds, or statistics, or reason anymore. Some things just couldn't be outrun. Odds might be calculated, inattention focused, reasoning torn apart. But luck, he thought, luck was something else entirely.

By the time Marta returned from the liquor store, José Antonio was warmly wrapped in a beach towel and drinking hot chocolate. The soft stems of his legs jutted out from the white terry cloth. Fernandito tried to cheer him up by performing a magic trick but ended up dropping an egg on his foot instead. After checking his vital signs one last time, the ambulance crew packed up and left.

Marta was inconsolable, provoking defensiveness in the guests. “It could've happened to any of us,” the preschool teacher said. But Enrique could tell that Marta didn't believe her. Meticulously, she checked her son for bruises and kissed him all over. At the liquor store she said she'd imagined wings on his back, like the ones Salvadoran women made for sick babies, the ones who couldn't be saved. She'd rushed back to the house frightened to death.

Without warning Marta handed Enrique her purse, picked up her son, and started walking purposefully toward the sea. Enrique followed her, still soaking wet from the pool. What else could possibly happen this afternoon? Soon the whole party was following Marta to the beach—a half-dressed parade of his neighbors and their children holding Fourth of July sparklers (Marta had brought back a sack of them) and paper flags. A propeller plane hovered above the shoreline. A couple of miles to the south, the Ferris wheel on the Santa Monica pier turned. Enrique longed to hear its carnival tune.

The coast curved in both directions, looking as though the ends might eventually meet. Only the horizon was straight, two distinct shades of blue. The sun was so bright, it made everything glitter. Seagulls drifted overhead, calling to one another and shedding feathers. The beach was sticky with seaweed and tar. Enrique wasn't sure what to do. Around him, people were jogging and picnicking and playing volleyball as if nothing bad ever happened. The children, led by his daughters, begged to go swimming but Enrique held them back.

Marta strode to the ocean's edge, set José Antonio down in the sand, and instructed him not to move. “Watch me,” she ordered. Marta plunged into the cold water—to her hips, to her waist, to her chest and neck. A wave rolled over her, soft and enormous. She sputtered and rubbed the salt water from her eyes but quickly turned and waved to her son. Enrique watched her in silence from the shore. He was afraid that Marta might sink but instead she rose with the very next wave. Then in a synchrony of arms, legs, and lungs, Marta swam.