Maggy's Child (14 page)

Maggy’s tone was light as she replied. “I felt ill, is all. I didn’t want to ruin the party for everyone else, so I came home alone. Since David isn’t here, I think I’ll take a sleeping pill and go to bed. You might tell Lyle when he comes in, so he doesn’t bother trying to wake me. Those things make me dead to the world.”

Lyle always looked in on his mother when he came in at night. At first Maggy had thought it was a charming habit, and then, later, when he showed such brutal indifference to her, his wife, she had resented it. Now she merely accepted it, and even found it occasionally came in handy. It allowed her to communicate with her husband through his mother, without facing him herself.

Virginia looked at her steadily for a moment. “I’ll tell him. How is your wrist?”

“Better, thanks.”

“Maggy …”

“Yes?”

“Nothing.” Virginia looked very old and tired suddenly. The dark smudges that lodged perpetually beneath her lower lids seemed more pronounced than usual, circling her eyes like two grayish bruises. In the unforgiving glow of the floor lamp, her too-white skin was a dry web of wrinkles. Her mouth was drawn and almost colorless. Her neck, thrusting up from the vee neck of her robe, was so thin as to appear scrawny. Maggy caught a glimpse of her collarbones and was shocked to notice how prominent they were through Virginia’s paper-thin skin.

Maggy felt a rush of concern. “Are you all right, Virginia?”

Virginia waved a hand in the air as though to shoo the question away. “I’m fine. A little tired, but fine. Why don’t you go along to bed, if that’s what you came home to do? I want to get back to my book.” Her tone bordered on the brusque.

Maggy was not offended. She knew how much Virginia, a robust sportswoman for most of her life, hated admitting to the physical weakness that was so much a part of her condition. It embarrassed her. Consequently, Maggy’s smile at her mother-in-law was warm. “I will. If you’re sure you don’t need anything.”

“I don’t. If I did, I’d call Louella.” Virginia’s tone softened as her gaze met her daughter-in-law’s. “Thank you for asking. Good night, Maggy.”

“Good night.”

Maggy lifted a hand in farewell, turned, and left the apartment. As she closed the door behind her, she experienced a momentary sadness. She always felt a twinge of regret in her dealings with Virginia. Had her marriage
worked out differently, she thought they might have been friends.

But under the circumstances there was nothing she could do for Virginia, just as there was nothing Virginia could do for her. Reminding herself of that as she wound her way back through the endless corridors toward the center of the house, Maggy succeeded in putting her mother-in-law out of her mind.

As she climbed the wide, curving staircase toward the second floor, Maggy’s steps lightened. A few more minutes, and she would be free! She was suddenly almost giddy with anticipation, like a prisoner about to be let out of jail. Of course, she had just a couple of hours. Then she had to come back. And sooner or later, she would have to face Lyle.

The realization brought fear in its wake. But she refused to let it dampen her rising spirits. She would enjoy the moment, and worry about the future when it was at hand.

If Lyle ever found out what she did on the occasional nights when she supposedly retired to bed early with a sleeping pill, he would be livid with rage—but with luck he would never find out. He hardly ever came to her room anymore. Even if, by some dreadful mischance, he should happen to do so on a night when she was gone, she thought—hoped—he would go away when his knock wasn’t answered. As angry as he was, though, it was quite possible that he would come to her room tonight, which was why she meant to be inside it with the door safely locked by the time he got home. She knew that he would dislike making a noisy scene to gain admittance, and in the morning she could always plead the effect of the sleeping pill as the reason why she did not hear him. He did not possess a key to the deadbolt she had had installed on her bedroom door, supposedly as a general safety precaution but really to keep him out. At least, she assumed he did not, though she was never 100 percent positive of
anything with Lyle. Thank goodness she had managed to come home from the party on her own. If he had accompanied her, there would have been no escaping his rage.

Tomorrow she would have to face him, but there would be ways to avoid being alone with him then. Church, for instance, and lunch at the Club afterward. Then he would play golf with his friends. With luck, she would once again manage to be safely locked in her bedroom before he came home for the night.

But the next few hours were hers. Like the other ten or so nights a year when she locked her door, turned out the lights, and slipped out her window, she was already counting the minutes until she could escape.

Tonight she had a mission as well. She had to dig up Nick’s “present” and take it to the one place in the world where she knew it would be safe. The one place where everybody was on her side:
Tia
Gloria’s house.

Maggy had bought the house for her father. Even now, almost nine years after his death, it gave her comfort to reflect that whatever else her disastrous marriage might have done, it had enabled her to support her father in comfort for the last two years of his life. Shortly after David’s birth, by means of cash advances on her credit cards and by scraping together all the pin money that Lyle, in his euphoria over David, had showered on her, Maggy had managed to come up with the funds required to purchase a small, dilapidated house on the Indiana waterfront that she knew her father would love. Deed in hand, she had gone to fetch him from the public housing project where she’d grown up and where he still lived. He had cried when she handed him the deed—and he had never returned to the projects.

Thus her father, Jorge Luis Garcia, the first generation of his family to be born a U.S. citizen, became a homeowner. It was his dream come true.

The son of itinerant farm laborers who had sneaked across the border from Mexico in search of work, Jorge
had lived all his life in conditions of extreme poverty. His family had moved constantly, rotating with the seasons from Florida’s orange groves to Georgia’s peanut farms to Kentucky’s tobacco fields. As the years passed, his parents left children who matured to adulthood and formed their own families behind at every stop along the way. Finally having died within three months of each other in Georgia, his parents were buried in that state’s red clay. After their demise, Jorge, their youngest, continued to travel from state to state with the crops, until one season, when he was working in the tobacco fields of central Kentucky, he fell in love with the third of the farm owner’s five daughters. Mary Kramer was just seventeen years old when they ran off and got married. Jorge was twenty-five.

If the Kramers had gotten their hands on Jorge, they would have lynched him.

Magdalena Rose was the result of that union. She was born within the year.

Disowned by her parents, shocked by the harsh reality of grinding poverty that came hard on the heels of her whirlwind romance, Mary Kramer Garcia had nevertheless rallied, rolled up her sleeves, and done what needed doing. The itinerant life was not for her, she decided after a single season on the road, and it was she who insisted that Jorge give it up. Their little family moved to Louisville—Mary’s Kentucky roots sank deep—and with Mary and Magdalena to provide incentive Jorge worked two jobs, nights in a dairy plant and days as a street sweeper. Mary had taken in laundry and cared for Magdalena. Maggy’s sole visual memory of her mother was of looking up at a redheaded, pale-skinned woman who leaned tiredly against a wringer washer as she endlessly twisted the white sheets that came through the wringer, day after day. To the present day, Maggy had only to smell laundry detergent to be reminded of her mother.

Mary was hit and killed by a car when Magdalena was four. Jorge was crazed with grief, and it was then that he
turned to the bottle. Within a year he had lost both jobs and they were kicked out of their little house for nonpayment of rent. Had it not been for a kindly priest, Maggy guessed that she and her father would have ended up in the streets. But Father John had taken pity on them and arranged for them to live in public housing. Always too proud to accept charity before, Jorge had accepted it then so that Magdalena would have a roof over her head. Later, his pride drowned in a tide of alcohol, he had made no protest when Father John arranged for them to get welfare.

Jorge never recovered from the loss of his wife. For the rest of his life, Maggy couldn’t remember a period of more than two consecutive days when he’d been sober. But she loved him. And she had never doubted that he loved her. He just couldn’t cope with his pain.

Had it not been for Nick, who first happened across six-year-old Maggy rooting through a fast-food outlet’s trash, Maggy didn’t know how she would have survived.

She could still remember the first words Nick had ever spoken to her: “Hey, kid, get out of the garbage! Don’tcha know there’s rats in them things?”

It had been dark, maybe eleven o’clock or so because the burger joint down the street from where she lived had just closed, though the red-and-yellow neon light in the shape of a giant M was still illuminated. It was summer, because it had been warm. The too-small, faded pink dress she’d been wearing had barely reached halfway to her knees, and its short sleeves had been uncomfortably tight around her upper arms. She’d been perched precariously on a stack of boxes in a dark corner of the parking lot, bottom upended as she pawed through discarded Styrofoam containers piled high in a Dumpster, looking for something edible. Already she had found a cheeseburger with nothing wrong with it at all and half a pack of fries. That would do for herself, but she needed to find more if she was to also feed her
papi
, who was at that moment
lying on the floor of their apartment recovering from a week-long drunk.

“Mind your own damned business!” she’d shot back, after a quick, initially scared glance had told her that the threat was not a threat at all, but only a skinny black-haired boy not much older than herself. She’d gotten back down to business, turning her back and sifting through the trash with single-minded concentration.

“You got a hole in your underpants! I can see your tushie through it!” was the taunting response. This assault on her modesty and dignity was too much. Maggy’s hand closed over the first promising missile that came to hand—a large paper cup almost full of Coke, lid still on, straw still protruding—and with a cry of rage she turned and hurled it at her tormentor.

It hit, dead on.

The boy shrieked as the cup smacked into his forehead and burst, drenching him with icy liquid. Maggy, triumphant yet knowing when she was in deep trouble, leapt down from her perch and bolted for home.

A flying tackle brought her down. Maggy hit the concrete and saw stars. But by necessity she’d learned to take care of herself. Biting and clawing and kicking and yelling, she squirmed over onto her back and fought like a little tigress.

He’d won in the end. Sitting on top of her, his hands pinioning her wrists to the ground, his wet black hair plastered to his skull where she drenched him, scratches she’d given him beading with blood on his left cheek, he unexpectedly grinned.

“You fight pretty good, for a girl.”

“Go to hell!”

“You live at Parkway Place, don’t you? So do we—me and my mom and my brother. I’ve seen you around.”

“Ain’t none of your business where I live!”

“You hungry?”

“No, I ain’t. I just poke around in Dumpsters ’cause I like ’em.”

“I got some spaghetti at home I can cook. Ain’t nobody there. My mom’s at work—she’s a waitress, she works nights—and my brother’s gone out somewhere. You want some?”

At the word spaghetti, Maggy’s stomach growled. She hadn’t eaten since the night before—and she loved spaghetti.

“I got to take some home for my
papi.
”

“Your what?”

“My daddy. He’s—sick, and I gotta take care of him.”

“He’s that old drunk that’s always fallin’ down the stairs, ain’t he? I had to jump over him once, ’cause he was sleepin’ right in front of the entrance to our building.”

“
Papi’
s not a drunk!” She stiffened, glaring, ready to fight again, all the good feelings brought on by the thought of spaghetti vanished in an instant.

“My mom gets drunk, too. Not as much as your dad, but I know what it’s like. We got lots of spaghetti, I can make enough for him. You want to come?”

“Not till you take back what you called my
papi
!”

“Okay, I take it back.”

Maggy relaxed slightly. The boy got off her. She scrambled to her feet and stood facing him while the big neon sign bathed them both in shades of red and yellow. She didn’t know whether to stay or to run.

“So you want spaghetti?”

In the end, the lure of spaghetti proved too strong to resist. “Yeah.”

“Then come on.” The boy started walking toward the cluster of apartment buildings at the far end of the street. He looked around to see if she was following. She was.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

“Magdalena. What’s yours?”

“Nick.”

Nick. He’d looked out for her ever since, until she’d left him behind to marry Lyle.

How he must have hated her for that. She knew, had he done it to her, she would have hated him.

And now he was back. Unbidden, his face as it looked now rose in her mind’s eye: dark, dangerous, charming, a little hard. A stranger’s face, though it bore an outward likeness to that of the boy she had loved. She had to keep reminding herself that that boy was gone forever, just as Magdalena was: vanished in the mists of time. Although, perhaps, not entirely. Maybe shades of the boy lived on in the man, remembering. Just as the part of her that was still Magdalena Garcia remembered, too.

Memory could be a dangerous thing. She had to keep reminding herself of that.