Red Glass (14 page)

Once everything was set up, the aunts brought us bowls of steaming pozole and tamales and sweet coffee and cinnamon rolls sprinkled with sesame seeds. As we ate, Dika hung on to Mr. Lorenzo, feeding him bits of her roll, pouting over his leaving. “Now when will you come back to me,
mi amor
?” she asked.

“In one week,
mi amor
,” Mr. Lorenzo said, stroking her cheek. “In one week we’ll return.”

I glanced at Ángel. He had stopped chewing and was staring at an orange peel in the dirt.

“One week!” Dika moaned. “One week without
mi amor
! How I will survive?”

As we finished dessert, it grew dark, and Ángel turned up the music so loud it vibrated my bones. The uncles dragged the aunts—who raised their voices in fake protest—inside the circle of chairs and started dancing.

Dika plopped down next to me. “Now, Sophie”—she rubbed her hands together devilishly—“you must to tell Ángel.”

“Tell him what?”

She winked and pinched my cheek. “You know! You see how I tell Mr. Lorenzo he is
mi amor.
You must to do the same.” She adjusted the clasp of my necklace, and smoothed the coconut circles against my chest. “You cannot wait for the things to happen. You must to make them happen. And now I will not say more because I know you are angry with me when I say the things how they are.”

I flushed. Dika was right. I felt as though I’d climbed up on the high diving board and was taking in the view. But the thought of stepping into the air still scared me.

After Ángel finished his pastry, he bowed to Dika, and ceremoniously asked her to dance. Watching Ángel dance was even better than watching him play basketball. He moved perfectly with the rhythm; he was a magical, flowing sculpture of music.

And Dika—who would have guessed she could move her body like that? She was in her element, like a sea cow in water, a graceful, beautiful thing, a strange mermaid. She followed Ángel’s spins and dips without missing a beat. She added belly dance moves, snaking her arms above her head, gyrating her hips. Beads of sweat flew off her like tiny diamonds.

After a few songs, Mr. Lorenzo danced with her. He wasn’t as amazing as Ángel—his movements were slow and deliberate and his eyes full of concentration, focused on which step came next. Still, Dika was glowing. She said to him loudly in Spanish, so that everyone could hear, “
Mi amor
, if you don’t come back from Guatemala in exactly one week, I’ll come get you and put you over my shoulder and carry you back!”

Ángel glanced at me and grinned. “Let’s dance, lime-girl.”

I shook my head. “I don’t know how.”

He pulled on my arm. “Come on. I’ll show you.”

But I shook my head and felt Dika frowning at me.

Ángel grabbed Abuelita instead, and after the song ended, he came back to me. I said no again, and then he grabbed an aunt, and for the next song I said no again, and then he danced with the other aunt, until he’d gone through every female but me and Ñola, who was lying beside the patio, watching the stars. I looked at Ñola and thought, That’s me, that’s who I’ll be in eighty years, an old weird lady who hovers at the edges of life and watches the sky and hears a faint echo of laughing stars and lives on that memory.

The next song was my favorite, “Following the Moon.” This time, when Ángel asked, I said yes.

Until very late we danced. I stepped on his feet and bumped into him on spins, but we laughed and I let the music move through me like water, and it was actually fun. Afterward, we all collapsed into wooden chairs, exhausted and sweating. Ángel sat next to me and let his arm rest on the back of my chair.

“So, lime-girl, why’d you run off last night?”

I shrugged, embarrassed. “I guess I was confused.”

“I missed you,” he said.

I looked at him. “Really?”

He leaned into me and lowered his voice, so low it crackled. “I dreamed about you last night, Sophie. You want to hear it?”

“Sure.”

“You were inside a blue room, at night. The moon was shining through the window. You were lying on a bed inside a white mosquito net. There was a red glass necklace around your neck. That’s all you had on.”

I felt myself blush.

He continued. “I looked at your hips and I wanted to move my fingers over them. I wanted this more than anything.”

A heat gathered in my center and ran down my thighs.

“But when I came closer I couldn’t find the opening to the net, and I got tangled up, and you were inside, watching me, smiling. But you didn’t help me.”

I looked at him hard and tried to make out the pupils in the dark through his sunglasses. “I would have helped you.” And then, quickly, before I could change my mind, I asked, “You want to go for a walk?”

He took my hand and pulled me up. I didn’t look back to see Dika’s reaction as we walked up the hill, past the outhouse, through the cornfield to an open meadow. Here we sat down and tilted our heads back, watching the moon, half full above us, small and clear in the sky.

Ángel took off his sunglasses. “Look,” he said, pointing. “Our stars.”

I nodded and stole a glance at his eyes. “I’ll never know what’s in your box, will I?”

He hesitated and then said, “Seventy-three hundred dollars.”

“That’s it? Just money?”

“It’s a lot of money.” He seemed hurt.

“I mean, I thought it was something mysterious, like a treasure map or old letters. Something special.”

The insect songs rose and fell and rose and finally he said, “It is special. I’ve been saving it for three years. I’m going to set up a business in my town.”

I tried to let the gravity of this settle in. He’d spent three years planning for this. And he’d probably been dreaming of it since he was a little kid. “Does anyone else know?”

He shook his head. “Don’t tell anyone. My dad thinks it’s too dangerous there.”

My stomach clenched. “Is it?”

“The war’s over, but my dad says the soldiers kept their weapons and their way of thinking.”

Suddenly my chest ached. What if something happened to him there? “Why are you going?” I whispered.

He lay back and watched the sky and I watched his face. “I always felt out of place in Tucson,” he said. “Like part of me was somewhere else.”

“But I feel that way too!” I said. “And I’m not running away.”

“I have to go, Sophie. You know how Pablo feels here, at home, with all these memories of his mother? I think that’s how it’ll be for me, too.”

I wanted to touch the curves of his cheekbones. Instead, I stretched out on my back beside him. I thought of Dika’s urgent voice:
You must to tell him, Sophie! You must!
I thought of Ñola, who let her one and only true love slip away. I took a deep breath. “Ángel, I want to tell you something. I want to tell you that…” I stopped because what I’d rehearsed was
I love you and I want you to come back
, but that suddenly seemed pointless and selfish. Isn’t that what it means to love someone—to help him do what his heart is calling him to do?

I looked at the sky because I was scared I’d lose my nerve if I looked right at him. My words came out slowly, drop by drop. “Every time I look at the moon I’ll think of you. And this night. And the night in the van with you following the moon. And that first night, remember, when you stepped off the bunk. Moonlight was coming through the window, and sparks were coming off you. Did you know that? Sparks like stars.

“And every time I see the stars I’ll see those sparks again. At first it will be a sad feeling. But over the years, it might change to a happy feeling with only a little bit of sadness. And maybe one day when I’m old like Ñola and lying on the ground watching the sky, maybe it will fill me with complete happiness to watch the moon and the stars and remember you.” I took a deep breath, held it, and waited. My eyes filled with tears. Crickets sang back and forth in waves. In the spaces between their songs, silence.

I felt him staring at me. I dared to turn my face toward his. Tears were spilling out of his eyes. I wiped the tears from his face, and then, very easily, our faces moved together and we tasted the salt on each other’s cheeks, each other’s lips.

Mi Amor
Is Gone

We kissed in the meadow for a long time. I touched the curve of his cheekbones, the muscled ripples of his shoulders, the dip where his hips met his waist. I had the feeling that I’d landed in a lush forest, a miraculous place that I needed to explore, down to every tree hollow and flower petal, because tomorrow it would all be gone.

We stayed together until just before dawn, when it grew cold and damp. The chickens woke up and the birds started chirping, threads of the world weaving themselves into a new day. We walked back to the room, hand in hand, and kissed again.

After he went to his mattress, I slipped back under the covers, wide awake, still feeling his hand slide over my shoulder, as though he were sculpting it. The particular smell of him stayed in my hair. And the taste of his skin, salty and smooth, lingered in my mouth.

A short time later, Abuelita got up, then Dika, and then there was motion behind the sheet, and Mr. Lorenzo appeared, and then Ángel. I stayed on the mattress and watched him walk by. He wasn’t wearing his sunglasses, a small gift to me. I smiled at him, and he smiled back, tired and happy and sad all at once.

Within an hour, we were in the kitchen, sipping coffee, hovering over a tattered map spread out on the table. Mexico was a giant white funnel that curved to the east and narrowed at Oaxaca, then widened again into Chiapas. After Chiapas came Guatemala, the pale yellow of summer squash.

Mr. Lorenzo moved his thick, soil-covered finger from Huajuapan along a black line down to Oaxaca City, then farther south, toward the blue Pacific Ocean, and along the coast to Tapachula, the border town. “We’ll catch a pickup truck to Huajuapan later this morning,” he said. “Then we’ll have lunch and buy food for the ride, and then take the evening bus. That way we’ll get there the next morning so we can cross the border in daylight.”

I glanced up from the map. “Why does that matter?”

Mr. Lorenzo cleared his throat and kept staring at the map. “Well, just a precaution. It’s safer in the day. Not as many bus-jackings.”

“Bus-jackings?” Dika cried.

“We’ll be fine,
mi amor.
During the daylight it’s safe, more or less.”

Dika did not look convinced.

Mr. Lorenzo patted her knee, then moved his finger from Tapachula farther down across the beige borderline. “Next we cross into Guatemala and take a few local buses to here.” He pointed to a space empty of marked roads, not far from the border, near a place called Tecún Umán. “Here is San Juan,” he said. “Our town.”

I saw nothing but yellow space, and for some reason, this made my stomach tighten. I looked at Ángel. He was sitting with Pablo on his lap, whispering to him and staring at me, but I couldn’t make out what he was saying. “I don’t see any town there,” I said.

Mr. Lorenzo shrugged. “Our town is not big enough for this map.”

“But how will you know where to go?” My voice sounded suddenly shrill, as though Dika had possessed me. “I mean, what if the roads have changed?”

“We’ll ask people,” he said. “No problem.” He took Dika’s pudgy hand in his. Her nails were candy purple, like grape-flavored bubble gum. She must have brought along a collection of nail polish. I was sure that yesterday her nails had been sparkly pink.

“And then, a week later,” Mr. Lorenzo continued with a grin, “I will come back to my girlfriend.” He gazed at Dika and she clung to him like a heroine on the cover of a cheesy romance novel.

None of us ate much of breakfast—the beans and tortillas and salsa felt stuck in my throat. And next thing I knew, the pickup truck was rumbling up the road and we were running out with Ángel and Mr. Lorenzo and their bags, flagging it down. The truck idled in a cloud of dust while Mr. Lorenzo kissed Dika goodbye and climbed on with his suitcase. Then Ángel pulled me to him and planted a long kiss on my lips, right in front of everyone. For a moment he looked hard into my eyes and I looked back. Then he gave Pablo a hug and hopped into the back of the truck with his backpack and duffel bag.

The truck pulled away in a puff of exhaust. Dika patted me on the cheek. “Ha! Finally! You take my advice!”

I didn’t tell her it was too late. Instead I said I was taking a walk to the stream, and I managed to hold back the tears until I was out of sight. I headed into the patch of woods, where Pablo had said the spirit people live. The
duendes.
I was glad the
duendes
wouldn’t let anyone cut down these trees. The light filtered through the leaves, making wavy patterns on the ground. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught flashes of light dancing like spirits. At the stream, reflections bounced off the water onto the undersides of fallen trees and branches, leaves and water and light moving, never the same from one moment to the next.

I took off my shoes and stepped from rock to rock. They were solid and cool beneath my feet, and the rhythm comforted me somehow, the focus on taking one step after another.

Then Pablo appeared. He must have followed me. I wiped the tears off my face and hoped it wasn’t too blotchy.

“
Estás triste
, Sophie?” Pablo asked. Are you sad?

“
Sí, principito.
I’m sad.”

“But you shouldn’t be sad.”

“Why?”

“Because Ángel told me to take care of you and make sure you’re not sad.”

“Big responsibility for a little boy.”

“He said if I take care of you, he’ll bring me a slingshot and show me how to shoot lizards and we can make lizard tacos.”

I felt angry that Ángel would get Pablo’s hopes up, making a promise he didn’t plan to fulfill. But then, a flicker of hope. “When did he say he’d be back?”

“One week.”

“When did he tell you about the present?”

“Right before he left on the bus. When he hugged me.”

Maybe he’d changed his mind. Maybe he was coming back. I would have a long week ahead.

“Sophie?”

“Yeah?”

“Will you read me a poem?”

Dika was melodramatic about Mr. Lorenzo’s being gone. Still, she had no doubt he would come back. She knew he was hopeless and helpless as a devoted puppy without her. “Oh!” she cried every few minutes, placing her hand theatrically over her great bosom. “Oh!
Mi amor
is gone! Oh, I feel lonely! Oh, I miss him!”

I stayed at a quiet distance from everyone else. I stripped the corncobs, fed chickens, made tortillas, all with barely a word. Whenever “Following the Moon” came on, my eyes got watery, and I walked up the path past the outhouse to a clump of white bell-shaped flowers that Abuelita called
Reina de la Noche
—Queen of the Night—and looked over the valley.

Once, on the trail above the outhouse, I nearly tripped over Ñola. Her eyes were open. Usually she laughed when I almost stepped on her, but this time she looked at me with her clouded eyes and said something in Mixteco. She repeated it. Over and over.
Cuaá nanducuvé
. She flicked her wrist as though she were brushing something away. Then she started to get up, and I helped her. She plucked a large white flower from the Queen of the Night plant and handed it to me.
“Cuaá nanducuvé,”
she said, and then inched her way down the path.

I spread open the petals and found, inside, another flower forming, a smaller flower, tender still, and curled up in itself. I pressed my nose into the flower, and inhaled its sweet, musky scent.