The Boy (10 page)

Luckily, the door was unlocked and Anna walked, a sudden tremor in her breath, to a spot roughly in the middle of the old adobe church and, there, sank to her knees.

Bringing both hands to her heart she said, “Please.”

Things happen, things that shouldn’t, things that respect no law, follow no method, assist no function, and are, in spirit and essence, nothing but madness—the cutting loose of the individual from the collective soul. On the cold floor of the church, Anna recalled her middle school teacher—hair teased, finger raised in ridiculous admonition—declaiming shrilly,
“Errare humanum est, perseverare autem diabolicum!”
To err is only human, to persevere is of the devil.  Anna nodded to herself, tears falling on unyielding stone, but then felt something turn. How could she go back to that drab life, how could she give up the thrill of the boy’s hands on her naked back, the warmth of his breath mingled with hers? And why? Why should she? She had the right to
life,
to an identity separate from that of her child. She had a right.

At home Esperanza had the cleaning channel on and Anna had to resist the impulse to hug her until she looked up from the TV and said, pure metal in her voice, “The kid’s gone.”

For a moment Anna could not breathe. “What do you mean, gone?”

Esperanza shrugged. “Gone. He packed a bag and left.”

Anna counted to five before she said, calmly, “Did he say where he was going?”

Esperanza didn’t even bother looking up.

“No,” she said. “He didn’t.”

Richard Strand opened the door with nothing on his face. Nothing.

“Is he here?”

“He is.”

“Can I talk to him?”

“No.”

“Richard . . .”

“No.”

Anna looked down at her hands. They were shaking, so she cupped her elbows and pulled them in.

“Is this your decision or is it his?”

“For the moment, mine.”

“Richard . . .”

“Good-bye, Anna,” and as she followed the movement of his arm in cold disbelief, the door inched shut in her face.

L
ow clouds moved in, and nothing was right. Even the children—golden, supple, fleet—running on winged feet toward their parents’ cars seemed to Anna distinctly insect-like in their hectic sweep across the parking lot. And her little girl advancing, eyes lowered, the weight of the world chained to one foot, punitive in her progress.

Eva opened the door and settled in without a word.

“There’s reason to celebrate,” Anna said sharply. The little girl sat still, slack about the mouth and shoulders.

“He’s gone. He’s out of the house. Are you happy? Are you satisfied? Because it’s all about you, right? All about
you
.”

“Mom,” Eva said.

“What?”

“He’s Richard’s son and Richard’s your friend.”

Anna started the car and reversed in a hard, jagged line away from the school toward a boy she did not see with a backpack, shoes, and no socks, legs like twigs. She hit the brakes with time to spare but, within seconds, there was a man with bulging eyes beating on her window with a fist.

“Are you crazy? Are you out of your mind? You could have killed him! You could have killed my son!”

Anna stepped out immediately. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t see him. I’m so sorry, Tyler. Are you okay?”

“You were going a hundred fucking miles an hour, that’s why you didn’t see him! This is a school, there are children everywhere, you don’t tear ass around the parking lot of a school!”

Anna raised both hands. “I’m so sorry,” she said, and if it hadn’t been for the small boy, who slipped his small hand in his father’s and, looking up with large, steady eyes, said, “I’m okay, Dad. It wasn’t that close,” who knows what would have happened. Who knows what the combined effect of fear and rage in a father’s heart might have been.

“I see you driving like that again, you can forget driving in this state until my son’s in college. You got that?”

Anna nodded meekly.

“And you can forget driving with your daughter in your car, okay? I’ll make sure of that. It’s called child endangerment. That’s what it’s called. Child endangerment.”

In the car, Eva would not stop crying.

“It’s no big deal,” said Anna, but Eva kept crying, and there was nothing in the world between school and home, only the severed sound of a sobbing child and the slow, hard beating of an adult heart and, somehow, a steady progress past the old blinking light toward the mesa and, at the point the canyon closed in around the river, the faint cries of
La Llorona
.

Anna’s
latilla
fence looked puny as she parked in front of it, incapable of holding anything in or out. Eva darted out of the car and was in Esperanza’s arms by the time Anna walked into the house.

“What did you do to her?”

“I did nothing to her.”

“She nearly ran over Tyler! She almost killed him!”

“Let’s stop talking garbage. I did no such thing.”

“Yes you did! And you don’t even care!”

“Mijita,”
said Esperanza, lowering her face to Eva’s and pulling her closer.

It seemed to Anna, standing there, confronted with the implausibility of a united front at her expense in her own house, that every moment spent in the pursuit of Eva’s happiness, every second devoted to the task had been a mistake, an error in judgment so colossal, so dire, that no compensation would ever be adequate enough, no matter the size or shape.

“I have given you everything,” she said. “Everything.” And she turned and headed out into the afternoon alone, shielding her eyes from the sun as she went.

There was no music in the bar, only a kind of bruised half-light in which three men sat with drinks in their dry hands.

“Jim Beam,” Anna said, pulling out a stool. “Double.”

T
he call came at eight in the evening three days later. Esperanza was out, Eva on the couch watching TV, Anna in her study trying to pluck words out of thin air, Jim Beam like liquid amber, liquid fire, on her desk. The phone rang, and Anna peeled out of her study and into the living room and stood there staring at the sequence of digits she knew so well.

On the couch, Eva laughed her little girl’s laugh and folded a long, pale leg over the other.

“Hey.” The boy’s voice was thick and syrupy.

“Where are you?”

“At Tito’s.”

Anna nodded, her mind already at work on the intricacies of crossing the entire town with cops lying spiderlike in their black cars.

“You coming?”

Anna cast a quick look at Eva. “Yes.”

“I’ve got to be somewhere in one hour,” he said.

“One hour?”

“Yeah.”

“Where?”

“A party,” said the boy, like it was nothing.

She ran from room to room, picking things up, dropping them, not remembering what their purpose was, the reason for their strange location, their stubborn solidity. She considered getting into the shower but there was no time. The house seemed suddenly hostile, labyrinthine. There were rooms with things that belonged to other rooms, a closet full of clothes she could not find, a pencil for the eyes she had purchased that was gone, her perfume, a brand-new bottle of Chanel No. 19, also gone, and a strange volition to the dispersion, as if the chaos had been coordinated ahead of time for the precise purpose of driving her mad and denying her even a scant ration of human happiness.

“Get in the car!” she shouted. Eva looked up with big moon-eyes.

“Why?” she asked.

“Because we’re going.”

“Where?”

“None of your business where. Get in the car.”

“But I don’t want to . . .”

Anna swept down on her little girl, her breath rank, her eyes shot through with blood.

“Get in the fucking car,” she said.

For a while the road lay flat and exact before her, the land semi-obscured on either side under a fraying ribbon of cadmium-orange light. The air was full of what would happen next—the approaching headlights, Eva’s long scream, the swerve into the sagebrush, the flip into the night. But it’s always like that, there are never any signs. We look for signs, but there are never any signs.

The engine stopped. The night closed in. Nothing moved.

S
he came to in a room with pale-green curtains and gray linoleum floors. Tubes—long, slender, perfectly transparent—looped out of her nose and arms. Her right eye was covered with a bandage; she would learn in time that fifty-five stitches had been applied, the tissues tightened around her eyeball, her sight saved over many hours by the work of many hands. She would learn other things in time, but for now it was just a slow coming to, a gradual surfacing, a prolonged peeling of layers until the sick realization.

She shot up in bed. “Where is my daughter?”

A nurse holding a clipboard to her chest turned, slid her reading glasses down her nose. “In the ICU,” she said.

Anna held herself up—chest heaving, muscles shaking, sweat gathering under her arms—on both sides of the metal frame.

“How is she hurt?”

The nurse put the clipboard down. “Mrs. A.,” she said, “your daughter is in a coma.”

Anna pulled the tubes out of her nose. She unpeeled the tape holding the needles in her arms, freeing herself as the nurse began to scream. She had her feet on the floor already, she had her eye on the door already, she was holding the nurse back as far as she could hold her when the surface of the world slipped out from under her—and everything went dark.

Hours went past before the next surfacing, the next unpeeling of layers. She was tied to the metal frame of the bed this time, bound at the wrists and ankles, unable to move an inch.

“My daughter,” she said through lips cracked and swollen. A doctor approached and stood peering down at her as she tensed against her bindings, struggling to keep the white figure in focus.

“You have sustained severe injuries. You have a fractured clavicle, four broken ribs, a punctured liver, a ruptured spleen, severe concussion, and you nearly lost one eye. You cannot move.”

Anna’s uncovered eye was dark and wide, fixed on the back of things already done.

“My daughter. I want to see my daughter.”

“Your daughter is in the Intensive Care Unit. I cannot take you down there.”

A tear as thick as blood slid down Anna’s cheek. How was the doctor to be persuaded, what argument could she use to soften his resistance?

“These beds,” she said. “These bed have wheels, I know they have wheels. I beg you, take me to see my daughter.”

“It’s out of the question.”

Anna tried to reach out with one hand but couldn’t.

“Do you have children?” she asked.

The doctor paused. “I do.”

“Imagine that was your child. Imagine that was your little girl.”

The doctor straightened, shook his head with terrible slowness.

“I would not have been driving. You had a blood alcohol content of 2.0 when they brought you in, more than twice the limit.”

Some things come with a margin, you can adjust to them, move around a little, negotiate the angle of compression, some kind of correspondence. Others don’t. They flatten the space between molecules and fill you with nothing.

“How deep is the coma?”

“Deep,” the doctor said with a voice drained of all emotion, but then something in Anna’s face must have pierced him because he added, more gently, “On a scale from fifteen to three, three being the worst, she’s around an eight or a ten. She’s being subjected to constant stimuli. It’s all we can do.”

“What are the chances she’ll recover?”

“We have no way of knowing. She might regain consciousness, or she might remain in a vegetative state. We can’t predict any of it. As soon as you’re in any shape to move, we’ll bring you down there so you can talk to her. It’s very important that she hears your voice. In fact, it’s crucial.”

“Does she have any other injuries?”

“No, no other injuries.”

Anna closed her eyes.

That night, in her dream, they were down by the river gorging themselves on sunlight, so the surfacing from sleep was as if from a fresh amputation—the lopping off of both legs at the thigh, the cut past bone, the laceration through ducts and bloodways—the pain too great to bear.

“I don’t want to live,” she said. “If my daughter dies, I don’t want to live.”

Empty words to an empty room. Time passed through a sieve of silence, faint shapes moved in and out, shadows came and went. Then Ree was there with her wide eyes, Mia with green tea. They sat on the side of the bed, holding Anna’s thinning hands, watching her slow tears.

“I need a lawyer,” Anna said, and the following day one came—large, freckled, spectacularly short of breath—and said, “As a two-time offender, not even taking your daughter into consideration, leaving her completely out of it, you’re looking at a minimum of seven days of mandatory jail time.”

“That’s the least of my concerns,” said Anna. “Do I lose custody of my daughter if she lives?”

The lawyer crossed his legs. “Depends. If a foster home is the only alternative, chances are you won’t. You’ll be subject to frequent and random testing for alcohol and drugs for a period set at the discretion of the judge, but you’ll probably get to keep her. If the noncustodial parent shows up—I understand he lives in England, so I don’t know what the probabilities are—and he sues for custody, he’ll probably win.”

“Jesus,” said Mia. “You’re freaking her out. Can’t you see you’re freaking her out?”

The lawyer considered Mia from behind lenses half an inch thick.

“Frankly, I can’t see a single reason why she shouldn’t be freaked out.”

Mia put her hands on her hips. “Her daughter is in a coma, isn’t that enough? You want her to get down on her knees? You want her to tell you she knows she fucked up? Well, she
knows
she fucked up, okay, fella? She
knows
.”

Anna raised a hand.

“Quiet,” she said, her head falling back into the pillow. “Quiet.”

In the sanitized stillness of the night, in the sterile hush that comes over hospitals after dark, there were never any nightmares, only dreams, and in those dreams there was the river rippling with its unseen catch of fish, the serrated edge between fields and pastures down by the old house where they used to live and where Eva used to run squealing from the cows. There was Eva’s knees-to-chest crouch in the observation of insect life, sandals the size of dollar bills, a swing tied to the lowest branch of a willow tree. There was Eva’s small hand in hers.

Early the morning of the third day, Esperanza walked in with a single rose in a small vase and Anna wept. Esperanza sat in a chair, head bent, elbows propped on knees.

“Did they let you see her?”

“I’m not family. It’s like I don’t exist.”

Silence fell like dust over a single ray of slanting light.

“Her father keeps calling,” Esperanza said. The two women stared at each other. Esperanza ran a hand down her face. “He’s her father, no? He has a right to know.”

“He will take her away from me, Espi. If she lives, if Eva comes out of her coma, he will take her away from me.”

Esperanza’s face was like a fist.

“Don’t do this to me.”

“He has a right. He has a right to know.”

“Not now. Please, not now.”

“He’s her father. He has a right to know.”

Anna pulled herself up.

“You’re going to do that to me? You’re going to let that son of a bitch take my little girl away?”

Esperanza stood, and there were things in her eyes Anna had never seen before, things from her childhood—dreams of a constantly receding figure, her mother maybe, who had died in detention when she was only eight, mouthing, “Come, you’ll be late,” as the girl scrambled forward in pursuit of what inevitably turned out to be a fistful of air. Memories of hands coming down on tables, extension cords coming down on innocent flesh, doors shutting her in, closing her out, and a place in her mind where none of that ever happened.

“You don’t deserve her,” she said. “You had her, she was yours, and you didn’t deserve to be her mother.”

Anna sat up and pulled the tubes out of her nose. “And you? What about you? Look at that punk you call your son. Look at him, with chains from his nose to his nipples, with an arsenal clipped to his eyebrows, with three charges for drug possession, three more for breaking and entering, and the prize for mothering goes to you? It goes to you?”

Esperanza moved closer, one fist balled by her side. “I had my son when I was eighteen. I had no money, I had nobody. I worked my ass off to put food in his mouth, day and night I worked my ass off. You were thirty-five, money coming out of your ears, the world at your feet, and look at you, look at your daughter in a coma downstairs because you needed a fuck.”

The volume needed to come down, the pitch, the tone, the register—all of it needed to come down. Anna put out a hand.

“Please,” she said.

Esperanza plunged her own hands into her pockets.

“Maybe you’ll get her back one day.”

“Please,” Anna said, her mouth full of her own tears, as Esperanza pulled the door shut behind her.