This Is How I'd Love You (19 page)

Amador reaches his hand out to Sacha’s. “Sir. Not many superintendents wanna be around for the blast.”

Sacha nods, his throat dry.

Amador steps out of the crew cart but cannot stand up straight. His work focuses on a new vein of white quartz that’s been located. There has already been deep holes drilled around the ore and now Amador will set a fuse in each of the holes to blast away the surrounding rock. There is a wooden ladder on the opposite wall that descends down a small hole.

Pointing, he says, “That’s the escape hatch. I will meet you there after I’ve lit the fuses.”

Henry leads the way. Sacha follows him. The wooden ladder sheds a splinter into his forefinger and he winces. Henry crouches and Sacha does so, too, his hands spread over his ears. They wait.

Eventually, Sacha’s legs tremble with the effort of kneeling. He is not accustomed to such physical feats. It reminds him of his age. He begins to question the sagacity of this endeavor. He is the superintendent—not a young man seeking their approval. Yet he cannot deny his esteem for the men who make this their living. This daily descent into a labyrinth of dark chambers, where a breath of fresh air becomes a luxury of which one could spend the entire day dreaming, requires a strong will. To Sacha, the sensation of fresh air entering his lungs is starting to seem as unlikely as one more kiss from his long-dead wife.

“How’s it coming, Amador?” Sacha says loudly, removing his hands from his ears, his voice echoing through the closed chamber.

“Yep,” Amador says, giving no other hint to his status.

Henry crouches beside Sacha, their shoulders and elbows touching. He shakes his head, admonishing Sacha for the interruption. Whispering, he says only, “Live explosives.” Sacha is confronted by the smell of Henry’s last cigarette, now stale on his breath.

Sacha nods, willing the bones in his legs to cease their aching and the muscles to release their cramping. He imagines climbing up the ladder, just to stretch his legs, have a peek at what that damn powder man is doing. How long might he be expected to wait like this? He realizes how little he knows about the workings of this underground world. Like a rodent in a crowded nest, he starts dreaming of escape. His fingers scrape mechanically at the hardened dirt in front of him.

It is at this moment that the call comes from Amador, “Fire in the hole!”

There is a silence broken only by Amador’s feet, scuffling across the dirt above them. His satchel sails in first, like some frantic, disoriented bird. Then, forsaking the ladder, Amador jumps in as well, his legs pulled in to his chest as though the cavern where Sacha and Henry are huddled is a swimming hole on a hot summer day. Amador’s hand grazes Sacha’s neck when he’s airborne as he tries to avoid landing right on top of him. There is something in his hand—something cold then hot, hard then soft, that easily sinks into him.

“No!” Amador says as he falls beside Sacha.

Just as his tumbling subsides there is an explosion of magnificent proportion. Sacha’s hands reach for his ears and his eyes shut tightly. There is a pain in his chest that seems to come directly from the noise of the blast. He curls his body tight around the pain, expecting it to subside in the quiet.

But the quiet comes and the pain remains. His hands are still tucked tightly around his ears and he can hear the ocean’s strong tide drifting in.

“Shit,” Amador says. “My steel.”

“What?” Henry says. “Where?”

Sacha understands that Amador has lost something. The two men are quietly panicking, but he is not yet sure why the location of Amador’s chisel is so important. The ocean’s soft, rhythmic noise dulls his reasoning. He opens his eyes. It is smoky, which has made their cavern even darker. A warm, wet stream trickles down his neck and he wonders if they are sweating as much as he is. The pain has subsided, but there is an ache that remains. He shifts his eyes and sees Henry’s face, black with dirt.

“Should we take it out, boss?” Henry asks, and then Sacha realizes just where the chisel is. He moves one hand to the dull ache in his chest, but there is nothing there, only the subtle beat of his heart. Henry shakes his head. He puts his hand to his own throat.

Sacha follows his lead, surprised when his fingers graze against the cool metal of Amador’s steel chisel. It moves slightly underneath his touch and the pain accelerates, driving hard into his chest and all the way through his legs.

“Oh, hell,” he says, realizing that the constant warm oozing is blood, not sweat. When he tries to turn his head, the pain squeezes tighter, as though it is a rope twisting around and around his neck.

Amador’s face is at Sacha’s periphery—his eyes red, his face blackened, his lips trembling. Sacha pities the poor man.

“I don’t think we should take it out,” Sacha says. “But I would like a bit of fresh air.” His own voice sounds very loud in his head, but he can tell that Henry is struggling to hear him.

Sacha decides to let Henry wrestle with the problem of their exit. He fixes his eyes on the dirt just above him, in a position that corrals the pain into that dull ache in the center of his chest.

It seems nearly unbelievable that the entire world exists a few thousand feet above his head, that everything is continuing out of his sight. Hensley preparing her own dinner, the dry goods store busy with inventory, the mournful cooing of retiring doves. All of it goes on without him. The miners hammering out nuggets of gold, Mr. Lin preparing the day’s specials, the fight for suffrage and workers’ rights on the streets of New York and Boston, the brutality of war, and, finally, the baby, his own grandchild, becoming eyelids and ankles and fingertips.

Sacha closes his eyes. He travels through the layers of dirt, reversing the recent journey down. And then, with great and sudden clarity, there is the burst of dusk, so bright compared to this hole. The thin, clean air stings his lungs and he breathes even deeper for the thrill of it. Far away, a bell is ringing, summoning children to school or men to work.

The sound of the bell conjures the only memory he has of the crossing from Germany to America. His mother and older brother were standing on the deck, awaiting the view of New York’s harbor. Behind them, he was bouncing a small red ball, trying to catch it on its first, then second, then third bounce. A strong hand grabbed his shoulder and Sacha immediately clasped the ball and shoved it in his pocket, afraid it would be confiscated. Instead, a large man in a smart blue uniform asked if he would like to ring the arrival bell from the bridge. Sacha nodded and followed the man up three flights of narrow stairs to a large metal bell that hung above even the officer’s head. He lifted Sacha into his arms and held him up so that Sacha could reach for the fraying brown rope that hung from the bell. Pulling hard on that rough rope, Sacha smiled so much he felt his chapped lips split and bleed, even as the loud metal clang rattled his teeth and made his fingers numb with its reverberation.

Even now, Sacha can taste the blood on his lips. He smiles at Henry—who is suddenly beside him, his face clean, his shirt white—wishing he had the energy to tell him about his first glimpse of America, that bell buzzing through the small length of his body.

Instead, Henry is telling him to breathe slowly in through his nose and out through his mouth. The blossoms of the fruit trees—pale pink, lavender, even yellow—have such a sweet fragrance that Central Park has become young love’s delight. Everything so full of raw possibility and hope—from the nectar collected in small dusty clumps by the honeybees to the electric, tender skin of his young wife’s fingertips when she wraps them around his arm. The future is unknown and thrilling. Their good fortune swelling between them on a Sunday afternoon—everything yet to come.

Straining to move, Sacha urges a shoulder forward. There is a whistle coming from his own body. A teakettle screaming that it’s ready. He wants to hold her there in the park. Olivia Wright. He wants to study the complex coloring of her golden emerald eyes one more time. Feel the heat of his own breath moisten her skin. Watch her lips move ever so slightly as she reads over his work. Give her more reasons to smile, more babies to swaddle, more trips to the seashore.

Tell her not to take the hot loaf of bread to her aunt’s apartment uptown. Forget the tea towel and the twine and silk shawl from Shanghai that she’d never wear again. Not after she shed it upon her return later that afternoon, a headache just setting in as dusk did. Taking a cup of tea beside him in the living room, her coloring fading, even as Hensley skipped through, the ribbons in her hair flapping like crimson warnings, and Harold recited his verses, stumbling with shame around the forgotten ending. She descended into a fever that night as she slept beside him—the first grip of the influenza her aunt would recover from just days later, but that she never would.

Just as Sacha had put his own linen to her face, hoping with each touch that she might soon recover, Amador wipes Sacha’s face with his dusty handkerchief. But Sacha does not want to be bothered with the poor man’s grief and regret. He only wants to see each of his children, now so grown and fierce that their previous chubby cheeks and short fingers reside only in his memory. Their contagious giggles and stormy tantrums. Pink rosebud lips and shell-shaped ears. Gone, soon. Recalled by no living soul. A worse death than his own.

That their sweet little legs pushing against his chest as he held them high will not be remembered after this. That the memory of their sleeping faces cradled by their mother’s arms, so dear to him, will be lost. That the countless details of their treasured beginnings will be buried here, too. Beside him, beneath him, within him. This is the sadness that presses against him, beginning with the steel embedded in his neck and filling him with its black, leaden weight. He cannot move his arms, nor his legs. It is as though there is a gigantic magnet just below him, pulling at all this metallic sorrow flooding his veins.

With great effort, Sacha rubs the fingers of his right hand in the dirt. If he can just keep moving, there may be a chance to resist the infiltration of the steel’s blackness. You cannot die if you are moving, he thinks to himself, wondering if this realization is as significant as it seems. Just stretch your fingers out, let their vague movement save you. Slowly, the dirt gives away beneath his efforts, creating five small divots of defiance.

Part Two

W
hen Hensley opens her eyes, there is a woman beside the bed. Her posture erect, her arms folded patiently in her lap. The room is dim—she has no idea the time of day, or even what day it is—but Hensley feels sure it is her mother. The woman doesn’t touch her. She doesn’t speak. Her face is composed, unmoved. But she worries over Hensley. Hensley knows, could sense, even before she was fully conscious, that this woman has been sitting here for hours, watching her sleep. In fact, could it be that at one point her mother’s hands were actually on her, smoothing her hair, easing her shoulders onto the pillow, stroking her temple?

This memory wakes her, tears seeping from behind her eyes into her throat. It was this presence, though, this reassurance, that allowed her to sink so far into the blackness that gathered around her, pulling at the edges of her mind, pushing its weight onto her chest. She simply gave in to it. She left all resistance to her mother, knowing that she would pull her back when it was time. It was as though she’d been loaded into a small rowboat, sack upon sack tossed on top of her slight body, until she could no longer move. The undecipherable rhythm of the water as it sloshed against the hull filled her ears with its urgency. She floated in those dark waters, bearing the weight, grateful for the grief that did not need words. That it was not hers alone.

But it was not her mother who pulled her back. It was Teresa who sat beside the bed, waiting for her. And Hensley hates her for it. Hates her for being here. For being real at all.

Her hair is not folded beneath Berto’s hat, nor are his boots on her feet, nor his high-collared shirt buttoned tightly around her neck, but, rather, her long hair is parted gently, falling across her shoulders, a full skirt wrapping her slender hips, a sheer cotton blouse buttoned nowhere near her neck. To Hensley, her beauty seems more of a disguise than Berto’s clothes.