Carry Me Like Water (64 page)

“You asked me that already.”

“I can’t remember what you said.”

“You probably weren’t listening.”

“Of course I was listening—I just forgot. I can’t remember everything. What’d you say?”

“I said I thought it was wonderful—strange but wonderful.”

“And you have no problems that she just up and leaves her body anytime she wants?”

“Eddie, I either have to take her word for it—or I have to believe she’s cracked. Does that woman look like a lunatic?”

“No.”

“A liar, then?”

“No. But—”

“But what?”

“I don’t know. I’m starting to worry about her.”

“Oh, you think she needs help.”

“Don’t put words in my mouth, Nena. I don’t think we need to ship her off to the funny farm—I just get a feeling.”

“I’m listening.”

“Well, she seems more distant, less emotionally engaged. She’s not one to hold back—and yet lately she seems almost unreachable. It scares me. I don’t know why—and you’ve noticed it, too. I can tell by the look on your face.”

She stared into her hands, then started doing exercises with her fingers.

“You used to do that all the time when we first started dating.”

She reached over and combed his hair with her fingers. “What are we going to do about Lizzie?” Her voice cracked. “We’re losing her. Rose, too.”

“Rose, too?”

“She’s preparing herself.”

“That’s silly,” he said.

“No. I know.”

“How do you know?”

“She’s just tired, Eddie. She wants to.”

“You mean if I wanted, I could just lie down and die.”

“Of course.”

“That’s crazy.”

“People do it all the time—it’s just that some people do it differently, and for different reasons. She’s tired, and she’s old, and she’s in pain. She’s had a life, you know? Who wants to live forever? And I can’t say that I blame her. But Lizzie, Lizzie’s another matter—these experiences, well, they’ve confused her.” She scratched at the sheets with her fingernails as if to tear them. “We can’t do anything, you know?”

“Tell her to come back.”

“No.”

“Why not? I’ll tell her.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“She has to make a choice.”

“I don’t believe this. I just don’t believe it.”

“Good, so it will be easy to disregard the whole matter.”

Eddie threw himself off the bed. “When are things going to get simple around here?”

“You want simple, Eddie? When have things been simple? When you were a child, were things simple? We’ll be parents for a second time, and we haven’t even begun with the first—is that simple? Hell, Eddie, sometimes even our sex is complicated.”

He laughed grudgingly—almost disgusted. “I’m going for a run.”

“In the rain?”

“It’s stopped.”

She looked out at the clearing sky. “So it has.”

He put on a pair of jogging shorts. He tied his running shoes and stared at them. “Will you talk to Lizzie?”

“She already knows what I think.”

“Because she knows you or because she’s stealing your thoughts.”

“She doesn’t have to steal them, Eddie.”

“Right.”

“You’re mad.”

“No, not really. It’s just that I need to take a day off from the truth.”

“Take a day then,” she said. She stretched across the bed and kissed his back.

13

B
ONES. DIEGO SAT
at his desk tracing the word, letter by letter, with his finger. He pretended his fist was full of sand—he emptied it out onto the desk. He blew it away with a breath. He thought the statue of Christ the King had a sick sense of humor.

Luz and Mundo had tried to comfort him all week long, but he refused to hear anything at all on the subject of the treasure. “At least we found something,” Luz said, “and we placed a cross to mark the grave—those things are very important, mi amor.”

Diego nodded, but was unable to hide his disgust. He wondered why the treasure had been so important.

He had begun to dream of his mother, and his dreams had brought back the memory he had hid from himself. He remembered clearly now that his mother had jumped out in front of a car to save his life because he had not heard it coming, because he had not been paying attention. He had been taught to be careful, to always look because he could not hear. But he had stepped out into the street because he had been thinking about a story he had read—a story, a stupid story. The next thing he felt was a hand pushing him out of the way. Then his mother lying there crushed. He found it odd that he had forgotten how she had died. He had not been a child when it happened. He suspected now that his sister had left because she blamed him for her death. Her blame was not exactly misplaced,
he thought. He began to despair, to hate himself, and he no longer felt anything except the full force of the dullness of his life. Diego was caught in a body that could neither speak nor hear, and he hated it, hated his life as he had never hated it before.

Bones. He traced the word on his desk again. He decided that he would start a new suicide letter. This time, he would carry it out. This time, he would end the nonsense. Mundo had come by every day and taken him out into the country to teach him to drive. It had been easier than he had thought. To keep his mind off the coffin and the skeleton and the deceiving Christ, he studied the driver’s manual late into the nighl. On the fourth day of his driving lessons, Mundo had taught him to parallel park. Mundo tried to make him laugh, but Diego refused to let himself be amused by anything. Since he had nothing else, he let the act of driving become everything. He learned to drive in six days. He had never found anything difficult to learn—except for speaking. He had refused to learn to speak at school because he did not want others to hear his voice. Why should they hear what he could not? But driving a car—that was easy. On Monday morning, Mundo took him to get his driver’s license. He got a perfect score on the written. Mundo explained to the uniformed official that Diego was deaf. The DMV officer pointed when he wanted him to turn in a particular direction. He look his picture and was given a temporary license. There was only one restriction placed on his license: All vehicles he was to drive had to have outside mirrors. Diego looked at his temporary license. “That’s all?” Diego wrote. “That’s all,’ Mundo nodded. Diego shrugged.

“Look, ese,” Mundo said, shaking him, “you got to get yourself together. You got to stop thinking about that coffin. No one cares, man. Did you really think we were gonna get rich, ese? This is America, Diego, and most people don’t get rich in America—got that? You been listening to the wrong people.”

“It’s not about being rich,” Diego wrote. He didn’t even want to try to explain his disappointment, couldn’t even begin to write the words that said what it had felt like to hear that voice speak to him. To have waited so long to hear and then discover that the voice had been a lie. “You’re right,” he wrote. “It doesn’t matter.”

Mundo tossed him the keys. “You drive,” he said, “you’re legal
now—and now you can apply for that job delivering flowers. I talked to the guy about you—told him all about you, ese,” Mundo didn’t tell Diego that he’d turned down the job offer himself because the guy was a do-gooder—the kind that was always trying to help fix other people’s lives. “No,” he told him, “I got a job—it’s my friend that needs the job.” He looked straight at Diego as he sat in the driver’s seat. “The guy says to go in and make your application.”

I won’t get the job, Diego thought as he looked away from Mundo and turned the ignition, and if I do get it, it’ll be because he feels sorry for me. I’m sick of people feeling sorry for me. Mundo directed him to the flower shop. They parked around the comer. “Just go in there,” he said. “Put in your application, got it?”

“I don’t want the job,” Diego wrote.

“You gotta work, ese. You and Doha Luz, gotta make the rent. That tough old lady ain’t gonna last forever—you need to work.”

“You don’t work,” he said.

“I get by,” he said. “I got some skills, bro.”

“Teach them to me.” he wrote.

“No, ese. I taught you how to drive—that’s the only skill I wanna pass on to a guy like you.”

“I’m not going in.”

“I’ll kick your ass all the way to the door,” Mundo said. He grabbed Diego’s pad away from him. “Just try it,” he wrote. “If you hate it—then quit. Just try it.”

Diego threw the keys on Mundo’s lap, stole back his pad and pen, and slammed the car door. He stomped toward the flower shop hating the power Mundo and Luz had over him. He stared at the door to the flower shop. He read the sign:
IF YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT TO SAY, THEN SAY IT WITH FLOWERS
. He pushed open the door and walked inside.

Mundo stood at the door smoking a cigarette and watched Luz as she stood over the kitchen table rolling out tortillas, each one as perfect and round as the one before. One at a time she cooked them on a comál she had inherited from her mother, the smell of them filling the warm September air. She reminded him of his mother—except
his mother had been more frail and had not been strong enough to keep fighting. Diego sat at the table patiently cleaning beans. His mind was on his letter and on his sister. He thought his final letter would be one in which he would ask her for forgiveness. It was his fault they were orphans. If he killed himself and left the letter to her, the authorities would be forced to look for her. As he fingered each pinto bean, he tried to imagine her face.

Mundo flicked his cigarette into the backyard.

“We have ashtrays,” Luz said, “act like a person.”

“It don’t hurt the ground. Doña Luz.”

“It does hurt the ground—and who the hell do you think cleans them up? The maid?” She cackled at her own joke.

He liked her laugh. “Don’t take a clean backyard so serious.”

“That’s what’s wrong with you,” she said as she handed him a tortilla right off the comál, “you don’t take your life seriously. What do you do? You hang out with gang members, you drink beer, you get into fights, you take up space—you call that living?”

“You clean other people’s houses—you call that living?”

She shot him a look. “I work,” she said. She spread out her hands and pointed to each corner of the kitchen, “and because I work we have this house. You? What have you got—you haven’t got a damn thing. You sleep at your mother’s house?”

“Mostly,” he said, his mouth full of her fresh tortilla.

“Well, what happens when she dies? How come you don’t get a job?”

“I don’t want no fuckin’ job, I just want to take up space—I wanna take up lots of goddamned space.”

She stared at the cut above his eye and shook her head. “One of these days you’re gonna mess with the wrong guy, Mundo. You think you’re a real badass gang member, but I see you. I know what you are. You’re a lot of things I don’t like, but you’re not a killer, Mundo. But one day they’re going to find your brown ass out on the street and it’s going to be dead. Dios te bendiga.” She buttered up another fresh tortilla and walked over to Diego and handed it to him. He looked up and took it. “Come out of that world of yours,” she told him firmly.

He took a bite out of the tortilla and nodded.

“He’s depressed,” Mundo said.

“Ahhh, only gringos with money get depressed—they’re the only ones who can afford to.”

Mundo laughed. “No, Doña Luz, you got that wrong. See, when a woman dumps me—man I get real depressed—it ain’t no gringo thing. I mean, I get so depressed I have to hit someone.”

“That’s not depression, menso. Depressed people don’t go around hitting other people.”

“How do you know?”

“I don’t know,” she said emphatically, “but I know one thing—if you’d keep your cosita in your pants, women wouldn’t go around throwing you out on your cholo ass.”

He polished off his tortilla. “Marriage ain’t natural—”

“Don’t give me that natural stuff—what the hell do you know about natural? People like you, you think streets and concrete and barrios are natural. A mesquite—now, that’s natural.”

Diego moved his clean pile of pinto beans with one swift movement of his arm; they fell into a pot he held like a pocket in a pool table. The sound of the beans in the empty pot made Luz lose her train of thought.

Diego looked up at her.

“What are you thinking about?” She asked.

He took out his note pad from his pocket. “When are you going to learn sign language?” he asked.

“I’ve learned all the languages I’m going to learn,” she said. “We talk just fine.”

“Did you ever stop to think that my hands get tired?” he wrote. He underlined tired.

“You still in a bad mood?” Mundo asked.

Diego shook his head. He looked down at his pad. “Did you know I’ve never made love to a woman?”

“Yeah,” Mundo said, “I figured that one out long time ago.”

“Is that it?” Luz asked. “Hell, Dieguito, sex—it’s not important.”

Diego stared at her as if his eyes were stone. “How many lovers have you had?”

Luz shook her head. “What difference does it make?”

“Ten?” he wrote, held it up and tossed the paper in the air. “Twelve?” he wrote, and again he flipped the page in the air. “Twenty?” He stared at both of them. “Don’t tell me it doesn’t matter. My body’s just like yours.”