Carry Me Like Water (66 page)

“They do?” Eddie asked. “How would we know?”

Maria Elena was about to make another joke but she was stopped by the look on Jake’s face. Eddie wore the same look when something was bothering him. It occurred to her that he might be feeling sick and something in her panicked. She had gotten used to thinking of him as strong and healthy, and she realized as she looked at him that she might never be prepared for his dying. She sat there silently and waited for him to speak. She heard Eddie’s voice: “What’s up, Jake?”

He looked at Maria Elena. “Lizzie’s in Rose’s room—” He stopped in midsentence.

“And?” Eddie asked. “Is that significant?”

“I went looking for her because we were supposed to go out walking in the desert. She was just sitting there holding Rose’s hand.” He looked at Nena. “She said to tell you it was time. She said to tell you to bring a candle.”

“Rose?” Maria Elena asked. She was prepared for that particular bit of news.

He nodded.

She handed the baby to Eddie who said nothing. She pointed to
the candle that had burned in Joaquin’s room the night he died. “Take that one to her,” she said. “Tell her I’ll be there in a minute.”

Jake took the candle, stared at it, and walked out of the room.

“How did you know it was time for—” He stopped.

“You can say the word ‘die,’ amor.”

“How did you know? What is it with you and Lizzie—what is it?”

“I had a dream, Eddie.”

“What did you dream?”

“I dreamed words.”

“Words?”

“Yes, words. Rose—she whispered them to me. I wrote them down.” She went to her jewelry box and gave him the words in the dream.

He took the folded up piece of paper, opened it, and read it slowly. “It’s a lovely poem,” he said.

“I knew you’d say that.”

“But that’s not what you wanted to hear. You wanted me to tell you that the poem was about Rose’s dying because it was whispered to you in a dream.”

“Yes.”

“That poem is life,” he said emphatically, “it’s not about death.”

“You think death is the opposite of life?”

“Well, of course it is.”

“What if death is just another country?”

“OK, what if it is another country? We can’t go there, now can we? And frankly I’m not really anxious to get there,” He looked at her sternly. “And you better not be anxious to get there either. When Rose dies, Lizzie won’t be able to follow her to wherever the hell she’s crossing. It’s not like going to Juarez, you know? And when Jake dies, I won’t be able to follow him into that other country—wherever the hell he’ll be living. We’ll just be exiled from each other again—and this time it will be permanent.”

Maria Elena studied his angry face. She took his arm and squeezed it. He wadded up her poem in his fist.

“I don’t know anything anymore,” he said.

“That’s OK,” she said, “Has knowledge ever made us more
decent?” She smiled at him. “Lizzie needs me,” she said. “I’m going to go sit with her.”

“Shouldn’t you call a doctor or something?”

“Rose doesn’t want one.”

“Did you dream that, too?”

“She told us.”

“You mean in a normal conversation.”

“Yes.”

“Oh.”

Jake sat at the kitchen table drinking a cup of coffee, reading the newspaper and holding his nephew in his arms, occasionally giving him a spoonful of oatmeal. “Hey Eddie, look at this, it’s Maria Elena’s ad in the newspaper.”

He walked over from the sink where he was doing dishes and glanced over his brother’s shoulder.

“Think it will do any good?”

“Well, she claims Diego used to be a newspaper freak.”

“Can’t she just go to the cops?”

“What a great idea,” he said. “How come we didn’t think of that?”

“Straight people have a hard time thinking.”

“Very funny.”

“Thank you.”

Eddie laughed. He kissed the top of his brother’s head. “I want you to stay forever.”

Jake nodded. “I can’t, you know.”

“I know.” Eddie walked back toward the sink and began drying the dishes. “Can I ask you a question?”

“Sure.”

“Do you think about death all the time?”

“No. Just every day.” He laughed.

“Seriously?”

“Sometimes, I don’t think about dying—I can’t. I’m still healthy. I feel fine. It’s hard to believe I’ll get sick because I have this thing in me. I’ll believe it when I feel it. Lately, I’ve been waking up at
night—and I can’t sleep, and I’m afraid. Remember, when we were small and we used to wait and pray Dad wouldn’t come in? It’s like that. And I can’t stop shaking.”

“So what do you do?”

“I go to Lizzie.”

“What?”

“She holds me. She doesn’t make me talk. She just leaves her door open, and sometimes I cry and she doesn’t make me turn the tears into words.”

“Good,” Eddie said. He continued drying the dishes while his brother continued reading the newspaper. He stared at his reflection in a plate. For no reason in particular he understood clearly that his life, and his brother’s, had been nothing more than a narrow escape. For whatever reason, whether by chance, by coincidence, or by fate, they had been brought together again. Here we are, he thought, in this kitchen, my brother and me and my son, I am the luckiest of men. And I understand the meaning of what I have escaped. He wanted to thank someone for his life. He would light a candle to Saint Jude, the patron saint of impossible causes as a symbol of his gratitude. He made this promise to himself as he looked at his reflection in the plate he was drying.

Again, the three women were together in a room with a candle. Only this time, they were not waiting for a body to rise, but to fall away from the earth. The two younger women had sat all morning with the old woman who worked harder and harder for each breath she stole. The candle burned in the room, and often the younger women would stare, shifting their gaze from the old woman to the candle. The old woman’s eyes had been shut all morning, but suddenly she opened them as if to look at the visible world one last time. “I want to taste some water,” she said.

Lizzie poured her a glass and helped her drink it, a simple but difficult task.

“I tasted a leaf this morning,” the old woman said softly. “It was as good as this water.”

The women nodded.

“I want to tell you something, Lizzie. I want you to know. The body is a friend. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Mama,
I
understand.”

“Good,” the old woman said. “Then don’t leave it until it’s time.” They were the last words she spoke. Rose’s breathing filled the room for the rest of the day and the two women kept a vigil at her side. She had risen with the desert sun, and with its setting, she took her last breath. Her final day had been peaceful and she had died willingly. It was the kindest of deaths. The old woman had lived her life—it had been what it had been—nothing grand—just a life. But she had at least lived it in some comfort, and she had at least had her say, and she had at least died welcoming the great silence that lay before her as if it were a quiet sky full of stars. Elizabeth wept in the arms of her friend not because she raged against her mother’s death, but because a daughter never welcomes the death of a good mother.

15

O
N THE DAY
Mundo was buried at Concordia Cemetery—not far from Mary’s grave—Diego received a letter in the mail informing him he had gotten the job at the flower shop. “I don’t want the job,” he wrote as he sat at the kitchen table. He flashed the note at Luz who was sitting quietly across from him smoking a cigarette.

“You want to die, too—is that it?” Luz asked and though Diego could not hear the anger in her voice, he could see it everywhere on her face.

“I’m too sad to work.”

“I’m sad, too,” she said, “so what? Dieguito, we have to keep on living. Did you see Mundo’s mother at the funeral? She’s dead, poor woman—given up, feels nothing. Couldn’t you see that?”

“She’s had a hard life.” He slapped his pad on the table.

“So what? I’ve had a hard life. You’ve had a hard life. So what? We’ve got to keep living.”

“Live to work?” he wrote.

“Yes. Live to work. Please, my Diego. This day is too sad. Flowers are a good thing. Tell them you’ll take the job.” She looked at him, carefully searching his face for a sign. “He wanted you to have the job,” he added. “He taught you to drive. He did that for you—a good thing. Don’t throw it away, my Diego.”

Diego watched her as she took another drag from her cigarette. She looked worn and pale. Today, there was not much fight in her eyes, but there was still enough strength in her to keep despair from possessing her body. The look she wore made Diego forget about his own sense of despair. Besides her, Mundo had been his only friend. And before that, Mary. He was disgusted at the way they had died, not died—been killed. They had lived hoping—
and for what?
And his myth, the one he needed so desperately, the myth of Carlota’s buried jewels, it had died along with everything else. He had never known how much power a legend could have and now it was as dead as Mundo and Mary, as dead as the houses in Sunset Heights that had once stood at the top of the stairs that went nowhere. But the aging woman in front of him was a wall that refused to crumble, a wall that had been spit on, written on, pissed and defecated on, and still the wall refused to crumble. That wall was all he had left. But even Luz needed comforting. He did not want to fight her, not today. “I’ll take the job,” he wrote.

“Good,” she smiled.

“Will you quit one of your jobs?”

“Such nice handwriting.”

He looked at her sternly.

“I don’t know if I can, Diego.”

“You work six days a week. At least quit your Saturday job—you don’t like that lady anyway—and she never pays you extra for ironing. Let her iron her own damn clothes. If you don’t quit at least one job, then I won’t deliver flowers.”

She laughed, then clapped her hands. “OK, my Diego, I’ll quit my Saturday job.”

“Good,” he wrote.

That afternoon, he walked toward downtown to accept the offer of a job delivering flowers. On the way there, he stopped at the steps that went nowhere. He climbed them and looked out at the city around him. He thought it was a sad city. He gathered the trash with his fingers as if his hand were a rake. He told himself he’d come back with a trash bag and rake up the litter. Things didn’t have to be so dirty.

The man he was replacing taught Diego everything he needed to know about the job. He gave him a map of the city, showed him how to look up addresses. Every day for two weeks, they delivered flowers and then drove around pans of the city, places he never knew existed. The city was bigger than he had imagined and he liked the fact that they were always so welcomed at the doors they knocked on. Luz had been right, it was a good job. Even the saddest of people smiled when they were handed flowers. The man who was training him warned him that not everyone welcomed flowers. “Once,” he told him, “one lady threw a vase of roses at me. ‘Tell the sonofabitch to shove them up his ass,’ she said. Just be smart and be careful. If they don’t want them, just take them back. You’re just a delivery man. The people at the shop will handle everything else.”