Red Glass (5 page)

I shrugged. “It’s too late to change. It’s an idea I’ve had for so long it’s ingrained in me. My curse.” My voice was shaking, so I closed my mouth.

“Your curse?”

“Forget it. It’s complicated.”

After a while, Ángel said, “Hey, I never told you the real reason I wear shades all the time.”

I was grateful he changed the subject. “Okay, why do you wear shades all the time?”

“Your beauty would blind me without them.”

My stomach leaped. I made a sound, which I intended to be a sarcastic snort, but it ended up sounding like a strangled laugh that got stuck coming out.

Ángel had a way of drawing Pablo out of his shell. His sunglasses and gold chains clearly left Pablo in awe. Yet he was willing to play silly games and be goofy with Pablo, which I’d never tried. I’d first seen Pablo as a traumatized boy, something terribly fragile, and it was hard to shake that image. Another thing that surprised me was how much Pablo loved Ángel’s stories of barely surviving deadly adventures, a topic I’d never brought up for fear of unearthing bad memories.

I liked listening to Ángel’s stories too. That way he could talk and talk, and I didn’t have to worry about saying anything stupid.

Later that night, Ángel and I got into the backseat with Pablo, and Mr. Lorenzo drove along the nearly deserted Route 15 with Dika beside him. The headlights shone lonely in front of us, and we were cozy in the backseat, Pablo leaning against me, eyes fixed on Ángel, mouth half open. The
cumbia
song “Siguiendo la Luna”—“Following the Moon”—was playing, and ahead, the moon was rising, full and huge and orange near the horizon. Once in a while, once in a long while, everything lines up perfectly and you think, Wow, this is life and I am living it. This is what I was thinking when Ángel said, suddenly, “I’m used to dying.”

“What?” I said.

“I’ve almost died four times. Every time a woman saves me.”

Escaping Death

“The first time,” Ángel said, “I was picking coffee beans. I was about four years old. To get to the finca our family had to walk for hours. It belonged to a rich family. They paid us to pick the coffee and gave us a room to stay in for a few weeks. The plants were on steep mountainsides, with loose rocks, really sharp. We each had ropes tied around our waists in case we fell. The year before, a girl fell and died. Fell into the river, hit her head, and drowned. We had to be careful. That’s why we had the ropes. And we each carried a basket. So there I am, filling the basket. It’s half full of berries when I slip.

“I wait for the rope to stop me. But I’m so little it slides right off. I keep falling. Rolling down the mountain. Rocks banging me, coffee plants grabbing at me. While I fall I think things. I wonder how it will to feel to fall straight down through the air. How will it feel when I smack the water? How will it feel to breathe in the river?

“Suddenly I’m lying still by a pile of giant rocks. I remember seeing candles lit there on a stone altar. I remember feeling the moss soft beneath me. No more bright sunshine, just cool shadows. I’m in heaven, I decide. And in the tallest candle flame there’s a dancing woman in white—
la Virgen
, I think at first. But then she turns into my mother, then my great-grandmother who died, and my great-aunt who died. She’s made of light. Glowing. Then she grows and grows until she’s so big she has one foot on either side of the mountain.

“Next thing I know, my mother—my real mother, in the flesh—is kneeling over me, her hands holding my face, her lips all over my head. She presses her head to my chest and hears my heartbeat. Moves her cheek near my mouth, feels my breath. She rips off her shirt and tears it to pieces. One strip around my arm, another around my leg, another around my forehead. The white strips turn red with my blood. I feel a little embarrassed that I see her breasts. She’s come first, and then the others come. I don’t know how she’s made it down here so fast. My father gets there and covers her with his shirt. Carries me along a path back to the hut.

“Later I ask my mother, ‘How did you find me before the others?’ She says, ‘
Hijo
, I saw a light over that spot where you were, a light that grew bigger and bigger.’ You know, for a while after that I asked myself: Why was my mother glowing along with my great-grandmother and great-aunt, when she wasn’t dead?”

We camped again the second night. The next morning, on the road again, Ángel leaned over to check on his carved box, which he kept under the seat and checked at least once an hour. I wanted to ask more about the box. Would he clam up if I mentioned it? I mustered up the breeziest voice I could. “Um, Ángel, so there’s probably something important inside that box, huh?”

He nodded, but said nothing.

Pablo started in. “Is animal? Is lizard? Is chicken?” and on and on until Ángel cracked a smile. Then Mr. Lorenzo and Dika joined in. “Hair gel? Drugs? Gold? Dirty magazines?” Ángel laughed, but he didn’t let Pablo shake the box, no matter how much he pleaded.

I loved listening to this silly banter with Pablo, because he seemed, for once, like a normal little boy. This was what we’d been trying to get him to do for the whole past year. Normal little boy stuff, stuff that could be even obnoxious at times. Mom and Juan would be amazed when we got back.

For the rest of the day, Pablo occasionally piped up with “
¡Yo sé! ¡Yo sé!
Is million dollar!…Is million million dollar!”

That afternoon, Pablo dozed while the road climbed uphill, through rugged mountains spotted with giant agave plants that were taller than me, their wavy leaves like jellyfish tentacles. Wet green leaves and tropical flowers filled the valley, looking mysterious through patches of fog. Ángel whispered to me, “Will Pablo come back to Tucson for vacations ever?”

“He’ll decide to live with us.” My voice sounded defensive. “I’m sure of it. And he’ll go to his village on vacations.”

“What if he wants to stay with his relatives?”

“Well, then he can. But look at him. He’s like a normal American kid now.”

“But this is his land,” Ángel said. “His
tierra
.”

“You left your
tierra
to come to the U.S.”

“I didn’t want to.”

He had papers, I knew, papers that made him and Mr. Lorenzo legal in the U.S. Dika had told me they were legal residents, just like her, since they were all three refugees, fleeing violence in their countries. Dika had gotten her visa before she came, but Ángel and his father came to Tucson first, illegally, crossing the desert. At their court hearing, they had to prove they would be killed if they went back to Guatemala. When I asked Dika how you prove something like that, she said,
They say us when they want to say us.

“But, Ángel, you live in Tucson now, and you’re there to stay, right?”

He didn’t answer.

“Ángel, you’re at least finishing high school and going to college in the U.S., right?”

He shrugged. “I already made my schedule for next semester. How could I miss calculus?”

Later, at a gas station, while Ángel was filling up the tank, I asked Mr. Lorenzo if they were going to stay in Tucson. Dika pricked up her ears. “Of course they stay in Tucson!” she said.

“Of course,” Mr. Lorenzo said, patting Dika’s hand. He switched to Spanish. “We have jobs and Ángel has school. And there is too much violence still in our town. Even now that there is no war, there are still weapons, and still anger. No, we will stay in Tucson. There is nothing for us in our town.”

“Except for your wife’s jewels,” I said.

“Yes. Except for her jewels.”

“Life is a long, long car ride,” I said to Ángel that evening as we wound up a mountain, past shacks selling fruit and sodas and beer. We sat in the backseat with Pablo, who was wedged between us, asleep.

“Headed where?”

“I don’t know. Death?”

“What do you know about death?” Ángel looked serious.

“I don’t know.” I laughed. I’d meant the comment as something lighthearted. “I’m still in the car ride part.” I didn’t say anything about all the times I’d convinced myself I was on the verge of death.

“What do you know about life, then?”

“Not much. Waiting.”

“For what?”

“School to end, school to start, to go to college, get a job.” To be in love, I thought. To have sex. To stop being scared.

Ángel peered out the window into the growing darkness, where the roadside dropped off steeply, a nearly vertical fall to the valley below. I couldn’t look. It made me dizzy and nervous to think that with one slip, our van could tumble over the cliff and smash at the bottom. All of us dead within seconds.

“When I think of life,” Ángel said, “I think of us all hanging by these ropes, feeling we’re safe. But really, we could slip out any time. None of our ropes are safe—that’s what I realized. That coffee-picking season, my bruises and scrapes healed up, and I went back to the coffee fields. This time my father tied the rope so tight it burned. I should have been scared, but I wasn’t. I loved it more then. I loved the way the berries tasted in my mouth, kind of sweet and slimy. I loved the sound of people singing and joking around while we picked.”

“I wouldn’t have done that,” I said. “I wouldn’t want to even look at the mountainside again.”

“Maybe. Or maybe not. Maybe life would taste sweeter.”

Ángel said he was born in the Mayan village where his mother grew up. A midwife delivered him at home, and after she cleaned and swaddled him, she told his parents, “Your son will travel far and do great things.” I wished someone had said that about me. A gem of knowledge to carry around in my pocket, to hold on to when panic welled up. I would step into elevators bravely, without a thought of the doors failing to open and being stuck inside for a week without food or water and dying alone. I would look people in the eye and move with confidence. That was how Ángel walked and talked. He had this clear stone inside him, so solid, this prediction that he would be great.

If Ángel had a gem at his center, what I had inside was a sharp, rusted piece of metal, like the rotting tailpipe on the ancient, beat-up car Mom had when I was little. Whenever it broke down, she had to find someone to give us a ride to get my allergy shots, which was hard when our phone was disconnected. Mom just bumbled around the neighborhood smiling, knocking on doors, asking for a ride, saying it would all work out, thanking everyone in her charming British accent. “Cheers! You’re brilliant!” Meanwhile I worried so much that my stomach ached and then she’d have to take off work and lose that day’s wages. And then my stomach ached even more, as though that shard of metal were digging itself farther and farther inside me.

The third night we slept in the van again, on the side of a dirt road just off Route 15. At some point in the night, Pablo crawled into bed between me and Dika. His head nuzzled into my neck. Light streamed through the window. Moonlight, it must have been, although I couldn’t see the actual moon from my angle. His small hands were tucked up under his chin. Was he anxious about going back to his village? I stroked his hair. It was fine, so fine, so soft. I buried my nose in it.

“
Mi abuelita te puede curar
, Sophie.” Pablo’s voice was thin and small, like a newly planted seedling.

I opened my eyes and looked at him.

“What? Your grandmother can cure me?”

“Sí.”
He looked at me. His eyes looked very old for a six-year-old’s, enough to make you believe in reincarnation. He could have been a wise old monk in a past life.

I spoke to him in Spanish. “
¿De veras?
Really? Cure me of what? My allergies?” My fears? My curse?

He nodded.
“Todo.”

He wound a strand of my hair around his finger, rubbed it against his cheek.

“That would be nice,
principito.
”

Someone shifted in the bunk over us.

Maybe Ángel was awake too. I pictured him curled around his locked box, smoothing the wood the way a child smoothes the satin edge of a blanket. I considered giving him a sign—clearing my throat, coughing, lightly whistling—but then I flushed at the thought, forced myself to close my eyes, and made my breathing match Pablo’s. Eventually I slept.