The Exquisite and Immaculate Grace of Carmen Espinoza (18 page)

More people walk past and leave through the door.

Minutes tick and I wonder if my mother has fallen asleep sitting upright in this strange house. I remember that she snuck out of her house and imagine her getting in trouble for being late.

I begin wonder if there is something more to this, something I’m not understanding, something I’m supposed to be learning—and how does any of this have to do with Daniel’s death—when another person enters the scene. At first I think he is leaving, but then he sees her and stops.
 

He looks back the way he came and nods his head at her, it’s as if he were saying, “You see this?” Then he smiles.

For some reason, a sudden sinking dread settles over me.

He walks over to where she is and flops down onto the couch beside her, making her body bounce, but she doesn’t stir.

She is asleep—passed out.

He leans over her, traces his finger from her forehead to her chin. Brushes her hair from her neck.
 

Still she doesn’t move.

His lips move, “Hello?” he smiles. “Anybody in there?”

When she doesn’t respond, he grabs her chin and shakes her head back and forth, “Hello?”

He leans closer to her, moves his other arm behind her so that her head rolls onto his shoulder and for a moment, he just sits there like that with her. His free hand against the side of her face, like they were a couple.
 

Then, his hand slides from her face to her breast.

I closed my eyes. I didn’t want to watch this, didn’t want to know. A hot ball of anger and fear lodged heavy into the back of my throat.
 

When I opened my eyes, they were no longer alone.
 

“Mom!” I cried, my voice rushing, ineffective, out into the water. But it was like watching a movie I had no control over—I could not help her.

Her shirt was unbuttoned, her bra unfastened, the guy sitting with her fondled her while the other one stood and watched.
 

I wished for it to end, to fade out, for someone to rescue her, for the guys to develop a conscious. None of these things happened.
 

It got much, much worse.

Eventually, one of them picked her up, cradled her in his arms, while the other said something I couldn’t make out to someone I couldn’t see. Across from the front door, a set of stairs rose up to the second floor. I watched them carry her up. They were smiling, joking. When her head accidentally hit the banister, they burst out laughing and almost dropped her.

Gathering themselves and her together, they disappeared with her up the stairs.
 

Again, I waited for the image to dissolve, break apart, crack into a thousand strands of light and become nothing at all. I prayed that was all I had to see. I knew what was happening, what they were doing to her—please don’t make me watch that.

But it didn’t. The scene didn’t finish, not yet.
 

A few seconds later, two more guys came running in, smiling, racing each other like kids vying for position. They rounded the banister and took the stairs two at a time.

This was the someone I couldn’t see.

They were not rushing to help her—they were going to hurt her too.
 

Finally, it came apart, unwound like snakes slithering into a thousand different directions.

In the next scene, the boys dumped her and her clothes onto a front lawn before speeding away in a truck. After that, an older man had her by the hair and was dragging her, naked and crying, into the house. Inside, he threw her against the wall of her bedroom, grabbed the bible from her dresser and threw it at her face.

The picture dissolved and reformed again.

It was her bedroom. Twilight seeped through her bedroom window throwing everything under shades of blue and gray. It looked quiet. She was curled up on her bed, her knees near her chest, her hand resting on the large mound of her belly.

When she sobbed, her shoulders shook.

The image came apart quickly. “Wait,” I said. I wanted a minute, needed to think. I knew exactly what I had seen, knew exactly what it meant. With that picture, my whole world shifted—my very existence.

There was no waiting, the next image was already forming.
 

My mother is again in her room, and everything is changed. Her posters are gone, and a crib in crammed into the corner.
 

A toddler sits crying on the floor.

My mother ignores it.

I can not hear it, but the baby’s face is getting redder as its crying is growing more intense. My mother is sitting at her vanity staring into her own tired reflection. The baby falls over sideways, its face an intense compression of hysterical crying—my mother leans closer to her mirror and puts her hands over her ears. Her own eyes and lips pressed tight until, like a triggered bomb, she explodes. When she turns to the crying baby, her face looks like unleashed rage—she shouts something over and over at the child too young to understand. Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!
 

Suddenly, her door opens and the man who had dragged her into the house and thrown the
 
bible in her face storms into the room. He shouts at my mother and slaps her across the face before bending down to pick up the baby.

Before bending down to pick up me.

He carries me, still screaming, out of the room.

As my mother lies in a heap on the floor, the room around her begins to come undone, a few threads at a time until finally, she too unravels, pulls apart, fades into the reality of what all of this is—not a movie, a memory. The catalog of a time, seventeen years ago, when my mother was forced to become the person she was not prepared to be.
 

My mother.
 

The constant caretaker of a consequence.
 

The living reminder of a horrifying night.
 

I didn’t want to see anymore, I wanted to stop looking. It was enough, just this, but the next memory began to form anyway—the truth did not care about my capacity to handle it.
 

I steeled myself, prepared myself to again have my eyes opened to the worst.
 

But my mother was smiling again. A big, bright, red smile. Her eyes were playful, gazing up into a face I had not seen in almost thirteen years. My father.
 

“No,” water rushed past my throat. He was not my father I reminded myself. It had been a hope I had hung onto for so long, a wish made on so many nights—that my father would come back to get me, to save me. Now I knew why he never did.

The picture looked familiar, and then I knew why. The photo. The only family picture, the one I had stolen from my mother’s drawer. Here we were, come to life, walking through the amusement park. My mother was smiling up at something her husband, Daniel’s father and my step-father, had just said. A few steps in front of them, Daniel stood on a curb, looking down at something holding his attention on the concrete below.
 

Suddenly, I knew what was coming. It was at the edge of my own memory, like a peering into light fog, submerged near my conscious.
 

“Don’t,” I begged.

But I had no impact on there past events.
 

There I was, four year old me, walking up to Daniel from behind. My arms moved fast, action without thought, my hands connected with his back and shoved him knees first onto the cement.
 

His shocked expression crumbled into distress, then tears as he sat back and looked at his small, bloody palms and knees. My parents ran to him, and as my father scooped little Daniel up into his protective arms, my mother turned on me.

I remembered this. The movie continued to play out before me and also ignited a long dormant flame inside my head.

She grabbed my arm and yanked me to her side.

My body went limp, an automatic resistance to what was coming next, but my mother just yanked my arm straight up and smacked my bare leg to make me straighten them before hauling me off to an unoccupied bathroom.

Here, in the epiphany pool, I watched a woman dragging her daughter away and the image began to fall apart, but inside my head, I knew what happened next.

In that bathroom, my mother towered over me. She slapped my head and shoved me against the bathroom stall, “How do you like it,” she hissed into my face with an expression of pure hatred.
 

My heart pumped panic through my blood as my ears and head rang from the force of her hand. She pushed me towards the toilet and my feet slipped on the small white tiles beneath us. My hand landed in the cold water and my face against the seat. She grabbed my hair, pulled me up, then shoved me down again.

“Get up,” she hissed. “You’re a pig.”
 

With my hands on the plastic seat, I pushed myself up, wishing she would decide she was finished punishing me and open the stall door.
 

She bent over, her face a horrible sneer, and whispered to me, “If you ever touch him again…I’ll kill you.” She stood up, glared at me, stared at me, gave me all her attention alone in this small and scary place. It wasn’t the way she looked at Daniel, she never looked at me the way she looked at him.

The main door to the bathroom opened and the sound of women’s voices echoed off the walls.

My mother slid the latch on the stall. “I hate you,” she whispered, and walked out.
 

I already remembered, remembered everything, but the image formed anyway.
 

Daniel is standing at the top of our stairs. He is smiling, big cheeked, bright eyes. In his hands, he is holding a small, dark haired doll. My only birthday gift.

Behind him, I walk out of our bathroom and see him. My brows furrow and my mouth opens wide, I am screaming at him.

Daniel jumps, and turns toward the sound of my voice.
 

I charge across the hall, arms reaching, mouth screaming.

Downstairs, my mother comes running—she will be too late.

My hands connect with Daniel’s chest, and his small body launches backwards.

Just as my mother arrives at the bottom of the stairs.
 

On this movie, there is no sound, but my memory has it, stored deep within me for all these years. Daniel’s head cracking against a wooden stair, the weight of his body breaking bones in his neck, the soft thump of his body landing a breath later.
 

My mother is charging up the stairs. Her hair is half rolled into hot curlers on top of her head, one eye lined in black, her white bra glowing against her dark skin.
 

Her red lips morph from fierce anger into a terrified despair. She stops on the stair just below Daniel and it’s as if she is frozen in time. She does not move.

Neither does Daniel.
 

At the top of the stairs, I clutch my doll to my chest.
   

There are no more images. When the threads of light pull apart this time, they keep moving into the dark, a thousand lines of light swim off in every possible direction.

I am alone in the dark.

My eyes close even though it makes no difference—there is nothing to shut out. The water rushes in and out of me with every breath while pressing in on me from every direction.
 

My mother didn’t kill Daniel—I did.
 

“I didn’t mean to,” my lips moved, and even though there was no sound for them, they still had the feel of a childish plea—the exact words I had used that day.

I didn’t mean to—but I still did.
 

Broken hearted and dying from grief, my step father left us. Daniel had been his only son, and intentional or not, I had killed him and he could not forgive me.

I didn’t know if my mother had ever loved me, maybe she was not capable of loving the result of that horrifying night, but I did believe she had always thought of me as her punishment, her cross to bear. And after Daniel died and my step father left, like the images in these inky waters, my mother began to come apart.
 

She started calling me a demon.
 

She believed I was the devil.

She protected herself from me with crucifixes and bible verse and, worst of all, distance. It was the distance, more than anything, that had made me believe there was something wrong with me, like I was a foul thing not to be touched.

Her last words to me, on the day I left her house, echoed in my head—
the devil took him from me.
For my mother, that devil had always been me.
 

My body began to move. It was impossible to tell which way I was going because I no longer knew from which way I had come. I could be floating back up to the surface, or deeper still into a fathomless eternal suspension. Neither option was something I wanted.

Was this my punishment? My own personal trap in The Between for the offense I’d committed against Daniel? I had stolen his life and now I would be forced to exist here, in a watery prison of nonexistence?

Or was I heading back to the surface, back to the faint who had so patiently waited for my time to run out?
 

All around me, the water seemed lighter, more dark gray than black. I didn’t allow myself to believe I was for sure heading to the surface because if this was just some trick my brain was playing, the disappointment of being wrong would crush whatever hope my heart still clung to. The truth was, given the choice, I would rather die than stay trapped here forever. And maybe, on the surface, there was still the chance of seeing Ray one last time.
 

A murky doubt pulled at my chest and filled my insides with a vacuous foreboding, an uncertainty that I was certainly never going to see Ray again—because I didn’t deserve to. I wasn’t entitled to ever feel that warmth again, the touch of his hand, that look in his eyes. Love. Someone, something, had loved me in this world and now I would never experience that again. I had killed Daniel—and then failed to save him.