Fever Dream: A Novel(25)

“May I speak with you?” asks my husband.

Your father doesn’t answer, and my husband chooses not to ask again. He starts to move closer, but he hesitates a moment. The kitchen is small and the man doesn’t move. My husband takes a step onto the damp wood floor, which creaks. Something in the man’s immobility makes my husband think this is not the first visit he has received.

“Would you like some mate?” your father asks, his back already turned as he dumps the used yerba into the sink. My husband says yes. Your father points to one of the chairs, and he sits down.

“I hardly even met your wife,” says your father. He sticks two fingers into the mate gourd and throws the remaining yerba away.

“But your wife met her,” says my husband.

“My wife is gone.”

He puts the gourd on the table. He doesn’t slam it down, but it is not a friendly movement, either. He places the yerba and the sugar on the table, then sits down across from my husband and looks at him.

“Go ahead,” he says.

Hanging on the wall behind him, there are two pictures of the man with the same woman, and below are more photos of the man with various horses. A single nail holds them all up. Each picture hangs from the previous one, each tied with the same thin rope.

“My daughter is not well,” says my husband. “It’s been more than a month, but . . .”

Your father doesn’t look at him, and pours another mate.

“I mean, she’s doing okay, they’re treating her and the spots on her skin don’t hurt as much anymore. She’s recovering, in spite of all she’s been through. But there’s something else, and I don’t know what it is. Something more, within her.” A few seconds pass before he goes on, as if he wanted to give your father time to take in his words. “Do you know what happened, what happened to Nina?”

“No.”

There is a moment of silence, very long, during which neither of the two moves.

“You must know.”

“I don’t know.”

My husband slams his hands down on the table, contained but effective. The sugar bowl jumps and its lid falls a little to the side. Now your father does look at him, but he speaks without fear.

“You know there’s nothing I can tell you.”

Your father brings the straw to his mouth. It’s the only object that shines in the kitchen. My husband is going to say something else. But then there is a noise, it’s coming from the hallway. Something is happening that my husband, from where he’s sitting, can’t see. Something familiar for the other man, who isn’t alarmed. It’s you, David. There’s something different that I couldn’t begin to describe, but it’s you. You peer into the kitchen and stand there looking at them. My husband looks at you, his fists relax, he tries to calculate your age. He focuses on your strange gaze, which at certain moments strikes him as dim-witted; he notices your spots.

“There you have it,” says your father, pouring another mate and again not offering any to my husband. “As you can see, I would also like to have someone to ask.”

You wait quietly, attentive to my husband.

“And now he’s started tying everything.”

Your father points toward the living room, where many more things are hanging from rope, or are tied together with it. Now my husband’s whole attention is focused on that, though he couldn’t say why. It doesn’t seem like a disproportionate number of things. It seems more like, in your own way, you were trying to do something with the deplorable state of the house and everything in it. My husband looks at you again, trying to understand, but you run out through the front door, and the two men are left in silence to listen to your steps moving away from the house.

“Come,” says your father.

They get up almost at the same time. My husband follows him outside. He sees him glance to both sides as he goes down the steps, maybe looking for you. He sees your father as a tall and strong man, he sees his large hands hanging down at his sides, open. He stops, not far from the house. My husband takes a few steps toward him. They are close together, close and at the same time alone in so much open land. Beyond the soy fields it looks green and bright under the dark clouds. But the ground they are walking on, from the road to the stream, is dry and hard.

“You know,” says your father, “I used to work with horses.” He shakes his head, maybe to himself. “But do you hear my horses now?”

“No.”

“Do you hear anything else?”

Your father looks around, as if he can hear the silence much farther away than my husband is capable of hearing. The air smells of rain and a damp breeze wafts up from the ground.

“You need to go,” says your father.

My husband nods as if grateful for the instruction, or the permission.

“If it starts to rain you’ll get stuck in the mud, you won’t get out.”

They walk together toward the car, now with more distance between them. Then my husband sees you. You’re sitting in the backseat. Your head barely clears the backrest. My husband approaches and looks in through the driver’s-side window, determined to make you get out. He wants to leave right now. Upright against the seat, you look him in the eyes, as though begging him. I see through my husband, I see those other eyes in yours. The seat belt on, legs crossed on the seat. A hand reaching slightly toward Nina’s stuffed mole, covertly, the dirty fingers resting on the stuffed legs as if trying to restrain them.