The Refugees(44)

I found sleeping pills in a drawer of his nightstand, along with a bottle of eucalyptus oil and a box of Salonpas. “Take one,” I said, dropping a pill into his mouth. He swallowed it without water and I rolled him over, because even that act required a man to use the muscles of his neck. I splashed some of the eucalyptus oil onto his shoulders and neck and began massaging him. Soon enough he was breathing evenly, and once he was asleep, I bandaged him with the white strips of Salonpas, their medicinal scent reminding me of the times when he would lay them upon me after particularly hard mornings of exercise.

After I was done, I picked up his shirt and opened the closet. The hanger was in my hand when I glanced at the shelf above the closet rod and saw my mother’s wig, resting on its Styrofoam head. What compelled him to save this, of all things, was beyond me. I hung up the shirt quickly and turned off the lights before I went to my room. There I lay in bed, listening for the police helicopters that cruised overhead almost every night or the Spanish rock that was always floating up from the crowded evangelical church down the hill. But everything was so strangely still and quiet, I thought I wasn’t even in my own apartment, and when I closed my eyes I saw the head’s oval face once again, marked by an arched nose and thin lips, its expression white, blank, and eyeless as it gazed down upon me.

Late the following day, the police found my father’s Honda on a side street of Boyle Heights. The next morning, while I was sleeping between shifts, my father went with Mimi to retrieve it from the impound lot. They returned by the time I was awake and drinking my coffee, black and without sugar. My father was whistling a tune I didn’t recognize when he opened the door, Mimi trailing behind him. “Miracles do happen after all,” he said. “The car’s in one piece. The police think it was just stolen by kids looking for a joyride.”

“Lucky you,” I said.

“The little bastards even left me a gift.” He chuckled and showed me a cheap removable stereo in his palm, his movement stiff and awkward from his strained neck. “I guess they couldn’t stand the radio.”

“The stereo’s probably stolen, too.”

“If the police don’t have a problem with it, then neither do I.”

After he went outside with a vacuum cleaner and rags to clean up the car, I was left alone with Mimi. She sat on the edge of the futon, wearing a purple satin tracksuit with clean white sneakers, hands folded on her lap as she smiled at me. The early morning sun coming through the living room windows reflected off the satin and illuminated her in the halo of dust floating up from the futon. Seeing her with my father made me think that perhaps Sam had made the right choice after all. Perhaps she was thinking of my father and mother when she divorced me. Perhaps she knew then what I know now, that they never should have married each other. The truth of the matter was that my father and mother should have married other people, even though, in that case, I might never have been born.

“Sometimes I feel so sorry for you bachelors,” she said.

“Mimi.”

“My housekeeper does a great job,” she went on. “She’s looking for some more work in case you need help cleaning.”

“Aunt Mimi,” I said. The coffee’s bitterness only made me aware of how dull my mind was.

“She cooks, too, nearly as good as I can.”

“You know he’s going to cheat on you, don’t you?”

For a moment she said and did nothing, her expression unchanging. I thought she might not have heard me, or if she had, that she was too shocked even to react. Then she stood up, brushing away the cloud of dust with a wave of her hand. I expected her to say something, perhaps how she was not like my mother, but she didn’t say a word. Instead, she walked to the door without looking at me, her smile fixed on her face, and for a moment I believed she might just ignore me. But, with her hand on the doorknob, she stopped and turned to look at me.

“Tell me something,” she said. The curve of her smile straightened into a thin, hard line. “Aren’t there times when you’d rather be someone else besides you?”

I went to work. Then I changed my clothes and went to work again. Near dawn of the next day, I came home from night duty and was so tired that I wasn’t even aware of crossing the threshold of my bedroom and falling asleep, not until a staccato pounding woke me up after what seemed like only minutes. Someone was knocking on the front door. The alarm clock said it was seven thirty, and when I looked down, I saw that I was still wearing my pants. My shirt and shoes were on the carpet. I waited for my father to answer the door, but when the pounding only became more insistent, I had to climb out of bed.

Whoever it was kept beating on the front door until I opened it. Sam was standing there, right hand raised and clenched. She was wearing an unbuttoned red cardigan over a black top and matching black pants made of stretchable wool. Her pregnant belly protruded over her waistband, and her top had ridden up, leaving an eye-shaped sliver of her flesh exposed. The navel at its center was like a pupil, its iris the gold belly ring she’d acquired in her freshman year one drunken night.

“I didn’t know you had it in you,” she said, brushing by me.

The sunlight behind her was blinding. I blinked and said, “What?”

“My car!” She pivoted in the middle of the living room to face me. “I spent all day yesterday getting it fixed. How could you do that? How?”