The Big Kahuna (Fox and O'Hare #6)(43)

After the game, I drove him back to Desert Hot Springs. The moon had already risen and the streets were empty and quiet, but there was some kind of outdoor celebration in his apartment complex, with loud music playing and kids splashing in the pool. He eyed the partiers wearily, then got out of the car and reached through the open window to shake my hand. “See you next week, brother.”

I got back on the highway, taking my time going home. Under my headlights, the yellow lines that marked the edge of the lane passed ceaselessly. I’d turned in my final paper for the spring semester, and I had hours and hours to kill before I could hope to fall asleep. Dolly Parton’s “Do I Ever Cross Your Mind” came on the radio and, whether because of the mood it set or because of my bout of nostalgia, I found myself thinking again about that dinner with Nora, going over every detail as if to sear it in my mind.





Efraín




After the old man robbed me of the pleasure of watching my daughter’s performance in the school play, he invaded my dreams. Nearly every night, I returned to that little stretch of the 62, my hands covered with grease, and watched his body roll off the hood of the car and land on the pavement. I thought of him now as Guerrero. Merciless in his campaign against me. Early in the morning, when I shaved by the yellow light above the bathroom mirror, he bumped against me and made me cut myself. In the van, while Enrique read the map, Guerrero was in the back, sabotaging our equipment by poking a hole in the carpet-cleaning hose or raiding our food supplies. I couldn’t find my Inca Kola when I opened my lunchbox, even though I had put it there myself. “You can have some of mine,” Enrique said, handing me his can. A button was missing on his uniform shirt and I wondered if that, too, was Guerrero’s doing.

Part of me, the part that had coolly measured the cost of calling the police and decided it was too high, knew that this was all in my head. It wasn’t the first time I had nicked myself while shaving, the carpet-cleaning hose was very old, Marisela had replaced my soda with water when my back was turned. But another part of me scrupulously tracked all the mishaps and setbacks I had suffered since the night of the accident and held up the tally to me at every opportunity. The longer I refused to come forward, the longer the list grew.

It surprised me that my memory of the accident did not dull with time, but became clearer instead. Now I was certain, or nearly certain, that the car that struck Guerrero was silver and that, whatever make or model it was, it had a long hood. And there was a sticker on the rear side window, round and red, an advertisement of some kind. Perhaps memory is not merely the preservation of a moment in the mind, but the process of repeatedly returning to it, carefully breaking it up in parts and assembling them again until we can make sense of what we remember. Several times a day, I returned to that moment on the highway, seeing it differently each time, as if it had been cast under a new light.

I didn’t tell my wife about the new details that had come to me, and she didn’t mention the accident on Saturday night when, exhausted from work and lack of sleep, I lay down on the sofa with my head on her lap. All I wanted was to forget, and yet my mind was diligently working on the opposite, forcing me back to that night on the 62. It was as though I were stuck in time, forced to relive, again and again, what had happened that night. Marisela seemed to have made her peace with my silence, because she stroked my hair while she watched Don Francisco on Sábado Gigante, and didn’t ask me any questions.

Nor did she bring up the accident on Sunday morning when we took the children to church. From his pulpit beneath the stained-glass windows, the priest spoke of the sacrament of penance, quoting from the Book of Psalms: “Then I acknowledged my sin to you and did not cover up my iniquity.” Oh, I knew what he meant. Confess, and your guilt will be forgiven.

But I had committed no crime, so why should I feel guilty?

And yet I did. It was guilt that weighed so heavily on me, and that made me revisit the accident so often over the past few days. I wanted desperately to be free of it, but walking back home, with Daniel’s hand in mine and Elena skipping over the lines on the sidewalk, I wondered whether forgiveness was worth all the things it could cost me. As we waited to cross the road, Marisela gave me a funny look. “What is it?” I asked.

“Your socks,” she said.

I looked down and saw that one sock was blue and the other was black.

“I noticed when we were in church,” she said with a little laugh. “But I couldn’t say anything then.”

My God, how I loved her smile. It was what had attracted my attention the first time I had seen her, on a crowded bus in Torreón, many years ago. She was smiling politely at something the conductor had said. In spite of the summer heat, she was in a long-sleeved black dress and shoes, and her hair was plaited in a severe braid on the side. It took a week before I ran into her again, and another before I caught on that she was a widow. But she barely acknowledged me, she was still wrapped up in memories of her dead husband, and I realized that I would have to compete with him for my happiness. My cousin Alonso, as usual, said there was no hope. “Nine months and she’s still wearing black,” he said. “He must have been some man.”

“Whose side are you on?” I asked.

It only made me more determined to talk to her. By asking around, I found out that she had two sisters who owned a hair salon in the neighborhood. Half sisters, I should say. They were much older, but neither of them was married or had a family. Instead, the two old crones had recast themselves as protectors of the beautiful Marisela. If I wanted a proper introduction, I would have to go through them. I was not rich or handsome, but I had been saving up for years to go north, and I suppose they saw this as a sign of ambition—something that Marisela’s first husband had apparently lacked. They made the introduction, and I was able to court Marisela. This is why I can never complain that we send them money every month, even though we have so little of it ourselves. But now another dead man was troubling my peace, and this time there were no magical stepsisters to save me.