Woman of Light (14)

SIX




To the Edges





For seven days, Maria Josie sat at Diego’s bedside, reading aloud from an old copy of Don Quixote, breaking only for meals, sleep, and her long shifts at the mirror factory. Between the book’s pages, Maria Josie would glance up with a watchful gaze, casually, as if checking the clock. It had snowed, padding the exterior brick and rickety roof in a pleasing weight. Several times a day, Luz brought Maria Josie water with iodine and an herb called plumajillo. She’d walk swiftly to the nightstand and place the white dish beside wilted lilies and dried marigolds and heaps of bloody gauze and wooden rosaries. There were santo candles burned into liquid wax. San Miguel, glowing from his eyes. The bedroom smelled like sickness, a plumy stench that clung to Luz’s clothes and hair. She’d open the windows only to mingle the smells of illness with carcasses and smog. Reina and Corporal looked on from their glass cage, and because Maria Josie was afraid of them Luz took over their feedings. Sunlight would warm their faces as she dropped mice into the cage.

“Any better?” Luz asked one afternoon, sprinkling hay into the terrarium.

Maria Josie sat beside Diego, cleaning her glasses. “See for yourself.”

From across the room, Luz considered Diego’s face. It was the size that frightened her most, the inhumanness of his proportion. “I just don’t understand why’d they do it. Why Diego?” she asked with sadness, thinking of the brick slammed into her brother, over and over.

Maria Josie grimaced, curving her arm in a flannel jacket over the chair’s back. “They’re men, white men.” She pushed forward and gripped Diego’s foot, small and paw-like beneath his quilt. “That’s what they do.”



* * *



—

On Thursday afternoon, Luz returned home from washday. She was surprised to see Diego wasn’t in bed. He was seated in a white chair with his face to the window, the orange curtains tied in great bows, his back lumped forward in gray pajamas. Maria Josie wasn’t home, and the apartment felt emptier without her. From the roof, there were sounds of melting snow. In the hallway, Luz slipped off her winter coat and hung it on the rack. She hurried toward her bedroom, afraid of seeing her brother mangled, the image of his new face, a sharp pain in her heart.

“Can’t say hello?” Diego said, his voice hissing, ugly.

Luz paused. She mouthed goddammit to herself before reluctantly stepping into the main room. The floorboards shifted.

“I heard you found me.” Diego kept his face to the window.

The room was bright. The bed had been stripped of its sheets, and a sagging pinstriped mattress was exposed. The nightstand’s bloody gauze was gone and the room smelled of sunshine and wet pavement. “I picked up your teeth,” she said. “The ones I could find.” Luz looked to a clay bowl on the bureau.

Diego laughed, rattling the floor. “How many?”

“Five.”

“Well, shit,” he said. “Tooth fairy owes me.”

Jazz came over the radio, a lone horn whining. Luz went to the bureau, clinked bottles of cologne as she eyed Reina along the windowsill with her vertebrae in four peaks, sacred mountains across her back. “Have they ate?” she asked.

“First thing this morning.”

Diego swiveled around then, facing Luz in polished light. His swelling had eased, though his jawline was lopsided and curdled, as if the upper skin had fused to his throat. Razor-thin lines traced the shaved sides of his head, ending at his mashed mouth, where Teresita’s stitching resembled train tracks. Diego’s face went from purple to green, yellow to black. Luz could see through a hole in his left cheek, clear into his mouth, to the bed of his tongue. In his lap, Corporal was funneled in a dark pile, and Luz must have made a face because Diego winced. He seemed in pain somewhere inside his throat. Bending forward, he gave Corporal a nudge, the snake sliding like a puddle off Diego’s blanketed lap. Luz was angry with herself, angry that part of her blamed her brother, for everything.

“Why were you outside the party?” she asked.

“I had a bad feeling, thought I should get going, but they caught me in the doorway.”

“Who did?”

“Eleanor’s people. Her brothers, her father.”

“Why hasn’t anyone called the police?”

“Come on, Little Light. You know why.”

Luz knew as well as anyone that those men probably were the police, or at the very least, associated with them. The orange curtain wavered then and Reina darted her face around the edges of the bow.

Diego said after a long while, “They’ve let me go at Gates.”

“What will you do? No one has shifts.”

“All snakes, all the time.” Diego struggled through a laugh, his cheek drafty through the stitched hole. “I’ll go north. There’s work in the fields.”

Luz pictured her brother wading through a sea of knee-high crops, laboring over mud-caked beets, buried in long green rows, the sky ablaze with dust and clouds and locusts. “You’re leaving?” she asked, her voice clipped with sorrow.

“Maria Josie’s asked me to get going.”

“But we came here together.”

“And I’m no longer welcome.”