Woman of Light (78)
“Avel,” Luz said, slinking off the metal sink.
David straightened his tie with deft hands. He reached for a folded towel from the rack above Luz. He wiped his hands on it and flung the white cloth over his shoulder. Without acknowledging Avel or Luz, David twisted around, moving through the doorway, walking out to the party, as if he had only been in the laundry closet cleaning up a spill.
Luz looked to Avel. She fixed her hair, holding her hands over her face. Through clenched teeth, she cried out, “Forgive me.”
Avel shook his head with a sadness so thick it felt like a wall. He reached for Luz’s throat and, with a gentle tug, snapped the golden chain around her neck, placing the engagement ring securely in his breast pocket. He said, “I really loved you.” He then left, darting into the party, his shoulders low.
Luz cried in small, climbing moans. But she soon heaved tears so uncontrollably that she wasn’t sure how a soul could feel such humiliation, such loss, all this pain wrapped together in one. She sobbed then, thinking of Diego, her father, every man who had ever hurt her. Someone must have called Lizette to the house, because she soon arrived at the laundry closet and screamed in terror at the sight of her disheveled cousin, weeping against the sink.
“What has happened? Who has done this to you?”
Lizette’s shrieks rose around them like a shelter, and Luz imagined the sounds of the cousins drifting high into the night sky, an eye looking down at the party on Fox Street, all the sparkling lights and dancing bodies, the children rushing from room to room, the steel pots steaming on the stove, the house a theater of life.
“Luz,” Lizette pleaded. “Who did this to you? Tell me.”
But all Luz could do was weep, shaking her head a violent no. “It was only me,” she cried. “There’s no one else. It was just me.”
THIRTY-THREE
El Mariachi
Avel stood across the street from the Law Office of David Tikas with a cigarette in his lips, the lighter clinking in his left hand and his gaze locked on that defiant-looking building. He thought of the first time he had laid eyes on Luz Lopez, before he knew her name, how she ran down Colfax Avenue with a red wagon filled with laundry sacks, the stone buildings closing around her like a tomb. Her eyes were feral but she carried herself with the same elegance as a wolf. She looked bright, like a girl who joked. Later, huddled outside, stealing swigs from a basement bottle of mezcal in broad daylight, Avel had stood with his new neighbor, a man named Santiago, who played mandolin. Avel swallowed three long pulls of Santi’s mezcal and said, I just saw this broad on a job. I’ve seen her before, out on the street. I’d like to know her. Santi had wagged his left leg, laughed. Have her fall right into your lap, if you know what I mean. Avel shook his head. Not this one, he’d said. She reminds me of them church girls, the ones from back home. Santi had tossed the empty bottle into the street and it shattered. Those girls, he explained, don’t exist.
Avel stood outside the law office and cursed the now starless sky. A dry wind blew from the east and ruffled the few high birch trees along Seventeenth Street. It was late now, and the city was silent. No traffic whined in the distance, no horns honked, no streetcars rattled. Avel pulled Luz’s office key from his pocket. She always kept it in the same spot, affixed to the metal ring with her keys to Hornet Moon.
He entered the office slowly. He considered Luz’s empty chair, the magnitude of her desk, the walls aching with their own kind of sadness. He hated to think of her in that chair being watched through the windows. The office sighed in its own blank darkness and, though not a soul was present, Avel could feel the echo of Luz’s movements through the space—her repetitive walk from the desk to the filing cabinet, her bending and turning her neck, the clink of her key in the door, and every single time she was summoned to his office, where she stood dutifully before David’s desk, asking in her sweet and devoted tone what it was he needed.
“That’s enough of that,” Avel said aloud. He forced his elbow through the plate glass between David’s office and Luz’s lobby. The crash matched the intensity of pain surging through Avel’s arm, and oddly in his chest. Blood appeared on his sleeve, blooming over his shirt cuff. He stepped into David’s office. He knocked furniture to the ground—the cabinets, their files, all the work Luz had done to order and preserve, now scattered about the floor. The bulletin board behind David’s desk caught Avel’s attention and he stepped closer, flicking his lighter to examine the webbed display of photographs, newspaper articles, and maps. Pinned nonchalantly among the scraps of information was an article from the Rocky Mountain News, YOUNG DENVER ATTORNEY MAKES A NAME, SEEKS JUSTICE.
Avel flicked his lighter near the article’s bottom edge, watched the flame swallow the yellow page. He then took the lighter to several maps, and moved on to the photographs, which burned in a curdling, wax-like way. The entire bulletin board went up in flames. Avel used the lighter on the files next, then the wastebaskets, bookshelves. What at first happened slowly then happened all at once. The curtains burned. Black smoke billowed and collected, eclipsing the already darkened tin ceiling. The walls showed the skeletal lines of the underlying lath. Avel coughed and squinted through smoke, his body covered in sweat. Heat pressed upon his back, pushing him outward as he turned around and stepped through the ghost of Luz’s path, exiting the Law Office of David Tikas as it burned on that summer night, so near to the full moon.