The Last Karankawas(21)

“I think I might be a medium, but I don’t know yet.” Beeb has continued speaking as they walk, closing in on the obelisk. The candlelight grows brighter; Ofelia makes out the shapes of four or five people. “I’ve been trying, but I haven’t had any encounters yet. Xander says I will soon, though! I’ve only been coming for about six months. We’re a small group, but we are true believers, every one of us! What about you, Ofelia? Do you believe?”

She stops, and Beeb, startled, does, too. Ofelia stares at Beeb, her smile so earnest beneath her bright knit cap.

“I believe in many things,” Ofelia says, allowing—for the first time in so many years—the pride and power of her rank to echo in her voice. Curandera. Soy la curandera. She need not explain herself to this amateur; the elements that mattered understood.

Beeb nods. She is unaware of the magnitude of the moment. Ofelia has named herself, renewed herself. Her body reacts now, reawakening as if from a long sleep. She senses fire in her fingertips and a tingling in her feet, the pooling of heat between her legs; she has the sudden urge to urinate, or maybe to shake her hips, to throw her head back and howl. She knows what to do.

“It was very nice meeting you, Beeb,” she says, “I think I’m going to go.”

“Oh! But we’re almost there!” Beeb gives a cry of dismay when Ofelia steps backward on the path. “You’re not going to stay for the meeting? You won’t even meet everyone?”

Ofelia shakes her head. She feels herself smiling. “No, gracias.”

The walk back along the path is quicker; she knows where the dangerous spots were now. She passes the black-eyed Susans, and Josephine Ardeth Gresham, and the white oleander tree. She makes the sign of the cross at Father Byrne’s headstone, Requiescat en pace, keeps walking. Somewhere in Brownsville, Roland’s is like the many modern ones here, with husbands and wives buried together. At the top in large, elegant print DE LOS SANTOS. Beneath it to the left, Roland’s first and middle names and the years that bracketed his life. To the right, a blank space. It will stay blank at least a little while longer, Ofelia knows. Let it.





WELCOME, WON’T YOU STAY AWHILE?


Luz

When Luz learned her grandmother died, she was floating the river, snug inside a cheap inner tube stolen years ago from the Rio Frio General Store. She was ten, and things were simple: school, sunshine, the river. Looking back now, Luz recognizes this young version of herself as a girl who grinned, leaping off into dark, deep water without regard for rocks beneath. That Luz never would have predicted a life for her grown self hundreds of miles away in Galveston—had she even heard of Galveston back then?—nor would have predicted a life so full of death. She remembers the June sun beating down that day as she drifted in the appaloosa shade of cypress patches. A few yards ahead thundered the first set of rapids, and as she prepared for the drop, she heard her mother—Luz, she cried, Luz, come back. Her mother stood on the banks sloping up from the water, the oversize T-shirt she wore as a bathing suit cover-up bunched in her hands, clutched to her mouth. Luz saw the grief in her eyes before she lowered the T-shirt and let it loose in a long wail.

Now, fourteen years later, death again. Mere miles from that spot on the Frio, in her parents’ house in Uvalde. Luz sits beside her mother, curled up in the hospice bed, smoothing the patchy dark hair against her scalp. Her mother has not spoken in days. Luz watches her chest rise and fall. Until it just falls, and she waits for the rise, but it doesn’t come. Finally, it doesn’t come. She presses her cheek to her mother’s cooling collarbone, sharp and frail beneath the nightgown; the circular ridge of the port-a-cath digs into her skin, but she does not care. Beside her, her father weeps into the pillow by her mother’s face. Gone. She is gone. No fanfare, no warning. Just days of this waiting. And now they are over.

Sorrow and relief course through her, twin currents. The relief shames her; Luz bites her tongue and bears down hard.

By the time her husband, Carlos, walks in after the seven-hour drive from Galveston, the men from Suarez Funeral Home have come and gone. Her dad speaks softly into his cell phone. Luz watches him from her seat on the couch as she folds the bed linens—she has washed, dried, and ironed each one, shoved the hospice bed against the wall, and returned her parents’ bed back where it used to be.

Carlos reaches out to touch her face. His eyes are red and raw; he must have cried the entire drive. You okay?

He seems surprised she isn’t crying. He doesn’t understand. Unlike these men, she doesn’t expel her grief through tears or noises. No bargaining, no anger. Instead she feels focused, sharper somehow. What Luz knows is simple: Her mother is dead, and she wants her back. She wants her back whole, the way she was before that stubborn tumor wormed in, lodging first in her breasts and then, once those were gone, reappearing where it had with her mother before her in the soft hollow of an ovary. But Luz knows, too, that she can’t have these things; simple, again. She is not stupid. She feels electrified in a way she has not been in years, alive and thrumming with the need to work, and work, piecing all this back the way it was.

She waits for Carlos to hug her dad, and when he sits beside her on the couch, moving to enfold her in his arms, she pulls back. In a clear voice tells him, I don’t want to go back to Galveston. I want to move back home. Not here—to Concan, really. And the river.