The Last Karankawas(22)
His jaw drops. It’s a sudden move. They’ve had a few good years in Galveston just steps from where his parents and childhood friends still live. But he reads something in the shadows of her face and nods. Okay, baby, we can do that. Luz knows he is thinking about her own breasts and ovaries, about the children he wants in the future. He’d have promised her anything.
* * *
The way she feels about river country—it’s the same way Carlos feels about the Gulf. Luz cannot understand his near-feverish devotion to Galveston’s brown sand, brown sea, the hordes of people who clog the beaches and leave Styrofoam cups and ripped chanclas amid knots of blood-colored seaweed. Who would choose that, she wonders—that tiny slice of a tiny sea—when all around you beats the heartblood of Texas, its green veins?
That’s where they met: college students at a ranch party on the Nueces, a stretch of the river where fresh water sinks into dark pools so deep she couldn’t swim to the bottom in one breath. Carlos Saldivar, he said, his full name, shaking her hand like she was a man. Luz liked that. He had a city look about him—when he said he attended UT Dallas, she laughed with the superiority she’d been taught as a Longhorn in Austin—and she felt like impressing him, or rather shocking him. Still the reckless ten-year-old rock scaler, cliff jumper. She climbed to the top of the bluff and leapt, spiraling through the air before slicing the water in a dive. She broke the surface, grinning, her friends cheering, and Carlos Saldivar stared with her beer in his hand and his mouth open, admiration in his eyes. He called her ballsy. He kissed her that night; he proposed a year later.
They were married a month after they both graduated college. Carlos suggested they move back to Galveston while he earned his real estate license, and she reluctantly agreed. His face lit up at the thought of going home, so bright she couldn’t bear to dampen it by telling him it wasn’t her home. What argument did she have, after all? His roots were buried deep in the town he loved, a sprawling weave of family and friends and history; unlike hers, from the southwestern wedge of the state, where the family tree consisted of her and her parents, both transplants from frontera towns. It’s nothing, she told herself again and again. It’s easy. Easy to uproot and move to the island with him, take a job as an office manager for a church rectory, grab drinks with his friends Hector and Carly and Jess at one of the dive bars lining the Seawall. He had a place, had people.
On Galveston she found salt water for miles and miles, heat and sweat in the air stinging her eyes, coating the insides of her mouth. All Luz had ever known in her twenty-one years was the rich damp-muck scent of cypress trees and chalky rocks and a cool green river. Carlos added a pool to the backyard of their bungalow on Pompano Avenue, but it wasn’t enough—the bottom scraped clean against her soles, the water felt lukewarm instead of spring-chilled. The drive became too far for her parents to make once the cancer metastasized a year later. She spent so much time back home that the thought of Galveston, of speeding her car past the potholes and semis and fast-food joints of 10 and 45, made her as queasy as Cytoxan made her mother. Not to mention the constant reminders—every clump of hair falling out, every purple ring in the bed of her mother’s fingernails—that this could happen to her as well, that she carried the same faulty coding in the genes.
No more, she thinks. She is still in her parents’ home, listening to the mockingbirds chatter and chase, watching through the kitchen window as they race around her mother’s jasmine, star-studded vines creeping up the porch posts. She hears Carlos watching TV in the living room, the strains of some TNT crime procedural. Upstairs her father is napping—Luz realizes he does that a lot now; they both do. They have learned it requires a new kind of energy, this living without her.
She flexes her fingers as they start to cramp. She has been writing thank-yous for an hour, responses to the many condolence cards, prayer and donation booklets, food deliveries. Someone has to. Luz closes her eyes briefly, reminds herself she is coming home, that Carlos has said yes. It’s nothing. It’s easy.
Her father descends, sleepy-eyed, gray-stubbled, in a T-shirt and the Longhorn pajama pants she gave him three Christmases ago. When she tells him they are moving to Concan, he calls her mija and cries a little. It’s going to be different, so you know. Things are changing, he says. It’s not how it used to be.
I know. The world before her eyes and beneath her feet fits wrong now, like two halves of a photo that don’t quite line up. She finds herself tripping over her own shoes or running her hips into the sharp edges of tables. Her own body has stopped making sense. But she doesn’t say that.
* * *
Carlos heads back to Galveston after the funeral to arrange their move, and Luz stays an extra week. Her father spends hours poring over the realty listings in Concan, Utopia, even Leakey. She wants a new place, their own, no matter how much he claims it wouldn’t bother him to have them both at the house. She bristles imagining Carlos crammed into her old bed, as fun as he jokes it would be. She doesn’t want him near her old things; she can’t explain why.
On the first calm day, she makes the twenty-minute drive north from Uvalde into the foothills, to where the rivers run. As she winds, speeding up on the two-lane roads, she thinks how Carlos flinches at the sudden drops, the turns, while she delights in them. The wax and wane of the hills. The mesquites and shrub grass melting into cedar trees stretching tall. Paved roads that become the crunch of crushed rock or caliche beneath tires.