The Last Karankawas(40)
She is desperate, too, for the bright spot of her brother to stay fixed on her. She has planned a scary and stupid thing.
Step 1. Scramble atop the banks on the other side of the river, grip the swinging rope suspended from the ancient oak closest to the water, and call to him: “Watch this. Pete, watch me.” He does not turn to look. Instead, he is whispering in his girlfriend’s ear when his sister tightens both fists around the rope’s knot and hurls herself through the air.
Step 2. Pretend to lose your grip halfway over the water. Flail your arms and legs and scream. Make this convincing. She does. She falls some ten feet to the spot where the water is shadowy. The flop stings the skin on her back, but it will be worth it. Be prepared.
Step 3. Once beneath the surface, blow out the air in your lungs—a steady stream of bubbles—until you sink to the bottom. Spot a big rock, big enough for your needs, and wiggle it into place on your chest. The sharp edges dig through her bathing suit, push into her tender skin. She ignores them, lets it weigh her down. This will be worth it, she reminds herself.
Step 4. Wait. Her lungs begin to burn. But he will help her. She reminds herself that he’s a caballero, her brother, a gentleman. A few precious bubbles escape her lips so she clamps them tighter. Says this to herself: Pete will save you. Any minute now. She says it as her chest seizes, as her fingers scrabble at the rock, ready to heave it off. She squints up through the water at the wavering world.
Step 5. Wait.
Step 6. Wait.
* * *
“Okay.” Pete drops the box inside her apartment, and she closes the door behind him. For a moment her brother stills, sweeps his eyes across the scene. One bedroom, one bath. Tiny living/dining room, kitchen, balcony with furniture. Framed photos of him, their parents and grandparents, on the wall.
He claps his hands and rubs them together. A service he can do, a difference he can make; she almost sees the purpose rise like steam off his skin.
“Let’s get prepping,” he says. “Take this roll and start taping an X inside all the bathroom and bedroom windows. I’ll do out here and bring in whatever you’ve got on your balcony.”
Twenty minutes later and she is finished, but the living room windows are bare. Her small patio set and three heavy ceramic planters still on the balcony, unmoved.
She finds him on the floor of her kitchenette, flipping through a back issue of the recent Texas Monthly issue with Concan on the cover. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” He waves it at her, beaming with pride. “We made the cover.”
Kristin can’t be mad; she saved the copy for him, after all. She lifts the duct tape from the floor and loops it around her wrist like a bracelet. She will do her own windows later. She knows how. She doesn’t need his help these days, though he keeps offering, and she keeps accepting. A check-engine light, a window that needs resealing, a hurricane coming. Or maybe it’s he who’s accepting help, and she the one offering. Be with me. Fix something for me.
“It’s not nearly that green anymore.” She crouches to sit beside him on the floor and points to the glossy magazine cover. “The river.”
“Yes, it is,” he corrects her. “You just don’t know where to go.”
* * *
The nursing classes for the junior college’s RN program last two years. Kristin hates statistics, has to take it twice, but otherwise she’s aces. Mom takes pride in buying her the scrubs she needs during clinical rotations in the lab or on the med/surg floor or in the ICU; she picks patterns of puppies, fireworks, big calla lilies in the style of Diego Rivera. The Uvalde hospital has several openings, but she accepts a job at the nursing home for now. It’s where she feels most needed—she cried during her rotation there, moved by how the men and women clutched her hands so tight when she murmured in her limited Spanish, how the conditioned air smelled sharply of powder and loose skin. She is still checking job listings near Galveston; it is a dream, she knows, but they went there once on vacation as kids, and she still likes the idea of going to the beach after a shift, of sand on her calves and humidity tangling her hair instead of this mesquite and springwater stretch of Texas that is all she’s ever known. She dreams of going off on her own, as her brother did.
On the day of her pinning ceremony, her parents sit proudly, her father in a shirt and pants he’s let her mother iron with starch for the occasion. But Pete’s chair is empty. His Army buddy who scrapes boats out in Corpus told him about a nonprofit that wants to clean up the Nueces River, and he headed out to meet them. Unlike Pete’s last job, they don’t need retail experience or a security background (“He says they won’t try to pigeonhole me like that other place, they’ll just let me be the real me”). Pete will return sixteen days from now, without the job but with a bottle of Crown as an apology gift. He will drink the whole thing.
* * *
CABALLERO, proclaims the stitching on his fatigues. The horseman, tall and straight in the saddle. In control.
What she can see now is that there is also something of the horse in him. Skittering, ready to bolt. And she doesn’t know if it’s Iraq, or if it’s always been there.
* * *
Step 7 was this: She kept waiting, waiting for him. She stared up at the surface of the water where it quivered, where light pierced through in staggering spears. She waited until small things sparked in front of her eyes. Until she knew she couldn’t wait for him anymore.