The Last Karankawas(42)

He watched me pull into the driveway, park. Neither of us moved. I let the car run; through the windshield, we stared at each other. I don’t fear strong emotions. Haven’t I always taught you to permit their passage, allow them to course through controlled, that this strength is what makes us warriors? Haven’t I taught you that much? But I bit my lip hard, gathering myself as I looked at him, my own prodigal son. Because my first thought was of you, and my first emotion was fear. Fear that you were still home where I had left you for Mass, snoring with your face down in the mattress and the pillows and colcha piled over you to keep out the early light. Fear that you had seen him out there and been frightened. Worse, fear that you had spoken to him, or let him in. A stranger he would be, no? You were five when he left, you were only twelve now, and you wouldn’t know him, would you, your own father?

The fear was first, but there were other emotions, boiling together like brujería on my tongue: betrayal bitter, joy bright as a burst of lime, and love—sí, love—bright and bitter both. It shocked me, the strength of these feelings, how far away my control seemed to be. As a young woman, I was unafraid of losing control to the spinnings of fate. I kept my mind and power tight in my own hands; your grandfather never could beat that out of me, no, pero lo trató. Not in decades had I needed to rein myself in. But today I did.

The sun was hazy in the sky, the heat of the day beginning to churn. It rose from the ground through the car beneath me, seeping up from my low heels and pantsuit. I sat with my hands at ten and two, the Vicente Fernández CD you gave me on my last birthday still playing through my speakers, though thankfully it was “Hermoso Cari?o,” full of delight and celebration, and not “Volver, Volver,” because that really would have been too much.

When I finally emerged from the car, I was calmer. The feelings had traveled to those spaces around my lungs and heart, no longer in my throat and ready to bubble, double double, toil and trouble—you were reading Shakespeare in school that year, remember? Macbeth and his witches. You read those lines to me and we laughed and laughed. Eye of newt, toe of frog. Midnight hags, híjole. But their rhymes I liked. The power of words, as I have often told you. The power of women’s words.

He sat in front of the screen door, knees bent on the step. I stood there on the sidewalk, looking down at him. For the first time in twenty-five years I was taller than him, mi hijo, and I drew strength from that small advantage. Down the street, a car honked; the ferry horn blew farther away. He tilted his head up to me.

He was thirty-nine but looked older, lines carved around his eyes and mouth. He was dark—he always had been; he took after me—but he wore a sweaty white work shirt with the sleeves rolled up so he looked even darker, sun-crisped at his forearms and in the Vs of his elbows. Blue jeans fraying and stained at the knees. His thick dark hair, mine también, was going white at the edges and in patches across his scalp.

I stared at him, wondering where my son had gone, who sat here before me.

Marcos, le dije. Just his name, not even a whole breath, but it came out broken.

Hi, Mama. When he spoke, it was almost a whisper, his voice deeper, cracked, too, and at the sound of it I jerked away from him. I knew who this man was, ves, who he had become in the years away from me. Somewhere in that time, his face and voice had become his father’s.

Before I could think, I had raised my hand.

I would have slapped him. I almost did. But I stopped before my palm hit his cheek. Someone kept me from it: the spirits, maybe, or Saint Anthony, or La Virgen, an infinitely better mother than me. No sé.

He hadn’t flinched, Marcosito, just watched me with my own black eyes. I dropped my hand quickly, bit my lip again. I would not lose my control.

You—first, you. You knocked? I asked.

He nodded. No one answered.

Ah, yes. When I shook you to say I was going to church, you mumbled from beneath the blankets that you and Jess were meeting at his house to play video games. In the summer you two were always running off, you and Jesusmaría: walking across the neighborhood to the houses of Hector or Carlos or los otros amigos, or over to the park to play baseball, or across to the beach. Prowling the island like fearless cats. I loved that, your instinct to roam your own space, lay claim to this land. That will change someday, but that is another story, one of yours, and this one is mine and his.

The hands resting on his bent knees were large and rough, skin peeling across his knuckles, the pads of his fingers white with calluses. There were new scars on them, his hands, and on his cheek that I had nearly slapped. How where when. Mi hijo chulo, who had been such a striking boy. Everyone said he resembled me, like me he was always drawing looks with his sharp jaw and his smooth skin and our long-lashed Karankawa eyes. His brows were thinner; I used to run my thumbs over them to smooth them down, the bushy caterpillars they had been when he was a boy. He used to laugh at that. His eyes were lined and smaller now, as if he had spent years squinting into the sun and didn’t know how to be in shadow. No spark, no life that I could see. Dónde.

My hand on the strap of my purse was clenched, so I lowered it to the ground, clasped my hand in the other and tried to stop them trembling. I knew what the Lord would have me do. Forgive, He would say, ten misericordia. But I could not find the mercy. I wanted to demand, Where have you been? Wanted to beat down on his shoulders and into his chest with my small fists that were growing more lined each day, another day without a word from my only son. Where have you been? Why did you go? What brought you back now? I wanted to scream, to strike. Women have words, but we have hands también.