The Last Karankawas(54)

The sound has lulled the baby into sleep; Eva pats his back, humming, two rosaries twined around her wrists and fingers. Mercedes sits on the floor, cross-legged, calm somehow—how can that be, Yvonne wonders. Girl from the Valley, girl from both sides of the border. What does she know of hurricanes?

Yvonne is more afraid than ever, which she hates. She despises looking weak, and she knows she must right now, to her older cousin, to her mother with her eternally judging eyes. She is married to a lawyer, damn it, one who was calling every five minutes from his business trip to Killeen to hear her voice until the towers went down. A good man, a white man. She is a nurse—an LVN, sure, but she completed nursing school while pregnant, landed a job in a cushy family practice clinic that even Carly is jealous of. She is the mother of a sweet, pink-cheeked boy who will be nothing like any of their fathers. She has made something of herself.

And yet, despite all that, she needs the prayer. Yvonne grasps for the words, snatching at what she does recall—Remember O Most Gracious Virgin Mary never known anyone left unaided confidence I fly unto thee my mother before thee I—but they shred apart in her memory and on her tongue. As she reaches for another word—intercession intercession—she hears the change in the storm. Mercedes straightens; she hears it, too.

Mercedes reaches up to where Aaron is sleeping, lays her palm flat against his small back. “Listen, Papa,” she murmurs, soothing her favorite nephew in his sleep, but he does not hear. Dream, then, she thinks. Dream of this storm that visited you, that showed you its strength as you slept. Despite what Yvonne thinks, she is familiar with hurricanes. Brownsville and Matamoros are at the tip of Texas, curling toward the Gulf. She remembered to board up the windows of the duplex apartment on Tuna she rents from Yvonne and Russell, to unplug the appliances and run the sinks and bathtub full of fresh water, to move as much as possible to higher ground. To take herself to higher ground, too—although there is no higher ground on this island, she has learned in the years she has been here, so she settled for the mental and emotional higher ground of family. The family she has cobbled together in Galveston, after leaving the others behind.

Aaron gives a little jerk, then continues to snore softly. Beneath her hand, his back rises and falls, rises, falls. She closes her eyes; she remembers when Celia was this small, when she could tuck the whole form of her sister against her chest and inhale the powder-milk-skin smell rising from her hair. Now Celia is fourteen, starting high school, playing volleyball and dating a girl from Edcouch-Elsa. Her texts to Mercedes are full of exclamation points and smiley faces, far cries from the fists beating on her shoulders three years ago, the ragged tears she wept when Mercedes told her—told them all—that she was moving away. When she showed them pictures of Galveston, Celia had sobbed and screamed, but their mother sat perfectly still. Mi vida, she said simply, with a smile that trembled and faltered when she turned to Mercedes. I understand. And she did, Mercedes knew suddenly, blinking back tears of shame because she hadn’t thought it earlier. Who else but her mother would understand the electric thrill and the terrible dread of knowing you must leave? She has not had a visit from them in a year; the checkpoints on the Valley highways make her mother nervous, even when she drives with Tío Carl, who looks most like a bolillo. So she resorts to phone calls and texts to tell them about living first with Tía Eva and the girls, then renting space in the duplex Russell owns. Landing the job at the Sand Crab, with its view of the bay and the Elissa, making friends. Getting to know her cousins, to be part of their lives here, to build one for herself. She has not yet told them of the application Yvonne gave her for a college on the mainland with a program in social work and a page on the website reading Undocumented students welcome. She has not yet returned Luis’s last text from months ago: I miss you.

Mercedes stills her body and the words in her mind so she can hear the rain. Listen. It is weaker than before; it strikes the roof and the boarded windows and the ground around them with a lesser ferocity than before. The wind—still strong but calmer, too, no longer a scream so shrill it stabs her ears. Her skin detects it: a resettling, a lightening. She holds her breath, as the hurricane does, and realizes.

“This is the eye,” she says. Her watch reads 2:09 a.m.

Yvonne thinks, Intercession intercession intercession.



* * *



The snap yanks Mercedes violently out of sleep. Yvonne hears it, too. An enormous splitting sound, like an iceberg shedding chunks in the nature show she and Russell watched months ago; calving, Russell said it was called, and kissed her when Yvonne, whose great-grandfather had been a cattle rancher outside Monterrey, said that was ridiculous. Other than on TV she has never seen an iceberg.

The splitting sound, from a distance outside, reverberates and slowly dissipates into rain. Then comes a roaring of wind that is not storm wind; too far away, harsher, guttural in Yvonne’s ears. It doesn’t take long for her to smell smoke. The black, choking scent snakes into her nose.

She meets Mercedes’s eyes across the king-size bed, in the dark. They are wide and frightened.

Fire. Mercedes’s breath stutters in panic; she wills herself to calm. Where? She blinks at her watch: 4:11 a.m. As she rises, Tía Eva and Aaron shift in sleep, mumble. She turns back to her cousin.

“We need to know where it’s coming from,” Yvonne whispers, and Mercedes nods. They need to know. If we’re in danger. And if we have to go—somewhere. Where? Somewhere.