The Last Karankawas(58)
“Do you know how long I had to beg them to let you stay here? They want to kick you out!”
“I did it for protection,” Magdalena said, jaw set. “I did it for all of us. Now we will be safe.”
“Burning palms won’t work. Chanting made-up words won’t, either. This is a real storm coming and you can’t stop it.”
“Lo hice por tí.”
“You don’t need to do anything for me—I can take care of myself. Besides.” Carly leaned forward, locked her hands onto the arms of Magdalena’s chair. Enough. Enough now. “I don’t believe in this shit, Grandma. You. Are. Not. A. Karankawa. They’re gone. They’ve been gone a long time. We don’t come from them, you and me. We’re just us.”
Magdalena turned sideways, and Carly—smarting with guilt—opened her mouth to apologize. But her grandmother whipped back. Her face, like that of the novela actress, bore the sheen of righteous indignation. The tears in her eyes reflected it, cast it back like an echo.
“You know better,” she snapped. “We fight, as they did. You used to believe what I told you, even when she didn’t.” Carly flinched at the mention of her mother, and Magdalena steamrolled past. “If I tell you we come from fighters, es verdad. Because we say it is.”
“I don’t come from fighters, Grandma. I come from runners.” Her grandmother’s face rippled; her whole frame shuddered. Still, the words were out; Carly was tired of holding them inside. Let them come. “Your son, your daughter-in-law. They’re my blood, too. More than some long-gone people, more even than you. They left us both and never looked back.”
Magdalena said nothing in response. Carly thought of the oyster shells lined along their TV stand, the ones Magdalena collected, how they gave off a hollow gleam without the oyster, all the life scraped out of them. Her grandmother looked like that now—emptied, scooped clean.
“You can’t will things to be different, Grandma. I came to tell you Jess and I are on our way to Sealy. We’re evacuating—this storm is going to be bad, and we’re not going to stay. We boarded up the house, we took care of everything. You’ll be safe here.”
She expected more fury, more indignation, but her grandmother pressed her lips together and turned her face toward the mirror with its BOI bumper sticker. She gazed at the green palm tree.
“We’ll come back once they reopen the roads.” I’m sorry, Carly thought.
Magdalena nodded distractedly.
“Grandma?”
“Just go, Carly Elena.” She sounded so sad.
* * *
It took more than an hour with the traffic, and though Jess tried to say calming things, she ignored him and opened the lockbox.
She found her diploma and the birth certificates—her grandmother’s and her own—and a photo of a very young Magdalena holding Marcos as a baby. There was one more, one she had never seen. Carly inhaled, slowly. She lifted the wedding photograph.
Marcos Castillo was young, about her own age. He angled his head in the curious way of posed photos, smiling just enough to show the upper row of teeth. His hair was cropped short. He had her grandfather’s bones, his heavy eyebrows, but the laugh lines beside his eyes were her grandmother’s. Carly’s, too. She recognized nothing else in him, this handsome man whose leaving was the first of the losses that measure her life, like channel markers indicating deep water.
It was the woman beside him who earned Carly’s careful looks. A younger, crisper version of the woman in her memories, Maharlika Velasquez Castillo had thick dark hair that waved appealingly around her wide face. The curls were styled—Carly knew her mother’s hair had been Pocahontas-straight. Her fingertips fluttered with the sudden memory of movement, of slipping softly down that waterfall of black where there are no bends in sight.
Here, her mother who rarely smiled was beaming. She leaned her right ear toward Marcos’s shoulder. His hand rested lightly, fingers bent possessively, around her waist. They looked innocent, bright with promise. They could have been her and Jess; the thought, which should have been sweet, filled Carly with dread. In less than a decade from this photo’s taking, both these people were elsewhere, out of each other’s life.
Her mother looked happy, tilting her body and her mind already to her husband. Was there something in there that showed how she would implode after he left? How she would shrink to a point and keep collapsing until she became a spore of what had once been a person, with no room for a daughter or a mother-in-law, nothing except the urge to seek out another shell, another reef, start over again?
Carly replaced the picture, remembering bitterly that she had left once, too, though she had come back. That she promised her grandmother she would stay this time, ride out the storm no matter what, yet instead was running. No better than you, she thought to the photo. No more loyal.
* * *
They both sense it, the moment Ike barrels into Sealy. The wind, which has been a steady whistle, suddenly crescendos to a shrill pitch. Carly winces. Jess freezes.
“Bad one,” she says, and feels him nod. Tighten his arms around her.
“Wonder if Alicia sounded like this,” he says. Neither of them was alive for the ’83 hurricane, but islanders still talk about it. The entire city lost power; roofs of whole buildings sheared off; dozens of tornados sprouted from the big wind.