The Last Karankawas(66)
“A few nights before the hurricane, he finally got a night off. I came over. We talked about the storm, about plans to evacuate. He didn’t have a car—you know. He said he’d figure it out, and he had to work the following night. I offered to pick him up that afternoon when I was getting out early. I said I could bring him to Conroe with me and my brother.” She draws from her cigarette. “We talked a little, and he got weird. That’s when I decided to go.”
“What do you mean?” Pierre is baffled. “How did he get weird?”
“I don’t know. I’ve tried to figure it out, but I can’t. He was talking about how he had a plane ticket to visit you and his mom back in the Philippines, and he was excited to visit, but he liked Texas. He said he was happy here, just here.”
She tosses the butt of her cigarette and pulls the pack out to light another. “He seemed like he was in a good mood, so—I told him I liked him. Like, really liked him. Told him I was … you know…” She blows smoke through her nostrils like a dragon and lowers her eyes.
Pierre wants to shake her. He clenches his hands. “What? You were what?
“That I was happy,” Kristin says, regret in her voice. And steel—Pierre can hear it. “I felt lucky that we found each other. He didn’t say anything for a minute. He looked … weird. And he said, ‘Not lucky. We’re blessed.’”
Pierre closes his eyes against a sharp sting in his gut. Knowledge, swift and sure: Rudy is alive. Alive. Thank God. Thank God thank God thank God damn it, he thinks, a vicious note he didn’t know he could summon. Rudy is alive, but now he knows what Rudy has done. That Rudy has run.
Kristin is still talking. “He got quiet. I kept waiting for him to say something else—like how he felt the same? But he didn’t. It was awkward. I felt awkward.” She sighs and takes a long drag. “I got out of bed and got dressed. I told him I’d call him after he got off work the next night, and he smiled and said okay. I kissed him and I left.”
She waits for Pierre to ask something else, but he doesn’t need to. He can see it exactly as it must have happened. Kristin pressing her cheek against Rudy’s as she says goodbye; Rudy flinching slightly, moving back, eyes already shuttering against her smile. Pierre knows it went this way because he and Rudy have seen it before. The last morning Tito Eusebio left for work, he patted both boys on the heads, but when Tita Grace leaned in to kiss him, he drew back. He said he loved them all with a mouth-smile that didn’t reach higher, and he put his hat on his head and turned to walk up the lane into town.
“I’m sorry” is all Pierre could think to say, gritting his teeth against the fury and the bitterness and the loss. Old habits again. Apologizing for Rudy. Cleaning up the mess he left.
“He’s not coming back, is he.” Kristin’s voice sounds flat, the sadness leached out of it.
Pierre shakes his head. “I don’t think so.”
“Do you—” She pauses, screws her face up, pushes on. “Do you know where he might have gone?”
Weeks ago, he might have answered, Anywhere. Let’s keep looking together. But now he is illegal, breaking his own rules, without Rudy in sight. So who could possibly say?
He reaches over and takes a cigarette from the pack between them. Kristin blinks, then fumbles to light it for him. Her gaze when she peers up at him through her bangs is wary. Pierre likes that, likes the way she seems cautious of him for reasons he doesn’t deserve, things Rudy and not he has done. As if Rudy were the sun and he the reflecting moon, honed harder, sharper in the cast-off glow.
The smoke is pungent, hot; when he breathes it out, he feels the rumblings of fire at the base of his throat. He wants to cough but forces himself to take another drag. Another. He and Kristin watch the sparse traffic move slowly down toward the causeway. When he leans over and places his hand on her cheek, it seems like he is watching himself from a distance, the way he watched Rudy; when she tilts her face up to kiss him, he feels as Rudy must have, hands triumphant in the air after winning a race.
It was easy for Rudy to leave. Less easy for Pierre to kiss Tita Grace goodbye, empty his savings for a plane ticket, stand in line for hours waiting for his visa processing, fanning himself in the hot, oppressive air of the government building with the application papers bearing his job status, his hospital pay stubs, his birth certificate. Cross not just a bay but an ocean and a continent. Less easy to make a life here, cobble it together from the rubble of a hurricane in a new world, than to return home to an old life fully formed. Rudy ran, but Pierre will stay. He has always been the stronger of the two, seeing things Rudy could not. Here, he thinks, inhaling Galveston salt, Kristin’s shampoo, here you can be anyone you want.
LUCKY GIRL
Maharlika
When I look back on this night years from now—long after Inay is gone, long after I have broken apart the life she left me and rearranged it—I will not remember much. What month, how many hours on the water, how the night ended, all of that erased. And maybe I forced myself to forget; I have been known to do that. Maharlika the runner, they probably say on two continents, Maharlika the abandoner. Sige, I don’t deny it. Forgetting has been a friend; she has pulled me forward when everyone would have me turn around, crawl back. They breathe my name thinking it means nobility, forgetting it means warrior—one thing I will never lose. Some things, like my name, I cannot forget; other memories will strike quick as heat lightning the rest of my years. I rinse rice in San Teodoro, the milky water swirling, and feel cold air from the Galveston casino boat’s vents, Inay beside me pulling her sweater close (though not the color of the sweater). I pluck a ghost-white hair from my temple—one of the few battles I do quit—and picture Inay’s debit card where her driver’s license should be, in the clear pocket of her wallet, first thing in sight. In case I get lucky, anak ko, in case I need cash fast—and though I will lose the sound of my mother’s voice, I’ll keep the way the stained tooth on her dentures winked when she laughed, how she rubbed her skinny fingers together in the sign for money. I used to think, So American, ignoring my own dentures and thin fingers, the work visa that proclaimed me an American, too, or a version of one. Who could know that forgetting, denying—the skills I already had—would be the most American things about me.