The Last Romantics(61)

“Sure. I remember.” The key slid into the lock, Luna turned it and eased the door open a crack, then turned quickly and slid inside. He did, he ran, but she was faster. She slammed the door shut and pushed the lock, and all Donny could do was throw up his hands and say, “Come on Luna, come on.”

She waved at him through the window glass. He didn’t wave back but kept his hands raised, palms up, shaking his head. The bat on his wrist rose and fell. Luna’s hands were trembling so violently she had trouble putting the car into drive, but the gear dropped into place and the car jumped away.

*

Joe and Luna are asleep. They do not go to Joe’s condo on South Beach, which he is embarrassed to show her because of the mess and the unpacked boxes, but again to the Betsy, to a suite that Joe cannot afford yet books nonetheless because it is the biggest and the best. Once he could have afforded it, and his habits have not changed. The bed is king-size, a raft of white cotton and silk duvet, down pillows that sink slowly beneath the weight of their heads. They sleep without trouble, dreamless, Joe’s right hand clasped loosely around Luna’s right wrist. She twitches and turns, and Joe turns with her.

*

On their tenth date, Luna told Joe this story about her mother and her sister:

Mariana has been gone for three weeks when Luna’s mother first talks about going back to Matapalo.

“Back?” Luna asks. She’s eighteen years old and a senior in high school.

“I miss home,” Luna’s mother says. “Maybe Mariana did, too. Maybe she went there.”

Luna is getting ready for work, pulling her hair into a ponytail, slipping into the loose black trousers she wears in the kitchen. “She would never go back,” Luna says. “Never.” She knows what happens to women and girls there. Mariana is younger; she doesn’t remember as much, but she remembers enough.

Her mother has just come home from her job cleaning rooms at the Betsy Hotel and is standing by the door, still in her uniform with the frilly white skirt. She sighs extravagantly and kicks off her shoes, then sits on the couch and stretches her legs long, spreading her bare feet with their thick yellow nails and calluses.

“Mami, put your feet away,” Luna says, and her mother slides them off the couch.

“But maybe for the jobs,” her mother says. “Tourism—everything is changing now. Rosa keeps telling me. Or maybe for Papi. She loved him, it didn’t seem to matter what he did. And she had that friend Sofía, remember her? They were like sisters.”

“I’m her sister,” Luna says, but her mother seems not to hear.

“I don’t know, it’s harder there, but it’s easier, too. Do you understand?”

Easier in that you had no choices, that your future was the same as your mother’s, and her mother’s, on and on. They call you bruja if you try for something different. Say that you have no respect or love for your family or your friends, say that you deserve all the bad luck God will deliver upon you. Go back to that?

“No, I don’t understand,” Luna replies, but she does in a small, secret way. There is a smell she remembers from Matapalo, a dry burning, tortillas cooking, gas from the stoves, a collection of different odors that together form one, and it is not immediately attractive, but it is specific. It is home.

The last time Luna saw Mariana, the bruises on the girl’s face had shaded already to yellow. Mariana spent a week on the couch, watching cartoons and sipping milk shakes through a straw. Her boyfriend, Davie, claimed she fell out of the car, not that he’d pushed her, and who could say? Mariana herself had been so high she barely remembered the night, only the flashing lights and the handsome ER doctor who handed her pamphlets on drug addiction and alcohol abuse. They pumped her stomach, took her blood, and told her all the things they’d found there. Mariana was fifteen years old.

“I don’t think Mariana wants to go back,” Luna tells her mother. “She wants . . .” Luna doesn’t finish the sentence, because she doesn’t know what Mariana wants, only that it is something she doesn’t yet have.

“Did the police call today?” her mother asks.

“They’ll only call if they have something new to tell us. Remember?”

“Oh,” says her mother. “Yes.”

“There’s nothing new,” says Luna, and she is suddenly angry at her mother, for her job and her feet and the way she lets the TV blare all day and all night. Luna picks up her bag, heavy with her American-history book. This quarter they are studying the American Revolution, George Washington crossing the Delaware, no taxation without representation, liberté, égalité. Without saying good-bye, Luna leaves for her 6:00 p.m.–to–2:00 a.m. kitchen shift at Revel.

One month later Luna’s mother asks for the savings-account passbook. “I need to go back home,” she says. “I don’t know what else to do. I can’t just sit here. If she comes back, you’ll see her. If she goes back to Matapalo, I’ll see her. It’s better to spread out.” Her mother’s face, since Mariana disappeared, has fallen into itself, like her cheeks are the roof of a house that has lost its beams.

Luna sees many flaws in her mother’s logic, but she does not describe them. She merely nods. Spread out. Like they have lost a dog in the greening sesame fields of Matapalo. Spread out, call her name, promise her treats and kisses. Luna has been saving for college, but she hands over the passbook. The college money never felt real anyhow. Luna has watched the number grow over the years to a figure that seems impossible. And it is. An impossibility. Luna has a 3.95 GPA, plays varsity softball, and works nights in the kitchen at Revel Bar + Restaurant. Her school counselor, Ms. Jasmine, tells her she has a shot at a good school, maybe UVA or UFlorida. Stay southern, only state schools with lower tuition. Study for your SATs, don’t get into the drug scene. Go straight home after work at night. Ms. Jasmine knows Mariana, knows the kinds of things she was doing before she disappeared.