Valentine(38)
Awake now in the dark, Glory moves one finger up and down the raised skin on her belly. About the width of a dandelion stem, the scar begins just below her breasts and follows a meandering path down her torso, as if she has been cut in half and sewn back together. At her navel, it curves around her belly button and continues on, stopping just below her pubic line. When she woke up in the hospital, she had been shaved and her belly was held together with a long line of metal staples. Lacerated spleen, the surgeon told Victor, probably from one of the punches she took to the abdomen. She fought, she fought, she fought. Her feet and hands were wrapped in white bandages, and her hair had been cut to the scalp, a line of stitches wandering across the crown of her head. Victor leaned down and whispered that her mama couldn’t come to the hospital—too many cops, too many questions—but she was waiting for Glory at home. Listen, he whispered to his niece, you survived this. He said something else then, but Glory was already sinking back into sleep and pain, and she couldn’t be sure what it was. She thought he said, This is a war story. Or maybe, this is yours.
*
When Victor knocks on the door at 4:30 every morning, he’s holding a chocolate doughnut and a carton of milk. Keep the door locked, he says. If you need help, dial zero for the motel office. After he leaves, Glory lies in bed and listens as the parking lot growls to life. Diesel engines and doors slam. Men, still half asleep, murmur outside her door. She hears the echo of work boots on the metal stairs, and the sudden blast of a car horn when one of the workers has overslept. And she hunkers down in her covers, fingers still wrapped around the knife handle. By five o’clock, the parking lot is mostly empty. Until the kids and wives and girlfriends wake up, the Jeronimo Motel will sit quiet as an abandoned church, and it is then that Glory is able to get her best sleep.
By late morning, when kids start running up and down the stairs and doing cannonballs into the deep end of the pool, when girlfriends and wives are heading out to work the lunch shift or pick up some groceries at Strike-It-Rich, when the woman who tries to clean the room has knocked on the door and handed her a stack of clean towels—no thanks, she says when the woman tries to come in and change the sheets—Glory has had the television on for hours. The soap operas and detergent commercials drone constantly in the background as Glory sleeps and snacks, bathes and showers, peeks through the curtain, watches a shaft of sunlight move across the floor. A couple of times she picks up the phone and thinks about calling Sylvia, but she has not spoken to anyone from school since February. And what would she say? Hello, from the stupidest girl in the world, who climbed into a stranger’s truck and slammed the door shut, whose picture ended up in the paper, blowing any chance she had at getting past this.
Her uncle returns by seven o’clock every evening, carrying bags from Whataburger or KFC, and some small gift—a magazine, lip balm, a small hot plate and cans of soup so she can make lunch, peanut butter and a box of saltines, a Spanish workbook with hardly any of the words filled in that he found on the ground next to a pumpjack. Every night he brings something, and when he hands it to her, she can see that he has done his best to get the oil off his hands.
One evening, he comes home with a pair of sunglasses, a portable cassette deck, and three tapes—Carole King, Fleetwood Mac, and Lydia Mendoza. Drove all over West Odessa to find that last one, he says. This machine is portable. You can carry it anywhere, you don’t even have to find a plug. He shows her where to put the batteries, how to adjust the shoulder strap.
I don’t want it, Glory says. I don’t want to hear any music, and if I did, it wouldn’t be this crap.
Okay. Victor loads the items back into a grocery bag. I’ll set them on the dresser in case you change your mind. Let me take a shower and we’ll watch some TV. Soon, Victor tells his niece, Alma will be back and they will all sit down together and watch their programs. He has sent letters to their family in Puerto ángel with their new address. It’s only a matter of time before Alma writes back to let them know she is fine. Your mother will have a plan, he says. She will try to cross again in September, when the weather is cooler.
It is June, and the patches of hair that cover Glory’s head are scarcely thicker than pinfeathers. Her hair, like the rest of her, is starting over. Like Brandy Henderson, the soap opera character in The Edge of Night who goes into hiding and disappears from the story, Glory’s life is a long pause, a stopped tape. But she is getting ready to start moving again. Come August, all she has to do is testify, her uncle says. Just put on a nice dress and walk into that courtroom, and tell the truth. I’m not doing it, she tells him. I don’t care what happens to him.
*
It is ninety-eight degrees outside when the air conditioner switches off, ticks steadily for a few minutes, and goes silent. Within minutes, as if it has been waiting for its opportunity to strike, the heat begins to seep through the windowpane and climb in through the small cracks on the windowsill. It crawls through the narrow gap between the door and carpet, and slithers from the vent above the bed.
Glory usually waits it out in a bathtub filled with cold water, but today it is so hot the water comes out of the faucet warm, and her embarrassment about her scars and hair, her desire not to be seen, and her fear and sorrow that she has been stolen from herself, that she has been wounded, maybe fatally—all are in abeyance to something she has not felt since February. She is bored. Or at least that is what she will name it this morning. In a few years, she might call it loneliness. This afternoon, she digs around in a box until she finds the bathing suit Victor bought for her, a simple blue one-piece with sturdy straps. She pulls it on without looking at her stomach, or her feet and ankles, or the star-shaped scar in the center of her palm.