Sammy and Juliana in Hollywood (33 page)

“We’re leaving,” she said. “Me and Charlie, we’re going to California.”

“That’s where everybody’s going,” I said.

“I’ll write,” she said.

But I knew she wouldn’t. She was like René. She would be too busy living.

I nodded.

“I’m glad you came, Sammy. To hear me sing.”

I nodded.

“You ever gonna leave Hollywood, Sammy?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think about it much.” I wondered if she knew I was lying.

She rummaged through her purse and took out a black rag. She tied the rag around my arm. Gentle. Like she was afraid of breaking me. “For Pifas,” she said.

I nodded. “For Pifas.”

I don’t know what she saw in my eyes. But she took my face and held it between her hands and held my face for a long time. As if she were memorizing me.

Her hands were as warm as the morning.

Then she let go.

I stood there, and watched her and Charlie walk away. Then Charlie turned around, “Hey, Sammy!” he yelled. “Next year in Jerusalem!”

I waved and yelled back, “Is that near Hollywood?”

Gigi turned around. I could see she was crying.

Don’t cry, Gigi. Don’t cry. I don’t want to remember you that way.

That was the last time I saw Gigi.

I went to the river that night. By myself. I smoked a few cigarettes and listened to the radio. There was a keg party in the distance. I could see the small fire they’d built. I could hear laughter. Someone was laughing. That was a good sign.

I wandered around my entire first semester like a lost boy, didn’t have friends, didn’t want any. I’d lost them. My friends. They were gone. When I got too sad, I’d tell myself that I only lost my friends. My father, my father had lost a leg and a kidney. No tears on his face. What had I lost, anyway? But I couldn’t help missing them. Pifas and Jaime and Angel and René. And Juliana and Gigi. My heart hurt. So, I tried to stop thinking about them. I kept busy. I made other plans.

That spring, there was a girl wearing a yellow dress at the student union. Yellow as the sun. The girl smiled at me. And I smiled back. But I wasn’t smiling at her. I was smiling at Gigi.

Sick. That was
a word I’d grown up with. Enferma. In two languages. Sick meant death—at least in the logic of my boyhood. Because of my mom. In Spanish, that word was a woman. And now, Mrs. Apodaca, she was sick. Enferma. That word was becoming her first name.

On good days, Mrs. Apodaca still managed to step out into her garden. She’d give her roses a good, hard look, as if she was willing them to behave, to stay orderly, the way she’d trained them. But she no longer touched them, as if she was learning to let go of the things she loved. Letting go was not a virtue she’d ever practiced.

On bad days, Mrs. Apodaca stood at the door and looked out. On those days I don’t think she even saw her garden. She was looking out to see something much bigger than what she’d planted in her small yard. She looked like she was looking out toward a swallowing sea. And what she saw in those waters was not death nor the future, but the past. Her husband. Her daughter sleeping in her arms, newly born, resting in the open air for the first time. The streets of Hollywood. The food she’d loved to cook, the taste of it in her mouth. The simple houses of a village in Mexico. The sound of her mother singing a song in a voice as familiar as the lines of her working hands. It was as if she was trying to memorize the entire world she’d known—in case she might need a fragment of it
after she died. That fragment might be her salvation.

I studied her like I’d like always studied her. Like I studied a good book. Good books taught you what you needed to know.

My dad and I, we kept up her yard. We weren’t as meticulous as she had been—but she didn’t seem to mind. Or notice. That was the sad part. She wasn’t out there telling us how to do it right. I missed her finger pointing at something in the garden—something only she saw. I missed that finger. I missed her disapproving voice. “No seas tan inútil.” To be useless. That was on her list of sins.

I missed her sturdy body that dared anyone brave enough to try and break her.

I missed her disciplined eyes.

I was working in her garden one day, talking to myself. I do that. I still do that. I looked up and she was standing on the porch. “Who do you talk to?”

“No one,” I said. I was still lying to her. I never learned.

“When I talk, I talk to God. Or Octavio. But you—you don’t talk to God.”

“Sometimes I do.”

“Mostly you don’t.” There was still a remnant of disapproval in her tired voice.

“No. I just talk to myself, I think.”

“I think you talk to Juliana.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Do you still miss your Juliana?”

I looked down at the ground and pulled a weed from her lawn. I hated this. Me and Juliana, we were a private thing. But Mrs. Apodaca
was determined to get an answer. Even then, as her body was dissolving. Even then, she was stronger than me.

“Sometimes,” I finally whispered. “Sometimes I still miss Juliana.”

“You think of her too often,” she said.

“Not too often.”

“It’s been a long time.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“I like thinking about her.”

“Why?”

“I just do.”

She shook her head. “She was young. And her father killed her. And you loved her.” She looked at me.

“That’s not a sin,” I said, “to love someone.”

“No,” she said. “And it’s not even a sin to love the dead.”

“So there’s no sin. So there’s no problem.”

She shook her head. “But what about the living?”

“The living know how to take care of themselves.”

“No. That’s not right, hijo. Óyeme, Samuel. The dead. It’s the dead who know how to take care of themselves.” She kept looking at me. “Let her go, mi’jito.”

I nodded. But I didn’t know how. To let go. I was like her. Refusing to let go of things. And she knew. And she couldn’t teach me to unclench my fist. She couldn’t. She knew that, too. I pulled out another weed.

“See,” she said. “Only the living care about pulling weeds.”

One afternoon, I dropped by her house. She wanted to go outside. I helped her to the porch. She sat there, looking out, saying nothing. And
I knew she was already leaving. “¿Qué va a pasar con mis rosales?” She looked at me.

“I’ll take care of them,” I said. I remembered that summer when she’d shown me everything about caring for roses—about which parts of the bush were dying and which parts were being born.

We sat there for a long time. “Todo lo que nace tiene que morir.”

I nodded. Mothers and girls and boys who went to war. And women who loved God. And roses. They all had to die.

I went to church and lit a candle for her. I whispered her name. All my life, people had been dying. And I wondered if it would ever stop. I knew it wouldn’t. But I hoped anyway. “Don’t take her.” That was my prayer. What did God want with a strict woman who liked to lecture people and keep a neat lawn? What did God want with a woman like that?

A few weeks later, I came home after studying at the library. It was after midnight. Dad was waiting up for me. He never did that. He’d done it a little when I was in high school, but not a lot. “Mrs. Apodaca’s in the hospital,” he said. I saw what he was holding in his eyes. I hated to see that look.

“What about Gabriela?” I said.

“She’s here. She and Elena are asleep.”

I nodded.

“If Gabriela comes to live here—” He looked at me. “Is that okay with you?” He didn’t have to ask. But he did. He was like that, my father.

That was the first time in a long time that I wanted to kiss him.

“Seguro,” I said. “A man can’t have too many sisters.”

My dad nodded. “You’re a good boy.”

“I’m not a boy anymore, Dad.” That’s what I said.

“No,” he said. “You’re not.” He looked sad, like he couldn’t even talk.
So he just whispered. “Mrs. Apodaca wants to see you.”

He looked at me, tired, my dad. Weary—that was the word. Mostly he tried to hide those things from me—but not tonight.

“She’s been good to us,” I said.

“You didn’t always think that.”

“She was hard.”

“And now?”

“She’s softer now.”

“She was never as hard as you thought.”

“I was a boy. I didn’t know.”

My dad put his hand on my face, then pulled it away. “Maybe it’s you who’s softer now?” It wasn’t really a question. “It’s not a bad thing to be soft,” he said. He reached down and scratched his prosthetic leg. A nervous habit. Reaching for something that was gone.

Mrs. Apodaca was praying her rosary when I walked into her room. She placed her finger on her lips. I could see the outline of her bones. Her flesh was abandoning her, like leaves abandoning a tree in November. She looked so thin. And her skin was gray, like a spent and poisoned soil. I bowed my head and let her finish. I knew how she felt about her prayers. I wondered what she was praying for. I had always wondered that.

When she was done, she gathered the rosary and placed it on her lap. She looked at me. “Why haven’t you painted your truck?” she said. Her voice was dry and old. But she wasn’t that old, Mrs. Apodaca—in her fifties. It made me happy to see that look of disapproval on her face. “Tres años andas en esa troca.”

“Sí, Señora, almost three years.” I smiled. “I guess if I don’t paint that truck, people are going to think I’m poor.” I handed her a glass of water.

She half smiled at my joke—then drank the water slowly, her hands shaking. “People already know you’re poor,” she said. “And they also know that you take no pride in the things you own.”

Still lecturing—that was okay. I’d fallen in love with her lectures. “Sí, Señora,” I said.

“Estoy muy enferma,” she whispered.

I nodded. It sounded like defeat. Back then I didn’t know the difference between acceptance and defeat.

“Y cansada. Hijo, estoy tan cansada.” She took a deep breath and closed her eyes. “I had a dream about your mother. She was beautiful, tú mama.” That was the only time she sounded soft, Mrs. Apodaca, when she talked about my mother. “You were so strong when she died.”

I didn’t remember it that way at all. I shook my head.

She pointed to the chair. “Siéntate. I want to tell you something.”

I sat and moved my chair right next to her bed.

“My mother and father, they gave me to God.”

“I know,” I said. “When our parents baptize us, they give us to God.”

“That’s not what I mean. My parents, they took me to a convent.” She looked at me. “That’s how it was done, sometimes. When your family was rich and you had too many daughters. They would give a daughter to the church.” She smiled. “Maybe—,” she shook her head. “Al cabo no importa. That’s where I learned English, in the convent. Those were my assigned subjects—English and Spanish. That’s what I would be teaching in the school we had.” She looked at me. I knew she wanted me to ask her something. But I didn’t know what to ask.

“You didn’t want to be a nun?” Maybe that wasn’t the right question.

“Seguro que sí. To be a nun is a holy thing. I wanted to be a nun.
Yes. But I didn’t want to teach the daughters of the rich. Anyone could do that. I wanted to work with the poor. Like Catherine of Sienna.”

I didn’t know anything about Catherine of Sienna. “And they wouldn’t let you?”

“No.”

“And so you left?”

“I wasn’t obedient.”

“I know,” I whispered.

She laughed. Me too. Then we just looked at each other. Like we were friends. “But my family,” she said, “they’d given me to the Church. I shamed them. I broke a promise.”

“It was your father’s promise.”

“A good daughter keeps a father’s promise.”

“I don’t think so.”

“You’re like me. Too ready to disobey.”

“There are things we have to fight.”

“You like to fight, don’t you?”

“I’ve had to learn.”

“Is it such a good thing to learn?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because I want to live.”

“To spend your days fighting? That’s no way to live.”

“You did,” I said. I shouldn’t have said that.

She didn’t smile. She didn’t get angry. She didn’t say anything. She looked at me. And I wondered what her eyes had been like when she was a girl. “There was a gardener.” She shook her head. “He brought me here, ese jardinero.”

“Mr. Apodaca?” I said.

She nodded. “Octavio.”

I understood now. Why she never spoke of Mexico. And why she carried herself the way she did.

“Was it hard?”

“I hated it here,” she said. And then she squeezed my hand. “It was just a place to run to. Because I could never go back. I had to choose. Octavio or Mexico. And here—,” and then she smiled. “Oh, but I had Octavio.” For a moment, I could imagine her as a girl, running away from the convent with a young man named Octavio Apodaca. A young girl like Gigi. Like Angel. Like Juliana.