All You Get Is Me (3 page)

One afternoon I came home from school to find her gone. The sofa was empty except for the indentation of my now-petite mother’s body on the burgundy velvet. I called around to all her old friends but no one had seen her in months. When my dad got home, we drove around the neighborhood, checking in bars and coffeehouses and bookstores, but we came home hours later, exhausted, without her.

At three a.m. the police called. They’d found her slumped over on a bus bench on Castro Street and taken her to the hospital. We went to pick her up. She was drunk and dehydrated and she had a few bruises on her but otherwise she was okay. My dad signed the release form and helped her into the car. No one said anything on the ride home. My mom looked out the window.

The next morning my mom was up and dressed in jeans, which now hung on her. She had blue-green bags under her eyes, and a bruise on her cheek had swelled into a bump. She buzzed around the kitchen like she’d been slapped awake and told she had to play the part of the mother in a production of
We’re a Normal Family
. When I emerged from my bedroom in my pajamas she kissed me like she hadn’t seen me in months.

“Roar, honey,” she said, placing her hands on my shoulders and looking me in the eyes, “things are going to be different from now on. I promise. I’m better now. I really am.”

Mom never told us what happened out there that night but it must have given her a jolt because she kept up the perfect mom/loving wife act for a couple of weeks. She even agreed to enter a rehab program. My dad and I held our breath. A week later she was back on the sofa and a week after that she started disappearing again. At first it was overnight, then it was a few days at a time. Sometimes she would show up on her own and sometimes the police would bring her home or the hospital would call. One day she disappeared for good. My dad filed a missing-persons report and he drove all over the city every night, looking for her in neighborhoods and places he’d never even been before. He hired a private investigator who came up empty. He told us that some people just don’t want to be found. My dad wouldn’t give up. He searched on the internet for my mom’s mother and finally found her in Vermont. Shortly after they met, my mom had told my dad that she’d had a falling-out with her mother and hadn’t spoken to her in years, and that her dad was dead. Her mom, my grandmother, told us that no such falling-out had happened and that my mom’s dad was very much alive. She said that my mom had just up and disappeared one day, never contacting them to tell them where she’d gone. My dad put me on the phone. They didn’t even know they had a grandchild. Her voice reminded me a bit of my mom’s. We had an awkward conversation and then I put my dad back on. He cried when he said good-bye to them and promised to keep them posted.

Through all of this I never hated my mom. I couldn’t very well hate someone who’d taught me how to polka, someone who’d taught me how to read tea leaves, give butterfly kisses, and make butterscotch brownies. When I was six, she gave me a Pentax point-and-shoot camera and taught me how to take a picture. I took photos of everything. Those photos are in a box in my bedroom closet now except for the best ones of my mom. Those I framed. They sit on my desk, pictures of her laughing at the beach, in the kitchen, walking up the street, painting. I got a better camera for my tenth birthday, with a zoom lens. I became a more accomplished photographer but I never got a great photo of my mom. She’d started slipping away by then. Now I never go anywhere without my camera.

After my mom disappeared for the last time, we left everything just the way it was for a whole year, even the paints, brushes, and canvases. We didn’t touch anything. We couldn’t. During that year I saw my mom everywhere: in bookstores, coffee shop windows, standing in line for movie tickets. But it was my old mom, back when she was happy and beautiful. I would even walk toward her, ready for her to smile at me and take me into her arms, but it was never her. Every afternoon when I came home from school, I half expected to find her there in the studio, painting or watching the world go by on Church Street. But eventually we realized we were waiting for something that was never going to happen. My dad packed up all her art supplies and her paintings into boxes and put them in our storage closet downstairs. One afternoon, not long after that, he picked me up at school and told me that we were moving on with our lives.

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“It means we’re moving.”

“Moving? Where to?”

“A farm. We’re moving to a farm.”

“We’re going to live with farmers?”

“No. We
are
the farmers.”

Chapter 3

T
hirteen black-and-white photos of the accident hang across the clothesline in my darkroom like crime-scene laundry. The last one is still in the developing solution. I push it around with rubber-tipped bamboo tongs as the image comes into focus. It’s the overturned SUV resting in the middle of the asphalt road. In the upper right-hand corner is an unintentional piece of the ambulance with its back doors open. I must have taken it right after the paramedics loaded the stretchers. Sylvia Hernandez’s bare foot is clearly visible. You can also see part of her other foot, which somehow still has a pristine white sneaker on it. I remove the print from the developer and drop it in the stop bath. I can’t take my eyes off Sylvia’s foot. Next to the accident photos are the rest of the photos from the roll: a Buddhist monk with a shaved head eating a wedge of melon, a young, smiling monk holding a puppy, Steve trying to hypnotize a chicken, a three-legged dog. I took them the day Steve and I drove over to the monastery not far from here. We had fun that day.

Sylvia is in a box on a plane right now. She’s flying home to her family in a small village in Mexico where she’ll be buried in a tiny graveyard full of flowers. If the Mexicans are right about what happens after you die, she’s already in heaven. I hope they know what they’re talking about for Sylvia’s sake. Tomás, her husband, won’t be attending the funeral. It’s far too risky for Tomás to cross the border into Mexico. Who knows if he’d ever make it back? My dad talked to Tomás’s employer, a factory farmer near here who plants genetically modified seeds from Monsanto. He grows corn, only corn, as far as the eye can see. He gets his laborers from a contractor who brings them in on horrible, crowded trucks like cattle. All of them, like Tomás and Sylvia, are part of an illegal workforce that people around here don’t like to think about too much. They work cheap and they don’t expect benefits. My dad asked the farmer if Tomás could have a few days off to deal with his affairs. Tomás is a good worker so he said he’ll probably take him back but he couldn’t promise anything. Why should his production suffer just because someone’s wife died? he reasoned. Besides, according to his records, Tomás doesn’t even exist. Rosa, the baby, is being sent to her grandparents in Mexico now because Tomás could never manage to take care of her if she stayed. He has no home here to speak of. Sylvia has a sister in the area, Wanda, but she’s also a farm laborer with two kids back at home in Mexico. I’m not sure who’s taking care of them but I sure hope someone is.

Sylvia was a housekeeper and a nanny for the Thompsons, who live in a development called Orchard Hill. It used to be a fruit orchard but pretty much all the trees had to be cut down to build the houses. There doesn’t seem to be a hill anywhere either. When the accident happened, Sylvia had just dropped off two of the Thompson kids at a summer day camp and she was on her way home to clean the house before it was time to pick them up. People around here who knew her say she was a happy person and a good, honest worker. You would think that they’d be able to come up with something better than that. Does anyone really want to be remembered as a good, honest worker? I seriously doubt it. I’m sure she would prefer something like:
Sylvia loved to dance and had a wonderful singing voice. She loved her baby, Rosa, and hoped to send her to school in America one day. The smell of corn tortillas made her terribly homesick and the sound of mariachi music on the radio made her cry. She looked great in red and owned three red skirts. When she smiled at you her face lit up and it was impossible not to smile back
. Something like that.

From inside my darkroom I can hear Steve or Miguel starting up the tractor, drowning out Bruce, our highly dysfunctional rooster who crows almost all day long. He has a determined look on his face as though he’s misplaced something important like his keys, and he’ll spend entire days scratching in the dry dirt looking for them. When he stops crowing for a while I find myself waiting for it. Aah, farm life.

My darkroom is an old supply shed, with blankets nailed over the windows, that my dad converted for me to fulfill a contractual agreement we arrived at on the day we left the Noe Valley house for good. He told me that if I let go of the banister and got in the car, he would build me a darkroom on the farm. Of course I needed that in writing. Parents are often full of empty promises when they want to motivate you and I needed a completion date for this alleged darkroom. I am, after all, the daughter of a lawyer. Before I got in the car I went up and down the street and delivered an index card with our new address and phone number to each of our neighbors just in case my mom came looking for us. They all looked at me like I was a sad orphan, which made me feel slightly better about the fact that I was getting away from this place where everyone knew at least part of my story.

My dad stuck to the contract. He insulated the shed and put in an old sink. He bought some used kitchen cabinets for storage and Formica countertops at a salvage yard to set a used Beseler enlarger on. It’s pretty rustic but it’s my first darkroom so I can’t complain too much.

My dad has been on the phone all morning with the police and his lawyer friend Ned. He’s hell-bent on making sure the woman who killed Sylvia (and walked away with a few scratches and a concussion) is charged. Miguel and Steve keep shaking their heads doubtfully. Steve told me that a rich white woman who hits an illegal Mexican immigrant with her car is likely never even going to hear about it again. If the roles were reversed, it would be a different story entirely. Sylvia would already be in prison. Well, my dad says that if the driver isn’t charged he’ll file a civil suit on behalf of her family, but Miguel isn’t even hopeful about that. He says that the family won’t want to stir up trouble and risk losing their jobs.

The Mexican people have a whole different take on death. They seem to view it as the other half of life. Not something to be feared. My favorite holiday when we lived in Noe Valley was the Day of the Dead, which happens every year right after Halloween. My mom and dad and I would walk down the hill to the Mission and buy sugar skulls at the bakery on Twenty-fourth Street and then we’d watch the parade of dancing skeletons and musicians and all sorts of ghoulish creatures go by. The idea is that the dead are gone but not forgotten. People wear pictures of their departed on a string around their necks and they build altars in their living rooms filled with candles and flowers and their dead relatives’ favorite snack foods and drinks and cigarettes. It’s a huge party with death as the theme. It’s awfully cool. I’ve got a ton of pictures I’ve taken in a box somewhere.

When the photos dry I pull them off the clothesline and put them in a stack. I click off the red light and pull open the wooden door. Bright sunlight streams in and I squint like a hamster. Steve is transplanting arugula seedlings that were started in the greenhouse into one of our “small gardens.” These are special raised gardens that are replanted all summer long so we always have fresh baby greens.

“Hey,” I call out as I walk past him.

He lifts the wide brim of his straw sun hat. “Hey, Roar. Whatcha got there?”

“Photos of the accident for my dad.”

“Lemme have a look.” He stands up.

I walk over and hand him the stack. He takes them in his filthy hands and flips through them, shaking his head. He stops at the one of the overturned SUV.

“Hey, I know that SUV. That woman is
mucho
uptight. She went off on me the other day when I double-parked in front of Millie’s for a nanosecond to deliver eggs.”

“Yeah, we kind of got that impression too.”

He hands the photos back to me. “Good CSI work, pal.”

“Yeah, thanks. She probably won’t even get charged.” I squint up at him. Steve’s about six feet tall.

“Nah, but what a load of bad karma.”

“You believe in that stuff?” I ask.

“Sure. There’s the criminal justice system, which isn’t worth a hill of beans in this country unless you’re white and rich, and then there’s karmic justice, which is part of the natural order of the universe.”

I nod. It makes sense to me. “Yeah. I suppose I believe in it too.”

My mom was a believer. She always told me that bad karma catches up with you when you’re least expecting it. She also told me that if you were cruel to animals you’d come back as one in your next life. I pointed out to her that Mittens, the cat who spent hours in her lap, could really be a bully who tied firecrackers to cats’ tails. She thought about this and then she never said anything about it again. I felt like a real killjoy for stepping all over her theory.

Steve arches his back and bends over to touch his toes. I stand there feeling stupid. He straightens up again and takes off his hat and runs his fingers through his coarse wavy red hair. He puts his hat back on and looks over at the house.

“Tell your dad I’m going to need some help loading the truck for the market later.”

“Okay.”

“You gonna work it with me?” he asks.

“I dunno.” I shrug like I don’t care. My dad pays me eight bucks an hour to work the local farmers’ market with Steve. What he doesn’t know is that I would do it for free just to watch Steve charm all the local women. I love his easy way of talking to people, getting them to try new stuff, telling them how to cook the produce we sell. His passion for the food we grow makes the market fun.