Louisa Meets Bear (30 page)

Conchita was three weeks old when PK and I married in a small dark church two blocks from Jorge's San Juan barrio flat. Jorge, who had morphed into PK's partner, insisted. “Your daughter must have a father,” Jorge proclaimed. PK, who I'd learned by then was a bit scared of Jorge, never challenged Jorge's authority on the matter. As for me, with a breast infection and leaking milk, I could not muster forces to object nor courage to telephone anyone other than Louisa to announce either Conchita's arrival or the upside-down marriage plans.

Conchita wore a tiny white lace dress that Jorge's wife, Maria, had made. Maria and Louisa, who'd come for the wedding, took turns holding her while Jorge snapped Polaroid pictures.

“
Mira, mira, rubia, rubia
,” look, look, blondie, blondie, Jorge would yell as each picture emerged, our forms and faces floating up through the dark paper, like bodies rising from the bottom of a deep black sea.

*   *   *

Julie, my neighbor, drives me back from the hospital. Even Julie, who has had her daughter, Angie, arrested after finding a crack pipe in Angie's purse, doesn't know what to say about Conchita sinking a knife into my arm. I am groggy from morphine. Julie pats my good arm and asks about pain, how many stitches, if I can shower with my bandage on. When we pull up to our apartment complex, a twenties brick building off Pelham Parkway, once respectable but now, with most of us on rent subsidies, only a half step better than public housing, she asks, “Do you want me to come in? Make you some tea? Help you clean up?”

I shake my head no, mutter thank-you's, and make my way toward the Tudor arched door.

Inside, it is silent. I survey the apartment for clues of Conchita's whereabouts: jeans splotched with blood crumpled on her bedroom floor, her closet door ajar with shoes every which way, mascara, hair spray, cotton balls strewn on the bathroom counter. In the kitchen, there is an ashtray with three cigarette butts, the poppy-seed cake still on the table, the bloodstained knife.

I lie on the couch with a blanket pulled up to my armpits and try Conchita's cell. It rings from her room. I turn on the TV, look without watching:
MacNeil/Lehrer
,
Law & Order
, the eleven o'clock news. I pick up our phone to check that the line is open, then fear that she's tried to call during that second, hang up, and pick it up again to see if a message has come through.

My daughter is out there in the night. I cannot remember when it was that we ceased feeling like extensions of each other, intertwined orbits, the moon and the earth. A nice-looking man announces that medical waste is washing ashore at Rockaway. I close my eyes, grateful that this time it is my blood on the towels.

*   *   *

PK left two days after Conchita's first birthday. I asked him to leave because I feared what I might do after six months with his new partners (by then Jorge was no longer working with him, which I knew was a bad sign but not how bad) and their middle-of-the-night calls that drew him from our bed to the shower to the drive to a silver limousine that would arrive, never shutting the engine, the windows sealed with black shades behind which I imagined hell and paradise bound in conjugal embrace—leggy prostitutes from the San Juan nightspots, fluted glasses of French champagne, machine parts in transit from Panama, each cylinder packed with the powder they called their white gold.

It was an early, early morning, the trees and the vines damp and drained of their color, little lapping sounds rising from the sea behind us. Even though I lost my nerve, weeping as he stood at the door, PK must have known I was right, that if he didn't heed what I'd said and leave, the mother of his child might be a woman who brought herself to shame.

By night, a frenzied panic set in. I telephoned everyone whom I had ever seen with PK, finally bundling Conchita into the car, driving with beaded eyes and rough breath the twenty miles to San Juan, tearing through Maria and Jorge's little house, looking under beds and inside closets even though I knew it made no sense, and then flinging myself wailing and crying into their arms, demanding that they tell me where the father of my child had gone.

Afterward, there was the lap, lap of the sea. There were Conchita's cries, starless nights rocking her back to sleep, gray dawns rising to feed her. There were the questions: Would I have put rat poison in PK's coffee, a call to the authorities, a gun to his dream-filled temple? Was there anything I wouldn't have done?

*   *   *

Conchita fumbles with the lock. By raising my eyelids slightly, I can see her tiptoe in with her wedge sandals dangling from one hand. There is the too-sweet smell of beer on a child's breath. I keep my eyelids lowered and let my drunken daughter pass by.

In the morning, I am stiff and depressed. My arm throbs and my throat is sandpaper. There is nothing I want, no tastes or smells or activities that draw me, only habit that compels feet to floor. Saran wrapped around my arm the way the nurse at the hospital showed me, I climb into a shower crowded with Conchita's stuff: apricot body scrub, loofah sponge, razor, shaving lotion, a waterproof radio that hangs on a strap from the showerhead. I am already dreading tomorrow, going to work at the bakery Louisa and I opened when Conchita was nine—Louisa the culinary force, the business side left to me, Louisa's cousin Lizzy the liaison with the psychiatric halfway house where most of our staff reside. Crazy ladies, as Lizzy had promised, make damn good bakers, but they are also so attached to Louisa and me that the sight of my bandaged arm will undoubtedly lead one of them to a meltdown.

At eleven, Conchita moves from bedroom to kitchen table. She's wearing a T-shirt and bikini panties.

I pour her a mug of half warmed milk, half coffee, and add two teaspoons of sugar. She holds the calf-colored concoction between her hands, blows gently on the top, and then nuzzles low into the steamy cup.

I am afraid to say anything.

Conchita keeps her nose buried in the mug. It is unclear if she is sniffing or drinking. After Lily died, the crisis counselor had told me to count ten breaths when I thought I couldn't stand being alive one more second. I count two breaths and then reach for Conchita's cigarette pack.

*   *   *

The week before PK left, I started to count ten breaths and then thought fuck it and threw a cup of what was thankfully lukewarm coffee in his face. He was in the shower, just in from a night trip to Ponce, the silver limousine having pulled into our drive as I rose to give Conchita her bottle. Conchita and her bottle in my arms, I was screaming through the shower curtain, “I can't go on, I can't live like this anymore, never knowing where you are or when you'll be home, it's not a life,” while PK hummed along with the water about whatever victory had transpired during the night.

“You're not listening to me,” I yelled. “I'm trying to talk to you, and you're not even listening.”

“You listen to me, bitch. Either stop shouting or get out of my bathroom.”

I think it was
my bathroom
that did it. The lid must have blown off some tucked-away box of rage. Who the hell was this man to talk to me this way? I'd had a hundred men before PK, and never had any of them talked to me this way. I put down Conchita's bottle and reached for something, for anything, to put in my hand, to hurtle, to smash—Conchita starting to wail as I found it, PK's coffee perched on the edge of the sink.

“You bitch. You fucking whore,” PK screamed after the coffee hit his face.

He pushed back the shower curtain and I ran. Out the door with Conchita in my arms, down the road, and then behind a bush, my hand stuffed over Conchita's wailing mouth, saved only by PK's nakedness—no man raised by an Italian mother, whether or not she was niece to a contessa or lived on Park Avenue, would show his genitals to the world—and by the seconds it took him to find his gym shorts and pull them over his dripping legs.

*   *   *

At twelve, Julie calls. “Let's go to the beach,” she says. “You and Angie and Conchita and me. I'll pack a picnic.”

“I'm not up for it.”

“You can't sit in the apartment all day. I'll put Angie on to talk to Conchita.”

After Conchita gets off the phone, she looks at me shyly like I am a stranger who has moved into her home.

“Can we go?” she asks. She opens her eyes wide and pulls on her lower lip. She's one of those girls whose features don't gel until late in their teens. At twenty-five she'll be beautiful.

“I'd like to go, Mom.”

The
Mom
takes up all the room in my chest, and for a moment I can't breathe. Lily was ten days short of her tenth birthday when she died. She'd just let go of
Mommy
and begun to call me
Mom
. I bite the nail on my little finger and focus on that to keep everything else still.

*   *   *

The girls vote for Jones Beach, where they can display their flat golden tummies to the boys who hang out by the boardwalk there. Julie, who used to live in New Haven, votes for Hammonasset, where there are dunes and wild grasses and slick rocks to clamber over.

“Hammonasset is so far,” Angie, a year older than Conchita, complains, leaning over the back seat and her mother's and my shoulders to finish outlining her lips in the rearview mirror.

“And there's no boardwalk,” Conchita pipes in.

“It's a tie, since you two are pipsqueaks and your votes count only a half.”

The girls make grunting noises.

“I'm the driver, so I get to decide,” Julie says.

“Then let me drive,” Angie says.

“Not until you pass the test,” Julie says.

“Which won't ever happen if it's up to you,” Angie says.

The two of them keep this up until Julie passes the exit for Rye Playland, the second place the girls have lobbied for. Then Angie settles into the back seat—beach bags, magazines, cans of soda, and snacks piled high in the center, Conchita asleep with her head propped on the door.

*   *   *

My first thought when Conchita mentioned the genealogy assignment for her American history class was what an insensitive thing to ask this group of fifteen-year-olds, most of them from tangled-up families like ours, to do—and at the end of the school year, to boot. I was wrapped in a towel, slathering on lotion, and it crossed my mind that I should call her teacher to object, but then the phone rang and it was Oona, the bipolar nighttime baker, talking so fast that I'd wondered if she was breaking through her lithium—the air-conditioning had died and,
screw all of yous
, she couldn't get the cakes iced in a kitchen hot as an oven—and I didn't think about the assignment again until I got home the next day, Friday afternoon, and there it was on the kitchen table, in front of Conchita: a piece of paper with the beginning of a family tree. On one side, my parents, my brother, his wife, their three children, Lily (d. 1982). On the other, an empty white space.

When Conchita was old enough to ask questions, I had told her that she had been born in Puerto Rico, her father had loved her, but the marriage was foolish and brief. Over time, she made specific inquiries, but actually many fewer than I had worried she would make: What did her father look like? How long had we known each other before we got married? How old was she when he last saw her? Had I heard from him since the divorce?

I unpacked the poppy-seed cake from the bakery box and took out the cake knife and two plates. Conchita pushed the paper toward me. “What should I fill in here?” she asked, pointing to the empty white space.

There'd been a time, it now seemed a lifetime ago, when, seeing an empty white space, I would have imagined a painting, but when Lily died, I'd lost the ability to conjure images. “Let me first get this box in the garbage and out of these clothes,” I said.

“I deserve to know. It's my right to know.”

Cake box in one hand, milk carton in the other, I faced my daughter, who was now standing, bouncing on her toes and flailing the paper through the air. I handed her the milk carton. “Pour us some milk while I change into my shorts and we'll sit down with some cake and talk about it.”

“I want to know.” Conchita's voice was losing the bass and her face was starting to bloat. “Where is he? Where is my father?”

I stood with the cake box still in my hand and my shirt stuck to my back staring at my daughter who rarely cries and had never before asked for her father. Conchita pounded on the counter, the paper now a crumpled ball in the palm of her hand. “Tell me,” she yelled. “NOW!”

With that imperious NOW, it was as if PK was in the room.
Come here NOW
, he would order, prone on the bed, his erection in his hand. And then later, after the imperiousness had been dosed with a two-day heroin binge and no sleep,
Stop that goddamn baby's crying. NOW
.

Sob after sob, Conchita was swallowing up what was left of the precious little air. I leaned on the counter. “Your father is dead.”

I closed my eyes, immediately regretting having blurted out the words. I'd learned about PK's death four years ago from Lizzy, who'd heard from her brother's roommate Tom, who'd read about it in the Horace Mann class notes. Tom had sent me a copy of the announcement. The way the cause of death was unspecified, a long illness, had suggested AIDS.

With my eyes closed, I could see the cove in the back of the Dorado villa: the blue water that turned purple and then green as the sun fell into the sea. At first, after I'd learned about PK's death, I'd imagined telling Conchita when she was fourteen or fifteen, but then when she turned fifteen, I'd imagined sixteen or seventeen. Lately, I'd been thinking when she leaves for college.

When I opened my eyes, what I saw was Conchita with the knife from the cake and what I thought was, like father, like daughter, PK had a sweet tooth too.