Red Glass (21 page)

“He has to be here,” I said quietly. “There’s no more space in the building.”

“I’ll smash his face in.”

Mercurio had found his tennis shoes and was heading for the door when it swung open and Nurse Reina appeared, looking haggard. Spots of dried blood speckled her uniform, and hair fell loose from her bun. Her eyes swept the room, taking in the scene. “What’s going on here?”

No one said anything, so I spoke. “Mercurio’s part of the gang that beat up Ángel.”

Understanding flashed across her face. She grabbed Mercurio’s arm. “Now you, back in bed,” she said in a voice so firm he didn’t dare protest. Her expert hands stuck his IV back in place. “I am sick of you boys killing each other. Killing yourselves. You hear me?”

“Is Raúl all right?” Mercurio asked weakly.

Nurse Reina moved the stethoscope over his chest, her head tilted in concentration. “Raúl,” she said. “The youngest one? Only thirteen?”

He nodded.

“Dead,” she said. She picked up Mercurio’s limp wrist, checking his pulse and watching the clock. “And you’ll be with him soon enough if you keep this up.” Nurse Reina gave him a long, hard look, then moved over to Ángel. He had turned away from the wall, and was watching Mercurio sob into his pillow.

Nurse Reina ignored his crying. “Now you,” she said to Ángel. “Justice has been served. Let this be and move on.” Silence as she moved the stethoscope over his chest and back, as he breathed in and out deeply, as she held his wrist and watched the clock and counted. “Perfect heartbeat,” she said. “Perfect pulse.”

And then, like a leaking balloon, she deflated, leaning against the wall and pressing her face into her hands.

I tried to think of something nice to say. Something hopeful. “There’s that new baby,” I whispered. “The beautiful one.”

“Yes.” She lifted her head.
“La muerte y la vida,”
she said. Death and life. “You know, my mother used to tell me, ‘Death is at your side from the time you’re born,
m’hija.
You need to be friends with Death. That’s what makes you love Life. And when it’s your time to die, you won’t be scared. Because,
m’hija
, Death is your friend.’”

Remedios

Nurse Reina left and came back an hour later with two plastic booklets. The passports. She tossed them onto the bed beside Ángel. He flipped through the pages, ran his fingers over the brown specks of dried blood.

“Found them in one of the dead boy’s pockets,” Nurse Reina said. “Evidence.” She looked hard at Ángel. “Want me to call the cops?”

Ángel glanced at Mercurio, whose sobs had turned into quiet gasps and sighs. “No. We have what we need.”

Nurse Reina nodded brusquely and disappeared into the hallway.

A minute or two passed, and then Ángel scooted behind me and smoothed my hair between his fingers, from the roots to the tips. He parted it and divided each part into three sections. Gingerly, he braided, his hands moving rhythmically, over, under, over, under. Finally he spoke, in a hoarse whisper at my ear. “I’m glad you’re here, lime-girl.”

“Me too.”

He finished the first braid and moved on to the second. “How did you find out where they threw the jewels?”

I smiled secretively. “I have my ways.”

“I can see your
chispa
now,” he said. “Your spark.”

After the second braid, he let his arms fall around me and laid his hand over my chest, on the left side, in the space between my neck and shoulder and breast. His hand spread heat through my chest, and I melted back into him.

Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed Mercurio staring at us with the dazed, naked expression of someone stepping out of a dark place into brilliant sunlight.

While Ángel was taking a shower and changing his clothes in the bathroom, Mercurio told me, “I didn’t think he was a real person. When we jumped him.”

“He’s as real as your friend Raúl.” I smoothed my fingers over my braids. They felt strong, like two thick, silk ropes.

Mercurio pushed himself up in bed. “I mean, I thought he was just some
pendejo
showing off his money, you know?”

“He worked hard for what he has. He spent a long time saving that money.”

Mercurio squeezed his eyes shut. “Why am I alive and Raúl’s dead? I’m the one who got him in the gang. I should be dead.”

“Maybe sometimes we get a second chance.” I thought of the flower Ñola had given me, its new, tender bud inside, waiting to open. “Maybe we can choose a different path.”

Ángel came back into the room, his bare feet leaving wet tracks on the tiles, his hair dripping and his skin still moist. Pale, wet light shone through the window, giving him a hint of iridescence, like an opened-up mussel shell.

Mercurio started unhooking the chains from his neck, which looked hard with the IV tube taped to his hand. “I’m sorry, man. Here.” He held out the chains, dangling from his long fingers. “Take them back. The money’s gone, but here.”

Ángel shook his head. “Keep them,” he said. “And remember.”

Remember that it is possible to let your heart fill with light.

Later that morning, Mr. Lorenzo bounced in, looking cheery until we told him about Mercurio and the accident. For a long moment, Mr. Lorenzo studied Mercurio’s wounded face, his eyes still swollen from crying. “You are very lucky, son,” he said finally.

Mercurio hung his head, stared at a crack in the wall. “I know,
señor
.”

Soon Mercurio’s family arrived. His mother was a short, pudgy woman in a flowered dress who talked nonstop. First she smothered him with a hug, and then she started scolding him. “You see,
hijo
, I always told you these friends would lead to trouble. Didn’t I always tell you?”

“Yes, Mamá.”

“Didn’t I?”

“Yes, Mamá.”

When she found out that Raúl had died, she cried, “Oh, little Raúl!” and turned to me and Ángel and Mr. Lorenzo. “Raúl always called my son his big brother. His real big brother was shot five years ago.” She turned back to Mercurio. “Remember? Remember how he always called you his big brother,
hijo
?”

Mercurio nodded, pressing his lips together.

His mother went on and on, and the more she talked about her son, the more tenderness crept up on me. It’s hard not to feel tenderness toward someone seen through his mother’s eyes. Mercurio had spent his early childhood in a Mayan village near Ángel’s grandmother’s village. Violence came there, too: Three of Mercurio’s uncles were killed by soldiers. His family moved to San Juan, where it was safer. When he was thirteen, the gang recruited him. His mother lamented that her son hadn’t wanted to be in a gang, but they’d said he was either with them or against them. He joined to survive.

More of Mercurio’s family trickled in throughout the day. It was breaking hospital rules to squeeze twelve people into one room, but the nurses were too exhausted to care. We ate chicken tacos that an uncle had brought, while Mercurio’s little nephew rolled a tiny yellow truck around people’s feet. Mercurio’s father and mother and aunt stayed at his bedside, fussing over him. Mr. Lorenzo talked to the uncle about politics while I played hand games with Mercurio’s little sister. She looked about the same age as Pablo, and even had dimples like him, but she wasn’t nearly as cute. I taught her Miss Mary Mac-Mac-Mac, and clap-clap-clapped my hands against hers. Every time we finished, she squealed,
“¡Otra vez!”
Again! Propped on his pillows, Ángel watched everything with an unreadable expression.

By afternoon, the rain had stopped, and the room was filled with smells of greasy chicken and fried plantains and fresh coffee. A radio blasted staticky salsa tunes. Mercurio’s grandmother had built a little fire by the tree outside the window. She boiled a big blackened pot of water and sprinkled in ground coffee, just picked from their fields and roasted. She stirred in sugar with a long wooden spoon, and then, once the grounds had sunk to the bottom, she dipped out gourdfuls of coffee and handed them through the open window. We passed around the steaming, chipped ceramic cups and sipped and talked.

Mercurio was recovering fast. After a nurse removed the IV drip, he got out of bed and limped over to Ángel. You could tell he was trying to strut his lanky legs and swing his arms coolly, but he couldn’t quite pull it off.

He wore his black baseball cap, the bill pulled low over his eyes. A pair of tennis shoes dangled from his hand, the bright white pair the nurse had taken off his feet. They weren’t the shoes stolen from Ángel; another guy had been wearing those, and now he was dead, and who knew where the shoes had gone. But these shoes looked similar to Ángel’s big clomping Nikes with silver trim.

“Here, man.” In a quick, awkward gesture, Mercurio handed Ángel the shoes. “See if these fit.”

Ángel slipped on the shoes, wiggled his feet inside. He nodded.

Tentatively, Mercurio asked, “You got gangs where you live?”

“Yeah. I don’t mess with them.”

“They don’t recruit?”

“They do, but you can say no.”

And I thought, suddenly, how easy it would have been for Ángel to join a gang. A gang was like a family, and all he had was his dad. Violence had touched his life too, and taken his mother from him. That must have injected a giant dose of anger into his heart.

“I don’t go out much,” Ángel said. “After school I just work. That’s how I saved the seventy-three hundred dollars.”

Mercurio looked at the tile floor. “I’m sorry, man.”

Mercurio’s mother waddled over with a plate of plantains. She was such a chipper, chatty woman, it was hard not to like her, in small doses at least. She had rosy cheeks and plump arms and fried, permed hair. Fake gold earrings with chips of red glass hung from her ears. The red glass and the bad hair made me think about Dika. Mr. Lorenzo had called and assured her everything was fine, but I could imagine her shrill voice commanding us to return the moment Ángel recovered. She would have been proud of how I handled Mercurio. If she were here now, she’d be passing around plates of fruitcake to celebrate.

Mercurio’s mother smoothed his hair. “Son, after you’re well enough to leave the hospital,” she said, “we’ll take you to Doña Remedios. She’ll give you herbs to make these scars fade.”

Ángel’s head snapped up. He stopped chewing his plantain. “Doña Remedios? The healer from the village of Magdalena?”

The woman nodded. “You know her, then. She’s an incredible healer, isn’t she? She still lives in her village, even though most everyone else moved after the houses were burned. She rebuilt her house better than before.”

Ángel turned to me. “Doña Remedios is the healer who helped at my birth. Remember I told you about her?”

I smiled. “Of course.” The midwife who said he’d travel far and do great things.

“I went to her village my second day here,” Ángel said. “To dig up the jewels and look for my mother. The place felt deserted, creepy, just a few old people around, and they only spoke
dialecto.
I asked them about Doña Remedios, but they shook their heads. I figured she’d died or moved or something, so I just got the jewels and left.”

Mercurio’s mother said, “Oh, but she was probably out gathering herbs or firewood. You should visit her. She is wise. Before the
violencia
, she had dreams of blood and machetes raining down. So when she heard the army was coming, she hid in the forest and didn’t come out until the army trucks left with the bodies. Go visit her. She lives in the blue house with all the flowers.”

“I’ll go with you, Ángel,” I said.

“But—”

“Don’t tell me it’s too dangerous.”

“Okay, lime-girl.” Ángel’s face softened. “Know what?”

“What?”

“I think tomorrow’s the day. The day I find out the truth.”

Late in the afternoon, Mercurio and his family moved into the room next door. Nurse Reina let them borrow her boom box and mix tape. They played it three times in a row, singing with thick accents. Their voices floated through the wall.
“Wel-comb to da Otel Cah-lee-forrr-nia…”

The doctor rolled her eyes at the music. She was a thin woman with chapped lips and hair glossed back in a tight, painful-looking ponytail. She examined Ángel and announced he was healing well and could leave the next day if he took it easy. She probably wouldn’t consider a hike in the mountains taking it easy, but we didn’t mention that. The swelling in Ángel’s face had gone down, and now only a few bruises and pink scars lingered. He still had to walk carefully, like an old man, but the doctor said he should be back to normal soon.

Mr. Lorenzo insisted we go together to the village and then, as soon as possible, return to Mexico. He missed Dika desperately, talked about her constantly: the delicious beef balls she made, the little pastries she bought at Albertsons and served with thick, muddy-bottomed coffee, the toast and apricot jam she ate every day for breakfast.

At the bus stop, we piled our bags on the roof of the yellow bus. The village was a few hours away, in the mountains. I felt like an old pro at taking these ancient school buses now. I didn’t even blink when a man sat next to me with a baby goat
baaah
ing in his lap. The bus rattled around curves of a dirt road, barreling through spots of drizzle and sunshine and fog. In the distance, mist shrouded the tips of volcanoes.

Ángel had made this trip to his mother’s village many times as a boy. When his mother was twelve, she’d moved from her village to the town of San Juan, where she worked as a maid and learned to speak Spanish. Six years later, she married Mr. Lorenzo. She loved her village and insisted that her son be born there, and often took him to visit her family on weekends.

As the bus crawled higher up the mountains, it grew so cool I put on my sweater. The bus swerved around people with bundles of firewood on their backs, strapped to their foreheads. Chickens and dogs skittered out of the way at the last second. Burros trudged along the roadside, loaded with stuffed burlap sacks. We passed cornfields and tall pines and other trees I didn’t recognize. Mr. Lorenzo pointed out the steep slopes of coffee plantations, which looked like forests but supposedly hid shiny green bushes with red coffee berries. He turned to Ángel. “We harvested coffee there,
hijo.
”