The Exquisite and Immaculate Grace of Carmen Espinoza (2 page)

She began crossing herself over and over, shaking and mumbling incomprehensible prayers under her breath.
 

The words, derived from the secret thoughts I had always held, fell from my lips, “You did it,” I said.
 

Her eyes flew open and met mine.
 

“You did it, didn’t you? You killed Daniel and daddy left.”
 

Her entire body began to quake but her eyes remained locked on mine.
 

“Say it! Say it! You killed him. You killed Daniel, your only son, my baby brother. You killed him!”

Her back arched spastically and she remained frozen before my eyes in this contorted form for seconds before collapsing to her knees. “The devil,” she sobbed to the floor. “The devil stole my baby, took him from me.” Her eyes turned back to me, filled with all the grief and hatred that had sculpted the beautiful happy woman in the picture I still held into the raving mess on the floor before me.
 

My mother was crazy.

I took a step towards the door, there could be no rational goodbyes between us. This would be the ugly end to the strained existence we had shared. “My car will be here any minute,” I explained as I moved past her and for the door.

“Carmen,” she hissed and grabbed my sleeve.
 

Stopped, I looked down at her. Suddenly afraid I had said too much. That she might, now that she knew I suspected her, try to stop me from leaving. Keep me close. But she dropped her arm back to the floor, as if the strain of hanging on to me for even another second was too much to bear.
 

“Out there,” she said softly. “You will not be safe. I have tried, Lord knows, I have tried,” she began to sob again. “But if there can be no forgiveness for me…”

“You don’t need my forgiveness, mother.” I bent down and picked up her rosary, gently cupped one of her hands and let the beads pool into her palm. “It is only God you should ask.”

She closed her hand over the beads and shook her head gently. “There are some sins, Carmen,” she whispered. “Not even God will forgive.”

Eight weeks after arriving in Oaxaca—“It’s pronounced Wa-hawk-a,” mentor Vicky explained—I realized I had made a terrible mistake. Standing, alone, in the Basilica de la Soledad with its gilded interior and Baroque facade, I stared up at the Virgin of Solitude. She was Oaxaca’s patron saint and as such, was draped in a cloak of black velvet and, according to my guidebook, encrusted with six hundred diamonds. Atop her head sat an apple shaped, four pound gold crown.
 

“My new best friend,” I whispered. It was my third visit to her this week.
Sol Abroad!
was not living up the to the “escape from my life” expectations I had been counting on. The belief that once I was free, once I was thousands of miles away from my mother, my life would begin to morph into some semblance of normal had not exactly worked out. In fact, I felt more alone than I ever had.
   

The couple standing near me commented in hushed French tones while snapping photos on their phones. Other tourists, paired and grouped, were doing the same all around me. Only The Virgin and I appeared to be alone.

I shrugged one arm from my backpack until it fell to the side in front of me and removed my camera and the photo from the front zippered pocket. I didn’t need any more pictures of The Basilica de la Soledad or the bejeweled lady of solitude but holding the camera and acting as if I were just like everyone else here helped to quiet the sense of alienation that had been growing in me, larger everyday, since my arrival in Oaxaca. Frozen in form, The Virgin had to helplessly endure the stares—at least I could move around.
 

Snapping two quick, out of focus photos, I let the camera dangle from its strap around my wrist while I permitted myself to stare at the family photo I had taken from my mother’s bedside table. It was a dangerous activity in public, every time I looked at the image of that happy family, together, it weakened the facade that kept the river of sadness in check. When I was alone in my room, the sounds of my host family’s routines always just outside my door, holding back the rising flood became impossible. The sobs that rolled up and out of me were so great I had to stifle the sounds with my pillow.

I think Graciana, my host mother, suspected. “You go out, like other students. Have fun.” She was forced to come to me with English because my Spanish remained as bad as it was when I first arrived. Like always, she received my tight smile and a silent nod. The problem was that it wasn’t as easy as, “like other students.” The primary reason why my escape had failed to produced the normal I wanted was because I wasn’t, “like other students.”
 

Something was fundamentally wrong with me.
   

The other students who had traveled here for
Sol Abroad!
were adjusting. They were exploring together, studying together, practicing their Spanish together, they were becoming friends. All the things that, it turns out, I didn’t know how to do. Always out of step, it felt as if they were all dancing to a similar rhythm while I couldn’t even hear the music. It was weeks before I could figure it out.
 

Debbie, an earnest girl with long brown hair from Nebraska, had opened up during one of our mandatory “group building” sessions. “I never even considered how hard it would be,” she had choked and swallowed big while fat tears ran down her face. “I miss my family so much…all my friends. I keep thinking about all the fun things they are probably doing…without me…I sometimes just want to go home,” she finished in a whisper. Like she was admitting to some dirty and terrible secret. All the while, everyone else was nodding in support, agreement, and mutual understanding. Three of the girls and one guy got up from their chairs to hug her and whisper words of encouragement in her ear.
 

I alone sat stony, unrelating. It wasn’t that I didn’t know sadness, it was that my sadness flowed from a different well altogether. I didn’t miss my mother, I was relieved to be away from her intense brand of religious crazy. Hardly something I could share out loud with a group of people who, small parental annoyances aside, all seemed to have really great parents. My sadness was a different animal residing in an entirely different country. All of them would eventually go back to their families, their friends. Their sadness was temporary, but mine, mine flowed from the inexhaustible source, it was the realization that you had no family to ever go back to.
 

I wasn’t only feeling alone right now because of geography. I was alone no matter my position on the globe. That thought, that knowing, was the cold wind filling my empty cage. No one was sending me letters from back home.
   

I really hated Debbie.
 

The Basilica de la Soledad was beginning to buzz from the collective activity of tourists and day trippers’ admiration. My family photo, which had enjoyed a protected and sheltered life hidden away in my mother’s drawer for so many years, was beginning to show signs of deterioration around the edges. I would need to find something to keep it protected in my bag. Studying our faces once more before returning it to the pocket, I wondered again about my miserable expression.

It had been my birthday for God sake. We were at an amusement park. Why on earth was I so unhappy? What irritated me was the fact that this was my one and only photo of us all and I looked as if I hated the world. I wished I could go back and tell my four year old self to knock it off and put on a happy face—one day, when your mother goes insane, your brother dies, and your father leaves you in the dust, this photo is going to mean more to you than you could possibly imagine. I ran my thumb once over Daniel’s image, unzipped my pack to put the photo away, and stopped.

Aside from the giant white castle in the distance, I had never really noticed any of the other figures in the background. Blurred figures, people half turned, a child sitting on the curb eating what looked like ice cream—now, something behind my image and to the right caught my attention. Was it a person, or a trick of the light? It looked like a shadow, transparent so that I could see the planter and blooming begonias behind it, but the shape looked human.

Someone rushed past me and swept the photo from my hands. A whirl of red. The picture landed on the floor several feet from where I stood. Automatically, I rushed to recover it before someone stepped on it. Once it was back in my hand, I looked up to see what had just come crashing through. In a crowd near the door that led to the church’s small religious museum, a shock of blonde hair and a bright red shirt was racing on tiny legs.

Recognition physically hit me before my brain had a chance to dismiss it. The adrenaline that pumped hard through my body made my fingers explode in a thousand pin pricks and sent my legs into motion after him. I was halfway across the church before the impossibility of it registered with me completely.

He wove in and throughout the people and disappeared through the door. “Excuse me,” I said as I pressed past an elderly Mexican man. The crowd around me seemed to thicken as it bottlenecked through the museum doors. I stood on my toes and craned my neck, trying to catch sight of him again. When a glimpse of red flashed between the legs of two woman talking, I was overcome with the irrational impulse to yell for him, “Daniel! Daniel it’s me, Carmen.”

The harder I tried to get through, the greater the crowd’s strength seemed to be. Simultaneously realizing that I was both ridiculous for even entertaining the thought that the boy could be Daniel and catastrophically frustrated with the glut of bodies surrounding me, I gave up trying to shove past anyone. “So stupid,” I muttered.

“Hey now,” the man in front of me turned around, his expression angry, “Who are you calling stupid?”
 

The quick shift from disappointment to embarrassment made me suck my breath. “What?…Oh, no…I,” shaking my head I tried to think of a logical explanation for my behavior. “Not you,” I blurted. The crowd around us shifted closer to the door. “I meant me. That I was stupid. I thought I saw someone…someone I know. Knew. I thought I saw someone I knew but that would be impossible and so I realized I was being stupid for getting all worked up and trying to shove past everyone when it didn’t even matter because there was no way it could have been…”

From almost the moment I had begun rambling, his expression had been one of amusement. “Hey,” he laughed. “I was only kidding.”

“What?” I asked still not catching on.

“Jo king,” he enunciated. “I knew you weren’t calling me stupid. Just a bit of a laugh.”

“You did?” My embarrassment began to shift into anger. He was making fun of me. While I had rambled on and on in front of him and all these people about insanely thinking that my dead brother, who died thirteen years ago, was running through the church, looking just the same as thirteen years ago, he was, “having a bit of a laugh,” about me—in front of all these people.
 

He nodded. “Just kinda of opening the door you know?” his face was bright and smiling. He shrugged and stuck out his hand, “I’m Joe.”

I stared at him a moment longer before considering his hand. “Opening a door?” irritation peppered my tone.
 

The tiniest cloud of worry floated past his shiny smile. “Well, yeah.” He bobbed his head back a forth a couple of times like a boxer entering a ring, “You know, a laugh to break the ice and then we chat while we wait in this enormous mob and afterward I’d let you buy me a gelato.”

My response erupted, “Wow,” I said in the snottiest tone I could muster. “I was wrong, you actually are stupid.”
 

Shock evaporated what remained of his smile and he took a step back.
 

No longer needing to see the boy to know it wasn’t Daniel, I turned in the opposite direction and headed for the church’s east entrance.
 

By the time I reached the sun baked court yard, the epiphany had struck. “That,” I said under my breath. “Is exactly why you don’t have any friends.” I leaned against the pillar behind me and let my head fall back with a thud.
 

On some level, I understood that other girls, other people, just rolled through a social exchange like that. Girls like Debbie. Debbie from Nebraska would have known how to handle that guy. She would have smiled, immediately, and produced her soft, chime like laugh of approval. A sound that drove the guys in the
Sol Abroad!
group mildly insane with their attempts to make her produce it just for them.
 

I didn’t know, instinctively, how to interact with other people. It was why there were no friends at home and why everyone from the group, especially the guys, pretty much avoided me now.
 

It was her fault—my mother’s. Because she kept me cloistered up in that house of religious nuttery. Overwhelmed and embarrassed, a fresh round of tears rose up and then down my face. I’d never had the chances Debbie did.

I could hear one of the other tourists coming out the church’s door. Mortification washed over me. I turned away, wiped my face and tried to stand up a little straighter.
 

The person lingered by the doors.
 

In a too late attempt to look like nothing was wrong, I started digging through my bag for my camera. Why didn’t the person just move on and leave me alone to fall apart in private? My hands shook, but I managed to open the zipper on my bag and pull out the camera.
 

A second later, it slipped through my fingers and hit the cement, an expensive sounding crack filled the air. It bounced twice more before coming to a rest several feet from where I stood. Shocked, I could see that the display screen had splintered into a glass web of destruction.
 

I didn’t make move, I just closed my eyes and continued to cry.
 

I had never owned a camera before. This one had been a gift from my Spanish teacher back home, a kind, elderly man who was surprised by my request that he help me apply to
Sol Abroad!
and thrilled when we found out I had been accepted on a full scholarship. He saw the way others avoided me in class, left me out of group activities, pretended they didn’t hear if I asked to borrow a pen, but whatever his suspicions about me or my problems both at school and home, he was decent enough to never voice a single one. Despite my dysfunctions as a person and my utter failure to make any progress towards commanding even the most basic Spanish, he had been nice to me. Now, because I was so stupid, and clumsy, and a complete and utter freak, his gift was broken.