The Fates Will Find Their Way (9 page)

13

O
f course Nora got pregnant again. Of course the only two times she’d ever had sex she ended up pregnant. Because if sex wasn’t for pleasure, then it had to be for a cause. And babies must be her cause, like it or not. This, at least, is what she told herself.

The second pregnancy was easier than the first. She knew what to expect. She wasn’t alone. The Mexican, who’d been with her during much of the first pregnancy, was with her still. And this was theirs. This strange thing growing inside Nora belonged not only to her, but also to the Mexican. It brought them closer. It brought all of them closer, in the way we hoped one day our own families would be brought closer. Nora to the Mexican, but also Nora to the girls, her daughters. The sisters.

Her face fattened. She stared at it endlessly in mirrors, and in windows strong enough to hold reflections. She blew her cheeks out at the girls. “I look like a chipmunk,” she would say. “I’m hideous.” The girls would giggle, blow their own cheeks out in imitation.

“You will have a little boy,” said the Mexican. “I can see it in your face.”

“You can see fat in my face,” she said. She blew her cheeks out for him too.

“You are beautiful,” he said. “More beautiful than before.” He held her face in his hands, something she loved, something that made her feel tiny and slight. “You have color now. You are a woman.”

She winced at the word.

“You are
my
woman,” he said.

“Let me be your girl,” she said. “I don’t want to be a woman.”

“Crazy
chica
. Crazy American
chica
. You can be anything you want as long as you are mine.”

“Tell me about the baby,” she said. “Say it in Spanish. Tell me about him.”

The Mexican could talk for hours about the baby. He could talk like this whether Nora was in the room or not. He liked the request—the chance to make noise, to blather, without risk of being understood. Because Nora still couldn’t understand the language. Not after two years even. Perhaps at first she had tried, but ultimately she’d given up. Abandoned the language, but not the Mexican.

The girls, who would throw themselves on their backs with laughter when the Mexican spoke Spanish, understood better than their mother. “
Sí
,” he said. “
Una criatura
. A little baby boy. Come,” he said to Nora. “I will cook us a large dinner. Cow tongue and conch. You will love it. No, no chocolate. We do not want a dark-skinned baby. Milk for you. Milk will turn the baby whiter than you. I promise you this. But no dark foods. I insist. Eat my cow tongue and conch and he will grow fat inside you.”

The baby did grow fat inside her, and the color stayed in her cheeks. She continued to feel happy, look healthy. Evenings now she drove, with the girls in the backseat, to pick up the Mexican when he was off work. She liked being alone less and less. She found the hours without the Mexican almost unbearable, even as she became more and more accustomed to the company of the girls. Nights like these, she would drive the pickup to the back of the restaurant and park next to the trash cans and the loading ramp, near the milk crates and empty cardboard boxes. And here she would wait for the Mexican to return to her.

Often she napped in the passenger seat, the girls asleep behind her, their hands always touching, fidgeting, even in their sleep. The windows down, she would drift in and out of consciousness listening to the radio station leaking out from screens in the kitchen, playing something Mexican always, something distant and strange and foreign. The crickets were at their loudest towards the end of her pregnancy. They had taken over Arizona that year. It was a quiet, brutal backdrop to the otherwise serene feeling of those nights in the back parking lot.

Some nights she wouldn’t wake up until the breeze hit her face as the car rounded the corner—the Mexican at the wheel—as they left the restaurant’s parking lot. On these nights he would scold her. “Crazy American. You think nothing can hurt you. Maybe one day someone tries to steal you. What then?”

“But you’ve already stolen me,” she would say. “How can a person be stolen twice? What are the odds?”

“Yes, you are odd.”

“Not
odd
,” she might have said one night, laughing at him, her hand behind his neck. “
Odds
. Like luck or chance or fortune.”

Perhaps he turned melancholy then. Perhaps he scolded her, as we ourselves have wanted to scold her. “Do not speak of fortune,” he might have said. “Do not speak of fortune ever. The fates do not like it. It is not yours to speak of. It is for the fates to decide.”

“Old man,” she might have said in response, not understanding his sudden shift towards gravity. And perhaps she might have grown panicky, except that just as quickly his mood grew light again and he laughed.

“Crazy American
chica
and her crazy old Mexican man,” he said. “We are a pair, yes?”

“Oh yes,” she said. “We are a pair.”

He clucked at her, charmed. And once home he did as he always did on those nights when she drove to pick him up. He opened the passenger-side door and helped her to her feet. And as she did on all those nights, taking his arm and his offer to help her up, she said, “My man,” then put a hand on her stomach before adding, “my men.” Always she would smile. The Mexican would lift the girls from the backseat, and like this, a family, they would walk into their house and go to bed.

W
hat might have happened is this: Nora Lindell died giving birth to her third baby. Just as it had been for her mother, a second pregnancy was too much for her. Pick a complication—too much blood loss, a botched C-section, a blood clot. It doesn’t matter. The point is that the baby lived—a girl, not a boy—but Nora died, and the Mexican was left with three little girls. Two of them white-skinned and red-headed like their mother. The smallest of them brown-eyed and brown-bodied.

The Mexican couldn’t have known—how could he? Nora had brought no pictures to Arizona, no proof of another life—but it was the youngest who looked most like Nora’s own mother. And he couldn’t have known how happy this would have made her, and so, instead, he was disappointed that he had corrupted Nora’s line. He was sad that together they had produced not one more baby in Nora’s image, but something strange and dark and foreign. He could see too much of himself in the new baby. And it was because of this, maybe, that he decided to look for the family she’d left behind. Maybe.

B
ecause, what might have also happened was this: Nora Lindell gave birth, at approximately twenty-one years old, to her third child—a girl, yes, and an incredibly tan-skinned one at that—and she lived. She lived, and together she and the Mexican raised the three girls in Arizona, in the desert, teaching them to distinguish real turquoise from fake, to recognize hot peppers simply by their smell, to cut fresh aloe and apply it to their wounds, to garden and to swim and to identify the stars in the desert sky. The girls learned the Mexican’s language, and they learned Nora’s language. And the five of them were thick as thieves. Or, at least, the four of them—the twins and the baby and the Mexican—were thick as thieves. Because Nora was close only to the Mexican. She mothered as a bystander, as a spectator. She did what she could to please the Mexican, but beyond that, she was helpless, incapable.

The new baby, when she cried, caused Nora such crippling headaches that she often returned to bed in the afternoon. Multiple days she spent in bed—so many and so often that the Mexican had to take time away from the restaurant. Nora cried during these periods, feeling guilty that the Mexican should have to work so hard. She apologized constantly, but whenever he brought the girls in to visit—“Please,” he would say, “they miss their mother”—she would turn away, crying harder, the headache sharper than ever.

B
ut then, why would she have stayed? Why not, then, say that she gave birth and, much as she did with us, with Sissy and with her father, she left the Mexican? Abruptly, mysteriously, unexpectedly. And, so, yes, what might also have happened is that she gave birth to her third daughter and stayed long enough only to see that the Mexican loved all the girls equally and that the four of them would be happy together, and then she left. And why not then say that it was after she left, when he was all alone and frightened of fathering them poorly, that he decided to look not for Nora but for the family she’d left behind? That he felt it was his duty, not because he didn’t love those strange girl babies, but because he did. Why not say this?

Maybe she disappeared from him the same way she disappeared from us—without explanation, without warning, without anything. One day here, the next day gone. All that’s left: innuendoes and guesses, half-true stories and gossip about what might have been. Maybe. But why let her break the Mexican’s heart? Why not give him something she never gave us? Hasn’t he earned it? Hasn’t he earned more than we ever did? After all, we knew her as children. We were children, and she was a child. And what do children owe each other? But a husband? Certainly a wife owes a husband.

And so, let’s imagine she was honest with the Mexican. Hard to believe that three babies could come from the body of one girl, one woman, and not have the effect at least of making that girl, that woman, more truthful with the one person she ever really loved. (If you’re wondering, the answer is yes, we have considered that the only reason we want Nora Lindell to love the Mexican is because he’s so different from any of us. To imagine her with someone
like
us but
not
us, that would be too much.)

She would have waited until winter to leave, waited because she knew the snow and ice and cold would help convince her it was time to go. The pool was covered and closed for the season. The twins were talking in complete sentences, throwing in Spanish here and there.
We are aquí
, they might scream from their bedroom when the Mexican came home from work at night.
We are hambrienta
.
We are two hungry caninas!
Hungry wolves, he called them, when he came home and picked them up, one in each arm, and squeezed them.
My hungry wolves
.

And the littlest, the dark-skinned girl, though she was not talking, she was walking now. Walking and sometimes running. She was small, so much smaller than the twins had been when they could walk, but she was something to see. A daredevil with her body. Launching it always in any direction. She hurdled the couches. She did flips off the beds. And by the time Nora left them, the littlest could scale the molding of the interior doorways. Using her feet like hands, she could propel herself to the top of a door frame and hang. Some children can’t be tamed. The acrobatics only worsened the headaches.

N
ora left early in the morning, before the girls were awake. It was dark in the bedroom. The winter would keep it dark for a few more hours. There was snow outside, which might have lighted up the land, lighted up the bedroom windows, but it didn’t. There was no moon to reflect, only clouds above, and so the room was dark and the world outside darker still.

She put her arms around the Mexican; his back was to her. She knew he was awake when he took her forearms in his hands. “Crazy American,” he said.

“Yes,” she said. “That’s me.”

“Chica
, why do I think you are leaving me?”

She squeezed him tighter.

“Then I am right,” he said.

“I don’t know why I’m leaving you,” she said finally. “I don’t belong here. I’m sorry.”

“This sounds like what they say on the television.
It’s me
,
not you
.” The Mexican raised his pitch when he said these words. His imitation of a woman, of a soap actress perhaps. “This sounds like a lie. Like an excuse.”

She was quiet.

“Have I asked too much?” the Mexican said. “Is there something I have done? Something I can do?”

Little tears were forming at the edges of her eyes.

“You’re perfect,” she said. “You’re perfect.”

“And the girls?” he said. “What of the girls?”

“They’re perfect too,” she said.

“Do not make fun,” he said. He was angry. “You know that is not what I mean.”

“I know,” she said. “Forgive me.” There was silence and she held him tighter, dug her nails into his skin. “I can’t take them with me,” she said at last.

She felt his body relax, though his hands did not loosen. “Good,” he said. “At least you are not that crazy.”

Her breath was shallow, uneven.

“You won’t come back to me,” he said. It might have been a question. She couldn’t be sure. He often forgot to inflect.

“No,” she said.

He turned to face her, even though there was still no light, even though they still couldn’t see each other. He put her hands on his face. It was wet.

“I understand,” he said. “You don’t think your old Mexican understands, but he does.”

“No, no,” she said. She shook her head; her entire body shook. “I don’t think that.”

“You must listen now,” he said. She used her thumbs to wipe away the wetness on his face. “You must listen and you must promise—”

“Yes!”

“—be quiet—you must promise that you will tell me about your family before you leave.” Nora was quiet. She moved one of her hands to cover his mouth, but he moved it away. “This is not something to negotiate,” he said. “It is only fair to the girls that I know as much as I can.”

She pushed herself into him then, nuzzling her face into his armpit. Slowly, calmly, surprisingly without reluctance, she began to talk: “The smallest one, that little animal of a girl, she looks just like my mother. The spitting image. She will be more beautiful than any of us. Even more beautiful than my sister. Have I told you about her?”

Even in our fantasies, we couldn’t put our own bodies next to hers. Even here, even as we ended their marriage, we could not imagine ourselves next to Nora. Instead, it was the Mexican in those final hours to whom she told the truth. And she told the truth quietly, a whisper that not even we could hear.