The Parallel Apartments (47 page)

Rose sat up.

“You know why I'm here, of course.”

“Ah…”

“When I first saw you standing at Matt's welcome desk, I ran you down my list, looking for Bingos. And guess who I found.”

“Matt.”

Rose took off her jersey. Her torso was like a male butterfly swimmer's, flat and smooth, except her nipples were womanly, berrylike. Still sitting, she pulled off her shorts and panties. Her penis was erect, curved, and nearly touching her solar plexus. She stood up.

“Me!”

Justine began to suspect “Rose” was an apparition. A ghost with a message.

“I watched you lick my glass. In the mirror over the lunch counter.”

Rose put one leg up on the edge of the bed, lifted her scrotum out of the way with one hand, and with two fingers of the other spread open the vulva of her small, delicate vagina.

“Vive la difference,”
said Rose.

XVI

October 2004

On the one-month anniversary of Montserrat's death, April filled a plastic bowl with Three Musketeers and Dots and Tootsie Rolls and grocery-store suckers. She opened the door to her apartment and placed an old air conditioner box out on the balcony. She sifted through the bowl of candy until it was all mixed together, then put it on top of the box. She shut herself inside her apartment. It was unlikely that anybody would trick-or-treat at this shitty apartment complex, but putting the last of her food (if you wanted to call rods and bars and balls of sugar food) out where anyone could take it gave her comfort, which in turn gave her the confidence to proceed with the evening.

Instead of putting on the Dora the Explorer wig and costume and going downtown to meet Ryan at the Vinyl Bar on Fourth, as planned, April changed into sweatpants and a T-shirt, placed her laptop on the toilet lid, drew a hot bath, eased into the water fully dressed, unwrapped a sterile seventeen-gauge needle she'd stolen from Planned Parenthood, seated it expertly into a vein in her right arm, and watched her blood drain into
the hot water in convect volutes. She would be empty in less than ten minutes, long enough to start a Scrabble game. She set it to “expert,” and was immediately able to play
CENTRAL
for 74. The computer countered with
COQUETTE
for 94. April welcomed a thrashing, which is what she usually got when playing at this difficulty level. When the score was 202 to 189, computer winning, April played
PET
just over
CENTRAL,
also making the words
PA
and
EL.
It didn't put her ahead much. April was growing lightheaded and a bit nauseated. The water had become a uniform, transparent vermilion. April lifted her arm out of the water. The blood flowed steadily, like a urination, out of the thick needle. The computer passed its turn. April stared at her letters.
AAEOOKU.
She was about to play
UKE,
but stopped. She stared at the board for a long time, re-reading the words. Portent spilled from them. She would never have expected a message
now.
Was she being tricked?

After a moment's hard staring at the board, she decided that no trick was being played on her. And if she was being tricked, she could always come back to this suicide business later.

She stopped the game. She got on the internet. She found the website for Central Market. The event was on Thursday. Tomorrow. She shut her eyes and remained quiet for a couple of minutes.

This would work.

On the verge of unconsciousness, April plucked the needle out of her arm. She lay in the cooling water and waited for her body to utter new blood into her veins. She slept. Many hours later she awoke, carefully stood up, drained the tub, shucked her soaked pink T-shirt and sweatpants, and showered. It was three in the morning. She dressed and drove to Walmart.

Back at home April opened the box with her costly new baby doll, an uncanny replica of a six-week-old baby. She swaddled it so its little face barely peeked out at the world. She donned a Baby Björn, a large, roomy one, and placed the doll in it. She walked around the room, lightly rocking the doll, looking in at it, cooing at it. She took the Björn off, dressed in jeans and a brown sweater, did her face, put on the Dora wig, slipped into a pair of worn brown moccasins, picked up the Baby Björn with the well-wrapped doll inside, found a screwdriver, and walked out the door. The candy was still there, apparently untouched. April descended the stairs. Still no one had come to collect Bryce's husband's Mini Cooper, which sat in the parking
lot, unused, eddies of dirt and twigs surrounding each tire. Another auspicious sign. She removed the license plates, then drove the car to Central Market, where outside in the small park that flanked the upscale grocery store, a monthly get-together of moms and babies and dogs was taking place: Babystock & Petpalooza. April had been to this event before, two or three years ago, to look at babies (but not to shop!), but she had forgotten about it until the Scrabble board reminded her. April put on her sunglasses. She parked in a spot close to the store, rear-first, leaving the doors unlocked.

April did not stand out among the many dozens of mothers. In the park she walked slowly among the mothers and strollers and dogs and children and Central Market employees and shoppers. No one looked at her, no one asked to peek inside her Björn, no one stared at her wig.

She sat at a picnic table with two other mothers, each in control of a double stroller, which they were rocking with their feet. The women were sharing a Caesar salad and a rotisserie chicken sandwich. One mother, who was sitting on April's side of the bench, bounced a well-wrapped baby on her lap. In the double stroller, which was parked between April and the mother, facing April, remained a loosely bundled baby, so thoroughly covered against the chill early November air that April couldn't see its face. At one edge of the park was a small stage upon which a violinist and an oboist were preparing to perform. They began to play a composition that April had never heard, but that was surely old; late-eighteenth-century German, possibly. She listened, her eyes closed, for several minutes. When she opened them, the mothers at her table had finished their salad and sandwich and were both working intently on their smartphones. April furtively adjusted the baby doll in her Björn, making room. She swung her legs over the bench seat, crouched down, deftly picked up the baby in the stroller, tucked it into her Björn with the doll, quietly stood, and briskly walked to her car. The baby was silent and still on the ride home.

She had done it. She had been calm the whole time, but the thrill of it, delayed until this instant, made her shudder.

At the Parallel Apartments, April carefully maneuvered the car so it was precisely where it had been before, its tires crowded with flotsam from rainstorms and time. It looked as though it had never moved. She put the license plates back on, climbed up to her apartment with the baby, and locked the door shut behind her. She lay on her futon and began to unwrap the baby.

What is this? A furry blanket, deep in the layers? The furry blanket was warm. It moved. A small dog poked its head out. A Lhasa Apso. It looked up at April and whimpered. April stared at the animal. She dug deeper into the blankets, but there was no baby.

XVII

1985–2004

By the time Mariarosa Balaguer was six, her aunt Olympe had accumulated three good reasons to move them both from Tegucigalpa to Laredo, Texas: (1) so Olympe, a cordwainer by trade and descent, could “work” for the border town's premier boot maker, Sir MacCrear, with whom she had recently begun a correspondence that had quickly risen from strictly professional to flirty professional to racily nonprofessional to lovey-dovey desperate; (2) to give Rose better access to doctors who were more likely to know how to treat a guevedoche, especially when the unique miseries and elevated medical risks of puberty arrived; and (3) to get Rose away from the rest of her greedy, brutal, and wildly superstitious family.

There had been guevedoche in the family as far back as anyone could remember, a scatter of unbranched, barren twigs at the reaches of the complicated family tree—an actual document, 340 years old, drawn originally in oak-gall ink on amate and colored with red earths and fading purple woad, and, in recent years, appended with names penned in ballpoint and colored with scented Crayola markers or dime-store poster paint. It now
hung in the kitchen of Rose's grandmother's house, a brick box on the edge of a semi-fashionable but declining area of Honduras's capital. Until Rose, Grandmother Balaguer was the most enthusiastic matchmaker of all her forebears and descendants, having successfully united no fewer than four hundred persons into no fewer than two hundred betrothals, reunitings, reverse estrangements, kiss-and-make-ups, and vivid one-nighters.

The document in Grandmother's kitchen had been, as many old manuscripts covered in paleographic mysteries are, bestowed with a magical quality (as far as matchmaking was concerned), and was often consulted by Grandmother when she was confronted with a matchmaking conundrum. The document was, in a way, an oracle speaking of, and to, its own future.

But Rose's birth flagged Grandmother's confidence and enthusiasm for matchmaking, as guevedoche could not reproduce (nor had they ever shown any matchmaking tendencies, at least not in
her
dynasty): the long line of matchmakers looked to be at a monstrous end, a failure Grandmother blamed herself for, as she had been responsible for the union of her son Aaron and a local cookie-and-cracker vendor named Beatrice, who had then produced Rose. The pain of Grandmother's loss of confidence she transduced into cruelty toward Beatrice; this cruelty Beatrice reflected onto Rose—first just neglect, then slaps, then throttlings, then beatings. By the time she was five, Rose was a limping scape of bruises and scars. Eventually the abuse transcended into exploitation: Beatrice and Aaron had begun to exhibit their child in a dope-shellacked tent on the ugliest edge of Tegucigalpa's worst slum, pricing the peeps according to the flesh the peeper wished to see. Very few wanted to see less than every inch of five-year-old naked Rose Balaguer, and so the box office quickly took in a fair amount of money.

Somehow, though, the child remained good-natured, gregarious, even bubbly. Moreover, Rose, in buck of family history, began to exhibit some matchmaking urges. She performed an elaborate wedding between Diarrea—a neighbor's incontinent bunny—and Carlos, an old, clear-plastic toy camel that had somehow acquired an interior puddle of greenish water that foamed dramatically when shaken. After the wedding, which had featured boiled eggs as bridesmaids, a cardboard chapel, a tiny gold band (a jewelry finding unearthed in the muddy road) for Diarrea's ring-phalange, and a lingering kiss, Rose drove the newlyweds in a wagon to Diarrea's hutch.

Even though the marriage ended a year or so later with Diarrea's
matriculation into a purse and some stew, Grandmother considered it a success—a portentous success. The end of her lineage might be in sight, but by god it had not yet arrived. She decided to apprentice Rose, and turn the little freak into greatness. In a kind of reconciliation with Beatrice and Aaron, Grandmother approached them with the idea of adding another dimension to their sideshow: matches for money. Rose Balaguer, the latest in a four-century line of matchmakers, and the first guevedoche to bear the sacred mantle, would, for a small fee, find you a mate, patch up a separation, pacify a business partner, reconcile internal family feuds. The little sideshow began to take in more money than ever.

But not enough, at least as far as Beatrice and Aaron were concerned. Grandmother had not objected to exhibiting Rose, but they had not told her about their newest sub-venture, which had been suggested to them by some of the peep show's more impassioned and hard-to-please clientele. They complained that their yen for more than just a show was ruining their health and vitality. They suggested some contact, to be remunerated, depending on the intimacy of the act, at five to ten times the price of a close look.

And so, for ten months in 1984, Rose's parents whored her out to the worst of the worst. Rose remembered very little. The older she got, the less real what had happened to her seemed, until it became a fiction, a suite of scratched, ill-lit black-and-white cartoons of men playing with a doll, rocking her in their laps, feeding her, tickling her, filling her with things, holding her so tight she couldn't breathe.

Eventually, even the cartoons rarefied into single snapshots, these in turn slowly abstracting to meaningless grays. But it had all happened: Rose's anus was scarred and distended; her rectum colonized with irrepressible venereal warts, her vagina lacerated, her perineum split and sewn up and split and sewn up, three generations of keloids holding it together, her uterus punctured, her throat ulcerated, and her pelvis distorted, it having once been broken (by a violent man later murdered by his wife for the crime) and then healed at an anatomically incorrect angle, giving her a pronounced pigeon-toed walk.

How she had grown up so emotionally stable was as much a mystery to her psychiatrists as her body was to her physicians. There were doctors who considered her normalcy an impermeable shell, a maturing embryo of hatred and fury within trying to peck its way out. They thought of Rose as a kind of time bomb and themselves as the bomb squad, and told her as much.

Aunt Olympe, Aaron's sister, lived on the other side of the city, having long ago left the poisonous Balaguers. The birth of Rose was the first reason in years that she'd had to visit her family. She fell in love with the child, and visited as often as she could after that.