The Sum of Our Days (11 page)

We're told that there is no pain as great as that of the death of a child, but I believe it has to be worse when your child disappears and you live forever not knowing what happened to her. Did she die? Did she suffer? You keep the hope that she is alive, but constantly wonder what kind of life she's living and why she doesn't get in touch with her family. Every time the telephone rang late at night, Willie's heart stopped with hope and with terror. It could be Jennifer's voice, asking him to come look for her somewhere, but it might also be the voice of a policeman asking him to come to the morgue to identify a body.

Months later, Jennifer still had not turned up, but Willie clung to the idea that she was alive. I don't know who it was who suggested that he should consult a psychic who sometimes helped the police solve cases. She had the gift of locating bodies and missing persons, and that was how we ended up together in the kitchen of a dilapidated house near the port. The psychic looked nothing like a divine, no star-patterned skirts, kohl-rimmed eyes, or crystal ball. She was a fat woman in tennis shoes and an apron, who kept us waiting while she finished bathing her dog. In the kitchen—narrow, clean, and orderly—were a pair of yellow plastic chairs, and we took our seat in them. Once the dog was dry, she offered us coffee, and sat down on a small stool facing us. We sipped from our mugs in silence a few minutes, then Willie explained the reason for our visit and showed her a series of photos of his daughter: some in which she was more or less healthy, and the most recent, taken in the hospital, already very ill, with Sabrina in her arms. The psychic examined them one by one, then put them on the table, placed her hands on them, and closed her eyes for long minutes. “Some men took her in a vehicle,” she said finally. “They killed her. They dropped the body in a woods near the Russian River. I see water and a wood tower; it must be a ranger's lookout.”

Willie, pale as death, said nothing. I put the payment for her services on the table, three times what it costs to see a physician, took my husband by the arm, and pulled him to the car. I got the key from his pocket, pushed him into the passenger side, and I drove, hands trembling and eyes clouded, across the bridge toward home. “You shouldn't believe any of this, Willie. It isn't science, she's a quack,” I begged him. “I know that,” he replied, but the harm had been done. Even so, he didn't truly grieve until much later, when we went to see a film about the death penalty,
Dead Man Walking
, in which there is a scene of the murder of a girl in a forest, similar to what the psychic had described. In the silence and darkness of the theater, I heard a heartrending cry, like the howl of a wounded animal. It was Willie, doubled over in his seat, with his head on his knees. We felt our way out of the theater, and once in the parking lot, locked in our car, he wailed for his lost daughter.

One year later Fu and Grace offered to have a ceremony in the Zen Center in Jennifer's memory, to give dignity to that tragic life and closure to the obscure death that left the family in eternal suspense. Our small tribe, and a few friends, including Tabra, Jason, Sally, and Jennifer's mother with a few of her friends, met in the same room where we had celebrated Sabrina's first birthday, in front of an altar that held pictures of Jennifer in her best days, flowers, incense, and candles. They had placed a pair of shoes in the center of the circle to represent the new path she had taken. Jason and Willie were moved by the good intentions of all those present, but they couldn't avoid exchanging smiles because Jennifer had never had a pair of shoes like those on her feet; they should have found some purple sandals, something more appropriate to her style. Both of them, who knew her well, imagined that if she had been watching that sad reunion from above she would be rolling with laughter, for she thought that anything with a hint of New Age was ridiculous, and besides she wasn't a person to mourn. She was completely lacking in self-pity; she was daring and bold. Without the addictions that trapped her in a life of misery, she might have lived an adventurous life, because she had her father's strength. Of Willie's three children, only Jennifer inherited Willie's lion heart, and she passed it on to her daughter. Sabrina, like Willie, can be dropped to her knees, but she always gets back up on her feet. That little girl, who almost never even saw her mother but who had her image engraved on her soul before she was born, participated in the rites in Grace's arms. At the end, Fu gave Jennifer a Buddhist name, U Ka Dai Shin: wings of fire, great heart. It was a proper name for her.

In a period of quiet meditation during the ceremony, Jason thought he heard his sister's voice breathing into his ear. “What the fuck are they doing? They don't have the least idea what happened to me! For all they know I could still be alive, right? The joke is that they'll never know.” Maybe for that reason, Jason has never stopped looking for her, and now, all these years later, now that we have the DNA tests, he is stubbornly trying to locate her in the infinite police archives of unsolved tragedies. As for me, during the meditation a scene emerged with great clarity in my mind: Jennifer was sitting on the bank of a river, paddling her feet and tossing little stones into the water. She was wearing a summer dress and she looked young and healthy, with no trace of pain. Rays of sun shone through the leaves and illuminated her blond hair and slim body. Suddenly she lay down, curled up on the mossy ground, and closed her eyes. That night I told Willie about my vision and we decided that that was how Jenny had died, and not the way the psychic had told us. She was very tired, she slept, and she never woke up. The next morning we got up early and the two of us went to the forest. We wrote Jennifer's name on a piece of paper, burned it, and threw the ashes into the same stream where earlier we had scattered yours. You two didn't know each other in this world, Paula, but we like to imagine that maybe your spirits are playing among the trees like sisters.

I
N THE SPRING OF
1994 Rwanda was often in the newspapers. News of the genocide was so horrible that it was difficult to believe. Children were being hacked to death, pregnant women were ripped open with knives to tear the fetuses from their wombs, entire families were murdered, hundreds of starving orphans were wandering the roads, villages were burned with all their inhabitants.

“What does the rest of the world care about what's happening in Africa? It's only blacks that are dying,” Celia commented indignantly, with that incendiary passion she dedicated to nearly any subject.

“The killing in Rwanda is terrible, Celia, but I don't think that's the only reason you're depressed. Tell me what's really happening with you,” I prodded.

“Imagine if they were hacking my children apart!” and she burst out crying.

There was no doubt that something was brewing in the soul of my daughter-in-law. She didn't have a moment of peace; she ran around doing a thousand tasks, she hid around corners to cry, and every day she was more emaciated. In addition, she had developed a true obsession with bad news, which she discussed with Jason, the only one in the family who read all the newspapers and who was capable of analyzing events with a journalist's instinct. He was the first person I heard relate religion with terror, long before fundamentalism and terrorism were practically synonymous. He explained to us that the violence in Bosnia, the Middle East, and Africa, the excesses of the Taliban in Afghanistan, and other disconnected events were caused by religious as well as racial hatreds.

Jason and Sally were talking about moving as soon as they could find an apartment somewhere, but they had looked in vain to find something within range of their limited income. We offered to help them, without insisting too much, so we wouldn't give them the impression that we were throwing them out. It was pleasant to have them with us. I was moved to see Jason in love for the first time and talking about getting married, though Willie was convinced that Sally and his son would not make a good pair. I don't know where he got that idea, they seemed to get along very well.

Abuela Hilda stayed in California for long periods of time, and under her influence the house would become a gambling den. Even my grandchildren, innocents still sucking their pacifiers, learned to do tricks with cards. She showed them how to play with such skill that a few years later Alejandro could have earned a living with a deck of cards. Once, when he was a runny-nosed kid of ten, a little sandpiper of a boy with round eyeglasses and teeth like a beaver, he wandered into a group of ominous-looking types who had brought their trailers and motorcycles to the beach and set up camp. The general look of those men—tank tops, tattoos, cowboy boots, and the inevitable bellies of good beer drinkers—did not intimidate Alejandro because he saw that they were playing cards. He went over to them, totally self-assured, and asked if he could sit in. They answered with loud guffaws, but he insisted. “We play for money here, kid,” they warned him. Alejandro nodded, feeling rich because he had five dollars in small change. They told him to sit down, and offered him a beer, which he amiably refused, more interested in the game. After twenty minutes, my grandson had fleeced the seven tough guys and left with bills spilling out of his pockets, followed by a hailstorm of oaths and curses.

We lived as a tribe, Chilean style; we were almost always together. Abuela had such a good time with Celia and her children that she preferred her company a thousand times more over mine and spent long stretches in her home. We had explained to Abuela that Sabrina's mothers were lesbians, Buddhists, and vegetarians, three words she was not familiar with. The vegetarianism was the only thing that seemed unacceptable to her, but she made friends with them anyway. More than once she visited them at the Zen Center, where she induced them to eat hamburgers, drink margaritas, and bet on poker. At times my mother and Tío Ramón, my ineffable stepfather, would come from Chile, and, added to them, my brother Juan, who arrived from Atlanta with the tilted head and grave expression of a bishop: he was studying theology. After he had devoted four years to the divine, Juan graduated with honors and then decided he wasn't cut out to be a preacher and went back to his university position as professor of political science, where he is today. Willie bought food wholesale and cooked for that camp of refugees. I see him in the kitchen, bloody knives attacking a hindquarter of beef, frying bags of potatoes, and chopping tons of lettuce. In moments of inspiration he would make lethally hot Mexican tacos while listening to his
ranchera
CDs. The kitchen would look like the morning after a night of Carnival, and guests would lick their chops but later pay the consequences of an excess of grease and chilis.

Our house was magical; it stretched and shrank according to the need. Perched halfway up a hill, it offered a panoramic view of the bay; there were four bedrooms on the first floor and an apartment below. It was there in 1992 that we installed a hospital room where you spent several months without altering the rhythm of family life. Some nights I would wake to the murmur of my own memories and those of the characters escaped from other people's dreams. I would get up and roam through the rooms, grateful for the quiet and warmth of that house. Nothing bad can happen here, I would think, all the evil has been expelled, and Paula's spirit is looking after us. Sometimes the dawn would surprise me with its capricious colors of watermelon and peach. I liked to look down at the scene at the foot of the hill, with the fog rising from the lagoon and wild geese flying south.

C
ELIA WAS JUST RECOVERING
from the battering of her three pregnancies when she had to go to Venezuela for her sister's wedding. By then she had a residence visa that allowed her to travel abroad and return to the United States. Nico and the children temporarily moved over to our house, a solution that Abuela found ideal: “Why don't we all live together, the way we should?” she asked. In Venezuela Celia was confronted by everything she had wanted to leave behind when she married Nico. It can't have been pleasant because she returned with her spirits lower than low, having decided to sever all contact with most of her relatives. She clung to me, and I was prepared to defend her against anything that came along, even herself. She started losing weight again, but we had a family council and forced her to see a specialist, who prescribed therapy and anti-depressants. “I don't believe in any of this,” she told me, but the treatment helped, and soon she was playing the guitar and making us laugh and rant with her antics. Despite the inexplicable fits of sadness, she had blossomed with maternity.

Her children were a perpetual circus, and Abuela often reminded us that we must cherish them because they soon grow up and leave home. It was the children, more than the doctors' prescriptions, that kept Celia going during that time. Alejandro, a little shy but very smart, stuttered wise phrases with his mother's deep voice. That year at Easter, before he went outside with his basket to hunt for Easter eggs in the garden, he whispered to me that rabbits don't lay eggs because they're mammals. “Then who leaves the Easter eggs?” I asked, like a fool. “You,” he answered. Ever since Nicole, the youngest, could stand, she'd had to defend herself against her brother and sister. One birthday I had the bad idea of giving Alejandro—who had begged on his knees, batting his giraffe eyelashes—a game of plastic Ninja daggers. First I got specific authorization from his parents, who did not allow him to have weapons, just as they opposed television—both impractical California New Age ideas because you can't raise little ones in a bubble. Better for them to be contaminated while they're young, that's the best way to immunize them. I warned my grandson that he could not attack his sisters, but that was like handing him candy and telling him not to suck it. He had the daggers all of five minutes before he stabbed Andrea, who gave it right back to him, and then both of them turned on Nicole. Next we saw Alejandro and Andrea running for their lives, with Nicole close behind, a dagger in each hand, howling like a serial thriller Apache. She was still in diapers. Andrea was the most colorful. She always wore pink; except for a pair of lime-green plastic sandals; her golden curls peeked from among the adornments she put in her hair—tiaras, ribbons from packages, paper flowers—and she lived lost in her imaginary world. She also had her “pink power,” a magic ring with a stone of that color, a gift from Tabra, which could convert broccoli into strawberry ice cream and send a kick by long distance to the boy who had made fun of her at recess. Once Andrea's teacher raised her voice to her, and my granddaughter confronted her squarely, pointing the finger with the powerful ring. “Don't you dare speak to me that way. I am
Andrea
!” Another time she came back from school very upset, and hugged me.