The Burning Side(14)
We dance and botch harmonies and tell Jo how godawful she looks as a blonde. Finally, I say, “Hey. You should have gotten the part.” And she says, “I know.” Then she starts talking about her next audition, which is glorious proof that my plan worked. Deb reaches up to pat my cheek and declares me her favorite kid, prompting eye rolls from the Russo kids and giving me a delicious glimpse of life with them. I will bury my former self and be relieved to do so. Here lies a lonely child. He’s in a better place now.
After our bellies are stuffed with brisket, we play bocce ball on the lawn. When no one else is looking, April makes bedroom eyes at me, summertime freckles across her nose. All the happiness niggles at me, and I can’t help but flash back to my earlier voicemail, to pozole in my tía’s kitchen, to my mother’s singing voice. But I blink that away and toss a ball with my new family.
* * *
When the time comes for our wedding in September, I scan the crowd for Izzy and Nacho as April walks down the aisle, white flowers in her hair.
They didn’t come. They didn’t call. The wedding canon begins.
I don’t have a single family member in attendance.
Three weeks after the honeymoon, a Dollar Tree card arrives in the mail with a short note scrawled in fading ink. Congrats. Glad your wild days are behind you. Best, N + I. There is no gift, no money, no apology for missing the wedding or indication that maybe we should catch up sometime. There is only the reminder of the burden my existence has always been to my family. I have the urge to crumple the card in my fist, but April wraps her arms around my waist from behind and asks, “Wild days?”
I haven’t told her much about my teen years, when I kept steady grades and jobs but also a steady buzz or high or whatever would take the edge off. I walked to school and work, trying to keep from putting my aunt and uncle out. But it wasn’t enough. I still saw their bald irritation at my late nights and Smirnoff bottles buried in the recycling. I saw the sighing inconvenience of my need for another meal or birthday acknowledgment. I lived every day in shadowy dread that they too would send me away. So I strove to have such little need that I became nearly invisible.
The morning after high school graduation, I packed everything I owned into two fat trash bags. Nacho and Izzy saw me off at the curb beside the beater I’d managed to buy. I took their key off its ring and set it on Izzy’s palm. I knew they would breathe a sigh of relief as soon as I drove away, finally leaving them to enjoy their morning routine in privacy. Two black coffees, oats with blueberries for her, frozen taquitos for him. I wondered if I should thank them, but the question filled me with pain. I hadn’t asked for this. So after being a ten-year-long interruption, I nodded goodbye.
They never checked whether I arrived anywhere. We all knew I had no plan. At some elusive point, I had crossed from that poor child to that welfare bum. I had no idea when it happened, but it did. My life was no longer my parents’ fault—it was mine.
I spent a year and a half doing nothing before I found history. Before I realized that the least alone I ever felt was when I studied what had happened on the land or in the buildings through which I walked, the people who inhabited this very same world across layers of time.
I started community college with ninety-four dollars and a face full of pimples. This, of course, was all before April. It was before I exchanged vodka for exercise and sulking for studying. It was before I put myself through school and concluded that teaching history to teens was my life’s calling. Then I met a young tutor one summer morning, my heart keeping time with the band, and I decided that maybe I had two life callings: history and her.
But I don’t want to think about that part of me—the morose part that my aunt and uncle deemed wild. So I shut the card, turn to April, and shrug.
Her arms are looped around me as she looks up. “Nice of them to send a card, yeah?”
It’s a sincere question. She doesn’t know what it’s like with them. But I can sense it behind her question just like I could sense it with my parents, and with Nacho and Izzy. The truth is a burden. Lie to me.
I meet her eyes. “Yeah.” I nod. “Nice.”
Concern leaves her face as if waiting for permission, and she slides her hand up me. “Okay, I know we need to do dinner, but I was hoping we could do something else first.” Her smile is coy as she reroutes her hand, sliding it downward. “Just real quick?”
I toss the card aside, mute my hammering memory, and take her in. Caramel hair falling out of its clip. Assured, inviting eyes. Curves pressing against her sweater.
I release her hair from the clip and ask, “But does it have to be quick, Mrs. Torres?”
An unbearably soft giggle. “No it does not, Mr. Torres.”
I shiver at the trill of my Rs on her tongue. The shared name is electric, the oneness it represents. The promise that I will no longer be alone.
APRIL
The Day After the Fire
AFTER ICE CREAM THE FAMILY disperses, and Josie and I start dishes. Mom and Dad take nightcaps out back, while Cameron follows Rachel, who walks around locating every single childhood photo of him. Leo takes the kids up to bed. This time last night, he was saying he wants a divorce, and I was hurrying out of the kitchen distracted, the back burner still on.
For a second, I forgot that I burned down my house.
I suddenly realize how exhausted I am. My head has a dull ache, and my eyes sting. With a sink full of suds in front of me, I look around this kitchen: the dark wood floors, the Tiffany chandelier, Dad’s fiddle-leaf fig in the alcove under the stairs. I can’t help but think, Better there than here. My house was on fire long before that fateful pot of noodles.