The Burning Side(21)
Leo laughs, and not kindly. He guzzles water, clocking my stare. My chapped lips.
“You didn’t bring water?” He extends his own, shaking his head in a way that says, Figures.
“I did bring some, I just ran out.” I decline his outstretched Ozarka.
He shrugs, screwing on the cap and dropping the plastic bottle beside a boxwood. “We can’t just hire people every time something’s hard.”
I will myself not to yell as I say, “This is a house fire. And we have insurance.”
He turns away. “Whatever.”
I encroach on his space for the second time today. I was not a confrontational person until Leo started withdrawing. Now there are moments when the desire for a reaction—any reaction—possesses me. “No, help me make a plan. Should I do research? Have you talked to anyone yet?” I gesture to the massive green coffin that now contains waterlogged years of our shared life. “I didn’t even know you got this dumpster.”
“Fine, hire people.” He throws down his gloves and peels off his shirt. Not what I was expecting. He turns and stalks away—not toward the house or car, but toward the creek.
Once he’s down the hill, I dart to the boxwood and unscrew the cap from his water bottle, gulping and gulping with such vicious thirst that the plastic sucks inward.
Then, in spite of myself, I follow him.
There are gnats and algae on the surface of the creek, and I watch as Leo walks straight into it. There is no wind, and the cicadas are deafening. The sun remains merciless, and birds dot the sky like specks of black pepper. I visor my eyes with a grimy hand. “You always say this creek is filthy.”
“It is.” Leo raises his arms. “But I’m filthier.” He looks me up and down. “You really want to drive home like that?”
We’re both covered in smears and specks of who-knows-what, our sweat like glue. So I peel off my clothes, down to my underwear, and I wade into the creek.
Leo laughs again, only a little, and this time he’s unreadable.
I snap, “What?” He has seen my body at its worst, but he hasn’t seen it in months.
He lowers himself into the water, rinsing gritty arms. “Just—” His eyes bounce away and back again. There’s a shift in the air between us. “If you had told us five years ago…”
So this is the moment I’ve been wanting, when we could commiserate. We could find comfort in each other like we did for so long. I don’t know why it’s happening now in our dirty creek rather than last night or the night of the fire, but it is. Marriage is rife with surprise syncopation.
But the way he’s looking at me is a gut punch of a reminder of everything that went wrong. After Otto was born, it became clear Leo needed an out. And because it was gradual, I didn’t see what was happening until it already had: I gave him his out, impulsive and ignoble. I did something wrong while he did nothing, which can be just as bad. But I’m the one who has given us a narrative, a pinpoint of blame.
My resolve gathers. I won’t go back to the way it was. So, like a monster from a swamp, I turn and lift dripping feet out of the water. “I’m going back to the kids.”
True to form, Leo says nothing as I collect my clothes and cut abruptly toward my mother’s car, where I get in and drive away, leaving my husband in the creek behind our house, the cicadas screaming.
LEO
2017
I’M GRADING AN ESSAY ON the battle of the Alamo when April says, “We should go to Mexico. Take a vacation.”
The essay is laid out in front of me, and I feel it in my bones—Santa Anna, Davy Crockett, bloodied men, and the burning question: To whom do we belong?
I set my pen down. “Why Mexico?”
“I was just thinking about how we haven’t taken a vacation since our honeymoon.”
Our honeymoon is a sore spot. I took April camping only to find out later from Cameron that she was disappointed not to do something nicer. April grew up taking family vacations every year, while I never once traveled for leisure. Our expectations were worlds apart.
She picks at her fingernail. “Josie told me about a nice rental option in Cabo.”
Cabo. Not Chiapas, where my parents are from. Or Juárez, where I have a cousin I haven’t seen in decades. She isn’t thinking about my history, or any history at all. Just vacation for vacation’s sake.
“Something wrong?” she asks.
“Uh, what about somewhere on the Texas coast instead?”
She crinkles her nose, so I guess this is Honeymoon Disappointment 2.0. But if I were to go speak Spanish in Mexico, I’d be an imposter. I wouldn’t have the privilege of clearly being a foreigner. People would wonder why I’m Mexican but not. Why I don’t have the right clothes or slang or cultural understanding.
And I thought April knew that I avoid reminders of my parents, who probably haven’t thought of me one way or another since they washed their hands of me twenty-six years ago. I’m not inclined to vacation in their homeland, where the language and traditions would mock me, son of a place where I’ll never belong.
April brightens. “Maybe South Padre! Pretty beaches, practically Mexico.”
And with that, she has me. I open an internet browser to search places to stay. The Alamo’s rotation of flags and violence can wait.