“That is a dangerous thing. She was very eager to get into a dance company, very afraid she would not. Audition after audition … It hurt her.”
“Did she ever make it?”
“It was competitive, but she would have.”
“How do you know?”
“She danced like water.”
Lila was gifted, nobody could deny that, but she was not disciplined. Between her talent, family money, and easy access to America, she never had to be. When the choreographer of a prestigious avant-garde company grabbed her crotch to better show her a lift, Lila did not think twice about throwing a water bottle at his head. It hurt her career, her unwillingness to capitulate to the men who groped and coaxed her in the name of correcting her. It was what made Santiago—so fearfully obsequious, so accepting of the white man’s power to instruct—respect her more than anyone he had ever met. And yet, in the end, she had doubted herself.
“How long were you married?”
“Just a moment. We are still married”—he tapped his heart—“in here.”
“But she died,” said Cleo flatly.
“It was an accident,” he said.
Accident, the same word Frank had used to describe what happened to Cleo. But with Lila it had been an accident. That first time they shot up was right before Christmas; he remembered using a string of tree lights to tourniquet their arms. By the end of summer she was dead. It was easy to overdose, everyone had said so. And Lila was so small, barely a hundred pounds with shoes on.
“Was it an accident?” he asked. “What you did? Frank said it was.”
Cleo looked down at her arm. A gauze bandage the color of dry clay was discernible beneath her kimono sleeve.
“It’s never an accident,” she said quietly.
He felt a surprising surge of anger toward her, this young girl who was so wasteful of her own life. How dare she? She didn’t know Lila. Lila had not wanted to die. She was more alive than anyone. And they were happy together, happy in their marriage. She just couldn’t stop using. It was different.
“So you wanted to die?” he asked.
She looked at him with her severe green eyes. “I wanted things to change.”
“But why?” Santiago’s voice was almost a wail. “Frank loves you so much. We all do. Me, Quentin, Anders—”
“Anders!” Cleo spat the word. “He doesn’t care about me. None of them do. They don’t care about anyone—”
“That’s not true!” interjected Santiago, but Cleo did not stop.
“They want me, they compete for me, but do they care about me? You think Anders ever even thinks of me after, after …”
She inhaled sharply and brought her hands to her throat as if to arrest the words at the source. She swallowed, and he watched her slim fingers slide over the skin of her neck with the effort of it. He waited for her to say more, but she appeared to be winning the battle to keep down whatever had wanted to come out.
“After what?” he asked.
She closed her eyes and knocked her head against the wall behind her. A single tear escaped from under one eyelid, made a dash down her chin, and disappeared into her lap.
“I’m sorry, Santiago. I think I need to rest. They give me these meds here … They make me so sleepy.”
“Of course. Of course, you must take rest.”
The anger had drained out of him just as swiftly as it arrived. He took the book from her lap, so she could turn herself around and lie down on the bed. She kept her eyes tightly shut as she curled sideways on the thin mattress. She seemed to recede inside the folds of her robe; he could no longer clearly see where her body ended and the bed began. He sat watching her huddled form, his large hands clutching her book. It did not feel right to leave so soon, when Frank had asked him to stay with her. He opened his mouth, then shut it again.
“I could read to you?” he asked.
He decided to take her silence as assent.
“Please excuse my accent,” he said, clearing his throat.
He was not familiar with the book, which was a collection of short stories with a sepia picture of an older woman standing in a field on the cover. She had a shock of white hair and a tough, good-humored look. The stories were very short, some only a page or two long, and it often seemed that nothing very much was happening in them, until something startling and irreconcilable did. In one, four young boys played between the train cars, annoying the other passengers, until one fell forward and was crushed beneath the wheels. In another, the narrator’s friend called to tell her she was dying, to which the narrator replied, “We’re all dying,” but then the friend did indeed die, and she was very sad. In another, entitled simply “Wants,” a woman ran into her ex-husband on the steps of the library. He accused her of not wanting anything, but she said she did have wants, which included being a different person, ending the war for her children, staying married to one person her whole life, and being able to bring back library books on time. Except the woman did not say this out loud, she said it only to herself and the reader, so no one would ever know but them.