It embarrasses Yolanda now to remember how entirely her field of vision narrowed, how, in her efforts to keep her husband away from weapons, she repressed her own intelligence, and her dignity, too. For eleven years she was a neurotic caged creature, like one of Amadeo’s feeder mice, obsessively arranging and rearranging her nest, unaware of the snake waiting in the terrarium next door.
Yolanda grew weary of the responsibility. Anthony wasn’t her flesh, yet he demanded the same constant supervision that even her children had begun to grow out of. He was like a child, but without the sweetness and vulnerability that enchanted her in Valerie and Amadeo. Every time, Anthony would pull out of his dark periods, beg her forgiveness, promise to never scare her like that again, and she’d relent, relieved to give the guns back.
For a long time it was just alcohol, at least as far as she knew. But one night, unable to sleep, she went out to find Anthony watching TV in the living room. It wasn’t long after eleven, though the kids had been asleep for hours, and Yolanda always went to bed early. She’d imagined curling up next to him, resting her head against his chest. He’d put one arm around her, his other hand on her bare leg. They’d watch whatever he was watching, and maybe, maybe, she could bring him back to bed with her. It had been so long since they’d held each other, since they’d spoken to each other with anything other than impatience or anger. Yolanda loved her husband, and this is why she tolerated his tantrums and his dark moods, his occasional rough pushes or slaps.
He was asleep on the couch—or rather, not quite asleep. Even in the cool light of the TV, she could see that his forehead was flushed, his eyes slit. His belt was loose around his bicep. Spread on the coffee table, all the props: square of foil, lighter, black-stained spoon.
When Yolanda approached, Anthony did not raise his head. She stood there in one of his undershirts.
“Not that,” she whispered. “I told you never that.”
“Yeah,” he murmured agreeably, then drifted off. The slack pleasure in his face almost made her envious. How dare he find such cheap satisfaction when all she did was work and worry? How dare he do what Elwin had done when he knew how much it had hurt them all?
She plucked the needle from where it had fallen on the couch cushion, imagining her own skin pierced, the skin of her sleeping babies. She turned slowly in the kitchen, queasily regarding the tip, uncertain how to throw it away, until she finally dropped it into an empty beer bottle, wrapped the whole thing in half a roll of paper towels, and double-bagged it. She took the bundle out to the trash can. After she’d cleaned up the mess, she paced the rest of the night, her blood coursing with the astonishment that her marriage was over.
When it was time to get the kids up for school, she covered Anthony with a blanket to make his sleep seem normal, and ushered them through their cereal and tooth-brushing as fast as she could. Once the bus had taken them away, she shook him awake and told him to move out.
There were entreaties, of course, tears, but Yolanda never wavered. The relief of having him gone was too powerful, a drug in itself. She braced herself for his incessant begging, but after the second visit and the fourth phone call, he quit trying. He was at his little brother’s house, his mother told her, where, no doubt, the two of them were drinking and shooting up to their hearts’ content, and, his mother made sure to point out, Yolanda was the one who’d driven him to it.
Nearly six months later, when she got the call from the police informing her of Anthony’s car accident, she’d been terrified at first that one of the children was with him, forgetting—stupidly—that they were never in his care anymore.
“Valerie! Amadeo!” she cried, flinging open doors, pulse throbbing in her head. When Yolanda burst through her bedroom door, Valerie looked up, her face open and surprised and then, very swiftly, irritated. “I’m working,” she said, then bowed over her notebook.
But Yolanda could not find five-year-old Amadeo. She ran around the house, then across the road to the Romeros’， calling wildly. Finally she came upon him and the other kids in the arroyo, rolling dump trucks through the sand. Only now did relief flood her, because what she’d feared for so long had finally happened. Wordlessly she grabbed Amadeo by the wrist and dragged him home while he fought and yelled and resisted, then just cried, until finally, bewildered at his mother’s strangeness, he fell silent.