Thank god Anthony hadn’t killed anyone else. When she thinks of him driving off the road, sailing through the air, Yolanda imagines that with all the alcohol in his veins, he must have caught alight himself, a falling, fiery star, leaving nothing, but she knows that isn’t true; she was at the funeral, saw his casket. She stood beside his mother, patting her as she wept. His mother wrenched away. “You drove him to this!” she cried, and then clung to Yolanda again. They’d been separated, but not divorced, Yolanda on the hook for truck payments and credit card bills, for his myriad debts to their friends and family.
Yolanda is an optimist. Yolanda considers herself a happy person. Her life is filled with love and family and friends. She likes people, believes that they are basically good. But this doesn’t change her simultaneous belief that the universe is essentially malevolent, life booby-trapped with disaster. The evidence is clear: so many bodies damaged and beaten and destroyed, washed up on the shores of her life. And her own body, harboring its deadly secret knot. It doesn’t seem normal, the sheer quantity of awfulness crowded into her family. Sure, every family has its problems, but her family problems are uglier.
She knows what Valerie’s take on it all would be: that somewhere buried in their past someone committed the first act of violence, and every generation since has worked to improve upon that violence, adding its own special flourish. She thinks of that first man, a conquistador, here in this dry new land for the purpose of domination and annihilation, yanking on the arm of his newly christened Indian wife, and from that union a son was born. Generations of injury chewed like blight into the leaves of the family tree: shaken skulls, knocking teeth, snapped wrists, collisions and brawls and fatal intoxication.
Sometimes during her lunch hour, Yolanda walks from the Capitol building to the cathedral, not to pray, but to sit in the bright, airy quiet. She refuses to look at La Conquistadora, the wooden statue of the Blessed Mother tucked high and snug in an opulent niche in her chapel to the left of the altar. The conquistadors brought her from Spain, hauled her around with them like a lucky charm as they invaded the peoples of the New World, and she served as a placid, unmoved witness to the violence they wrought. No wonder the Spaniards loved her so: O Conquistadora, Our Lady of the Rosary, Blessed Mother, Adoring Mother, Our Mother of Excuses and Turning a Blind Eye, Our Lady of Willful Ignorance and Boys Will Be Boys, Our Lady of Endless, Long-Suffering Hope. In the nineties, in a belated acknowledgment of the Church’s violent past—or, more accurately, a feeble revisionist cover-up of that past—the bishop renamed her “Our Lady of Peace.” But there’s never been peace in this land, not then and not now, not for her family and not for Yolanda.
Yolanda rolls onto her side, presses her cheek into the pillow. This is her favorite position, the one she allows herself only when she really needs comfort. For years she’s tried to sleep on her back, because she heard that sleeping on your side gives you wrinkles, that long vertical one down the cheek. But Yolanda doesn’t have to worry about that vertical wrinkle now.
At the Rosary for Elwin, when Yolanda was fourteen, Yolanda’s mother advised her not to look at him spread out in his coffin. “If you do, you’ll always remember him dead, you won’t be able to help it.” So Yolanda hadn’t approached the coffin, but her mother’s warning had been a kind of curse, because she still can’t conjure the living face of her favorite cousin. What remains vivid is the scene of his death, a scene she invented from the adults’ whispers. The blue truck marooned in the dirt parking lot; beyond, the flashing neon sign: Engine RX. In her mind she approaches the truck, knowing what she’ll see. Elwin’s arms are spread, as if he’s opening himself to the stars, but the stars have been blotted out. His face glows orange, then pink, then green, eyes blank, rolled up to the whites.
Thirteen years later, at Anthony’s Rosary, there had been no viewing. Just the gleaming casket clamped shut. Although he didn’t actually die the night she caught him passed out in the living room, that’s the image that persists in her mind: the blue light from the television playing on his slack features. For thirteen years, it seems, Anthony had been chasing Elwin.
She never said goodbye to Anthony, not truly. She’d imagined that he might return to her as the person he’d once been, that she’d once imagined him to be.