Teresita yanked her daughter’s arm, directing Lizette to give the men glasses of milk and bowls of yesterday’s menudo. “Sober those drunks up,” she said. “This is unacceptable. All of you,” Teresita shouted, her wooden spoon high as a shield, “get the hell out of my kitchen.”
The men were a small mob in their crunched shirtsleeves and wetted hair. Maria Josie was with them, too—David had driven to Hornet Moon, thrown rocks at the windows until she woke up, a woman beside her （they had said in snide remarks） she left behind as she rushed out. Their armpits were damp and their alcoholic stench was thick. Voices caught like fire. Anguish grew or diminished within seconds. The room was sick with fear. Papa Tikas raised both arms, as if to argue with Teresita. His velvet jacket lay lazily over one shoulder and his watch face was speckled in blood. He muttered into a clenched fist before retreating from the kitchen, the other men following as Lizette trailed them with food, the glasses of milk bone-white against the pewter tray. The men debated their way into the next room, cursing in all their languages. Teresita told Luz to stand at the counter, finish chopping pork for tomorrow’s meal. “Wash your hands,” she said, and Luz felt sobs returning to her face, but out of fear of Teresita’s anger she sealed that part of herself away. She focused on the meat, the faint and spiraled veins, and as she cut, Luz noticed that her red satin dress was darker in all the places where she’d cradled her brother’s head to her body, crying out for help in the empty alley.
Teresita set her spoon on the stove. She wiped her hands over her beige apron, working the flesh between her fingers. She was a beauty like Lizette, though motherhood had increased her body, left her breasts full and low, her forehead in a constant pinch. Her black hair was braided down her left shoulder, and she wore strings of turquoise clipped into each ear. She had bronze skin, a wide and regal nose, and intimidating black eyes that were wet like a cow’s. Bending over Diego, Teresita’s form was commanding. The smell of his body mixed with the scent of hominy, like pennies, turned soil, very alive. She lifted his chin with two fingers, turned his neck side to side. Sniffed.
Luz turned away and returned to her pork.
Teresita said, “Better get used to it, mija. Soon you’ll be a wife and a mother. They blow themselves up in mines, shatter bones with gears, crush their faces with rocks. Who do you think fixes all that?”
There was commotion from the other room then, a pounding on the front door. Luz heard Maria Josie’s voice rise above the men. A woman screeched from the stoop, pleading to be allowed inside the home. The woman said that she loved Diego, her voice rhythmic with tears. Eleanor Anne, Luz thought, and then Maria Josie shouted, firm and final, “Can’t you see you’ve done enough? You’ll get us all killed if they followed you here.” Then the door was slammed.
Lizette reentered the kitchen with an empty tray. She gave the table and Diego a sidelong glance. She looked like herself but as a little girl. Her eyes met Luz’s and together they understood each other, now fluent in fear.
“He needs a sew,” Teresita said. “Get the white thread. Break some ice.”
Lizette reached first for the metal pick in the sink. Beside Luz at the counter, she hacked at a block of ice before plunging her hands into a junk drawer filled with rubber bands, matchboxes, needles, and twine. Their movements were synced, two girls working away in a kitchen, as if food were spread across the table instead of their semiconscious kin. Teresita flicked on the radio. She moved the dial from a mystery serial and past Leon Jacob until she landed on a lonesome ranchera, the emotional notes held within her throat, a humming above the table.
Lizette brought her mother the thread, and Teresita pulled an arm’s length against the lighted room and snapped it with her teeth. Diego groaned across the table. Beneath her apron, Teresita wore a gossamer nightdress, the cotton style of peasant girls. She almost seemed younger than Lizette or no age at all. She pulled a chair near Diego’s face and told the girls they could watch, if they wanted. “I won’t make you fix him this time, but it’ll serve you both to learn.” She got to work, her nimble fingers diving into Diego’s skin as though he were a quilt. Luz was ashamed of herself as she moved to the open doorway between the kitchen and the other room. She couldn’t look at the garbled openings in her brother’s face.
“There, that should do it,” said Teresita, tying the thread in a bow, Diego’s moans escaping his mouth. “Easy does it, Nephew. Easy does it.”
SIX
To the Edges
For seven days, Maria Josie sat at Diego’s bedside, reading aloud from an old copy of Don Quixote, breaking only for meals, sleep, and her long shifts at the mirror factory. Between the book’s pages, Maria Josie would glance up with a watchful gaze, casually, as if checking the clock. It had snowed, padding the exterior brick and rickety roof in a pleasing weight. Several times a day, Luz brought Maria Josie water with iodine and an herb called plumajillo. She’d walk swiftly to the nightstand and place the white dish beside wilted lilies and dried marigolds and heaps of bloody gauze and wooden rosaries. There were santo candles burned into liquid wax. San Miguel, glowing from his eyes. The bedroom smelled like sickness, a plumy stench that clung to Luz’s clothes and hair. She’d open the windows only to mingle the smells of illness with carcasses and smog. Reina and Corporal looked on from their glass cage, and because Maria Josie was afraid of them Luz took over their feedings. Sunlight would warm their faces as she dropped mice into the cage.
“Any better?” Luz asked one afternoon, sprinkling hay into the terrarium.
Maria Josie sat beside Diego, cleaning her glasses. “See for yourself.”
From across the room, Luz considered Diego’s face. It was the size that frightened her most, the inhumanness of his proportion. “I just don’t understand why’d they do it. Why Diego?” she asked with sadness, thinking of the brick slammed into her brother, over and over.
Maria Josie grimaced, curving her arm in a flannel jacket over the chair’s back. “They’re men, white men.” She pushed forward and gripped Diego’s foot, small and paw-like beneath his quilt. “That’s what they do.”
* * *
—
On Thursday afternoon, Luz returned home from washday. She was surprised to see Diego wasn’t in bed. He was seated in a white chair with his face to the window, the orange curtains tied in great bows, his back lumped forward in gray pajamas. Maria Josie wasn’t home, and the apartment felt emptier without her. From the roof, there were sounds of melting snow. In the hallway, Luz slipped off her winter coat and hung it on the rack. She hurried toward her bedroom, afraid of seeing her brother mangled, the image of his new face, a sharp pain in her heart.
“Can’t say hello?” Diego said, his voice hissing, ugly.
Luz paused. She mouthed goddammit to herself before reluctantly stepping into the main room. The floorboards shifted.
“I heard you found me.” Diego kept his face to the window.
The room was bright. The bed had been stripped of its sheets, and a sagging pinstriped mattress was exposed. The nightstand’s bloody gauze was gone and the room smelled of sunshine and wet pavement. “I picked up your teeth,” she said. “The ones I could find.” Luz looked to a clay bowl on the bureau.