The furniture was covered in plastic, the far wall swatched with a dozen saturated colors: Gentleman’s Gray, Salamander, Ebony King, Shadow. I already knew the dining room would be Dark Burgundy, and the casual den, bright with sunlight, would be Sea Star. I had thought Mami’s white walls were so boring, so austere, ?y luego qué hice? Taken an interior decorator’s advice and painted the whole place white. But I hadn’t cared back then. Andres was gone. Fabian was gone. The cuates were gone. There was no home to make here. It was a place to be when I was nowhere else.
That Monday, the day the police first came to the bank, a scream had built in my throat, as if before that moment there had still been a chance it wasn’t real. Once they left, I rushed over to Marta’s house, since she only worked mornings. Sergio was Fabian’s alibi for the first part of the night, and Marta, though she didn’t know it yet, was mine for the second. It wouldn’t be long before the police interviewed them. It was better she hear it from me.
At first, Marta thought it was a joke. She’d laughed into her coffee cup, telling me to stop being stupid. Marta was wearing a Guess shirt. I remembered because I’d stared at the rhinestone-studded triangle—those three shining points, separated by equal distances. Once she realized I was serious, Marta had set her cup down so hard it broke. I reached for the secador, and she started yelling. “Get out, Lore! Get out of my house! I don’t even know you. Get the hell out!”
I had cried, begged. But Marta couldn’t understand. She refused to even try. The last thing she said to me before slamming the door was: “How could you do this? You had it all. Tuviste todo.” But nobody could have it all, or at least not for long.
After the arrest, when Gabriel and Mateo were still too disgusted to even look at me, Mateo slipped a note beneath my bedroom door: We’re going to stay with tía Marta and tío Sergio. Don’t try to make us come back. I had felt engulfed with rage, a walking fireball. Marta had been jealous of me for fifteen years, ever since one careless night resulted in the cuates. I’d been able to do, without effort, what no amount of planning or prayer or potions had done for her. And now Marta had my sons. In those fevered moments after reading the note, I called my sister. “Are you happy now?” I shouted. “You win, are you happy?” Marta, rightfully, hung up on me.
But I needed to see my children, and Marta would never keep them from me. So, like some deadbeat dad, I dropped off cash for the cuates’ food and basketball uniforms and field trips. I sat across from them in Marta’s living room, watching Miami Vice and The A-Team, anything that would keep us in the same space.
Gabriel had been so angry. I had worried about them both, of course, though Gabriel more than Mateo, with his bad grades and skipping school and, as Mateo had feared, losing his spot on the basketball team. Once I’d forced them to move back in with me, all I saw of Gabriel was the sliver of light beneath his locked door. Terrible, angry music, the kind Mami would have called satanic. He refused to talk to me. Wouldn’t eat dinner with us. I’d worry he never ate at all, except the plate I put in the fridge for him every night was in the sink by morning. I scrubbed at the hardened remains con ganas, con amor, because they were the closest I could get to my son, the closest he’d let me get.
Mateo’s grief—because that’s what it was, wasn’t it, grief for the loss of Fabian and me, for the idea he had of us—was quieter, more restrained. Occasionally, he let me hug him. Then he’d slip away. Another shut door, another sliver of light.
And then, only a few months later, the hysterical call from Marta: “Papi’s gone! He’s gone!” For a wild moment I remembered the time the cuates had slipped away at H-E-B. I had shouted to anyone who would listen, “?Mis ni?os! Please, help me find them!” They’d been playing hide-and-seek the way they did at Fabian’s warehouse. Now, on the phone, I almost said to Marta, “Don’t worry, we’ll find him!” But she was sobbing, unable to speak, and I knew Papi was beyond finding.
Mami blamed me. All that stress on his poor heart, and I couldn’t say she was wrong. She cut me out after that, and the rest of them—except for Marta, eventually, and occasionally Pablo—followed suit. I’d gone from two families to none. Sometimes, in the months and years after everything happened, I felt like a ghost haunting the wasteland of my old life. I sat in the living room in the dark, drinking Bucanas, flipping through photo albums of when the cuates were babies: there I was, smiling a stunned, aftershock smile, and Fabian, cupping one boy in the palm of each rough hand like some kind of god, though it was my body they’d ripped through on their way to the world. I stroked their cheeks and hair through sheets of yellowed plastic. I whispered apologies, regrets. I went to bed half-drunk and woke up feeling bruised. I went to the kitchen and dropped a curl of orange peel, a cinnamon stick, and piloncillo in a saucepan and drank café de olla, my fingertips smelling like Andres’s. I wrote my useless letters to Penelope and Carlitos, and sometimes I caught myself driving to the cemetery. I wasn’t sure why. I pretended it was to sit by Papi’s grave, though I could still feel his disappointment coursing up through the earth.
Those were dark times. Now, at least, I had the cuates again, and my grandsons. If I didn’t lose them.
The paint fumes were giving me a headache, so I went outside. It was one of those rare, perfect fall days, when the sky is heartbreak blue but the heat has finally broken like a fever, leaving only gentle warmth in its place. Since my retirement, gardening had taken up most of my time. Weekend mornings at Home Depot and Lowe’s, plus countless hours listening to the Gardening South Texas Radio Show, and the springtime drives to Floresville for the South Texas Home, Garden, and Environmental Show. I was proud of my citrus trees, the fat lemons that smelled like oranges, the oranges nearly as big as grapefruits. The Braithwaite and Mary Roses and d’Urbervilles, all the secret knowledge that comes with trying to control the natural world.
Fabian was in a gardening program in prison. As I fertilized the broccoli, brussels sprouts, and cauliflower with ammonium nitrate, I pretended he was kneeling beside me. I could almost feel the brush of his glove on mine. We’d complain about our knees, laugh about what viejitos we’d become. We’d make sandwiches with rotisserie chicken from H-E-B, and on a day like this, we’d eat on the patio, sipping coffee and throwing a tennis ball for Crusoe.
Fabian was due for release in five years. He should have been out thirteen years ago, but his caseworker had said we didn’t need a parole lawyer, that it was his job to help Fabian put together the packet. It was all so convoluted. Nadie nos dijo que we were supposed to start writing letters and pulling together a release plan six months before the hearing. Pero they had no problem letting Penelope and Carlitos know in time for Penelope to write that searing victim impact letter, and there went our chance.
Two years later, we hired a lawyer. Six thousand dollars, all our letters, family photos, Marta guaranteeing him a job at her restaurant, Fabian’s pinche high school transcripts. And he was a model inmate, part of all the programs, teaching other men English, or to read and write. But then out of nowhere there was a fight. After that second rejection, he waived the hearings. He didn’t want the cuates and me to go through the disappointment again, he said. Spending half our lives hoping, como si hope were such a terrible thing. Well, now we’d be seventy-two before he was out.
If.